B-2 Is An Old Spirit/ Needs Upgrading USAF says

Stealth bomber is due for upgrade
Its computers, other electronics 2 decades old
By Bruce Rolfsen - Staff writer Air Force tTmes


Posted : Sunday Sep 21, 2008 9:03:01 EDT
The iPod lying on your desk is higher tech than the stealth B-2 Spirit bomber.

At least that’s the case when you’re talking electronics.

Upgrading the stealth bomber’s two-decade-old flight computers, cockpit displays, radar and communications gear is part of the ambitious improvement efforts for the bomber being undertaken by the Air Force and B-2 builder Northrop Grumman.

“We’ve been flying this plane for almost 20 years,” said Dave Mazur, vice president of long-range strike at Northrop. “We’ve never had a [computer] processor upgrade. The iPod you carry around has more processing power than a computer onboard a B-2.”

Still, the bomber’s first upgrade is arriving soon. A new digital “active electronically scanned array” radar is well into the flight testing phase on a B-2 used only for evaluation and is installed on the first of 20 operational Spirits scheduled for modifications, Mazur said.

By the end of 2010, the radar should be on six bombers, and by the end of 2013, approved for initial operating capability and all Spirits.

The new radar is needed, in part, because the Federal Communications Commission sold the X-band radio frequency used by the B-2’s old radar to a commercial user, Mazur said Sept. 16 at the Air Force Association’s Air and Space Conference. Security concerns prevented him from naming the firm or frequency.

The cost of the radar project is about $1.15 billion.

As the radar project ends, work begins on communications, computer and cockpit display upgrades.

Added to the B-2 will be computer processing units, disc drives and fiber-optics cables. In the cockpit, nine flat-panel screens able to handle digital signals will replace tube-based display screens.

The electronics will be connected to a pair of new extreme high-frequency satellite dishes that link the B-2 via satellite to commanders and aircraft anywhere in the world. Installing the 3-foot-diameter dishes will require cutting open the top of the B-2’s center fuselage and fabricating mounting positions for the two 300-pound dishes. Fielding the satellite dishes is expected in 2013 and beyond.

In a parallel project, the B-2 will be outfitted to carry up to 64 laser-guided Small Diameter Bomb IIs, enabling the jet to strike moving targets.

To improve flight-line maintenance of the airframe, Northrop is using a new coating for the B-2 fuselage, called the “advanced topcoat system.” The coating is expected to shorten time maintainers spend preserving the airplane’s stealthiness after they open access panels.

The difficulty of maintaining the B-2’s stealth coating is a factor leading to the bomber’s low mission-capable rate of 48.7 percent in 2007, the lowest of any Air Force fighter or bomber, Air Force officials have said. Improvements to the stealth skin helped improve the rate in recent years from a low of 30.6 percent in 2005.

Generals face discipline over nuclear woes

Generals face discipline over nuclear woes
By Michael Hoffman - Staff writer Air Force Times
Posted : Friday Sep 19, 2008 15:49:26 EDT
Several Air Force generals and colonels will be disciplined next week for mistakes made handling nuclear weapons and nuclear-related materials over the past year, said congressional and Air Force sources.

One congressional aide said to expect the announcement on Tuesday.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered Navy Adm. Kirkland H. Donald, director of naval nuclear propulsion, to investigate the Air Force’s nuclear mission after it was discovered in March that sensitive ballistic missile components were wrongly shipped to Taiwan in 2006 and airmen mistakenly flew six nuclear tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 across the country in August 2007.

Donald’s report includes recommended disciplinary actions for top Air Force leaders in the nuclear business. The punishments will be handed out next week based on these recommendations, according to Air Force sources.

The chapter that contained the disciplinary recommendations was not initially released to Congress. In fact, congressional members threatened to hold up the confirmation of Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz until they received it.

Air Force leaders plan to announce these punishments a week after the service held its Nuclear Summit that was attended by defense department and other agency partners.

It also comes after the Task Force on Nuclear Weapons Management headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger released their report which ripped the Air Force’s ability to handle nuclear weapons and recommended sweeping changes to halt the erosion of the service’s nuclear enterprise.

NSA Spooks Sued

The Electronic Frontier Foundation Thursday opened what attorney Kevin Bankston called the "second front in our battle to stop the NSA's illegal surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans," with a lawsuit targeting top administration officials who approved or implemented the National Security Agency's program of warrantless surveillance. At the heart of the suit is a surprising and complex question that legal experts say remains radically unsettled: Can a computer eavesdrop?

The first front in this fight is EFF's ongoing lawsuit against telecom firms believed to have participated in the NSA program, which the group once thought would be the quickest way to get at the underlying question of whether the NSA program was itself lawful. But that litigation spurred Congress to pass the FISA Amendments Act this summer, granting retroactive immunity to the defendant companies, provided the Attorney General certifies that they received assurances from the government that the surveillance was lawful. While EFF believes the immunity provision to be unconstitutional, Bankston acknowledged in a press teleconference this afternoon that "litigating that question is going to slow us down." They've therefore decided to cut out the middleman and target the government directly.

The new suit, Jewel v. NSA, seeks both injunctive relief—the cessation of the program and the destruction of records obtained through it—and civil damages from the officials most responsible for the program. EFF's complaint alleges that the program violates the Constitution, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Wiretap Act, and the Stored Communications Act. Bankston believes the new suit is likely to be shunted to the docket of California judge Vaughn Walker, who has heard both the consolidated telecom lawsuits and a number of other cases implicating the NSA program.


President Bush is a named defendant
In addition to government agencies—the Department of Justice and National Security Agency—the lawsuit names a number of administration officials as defendants, in both their official capacities and as private individuals: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, as well as the the attorneys general, NSA directors, directors of national intelligence, and an indeterminate number of unknown "John Does" who played some role in authorizing and implementing the warrantless wiretapping. Bankston said that EFF is asking for civil damages from all of these officials—with the exception of the president, who enjoys immunity from civil liability for actions in office—in order to secure "personal accountability from the architects of the program, and to provide a strong incentive against future lawbreaking by these or other government officials."

The plaintiffs are the same as those in the telecom case, Hepting v. AT&T, with one more added for good measure. All are ordinary citizens of a "nationwide class of customers of all AT&T residential phone and internet service providers," and their standing to bring suit relies not on any contention that they were specific targets of NSA surveillance, but on the claim that the government was indiscriminately vacuuming up vast quantities of data, to be filtered by the government according to algorithms known only to them.

This claim rests in large part on evidence provided by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, who has provided documentation attesting to the existence of a secret room in AT&T's Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, where fiber optic cables were diverted through a sophisticated Narus traffic analysis machine. As EFF attorney Cindy Cohn notes, this is a hub facility through which both purely domestic and international traffic are routed, whereas a program targeting exclusively international or domestic-to-foreign communications should be situated at the point where "the wire hits the beach." The Folsom Street room is believed to be only one of many similar interception stations. According to a March report in the Wall Street Journal, "current and former intelligence officials confirmed a domestic network of hubs, but didn't know the number."

This is where things get murky.

The case EFF plans to make—and, indeed, their plaintiffs' standing to bring suit—rests on the premise that the wholesale diversion of domestic communications to the government's filtering device in itself constitutes a search or seizure beyond the bounds of both the Fourth Amendment and federal wiretap statutes—including the new FISA Amendments Act, which gave the Attorney General broad discretion to authorize the collection of communications, including domestic-to-international communications, provided the "target" of the investigation is a foreign person or group.

But the government has never accepted that premise. During the 2000 controversy over the FBI's use of (now superseded) packet-sniffing software dubbed "Carnivore," officials argued that the ephemeral copying of data into memory for the purpose of filtering out targeted material did not itself impinge upon privacy interests. Sifting that took place "inside the box" did not amount to a Fourth Amendment "search" until data was actually recorded in a human-readable form.

Judge Richard Posner applied this argument to still more intrusive data mining practices in a much-discussed 2006 article in The New Republic. "A computer search does not invade privacy or violate FISA, because a computer program is not a sentient being," wrote Posner. "But, if the program picked out a conversation that seemed likely to have intelligence value and an intelligence officer wanted to scrutinize it, he would come up against FISA's limitations."

Breaking News; Islamabad Hotel Bombing

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- A car bomb detonated Saturday night in the heart of Islamabad, killing at least 20 people and wounding at least another 20, police said.


Rescue workers pulled bloodied victims from vehicles, and other casualties could be seen in the street. Officials predicted the casualty tolls would rise.

GEO TV's Hamid Mir, who was at the explosion site, said he saw at least 52 bodies. Most of the fatalities appeared to be drivers who were waiting with their cars outside the hotel, and hotel staff -- most of them security guards.

Mir said a witness saw the gates of the hotel rammed open by a small car, followed by an explosive-laden truck that detonated.

The blast caused a natural gas leak that set the top floor of the five-story, 258-room Marriott Hotel on fire. The blaze quickly engulfed the entire structure. More than a dozen cars were reduced to twisted steel. Watch firefighters battle fire at hotel »

Police described the blast, which occurred at 8 p.m. (10 a.m. ET), as a car bomb.

Nearby trees were felled by the blast, which occurred hours after newly elected President Asif Ali Zardari addressed a joint session of Parliament and promised to root out terrorism.

Video showed a deep crater in the pavement where the bomb is thought to have detonated.

At the CNN bureau, more than two miles from the hotel, the explosion sounded like it occurred just outside, said CNN's Reza Sayah, who was at his desk at the time.

"All of a sudden, the bureau roared and rumbled," he said. "It was a roaring rumble that would not stop. Seconds later, the windows shattered."

The Marriott, a Western brand-name hotel, has been the site of attacks in the past.

Located near the diplomatic section of the city and heavily guarded by police and military, the facility is popular among tourists. Any car entering the facility is searched, its underside scrutinized for bombs, before it is allowed to pass through heavy steel gates.

Gen. Schwartz:"More V-22s, more C-130s and reforming UAV culture."

Schwartz pledges to remake UAV culture
By Ben Iannotta - Staff writer Air Force Times

Posted : Thursday Sep 18, 2008 16:49:23 EDT

Near the end of the U.S. Air Force’s annual “Four Star Forum” session Sept. 17, one of the 13 assembled generals made a quip that summed up the challenge the Air Force will face as it attempts to reclaim what Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz called its “ass-kicking good” performance status.

The moderator asked Lt. Gen. Donald Wurster, commander of the service’s special operations command, what he would do if he had “another dollar” to spend in his budget. Wurster said he would buy more CV-22 tilt-rotors and MC-130 transports. “Then I’d walk down the table here and knife each of these gentleman in the back and take their one dollar,” he joked.

Schwartz has the challenge of fixing a service that is weighing multiple and sometimes competing issues, from the proper roles of ISR aircraft to where to apply dollars to its aging manned aircraft. Schwartz said the Air Force would remake its UAV “culture” and make sure UAV operators no longer feel like they are living in a “leper colony.” He said he would reach an agreement with the Army to end the internal debate over the respective roles of each in unmanned ISR. He promised to restore confidence in his service’s stewardship of nuclear weapons. And, he said, these issues would be sorted out with the highest ethical standards.

Schwartz said retired generals “have an obligation to refrain from taking sides in public debates on key acquisition programs.” He was even more blunt with reporters later: “What I think we need to avoid is to have Americans believe that their military leadership can be bought,” he said.

Schwartz appeared to be referring to the retired generals who have taken sides publicly in the fight between Northrop Grumman and Boeing over the service’s new refueling tanker. He might also have been referring to Northrop Grumman’s successful effort to win more funds for its E-8 Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar aircraft by enlisting retired generals, including one on the company’s payroll, to write letters.

In terms of unmanned aircraft ISR, Schwartz conceded that the roles of the Air Force and Army needed to be made clearer. “In the end it will get decided in the [joint staff’s] tank and I’m comfortable with that,” he said.

Schwartz did not rule out drawing some lessons from the Army, which routinely uses enlisted people to fly UAVs and fire cannons and missiles. The Air Force has so far insisted on entrusting UAV ordnance to officers. “For the near-term, we will draw from the officer talent pools. But I don’t dismiss the possibility that we could go a different way. No options are off the table,” he said.

As for ISR strategy, the service’s role in Africa consumed much of the conversation among the generals because of the scheduled “initial operating capability” for the new Africa Command Oct. 1. “Africom is a strange animal. It is a [combatant command] with no assigned forces,” said Gen. Roger Brady, who for the time being oversees Air Force operations in Africa as commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe.

“Although the Horn of Africa is a significant issue, obviously, it’s going to be largely at least for the short term an ISR big lift, command, and also partner-building” effort, Brady said.

Wurster, the special operations commander, said his forces would use ISR equipment to deny sanctuary to the continent’s terrorists: “If we can make it difficult for them to move money, if we can make their movements traceable, then we’ll arrive at the position where every night they’ll go to bed and say, ‘Maybe today I made the mistake that will let them find me,” he said. “We want to roll these people up so they don’t have a place to go and nest like they did in the south of Afghanistan before 2001.”