Nov04

The FBI Announces Gangs Have Infiltrated Every Branch Of The Military

The FBI has released a new gang assessment announcing that there are 1.4 million gang members in the US, a 40 percent increase since 2009, and that many of these members are getting inside the military (via Stars and Stripes).

The report says the military has seen members from 53 gangs and 100 regions in the U.S. enlist in every branch of the armed forces. Members of every major street gang, some prison gangs, and outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs) have been reported on both U.S. and international military installations.

From the report:

Through transfers and deployments, military-affiliated gang members expand their culture and operations to new regions nationwide and worldwide, undermining security and law enforcement efforts to combat crime. Gang members with military training pose a unique threat to law enforcement personnel because of their distinctive weapons and combat training skills and their ability to transfer these skills to fellow gang members.

The report notes that while gang members have been reported in every branch of service, they are concentrated in the U.S. Army, Army Reserves, and the Army National Guard.

Many street gang members join the military to escape the gang lifestyle or as an alternative to incarceration, but often revert back to their gang associations once they encounter other gang members in the military. Other gangs target the U.S. military and defense systems to expand their territory, facilitate criminal activity such as weapons and drug trafficking, or to receive weapons and combat training that they may transfer back to their gang. Incidents of weapons theft and trafficking may have a negative impact on public safety or pose a threat to law enforcement officials.

The FBI points out that many gangs, especially the bikers, actively recruit members with military training and advise young members with no criminal record to join the service for weapon access and combat experience.

The full assessment is definitely worth checking out

Oct21

U.S. Army Turns to Videogames for Training

The Army's Joint Training Counter-IED Operations Integration Center uses games to train soldiers better.

This past week marked the release of the latest version of Medal of Honor, a videogame that has come under a great deal of fire since it was revealed that in its newest iteration players would be able to assume the role of Taliban fighters and fire on American troops. After fielding protests and complaints, Electronic Arts made a last-minute decision to rename the terrorists in the game, calling them “an opposing force” instead of “the Taliban.”

The controversy is hardly a surprise, given that the game addresses an ongoing conflict, a fight where moms and dads, brothers, sisters and friends are still in harm’s way. What is surprising is that playing a videogame where players can assume the role of terrorists is something that the U.S. Army not only understands, but actively develops and plays on a regular basis.

To understand why the Army (and other branches of the Armed Forces) are playing videogames — and playing as insurgents — let’s backtrack. When the United States mobilized its forces and headed to the Middle East nearly a decade ago, some in the public, media and politics assumed it would be a quick fight. Here was the most advanced fighting force the world had ever known — its soldiers were well-trained and they had access to technological weapons worthy of science fiction novels. Their foe was a disparate group, underfunded and fighting with outdated weapons in various states of disrepair and munitions left over from a handful of other wars.

But then the unexpected happened. Instead of rolling over, the enemy’s guerrilla tactics (specifically the use of roadside bombs) changed expectations of a quick victory. These improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have accounted for about half of all coalition casualties.

It took a while for the Army to react, as most large organizations do, and most of the initial reactions to the IED problem weren’t entirely successful. In fact, it wasn’t until 2004 when John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, insisted on the equivalent of the Manhattan Project to come up with real solutions to counter IEDs, that the Army was able to kick it into high gear.

Many organizations were born out of Abizaid’s request (and the funding that accompanied it), and it’s one of these new groups that is tasked with using videogame tools to help soldiers and commanders understand how to not only train smarter, but also to understand how their enemy thinks. Part of that mission is occasionally playing the role of insurgent in these games.

Making Training as Complex as the Actual Fight

Tucked away in a nondescript strip mall near Fort Monroe, Virginia are the offices of the Joint Training Counter-IED Operations Integration Center, or JTCOIC. It’s here that the Army has adopted videogames.

Mark Parent, Director of Operations, explains their mission: “In the past, the usual turnaround for training has been long; sometimes it takes many years to make changes. We’re tasked with getting that information out sooner. Our goal is to make the scrimmage as hard as the game.”

JTCOIC began exploring how to best leverage existing information, such as reports and databases, and analyze how to use that information to train soldiers better. As JTCOIC ramped up, it began looking for ways to get training and information out to as many soldiers as possible, as quickly as possible. Technology appeared to be the most sensible solution and the group began pursuing a wide scope of activity.

Under the guidance of former First Sergeant Mark Covey JTCOIC began to really find its way. Covey heads up JTCOIC’s Systems Integration Modeling and Simulation (SIMS). A team of artists, programmers and videographers started to challenge the way the Army thought about training.

“When I joined the army in the early ’80s, most of stuff was canned and scripted and it took weeks or months or years to change training content,” said Covey. “Often it was based on a target that didn’t exist, a made up location like ‘Transnovia.’ Today, we make training based on actual locations, actual villages and actual events. The geographies are accurate and, more importantly, the activity is accurate.”

What SIMS does now is miles beyond the borders of Transnovia. While the team offers a variety of services (machinima movies of downrange incidents, playable scenarios based on battlefield engagements, movies and playable scenarios strictly for specialized training and many more products — if it can be dreamed up, SIMS can deliver, it boils down to training using game software. The team takes a scenario — whether based on actual events or invented by a trainer — and using a variety of software, creates a 2-D or 3-D virtual training event of that scenario. The closest comparison is a last-gen Call of Duty, but with very real consequences.

“I think one of the very first [simulations] we did followed an event that took place in Mosul,” said Richard Williams, Technical Director of SIMS. “There was a five-vehicle convoy. The first vehicle turned the corner around a park, went up about 100 meters and got hit by 400 pounds of deep-buried explosives. Every soldier inside that vehicle died. Following that, there was a complex attack: Insurgents to the east at about 300 meters, insurgents to the north on top of a mosque at 300 meters and insurgents to the south on top of a building, attacking.

“We produced this product, created the terrain … everything … and had it done in four days. When it was done, it was amazingly powerful because what we did was create a transition from the real world of photographs and reports into the virtual world’s polygons and there was a feeling of ‘now we get it.’ Now we can see what the bad guys are doing and what their point of view was, what the trigger man’s aim point was.”

For soldiers in the field to be able to visualize enemy strategy and see the battlefield through the enemy’s eyes, it was a breakthrough. But the SIMS unit was just learning their craft at that point, says Williams. “It was just four of us. It was very rough, we were using Camtasia, we didn’t have hardware capture cards, we didn’t have professional videographers or anything like that. But when we finished, we knew we were going in the right direction. And we’ve kept adding resources, capabilities, components and expertise.”

Using Game Software to Train for Serious Situations

The SIMS group has grown since that first simulation. From humble beginnings, Covey, Williams and the rest of the team moved their operation to the Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2) platform, based on the Armed Assault PC games. It’s a nice match for JTCOIC because VBS2 ships with 6,000 pre-rendered objects, including many vehicles, weapons and characters, plus operators can create and add new objects. “[Since moving to VBS2] we’ve added about 100 vehicles and 300 to 400 other objects,” says Williams. They’ve created everything from a pack of cigarettes to a Patriot missile battery.

“When the men and women in the field identify a new combat tactic the enemy is using, we take all data from that event and run it through a variety of toolsets — through constructive-based simulations if you need a physics-based result — and then pipe it through the game software,” says Covey. Because the Marines, NATO, the Army and all major allies have purchased VBS2, SIMS can produce a single product and distribute unclassified products to all its allied partners.

Plus, for a growing audience of 500 to 600 trainers worldwide, the SIMS team add roughly as many object and programming requests to their queue as they turn out each week. “Our customers are used to having to fill out forms and dealing with a process that’s pretty bureaucratic,” says Williams, “but we try to make things as easy as possible for them. All we need is an e-mail request and we get to work.”

Of course, not everything the SIMS team does can be done with a quick turnaround. Some videos and simulations can take much longer, depending on their complexity. One of the biggest hurdles can be the terrain. “There are various databases where terrain models can be found,” says Covey. Some terrain can be created quickly or adapted from existing maps. Other geography has to be created from scratch, which can take time.

One of the few downsides of the operation is that the models and animation look dated. While there are certainly alternative solutions that look better, provide more realism and come closer to meeting today’s expectations for life-like models, animations and particle effects, every other option adds days (or months) to the process and, with those time increases, dollars to the bottom line. Machinima offers a fast turnaround and cost efficiency, as well.

Workflow for the group is indeed fast. The SIMS team has taken a page out of Hollywood’s playbook. They begin by creating a storyboard of what happened downrange or what a trainer wants to create. Based on those needs, they pull objects from the VBS2 library or create them for this project. Some new vehicles are drawn from scratch. They assemble other objects, like buildings, from a Lego-like assortment of pre-drawn windows, roofs and walls — a system that allows the team to quickly create new environments to fit a wide variety of situations. In most cases, the team does the voice-over work, as well, allowing the process to be streamlined even further.

The tools they use are largely what you’d find in any game-development office: 3ds Max, Maya and Photoshop are used for the heavy lifting. A VBS2 add-on called Oxygen is used to port between Maya and VBS2. Like most of what SIMS does, this is a well-thought out decision. If the Army decides to move to a platform other than VBS2, models developed in 3ds Max or Maya should be able to port to a new platform with minimal pain.

VBS2, while not the prettiest solution, offers some very realistic physics. The SIMS team prefers to work from CAD drawings, but in certain instances they have to make do with photographs, technical drawings and manuals.

One such vehicle led to some programming challenges. “We were building the OH-58 Delta from scratch,” says Covey. “We couldn’t get that thing to fly worth a darn. Every single time it would take off and crash, take off and crash. So our lead programmer began adjusting where the mass was located on the vehicle. He ended up putting almost the entire mass of the OH-58 Delta in the rotor tips and it flew like a champ. We didn’t think it was physically accurate, but it worked.

“We sent it down to the aviation center at Fort Rucker with the caveat — it will fly, the optics work, the missile systems work, but we put all the mass in the rotor tips because we couldn’t get it to fly. They wrote back: “That’s where the mass is.” I’d like to say we were smart, but we got lucky on that one.”

Covey and his team have also used the game engine to create training simulations for vehicles. While Covey is quick to admit he isn’t trying to create anything as in-depth as a flight simulator, they can replicate basic controls for other vehicles. The Husky mounted detection system is a vehicle that Army engineers use to seek out anti-vehicle landmines and other explosive hazards.

The operation of the vehicle takes a little getting used to and, rather than let a new user learn on (and beat up) a very expensive piece of equipment, the SIMS team created a simulation showing the controls via the GUI in the game. This way, users have a fair amount of familiarity before sitting behind the controls of this valuable machinery.

Another example of what the SIMS group can do is weapons training. “The XM25 is not an official piece of Army equipment,” says Covey. “And before ARCIC (the Army Capability Integration Center) purchased them, they wanted a way to evaluate them and train soldiers on the weapon system.” So SIMS studied what the XM25 did and created a virtual training center. “My guys got down to the drag coefficient on each individual piece of shrapnel, allowing our damage model to take all this into account,” said Covey.

Giving Soldiers the Tools They Need to Get the Job Done

Another team is hard at work on User Defined Operational Programs or UDOP. These applications cover a variety of tools to help soldiers in the field, but probably the most interesting is the Army’s adaptation of Google Earth.

Using its own mapping system, JTCOIC has created a website where soldiers can log in and download .kml files that are updated daily for specific locations. Based on situation reports, important details are added to a region’s maps. Schools, mosques and roads are all defined. Additionally, callout windows describe attacks in recent days, explosions and other important data that a driver or unit commander can review before setting out for the day (or night).

UDOP also creates maps with 3-D flyover capabilities. These maps allow the user to virtually walk the streets of an upcoming route. In addition to noting key elements like the other maps, the 3-D maps give soldiers a sense of what a route will be like, what rooftops, cross-streets and alleys to be aware of and potential fields of to keep in mind.

A couple of doors away from UDOP, is what appears to be a small sound stage. In the center of the room is a cube with sides about eight feet square. One of the sides slides open like a porch door. The floor is slightly elevated in what the JTCOIC refers to as “The Cave,” a moniker that conjures up the notion of a dark, damp space. But The Cave’s air is crisp, since there are plenty of machines to keep cool. The walls are a bright, white fabric for displaying images projected on them. There is no ceiling to the cube, but images can be projected on all four walls and the floor, creating an immersive experience. This is achieved by running a single simulation on what is, essentially, five displays, using five different in-game cameras.

A simulation of the Battle of Kamdesh is loaded and moments later, we are hovering above Command Outpost Keating in eastern Afghanistan. The simulation, created using the SIMS team’s VBS2 tools, illustrates how insurgents attacked a soon-to-be-deserted combat outpost in the mountains of the Nuristan province.

As Taliban commanders hid in a mosque, directing the attack, U.S. and Afghanistan soldiers in the valley below fought off attacks from all sides. Using the VBS2 software and The Cave to illustrate how the battle progressed, Army commanders and analysts were able to look at the battle from all angles, including enemy positions and their movement, and include the Army’s defense and response tactics.

It’s easy to see why JTCOIC has invested so heavily in the SIMS team. Despite the rough polygons and bland textures, in The Cave, the fight comes to life and it’s easy to imagine the battle developing around you.

“Before we started, there were reports that no one wanted to read, then there were PowerPoints that put everyone to sleep,” said Covey. “Now, in The Cave, we put you in the battle.”

It’s been a short three years since the JTCOIC was sketched out on paper. In the months since its inception, they have made great inroads on how the soldiers in today’s Army are trained. Resistance has popped up now again in the middle bureaucracy, but the commanders see the efficiencies and benefit of this type of training and the front-line troops, raised on Xbox and Playstations, expect it.

And, yes, there are times when the role of insurgent is played in these games, but there are stark differences between a gamer playing Medal of Honor for fun after school or work and a professional who’s trying to learn how to keep soldiers safe in the future. And that’s what JTCOIC has done — via SIMS and UDOP and the many products they produce — they have found ways to improve the safety of our soldiers. And for the moms and dads, brothers, sisters and friends out there in harm’s way, there really is no better mission.

Aug31

Military Computer Attack Confirmed

A top Pentagon official has confirmed a previously classified incident that he describes as “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever,” a 2008 episode in which a foreign intelligence agent used a flash drive to infect computers, including those used by the Central Command in overseeing combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Plugging the cigarette-lighter-sized flash drive into an American military laptop at a base in the Middle East amounted to “a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control,” according to William J. Lynn 3d, deputy secretary of defense, writing in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.

“It was a network administrator’s worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary,” Mr. Lynn wrote.

The incident was first reported in November 2008 by the Danger Room blog of Wired magazine, and then in greater detail by The Los Angeles Times, which said that the matter was sufficiently grave that President George W. Bush was briefed on it. The newspaper mentioned suspicions of Russian involvement.

But Mr. Lynn’s article was the first official confirmation. He also put a name — Operation Buckshot Yankee — to the Pentagon operation to counter the attack, and said that the episode “marked a turning point in U.S. cyber-defense strategy.” In an early step, the Defense Department banned the use of portable flash drives with its computers, though it later modified the ban.

Mr. Lynn described the extraordinary difficulty of protecting military digital communications over a web of 15,000 networks and 7 million computing devices in dozens of countries against farflung adversaries who, with modest means and a reasonable degree of ingenuity, can inflict outsized damage. Traditional notions of deterrence do not apply.

“A dozen determined computer programmers can, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, threaten the United States’s global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target,” he wrote.

Security officials also face the problem of counterfeit hardware that may have remotely operated “kill switches” or “back doors” built in to allow manipulation from afar, as well as the problem of software with rogue code meant to cause sudden malfunctions.

Against the array of threats, Mr. Lynn said, the National Security Agency had pioneered systems — “part sensor, part sentry, part sharpshooter” — that are meant to automatically counter intrusions in real time.

His article appeared intended partly to raise awareness of the threat to United States cybersecurity — “the frequency and sophistication of intrusions into U.S. military networks have increased exponentially,” he wrote — and partly to make the case for a larger Pentagon role in cyberdefense.

Various efforts at cyberdefense by the military have been drawn under a single organization, the U.S. Cyber Command, which began operations in late May at Fort Meade, Maryland, under a four-star general, Keith B. Alexander.

But under proposed legislation, the Department of Homeland Security would take the leading role in the defense of civilian systems.

Though the Cyber Command has greater capabilities, the military operates within the United States only if ordered to do so by the president.

Another concern is whether the Pentagon, or government in general, has the nimbleness for such work. Mr. Lynn acknowledged that “it takes the Pentagon 81 months to make a new computer system operational after it is first funded.” By contrast, he noted, “the iPhone was developed in 24 months.”

Mar04

Sexual Assaults on Female Soldiers: Don't Ask, Don't Tell

What does it tell us that female soldiers deployed overseas stop drinking water after 7 p.m. to reduce the odds of being raped if they have to use the bathroom at night? Or that a soldier who was assaulted when she went out for a cigarette was afraid to report it for fear she would be demoted — for having gone out without her weapon? Or that, as Representative Jane Harman puts it, "a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire."

The fight over "Don't ask, don't tell" made headlines this winter as an issue of justice and history and the social evolution of our military institutions. We've heard much less about another set of hearings in the House Armed Services Committee. Maybe that's because too many commanders still don't ask, and too many victims still won't tell, about the levels of violence endured by women in uniform.

The Pentagon's latest figures show that nearly 3,000 women were sexually assaulted in fiscal year 2008, up 9% from the year before; among women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number rose 25%. When you look at the entire universe of female veterans, close to a third say they were victims of rape or assault while they were serving — twice the rate in the civilian population.

The problem is even worse than that. The Pentagon estimates that 80% to 90% of sexual assaults go unreported, and it's no wonder. Anonymity is all but impossible; a Government Accountability Office report concluded that most victims stay silent because of "the belief that nothing would be done; fear of ostracism, harassment, or ridicule; and concern that peers would gossip." More than half feared they would be labeled troublemakers. A civilian who is raped can get confidential, or "privileged," advice from her doctors, lawyers, victim advocates; the only privilege in the military applies to chaplains. A civilian who knows her assailant has a much better chance of avoiding him than does a soldier at a remote base, where filing charges can be a career killer — not for the assailant but the victim. Women worry that they will be removed from their units for their own "protection" and talk about not wanting to undermine their missions or the cohesion of their units. And then some just do the math: only 8% of cases that are investigated end in prosecution, compared with 40% for civilians arrested for sex crimes. Astonishingly, about 80% of those convicted are honorably discharged nonetheless.

The sense of betrayal runs deep in victims who joined the military to be part of a loyal team pursuing a larger cause; experts liken the trauma to incest and the particular damage done when assault is inflicted by a member of the military "family." Women are often denied claims for posttraumatic stress caused by the assault if they did not bring charges at the time. There are not nearly enough mental-health professionals in the system to help them. Female vets are four times more likely to be homeless than male vets are, according to the Service Women's Action Network, and of those, 40% report being victims of sexual assault.

Experts offer many theories for the causes: that military culture is intrinsically violent and hypermasculine, that the military is slow to identify potential risks among raw young recruits, that too many commanders would rather look the other way than acknowledge a breakdown in their units, that it has simply not been made a high enough priority. "A lot of my male colleagues believe that the only thing a general needs to worry about is whether he can win a war," says Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez of the Armed Services Committee. "People are not taking this seriously. Commanding officers in the field are not understanding how important this is."

But there are some signs that both Congress and the Pentagon are getting serious about this problem. It is now possible for victims to seek medical treatment without having to report the crime to police or their chain of command. More field hospitals have trained nurse practitioners to treat the victims; more bases have rape kits. "More than ever," Sanchez says, "I believe that our leadership at the very top is beginning to realize that they need to be proactive."

According to a report by the Defense Task Force on Sexual Assault in the Military Services, the progress made so far remains "evident, but uneven." The failure to provide a basic guarantee of safety to women, who now represent 15% of the armed forces, is not just a moral issue, or a morale issue. What does it say if the military can't or won't protect the people we ask to protect us?

Feb11

A Brief History of Gays in the Military

In his first State of the Union address, President Obama declared that he would work to "finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are." Though a June 2009 Gallup poll showed that 69% of Americans support allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military, repealing "Don't ask, don't tell" will take more than a declaration — it will take an act of Congress. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are presenting a proposal to repeal the ban in the first congressional hearing on the issue in 17 years. According to a Jan. 26 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA's School of Law, there are an estimated 66,000 lesbians, gays and bisexuals currently serving in the U.S. armed forces; for these soldiers, progress on a repeal is only the latest glimmer of hope in a long history of secrets.

For the ancient Greeks, gays serving in the military were no big deal. Indeed, Plato wrote in his Symposium that a small army composed of lovers and those they loved would be more than a match for much larger armies: "For love will convert the veriest coward into an inspired hero." But for the most part, that's where support of gays in the military ended. Following the Crusades, the Knights Templar were persecuted and many members burned at the stake for their same-sex affairs in the early 14th century. In the Napoleonic wars, four men aboard the British ship H.M.S. Africaine were hanged in 1816 for "buggery"; two other crewmen were whipped for "uncleanness" (a term used to describe deviant sexual behavior). Even General George Washington discharged an American soldier in 1778 for participating in homosexual acts.

Though the U.S. military explicitly prohibited homosexuality in the Articles of War of 1916, a ban wasn't enforced until World War II. Amid the largest mobilization in U.S. history, the Army, Navy and Selective Service System developed procedures for spotting and excluding homosexual draftees from service: recruits were screened for feminine body characteristics, effeminacy in dress and manner and a patulous (expanded) rectum. By war's end, more than 4,000 of the 12 million men conscripted for the war effort were rejected for being gay. (Thousands of lesbians were allowed to serve the war effort, however; asking women about their sexuality violated the standards of behavior at the time.) During Vietnam, homosexuality or the appearance of it was seen by some as a way to avoid service in a bloody and unpalatable conflict, although it didn't always work: in 1968 Perry Watkins, a 19-year-old from Washington, was drafted despite checking the "yes" box in the category "homosexual tendencies" during his preinduction physical examination. After 16 years of service, the military discharged Watkins for his sexual orientation in 1984; he promptly filed a lawsuit and went on to win his case in 1990.

Enter "Don't ask, don't tell." During his 1992 presidential campaign, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton promised to lift the ban on gays in the military — a move opposed by senior military officials and a majority of the American public. It became one of the first issues Clinton tackled as President, but when the White House attempt to unilaterally repeal the ban stumbled, Congress passed a law to keep openly gay men and women from serving. Gays were allowed to serve so long as they kept quiet about their sexual orientation. The phrase "Don't ask, don't tell" doesn't completely describe the law, formally known as the Military Personnel Eligibility Act of 1993. While the Pentagon agreed to stop asking about sexuality in recruitment forms and interviews, it never agreed to stop investigating whether those serving in the military were gay. As a result, since 1994, more than 12,000 servicemembers have been dismissed because of their sexual orientation.

Today, 25 countries allow gays to openly serve in their armed forces, including the U.S.'s closest neighbor, Canada. The British military began allowing gays to serve in 2000; members of the Ministry of Defense told The New York Times in 2007 that there had been no reported incidents of harassment, discord, blackmail or bullying, nor any erosion of unit cohesion or military effectiveness. In Israel, which has had no restrictions on gays serving in the military since 1993, the army magazine, Bamahane, showcased two men hugging each other on a 2009 cover. In Russia, people "who have problems with their identity and sexual preferences," as the military guidelines put it, are allowed to serve only during times of war. Many other countries ban homosexuality in society in general, making gays' military service there a nonissue. In the U.S., however, many think it's time for the military to catch up with the times. "As a nation built on the principle of equality," wrote General John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a letter to Pentagon leadership, "we should recognize and welcome change that will build a stronger, more cohesive military."