Word: pentagonals
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...Robert Gates flies around the world to war zones and allies, to China and Russia and Suriname, on a Cold War relic called the Doomsday Plane. Forged in the 1970s by Boeing, it was designed to stay aloft even in the midst of nuclear war. It's an airborne Pentagon. The plane is so heavy that it needs refueling in midair on long flights. The Air Force crew aboard told me that on occasion, the fuel nozzle from the floating tankers has smashed through the pilots' windshield like an angry space creature. It's one of a handful of planes...
...classic Gates: droll, attentive to timing, a little self-deprecating, acutely self-aware. It was also revealing. Gates is a careful, restrained player who wields his power with quiet but ruthless efficiency - as he did on Feb. 1, when he fired the military officer overseeing the Pentagon's new F-35 stealth-fighter-jet program for cost overruns and technical failures and punished Lockheed Martin by withholding $615 million in fees. Lots of defense contractors and program managers underachieve, yet they almost always get away with it. Not under Gates...
...military keyboards. The Army is developing "techniques that capture and identify data traversing enemy networks for the purpose of Information Operations or otherwise countering adversary communications." And the Navy is developing "a non-lethal, non-attributable system designed to offer non-kinetic offensive information operation solutions," according to Pentagon budget documents. (See how cyberwar was envisioned...
...keystroke to travel halfway around the world). Far better to be on the prowl for cybertrouble and - with a few keystrokes or by activating secret codes long ago secreted in a prospective foe's computer system - thwart any attack. Cyberdefense "never works" by itself, says the senior Pentagon officer. "There has to be an element of offense to have a credible defense...
...Such cyberbattles are already happening in miniature. In Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. cyberwarriors are hard at work denying enemy commanders the ability to direct their forces, the senior Pentagon officer says. "I shut it down, take away your electricity, take away the radio, infect your phone," he explains. "Now you don't know where I'm coming from, or if you do, you can't tell the rest of your force what's going on." More insidiously, the U.S. can doctor the information the foe gets. "I can alter the messages coming across," he says...