20 Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped. By Joe Russo »

Nasser’s ‘Nazi Rockets’

Map showing the distances claimed by Egypt for the reach of its rockets. Exactly half a century ago, in the spring of 1963, Israel was suddenly gripped by a curious mass panic. Sensational newspaper reports and radio announcements claimed that the country was threatened by enemy ‘atom bombs’, ‘fatal microbes’, ‘poison gases’, ‘death rays’ and a ‘cobalt warhead’ that could ‘scatter radioactive particles over large areas’. Within hours, opinion in the entire country had been ignited. Parliamentary debates, everyday conversations, even songs and poems were all preoccupied obsessively with the same theme – that Israel was confronted by the imminent threat of another Holocaust, less than two decades after the first.

The source of this supposedly dire foreign menace was not Iran, nor the Soviet Union, although superpower tension at this stage in the Cold War was certainly intense. The perceived threat instead emanated from Egypt, which over the past decade had been led by the supremely charismatic and populist military officer, 44-year-old President Gamal Abdul Nasser.

Several months before, in the early hours of July 21st, 1962 Nasser had stunned the world by successfully test-firing a number of rockets. Specially-invited contingents of foreign journalists and cameramen had been driven to a remote spot deep in the Egyptian desert, not far from the central Cairo-Alexandria highway. They watched as a massive explosion shook the ground and a white missile lifted itself from a camouflaged position, a short distance in front of them. As one American correspondent wrote: ‘It pierced a long, white cloud and later, in plain view, slowly arched to the north towards the Mediterranean.’ Over the next few hours three more launches were carried out in quick succession before the journalists returned home, amid scenes of jubilation from ecstatic crowds. The Egyptian public had heard the news when a special announcement, broadcast on a national public holiday, announced on government radio that Egypt had ‘entered the missile age’.

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The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWS

By Nigel Jones

Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWS. Sönke Neitzel & Harald Welzer. Yale University Press 468pp £25

Eleven years ago Sönke Neitzel, a German historian based at Glasgow University, stumbled on the sort of documentary treasure trove that other historians spend their lives dreaming about. On a rainy autumn day, during a routine research visit to the National Archives in Kew, Neitzel came across the transcript of a covertly taped conversation between captured German officers in a British PoW camp. Like Oliver Twist he asked for more and it soon became clear that his original find was just the tip of a gigantic iceberg.

Late in the Second World War, the British had systematically bugged private discussions between captive German soldiers of all ranks. (The Americans soon followed suit and recorded the conversations of their PoWs, too.) The resulting mountain of material has already yielded one fascinating book, Tapping Hitler’s Generals (2007), in which Neitzel used taped discussions, including heated arguments, between German generals held in Trent Park camp, following the capitulation of the Afrika Korps in Tunisia in 1943 and after the 1944 Normandy campaign.

These unguarded conversations proved a rich haul to the British Intelligence ‘buggers’ monitoring them. They showed, for example, the deep disillusionment among the higher ranks of the Wehrmacht with their Führer and his disastrous mismanagement of the war. They also revealed the army’s bitter and cynical hostility to the growing power of Himmler’s SS.

Now, in Soldaten, his second selection of extracts from the taped transcripts, Neitzel has printed more reflections from the generals, but also extended his trawl to the Wehrmacht’s lower ranks: commissioned officers, NCOs and ordinary private soldiers. Like Tapping Hitler’s Generals this is an equally fascinating snapshot of the psychology of Hitler’ssoldaten. In their chats, which they naively imagined to be private, the men who had occupied Europe unbutton and tell us, often in salty terms, their true opinions and experiences.

The great value of Neitzel’s work is that these conversations are not the results of interviews in which German soldiers told their captors what they wanted to hear. Nor (as, for example, in evidence given at the Nuremberg tribunal) are they statements consciously presented for public consumption. Rather, these are akin to informal messroom chatter (without the distorting addition of alcohol), by turns boastful, remorseful, rueful, but above all candid. With no idea that they were being overheard, still less that their comments would ever be published, the soldaten let down their guards. In a nutshell, the picture that emerges is, in Kipling’s phrase about armies, that of ‘a brutal and licentious soldiery’, as cruel as they were casual in inflicting horrific violence on combatants and civilians alike.

One result of their frankness is that it will never again be possible to argue, as many have, that in contrast to the despised SS, the Wehrmacht fought a ‘clean’ war, not dirtying their hands with atrocities. (One recounts with pride wearing chamois gloves in order to knock down a ‘dirty Polish swine’.) With astounding insouciance, often punctuated with laughter, they recount crimes they have either witnessed without protest or carried out, ranging from the mass gassing of Jews and gang rapes to individual killings: a Dane shot dead over a trivial quarrel on a tram; a Frenchman gunned down because the killer needed his bicycle. One or two voices feebly protest that such crimes are not the actions of ‘honourable soldiers’ but they are a distinct minority.

Astonishingly, until we recall how deeply Nazi totalitarianism had warped German minds, the most common complaint voiced about war crimes here is that there were not enough of them. Seeing German defeat approaching (although some still put their faith in the Führer or secret weapons supposedly about to come on stream), many voices lament that Germany would have won if only they had been ten times as ruthless as they were. ‘We were too soft’ is an all too common refrain.

This book is genuinely ground-breaking in letting Hitler’s soldiers speak out in their own unvarnished voices. It is not a pretty sound. Neitzel’s work on these transcripts is an important, contribution to the great debate on who knew what about the Third Reich’s agenda, both hidden and open. It is such a significant work that it is much to be regretted that Neitzel, instead of writing it alone as he did with his first volume, called in as co-author the social psychologist Harald Welzer. I feared the worst when I read that Welzer, rather than a historian, was a professor of something called ‘transformation design’ and he does not disappoint. His jargon-laden commentary, telling us what we ought to think about the transcripts rather than letting the soldaten speak for themselves and forever fitting their remarks into a Procrustean bed of psycho/social-babble, is a continually irritating and unnecessary background noise and diminishes the impact of this powerful book. Neitzel should have had the confidence to let his witnesses condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

Nigel Jones is the author of Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (Hutchinson, 2011)

Some advice on women in combat from a female veteran. By Jazz Shaw »

Yesterday’s column on women in combat elicited a number of passionate responses from both sides. Some of them came from proponents of the move, frequently citing alternate motives on my part. These ranged from “trying to keep women pregnant in the kitchen” and “Republicans want to lock women in the 1950s” to whichever variant of the GOP’s “war on women” you’d care to name. Many others lent a more sympathetic ear. One in particular, though, caught my attention. It was from one of America’s female veterans who served in Iraq, delivered with a first hand, been there, done that background. The Marine in question – who for purposes of publication will go by the pseudonym of “Sentry” – had previously submitted this history and opinion as a comment at National Review, but her story was compelling enough that I checked into her background, contacted her and decided to republish it here in its entirety. I offer the following as a third party testimony to stand your scrutiny on its own merits.

I’m a female veteran. I deployed to Anbar Province, Iraq. When I was active duty, I was 5’6, 130 pounds, and scored nearly perfect on my PFTs. I naturally have a lot more upper body strength than the average woman: not only can I do pull-ups, I can meet the male standard. I would love to have been in the infantry. And I still think it will be an unmitigated disaster to incorporate women into combat roles. I am not interested in risking men’s lives so I can live my selfish dream.

We’re not just talking about watering down the standards to include the politically correct number of women into the unit. This isn’t an issue of “if a woman can meet the male standard, she should be able to go into combat.” The number of women that can meet the male standard will be miniscule–I’d have a decent shot according to my PFTs, but dragging a 190-pound man in full gear for 100 yards would DESTROY me–and that miniscule number that can physically make the grade AND has the desire to go into combat will be facing an impossible situation that will ruin the combat effectiveness of the unit. First, the close quarters of combat units make for a complete lack of privacy and EVERYTHING is exposed, to include intimate details of bodily functions. Second, until we succeed in completely reprogramming every man in the military to treat women just like men, those men are going to protect a woman at the expense of the mission. Third, women have physical limitations that no amount of training or conditioning can overcome. Fourth, until the media in this country is ready to treat a captured/raped/tortured/mutilated female soldier just like a man, women will be targeted by the enemy without fail and without mercy.

I saw the male combat units when I was in Iraq. They go outside the wire for days at a time. They eat, sleep, urinate and defecate in front of each other and often while on the move. There’s no potty break on the side of the road outside the wire. They urinate into bottles and defecate into MRE bags. I would like to hear a suggestion as to how a woman is going to urinate successfully into a bottle while cramped into a humvee wearing full body armor. And she gets to accomplish this feat with the male members of her combat unit twenty inches away. Volunteers to do that job? Do the men really want to see it? Should they be forced to?

Everyone wants to point to the IDF as a model for gender integration in the military. No, the IDF does not put women on the front lines. They ran into the same wall the US is about to smack into: very few women can meet the standards required to serve there. The few integrated units in the IDF suffered three times the casualties of the all-male units because the Israeli men, just like almost every other group of men on the planet, try to protect the women even at the expense of the mission. Political correctness doesn’t trump thousands of years of evolution and societal norms. Do we really WANT to deprogram that instinct from men?

Regarding physical limitations, not only will a tiny fraction of women be able to meet the male standard, the simple fact is that women tend to be shorter than men. I ran into situations when I was deployed where I simply could not reach something. I wasn’t tall enough. I had to ask a man to get it for me. I can’t train myself to be taller. Yes, there are small men…but not so nearly so many as small women. More, a military PFT doesn’t measure the ability to jump. Men, with more muscular legs and bones that carry more muscle mass than any woman can condition herself to carry, can jump higher and farther than women. That’s why we have a men’s standing jump and long jump event in the Olympics separate from women. When you’re going over a wall in Baghdad that’s ten feet high, you have to be able to be able to reach the top of it in full gear and haul yourself over. That’s not strength per se, that’s just height and the muscular explosive power to jump and reach the top. Having to get a boost from one of the men so you can get up and over could get that man killed.

Without pharmaceutical help, women just do not carry the muscle mass men do. That muscle mass is also a shock absorber. Whether it’s the concussion of a grenade going off, an IED, or just a punch in the face, a woman is more likely to go down because she can’t absorb the concussion as well as a man can. And I don’t care how the PC forces try to slice it, in hand-to-hand combat the average man is going to destroy the average woman because the average woman is smaller, period. Muscle equals force in any kind of strike you care to perform. That’s why we don’t let female boxers face male boxers.

Lastly, this country and our military are NOT prepared to see what the enemy will do to female POWs. The Taliban, AQ, insurgents, jihadis, whatever you want to call them, they don’t abide by the Geneva Conventions and treat women worse than livestock. Google Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca if you want to see what they do to our men (and don’t google it unless you have a strong stomach) and then imagine a woman in their hands. How is our 24/7 news cycle going to cover a captured, raped, mutilated woman? After the first one, how are the men in the military going to treat their female comrades? ONE Thomasina Tucker is going to mean the men in the military will move heaven and earth to protect women, never mind what it does to the mission. I present you with Exhibit A: Jessica Lynch. Male lives will be lost trying to protect their female comrades. And the people of the US are NOT, based on the Jessica Lynch episode, prepared to treat a female POW the same way they do a man.

I say again, I would have loved to be in the infantry. I think I could have done it physically, I could’ve met almost all the male standards (jumping aside), and I think I’m mentally tough enough to handle whatever came. But I would never do that to the men. I would never sacrifice the mission for my own desires. And I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if someone died because of me.

- Sentry

I will close by noting that the picture on the front page of the site associated with this letter is not of the author. Also, the text has not been edited from the original in any way other than to remove some page breaks which make publication messy.

Photo: Flickr user eldh

CAN YOU PREDICT THE FUTURE BY READING TWITTER? THE PENTAGON THINKS MAYBE.

By Dawn Lim

The Defense Department wants new computer tools to analyze mounds of unstructured text, blogs and tweets as part of a coordinated push to help military analysts predict the future and make decisions faster.

The search is part of the Office of Naval Research’s “Data to Decisions” program, a series of three-to-10-year initiatives that will address the volume of information that threatens to overwhelm planners in the digital age, contract databases indicate. The goal is to build an open source system that can unite various tools that collect, manage and draw relationships between data sets.

In a program announcement, ONR is calling for computer algorithms to predict events, fuse different forms of information and offer context on unfolding events. The office expects to spend $500,000 each year in funding. “The Department of Defense recognizes the potential for text analytics to play a vital role in future capabilities that inform timely and accurate situational awareness in time-constrained, uncertain, and complex environments,” the tender reads.

Defense is seeking ways to predict the future by monitoring Twitter, blogs and news, and determining the “frequency of contacts between nodes or clusters.” As networks grow larger and more complex, researchers have found it harder to monitor group behavior. ONR also wants researchers to discover networks that could be hidden within networks, and how information and money flows through a community.

Officials also want tools that fuse and assimilate multiple, incomplete data sets on agriculture, weather, terrain, demographics and economic indicators to find patterns. ONR is especially interested in ways to comb text-based information to provide more nuanced views of how groups, such as terrorists, operate by extrapolating the “stated values and beliefs that motivated behaviors of interest,” “community structure and clusters of social networks” and the level of “emotional support expressed towards topics or persons.”

The office also seeks better technologies for machine translation and processing — translating physical characters or sounds — into one machine-readable language.

Proposals are due Jan. 15 and funding decisions will be made by Feb. 15, contract documents indicate. Carey Schwartz, an ONR program officer and researcher affiliated with the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, spearheads the program. So far, Clifton Park, N.Y.-based Kitware, which develops algorithms to analyze battlefield imagery, has been slated for funding, in partnership with software developer SOARTech, data-focused firm Signal Innovations Group, sensor processing company Systems Technology Research, defense giant Lockheed Martin Corps. and University of Southern California.

Government agencies have been pushing technologists to refine techniques to sift through open source intelligence or publicly available data sets. The CIA, responding to mounting calls that such information needed to be systematically collected and better analyzed, created the National Open Source Center in suburban Northern Virginia around 2005 to acquire and analyze the information to support intelligence agencies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s research arm, in 2012 sought out research ideas on computer programs that predict “cyber terrorism events” by detecting how criminal groups and hackers interact on the Internet.

The Return of Toxic Nationalism. By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

The spread of universal values is being rolled back on many fronts, from Russia to the Middle East.

Western elites believe that universal values are trumping the forces of reaction. They wax eloquent about the triumph of human rights, women’s liberation, social media, financial markets, international and regional organizations and all the other forces that are breaking down boundaries separating humanity.
Tragically, they are really observing a self-referential world of global cosmopolitans like themselves. In country after country, the Westerners identify like-minded, educated elites and mistake them for the population at large. They prefer not to see the regressive and exclusivist forces—such as nationalism and sectarianism—that are mightily reshaping the future.

Take Cairo’s Tahrir Square in early 2011. Western journalists celebrated the gathering of relatively upper-income Arab liberals with whom they felt much in common, only to see these activists quickly retreat as post-autocratic Egypt became for many months a struggle among the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist Salafists—with the Coptic Christians fearing for their communal survival.

Ryan Inzana

Though secular liberals have resurfaced to challenge Egypt’s Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, do not be deceived. The military and the Muslim Brotherhood both have organized infrastructures. The liberals have only spontaneous emotion and ad hoc organizations. An Islamist-Nasserite regime-of-sorts is likely to emerge, as the military uses the current vulnerability of the Muslim Brotherhood to drive a harder bargain.

Egypt and the Middle East now offer a panorama of sectarianism and religious and ethnic divides. Freedom, at least in its initial stages, unleashes not only individual identity but, more crucially, the freedom to identify with a blood-based solidarity group. Beyond that group, feelings of love and humanity do not apply. That is a signal lesson of the Arab Spring.

An analogous process is at work in Asia. Nationalism there is young and vibrant—as it was in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Asia is in the midst of a feverish arms race, featuring advanced diesel-electric submarines, the latest fighter jets and ballistic missiles. China, having consolidated its land borders following nearly two centuries of disorder, is projecting air and sea power into what it regards as the blue national soil of the South China and East China seas.

Japan and other countries are reacting in kind. Slipping out of its quasi-pacifistic shell, Japan is rediscovering nationalism as a default option. The Japanese navy boasts roughly four times as many major warships as the British Royal Navy. As for Vietnam and the Philippines, nobody who visits those countries and talks with their officials, as I have, about their territorial claims would imagine for a moment that we live in a post-national age.
The disputes in Asia are not about ideology or any uplifting moral philosophy; they are about who gets to control space on the map. The same drama is being played out in Syria where Alawites, Sunnis and Kurds are in a territorial contest over power and control as much as over ideas. Syria’s writhing sectarianism—in which Bashar Assad is merely the leading warlord among many—is a far cruder, chaotic and primitive version of the primate game of king of the hill.

Nationalism is alive and thriving in India and Russia as well. India’s navy and air force are in the process of becoming among the world’s largest. Throughout most of history, India and China had little to do with each other, separated as they were by the Himalayas. But the collapse of distance by way of technology has created a new strategic geography for two big nations. Now Indian space satellites monitor Chinese military installations, even as Chinese fighter jets in Tibet have the possibility of including India within their arc of operations. This rivalry has further refined and invigorated nationalism in both countries.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s nationalism is a large factor in his high popularity. President Putin’s nationalism is geographical determinism: He wants to recreate buffer states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, like in the old Soviet Union. So he does everything he can to undermine the countries in these regions.

Western elites hope that if somehow there were truly free elections in Russia, then this foreign policy might change. The evidence is to the contrary. Race-hatred against Muslims is high among Russians, and just as there are large rallies by civil-society types, there are also marches and protests by skinheads and neo-Nazis, who are less well-covered by the Western media. Local elections in October returned a strong showing for Mr. Putin’s party. Like it or not, he is representative of the society he governs.

Nor can Europe be left out of this larger Eurasian trend. A weakening European Union, coupled with onerous social and economic conditions for years to come, invites a resurgence of nationalism and extremism, as we have already seen in countries as diverse as Hungary, Finland, Ukraine and Greece. That is exactly the fear of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee, which gave this year’s award to the European Union in order to make a statement against this trend.

Fascists are not about to regain power anywhere on the Continent, but the age of deepening European integration is likely behind us. Get ready to see more nasty and thoroughly frightening political groupings like Greece’s Golden Dawn emerge across the Continent.

We truly are in a battle between two epic forces: Those of integration based on civil society and human rights, and those of exclusion based on race, blood and radicalized faith. It is the mistake of Western elites to grant primacy to the first force, for it is the second that causes the crises with which policy makers must deal—often by interacting with technology in a toxic fashion, as when a video transported virtually at the speed of light ignites a spate of anti-Americanism (if not specifically in Benghazi).

The second force can and must be overcome, but one must first admit how formidable it is. It is formidable because nations and other solidarity groups tend to be concerned with needs and interests more than with values. Just as the requirement to eat comes before contemplation of the soul, interests come before values.

Yet because values like minority rights are under attack the world over, the United States must put them right alongside its own exclusivist national interests, such as preserving a favorable balance of power. Without universal values in our foreign policy, we have no identity as a nation—and that is the only way we can lead with moral legitimacy in an increasingly disorderly world. Yet we should not be overturning existing orders overnight. For it is precisely weak democracies and collapsing autocracies that provide the chaotic breathing room with which nationalist and sectarian extremists can thrive.

Mr. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and author of “The Revenge of Geography” (Random House, 2012).

A version of this article appeared December 24, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Return of Toxic Nationalism.

Guns, unlike almost every other technology, are unique in that the more they improve, the less safe they become…The AR-15 shows how guns have become gadgets, thanks to technological change and an army of fanboys connected over the Internet. It’s a military weapon in the hands of civilians, so exquisitely designed that it might as well have been invented in Cupertino by Apple. It’s the iPhone 5 of guns, only instead of an app ecosystem, it has an ecosystem of parts and ammunition designed to make it as effective as possible.

“

—	Christopher Mims on how guns became gadgets

The US military is a useful ally on climate change

THE US military brings a whole new dimension to the phrase “gas guzzler”. From the fuel efficiency of its battle tanks - measured in gallons per mile - to a total consumption of oil that exceeds that of most nation states, the Pentagon looks like an environmentalist’s nightmare.

This appetite for energy is at last being seen as a threat, though not to the environment: the top brass understands that relying on dwindling oil supplies from unstable or hostile countries is a bad idea. That is why they are adopting ambitious goals for renewable energy (see “Eco-warriors: US military pushes for green energy”).

The Pentagon’s drive for green energy represents a tremendous opportunity. If the military meets its targets, it could transform the energy landscape to everyone’s benefit. When it comes to creating markets for new technologies, the Pentagon’s procurement machine has no equal. If it decides to pump money into green energy, the economics suddenly look more favourable. They don’t call it the military-industrial complex for nothing.

The opportunities are not just economic. Some psychologists have long argued that military involvement in green issues could help break down scepticism about climate change on the US right. So far, it hasn’t turned out that way. Some Republican members of Congress want to bar the Pentagon from buying green fuels that cost more than conventional ones.

That smacks of special pleading for vested interests, and is likely to be a false economy anyway. It may be worth paying more in the short term to nurture technologies that offer a home-grown, stable alternative to volatile oil markets.

Wider economic returns are also worth considering. US politicians on both sides like to laud Google and other firms that have earned billions from the internet. It’s easy to forget that this was once a fringe technology, nurtured by Pentagon investment. Letting the military lead the way might be the best way to build a new energy economy.

Greens, too, should support the manoeuvre. They may not like the idea of the US military muscling in on “their” crusade. But when you’ve got a war to fight, it helps to have the big boys on your side.

From issue 2889 of New Scientist magazine, page 3.

Ahmadinejad says “this is a war Iran will win!” Reuters

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused
his country’s enemies of enacting a sinister plan to create a drought by somehow destroying the rain clouds before they reach Iran, several Iranian websites reported on Tuesday.

Well-known for his anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric, Ahmadinejad has made similar remarks before and last year accused the West of devising a plot to cause drought in the Islamic republic.

“The enemy destroys the clouds that are headed towards our country and this is a war Iran will win,” Ahmadinejad said on Monday, according to several websites including the BBC’s Persian-language site and www.snn.ir.

Iran has one of the world’s driest climates and officials have warned that a severe lack of rainfall in parts of the country has created drought-like conditions.

Ahmadinejad has courted controversy in the past, not least by denying that the Nazi Holocaust - in which six million Jews were killed - ever happened, a stance that drew furious criticism from politicians across the globe.

The Iranian authorities have repeatedly accused the West of hatching plots to undermine Islamic leadership.

Iran is also at odds with the United States and its allies over its disputed nuclear program which the West fears is aimed at developing nuclear weapons. Tehran denies its program has any military dimension.

(Editing by Andrew Osborn)

As a result of the armistice line in 1949, before the 1967 war Israel was living in a precarious military situation because of its lack of strategic depth in which to deploy… Furthermore the very nature of Israel’s borders meant danger: the Gaza Strip occupied by the Egyptians in 1948 was like a dagger poised against the main centres of population in southern Israel and along the coast; Jerusalem was divided and on a number of occasions Jordanian soldiers or local Jordanians had opened fire in the middle of the city with all that that had entailed. An advance by Jordanian troops of some 500 yards from areas along the main road to Jerusalem would have cut the main artery to the capital of Israel. Jordanian forces stationed on the hills above Kalkilyeh looked down upon Tel Aviv and its satellite cities, accommodating some 40% of Israel’s population, while those stationed at Tulkarm observed the coastal city of Netanya, 10 miles away, fully aware of the fact that an armoured thrust by them across this short distance would cut the State of Israel in two at its narrow Waistline. On the Golan Heights Syrian troops looked down on the Israeli villages in the Jordan Valley and harassed them with fire over the years.

“

—	Herzog, Chaim. 1975. The war of atonement: October, 1973. Boston: Little, Brown. 2.

TALKS

James Stavridis: How NATO’s Supreme Commander thinks about global security

Imagine a global security driven by collaboration — among agencies, government, the private sector and the public. That’s not just the distant hope of open-source fans, it’s the vision of James Stavridis, the Supreme Commander of NATO, who shares vivid moments from recent military history to explain why security of the future should be built with bridges rather than walls.

What will 21st-century security look like? NATO Supreme Commander James Stavridis suggests that dialogue and openness will be the game-changers.Full bio »

Disabled soldier fulfills dream of becoming IDF officer. By Reuven Weiss

In spite of being born with cerebral palsy, 21-year-old soldier graduates from officers’ training course. ‘I felt obligated to Israel,’ he says

B. (21) was born with cerebral palsy and has partial paralysis in all four limbs. Just before he turned 18, B. got a letter from the IDF, stating that he was officially exempt from military service.

However, the physical hindrance did not stop B. from insisting on forgoing his exemption and joining the IDF. “I felt obligated to my country,” B. explains, I decided that there was no reason for dodging the draft and giving up. Nothing justified not being like everyone else.”

According to Yedioth Ahronoth, B. battled doctors’ references, and was eventually granted the awaited permit, by order of which he was able to volunteer for a three year service, which is the duration of men’s mandatory service.

He was assigned to a highly classified Intelligence unit, where he was greatly valued. But that was also not enough. Last week, B. graduated from the IDF officers training course, and even got the Brigade Commander Decoration. “Being an IDF officer was a lifelong dream,” B. says enthusiastically.

“Ever since I was enlisted, I wanted to be an officer, and I’ve been struggling to make it happen since my first day in the army. That is my form of self-fulfillment. I consider IDF service a calling, and see myself part of the military for many years to come.”

The massive heat on the day of the graduation ceremony at the officers’ training base (Bahad 1) did not scare away B.’s many friends, who joined his family members to share his exciting moment with him. “They are my driving force,” B. explains, “without my family and friends I couldn’t have done it.”

Status and accomplishment notwithstanding, B. diverts attention from his own story and speaks up to those who oppose universal recruitment: “I turn to all to please reconsider,” he said, “it’s only three years. You don’t have to be an officer. You can be in combat or logistics. Everyone should contribute what he or she can. This is our country, and everyone who is still hesitating can take a look at me.”

B.’s identity, as well as his official capacity, cannot be disclosed due to national security issues, but according to Yedioth Ahronoth, in about a month and a half, following professional training, B. will be awarded the rank of second lieutenant, thereby officially becoming an officer in the Israel Defense Forces.

Military Warnings

“Aim towards the enemy.”
Instruction printed on U.S. Rocket Launcher

“When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend.”
U.S. Army

“Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate. The bombs
are guaranteed to always hit the ground.
U.S.A.F.

“If the enemy is in range…so are you.”
U.S. Army Infantry Journal

“A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when
you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what’s
left of your unit.
U.S. Army’s magazine of preventive maintenance

“It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you
just bombed.”
U.S. Air Force Manual

“Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo.”
U.S. Army Infantry Journal

“Tracers work both ways.”
U.S. Army Ordinance

“Five-second fuses only last three-seconds.”
U.S. Army Infantry Journal

“Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.”
Col. David Hackworth

“If your attack is going too well, you’re probably walking into
an ambush.”
U.S. Army Infantry Journal

“No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection.”
Joe Gay

“Any ship can be a minesweeper…once.”
Anonymous

“Never tell the Platoon Sergeant you have nothing to do.”
Unknown Army Recruit

“Don’t draw fire; it irritates the people around you.”
Your Buddies

“If you see a bomb technician running; try to keep up with him.
U.S. Army Trooper

Walk the Prank: Secret Story of Mysterious Portrait at Pentagon. By ADAM ENTOUS

WASHINGTON—In a Pentagon hallway hung an austere portrait of a Navy man lost at sea in 1908, with his brass buttons, blue-knit uniform and what looks like meticulously blow-dried hair.

Wait. Blow-dried hair?

The portrait of “Ensign Chuck Hord,” framed in the heavy gilt typical of government offices, may be the greatest—or perhaps only—prank in Pentagon art history. “Chuck Hord” can’t be found in Navy records of the day. It isn’t even a real painting. The textured, 30-year-old photo is actually of Capt. Eldridge Hord III, 53 years old, known to friends as “Tuck,” a military retiree with a beer belly and graying hair who lives in Burke, Va.

Department of Defense

‘Ensign Chuck Hord, lost at sea.’

Most military officers who climb the ranks or command daring battles only dream of having a portrait hang in a corridor of power at the Pentagon alongside the likes of Patton, Nimitz and Eisenhower. Capt. Hord’s made its way to the Pentagon’s C-ring hallway via several parties, an alliance of British and Canadian military officers and a clandestine, predawn operation later dubbed “THE PROJECT.”

The picture came into existence after Capt. Hord graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1982. During a visit to then-Ensign Hord’s hometown of Kingsport, Tenn., his proud parents suggested he sit for a formal portrait. Wearing midshipman’s garb and an Annapolis class ring, he posed for the town’s best-known photographer in front of a cloth screen with his arms resting on an antique-looking chair.

The photographer liked the photo so much he framed several copies and hung them in stores around Kingsport to advertise his business, Capt. Hord says. Some were textured and signed to resemble oil paintings.

Colleagues say Capt. Hord has always been something of a prankster. His 1982 Naval Academy yearbook says he “never let academic problems interfere with his two favorite pastimes, drinking beer in dives and playing the ponies.”

After his graduation, he went to sea, captained a guided-missile frigate in the Pacific hunting for drug runners and studied at the National War College.

In his first stint at the Pentagon starting in 1997, his slapstick sense of humor earned him the title of the “George Costanza” of the Joint Staff, a reference to a character from the sitcom “Seinfeld.”

Over the next 20 years, some of the portraits found their way back to the Hord family. In 2004, Capt. Hord says his sister surprised him by bringing the largest one—3 feet tall—to a party at his Virginia house. She left it by the front door.

Capt. Hord at the time was director of the Multinational Interagency division, a new Pentagon office designed to coordinate military logistics between the U.S. and its closest allies.

Office colleagues say Capt. Hord developed close bonds with his British, Canadian and Australian counterparts. Their office boasted its own beer fridge.

Several of Capt. Hord’s work colleagues attended the 2004 party, including a British captain who smuggled the portrait into his car and put it on display at the office. Capt. Hord, amused, called it an act of “buffoonery.”

TUCK HORD

The portrait then started making surprise appearances at events when Capt. Hord was in attendance. It attended his 2005 farewell party when he left the Pentagon office to take a new post in Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean atoll where the Navy has a base.

He left the portrait with his officemates, who placed it on the wall above his old desk.

In 2009, British Naval Capt. Mike Bullock, now a commodore, lugged the heavy portrait past armed Pentagon security guards, onto a subway train and to Capt. Hord’s retirement party at Washington’s Navy Memorial.

“I was expecting to be questioned by the Pentagon police why I was taking the picture out of the building and instead was helped through the barrier!” Commodore Bullock recalled.

After the party, Capt. Hord refused to take ownership of the portrait, Commodore Bullock said. “I think the contrast between the Ens. Hord and the retiring Capt. Hord was too much for him!” he added.

Back on the wall in the office, visitors often asked who it depicted. “They all looked at it and said, ‘Man, what year was that? It looks like the 1800s,’ ” said Canadian Lt. Col. Brook Bangsboll.

That was the light-bulb moment. On one of his last days at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Bangsboll went to a jewelry shop to have a brass plaque engraved, egged on by colleagues and co-conspirators. “We didn’t know what to do so we said, ‘Let’s just lose him at sea,’ ” Lt. Col. Bangsboll said. “It makes it interesting and kind of mysterious.”

He kept the circumstances of the ensign’s death vague because he thought some nosy Navy historian would spot the ruse if the plaque cited a specific battle.

The jeweler made a typo, engraving “Chuck” instead of “Tuck.” Lt. Col. Bangsboll felt that was fitting, given the surreptitious nature of his endeavor. It read:

ENS CHUCK HORD

USNA, CIRCA 1898

LOST AT SEA 1908

Lt. Col. Bangsboll scouted the halls for the right spot. He planned to put the portrait in a foyer dedicated to logistics—the office’s specialty—but feared those responsible for displays in the area would catch on.

He settled on a previously unadorned hallway which gets less foot traffic. At 6:15 a.m. on July 29, 2011, Lt. Col. Bangsboll spirited the portrait to the hallway and drove a large screw into the wall.

“The place was quiet,” he recalls. “No one noticed.”

For the next seven months, the portrait attracted little attention. One Pentagon official, as he walked by the photo, said it had never crossed his mind to look twice.

Unfortunately for Capt. Hord, the gag is up.

After The Wall Street Journal asked Pentagon officials about the long-lost sailor’s suspiciously modern hairstyle, Lt. Col. Bangsboll, who has returned to Ottawa, received what he described as a “fairly frantic email” from an American major still in the liaison office.

“They’re onto you, sir,” U.S. Army Maj. Brooke Stull told Lt. Col. Bangsboll. “We’ve had to take the picture down.”

A Pentagon official explained by email why Capt. Hord’s picture was removed from the public hallway. “There’s an approval process for Pentagon portraits and this beautiful picture has not been approved for display :)”

Capt. Hord makes no apologies.

“A little bit of alcohol and a whole big dose of irreverence plays into it,” he said. “Plus you feel like you’re getting one over on somebody.”

But he also seems a bit sad. “I started that office and this was going to put me in perpetuity in the Pentagon,” he said with a sigh.

The portrait, whose frame was badly damaged after its removal from the wall, now sits on the floor of the office where Capt. Hord once worked, leaning against a cubicle wall.

—Julian E. Barnes
contributed to this article.

Ekso’s Exoskeletons Let Paraplegics Walk, Will Anyone Actually Wear One? By Ted Geenwald

After six years in a wheelchair, Tamara Mena can walk again. PHOTO BY GABRIELA HASBUN

Tamara Mena was 19 years old when she dismissed all hope of ever walking again. Mena was living in San Diego and working toward a degree in hotel management when she and her boyfriend Patrick decided to hit the clubs in Rosarito Beach, just across the Mexican border. Since they didn’t want to risk drinking and driving, they took a cab. They never made it to Mexico.

About 2 miles from their destination, their vehicle slammed into a horse. The impact launched the animal into the air; it landed on top of the cab, crushed the roof to seat level, and killed Patrick and the driver instantly. Mena was paralyzed from the midchest down.

“I wanted to walk,” she says. Graced with tawny hair, high cheekbones, and chocolate-brown eyes, Mena, now 25, is a picture of youthful vitality if you overlook the tracheotomy scar where medics inserted a tube to oxygenate her collapsed lungs after the accident. “I looked into walking with braces, but they sucked the energy right out of me. I met with a doctor about stem-cell treatments, but that was costly and there was no guarantee. I gave up. I had to move on.”

EXOSKELETONS, SAYS EKSO BIONICS CEO BENDER, WILL BE “THE JEANS OF THE FUTURE,” STREAMLINED ENOUGH TO WEAR IN ECONOMY CLASS.

Six years after that fateful night, in a nondescript warehouse in Berkeley, California, she is moving on—using her own two legs. She stands on the linoleum floor, supporting herself with a pair of crutches, an expression of quiet determination on her face. The lower two-thirds of her body are enclosed in an aluminum frame attached by Velcro straps to her ankles, calves, thighs, hips, and chest. A physical therapist stands behind her, one hand grasping a handle on the contraption’s rear panel, the other holding a control panel. Each time the therapist presses a button, small electrical motors at the frame’s joints move in a motion that replicates the action of corresponding muscles—one of Mena’s hips swings ahead, the associated knee rises, the foot lifts and then falls to the floor, and she takes a precious step forward.

Mena is a test pilot for Ekso Bionics, a front-runner in robotic exoskeleton technology, which can replace or augment human capabilities. Led by Icelandic CEO Eythor Bender, the company has licensed its technology to Lockheed Martin for military use and sold its initial medical product, the Ekso, to rehabilitation centers throughout the U.S. Bender says the medical market is just the beginning. He envisions robotic frames for industrial workers, like miners, dockers, and construction workers. He imagines that each of us will want an exoskeleton: “the REI Ekso,” recreational outerwear that confers superhuman strength and endurance.

“We’re starting with soldiers and paralyzed people because their needs are great and the opportunity for funding is better,” Bender says. “But you can imagine exoskeletons for workers using tools too heavy to hold for more than a few minutes. And a consumer version for people who want to run a marathon or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.” Exoskeletons, he dreams, will be “the jeans of the future”—practical, fashionable, and streamlined enough to wear in economy class.

First, though, he must get past obstacles that have derailed many a medical-device company. He must convince rehabilitation therapists and wheelchair users that the Ekso is more than a pricey gewgaw. He will need to outdistance competitors, some of whom already have products on the market. Finally, he must persuade the FDA and the insurance industry that paralyzed people need to walk, a proposition that’s controversial even among paraplegics.

NORDIC SPIRIT: CEO Bender thinks exoskeletons could affect industries as diverse as construction and health care.PHOTO BY GABRIELA HASBUN

For Mena, the Ekso’s impact has already exceeded expectations. “I just wanted to walk again,” she says. “But once you get up, you realize how meaningful it is to look at people eye to eye and hug someone while you’re standing up. I had forgotten what that felt like. Once you remember, it’s hard to go back to a wheelchair.”

Ekso Bionics’ staff has ballooned from 23 to 68 in the past year, and its Berkeley facility is fit to burst. Past the cramped reception area (which doubles as a customer-service bullpen), it’s Santa’s robotics workshop. The 12,000-square-foot floor is a labyrinth of workbenches, storage bins, and whiteboards covered with electrical diagrams. A yellow gantry—basically a 35-foot girder on trestles—cuts across the floor to protect test pilots like Mena against falling.

A fully assembled Ekso hangs on a rack next to one of the benches, its legs pumping repetitively in test mode. Even without an upper body, it looks shockingly human. Its architecture matches the familiar anatomy of legs and hips; its black aluminum frame (adjustable to wearers of different heights) mimics the bones, its gently whirring electrical motors, the muscles. Its gait falls between a leisurely stroll and a military step as it marches toward the marketplace.

The dream of a wearable robot capable of overcoming the frailties of human anatomy dates back at least to March 1963, when Marvel Comics published its first issue devoted to Anthony Edward “Tony” Stark, a millionaire industrialist who donned a mechanized suit to become the Invincible Iron Man. The U.S. military was thinking along the same line, and six months later, Army engineer Serge J. Zaroodny published a paper entitled “Bumpusher: A Powered Aid to Locomotion.”

Zaroodny’s design kicked off nearly four decades of dubiously productive military investment in the concept. The human body burns calories in proportion to the work it does, but early exoskeletons consumed immense amounts of energy simply standing still. The only solutions were to tether the robot to a wall socket or strap a powerful gasoline engine to its back. Neither option was fit for the battlefield. A key breakthrough came in 2004. At the University of California, Berkeley, Homayoon Kazerooni, Nathan Harding, and Russ Angold realized that the standard techniques for driving hydraulics were simply too inefficient. A mobile robot required a fresh approach. Their DARPA-funded design shunted weight through its joints into the ground, so it didn’t consume energy at rest, and it used regeneration to take advantage of gravity and recapture expended energy. This allowed the team to cut the electrical cord in favor of battery power. The result was the first practical untethered exoskeleton.

Angold had only military needs in mind until he received a terrible phone call: His brother had broken his back. “I flew to Virginia Beach, where he was in the hospital, and said, ‘We’re going to make exoskeletons to help people walk again,’” he recalls. His brother eventually made a full recovery, and Angold returned to martial applications. But at conferences, the team kept running into doctors interested in a therapeutic exoskeleton.

Recognizing opportunities in two disparate markets, in 2005, Kazerooni, Harding, and Angold formed Ekso Bionics (then called Berkeley Bionics). CEO Bruce Borup came aboard three years later, fresh from a stint with CFC, Inc. magazine’s fastest-growing U.S. defense contractor of 2007. He promptly cut a licensing deal with Lockheed Martin, which would refine, manufacture, and market the olive-drab Human Universal Load Carrier, or HULC, giving Berkeley Bionics a royalty on sales.

Borup’s knowledge of the defense market was indispensable to securing the deal, but he departed soon afterward. To attack the medical market, the company needed a different kind of CEO. It needed Eythor Bender.

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