Poor Contracting Hindering Iraq Reconstruction

The Department of Defense (DOD) effort to reconstruct Iraq following the U.S. invasion is being hampered by poor contracting with companies and inadequate security, a government watchdog agency says.

DOD has relied extensively on private contractors to undertake major reconstruction projects and provide support to its deployed forces in Iraq, but these efforts have not always achieved desired outcomes, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). GAO is the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress.

Further, the Iraqi government must be able to reduce violence, sustain reconstruction progress, improve basic services, and make a positive difference in the daily lives of the Iraqi people, GAO says.

"The challenges faced by DOD on its reconstruction and support contracts often reflect systemic and long-standing shortcomings in DOD’s capacity to manage contractor efforts. Such shortcomings result from poorly defined or changing requirements, the use of poor business arrangements, the absence of senior leadership and guidance, and an insufficient number of trained contracting, acquisition and other personnel to manage, assess and oversee contractor performance, the GAO says in a new report. "In turn, these shortcomings manifest themselves in higher costs to taxpayers, schedule delays, unmet objectives, and other undesirable outcomes."


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Company Commercializes Caltech Tech To Improve Security

A company that commercializes technologies from NASA and the US Department of Defense, announced that the company has made significant strides leveraging so-called "SHINE" expert system technology licensed from Caltech to pursue major opportunities in the commercial, defense, and homeland security sectors.

To penetrate the growing market formaritime container screening, port security, automated threat detection, real-time sensor fusion and embedded diagnostics/prognostics applications, VIASPACE Security says it is identifying and developing relationships with potential new customers, adding staff and resources to its SHINE-based development efforts, executing on its contract with L-3 Communications forthe US Department of Homeland Security's Advanced Container Security Device project, and teaming with Raytheon Company's Network Centric Systems on security and surveillance applications.

VIASPACE has an exclusive license from Caltech to commercialize SHINE technology for most major applications including container security, diagnostics/prognostics, sensor fusion and homeland defense. SHINE is areal-time inference engine and software platform originally developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for space flight operations, and is used in several NASA applications including the Mars Exploration Rover and Spacecraft Health Automatic Reasoning Pilot (SHARP) program.

Security Inc. is leveraging the technology along with its own development efforts to deliver high performance, real-time inference andsensor data fusion-based technologies, products and services. Sensor fusion combines large volumes of data, observations, and inferences derived frommultiple sources and sensors to generate reliable decision-supportinformation in critical applications where speed, accuracy and ease of deployment are crucial, the company says.


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Anti-terror Defenses Must Adapt, Rand Report Says

When designing systems to protect people and places against terrorist attacks, government officials should take into account that terrorists actively seek and find ways around defensive measures deployed against them, according to a recent RAND Corporation study.

The report examines defensive technologies – the systems and approaches used to protect an area and people in it from terrorism – along with the methods terrorist groups have historically used to thwart attempts to discover and frustrate their efforts.

“The most important point we found is that terrorist organizations keep changing their strategies in order to remain effective, and we have to design our defense capabilties to adapt,” says lead study author Brian Jackson. “If we don't, we risk spending our resources building the equivalent of a fortress wall that won't actually provide much protection once terrorists have found a way over, under, through or around it.”

Defensive technologies examined in the report include: surveillance methods, techniques that counter terrorist weapon systems, blast walls and terrorist profiling.

RAND researchers note in the report that while America's defensive technologies can provide an edge in combatting terrorism, that edge can be dulled by the countertechnology efforts of terrorists.

Jackson and his colleagues at RAND, a nonprofit research organization, recommend that counterterrorism experts design multiple technologies to fight terrorism. Then when terrorists figure out how to defeat one defensive technology, there will always be another one waiting to be deployed.

“For most defensive technologies, terrorists will eventually develop countermeasures that will limit the value of the technologies,” Jackson says. “So it is imperative that we have other options available when that happens.”

The study also concludes that it is particularly important for those who design defensive technology to “red team” new systems, a process for anticipating what countermeasures the enemy will use and whether or not that strategy is likely to work.

“In a red team exercise, the good guys pretend to be the bad guys, to see if they can defeat the technolgies designed to defend against terrorism,” Jackson says. “When they uncover weak points in defenses, those weak points can often be closed.”

The goal of such a process is to assess the limits of a technology before it is built and deployed, thereby helping reduce the risk that limited resources will be spent to design and construct a defensive system that ultimately won't provide much protection.

For example, when countries examined in the study tried to use profiling techniques to identify members of certain terrorist organizations, the terrorist groups simply found people who did not fit the profile to carry out high-priority missions like suicide bombings. Government officials should anticipate such countermeasures by terrorists when crafting new defensive approaches.

Researchers examined terrorist conflicts and methods that included Palestinian terrorist groups, Southeast Asia's Jemaah Islamiyah, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

Understanding how terrorist groups have adapted to defenses deployed against them in the past allows government officials to design better and more robust measures for today's threats, according to the report.

RAND researchers found that when faced with a defensive technology threat, each of the terrorist groups studied responded by:

• Changing the way it carries out its activities or designs its operations so that the terrrorist organization may reduce the value of a defensive technology.
• Modifying its own technologies, acquiring new ones or substituting different measures for those already in place in order to limit the impact of a defensive technology on its activities.
• Avoiding the defensive technology by moving terrorist operations to a different area.
  Attacking the defensive technology in order to damage or destroy it.

Creators of defensive technologies used by governments need to be aware that those defenses could eventually be used against them, according to the RAND researchers. For example, detection systems could be used by terrorists to produce false alarms in order to trigger response systems and cause chaos.

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