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The whole art of war consists of getting at what is on the other side of the hill,” said the Duke of Wellington, conqueror of Napoleon at Waterloo. In the murky kind of fight that marks modern warfare against terrorists and guerrillas, knowing what’s on the other side of the hill?or inside a building?takes on a whole new urgency and meaning. Lt. Col. Scott Williams, who leads a unit of Apache helicopters in Baghdad, is in the business Herve Leger Strapless Bandage of “servicing” targets, by which he means anything from blowing up a building with a Hellfire missile to helping local police make arrests. He must know when to shoot?and when not to.

Williams recently spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter after leading an airborne foray into Sadr City, where a drone?a pilotless craft generically known as a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)?had found a rocket emplacement and transmitted images back to the ground commander. Insurgents had attacked the Green Zone with rockets from the site and retreated into a nearby apartment block. Williams and his fellow Apache pilots swooped in for the kill, but pulled back. The UAV?known as a Shadow?had spotted children going in and out of the building. “We knew the bad guys were there,” Williams said. “We saw them walk in and out, we saw them place the [missiles] ? We could have serviced that building and we probably could have killed four or five of the guys that were involved in it.

But the decision was made at the command level?because of the women and children who were potentially in that building?not to service the target.” Instead, the Apaches took out the rocket-launch site and a few of the men around it.

In the kind of counterinsurgency struggle fought in Iraq and in troubled places around the globe, winning hearts and minds is more important than body counts. There is no technological silver bullet that will help America win these wars. But in the cat-and-mouse game played by insurgents who mix freely with civilians, the ability to loiter over a target, to watch closely with cameras before the bombs begin to fall, is crucial. American forces call this “persistent stare capability” or “the unblinking eye”?and only drones have it.

The UAV is the “smart bomb” of the Iraq War, the latest turn in the unending offense-defense spiral that characterizes the history of warfare. Army units searching and fighting house-to-house are using hundreds of drones, some of them as small as a model airplane (the Raven), to track enemy movements. Patrols regularly use them to scout out the route ahead. Commanders position them over well-traveled roads to keep an eye out for insurgents planting IEDs?a task once performed by soldiers sitting in their Humvees for hours on end. The Army is even working on drones that can detect IEDs by seeing where the earth has been recently disturbed. Army drones alone flew more than 46,450 hours in March.

In complicated urban street fights like the recent battles to pacify Sadr City, UAVs have even taken the lead, seeking out targets so that U.S. troops didn’t have to enter the area. They’re the sharp end of a vast and invisible infrastructure, involving satellites and GPS and communications channels able to handle gigabytes of information every second?a network that only the U.S. military possesses. Images from a drone can be relayed instantly to a laptop with the ground unit, a command center located miles away, and (for birds like the Predator) to imagery analysts as far away as Germany or Nevada. Sometimes Apache pilots like Williams are called in to strike; other times the American gunners and bombardiers who carry out the hits are thousands of miles away, safe from rocket fire.

This revolution in unmanned warfare has been a long time coming, but it’s been spurred by the unique demands of Iraq. Even in the first years after the fall of Baghdad, drones were little more than a cool toy or a battlefield accessory. Special Operations Forces used them for high-priority missions, but they were not considered essential to the war effort. Demand has grown from the ground up, dramatically, as commanders and grunts recognized their usefulness. “We can see into an alleyway, see teams organizing an attack,” says Lt. Col. Paul V. Marnon, a battalion commander for the 3CAB. Marnon flies Apache attack helicopters and gets most of his recon and targeting information from the unmanned craft. Over the past two months, he says, 90 percent of his “kills” have been aided by UAVs.

The inability to deploy UAVs fast enough to meet the demand has been a source of frustration to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Flying down to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama late last month, Gates scribbled this paragraph into a prepared speech: “I’ve been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets into the theater. Because people were stuck in the old ways of doing things, it’s been like pulling teeth.” Gates pointedly attacked what he calls “Next-War-itis,” the propensity of the Defense establishment to prepare for some future Big War?a massive, high-tech conflict against a rival nation-state, tank against tank, ship against ship?rather than coping with the real, messy wars of the present. Besieged with frantic requests from commanders on the ground for more UAVs, Gates recently approved a 240 million boost in spending on reconnaissance surveillance craft, including a stopgap plan to hire private contractors to fly light aircraft, specially equipped with cameras and other sensors, over Iraq and Afghanistan.

The harsh necessities of war and an impatient civilian leader prodding the balky brass?that has been the history of UAV development for decades. Pilotless drones have always been a bastard step-child of the military, with the institutional bias favoring “manned platforms.” (The best way to advance in any service is to see combat?in the Air Force, it’s the flyboys who get ahead.) The history of the UAV is deliciously quirky, and a reminder that innovation often comes from mavericks operating outside the military-industrial complex. The story really begins in a factory in southern California in the middle of World War II.

Marilyn Monroe was only the second most-important discovery at the Van Nuys plant of the Radioplane Co. in 1944. The young Norma Jean Dougherty was working at the plant near Los Angeles when a photographer for the Army magazine Yank spotted her, photographed her and told her she might have a future as a model. Radioplane’s real contribution to the war effort was the drone?unmanned aerial craft that could be steered by radio signals.

Initially, the drones were used for antiaircraft target practice. In the 1950s, Gen. Curtis LeMay, founding father of the Strategic Air Command?America’s first nuclear strike force?acquired drones as decoys to protect his B-52 bombers from Soviet air defenses. Then around 1960, a young Japanese-American engineer named Norman Sakamato began pushing a bright new idea: that the drones be equipped with a camera in the nose and used for aerial reconnaissance and espionage. (It is one of the many ironies of the history of the UAV that the man some call the “godfather” of drones spent the first two years of World War II with his family in a Japanese internment camp in Arizona.)

At first, the military did not seem much interested. But then a manned U-2 spy plane was shot down by Soviet-made anti-aircraft missiles over Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, pushing the superpowers to the brink. Suddenly, the Pentagon took notice; Sakamato’s company, Ryan-Teledyne, was soon awash in contracts for a drone called the Firebee. By the Vietnam War, more than 1,000 Firebees were flying over enemy territory on photo-reconnaissance missions or jamming radars.

Typically, though, after the war ended, the drone was nearly grounded by military bureaucracy and service parochialism. ICBMs were supplanting B-52s in the cold-war arsenal, and the rest of the Air Force never warmed to the concept of unmanned vehicles, preferring to keep a “man in the loop”?and ensure flying time for aviators. The Army plunged into procurement hell, developing a drone with so many bells and whistles that it barely got off the ground. Ill conceived from the start, the Aquila needed hundreds of tons of backup Herve Leger Deep-V Bandage equipment, which required an hour to set up or take down. Crashing every 20 hours or so, its costs climbing to 3 million a copy, the Aquila was canceled in 1987 after burning through 1 billion.

While the Americans fussed and dithered, the Israelis moved quickly to develop cheap and reliable drones. The impetus was, as usual, the exigencies of combat?Israel was flummoxed by Egypt’s Soviet-built air defenses in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Helped, in part, by studying the design of an American-made drone that crashed and washed up on its shores, Israel developed a topflight secret drone program. President Herve Leger Bandage-lacing High- Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. P. X. Kelley were the first to discover how far the Israelis had progressed. On visits to Israel in the mid-’80s, Lehman was allowed to pilot a drone, and Kelley was presented with a kind of home video of his trip, shot by a circling drone.

Impressed, Lehman bypassed regulations to acquire Israeli drones called Pioneers to fly off ships and help them direct their guns. Noisy as a lawn mower, the Pioneer was scarily effective in the 1991 gulf war, when Iraqi soldiers learned to fear the barrage of missiles that would quickly follow its buzz. One Pioneer shot footage of a squadron of Iraqi soldiers waving their shirts in the air, likely the first unit ever to surrender to a drone.

When fighting in the Balkans broke out in the early 1990s, Jim Woolsey, director of the CIA, was in a jam. He did not have many (if any) spies on the ground. Desperate for imagery from Bosnia, he asked the Air Force what it would take to get a drone for the spooks. The answer, he recalls, was “six years and 500 million.” Then Woolsey remembered a secret UAV project run out of the Pentagon’s civilian Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency using the design skills of a brilliant Israeli expat named Abe Karem. Woolsey tracked down Karem in California. Karem told him his craft, code-named Amber, had been cut from the budget by the Army in 1990 and was now lying in pieces in a California warehouse. What would it take, Woolsey asked, to get it flying again? “Six months and 5 million,” he recalls Karem’s saying. (Karem says the story is a bit more complicated, but Woolsey’s version is essentially correct.) The stripped-down craft that emerged was called the Gnat. Woolsey was so pleased by the videos it took that he arranged to have them piped back to a TV set in his office in Langley, Va. He would amaze congressmen with private showings. (Among the lawmakers who enthusiastically backed the Gnat was Charlie Wilson, the character played by Tom Hanks in the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War.”) The drone was back in business. In the late 1990s the Gnat evolved into the Predator, a drone that could not only take pictures but fire missiles.

Even that didn’t happen overnight. For years the CIA and Air Force squabbled over control and funding of the project, missing the chance to use a Predator as an offensive weapon against terrorists in hiding. A crucial advocate for the project was Gen. John Jumper, who was commander of U.S. air forces in Europe during the Kosovo conflict. He was exasperated that the early Predators didn’t have GPS. (Jumper is recalled by a colleague remarking about a recon photo of a Serbian tank hiding in a forest: “That’s a very nice tank. Where the f??? is it?”) When Jumper returned to the United States to run Air Combat Command in 2000, he made a new push to get a weapon under the Predator’s wings.

The only missile small enough for the task was the Hellfire, an Army antitank weapon. But the missile was designed to fire over trees, so its initial trajectory was upward; it had to be rejiggered to shoot down. Later it was found that the warhead wasn’t powerful enough. (In one instance, recalled by the then Air Force Secretary James Roche, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded to know why after-action video showed Qaeda militants staggering alive out of a supposedly demolished bunker.) Because the weapon was designed to cripple tanks, it had a very focused blast. So designers added a sleeve around the warhead that would fragment upon detonation into thousands of flying razor blades. The first operational target for the new weapon was a Qaeda operative in Yemen, riding with five colleagues in an SUV on Nov. 5, 2003. After-action video showed that the only identifiable item in the remains of the blast was the vehicle’s oil pan.

The Predator is the UAV most civilians are familiar with, but only it and a newer craft called a Reaper?equipped with four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs?are armed. The CIA and Air Force control these drones, using them to take out high-value targets?terrorist leaders?in remote corners of Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as in Iraq. The Air Force guides its Predators (as well as the high-flying Global Hawks, which can stay aloft for more than 20 hours watching a battlefield) from Air Force bases in Nevada and California?more than 8,000 miles from the killing zone. They use only qualified fighter or bomber pilots, who lead a somewhat surreal life. An Air Force pilot at Creech can wake up at his suburban house in the morning, drive his kids to school, go to work, kill a terrorist with a Predator, pick up his kids from soccer practice, and fall asleep in front of the tube ? all in a day’s work.

The vast majority of the roughly 1,500 drones flying in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, are much smaller craft, controlled by soldiers and Marines. Not long ago, a NEWSWEEK reporter watched as Sgt. Lenzy Schneider, 24, launched a Raven UAV from the roof of a building in a forward operating base near the town of Balad. Ravens are about the size of large model airplanes, with a wingspan of three feet. (The drone is sometimes mistaken for a bird when it is high in the sky.) Battery-powered, made of Kevlar and Styrofoam, they weigh less than five pounds and cost a mere 35,000?about one twentieth the price of a Predator. They’re launched the same way a child might send a model plane skyward?with a flip of the wrist. “Anyone can fly it, even me,” says Schneider, grinning. A two-week course is all a soldier needs to master the fundamentals of the Raven, although the Army has created Fitness: Gyms Go Designer a new classification?15W?for pilots who control larger drones.

Sgt. Chris Hermann, 24, flies his Shadow?one of those larger craft, launched by catapult and capable of staying airborne all day long?from a comfortable chair inside a trailer at a forward operating base outside Baghdad. He controls the bird with a large trackball, a hemispherical device built into his computer console. “Yeah, middle of the desert, aircon and a padded seat, there are worse jobs in Iraq,” he says. The job is important but not all that challenging, he says. “We all joke about it,” he told a NEWSWEEK reporter. “A monkey can do this job, this bird flies itself, it lands itself.” When the weather is bad and the Shadow can’t fly, Hermann and his buddies will get together and play Battlefield 2 or Call of Duty 4 or The Underground. Compared with those videogames, Hermann says, flying a Shadow is “kind of like old Atari, pretty basic, point and click.”

Army soldiers don’t do the shooting themselves; for that they call in Apaches or F-16s. But Sgt. Tim Bush, Schneider’s partner, says Iraqi insurgents have learned to fear the drones. “They hear some sort of air noise and they don’t know exactly what it is, but they know it’s associated with ‘my buddy getting killed’,” says Bush. “Anything that makes them uneasy makes me happy.” Unfortunately no airstrike is entirely precise, and drone-related hits have most likely killed dozens of civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan. An Iraqi correspondent for NEWSWEEK was recently taken to sites in Sadr City where, it was claimed, women and children had been killed by errant UAV strikes. In the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, village mothers have been known to use the threat of a Predator attack to get their children to behave: “Obey or the ‘buzz’ will come after you.”

That’s a problem in fighting a counterinsurgency, where winning over the population is key. On the one hand, the coverage provided by UAVs allows ground troops to travel more freely and openly, to get out of their Humvees and interact with civilians. But the act of killing is becoming ever more remote?even robotic. Northrop-Grumman is even working on a 635 million contract to develop an unmanned bomber for the Navy. The X-47B will be the size of an F-14, but designed to fly from an aircraft carrier?with folding wings that would allow it to fit in carrier elevators. For now, this is just a “proof of concept” program, meant to demonstrate what is and isn’t possible. But the first prototype is due next year.

As any military man can tell you, no war can be won from armchairs in Nevada. Soldiers will still have to confront the enemy (or, more precisely, try to figure out who is the real enemy) and partake in the endless trial of trying to win hearts and minds without winding up in a coffin. But with UAVs overhead, soldiers do not have to feel like they are sitting ducks for every ambusher or bombmaker. As they peer up at that ? bird? ? it’s the insurgents who have to worry.

The Pigneto neighborhood is one of the most culturally diverse in Rome. City residents consider it bohemian and flock to its ethnic restaurants and quaint stores. But last weekend the trendiness turned to ugliness when a group of around 20 balaclava-clad men, some wearing bandannas with swastikas, demolished shops and beat up non-Italian shopkeepers?mostly Chinese, Indian and Bangladeshi?with lead pipes and baseball bats. CCTV footage captured much of the violence, and residents reported that the gangs chanted “Get out, bastard foreigners.”

Xenophobia is hardly new to Europe. But blatant hostility toward immigrants has taken a nastier turn in Italy since Silvio Berlusconi’s rightist government took power last month. Amnesty International, in a report released Wednesday, warns that Italy’s new “climate of discrimination” is a dangerous trend, encouraged by the country’s ruling political parties. “We are facing a wave of racism affecting all immigrants in Italy, including those who are documented,” Daniela Carboni of Amnesty International’s Italian division told a press conference after the report was released. “The erosion of everyone’s rights threatens to turn Italy into a dangerous country, currently for Roma [sometimes called gypsies] and Romanians and in the future potentially for all of us.”

The first violent incident took place on May 1 in the northern city of Verona, when 29-year-old Nicola Tommasoli (a Jew of Romanian descent) was beaten into a coma. Tommasoli eventually died of his injuries, and five members of a neo-Nazi gang called the Veneto Skinhead Front were arrested in connection with the assault. Herve Leger Scoop Neck And while no one is suggesting any official sanctioning of the beating, Flavio Tosi, the mayor of Verona, is a member of the extreme right Northern League, which repeatedly and publicly calls for violence against immigrants and socialists. (Tosi has since criticized the attack, saying that Verona “is not a city of neofascists and it does not deserve this shameful label.”) Nor are these hate crimes confined to the right. A week later in Turin, Herve Leger V Neck Bandage during a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, a group of left-wing activists burned the Israeli flag and attacked some Jewish members of the celebrating crowd.

In other incidents this month, neo-Nazi gangs vandalized Roma camps in Milan, and in Naples two Roma camps were torched, allegedly by the local organized crime syndicate known as the Camorra, after a young Roma woman allegedly tried to kidnap an Italian child. Amnesty International is calling for Italy to investigate the Naples incident, referring to testimony and photos that might prove that police officials did nothing to stop it. Television footage shows some members of the group that burned the Neapolitan camps bragging about “ethnic cleansing.” Laura Boldrini, a regional spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), compared images of the scene to the forced migration of gypsies out of the Balkans, declaring, “We never thought we’d see such images in Italy.”

Other groups and public figures are equally scandalized. Walter Veltroni, the former Rome mayor who also tried to rid the capital of Roma

She made a noise in her mouth, and, still holding my shoulders, pressed her forehead against my chest and began to cry a bit.

“By that you mean I’m too old for you to bother being silly with, don’t you?” she observed between sobs. “You’re thinking that a woman my age can’t afford to be coy.”

Fresh tears. Everybody was digging truth out of me.

“Why hurt yourself?” I asked over her hair to the whiskey bottle on the night stand.

“You’re the one that’s doing the hurting,” Miss Rankin wept, looking me square in the eye through her tears. “You go out of your way to let me know you’re doing me a favor by picking me up, but your generosity doesn’t include wasting a little time being gentle!” She flung herself, not violently, upon her pillow, burying her face in it. “It doesn’t make the least bit of difference to you whether I’m bright or stupid or what, does it? I might even be more interesting than you are, since I’m a little older!” This last piece of self-castigation, while it choked her completely for a moment, made her mad enough to sit up and glare at me defiantly.

“I’m sorry,” I offered politely. I was thinking that even if she were talented as, say, Beatrice Lillie, is talented, one would not pick her up in order to witness a theatrical performance: one would purchase a theater ticket.

But we don’t object to this exaggeration of the “historical” facts, because we understand the instructional-scientific purpose of the foldout: namely, to illustrate the actual ecology of a Chesapeake marsh by distorting the time-frame, by cutting away certain factual barriers to normal human vision, and by moving the whole scene from the inconvenient reality of three physical dimensions (plus scale, motion, smell, feel, taste, and sound) to the convenience of two visual dimensions, scaled down, frozen in action, and approximated in color. We don’t mistake it for reality, though it is inspired by reality. We don’t mistake it for science, though it grows out of science. We don’t mistake it for fine art, either, though the artist (Mr. Ned Seidler) is properly called a staff artist and is good at his trade. We would not likely frame and hang the original on our walls as art, much less expect to see it in the National Gallery or the Louvre or the Metropolitan — though I confess that my particular copy was carried around with Shelly and me for some seven years, from Buffalo to Boston to Baltimore, to remind me, while I was writing the LETTERS novel, of all the life and death besides historical human life and death that goes on all the time in the place I was writing about.

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Leisa Barnett

Young King Arthur was ambushed and imprisoned by the monarch of a neighboring kingdom. The monarch could have killed him but was moved by Arthur’s youthful happiness. So he offered him freedom, as long as he could answer a very difficult question. Arthur, would have a year to figure out the answer. If, after a year, he still had no answer, he would be killed.

The question was: What do women really want? Such a question would have perplexed even the most knowledgeable man, and, to young Arthur, it seemed an impossible query. Since it was better than death, however, he accepted the monarch’s proposition to have an answer by year’s end.

He returned to his kingdom and began to poll everybody; the princess, the prostitutes, priests, the wise men, and the court jester. In all, he spoke with everyone but no one could give him a satisfactory answer. What most people did tell him was to consult the old witch, as only she would know the answer. The price would be high as the witch was famous for the exorbitant prices she charged.

The last day of the year arrived and Arthur had no alternative but to talk to the witch. She agreed to answer his question, but he’d have to accept her price; the old witch wanted to marry Gawain, the most noble of the Knights of the Round table and Arthur’s closest friend! Young Arthur was horrified, she was hunchbacked and awfully hideous, had only one tooth, smelled like a sewer and often made obscene noises. He had never run across such a repugnant creature. He refused to force his friend to marry her and to have to endure such a burden.

Gawain upon learning of the proposal, spoke with Arthur. He told him that nothing was too big a sacrifice compared to Arthur’s life and the preservation of the Round table. Hence, their wedding was proclaimed, and the witch answered Arthur’s question.

What a woman really wants is to

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By Andy Beal jordan basketball shoes 0 NBA Basketball Shoes

Some interesting data about which search engines are mens basketball shoes used by search engine employees. Not surprisingly, a lot of Yahoo and Microsoft employees use Google.

Nathan believes this data suggests that Yahoo and MSN employees are not happy with their own product. That may well be true. Then again, I’m sitting here in an Overture shirt and not a WebSourced one. Doesn’t mean I’m not passionate about my company.

Thanks to Robert for making sure I found the data.

Some key quotes from the post:

“So, what search engine do Google employees use? Not surprisinly, 100% of them use Google.”

“Meanwhile, Apple employees use Google 87.5% of the time, with 10% going to Yahoo.”

“While MSN does better at Microsoft than elsewhere (19.6% compared to 10.23% among the general public), Google is still tops, at 66.31% (Yahoo falls to 10%).”

“Finally, at Yahoo, 68.9% of employees use Yahoo, but a still-strong 29.8% use Google (compare that to Google’s 100% loyalty).”

Read the post for more info.

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and best basketball shoes interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

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Rules of Improv Theater

With the growing poularity with water fed pole window cleaning, due to much safer working practices, and 50% time saving, it is no surprise the outside window cleaning with a squeegee will soon be a thing of the past

Firstly we will start with the brush as it is the part of the system that is doing the cleaning. There are many types of brush on the market, but the main part of the brush for cleaning windows are the jets that spray the water, and the bristles that are in contact with the glass. There are two types of jets, and are usually referred to as fan jets, or pencil jets. Fan sprays usually have the water coming out under pressure, and usually cover the whole width of the brush. Pencil jets have water flowing from two places in the brush only, and the water is not under any pressure. Rinsing with the brush on the glass is normally preferred by people using fan jets, and pencil jets usually preferred by people who lift the brush off the glass when rinsing. The next important part of the brush is the bristles, they come in all lenghts, shapes, and density, but as a rule you don’t want them flocked(bashed at the ends)as they trap dirt, you also don’t want them too dense, as the dirty water won’t flow down the glass, and you want them crinkled, so that more of the bristle is in contact with the glass which aids scrubbing.

The pole, the first window cleaning water fed pole to come on the market were very heavy constructed mostly of fibre glass, and were quite conveniently made by the manufacturer not to be taken apart, meaning all different sizes were needed, to reach different heights of window. Now thankfully there are many types of pole on the market, which have been developed for window cleaning, by window cleaners. These poles are getting lighter stronger, and much less expensive.

Water treatment, the dissolved solids need to be taken out the tap water so as the glass dries spot free when the water evaporates. If you used ordinary tap water to clean the windows, when the water evaporated the dissolved solids would be left behind, showing up as dirty marks on the glass. There are two methods of purifying the tap water Deionization, and Reverse Osmosis, and the one you need can be determined by how hard your tap water is, For hard water Reverse Osmosis, and for soft water Deionization.
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Rest of the equipment needed, you need a pump to pump your pure water from the holding vessel to the window. You also need a means of carrying water to the work site which can be a van or trailer with a tank fitted, or a trolley with water containers on it. A hose reel is needed to transfer the water from the tank to the pole. You also need a 12V power supply to operate the pump.

There are many good window cleaning suppliers selling systems, and the three main questions you ask before you buy is, what sizes watter treatment system is supplied (measured in GPD) How high does the pole reach, and is the tank baffled and secured in the van.

When a water fed pole window cleaning system is purchased, it should not only be down to cost alone. The environmentally friendliness of the system should also be considered? How efficient is the system?

Copyright (c) 2008 Peter Fogwill

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