Flash Gordon Left Me The Keys

Rumsfeld se convertit à la «lutte idéologique»

Dans une note «confidentielle» sur la stratégie américaine, qui, selon certains observateurs, a été livrée aux médias par Rumsfeld lui-même, le chef du Pentagone interroge les responsables du ministère de la Défense sur le bien-fondé de la politique américaine en matière de lutte contre le terrorisme.

Sous l'intitulé «Sommes-nous en train de gagner ou de perdre la guerre mondiale contre le terrorisme ?», Donald Rumsfeld met l'accent sur la lutte idéologique, soulignant à trois reprises le rôle d'école du terrorisme que jouent, selon lui, les madrassas, c'est-à-dire les écoles coraniques.

Dans une entrevue accordée au Washington Times, le ministre de la Défense, héraut de l'intervention militaire tant en Afghanistan qu'en Irak, lance aussi l'idée d'une «agence d'information gouvernementale du XXIe siècle» chargée de mener la «guerre des esprits».

«L'immense majorité des gens dans le monde, quelle que soit leur religion, ne croient pas au terrorisme. Ils ne croient pas à l'utilité de parcourir le monde en tuant des innocents, hommes, femmes et enfants, dit-il. Il faut qu'il y ait davantage de gens qui osent prendre position ainsi dans le monde, que ce ne soient pas seulement nous.»,

Pour nombre d'experts du terrorisme, il était temps que le gouvernement américain manifeste cette inflexion de sa stratégie. La politique actuelle des États-Unis dans ce domaine «ne marche pas, elle est stupide», estime ainsi Xavier Raufer, expert français du terrorisme.

L'échec américain réside notamment dans l'incapacité de Washington à répondre aux exhortations d'Oussama ben Laden et dans son obsession à l'égard de l'homme, aux dépens de la réfutation de son discours. «Ben Laden n'est pas le chef de l'IRA [l'Armée républicaine irlandaise]. Son seul pouvoir, c'est son prêche. Il a le pouvoir de répandre la parole, d'inciter les gens au djihad, mais il ne peut les y contraindre. Il peut exhorter les gens, les pousser à agir, mais il ne peut pas donner d'ordre. Ce n'est pas le général d'une armée», explique Xavier Raufer.

Pour Ivo Daalder, de l'institut américain Brookings, il est simpliste de voir dans les madrassas la clé du problème. «Il [Rumsfeld] devrait s'interroger sur notre politique proche-orientale, sur le soutien que nous apportons aux régimes répressifs d'Arabie Saoudite et d'Égypte. Il est frappant de voir combien cette structure de pensée est étroite», estime-t-il.

Pour de nombreux experts, Rumsfeld a fait circuler cette note pour montrer qu'il est toujours «dans le coup», lui dont la position auprès de George Bush semble devenir plus fragile à mesure que la lutte contre le terrorisme s'enlise.

«Rummy veut montrer qu'il fait toujours partie du jeu, qu'il n'est pas idiot et qu'il est conscient de la nécessité, pour le gouvernement américain, d'actualiser en permanence ses priorités», explique John Pike, directeur de l'institut GlobalSecurity.org.

Son constat est toutefois sans appel : «Cela fait deux ans que nous sommes en Afghanistan et on continue à nous tirer dessus. Quant à l'Irak, s'il n'est pas sûr que des liens avec al-Qaïda existaient il y a un an, aujourd'hui c'est une certitude.»

Pour autant, aucun expert n'envisage un virage à 180 ? degrés de la politique américaine en Irak, où les enjeux pétroliers priment. «Il est exclu de faire en Irak ce que l'on a fait au Viêtnam, à savoir annoncer la victoire et rentrer au pays, dit John Pike. S'ils faisaient prêter serment à [l'ancien dirigeant en exil Ahmad] Chalabi en lui souhaitant tout le bien possible avant de partir, quelques jours plus tard, un homme avec une grosse moustache ferait son apparition, lui tirerait une balle dans la tête et dirait : "C'est moi le chef".»

John Pike pense que la présence militaire américaine en Irak ira en décroissant à l'approche des élections présidentielles de novembre 2004, à condition toutefois que Saddam Hussein soit capturé. «Le prochain signe crucial, c'est le jour où ils prendront Saddam. Ce sera alors très tentant d'annoncer un désengagement partiel», prédit-il.

1983 Bombing Marked Turning Point In Terror
The U.S. reaction to the Beirut attack set off a chain of events, some say

TAMPA - Jimmy Barber wants the world to remember what happened 20 years ago today: the bombing that killed scores of U.S. Marines in Lebanon.

A Tampa Marine, Lance Cpl. Ferrandy D. Henderson, was among 22 Floridians who perished in the attack that left 241 Americans dead at a Beirut barracks Oct. 23, 1983. The U.S. carnage was worse than any single day of the Vietnam War.

Barber, a 53-year-old Vietnam veteran from Brandon, pushed last year for a commemoration. And now a display about the bombing is at Veterans Memorial Park off U.S. 301.

In retrospect, analysts say, the Beirut bombing provided a game plan for 20 years of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, although no one at the time predicted today's war against global terror.

Speaking in Tampa last week, Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan's defense secretary, ranked Beirut as the worst event on his watch. In his view, there was no good reason for U.S. troops to be there to help a peacekeeping force responding to Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

"I urged as strongly as I could, apparently not strongly enough, that we shouldn't be there, that we should take those troops out, at the very least put them on ships offshore," Weinberger said. "They were sitting in the middle of a bull's eye."

The military soon pulled out of Beirut, and experts say that emboldened other terrorists. Six months earlier, zealots had driven a truck bomb into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 17 Americans and 46 others. And afterward, terrorists:

Attacked U.S. embassies in Kuwait two months later and in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing about 230 people.

Hijacked TWA Flight 847 for 17 days in the Middle East in 1985, taking hostages and killing a Navy diver.

Blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270.

Bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six and wounding about 1,000.

Bombed Khobar Towers, a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, killing 19 and wounding more than 370.

Struck the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39 others.

Flew hijacked jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed one into a Pennsylvania field Sept. 11, 2001, killing more than 3,000.

Assessing The Lesson
Osama bin Laden, identified as the mastermind behind Sept. 11, underscored the symbolic importance of the 1983 violence when he told ABC News in 1998 that U.S. soldiers were "paper tigers."

"The Marines fled after two explosions," he recalled.

"There is no question it was a major cause of 9/11," said former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the Sept. 11 investigative commission quoted recently in Knight Ridder Newspapers. "We told the world that terrorism succeeds."

Not all agree with that conclusion. But some warn that today's shaky situation in Iraq, with continuing attacks on U.S. troops, may foreshadow another Beirut with potentially high casualties that could erode public support for the mission espoused by President Bush's administration.

"Every one of these bombings in Baghdad is a flashback to the Beirut bombing," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington think tank. "They've seen this movie, and they know how it ends."

Remembering The Sacrifice
Indeed, Bush reminded the nation of Beirut in a prime-time speech last month during which he urged the country to brace for a long and costly battle to rebuild Iraq - while not repeating past mistakes and leaving before completion.

Pike said the lesson of Beirut ought to be that Americans will bail out if they "see no good reason to stay and be blown up." Beirut was "a demonstration of American rationality," he said, "and I think it demonstrated what is generally the case in the history of modern warfare - that there has to be a proper tie between ends and means and cost and benefit."

In any case, veterans such as Barber won't forget the sacrifices of those who died two decades ago.

"I have a patch worn by a survivor that was donated" to the display at Veterans Memorial Park, Barber said. "The man who gave me the patch, he came up and said, "I know how you Vietnam vets must have felt. No one did anything to remember us.' "

Strained Navy experiments with smaller strike groups

Hoping to double the forces it can send to hot spots around the world, the Navy has begun experimenting with deployments of small strike groups of ships to reduce the Navy's reliance on its heavily used aircraft carrier fleet.

The Navy also plans to dramatically overhaul the schedule for deploying military personnel on ships, reducing the time between deployments and creating a less predictable schedule.

Officials have characterized the plans as a means to be more responsive to unpredictable and more numerous threats in the post-Cold War era.

The Navy's prototype Expeditionary Strike Groups pair 2,200 Marines and their equipment aboard amphibious assault ships with a mix of Navy destroyers, cruisers and submarines that provide defensive measures and the ability to launch cruise missiles at targets far inland.

The amphibious assault ships in the past had sailed alongside one of the Navy's 12 aircraft carriers, whose fighter planes they depended on for protection from air strikes.

Now they will be permitted to operate independently, theoretically doubling to 24 the number of seagoing forces that can project U.S. power around the world -- though only one-quarter to one-third of those forces might be available at any given time, said Ronald O'Rourke, an analyst for the Congressional Research Service.

"As good as a carrier strike group is, it can only be in so many places, and this is about distributing a [broader] strike capability across the globe in this war on terrorism that we're in now," said a senior Navy official familiar with the new strategy. "It's about being places, and being able to reach out and influence places ashore."

The change also reflects strains on the Navy since the campaign against terrorism began two years and two wars ago, said A.D. Baker III, editor of the Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World.

"The Navy is being forced to burn the candle at both ends," he said. The new measures "will work in the short term to give the impression that the U.S. Navy is everywhere, for a while."

The changes also call for a more flexible fleet-wide deployment timetable, which is now in its early stages.

A radical break in schedules
The new program would be a radical break from the regular deployment schedule the Navy has used for decades and devised in part to boost re-enlistment rates by making life easier, or at least more predictable, for families of sailors typically at sea for six months or more.

As the demand for naval forces in Afghanistan and Iraq has shown, those drawn-out but foreseeable timetables no longer can be relied on, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy group.

The Navy long had operated around a model of deploying three aircraft carriers at a time while doing maintenance and training on the others. Deployment schedules were known years ahead of time.

But the last year alone saw six carriers and their attending battle groups sent to the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean Sea during the war in Iraq. A seventh, the USS Carl Vinson, was rushed to patrol near North Korea with maintenance half-finished after an earlier deployment to Afghanistan. Other Navy and Marine Corps forces evacuated civilians in Liberia and hunted Al Qaeda fighters in the Philippines.

"We're at war. It's as simple as that," Pike said.

Disconcertingly scattered
It also is disconcertingly scattered, requiring major changes in how the armed services respond to threats, say Pentagon strategists. The Navy in particular has had to adjust from countering another navy at sea to fighting enemies ashore.

"What we have now is smaller, more agile units that pack a lot more wallop," said Navy Capt. Dana Dervay, who works in the future operations office for the Atlantic Fleet.

Another change could put an admiral or Marine general in charge of each group, meaning a higher-ranking decision-maker would be at hand as intelligence comes in, said Rear Adm. Robert Conway, who commands the first such expeditionary strike group from the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu.

"I can make the call in a lot of cases. Before, everybody was going somewhere else for the higher authority," he said in an interview. "Now, I am the higher authority. It gives the group speed. And in the global war on terrorism, speed is everything."

The Peleliu has been near Iraq since leaving San Diego in September. A second expeditionary group will center on another assault ship -- the USS Wasp -- and is preparing to leave Norfolk early next year.

Despite the hope that they will eventually operate independently of carriers, the Peleliu so far has worked with carriers in the gulf region. It is not clear whether the strike group built around the Wasp would operate with a carrier.

"Right now it's an experiment, and the Navy has presented it as such," O'Rourke said.

The new deployment schedule is more certain -- the Navy says it is being implemented -- though several variables have yet to be finalized.

"I cannot tell you how many options we've looked at--when to deploy and how long? Should it be one long [deployment], or three short ones? We're continuing to refine" the plan, said the Atlantic Fleet's Dervay.

Though six-month cruises will still occur, some ships likely will be sent for longer, while others could be dispatched to trouble spots for only a month or two. Returning ships would be kept on alert for a time, ready to head back out to sea on short notice. Following typical six-month maintenance schedules, they would be ready to go out after just four or five months of training--more than six months faster than earlier, a senior Navy official said.

Pentagon strategists who support the plan talk about its promise of doubling the "employability" of carriers by either speeding them out to sea or keeping them ready in the event of an emergency. Though carriers will be the first to employ the new timetables, other ships would follow.

Critics say the plan leaves unanswered many questions, including what impact more frequent cruises will have on an aging fleet.

"The people and the ships and the aircraft, and all of the subsystems, are all going to be worn out," Baker said. "It should be a temporary step in anticipation of a short-term need. But it's being couched as a permanent change.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia in secret nuke pact
Islamabad trades weapons technology for oil

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on "nuclear cooperation" that will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil, according to a ranking Pakistani insider.

The disclosure came at the end of a 26-hour state visit to Islamabad last weekend by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, who flew across the Arabian Sea with an entourage of 200, including Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal and several Cabinet ministers.

Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the pro-American defense minister who is next in line to the throne after the crown prince, was not part of the delegation.

"It will be vehemently denied by both countries," said the Pakistani source, whose information has proven reliable for more than a decade, "but future events will confirm that Pakistan has agreed to provide [Saudi Arabia] with the wherewithal for a nuclear deterrent."

As predicted, Saudi Arabia - which has faced strong international suspicion for years that it was seeking a nuclear capability through Pakistan - strongly denied the claim.

Prince Sultan was quoted in the Saudi newspaper Okaz yesterday saying that "no military agreements were concluded between the kingdom and Pakistan during [Prince Abdullah's] visit to Islamabad."

Mohammad Sadiq, deputy chief of mission for Pakistan's embassy in Washington, also denied any nuclear deal was in the works. "That is totally incorrect," he said in a telephone interview. "We have a clear policy: We will not export our nuclear expertise."

But the CIA believes Pakistan already has shared its nuclear know-how, working with North Korea in exchange for missile technology.

A Pakistani C-130 was spotted by satellite loading North Korean missiles at Pyongyang airport last year. Pakistan, which is estimated to have between 35 and 60 nuclear weapons, said this was a straight purchase for cash and strongly denied a nuclear quid pro quo.

"Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia," the Pakistani source said, "see a world that is moving from nonproliferation to proliferation of nuclear weapons."

The Saudi rulers, who are Sunni Muslims, are believed to have concluded that nothing will deter the Shi'ite Muslims who rule Iran from continuing their quest for a nuclear weapons capability.

Pakistan, meanwhile, is concerned about a recent arms agreement between India, its nuclear archrival, and Israel, a longtime nuclear power whose inventory is estimated at between 200 and 400 weapons.

To counter what Pakistani and Saudi leaders regard as multiple regional threats, the two countries have decided to quietly move ahead with an exchange of free or cheap Saudi oil for Pakistani nuclear know-how, the Pakistani source said.

Pakistanis have worked as contract pilots for the Royal Saudi Air Force for the past 30 years. Several hundred thousand Pakistani workers are employed by the Gulf states, both as skilled and unskilled workers, and their remittances are a hard currency boon for the Pakistani treasury.

Prince Abdullah reportedly sees Saudi oil reserves, the world's largest, as becoming increasingly vulnerable over the next 10 years.

By mutual agreement, U.S. forces withdrew from Saudi Arabia earlier this year to relocate across the border in the tiny oil sheikdom of Qatar.

Saudi officials also are still chafing over a closed meeting - later well publicized - of the U.S. Defense Policy Board in 2002, where an expert explained, with a 16-slide Powerpoint presentation, why and how the United States should seize and occupy oil fields in the country's Eastern Province.

Several incidents have raised questions over the extent of Saudi-Pakistani cooperation in defense matters.

A new policy paper by Simon Henderson, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted that Prince Sultan visited Pakistan's highly restricted Kahuta uranium enrichment and missile assembly factory in 1999, a visit that prompted a formal diplomatic complaint from Washington.

And a son of Prince Abdullah attended Pakistan's test-firing last year of its Ghauri-class missile, which has a range of 950 miles and could be used to deliver a nuclear payload.

President Bush was reported to have confronted Pervez Musharraf over the Saudi nuclear issue during the Pakistani president's visit to Camp David this summer, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage raised the issue during a trip to Islamabad earlier this month, according to Mr. Henderson's paper.

"Apart from proliferation concerns, Washington likely harbors more general fears about what would happen if either of the regimes in Riyadh or Islamabad became radically Islamic," according to Mr. Henderson.

GlobalSecurity.org, a well-connected defense Internet site, found in a recent survey that Saudi Arabia has the infrastructure to exploit such nuclear exports very quickly.

"While there is no direct evidence that Saudi Arabia has chosen a nuclear option, the Saudis have in place a foundation for building a nuclear deterrent," according to the Web site.

*Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor at large of The Washington Times, is editor at large of United Press International as well.

Warfare at the speed of light

DOWN THIS tiled corridor, light does muscular, noisy work. Lasers dig dirt and weld metal. They pound aircraft parts into shape. In Bob Yamamoto's lab, light devours.

He straps on emerald green goggles. A technician stabs a fire button and calls out the computer countdown. "Three ... two ... one ..."

Then ... nothing. Just a buzz of electronics and an ephemeral glow in this darkened room at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. But inside Yamamato's target chamber, a block of steel spits flame and molten metal.

In those two seconds, 400 blasts of light poured into slabs of clear, manmade garnet. Swollen in energy, the crystal's atoms then unleashed torrents of infrared light to ricochet 1,000 times between two mirrors and multiply, finally escaping as 400 pulses of pure, square beam.

Kilowatt for kilogram, this is the world's most powerful solid-state laser. Its invisible beam drilled Yamamoto's inch-thick steel plate in two seconds. Add larger crystals and it will eat steel a mile or more away.

"What we're building," Yamamoto explains, "is a laser weapon."

After sinking 40 years and billions of dollars into beam weapons, defense scientists are on the cusp of what could be a military revolution -- warfare at the speed of light.

"We've made a quantum leap here," said Randy Buff, solid-state laser program manager for the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command. "We're anxious to get out there and do something."

No longer are laser guns the stuff of Hollywood and Strategic Defense Initiative fantasy. Instead of laser-guiding bullets and "smart" bombs, the Pentagon inside of a decade could be armed with a beam weapon that is near-instantaneous, gravity-free and truly surgical, focusing to such hair-splitting accuracy that it could avoid civilians while predetonating munitions miles away.

A laser arms race already is under way, chiefly in California. The prize is billions of dollars. Three families of high-energy beams -- powered by combusting chemicals, electron accelerators and crystals, such as Yamamoto's -- are vying for the Pentagon's eye.

Defense contractors are sniping at each other's designs, and corporate alliances are shifting. But no one seems to doubt that battle lasers -- perhaps mounted on Humvees, jet fighters and unmanned aircraft -- could knock down previously untouchable targets such as artillery shells, mortars, surface-to-air missiles and even cruise missiles at ranges of up to dozens of miles in good weather. In clear air above the clouds, a high-powered laser could lance out 500 miles to destroy rising ballistic missiles.

"If we had them today, they'd be at the former Saddam Hussein International Airport, making sure no one gets off a shoulder-launched missile at an aircraft," said Mike Campbell, a laser expert at General Atomics in San Diego.

By coaxing a huge power boost out of tiny laser diodes like those in CD players, scoreboards and supermarket scanners, scientists are squeezing unprecedented power out of lasers made of exotic crystals -- distant cousins of the world's first laser, which Theodore Maiman fashioned from a ruby cylinder in 1960.

The latest breed of solid-state lasers now are poised to break the dominance of giant, chemical gas-powered beams with compact, mobile weapons that can run off a Humvee's diesel engine or a jet fighter's turbine.

Experts liken this evolution to the shift from 1950s vacuum tubes to the solid-state transistors now driving everything electronic.

"We think the whole thing's going to go solid state," said Lloyd Hackel, chief of laser science technology at Livermore Lab. "Gas lasers are sort of the vacuum tubes of lasers. They work, but in terms of density, intensity and reliability, it's going to go solid state."

No coherent military plan
The Pentagon's economic power places the military at the decisive center of this transition. So far, however, experts say the Defense Department has no coherent plan for speed-of-light weapons research, scattering projects among the Air Force, Army and Navy.

As an offshoot, few in the Pentagon are grappling with the implications of highly mobile laser forces:

Are military computers and commanders ready for entirely automated weapons that deliver instant, lethal blasts of energy and can be retargeted in seconds? Lasers under testing for air defense already offer that capability. Fully automated firing on offensive targets is a short step behind.

"When you develop the capability to track, target and destroy something in a second, then the temptation to remove humans from the decision cycle becomes very great," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based defense think tank.

Will U.S. forces fire lasers on humans? International treaty forbids the use of lasers for blinding people. But there is no legal ban on striking humans. U.S. Special Operations Command wants to load a medium-power laser alongside artillery and miniguns on a future version of the AC-130 gunships that since Vietnam have been a mainstay of special forces attacks on ground targets. The laser's power could blow tires and ignite gas tanks, but wouldn't be lethal for tanks or armored vehicles.

"It would be a very long-range, ultra-accurate sniper rifle," suggests John Pike, a weapons expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org.

The likely targets, Thompson said, "would be some sort of lighter vehicle or combustible structures or it could be people. Remember we're talking about a system that can be instantenously retargetable."

Will the payoff of battle lasers sufficiently outweigh their huge drawback -- loss of power and range in bad weather, fog, dust and smoke -- that the U.S. military will shift toward fair-weather operations?

Is the United States willing to defend or attack satellites with lasers? The Air Force's Airborne Laser is to start test-firing against missiles in 2004. But the longer range of its laser in the thinner, upper atmosphere brings space vehicles within targeting.

How will other nations respond? Experts believe the United States could enjoy a near monopoly on battle lasers for years. But under what circumstances will it justify their use in the face of likely international opposition?

Well before the end of the Cold War, Pentagon technocrats talked of "transformation" of the military -- a fusing of electronic eyes, fast communications and data crunching with precision weapons to wage war at hyperspeed and high efficiency.

But despite compressing the time to identify and attack adversaries, U.S. weapons are still chained to the slow, Newtonian physics of explosives, chemical propellants and metal projectiles, and are still restrained by gravity.

Ballistic warheads can strike at speeds greater than Mach 20. But readying them for launch takes several minutes at least and delivering them several more. Lasers race to target at roughly Mach 860,000.

"There's no problem with dodging the bullet," said the Lexington Institute's Thompson.

With that allure, the Bush administration has specified that the signature vehicles, aircraft and vessels of the next-generation military accommodate futuristic weapons.

Defense contractors are shoehorning laser bays into future fighters, tilt-rotor aircraft and helicopters. Humvees are going to hybrid diesel engines, and the Navy's new DDX destroyer to all-electric drive. The military wants to cuts its logistical burden of fuel supply, but a secondary reason is extra electrical power for energy weapons.

"They would have substantial surplus capability for some power-hungry weapon of the future, and whether that would be a laser or a microwave gun or a rail gun isn't certain," said GlobalSecurity's Pike.

The era of battle lasers began in the mid-1990s, when military scientists in New Mexico burned a hole in a Scud missile standing miles away. Soon after, a powerful chemical laser funded by the Pentagon and the Israeli Defense Force began blasting rockets and artillery shells out of midair. Scientists think such lasers have promise for knocking down mortar shells.

Mortars and artillery are so lethal for infantry that they account for nearly half of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq. But no effective defense exists.

'Let your imagination go'
"Nobody thought that could be done," said Josef Scwartz, program manager for the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser at Northrop Grumman. "Everybody thought you'd just hide in a hole. Now you have the ability to shoot it out of the sky. And if you can do that, you can let your imagination go."

Defense theorists already are performing computer simulations of laser battles. "What it does is change the battlefield," said Thomas McGrann, a military operations analyst who runs battle simulations in Livermore Lab's Q Division. "What we're seeing is, he fires something at me, I knock it down. Anywhere from one to three kilometers out, I'm going to suppress his fire. And when he sends his UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) up -- and they're hard targets to kill -- I can take them out. An Army guy says he's taking fire from a wooded hillside. We start a fire there."

But forget about "Star Wars" and blaster pistols knifing the air with multi-colored beams. Visible lasers so far don't pack sufficient punch over distance to be useful weapons.

The laser battlefield will be largely invisible. Targets will explode, break apart in midair or burst into flame without apparent cause.

Soldiers won't buckle themselves into a laser cannon. The earliest battle laser systems are designed to defend U.S. troops and aircraft against airborne shells and missiles. That means computerized systems for tracking, targeting and firing faster than humans can react.

And the world's first laser weapons won't be worn on the hip: The most technically mature candidates are sprawling monstrosities weighing 50 tons and filling the better part of a Boeing 747 or, in the case of Northrop's MTHEL, a full-sized drug store, backed by chemical tanks or factories to recharge the lasers.

That's been the story of laser weapons for years. Chemical lasers are proven at delivering high-powered beams at great distances -- if they have enough chemicals. Scwartz' challenge is shrinking its laser by a fifth, to fit inside two cargo containers, packed inside a C-130 cargo plane.

"Can we do it?" he said. "We think we can."

But some Army officials are wary of hauling tanks of flammable, toxic chemicals into a war zone. A former Pentagon official noted that a .50-caliber armor-piercing/incendiary bullet could ignite a toxic explosion.

Once the laser stops firing, it must vent hot chemicals. That chemical and thermal signature could make a weapon traveling in two tractor trailers a conspicuous target.

Ultimately, battlefield lasers will have to be more compact, mobile enough to fit in the tail of the helicopter, in the belly of a jet fighter or in the backseat of a Hummer.

"Solid-state lasers seem to be the ideal for laser weaponry," Thompson said. "The basic design seems to be less complicated than either free-electron or chemical lasers and it seems to be more easily incorporated, say, into a fighter. They have more potential over the long run because of their potential compactness and the flexibility of their power sources."

The most powerful electric laser is taking shape in Yamamoto's lab at Lawrence Livermore, where pursuit of hydrogen fusion has produced two generations of laser jocks and the world's most powerful solid-state lasers.

"If you want something small enough and light enough to put on a Humvee or the back of a copter and have enough oomph to do something, the way to do it is a solid-state laser," Yamamoto said.

Experts agree battle lasers need at least 100 kilowatts of power. The Pentagon wants to see who will get to 25 kilowatts first in 2004.

Yamamoto is a veteran builder of lasers and atom smashers. Next to those, the laser weapon sitting on his lab bench is easy: It's modular. He just adds another 4-inch slab or two of manmade garnet and surrounds it with diodes. He expects to beat 25 kilowatts by Christmas and double it early next year. To reach 100 kilowatts will take more and bigger slabs.

Yamamoto's problem is heat. Lasing makes the crystals warm inside and corrupts the light beam. Eventually, the slabs can crack and shatter. They're thick and don't cool well in chilled water or gases. Livermore's laser designers had a simpler idea: Build two or more of the compact lasers in cassettes and rotate them when hot.

A leap in efficiency
But the real innovation that makes solid-state lasers worthwhile for defense are high-power diodes. Instead of using flashlamps like Maiman's ruby and the National Ignition Facility, Yamamoto's laser is pumped by more than 8,000 diodes. They're 10 times as efficient.

In theory, that means a liter of everyday Army diesel fuel costing as little as $1 will generate enough rapid-fire laser pulses to destroy a standard airborne missile. The job now falls to Patriot missiles costing $3 million apiece.

The question is, will solid-state lasers that today resemble science projects, full of glass, mirrors and banks of sensitive electronics take the beating of battle?

"You have to get these lasers out in the field to see if they work. If you hit a bump in the road, do they hold up? Do you need five Ph.D.s to make them work?" said General Atomics' Campbell.

Moreover, all laser guns will, for the forseeable future, remain fair-weather weapons. Airborne particles and vapor diffuse the beam and cut its range enormously. Smart adversaries will attack under cover of smoke or inclement weather.

"In the first order, lasers are not going to work on bad days," Campbell said. "They're just not."

But then, neither do so many of the optical sensors on which U.S. forces depend for information-accelerated warfare.

"I'm sure there will be many games to be played in measures and countermeasures and counter-countermeasures," said Northrop's Scwartz. But the rule of thumb is "if you see a target, you can kill that target."

Military coexists with endangered pronghorn on bombing range

It's not yet sunrise but Pam Landin's day is already swinging into high gear on this southern Arizona military range.

She has hiked 200 feet up a rocky slope to a ledge on Observation Point Echo, overlooking a vast flat landscape where Air Force pilots routinely practice bombing runs. With binoculars and a high-powered scope she searches the desert below for endangered Sonoran pronghorns.

The presence of any of the deer-like animals within three kilometers of a nearby array of targets resembling tanks can force pilots to detour to other sites on the Air Force's 1.1 million-acre portion of the range, or even scrub their missions.

The Air Force and the Marines, who also use part of this range, are key players in efforts by federal and state agencies to ensure the survival of the fleet, elusive pronghorns.

Both military branches provide money for studies and other support, even pitching in thousands of dollars to drill desert wells in an adjacent wildlife refuge to irrigate plots of forage for the animals, whose population has been decimated by drought.

Air Force Col. James Uken, the Goldwater range's management officer, said that for the Air Force's part, "when you total up all the different projects we've been involved in over the period of time, I'm sure the dollar value exceeds $1 million."

That doesn't include the cost for the pronghorn spotters - four or five biologists including Landin - who climb observation points overlooking the north and south tactical ranges at least once every weekday a few hours before every bombing run.

"The Air Force spends a lot of money annually simply to avoid the rare, and probably unlikely, scenario of actually harming a pronghorn," said John Hervert, wildlife program manager for the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, a principal in a multiagency pronghorn recovery team.

So does the Marine Corps, which manages another nearly 692,000 acres on the Goldwater Range's western end.

"It's something that they've become accustomed to deal with," said John Morgart, coordinator of the Sonoran pronghorn recovery team for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "I have a lot of confidence in my military counterparts."

The goat-sized Sonoran pronghorn, which is related to the antelope but is genetically distinct, is in a critical period.

The U.S. population numbered about 138 less than two years ago, but last winter it crashed to an estimated 21 after more than a year without rain. Northern Mexico has fewer than 300 Sonoran pronghorns.

But the Arizona survivors also produced eight to 10 fawns this spring, with most apparently surviving so far.

Survival of all the fawns would be phenomenal, especially since there was concern whether the animals would even mate last year, said Uken, who considers himself part of the recovery team.

The Air Force has been using pronghorn spotters for at least six years, since Fish and Wildlife issued a biological opinion under the Endangered Species Act as part of a settlement with Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group.

"We stood up to that responsibility at least six years ago, and have been doing so ever since," Uken said. "We accept that as part of our doing business, our operations."

On average, 7 percent of all scheduled bombing missions are scrubbed because of pronghorns near target sites, and another 26 percent are rerouted to secondary target areas, he said.

There are 45,000 flights a year over the Air Force side of the Goldwater Range and 18,000 flights a year over the Marines' side, Uken said.

Hervert noted the pronghorns disproportionately favor the Air Force's north and south tactical ranges, where bombs tear up creosote, a plant that hinders the pronghorns' ability to see predators. The bombs, other munitions and flares also gouge out craters that hold rainwater and foster growth of plants the animals favor.

"In doing their job, they've created habitat that is attractive to the animals," Morgart said.

On a recent day, Landin spotted a cluster of tiny specks - five white-rumped pronghorns - bedded in vegetation near a small rocky formation nicknamed Peanut Hill, four or five miles west of her location.

Those pronghorns and two others have been hanging around Peanut Hill for about a month, she said.

Noah Matson, a Washington-based public lands management specialist with Defenders of Wildlife, said the Air Force and Marines are making an effort to help the recovery program.

"We think the Air Force monitoring program is a really important part of the effort," Matson said. "And we don't think it has a tremendous impact on the Air Force training."

Ron Pearce, civilian manager for the nearly 692,000-acre Marine Corps' portion of the Goldwater Range, said the Corps first consulted with Fish and Wildlife in 1988 over the pronghorn and has given more than a dozen research and recovery grants since 1994 to help the animal.

In all, the Marine Corps has spent about $750,000 on pronghorn recovery, of which only $83,000 was required, he said.

"We did it because it was the right thing to do, and we did it because we had the resources and we had the authority," Pearce said.

Legislation now being sought by the Department of Defense seeks exemptions to key environmental laws, contending they hamper the military's ability to train. One of five provisions still before Congress allows for exemption of some military land from critical habitat provisions of the Endangered Species Act.

But biologists and military officials alike say neither Air Force nor Marine operations on the Goldwater Range concerning the Sonoran pronghorn would be affected, primarily because critical habitat was never designated.

"I think the people I deal with would continue to see the positives of having pronghorn monitoring out there," Morgart said. "The military doesn't want to be seen as uncaring of the environment or endangered species."

U.S. missile defense unit mobilizing in Springs

Colorado Springs will house the nerve center of the United States’ fledgling missile defense system, further solidifying its role as the hub of homeland defense.

The city is home to NORAD, the nation’s early warning missile system, and Northern Command, charged with defending the United States against attack.

In September, the first unit charged with defending the nation against missile attack will begin operations.

Called the Missile Defense Brigade, it was activated Thursday at Peterson Air Force Base.

“What a historic event. Another chapter as we prepare to defend our homeland,” said Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano Jr., commander of Army Space and Missile Defense Command.

Sixty soldiers will sit on alert at command centers inside Cheyenne Mountain, at Peterson and elsewhere in Colorado Springs.

Troops in the mountain already watch for missile launches using information from satellites and ground radar, but the nation has no way to defend against an attack. The new missile defense soldiers would alert troops in Alas- ka and California, who would launch missiles that are supposed to shoot down incoming missiles.

The troops on watch here will be full-time Colorado National Guard soldiers, a nod to the Guard’s longtime role as defenders of the nation and evidence of a stretched military where the reserves are counted on more.

President Bush ordered the military to install groundbased defensive missiles at Fort Greeley, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in 2004.

The roughly $22 billion program will field 10 missiles next year and 10 more the year after, said Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.

The military also is moving ahead with defensive missiles on Navy ships and an airborne laser mounted on a converted 747 airliner intended to shoot down missiles.

Lehner said the military has proven an incoming missile can be shot down with another missile, despite some failed tests.

Critics such as John Pike disagree. Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think-tank, said missile defense technology “has been known to work on occasion.”

The military showed it is “physically possible,” not that it can work in a realistic attack scenario, he said.

Missile defense could give U.S. leadership a false sense of confidence they can fight a nation such as North Korea and not worry about a nuclear strike, Pike said.

“The consequences of failure are catastrophic,” he said. “If the only thing standing between an American city and a North Korean missile is this (technology), we are in trouble.”

Pike said the billions being poured into missile defense would be better spent making airliners less suspectable to terrorists’ shoulder-fired missiles.

Col. Gary Baumann, commander of the new missile defense unit in Colorado Springs, said his job is not to debate where the threat may be coming from, just to prepare for the mission.

The military did a nationwide search for the soldiers who will serve in the unit here. Half are in place and participating in training at Schriever Air Force Base.

The hours have been long and will get longer once the mission begins, when the troops are on constant watch, Baumann said.

“We are prepared for any threat that will come our way,” he said.