An F-22 takes off on a training flight last month. Photo: Air Force

The Air Force has some bad news for the pilots of its F-22 Raptor stealth fighters: your planes are going to make you feel crappy and there’s not much anyone can do about it. And the message to the maintainers of the radar-evading jet is even more depressing. Any illness they feel from working around the Raptor is apparently all in their heads, according to the Air Force.

Those admissions, buried in newly released Congressional records, represent the latest twist in the years-long saga of the F-22′s faulty oxygen system, which since at least 2008 has been choking pilots, leading to confusion, memory loss and blackouts — combined known as “hypoxia” — that may have contributed to at least one fatal crash. Ground crews have also reported growing sick while working around F-22s whose engines are running.

The Air Force claims its has a handle on the in-flight blackouts. All 180 or so F-22s are having faulty filters removed and new backup oxygen generators installed. There have also been changes to the G-suits pilots wear. But the Air Force says the alterations won’t do anything to fix the so-called “Raptor cough,” a chronic condition afflicting almost all F-22 pilots.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

They were once the stuff of science fiction. In recent years, a host of government and private groups have begun experimenting with robotic exoskeletons able to augment the human body — and even restore paraplegics’ ability to walk.

The U.S. military has been a major sponsor of exoskeleton development. But commercial, medical firms have raced ahead of the Pentagon in actually getting the robotic devices into everyday use.

Last month, Argo Medical Technologies, an Israeli-founded firm based in Massachusetts, announced that its ReWalk exoskeleton had been approved for personal use in Europe.

Read the rest at Offiziere.ch.

Blackhawk medevac helicopter. Photo: Army

It’s one of the most dangerous missions on the modern battlefield — and one of the most important. Crews flying big, vulnerable and sometimes unarmed helicopters brave gunfire, bad weather and rugged terrain to snatch wounded troops from a firefight or the scene of a bomb blast.

Medical evacuation crews are some of the gutsiest people around. But to avoid another Black Hawk Down scenario — in which the rescuers also get trapped alongside the wounded — in the hottest battle zones the Pentagon sometimes grounds the medevac copters under certain conditions. Now the Army has latched onto a possible solution: replace the human copter crews with Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) drones.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

USNS Comfort. Navy photo.

A paragraph or two a day from my forthcoming book FROM A TO B: HOW LOGISTICS FUELS AMERICAN POWER AND PROSPERITY:

The Bataan’s group reaches Haiti on January 18, by which time the situation on the ground is clearer. Conditions are worse than many expected. Before the Bataan even weighed anchor, her helicopters join choppers from the Vinson and the Normandy, ferrying relief supplies ashore.

Inside the ship’s steel belly, amid a buzz of activity, the medical department gets ready to receive patients. They make beds, set aside drugs and bandages, and sketch out a basic division of labor between the Bataan and the Vinson and — once she arrives from Baltimore — the Comfort.

For several weeks, the Comfort will represent the biggest and most sophisticated hospital in Haitian territory. Her capabilities are impressive. “They’re bringing about six hundred medical personnel and about a thousand-bed hospital facility,” says Cdr. William Wallace, a Navy surgeon attached to the Bataan. “They also have other heavy equipment like CT scans, MRIs, a lot more X-rays than we do. They’re also bringing other supplies such as blood — lots of blood, about five thousand units — and they can serve as many as about one thousand patients.”

The fighting was furious — and entirely one-sided. While on patrol in eastern Afghanistan Paktia province in December 2002, paratroopers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division had taken a wrong turn and blundered straight into one of Paktia’s isolated villages. The villagers weren’t Taliban or even Taliban sympathizers. But they were heavily armed — and determined to keep the Americans out.

AK-47-armed men opened fire from inside mud huts and behind stone walls. The American commander, recognizing his mistake, ordered his men not to shoot back. Bullets pinged off the doors and roofs of unarmored Humvees. Still, the Americans held their fire. The paratroopers’ restraint, even in the face of mortal danger, was the most incredible thing that one 26-year-old Air Force controller had ever seen.

Eight years later, Tech. Sgt. Phoebus Lazaridis was back in Afghanistan on his third combat tour. He lived alongside soldiers in remote outposts, coordinating air strikes against the Taliban. By 2010, Lazaridis had seen as much war as any American combatant, and had a Bronze Star — pinned on his chest by U.S. House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2009 — to prove it.

It was on that third deployment, to Kunar province north of Paktia, that Lazaridis turned to a childhood passion, in an effort to understand himself and his war experiences. He began drawing comics again, years after the aspiring artist had put down his pens and pencils to join the Air Force. Lazaridis’ unpublished graphic novel Silver Shields, set during the ancient Greek invasion of Afghanistan more than two millennia ago, is a metaphor for his — and America’s — involvement in the “Graveyard of Empires.”

Today the Pentagon is looking to expand on personal projects such as Lazaridis’. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the military’s fringe-science wing — has launched an initiative meant to encourage U.S. troops returning from war to tell their own stories in comics form. They’ve given the the program a cumbersome, miljargon name, “Online Graphic Novel/Sequential Art Authoring Tools for Therapeutic Storytelling.” But the goal is fascinating: help troops “process their memories and emotions” in a “graphic novel/sequential art format.”

If it survives Darpa’s sometimes fickle management process, the war-comics initiative could capitalize on, and even expand, a deep but mostly unheralded groundswell of comics written for, by and about veterans of the Afghan war. But the program also risks exposing the public to some of the ugliest emotional vestiges of the decade-old conflict.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

PLAN photo.

Every day for a week in early September, U.S. Army soldiers traveled the same 10-mile route between Kinshasa’s dilapidated Grand Hotel and the hilltop Congolese military training base overlooking the Democratic Republic of Congo capital. The Americans probably didn’t realize it, but the wide, smooth, freshly-paved avenue they used, so incongruous in a city of potholed and unpaved roads, had recently been constructed by a growing rival — China.

The U.S. soldiers were in Congo to help train up their counterparts in the Forces Armees de la Republique Congolese — the Congolese army. The two-week training exercise, organized by the three-year-old U.S. Africa Command, was meant to extend Washington’s influence in this rare mineral-rich but unstable Central African country. But Chinese road engineers had already been to Kinshasa to do the same on Beijing’s behalf, using somewhat more subtle means.

That China and the United States are in a race to gain sway over countries possessing vital natural resources, not only in Africa but across the developing world, is hardly news. But the scene in Kinshasa — U.S. troops speeding down a Chinese-built road — underscores the differing strategies Washington and Beijing have tended to pursue. While it has fallen on the U.S. military to lead the country’s forays into Congo and other mineral-rich nations, most notably Iraq and Afghanistan, China has traditionally preferred underwriting infrastructure projects. Indeed, Chinese engineers are a fixture in developing country outposts as remote as Chad and Somalia.

Yet while the two powers approach the question of influence from different starting points, they are also increasingly overlapping in the way they develop their soft power — particularly in the use of their navies. Both countries have increasingly embraced hybrid military-humanitarian missions that could become more prominent as the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down.

Indeed, even as these conflicts raged over the past decade, the U.S. has also been pioneering and developing large-scale soft-power missions, deploying military and civilian medical personnel, engineers and instructors aboard warships and airlifters across Latin America, Africa, the Caucuses, South-east Asia and Oceania. And, after a period of observation and study, China has begun copying the U.S. approach.

Beijing’s mimicry represents a tacit endorsement of the U.S. efforts, and also coincides with similar initiatives taking shape in other wealthier nations, including Japan and the Netherlands. The United States has made sure to play an important supporting role in Tokyo’s and Amsterdam’s initial, modest soft-power missions, with Washington having long viewed soft power as an ideal venue for international cooperation.

Read the rest at The Diplomat.

Medflag '06 in Ghana. DoD photo.

KINSHASA, Congo — The local residents had been waiting for hours, and there was no guarantee they’d get in to the poorly lit room where administrators from the Forces Armées de la République Democratique du Congo (FARDC) were busy filling out paperwork. The U.S. Army and the FARDC were trying to register the Congolese civilians for a free health clinic that would take place the following week. The clinic, administered by military medical personnel from both countries, would be one of the culminating events of a two-week, U.S.-led exercise meant to improve the FARDC’s medical capabilities — all part of the “soft power” strategy advanced by U.S. Africa Command, based in Germany.

But outside the gate, scores of Congolese people still sat on curbs or milled around. Some had been there for hours trying to get registered, with no luck. Their conditions were either not severe enough, or too severe for clinic treatment — or else they just couldn’t shove their way past the guard at the gate. It was late morning and the number of people already registered was nearing the FARDC-imposed limit of 2,000 cases. Any more than that and the medical staff could be overwhelmed, U.S. Army Maj. Junel Jeffrey told World Politics Review. The disappointed Congolese muttered under their breaths.

The U.S. Army had come to Congo in part to win hearts and minds. Turning away patients meant possibly alienating the very people the Americans were hoping to befriend. In underestimating the sheer depth of need in Congo, the Army could appear fickle, even cruel. The sick and injured who responded to the advertisements offering free medical care would instead discover that there wasn’t nearly enough care to go around.

Read the rest at World Politics Review.

U.S. Army and Congolese army doctors render free medical care at a clinic in Kinshasa, as part of the Medflag ’10 exercise.

Kinshasa — Corrupt and impoverished, Congo doesn’t have much in the way of emergency services. Wrecked cars become semi-permanent urban art installations on the side of the road. When fires break out, it can take hours for anyone to respond. MONUSCO, the U.N. peacekeeping force, has been forced to put out some fires for the Congolese.

Colonel Gilbert Kabanda, the Congolese army’s surgeon general, painted a grand picture of U.S.-trained Congolese medics deploying across the country in up to 11 specialized emergency medical companies, shifting easily between combat tasks and mitigating mass-casualty incidents and natural disasters.

But it’s more likely that the Congolese medics will wind up just playing EMT in Kinshasa. Kyala Hubert, one of the medics attending the Medflag ’10 training, said he looked forward to applying his new American-taught litter-handling skills … in responding to traffic accidents.

Maybe the U.S. government should have sent a bunch of traffic cops and ambulance drivers, instead of soldiers.

Kinshasa — A free health clinic was one of the culminating events of the U.S. Army-led “Medflag ’10″ training exercise in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While American instructors trained up Congolese medics, U.S. and Congolese officials oversaw registration of civilians to attend the clinic. The civilians lined up before a  board of Congolese officers and described their condition and the treatment they hoped to receive. If they were lucky, their names were added to the list.

Many of those who didn’t make the list were unhappy. Others had more pointed complaints, as depicted in my video report.

Kinshasa — Soft power can be tedious, exhausting, frustrating. A hundred U.S. Army doctors and medics are in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, to train several hundred medics from the Congolese Forces Armees de la Republique Democratique du Congo. The Americans’ idea: to leave the Congolese more capable and more professional than how they found it, hopefully contributing to slowly increasing stability in this troubled Central African country. But even these modest goals are easier said than done. For starters, Congo is hot, remote and under-developed. Plus, there are huge language and technological barriers between the Americans and Congolese, as depicted in my video report above.

Pacific Partnership 2010. Navy photo.

In recent years, the Navy has started dispatching dozens of hospital ships — some as big as shopping malls — to aid developing nations. The crews consist of doctors, nurses, engineers, pilots, volunteers, and even acupuncturists, all there to help. But as Mental Floss reporter David Axe learned while visiting the Kearsarge ship in Nicaragua, the Nashville in Gabon and the Comfort in Panama, these missions aren’t about altruism; they’re about winning friends and influencing nations.

Soft Power
The U.S. Navy has been in the medical business for decades, often setting sail in response to earthquakes or hurricanes. But until recently, these missions were for emergencies only, and not part of a bigger diplomatic strategy. It took the Iraq War to change that.

After years of failing to pacify Iraq with firepower, the Pentagon decided it needed to think outside the arsenal. The result was a new theory called “soft power.” The idea is to send the military into potential conflict zones — along with other government agencies and civilian volunteers — years before any fighting breaks out. The troops hand out free medical care, aid local governments, and build roads and schools. Basically, they do anything they can to be of assistance.

By giving everyone a helping hand, soft-power programs hope to improve the United States’ image and leave a lasting, positive impression of America on the citizens of other nations. “It’s about influencing generations to come,” says Navy Commodore Frank Ponds.

Beginning in 2006, the Navy sent ships to places where conflicts were simmering. Then, in November 2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made soft power official policy during a speech at Kansas State University. Now, it’s all the rage at the Pentagon. There is at least one major soft-power mission to Asia, Africa and Latin America each year, meaning U.S. Navy ships are already becoming an increasingly common sight all across the world.

Read the rest at Mental Floss.