Crotch Bombers And Laser Jeeps

An interesting piece by Bob Cesca this morning:

Last night, Keith, Richard Wolffe and Arianna Huffington discussed the possibility that the failure to communicate details of the Underpants Bomber before it happened might have been intentional.

In other words, did one or more operatives in the intelligence community deliberately withhold information in order to, I don't know, sabotage the Obama presidency? Foment an escalation in Yemen?

And by "interesting" I mean "completely full of crap".  It's one thing to play the Obama Derangement Syndrome Card if you're the Republicans who stand to gain from Obama losing, but the Intel community gains nothing from doing this.  There's no upside in sandbagging Obama here when the opposition is complaining that government is incompetent and partisan as it is.

Meanwhile, speaking of weapons the terrorists might want, Yggy ponders the Laser Avenger:

Aaron Rowe at the Danger Room writes about Boeing’s Laser Avenger, “a cannon that could be used to take down incoming aircraft.” It seems that Boeing was able to use this device to blow a UAV out of the air with a fairly low-powered laser while Northrup Grumman is working on an even more powerful laser.

This all sort of leaves me wondering what problem this technology is a solution to. For the past twenty years every conflict the U.S. military has been involved with has involved overwhelming American air superiority. Finding better ways to shoot down enemy aircraft hasn’t been high on the priority list. But by the same token, the very dominance of American air power means that this would be very useful for America’s adversaries. Nobody we’re realistically going to fight could possibly build up a squadron of fighters to go toe-to-toe with the Air Force, but plane-killing lasers could be very useful. Obviously Boeing isn’t working on this technology in hopes of selling it to the Taliban, but my sense is that we should be hoping that we see relatively little progress on this sort of thing in years to come.

Whaddya mean "what this technology is a solution to?"  It's a solution to the bad guys getting Predator drones.  Jesus, you want to talk about an ace weapon for a terrorist...a remote controlled guided bomb with real time intel?  If I'm AQ, I want some of these guys flying right over the Green Zone in Baghdad.

We basically invented the UAV.  Now we've invented the weapon to stop it from being used against us.  If you're a defense contractor, it pays to make both, dig?