Life or death in wartime is horrifically random, subject to “fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,” but sometimes that randomness generates not tragedy, but miracles. Such is the story of Army Sergeant Roger Daniels.

On a patrol in Afghanistan last August, Daniels, then just 21 years old, took a bullet to the head and survived with just a concussion because his helmet stopped the high-powered 7.62 millimeter round – something the standard-issue Advanced Combat Helmet was never designed to do. Last Friday, after experts at the Army’s PEO-Soldier unit had spent a year studying the miracle helmet, Daniels got it back in a ceremony at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington.

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USS Guardian lies crippled on UNESCO World Heritage Tubbataha Reef in the Philippines

WASHINGTON: The January grounding of the minesweeper USS Guardian in a Philippine coral reef was caused in large part by a National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) map that was, quite simply, wrong by eight nautical miles, Breaking Defense has learned.

“It really was just a terrible fluke that caused the error,” NGA spokeswoman Christine Phillips said in a frank discussion of the incident and its aftermath.

The Sulu Sea grounding prompted NGA to order an agency-wide review of the nautical charts detailing the entire surface of the earth covered by the oceans. Also, NGA and the Navy have convened a team of maritime experts to take “an exhaustive look to make sure we are as sound as we can be,” Phillips told me.

The error boiled down to someone at NGA failing to update a map with corrected data after cartographers discovered an inaccuracy.

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A Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier like those that jettisoned two bombs near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

[updated Wednesday 11:15 am] Yes, it is a bad idea to drop bombs on a World Heritage site, even when they aren’t armed to explode. But it’s arguably better than dropping the bombs on people.

Australians are understandably upset after US Marine Corps AV-8B Harriers, participating in a joint US-Australian exercise called Talisman Saber, jettisoned two bombs into the waters of the Great Barrier Reef. [Clarification: They also dropped two inert practice bombs that didn’t contain any actual explosive].The pilots made sure not to arm the bombs, so they did not go off and probably never will, but that’s still a lot of undetonated explosive uncomfortably close to a lot of marine life.

So why did the Americans do this?, To avoid endangering human lives. The US fighters were supposed to drop their bombs as part of the training exercise, but the designated bomb range — actually just a specified area of water — turned out to have unauthorized civilians in it: “There were civilian boats right underneath them,” said a US Navy spokesman, Commander Williams Marks.

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An Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt fires its massive 30 mm cannon in training.

Today, the US Air Force announced that squadrons grounded since April, from combat units to the famous Thunderbirds, had the funding to fly again – for now. Congress had given the service permission to move some $423 million from other programs into the training budget, enough to keep planes flying until October 1st, when the next fiscal year begins and the military’s money problemsmay start all over again.

To get the money for that short-term fix, however, the Air Force had to cut back on long-term investments. That includes almost $20 million in new missiles, $50 million in new C-130 transports (mostly the souped-up Special Force version, the MC-130), and about $70 million in upgrades for existing aircraft, from B-1B bombers to F-15 fighters. That’s particularly troubling at a time when most Air Force fighters were built during the Reagan buildup and are wearing out, with one 27-year-old F-15 literally breaking apart in flight back in 2007. (Bombers, on average, are even older, although they aren’t flown as hard). But the service bit that bullet and decided near-term combat readiness had to be the top priority for limited dollars.

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PENTAGON: In intellectual terms, Air-Sea Battle is the biggest of the military’s big ideas for its post-Afghanistan future. But what is it, really? It’s a constantly evolving concept for high-tech, high-intensity conflict that touches on everything from cyberwar to nuclear escalation to the rise of China. In practical terms, however, the beating heart of AirSea Battle is eleven overworked officers working in windowless Pentagon meeting rooms, and the issues they can’t get to are at least as important as the ones they can.

“It’s like being a start-up inside a great, big, rigid corporation,” one Air-Sea Battle representative told me in an exclusive briefing last month. The Air-Sea Battle Office (ASBO) has just 17 staff: those eleven uniformed officers, drawn from all four services, plus six civilian contractors. None of them ranks higher than colonel or Navy captain. Even these personnel are technically “on loan,” seconded from other organizations and paid for out of other budgets. But those 17 people sit at the hub of a sprawling network of formal liaisons and informal contacts across the four armed services and the joint combatant commands.

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[UPDATED with video & Winslow Wheeler comment] WASHINGTON: It’s been a tough week for critics of the F-35. Concurrency costs dropped an impressive half billion dollars — note to Winslow Wheeler — and the Air Force version launched an air to air missile for the first time.

The F-35A launched the AMRAAM missile on Wednesday (it can take the Pentagon a while to clear even good news for release). [Video of the test went online Monday:]

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The eagle hasn’t exactly landed, but it did the next best thing. This afternoon, off the Virginia coast, the Navy’s experimental X-47B UCAS (Unmanned Combat Air System) became the first unmanned aircraft to do a “touch and go” on an aircraft carrier.

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The two Littoral Combat Ship variants, LCS-1 Freedom and LCS-2 Independence.

CAPITOL HILL: The Navy is 90 percent sure its current estimated cost to operate and maintain the controversial Littoral Combat Ship is off target, according to a draft Government Accountability Office report obtained by BreakingDefense.

According to the anonymous authors – whose diagnosis, we should emphasize, is not yet the official and fully vetted conclusion of the GAO, which won’t publish the final report until September – the Navy may go into a critical decision in 2015 about whether to contract for up to 28 more Littoral Combat Ships without enough understanding of the long-term costs, the evolving concepts to sustain the vessels, or even whether they have enough bandwidth to exchange maintenance data with support facilities ashore. As a result of this uncertainty, the GAO draft says the Navy’s own analysts have “only about 10 percent confidence” in the current estimate that it will cost $50.4 billion to “operate and support” a total of 55 LCSs over their 25-year service lives. While such long-term “life cycle costs” are notoriously hard to estimate accurately decades out, a normal program would have at least 50 percent confidence in its figures at this stage.

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WASHINGTON: Acquisition experts agree that accurate cost estimates can be devilishly difficult to get right. The Pentagon’s top cost estimator, Christine Fox, says current cost estimates are often accurate within several percentage points. That’s impressive, but on programs measured in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, a few percentage points can mean a few billion dollars.

Case in point: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Its cost estimates have wandered between $1.1 trillion and $1.5 trillion just in the last year;that’s a $400 billiondifference. Now, that estimate assumes the F-35 flies for more than half a century (55 years) and makes all sorts of highly questionable assumptions, like the rate of inflation, the price of fuel, labor costs and on and on.

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