Here's an idea for new unofficial Gizmodo game. It doesn't have a name, but it's based on guessing what Bob Woodward was talking about when he said the U.S. military had some super secret new gadget, gizmo or technology at their disposal in Iraq. Woodward says the tech is used to "locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq [and] the operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the US government." My guess as to what Woodward was talking about (with the help of Bruce Schneier readers): Hyperbole and book sales. You can do better!

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Last week, the 174th Air Force Fighter Wing flew its last manned combat sortie over Iraq in F-16s, which have now been mothballed in favour of MQ-9 Reapers. This makes it the first combat-specific wing to ditch conventional aircraft entirely in favour of unmanned robo-drones piloted from the ground. Welcome to the Skynet era, everyone!

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A few months back, some troops driving a Humvee in Iraq got hit. The troops evacuated before a blast blew the doors off of the vehicle; only one of the soldiers sustained a shrapnel injury. As you'll see, the Humvee didn't make it, but a Garmin eTrex left behind in the wreckage still worked.

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We cover a lot of high-end military gear here on Giz, but just one of the things that Generation Kill, a great new miniseries that premiered on HBO last night, does well is remind everyone that in the real world, the military is not all UAVs and lasers just yet. Instead of morphing robots to peer under doors, microwave insanity guns or even current-gen tech like Blue Force GPS consoles in every Humvee, the Marines of the First Recon Battalion depicted in the show are lucky if they can get batteries for their nightvision goggles.

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What do you do with a C-130 cargo aircraft that has made a crash-landing in an insecure area of Iraq? If you're the 447th Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron you wire it with explosives and you blow it up. Again and again and again... until it's in small enough bits to load onto a flatbed and ship back to an air base. Apparently it's pretty rare for an aircraft to make emergency landings in the field, which is good news. Though if it resulted in more videos like this, we wouldn't complain. [PointNiner via Danger Room]

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The U.S. military has been running two prototype generators that run on leftovers, shredded documents and ammunition wrappers at their headquarters in Iraq. The Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery (TGER) works by breaking down garbage into small bits and then heating it up until it becomes a synthetic gas and then combining it with the ethanol produced from the fermenting of foods and liquids. The result is a fuel capable of running the generators.

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Dash over at Fleshbot's got a very interesting look at Ars Elektronika in SF, where inventors and teledildonics fanatics gather together to show off the weird, gadgety and sexy things they made in their sex dungeons. One invention is a vibrator that's connected to the U.S. Geological Survey which only activates during an earthquake somewhere in the world. "Only trouble is that when your own "Big One" finally arrives, it's tempered by the realisation that a building might have collapsed somewhere with people trapped inside." It gets better. Another is tied to how many Iraqi civilian deaths there are a day which you can read about over at Fleshers (NSFW). [Fleshbot]

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Over two months after The Mystery of Godzilla and the Undersea Cables, a mini-series starring Tom Selleck and Dyan Cannon, at last we have closure. Two ships, one Korean and one Iraqi—typing fingers at the ready, conspiracy theorists—were impounded by the authorities in Dubai a couple of months ago and, following payment of a rather large fine by the Korean ship, it has been allowed to leave. More below.

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We showed you the first gun-toting robots when they were first unleashed in Iraq, but those were merely bomb-disposal robots with guns attached to them. Now, from the same company, we have robots built from the ground up to be killing machines. Think of them as a very early version of the T-1000. Danger Room got themselves exclusive video (above) and pics (below) of the new deathbots in action.

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That troop surge in Iraq we've heard about? It's here, although it's not what you expected. It's a surge of robots; 3000 robots, to be exact. These won't be the gun-toting robots that we recently reported on, with the surge instead consisting of mostly 50-pound reconnaissance bots that will sniff out bombs without putting troops in harms way. We're just one step closer to a war that just consists of robots shooting at other robots. [Danger Room]