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Improving fast-moving mobile networks
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) allow people in multiple, rapidly-moving vehicles to communicate with each other – a useful technology in for emergency-response situations or soldiers under fire; researchers have devised a method to improve the quality and efficiency of data transmission in these networks
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Teaching robots to pick up oddly shaped objects
The use of robots in military and first response missions is growing; in some of these missions – for example, checking a suspicious object, lifting an oddly sahped IED off the floor — robots need more flexibility and dexterity than is currently available; researchers offer encouraging news on this front
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U.S. Navy’s animal warriors enjoy the best of health care
The U.S. Navy is expanding the use of bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to protect harbors from enemy swimmers, detect explosives on the seafloor, and perform other tasks such as guiding sailors through mine-laden waters or attaching recovery lines to lost equipment on the seafloor; the growing reliance on these mammals means that the Navy is also keeping a closer eye on their health
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Protecting U.S. ships from Iranian speed-boat swarm attacks
In the event of a U.S. military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Iranians will adopt what the weaker side in a conflict typically does: engage in an asymmetric warfare; in the case of a naval clash, the Iranians are likely to use swarms of hundreds of small speed boats, equipped with anti-ship missiles and other weapons, to attack the much larger U.S. ships in the narrow confines of the Gulf; the U.S. Navy wants to use ray guns to deal with this threat
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Laser weapon to protect ships from anti-ship missiles
Northrop Grumman tests next-generation high-energy, solid-state lasers; the test demonstrated that the laser could burn through the skin and critical components of a target drone used to simulate anti-ship cruise missile threats to U.S. Navy ships
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DARPA wants technology to see through clouds
Soldiers who encounter enemy forces on the ground benefit from overhead aircraft support; some capabilities are lost, however, when cloud-cover obscures the view; DARPA is seeking advanced, flyable electronics and scene simulation technology for video synthetic aperture radar
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U.S. military seeking non-lethal UAVs
The U.S. Army is seeking non-lethal warheads to be deployed on tiny UAVs; the U.S. Army describes the possible uses of the non-lethal UAV: “Potential commercial applications might include, but are not limited to: crowd control for local law enforcement; border protection for Homeland Security; or temporary incapacitation of non violent criminals for local SWAT teams and/or law enforcement”
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First U.S. drone attack in Pakistan in a month kills four terrorists
Yesterday, Sunday, missiles launched from a CIA drone missiles hit military targets in Pakistan for the first time in a month. The attack killed four al Qaeda members, but further heightening tensions between the United States and Pakistan. Back in November 2011, U.S. airstrikes, called in by Pakistani commanders n the ground, killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers. In response, Pakistan said that unless the United States apologized for the incident, no more U.S. drone attack would be allowed against terror targets inside Pakistan. The United States expressed regrets over the death of the soldiers, but refused to apologize, saying the accident was the result of mistakes and miscommunication on both sides. Since November, the United States has reduced considerably the number of drone attacks inside Pakistan, but has refused to end such attacks altogether. The U.S. refusal has led to Pakistani parliament, on three different occasions, to pass resolutions calling upon the United States to cease and desist.
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Surface-to-air missiles to protect London Olympic Games
British security sources revealed that the security envelope developed to protect the Summer Olympic Games in London will include six Rapier surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries. The British security forces will conduct, between 2 and 10 May, a massive exercise, called Exercise Olympic Guardian, on land, sea, and in the air in the London and Weymouth areas. For those familiar with London: For the exercise, six sites were selected for deployment of the SAM dummies: the Lexington Building in Tower Hamlets; the Fred Wigg Tower in Waltham Forest, east London; Blackheath Common; Oxleas Wood, Eltham; William Girling Reservoir, Enfield; and Barn Hill in Epping Forest.
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NATO prepares for a new, futuristic war
NATO’s Operation Locked Shields, an international military exercise the military alliance conducted last month, was different from trasditional war games. There were no bullets, tanks, aircraft, ships, or camouflage face-paint. The troops involved in the exercise spent most of their time in air-conditioned rooms within a high security military base in Estonia. The exercise, a window into what a future war would look like, had one team of IT specialists detailed to attack nine other teams, located in different parts of Europe. The IT experts, working from their terminals in the Nato Co-operative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, created viruses, worms, Trojan Horses, and other Internet attacks, aiming to hijack and extract data from the computers of their “enemies.”
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Two Taiwanese nationals charged in military technology smuggling plot
Taiwanese nationals engaged in smuggling counterfeit consumer goods and crystal methamphetamine into the United States, are discovered to be working for Chinese intelligence agencies in an effort to smuggle sensitive U.S. military technology out of the United States
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Review of HTV-2 second test flight concluded
The goal of the Pentagon’s Conventional Prompt Global Strike initiatives is for the U.S. military to have the capability to reach anywhere in the world in less than one hour; a key element of the project is the is Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2), which can reach speeds up to twenty times the speed of sound; during an 11 August 2011 flight test, the HTV-2 developed what DARPA describes as “flight anomalies,” which an engineering review board has examined
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New sensor to enable military operations in GPS-denied areas
Many U.S. military systems, such as missiles, rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) to provide accurate position, orientation, and time information while in flight; a DARPA project seeks an atomic inertial sensor to measure orientation in GPS-denied environments
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DARPA offers $2 million in prizes for Robotic Challenge winners
DARPA is seeking hardware, software, modeling, and gaming developers to link with emergency response and science communities to design robots capable of supervised autonomous response to simulated disaster
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U.S. Navy experience shows climate alterations
The U.S. Navy reports that because of its worldwide presence, it sees the effects of climate change directly; and expert tells a scientific audience at Sandia Lab that disparities in current climate science projections “mean that the Navy should plan for a range of contingencies, given our limited ability to predict abrupt change or tipping points for potentially irreversible change”
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More headlines
The long view
Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence
By Trina West
Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.
Testing Cutting-Edge Counter-Drone Technology
Drones have many positive applications, bad actors can use them for nefarious purposes. Two recent field demonstrations brought government, academia, and industry together to evaluate innovative counter-unmanned aircraft systems.
European Arms Imports Nearly Double, U.S. and French Exports Rise, and Russian Exports Fall Sharply
States in Europe almost doubled their imports of major arms (+94 per cent) between 2014–18 and 2019–23. The United States increased its arms exports by 17 per cent between 2014–18 and 2019–23, while Russia’s arms exports halved. Russia was for the first time the third largest arms exporter, falling just behind France.
How Climate Change Will Affect Conflict and U.S. Military Operations
By Doug Irving
“People talk about climate change as a threat multiplier,” said Karen Sudkamp, an associate director of the Infrastructure, Immigration, and Security Operations Program within the RAND Homeland Security Research Division. “But at what point do we need to start talking about the threat multiplier actually becoming a significant threat all its own?”
The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies
By Matthew Guariglia
From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.