• 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Protecting U.S. ships from Iranian speed-boat swarm attacks

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    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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.”

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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”