Military technology

  • Syria arms dozens of chemical aerial bombs

    President Assad has taken the last step required for using chemical weapons: over the weekend the Syrian military begun to move chemical weapons from their storage areas to military bases where the delivery vehicles of these weapons – planes, tanks, and artillery – are stationed; on Tuesday and Wednesday the Syrian military has taken the second step required before chemical weapon deployment: its engineers have begun to mix the chemicals of these binary weapons, making them operational; the bombs have been placed in hangars next to the planes which will carry them to target – and it would now be a matter of minutes from Assad ordering the use of these weapons to planes dropping them on their targets

  • Israel to test advanced Arrow 3 anti-missile missile

    The official in charge of developing Israel’s missile defense system said yesterday that in the coming days Israel would conduct a test of the advanced Arrow 3 missile; the Arrow 3 has been developed to shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles on their way to Israel; the Arrow 3 has been designed to intercept missiles carrying nuclear warheads – and intercept them outside the atmosphere

  • U.S. denies Iran’s claim that it had captured a U.S. surveillance drone

    Drones are used extensively by the United States to monitor not only Iran’s nuclear activities, but also its military moves on land and at sea. Iran’s state television reported on Tuesday that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps naval forces captured an American drone that entered Iranian airspace over the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Navy quickly denied the claim

  • The Assad regime moving chemical weapons closer to delivery vehicles

    Over the weekend, the besieged Assad regime has begun to move chemical munitions out of storage to military bases where the delivery vehicles for these weapons are based; the move of these munitions was captured by U.S. and Israeli intelligence assets, and confirmed by human sources inside the regime; the readiness of the regime to place chemical warheads right next to the weapons – missiles, planes, tanks, and artillery – which will deliver them has dramatically increased the sense of alarm in the region, in Europe, and in Washington

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  • Squirrels-inspired deceptive robots to help the military

    Using deceptive behavioral patterns of squirrels and birds, researchers have developed robots that are able to deceive each other; the applications could be implemented by the military in the future

  • Marines looking for solar energy in combat outposts

    The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is looking to the sun for energy in an effort to help Marines do away with diesel-guzzling generators now used in combat outposts; the Renewable Sustainable Expeditionary Power (RSEP) program seeks to create a transportable renewable hybrid system that can provide Marines with electricity for a 15-day mission without relying on fuel resupply convoys that often become targets for adversaries

  • Fabric for military uniforms to repel chemical and biological agents

    Military uniforms of the future may offer a new layer of critical protection to wearers; the fabric will be able to switch reversibly from a highly breathable state to a protective one in response to the presence of the environmental threat without the need for an external control system; in the protective state, the uniform material will block the chemical threat while maintaining a good breathability level

  • DARPA’s program to reveal backdoors, hidden malicious functionality in commercial IT devices

    The scenario is one that information security experts dread: widespread dissemination of commercial technology which is secretly wired to function in unintended ways or even spy on its users; from this vantage point, mobile phones, network routers, computer work stations, and any other device hooked up to a network can provide a point of entry for an adversary; for the Department of Defense this issue is of great concern, and DARPA pland to do something about it

  • Lockheed Martin demonstrates ground-based laser system against short-range threats

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    Lockheed Martin has successfully demonstrated a portable, ground-based military laser system in a series of tests against representative airborne targets; the Area Defense Anti-Munitions (ADAM) system aims to provide a defense against short-range threats, such as rockets and unmanned aerial systems

  • Israel successfully tests David’s Sling mid-range missile defense system

    During the just-ended Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel made military history by successfully employing a missile defense system to protect the country’s population: during the 8-day war, Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched 1,506 rockets and missiles at Israeli towns and cities; of those, 1,057 fell harmlessly in empty fields, but 449 were headed toward populated centers; of the 449, Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepted 421, and 28 hit buildings, killing five; yesterday Israel announced the successful test of David’s Sling, a mid-range missile defensive system; the system is designed to protect against missile with a range of up to 180 miles, like the missiles in the hands of Syria and Hezbollah

  • Israel’s operation in Gaza: limited goals – for now, I

    In an impressive military move early Wednesday morning, Israel killed Ahmed Jabari, the top military leader of Hamas and a few of his lieutenants; even more impressively, and more meaningful strategically, the Israel Air Force (IAF) attacked dozens of targets across the Gaza Strip, destroying hundreds of Hamas missiles and rockets; the most important targets were storage facilities where mid-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 missiles were being kept, and dug-outs from which these missiles would be launched; in a few minutes, Hamas’s strategic ace in the hole was destroyed; but what are Israel’s broader goals, and can these goals be achieved?

  • Powerful debugging program to help U.S. nuclear deterrence

    Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have used the Stack Trace Analysis Tool (STAT), a highly scalable, lightweight tool to debug a program running more than one million MPI processes on the IBM Blue Gene/Q (BGQ)-based Sequoia supercomputer; LLNL plans to use Sequoia’s impressive computational capability to advance understanding of fundamental physics and engineering questions that arise in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) program to ensure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without testing

  • Israel, for the first time since the October 1973 war, fires warning shots into Syria

    The civil war in Syria has taken an ominous turn on Sunday as Israel, for the first time since the October 1973 Yom Kippur war, fired into Syria to warn the beleaguered Assad government that Israel would not tolerate shelling from Syrian territory into Israel; on four separate occasions last week, mortars from Syria fell in the Golan Heights, an area Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 war; it appears that the mortar fire was not intentional, but rather stray rounds, the result of errand shelling; on Saturday nine days ago, a few Syrian tanks entered a no-man’s land near the Israel border, in violation of the 1974 cease-fire and force-separation agreement between Israel and Syria

  • U.S.-Iran tensions rise as Iran tries to disrupt U.S. reconnaissance flights in Gulf

    Tensions between the United States and Iran increase as news emerged last week of an attempt by four Iranian fighter planes, on 1 November, to shoot down a U.S. Predator drone engaged in a surveillance mission over international water in the Persian Gulf

  • CIA-commissioned climate change report outlines perils for U.S. national security

    U.S. national security leaders believe that the accelerating pace of climate change will place severe strains on U.S. military and intelligence agencies in coming years; the reason, according the National Research Council, the U.S. top scientific research body: climate changes will trigger increasingly disruptive developments around the world; a 206-page National Research Council study, commissioned by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services, concludes that states will fail, large populations subjected to famine, flood, or disease will migrate across international borders, and national and international agencies will not have the capacity or resources to cope with the resulting conflicts and crises