• DARPA’s UAVForge shows challenge of developing perch and stare UAV

    DARPA’s UAVForge is a crowdsourcing competition to design, build, and manufacture an advanced small UAV; the competition aims to determine whether a loosely-connected community of UAV enthusiasts could develop a militarily relevant back-pack portable UAV with specific capabilities

  • New device allows users to scale walls, mountain faces

    A group of mechanical and aerospace engineering students, using engineering principles, basic math, and ingenuity, have designed a system which would enable special operations force personnel, first responders, and members of search and rescue teams to scale buildings or mountain faces under a variety of conditions

  • Raytheon demonstrates missiles to engage swarms of small boats

    In the event of a military a U.S.-Iran military clash, the Iranian Navy plans to use hundreds of small boats, equipped with anti-ship missiles, to attack larger U.S. ships in the waters of the Persian Gulf; the Griffin B missile from Raytheon aims to offer an answer to the small-boat problem, and the company says that in a recent live-fire demonstration, the U.S. Navy proved the ability of the Griffin B missile to engage rapidly moving small boats

  • Students build slingshot-driven test for artillery shells

    The current method the U.S. Air Force uses to study the behavior of artillery shells causes these shells to be destroyed in the process; the Air Force wants to know more about the behavior of artillery shells as they accelerate and decelerate – and Rice University students invents a device to stop high-velocity projectiles without destroying them

  • 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