The controversy surrounding Wikileaks continues, as you always expected it would. All branches of the Unites States military are now banning their personnel from having anything to do with the site, primarily to avoid “electronic spillages,” a phrase I have never heard before. The Pentagon told the Washington Times that those in the Navy should avoid accessing the site so as to prevent the… → Read More
Among the many advances in military technology, perhaps one of the most unwelcome was the “Active Denial System,” a super-short-wavelength radiation weapon that caused intense pain in whoever it was aimed at, be it enemy combatants, protestors, or geese. Enemies of the technology cited its ripeness for abuse when calling for it not to be deployed, but it was sent over to Afghanistan anyway… → Read More
Well, well, well. Yesterday morning I wrote a quick thing about the U.S. Navy and Raytheon’s successful laser attack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Several hours later DRUDGE~! runs the same story way up top, in bold red font. The point is: I beat Drudge. Yes! I bring this up because, in the hours after I wrote the story a whole bunch of pictures came out that are worth your time gawking… → Read More
There’s no way to begin this next story without breaking out this movie quote: “If I were creating the world I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, Day One!” With that out of the way, for the first time in human history a laser was used to shoot down an aircraft in flight. Well done to the fine folks at the US Navy. → Read More
It’s summer here in the Northern hemisphere, and that means the solar-based industry in the US is in top experimental gear (to clarify: the company in question is British but the test flight is in the Arizona Desert). A few more months and they’ll hibernating or relocating to their Australian headquarters, but in the meantime, we’re getting a lot of solar-related news. It… → Read More
What’s with the ominous names for these things? You’ve got the Predator, the Taranis, the EATR, and now the Phantom Eye? I guess there’s a bit of psychological warfare going on there. You don’t want the enemy to look up and say “Maybe we shouldn’t… what if there’s a Model BAE-2455G up there somewhere?”
So when Boeing unveiled their new unmanned high-altitude aircraft, they had to go with… → Read More
No, this aircraft most certainly isn’t as green as the Solar Impulse, but that doesn’t mean it’s not pretty amazing. It’s called, quite modestly, Taranis. It costs around $214 million, and it’s pretty much the pinnacle of stealth flight. → Read More
These “combat airships,” which by the way are awesome, are being researched and built by defense contractor Northrup Grumman as an effort to keep an “unblinking eye” above Afghanistan. Yes, I know Baghdad isn’t in Afghanistan, but they’ll probably deploy them there too, and the headline made more sense this way. Moving on. The Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle bears a resemblance (or it… → Read More
Wikileaks vs. the U.S. Military continues. You’ll recall that the U.S. Army labeled the Web site a “potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.” Now the Army has arrested the person who hundreds of thousands of documents, including that pretty gruesome video from a few weeks back, to the site. The person… → Read More
I think it must be hard to feel like a one-man army when you’re wearing such a dorky piece of headwear. The new COMBATREDI (yes, it’s all caps; no, it’s not an acronym) training system pairs a helmet-mounted VR visor with a backpack processing unit to create a rich and immersive “virtual battle space.” Sure, just like a Virtual Boy! → Read More
I’m torn here. Not literally torn, as I expect to be when the robots take over and my body is used for spare parts, but morally torn. On one hand, here we have a little robot that could venture into dangerous situations via remote control and detonate bombs or flush out enemy dudes. Could save lives. On the other hand, here we have a little robot that, given the spark of strong AI, could rumble by… → Read More
It’s all a bit like Mass Effect. The U.S. Air Force successfully launched the X-37B unmanned spacecraft yesterday, but the question that nobody knows the answer to: what’s it for? The Air Force refuses to say what the X-37B’s mission on beyond something along the lines “we wanted to see if it works.” OK, but do you plan on doing with it? “Sorry, classified.” Neat. → Read More
First, a trivia question: how many of you remember Super Force? Because that’s the first thing I thought of when I saw this picture. Even more, this Starcrafty Korean concept soldiers. Moving on, though… remember that wrist-mounted device HP showed off in its “let’s do amazing” ads a little while back? Turns out they were showing an old model: the plan now is to have nice big e-ink displays… → Read More
You know all those drones you kids use to rain grim death upon your unfortunate friends in Modern Warfare 2? Well, according to an American University law professor’s Congressional testimony, they may be illegal under international law. Of course, they could be totally fine, too, it’s just that nobody really knows for sure. That’s probably not what the U.S. military wants to hear, given how much… → Read More
There’s a certain amount of pride in seeing a country pump out something like the new F-35B Lightning II fighter jet. At $113.5 million per aircraft, it’s about as far away from the meaning of the word “inexpensive” as possible. It makes you think, well, if we can afford things like that, why can’t we afford things like this? But, whatever. The entire purpose of this post is to watch a… → Read More
Who saw The Hurt Locker? Oh, right: none of you. Even if you didn’t you probably are already familiar with the basic concept: a U.S. Army guy whose job it is to disable I.E.D.s sorta goes crazy. That’s the gist of it. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense in the UK has unveiled something called the Dragon Runner, a remote-controlled robot that disables bombs. → Read More
Well, there goes Zion. That rave-lovin’ excuse for a remnant of humanity would have been taken out in a trice by these Robotic Underground Munitions. And so it will be once the Robocalypse hits. Why are we doing the machines’ job for them?
Here, I’ve got a better name for these bunker-busting subterranean missiles: Drill-based Earth-Asploding Terrifying Horrorbots. → Read More
Just so you know, I’m not making light of warfare — it’s just that virtual training like this, while valuable, does remind one simultaneously of Modern Warfare and Ender’s Game. Of course, as this article notes, the current generation of potential soldiers has grown up in a digital age and expects a little Xbox with their ammo box. → Read More
Here’s something old, but definitely cool and worth showing you. Livejournal user Igor113 posted some pictures from his trip to… somewhere in Russia. He loves to travel and take pictures, and these are some extremely cool photographs of some rusted and cool equipment. Igor did apologize for the quality of his camera though, and requests that you don’t kick his legs. → Read More
This rather unconvincing video shows a current project of DARPA’s, in which a jet is accelerated first by regular propulsion, then ramjets, then scramjets — eventually pushing the vehicle to a ridiculous Mach 6. That’s somewhere around 1700-2000 meters per second, or ~4000MPH. That’s if they can keep the thing from breaking apart. Wikipedia tells us that “while very short suborbital scramjet… → Read More
Shocking admission: I’ve never seen a Star Wars movie. Well, that’s not entirely true: I did see Episode One and Episode Three, but I’m pretty sure those don’t really count. (I liked the song “Duel of the Fates,” though, and the one that played when Anakin fought the other guy in the lava or whatever.) I bring this up because this story is about C3PO, the friendly robot that I’m only familiar with… → Read More
Do you see what I’m seeing? That big ol’ column in the first shot is a LASER. A huge, sustained, sci-fi style laser. It’s blasting a missile in midair during a test. And that second shot? Talk about C-beams off the shoulder of Orion. → Read More
This is strangely cool. A defense contractor developed a type of steel reinforced armor that could replace the basic sandbag encampment. The armor assembles extremely quickly and is resistant to bullets, grenades, and IED blasts. It also takes about 10 minutes to put together without tools. It really is amazing the new technology that is coming out for the military. → Read More
In a sense, the following story can be summed up thus: the US military wants new, hi-tech equipment. That’s not exactly breaking news, no, but there’s an Avatar connection, so if the world could stop rotating on its axis for a moment… It’s called Fine Detail Optical Surveillance, and the military wants Darpa to develop it. Think 3D spy cameras. Attach one to a Predator-type device and the boots… → Read More
A few weeks ago word got out that the U.S. Air Force had purchased 2,200 PS3s to throw into a supercomputing cluster. The cell-powered PS3s are to be used for research in “urban surveillance,” what that is. → Read More
After watching Generation Kill, my anxiety for our troops went up quite a bit. War is an ugly business to begin with, but when you’re driving around a battlefield in an unarmored Humvee with electrical problems, it tends to look even uglier. Afghanistan is still an extremely hairy theater, and the vehicles they’ve had over there over the years (years, people) just weren’t cutting it. So the… → Read More
Twenty-six hours and one minute. That’s how long a new, unmanned, experimental Navy aircraft flew through the air during a recent test run. It’s called the Ion Tiger. There it is, right there. → Read More
The Harrier jumpjet is one of the most famous aircraft in the world. Ideal for carrier take off and landings, the jumpjet has been part of the US military arsenal for many years. The problem is that it isn’t very fast. Now the next generation of jumpjet is entering testing to see if it measures up. → Read More
A helmet-mounted radar unit seems redundant with the kind of crazy surveillance and intel they already have available or in the pipes, but hey, whatever helps our boys. While satellite and air-based imaging are invaluable to the modern field commander, an individual infantryman has little feedback in an more local tactical situation. So why not have an imaging system for individuals? → Read More
So everyone knows now that the military uses UAVs for actions in the Middle East. What isn’t as commonly known, is that the men and women who pilot the remote controlled aircraft do so from the relative comfort of a top secret facility in the Nevada desert. In some ways, it’s the ultimate video game. → Read More
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