• Surge in armored car sales in Brazil

    Brazilians have to live with exceedingly high levels of crime — in the late 1990s, for example, the UN ranked the Jardim Ângela section of São Paulo as the most violent neighborhood in the world — at the same time that government agencies, owing to corruption or incompetence, fail to provide security; São Paulo leads the country — and the world — in making and selling armored cars; tax breaks now allow the middle class to buy protection which once was the reserve of the rich

  • BAE in $61 million contract to service MRAPs

    The U.S. military buys more and more RG33 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to defend U.S. soldiers from IEDs; there is a need to service these lumbering vehicles, and BAE receives a contract to do so

  • More orders for AS&E's cargo screening vans bring in $4.7 million

    Massachusetts-based AS&E’s popular Z Backscatter Vans are becoming more popular; company receives $4.7 million order for the “drive-by” scanning system, following several other orders in the past month

  • U.S. Navy nears decision on Littoral Combat Ship

    The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) will help the U.S. Navy counter growing “asymmetric” threats like coastal mines, quiet diesel submarines, global piracy, and terrorists on small fast attack boats; two teams — one led by General Dynamics, the other by Lockheed Martin — compete for a contract that could be worth more than $30 billion when all is said and done

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  • Aussie explosive maker reports healthy returns

    Melbourne-based Orica is the world’s largest industrial explosives maker — and also the world’s largest producer of explosives used in land mines; results for the first half of 2009 shows increase of 15 percent in profit before one-time charges

  • Alion awarded $8.5 million U.S. Air Force contract

    Virginia-based employee-owned specialist awarded a follow-on contract to design and maintain a Web-based system that reports, assesses, and predicts Air Force readiness levels

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  • Lockheed intensifies efforts to sell Turkey missile defense systems

    Turkey lives in a dangerous neighborhood; the accelerated pace of missile development by Iran has not gone unnoticed in Ankara, and Turkey wants to invest $4 billion in buying a missile defense system; Lockheed Martin teams up with Raytheon to win the contract

  • DARPA awards Lockheed $399.9 million for blimp

    Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, receives nearly $400 million from the Pentagon to develop a blimp-carrying radar; the radar would be about 6,000 square meters (7,176 square yards) in size

  • Northrop Grumman acquires KillerBee UAV line from Swift

    The KillerBees are blended wing-body UAVs offered in sizes ranging from 6.5 feet to 33.2 feet in wingspan; NG changes name from KillerBee to Bat

  • Dutch flying car company, well, takes off

    Dutch flying car company PAL-V is gearing up for market launch of its flying car; it is Europe’s response to Massachusetts-based Terrafugia’s Transition

  • Virulent H5N1 mistakenly mixed with H3N2

    Austrian branch of vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu to Avir lab, also in Austria; a Czech affiliate of Avir conducted tests on ferrets, which died; investigation shows that the H3N2 batch contained live virulent H5N1 virus

  • GE sells its Homeland Protection business to Safran for $580 million

    Following 9/11, GE acquired Ion Track (2002) for an undisclosed sum and InVision Technologies for $900 million (2004); the Homeland Protection unit had revenue of $260 million last year, which GE saw as disappointing; CEO of French company Safran: We want to become “a pivotal player in the security market”

  • U.K. government drops central database scheme

    Burden of storing communication logs will now fall to ISPs

  • Financial crisis offers opportunities for start-ups

    A world of failing corporate titans and changing government policy is chaotic, but chaos creates opportunity and leaner times bring focus; savvy and nimble start-ups are in a position to exploit the situation

  • Growing problem: Private security companies pose risk to privacy

    Government mandates in the U.K. now require more and more businesses to collect more and more information about individuals who use these businesses’ services; private contractors are hired to handled the collection and handling of the personal information collected; these contractors are not bound by the tight rules governing the government handling of such information (not that the U.K. government is doing a very good job following these rules)