• Hi-tech navies protect shipping from Somalia's pirates

    The six ship EU force and other Western-led forces patrolling the Gulf of Aden have disrupted fifty-nine pirate groups in April and May alone; some naval forces in the region concentrate on escorting convoys of their own national vessels, while the Western-led forces spread themselves across the region saying they want to protect all shipping regardless of flag

  • Researchers show that light can be bent around corners

    Israeli researchers show that small beams of light — called Airy beams — can be bent in a laboratory setting; Airy beams promise remarkable advances for engineering, and they could form the technology behind space-age “light bullets” — as effective and precise defense technologies for police and the military, but also as a new communications interface between transponders

  • DARPA aims to help U.S. Army snipers to, well, aim better

    DARPA wants to help the U.S. Army’s snipers; in the works: programs aiming to give snipers the power to hit a target from 2,000 meters away in winds as high as forty miles per hour; making bullets that can change course in mid-air; and a stealth sniper scope that would make shooters all but invisible

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  • Robot assembles itself, then flies

    Soldiers and first responders often find themselves in situations of surveillance or search and rescue, in which they may have to figure out on the fly what size and shape surveillance or search-and-rescue robot they need; Swiss researchers develop a flying platform made up of autonomous wheeled vehicle that lock together to share the task of controlled and autonomous flight; this self-sufficient wheeled DFA has another advantage: if one of the parts of which it consists breaks, the robot can reconfigure itself or substitute in a different part

  • Autonomous vehicles to map battle environments

    War is always accompanied by the fog of war; to pierce that fog, researchers at Cranfield University are working on developing swarms of autonomous military vehicles capable of sharing and overlapping video images to create high-resolution 3D panoramic scenes of dangerous battlefield areas

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  • UN criticism of U.S. UAV war not likely to stop CIA drone strikes

    A UN report on the U.S. UAVs against terrorists and insurgents calls on countries to lay out rules and safeguards for carrying out the strikes, publish figures on civilian casualties, and prove they have attempted to capture or incapacitate suspects without killing them

  • Birmingham area law enforcement deploying technology quickly to share paperwork in patrol cars

    Police in Alabama begins to use New World software system which lets law enforcement officials create a one-stop shop for identifying suspects and spotting crime trends, among other things; it is a way wirelessly to integrate data from the field, dispatch, the records room, the jail and even neighboring departments

  • Senate panel rejects Pentagon counter-IED group $400 million emergency funding request

    Senate panel denies Pentagon’s counter-IED group a $400 million emergency request; lawmakers say that counter-IED organization has misused funds allocated to it — among other things, to hire private contractors in Iraq to hunt down insurgents; senators also criticized the group for planning to use emergency funds to fund long term projects such as airships and UAV radar

  • BAE and Portendo join forces on IED detector

    The device aims a laser beam at a particular area suspected to hide an IED; the reflected light is collected by the apparatus and is analyzed using a Raman scattering method, which provides a unique molecular signature which can be compared against an explosives database; Raman spectroscopy has long been thought to hold promise for such applications, but it typically provides a very weak signal; until now

  • DARPA looking for automated insider threat spotter

    The U.S. National Counterintelligence Strategy asserts that “Trusted insiders — are targeting the US information infrastructure for exploitation, disruption, and potential destruction”; DARPA, the Pentagon research arm, is soliciting idea for technology which will automatically spot — and eliminate — insider threat to U.S. information infrastructure

  • Israel buys advanced commando transport

    All of Iran’s nuclear weapons-related facilities can be destroyed from the air, but in some cases — for example, labs and design offices located in densely populated areas — special forces may be preferable in order to avoid civilian casualties; commandos would also be useful if leaders of the Iranian program — nuclear scientists and members of the Revolutionary Guard — were targeted for assassination in order to deal the Iranian program an even heavier blow; Israel buys an advanced version of the C-130J, which has been modified for special operation missions

  • U.S. Air Force shifts 30,000 troops to "cyberwar front lines"

    The USAF has assigned 30,000 to cyberwarfare specialties; 3,000 will become cyberspace officers; Brigadier David Cotton, director of cyberspace transformation, says about the new specialty: “It’s not just spray paint, it’s a new mindset”

  • U.S. Army's XM25 smart grenade launcher described as "game changer"

    New smart grenade launcher described as a “game changer”; the XM25 can fire 25mm rounds that explode at any distance set by a soldier, effective at a range of up to 700 meters; the 14-pound, $25,000 gun can fire rounds in just seconds, it could replace the need to call in fire missions, artillery, or air strikes in some situations, which can take anywhere from several minutes to an hour to arrive

  • Russians say they are developing new weapon for space defense

    Russia says it is deploying a “fundamentally new weapon” to ward off future threats from space; Russian brigadier says that “In the near future we will have to perform the task of protecting Moscow from space-based threats,” adding that he hoped the potential protection would be enough and it would not actually have to be used