Items tagged with Military
In April we learned that a petition was circulating at Google signed by workers who wanted the search giant to sever ties with the Pentagon and stop working on a military AI project. That AI project is called Project Maven, which is a Pentagon effort to create an AI capable of sorting through footage taken from drones. When we first learned about the petition in April, it had been signed by over 3,100 Google employees. The petition read in part "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war." Reports are claiming that at least a dozen Google employees have now resigned in protest...
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Just as the U.S. Navy looks to scrap its incredibly powerful railgun, the Chinese Navy have apparently installed a railgun of their own onto one of warships. A leaked image appears to give us our first glimpse at this immensely powerful weapon, but no real details are known about the Chinese weapon at this time. Image via NewScientist The image appears to show parts of the barrel of the railgun wrapped in camouflage (sort of like what we see automotive manufacturers using to hide the lines of their new vehicles during testing). If the weapon in the images is in fact a railgun, it would make China...
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For all the tens of thousands of people around the world that believe in UFOs and aliens, there are vast numbers of people who label the believers as nut jobs and ostracize them as crackpots. This means that many people in the military who encountered unknown objects in the skies over the years never reported the encounter out of fear of being labeled. Just because something is labeled an Unidentified Flying Object or UFO doesn't mean that object is from another world. It simply means that we don’t know where the object came from or what it is. As it turns out, the Pentagon and the U.S. Military...
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As North Korea continues to build up its missile program and arsenal, the U.S. and other nations allied against the growingly erratic regime are looking for a way to protect nations from North Korean missiles. The U.S. has a weapon called CHAMP (Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project) that could potentially stop North Korean missiles from launching, or force them to splash down harmlessly in the ocean after launch. The system is launched in a cruise missile from an aircraft and rather than having conventional explosives or nuclear payloads inside, it is...
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The U.S. Navy has spent half a billion dollars working to perfect a new type of projectile weapons technology that could be used in current and future naval ships. That gun is the railgun, which has always sounded like something out of a video game or science fiction. Unfortunately, it looks as though the project is possibly going to be scrapped after all the money and time was put into the research and development of the weapon. The strange part is that the weapon isn't possibly being scrapped because it doesn’t work; the railgun works quite well. The beast can toss a projectile down range...
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Odds are that most of what regular Americans know about submarines comes from what we see in movies. Those subs always have a large mast that comes down in the middle of a room for the periscope. The person manning that periscope simply spins in a circle to look out and see what's going on above the surface of the water. However, most modern subs don't operate in this manner. The sub in the image above is one of the U.S. Navy's newest submarines called the USS John Warner. Inside the advanced attack submarine are lot of high-resolution screens that show all manner of detail on the sub including...
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US Army recently banned the use of all drones built by drone maker DJI. The military warned that the drones might have unspecified "cyber vulnerabilities." The Army memo was published on August 2nd and read in part, "due to increased awareness of cyber vulnerabilities associated with DJI products, it is directed that the U.S. Army halt use of all DJI products." DJI is a Chinese company and the US government has long had fears of Chinese manufacturers installing spyware or backdoors into products, giving them access to classified and sensitive data. DJI for its part has announced that it is...
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Where information gathering is concerned, it's hard to imagine any entity on Earth that captures more data than the US military. It's a constant digital battle to fetch new data and analyze it as quickly as possible in an effort to effectively move operations forward. But an obvious problem arises: there's often just too much data to churn through. Fortunately, computer hardware and software continually evolves, and it can help dramatically improve this sort of work. The same applies to our neural functions, which our computers can read and interpret. A great example of this has just been revealed...
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Building exoskeletons to aid persons or animals is nothing new, and in recent years, we've seen numerous examples of them being built with the use of 3D printing. For those who need them, they can reintroduce some lost capability back into their lives or introduce new-found capability. However, as the US Army has now proven, they can be used for other things, as well. Think Deus Ex-like augmentations. The result of mechanical engineer Dan Baechle's efforts is MAXFAS, a mechanical arm exoskeleton that's designed to improve the accuracy of a person's gun aim. It's to be used both on and off the field,...
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DARPA has a penchant for putting outlandish ideas forward, but that's sort of the point. Without far-fetched ideas, how is one's military and technological prowess to evolve? For those just catching up, DARPA is the United States miltiary's advanced tech arm, and a new filing makes clear that at least a few mad scientists within its walls are thinking about floating aircraft carriers of a different kind. Presently, floating aircraft carriers float on water, but if DARPA has its way, they'll float on air. Flying aircraft carriers seem like an idea that would take shape within a major motion picture,...
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Iron Man may be a fictional character in the land of comic books and Hollywood adaptations, but is such a suit out of the real of possibility? Apparently the U.S. Special Operations Command is determined to find out. They've teamed up with some of the brightest minds and researchers from various universities and laboratories to see if an Iron Man-like suit could be created for military applications. The goal is to build superior body armor than what's available today, as opposed to being able to fly up into the atmosphere like a tin version of Superman. Efforts to build better armor are already...
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Cue those "hand quotes", because Boeing's got the freakin' lasers. Called the 'Thin Disk Laser', Boeing's managed to deliver a product that's 30% more effective than what the US' Department of Defense required, and if used in combat, I'm not sure we'd want to know what kind of damage it could do. Let's just say, when less than 1 watt could easily blind you, it seems likely that 30,000 watts could do some ridiculous damage. Boeing's laser, also referred to as an 'Active Mirror Laser', is a solid-state type that implements a lasing material to act as an amplifier and a mirror to direct the beam....
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DARPA is known for doing some pretty outlandish things, partly in the world of technology and partly in the world of military. And often, those sectors cross paths. DARPA's Adaptable Sensor System (ADAPT) program has launched this week, aiming to transform how unattended sensors are developed for the military by using an original design manufacturer (ODM) process similar to that of the commercial smartphone industry. The goal is to develop low-cost, rapidly updatable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors in less than a year, a marked improvement to the current three-to-eight...
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GPS is a powerful navigational tool that’s changed the way we travel, but it’s not without its shortcomings. The simple chip-to-satellite communication can be disrupted far too easily, for example, such as when a user goes through a tunnel or if there’s simple interference nearby. Being that GPS was originally developed for the military, those limitations are not just inconvenient, but life- or mission-threatening. DARPA researchers at the University of Michigan have been developing a “timing & inertial measurement unit” (TIMU) that will augment GPS when needed...
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