IN THE NEWS
DARPA ADVANCES NEW SQUAD X TECHNOLOGIES FOR U.S. INFANTRY
DARPA PRESS RELEASE February 9, 2015
DARPA — DARPA’s new Squad X Core Technologies (SXCT) program aims to address this challenge and ensure that dismounted infantry squads maintain uncontested tactical superiority over potential adversaries without being overburdened by cumbersome hardware. The goal is to speed the development of new, lightweight, integrated systems that provide infantry squads unprecedented awareness, adaptability and flexibility in complex environments, and enable dismounted Soldiers and Marines to more intuitively understand and control their complex mission environments.“SXCT aims to help dismounted infantry squads have deep awareness of what’s around them, detect threats from farther away and, when necessary, engage adversaries more quickly and precisely than ever before,” said Maj. Christopher Orlowski, DARPA program manager. “We are working towards advanced capabilities that would make dismounted infantry squads more adaptable, safe and effective.”
FEMALE SOLDIERS PASS INITIAL TEST AND PREPARE FOR RIGORS OF ARMY RANGER COURSE
THE U.S. ARMY-MILITARY NEWS, February 6, 2015
DAVID VERGUN — Five female Soldiers out of 26 Service members graduated from the first-ever, gender-integrated Ranger Training Assessment Course, or RTAC, which qualifies them to go on to the Army's Ranger course, beginning in late April. The training is a pre-Ranger course that is mandatory for all female Soldiers, as well as many male Soldiers, said Maj. Gen. Scott Miller, commander of the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence, or MCoE, at Fort Benning, Georgia. Fort Benning hosts both RTAC and Ranger school.
WHY NORTHROP GRUMMAN RAN A SUPER BOWL AD FOR A STEALTH BOMBER
FOXTROTALPHA, February 2, 2015
TYLER ROGOWAY — How many American consumers are looking to purchase a new long-range stealth super-bomber? None. So why would Northrop Grumman spend big bucks on producing such a glitzy ad and pay to have it run in Washington DC and Dayton, Ohio during the Super Bowl? Defense contractors have learned a thing or two from Steve Jobs. The stakes for winning a 'banner' defense contract are not high, they are almost unfathomable. This is especially true in today's fiscal and technological climate. In the 1950s, a fighter jet design could be retired in less than ten years of it entering active service. [...] What this means is that big defense contractors cannot lose a major contract and just chalk it up to tough luck and wait for next opportunity to come around. Why? Because there may not be another opportunity for half a century, and by then who the hell knows where the focus on warfare will be. In 2065, bombers may take a back seat to new cyber weapons or nano and counter nano robotics.
CONGRESS SEEKS TO BRING OBAMA'S ISIS WAR ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE LAW
THE GUARDIAN, January 28, 2015
SPENCER ACKERMAN — A legislative push to retroactively justify Barack Obama’s war against the Islamic State would also phase out the prime legal wellspring of the global US war against terrorism. Sunsetting the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) has been alongtime goal of the anti-Isis bill’s architect, Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. [...] Schiff’s bill would give all military efforts against Isis and against al-Qaida and its affiliates an expiration date of three years after passage. The gambit is both a temporary reprieve to US counter-terrorism, deferring an expected debate in Congress this year about the future course of an evolving, 13-year-old war, and an attempted restriction of presidential authority to unilaterally wage a global war in the future. Additionally, the Schiff bill would immediately retire the 2002-era authorization for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which the White House last year cited asanother source of authority to attack Isis in the absence of explicit congressional approval.
WHITE HOUSE DRONE CRASH
THE NEW YORK TIMES, January 27, 2015
WASHINGTON — It was 42 degrees and raining lightly around 3 a.m. on Monday when an inebriated off-duty employee for a government intelligence agency decided it was a good time to fly his friend’s drone, a 2-foot-by-2-foot “quadcopter” that sells for hundreds of dollars and is popular among hobbyists. But officials say the plan was foiled, perhaps by wind or a tree, when the employee — who has not been named by the Secret Service or charged with a crime — lost control of the drone as he operated it from an apartment just blocks from the White House. He texted his friends, worried that the drone had gone down on the White House grounds, and then went to sleep. It was not until the next morning, when he woke and learned from friends that a drone had been found at the White House, that he contacted his employer, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He then called the Secret Service and immediately began cooperating with an investigation into the incident.
PENTAGON WANTS DRONES TO HUNT IN PACKS, LIKE WOLVES
THE WASHINGTON POST, January 23, 2015
DAN LAMOTHE — The U.S. military is preparing for a series of meetings that could shake up how the Pentagon flies its fleet of drone aircraft and move them toward hunting together in packs. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will host the gatherings in March for its Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program, it said this week. The major emphasis: Figuring out a way to move free of having a pilot operate only one drone with assistance from a sensor operator and a team of intelligence analysts through satellite links. “Just as wolves hunt in coordinated packs with minimal communication, multiple CODE-enabled unmanned aircraft would collaborate to find, track, identify and engage targets, all under the command of a single human mission supervisor,” said Jean-Charles Ledé, the program’s manager, in a statement.
NEW GUIDED BULLET MAKES SNIPERS DEADLIER
THE U.S. MARINE CORPS TIMES, January 17, 2015
JAMES K. SANBORN — The agency responsible for developing the Defense Department's next generation, science fiction-like technology is working to bring guided bullets that can change direction mid-flight to the military's most elite marksmen.After successfully test firing a guided .50-caliber round this summer, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is now conducting "system-level" testing, which will help determine how a guided bullet would work with a service rifle on the battlefield. In July, DARPA posted a video of testing for its Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance, or EXACTO program, in which several of the steerable rounds were deliberately fired off target. In the video, the bullet changes direction multiple times before striking the intended target, which was located to the left of the test's point of aim. The new technology would be a welcome and useful development, but wouldn't replace the need for well-trained traditional sniper teams, said Ryan Innis, a former scout sniper with 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion. Innis, who left the Marine Corps as a sergeant in 2013 after serving on the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Units anti-piracy raid force near East Africa, said a guided bullet could make all Marines pinpoint marksmen.
DEATH BY ROBOT
THE NEW YORK TIMES, January 11, 2015
ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG — Imagine it’s a Sunday in the not-too-distant future. An elderly woman named Sylvia is confined to bed and in pain after breaking two ribs in a fall. She is being tended by a helper robot; let’s call it Fabulon. Sylvia calls out to Fabulon asking for a dose of painkiller. What should Fabulon do? [...] It’s a shorter leap than you might think, technically, from a Roomba vacuum cleaner to a robot that acts as an autonomous home-health aide, and so experts in robot ethics feel a particular urgency about these challenges. The choices that count as “ethical” range from the relatively straightforward — should Fabulon give the painkiller to Sylvia? — to matters of life and death: military robots that have to decide whether to shoot or not to shoot; self-driving cars that have to choose whether to brake or to swerve. These situations can be difficult enough for human minds to wrestle with; when ethicists think through how robots can deal with them, they sometimes get stuck, as we do, between unsatisfactory options.
MILITARY GRADE 3-D PRINTED DRONE
WIRED, September 16, 2014
JORDAN GOLSON — We have 3-D printed keys, guns and shoes—now a research team at the University of Virginia has created a 3D printed UAV drone for the Department of Defense. In the works for three years, the aircraft, no bigger than a remote-controlled plane, can carry a 1.5-pound payload. If it crashes or needs a design tweak for a new mission, another one can be printed out in a little more than a day, for just $2,500. It’s made with off-the-shelf parts and has an Android phone for a brain. “We weren’t sure you could make anything lightweight and strong enough to fly,” says David Sheffler, who led the project. Sheffler is a former engineer for Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce who now teaches at the university. After he created a 3-D printed jet engine in one of his classes, the MITRE Corporation, a DoD contractor, asked him to create a 3-D printed UAV that could be easily modified and built with readily available parts.
OBAMA'S SPEECH ON U.S. DRONE POLICY
THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 23, 2013
PRESIDENT OBAMA —
As was true in previous armed conflicts, this new technology raises profound questions — about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law; about accountability and morality. So let me address these questions. To begin with, our actions are effective. Don’t take my word for it. In the intelligence gathered at bin Laden’s compound, we found that he wrote, “We could lose the reserves to enemy’s air strikes. We cannot fight air strikes with explosives.” Other communications from al Qaeda operatives confirm this as well. Dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, U.S. transit systems, European cities and our troops in Afghanistan. Simply put, these strikes have saved lives. Moreover, America’s actions are legal. We were attacked on 9/11. Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces. We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first. So this is a just war — a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.
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