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Bandwidth on Navy ships is a scarce, expensive commodity. For sailors using non-essential systems, like recreational computers? Dial-up speeds -- if they're lucky. But by the end of the year, for the first time, the Navy will put a 4G LTE wireless network aboard some of its ships, giving a whole new communications tool to sailors and Marines: their smartphones.
If you work for IBM, you can bring your iPhone to work, but forget about using the phone's voice-activated digital assistant. Siri isn't welcome on Big Blue's networks.
Northrop Grumman has finally penciled in the first flight of the giant surveillance airship it's building for the U.S. Army. The football-field-size, helium-filled robot blimp should take to the air over Lakehurst, New Jersey the first or second week of June.
The military-industrial complex just got a little bit livelier. Quite literally. That's because Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, has kicked off a program designed to take the conventions of manufacturing and apply them to living cells. Think of it like an assembly line, but one that would churn out modified biological matter -- man-made organisms -- instead of cars or computer parts.
Drones overhead and smartphones in hand, we drift through panoptic lives and push-button wars. It sometimes feels like most songwriters couldn't give a crap, but not hip-hop visionary El-P: He's still raging with feeling against the machine, from within the increasingly dense machine music he painstakingly crafts. The Brooklyn rapper's latest round of literate but inflammatory blasts comes on arresting new record Cancer for Cure.
For years, U.S. government agencies have told the public, veterans and Congress that they couldn't draw any connections between the so-called "burn pits" disposing of trash at the military's biggest bases and veterans' respiratory or cardiopulmonary problems. But a 2011 Army memo obtained by Danger Room flat-out stated that the burn pit at one of Afghanistan's largest bases poses "long-term adverse health conditions" to troops breathing the air there.
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether to halt a legal challenge to a once-secret warrantless surveillance program targeting Americans' communications that Congress eventually legalized in 2008. The announcement is a win for the Obama administration, which like its predecessor, argues that government wiretapping programs and laws can't be challenged in court.
This week, the U.S. and its allies will sit down with some of their arch-nemeses: the Iranians. Big, unresolved questions persist about Iran's nuclear program, which Iran swears exists just to produce peaceful nuclear energy. In particular, those questions primarily concern five installations that concern the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world's nuclear watchdog. And unless you're a nuclear wonk, you probably don't understand them. Here's a crib sheet.
Like most social sites, Twitter tracks your every move around the web. Now, however, the company has joined a growing number of websites that support the "Do Not Track" standard, offering users a way to opt out of the tracking.
The detention facility that the U.S. built in Afghanistan is state-of-the-art. Except for all the faulty hinges on the cell doors. Or the locks that are, in the words of a new report from the Defense Department's inspector general, "incapable of locking either manually or electronically." Or the construction that's deemed "not up to the standard suitable for a detention facility." The worst part? U.S. military commanders have known about these flaws since the prison opened its doors.
Washington believes it has a deal, finally, to reopen Pakistan's resupply routes for the Afghanistan war, saving a bunch of cash. But not before its Pakistani frenemies drive the price up.
Pakistan wants a $5,000 fee on every shipping container that passes through what NATO calls the Ground Lines of Communication, or GLOCs, on its ...
Today was a magic day!
Finally the seat for space capsule Tycho Deep Space arrived. This final coating layer of leather and super fancy detailing was done by Krumnaalen and they have done an amazing job!!! So, thank you so much for this work.
Please find all blogs related to the development of this seat if you ...
No one really understands the Navy and Air Force's new blueprint for dominating Earth's seas and skies. But what's increasingly clear, even to the heads of both the Navy and Air Force, is that there's a big challenge ahead for it, one that doesn't have anything to do with an adversary like China: getting U.S. ships, subs, planes and drones to actually talk to one another.
Over the past few billion years, life has undergone stark transformations, from isolated organisms to collections of cells to inventive machines able to grow with sunlight to larger creatures that swim, crawl, and hop across the planet?s surface.? Along the way, increasingly pervasive organisms encountered a range of environments that challenged genetic codes to solve ...
Next Wednesday, Iran will try to launch an experimental reconnaissance satellite into orbit -- just as international negotiators gather in Baghdad for talks about Tehran's nuclear program. The timing couldn't be more inflammatory, and rogue state satellite launches are usually considered to be missile tests in drag. So why isn't the world throwing itself into a tizzy about the mission?
For five years, America's most expensive fighter jets have been poisoning their pilots and crew. On Tuesday, the Defense Secretary finally stepped in -- restricting the flights of the F-22 Raptor, and ordering the Air Force to begin an "expedited installation" of an automatic backup oxygen system for the entire fleet of Raptors, Pentagon spokesman George Little tells reporters. But Panetta is allowing the stealthy dogfighter to keep flying -- for now.
Afghanistan war commanders have tenures as long as Spinal Tap drummers. Army Gen. David McKiernan got fired in 2009. His replacement, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, resigned the next year. Now the current commander, Marine Gen. John Allen, may be out the door as well, more than a year early.
If Washington Post ace Greg Jaffe is ...
For nearly six months, Pakistan has closed its ground shipping routes to convoys resupplying the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Getting those resupply routes open is preoccupying U.S. military officers and diplomats as they haggle, sweet-talk, beg and cajole their Pakistani counterparts, since alternative shipping routes are vastly more expensive. Exactly how expensive, the Pentagon won't ...
On Monday, the U.S. Navy will officially announce the ships for its demonstration of the "Great Green Fleet" -- an entire aircraft carrier strike group powered by biofuels and other eco-friendly energy sources. But if a powerful congressional panel has its way, it could the last time the Navy ever uses biofuels to run its ships and jets.
It was a project that symbolized the grand ambitions the United States had to rebuild Afghanistan. A DIY Wi-Fi network, free for Afghans to use, powering the aid projects and business ventures of the eastern city of Jalalabad. But now funding for the JLink network has run dry, and like so much of the Afghanistan war, it's run out of time. Jalalabad is about to go offline.
It's official: the U.S. drone war over Pakistan, Yemen and beyond really does exist. John Brennan, President Obama's principal counterterrorism adviser, disclosed the government's worst kept secret in a Washington speech last week. So now the Pentagon has to talk about it. Kind of.
Nano drones that an infantryman can pull out of his pocket; helicopters piloted by robots who extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield; micro satellites on demand; virtual training with a helmet from your office; algorithms that resolve pilots' ethical dilemmas (so they won't have to deal with those pesky war crimes tribunals); and farming out code to a network of high school kids. Welcome to the Israel Air Force of 2030.
As a recognition for Astronaut Andr? Kuipers' scientific work and contribution, the European Space Agency and Samsung Mobile have teamed up with Spanish artist Notasso, to create a fine piece of art, so big that you can see it... from space.
Before the U.S. military suspended a course for senior officers on Islam, instructors lectured that a "total war" would be necessary to protect the United States from an Islamic menace. "Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction," Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley asserted at the military's Joint Forces Staff College.
With the cargo version of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft waiting patiently at Cape Canaveral for its scheduled launch on May 19, its astronaut-carrying sibling has received a thumbs up from NASA.
As long as the Air Force pinky-swears it didn't mean to, its drone fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. And it can hold data on them for 90 days -- studying it to see if the people it accidentally spied upon are actually legitimate targets of domestic surveillance.
Improvised explosive devices, the Afghanistan War's signature insurgent weapon, are now a quarter less effective than they were last year, according to Pentagon statistics provided to Danger Room. During the year that just ended, from April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2012, insurgents detonated 7,166 bombs against U.S. troops and their allies. During the previous year -- April 2010 through March 2011 -- insurgents detonated 8,557 such bombs.
Federal authorities seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four "pre-release" music tracks, giving it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired.
Osama bin Laden may have been the evil mastermind behind the world's most successful terrorist group. But in his final days, he sounded more and more like your great aunt Henrietta: nagging his subordinates for not hating America enough -- the terrorist equivalent of telling the kids to get off his lawn -- and getting awfully confused about this whole e-mail thing.
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