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compare the Estonian Cyberwar: "The strategy requires the aggressor to identify and attack the weakest link on the network, and then use it as a cover to give the appearance of legitimacy and rapidly propagate the malicious code throughout the rest of the network."

I mean listening. http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003015.html

I'm at a loss as to why incineration isn't being touted as the next wave of energy production.

DARPA is working on that.

This refers to the UD effort that predates FCS by many years:

http://www.angelfire.com/art/enchanter/hybrid.html

Ralph Zumbro, Author of "Tank Sergeant", writes about the Hybrid drive M113 that United Defence have built:-

                "Phil, The one I was in, and it may be the only one, is state of the art. They steer it with a Bradley gunner's control and it will run for an hour at 30mph on two batteries which are in boxes sized approximately 18"x36"x48". Then a standard issue genset cuts in. The motors are rated at 250 hp each and are oil cooled. It is weird to see a 3 inch diameter drive shaft coming out of a motor the size of a 5 gallon can.
                The rubber tracks are soundless, and they've got 2500 miles on them with very little wear showing. That adds up to a VERY quiet vehicle for recon work. Put electric motors, rubber tracks and a two man turret with a 30mm gatling weapon on a standard 113 hull and you've got a recon Tankita.
                I mentioned to the people at United Defense that not needing air for the engine made the vehicle capable of running around UNDER water and was told that that had been thought of. That means that you could add enough armor to stop larger weapons, as long as you don't compromise the mobility."

More links:
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002338.html

Hybrid M113
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbWbkOkTydk

Hybrid HMMWV
http://www.evworld.com/archives/conferences/evs14/ humvee.html

The CIWS has two radars that work together to engage targets. The first radar is the search radar, located inside the radome on the weapon control group (top of the white painted portion). The search subsystem provides bearing, range, velocity, heading, and altitude information of potential targets to the CIWS computer. This information is analyzed to determine whether the detected object should be engaged by the CIWS system. Once the computer identifies a valid target (see details below), the mount moves to face the target and then hands the target over to the track radar. The track radar is an "orange peel"-style radar that is more precise, but can only view a much smaller area. The track radar observes the target until the computer determines that the probability of a successful hit is maximized and then, depending on the operator conditions, the system will either fire automatically or will recommend fire to the operator. While firing, the system tracks outgoing rounds and 'walks' them onto the target.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS

but (iirc) they can destroy satellites with them now.

They used the lasers to light up the satellite, and smacked it down with a missile (kinetic).

They also have the ability to blind some satellites cameras with lasers.

They do not have the ability to destroy satellites with lasers.

Dragon Skin at Defense Tech

This is why the USS Jimmy Carter was built!

It looks like it turned into this http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002723.html

The CIA's experiments in radio control of the brain are based on the development of the EEG in the 1920's. In 1934, doctor's Chaffee and Light published a pivotal monograph, "A Method for Remote Control of Electrical Stimulation of the Nervous System". Work along the same lines allowed Dr. Jose Delgado of Cordoba, Spain to climb into bull-ring and, with the push of a button, trigger an electrode in the head of a charging bull and stop the beast in it's tracks.

Further groundbreaking advances were made by L.L. Vasiliev, the famed Russian Physiologist and doyan of parapsychology, in "Critical Evaluation of the Hypnogenic Method". The article detailed the experiments of Dr. I.F. Tomashevsky in remote radio control of the brain "at a

It's not the first time that they have done this, during the training maneuvers against against the Indian Air Force they sent outdated aircraft and crippled the ROE and engagement envelopes of the AIM-120s.

That argument is not such a good example. The IAF were using Mig-21 Bis along with older Jaguars and Mirage 2000 fighters. Even if they had some Mig29s and Su-30s the Mig21s were the ones that gave the American pilots trouble. If you have a 50 year old aircraft that can beat the crap out of the slightly not so modern F-15Cs you'd better sit up and take notice.

This is pretty late, but Defensetech is pretty sweet too.

Wonder what documents. There was a major reclassification effort that has been going on through the war - documents having bee reclassified back to world war II.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002181.html

Seriously though, as I understand it the expected test of the Land Warrior system in Iraq (outfitting one of the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams from the 2nd ID) was scaled back from 'full-deployment' to every soldier due to weight concerns (the batteries, cameras, and computers still took up far too much weight - not to mention being expensive). Only one soldier in a squad would have the full system. It looks like instead they decided to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that doesn't add 40lbs of weight to a soldier that already has plenty of gear to haul around. According to General Dynamics C4 they're basically merging the Land Warrior and Future Force Warrior programs.

The biggest problem of force projection, is to transport materiel to where it is needed. It appears that the Russians have been selling Zubr hovercraft. I had the pleasure of seeing some of these laid up in a St. Petersburg shipyard, 60-knots and about 540 tonnes. The PRC has ordered six at the moment. If they start to buy more or seek a manufacturing license, this could be a cause for worry.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002794.html

If you think about what happened when Katrina struck these black boxes might have helped both local and federal authorites if they had them, had plans to use them and they indeed worked as advertised; other problems came to light http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002715.html in the areas of systems speaking to systems and a severe lack of bandwidth that might have not allowed the box/boxes to function as expected.

"Thermobaric Urban Destruction" is the title of the "users manual" for the latest weapon being deployed by US Marines against "urban targets". Basically it is a cheap, highly portable building leveler that mixes "fuel" with air and then sparks it. This could backfire. Seriously backfire. As in "Burning Down the Civilization" backfire. Thermobarics, as a kind of fuel-air explosive technology, use air for the oxydizer, into which a fuel is sprayed--sort of the way coal mine dust, grain elevator dust and natural gas leak explosions do. Unlike Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO), you can't lock onto a substance like ammonium nitrate for detection and control, anymore than you can control access to, uhm, air. That means you can't use a substance-control strategy against them without getting rid of gasoline, diesel, natural gas--you know--fuel. Since everyone drives around in vehicles with tanks filled with the chemical energy equivalent of 500lbs of explosives just waiting for a technology to disperse it efficiently into an aerosol near an enemy's real estate assets (and/or the enemy himself), it is rather easy to imagine things getting out of hand if the right aerosol technology gets developed. And with the critical materials so redily available, experimentation with techniques for dispersal--techniques that don't require a lot in the way of special equipment or materials--will evolve Improvised Explosive Devices terribly rapidly.

To sum up, with the US deploying thermobarics in Iraq for demolishing buildings and killing their occupants, I can easily imagine two things happening:

1. The Iraqi resistance will start to use it in an "open source" developed Improvised Explosive Device.
2. US soldiers will acquire this "open source" technology while in Iraq and do a "technology transfer" to urban gangs as they have already done with other technology acquired during military service in Iraq.

The Air Force Research Laboratory may well be already using robots to map out underground enclosures http://www.wired.com/news/technology/software/0,71 779-0.html some more information and ideas discussed by David Hambling via http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002775.html

Combine this with the recently renewed efforts by the marines to develop a system to deploy soldiers from space, and we're pretty much there.

Okay. I guess things will be fine, as long as the crowds of protesters don't have any eyeglasses. or contacts. or loose change.

Tell you what. You guys test it on yourselves. Publish the results (in something other than press-release one sheet form). Then we'll talk.

OK, thanks for pointing those out. Now we can board the boats and steal them.

Anyone who wants to use this information to steal one of the boats already knows this. They have followed the program's progress, read articles about the testing and very probably surveilled the boats themselves. This man's point is not that the information isn't available, but that Lockheed Martin and the government are refusing to fix a problem which any trained assailant could spot through normal intelligence channels. Finding out that the boats have a blind spot would be easy: photograph the boats at anchor and carefully study the photographs.

My problem with this is, working in automotive systems, we regularly see this requirement, and it's more of a "spec" thin

My dad worked for Lockheed for 20+ years and dealt with MIL-SPEC a lot. The specifications are there for a reason: the same weapon or system has to work exactly as well no matter the conditions. And, as this is very literally a matter of life and death, the systems must work every time. These cutters aren't cars. They're weapons systems meant to protect us. These cutters may have to help protect the equally-imparied SBX radar in the Bering Strait in that -40 degree weather and fog.

This one is a bit ridiculous, and shows his paranoia.

If you go back and watch the video, he says that the unshielded cables are only part of the problem with the communications systems. As the system is a classified he can't really discuss it, be he clearly said that 1) the system did not pass "tests" and that 2) he believes the system is insecure. My dad's an engineer. When your engineers tell you that something is wrong, you listen.

puts our Coast Guards at much greater jeopardy than the things he's addressing!

You miss the point: the Coast Guard is ALREADY at risk. As I said, anyone who wants to attack or steal these boats already knows this, because the development process of weapons systems is public record (dreary and boring public record, but public nonetheless). What he is trying to do is move Lockheed Martin and the government to fix the problem before some takes advantage of it.

"That is way out of line with what is useful and really of value in the real world

Unless of course you get a job at the Pentagon

Seems they do pie-in-the-sky research all day long with a seemingly unlimited budget and no milestones... just what the person who posed the question wanted!

I was talking about the communicators in The Original Series, not from The Next Generation. They looked very much like today's flip phones.

Nor was I talking about stun guns. We do have honest to goodness laser weapons now, which at this point only cause blindness, but there are also weapons under development that will do further damage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personnel_Halting_and _Stimulation_Response_rifle

There is also a laser-equipped 747 that can shoot high-powered beams at a given target.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000551.html

The tricorder is also a real device, although the technology still has a long way to go.

http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0996September/Sparky/tr icorder.html

Transparent Aluminum, first introduced with ST4:The Voyage Home as the superstrong "metal glass" used to haul two humpback whales back to the 23rd century, is also the real thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_aluminum

I don't smoke anything, not even tobacco.

Hmm...the military has been working on this for years to destroy tactical missiles and artillery rounds in flight. I'd be very surprised if it shows up at airports before it shows up in air defense artillery units.

(The links I provided describe intermediate systems. One is a developmental laser. The other is not capable of engaging aerial targets).

Here there is a blog that quotes a couple of people saying that the NSA data mining is doing more harm - in the sense of overwhelming the FBI with bad leads - than good - in the sense of finding terrorists.
I guess I have to question this in terms of traditional press personals. At no time or place does a newspaper require that you present proof of age prior to or durring the posting of personal adds. They don't even inquire if the add is yours or if your pulling a prank on someone else.
If a newspaper is not responsible for the usage of it's personals, how can MySpace be responsible for the use of it's services. Worse, there are policies in place to restrict access between people claiming to be adults & those claiming to be children. There are also procedures in place to remove accounts determined to be/reported to be used by people of the wrong age-group.
Where does this end, I would think that the log files for a day's worth of MySpace traffic would be substantial in terms of storage requirements. From the artical, they want 2 at least years for ISP's. That's going to be a huge storage amount. Who pays for keeping it? It serves no useful purpose for an ISP or site after about a week or so (time enough to verify a claim of acct hijacking) so this is just a waste of time and money for them. What does it give the police ... nothing significant. By the time they can track down a name & account to attach to it, they've already identified enough to find someone in more traditional ways - 2 or 3 year old data is going to be worthless.
Let's look at it from another angle. The 80GB tapes I use at work are about $125US each. What is going to be the cost to store every transaction record from every ISP and Social Networking site/BBS? I think we can easily say it's going to be in the millions. What benifit is it really going to provide? The FBI's own reports [sorry at work not going to google for FBI reports on the appropriate subject] estimate that full funding for these kinds of actions will cost around $400M/yr and help less than 1000 kids a year. Sorry, $400,000/child is not a good expenditure ratio - when you concider the same amount of money can be spent in other ways - Community centers, education, more/better trained police, runaway programs, and drug programs are the ones that come most immediately to mind - and help many, many, many more children for even less money. Call me a heartless, callus bastard, but I think that if the govt is going to spend money 'for the sake of the children' then they should have a program that is going to actually do something 'for the children'. When the proponents of it show it's horribly ineficient, it's time to drop it and come up with something else. Of course this is the same government that still thinks that telling kids 'abstinance is good' will stop teenage pregnancy.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, and want actual details, look to http://www.defensetech.org/ and spider out from there. Mainstream media rarely covers anything from the military.com network.

Here you are. Notice the sentence about "...a Linux-based operating system, as opposed to Windows. 'Evidence shows that Linux is more stable. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to Linux-based OS,'" says the program's manager, Lt. Col. Dave Gallop".

all ears, no brain

Check out the story "Death Ray -- or Accounting Shift?" here: http://www.defensetech.org/

I'm not sure I agree with you, but this article seems to support your argument:

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002229.html

I'm not too worried about offshoring; I got a job working in a Faraday cage with Schrödinger's cat, breaking enigma code, and wearing a tin-foil hat.

Tested already in late February... "A few weeks back, Trophy, an Israeli active protection set-up, went through its first tests on an American Stryker vehicle. It's already being used to protect Israeli tanks against rocket-propelled grenades. [In a] Feb. 28 test... two inert RPGs were fired simultaneously; one would hit the Stryker while the other was intentionally aimed for a near miss... Trophy was able to track the trajectory, discriminate among the two parallel targets, and determine which one would actually hit the Stryker before selectively unleashing its lethal countermeasures. The actual method used to destroy the targets is classified." http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002230.html

the missing link

Alas, the Airborne Laser Project is in danger of being canceled. The reprieve is contingent on meeting a very tight schedule.

Alas, the Airborne Laser Project is in danger of being canceled. The reprieve is contingent on meeting a very tight schedule.

Supposedly during one of the tests, someone got the bright idea to take a picture of the sleeping bats before carting them out to the test area (asleep and equipped with their little napalm canisters.) They all woke up with the flash. And, as they say, Hilarity Ensued.

We (humans) have never had good luck at this sort of thing. The Russians tried it with dogs carrying satchel charges; they trained the dogs by feeding them underneath tanks. Well, the only problem was that they used Russian tanks to train 'em, not German tanks...and apparently dogs are very good at distinguishing between Russian and German tanks.

And again, Hilarity Ensued.

...including the L.A. Sheriff's Department's ultra-powerful sonic blaster, is here. nms

If you want a real account of military-trained animals getting out and causing havoc, check this out. One of my old biology profs knew a guy who worked on this.

There are a few in use currently in Iraq. There is the Talon which can fire many different weapons (M249, .50 cal, M4A1, M24, etc). They are very accurate, more accurate than any soldier. Every EOD team seems to have one of these which they use to detonate IEDs.

UAVs are everywhere and are common place in almost all operations. There is the Predator, which when armed with the hellfire missile system can be very leathal and the little Raven which can be utilized at the squad level. The new Viper Strike bombs, which are starting to be depoyed on UAVs, are very usefull in urban situations where you need to take out the enemy without harming innocents in say, the next room. This is a big development because the "insurgents" like to take shelter in mosques, schools, and hospitals, etc. The new Hardstop bombs help in this situation as well (but I do not think they are carried by UAVs). Anyways, here is an exellent video/story which mixes captured enemy video with the video from the UAV which nails them. I love UAVs.

News flash for those jarheads: major arterial bleeding isn't EVER going to be stoppable with "magic dust". Tourniquet, hemostat, or direct pressure are the only way. Are these people stupid?

One of the more interesting things I've seen out of this war was the unveiling of some absolutely brutally honest product reviews from the Marines.

Put simply -- this ain't the first clotting agent thats been developed, but oh boy does QuikClot apparently fail. Story here:

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000458.html

and the PDF (which rocks) is here:

http://www.sftt.org/PDF/article05122003a.pdf

--Dan

Don't count on it. If that artcle's right, there's a good chance that competing systems's accuracy would go to zero in such an event.

There's more on this and other long-range UAVs over at Defense Tech -- including a solar-powered drone that just set endurance records.

I think this whole blog thing is getting way out of hand. Who cares that much about someone else life? Most people can't even care for themselves...why should you be worrying about checking out the latest cell phone picture with a story about how the line at McDonalds is too long. Gimme a break.

You're reading the wrong blogs. Here's a few:

http://defensetech.org/
http://www.back-to-iraq.com/
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
http://www.juancole.com/
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

DefenceTech.org Times' shaky spacewar story:

"[Global Strike] -- which we first looked at back in November 2003 -- is legit, with a hefty $91 million invested into it over the last two years. But, by making so little distinction between this effort and more pie-in-the-sky plans, the Times does its readers a bit of a disservice."

Umm... I hate to bust your conspiracy bubble, but...

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001511.html

Area 51 isn't filtered.

Borrow from the latest military hardware and mount a 9mm on the robot. Code the firmware to detect intruders, give them a warning and detect hostility, and mow them down if hostility is detected after the warning has begun being given... :)

(No, I'm not serious. I've played Deus Ex and DX: Invisible War too much to think this is a good idea...)

Hope it hasn't invited any of it's mates to the picnic.

and you'll find this article (http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001084.html) which talks about an even stranger flying vehicle.