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The sad thing about the fork in this story leading to crap like this is that people politicize scientific endeavors to get floor time. Nuclear happens to be an unfortunate keyword.

I for one do not want to sit in the dark ages and think that if NASA determines it best to use fission reactors to best perform deep space studies, so be it. Fanatics will fantasize about a cabal of technophiles, Illuminati and energy moguls and the x-files guys all hanging out in a dastardly plan to bring about Armageddon because you know, all these rich powerful people really want say, a nuclear war so they can live out their days in a bunker on a destroyed earth because that's the very definition of FUN! It's like people in a vocal minority to maraud around looking to bring Bush or the liberal establishment or [name your group to blame everything on here ]into every discussion.

All countries "are". They are not good. They are not evil. They are all unilateralist whenever they can afford to be. If you want others to believe in your morality, grab an orange robe and become a Buddhist monk. Otherwise, you're a money grubber just like the rest of us.

Those who bet on apocalypse the end of days, bet against a bright future basically always lose. It's not wise to sell short on the progressive countries of the world. Luddites who hearken back to the good ole days are essentially insane.

Now as far as nuclear devices with regards to the US - the US has been in possession of nuclear weapons the longest and has been able to refrain from using them the longest (Time since Nagasaki, as in, longest period of years since they were last used in war) despite the apparent efficacy of nuclear attack in bringing WW2 to a close.. They are staggeringly expensive and have little military value (until recently, the below ground penetrating missile/bomb design and nuclear torpedoes are also effective, both of these are tactical applications) they are essentially a threat over population centers. The US would not use strategic weapons unless they are used upon the US. Strategic weapons are essentially possessed only by France, Britain, Russia, China, US (and a lesser extent, India, Pakistan). They are effectively deterrence in that populations centers will be totally destroyed if the US is attacked. I don't foresee the preemptive use of strategic weapons nor is there any evidence of that in US nuclear posturing doctrine, which is publicly available:
FAS NPR , and Globalsecurity NPR, and DefenseLINK NPR.

The new preemptive nuclear strike parts of the doctrine basically wants to make a case for the use of tactical nuclear weapons against well fortified targets. Given that a swift conventional campaign in Iraq was so politically painful for the US, I seriously doubt that the US will ever use tactical nukes, much less preemptively. I think the document says it best: It's a nuclear posturing document. Anyone can break their own doctrine or even a SALT treaty anytime they want (See DPRK for an example of violating agreements). You think "dismantled" warheads aren't ready to go at Pentax? The modification of the nuclear posturing to say we will consider the use of preemptive nuclear strike in response to threats from Nuclear/Chemical/Biological attack or threat is simply this: Terrorist of the world and Countries of the world: Think long and hard about turning a blind eye or abetting subversive organizations that place US citizens under a potential deadly threat.

Strategic Weapons and the Cuban Missile Crisis: On October 25, 1962, Castro begged in a letter to Khruschev to preemptively strike the US. Khruschev was essentially shocked that Castro didn't get it. The posturing wasn't designed to start a strategic nuclear war, which Khruschev made clear in a letter to Castro on October 27, 1962,

So whose going to take on America?

I believe that would be China, sometime within the next 25-50 years.

It promises to be an. . .interesting 21st Century.

Uh, no. To do that you have to do one of two things: 1) Pull out of the Berne Convention

Right; musn't have that. Pulling out of the ABM treaty, ignoring parts of the Geneva convention, and gutting the verification parts of the biological weapons convention, that's all fair game. But the Berne convention and its IP guarantees, now that's sacred.

I wrote to the guy who wrote that story on hankooki.com. He couldn't produce the corroborating story (I asked for ANY other news source, AP or otherwise - no response), nor the document name or refernce number referred to in the story, nor does a myriad of searches on news.google.com turn up anything, nor is there any mention of it on www.fas.org.

The system was called Land Warrior not Urban Warrior. you can visit the site and see it listed under programs. The link however is bad.

FAS has a brief overview of the old project specs though.

This is a lot more like the proposed Land Warrior program from a few years back. The OICW was supposedly almost ready for production back then as well.

This just sounds like they revised the land warrior inititive a few times and this is the current draft run of it. I don't have all the old links for land warrior handy but you can probably find most of them via google. I would count any news of a new military combat armour system as vapourware until they actually produce a working prototype and not just a mock up of one.

As for the OICW several companies were working on their own version back then. I'm suprised that none have been marketed just yet. Perhaps it could be because they are so integrated with the suit pushing for their adoptation is useless until the suit hits production. I'm not sure, I just follow the technology because I'm waiting on them to develop mecha.

Here's one link I still have for the OICW plan.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/oicw.htm

I'm not sure who won the contract as I recall another munitions manufacturer involved in this as well.

This gives you a lot of faith in the kind of screening they do at the national weapons labs and at Homeland Security!

You've gotta love our fellow /.'ers who are still that naive. We've got to put them in a jar and keep them in a museum for future generations to look at - it would be a shame if we loose you guys for good...

No, I didn't mean to insult you, skyshadow (sorry if I did), but seriously,

Although the Iraqis initially used chemical weapons to prevent defeat and to reduce battlefield losses, they later integrated CW attacks into combined-armed operations designed to regain lost territory and to gain the offensive. Iraq's use of CW in the war with Iran can be divided into three distinct phases:

1. 1983 to 1986--used in a defensive role; typically to deflect Iranian human-wave assaults. In 1984 Iraq became the first nation to use a nerve agent on the battlefield when it deployed Tabun-filled aerial bombs during the Iran-Iraq war. Some 5,500 Iranians were killed by the nerve agent between March 1984 and March 1985. Tabun kills within minutes. Some 16,000 Iranians were reported killed by the toxic blister agent mustard gas between August 1983 and February 1986.
2. 1986 to early 1988--iraq adapts use against Iran to disrupt Iranian offensive preparations.
3. early 1988 to conclusion of the war-- Iraq integrated large nerve agent strikes into its overall offensive during the spring and summer of 1988 leading to the ceasefire.

Iran used chemical weapons late in the war, but never as extensively or successfully as Iraq. The success of Iraqi offensive operations in the southern sector in mid-1988 ultimately caused the Iranians to cease hostilities. The use of chemical weapons contributed to the success of these operations.

The first chemical attacks by Saddam Hussein against civilian populations included attacks launched by Iraqi aircraft against 20 small villages in 1987.

The real question is, what was the status of Iraq's programs before the Iraqis were liberated? Since Iraq developed binary chemical munitions, and some components of them are dual use and difficult to track down, it may be that we will never find a filled munition. But even the UN inspectors found some empty missile chemical warheads that they shouldn't have had before the war. Since the war the US has found several mobile labs. And there are still massive amounts of weapons material unaccounted for.

when Saddam forced UN weapons inspectors to leave the country in 1998, up to 360 tonnes of bulk chemical warfare agents, including one and half tonnes of VX nerve agent, were still unaccounted for, as was the growth media sufficient for producing 26,000 litres of anthrax spores.

Tens of thousands dead? I dont' think so. Most of the estimates that I've seen are more like 5-10,000. Even if its more, it will still mean the end of Saddam's mass graves.

Another day and another mass grave is unearthed in Iraq. This weekend a team of British forensic scientists has the unenviable task of collating evidence from the latest of Saddam's killing fields to have been positively identified.

So many of these harrowing sites have been uncovered in the two months since Saddam's overthrow that even the experts are starting to lose count of just how many atrocities were committed by the Iraqi dictator's henchmen.

Officials working for Iraq's interim government say that more than 150 such sites have been reported to them, and that about 40 have been positively identified.

According to Human Rights Watch, the bodies of some 300,000 Iraqis could be occupying these mass graves, the victims of the numerous bloody campaigns of persecution and retribution that Saddam Hussain conducted against his own people, whether Shiites or Kurds.

No they didn't; they admitted to having *a nuclear weapons programme*.

You're a bit out of date. The North Koreaks are claiming to have nuclear weapons.

And by the way, South Africa never "demonstrated" success with nuclear weapons. They just had them.

This site, the Federation of American Scientists, has a comprehensive look at DRK's nuclear program. They're a lot more real than Iraq's WMD. It might be debatable if they have one today, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.

MOAB: the Monster Truck of American Ordnance

Of course, I can't think of a single contingency where it would be sane or smart to use the MOAB, either. Even if we had a real war with real American interests (as opposed to Brown & Root interests) at stake rather than a neoimperial war to recolonize a former British colony (with American masters now, of course), I can't think of a good reason to use it. If we ever had a real war, tac nukes make more sense.

It's the same thing with these super teched out uniforms. We are fighting colonial wars in impoverished Third World countries that have no hope of actually beating the U.S. in conventional warfare. The big scary villains right now are Iran and North Korea, and the only reason they are "scary" is because if they kill too many of our soldiers it will look bad in the polls, but these teched out uniforms won't help with that. Good body armor, good vehicle armor, and lots of air support is what is needed. Iran and North Korea have no hope of beating the U. S., which spends more on its military than the next 14 nations combined, even if they use a couple of nukes.

Asymmetrical warfare is based on the idea that the enemy (assuming you are in the position of a guerilla/terrorist) is patient, hides well, and constantly scans the enemy for weak points. In the case of terrorists, there will always be a huge number of targets as long as the U.S. is at all a nice place to live, and even if it turns into East Berlin I don't think they can completely shut down terrorism. (A guy in South Korea recently showed what could be done with ordinary gasoline and a subway, for example. He did much better than those Japanese fanatics with their Sarin gas bags.) In our colonies, like Iraq, it will be guerilla warfare. They'll keep testing the defenses, and I suspect they will find weaknesses. (This is why up until recently U. S. wars were supposed to have something called an exit strategy. In other words, the war ends, the troops come home, rather than being permanently deployed to foriegn combat zones.)

So why spend money on all this high-tech but useless and detrimental gear? Well, war is a racket, as Major General Smedley Butler said, and a big part of the racket is bilking the American taxpayer out of billions of dollars to buy weapons that the military should neither need nor want.

Iraq didn't have any SCUDs. Iraq fired HY2 (a modified HY1) Silkworm (US designation Seersucker) missiles at Kuwait. A much different beast. They have an effective range of 80 miles tops. A modified SS-1C Scud-B or Al-Hussein has a range of about 500 miles. A big difference.

Here's an AP story of the missile that hit the shopping mall in Kuwait.

Missile fired at Kuwait City

U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said the attack on the mall appeared to have involved a Chinese-made Silkworm cruise missile launched from southern Iraq.

Note Iraq was never barred from possesing the Silkworms because of their limited range.

I challange you to find a story about a Scud being found in Iraq, it didn't happen. It's pretty obvious you really don't know what you're talking about. Try informinging yourself and come on back to /.

Iraq didn't have any SCUDs. Iraq fired HY2 (a modified HY1) Silkworm (US designation Seersucker) missiles at Kuwait. A much different beast. They have an effective range of 80 miles tops. A modified SS-1C Scud-B or Al-Hussein has a range of about 500 miles. A big difference.

Here's an AP story of the missile that hit the shopping mall in Kuwait.

Missile fired at Kuwait City

U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said the attack on the mall appeared to have involved a Chinese-made Silkworm cruise missile launched from southern Iraq.

Note Iraq was never barred from possesing the Silkworms because of their limited range.

I challange you to find a story about a Scud being found in Iraq, it didn't happen. It's pretty obvious you really don't know what you're talking about. Try informinging yourself and come on back to /.

The US uses the same thing with SIPRNET. It is physically separate from the internet. Script kiddies like to gloat about how insecure military networks are and how they hacked into classified information. Not true. They may certainly have seen some "private" web sites with telephone or social security numbers, but not actual classified information. They'd need to dig a hole and splice fiber first.

We also test fired an anti-satellite laser at a satellite that was no longer in use. We were originally planning to destroy the unused satellite in the test, but other countries asked us not to do so in fear of all the little pieces flying around in orbit.

" so the easy, efficient solution is for the US to give the GPS network to the UN, right?"

umm no... that will never happen, the United States Nuclear Detonation Detection System is also part of the GPS system.

Too late. Already done: pegasus.

This is what I think the article was referring to. It is used to hoist a radar system high in the air. They also use one to broadcast propiganda into Cuba from a site in Florida. I think I remember reading about them being used more for drug interdiction than anything else. Honig

>The enemy migs in Top Gun seemed pretty imaginary to me

What did you expect, that they could "borrow" a couple of Fulcrums? Remember, Top Gun was made, what, 1986-ish? Soviet Union hadn't fallen yet, 29's were probably a little hard to come by unless you are Saddam.

IIRC, they used airforce trainer (prolly T-38 Talon) jets to 'simulate' the migs -- probably the closest you could get back then on a budget.

Ah, no. You see, the TOW is a guided anti-tank missile, while the Carl Gustaf is a recoilless rifle. As in, it has a rifled barrel. It's reusable and you can use different kinds of ammunition. It's also more portable than, say, a TOW, and much cheaper. The Carl Gustaf M3 is currently in service with the Rangers and the Navy SEALS, BTW. More info here.

well, somtimes the truth is stranger than any (bad) sci-fi. ;-)
links provided:
one
two
three
four
(scroll to end)

as to the superiority of the Russian space programme (look, we don't kill our cosmonauts!)

No, when you can airbrush them out of photos and otherwise 'disappear' their entire existences like something out of "1984," you don't need to kill your Cosmonauts.

We'll just have to bring back CONELRAD.

Smaller. There was a lot of interest from the 1960s onwards with launching satellites from high velocity artillery. The work was pioneered by Gerald Bull, who later went on to develop long range artillery for the South Africans, develop the Iraqi supergun and ended his days being assassinated - presumably by the Israelis.

Bull was in charge of a 1960s project called HARP which built an enormous cannon to fire projectiles into the upper atmosphere (and we're talking about 180 km here) over Barbados (well if you're going to do science, you should do it somewhere nice).

The projectiles were instrumented devices known as martlets, Bull planned to develop martlets with small motors that would give them enough kick to enter low orbit.

The cannon would have been much cheaper than rockets, but the technology of building advanced satellites capable of withstanding the shock of launching would have been formidable.

The supergun built for the Iraqis by the British company Matrix Churchill would have not been able to fire satellites, but a bigger one designed by Bull would have. He got round the problem of a short, sharp shock by having a series of explosions accelerate the projectile as it travelled along the gun barrel. Since there would be less pressure on the barrel, it needn't be so strong or made of advanced materials. Bull got the idea from the German V3 gun built to bombard London during WW2. The photo is dreadful but it shows the central barrel and the side barrels coming off it. Each of those would have fired in turn behind the shell and accelerated it up the gun and towards Britain.

More on HARP here and other space guns (with an awesome picture of the HARP gun firing here.

Best wishes,
Mike.

The numbers for FISA taps are available for 2001. The 2002 numbers aren't available yet.

Interesting post on this from Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington.

There have been cases where software bugs in medical equipment killed people. In those cases, there would be strong precedent for product liability lawsuits.

Suppliers to the military are harder to sue, which is probably good news to the folks whose bugs killed soldiers when their mortar targeting software made incorrect assumptions about target altitude or when a Patriot missile targeting system's clock overflowed after 8 hours.

For further reading on software liability issues, see this Business Week article, which was discussed on /. and badsoftware.com, which surveys software liability issues from a consumer's perspective.

"So small that it can drop a sugar cube into your cup of coffee."

A full-scale CH-53D could do this as well. Of course, instead of trying to maneuver the bird into position to drop one cube into your coffee, it'd probably just dump 6.35e05 cubes of sugar onto and around your cup of coffee, which, while not terribly useful, would look pretty damn cool.

"The instruments were recently shock tested in the New Mexico desert by firing them at high speed into 2 metres (6 feet) of plywood, where they experienced 1200 G's of shock and worked perfectly afterwards."

Is that 1200 Earth G's, or 1200 Lunar G's?

And after their other fiasco, you would expect them to use metric units only.

Chip H.

man, some people have too much monaaay. i thought we were experiencing global warming? the water'll still be good! and just how are they planning to bring it all back to earth if they find some? each missle costs $145,000 too!

If you browse a Moro Islamic Liberation Front site you're a terrorist not a paedo :)

Can someone tell me what OS it's running on?

Looks like it runs on many different systems. Given that it is platform agnostic, the GUI likely is a motif app and what you see is a X server running on winblows. Look here.

While some units have rather modern system that can graphically display locations of other troops, others rely on 10-year-old 5 channel receivers. Kind of odd when I can 12 channels on my civilian model (with admittedly lower spatial accuracy).

The fact that some units are using a "10-year-old 5 channel receiver" does not surprise or concern me in the least. The military has prerogatives other than "latest and greatest nifty stuff" when procuring equipment.

Those old units probably contain custom hardware to cope with un-obfuscating GPS signals for back when the signal was still (and could again) being obfuscated. Those devices survive generation after generation of soldiers who are expected to use the things in all combat environments. In other words, this is not some plastic Taiwanese el-cheapo GPS receiver you paid $300 for at wiggliesneatshit.com. Do you have any clue how much time and money it takes to build one-off mil-spec equipment in low volumes that the military routinely requires?

I've actually found detailed technical information about the unit you're talking about. It's here and it's a damned interesting read. For instance, does your spiffy little 12 channel unit happen to have any anti-jamming/spoofing features? Exactly how many artillery shell concussion shock waves will your unit survive while your crew is firing the ol' 155mm? The DoD is so happy with the things they are trying to extend the warranty!

The fact that some units have more modern equipment than others is a perfectly normal, healthy way to run a military. Some of you paying attention to our recent deployment to Iraq have learned that the Army's 4th Infantry Division has only just now arrived in theater. This happens to be the Army's "showcase" Division. If it's the latest, the 4th ID has got it. It's not that our government didn't want to deploy the 4th, but Turkey didn't cooperate and the whole outfit had to be floated around the Mediterranean. Basically, the most advanced ground force on Earth arrived just in time to become traffic cops. Meanwhile, the old fashioned 10-year-old PLGR units are probably exactly what the 3rd ID used to actually get the job done.

You show me someone astonished by military procurement practices and I'll show you an ignorant fool. The next time you have the urge to compare your knowledge of equipment/technology to that of a military, just assume your wrong and shut up.

Plus the old ones have such a crappy user interface that you accidentally drop bombs on your own troops. Apparently, its a 14 step process to replace the battery, and in the confusion of battle mistakes are made. The same display for "current" location is used for "target" location, and in Afghanistan they dropped some on themselves. (Learned during a presentation by Alan Cooper).

...and the Corona satellite.
What I find interesting is that what most people in the US and the rest of the world thought to be a series of peacefull research sateliets named Discovery, actually was the corona spy satelite system. It's even more amazing when you realise what they actually achived with such a 'primitive' system, starting virtually from scratch.

I also found some links to the Thor booster and Agena spacecraft, variants A, B and D on Encyclopedia Astronautica - my favorite webpage for such things.

right, they "deplete" the radioactive components out of the uranium to make it completely safe

Uranium-238 becomes DU, which is 0.7 times as radioactive as natural uranium. Since DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, there is very little decay of those DU materials.

See, very little decay -- that means it is safe to shoot, wear or eat!

In fact, it is so safe and strudy that many municipalities are considering it for use in constructing schools and hospitals. There is a plentiful supply of DU just sitting around, the NRC is looking for volunteer communities to receive free consignments.

...a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport and accelerate up to twenty-five times the speed of sound, attaining low earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours....

It is was also called the X-30. Development was public for several years and then disappeared. Perhaps still going strong in the Black Ops arena? A Google search for NASP on reveals NASPWEB, the National Association of School Psychologist. (An interesting cover)?

Sidebar
What many people may have forgotten was that the State of the Union address was originally scheduled for the evening of January 28, 1986. It was postponed after the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded during liftoff that morning. No "smoking gun" was ever found that the White House pressured NASA into a launch.

Challenger was originally suppose to launch the previous day, January 27, and should have been in orbit when Raegan gave his talk the next day. However the handle on the shuttle access hatch could not be detached. It had corroded in place. It had to be drilled off! After that, I figured it would be a week to replace the hatch.

A cold front moved through Florida that night. As I drove to work the next morning in subfreezing weather, I was surprised when I heard the count down was in progress. At the time, I had been in Florida for six year and that was the coldest morning ever. I never expected them to attempt a launch.

I joined the Navy in '92 (left in 96) and worked on a destroyer as an Electonic Warfare technician. Sitting on watch staring at a SLQ-32 console often had me thinking I was playing a video game. A big part of the job was figuring out who was who. The first "long" cruise we went on (only two weeks - heh) standing 12 hours of watch a day, working for 6 more hours, and getting 4 hours of sleep a night warped my thinking in that I was no longer figuring out who the ships were on my scope, I felt I was creating them! I'd pick up a signal, build a track, decide who it was, and viola, there it was! These ships were nothing but signals and icons to me.

Getting off the ship in San Diego was a huge wake up call... I had been "creating" the USS Rubin James, USS Ingersol and others. But as I walked down the pier, there they were, very real ships with hundreds of very real people walking off heading out to the bars and night clubs...

Scared the hell out of me.

I joined the Navy in '92 (left in 96) and worked on a destroyer as an Electonic Warfare technician. Sitting on watch staring at a SLQ-32 console often had me thinking I was playing a video game. A big part of the job was figuring out who was who. The first "long" cruise we went on (only two weeks - heh) standing 12 hours of watch a day, working for 6 more hours, and getting 4 hours of sleep a night warped my thinking in that I was no longer figuring out who the ships were on my scope, I felt I was creating them! I'd pick up a signal, build a track, decide who it was, and viola, there it was! These ships were nothing but signals and icons to me.

Getting off the ship in San Diego was a huge wake up call... I had been "creating" the USS Rubin James, USS Ingersol and others. But as I walked down the pier, there they were, very real ships with hundreds of very real people walking off heading out to the bars and night clubs...

Scared the hell out of me.

Some of the South American governments were infamous for this.

So, the issue might be that he is being detained without due process or habeas corpus rights

please don't confuse the issue and say the US government "disappeared" him.

Yes this is definitely flamebait, aside from the "gratuitous provocative comment", consider that approximately 3,000 Chileans were murdered by the Pinochet government (and some Americans were murdered as well. This government overthrew one that was democratically elected and forced decades of dictatorship on Chile. It is well documented that the coup was strongly supported by the US government, a fact that to this day makes Henry Kissenger very nervous.

now who is the terrorist in this case?

• The US could have a good go, but im sorry the sum of every other Nation out there DOES outweigh the US...

• you could destroy a heck of alot, but theres alot of nukes in other countries also,

• and far bigger armies.

• You may have the hi-tech, but it will only last so long.

• So Yes, we do have nukes/ICMBs,

• yes we do have spies in all areas of the world

• although the only area to really count is the US so we at least can concentrate on there,

• hell the US was so shocked that someone would attack it on its home turf the aircraft sent up at 9/11 were not even armed.

• Protocol IV to the 1980 convention
• FAS' take on the same convention
• Comment from the Human Right Watch

Will this allow me to put a GBU-32 through a window of the building where the goatse website is hosted?!

"Spray systems mounted on the Mi-8 HIP helicopters were also used against troop concentrations"". (the Mi-8 is a Soviet design)

"Iraqi Su-22 FITTERs and MiG-23 FLOGGERs conducted most air-launched chemical attacks". (likewise, so are the Su-22 and MiG-23)

The US was real buddy-buddy with the other signers of the Baghdad Pact, so I doubt the US was all that hot to have the monarchy overthrown by either communists or Ba'athists.

Poisonous chemicals and deadly viruses are not weapons in their own right. They have many legitimate commercial, agricultural and research uses. Whether or not it was [a good idea/moral] to let Iraq buy dual-use precursor materials is open for debate, but the fact remains (and no one claims otherwise) that Saddam manufactured all his biochem weapons domestically.

auto-aim in some systems-- part of the recent effort of the DoD to install autonomous or semi-autonomous systems to reduce the number of personnel in a given system, in order to minimize error and reduce maintenance costs.

The Patriot missile system, for example, can be set to one of three levels: manual, semi-automatic, or fully automatic. In semi-automatic mode, it detects and assesses inbound targets and tells the operator, who decides what to do. In fully automatic, it detects, assesses, and engages inbound targets without the operator's help. As one might imagine, it is very fast in fully automatic mode.

Another auto-aim system is the Phalanx Close In Weapons System, designed to protect Navy ships from incoming missiles, planes, and high speed boats. It's been mentioned on slashdot many times before. The CIWS has a fully automatic radar system and an attached 20mm gatling gun as a last line of defense so incoming threats can't overwhelm the limited human capacity of the ship, and was deployed in 1977.

So far one of the only auto-aim technologies for ground troops is the TLOS, which detects the enemy's optical devices, like sniper scopes and laser designators, so the foot soldier can engage them faster than if he were searching with the naked eye. But this technology will no doubt be implemented on a wider scale in the next decade when the digital battlefield becomes mainstream. I would look more along the lines of Tactical Mobile Robotics to find auto-aim technologies. See Raptor, basically a sentry that never sleeps. Also, DARPA has a lot of autonomous technology projects in the works.

auto-aim in some systems-- part of the recent effort of the DoD to install autonomous or semi-autonomous systems to reduce the number of personnel in a given system, in order to minimize error and reduce maintenance costs.

The Patriot missile system, for example, can be set to one of three levels: manual, semi-automatic, or fully automatic. In semi-automatic mode, it detects and assesses inbound targets and tells the operator, who decides what to do. In fully automatic, it detects, assesses, and engages inbound targets without the operator's help. As one might imagine, it is very fast in fully automatic mode.

Another auto-aim system is the Phalanx Close In Weapons System, designed to protect Navy ships from incoming missiles, planes, and high speed boats. It's been mentioned on slashdot many times before. The CIWS has a fully automatic radar system and an attached 20mm gatling gun as a last line of defense so incoming threats can't overwhelm the limited human capacity of the ship, and was deployed in 1977.

So far one of the only auto-aim technologies for ground troops is the TLOS, which detects the enemy's optical devices, like sniper scopes and laser designators, so the foot soldier can engage them faster than if he were searching with the naked eye. But this technology will no doubt be implemented on a wider scale in the next decade when the digital battlefield becomes mainstream. I would look more along the lines of Tactical Mobile Robotics to find auto-aim technologies. See Raptor, basically a sentry that never sleeps. Also, DARPA has a lot of autonomous technology projects in the works.

auto-aim in some systems-- part of the recent effort of the DoD to install autonomous or semi-autonomous systems to reduce the number of personnel in a given system, in order to minimize error and reduce maintenance costs.

The Patriot missile system, for example, can be set to one of three levels: manual, semi-automatic, or fully automatic. In semi-automatic mode, it detects and assesses inbound targets and tells the operator, who decides what to do. In fully automatic, it detects, assesses, and engages inbound targets without the operator's help. As one might imagine, it is very fast in fully automatic mode.

Another auto-aim system is the Phalanx Close In Weapons System, designed to protect Navy ships from incoming missiles, planes, and high speed boats. It's been mentioned on slashdot many times before. The CIWS has a fully automatic radar system and an attached 20mm gatling gun as a last line of defense so incoming threats can't overwhelm the limited human capacity of the ship, and was deployed in 1977.

So far one of the only auto-aim technologies for ground troops is the TLOS, which detects the enemy's optical devices, like sniper scopes and laser designators, so the foot soldier can engage them faster than if he were searching with the naked eye. But this technology will no doubt be implemented on a wider scale in the next decade when the digital battlefield becomes mainstream. I would look more along the lines of Tactical Mobile Robotics to find auto-aim technologies. See Raptor, basically a sentry that never sleeps. Also, DARPA has a lot of autonomous technology projects in the works.

auto-aim in some systems-- part of the recent effort of the DoD to install autonomous or semi-autonomous systems to reduce the number of personnel in a given system, in order to minimize error and reduce maintenance costs.

The Patriot missile system, for example, can be set to one of three levels: manual, semi-automatic, or fully automatic. In semi-automatic mode, it detects and assesses inbound targets and tells the operator, who decides what to do. In fully automatic, it detects, assesses, and engages inbound targets without the operator's help. As one might imagine, it is very fast in fully automatic mode.

Another auto-aim system is the Phalanx Close In Weapons System, designed to protect Navy ships from incoming missiles, planes, and high speed boats. It's been mentioned on slashdot many times before. The CIWS has a fully automatic radar system and an attached 20mm gatling gun as a last line of defense so incoming threats can't overwhelm the limited human capacity of the ship, and was deployed in 1977.

So far one of the only auto-aim technologies for ground troops is the TLOS, which detects the enemy's optical devices, like sniper scopes and laser designators, so the foot soldier can engage them faster than if he were searching with the naked eye. But this technology will no doubt be implemented on a wider scale in the next decade when the digital battlefield becomes mainstream. I would look more along the lines of Tactical Mobile Robotics to find auto-aim technologies. See Raptor, basically a sentry that never sleeps. Also, DARPA has a lot of autonomous technology projects in the works.

The J-STARS ground surveillance system is designed to use radar to detect and track slow moving or semi-fixed land targets like vehicles and relay the information to ground units. The system consists of aircraft with high energy radar and advanced signal processing combined with ground stations to receive the information.

Combined with a 3-D map of the battlefield, the location and movements of enemy forces beyond visual range would be a powerful asset. Even if it's as simple as a "red area" on the map to show pilots where *not* to go, that's a huge value. Assuming the system could be extended to ground troops, this type of information could make a huge difference in, e.g., urban areas where troops can't see past the buildings around them. I can think of plenty of Special Forces applications.

Imagine having a monocular on your non-dominant eye showing you a wireframe map of a city in both 2-D and 3-D space with estimated locations/movement of enemy units so you can navigate without making contact. The National Imaging and Mapping Agency has quietly been acquiring and processing high-res 3-D maps of most of the Earth, so it looks like we're well on the way to a totally geographic-aware force.