The joint patrol first passed through a 12-mile-wide strait between Japan’s main islands in an already significant show of force.
Mapping the ocean floor will have plenty of scientific and commercial uses. The military, too, may be interested.
That layer would be absolutely essential in trying to defend against a FOBS, that is if a defense at all is actually feasible or even strategically sound. We are not talking about a rogue state here with a few advanced ballistic missiles. China would be able to deploy dozens or even hundreds of these at once. At a certain point, kinetic defenses against such a capability become a losing proposition and a very costly one at that.
Still, this was an early test aboard a full-on rocket used for traditional space access missions. It will take China some time to perfect such a system and package it in a quickly deployable militarized configuration. Major thermal and ablative issues also must be overcome, among others, but it’s not like China hasn’t been working diligently in the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle realm for many years.
Regardless, if this report ends up being fully accurate, one thing is likely: New calls for hugely expensive missile defense capabilities will be ringing loud and often on Capitol Hill, as well as demands to do whatever possible to bring China to the bargaining table in hopes of obtaining some type of strategic arms limitation treaty.
North Korea fired at least one ballistic missile from its eastern coast on Tuesday morning, according to South Korean and Japanese officials.
The launch took place in the port city of Sinpo, Hamgyong province, at about 10 a.m. local time Tuesday (9 p.m. ET Monday), South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said. In a text to reporters, the JCS said it appeared to be a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM).
South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the missile is estimated to have been fired from the sea, but has yet to confirm whether it was launched from a submarine. Sinpo is home to a North Korean naval shipyard.
BEIJING, Oct 18 (Reuters) — China tested a space vehicle in July, not a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile as reported by the Financial Times, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Monday.
Quoting five people familiar with the matter, the Financial Times reported on Saturday that China had tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile that flew through space, circling the globe before cruising down toward its target, which it missed by about two dozen miles. read more. The paper said the feat had “caught U.S. intelligence by surprise”.
“It was not a missile, it was a space vehicle,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a regular press briefing in Beijing when asked about the report, adding it had been a “routine test” for the purpose of testing technology to reuse the vehicle.
“This speed bag resupply feature is a game changer for the warfighter,” said in a statement Mike Goodwin, sales and strategy manager Bell. “With the ability to drop supplies quickly and efficiently in a drop zone or a remote location, we can get critical supplies delivered as soon as they’re needed.”
Bell claims the APT has already flown 420 times at U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, in Georgia, and other sites. Now, the company is seeking to demonstrate how the aircraft can drop supplies on demand at its cruising speed of 80 mph (129 km/h).
Continue reading “Goodbye Paradrops! Bell Showcases Its New Autonomous Supply Drop Drone” »
The robot dog has a remote-controlled rifle attached to its back as a human operator can control it via an Android tablet. The robot has been named the SPUR, which stands for Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle.
It features a 6.5mm Creedmoor rifle, from military defense company SWORD International, on top of a Quadrupedal Unmanned Ground Vehicle (QUGV) developed by Ghost Robotics.
The SPUR was first displayed at the US Army’s annual convention in Washington DC on Monday.
Continue reading “Armed with remote-controlled rifles, military robot dogs are now on the move” »
At the outbreak of World War I, the French army was mobilized in the fashion of Napoleonic times. On horseback and equipped with swords, the cuirassiers wore bright tricolor uniforms topped with feathers—the same get-up as when they swept through Europe a hundred years earlier. The remainder of 1914 would humble tradition-minded militarists. Vast fields were filled with trenches, barbed wire, poison gas and machine gun fire—plunging the ill-equipped soldiers into a violent hellscape of industrial-scale slaughter.
Capitalism excels at revolutionizing war. Only three decades after the first World War I bayonet charge across no man’s land, the US was able to incinerate entire cities with a single (nuclear) bomb blast. And since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1,945 our rulers’ methods of war have been made yet more deadly and “efficient”.
Continue reading “Algorithms of war: The military plan for artificial intelligence” »
According to this guy, the argument will be that the AI is needed to make split second decisions, and will gradually increase from there.
Retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal joins ‘Influencers with Andy Serwer’ to share his biggest fears regarding artificial intelligence.
ANDY SERWER: I want to ask you about AI, artificial intelligence, because you wrote, “ceding the ability to manage relationships to an algorithm, we rolled a dangerous die.” What are the specific uses of AI that concern you and then we can talk about AI weapons and that’s really scary stuff. But let’s talk about it generally and then specifically with regard to the military.
Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) has inked a partnership with Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics to identify uses cases involving legged robots for security, defence, and humanitarian applications. They will look to test and develop mobile robotic systems, as well as the associated technology enablers, that can be deployed in challenging urban terrain and harsh environments.
The collaboration also would see robots from Ghost Robotics paired with DSTA’s robotics command, control, and communications (C3) system, the two partners said in a joint statement released Thursday.
The Singapore government agency said its C3 capabilities were the “nerve centre” of military platforms and command centres, tapping data analytics, artificial intelligence, and computer vision technologies to facilitate “tighter coordination” and effectiveness during military and other contingency operations.
