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Category: military – Page 307

Draper Gets DARPA Contract to Improve Stealth Capabilities for Undersea Vehicles

I love contract season with the US Government because you get to see all of the cool projects being awarded.

CAMBRIDGE, MA — The U.S. military’s unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) depend on stealth as they conduct surveillance and reconnaissance and other missions in the deep oceans. With Global Positioning System (GPS) signals unable to penetrate the ocean’s surface, these UUVs can rely on inertial sensors to provide acceptable positioning information during short missions. On longer missions, however, inertial sensors accumulate error, forcing the vehicles to risk exposing themselves to enemies as they periodically surface to obtain a GPS fix.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is addressing this issue by funding the development of a small number of acoustic transmitters that can be anchored to fixed locations around ocean basins to serve as an undersea navigation constellation, according to a May 10 release by the Cambridge-based nonprofit company Draper.

By measuring its range to multiple signals emanating from known coordinates, an undersea vehicle can operate continuously with accurate navigation information without needing to surface for GPS fixes or to use high cost inertial systems that are typical of current UUVs. DARPA awarded a contract on March 15 to a Draper-led team to begin development of a solution for the Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation (POSYDON).

Air Force wants swarms of small ‘kamikaze’ drones to defeat missiles

Nice; let’s hope they hit the right target.

“I need a stealth bomber that’s going to get close, and then it’s going to drop a whole bunch of smalls – some are decoys, some are jammers, some are [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] looking for where the SAMs are. Some of them are kamikaze airplanes that are going to kamikaze into those SAMs, and they’re cheap. You have maybe 100 or 1,000 surface-to-air missiles, but we’re going to hit you with 10,000 smalls, not 10,000 MQ-9s. That’s why we want smalls.”

SAMs stands for “Surface-to-Air Missile,” and they’re one of the reasons that the Air Force has invested so much in stealth technology over the years: if a missile can’t see a plane, it can’t hit it. The problem is that the economics don’t quite work that way: it’s easier to make a new, better missile than it is to make an existing airplane even stealthier, and modern Air Force fighters serve for around 30 years each—longer if they’re bombers. Missiles are generally cheaper than airplanes, so anyone who wants to protect against aerial attack just needs to invest in a lot of missiles.

f-22 f22 raptor inherent resolve arabian sea
US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Corey Hook As stealthy as planes can be, missiles can always be made to find them.

WW3 Scenario: Pentagon No Match Against Russia & China’s Supersonic Warheads

The United States is preparing for war against two of the threats it has named constantly: Russia and China. However, the West may have to think twice before truly waging a war against the two countries as new reports say the military gap between the US and the two countries are closing in. Are Russia and China now at par with the United States?

American military analysts are claiming that military advancements in Russia and China now pose serious threats to the United States. Furthermore, the analysts said that it is no longer safe for America to continue pursuing its presence in the South China Sea, especially near where China has deployed considerable military assets. Russia previously also said that the United States is not safe in the Baltic Sea especially given the recent military encounters.

“Since the end of the Cold War, the US military has never really had to fight an enemy that had its own arsenal of precision-guided weapons,” said Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow at the US Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments as reported by The Hill.

US military proposes secure, self-destructing messaging app

Military’s new Mission Impossible style messaging.

The U.S. military needs new messaging technology that’s ultra-secure and self-destructs. Sound familiar?

Think SnapChat. That’s an important part of what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is aiming to do via a request for proposals posted on a DOD Web page. In Phase III of the project, DARPA says it requires “a secure messaging system that can provide… one time eyes only messages,” among a host of other features. Similarly, SnapChat allows a message to be viewed for a short length of time (1 to 10 seconds) before it becomes inaccessible, the primary reason it has become such a popular messaging platform.

Beyond this, the larger objective for the military is to meet a “critical DoD need to develop a secure messaging and transaction platform.” The DARPA request for proposals is aimed at building a messaging platform that the military could use for secure communication ranging from procurement to intelligence.

DARPA director cautions on AI’s limitations

Another person this time DARPA (Arati Prabhakar) speaks about the truth on AI and it’s real world limitations.

The Pentagon’s R&D arm is heavily invested in driving the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but the program’s director warned the technology isn’t without its limitations.

May 02, 2016.

Board member Teri Takai told FedScoop that engagement from federal agencies is critical in order to meet FirstNet goals.

Raytheon developing technology to make software “immortal”

Making software immortal; Raytheon is trying to make it a reality.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 2, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — A team led by Raytheon BBN Technologies is developing methods to make mobile applications viable for up to 100 years, despite changes in hardware, operating system upgrades and supporting services. The U.S. Air Force is sponsoring the four-year, $7.8 million contract under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems program.

“Mobile apps are pervasive in the military, but frequent operating system upgrades, new devices and changing missions and environments require manual software engineering that is expensive and causes unacceptable delays,” said Partha Pal, principal scientist at Raytheon BBN. “We are developing techniques to eliminate these interruptions by identifying the way these changes affect application functionality and modifying the software.”

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