The commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Marine General Francis Donovan, has ordered the formation of a new command. This command, it turns out, is the so-called “autonomous warfare command” (SAWC).
The purpose of creating SAWC is stated as supporting the priorities of the US President’s National Security Strategy, the key directions of the Secretary of Defense’s National Defense Strategy, and the imperatives of SOUTHCOM (US Southern Command) itself.
Address correspondence to: Taylor A. Doherty, UCSD, 9,500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093–0635, USA. Phone: 858.822.7563; Email: [email protected].
Find articles by Wang, X. in: | Google Scholar
¹VA San Diego Healthcare System, La Jolla, California, USA.
The U.S. Army 1st Cavalry Division has completed the latest phase of its counter drone experimentation, a live-fire exercise from April 7–9 testing cUAS systems for its “Golden Shield” counter-drone concept for an armored formation. This significant step in the division’s Pegasus Charge initiative incorporated autonomous cUAS battlefield effectors for the first time, advancing efforts to protect U.S. forces from the growing threat of small unmanned aerial systems. Exercise Golden Shield integrated advanced sensors, kinetic and non-kinetic effectors and command-and-control systems to create an autonomous cohesive defense against small UAS. The effort, led by the 1st Cavalry Division in collaboration with Army DEVCOM and industry partners, aims to enhance the protection of armored vehicles and their crews while maneuvering. The system links sensors and weapons on tactical vehicles to automatically detect, track and engage threats, significantly shortening the sensor-to-shooter timeline and reducing cognitive load.
“The intent is to take these systems we tested this week and begin to integrate them within our armored formations’ training,” said Maj. Kevin Correa, 1st Cavalry Division’s air and missile defense chief. “In that way, we are able to fully exercise not only the systems, but the tanker’s ability to manage these systems while conducting their normal operations.”
“The future is formation-based layered protection, and this is the start of that,” said Alfred Grein, executive director for Research and Technology Integration for the U.S. Army Capabilities Development Command Ground Vehicle Systems Center. “Some (of the systems) are more mature than others. But understand that’s part of why we do experiments to determine what we think is ready to hand-off to Soldiers in the field environment.”
Thales launches the TopStar Smart Receiver, a three-in-one ultra-compact solution providing land forces with resilient positioning, navigation and timing capabilities, while maintaining radio communications in increasingly contested electronic warfare environments. TopStar Smart Receiver can be integrated into land vehicles, drones and munitions. Produced entirely within a sovereign European industrial base, TopStar Smart Receiver is assembled at Thales’ site in Valence, France. This solution is already available for testing in real-world conditions.
Adelaide University researchers have successfully tested a new type of portable atomic clock at sea for the first time, using technology that could help power the next generation of navigation, communications and scientific systems. The research team, from the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS), developed the highly precise device and trialed it aboard a vessel provided by the Royal Australian Navy in July 2024. They have reported their findings in a new paper published in the journal Optica.
Atomic clocks are the world’s most accurate timekeepers and are essential for technologies such as GPS navigation, telecommunications networks and radio astronomy. However, most high-performance atomic clocks operate in carefully controlled laboratory environments and are not designed to be easily transported or used in challenging real-world conditions. The newly developed device changes that.
Photonics researchers created a portable optical atomic clock that uses laser-cooled atoms of the element ytterbium to keep time with extreme precision. By cooling the atoms with lasers and measuring a very specific atomic transition, the clock can track time far more accurately than conventional systems.
A critical vulnerability in the wolfSSL SSL/TLS library can weaken security via improper verification of the hash algorithm or its size when checking Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) signatures.
Researchers warn that an attacker could exploit the issue to force a target device or application to accept forged certificates for malicious servers or connections.
WolfSSL is a lightweight TLS/SSL implementation written in C, designed for embedded systems, IoT devices, industrial control systems, routers, appliances, sensors, automotive systems, and even aerospace or military equipment.
Territorial conflicts in animals can inform aspects of human warfare, but civil war, with its shifting group identities, has not been previously observed. We report a rare, permanent fission in the largest-known group of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Using 30 years of behavioral observations and network analyses, we describe a transition from cohesion to polarization in 2015 and the emergence of two distinct groups by 2018. Over the next 7 years, members of one group made 24 attacks, killing at least seven mature males and 17 infants in the other group. These findings indicate that group identities can shift and escalate into lethal hostility in one of our closest living relatives in the absence of the cultural markers often thought necessary for human warfare.
The US Air Forces Central (USAFCENT), a component of US Central Command (CENTCOM), has placed an order worth over $9m with US-based drone manufacturer Skydio for the supply of Skydio Dock and X10 systems.
The drones and infrastructure will be used to secure US airbases in the Middle East as part of one of the largest deployments of autonomous drone security systems by the US Air Force (USAF) for international base protection.
