Lifeboat Foundation

Key point: Washington knows it needs high-tech weapons and machines to win future wars. That includes robots to haul supplies and assist the Marines in winning any fight.

The U.S. Navy is moving quickly to develop robotic warships that could hunt submarines and other ships, screen aircraft carriers and convoys from air attack and sweep away enemy mines.

But there’s another mission the Navy should consider assigning to unmanned surface vessels, Neil Zerbe, a retired Navy officer, argued for the Center for International Maritime Security: shuttling supplies from ship to shore in the aftermath of an amphibious assault by U.S. Marines.

MOSCOW – Russia’s next-generation long-range radar technology has been able to detect a group of 6 fifth-generation F-35 multirole fighter jets near the Iranian border. This was achieved by a radar that has a specific mode of operation which uses the ionosphere when scanning airspace.

Missile and air defense radars control airspace around the Russian Federation over distances of up to several thousand kilometers. This was noted by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who said that long-range air defense radars detected 6 fifth-generation F-35 multi-purpose fighters near Iranian airspace just hours after a missile attack on US military bases in Iraq.

According to the head of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “at that moment, at least six F-35 fighters were detected near the Iranian border. This information needs further confirmation, however, it indicates the seriousness of the situation which has further increased tensions in the region,” RG, a Russian web portal, stated.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Although hypersonic weapons might seem like relative newcomers, known advantages of these weapons are both self-evident and multi-faceted as they can be fired from much greater stand-off ranges while having vastly increased ability to defeat, circumvent or simply destroy enemy air and ballistic missile defenses.

USAF Research Laboratory is working round-the-clock on hypersonic weapons designed to come in the next 10–15 years, in order to “expand USAF’s mission options” in the next decades, as an increasingly contested airspace is emerging, limiting US strike capabilities.

The Pentagon has been aggressively pushing for hypersonic weapons development, especially after Russian advances in this field have left the US trailing behind. Given the implications associated with firing weapons able to travel at over five-times the speed of sound, a number of programs have been underway (reportedly, there are up to 8 US hypersonic programs currently underway).

In 1946 the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or the ENIAC, was introduced. The world’s first commercial computer was intended to be used by the military to project the trajectory of missiles, doing in a few seconds what it would otherwise take a human mathematician about three days. It’s 20,000 vacuum tubes (the glowing glass light bulb-like predecessors to the transistor) connected by 500,000 hand soldered wires were a marvel of human ingenuity and technology.

Imagine if it were possible to go back to the developers and users of that early marvel and make the case that in 70 years there would be ten billion computers worldwide and half of the world’s population would be walking around with computers 100,000,000 times as powerful as the ENIAC in their pants’ pockets.

You’d have been considered a lunatic!

The chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, Gen. Dave Goldfein, confirmed to CNBC the plane that crashed was an Air Force E-11 military airplane. The plane crashed Monday in territory under Taliban control. Arif Noori, a spokesman for the governor’s office in Ghazni, said fire brigades, security officials and rescue teams were at the scene of the crash.

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Europe’s Galileo satellite navigation system can now not only receive, relay, and locate distress beacon signals, it can also respond to the SOS, sending back an acknowledgement to those awaiting rescue that their location and call for help has been received and search and rescue services are responding. The new function became operational during the 12th European Space Conference in Brussels, which ran from January 21 to 22, 2020.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have come a long way since the US Military introduced the first, Transit, in the 1960s. The technology not only revolutionized navigation to the point where anyone with a smartphone can pinpoint their location with the touch of an icon, but it’s also having an increasing impact as more functions are added to that of basic navigation.

Continue reading “ESA’s Galileo satnav system can now reply to SOS signals” »

The US Air Force’s (USAF) XQ-58A Valkyrie low-cost unmanned air vehicle (UAV) demonstrator has completed its fourth flight at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has partnered with Kratos Defense & Security Solutions to develop the demonstrator.

It is part of the research laboratory’s Low Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology portfolio.

The deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program, said an Israeli biological warfare analyst.

Radio Free Asia last week rebroadcast a Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory, known the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.

The U.S. isn’t the only nation preparing for space warfare.