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Category: military – Page 184

The Pentagon is executing its first project under the authorities granted by the Defense Production Act in order to produce more than 39 million critical N95 masks amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

“On the evening of April 10, the Department of Defense received approval from the White House Task Force to execute the first DPA Title 3 project responding to COVID-19,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Andrews said in a statement.

“The $133M project will use these authorities to increase domestic production capacity of N95 masks to over 39 million in the next 90 days,” the statement added.

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DARPA is planning to develop a travel adapter for the human body. Called the ADvanced Acclimation and Protection Tool for Environmental Readiness (ADAPTER), the new program aims to produce an implantable or ingestible bioelectronic device to help soldiers handle jet lag and diarrhea.

Anyone who has traveled extensively knows that jet lag and diarrhea are not jokes. Jet lag and other sleep-cycle disruptions such as shift work can impair alertness and athletic performance, and cause disorientation, fatigue, indigestion, irritability, insomnia, and excessive sleepiness. Meanwhile, travel diarrhea can produce symptoms that range from unpleasant to severe.

This is bad enough for tourists or business people, but for soldiers jet lag and diarrhea can be a real hindrance as hundreds or even thousands of soldiers can be deployed to the other side of the world at a moment’s notice, only to end up running so far ahead of the logistical chain that they have to rely on local food and water instead of standard military rations. The end result is soldiers impaired by disrupted sleep cycles or requiring medical attention for intestinal problems as a result of consuming contaminated food and water.

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Chip maker Intel has been chosen to lead a new initiative led by the U.S. military’s research wing, DARPA, aimed at improving cyber-defenses against deception attacks on machine learning models.

Machine learning is a kind of artificial intelligence that allows systems to improve over time with new data and experiences. One of its most common use cases today is object recognition, such as taking a photo and describing what’s in it. That can help those with impaired vision to know what’s in a photo if they can’t see it, for example, but it also can be used by other computers, such as autonomous vehicles, to identify what’s on the road.

But deception attacks, although rare, can meddle with machine learning algorithms. Subtle changes to real-world objects can, in the case of a self-driving vehicle, have disastrous consequences.

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You know the scene in “Akira” where Tetsuo rips a satellite space weapon out of orbit?

Now the U.S. military wants to try something similar, according to Defense One. The Pentagon is requesting hundreds of millions of dollars to ramp up space-based weaponry including particle beams and space lasers that’ll fire downward at Earthly targets — a dark vision of the militarization of space.

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The satellite captured a Pakistani Navy hovercraft approaching Manora beach. This is a convenient location, right next to a a major Marines base known as PNS Qasim. From other sources we know that the hovercraft was carrying both Pakistani and Chinese marines. The troops ran down the ramp and across the beach side by side, a formation designed for the cameras. In combat conditions the troops would probably not be deployed in this manner.

The joint exercise was not just for the cameras however. It underscores the close defense relationship which extends into industry. China is a major arms supplier to Pakistan, and has been helping better establish local shipbuilding. The exercise in question, Sea Guardian 2020, took place in January.

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The military branches are requiring troops to make their own cloth face masks after the Pentagon’s latest policy directed face coverings for all personnel during the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The Defense Department announced Sunday that troops, DoD civilian employees, contractors and family members are encouraged to make simple coverings out of clean T-shirts and other household materials. The do-it-yourself face coverings are mandatory whenever people cannot maintain six feet of social distance in public areas or places of work, according to the policy, signed by Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

The DIY masks will help preserve much-needed N95 and surgical masks for health care workers, the policy states.

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The US is well behind China on this front, though. A team led by quantum supremo Jian-Wei Pan have already demonstrated a host of breakthroughs in transmitting quantum signals to satellites, most recently developing a mobile quantum satellite station.

The reason both countries are rushing to develop the technology is that it could provide an ultra-secure communication channel in an era where cyberwarfare is becoming increasingly common.

I t’s essentially impossible to eavesdrop on a quantum conversation. The strange rules of quantum mechanics mean that measuring a quantum state immediately changes it, so any message encoded in quantum states will be corrupted if someone tries to intercept it.

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