Lifeboat Foundation

Fun stuff.

Johnny Matheny’s handshake is friendly, confident and firm — though not in the bone-crushing manner favoured by some of the alpha types here in the Pentagon.

What is remarkable is that Matheny’s proffered hand is not actually his. It is part of a robotic prosthesis researchers hope one day could help transform the lives of countless amputees.

Continue reading “From robotic hands to ‘gecko feet’, Pentagon’s DARPA research agency showcases future tech” »

Defense Department scientists are working on a new, digital night vision and thermal device that’s smaller and lighter than the Army’s latest Enhanced Night Vision Goggle.

The PIXNET camera is designed to provide small combat units with a “helmet mounted shortwave and longwave infrared blended imager with wireless networking capability,” according to officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the May 11 DARPA Demo day at the Pentagon.

Currently, soldiers use the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle, or ENVG. The Army began fielding the first generation of the ENVG in 2009 and has since fielded a slightly improve version in the ENVG II.

Continue reading “DARPA Working on New Night Vision Device” »

A new underwater GPS.

For all the benefits that the Global Positioning System provides to landlubbers and surface ships, GPS signals can’t penetrate seawater and therefore can’t be used by oceangoing vehicles like submarines or UUVs. That’s why DARPA is creating an acoustic navigation system, dubbed POSYDON (Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation), and has awarded the Draper group with its development contract.

The space-based GPS system relies on a constellation of satellites that remain in a fixed position relative to the surface of the Earth. The GPS receiver in your phone or car’s navigation system triangulates the signals it receives from those satellites to determine your position. The POSYDON system will perform the same basic function, just with sound instead. The plan is to set up a small number of long-range acoustic sources that a submarine or UUV could use to similarly triangulate its position without having to surface.

Continue reading “DARPA is building acoustic GPS for submarines and UUVs” »

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.

Continue reading “Draper Gets DARPA Contract to Improve Stealth Capabilities for Undersea Vehicles” »

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.

Continue reading “Air Force wants swarms of small ‘kamikaze’ drones to defeat missiles” »

1100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets from 1956 on the interactive NukeMap. How many nuclear weapons do you think are necessary for deterrence?

Of course; makes sense.

DARPA hopes it can ‘fingerprint’ individual cyberattackers and build a picture of their handiwork over time.

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.

Continue reading “WW3 Scenario: Pentagon No Match Against Russia & China’s Supersonic Warheads” »

Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said that Artificial Intelligence had already taken over defense targeting decisions on Aegis missile warships of the US Navy.

© Photo: Pixabay.