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Category: military – Page 295

A remotely-operated robot reproducing the minutest particulars of a human doing complicated work will be taken into space to do dangerous jobs in orbit. An operational prototype has been demonstrated to the Russian government’s military sci-tech curator.

Military robots under development in Russia won’t be limited to the battlefield only: space applications will have priority, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told reporters last weekend.

“We’ve launched work to create an avatar that will become a crewmember of the Russian national orbital station,” Rogozin said.

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See even Space gets it — the importance of great Cyber Security is needed now.

The disruption of capabilities that space assets provide would have immediate, far-reaching and devastating economic, political, and geostrategic consequences. Over the past two decades, space vulnerabilities have grown dramatically in a manner commensurate with terrestrial dependency on space-based capabilities and enablers. This is true for both civilian and military activities. Purposeful interference with space systems could rather easily trigger a retaliatory spiral of actions that could compromise a safe and secure operating environment in space. Accordingly, having available a range of measures to prevent or preempt an incident, or even full-up conflict, is of rapidly growing importance to an increasing number of countries.

The interruption of space services through a cyber attack could involve large, and possibly very complex, knock-on effects. As the space and cyberspace domains are linked operationally—space cannot exist without cyber and cyber, in some cases, without space—and they permeate all other warfighting domains (i.e. land, air, and sea), cyber-related vulnerabilities of space assets are a major concern. Global effects would be virtually instantaneous.

Given these realities, space-dependent civilian governments are wise to be seeking new ways to engage in serious international discussions concerning how best to ensure responsible behavior in these two connected domains. Meanwhile, space-dependent militaries are, to varying degrees, bracing themselves for the worst by the establishment of crisis management mechanisms to address fast-moving security threats emanating from cyber-related vulnerabilities embedded in space systems and operations. In some cases, this mechanism includes taking proper account of growing government dependency on commercial providers as key parts of both military and civilian missions.

Continue reading “Governance challenges at the intersection of space and cyber security” | >

Elite X-Plane General Aviation Dream Package flight simulator system (credit: Xforce PC)

You can learn how to improve your novice pilot skills by having your brain zapped with recorded brain patterns of experienced pilots via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), according to researchers at HRL Laboratories.

“We measured the brain activity patterns of six commercial and military pilots, and then transmitted these patterns into novice subjects as they learned to pilot an airplane in a realistic flight simulator,” says Matthew Phillips, PhD.

The study, published in an open-access paper in the February 2016 issue of the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found that novice pilots who received brain stimulation via electrode-embedded head caps improved their piloting abilities, with a 33 percent increase in skill consistency, compared to those who received sham stimulation. “We measured the average g-force of the plane during the simulated landing and compared it to control subjects who received a mock brain stimulation,” says Phillips.

Continue reading “Now you can learn to fly a plane from expert-pilot brainwave patterns” | >

China’s public report on their own Cyber Security Strategy — don’t get too excited; it is a “public” version of their plan (mean nothing in depth).

New cyber warfare unit

While China was assessed to have cyber warfare capabilities for quite some time, the declaration by its Central Military Council of the formation of a new military branch focussed on digital battleground technically called Strategic Support Force on 1st Jan. 2016 confirmed this. This new force is mainly aimed at providing resources capable of protecting China’s cyber and space security. On this occasion Xi pointed out that this force is central to achieving the “Chinese Dream” suggesting its importance.

This development has not come as a surprise. Last year China had released it’s first-ever White Paper on military strategy [entitled “China’s Military Strategy”] which stressed on need to shift to “active defence” and emphasized China’s commitment to “winning informationized local wars” as also becoming a maritime power. The White Paper also contained the first official acknowledgement of China’s commitment to building a cyber force with the capability to engage in offensive cyber operations.

Continue reading “Chinese cyber strategy-building deterrence” | >

This story crosses into the realm of satellite launchers and commercial space, but has troubling implications for international security. I personally am a bit more worried about North Korea’s ability to secure ballistic sub-launched weapons of mass destruction since I think that they offer more stealth than an ICBM silo, which we can fairly easily detect.

North Korea’s potential intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) threat may be stealing headlines, but the rogue state’s interest in submarine-launched nuclear weapons is arguably even more worrisome.

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In 2010, DARPA announced it was creating an autonomous, submarine-hunting war machine that would be manned with exactly zero people. Now, that vehicle is ready for action.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV, is now scheduled to be launched April 17 from the Vigor Shipyards in Oregon. The ACTUV will continue sea-trials for 18 months following its maiden voyage, where it will be tested for its long-range tracking and self-driving functions.

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GPS is an utterly pervasive and wonderful technology, but it’s increasingly not accurate enough for modern demands. Now a team of researchers can make it accurate right down to an inch.

Regular GPS registers your location and velocity by measuring the time it takes to receive signals from four or more satellites, that were sent into space by the military. Alone, it can tell you where you are to within 30 feet. More recently a technique called Differential GPS (DGPS) improved on that resolution by adding ground-based reference stations—increasing accuracy to within 3 feet.

Now, a team from the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that augments the regular GPS data with on-board inertial measurements from a sensor. Actually, that’s been tried before, but in the past it’s required large computers to combine the two data streams, rendering it ineffective for use in cars or mobile devices. Instead what the University of California team has done is create a set of new algorithms which, it claims, reduce the complexity of the calculation by several order of magnitude.

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