Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: military – Page 302

US Navy fighting the real war that is ramping up by unpluging from certain networks. Well, that is an option; but also very limiting to “sneaker net” information file transfers. Definitely not uncommon across other areas of government.

SAN DIEGO — For the Navy, the best defense against a high-tech enemy may be a low-tech strategy.

After decades of building equipment, aircraft and ships designed to communicate with each other and back to shore, the Navy is now looking to “selectively disconnect” its systems to minimize vulnerability to cyberattacks, said Rear Adm. Lorin Selby, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

“We’re going back now and trying to selectively disconnect things and slow down some of these connections and only do it where we think it makes sense, where it’s safe to do it,” Selby told an audience at the AFCEA West conference in San Diego. “We’ve got to be more judicious with the things we connect to the internet or to shore, those kinds of vulnerabilities.”

Read more

Exploring the new battlegrounds of war — a lesson from Ukraine and Russia.

Failure to respond to this blurring of lines will result in the current multilateral system and rules of war becoming gradually outdated. As geopolitical power shifts to emerging states and non-state actors, and strategic competition for regional spheres of influence returns, the aspirations which informed the UN Charter – of a world defined by universal values of democracy and rule of law – seem increasingly hollow. But what new principles and values should underlie the ways in which disputes are resolved? As the incentives for hybrid warfare grows inexorably wider and more complex, we either redraw the lines, or face a future of warfare where there is no distinct or real peace.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more