Defense, Police, Prisons, Weapons etc.

[winston]

New fabric can wipe away toxic chemicals: study

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A new dry wipe can clean up chemical agents such as mustard gas, giving soldiers a more convenient way to deal with toxic materials on the battlefield, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

The wipe was developed by researchers at Texas Tech University in Lubbock in response to a call by the U.S. military for better ways to decontaminate military personnel and equipment.

"This is the first time this kind of wipe has been developed and it has been tested against a real chemical agent," Seshadri Ramkumar of Texas Tech, who developed the wipe, said in a telephone interview.

In tests performed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California using mustard gas and other toxic chemicals, the wipe outperformed 30 different materials, including some currently used in military decontamination kits.

Ramkumar, whose study appears in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, said the dry wipe has an activated carbon core sandwiched between an absorbent layer on the top and bottom. It is meant to replace loose particle cleaners currently used by the military.

"When a soldier is fighting and there are open wounds, he will not be able to put loose particles on the skin.

"They needed something which is not loose particles and they also needed something which can be used both on human skin and on sensitive equipment. This is a tremendous improvement," Ramkumar said.

The university has licensed the product, known as Fibertect, to Hobbs Bonded Fibers in Waco, Texas.

[winston]

Worldwide spending on weapons has reached record levels amounting to well over $1tn last year, a leading research organisation reported today.

Global military expenditure has risen by 45% over the past decade to $1.46tn, according to the latest annual Yearbook on Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).

Though the US accounts for more than half the total increase, China and Russia nearly tripled their military expenditure over the decade, with China now second only to the US in the military expenditure league table.


– The Guardian

[winston]

BTW, Drones are being manufactured 24/7. It's a cheaper alternative to training a pilot and building those expensive war planes ..

America's military empire is bleeding the country dry By Chalmers Johnson on Lew Rockwell.com:

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories.

We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there – 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence .

[kennynah]

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories.

[winston]

Review shows dramatic shift in Pentagon's thinking By Mike Mount, CNN

Under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Pentagon is building up its fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* Quadrennial Defense Review will be issued the same day the Pentagon presents its budget
* New review stresses threat of cyber attacks and threats to surveillance satellites
* The review puts a priority on helicopters for the rugged terrain in Afghanistan
* Review also says effects of climate change could be a cause for future conflicts

Washington (CNN) -- The Pentagon will no longer shape the U.S. military to fight two major conventional wars at once, but rather prepare for numerous conflicts and not all in the same style, according to a draft of a new strategic outlook the Pentagon is announcing on Monday.

The new mantra for military planners will replace the almost 25-year-old combat planning style of fighting and winning two major conventional wars in two different locations in favor of a fighting force that is capable of protecting U.S. interests around the world from a range of threats, from terrorism to cyber attacks.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/02 ... index.html

[kennynah]

Under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Pentagon is building up its fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.

in case, you are wondering if that unmanned aircraft that pursued Jerry Shaw and the FBI agent in the movie Eagle Eye, is just a stage prop....

think again... it is a real and operational flying vehicle....

[kennynah]

people should come to realize that the biggest threat to national security is USA and its overly lobsided technological supremacy....

if you have an iPhone... i suggest you simply click on "Maps", a defacto application found on the screen.... just type in any, and i mean any street name you fancy....however remote that address may be.... you will see not only the map, but real still pictures in 360 degree panaroma view of your location....

this is not just very interesting...it is very scary....

[winston]

And I thought such star-wars systems were a generation away

=====================================

Laser weapon knocks down missile off Calif coast

Air Force says laser defense weapon destroys missile in test off Calif coast

ROBERT JABLON
AP News

Feb 12, 2010 20:52 EST

A high-powered laser destroyed a target missile in flight off the Central California coast in a milestone test of a futuristic but troubled national defense system, the Air Force announced Friday.

A laser weapon mounted on a Boeing jumbo jet tracked the missile as it accelerated over the ocean off the Point Mugu Naval Warfare Center Thursday night, then fired an energy beam that heated the missile until it cracked and broke up, according to statements from the Air Force and two aerospace companies involved in the program.

The test is a boost for a program that has had billions in cost overruns and saw its budget sharply cut last year by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who called the concept "fatally flawed" and destined if for minimal research-and-development.

While the success of the test is a technological triumph, it won't save the airborne laser program from being placed on life-support, a defense analyst said.

"The program results are, unfortunately, two years behind the secretary's decision to cancel the program," said Jim McAleese of Mcaleese and Associates, a lawyer and defense consultant in Virginia who is not affiliated with the project.

The laser program was designed to kill missiles at short range. The 2011 budget for the Missile Defense Agency concentrates instead on two ship-based missiles — the Aegis and the SM-3 — that are more useful for regional conflicts involving, say, Iran or North Korea, Mcaleese said.

"As a practical matter, absent something extraordinary, the program has already receded backwards into a technology incubator as opposed to proceeding into production and fielding," he said.

During Thursday's test, the so-called Airborne Laser Testbed was flown on a modified Boeing 747-400F that took off from Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, Boeing said.

The system used two low-energy lasers to target the missile as it was boosting into the sky from a sea platform, then fired a megawatt-class Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser, or COIL, according to the Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency.

"While ballistic missiles like the one ALTB destroyed move at speeds of about 4,000 miles per hour, they are no match for a superheated, high-energy laser beam racing towards it at 670 million mph," Northrop Grumman Corp. said in a statement. "The basketball-sized beam was focused on the foreign military asset, as the missile is called officially, for only a few seconds before a stress fracture developed, causing the target to catastrophically split into multiple pieces."

"This experiment marks the first time a laser weapon has engaged and destroyed an in-flight ballistic missile, and the first time that any system has accomplished it in the missile's boost phase of flight," Boeing Co. said in a statement. "ALTB has the highest-energy laser ever fired from an aircraft, and is the most powerful mobile laser device in the world."

However, the Air Force said the weapon destroyed a solid-fuel target missile in flight on Feb. 3, although the statement did not provide details. It said the same kind of solid-fuel missile was hit by the laser in a second test Thursday night at Point Mugu but the beam shut off before it could destroy the rocket, the Air Force said.

Much of the research on the program was done in Southern California, which would have benefited economically had the program gone operational.

The airborne laser program began in 1996 and is one in a series of missile defense programs that originated in President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983 — the much-maligned "Star Wars" missile shoot-down effort that was criticized as impractical, expensive and overreaching.

The airborne laser program itself was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget when the defense secretary decided to cancel money for a second aircraft and opted to shunt the existing weapon into research and development.

"This was supposed to put high-powered lasers on a fleet of 747s," Gates said in a speech last year. "After more than a decade of research and development, we have yet to achieve a laser with enough power to knock down a missile in boost phase more than 50 miles from the launch pad — thus requiring these huge planes to loiter deep in enemy air space to have a feasible shot at a direct hit."

Gates said the program would have needed 10 to 20 operational aircraft at around $1.5 billion each.

Source: AP News

[winston]

US cyber defense strategy details hit the Internet

The White House has pulled back the curtain on portions of a secret US cyber defense strategy crafted during the administration of former president George W. Bush.

White House Internet security coordinator Howard Schmidt described bits of the strategy at the RSA cybersecurity conference here, saying the revelation was part of a promise of transparency by President Barack Obama.

Parts of a Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) declassified by Obama became available online Tuesday at whitehouse.gov/cybersecurity.

"We can't ask industry to help government and government can't help industry if we don't have transparency," Schmidt said while making the announcement.

"It gives the American people the ability to partner with their government."

Scott Charney, Microsoft corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing, was among those that welcomed the idea of the government being more forthcoming with cyber defense information.

"The public-private partnership is in need of improvement; it always has been," said Charney, who was head of computer crime prosecution at the Justice Department from 1991 to 1999.

"It seems the government has moved from a phase of consideration to a phase of action, and that is a good thing."

Sharing cyberattack information between government and private business has been muted by national security concerns on one side and fears of tainting brand images on the other.

"It never really happened," Charney said. "The government didn't share and the industry didn't share."

Schmidt said he hoped releasing declassified versions of the strategy would drive alliances between government cyber warriors and security firms, academics and others skilled in the field.

"Our collective knowledge is our biggest strength," Schmidt said. "We will not beat our adversaries because they are weak; we will beat them because we become stronger."

CNCI was crafted as the result of a presidential directive signed by Bush in January of 2008. Its budget remains a mystery but is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars.

The declassified strategy includes consolidating the government computer network and deploying sensors to detect intrusions.

Government agencies must work together on research and link "cyber ops" centers to more astutely assess situations, according to the CNCI.

"There is a pressing need to ensure that government information security offices and strategic operations centers share data regarding malicious activities against federal systems," according to freshly declassified documents.

One of the initiatives calls for a government-wide cyber counterintelligence plan to "detect, deter, and mitigate the foreign-sponsored cyber intelligence threat" to US networks and private businesses.

The government must also figure out its role in the cyber defenses of power grids, financial markets and other computer infrastructure that have become critical to daily life in this country, according to the CNCI.

The US government will need to show it can be trusted to fairly balance cyber defense with respect for privacy of online information.

Some RSA attendees were skeptical, citing Bush-era shenanigans that evidently included snooping on email and other Internet communications without proper court orders.

"You lose trust, it gets harder to do the right thing," Charney said. "If you are Howard Schmidt, the NSA, or whoever, you need to explain what you want to accomplish and how you will execute on it while balancing privacy concerns."

Public-private partnership is imperative to cyber defenses, said Melissa Hathaway, who served as interim cyber chief for Obama before becoming a consultant to computer security firms such as Cisco.

"We are almost at epidemic levels of online fraud and crime; pillaging and looting on the Internet," she said at RSA.

Hathaway proposed the creation of a non-profit organization to act as a neutral party or "safe house" for inside information shared by businesses to alleviate fears of disclosing weaknesses to competitors.

Source: AFP Global Edition

[kennynah]

W ..

one day, the US gahmen may decide to spend billions to prepare its young to shoot bazookas by giving them out in schools and build using them into their curriculum....