WASHINGTON: You didn’t hear much about them during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but DARPA, small businesses, and universities were the people who most impressed retired Gen. Hoss Cartwright when he was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as he and the services scrambled to find weapons to give American troops a… Keep reading →

COMDEF: After decades without a significant new rotocraft technology, the head of Pentagon buying says he’s going to try and fund a new initiative to move helicopters and their brethren like the V-22 ahead. It won’t be easy. “Anything is going to be very hard to squeeze into the budget,” Kendall told reporters during a… Keep reading →

Anti-submarine warfare has given rise to some of the best war movies — “Run Silent, Run Deep;” “The Hunt For Red October” and “Das Boot” come to mind. The romance of the terror of being hunted and of the human conflict inherent in submarine warfare offers great material for auteurs. But the sometimes unbearable tension… Keep reading →

New technology creates new capabilities — and new vulnerabilities. “Moving to the cloud” is the trend du jour, even in the intelligence world, but the recent attacks on the nation’s banking system has raised uncomfortable questions about how to make cloud computing secure. “The cloud” may seem amorphous, but in reality it consists of a… Keep reading →

It’s conventional wisdom to declare that offense will always beat defense in cyberspace, because the Internet was designed with access in mind, not security. It’s a technological problem with strategic consequences as Russian and Chinese hackers rob us blind. But now DARPA, the agency that invented the Internet, is tried to reverse that situation by… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Why in the world is the Pentagon trying to develop a better beef jerky, run grocery stores, microbreweries, study flying dinosaurs and build (not tilt at) windmills? That is the question a conservative Republican senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, asks in a new report — “Department of Everything” — issued today. The subtitle of… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: If you’ve ever daydreamed of designing your own tank — okay, “infantry fighting vehicle” — then DARPA wants to give you your shot. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a long history of long shots, including such high-risk, high-reward projects as the first stealth aircraft and the earliest version of what became the… Keep reading →

China unveils a new “stealth” jet, but we don’t know how stealthy it is or when it might fly actual missions. China unveils a new aircraft carrier. Its leaders boast about extending China’s reach, but the carrier doesn’t have any planes and we aren’t sure when they might build them. Monitoring a rapidly developing China,… Keep reading →

Why is the military’s elite research arm so interested in robots with legs? It isn’t speed. Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah robot, funded by DARPA, made headlines after it broke its own speed record yesterday and became the first robot to run on legs faster than the fastest human, track star Usain Bolt. Cheetah got up to… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: I walked past a sandy desert, a littoral waterway and a steamy jungle and watched a human-like robot extinguish a shipboard fire, all in about an hour and without leaving town. It was possible because the Navy has opened a new Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR) on the grounds of the Naval Research… Keep reading →