America is only in the first year of the kind of fight Israel has been wag­ing for decades. So it’s only nat­ural that the Pentagon is start­ing to get some of its com­bat tech­nol­ogy from Tel Aviv.
“From ten­nis ball-​​sized sen­sors that can be thrown or shot from snipers rifles into ter­ror­ist lairs to wall-​​breaching devices for urban com­bat, gear invented for Israels anti-​​terror wars in Gaza and the West Bank are increas­ingly being put in the hands of U.S. warfight­ers,” Defense News reports.

One sys­tem pro­posed for the U.S. Marines is a remote-​​controlled weapon sta­tion for crew pro­tec­tion and tar­get engage­ment. Combined with an… acoustic sen­sor detec­tion and direction-​​finding device, it essen­tially becomes a robotic anti-​​sniper weapon for wheeled or tracked vehi­cles…
[An Israeli] firm sold 100 mar­itime ver­sions of the remote-​​controlled sys­tems to the U.S. Special Operations Command in late 2003…
Meanwhile, the Pentagons Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office has ordered mul­ti­ple pro­to­types of a new, 360-​​degree sur­veil­lance sen­sor from a small Tel Aviv-​​based firm called ODF Optronics Ltd. Called the Eyeball, the ten­nis ball-​​sized recon­nais­sance sys­tem con­tains motion-​​detectors, a voice-​​activated recorder, speak­ers, micro­phones and trans­mit­ters to see, hear and com­mu­ni­cate with enemy insur­gents within a 25 meter radius…
And, the U.S. Army has ordered an addi­tional 14 Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd.-developed Hunter unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles to sup­port ongo­ing oper­a­tions in Iraq.
The Hunter con­tract, esti­mated at $33 mil­lion, is a follow-​​on to the Armys exist­ing fleet of sys­tems, which col­lec­tively flew more than 3,000 hours over the Iraqi the­ater, U.S. and Israeli sources said. 

“Popular sci­ence mag­a­zines used to be aimed at the geeky wannabe inven­tor,” Salon says. “Today, it’s all about the glam­our of war.”

Fareed Zakaria has a must-​​read Newsweek col­umn on “the rise of a new phe­nom­e­non in global pol­i­tics: ter­ror­ism that is not state-​​sponsored but society-​​sponsored.”

Al Qaeda has lost its base in Afghanistan, two thirds of its lead­ers have been cap­tured or killed, its funds are being frozen. And yet ter­ror attacks mount from Indonesia to Casablanca to Spain. “These attacks are not being directed by Al Qaeda. They are being inspired by it,” the offi­cial told me. “I’m not even sure it makes sense to speak of Al Qaeda because it con­veys the image of a sin­gle, if decen­tral­ized, group. In fact, these are all dif­fer­ent, local groups that have in com­mon only ide­ol­ogy and ene­mies.“
This is the new face of ter­ror: dozens of local groups across the world con­nected by a global ideology.

“NASA has made aero­nau­tics his­tory by launch­ing an exper­i­men­tal jet that reached a record veloc­ity of just over seven times the speed of sound,” CNN reports.
“Fifty-​​seven years after test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound bar­rier, NASA on Saturday launched the unpiloted [X-​​43A] research jet. It is the first time a supersonic-​​combustion ram­jet, or scram­jet, which uses air for fuel, had trav­eled so fast.“
Slashdot has more here. And here’s an arti­cle of mine from November on the Pentagon’s super­sonic efforts.

If a new Pentagon pro­posal gets through Congress intact, half of the G.I.s in Germany may being say­ing auf wieder­se­hen to Deutschland. Phil Carter <a href=“a href=“http://philcarter.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_philcarter_archive.html#108023184207566987″>explains the move.

Back in the day, putting down a jail­house riot meant using a cou­ple of billy clubs and a whole lot of mal­ice. But now, there’s a wider array of tools, from cam­eras that see through walls to robots that spew fog. Wired mag­a­zine looks at the tech­nol­ogy of prison guards.

Clearing the world’s nearly 60 mil­lion unex­ploded land mines is tedious, tor­tur­ous work, with con­ven­tional detec­tors often unable to tell the dif­fer­ence between a mine and a Coke can.
“But a new tech­nol­ogy that shakes the sur­face of sus­pected mine fields with gen­tle seis­mic waves may one day detect many plas­tic or metal mines while ignor­ing metal debris,” the New York Times reports. “That is because these mines vibrate dif­fer­ently from the soil or debris around them. Radar or laser-​​based scans can detect this dif­fer­ence and, with the right sig­nal pro­cess­ing, show the loca­tion of mines in com­puter displays.”