Killing two British pilots and shooting down a U.S. Navy fighter was just the beginning. The Patriot missile defense system had a slew of problems during the Iraq invasion — problems which are only now slowly coming to light. “Spurious ‘ghost’ missile tracks showed up on Patriot Missile battery radars hundreds of times before and […]
July 2004
They may look a litle silly — like giant volleyballs, kinda. But the Navy thinks that big, round blimps may just be the key to spying on terrorist camps, and communicating with its sailors. As we’ve mentioned before, the U.S. military has been on a bit of an airship kick, lately. That’s because the helium-filled, […]
U.S. Special Forces have a new way of learning Arabic — by playing a video game. Arabic is one of those languages that are particularly hard to master in a classroom. There’s a whole new alphabet to learn. A lot of the syllables seem the same to American ears. Unlike French or Spanish, there aren’t […]
Guarding military bases can be a lousy job — long strecthes of mind-numbing boredom, punctuated by flashes of intense danger. A perfect gig for a robot, in other words. So Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is trying out a set of drones to watch its perimeter, the AP notes. One robot being tested is […]
It’s a spook fantasy: an all-seeing, always-on, rain-or-shine constellation of satellites, able to keep track of every plane, truck, and person below. “We need to know something about everything all the time,” undersecretary of defense for intelligence Stephen Cambone told a conference last year. “We need an illuminator, throwing into relief all the pictures and […]
