Free Republic

The lightning rod for rapid fielding of directed energy (DE) weapons and advanced sensors will be the military’s next-generation jammer programs that exploit technologies like active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs) antennas and high-power microwave (HPM) capabilities, say senior U.S. government and industry officials at the 13th Directed Energy Conference. Radars on the Lockheed Martin F-22 and F-35, and Boeing F/A-18F and EA-18G, already have the potential to fire focused beams of energy as soon as funding is available to develop the necessary advanced algorithms. The U.S. Navy’s Next Generation Jammer program is expected to move AESA from radar applications to...

Israel has assessed that Iran could employ electronic warfare (EW) to shut down communications in the Jewish state. Officials said the Defense Ministry and the military have concluded that Iran was acquiring and testing EW systems meant to destroy computers in government and key facilities as well as the Internet infrastructure in Israel. They said Iranian methods could also include hacking computers of the state-owned broadcasting network and planting false messages. "On its own, Iran doesn't yet have significant EW capabilities," an official said. "But we know that it is working with elements in several countries, including China, that have...

While the Pentagon may not have been listening to the increasing calls, from the troops, for a militarized smart phone, one defense supplier (Raytheon) has, and resulted in RATS (Raytheon Android Tactical System). Taking advantage of the open source Android operating system (think of it as mobile Linux), and the thousands of applications already available for it, RATS combines this with increasingly powerful, and inexpensive smart phone hardware, to produce something the troops want. Actually, RATS isn't a phone, it's a wi-fi device that looks like one (as does the Ipod Touch). RATS has GPS, a compass, vidcam and software...

The military is a major user of supercomputers (the fastest computers on the planet). These machines were first developed, as were the first computers, for military applications. These ultra-powerful computers are used for code breaking, and to help design weapons (including nukes) and equipment (especially electronics). The military is also needs lots of computing power for data mining (pulling useful information, about the enemy, from ever larger masses of information.) Because there's never enough money to buy all the super-computers (which are super expensive) needed, military researchers have come up with ways to do it cheaper. A decade ago, it...

The U.S. Navy is playing catch-up by equipping some of its F-18E fighters with IRST (Infa-Red Search & Track). The first F-18E Block IIs are entering service, carrying an IRST pod. IRST uses a high resolution infrared (heat sensing) radar to positively spot and identify a potential aerial target (using a 3-D model of the target in its computer memory.) This is similar to the ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared) pods used to spot surface targets. FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared Radar) has been around since the 1980s, and as the technology became more powerful, it was possible to spot...