Free Republic

Aseismic shift has occurred in the Trump administration’s new defense spending plan that is just emerging when it comes to the USAF’s airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) predicament. The service’s E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft are dwindling in number and rapidly aging into unsupportability. The proven and in-production E-7 Wedgetail, based on the Boeing 737 and serving with multiple allies, was supposed to bridge the gap between the E-3’s retirement and pushing the sending part of the mission to space-based distributed satellite constellations. You can read all about this here. Now, if the administration gets...

It is in one of the most remote places on the planetFor many centuries, extensive, vast and lush deserts in terms of sand have been a challenge for archaeology, as beneath their dunes there may be remains of ancient civilisations. Well, thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR), something surprising has been discovered in the Dubai desert. What is synthetic aperture radar (SAR)? Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a technology that provides high-quality images of the subsoil and can penetrate sand. This information is combined with powerful algorithms to analyze large areas of land for patterns that...

On June 24, 2012, the body of Shane Todd, a young US electrical engineer, was found hanging in his Singapore apartment. The Singapore Police say it was suicide, but the Todd family believes he was murdered. -excerpt- ... Shane told his family that he was being asked to compromise US security and he feared for his life. Shane refused to do what he was being asked to do and turned in his sixty day notice at IME. Shane found a good job with a company in Virginia, and bought a ticket to fly back to the US on July 1,...

State-of-the-art drone-hunting technology being used on the battlefield in Ukraine could soon be deployed to crack the mystery behind a spate of unmanned flying objects purportedly spotted in the skies over New Jersey, New York and other Northeast cities, experts said. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul have asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deploy the Robin Radar System to assist investigators in getting to the bottom of who is behind the alleged drones that residents and local and state officials say have been flying over communities at night since mid-November. "I...

The FBI has been notified about the dangers that certain people could pose at least five times in recent years, and those people went on to commit a mass shooting, or attempted to kill Trump. Here is a look at those incidents and what the FBI admitted to knowing before the events. The FBI has come under renewed heat after admitting it had been previously notified that the suspect in a second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump illegally had a gun due to his status as a convicted felon. The missed opportunity involving Ryan Wesley Routh is not...

The automotive industry has lost one of the great saviors of speed. Michael Valentine, president of Valentine Research and one of the leading pioneers in the radar detection business, has passed away unexpectedly at the age of 74, according to an obituary posted by Cincinatti.com. If you’ve been around fast cars long enough, you’ve surely encountered a radar detector or two — and no brand of detector is as well-respected as Valentine Research. Michael Valentine’s interest in radar began during his stretch at the University of Cincinnati School of Applied Sciences, where he started his studies in 1967. Police departments...

Stealth is a great force multiplier. For aircraft in particular, being invisible may well be better than being fast or agile, as was proved with the first-generation stealth F-117 in Operation Desert Storm. In the event of a major war, stealth aircraft can penetrate enemy airspace, proceed to strategic targets deep within enemy territory, and deliver steel on target. The B-21 appears to be ready to redefine what stealth means. A recent paper from the Hudson Institute, which is advocating for the purchase and deployment of the B-21, claims that the new Raider has the radar cross-section of... an insect.The...

A Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian radar station that can track nuclear missiles has sparked alarm in the West. Kyiv hit the Armavir radar station in the Krasnodar border region on May 23, damaging the state-of-the-art facility, which provides conventional air-defence as well as forming part of Moscow’s nuclear warning system. Ukrainian officials confirmed on Saturday that their forces had carried out the strike, saying the facility monitors airspace over the country and occupied Crimea. The radar station has reportedly been able to track long-range Atacms missiles, delivered by the US to Ukraine earlier this year. Mauro Gilli, a...

Satellite imagery confirms a Russian strategic early warning radar site in the southwestern end of the country was substantially damaged in a reported Ukrainian drone attack earlier this week. This looks to be a first-of-its-kind attack on a site linked to Russia's general strategic defense. As such, it points to a new and worrisome dimension to the conflict, especially when it comes to the potential use of nuclear weapons.A satellite image taken on May 23 that The War Zone obtained from Planet Labs of the Armavir Radar Station in Russia's southwestern Krasnodar Krai shows significant debris around one of the...

Video of meteorologist predicting severe Texas weather two days before it occurs and showing the Doppler beams ionizing the atmosphere. The Doppler radar towers put in a couple of decades ago have ten times the power going to them required for weather forecasting. The order of magnitude of power is for weather control.

Zhao captured the information in surreptitious recordings and photographs, including “operational plans for a large-scale U.S. military exercise in the Indo-Pacific Region, which detailed the specific location and timing of Naval force movements, amphibious landings, maritime operations and logistics support,” prosecutors said. “The indictment further alleges that Zhao photographed electrical diagrams and blueprints for a radar system stationed on a U.S. military base in Okinawa, Japan,” the release explained. In exchange for that information and details about Naval Base Ventura County and a base on San Clemente Island, Zhao allegedly received $14,866.

I have no idea why the DOJ is putting out a press release about this. It seems more like the sort of thing to never mention again. A U.S. Navy service member was sentenced today to 27 months in prison and ordered to pay a $5,500 fine for transmitting sensitive U.S. military information to an intelligence officer from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in exchange for bribery payments. According to court documents, Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao, 26, aka Thomas Zhao, of Monterey Park, California, pleaded guilty in October 2023 to one count of conspiring with the intelligence officer and...

Some of you folks might find this interesting. It is most a discussion of the current state of development of AI and the pace of development. The person being interviewed is the co-founder of an AI company, is immersed in the industry, and seems to have a pretty good grasp on what is going on behind the scenes. Bio of Mitch Randall from source:Mitch Randall is the CEO of Ascendant AI and innovator behind the SkyWatch Passive Radar UAP tracking system. Skywatch was developed through the Galileo Project and hopes to detect UAP using reflected signals from existing transmitters as...

One of the most elongated asteroids ever imaged by planetary radar was closely tracked by the agency’s Deep Space Network. This collage shows six planetary radar observations of 2011 AG5 a day after the asteroid made its close approach to Earth on Feb. 3. With dimensions comparable to the Empire State Building, 2011 AG5 is one of the most elongated asteroids to be observed by planetary radar to date. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechOn Feb. 3, an asteroid more than three times as long as it is wide safely flew past Earth at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers,...

A miniature device that scans deep below ground is being developed to identify ice deposits and hollow lava tubes on the moon for possible human settlement. The prototype device, known as MAPrad, is just one-tenth the size of existing ground penetrating radar systems, yet can see almost twice as deeply below ground—more than 100 meters down—to identify minerals, ice deposits, or voids such as lava tubes. Local start-up CD3D PTY Limited has now received a grant from the Australian Space Agency's moon to Mars initiative to further develop the prototype with RMIT University, including testing it by mapping one of...

The Federal Communications Commission waived its rules so Amazon can build radar sensors that the company says would be used to track people’s sleep. The federal government’s exemption for Amazon paves the way for the tech giant to monitor users’ movements in the bedroom with extreme precision — all without users having to press a button. The FCC accepted Amazon’s claim that the tech would be used to improve users’ health and wellness.

A bill allowing municipal police across Pennsylvania to use radar guns for speed enforcement details passed the state Senate Tuesday on a 49-1 vote. Pennsylvania is currently the only state in the nation that limits the use of radar exclusively to its state police. That’s a sore spot for many municipal officials and police chiefs, who feel they are handicapped in monitoring speeding in residential zones and local roads where speeders can really raise the risk of an accident. But it’s also been a treasured, 60-year-old safeguard for some motorists. Critics have worried that those same municipal officers would take...

The 17-year “Brood X” cicadas are hatching in such high numbers that they’re being picked up by weather radar in Virginia. “THIS is not rain, not ground clutter,” NBC meteorologist Lauryn Ricketts tweeted on Monday. “So likely CICADAS being picked up by the radar beam.” Pallozzi said the NWS has a weather radar located in Sterling, Virginia, in the same region as the radar map that Ricketts posted, and explained that the beams the radar devices send out rise the further they travel from the machine. So the beams are picking up the newly emerged cicadas on the ground near...

A former US Navy pilot is opening up about his infamous alleged UFO sighting off the coast of California in 2004. Commander David Fravor said he witnessed a Tic Tac-shaped object in the sky in November 10, 2004 performing extraordinary aerial maneuvers that he said no modern human technology was capable of. 'This is not like we saw it and it was gone or I saw lights in the sky and it's gone – we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers,' Fravor said in a sit-down interview with Russian-American YouTuber and MIT researcher Lex...

Radar is a useful tool with familiar uses such as detecting aircraft and observing weather. It also has some less known applications, such as a technology known as ground-penetrating radar (GPR). Despite the difficulty of sending and receiving radio waves through solid objects, with the right equipment it’s possible to build a radar that works underground as well. GPR is used often for detecting underground utilities, but also has applications in other fields such as archaeology and geology. For those people in these fields, a less expensive GPR was the priority of a group presenting at a 2017 National Institute...