War Is Boring

The U.S. military’s more than decade-old effort to produce a hypersonic global strike weapon just took a big step forward and a big step back. On April 20, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, published the results of an engineering review of a key hypersonic vehicle test.

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN The military has a data problem. More specifically, it has a too-much-data problem. Analysts have to sort through massive amounts of information collected by orbiting surveillance drones and satellites, or finding the data trails left behind by spies inside defense networks. Sorting through all this data is also necessary for making unmanned [...]

Chances are you’re reading this on an object that wasn’t assembled with much human input. These days nearly everything is manufactured using automation; what still requires manual labor is made in sweatshops of one form or another. One major economic sector has so far remained outside this great industrial transition: construction, which remains a largely hand-fabrication industry. Indeed, its labor-intensive practices provided a good life to a great many people until the Great Recession, and it’s unlikely to employ that many people again for a long time.

A U.S. Naval Academy midshipman snagged a $25,000 prize for his research into new ways of cleaning drinking water in Bangladesh. Stephen Honan won Harvard’s Anwarul Quadir Prize for an essay advocating ferns as a natural filtration system for polluted water.

In October of last year, a platoon from the U.S. Army’s 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment, strolled into the village of Baraki Rajan, 50 miles south of Kabul. The soldiers, deployed from upstate New York since January, held their rifles loosely, muzzles pointed down, deliberately not aiming at anyone. That was meant as a signal — a signal that the residents had, over time, learned to read.

by DAVID AXE Ever watch Better Off Ted, the ABC show about the world’s looniest defense contractor? In one episode, the fictional Veridian Dynamics looks for ways to “weaponize pumpkins.” Following in Veridian’s wicked little footsteps, I’m wondering if any of our readers can figure out how to combine and weaponize two of the year’s [...]

by DAVID AXE “Let’s go get blown up,” said Staff Sergeant Ashley Hess, platoon sergeant for 2nd Platoon, Able Troop, 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry. Hess, pictured at center, climbed into the cab of his Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored truck with his driver and two cavalry troopers. It was October 16 in Baraki Barak, a district of [...]

This post follows up on our November 22 post on the “Insurgents and the Future of War” event held at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on November 16. Counter-insurgency expert Dave Kilcullen gave the keynote. Shawn Brimley, Special Advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; Max Manwaring, a professor of [...]

by DAVID AXE It’s conventional wisdom that deep unemployment in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan contributes to extremism and insurgency. For that reason, coalition forces often make job creation a centerpiece of their strategies. In southern Iraq in 2006, British Lieutenant Colonel John Bowron said joblessness “puts people in front of a militia recruiter.” The [...]

by DAVID AXE Two years after its formation, a controversial military program to embed civilian social scientists inside combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan is scrambling to recover from a string of crises. How the so-called “Human Terrain System” responds to a spate of combat deaths and a disastrous employee pay cut will determine whether [...]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/NHwhGUo90jw" width="490" height="400" wmode="transparent" /] by DAVID AXE Did you see the new movie The Men Who Stare at Goats? Remember Stephen Lang’s character General Dean Hopgood — the grinning, white-haired officer who championed Jeff Bridges’ character’s notion of psychic warriors? Well, Hopgood’s based on a real guy, an Army Major General Albert Stubblebine, [...]

by DAVID AXE One of the biggest challenges in the world of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is how to get them to fly together, in formations or “swarms,” cooperating and not colliding. Developers are testing out a number of methods: proximity-detecting radars and lasers, computer models that treat each drone like a node in network, etc. [...]