War Is Boring

A reminder from reader Mike Pearson that MIT tested a “flipping” vertical-takeoff drone five years before the Navy’s and Aerovel’s Flexrotor.

Photos posted to the Internet in China last week seem to confirm that the Chinese Navy has installed arrestor gear and other vital equipment on its refurbished Soviet-made aircraft carrier, the ex-Varyag. If genuine, the installations could represent a big step forward for the first-ever seaborne, fixed-wing aviation capability for the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

It was sold as a demonstration of Taiwan’s high-tech defenses against a rapidly rising China. But Tuesday’s firing of 19 air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles before an audience of top government officials and reporters might end up having another equally important effect for Taiwan: scoring pity points with China hawks in Washington.

The U.S. Department of Defense “continues to layer unnecessary costs onto next-generation weapons programs to satisfy bureaucratic constituencies,” The Lexington Institute’s resident arms-industry booster Loren Thompson writes in his latest screed for Defpro, “as in the decision to delay development of the F-35 fighter so that thousands of redundant test flights can be conducted.”

Two weeks ago the Army’s semi-robotic Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon (NLOS-C) prototype, the first major weapon in the $160-billion Future Combat Systems program, fired its first round. NLOS-C reduces the current four-man howitzer crew to just two. While that will mean savings in manpower costs, there are potentially huge (and negative) implications on the battlefield, according to [...]

A couple months back, the Coast Guard contested my assertion in The Washington Times that problems with unsecured communications systems aboard the new flagship cutter Bertholf (pictured) would delay that ship’s entry into service. Three months later, the Coast Guard proudly announced that Bertholf had passed a rigorous Navy inspection … and would be accepted. [...]

A van full of insurgents speeds through the desert. They do not notice a series of networked ground sensors that have begun tracking their every move. Hovering somewhere overhead, a tiny robot points its camera at the van and takes note of its color scheme and markings. An even bigger drone, thousands of feet above [...]

On Oct. 19, NATO troops on patrol in Afghanistan’s Helmand province fired a warning shot to stop a civilian vehicle that had come too close to the soldiers’ convoy. The round ricocheted, killing a two-year-old girl outside her home, according to Agence France-Presse. It’s an old problem in Iraq and Afghanistan, where occupying troops find [...]

My dad, a General Motors engineer based in Detroit, called this morning to tell me he was standing in front of the company’s “Boss” robot — a modified Tahoe — that won the $2-million first prize in the Nov. 3 Urban Challenge race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The automaker has hailed Boss as a [...]

Darpa: [Carnegie Mellon] Tartan Racing’s “Boss” of Pittsburgh, Penn., turned in the top performance in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge and won the $2 million cash prize as the competition’s first-place winner, DARPA announced today. Stanford Racing’s “Junior” of Stanford, Calif., won the $1 million second place prize, while Victor Tango’s [...]

Oops. I jumped the gun in reporting that Virginia Tech had possibly won Urban Challenge. Tech was actually third to roll past that checkered flag, after Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. In coming minutes all six remaining vehicles are expected to finish the race.   But speed isn’t the only criterion. Virginia’s Victor Tango was pretty quick, [...]

Urban Challenge comprises three missions in which each bot must hit certain waypoints and accomplish tasks like parking and negotiating intersections. Just six vehicles made it to the third mission, leaving five defeated bots parked in impound. Between each mission, teams get a five-minute pit stop. While one crewman loads mission parameters into the main [...]