DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has released a request for proposals to develop a National Cyber Range, part of a $30 billion, government-wide effort to prepare for online battle.
Israeli military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it "could take over completely" from flesh-and-blood operators in the event of an all-out nuclear attack.
The South African National Defence Force "is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise.
The Defense Department is exploring the feasibility of creating a space-based solar power network that uses satellites for capturing the sun's energy and streams it down to Earth for use as electricity.
The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking.
Defensetech's Noah Shachtman and Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information pick apart a recent story in Defense News that claims China is testing blinding lasers on U.S. military satellites.
The Israeli government is openly considering jamming Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV broadcasts -- which stayed on the air, despite repeated aerial and electronic attacks -- despite the fact that these transmissions are carried by commercial satellites.
"After decades of expensive, well-publicized failures, laser weapons may finally be on the horizon. Can scientists end the era of bombs and bullets?"
The U.S. is developing a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to "detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments." It's part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish "military omniscience" and "ubiquitous monitoring."
Surveillance companies, using networks of cheap Web-connected cameras and powerful new video-analysis software, are demonstrating the kind of surveillance capabilities that were once only possible in a Hollywood movie. Faces and license plates can now be spotted, in almost real time, at ports, military bases and companies. Security perimeters can be changed or strengthened with a mouse click. Feeds from hundreds of cameras can be combined into a single desktop view. And videotape that used to take hours, even days, to scour is searched in minutes.