Russia has a ten year arms procurement plan from 2018 to 2027 which will have almost flat spending at $34 billion. The USA is spending about $155 billion ($90 billion on weapons procurement and $65 billion on weapons research and development. The US will likely grow military procurement spending moderately over the next ten years. …
Reaction Engines has begun construction of a new high-temperature airflow test facility where it plans to validate the performance of its precooler heat exchanger technology, an enabler of its revolutionary SABRETM engine. Located at the Front Range Airport near Watkins, Colorado, the test facility will be capable of exposing the precooler test article (HTX) to …
This month the MAST (Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology) proram which has been run by the US Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, is wrapping up after ten successful years. MAST co-ordinated and paid for research by a consortium of established laboratories, notably at the University of Maryland, Texas A and M University and Berkeley. There …
The US Air Force has begun experimenting and conceptual planning for a 6th generation fighter aircraft to emerge in coming years as a technological step beyond the F-35. The Navy vision for a future carrier air wing in 2040 and beyond is comprised of the carrier-launched variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C, and …
Wang Hongguang, former deputy commander of the Nanjing Military Region, warned that war could break out on the Korean peninsula at any time from now on until March when South Korea and the United States held annual military drills. “It is a highly dangerous period,” Wang said. “Northeast China should mobilize defenses for war.” Beijing, …
RAND evaluates the capabilities of current and programmed U.S. forces to meet the demands of conflicts that could arise involving any of five potential adversaries: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Salafist-jihadi groups worldwide. The report finds that U.S. forces today are larger than necessary to fight a single major war, are failing to keep …
China’s first domestically built aircraft carrier the 001A started preliminary trials in Dalian in the northeast of China in November. It has a similar design to the country’s first carrier the Liaoning. Chinese engineers and designers who built the ship had studied the most advanced military technology used by the Americans and Soviet and tried …
The US surface fleet may not be adequately trained for high-intensity combat, four experienced former skippers and the former deputy secretary of defense warned a US Naval Institute conference here on Monday. The US Navy has huge budgets but has mismanaged so that many sailors are trained for basic tasks “Navigation and seamanship, these are …
The best time to take out the North Korean ICBMs are before launch during the 3-4 minutes of the boost phase when they are first launched. Taking out the ICBMs when they are about to hit their target is a far harder problem. The ICBMs can deploy decoys and they can alter course. Hitting the …
Patrick Tucker at Defense One reports that tests started October 2014 show that F35 could spot and track ICBMs to help Navy missiles shoot them down. In October 2014, Northrop and MDA launched FTX-20, an experiment to see, among other things, whether the DAS could track an enemy ICBM. They took data from the sensors, …
DARPA is funding $100 million to develop gene drive, which can wipe out dangerous animals and insects. It could get rid of malarial mosquitoes and invasive rodents. The DARPA program is discussed in some recently release emails. Darpa believes that a steep fall in the costs of gene-editing toolkits has created a greater opportunity for …