Archive for the 'War' Category
U.S. Monthly Combat Deaths in Iraq at 3-Year High
June 30th, 2011Via: New York Times: Fifteen American soldiers have been killed in June, 14 of them in hostile incidents. According to icasualties.org, an online database, this was the highest number of combat fatalities since June 2008, when 23 soldiers and Marines were killed.
Launch Code for U.S. Strategic Nuclear Missiles Was Twelve Zeros Until 1977
June 30th, 2011“But I don’t understand what would be such a big deal if there were a nuclear exchange, only about 500 million people would die…” Via: Countdown to Zero: Research Credit: bretwalda
Greece: Possibility of a Military Coup?
June 28th, 2011Via: CityWire: While the IMF stalls on its rescue package for Greece, many in the market are beginning to question whether the country would not in fact be better off out of the euro altogether. But for Steven Cordell, manager of Cazenove’s Pan Europe fund, that is a scenario that should be avoided at all […]
DARPA: Mind’s Eye Program
June 23rd, 2011Via: SRI: SRI International is leading a team to design a visual intelligence system, known as VIGIL (Visual Intelligence Grounded in Learning), to enable a new era in unmanned robotic surveillance. The SRI team is being funded through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Mind’s Eye program. VIGIL will be integrated with other […]
NATO’s First Combat Casualty of the War in Libya Was a Robot
June 22nd, 2011Via: Wired: NATO has suffered its first apparent combat casualty of the three-month-old war in Libya. And it’s a robot. Wing Cmdr. Mike Bracken said the alliance lost contact with the unmanned rotorcraft this morning. “This drone helicopter was performing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance over Libya to monitor pro-Gadhafi forces threatening the civilian population,” Bracken […]
Hiding Surveillance and Killer Drones in Plain Sight
June 20th, 2011Via: New York Times: Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds. The […]
Largest Ever Marine Corps Drill on U.S. East Coast
June 20th, 2011[???] Via: CNN: It’s mid-June, a perfect time to visit the beach to watch porpoises play in the surf or seagulls strut the sand — or you could watch a formation of Marine Corps warplanes darting over the shore at hundreds of miles per hour. But don’t worry — the United States hasn’t declared war […]
Eisenhower’s Worst Fears Came True: We Invent Enemies to Buy the Bombs
June 19th, 2011Via: Guardian: Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain’s borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again […]
Libyan Rebels: DIY Weapons
June 15th, 2011Via: Al Jazeera: As the war in Libya stretches on, the availability of arms and ammunition is becoming a problem for rebel fighters. A school in Misurata has become the laboratory for invention of new weapons with the help of discards and scraps.
Change: First Lady Wants Hollywood to Excrete Even More Pro Military Propaganda
June 15th, 2011Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy by Matthew Alford: Hollywood is often characterized as a stronghold of left-liberal ideals. In Reel Power, Matthew Alford shows it is in fact deeply complicit in serving the interests of the most regressive U.S. corporate and political forces. Films like Transformers, Terminator: Salvation and Black Hawk Down are […]
