Pax Americana, Technological Readiness and broken weapons systems

[AdamG]

Good & reasonable OPSEC or Brewster Aeronautical Corporation grade shenanigans?

The Pentagon's $928 million hypersonic weapons program is now shrouded in secrecy

The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin have shared limited details about their efforts in developing hypersonic weapons.
A U.S. Air Force spokesman said the service will not be making any announcements in the near future regarding its work on hypersonics.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/us-m...n-secrecy.html

[AdamG]

The Pentagon has completed initial draft plans for several emerging low-yield sea-launched nuclear weapons intended to deter potential attackers and add new precision strike options to those currently possible with the existing arsenal.

While final requirements for both a low-yield sea-launched nuclear cruise missile and long-range sub-launched low-yield warhead are still in development, Pentagon officials tell Warrior Maven the process has taken several substantial new steps forward.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/06/...ar-weapon.html

[AdamG]

Anyone remember the tale of the 4th Infantry Division in 2003?

At the eleventh hour the Turkish parliament refused passage, and the division belatedly redeployed through Kuwait.

Blocking the delivery of the F-35 fighter jets to Turkey over its procurement of the Russian-made the S-400 air defense system would bring about consequences, said Turkey’s foreign minister in a meeting with two senior United States senators on the margins of the NATO Summit.

Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu met with Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from the New Hampshire, and Tom Thillis, a Republican from North Carolina, in Brussels on July 12. Both senators initiated congressional actions against the delivery of the F-35s to Turkey because of the continued detention of Pastor Andrew Brunson and Ankara’s planned procurement of the S-400 anti-ballistic missile system from Russia.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/tur...er-jets-134546

[AdamG]

The US Army has a new plan for microwaving drones out of the sky. In a public solicitation last Friday, the agency announced its intention to purchase an airborne high-powered microwave system from Lockheed Martin, which is intended for use against drones. The weapon, which would be mounted to an airplane, would disable fixed-wing or quadcopter drones with a beam of focused radiation.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17...ockheed-martin

Precedence -

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has accused opposition lawmakers of playing a role in a failed attempt to assassinate him over the weekend.
During a nationally televised address to Venezuelan troops on Saturday, Maduro was unhurt when explosives-laden drones exploded near the podium. In a speech on Tuesday, Maduro said Julio Borges, a prominent opposition leader living in exile in neighboring Colombia, was a co-conspirator in the plot, but he did not elaborate on what role the politician had played.

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/63658...nation-attempt

[AdamG]

Amid concerns over North Korea, federal emergency managers are updating disaster plans to account for large nuclear detonations over the 60 largest US cities, according to a US Federal Emergency Management Agency official.

The shift away from planning for small nuclear devices that could be deployed by terrorists toward thermonuclear blasts arranged by “state actors” was discussed on Thursday at a two-day National Academies of Sciences workshop for public health and emergency response officials held at its headquarters across the street from the US State Department.

“We are looking at 100 kiloton to 1,000 kiloton detonations,” chief of FEMA’s chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear branch Luis Garcia told BuzzFeed News. The agency’s current “nuclear detonation” guidance for emergency planners, first released in 2010, had looked at 1 to 10 kiloton blasts — smaller than the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs that killed more than 200,000 people at the end of World War II. Those smaller size detonations had seemed more reasonable after 9/11, with high concerns about an improvised terrorist bomb.

But last year North Korea tested an apparent thermonuclear bomb with a surprisingly large estimated blast size of 250 kilotons, a “city buster” much bigger than past test blasts and nearly the size of current US intercontinental ballistic missile warheads. The test blast kicked off a new era of nuclear anxiety in the US.

*

The updated FEMA guidance would be for the 60 largest urban areas in the US and will rely on newer detonation models created by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...omb-fema-plans

[AdamG]

Passwords that took seconds to guess, or were never changed from their factory settings. Cyber vulnerabilities that were known, but never fixed. Those are two common problems plaguing some of the Department of Defense's newest weapons systems, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The flaws are highlighted in a new GAO report, which found the Pentagon is "just beginning to grapple" with the scale of vulnerabilities in its weapons systems.

Drawing data from cybersecurity tests conducted on Department of Defense weapons systems from 2012 to 2017, the report says that by using "relatively simple tools and techniques, testers were able to take control of systems and largely operate undetected" because of basic security vulnerabilities.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/09/65588...ttack-gao-says

[AdamG]

This smells like somebody in the decision making process has a brother-in-law that owns a manufacturing facility...

USSOCOM wants American companies to explore whether it is feasible to “reverse engineer or reengineer and domestically produce the following foreign-like weapons: 7.62×54R belt fed light machine gun that resembles a PKM (Pulemyot Kalashnikova Modernizirovany), and a 12.7×108mm heavy machine gun that resembles a Russian-designed NSV (Nikitin, Sokolov, Volkov).”

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/bu...ine-guns-32956