U.S. Ducks As Cluster Bomb Ban Takes Effect

Every war must end, instructed the U.S. strategist Fred Ikle. But leftover unexploded ordnance can be a war’s legacy, particularly when small and unstable munitions lay around areas where civilians rebuild their lives after the fighting stops. That’s why a new international ban on cluster munitions will take effect on Saturday. The U.S., however, isn’t [...]

Al Qaeda in Iraq’s Health Care Plan: Stolen Blood, Skilled Docs

Pockets of insurgents are stealing blood supplies from local hospitals and blood banks in Iraq, often at gunpoint, and using the looted stockpiles to treat their own troops. That’s the report out of the New York Times this week, but it’s only another reminder of the premium placed on life-saving medical supplies — blood and [...]

July 29, 1958: Ike Inks Space Law, NASA Born in Wake of Russ Moon

1958: President Eisenhower signs the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The plot had thickened months before.
Beep … beep … beep …
They were steady, almost metronomic, signals coming from a tiny radio beacon orbiting the Earth every 96 minutes aboard an aluminum sphere measuring a mere 22 inches across. [...]

Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

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The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, [...]

Wii Air Force: Will Gamer Gloves Help Fly Combat Jets?

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s band of futurists at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base think that pilots and flight engineers spend way too much time flipping switches and pressing buttons. In a recent pre-solicitation, the labs made it known they want enterprising engineers to design a pair of high-tech flight gloves that can help you fly [...]

Petraeus: Fight ‘With Discipline,’ Contract With Care

Earn the Afghan people’s trust. Use the amount of force necessary to win a fight and no more. If you tolerate corruption, you’ll be perceived as corrupt yourself. Be prepared to hold and transfer territory if you take it. Partner with NATO civilians and Afghans at all levels. Remember that the performance of contractors you [...]

Insurgent Leader On WikiLeaks: Now You Tell Us

There’s been a lot of talk about the danger posed by WikiLeaks’s disclosure of tens of thousands of military documents from Afghanistan. But so far, our cyber-sleuths aren’t seeing a lot of chatter on the Takfiri side of the internet. One notable exception: a leader of the Haqqani Network, a faction aligned with al-Qaeda, who [...]

My War, WikiLeaked: Why the Public (and the Military) Can’t Count on Those Battle Logs

Echo company got into a gunfight in August 2009 in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. You’ll learn that by reading the report found in WikiLeaks’ database. You’ll learn that, after a chase, the marines killed one insurgent. You’ll learn that the insurgents supposedly fled and that the troops — part of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines — [...]

Marines’ Stealth Jet Struggling to Lift Off

90% of America’s combat aviation power is eventually supposed to come from F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. But the $388 billion program has busted its budget so badly, it’s on the verge of collapse. So a couple of weeks back, some two-bit defense pundit proposed overhauling the JSF effort by getting rid of its most expensive, [...]

July 28, 1948: IG Farben Explosion Punctuates Nuremberg Trial

1948: A deadly explosion at German chemical conglomerate IG Farben’s Ludwigshafen plant on the Rhine River kills more than 200 people and injures more than 3,800 — 500 of them seriously. It violently interrupts the closing phase of the Nazi corporate conspirator’s post-war trial at Nuremberg. Two days later, the War Crimes Tribunal finds [...]