Nearly 1,000 workers at 3 defense contractors in the Washington, DC area – General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman – are being laid off this year, the Washington Examiner reports.
A number of projects are working to free science from the bottlenecks of copyright-bound paper articles, even for research produced on the public dime. Open source science is impractical for much defense R&D, except as a potential input. On the other hand, new Open Science approaches have shown great promise for areas like disease cures – which do have a military dimension.
Israel is setting up a taskforce to develop defense capabilities against cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. Rumor has it that they set up a task force to handle the other end a while back. You’d have to ask the Iranians.
Coastal surveillance and “maritime domain awareness” are growing priorities for nations who wish to secure control of their borders against threats ranging from drug smuggling, to illegal immigration, to terrorist infiltration. Recent contracts in Yemen and Malaysia offer good examples. This task has always been a priority for neutral Sweden as part of its basic defense, and ITT Corporation recently signed a $44.9 million contract with the Swedish Defence Material Administration (FMV) for the Reliability and Modification (REMO 870) upgrade of their PS-870 coastal/gapfiller radar systems and their integrated, turnkey coastal surveillance system, the SABER-2020.
The REMO 870 program will upgrade the radars to the LCR2020 model standard by adding state-of-the-art processing, transmitter, antenna and display technologies, while following the current trend of using commercial off-the-shelf equipment rather than dedicated military-only circuits. The goal is improved reliability and autonomous operation, for detection of land and sea threats.
