* After almost 2 years of denial, US Defense Undersecretary Ashton Carter instructed the services to work on FY 14 and FY15 budgeting scenarios that span a range going from the president’s unrealistic FY14 budget to full sequestration (~10% lower). Give it another year or two and they might start to defend sequestration.
* The Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation office (DOTE) updated their Test & Evaluation Master Plan (TEMP) guidebook [PDF] with a new section on the design of experiments, and a few other changes.
* The US Coast Guard published its Arctic strategy [PDF] . They want to develop better awareness, governance, and international partnerships.
* Small Diameter Bomb + MLRS rocket = interesting long-range precision artillery strike. Boeing is working on the concept with Lockheed Martin.
* How much to invest in Afghanistan, and whether to sell them weapons, will be a delicate balancing act for India.
* Canada’s minister for Armed Forces Public Works Rona Ambrose says defense procurement should be driven by best value and national industrial considerations, rather than just price. Buy cheap, achète 2 fois.
* Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner appointed congressman Agustín Rossi as defense minister out of the blue. Rossi was a reliable ally of the president as party whip in the lower chamber, from which he never disappeared to hike the Appalachian trail. La Nacion | Perfil [both links in Spanish].
* With funding from US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, researchers at the National Institute for Aviation Research have good hopes to produce a leg splint that would be useful in the battlefield thanks to its very fast hardening speed.
* With the prevalence of IEDs during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, a higher proportion of American soldiers have lost limbs there than during earlier more conventional wars. The technology for prosthetic limbs is getting much better, but the proper interfacing with the human neural system has been a bottleneck to fully functional artificial limbs. DARPA is trying to fix that with their Reliable Neural Technology (RE-NET [PDF]) research. The video below illustrates the level of control currently achieved:
