* President Obama authorized targeted airstrikes against ISIL insurgents in Iraq, as well as humanitarian assistance to civilians stranded on a mountain. British Prime Minister David Cameron is “extremely concerned” by the situation in the country and “utterly condemns” ISIL’s attacks, but also rules out [AFP] a military intervention by the UK.
* Former British defence secretary Liam Fox talks in a BBC interview about Vladimir Putin’s trampling of international law, and how Western powers should respond.
Asia
* US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is in India [Hindustan Times] to discuss arms sales and the amount of technology transfer that they might entail, starting with Javelin missiles.
* Chinese official media, like their Russian counterparts, like to refer to public opinion in democratic countries whenever that can undermine the official security posture of these states. Case in point: this take on Japan’s latest defense whitepaper. Please tell us, what does the Chinese population think of their own country’s military build up?
From Crawling to Walking
* DARPA wants to shorten the time [FBO] it takes to go through an applied material development sequence from a decade to less than 3 years. The reason:
“Platform programs are extremely reluctant to adopt new material technologies, and platform designers most often default to mature materials with decades of heritage. This limits the trade space and capability of advanced defense systems, as exemplified by the current limitations in hypersonic platforms. For hypersonic platforms, heritage materials are asked to perform at their extreme thermal-chemicalmechanical limits, and the use of heritage materials severely limits the design space for hypersonic platforms.”
* Researchers from Harvard and MIT are working on a crawling robot that can flatten and unfold itself: Science | IEEE Spectrum | Video below:
