Outgunned in the Drone Fight

The British Army began World War I with only two machine guns per infantry battalion. One gun was a spare, meaning the effective ratio was one per 1,000 soldiers. Historian John Ellis summarized, “For the British commanders, on the eve of the First World War, the machine gun simply did not exist.” 

The inability to grasp the changing technological character of ground combat cost British forces dearly early in the war. In what remains the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, tens of thousands of British soldiers were mown down by German machine gunners in the 1916 Battle of the Somme, despite automatic weapons having existed in a similar form since 1893.

The adoption of the machine gun is an apt analogy for the integration of small unmanned aerial systems in the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. military. As with the adoption of the machine gun, failure of vision, traditionalism, and bureaucratic resistance are leading to insufficient numbers and delayed force modernization.

 Despite observing small drones proliferate globally and their growing use on modern battlefields, the U.S. military has still not equipped its infantry with adequate numbers or pushed ownership of these systems low enough to have an impact.    READ MORE...

China's Aggressive & Insidious Behavior in the Pacific

Soldiers from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion 69 Infantry Regiment , New York Army National Guard acting as an opposing force defend their positions during the final battle of Exercise Talisman Sabre at the Shoalwater Bay Training Area, Queensland, Australia on July 19, 2017.U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Michael Tietjen



The US Army is conducting various training and exercises with international partners in the Indo-Pacific region.

US Army Pacific's commanding general said the land power network across the region is stronger than ever.

The increased partnership is the "greatest counterweight" to China's "aggressive, insidious" approaches, he added.


Facing challenges from China and the possibility of a future fight in the Pacific, the US Army is training closer than ever with its international allies and partners to harness the skills needed for land combat across the challenging and diverse region.

Those exercises, from biennial training in Australia to US Army Pacific's new Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center rotations in Alaska and Hawaii, and the "persistent state of partnering" with allies is "the greatest counterweight" against China's "aggressive, insidious" behavior, US Army Pacific's commanding general told Business Insider during an interview at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska.     READ MORE...

Army Creating False Arrest Records for Soldiers

A new class action lawsuit alleges the U.S. Army knowingly stuck thousands of soldiers and veterans with a false arrest record over the past six years.

"Defendants have shown that they would rather indulge in bureaucratic inertia rather than fix a problem that has now destroyed the lives, reputations, and careers of numerous service members," attorneys wrote in the class action suit against the Army, its Criminal Investigation Division (CID), the FBI and the Department of Defense, as well as each agency's respective leader.     READ MORE...

2023 Index of US Military Strength

The 2023 Index concludes that the current U.S. military force is at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict while also attending to various presence and engagement activities. The force would probably not be able to do more and is certainly ill-equipped to handle two nearly simultaneous MRCs—a situation that is made more difficult by the generally weak condition of key military allies.

In the aggregate, the United States’ military posture can only be rated as “weak.” The Air Force is rated “very weak,” the Navy and Space Force are “weak,” and the U.S. Army is “marginal.” The Marine Corps and nuclear forces are “strong,” but the Corps is a one-war force, and its overall strength is therefore not sufficient to compensate for the shortfalls of its larger fellow services. 

And if the United States should need to employ nuclear weapons, the escalation into nuclear conflict would seem to imply that handling such a crisis would challenge even a fully ready Joint Force at its current size and equipped with modern weapons. 

Additionally, the war in Ukraine, which threatens to destabilize not just Europe but the economic and political stability of other regions, shows that some actors (in this case Russia) will not necessarily be deterred from conventional action even though the U.S. maintains a strong nuclear capability. 

Thus, strong conventional forces of necessary size are essential to the ability of the U.S. to respond to emergent crises in areas of special interest.

As currently postured, the U.S. military is at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests. It is rated as weak relative to the force needed to defend national interests on a global stage against actual challenges in the world as it is rather than as we wish it were. 

This is the logical consequence of years of sustained use, underfunding, poorly defined priorities, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and a profound lack of seriousness across the national security establishment even as threats to U.S. interests have surged.  READ MORE...

Nuclear Quantum Computing

A trio of separate research teams from three different continents published individual papers indicating similar quantum computing breakthroughs yesterday. All three were funded in part by the US Army and each paper appears to be a slam dunk for the future of quantum computing.

But only one of them heralds the onset of the age of nuclear quantum computers.

Maybe it’s the whole concept of entanglement, but for a long time it’s felt like we were suspended in a state where functional quantum machines were both “right around the corner” and “decades or more away.”

But the past few years have seen a more rapid advancement toward functional quantum systems than most technologists could have imagined in their wildest dreams.

The likes of IBM, Microsoft, D-Wave, and Google putting hybrid quantum systems on the cloud coupled with the latter’s amazing time crystal breakthrough have made 2018-2021 the opening years of what promises to be a golden age for quantum computing.

Despite this amazing progress, there are still holdouts who believe we’ll never have a truly useful, fully-functional, qubit-based quantum computing system.

The main reason given by these cynics is usually because quantum systems are incredibly error-prone.  READ MORE...

An Impossible Crystal Formed

According to Michelle Starr, a journalist for Science Alert...

An 'Impossible' Quasicrystal Was Forged in The World's First Nuclear Bomb Test.  At 5:29 am on the morning of 16 July 1945, in the state of New Mexico, a dreadful slice of history was made.

The dawn calm was torn asunder as the United States Army detonated a plutonium implosion device known as the Gadget - the world's very first test of a nuclear bomb, known as the Trinity test. This moment would change warfare forever.

The energy release, equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, vaporized the 30-metre test tower (98 ft) and miles of copper wires connecting it to recording equipment. The resulting fireball fused the tower and copper with the asphalt and desert sand below into green glass - a new mineral called trinitite.

Decades later, scientists have discovered a secret hidden in a piece of that trinitite - a rare form of matter known as a quasicrystal, once thought to be impossible.

"Quasicrystals are formed in extreme environments that rarely exist on Earth," explained geophysicist Terry Wallace of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"They require a traumatic event with extreme shock, temperature, and pressure. We don't typically see that, except in something as dramatic as a nuclear explosion."

Most crystals, from the humble table salt to the toughest diamonds, obey the same rule: their atoms are arranged in a lattice structure that repeats in three-dimensional space. Quasicrystals break this rule - the pattern in which their atoms are arranged does not repeat.

When the concept first emerged in the scientific world in 1984, this was thought to be impossible: crystals were either ordered or disordered, with no in-between. Then they were actually found, both created in laboratory settings and in the wild - deep inside meteorites, forged by thermodynamic shock from events like a hypervelocity impact.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...