Tag Archives | Military

The Navy’s Plan To Turn Underground Wisconsin Into A Global Radio Transmitter

By on January 4, 2013 in News 5

A dose of strange history via BLDGBLOG:

Project Sanguine was a U.S. Navy program from the 1980s that “would have involved 41 percent of Wisconsin,” turning that state into a giant “antenna farm” capable of communicating with what Wikipedia calls “deeply-submerged submarines.”

Each individual antenna would have been “buried five feet deep” in the fertile soil of the Cheese State, creating a networked system with nearly 6,000 miles’ worth of cables and receiving stations. The Navy was hoping, we read, for a system “that could transmit tactical orders one-way to U.S. nuclear submarines anywhere in the world, and survive a direct nuclear attack.” In other words, the bedrock of the Earth itself could be turned into a colossal radio station.

The project was controversial from the start and was attacked by politicians, antiwar and environmental groups concerned about the effects of high ground currents and electromagnetic fields on the environment.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 5

The United States And New Zealand Secretly Tested ‘Tsunami Bombs’ Designed To Destroy Cities By Flooding

By on January 3, 2013 in News 7

Via the Daily Mail, this likely will trigger conspiracy theories regarding natural disasters past and future:

The U.S. and New Zealand collaborated on a top-secret plan to develop a ‘tsunami bomb’ capable of devastating coastal cities, it has emerged. The countries carried out covert tests of the potential weapon of mass destruction – designed to use underwater explosions to trigger huge tidal waves – in waters around Auckland and the Pacific island of New Caledonia during the Second World War.

Details of the secretive operation, code-named Project Seal, were discovered in military files buried in New Zealand’s national archives by author and film-maker Ray Waru. The files revealed how around 3,700 bombs were exploded during testing, which was launched in June 1944, and indicated that the weapon was feasible.

Mr Waru said: ‘It was absolutely astonishing. First that anyone would come up with the idea of developing a weapon of mass destruction based on a tsunami… and also that New Zealand seems to have successfully developed it to the degree that it might have worked.’ While initial testing was positive, Project Seal was shelved in early 1945.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 7

Scientist Wants Military to Close the ‘Mutant Gap’ With Biomodded Soldiers

By on December 26, 2012 in News 31

Picture: Vitruvian Man – Da Vinci (PD)

Nothing to see here, citizen. Go watch some more television while we quietly build our biomodded super soldiers.

Via WIRED:

Greater strength and endurance. Enhanced thinking. Better teamwork. New classes of genetic weaponry, able to subvert DNA. Not long from now, the technology could exist to routinely enhance — and undermine — people’s minds and bodies using a wide range of chemical, neurological, genetic and behavioral techniques.

It’s warfare waged at the evolutionary level. And it’s coming sooner than many people think. According to the futurists at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, by 2030, “neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought. Brain-machine interfaces could provide ‘superhuman‘ abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.”

Qualities that today must be honed by years of training and education could be installed in a relative instant by, say, an injection or a targeted burst of electricity to the brain.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 31

More Signs of the EU Starting to Build Up its Own Millitary

By on December 21, 2012 in News 2

“A country cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war”.

Albert Einstein

The inevitable rise of a European army to rival those of other world super-powers appears on our collective horizon. The Telegraph reports:

Under a deal reached in Brussels yesterday, leaders of all 27 EU countries promised to “strengthen” Europe’s ability to deploy troops “rapidly and effectively” in any future crisis.

They committed to “systematically considering cooperation” across Europe whenever EU member states begin drawing up their national defence plans.

Downing Street sources said the Prime Minister was “entirely happy” with the new arrangements. Britain already has a formal treaty with France for sharing defence capabilities, such aircraft carrier capacity.

Government sources said the new agreement would pave the way for Britain to extend this collaboration beyond France to other countries.

It’s worth remembering that less than 70 years ago millitary “collaboration” between the European powers had terrible consequences. The last time a command and control centre was established in Europe it took the combined might of the American and Soviet millitary to eventually thwart its aim of world domination.… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 2

Judge Rules That Any Mention Of Torture In 9/11 Trial Will Be Classified

By on December 16, 2012 in News 3

For its own good, the world can’t know what the CIA has or hasn’t done. Via the Christian Science Monitor:

In a significant victory for government prosecutors, the military judge presiding over the trial of accused 911 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has granted a government request to treat as classified any testimony or discussion about the alleged torture of Mr. Mohammed and others during CIA interrogations.

Off limits at the military commission trial at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay are any details surrounding the defendants’ capture, detention, and alleged torture by the CIA. It includes “the enhanced interrogation techniques that were applied to an accused … including descriptions of the techniques as applied, the duration, frequency, sequencing, and limitations of those techniques.”

Defense lawyers had challenged the government’s expansive assertion of authority to designate certain subjects as protected secrets in the case, saying it was improper for prosecutors to attempt to censor Mohammed and his four co-defendants from discussing their own personal observations of things they involuntarily endured during years of CIA detention and interrogations.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 3

Inside The Army’s Cold War Experiments In Psychochemical Warfare

By on December 14, 2012 in News 2

The New Yorker unravels the military’s secret program to develop the ultimate “humane” weapon for the wars of the future — mass-delirium-inducing gas:

Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of war without killing. He joined the Army in 1956 and left it in 1976, and in that time became the military’s leading expert in a secret Cold War experiment: to fight enemies with clouds of psychochemicals that temporarily incapacitate the mind-—causing, in the words of one ranking officer, a “selective malfunctioning of the human machine.”

Today, the facility, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings on the Chesapeake Bay. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved.

I spoke to a former Edgewood test subject who was given the nerve agent VX. The effect was rapid. There was a radio on in the room, but the words made little sense.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 2

National Intelligence Council Predicts Cyborg Enhancements and Augmented Reality

By on December 11, 2012 in News 15

Picture: TenaciousMe (CC)

Remember daydreaming about robots and cyborgs as a kid? They’re almost here! Bad news, though: They’ll be killing machines. What could possibly go wrong? You’re welcome, future.

WIRED reports on some of the predictions of the National Intelligence Council:

We’ve seen experimental prosthetics in recent years that are connected to the human neurological system. The Council says the link between man and machine is about to get way more cyborg-like. “As replacement limb technology advances, people may choose to enhance their physical selves as they do with cosmetic surgery today. Future retinal eye implants could enable night vision, and neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought,” the Council writes. “Brain-machine interfaces could provide ‘superhuman’ abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.”

And if the machines can’t be embedded into the person, the person may embed himself in the robot.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 15

Economic Crisis Fuels Military Intervention As The Chemical Weapons ‘Threat’ Becomes The New Pretext

By on December 9, 2012 in News 8

USS Eisenhower 2Durban, South Africa: The US economy is sluggish with fears of a new recession. The Democrats and Republicans once more cannot agree on what to do about the alleged “fiscal cliff” that threatens to further unravel the economy, even as analysts say that the whole notion of going over the “cliff “ has been fabricated by the right to force more cuts in social benefits.

Consumer confidence is dipping in this festive season of global shopping–not a good sign, since consumption and spending at the malls is an economic driver with 70% of economic activity based on getting consumers to buy even when it means they must go deeper and deeper in debt using credit cards and loans.

What can the Obama government do? The political stalemate has blocked new jobs and stimulus programs so reliance on Federal Reserve Bank interventions has grown, but they are not printing enough money to turn things around.… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 8

State Department Offering Contractors $10 Billion To Operate Overseas Drug-War Airforce

By on December 8, 2012 in News 3

With such an effort, surely this war on drugs will be won soon. Wired reports:

Unsure how your private security firm makes money as the U.S. war in Afghanistan winds down? One option: Go into the drug trade — more specifically, the lucrative business of fighting narcotics. The State Department needs a business partner to keep its fleet of drug-hunting helicopters and planes flying worldwide. You could make up to $10 billion.

Starting next month, the State Department will solicit some defense-industry feedback on a contract to help operate its 412 aircraft, based in at least eight nations, before it reopens the contract for bidding. Among the missions: “Provide pilots and operational support for drug interdiction missions such as crop spraying.”

In Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Pakistan, and Guatemala, State Department air operations mostly perform “counternarcotics and law enforcement activities,” explains State Department spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala, and in Afghanistan it does transportation support as well.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 3

The New Soft-Focus Lens Of War

By on December 3, 2012 in News 1

Via the The New Inquiry, Huw Lemmey on social media as tools of destruction:

By nightfall tonight that explosion which just shook your neighborhood, in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, will have been liked over 8,000 times on Facebook. Welcome to Gaza City.

The transmutation of territorial control today enters a new topography, an extension of the historical “propaganda war”: control of the networked space online. The IDF have run a comprehensive social media campaign from the first stages of the new assault, announcing the assassination of Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari on Twitter, followed up by YouTube footage of his targeted killing within minutes.

Far from embracing ideas of a futuristic, dehumanising warfare, the instagrams of IDF, processed through the various “retro” and “soft-focus” filters, serve a dual purpose. The first purpose is that of historicization. Much as the hipstamatic literally filters the contemporary condition through the lens of the ’60s and ’70s, the use of “retro” filters removes the images of today’s IDF from their context within the current campaign of blockade and air assault and reframes them as part of the Israeli foundation story.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 1