Navy Enlists High Technology, (Washington Times)…United Press International

The U.S. Navy and major American defense contractors are working on new high-tech systems to confront the renewed dangers of submarine warfare in the 21st century.

Getting Robots Of War To Act More Naturally (Philadelphia Inquirer)…Faye Flam, June 12, 2008, Pg. 1

The next generation of military robots won’t just be humanoids like the Terminator.

The robots of the future will likely work in concert, like a swarm of ants. Others may creep like spiders or hover like hummingbirds, if the work at the University of Pennsylvania is an indication.

Most of the more than 5,000 robotic devices now in Iraq are remote-controlled, sniffing out explosives or performing other jobs with constant human instructions.

But in a shift with huge implications for warfare and diplomacy, the military wants robots that act on their own volition. It’s a prospect that promises to save lives, but could also make wars more palatable and easier to start, some experts say.

GM: Live Green or Die, May 15, 2008. Business Week.

But Lutz is a pragmatist who believes the electrification of the car is the only way to preserve American car culture. "We were agonizing over what to do to counter the tidal wave of positive PR for Toyota," Lutz says. That month, GM came up with the Volt.

No one knew if something resembling supersize cell-phone batteries would work in a car. And GM executives confess the Volt was originally conceived as an image play

By January of this year, the Volt had become the centerpiece of GM’s green strategy.

Despite the tight schedule, Kruse says the batteries will be ready by 2010. "We’re making history," he says. "Fifty years from now, people will remember [the] Volt-like they remember a ’53 Corvette."

Even as the engineers toil to get the science right, Wagoner and Lutz are pushing to change GM’s culture. … That’s a daunting prospect.

…  Had Dr. Seuss depicted the company, he might have drawn a skyscraper in which the CEO hands out an edict from the top floor and a pastel-colored arm reaches out each window, passing the note 40 floors below to the rank and file. Wagoner is not given to cheerleading or, as one executive puts it, "

Marines Return To Afghan Village, Hope To Keep It (New York Times)…Carlotta Gall, June 9, 2008

United States marines pushed the Taliban out of this village and the surrounding district in southern Helmand Province so quickly in recent weeks that they called the operation a “catastrophic success.”

…. When on patrol, the marines carry a small gadget the size of an old Polaroid camera that takes fingerprints, photos and an iris scan of people they meet. It is used to build a database of the residents so they can easily spot strangers, the marines say. The Afghans accepted the imposition without protest.

Observation on the ground, information from the populace and control of key commerce and transportation routes are all ways to prevent the Taliban from seeping back into the area, Col. Peter Petronzio, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said in an interview.

“You need physically to be there,” he said. “You need to continue to move about the population, let your presence be known, but do it in a way so that you are not smothering and overwhelming. You have got to let life go on.”

Head Injuries, (CBS)…Kimberly Dozier, June 9, 2008 , 6:30 PM

Now to a health concern involving American troops in Iraq. Head injuries from roadside bombs are among the biggest threats to frontline soldiers. But Pentagon officials may have found a better way to provide protection. Technology used on the football field could soon be adapted for the battlefield.

It was one of those eureka moments. Army doctors home from Iraq and Afghanistan were watching NFL players pound it out and thought, that’s what our soldiers need, helmets like that. Because believe it or not, the effects on the brain of this can be a lot like this – blasts strong enough to shake and even bruise the brain often leading to traumatic brain injury known as TBI. Today an estimated 30 percent of troops who’ve served in combat suffer from TBI after repeated exposures to blasts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The army has sent out a call to NFL helmet makers like Riddell telling them apply their technology to combat helmets and we’ll buy hundreds of thousands of them.

They’ve done it before. Founder John Riddell invented World War II’s classic web suspension helmet. A different war means different challenges.

We’re looking for a pad system that is compatible with the advanced combat helmet. We’re looking for pads that can meet our requirements of sustaining blunt trauma at 10 feet per second.

Military Supercomputer Sets Record, (New York Times)…John Markoff

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.