30 mars 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval
Zumwalt Destroyers Spy With Drones | Fleet Battle Problem Test
In a new test, the USS Michael Mansoor will provide command and control to a variety of remotely crewed drones and ships.
17 décembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
Sweden ups defense budget 40% due to regional tensions
By: The Associated Press
STOCKHOLM — Sweden's parliament on Tuesday approved a 40 percent increase in the defense budget for 2021-2025 because of tensions in the Baltic Sea region in recent years, with officials saying Russia is the main reason for the move.
The 349-member Riksdag assembly approved the largest hike in 70 years, bringing the annual defense budget by 2025 to 89 billion kronor (U.S. $11 billion).
Defence Minister Peter Hultquist told the assembly before the series of votes that “it is the largest investment since the 1950s.”
The proposal was put forward in October by Sweden's two-party Social Democrat-Green Party minority government, and it received immediate backing from two smaller opposition groups.
The government described it as sending a signal after Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, repeated airspace violations by Russian military aircraft in the neighboring Baltics and a military buildup in Russia's exclave of Kaliningrad, which sits across the Baltic Sea from Sweden.
“There is much to suggest that Russia's military capabilities in absolute terms will increase throughout the next 10-year period,” the adopted proposal read.
The plan will see the armed forces grow from the current 55,000 positions to 90,000 by 2030. Several disbanded regiments will be reestablished and the number of conscripts will increase to 8,000 annually, which is a doubling compared with 2019. The Navy will receive new equipment and there will be upgrades in armament.
Sweden currently spends 1.1 percent of gross domestic product on defense. Guidelines issued by NATO, of which Sweden isn't a member, advise that members spend 2 percent, although many do not achieve that target.
In December 2017, Sweden decided to establish the nation's first new military regiment since World War II — a unit of 350 soldiers based on the strategically important Baltic Sea island of Gotland.
In the same year, Sweden also introduced a selective military draft for men and women, having previously abolished a men-only draft in 2010.
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30 avril 2024 | International, Naval
Initial construction to begin in June on new Canadian warships
The work is proceeding even though the Canadian government has yet to sign the actual construction contract to start building the 15 warships.
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20 août 2019 | International, Autre défense
A robot as slow as a snail ... on purpose
By: Kelsey D. Atherton Snails and slugs are so commonplace that we overlook the weirdness of how they move, gliding on a thin film across all sorts of terrain and obstacles. Popular imagination focuses on how slow this movement is, the snail defined by its pace, but it is at least as remarkable that the same mechanism lets a snail climb walls and move along ceilings. The movement is novel enough that there is now a snail-inspired robot, sliding across surfaces on an adhesive membrane, powered by a laser. The snail robot, produced by a joint research team at the University of Warsaw Poland, together with colleagues from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, created a centimeter-long robot powered by light. The research, published July in Macromolecular Rapid Communications, sheds new insight on how animals move in the wild, and on how small machines could be built to take advantage of that same motion. Why might military planners or designers be interested in snail-like movement? The ability to scale surfaces and cling to them alone is worth study and possibly future adaptation. There's also the simple efficiency of a creature that maneuvers on a single, durable foot. “Gastropods' adhesive locomotion has some unique properties: Using a thin layer of mucus, snails and slugs can navigate challenging environments, including glass, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, Teflon), metal surfaces, sand, and (famously) razor blades, with only few super-hydrophobic coatings able to prevent them from crawling up a vertical surface,” write the authors. “The low complexity of a single continuous foot promises advantages in design and fabrication as well as resistance to adverse external conditions and wear, while constant contact with the surface provides a high margin of failure resistance (e.g., slip or detachment).” Snails can literally move along the edge of the spear unscathed. Surely, there's something in a robot that can do the same. The small snail robot looks like nothing so much as a discarded stick of gum, and is much smaller. At just a centimeter in length, this is not a platform capable of demonstrating much more than movement. The machine is made of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers, which can change shape when scanned by light. Combined with an artificial mucus later formed of glycerin, the robot is able to move, climb over surfaces, and even up a vertical wall, on a glass ceiling, and over obstacles, while it is powered by a laser. It does all of this at 1/50th the speed a snail would. This leaves the implications of such technology in a more distant future. Imagine a sensor that could crawl into position on the side of a building, and then stay there as combat roars around it. Or perhaps the application is as a robot adhesive, crawling charges into place at the remote direction of imperceptible light. Directing a robot into an unexpected position, and having it stay there with adhesive, could be a useful tool for future operations, and one that would be built upon research like this. The robot may be comically slow now. The pace of the technologies around it is not. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/robotics/2019/08/19/do-snail-robots-foreshadow-the-sticky-grenades-of-the-future/