Pentagon
SALT LAKE CITY, June 29, 2009 -- Experimental devices that read brain signals have helped paralyzed people use computers and may let amputees control bionic limbs. But existing devices use tiny electrodes that poke into the brain.
LIVERPOOL, UK - 7 April 2009: Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered a five-sided ice chain structure that could be used to modify future weather patterns.
While U.S. intelligence officials have spent more than seven years searching fruitlessly for Osama bin Laden, UCLA geographers say they have a good idea of where the terrorist leader was at the end of 2001 — and perhaps where he has been in the years since.
The Air Force unveiled its new Future Total Force concept at the Pentagon Dec. 1, introducing six test cases that will help shape the way the service trains, equips and employs its active- and reserve- component members.
The new plan will help prepare the Air Force for the future by maximizing the capability of equipment and balancing the experience levels of Air Force members, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Wood, Air Force deputy chief of staff for plans and programs. This will reduce redundancies and eliminate outdated operations while improving the service's training, effectiveness and overall combat capability, he said.
The search-and-rescue dogs deployed following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have not suffered either immediate or short-term effects from exposure to the disaster sites, researchers report, and should help relieve fears about the after-effects of working at the 9/11 sites. For the last three years, researchers tracked the health of dogs and handlers from the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Fresh Kills Landfill site on Staten Island, where debris from the World Trade Center was further searched. ''Overall, the lack of clear adverse medical or behavioral effects among the 9/11 dogs is heartening, both for the animals and the human rescue workers. Since dogs age more rapidly than humans, they can serve as sentinels for human disease. We are encouraged that we do not see significant increases in cancer and respiratory diseases.''
About 40 percent of Pentagon personnel screened for mental health disorders in the four months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were at high risk for problems like generalized anxiety, panic attacks, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or alcohol abuse, a new study finds.
Thousands of active duty and reserve U.S. service members deployed overseas for Operation Iraqi Freedom will undergo an enhanced post-deployment health assessment process. The new health evaluation process was approved mid-April and is being implemented now to provide added safeguards for the health of deployed service members, Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, told Pentagon reporters April 29.
Faced with the possible threat by North Korea of a nuclear warhead reaching the United States, senior Pentagon officials told the House Armed Services Committee March 20 they are moving forward with a billion-dollar missile defense system. "We have achieved a number of successes in the missile defense test program, which have added momentum to the development effort and bolstered our confidence that we will be able to meet the challenges that lie ahead," Edward E. "Pete" Aldridge Jr., undersecretary of defense acquisition, technology and logistics, told the committee.
In the first 24 hours of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, coalition military aircraft "struck more targets than were struck in all of 1942 and 1943 by 8th Air Force during the Combined Bomber Offensive," an Air Force officer said in the Pentagon today. In the opening hours of the impending military conflict with Iraq, American aircraft could drop 10 times as many bombs. The looming clash will be "an order of magnitude larger in terms of numbers of targets struck within the first 24 to 48 hours," Col. Gary Crowder, chief of strategy, concepts and doctrine for Air Combat Command, said. Advances in precision and stealth technology and a new approach to planning have allowed for more efficient prosecution of bombing campaigns, the colonel said.
The Defense Department today unveiled a billion dollar roadmap for unmanned aerial vehicles during the next 25 years. Plans call for developing joint interoperable UAVs that are capable of everything from surveillance to air strike. "The roadmap provides those high priority investments necessary to move UAV capability to the mainstream," said Dyke Weatherington, deputy of the UAV Planning Task Force in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, at a DoD press briefing today. "The potential value UAVs offer range across virtually every mission area and capability of interest to DoD. The roadmap identifies those key technology areas that we think are right for investment."
Pentagon officials showed pictures today from the 1991 Gulf War of an Iraqi tank completely destroyed by a 105 mm round made of depleted uranium. The round had pierced the tank's thick armor, leaving only a burned out shell. Even more impressive, they told of how a DU round had penetrated directly through a sand dune to demolish a tank hiding behind it. "That's how much of an edge it gives us, and we don't want to give that up," Col. James Naughton of the Army Materiel Command said today at a Pentagon briefing to explain the uses and health effects of DU on the battlefield.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon Town Hall meeting that his department is still "not yet arranged to deal successfully" with the new threat of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, and that a reorganization he began before September 11, 2001 must continue.
