Quote; "WASHINGTON — Lawmakers on Tuesday took the first step towards
establishing a ‘Space Corps’ within the Air Force — similar to the way
the Marine Corps functions in the Navy — by drafting legislation that
would require the new organization to be set up by January 1, 2019.
As the House Armed Services Committee
prepares to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the
strategic forces subcommittee — which oversees military space matters
— released its proposed additions to the bill. The subcommittee has
scheduled a formal legislative mark-up session for its portions of the
bill on Thursday.
The subcommittee’s top Republican, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, and top Democrat, Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, said the subcommittee’s mark would require the Air Force to establish the Space Corps to serve “as a separate military service within the Department of the Air Force and under the civilian leadership of the Secretary of the Air Force.”
“There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the strategic advantages we derive from our national security space systems are eroding,” Rogers and Cooper said in a prepared statement. “We are convinced that the Department of Defense is unable to take the measures necessary to address these challenges effectively and decisively, or even recognize the nature and scale of its problems.”
“Thus, Congress has to step in,” the statement continues. “We must act now to fix national security space and put in place a foundation for defending space as a critical element of national security. Therefore, our Mark will require the creation, under the Secretary of the Air Force, of a new Space Corps, as a separate military service responsible for national security space programs for which the Air Force is today responsible. We view this as a first, but critical step, to fixing the National Security Space enterprise.”
The Space Corp would be led by its own chief, who would sit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a six-year term, the bill says. It would be a position equal to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and would answer to the Secretary of the Air Force.
The subcommittee’s markup of the bill would also set up a U.S. Space Command that would be a sub-unified command under U.S. Strategic Command, a move lawmakers hope would improve the integration of space operations in warfighting.
The subcommittee’s action on the NDAA is one of the early steps in a lengthy legislative process. The bill would still need to get approval from the full committee before it could be debated by the House, but the chamber isn’t expected to vote on the NDAA until after the Fourth of July holiday." Go to: http://spacenews.com/house-panel-takes-first-step-towards-military-space-corps/ For full article.
HASC BACKS SPACE CORPS
Quote; "The committee rebuffed an amendment from Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) that would strip a provision from the Strategic Forces mark creating a Space Corps and replace it with a report on the need for a separate space services.
Turner argued the reorganization of the Air Force's space mission needed more study, saying the bill was "asking us to do something we haven't done something since 1947."
Still, the proposal drew opposition from both parties, and Strategic Forces Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) defended his panel's development of the measure. "To delay this, in my view, would be irresponsible," he said, adding not implementing the measure would be "legislative malpractice." Go to: http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-defense/2017/06/29/hasc-approves-ndaa-just-before-midnight-221115 For full article.
The subcommittee’s top Republican, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, and top Democrat, Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, said the subcommittee’s mark would require the Air Force to establish the Space Corps to serve “as a separate military service within the Department of the Air Force and under the civilian leadership of the Secretary of the Air Force.”
“There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the strategic advantages we derive from our national security space systems are eroding,” Rogers and Cooper said in a prepared statement. “We are convinced that the Department of Defense is unable to take the measures necessary to address these challenges effectively and decisively, or even recognize the nature and scale of its problems.”
“Thus, Congress has to step in,” the statement continues. “We must act now to fix national security space and put in place a foundation for defending space as a critical element of national security. Therefore, our Mark will require the creation, under the Secretary of the Air Force, of a new Space Corps, as a separate military service responsible for national security space programs for which the Air Force is today responsible. We view this as a first, but critical step, to fixing the National Security Space enterprise.”
The Space Corp would be led by its own chief, who would sit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a six-year term, the bill says. It would be a position equal to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and would answer to the Secretary of the Air Force.
The subcommittee’s markup of the bill would also set up a U.S. Space Command that would be a sub-unified command under U.S. Strategic Command, a move lawmakers hope would improve the integration of space operations in warfighting.
The subcommittee’s action on the NDAA is one of the early steps in a lengthy legislative process. The bill would still need to get approval from the full committee before it could be debated by the House, but the chamber isn’t expected to vote on the NDAA until after the Fourth of July holiday." Go to: http://spacenews.com/house-panel-takes-first-step-towards-military-space-corps/ For full article.
HASC BACKS SPACE CORPS
Quote; "The committee rebuffed an amendment from Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) that would strip a provision from the Strategic Forces mark creating a Space Corps and replace it with a report on the need for a separate space services.
Turner argued the reorganization of the Air Force's space mission needed more study, saying the bill was "asking us to do something we haven't done something since 1947."
Still, the proposal drew opposition from both parties, and Strategic Forces Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) defended his panel's development of the measure. "To delay this, in my view, would be irresponsible," he said, adding not implementing the measure would be "legislative malpractice." Go to: http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-defense/2017/06/29/hasc-approves-ndaa-just-before-midnight-221115 For full article.
Secret Missions of the X-37B.
Quote; "WASHINGTON – Alarms once again are being sounded over North Korea’s
capability to launch satellites that could carry a nuclear weapon and be
detonated at a high altitude over America, creating an extremely
powerful electromagnetic pulse that would knock out the nation’s
vulnerable electrical grid system, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
It is on that grid system that the nation’s life-sustaining critical
infrastructures, from food supplies and utility services to financial
and even communications, depend.
Pyongyang already has demonstrated it can launch such satellites. Two already are in orbit, even though experts don’t know what the satellites are doing.
Peter Pry, who already has expressed concerns about Pyongyang’s satellite launches, has warned that North Korea would not need a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Instead, it could put a nuclear weapon on a satellite that could be detonated on command over the United States.
Pry, who is executive director of the congressional advisory Task Force on National and Homeland Security and U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, has said Pyongyang has been testing smaller nuclear kiloton warhead that emit greater amounts of gamma rays, a form of electromagnetic energy, rather than devices with physical destructive capability.
Now Jim Oberg, who is one of the few American scientists to visit North Korea’s Sohae space launch site in the northwest corner of the country, has expressed similar concerns about the content of North Korean satellites.
Oberg is a retired space shuttle Mission Control specialist with NASA and worked for U.S. Space Command.
For the rest of this report, and more, please go to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
“There have been fears expressed that North Korea might use a satellite to carry a small nuclear warhead into orbit and then detonate it over the United States for an EMP strike,” Oberg said in a Space Review article. “These concerns seem extreme and require an astronomical scale of irrationality on the part of the regime.
“The most frightening aspect, I’ve come to realize,” he said, “is that exactly such a scale of insanity is now evident in the rest of this ‘space program.'”" Go to: http://www.wnd.com/2017/02/new-alarms-sounded-over-north-koreas-emp-potential/ For full article.
Nb. Date of projection.
Quote; "US military boffins are preparing highly sophisticated technical defences against the dreaded electromagnetic pulse bomb, a weapon which has long been anticipated but never successfully built*.We know about the counter-electropulse defence technology because the company which will develop it - HRL Labs of Malibu, California - announced their contract win yesterday. The programme is referred to by the Pentagon as Electromagnetic Pulse-tolerant Microwave Receiver Front-end, or EMPiRe*.
The idea of the attacking e-weapon is that it would release a hugely powerful radio-frequency or microwave pulse. In the same way that a normal, very weak emission is picked up by a radio or radar antenna to produce a measurable current, the weapons-grade pulse would induce a vicious surge in exposed electronic equipment - potentially frying it for good, or at least shutting it down for a bit.
Such weapons, it's often thought, might be driven by explosions or other rapid processes rather than normal batteries or generators, because of the need to release large amounts of power very fast: hence pulse bomb rather than pulse raygun etc.
Normally, the defence against this sort of thing is simple. You merely enclose your electronics in a conductive metallic Faraday cage, perhaps fashioned of trusty tinfoil if nothing better comes to hand. The problems of generating and focusing powerful electropulses are already enormous* - so enormous, in fact, that decades of secretive US effort have failed to produce any working EMP weapons**. Producing an EMP which has range, focus and power sufficient to sizzle its way through a decent Faraday cage is just not on.
But there are problems here. Some kinds of electronics are no use if you wrap them up in a radio-proof box. In particular, a microwave receiver in a communications or radar set needs to pick up RF radiation - but if you let it, an EMP bomb or whatever might fry the electronics of the connected system.
HRL's proposed solution is to isolate the "front end" of the receiver, which will "sense incoming electrical fields through a high-performance microwave photonic link". The new HRL front end will pass information to the signal processors optically, meaning that no electric surge through into the protected back end is possible.
"The thermal effects of a high-energy attack will be insignificant because our sensor head absorbs negligible radio-frequency power," says HRL Senior Scientist Dr James Schaffner.
HRL's research is funded by DARPA, the Pentagon's elite group of paradigm-punishing, technonoclastic nerd-wranglers. DARPA's goal often appears to the outsider to be that of rendering America's latest military tech obsolete well before it actually comes into service. In this case the Pentagon brainboxes may well excel themselves, as even the more ambitious ongoing US pulse-bomb efforts only see themselves starting a useful weapons programme from 2012. (To be fair, DARPA might be more worried about EMPs from nukes*.)" Go to: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/28/darpa_pulse_weapon_countermeasure/ For full article.
*Italics mine. This article strikes me as both disingenuous and misleading (unlike the one above that just appears to be ill informed on the threat), civilian technology is not usually encased in a Faraday Cage, working EMP weapons would appear to be fact (see below), and have been for a long time (esp. the nuclear variety), and indeed DARPA are worried about EMPs from nuclear weapons (underplayed), but surely they've already developed (or are developing), countermeasures to their own technology?....
CHAMP
Quote; "The Pentagon’s Counter-Electronics High-Power Advanced Microwave Project (CHAMP) has been one of the sci-fi like weapons programs that has the ability to change warfare as we know forever. Now it looks like the CHAMP has found an ideal delivery vehicle, the stealthy Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range.
The technology has been around conceptually for many years and something like it was even rumored to have been deployed secretly before. For instance, there were reports that during the fall of Qaddafi, unmanned aircraft orbited over Libya’s most volatile weapons stockpiles and zapped vehicles engines and electronics that approached."
.."CHAMP, which is a Boeing and Air Force Research Laboratory project, was successfully tested in 2012 aboard a AGM-86 Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM). During the test, which occurred over a bombing and testing range in Utah, the CHAMP equipped CALCM flew over a two story building filled with computers and other powered technology and initiated a high-power, directed microwave burst above it as it passed by. The burst knocked out all the equipment inside. The test went on to zap six more targets successfully before the missile crashed itself in a pre-designated area. Other test flights are set to have followed, and even hardened targets were not completely immune to CHAMP’s zapping power." Go to: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/this-stealth-missile-will-use-emps-to-cripple-enemy-ele-1705441209 For full article.
Quote; "THE United States Air Force wants to fry your phone. And your computer. And your car. It’s investing millions into modifying missiles into weaponised microwave ovens.
Arafel: All of these articles downplay the threat (EMP nukes are very much in the armoury esp. for use against non-nuclear powers). Not effective against military installations? Maybe so but only the properly shielded (and this would need to be considerable in the case of air-burst nuclear EMP weapons). We are a technologically reliant culture, the likelihood is we'd end up like this...
Instilling panic in civilian populations has been a weapon of war since the beginning and if this were to include parts (or all) of the vital services and administration? Khaos.
UN Nuclear Ban
Quote; " "None of the nine countries known or believed to possess nuclear weapons — the United States, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — is supporting the treaty. Many of their allies also did not attend the meeting*.
Instead of a ban, the US and other nuclear powers want to fortify the pre-existing Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
That pact, which has been widely criticised as being ineffective, originally sought to limit the spread of atomic weapons beyond the five already in possession at the time of its inception – the US, Russia, Britain, France and China. It compels non-nuclear signatory nations to promise not to purse atomic weapons. In return, those who already own nuclear weapons would be obliged to commitment towards nuclear disarmament and guarantee non-nuclear states access to peaceful nuclear technology for producing energy*." Go to: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/g20-summit-120-countries-adopt-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty-arms-war-prohibition-disarmament-a7828581.html For full article.
*That's oxymoronic too (and indicates the true direction of Time's Arrow), nuclear power is essential for nuclear weapon production and the truth is even those countries which do not possess them but run reactors underpin proliferation. A nuclear powered world without nuclear weapons? Ludicrous..." Go to: http://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1499501028.html
For full post.
*Italics mine.
Pyongyang already has demonstrated it can launch such satellites. Two already are in orbit, even though experts don’t know what the satellites are doing.
Peter Pry, who already has expressed concerns about Pyongyang’s satellite launches, has warned that North Korea would not need a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Instead, it could put a nuclear weapon on a satellite that could be detonated on command over the United States.
Pry, who is executive director of the congressional advisory Task Force on National and Homeland Security and U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, has said Pyongyang has been testing smaller nuclear kiloton warhead that emit greater amounts of gamma rays, a form of electromagnetic energy, rather than devices with physical destructive capability.
Now Jim Oberg, who is one of the few American scientists to visit North Korea’s Sohae space launch site in the northwest corner of the country, has expressed similar concerns about the content of North Korean satellites.
Oberg is a retired space shuttle Mission Control specialist with NASA and worked for U.S. Space Command.
For the rest of this report, and more, please go to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
“There have been fears expressed that North Korea might use a satellite to carry a small nuclear warhead into orbit and then detonate it over the United States for an EMP strike,” Oberg said in a Space Review article. “These concerns seem extreme and require an astronomical scale of irrationality on the part of the regime.
“The most frightening aspect, I’ve come to realize,” he said, “is that exactly such a scale of insanity is now evident in the rest of this ‘space program.'”" Go to: http://www.wnd.com/2017/02/new-alarms-sounded-over-north-koreas-emp-potential/ For full article.
Nb. Date of projection.
Quote; "US military boffins are preparing highly sophisticated technical defences against the dreaded electromagnetic pulse bomb, a weapon which has long been anticipated but never successfully built*.We know about the counter-electropulse defence technology because the company which will develop it - HRL Labs of Malibu, California - announced their contract win yesterday. The programme is referred to by the Pentagon as Electromagnetic Pulse-tolerant Microwave Receiver Front-end, or EMPiRe*.
The idea of the attacking e-weapon is that it would release a hugely powerful radio-frequency or microwave pulse. In the same way that a normal, very weak emission is picked up by a radio or radar antenna to produce a measurable current, the weapons-grade pulse would induce a vicious surge in exposed electronic equipment - potentially frying it for good, or at least shutting it down for a bit.
Such weapons, it's often thought, might be driven by explosions or other rapid processes rather than normal batteries or generators, because of the need to release large amounts of power very fast: hence pulse bomb rather than pulse raygun etc.
Normally, the defence against this sort of thing is simple. You merely enclose your electronics in a conductive metallic Faraday cage, perhaps fashioned of trusty tinfoil if nothing better comes to hand. The problems of generating and focusing powerful electropulses are already enormous* - so enormous, in fact, that decades of secretive US effort have failed to produce any working EMP weapons**. Producing an EMP which has range, focus and power sufficient to sizzle its way through a decent Faraday cage is just not on.
But there are problems here. Some kinds of electronics are no use if you wrap them up in a radio-proof box. In particular, a microwave receiver in a communications or radar set needs to pick up RF radiation - but if you let it, an EMP bomb or whatever might fry the electronics of the connected system.
HRL's proposed solution is to isolate the "front end" of the receiver, which will "sense incoming electrical fields through a high-performance microwave photonic link". The new HRL front end will pass information to the signal processors optically, meaning that no electric surge through into the protected back end is possible.
"The thermal effects of a high-energy attack will be insignificant because our sensor head absorbs negligible radio-frequency power," says HRL Senior Scientist Dr James Schaffner.
HRL's research is funded by DARPA, the Pentagon's elite group of paradigm-punishing, technonoclastic nerd-wranglers. DARPA's goal often appears to the outsider to be that of rendering America's latest military tech obsolete well before it actually comes into service. In this case the Pentagon brainboxes may well excel themselves, as even the more ambitious ongoing US pulse-bomb efforts only see themselves starting a useful weapons programme from 2012. (To be fair, DARPA might be more worried about EMPs from nukes*.)" Go to: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/28/darpa_pulse_weapon_countermeasure/ For full article.
*Italics mine. This article strikes me as both disingenuous and misleading (unlike the one above that just appears to be ill informed on the threat), civilian technology is not usually encased in a Faraday Cage, working EMP weapons would appear to be fact (see below), and have been for a long time (esp. the nuclear variety), and indeed DARPA are worried about EMPs from nuclear weapons (underplayed), but surely they've already developed (or are developing), countermeasures to their own technology?....
CHAMP
Quote; "The Pentagon’s Counter-Electronics High-Power Advanced Microwave Project (CHAMP) has been one of the sci-fi like weapons programs that has the ability to change warfare as we know forever. Now it looks like the CHAMP has found an ideal delivery vehicle, the stealthy Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range.
The technology has been around conceptually for many years and something like it was even rumored to have been deployed secretly before. For instance, there were reports that during the fall of Qaddafi, unmanned aircraft orbited over Libya’s most volatile weapons stockpiles and zapped vehicles engines and electronics that approached."
.."CHAMP, which is a Boeing and Air Force Research Laboratory project, was successfully tested in 2012 aboard a AGM-86 Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM). During the test, which occurred over a bombing and testing range in Utah, the CHAMP equipped CALCM flew over a two story building filled with computers and other powered technology and initiated a high-power, directed microwave burst above it as it passed by. The burst knocked out all the equipment inside. The test went on to zap six more targets successfully before the missile crashed itself in a pre-designated area. Other test flights are set to have followed, and even hardened targets were not completely immune to CHAMP’s zapping power." Go to: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/this-stealth-missile-will-use-emps-to-cripple-enemy-ele-1705441209 For full article.
Quote; "THE United States Air Force wants to fry your phone. And your computer. And your car. It’s investing millions into modifying missiles into weaponised microwave ovens.
The devastating power of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) has long been associated with nuclear war.
It’s
a flash of raw electromagnetic energy through the atmosphere that fuses
delicate electronics into irreparable smoking scrap.
The problem has always been the nuclear bit: Using one to fry a phone network would have been overkill.
Not to mention a trigger for an almost inevitable ‘mutually assured destruction’ escalation.
So the US military has been seeking less lethal ways of sowing confusion among its enemies.
Enter flying microwave ovens.
The idea was tested as far back as 2012 when Boeing flew an EMP missile off a B-52.
It didn’t get the contract, though.
Flightglobal reports defence
contractor Raytheon has just been handed $US4.8 million to attach a
microwave generator to two conventional cruise missiles." Go to: http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/inventions/us-air-force-modifies-cruise-missiles-to-carry-electromagnetic-pulse-generators--to-destroy-electronics-from-a-distance/news-story/f1898c65dd851fe23f2fca578db83b2b For full article.
Arafel: All of these articles downplay the threat (EMP nukes are very much in the armoury esp. for use against non-nuclear powers). Not effective against military installations? Maybe so but only the properly shielded (and this would need to be considerable in the case of air-burst nuclear EMP weapons). We are a technologically reliant culture, the likelihood is we'd end up like this...
Instilling panic in civilian populations has been a weapon of war since the beginning and if this were to include parts (or all) of the vital services and administration? Khaos.
UN Nuclear Ban
Quote; " "None of the nine countries known or believed to possess nuclear weapons — the United States, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — is supporting the treaty. Many of their allies also did not attend the meeting*.
Instead of a ban, the US and other nuclear powers want to fortify the pre-existing Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
That pact, which has been widely criticised as being ineffective, originally sought to limit the spread of atomic weapons beyond the five already in possession at the time of its inception – the US, Russia, Britain, France and China. It compels non-nuclear signatory nations to promise not to purse atomic weapons. In return, those who already own nuclear weapons would be obliged to commitment towards nuclear disarmament and guarantee non-nuclear states access to peaceful nuclear technology for producing energy*." Go to: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/g20-summit-120-countries-adopt-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty-arms-war-prohibition-disarmament-a7828581.html For full article.
*That's oxymoronic too (and indicates the true direction of Time's Arrow), nuclear power is essential for nuclear weapon production and the truth is even those countries which do not possess them but run reactors underpin proliferation. A nuclear powered world without nuclear weapons? Ludicrous..." Go to: http://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1499501028.html
For full post.
*Italics mine.
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