tagged w/ BAE Systems
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“Egypt gets the most U.S. foreign aid of any country except for Israel.”
“The other group that benefits from this aid arrangement is U.S. defense contractors. As we reported with Sunlight Foundation, contractors including BAE Systems, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have all done business with the Egyptian government through relationships facilitated by high-powered DC lobbyists.”“Egypt gets the most U.S. foreign aid of any country except for Israel.”... more
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Invisibility will be possible due to sophisticated electronic sensors attached to the armored vehicles, which will project images of the surrounding environment on the outside of the vehicle, thereby making it merge with the battlefield landscape.
.http://ramanan50.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/invisible-tanksimagevideo/Invisibility will be possible due to sophisticated electronic sensors attached to the... more
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"A federal judge Wednesday blocked the public from attending a critical set of pretrial hearings in the prosecution of five U.S. security contractors accused of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in a 2007 shooting.
The hearings, which are expected to last through Friday, will examine whether the government improperly used immunized statements by the Blackwater Worldwide security guards in its investigation. The guards gave the statements to the State Department shortly after the controversial shooting Sept. 16, 2007, in a busy Baghdad square.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said Wednesday that he was closing the hearings because he wanted to shield witnesses and potential jurors from pretrial publicity. He also cited concerns about the disclosure of grand jury material. Urbina said he wanted to ensure the guards received a fair trial.
The five guards -- Paul Slough, Nicholas Slatten, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Donald Ball -- are charged with voluntary manslaughter and weapons violations in the killing of 14 civilians and the wounding 20 others. The Justice Department alleges that the guards unleashed an unprovoked attack on Iraqi civilians in Nisoor Square while in a convoy. One guard, Jeremy P. Ridgeway, has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against the others.
Blackwater, which has since renamed itself Xe, had a contract to provide security for the State Department in Iraq.
The proceedings underway in the District's federal court, known as Kastigar hearings, will probe how well investigators gathered evidence without being tainted by those immunized statements. If the judge finds the government's case is tainted, he might be forced to throw out the indictment."
Fair trial? Throw out the indictment?
Contractors are mercenaries under a contract, hence the name, and part of the contract is that they cannot be prosecuted for crimes that the average American soldier would be under United States and International Law. Essentially, the have immunity.
So, when Blackwater, Xe, Executive Outcomes, Halliburton, KBR, BAE Systems have their mercenaries shoot up villages and revel in the plunder of heroin and prostitutes, American soldiers get hit with the retaliation, and in the case of Afghanistan, they're about to hit back real hard. Think Vietnam was bad? Wait til he Taliban start their "Tet Offensive."
These "peacekeepers" are now patrolling the streets of the US as part of an international police force. Google 'G20 police pittsburgh' and click on images. Remember, contractor=mercenary and they have no allegiance to the United States or the Constitution. They work under a different contract and they get private trials."A federal judge Wednesday blocked the public from attending a critical set of... more
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Tens of thousands risk their lives to cross into Britain each year by clinging underneath trucks transported on ferries. The border agency has a robot dubbed "Hero" that is capable of ferreting out these stowaways using a combination of cameras and sensors. Tens of thousands risk their lives to cross into Britain each year by clinging... more
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UK-headquartered arms globocorp BAE Systems has shown off a raft of new robotic concepts this week at the Farnborough Air Show. But the newest and biggest kid on the BAE droidplane block is the Mantis, a large and powerful twin-engined technology demonstrator project whose wraps came off on Monday for the ceremonial inking of an MoD contract.
In essence, it's a fairly normal unmanned aerial vehicle of the same general type as the well-known American Predator and Predator-B/Reaper. The exact capabilities and subsystems are being decided, but Mantis will have visible and infrared imaging, a ground-scanning radar, and in all probability a laser-dot pointer for precision guided munitions. The model here at Farnborough was shown with mockup smartbombs and "Brimstone" missiles attached, too (Brimstone is the Europeanised version of the successful Hellfire tankbuster, already employed on attack helicopters and Predators).
The Mantis has some special sauce not usually seen on current Predators and such - it will use onboard processing, allowing much less bandwidth to be used in downloading radar data. This potentially spares the British forces' pay-as-you-go PFI satcomms budget, and could be a popular feature. Likewise, the Mantis is intended to fly autonomously as much as possible, avoiding the severe pilot-manpower burdens associated with most of the present-day Predator fleet.
“As a company, we have not got drawn into the ‘me too’ group of unmanned air vehicles,” said BAE robocraft chief Mark Kane in a statement earlier this week. “We have skipped a generation and whereas most current UAVs are remotely piloted or have some automatic functions, ours are fully autonomous.”
This would seem about all the autonomy you actually want in current wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. Super-UAVs which can fly an entire mission without any communications back to a ground station might have some advantages in big wars against sophisticated enemies, but wouldn't need - and wouldn't be allowed to use - full autonomy above today's battlefields. In any case, by Wright's description, the Mantis in particular - unlike BAE's other MoD demonstrator, Taranis - isn't intended to be independent. Primarily a surveillance and recce platform, Mantis would lose most of its point if it never told anybody what it could see.
Asked what Mantis would bring to the party that wouldn't be available from other companies sooner and almost certainly cheaper, Wright said that a big advantage for Mantis would be "sovereignty", in that the machine's support and parts base would be British rather than under foreign control. But he was reluctant to say hand on heart that Mantis wouldn't incorporate any overseas kit or need any overseas backup, and understandably so - that would make it a very exceptional aircraft indeed. Just one of the candidate subsystems (the Selex Galileo PicoSAR radar being considered for Mantis) is at least partly Italian.
All in all, the Mantis does indeed look a bit like a "me too" system. BAE have seen the explosion in UAV use - especially by the military, but more and more in the civil sector - and they are determined to catch up with the leaders, ideally at the taxpayers' expense. Mantis has actually been under development for some time, and it seems plain that BAE would need to do it whether or not they had any seed money from the UK MoD. Even if that weren't the case, it's hard to see why the MoD would care - it is already flying Reapers, and would buy more right now if it had the money.
The MoD having recently stated that it can buy brand new Reapers for £10m a pop, it seems reasonable to suppose that actually the Mantis pricetag is being withheld so that people won't ask why we don't just buy X number of Reapers or Sky Warriors instead - or even, perhaps, Y number of desperately-necessary Chinook transport choppers, armoured vehicles or whatever. After all, there's a whole other government department in charge of business subsidies.UK-headquartered arms globocorp BAE Systems has shown off a raft of new robotic... more
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The first passenger plane equipped with a system to repel shoulder-fired missiles successfully completed its flight, a British defense and aerospace company announced.
The JetEye infrared missile-defense system was tested on an American Airlines flight that took off July 11, according to a statement from BAE Systems. The plane flew from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport in California, the company said.
The JetEye system works by detecting the heat-seeking missiles and then firing a laser, which diverts the missile. American Airlines refused to make the system mandatory on all trips but agreed to cooperate with the tests.
The flight represents the final phase of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Counter-Man-Portable Air Defense System program, designed to test the suitability of missile-protection equipment for commercial aircraft.
Previously, the technology was successfully evaluated on an American Airlines test aircraft and an ABX Air Inc. cargo aircraft.
The missile-protection equipment will be installed on two more American Airlines 767-200 aircraft for daily cross-country flights through March. Engineers will evaluate the system's maintainability and reliability, as well as its suitability for the airline industry. No missiles will be fired at these flights.
"BAE Systems worked closely with DHS and the airline industry to develop an effective response to potential terrorist threats," said Burt Keirstead, JetEye program director for BAE Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Homeland Security officials said in January that there is no specific threat of these weapons being fired at planes.
However, Taliban forces successfully used shoulder-fired missiles against Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan. Terrorists tried in 2002 to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya with them.
Insurgents hit a cargo plane in Baghdad the following year, but the plane landed safely.
Experts say that about 500,000 to 700,000 shoulder-fired missile weapons have been produced worldwide, and some have been purchased in Middle Eastern and Central Asian arms markets for as little as $5,000.
Since 2003, Congress has pressured Homeland Security to adapt military anti-MANPADS technology to commercial aviation.
BAE Systems, based in Farnborough, England, works with American Airlines Maintenance and Engineering Services, which provided the test aircraft and engineering services for the development of JetEye.
DHS awarded BAE Systems a $29 million contract in January for this final evaluation phase of the program, which calls for the planes to log about 7,000 flight hours.
Northrop Grumman, a defense company with its own system to protect planes from portable missiles, urged the Defense Department in March to install its system on commercial flights that take soldiers and equipment to war zones.
Jack Pledger, a Northrop Grumman executive, said in March that 27 terrorist groups are believed to possess shoulder-fired weapons, that aircraft are vulnerable to the missiles within 25 miles of airports and that one missile incident could have catastrophic effects on the U.S. economy.
In March, the Northrop system concluded a 14-month test during which anti-missile systems were installed on 11 FedEx cargo planes that flew 4,500 flights.The first passenger plane equipped with a system to repel shoulder-fired missiles... more
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The UK's high court has ruled today that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and Blair's government acted unlawfully in dropping an investigation into alleged bribery in an arms deal between BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia. Threats about intelligence sharing and trade that amounted to diplomatic blackmail were made by Saudi Arabia in order to stifle the investigation. According to an SFO document, the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia warned that 'British lives on British streets', were at risk if the fraud investigation continued. The memo added: 'If this caused another 7/7, how could we say our investigation is more important?'
The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and anti-corruption campaigners Corner House had sought a review of the decision made in December 2006 by the SFO director, Robert Wardle, to drop the investigation into allegations of bribery and corruption over the £43bn Al-Yamamah arms deal, agreed by the Thatcher government in 1985.
'No one, whether in this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice', the two judges ruled. They were scathing about the SFO's inability to tell Saudi Arabia its threats would be ignored. It is likely that the SFO will have to reconsider its decision.
The UK's high court has ruled today that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and... more
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