Latest news with #Matthys
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Yahoo
More data, comms, countermeasures needed for Special Ops aircraft
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways TAMPA, Fla. – Special operators are looking to industry for a suite of upgrades to their fixed-wing aircraft, such as radio frequency countermeasures, new methods for aerial refueling and improved networking. At the annual Global SOF Foundation Special Operations Forces Week, Special Operations Command officials who develop aircraft shared these and other updates that are needed from its largest to smallest platforms. For one key platform program, the MC-130J Combat Talon III, operators envision the aircraft as a nexus in the battlefield, connecting the lowest-level operator on the ground with space, air and even commands in the homeland. To do that, the MC-130J will need some new capabilities. They are currently testing terrain following and avoidance technology that includes dynamic retasking. They'll also need networked data from the aircraft systems to work with satellite communications, radio signals, data links and data fusion across multiple platforms. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the aircraft requires upgraded radio frequency countermeasures and considerably more processing power for all of the data streaming in. Next steps include a capability release that will include tactical mission route replanner technology, along with tactical flight management and defensive countermeasures, as well as embedded training systems to simulate more complex missions. Beyond those capabilities, operators are looking to extend the range and reach of the aircraft, improve its communication systems, advance its defensive systems, increase its payload capacity for diverse mission sets and precision airdrop and landing capabilities, said Lt. Col. Andrew Sturgeon, head of mobility for Program Executive Office-Fixed Wing. The recently named OA-1K Skyraider II is also on the upgrade list, as SOCOM wants modular sensor payloads and weapons enhancements for the propeller-driven airplane, said Lt. Col. Shawna Matthys, who heads the integrated strike program. For both the Skyraider and the AC-130J Ghostrider, officials are looking for longer-ranging weapons systems for contested environments, air-launched loiter munitions and collaborative weapons options, Matthys said. Across the entire strike portfolio, which touches nearly every fixed-wing platform, Matthys said those munitions need increased automation and autonomy, advanced navigation and sensing and secure, resilient communications, along with modular payload effects. That gives operators more options for targeting and destroying targets on various missions. For its drones, such as the MQ-9A and the MQ-1C, special operators seek hardened data links and communications, 'easily adaptable autonomous behavior profiles,' the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to reduce data link bandwidth requirements and the use of autonomy for the entire kill chain, said Brandi Evans, head of airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance for PEO-Fixed Wing. Beginning this month, the office's adaptive airborne enterprise program will look to give operators multi-aircraft control interface software, increase survivability and integrate autonomy onto existing systems, Evans said. For manned ISR platforms, such as the U-28 and DHC-8 (STAMP), officials are looking to improve sensors, integrate all-weather capabilities and automate aspects of aircraft operation to reduce crew workload, as well as edge data processing.
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World by Tom Phillips review
At 9.45pm on 13 April 2029, you might want to take a look out of the window. That rock in the sky heading your way fast is actually an asteroid called 99942 Apophis, named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos. Roughly the size of Wembley Stadium, when Apophis hits it'll do to our species what another asteroid did to the dinosaurs 66m years ago. Did I say 'when'? I obviously meant 'if'. After all, as Tom Phillips puts it, space is big, and little Earth easily missable – despite the nominative determinism of what he nicknames Smashy McDeathrock. Plus, in 2022 Nasa deliberately crashed the Dart spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, knocking if off course. If Smashy hits London, hypothesises Phillips, it'll engulf everywhere from Camden to Clapham in a fireball and leave a crater three miles wide that 'would have previously contained approximately 150 branches of Pret'. Truly, any survivors will envy the dead. The serious purpose of Phillips's jolly doomscroll through the apocalyptic sex cults, pandemics, nuclear armageddons, rapture-fetishising fruitloops, numerologically obsessed nincompoops, swivel-eyed preppers waiting out zombie apocalypses in their Utah silos, not to mention the Bible's (spoiler alert!) troubling last act, is to work out quite why, after so many failed prophesies, doom-mongery still thrives. Have we learned nothing from the fate of Dutch baker Jan Matthys, who in 1533 predicted Jesus's second coming and that the last day was imminent? Clearly not. For a while, Matthys headed what proper historians don't call a funtime Anabaptist proto-communist sex cult in otherwise sleepy Münster. The local prince-bishop's soldiers put an end to that nonsense, hacking Matthys to pieces and nailing his genitals to the city gates, as a warning that one should, in Phillips's words, 'not even slightly consider fucking with the prince-bishop of Münster'. Though Matthys's world ended that day, humanity did not. Some 490-odd years later we're still around – as is a secular mutation of conspiracist apocalyptic thinking, most tellingly among Trump-loyalist tech bros. PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, for instance, recently argued in the FT that Trump's second term heralds apocalypse, but in a good way. Apokálypsis, the Greek for unveiling, Thiel wrote, will adjudicate 'the sins of those who govern us today'. Thanks to Trump and the internet, politically inconvenient information allegedly redacted by what Thiel calls the 'Distributed Idea Suppression Complex' (ie legacy media, Democrats and others in the woke blob) will become available, enabling us to learn that Covid was a bioweapon and who killed JFK. Thiel didn't consider a more inconvenient truth, namely that the internet doesn't so much tell truth to power as dupe cognitively depleted QAnon rubes with paranoid guff. That would explain what happened on Tuesday 2 November 2021. Demolition contractor turned online influencer Michael Protzman predicted that on that day, John F Kennedy Jr would appear in Dallas to announce that he had not died in a plane crash in 1999. Several hundred followers gathered on the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza where his father was assassinated nearly 60 years earlier. 'Quite why they expected JFK Jr to reveal himself in Dallas when he'd died off the coast of Massachusetts is a little unclear,' Phillips writes, though he notes that some believed he would go ''And here's my dad, who's also alive', as a surprise finale.' Neither turned up. Undaunted, like so many of the failed prophets with whose stories Phillips entertains us, Protzman led followers to a Rolling Stones gig where 'he assured them that Keith Richards would remove his face revealing that he had actually been JFK Jr for an unspecified time'. Fans of Phillips's earlier books Humans: A Brief History of How we F*cked It All Up and Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t will be pleased that the ex-BuzzFeed editor is on form, not letting the grimness of his subject spoil his gagsmithery. There's a lengthy set up, for instance, for a joke about the 15th-century BC Battle of Megiddo, the city lent its name to Armageddon. The passage seems to make the editorial cut chiefly so Phillips can tell us that the Pharaoh Thutmose III tried his – wait for it – thutmost in that battle. Only one criticism – the title. Phillips has more asterisks than asteroids. Say what you want about the Is It Just Me Or is Everything Shit franchise, at least it had the courage of its cussing. His book is topically valuable corrective for those who think – what with Gaza, Ukraine, floods, firestorms and fools with their fingers on world-ending buttons – we are indeed in the end times and should descend into our silos or colonise Mars. We are not the first to suppose the end is nigh, counsels Phillips. Nor will we be the last. For its most fervent believers, Phillips concludes, apocalypse is 'not simply a terrifying event to be feared, but an ultimate triumph to be longed for and worked towards. At the end of days, Good would finally triumph over Evil, all the woes of the material world would be swept away, and the true believers would be rewarded with the paradise of a new world.' How much harder to refuse such narrative closure, to live – and die – in a world that can't be redeemed nor utterly expunged of human wickedness. A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World by Tom Phillips is published by Wildfire (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
