The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency helped develop some of the technologies that enabled the US to come out on top in the Cold War. Now, DARPA is in the middle of transitioning its effort to better match the “Long War,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports, helping to develop technologies that give US military forces the advantage in non-traditional and irregular combat. DARPA Director Anthony Tether told more than 3,000 scientists, businessmen, and military leaders gathered for the agency’s 50th anniversary conference in Anaheim, Calif., earlier this month that the agency needs to anticipate the challenges and develop the means to beat more adaptive and fluid enemies. Efforts being pushed include new aerial platforms that are designed not only to warn of threats but to destroy them by delivering what scientists called “ultra-precise effects” that could be launched from anywhere in the US with minimal harm to non combatants. (Readers may find copies of presentations here.)
More than 20 tankers lined the runway at McConnell Air Force Base, Kan., on March 27, for an “elephant walk” and the base’s largest mass launch of aircraft ever. Sixteen KC-46s and five KC-135s participated in the flush, with aircraft and Airmen from the 22nd Air Refueling Wing and the 931st…