The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast is a large-yield bomb, developed for the United States military by Albert L. Weimorts, Jr. of the Air Force Research Laboratory. It was first tested in 2003. At the time of development, it was said to be the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal. The bomb is designed to be delivered by a C-130 Hercules, primarily the MC-130E Combat Talon I or MC-130H Combat Talon II variants. The bomb's name and nickname were inspired by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's invocation of the "mother of all battles" during the 1991 Gulf War.
Cult of the Dead Cow, also known as cDc or cDc Communications, is a computer hacker and DIY media organization founded in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas. The group maintains a weblog on its site, also titled "Cult of the Dead Cow". New media are released first through the blog, which also features thoughts and opinions of the group's members.
Sharon Weinberger is an American journalist and writer on defense and security issues. She is a Carnegie/Newhouse School Legal Reporting Fellow where her "project will examine a legally murky intersection between ethics and fraud in military contracting". Starting in Autumn 2009 she became an International Reporting Project fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
The Daily Beast is an American news website focused on politics, media, and pop culture. Founded in 2008, the website is owned by IAC Inc.
Spencer Ackerman is an American journalist and writer. Focusing primarily on national security, he began his career at The New Republic in 2002 before writing for Wired, The Guardian and The Daily Beast.
Margaret Garrard Warner is a senior correspondent for The PBS NewsHour. Before joining the NewsHour in 1993, she was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The San Diego Union-Tribune, the Concord Monitor, and Newsweek.
Turks in Pakistan are ethnic Turkish people living in Pakistan. These terms are also used to refer to Pakistani-born individuals who are of full or partial Turkish ancestry. Turkish educators in Pakistan are involved with the PakTurk International Schools and Colleges, which has 25 branches in the country. As of 2016, there were over 100 Turkish educators teaching at these schools, and including their families has a population of 400 Turks.
Electronic harassment, electromagnetic torture, or psychotronic torture is a conspiracy theory that malicious actors make use of electromagnetic radiation, radar, and surveillance techniques to transmit sounds and thoughts into people's heads, affect people's bodies, and harass people. Individuals who claim to experience this call themselves "targeted individuals" (TIs). Some claim they are victims of gang stalking and many have created or joined support and advocacy groups.
Charles Maria Herzfeld was an Austrian-born American scientist and scientific manager, particularly for the US Government. He is best known for his time as Director of DARPA, during which, among other things, he personally made the decision to authorize the creation of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.
The Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES) was a concept for an unmanned VTOL flight module that can transport various payloads. The concept started as the TX (Transformer) in 2009 for a terrain-independent transportation system centered on a ground vehicle that could be configured into a VTOL air vehicle and carry four troops. ARES' primary function was the same as TX, to use flight to avoid ground-based transportation threats like ambushes and IEDs for units that don't have helicopters for those missions. It was to be powered by twin tilting ducted fans and have its own power system, fuel, digital flight controls, and remote command-and-control interfaces. The flight module would have different detachable mission modules for specific purposes including cargo delivery, CASEVAC, and ISR. Up to 3,000 lb (1,400 kg) of payload would be carried by a module.
Regina E. Dugan, is an American businesswoman, inventor, technology developer and government official. She was the first female director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where she served from July 2009 until March 2012.
Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales, or ADAMS, was a $35 million DARPA project designed to identify patterns and anomalies in very large data sets. It is under DARPA's Information Innovation office and began in 2011 and ended in August 2014
Cyber Insider Threat, or CINDER, is a digital threat method. In 2010, DARPA initiated a program under the same name to develop novel approaches to the detection of activities within military-interest networks that are consistent with the activities of cyber espionage.
Khosrow Sofla was a village in the Arghandab District of Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan that was demolished by the United States Army in October and November 2010. After experiencing high casualties resulting from firefights and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) outside the village, Lieutenant Colonel David S. Flynn of the American 1-320th field artillery, a part of the 101st Airborne Division, ordered villagers to evacuate Khosrow Sofla, Khosrow Ulya, Tarok Kolache, and Lower Babur and used aerial bombardment to partially or wholly destroy the villages.
Lower Babur is a village in the Arghandab District of Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan that was destroyed by American military forces in October and November 2010.
The Precision Airborne Standoff Directed Energy Weapon was a weapons system described in unclassified documents leaked to Wired magazine in 2007.
12 Strong is a 2018 American action-war film directed by Nicolai Fuglsig and written by Ted Tally and Peter Craig. The film is based on Doug Stanton's non-fiction book Horse Soldiers, which tells the story of U.S. Army Special Forces sent to Afghanistan immediately after the September 11 attacks. The film stars Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Michael Peña, Navid Negahban, Trevante Rhodes, Geoff Stults, Thad Luckinbill, Ben O'Toole, William Fichtner, and Rob Riggle.
Todd Huffman is an American technology entrepreneur and prolific photographer. He was a co-founder of the biomedical imaging company, 3Scan, co-founder of the un-conference BIL Conference, and a member of the disaster aid group Synergy Strike Force.
On 13 April 2017, the United States conducted an airstrike in Achin District, located in the Nangarhar Province of eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. The airstrike was carried out using the largest non-nuclear bomb in the United States' arsenal, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), with the goal of destroying tunnel complexes used by the Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS-KP).
