First Successful Uninhabited for a UH-60A Black Hawk Helicopter

On 8 February, the US company Sikorsky, owned by the Lockheed Martin group, communicated that they completed the first-ever two uninhabited flights with a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter. These first flights are linked to the testing of a new technological system for autonomous driving called MATRIX. The initiative is part of the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program, launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It aims to develop portable and removable automation systems for helicopters.

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Raytheon Develops New Software to Bypass the Language Barrier in Research

Retrieving information has always been a key requirement of intelligence analysis. Yet, for centuries, the language barrier has presented a crucial obstacle. In 2017, IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) launched its MATERIAL (Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language) program to solve the age-old problem of cross-language data retrieving. Five years later, Raytheon BBN Technologies seems to have found the solution. The American conglomerate, battling with competitors such as Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, designed software capable of translating search results from all languages to English.

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Turkey and Ukraine TB2 drone agreement

NATO member Turkey and its Black Sea ally Ukraine have agreed to coproduce Turkish-made military drones at a production site in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Defence Minister Olesii Reznikov has recently made public the bilateral agreement between Turkey and Ukraine in the military defence industry.

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The Military Role of United States Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons in Europe

The term ‘non-strategic nuclear weapon’ (NSNW) includes nuclear warheads for all delivery systems such as gravity bombs for aircraft other than nuclear-capable heavy bombers, nuclear warheads for naval cruise missiles and torpedoes, and nuclear warheads for anti-ballistic missile (ABM) and air defence systems. The NSNWs term would also capture any nuclear warheads for surface-to-surface missiles with less-than-50 kilometres ranges, and nuclear artillery shells.

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The Ukraine-Russia Crisis: Current Developments and Prospects for European Security

In recent months tensions between Russia and NATO have reached a critical point as Russia has mobilised more than one hundred thousand troops along Ukraine’s border. Russia wants to coerce NATO to meet its demands by mobilising these troops. One of these demands holds that NATO will not expand further and halt all new membership plans, including Ukraine. In addition, Russia wants NATO to reduce its military presence in countries close to Russia’s borders, essentially returning NATO forces to where they were stationed before 1997 (Roth, 2021). Moscow states they are not planning any invasion. However, they argue that if their security demands are not met, their next step might be a military one (Kirby, 2022). The U.S. government expects that a Russian incursion into Ukraine could lead to the deaths of roughly 50.000 civilians and cause a refugee crisis in Europe (Cooper and Sanger, 2022).

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