The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding several new initiatives that hope to improve defense operations from process prediction—understanding the surprise factor in complex systems—to analyzing blogs to determine patterns to aid in the war against terrorism. In other research, AFOSR believes it has developed a break-through in high energy laser technology involving an electric oxygen iodine laser research, solving a 30-year-old problem.
Special-ops aviators, a physicist from the intelligence community, and an enlisted Marine with decades of deployments: U.S. Space Command’s military and civilian leaders who spoke May 7 were as likely to come from strictly space backgrounds as not. These are some of the day’s insights from inside the command, which…