Tag Archive for: Cannon’

Bringing in the big gun: Army paves way for “strategic cannon”

Soldiers in combat gear fire a gigantic gun.

Enlarge / US Army troopers assigned to the Field Artillery Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, fire their M777 Howitzer. The Army is looking for a gun with a bit more range—over 1,000 nautical miles. (credit: US Army)

In 2017, the US Army established a collection of cross-functional teams (CFTs) aimed at rapidly pushing forward key technologies to advance the services’ next generation of capabilities. One of those teams was the Long Range Precision Fires “pilot,” an effort to develop the next generation of Army artillery—including “deep fires,” an artillery capability that can strike at strategic targets well within an adversary’s defenses.

That effort has spawned what Army Futures Command chief Gen. John Murray described to Congress last year as “the Strategic Long Range Cannon, which conceivably could have a range of up to 1,000 nautical miles” (1,150 miles, or 1,850 kilometers).

The Strategic Long Range Cannon program is now advancing through its first set of technical hurdles. Col. John Rafferty, head of the Long Range Precision Fires CFT, told Defense News in advance of this week’s Association of the US Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting that the Army wants to demonstrate a prototype of the gun system by 2023. Currently, the Army is working with the Center for Army Analysis and the Research and Analysis Center at White Sands Missile Range to confirm the technical feasibility of the cannon. The Army is preparing to perform early tests at Naval Support Facility Dahlgren, the site of the Navy’s test range for naval artillery.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

China’s ‘Great Cannon’ DDoS tool enforces Internet censorship

China is deploying a tool that can be used to launch huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to enforce censorship. Researchers have dubbed it “the Great Cannon.”

The first time the tool was seen in action was during the massive DDoS attacks that hit software development platform GitHub last month. The attack sent large amounts of traffic to the site, targeting Chinese anti-censorship projects hosted there. It was the largest attack the site has endured in its history.

That attack was first thought to have been orchestrated using China’s “Great Firewall,” a sophisticated ring of networking equipment and filtering software used by the government to exert strict control over Internet access in the country. The firewall is used to block sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as several media outlets.

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Network World Security