Pentagon establishing new agency to oversee US military space technology development

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The Department of Defence (DoD) is creating a new Space Development Agency (SDA) oversee the development of sensors and weapons to counter advances by Russia and China, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said in a memo published on Thursday.

Joint Chiefs Chairman: Google ‘Is Indirectly Benefiting The Chinese Military’

WASHINGTON (CBS SF / CNN) — America’s top general said Thursday that Mountain View-based Google’s work in China “is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military.”

“The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military and I’ve been very public on this issue as well,” Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

President Xi Orders Chinese Army To “Prepare For War”

 

In just a few short days, China has proved that investors who have been underestimating the geopolitical risks stemming from the simmering tensions between the US and China over the latter’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and paranoia over the fate of Taiwan – a de facto independent state that President Xi Jinping is aggressively seeking to bring under the heel of Beijing – have done so at their own peril.

Earlier this week Xi Jinping, the Chinese emperor for life president provoked an angry rebuke from Taiwan’s pro-independence president when he demanded during a landmark speech earlier this week that Taiwan submit to “reunification” with Beijing.

And as if tensions between China and the international community weren’t already high enough amid a worsening economic slowdown that’s hurting global economic growth and a tenuous trade “truce” with the US,  in another speech delivered on Friday during a meeting of top officials from China’s Central Military Commission which he leads, Xi took his belligerent rhetoric one step further by issuing his first military command of 2019: that “all military units must correctly understand major national security and development trends, and strengthen their sense of unexpected hardship, crisis and battle.”

U.S. to Deploy Smaller Nuclear Warheads to Counter Russia’s Low-Yield Arms

The guided missile submarine USS Ohio (SSGN 726) stops for a personnel boat transfer / Getty Images

 

Nuclear review warns of new dangers from China, Russia

The United States will deploy modified smaller nuclear warheads on submarine-launched ballistic missiles and re-deploy sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles to counter Russia’s plans for using small nuclear weapons.

The policy shift is outlined in the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that calls for modernizing aging weapons and delivery systems but not building new, more efficient and safer warheads.