Roger That: U.S. military is experimenting with invisibility technology

Remember that story line in the TV series “Star Trek,” when Capt. Kirk would use a cloaking device to make the Starship Enterprise invisible to their Klingon adversaries? Well, it turns out that technology might not be too far in the future.

A university researcher in California says that he and his colleagues have demonstrated a major breakthrough in the quest for invisibility, and he has the military’s attention, according to Army Times.

Boubacar Kante, a professor at the University of California-San Diego, and his colleagues tested the first effective “dielectric metasurface cloak.” That’s a fancy way of describing a super-thin, non-metal material that manipulates electromagnetic waves, including visible light and radio waves.

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced Sunday that the United States would significantly boost the number of worldwide migrants it takes in over the next two years, though not by nearly the amount many activists and former officials have urged, according to Yahoo News.

The U.S. will accept 85,000 refugees from around the world next year, up from 70,000, and that total would rise to 100,000 in 2017, Kerry said at news conference with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier after they discussed the mass migration of Syrians fleeing their civil war.

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A series of new proposals issued this month in a long-anticipated study on the military commissary system has raised alarms among commissary watchdogs, union officials and industry representatives, according to Military.com.

“The intent seems to be to treat the commissary like a grocery store, and I think that overlooks the fact that that’s not really its mission,” said Eileen Huck, a deputy director of government relations for the National Military Family Association. “Its mission is to provide a non-pay benefit to service members and their families.”

The report recommended a series of changes that would allow the commissary system to set its own prices based on region, reduce employee wages and benefits, and consolidate operations. By law, the commissary must sell goods at cost, plus a 5-percent surcharge, known as “cost-plus.” Operating expenses, including employee costs, are covered by $1.4 billion in taxpayer funding.

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The United States and China are negotiating what could become the first arms control treaty for cyberspace, embracing a commitment by each country that it will not be the first to use cyberweapons to cripple the other’s critical infrastructure during peacetime, according to officials involved in the talks, the New York Times is reporting.

While such an agreement could address attacks on power stations, banking systems, cellphone networks and hospitals, it would not, at least in its first version, protect against most of the attacks that China has been accused of conducting in the United States, including the widespread poaching of intellectual property and the theft of millions of government employees’ personal data.

This story was originally published September 21, 2015 at 10:59 AM with the headline "Roger That: U.S. military is experimenting with invisibility technology."