Thousands of troops stood ready to storm the Japanese coast in 1945, only to be replaced by an occupation force built on a contingency plan that the record refuses to explain.
By Harlan Pryce ·
Attack submarines operate in a curated circuit of secrecy, scanning for missile pulses while the specific threats that drove hardware upgrades remain obscured.
By Marcus Boone ·
The Mekong Delta's jagged reality was smoothed over by official records to mask how the Black Pony used observation planes for direct aggression.
By Desmond Okafor ·
Aircrews were to be spared the risk of penetrating hostile airspace until inter-service dysfunction left the military with a $733 million aircraft that could not fit its own sensors.
By Marcus Boone ·
Internal reckonings with failure and misconduct among Pacific Fleet crews remain hidden within restricted files covering torpedo training and mine warfare.
By Vera Kessler ·
Stealth and survival depended on engine repairs for the "Blue 11" submarine force, and disposition schedules determined whether strategic vessels were modernized or scrapped.
By Vera Kessler ·
Whales and dolphins face noise 200 billion times the disturbance threshold while the US Navy lets its own contractor write the environmental impact statement.
By Miriam Adler ·
Non-cooperative vessels were reduced to frequencies and 3-D state vectors for weapons fire control during a Navy demonstration program from 1993 to 1996.
By Miriam Adler ·
Secret weapon prototypes and encryption devices were left to the abyss until the Unmanned Vehicles Detachment recovered $100 million in hardware to prevent adversary windfalls.
By Harlan Pryce ·
Flight crews were forced to rely on a consumer laptop and Windows 95 to control a $52 million jammer in a makeshift bridge the government called a 'less-than-optimum solution.'
By Marcus Boone ·
Populations in littoral operations risk being tracked and eliminated by machines as the Navy removes human pilots to avoid the political crisis of a shot-down crew.
By Miriam Adler ·
Targets face a shorter window between being seen and being destroyed as these systems identify specific equipment and vehicles from high altitude.
By Miriam Adler ·
Lost military assets and WWII warplanes lay hidden in the abyss until the Navy used an untethered system to scan the seafloor 20,000 feet deep.
By Marcus Boone ·
Two men sat stranded in the deep with dwindling air before a robotic arm built to hunt lost nuclear weapons performed the deepest underwater rescue in history.
By Eleanor Voss ·
Smugglers operated undetected by failing Cold War gear until the US Navy and UK aligned their signal exploitation to prosecute targets in international waters.
By Miriam Adler ·
Nuclear and diesel-electric submarines are hunted by a hidden grid of sea-floor hydrophones that strips away the anonymity of the abyss for national command authorities.
By Miriam Adler ·