Photo: Lightweight, portable vehicle simulator for teaching vehicle control and accident avoidance. Courtesy Army CRREL.

From Armed With Science:

Because one-third as many soldiers are killed in vehicle accidents as in combat, researchers are developing a training simulator that creates environments mirroring the challenges servicemembers face behind the wheel.

“Our work is focused on how wheeled vehicles behave on gravel, loose stones, mud, snow and ice, because these are surfaces where military vehicles frequently operate,” Barry Coutermarsh, a research engineer with the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab (CRREL) in Hanover, N.H., said in a March 10 interview on the “Armed with Science” podcast.

Read more ….

Photo from The Canadian Press

From The National Post:

Last Thursday’s budget should silence the doubters: Canada’s mission in Afghanistan will end in 2011.

While some had suspected that Stephen Harper’s government might find a way to maintain a troop presence there, either by deploying a smaller contingent of troops on a rebranded mission or by appearing to be talked into it by Barack Obama, the budget makes clear that drawing down the war in Afghanistan and slowing the rate of military expenditures, will form a key part of the Conservative government’s plans to slay the deficit.

Read more ….

My Comment: The Canadian departure from Afghanistan has not played that much in the news, but its impact will be even greater than the Dutch decision to depart from Afghanistan.

A group of the Legionairres arriving back in Almería yesterday – Photo EFE

Yesterday, an American involved in the war effort handed me a document.

Photo: Former CIA Director Michael Hayden

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said the agency has taken it as “a matter of faith” that if al-Qaida obtained a nuclear weapon, they wouldn’t hesitate to use it against the United States.

“If they had the ability, they would do it,” he told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.

“Now as a practical matter, if you’re asking me in my professional persona, it’s weapons of mass destruction they’re after.

The Taliban’s IEDs killed 48 British troops last year.
Photo from The Independent

TALIBAN killers have blown themselves up laying booby-trap bombs, we can reveal.

Up to 20 are thought to have died planting Improvised Explosive Devices.

They were racing to plant the IEDs before the Allied offensive Operation Moshtarak.