It was supposed to be just a way-cool, gee-whiz skateboard for extreme sports. But then, nothing says extreme like combat. So when folks at the Naval Postgraduate School in California saw Ben Gulak’s motorized, tank-treaded skateboard they asked him to come out and test it for possible military applications. “It was really cool,” Gulak told DoD Buzz, “because the NPS guys were already using an autonomous robot vehicle but it … had difficulty going over really rough terrain.”

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is taking suggestions for how to outfit the latest in its Predator ISR and combat strike aircraft. The Predator C, aka Avenger, so far is a fleet of one that flew for the first time last March. A second Avenger is in development and General Atomics is looking to the military customer to tell it what it wants to see in the new system. “The aircraft is not being built to any program requirements,” said Frank T. Yakos, business development manager for GA.

L-3 Communications is hoping to capitalize on its rapid production and fielding of an ISR plane for the Air Force to snag a similar Army contract perhaps as early as this month. The company announced Sept. 13 that it has just delivered the 37th and final MW-12 Liberty surveillance plane about 14 months after the first one began flying in Afghanistan. The Army is looking for a fleet of 37 similar planes.

Israel will probably attack Iran to keep it from developing a nuclear bomb, but it will try to do it without making the U.S. an accomplice, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Israeli advocate says. Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by training and longtime Washington-based syndicated columnist and political analyst for Fox News, made the prediction to Military​.com during his appearance at the annual Air & Space Conference sponsored by the Air Force Association.

After a two-year effort, an international ban on the use of cluster bombs will go into effect on Aug. 1. And, just as it did with the landmark landmine ban, the United States refused to sign the treaty and has no plans to scrap its inventory of cluster bombs. But the world’s sole superpower may find it more difficult to use them thanks to European allies who agreed to the ban last month.

President Barack Obama issued an executive order this week changing the line of succession at the Defense Department, reversing changes made by the Bush administration in 2005. The deputy secretary of defense remains the immediate successor if the secretary of defense is unable to perform his duties, but the March 1 executive order reinstates the three service secretaries – Army, Navy and Air Force, in that order – as next in line.

In a Defense Department world where multi-billion-dollar contracts for aircraft will likely first net you long waits, missed deadlines and demands for millions more bucks before a plane appears on the horizon, the Air Force’s latest counter-intelligence aircraft is an anomaly.

Hawker Beechcraft Corp. and Lockheed Martin are pooling resources and technologies to develop a trainer-cum-combat ready aircraft that may also pull duty for close air support or intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Officials from the two companies formerly announced the team effort today at the Air Force Association’s Air & Space Symposium in Maryland.

Come December anyone wanting to know how the Air Force intends to meet its global mobility mission over the next half dozen years or so may finally get a chance to see the plan in writing. The Mobility Capability and Requirements Study will succeed a capabilities study that Pentagon and Air Force leaders kept under wraps for years because, according to some former, very senior mobility officials, of its flawed assumptions.

The Arrow, a kit-plane turned UAV test bed and surveillance drone, may soon be doing more than watching for action. A spokesman for Neany Inc. of Maryland, which makes the Arrow, says the company plans to put “armaments” on the aircraft, though he’s not able to say just what kind or for which branch of service.

One of the oddest looking drones on display at the Paris Air Show is a helicopter whose fuselage is not much bigger than a 1960s’ model Volkswagen Beetle – if that! – and with a propeller in the rear for additional forward thrust. The Xenon, based on the now rarely seen gyrocopter, was acquired from Celia Aviation of Poland for use by Selex Galileo as a Short Take-Off and Landing, Optionally Piloted Vehicle.

The long, winding and often bumpy road the Pentagon has taken toward getting a new aerial refueler means the KC-135 is going to be pressed into even more years of service. Because of that, tests will get underway starting in September to ensure that an anti-manpad system officials want to attach to the plane will not adversely affect refueling operations.

Emergency responders, military and Northrop Grumman officials discovered another use for the spy drone Global Hawk after wildfires hit California last year, followed by Hurricane Ike in Florida and Texas. The high-flying surveillance aircraft can be loaded up with communications relays to re-establish vital links destroyed during the disasters.

A French company that has sold and set up passenger-carrying tethered balloons at tourist spots such as Disney World is now promoting use of balloons for airborne training. A co-founder of Aerophile set up a balloon parachute station in Dubai only a few months ago, and is talking with officials from several other countries about making the centuries-old flying machine part of the future of military jump training.

“You can fly a Global Hawk over a hurricane for its entire life, and drop temperature-measuring devices [into it] and begin to model the development of hurricanes and storms and typhoons,” said Ed Walby of Northrup Grumman, who predicts the unmanned aerial vehicle eventually will replace the hurricane monitoring missions carried out by the Air Force using specially equipped WC-130s.

The AN/APG-81 Active Electronically Scanned Array array is intended to give pilots in the still-in-the-future plane the ability to engage air and ground targets at long range and improve situational awareness. But it also comes with the capability of distinguishing between enemy and friendly targets — something that field commanders and policy makers alike understand has real value.

European aerospace giant EADS has begun production of a system intended to thwart terrorists carrying chemical or explosive weapons, a technology that also promises to be a boon to air travelers long grown frustrated with lines, delays, pat-downs and moving shoeless through airports. And then there are the more invasive searches that can really put a damper on that trip to Disney World…

After chronic problems with technology and cost overruns, the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle may actually have been steered onto the right path. Existing prototypes suffered significant hydraulic and electrical problems, and there were issues with the feed and eject systems of the main gun, EFV Program Manager Col. Keith Moore told a group today at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space symposium. For all intents and purposes, however, the EFV was bascially put back on the drawing board as designers sought to tackle issues that put its costs up and its schedule behind.

It’s six feet long, has seven foot wings, comes in its own launching case and weighs 135 pounds. Commanders will be able to fly eyes well over the horizon — at sea or land — without a pilot or even a runway with a new, portable unmanned aerial vehicle under development by DRS Technologies. The battleship gray bird with collapsible wings for easy storage can be set up for pneumatic launched within minutes,