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HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of the Royal Navy's new aircraft carriers, on a sea trial this week. (Photo by the Press Association)  At a time of rising tensions between China and the US, a move likely to anger Beijing. The UK would increase in presence in the waters after it sent four combat aircraft for joint exercises with Japan in the region last year, British Defense Minister Michael Fallon said Thursday. "We hope to send a warship to region next year. We have not finalized exactly where that deployment will take place but we won't be constrained by China from sailing through the South China Sea," Fallon told Reuters. "We flew RAF Typhoons through the South China Sea last October and we will exercise that right whenever we next have the opportunity to do so, whenever we have ships or planes in the region,” he added. UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson also said Thursday that Britain plans to sail two new aircraft carriers through contested Asian waters. “One...

By  Kelsey D. Atherton   Screenshot by author, from  YouTube DARPA Tern Concept Video Taking off like a helicopter and flying like a plane, TERN is designed as a versatile armed scout that can operate far from its home ship. Terns are a family of shorebirds that can nest in marginal conditions and thrive everywhere from beaches to wetlands to rivers to inlets. TERN, or the Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node, is a drone developed by Northrop Grumman for both the DARPA and the Office of Naval Research, with the goal of giving the Navy and Marine Corps a versatile flying scout that can support ships and troops almost anywhere they may be. Today, DARPA announced funding for Phase III of the project, which aims to take it from a mere concept to a working, flying, fighting robot by 2018. So what, exactly, does TERN do? It perches on ships, even small ships without runways, and then  takes off vertically like a helicopter , before transitioning to plane-like hor...