The Pentagon’s top weapons analysts are reportedly arguing that the Navy does not face a fighter gap, something Boeing and various lawmakers have argued is a pressing problem the country must fix.
A congressional source tells us that “apparently PA&E is convinced that there isn’t actually a strike fighter shortfall, while the Navy is convinced they’ll be 240-plus planes short of Naval strike fighters… We’re trying to figure out how PA&E can possibly come to this conclusion, but we’re not getting many answers.”
Several senior OSD sources told me that PA&E is making this argument, based on a range of capabilities offered by the Air Force.
“PA&E’s contention is that we have excess Air Force strike fighter capacity, so the Navy shortfall doesn’t affect us strategically… But I don’t think the Air Force can land their fighters on a carrier,” our congressional source said wryly.
The fighter numbers were summarized recently in a study by the Congressional Research Service’s naval analyst, Ron O’Rourke. “The Navy projects that a current strike-fighter shortfall of about 15 aircraft will grow to about 30 aircraft in FY2009, to more than 50 aircraft in FY2016, and to more than 90 aircraft in FY2017-FY2020, before declining to more than 50 aircraft in FY2021 and to roughly zero aircraft by FY2025. At its peak in FY2017, the Navy states, the Dept. of Navy projected strike-fighter shortfall will be 125 aircraft, of which 69 will be Navy strike-fighters,” O’Rourke wrote.
[Since writing the above, I received the newest CRS analysis. It doubles the estimated shortfall. This is what the report, by Christopher Bolckum, says: "The Navy projects that if no additional action is taken, a DON strike-fighter shortfall of about 15 aircraft in FY2009, to 50 aircraft in FY2010, and to a peak of 243 aircraft in FY2018. The projected strike-fighter shortfall is hoped to decrease after FY2018, but the DON will still have a gap of over 50 strike fighters in 2025. At its peak in FY2018, the projected DON strike-fighter shortfall will be 129 Navy strike-fighters and 114 Marine Corps strike-fighters.
"This projected strike-fighter shortfall is twice as big as the Navy’s earlier projected shortfall of 125 aircraft. 9 (See Figure 1, below) The earlier estimate was the Navy’s, “most optimistic” projection because it assumed, among other things, that the service lives of Hornets could be extended from the current planning figure of 8,000 flight hours to 10,000 flight hours." You can read it here.]
We’re trying to get more information from Boeing here at the Navy League conference.
Boeing has been making a valiant effort to convince the Pentagon and the public that the Navy’s fighter gap should be closed using F-18 E/Fs. These planes are cheaper than F-35s, are already available in production models and they meet the service’s current operational requirements, the company has argued.
A determined enemy approaching alone from the sea may soon find himself intercepted and tracked by a torpedo-shaped drone that will sound an alarm, flash lights and spot his exact location in the water.
The model now on display at the Navy League's Sea Air Space symposium in Maryland, submerged in a water tank and bearing a slithery Moray Eel along its sides, is being developed by SAIC as a non-lethal warning system.
What they're developing is a candidate technology for a solution to deterring swimmers, said Jim Pollock, mission capability manager for the War on Terror, Naval Undersea Warfare Center, and project manager for the Integrated Swimmer Defense Program. "It's not necessarily a solution that the Navy has picked at this point."
The roughly 5-foot long Reusable Unambiguous Swimmer Warning Vehicle can do up to 8 knots. Once launched, it heads directly for its target, slowing down when near it and rising to the surface where it continues to circle the suspect swimmer's position and relaying it to handlers aboard ship or in port.
The system is equipped with GPS for surface tracking and a three-axis digital compass for underwater work.
For now, the system is being developed purely as a defense, warning tool, which is how it was packaged when it was submitted for budget approval.
But the mission of the Integrated Swimmer Defense System is to develop a means of thwarting combat divers and swimmers, so it's likely whatever interceptor drone eventually is built and fielded will also come with a lethal option.
The Predator, after all, began as a surveillance drone only, but now carries out combat attacks armed with two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles.
-- Bryant Jordan
AgustaWestland Pitches VH-71 Compromise
This article first appeared in Aerospace Daily & Defense Report.
Stung by criticism in Washington over the VH-71 presidential helicopter program that U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to scrap and reassess, AgustaWestland is firing back and arguing, essentially, that there is no reason to start all over.
Rather than junking the Increment 1 helos, which the Pentagon says only have 5-10 years of useful life and are therefore not worth fielding, AgustaWestland argues that the rotorcraft, with some certification activities, can be validated for at least 10,000 hours of useful life, not the 1,500 specified by the Navy. The baseline AW101 aircraft is already certified for that flight time.
Moreover, with about $3.3 billion already sunk into the program, AgustaWestland argues it can deliver 19 more Increment 1 variants for another $3.5 billion.
The total would roughly equal the original VH-71 program budget before costs more than doubled as requirements grew and the program raced ahead.
The helo maker further is floating the idea of building an upgraded version, a so-called Increment 1.5, which would be close to meeting the full program requirements but below the $13 billion price tag the program has now reached.
Meanwhile, AgustaWestland has delivered the fifth pilot-production VH-71 from its Yeovil, U.K., production facility.
Chief Executive Officer Giuseppe Orsi says that while program costs have doubled, the helicopter's portion is only a comparatively modest 8 percent over plan and six months behind schedule, which he attributes to 50 major and 800 other design changes.
AgustaWestland on April 28 finished delivery of Increment 1, with the last of nine VH-71s now bound for completion with integrator Lockheed Martin.
In the past two weeks I have been able to interact with many public/private and military cyber attack/warfare subject matter experts and lawmakers. The first interaction was at the highly attended InfoWarCon event in Washington, D.C., and the second at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Congressional Commission hearing. It has my experience that highly skilled and motivated professionals are highly opinionated and rarely agree, but this was not the case. In fact it was a bit concerning how aligned everyone's opinions were on the topic of the threat posed by cyber espionage and attacks on the national security of the United States.
This does not mean to imply that there were no differences in interpretations of motivations behind events, but all the main points were very tightly clustered together in what I would deem as consensus on the current degree of cyber warfare and security risk.
One point I found particularly interesting was that in multiple conversations about China's cyber weapons capabilities Russia came up as well. Previous blog posts estimated Chinese and Russian cyber capabilities as well as a posting that discussed how comparable Chinese, Russian and U.S. cyber capabilities were. In addition, I testified that China and Russia seemed to be collaborating. Here are some reasons cited during the hearing.
1. Chinese direct investments in Russia.
2. China and Russia held joint military exercises.
3. China and Russia signed cooperative agreement on encryption.
4. Russia in China. Discussed their 200+ political, economic, military and cultural programs.
5. The Russian Business Network seemed to have substantial presence in China for a brief period.
6. Russia and China have very similar opinions about cyber warfare and have publicly equated cyber warfare with kinetic war.
7. Joint discussion about Russia's massive natural gas and oil reserves and China's growing hunger for the two critical resources.
All of the discussions around the subject of Chinese and Russian started me thinking about the likelihood of China and Russia to collaborate and coordinate their cyber warfare capabilities, doctrine and strategies.
The Corps' 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines said they needed it. Now Marines across the fleet are going to see a smarter -- and meaner -- air refueling capability.
Adding another arrow to its quiver, the Corps is moving quickly with an ambitious plan to arm one of the service's aviation workhorses with intel-gathering capabilities and a trio of weapons systems.
For less than the cost of an AC-130 gunship, the Corps plans to build for its fleet of KC-130J Super Hercules nine mission kits that will include an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensor, as well as three separate weapons systems, according to Marine Corps Maj. J.P. Pellegrino.
"We're not building a gunship, we're building a mission kit," Pellegrino stressed.
The Corps is not permanently attaching weapons to the plane, but is engineering a mission kit that will convert the normally static KC-130J into a deadly prowler in the sky.
Dakota Wood, a former Marine lieutenant colonel and a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the move to arm the air refueler will keep adversaries guessing.
"What you would like to do is keep the enemy off balance and complicate your enemy's defensive problem," Wood said.
The Corps envisions the system to work primarily as a surveillance tool, allowing the ISR sensor to feed-real time video to Marine commanders while the aircraft lingers over an area of responsibility, often refueling other aircraft.
Marine Air Ground Task Force commanders operating across Afghanistan currently have little to no persistent surveillance capability. The new mission kits will change that.
"We can operate day and night from very high altitude," Pellegrino said. "Say we have two airplanes in theater and I need extra ISR out tonight. While you are giving gas, you keep an area under surveillance."
And the diverse weapons portfolio included in the mission kit makes the upgrade especially lethal.
Plans call for a set of three weapon platforms: Four AGM-114 Hellfire laser-guided air-to-surface missiles, a Mk44 Bushmaster II 30mm cannon hung out the left paratroop door, or precision-guided munitions dropped from a lowered rear ramp.
Another interesting package from my favorite show on television. I know how much you like the in-depth, technical nature of Tactical Impact based on your glowing reviews of previous posts, so here's another one I thought you'd like to chew on.
Have a great weekend and stay tuned for comprehensive coverage of the Navy League's Sea Air Space exposition next week in Washington, DC. We'll be all over it like white on rice.
-- Christian
Army to Field Experimental Soldier Systems Equipment
Wearing their Rapid Equipping Force hat, The Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group set about to assemble a package of Commercial Off the Shelf Soldier Systems equipment to conduct a demonstration with members of the 4th Infantry Division deploying to Afghanistan. The aim was to demonstrate that these alternative technologies will enhance the combat effectiveness of our troops fighting in the brutal terrain of Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, a long brewing battle between the Army’s Acquisition community and the REF seemed to come to a head two weeks ago when the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology halted the shipment of the equipment package into theater and began to ask some very pointed questions about the capability of the armor package chosen. Long-term friction has come about as the REF continues to conduct rapid identification, assessment, and fielding of critical warfighting technologies while the traditional acquisition system takes a much more methodical approach and fielding of new systems requires longer lead times.
The system in question is the MBAV cutaway plate carrier produced by Eagle Industries used in conjunction with a hard plate only certified for use by USSOCOM. All of this is fully in the Army’s purview and unknown to most sitting on the sidelines of this issue, PEO-Soldier is in the midst of an evaluation of five cut away armor plate carriers. It is highly probable that the cutaway system chosen by AWG is also a candidate in this PEO-Soldier evaluation.
The situation seemed to take on a life of its own and after two weeks of consideration the Army has chosen to field the experimental package and it will be shipped for use by 480 Soldiers across two battalions of the deploying 4th ID. According to Army sources, short notice testing was completed to provide a safety release of the equipment. However, the new lightweight hard armor plates used by SOCOM will be replaced by the Army’s current issue plates.
Data collection will be accomplished by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
This article first appeared in Aviation Week & Space Technology.
The U.S. is exploring the use of commercial satellites to enhance ship identification and communication for the battle against piracy.
Long before the U.S.-flagged container ship Maersk Alabama was attacked by Somali pirates this month, a sister vessel, the Maersk Iowa, was plying the sea lanes between the U.S. East Coast and the Indian Ocean, testing a device that combines the information obtained from shipboard radar and identification transponders to give authorities a better overview of who is on the water and what they are up to.
Now, the U.S. Office of Global Maritime Situational Awareness wants to leverage that data fusion technology to create a spaced-based collaboration for International Global Maritime Awareness. Guy Thomas, the office's science and technology adviser, envisions a networked information system using commercial satellites to transmit a common operating picture to authorities, allowing them to monitor large ocean areas.
Thomas, a former Navy signals intelligence officer working for the interagency maritime situational awareness office, thinks navigational radar and other sensor data from thousands of merchant ships -- enhanced by commercial satellites rapidly relaying the information to authorities -- could help overcome the challenge of monitoring the vast maritime domain.
Using existing commercial satellite technology, such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and electro-optical and infrared imaging, could provide all-weather night-and-day surveillance, even in heavy cloud cover. The satellites and shipboard sensors would complement each other, either calling attention to anomalies or checking and verifying them. The time it takes to download information from a satellite could be as little as 5 min., says Thomas. The information would be made available to authorities in an unclassified format. L-band radar, less detailed but also less expensive, would be adequate to detect the wake of ships at sea from space, he asserts.
Probably the greatest obstacle facing the warships from more than a dozen nations patrolling the pirate-infested waters between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea is that the area "is just vast, more than a million square miles," says Gordan Van Hook, the director of innovation and concept development for the U.S.-based Maersk Line Ltd. According to U.S. Central Command, 33,000 ships passed through the Gulf of Aden in 2008. The same year, 122 piracy events occurred, with 42 successful and 80 unsuccessful.
International maritime regulations require commercial ships weighing more than 300 tons to carry an Automated Information System. Initially intended as an anti-collision device, the AIS is similar to the transponders that FAA regulations require on civil aircraft. Broadcasting on VHF radio, it divulges a ship's identification number, navigation status, speed and course heading every 2-10 sec. Name, cargo, size, destination and estimated time of arrival are broadcast about every 6 min. Other vessels with AIS in range constantly receive those data. However, each vessel is its own information bubble, says Van Hook, and cannot share data about other ships it encounters with authorities when more than 50 mi. from shore.
In a test project funded by the Transportation Dept., Lockheed Martin put a prototype data fusion system, known as Neptune, on Maersk cargo vessels, starting with the Maersk Iowa in 2006. Neptune took the information obtained by the ship's radar, which has a radius of about 20 mi., and combined it with data from passing ships received through its AIS. The information was sent via an Inmarsat satellite to a Lockheed Martin fusion center in Eagan, Minn., says Van Hook.
04/25/2009 - Canadian soldiers storm a beach in Mayport, Fla., April 25, 2009, during an amphibious assault demonstration. The service members are participating in the 50th annual multinational exercise UNITAS Gold, which involves participation from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Germany, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and the United States. The two-week long exercise includes realistic scenario-driven training opportunities such as live-fire exercises, shipboard operations, maritime interdiction operations and special warfare. (DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Alan Gragg, U.S. Navy/Released)
Courtesy my friend John Donovan, who writes: [Dammit!] We demand the immediate withdrawal of your forces!
--John Noonan
Combat Advising (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Counterinsurgency)
Combat advising is central to successful counterinsurgency operations in existing U.S. conflicts around the world. As U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates observed, “The most important component in the War on Terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern their own countries.”1 Similarly, in 2006 the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency, identified the most critical task required to conduct effective counterinsurgency operations as, “…developing an effective host-nation security force.”2 The importance of combat advising is not a new realization. In fact, major U.S. efforts in this area began in the early 1950s when U.S. forces provided training and assistance to Greece, the Philippines, China (Taiwan), Iran, and Japan. Since that time, protracted combat advising operations have occurred in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador.
The traditional arm of America's combat advising force, Special Forces A-Teams, are way overtasked at the moment. To compensate, we've been sticking officers in a combat advisor role that -honestly- have no business being there in the first place. The solution, to create a combat advisor command, pains me due to my severe bureaucracy aversion, but does make some sense from a training and sustainment point of view.
Still, it seems as if combat advising is something that could be rolled into our Joint Special Operations Command. The initiative-fostering culture of our boys in black, as well as their equal aversion to chickenshit regulation and bloated command infrastructure, is precisely the right environment for this style of soft operations (think Lawerence of Arabia for the 21st century).
This article first appeared in Aerospace Daily & Defense Report.
This article first appeared in Aviation Week & Space Technology.
