CYBER DANGER: The U.S. Defense Department must continue to increase its cyber capabilities, according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and will do so even as it pares back force structure in other areas where the military has excess capacity measured against real-world threats. “Compared to our conventional military edge, which remains overwhelming and unrivaled, our nation is dangerously exposed to cyberspace attacks,” Hagel said last week in a speech at the University of Nebraska in Omaha.
The U.S. Marine Corps vertical-lift UAV cargo system should become a program of record, says Gen. James Amos, Corps commandant. “The concept of an unmanned system that carriers cargo around is a proven system,” Amos said June 26 during a media roundtable discussion. “My intention is to make it a program of record.”
Click here to view the pdf Senate Authorizers' Changes To Fiscal 2014Defense Spending Bill ($ In Thousands; Base Budget Only) Senate Authorizers' Changes To Fiscal 2014 Defense Spending Bill ($ In Thousands; Base Budget Only) Account Descript
India’s first Indigenous Aircraft Carrier (IAC) will be ready for deployment by the country’s navy in the next five years, a senior government official says. The IAC, which is likely to be named INS Vikrant – after India’s first and now decommissioned aircraft carrier – will be put in the water in August and undergo its first sea trials 10 months later, the official says.
The Spanish air force has formally retired its fleet of Dassault Mirage F-1s in a ceremony in the country’s south. A ceremonial final flight took place June 23 at Albacete airbase, marking the end of the type’s 38-year career with the air arm, air force officials in Madrid told Aviation Week. The type is now being replaced by the Eurofighter EF2000.
Conducting an amphibious exercise is hard enough. Landing an MV-22 Osprey on a Japanese ship during such a drill can be a logistical nightmare. As the U.S. Marine Corps tested its amphibious chops earlier this month during exercise Dawn Blitz off the California coast, U.S. sailors aboard the LHA-4 USS Boxer trained their Japanese counterparts on heat shields used by ships for MV-22 landings to carry off such an operation.
NEW DELHI — An Indian air force (IAF) helicopter on a rescue mission in the hilly terrain of the flood-ravaged Uttarakhand state in northern India crashed on June 25, killing at least eight people. The newly acquired Mi-17 V5 helicopter was one of 45 aircraft pressed into service by the IAF to evacuate victims of the flash flood, which has killed more than 1,000 people and displaced more than 50,000.
PARIS — French defense procurement agency DGA is seeding innovative dual-use technologies through a fast-track financing mechanism aimed at supporting small- and medium-sized businesses in France.
EADS Innovation Works — the European giant’s research and technology arm — is exploring a concept for a twin-hulled tropospheric airship capable of staying aloft for 40 days. EADS says it has completed initial definition of the Tropospheric Airship, and is “now seeking partners for follow-on work that could lead to flight test of a first (manned) demonstrator in three years.”
ICBM REPORT: With nuclear warhead reductions now clearly up for discussion in Washington and Moscow after President Barack Obama’s Brandenburg Gate speech last week, contractors and supporters of delivery platforms will be increasingly trying to glean the fallout for their favorite bombers, submarines or intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). And a pending report from congressional auditors may feed the conversation.
One of the biggest challenges facing the U.S. in its Asia-Pacific military resources shift is gaining safer entry into undersea realms ruled by enemy submarines. The Pentagon and its regional allies honed their antisubmarine warfare (ASW) skills earlier this month during the exercise Pacific Bond 2013 near the Marianas Island chain.
While most of the recent focus in the Asia-Pacific has centered on China’s aircraft carrier development or the deployment of the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) to Singapore, some of the real regional investment is in the more midrange amphibious ship fleets and their mobile ability to launch fixed-wing aircraft.
The Defense Department says it plans to take steps to better employ the under-used Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) as the nation transitions from a wartime mind-set.
The U.S. Army has conducted a series of flights with a fly-by-wire helicopter testbed to demonstrate autonomous operation using a scanning laser radar (ladar) to detect and avoid terrain and obstacles. The flights demonstrated the helicopter’s ability to navigate and exit canyons, detect and avoid aircraft and wires, and select a safe landing area using a capability called terrain-aware autonomy.
Even as the U.S. Navy looks to mate its first full-fledged mission module payload with an operationally deployed Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) hull, the service is looking to develop an assortment of other packages to further enhance the ships’ capabilities. LCS is designed to deploy with replaceable modules tailored to specific missions that are meant to be switched out with relative ease as needed. The three main planned LCS mission modules cover countermine, antisubmarine and surface-warfare missions.
The U.S. Army’s aviation brigades are spared in the service’s initial force structure reductions of 80,000 soldiers. The reductions would allow the Army to meet the current national security strategy and do not account for across-the-board budget cuts, says Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno. “If full sequestration continues, we’ll have to take a look at aviation brigades,” Odierno says. “They’ll probably reduce.”
LONDON — The U.K. is claiming second place in the league of defense exporters after achieving £8.8 billion in exports in 2012. Figures released by U.K. Trade & Investment’s Defense and Security Organization (UKTI DSO) show that exports rose in 2012 by 62% from 2011. The agency says that the U.K. is maintaining its position as the second largest defense exporter after the U.S. Combined defense and security exports rose to £11.5 billion ($18 billion) in 2012, up from £8 billion in 2011.
HOUSTON — Celestis, Inc., the post-cremation memorial spaceflight company, is offering to send a small sample of a loved one’s ashes into deep space in November 2014, accompanying a solar-sail mission flying as a secondary payload to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Deep Space Climate Observatory (Dscovr). Planned for launch from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Dscovr will head for the Earth-Sun L-1 Lagrangian point, where the NOAA spacecraft will serve as a solar weather sentry.
