About 13% of the $6.7 billion the Pentagon is slated to spend between fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2017 for fighting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) is still up for grabs, with no contractor chosen yet, according to an Aviation Week Intelligence Network analysis of data provided by Avascent 050, an online market analysis toolkit for global defense programs. Countering IEDs had become a major thrust for the Pentagon in 2001-05, after the U.S. began operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Enemy forces started to attack the road convoys and ground logistics chains of U.S.
An Aug. 31 story on the JDAM-ER mischaracterized the status of the agreement between Times Aerospace Korea and Boeing. The two companies ended their agreement to co-develop a wing kit for 2,000-lb. JDAM bombs, but Boeing intends to complete the work with other partners.
The fall of the Syrian government would not be good news for Israel. It could, among other perils, trigger another massive dump of arms—including ballistic and air defense missiles as well as chemical weapons of mass destruction—onto the black market. “What will happen to Bashar [Assad, Syria's president] is very interesting to us, but it is also a great mystery,” says Col. Erez Viezel, a conceptual planner for Israeli Defense Intelligence (IDI). “We want to know how much control he has over the things that threaten us.”
BERLIN – German researchers are pleased so far with the results of their summer launch of a rocket-boosted hypersonic demonstrator, which reached 11 times the speed of sound, even though it is now clear they will not be able to recover the vehicle payload from its resting place at the bottom of the Greenland Sea.
The Michigan lab that introduced the notion of beetle-generated power for remote-controlled, insect-borne reconnaissance sensors is back—this time with an idea to generate energy from low-frequency ambient sound.
A U.S. Air Force detachment will be sent to Poland this year, marking the first time that U.S. forces will be based on Polish soil. The detachment, which will consist of a dozen airmen, will assist Poland with training for its C-130s and F-16s. The agreement on stationing troops came out of a meeting in late July between Poland's minister of national defense, Tomasz Siemoniak, and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
The U.S. Navy, planning for next-generation antiship missiles, detailed on page DT4, uses the term “net-enabled.” For the Navy, that term has meaning. A net-enabled weapon (NEW) is assisted by the net, getting updates on its target from other platforms, but is not dependent on it.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, can do many things, but high-g maneuvers to evade obstacles are not among them. This could change, however, as researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, New York and Stanford universities work to achieve “fast (35 mph.), accurate and repeatable flight” with a small UAV. The team, led by Associate Professor Russ Tedrake of MIT, built a trial UAV with a wingspan of 28 in.
The U.S. Army is exploring whether a short-range missile defense target, designed to be one-third the price of using Patriot missiles in such a role, can feasibly be added to its arsenal to reduce the cost of flight testing. The Economical Target makes use of surplus rocket motors, coupled with a rudimentary rocket body to effectively form a sounding rocket suitable for some missile defense tests, says Thomas Webber, acting director for rapid transition at Army Strategic Command. Lt. Gen.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has successfully tested an imaging device at 0.96 and 1.4 gigapixels of resolution (see photo), developed for its Aware—Advanced Wide FOV(field of view) Architectures for Image Reconstruction and Exploitation—program. One goal of the effort is to produce an imaging system with as many as 150 parallel micro-scale cameras behind a spherical objective lens, which will eventually generate ultra-wide FOV images of up to 50 gigapixels.
U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command (Marsoc) will soon get a new version of its signature .45-caliber M45 handgun. The Marine Corps Systems Command announced on July 18 that it had awarded Colt Defense of West Hartford, Conn., a $22.5 million contract to supply up to 12,000 Close Quarter Battle Pistols (Model O1070CQBP) and spare parts to Marsoc through July 2017. The Colt sidearm reportedly outperformed competitive .45-caliber weapons from Springfield Armory and Smith & Wesson in accuracy and other areas, notably durability.
