It is an illusion to think that a $200M aircraft will have operating and support costs anywhere close to the $60M aircraft it is replacing. More expensive aircraft cost more to operate than less expensive ones, and it is often a proportional relationship. Partner nations may get a 'deal' on procurement as has been suggested, but will they be able to afford to operate the aircraft for 30 years?- —Talos IV on a post about Canada's commitment to the JSF
Getting Helicopter Development Right For The U.S. Army Getting Helicopter Development Right For The U.S. Army Getting Helicopter Development Right For The U.S. Army
The XM25 Individual Semi-Automatic Airburst System (Isaas) offers a new solution to one of the perennial challenges in combat: how do you hit what you cannot see?
It has been decades since the U.S. Army had the chance to define a clean-sheet rotorcraft. But an opportunity is approaching as the service heads toward the multi-year demonstration of configurations and technologies for next-generation utility/attack rotorcraft that could replace today's Sikorsky UH-60s and Boeing AH-64s, beginning around 2030.
U.S. Marines began deploying BAE System's Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) in Afghanistan last month. APKWS is a mid-body attachment that converts Hydra-70 2.75-in. unguided aerial rockets to laser-guided missiles. Reported accuracy is less than 1 meter (3.3 ft.) at 3 mi. APKWS was in development for years by the Army, then, following cutbacks, the Navy, which designates it WGU-59/B. The weapon fills a niche in asymmetric warfare: destroying soft and lightly armored targets cheaply and with low collateral damage.
Reviewed By Angus Batey 21ST CENTURY CYBERWARFARE BY WILLIAM T. HAGESTAD, 2nd IT Governance Publishing, 2012 348 pp., $119 In recent months, Bill Hagestad has become a familiar yet discomfiting figure on the cyberdefense conference circuit.
Graduate students in laboratories the world over have experiments at their fingertips. Kevin Warwick's lab may be the only one where they can say the experiments are inside their fingertips. “I have three students at the moment who have magnets implanted,” Warwick says from the University of Reading, England, where he is a professor and cybernetics researcher. “We are looking at sensory substitution. It's converting things like ultrasonic senses and infrared senses and even audio into vibrations they can feel in their fingertips via these magnets.”
India expects to induct its first Scorpene submarine beginning in 2015, three years behind the original schedule. All six submarines will be in service by 2018 at a revised cost of $4.7 billion, Defense Minister A.K. Antony told Indian parliamentarians last month. First delivery was expected in December 2012, with subsequent subs a year apart, Antony said. The six are being built at Mazagon Dock (MDL) under technology- transfer agreements with France's DCNS.
At the end of February an image of a new People's Liberation Army (PLA) missile appeared on Chinese websites with the distinguishing feature of the PLA's first use for a 12 X 12 wheeled transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) from the Wosang company, part of the Sanjiang Space Group. This group also produces the DF-11 short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) and the DF-21 family of medium-range ballistic missiles. However, this new TEL is perhaps 30% larger than the 10 X 10 wheeled TEL that carries the 2,500-km-range (1,550-mi.) DF-21C, first seen in 2005.
Roadside attacks have been around almost as long as soldiers have marched down roads. Until 9/11, casualties from these attacks were less significant compared with the large numbers lost on battlefields to poisonous gas, machine guns and air assaults. But in today's often urbanized, counterinsurgency warfare, roadside attacks with homemade bombs and mines—collectively known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs)—are the principal cause of loss of life and limb among Western militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has achieved a land-speed record for Cheetah, a four-legged robot developed by Boston Dynamics of Waltham, Mass., for the Maximum Mobility and Manipulation program. Cheetah was clocked at 18 mph while galloping on a lab treadmill. While this is a fraction of the speed that its flesh-and-blood namesake achieves—0-60 mph in 3 sec.
Over the next several years, more than a few big-ticket items in the Army's annual budget will reach major milestones—transitioning from new-build production to long-term sustainment accounts. Overall, 37 Army systems will make that switch, moving Army dollars away from the production line to the often more complicated—and very expensive—world of spare parts, upgrades and reset contracts.
The Lockheed Martin F-35 program made unwanted headlines in the U.K. last month after The Sunday Times revealed that BAE Systems' portion of the project had been subject to significant data theft. Sources told the newspaper that the network intrusion began in 2009 and had gone undetected for around 18 months.
Paul McLeary (Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Aberdeen, Md.)
The U.S. Army is not sugarcoating it: The armed service is about to go through deep, emotionally wrenching changes. Even as the smell of cordite still hangs in the Afghan air, the service's chiefs are busy planning the Army's postwar posture and equipment needs.
The U.S. Navy plans carrier launch and recovery tests for its two X-47B unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAV) next year—but guiding UCAV on deck is a challenge. Work at MIT with gesture-recognition software could eventually enable personnel to direct UCAV via hand and body gestures as they do with manned aircraft. Doctoral candidate Yale Song is fine-tuning software he helped develop that recognizes gestures now in use by deck crews. Song uses a stereo camera to record body movements.
Questions over cost and risk are already threatening the U.S. Navy's Flight III version of the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyer fleet while the program is still in the service's developmental womb. Military analysts for a host of government watchdog agencies such as the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congressional Research Service (CRS) and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have questioned the Navy's Flight III plans for some time, but it is the GAO review released earlier this year that highlights newly emerging cost and schedule risks.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators is urging Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to stop an arms deal with Russia as Syria smolders. The March letter asks the Pentagon chief to end all business with Rosoboronexport, the Russian state arms firm, to protest its continuing sale of weapons to Syria. At stake is a deal worth up to $1 billion to supply Russian Mil Mi-17 helicopters and spare parts to the Afghan military. “U.S. taxpayers should not be put in a position where they are indirectly subsidizing the mass murder of Syrian civilians,” the senators wrote.
A Lockheed Martin-developed advanced foliage-penetration radar has been deployed operationally to South America, as the company expands the sensor's ability to track moving vehicles and dismounted individuals. The deployment comes as the U.S. Army works toward a program of record for penetrating synthetic-aperture radar/moving-target indicators to be carried by a range of manned and unmanned fixed- and rotary-wing platforms. Delayed by budget cuts, the program may now begin in fiscal 2014.
With the U.S. Congress looking at ways to fix the management of the three U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, one prominent former official says the solution is to move the labs from the Energy Department to the Defense Department, a move that would reverse a decades'-old management decision that some say is now detrimental to national security.
Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) is changing in the same way as warfare as a whole. Targets used to be easy to find and identify, though hard to kill, but now the reverse is usually true. ISR data used to be hard to get, which made the volumes manageable. Now, collection is cheap but meeting the demands of processing, exploitation and dissemination, or PED, is hard.
Facing the downturn in traditional European and western defense markets, Thales Group held its first Technodays exhibition here Feb. 15-17, showcasing technology for defense, security, aerospace and ground transportation. Nearly 100 demonstrations from 15 countries included technological displays with military, security and civilian applications.
