During a hearing in October 2011, the chairman of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee grew misty-eyed when he could not tell one armed service member what his future prospects would be in the military in an era of declining defense budgets.
One person's junk is another person's treasure—or at least that appears to be the premise behind a new effort, appropriately called Phoenix, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). The basic idea is to harvest parts from decommissioned satellites to build new spacecraft on the cheap. Darpa wants to take advantage of leftover equipment from more than 1,000 satellites that have been launched in geostationary Earth orbit over the past 50 years, many of which are retired but still have salvageable hardware.
Even with the drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, where combat conditions have placed a premium on both precision and volume of fire, the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) will evolve to meet new requirements. Lockheed Martin is considering various options to sustain production and introduce upgrades, building on U.S. Army and Marine Corps plans to keep the rocket and its launchers in service until 2050. Meanwhile, a number of allied customers also are expected to extend the life of their own launchers.
Military forces have faced the potential of crippling radiation exposure for decades, first during the Cold War and recently with “dirty bombs” emerging as a potential terrorist weapon. Antidotes for radiation sickness exist, but work is ongoing to develop more effective treatments that increase survival rates. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) last month announced encouraging findings from work in this area, some of which resulted from the Radiation Biodosimetry (Rabid) program that concluded last year.
A homeland security mission assigned largely to the Air National Guard in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks still lacks a plan to deal with its aging aircraft, according to the draft of a U.S. Government Accountability Office report obtained by Aviation Week. The report is coming at a delicate time for the Air Force. Supporters of the Air National Guard are sensing that reductions will be announced with the Feb. 13 budget release and are already mobilizing their response.
Countries are addressing budget shortfalls by slashing defense expenditures, the U.K. among them. Cutbacks will not affect all programs —sectors vital to countering evolving threats or achieving battlespace dominance will continue to receive funding, such as unmanned aerial systems (UAS). The Defense Ministry in late December awarded a four-year, £40 million ($62 million) research contract to BAE Systems for the Future Combat Air System. The results will “sustain and develop . . .
As soon as the helicopter touched the ground on a dusty airfield in southern Afghanistan, the game had been forever changed. After a decade of sending vulnerable, manpower-intensive, fuel-guzzling ground convoys to resupply troops at far-flung combat outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan—and seeing those convoys consistently ambushed, blown up or just delayed—the U.S. Marine Corps had had enough. So, on Dec. 17, 2011, the Corps for the first time delivered supplies to troops using a remotely piloted helicopter.
Israeli air force air and missile defenses are to be combined and reorganized to better protect the entire nation. Under this doctrine, defense of Israel's skies will combine all forces designated to intercept enemy aircraft with all the assets allocated to intercept missiles, regardless of range. The multilayered, active defense will be run by a centralized interception-management center, which will also provide the common air picture that enables aircraft and interceptor missiles to safely coexist.
GENOA — Avio’s continued growth is reflected in its 2011 results, which improved from the previous year despite the difficult economic scenario in Europe. The Italian aerospace propulsion company, which is led by Francesco Caio, reached the €2 billion ($2.6 billion) revenue mark, improving by 14.5%, compared with €1.75 billion the year before. The company’s operating results also improved, to €380 million, versus €360 million in 2010.
Over in China and Russia I'm sure that engineers at both Chengdu and Sukhoi will be raising their glasses in the New Year to the F-22 and the F-35 as doing more damage to the U.S. fighter world than all their fighter aircraft combined! —RSF in a comment about the F-35 on the Ares blog. Phabulous! I said it last time, but an F-4F-ICE full of Amraams and IRIS-Ts getting herded around by savvy Luftwaffe crew is very much a modern phormidable threat. —Frink-L in a comment about Phantoms
For NATO, 2012 is to be year of disengagement from Kosovo—finally. Allied troops have been preoccupied there since 1999, and plans—which have been restructured several times—once called for NATO troops largely to have been withdrawn by now. But ethnic clashes in the northern part of the country—where the bulk of the Serbian minority is concentrated—in the latter half of 2011 slowed that move, and now officials are updating their plans to try again this year.
The U.S. Navy is studying its force structure in a review that could very well drop the floor on the 313-ship fleet that has anchored the nation’s maritime defense strategy for years. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the relatively new chief of naval operations (CNO), has asked the top Navy command to generate a force structure study to take into account the new military strategy of the Obama administration, as well as the tighter fiscal reality that will be presented with the fiscal 2013 budget, says Adm. J.C. Harvey Jr., commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command.
Portable radar that sees through walls is a growing area of development. A recent entrant is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, which developed an ultra-wideband (UWB), multiple input/multiple output phased-array sensor with real-time acquisition and processing capabilities and video-like synthetic aperture radar imaging. The device is 8.5 ft. wide and 2 ft. high. When mounted on a mobile platform, it is 5 ft. tall. Importantly, the radar reduces through-wall data collection time to less than 100 millisec., an extremely fast rate.
Obviously, what you need to prevent your Otto fuel from freezing at altitude during a long patrol is a torpedo cozy. During the January travel break, Editor-in-Chief Bill Sweetman discovered this artwork by Philadelphia “yarn bomber” Ishknits in the Torpedo Factory Arts Center in Alexandria, Va.
Concerns over China's claims to the South China Sea are sparking an arms race among its Southeast Asian neighbors, some of which have maritime patrol, airborne early warning and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) aircraft high on their priority lists. China has laid claim to most of the South China Sea, a body of water that includes vital sea lanes and under which lie rich deposits of oil and gas.
The recent discovery by researchers in Rotterdam, Netherlands, that the lethal H5N1 avian flu virus could be genetically modified with relative ease into an airborne vector was the talk of the scientific community going into early 2012.
Few details about the merger are being disclosed, but if approved, it will create a company with more than 40,000 employees and operations to 115 destinations in 23 countries. The combined entity will be named LATAM Airlines Group, although the two companies will operate as separate brands.
MANILA — The South China Sea dispute has led the Philippines to move to strengthen its military capability as quickly as possible as a hedge against maritime intrusions by China. The government is planning to sign contracts before the end of July for the purchase of military aircraft as part of its air force’s modernization program.
A new hyperspectral sensor that could be used to detect drug labs or bomb-making facilities is set to deploy in early 2012 onboard the MQ-1 Predator, according to the U.S. Air Force. The Airborne Cueing and Exploitation System Hyperspectral (ACES HY) sensor works by collecting light reflected off objects on the ground from across the electromagnetic spectrum, which can help identify objects not visible to the human eye. By looking for specific spectral “fingerprints,” hyperspectral sensors can identify the composition of materials and even see through camouflage.
