DONLEY LEAVING: U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley is leaving his position to return to private life. “Mike has been an invaluable adviser during my first two months as Secretary of Defense and has been an outstanding leader of the Air Force for nearly five years,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in a statement. Donley was appointed in October 2008, taking over from Michael Wynne, who resigned along with Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley after two high-profile incidents of nuclear weapon mishandling by the service.
U.S. Navy officials have for months been trumpeting the need to develop a stronger base of smaller warships to help implement the Pacific pivot, and the service’s recently released shipbuilding plan backs that up with proposed procurement through the coming decades.
Now that the U.S. Navy is pushing even harder to equip its vessels with lasers, the service is focusing on reliable, high-voltage shipboard power to feed those weapons. Indeed, Navy officials say, meeting that need is becoming a matter of national security.
SEQUESTRATION Pinch: The controversial debt-and-deficit fighting law in the U.S. is expected to lead to slow merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in the aerospace and defense sector, according to PwC’s Aerospace & Defense practice. “It has now been 20 months since the last defense deal announcement greater than $1 billion,” said Scott Thompson, PwC’s U.S. aerospace & defense leader.
The Pentagon justifiably regards quiet submarines as a threat. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) seeks to neutralize them with DASH, the Distributed Agile Submarine Hunting program, which is developing deep-ocean acoustic nodes that function as maritime satellites, or “subullites,” as Darpa calls them. The low noise of extreme depths enhances deployment of scalable fixed and mobile collaborative sensor platforms that detect (fixed) and track (mobile) submarines over large areas. Darpa recently tested two collaborative prototypes.
No matter how advanced a bolt-action rifle is, it represents 19th-century technology, says Bret Boyd, vice president of sales and marketing at TrackingPoint Inc., a company that is using 21st-century technology to make this type of weapon far more accurate.
The German army officially received its expanded future soldier system on March 7. The IdZ-ES, short for Infanterist der Zukunft-Erweitertes Systeme, goes to the 10th Panzer Div.'s Mountain Infantry Btn. 232, which deploys to Afghanistan in June. Rheinmetall Defense received an order for 30 systems in 2012 and another in January for 60 more. The 60-system order is being delivered in two batches: the first by midyear and the second at year-end. Each system has enough equipment to outfit a 10-man squad.
The U.S. Army is moving forward with development of a 120-mm tank round that will, in one unit of ammunition, combine the capabilities of four different rounds now in use and loaded aboard tanks, and provide two new capabilities. According to the Army News Service, the Advanced Multi-Purpose (AMP) round has an ammunition data link and programmable multimode fuze. The data link is used to select the capability necessary to defeat a target, while the fuze can be set to one of three modes—impact-detonate, detonate-delay, or airburst.
Moving equipment efficiently and economically during NATO's drawdown in Afghanistan poses serious challenges to the major players deployed there. “Everyone fixated on rushing kit into theater. Getting it back is left to chance,” says one British logistics planner.
Mortars, short-range rockets, improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) are insurgents' weapons that military forces deal with by employing superior protection, operational procedures and tactics, and real-time intelligence. When insurgents obtain guided weapons, however, there is a major escalation in the threat level.
Laser beams that measure an object's distance are part of navigation systems in autonomous vehicles. This time-of-flight (TOF) technology has limitations, however, in distance and in imaging objects that do not reflect beams well. Researchers at Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh, Scotland, developed a TOF system that yields high-resolution 3-D data about objects 1 km (0.6 mi.). The work raises the possibility that the system could not only guide autonomous vehicles but be a portable targeting device.
Most garments protect against contamination from chemical and biological agents by erecting fabric barriers between the body and toxins. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is experimenting with specially spun fibers that incorporate such additives as quaternary ammonium salt biocides, polyoxometalates, fullerenes and phthalocyanines, which spontaneously decontaminate fabrics by neutralizing the chemical and biological agents they contact.
If South Korea builds its proposed KF-X stealth fighter, it will need to export it. So one key question hanging over the much-delayed project is whether the country can build the aircraft cheaply enough and attract adequate demand. Another is whether South Korea can build it at all.
For most of the Cold War, Britain built or tried to build large fighters and strike aircraft that it believed were needed to face the Soviet threat. France consistently built smaller, cheaper fighters that it could export. So whereas English Electric and its successor company made 338 powerful Lightning fighters, which had an empty weight of about 13 metric tons (29,000 lb.), Dassault made 1,401 contemporary Mirage IIIs, which were half as large.
In his recent Viewpoint, “Not Even Close: The Better Choice for LAS” (AW&ST April 15, p. 58), Fred George identifies “significant differences” between Beechcraft's AT-6 and Embraer's Super Tucano aircraft, both competing for the hotly contested U.S. Air Force (USAF) Light Air Support (LAS) bid. However, his opinion of those differences ignores significant facts and badly misuses others in an attempt to substantiate his view.
