Intended as a replacement for the Hellfire, Maverick, and TOW missiles.
I’m still a bit dubious of replacing the Maverick with the missile, seeing as how the warhead for the Maverick is heavier than the whole JAGM, and so I cannot see how the JAGM won’t be at a disadvantage against fortifications and military naval vessels (i.e. bigger than drug-runner’s speed boats).
Dan Froomkin, that is, about the bogus numbers that the Pentagon keeps feeding the media regarding Guantanamo detainees who have returned to the fight:
Denbeaux calls this week’s outrageous Pentagon assertions the latest example of what he calls “numbers without names and trends without numbers.” He told me he’s outraged it’s been so widely picked up — including by the Times.
“I don’t see what the point is of a public editor criticizing a story for the New York Times if they’re going to republish it a year later,” he told me.
Gullible, amnesiac journalists are a dangerous thing. Is our profession really incapable of learning anything from its mistakes?
Yes, journalists are so tied to their sources that they will repeat the same lie, even if it it’s known to be a lie, over, and over, and over, and over again.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
Credit: SAAB CONCEPTIn an effort to improve its chances to sell its Gripen to India for the MMRCA competition Saab has once mooted the possibility of an aircraft carrier capable Gripen:
Saab believes modifying the Gripen NG to meet an Indian requirement for a carrier-borne fighter would add only 400 kg. (880 lb.), giving the aircraft—dubbed Sea Gripen—an empty weight of 7,500-8,000 kg.
…………
The Sea Gripen would require a new main undercarriage and nose gear, airframe strengthening in specific areas and a redesigned arrestor hook. Given the comparatively small size of the Gripen, this obviates the need for folding wings. The company is proposing Sea Gripen as a “partner program,” with the first target country being India.
Even for an aircraft as light as the Gripen, having a delta of only 400 kg (880 lb) is pretty impressive, so I’m wondering if they are trying the same thing that was proposed for the Eurofighter Typhoon, when it was proposed to create an auto-land system that allowed for a flare before landing to the need to reinforce the landing gear and structure.
[on edit]
There is also the possibility that Swedish operational requirements, which include the ability to operate from austere fields, such as roadways, may have already resulted in a landing gear that is rather more robust than those found on the normal western jet fighter.
So far, I’ve shown you military video of M-16 magazine operation, the Rafaele Python, and a Bollywood musical weapons sales vid, but I’ve seen nothing…………………Nothing!!!!That compares in majestic scope to this simulation of a combat between a Chinese J-10 and the American F-22.
It is one for the ages.
It’s a dedicated bomber variant of the Flanker, with side-by-side seating and a toilet(!) for extended missions, and the first two aircraft in an order of 32 have entered service with the Russian Air Force.
It should be a significant improvement on the Su-24, even in its M2 upgrade, and should significantly improve the strike capabilities of the fierce, particularly in night/adverse weather conditions.
Because, whether the President is a Democrat or a Republican, having an “invade anywhere anytime” military is like giving a loaded revolver and amphetamines to a toddler:
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, (I-Conn) a renowned hawk and one of the foremost champions of the invasion of Iraq, warned on Sunday that the United States faced “danger” unless it pre-emptively acts to curb the rise of terrorism in Yemen.
“Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war,” Lieberman said, during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday”. “That’s the danger we face.”
(emphasis mine)
The problem with having a military that is able to invade anywhere, anytime, for any reason, is that there are people, including Joe Lieberman and whoever, “Somebody in our government,” is with small brains, and even smaller penises, who will use military power with all the forethought of the aforementioned child on speed.
If you build the military, they will use it recklessly, to the detriment of both the nation and to the military itself.
The current “seabasing” concept being developed in the Pentagon is just the sort of “invasion in a box” that will make this even easier to do, and hence more likely.
The capabilities that we implement actually increase the military death toll, because they encourage insane strategies by the civilian and senior military leadership.
What’s more, they starve our economy, it will be costing in excess of $1 million a year per soldier in Afghanistan, and they starve the social safety net, killing our own citizens through lack of healthcare, and over the longer term, through a lack of investment in infrastructure and education.
H/t Attackerman.
RQ-170
What are the fairings on top are for, maybe antennae?
So, I was wrong, when I suggested that there was no reason for the USAF to be flying a stealthy UAV in Afghanistan and that someone was Photoshopping a Burt Rutan project.
I was wrong.
The configuration is interesting, because while it is clearly low observable, the location of the exhaust is fairly conventional, rather than discharging on top of the wing, which implies that, despite it clearly being a LO design, it’s not a “LO is the be all and end all of the design” vehicle like the F-117 and B-2 are.
The USAF has now admitted to fielding the RQ-170 Sentinel UAV in Afghanistan as well as the fact that it was developed at Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks.
It appears to have been developed in response to the diplomatic brouhaha that resulted from the interception and forced landing of an EP-3 at the beginning of the Bush Administration.
It should be noted that the RQ designation means that it is unarmed, (paid subscription required) and the linked article also gives a reason for the USAF to deploy a radar evading UAV to Afghanistan:
“Don’t get enamored with current conditions,” [Air Force deputy chief of staff for ISR, Lt. Gen. Dave] Deptula cautions. “We don’t know what the future will bring.” While operations in Afghanistan will be “more complex than ever,” the future is “not only going to be about irregular warfare.”
Beyond 2011, the Air Force’s first priority and the destination of the next dollar to be spent “if I were king for a day,” Deptula says, “would be for long-range [reconnaissance and] precision strike. That’s the number-one need.
The “black” Sentinel was seen in 2007 at Kandahar, Afghanistan. Two photographs surfaced this year via the Secret Defense Blog.“We cannot move into a future without a platform that allows [us] to project power long distances and to meet advanced threats in a fashion that gives us an advantage that no other nation has,” he notes. “We can’t walk away from that capability.
It’s all about the Benjamins. The USAF is deploying this to Afghanistan because they think that it will help them in their budget fights against other services.
AS-18 Kazoo variant
AS-15 Kent Variant
We now have evidence that the Russians are modifying their cruise missiles to accommodate conventional warheads. (paid subscription required)
You can notice on both the Kazoo (top) and the Kent, forward surfaces have been added, probably to accommodate a center of gravity that has moved forward due to a heaver conventional warhead replacing the previous nuclear payload.
Additionally, the Kazoo appears to have some electro-optical sensors, which are likely used to improve terminal accuracy, reported to be 2-5 meters.
Considering their experience in Georgia, where they aircraft to anti-aircraft systems that they had designed, the renewed focus on stand off weaponry is not a surprise.
They have conducted tests, and have successfully intercepted a high-speed “cigarette boat”, which simulates a drug running boat.
The idea here is that if an aircraft encounters a ground target while only armed for air-to-air, it could use the Sidewinder to take out the target.
Me, I’m wondering why they don’t just use the cannon.
One interesting bit here is that the F-22 crash 9 months ago might have been a part of this test, as it was reported that the smaller side bay doors were open at the time of the incident.
Fail!
So we see a front page editorial in the Mobile Press-Register calling for Northrop-Grumman/EADS to be given a fair shake in the tanker competition, which is far from surprising, since that is where the tanker would be assembled if the A330 wins, but they also have an editorial cartoon showing the “customers” of the tanker.
Notice anything?
Like the model of the aircraft?
It’s an F-15 Eagle made by Boeing whose 767 is competing against the A330 for the contract.
Considering the fact that there are 3 fighters currently in front line service with the USAF, and two of them are not made by Boeing, the choice here seems a big….Inopportune.
Python 5 and Derby
Stunner with 2nd stage
Rafael’s video Pr0n, H/t ELP Defens(c)e Blog
Israel is looking at using its Stunner anti-missile interceptor as a starting point for follow-ons to their Python 5 and Derby missiles.
The Python is a 6″ diameter short range (20+ km) infrared guided dogfight missile, and the Derby is a slightly lengthened version active radar guided version with with an ogive nose, and other aerodynamic cleanups (and possibly a longer motor) to achieve a range of about 50km, so replacing both of these with one derivative of another missile is certainly in the realm of possibility.
On the basis of the pictures here, and not much else, it appears that the 2nd stage of the Stunner is about the same size as the Python/Derby.
I’m not sure how much would be gained by developing a Python replacement on this platform, the as the missile already has excellent kinematics, as shown by the marketing video, though marketing videos should always be taken with a bit of a grain of salt.
That being said, given the Stunner’s configuration, the 2nd stage has a dual pulse motor, the 1st stage that would not be carried in an air launched version, could give significant increases in range and lethality for any potential Derby successor.
Here is my earlier post on the Stunner missile.
It looks like they are looking at replacing/upgrading the M4 carbine again.
As a result of stoppages and other problems under very heavy use, they are looking at some mods:
Army weapons officials presented the proposed changes to Congress on Oct. 30. They are:
- Adding a heavier barrel for better performance during high rates of fire.
- Replacing the direct-impingement gas system with a piston gas system.
- Improving the trigger pull.
- Adding an improved rail system for increased strength.
- Adding ambidextrous controls.
- Adding a round counter to track the total number of bullets fired over the weapon’s lifetime.
I think that the gas tube operation has always been a problem, so going with a piston makes sense, and an improved trigger pull, making the weapon a bit more robust, and adding ambidextrous controls are all pretty common sense. The heavier barrel is a trade off, more weight vs better performance under heavy use, and I don’t have the data for that.
As to the round counter, it has to be designed such that if it fails, everything else works, because it add a lot of complexity.
To my mind, the real solution is to go with a Bullpup design, which would be shorter, but have a longer barrel, and you can incorporate improvements in a new weapon.
That being said, arguments over the M16 family, and 5.56mm rounds tend to be contentious.
H/t Ted Rall.
Sub Quietness
Both the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), and Robert Farley at Information Dissemination make a very big deal about about the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) report that notes that current Chinese SSBNs are noisier than their Soviet equivalents from 30 years ago.
The ONI report notes that the submarines are easily detected, the sortie rate for patrol missions is low, and that the range of the missiles is low, and so the FAS concludes:
The ONI report concludes that the Jin SSBN with the JL-2 SLBM gives the PLA Navy its first credible second-strike nuclear capability. The authors must mean in principle, because in a war such noisy submarines would presumably be highly vulnerable to U.S. or Japanese anti-submarine warfare forces. (The noise level of China’s most modern diesel-electric submarines is another matter; ONI says some are comparable to Russian diesel-electric submarines).
That does raise an interesting question about the Chinese SSBN program: if Chinese leaders are so concerned about the vulnerability of their nuclear deterrent, why base a significant portion of it on a few noisy platforms and send them out to sea where they can be sunk by U.S. attack submarines in a war? And if Chinese planners know that the sea-based deterrent is much more vulnerable than its land-based deterrent, why do they waste money on the SSBN program?
The answer is probably a combination of national prestige and scenarios involving India or Russia that have less capable anti-submarine forces.
And Mr. Farley concurs.
I disagree. The purpose of building a credible SSBN force is to deter the United States.
Submarines, SSNs specifically, dominate the conflict at seas, as shown by the General Belgrano’s sinking by the HMS Conqueror, but they do not create prestige as such.
Unlike surface combatants like carriers, LPDs, or other vessels carrying naval artillery, they cannot control control coastal regions effectively. Even a relatively small gunboat can interdict a coastal road for an extended period of time.
What a Submarine can do is sink all those surface combatants with relative impunity, maintain a difficult to detect 2nd strike with nuclear weapons, or launch a surprise surgical strike (“cruise missile diplomacy”).
I think that the Chinese have always taken the longer view on these sorts of issues, going back to well before the creation of the PRC, and realize that in order to a more effective submarine force, they need to advance incrementally, and learn how to build, maintain, and crew better boats over time.
They are familiar with Soviet weapons, and they know the disasters that resulted from pushing the envelope.
Additionally, their horrific history regarding Mao’s Great Leap Forward is a relatively history, and so they are taking measured steps.
Simply put, the Chinese do not feel the level of paranoia that the Soviets did regarding an attack by western forces, and as such, they are taking their time, rather than rushing new systems into service when doing so would entail a large amount of risk.
The shape of anti-stealth
The USAF is expanding a massively parallel supercomputer. It is made from 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, and its purpose is deriving more resolution from radar imagery:
The U.S. Air Force is looking to buy 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles to built out a research supercomputer, according to an document posted on the federal government’s procurement Web site.
The PlayStation 3s will be used at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s information directorate in Rome, N.Y., where they will be added to an existing cluster of 336 PlayStation 3s being used to conduct supercomputing research.
The Air Force will use the system to “to determine the best fit for implementation of various applications,” including commercial and internally developed software specific to the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processor architecture. The research will help the Air Force decide where Cell Broadband Engine processor-derived hardware and software could be used in military systems.
The Air Force has used the cluster to test a method of processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and “neuromorphic computing,” or building computers with brain-like properties.
The thing to note is that the PS/3 costs about $250 online, so the cost of buying all these boxes is under ½ a million dollars.
That’s less than most missiles out there, and by fusing the data, you can get a much more accurate picture of position and heading, probably close enough for a targeting solution.
If you assume that each one of the data centers costs about $1 million, even a relatively poor nation could deploy dozens of centers around the country, and use them to detect stealthy attack.
Heck, with a size of 12.8″(W) x 3.8″(H) x 10.8″(L), 0.304 you could fit 2200 PS3s in a box 8¾ feet on a side, so, if you assume that putting them and a rack and cabling them together increases the required volume by a factor of 5, you can fit the system on about 4 flatracks (picture).
If you were just to buy the boxes, and extract the electronics, you might be able to fit this in one flatrack, though at that point, power and cooling get iffy.
Still, the technology for ganging the PS3’s cell processors into a massively parallel supercomputer is very much public knowledge, with most of the requisite software being GPLed open source.
I find out that the Bush appointees in the Veteran’s Administration went all out in an attempt to deny care to soldiers suffering from PTSD.
The reason that they gave was because they believed that it was an indicator of insufficient patriotism and faith in God, but there is also a more sinister, and self-serving calculus here (at bottom), one that would have Richard Dawkins maintaining that these folks would be damned for all eternity:
During the Iraq war, however, the great difficulty veterans experienced in getting psychiatric care—greater than before—was not a product of cost-cutting, but of conviction: many Bush administration officials believed that soldiers who supported the war would not face psychological problems, and if they did, they would find comfort in faith. In a resigned tone, one prominent researcher who worked for the VA, and asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, explained that high-ranking officials believed that “Jesus fixes everything.” Benimoff and the others who returned with devastating psychological injuries found a faith-based bureau within the VA. At veterans’ hospitals, chaplains were conducting spirituality assessments of patients.
Sullivan was working as an analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington in early 2005 when he was called to a meeting with a top political appointee at the VA, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon. McLendon, an intensely focused man in a neatly pressed suit, kept a Bible on his desk at the office. Sullivan explained to McLendon and the other attendees that the rise in benefits claims the VA was noticing was caused partly by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “That’s too many,” McLendon said, then hit his hand on the table. “They are too young” to be filing claims, and they are doing it “too soon.” He hit the table again. The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.” At that point, he slammed his palm against the table a final time, making a loud smack. Everyone in the room fell silent.
“I was a little bit surprised,” Sullivan said, recalling the incident. “In that one comment, he appeared to be a religious fundamentalist.” [Appeared to be? Is a religious nutcase] For Sullivan, McLendon’s remarks reflected the views of many political appointees in the VA and revealed what was behind their efforts to reduce costs by restricting claims. The backlog of claims was immense, and veterans, often suffering extreme psychological stress, had to wait an average of five months for decisions on their requests.
….
When a 2006 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about whether soldiers were getting the psychiatric help they needed, an assistant secretary of defense disputed the report’s findings, pointing to the fact that soldiers were being referred to chaplains. During this time contracts for veterans’ services were increasingly parceled out to leaders of faith-based organizations rather than to secular ones, even though veterans’ advocates opposed any bias toward faith-based treatment and argued that replacing empirically proven, nonsectarian programs with faith-based ones was a mistake.
(emphasis mine)
We have to realize that there was more to this though, than just penny pinching, or a wish to rely on the the great “Sky God”, this is also all about patronage.
The Bush administration used its “faith based initiative” as a patronage and pork-barrel program, and every dollar that they diverted to their Evangelical Christo-Fascist allies was a dollar that could be used by these folks to politically support the Republican Party.
The F136 alternate engine was running on the test stand, and sustained minor damage, which led people to rumors that the combustor needed to be redesigned.
It now turns out that the problem is much less severe than originally reported. The damage was from a lug that attaches the diffuser to the combustor that came loose during testing.
Obviously, this is not something that you want happening on an aircraft in flight, though the damage was minor, and not noticed until the engine was torn down after a test run, but it’s a not uncommon thing to have happen at this state of the development process.
Both Boeing and Northrop/Grumman-EADS are expressing serious concerns on the USAF’s draft tanker Request for Proposals (RFP). (paid subscription required)
We have Northrop’s complaint that Boeing got Northrop’s detailed pricing data when it made its challenge on the last contract, and Boeing is complaining that there requirements are all weighted identically:
The draft RFP places equal value on non-essential and essential qualities—such as sink and toilet water flow and fuel offload or past performance—respectively. “If everything is important, is anything important?” [Boeing business development vice president Mitchell] Waldman said. “In this competition, risk is essentially pass/fail.” In the last competition, key requirements were weighed as well as past performance and risk.
There are also complaints from Boeing that have not been released to the public.
The Secretary of the Airforce has stated that he is open to changing the RFP, but that would invite a repeat of the last clusterf$#@ on tanker procurement.
Unfortunately, as Bill Sweetman laments, the software in question is:
While we’re going back and forth about the supposed sixfold advantage of the JSF over anything except the F-22, see this from a year ago:
“U.S. Air Force analyses show the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is at least 400 percent more effective in air-to-air combat capability than the best fighters currently available in the international market.”
And now it’s 600 per cent. This does of course prove convincingly that Lockheed Martin is right to suggest that the F-35’s capability will be able to be vastly improved through software alone.
That software being, in this case, PowerPoint.
…
(emphasis mine)
Mr. Sweetman owes me a screen wipe.
It’s beginning to look like Obama has a problem in Afghanistan.
On one side, he has the military, which is pushing for an escalation, because too many of the senior officers are too invested in their theories of irregular warfare, and have lost sight of the regional goal, and so are looking for “victory” (McChrystal, Petraeus).
On the other side, which also includes military personnel, you have people see the real goals of Afghanistan as simply insuring that al Qaeda does not create another safe-haven there, and this side includes much of the state department, most of our European allies, and now, it appears, Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, who has sent memos saying that an escalation would make things worse.
Note that Eikenberry is a retired general, and he commanded US forces there in 2007 and 2007, but until now he has scrupulously avoided comment on the military end of things:
Although Eikenberry’s extensive military experience and previous command in Afghanistan were the key reasons Obama chose him for the top diplomatic job there, the former general had been reluctant as ambassador to weigh in on military issues. Some officials who favor an increase in troops said they were surprised by the last-minute nature of his strongly worded cables.
In these and other communications with Washington, Eikenberry has expressed deep reservations about Karzai’s erratic behavior and corruption within his government, said U.S. officials familiar with the cables. Since Karzai was officially declared reelected last week, U.S. diplomats have seen little sign that the Afghan president plans to address the problems they have raised repeatedly with him.
When I made comparisons to the mistakes made following the assassination of Diem in Vietnam, I had no idea that people who have Obama’s ear were of like mind.
Karzai is there because the US installed him, and could only gain legitimacy through the quality of his governance, hence he has no legitimacy in Afghanistan.
With all that is going on, and there are now official statements from the White House saying that, “Our commitment is not open-ended,” which implies people are starting to get a clue, and aren’t being hawkish because they think that it will help in 2012.