Tag: Defense Procurement

Sikorsky-Boeing Takes Wraps Off Defiant X Design For U.S. Army’s FLRAA | Aviation Week Network


Much Smaller Footprint than a Tilt Rotor

After putting out a representative demonstrator, Sikorsky has revealed off of its Defiant-X helicopter for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) program.

It does not achieve the same speeds as the tilt-rotor competitor V-280 Valor from Bell, 280 kt (520 km/h) from the Bell offering as versus and 250 kt (465 km/h) for the coaxial compound helicopter, but its footprint on the ground and on takeoff and landing, and its agility during takeoff and landing should be significantly greater than the V-280.

Also, the helicopter should be significantly more agile during takeoff, landing, and autorotation, because of lower disk loading.

One lingering uncertainty surrounding the U.S. Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft has centered on the service’s ultimate requirements for the advanced rotorcraft that will replace its Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters.

When the Army launched the precursor Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstration (JMR TD) program in 2013, it provided industry with a “model performance specification”—placeholder requirements that would allow them to begin designing an aircraft.

The result was a pair of 30,000-lb. gross-weight-class demonstrators—the 280-kt. Bell V-280 Valor tiltrotor and 250-kt. Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant, a coaxial rigid-rotor compound helicopter—both substantially larger and faster than the 22,000-lb. gross-weight UH-60M they are designed to replace.

Now, almost halfway through the CDRR phase, the answer to that lingering question about the Army’s requirements may be becoming clearer. The Sikorsky-Boeing team has taken the wraps off its Defiant X offering for FLRAA, and the design differs only in detail externally from the SB-1 now in flight test.

In terms of overall size, the Defiant X has the same operational footprint as the demonstrator, says Jay Macklin, Sikorsky’s director of Future Vertical Lift business development. The Defiant X also fits within the operational footprint of the Black Hawk, which the FLRAA is intended to replace beginning in 2030.

The Defiant X design has been optimized to meet Army requirements for survivability, maneuverability and agility in the objective area, or “at the X,” says Macklin, so that troops can be landed and offloaded quickly and safely during an air assault.

I favor the coaxial helicopter over the tilt rotor.

It seems simpler and safer.

A Real Vote of Confidence in the F-35

Following the decision to acquire new-build F-15s for the USAF for the first time in 16 years, the news that the U.S. Air Force is discussing additional purchases of the F-16 as well must be seen as evidence that the force is less than enamored of the performance of the F-35 at this point:

U.S. Air Force officials are talking about ordering new Lockheed Martin F-16s two decades after signing the last production contract.

A review of the tactical aircraft portfolio now underway is set to deliver another Air Force acquisition shake-up in the fiscal 2023 budget request, with F-16s, Boeing F-15EXs, a new breed of so-called attritable aircraft and a next-generation fighter competing for a pool of production funding once monopolized by Lockheed’s F-35A.

………

U.S. Air Force officials are talking about ordering new Lockheed Martin F-16s two decades after signing the last production contract.

A review of the tactical aircraft portfolio now underway is set to deliver another Air Force acquisition shake-up in the fiscal 2023 budget request, with F-16s, Boeing F-15EXs, a new breed of so-called attritable aircraft and a next-generation fighter competing for a pool of production funding once monopolized by Lockheed’s F-35A.

Call me a cynic, but my guess is that the Air Force took a look at the costs of maintaining and operating an all F-35 fleet, and realized that it was simply not possible.

The reasons for the shift in resources has evolved in public statements over time. When Air Force officials requested funding in 2019 to order the first eight of up to 144 new F-15EXs, they justified the unexpected move as a response to an urgent need. Recent inspections had determined that an aging fleet of F-15Cs require new wings to remain airworthy, and the existing training pipeline and infrastructure made F-15EXs a more expedient option than the F-35A.

But the tactical aircraft fleet review could establish a permanent combat role for nonstealthy fighters for decades to come. The F-15EX not only represents a convenient option for an urgent F-15C replacement, but its centerline weapon station with a 7,500-lb. load capacity also may fill a gap in the Air Force’s force structure for a tactical aircraft that can carry a rocket-boosted hypersonic glide vehicle.

………

Roper also put Lockheed on notice about the Air Force’s frustration with the F-35A’s sustainment costs. Lockheed has committed to reducing the average hourly cost to operate the F-35A to $25,000 by 2025, a roughly 25% reduction compared to 2018 levels. But as his resignation approached, Roper was not satisfied with the pace of the reduction, as the Air Force seeks to add new F-35s to the fleet at an annual rate of 48-60 jets a year.

I believe that the technical term for this is overpriced and under-performing.

Who Cares, There is Money to Be Made


US System


Russian Kinzhal

A new report suggests that hypersonic weapons do not add any meaningful military capabilities. (Original paper)

This is not a surprise.

The Skybolt air launched ballistic missile showed how a conventional missile can achieve what they are attempting now in the 1960s,  the Pershing II missile demonstrated a maneuverable reentry vehicle and reached deployment in the 1980s.

This does not matter. 

The defense contractors get their vig, and retired generals get their comfortable sinecures, so it’s good for everyone ……… except the taxpayer, and the people who are told that there is no money to supply a basic social safety net:

Military experts call hypersonic warheads the next big thing in intercontinental warfare. They see the emerging arms, which can deliver nuclear or conventional munitions, as zipping along at up to five miles a second while zigzagging through the atmosphere to outwit early-warning satellites and some interceptors. The superfast weapons, experts say, lend themselves to surprise attacks.

………

Now, independent experts have studied the technical performance of the planned weapon and concluded that its advertised features are more illusory than real. Their analysis is to be published this week in Science & Global Security.

In an interview, David Wright, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the new analysis, called the superweapon a mirage.

“There’re lots of claims and not many numbers,” he said. “If you put in the numbers, you find that the claims are nonsense.”

Military officials called the paper insubstantial, saying it was based on outdated data. But they declined to disclose new findings.

“Due to the classified nature of hypersonics technologies, we are not at liberty to publicly discuss current capabilities,” Jared Adams, chief spokesman for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, said in an email.

Of course they are.  They want their money. 

Claiming that it’s sooper sekrit knowledge has been a dodge used by the military-industrial complex since Truman was in the White House.

………

By definition, hypersonic vehicles fly at more than five times the speed of sound — or up to dozens of times faster than jetliners. The warheads rise into space atop a traditional long-range missile but then descend quickly into the atmosphere to bank, careen and otherwise maneuver. They’re basically stubby gliders. The curved upper surfaces of their wedge-shaped bodies give them some of the lifting power of an airplane wing.

Dr. Wright and Dr. Tracy based their analysis on the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 — an experimental warhead developed by the Air Force and Darpa. Their findings, they say, also apply to other American prototypes, as well as devices being developed by China, Russia and other countries.

The computer simulations drew on the physics of moving bodies and public disclosures about the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 in order to model its most plausible flight paths. The team zeroed in on signature phases of hypersonic flight — when the vehicle zooms through the atmosphere and then plunges to hit a target.

The two experts say their computer modeling fills in public gaps on the weapon’s overall performance as well as its potential interactions with existing military systems for detecting and defeating weapons launched from distant sites.

In their paper, they see the weapon as essentially failing to outwit early-warning satellites and interceptors. For instance, current generations of space-based sensors, they report, will be able to track the weapon’s fiery twists and turns during most of its flight through the atmosphere.

And surprisingly, given the weapon’s speedy reputation, they say their analysis shows it will fly intercontinental distances more slowly than ballistic missiles and warheads fired on low flight paths known as depressed trajectories. In war, such tactics are seen as a good way for attackers to evade interceptors and lessen warning time.

Dr. Wright and Dr. Tracy conclude that the envisioned new weapon is, at best, “evolutionary — not revolutionary.”

Note that their criticisms are based on some pretty elementary physics, specifically that the lift/drag ratios of hyper-sonic bodies are pretty pathetic.

The Russian Systems, like the Kinzhal, and Chinese systems like the DF-21, are not the wedge shaped lifting bodies, they are simply missiles with improved guidance systems allowing for improved targeting and evasion of defenses.

What’s more, they are already in service in limited numbers.

The US system is more complex, more technically challenging, and doesn’t gain a whole bunch more.

Once again, the US is pursuing “dominance” at an unsustainable cost and a time frame of decades.

To quote Ike, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Boeing Cannot Make Aircraft Anymore, Part XXXIV

The delivery of one of the first two KC-46 tankers has been delayed after debris was found in the fuel tanks.

This is aircraft manufacture 101, and it happened on one of the first air frames that was supposed to been accepted by the Air Force.

Boeing really cannot make airplanes any more:

The delivery of a new KC-46 Pegasus tanker aircraft to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina has been delayed after foreign object debris was found inside the plane by Boeing inspectors.

The delayed aircraft was to have been one of the first two KC-46s delivered to Air Force Reserve Command at Seymour Johnson on June 12. But while the first was successfully delivered, debris was found in the fuel tank of the second during its pre-acceptance inspections.

In a statement provided to Air Force Times and Defense News on Monday, the Air Force said the debris came from “non-standard factory rework,” and not the kind of “production line quality escapes” that caused the Air Force to halt KC-46 deliveries in March 2019.

Those problems with foreign object debris, or FOD, led the Air Force to put a plan in place to correct the problem.

………

Just a month after Boeing began delivering the KC-46 to the Air Force in January 2019, the service found foreign object debris — tools or other materials used to build the aircraft — left behind in multiple KC-46s, creating a potential safety hazard. As a result, the Air Force stopped accepting new tankers over a weeks-long period in March and April 2019 as it investigated the issue.

I’m not sure that Boeing can be fixed without burning the whole rotten edifice down and rebuilding from the ashes.

What a Sh%$ Show

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was a failure, largely because it hot swappable mission module system created an underarmored and under performing frigate, though they were rather speedy.

Well, now the Navy is trying to replace their latest failure with the FFG(X), which would replace the long serving Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate.

The problem is that, because of the inevitable mission creep, the cost and weight are completely out of line with a frigate.

They will be replacing the 4100 ton displacement Perry frigate with a 7400 ton ship, which continuing to procure the 9,700 ton Arleigh Burke class, only it’s supposed to be half the price.

Ships, much like hamburger, and purchased by the pound, so the navy’s promise of a relatively inexpensive ship was always a fools errand, but even so the original estimate of $940 million, which is a ripoff to begin with, since the FREMM from which it is derived costs about €600M ($650M), but it now appears that it will cost about $1.4B a ship.

This is insane and unsustainable:

The Navy truncated orders for its ill-fated Littoral Combat Ship because the small vessels were vulnerable to attack and too lightly armed. Now, a new report suggests that the frigate intended to replace it may cost 56% more than projected partly because it’s bigger.

The service projects that 18 of 20 new frigates will cost an average of $940 million each in inflation-adjusted dollars. The first two are estimated at about $1 billion each because of one-time costs.
relates to Big Navy Frigate Risks Oversized $1.4 Billion Cost Per Ship

But the Congressional Research Service alerted lawmakers this week to “a potential issue” worth reviewing: the accuracy of Navy cost estimates considering that “ships of the same general type and complexity that are built under similar production conditions” tend to have similar — and substantially higher — costs per ton of displacement.

CRS raised a warning because, at 7,400 tons, the frigate to be built in Wisconsin by a unit of Italy’s Fincantieri SpA is about three-fourths the size of an Arleigh Burke destroyer and carries many of the same weapons systems. The latest of the destroyers are estimated to cost $1.9 billion apiece.

That could put the cost for most of the frigates at as much as $1.47 billion each, “an increase of about 56%,” based on comparing their tonnage to the destroyers’, the research service said.

CRS suggested lawmakers ask the Navy the basis for “its view that the frigate — a ship about three-quarters as large” as the destroyer, with installed capabilities that are “in many cases” similar — “can be procured for about one-half the cost.”

It can’t, and it’s over priced, and they are demanding too much from the platform, and they making the ship even larger than the model from which it is derived, (The FREMM is about 6,400 tons) so it’s likely to end up costing more than the Burkes.

Cancel this now, and procure a frigate, and not a destroyer with a slightly smaller gun.

More Mistake Jet Follies

It appears that the Pentagon’s solution to problems with the F-35 is to declare that it’s not really a problem, or at least not a serious problem.

Cases in point, the F-35 will literally melt the back of the plane if it spends more than about a minute at supersonic speed, and the response is to remove this as a requirement:

An issue that risks damage to the F-35’s tail section if the aircraft needs to maintain supersonic speeds is not worth fixing and will instead be addressed by changing the operating parameters, the F-35 Joint Program Office told Defense News in a statement Friday.

The deficiency, first reported by Defense News in 2019, means that at extremely high altitudes, the U.S. Navy’s and Marine Corps’ versions of the F-35 jet can only fly at supersonic speeds for short bursts of time before there is a risk of structural damage and loss of stealth capability.

The problem may make it impossible for the Navy’s F-35C to conduct supersonic intercepts.

“This issue was closed on December 17, 2019 with no further actions and concurrence from the U.S. services,” the F-35 JPO statement read. “The [deficiency report] was closed under the category of ‘no plan to correct,’ which is used by the F-35 team when the operator value provided by a complete fix does not justify the estimated cost of that fix.

This is what happens when you have a deeply corrupt and completely dysfunctional acquisition process.

But wait, there’s more:

The F-35 Joint Program Office has put in place stopgap fixes for five key technical flaws plaguing America’s top-end fighter jet, but the problems have not been completely eliminated.

Last June, Defense News reported exclusive details about 13 major technical issues, known as category 1 deficiencies, impacting the F-35. The JPO has since quietly downgraded five of those issues to the lesser category 2.

A category 1 deficiency is defined as a shortfall that could cause death, severe injury or illness; could cause loss or damage to the aircraft or its equipment; critically restricts the operator’s ability to be ready for combat; prevents the jet from performing well enough to accomplish primary or secondary missions; results in a work stoppage at the production line; or blocks mission-critical test points.

In comparison, a category 2 deficiency is of lesser concern — something that requires monitoring, but not something that should impact operations.

But downgrading the category doesn’t mean the problems are solved, said Dan Grazier, who tracks military issues for the Project on Government Oversight.

………

The ALIS sovereign data transfer solution does not meet information assurance requirements.

………

Incorrect inventory data for complex assemblies continues to result in grounding conditions.

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The F-35B and F-35C experienced incongruous lateral and longitudinal control response above a 20-degree angle of attack.

One of the most eye-opening issues identified in the initial report was that the F-35B and F-35C models used by the Marine Corps and Navy become difficult to control when operating above a 20-degree angle of attack — which would be seen in the extreme maneuvers a pilot might use in a dogfight or while avoiding a missile.

Pilots reported the aircraft experiencing unpredictable changes in pitch, as well as erratic yaw and rolling motions when coming in at that angle of attack

………

There were unanticipated thrust limits in jetborne flight on hot days.

That last one could cause the lost of an aircraft executing a vertical landing.

You can get a good summary from POGO, but the bottom line is that the aircraft is not combat ready.

Remember the $400 Toilet Seat?

Yes, it appears that our newest aircraft carriers, the Gerald Ford class, has another problem in addition to its advanced catapult system, advanced arresting gear, and advanced weapons elevators, it’s toilets do not work properly.

Pretty much every time that they attempted to make a technological great leap forward, it simply has not been able to work reliably:

New toilets on the Navy’s two newest aircraft carriers clog so frequently that the ships’ sewage systems must be cleaned periodically with specialized acids costing about $400,000 a flush, according to a new congressional audit outlining $130 billion in underestimated long-term maintenance costs.

The Navy isn’t sure the toilet systems on the USS Gerald R. Ford and the USS George H. W. Bush can withstand the demand without failing frequently, according to the watchdog agency’s report on service sustainment costs released Tuesday.

The new toilet, similar to what’s used on commercial aircraft, is experiencing “unexpected and frequent clogging of the system” so the “unplanned maintenance action” will be needed “for the entire service life of the ship,” the GAO said in the report requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Although the costly toilets are illustrative of the problem, “we generally did not include these types of ongoing costs in our calculation” of the Navy’s looming sustainment bill, according to the report.

………

Overall, the Ford’s estimated lifetime operations and sustainment costs have grown to $123 billion from $77.3 billion, the most of six programs GAO evaluated.

“The Carrier toilet system is indicative of the kinds of issues we highlight in our report that are requiring more money, time, and effort to fix than originally anticipated due to a lack of adequate sustainment planning during the acquisition process,” said Shelby Oakley, a GAO director who manages the agency’s ship acquisition reviews

“The pipes are too narrow and when there are a bunch of sailors flushing the toilet at the same time, like in the morning, the suction doesn’t work,” said Oakley. “The Navy didn’t anticipate this problem.”

The US Navy has almost 250 years experience with handling how much sh%$ a sailor puts out, and they could not get this right.

Hell, even Princess Cruise line can make their toilets work.

This problem is not unique to the Navy though, when the B-2 originally deployed, there was no toilet (now they have a chamber pot), and they added a cot to the back of the cockpit so that pilots could deal with the rigors of missions that could exceed 24 hours.

How does the Pentagon, and the defense contractors, miss this crap?  (Pun intended)

Fail

The US Navy publicly wants to expand its fleet to 350 ships, but the Littoral Combat Ship program is such a clusterf%$# that they are looking at retiring the first 4 ships of the class, despite the fact that they are only 6 years old:

The US Navy is looking to retire the first of four littoral combat ships, despite being just over half a decade old.

Despite a push to reach 335 ships by 2030, the Navy is seemingly more than happy to ditch its LCS fleet, even though many of the ships have at least one to two decades of life left in them.

The ships are non-deployable and have been since they were initiated in the early 2000s. Since their inception, they have been plagued with developmental woes and quality control issues.

The Navy is currently looking to retire two LCSs from the Freedom class, as well as two from the Independence. Of these ships, the youngest is the USS Coronado, which is less than six years of age.

While a revolutionary concept surrounding the ability for a “modular” ship to fulfill many missions, the LCS program proved too much to juggle, particularly with expanding roles and design specs that kept changing.

The LCS has always been ill-conceived, undermanned, fragile, and undergunned.

It’s core feature was supposed to be swappable combat modules, but they never worked, and could never have worked overseas because of security issues.

Why a few dozen general officers have not been fired over this is beyond me.

This is Will Never Save Money

Will Roper, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, wants to restructure the cost profile of the next US fighters to front load the costs, on the theory that this will save money down the road through Silicon Valley style “Distruption.”

Well, that just pegged my bullsh%$ meter:

The U.S. Air Force’s acquisition chief said Feb. 18 that he expects a congressional backlash over how a recent revamp of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) procurement strategy could drive up the average procurement unit cost (APUC) of a sixth-generation fighter.

But the Air Force remains committed to an acquisition strategy for an F-22 replacement that accepts higher upfront costs in order to save money during the sustainment phase of the program, said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force, speaking during an “Ask Me Anything” webinar for the service’s acquisition workforce. The Pentagon calculates APUC by dividing total procurement costs, including recurring and nonrecurring bills, by the number of units purchased.

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But Roper, who was appointed in 2017, said in early 2019 that the strategy had changed. The details of the highly secretive NGAD program are murky, but Roper has compared the new acquisition strategy to the business model for the Apple iPhone. Apple does not sustain the iPhone beyond a few years, so it makes profits by charging a premium on the design at the point of sale. Although the upfront cost is higher, Apple’s business model incentivizes an external community of software developers to create applications for the iPhone at little to no cost.

Roper wants to apply a similar philosophy to the development of the next generation of combat aircraft. He wants traditional defense prime contractors to transition away from a sustainment model for profits and incentivize them to focus on design by offering them a premium.

An iPhone has a life of about 3 years., and with the exception of electricity to keep it charged, it has a sustainment cost of $0.00.

A fighter aircraft is a completely different life cycle.

This is a particularly disastrous form of bullsh%$ bingo.

The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight Buys the Plane That Can’t Shoot Straight

I am referring, of course, to the trillion dollar F-25 mistake jet, whose cannon is wildly inaccurate, and puts cracks in the airframe:

Add a gun that can’t shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws.

The 25mm gun on Air Force models of the Joint Strike Fighter has “unacceptable” accuracy in hitting ground targets and is mounted in housing that’s cracking, the Pentagon’s test office said in its latest assessment of the costliest U.S. weapons system.

………

The number of software deficiencies totaled 873 as of November, according to the report obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its release as soon as Friday. That’s down from 917 in September 2018, when the jet entered the intense combat testing required before full production, including 15 Category 1 items. What was to be a year of testing has now been extended another year until at least October.

“Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number” and leaving “many significant‘’ ones to address, the assessment said.

This procurement program really is a complete cluster-f%$#.

Boeing Cannot Make Planes Anymore

It now looks like the Remote Vision System (RVS) for the Boeing KC-46 tanker is still not working properly, and may never do so, which would mean that the boom operator has to go back to a station at the rear of the aircraft:

The U.S. Air Force does not believe Boeing’s proposal for the KC-46 Remote Vision System (RVS) will meet the program’s critical performance parameters, according to a service official.

This is based on evidence the service has seen to date, Lt. Gen. Jon Thomas, Air Mobility Command deputy, told Aerospace DAILY Jan. 29.

“The tanker is not capable of all of its missions and won’t be until the problems with the Remote Vision System are fixed,” he said.

The Air Force is counting on the KC-46A Pegasus to recapitalize its tanker fleet and delays to the program only exacerbate the service’s capacity problem.

“It’s really hard for us to consider the KC-46 part of our operational capacity,” Thomas said.

Seriously, if there is anything in aviation where Boeing should be the center of excellence, it is aerial refueling, and they cannot get that right.

Same Sh%$ Different Name

One of the selling points of the F-35 Lightning II is its prognostics based maintenance system.

Unfortunately, this has turned into a completely non-functional sh%$ show.

In response, Lockheed and the Pentagon have given the system a new name, and started back at square one on the software.

To quote Albert Einstein, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

The US military is dumping its Autonomous Logistics Information System (ALIS) in favour of ODIN as it tries to break with the complex past of its ailing F-35 fighter jet maintenance IT suite.

ALIS is the software suite that comes bundled with the F-35 fighter jet. A Lockheed Martin product, ALIS is intended to be a proactive maintenance suite: it tracks the health of each jet, tells supply systems when to order parts and tells maintainers what needs doing and when.

At least, that was the theory. Instead the all-encompassing suite has become so unwieldy and problem-ridden that the US armed forces are ditching it in favour of a new thing called ODIN, or Operational Data Integrated Network.

………

Far from meeting its originally envisioned role, ALIS was so bad that the US Government Accountability Office, an auditor similar to Britain’s National Audit Office, reckoned one US Air Force unit wasted 45,000 working hours per year working around ALIS’s shortcomings. In 2018, US Marine Corps station Beaufort was suffering spare part shortages of up to two years, thanks to ALIS making a hash of its spare part systems.

So, you have the same folks who made a complete dogs breakfast out of maintaining the F-35 are going to start from square one, with the same people, and make it all better.

Seriously?

The Navy’s Quest to Eliminate Sailors is a Threat to the National Security

It turns out that the the collision between the USS John S. McCain Alnic MC in the Straits of in August 2017 was largely an artifact of the new navigation that the Navy had installed to reduce crewing.

This is not a surprise.  The US Navy has aggressively attempted to reduce crewing in an attempt to free up money for the latest and (not so much) greatest tech.

For example, the 16,000 ton Zumwalts have a crew of 175, (it was originally supposed to be less than 100), and the previous 9,000 ton Burke DDGs have a crew of 350.

The Zumwalts have nonfunctional guns, have suffered repeated breakdowns, and, given the parsimonious crewing, probably has a glass jaw.

And now, the Navy’s fetish has equipped the Arleigh Burke class destroyers, which work, albeit with a lot of sailors, are crippled by the automated steering system they have installed:

Dakota Bordeaux had rarely traveled outside his home state of Oklahoma before he joined the Navy in February 2017. He’d certainly never seen the ocean.

But only four months later, Bordeaux was standing at the helm of the USS John S. McCain, steering the 8,300-ton destroyer through the western Pacific. Part of the Navy’s famed 7th Fleet, the McCain was responsible for patrolling global hot spots, shadowing Chinese warships in the South China Sea and tracking North Korean missile launches.

It filled the high school graduate with pride.

“Not many people of my age can say, ‘Hey, I just drove a giant-ass battleship,’” said Bordeaux, 23.

………

To guide the McCain, Bordeaux relied upon a navigation system the Navy considered a triumph of technology and thrift. It featured slick black touch screens to operate the ship’s wheel and propellers. It knit together information from radars and digital maps. It would save money by requiring fewer sailors to safely steer the ship.

Bordeaux felt confident using the system to control the speed and heading of the ship. But there were many things he did not understand about the array of dials, arrows and data that filled the touch screen.

“There was actually a lot of functions on there that I had no clue what on earth they did,” Bordeaux said of the system.

………

A 19-year Navy veteran, Sanchez had watched as technicians replaced the ship’s traditional steering controls a year earlier with the new navigation system. Almost from the start, it caused him headaches. The system constantly indicated problems with steering. They were mostly false alarms, quickly fixed, but by March 2017, Sanchez’s engineers were calling the system “unstable,” with “multiple and cascading failures regularly.”

………

But a ProPublica examination shows that the Navy pursued prosecutions of the two men even as its investigators and those with the NTSB were learning that the navigation system, if it hadn’t technically malfunctioned, had played a critical role in the deadly outcome in the Pacific.

Its very design, investigators determined, left sailors dangerously vulnerable to making the kinds of operational mistakes that doomed the McCain. The Integrated Bridge and Navigation System, or IBNS, as it was known, was no technical marvel. It was a welter of buttons, gauges and software that, poorly understood and not surprisingly misused, helped guide 10 sailors to their deaths.

Despite its issues, the IBNS operated for years without major incident. Navy sailors did what they have always done: They found ways to make do with an imperfect technology.

The NTSB put it plainly: “The design of the John S McCain’s touch-screen steering and thrust control system,” the board found, “increased the likelihood of the operator errors that led to the collision.”

The Navy investigators, for their part, determined that the system’s “known vulnerabilities” and risks had not been “clearly communicated to the operators on ships with these systems.”

………

In the end, though, the Navy punished its own sailors for failing to master a flawed system that they had been inadequately trained on and that the Navy itself came to admit it did not fully understand.

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The Navy has committed almost half a billion dollars to build the navigation system and install it on more than 60 destroyers by the end of the next decade — the entire fleet of the tough, stalwart warships that form the backbone of the modern Navy. Yet no one responsible for the development or deployment of the technology has faced any known consequences for the McCain disaster.

A number of current and former Navy officials remain convinced the navigation system should never have been put to use. And they worry about the Navy’s slow pace in installing a new, improved version.

“The IBNS has no place on the bridge of a U.S. destroyer,” said one former senior Navy officer with direct knowledge of the McCain accident. “It’s not designed to have the control that you need to navigate a warship.”

Seriously, our military is increasingly pursuing a path in which combat readiness is a distant second to procurement.

Also, as an aside, the article is a valuable story, but they have jammed it up with Javascript and HTML 5 animations and similar web-bling that it is difficult to read.

Whoever decided on the format needs a stern talking to.

More Boeing Follies


Still not Working

Boeing proposed an advanced vision system for their new tanker.

It does not work, so they are looking for government money to add a laser ranger-finder to their refueling boom:

Boeing is researching adding a laser-range finder to the KC-46A Pegasus’ problem-plagued refuelling boom camera system.

The laser-range-finder retrofit onto the boom cameras, known as the remote vision system (RVS), would give operators additional information about the true distance between the end of the KC-46A’s boom and a receiving aircraft’s receptacle during in-flight refuelling, says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the US Air Force (USAF) for acquisition, technology and logistics at the Reagan National Defense Forum on 7 December.

………

The KC-46A in-flight refuelling tanker’s original RVS cameras had two problems: a distorted three-dimensional video feed which makes it difficult for operators to perceive distances; and a problem automatically adjusting to changing lighting conditions, which causes the screen to washout in certain scenarios.

“There is… a rubber sheet effect where some parts get stretched, some parts get compressed, so that the reality that the operator sees on the screen is not the same as the one outside the plane,” says Roper.

………

“The remote visual system — I am going to worry about it each day until we have a validated design,” he says. “One thing I am very happy about, we’ve got some of the best visual experts at the Air Force Research Lab and they are creating a model, a simulator of the RVS, [that] we can work through design iterations with Boeing, ahead of them putting engineering investment time on them.”

In older tankers, the boom operator sits at the rear of the plane, and direct it into position, but this time around they decided to use a sophisticated camera system, because ……… SCIENCE.

Ka-ching.

Pentagon’s predilection for incorporating unproven technology in front line systems seems to serve no purpose beyond increasing contractor profits.

So, Boeing screws up, and we all pay for it.

Boeing really cannot make anything anymore, can they?

Not a Surprise

One of the selling points of the F-35 is that it supposed to be significantly more reliable than legacy aircraft.

Not so much:

The Pentagon’s chief weapons tester said the next-generation F-35 jet continues to fall short of full combat readiness targets and, despite some progress on reliability issues, all three versions of the fighter are breaking down “more often than planned.”

None of the Air Force, Marines and Navy variants of the Lockheed Martin Corp. fighter are meeting their five key “reliability or maintainability metrics,” Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s director of operational testing, said in prepared remarks Wednesday before two House Armed Services Committee panels.

………

“The operational suitability of the F-35 fleet remains at a level below service expectations,” Behler said in the prepared remarks. “In short, for all variants, aircraft are breaking down more often than planned and taking longer to fix.”

………

Even with that 2020 target approaching, analysis to date shows that neither the Marine Corps nor Navy F-35 models are currently “on track” to meet their reliability metrics even as they log more hours, according to the latest assessment.

Among the key lagging metrics cited by Behler are “mean flight hours between critical failure” — a data point that refers to the time between failures that result in the loss of capability to perform a mission-critical task, or mean time between part removals for replacement from the supply chain.

Significantly, while the F-35 fleet demonstrated, over short periods, “high mission capability” rates reflecting the percentage of time jets are safe to fly and able to perform at least one specific mission, the jets “lagged” by “a large margin” the more complete measure of “Full Mission Capable” status, he wrote.

That indicates “low readiness” for combat missions “that require operationally capable aircraft,” Behler said.

Something is seriously wrong with our whole weapons procurement and development process.

Mistake Jet Update

Full rate production for the F-35 Lightning II has been delayed.

What can I say, this program has only been around for more than ¼ century, and that is just not enough time:

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter full-rate production decision, which is slated for December, may be put off for up to 13 months because of delays with integrating the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE).

Pentagon chief weapons buyer Ellen Lord signed a program deviation report this week that documented the expected threshold breach in the milestone C full-rate production decision, she told reporters Oct. 18 during a Pentagon briefing.

“What this is a result of, and I follow this very carefully, is the fact that we are not making as quick progress with the Joint Simulation Environment integration of the F-35 into it,” Lord said. Integrating the JSE with the F-35 is “critical” for initial operational test and evaluation, she said. The JSE projects characteristics like weather, geography and range that allows test pilots to use the jet’s full capabilities against the full range of required threats and scenarios.

This simulator is not a pilot simulator.  It’s an software development environment to validate that the software actually works.

It doesn’t work.

Still Cheaper than the F-35 Mistake Jet

The Snake-And-Alligator Border Moat: A Budget Analysis

Defense One

Someone ran the numbers of Trump’s suggested border moat with various reptiles, and came up with, “$2.5 billion in set-up costs, plus annual operating costs of $1.8 billion.”

By comparison, the F-35 is expected to cost US$1.508 trillion through 2070, 64 years, or about $23½ billion a year.

Personally, I want Sharks with frikken lasers, or at least some ill-tempered mutated sea bass.