Ares: A Defense Technology Blog

Ready for Primetime? Part Two

Like a bad stain, it seems the V-22 Osprey can't wash away the stigma that it is more prone than other rotorcraft to vortex ring state and more likely to crash if it encounters the phenomenon. Granted, damn blood spots should be hard to get out, but how accurate is the recent criticism (PDF!) by the Center for Defense Information that the V-22 remains dangerously and uniquely susceptible to VRS and blade stall?

After months of flight testing, the Marine Corps and Osprey's makers, Boeing and Bell Textron, said VRS is no more of an issue than for other rotorcraft: something that pilots need to be aware of, but not something they should freak about. And it's not something that only test pilots are qualified to avoid. Contrast that with Lee Gaillard's report which depicts VRS as a monster waiting to devour any distracted pilot who wanders outside of a very narrow arrow of the flight envelope.

What's the objective bystander to think? Gaillard makes much ado about how the Osprey is limited to vertical descents of 800 feet per minute (only 9.1 mph, he emphasizes). He says such a slow descent would make the Osprey a fat target in a hot landing zone. But 800 fpm is a meaningless number when separated from horizontal speed; and Gaillard never mentions that the 800 fpm limitation only applies when forward airspeed is less than 40 knots.

Above 40 knots, the limit on vertical descent grows dramatically until, in full airplane mode, the Osprey can, like any airplane, drop like the proverbial brick. NAVAIR says the 800 fpm-descent limit at less than 40 knots applies to ALL Marine Corps helicopters, and that flight testing showed that the V-22 doesn't get close to VRS until 2000 fpm. Furthermore, the V-22 can swoop in from high altitude at more than 200 knots and not start slowing down until it's a minute and a half from the landing zone, minimizing its exposure, says NAVAIR. And it's 75 percent quieter in aircraft mode than the CH-46 and CH-53 it's supposed to replace.

But what does the Navy know? For comparison, look at the UH-60 Black Hawk. A Black Hawk pilot told me he sometimes sees 2500 fpm descents when coming into an LZ doing 60 or 70 knots. That's a vertical speed of 28 mph (only!), but apparently it's no problem for the ubiquitous, beloved and combat-proven Black Hawk. Why would anyone think a V-22 carrying 60 knots forward airspeed would be any worse?

Starving Iran's Tomcats

The U.S. government has stepped in to halt the auctioning of spare parts for the Northrop Grumman F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, Defense News reports:

The sales of all F-14 parts were suspended on January 26 pending a review, the Defense Logistics Agency said in a statement. Dawn Dearden, a spokewoman for the agency, told AFP the sales were frozen “given the current situation in Iran.” Iran bought 79 F-14s from the United States before the fall of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979. The move comes amid growing U.S.-Iranian tensions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program and what Washington sees as Iranian subversion of U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.

Not to mention Iranian agents have been fingered in the recent Iraq commando raid that killed five U.S. troops, according to The New York Times:

Investigators say they believe that attackers who used American-style uniforms and weapons to infiltrate a secure compound and kill five American soldiers in Karbala on Jan. 20 may have been trained and financed by Iranian agents, according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable about the inquiry.

With a confrontation looming, the U.S. is trying to strangle the Iranian air force in advance of a bombing campaign. As I reported last year at Defense Tech, the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force has managed to maintain or even increase its combat power despite embargoes:

All told, the IRIAF flies as many as 300 fighters. All are older designs, but have been maintained and, in many cases, upgraded by the indigenous aerospace industry, which has become proficient in reverse-engineering weapons and spare parts -- and perhaps even engines. And the IRIAF has aerial tankers too -- a force multiplier only the most advanced air forces maintain.

Iran's air defense network would be a tough nut to crack, even with our F-22 fighters and aircraft carriers. We could do it, of course, but probably not without loss. But then what?

And don't forget: there is still no direct evidence of state-sanctioned Iranian meddling in Iraq. If there is, our government hasn't entrusted us with it.

Cross-posted at Defense Tech and War Is Boring

You're Fired!

Navy chief Admiral Mike Mullen has fired the captain overseeing the Littoral Combat Ship program, Defense News reports:

Capt. Donald Babcock, the Navy’s LCS program manager, was relieved of his duties Jan. 29 by his boss, Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton – who also is being reassigned. Hamilton relieved Babcock due to “loss of confidence in his ability to command,” according to a Navy source, who added that Babcock would be reassigned to “administrative duties.”

Both men got their pink slips after an audit revealed that the Lockheed Martin version of the LCS would come in at around $400 million, nearly double the target cost. Two weeks ago the Navy suspended work on the second LockMart LCS for 90 days, long enough to get new managers in place and, hopefully, put the fear of God in Lockheed Martin.

With 55 ships planned, the LCS is a lynchpin of the Navy's future fleet. The class is designed to work close to shore at high speeds and to carry "modular" weapons and sensors packets to enable it to swing between missions. The idea was to populate coastal waters with large numbers of LCSs anchored by a Zumwalt-class land-attack destroyer. But that concept is in jeopardy if the Navy can't keep down costs on both ships. Already the first Zumwalt is careening towards a $3-billion pricetag. Toss in cost overruns on the LCS and the Navy's future surface fleet is dead in the water.

Far from being discouraged, naval analyst Bob Work sees the pink slips and the work stoppage as positive signs. "The Navy needed to say it had a problem. The second thing they had to say was that we have to build affordable ships. Mullen has shown that he is dead serious about doing that."

Cross-posted at War Is Boring

New Troops = New Units, Gear?

A plan to grow the Army and Marine Corps over the next decade could mean the resurrection of units disbanded during the force reductions of the 1990s, according to Pentagon sources. And it might require major equipment purchases.In his January State of the Union address, President George W. Bush proposed adding 92,000 troops to the Army and Marine Corps. According to the Pentagon, that would grow the active Army from the current 512,000 to 547,000; the Army National Guard by 8,000 to 358,000 and the Army Reserve by 1,000 to 206,000. The Marines would gain 22,000 people at a rate of around 5,000 annually.

The new troops would be a "shock-absorber," in the words of one Marine general, and should mitigate the impact of repeated long deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush's proposal coincided with another proposal to deploy an extra 22,000 soldiers and Marines to Iraq to combat sectarian violence in Baghdad and the Sunni insurgency in the country's western desert.

While most pundits welcome larger ground forces, there are questions about how the new troops will be organized and equipped. New troops could form new units or simply reinforce existing ones.

"For the most part it would be new units, since the Table of Organization and Equipment that defines different types of units is invariant with respect to the total end-strength of the service," contends John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a think-tank based in Alexandria, Virginia.

Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Carl Ey confirms Pike's assertion, saying the 34,000 new active-duty soldiers are enough for "up to five or six brigades." The names and traditions of disbanded Brigade Combat Teams might be dusted off for the purpose, he adds. "There have been plenty of BCT flags retired in past."

Fixing the Raptor

The Lockheed Martin F-22A Raptor is the best fighter jet in the world. It's faster, longer-legged, more maneuverable and packs better sensors than anything else flying. But there's one inexcusable gap in its capabilities. Unlike even older fighters, the Raptor can only receive data from external sources; it can't send. Raptor pilots have to get on the radio and tell others what they see on their radars. This at a time when rapidly sharing information between planes, ships and ground forces is the arguably the key to U.S. military power.

I asked the Raptor jockeys at Virginia's Langley Air Force Base about this last year and they shifted uncomfortably in their seats while feeding me some line about how voice comms work just fine. Then they quiety stressed that fixes were being planned. Now those fixes are finally firming up, according to Aerospace Daily & Defense Report:

The F-22 Raptor's "embarrassing success" has created a need for rapid modification of the fighter, says Air Force Gen. Ronald Keys, chief of Air Combat Command. ACC wants a stealthy "tactical target network" data link that can quickly pass key parameters on enemy targets without giving away its position. In initial exercises, the F-22 "was much better at [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] and absorbing signals than we had anticipated," Keys says.

Keys went on to say that fixes were planned for the 2008-2013 period, by which time all 180 Raptors should be in squadron service at Langley and in Alaska and New Mexico. The general didn't exactly specify which datalink would be fitted, but recent Air Force experiments, as reported in Defense News last summer, might offer a clue:

The proposed Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT) proved its mettle during a recent two-week exercise in Nevada, allowing troops and military platforms to swap information with Internet-like speed and ease. F-15 and F/A-18 fighter jets took in information about proposed targets, gathered sensor data, and sent it to ground stations to be fused with other data for more precise targeting, Boeing Advanced Systems President George Muellner said May 11. “And it’s all machine-to-machine,” Muellner said.

Machine-to-machine. That means automatic, hands-off, fast and easy. It lets the pilot focus on what pilots do best, flying airplanes, searching the sky and ground for targets with their own eyeballs, and making decisions about who to kill and when.

Cross-posted at War Is Boring and Defense Tech

T.M.I., Dude

That's "too much information," for those of you over the age of fourteen. These days, information superiority is supposed to make U.S. military forces faster, smarter and more lethal  and able to defeat more numerous foes on their own turf. But how much information can one soldier process, and how fast can he make decisions?

Unmanned vehicles sporting sophisticated sensors are key suppliers of new and more voluminous streams of info to grunts on the ground. But in addition to potentially overwhelming customers with too much information, robots require regular input from their human masters.

That's a key problem facing the engineers responsible for developing the Army's human-robot interfaces. At the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in suburban Detroit, Gregory Hudas and his colleagues are trying to figure out what robots should be allowed to do on their own, and what they should ask permission for. The key factors are what human operators are comfortable with, and what they're capable of. "We must be aware of when they [soldiers] get overloaded."

To work out this problem, the folks at TARDEC have linked up two consoles representing the controls of a Future Combat Systems fighting vehicle. Each console boasts three tall touch-screen displays. At the center in front of a padded seat, there is a control stick similar to what you might see on an arcade game. The consoles include a simulation function, akin to a video game, that the TARDEC engineers use for tests.

On one screen, a TARDEC engineer representing an FCS crewman brings up an overhead map of the battlefield dotted with icons representing his vehicle and four robots that he's controlling. One is a Fire Scout aerial drone. The others are ground drones equipped with cameras and guns. On his other screens, the crewman can see what his robots are seeing in addition to what's outside his own vehicle. It's a massive amount of data for one man to process, and things are sure to get worse when he decides to send his drones on a reconnaissance mission, potentially forcing him to also coordinate the movements of five vehicles simultaneously while facing an elusive enemy on unfamiliar terrain.

Which is why the Army decided that each FCS vehicle would include two identical consoles. Side-by-side crewmen would share responsibility for all the functions described above. The Army believed that by coordinating their efforts, one two-man crew should be able to control 10 drones and keep up with all their data feeds.

But that's too many robots, Hudas says. Four drones is the realistic max. And a third crewman at an additional console is ideal. And that's assuming a minimal level of human intervention in the drones activities. Basically, you tell a drone what to do, confirm the command, then let it go. Now, if the drone wants to kill something, it's going to need a soldier's permission. But for surveillance and reconnaissance, it can make its own decisions. "With those applications," Hudas says, "we don't even want a soldier."

Thanks to TARDEC and other research organizations, the Army is making enormous strides in combining thinking men and thinking machines into one cohesive fighting force. That's the subject of a feature slated for our March issue. Stay tuned.

Cross-posted at Defense Tech and War Is Boring

Ready for Primetime? Part One

“It’s a great aircraft, powerful, stable, twice as fast as a Frog and goes over six times as far.” That’s Lieutenant General. John G. Castellaw, the Marine Corps’ Deputy Commandant for Aviation, comparing the new Bell/Boeing MV-22 Osprey to the 40-year-old Boeing CH-46 “Frog.”

More than 20 years after beginning development, and seven years after a spate of crashes that killed 30 people, the $130-million-per-copy Osprey is finally prepping for its first combat deployment. One of the Marines’ two operational squadrons will head to Iraq or Afghanistan sometime this year. Meanwhile, deliveries continue to the Marines and the Air Force, with more than 50 aircraft in service against a planned total of 410.

Despite the Osprey program’s advanced state, critics are still calling for its cancellation. None have been more vociferous than the wonks at Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C. On January 18, freelance writer Lee Gaillard presented his CDI-backed report V-22 Osprey: Wonder Weapon or Widow Maker. “This glitch-plagued program … is poised to reveal fundamental flaws that may cost even more lives.”

• The Osprey is prone to stalling while descending at 800 feet per minute or faster
• The cabin is too small to haul the advertised two squads (around 26 Marines)
• The cabin isn’t pressurized, limiting how high it can fly with troops
• Its range is no greater than that of many heavy helicopter designs
• Lacking guns, it’s vulnerable in hot landing zones

Many of these flaws were revealed in the military’s operational evaluation that wrapped in 2005. Still, the Pentagon cleared the Osprey for service. Gaillard chalks this up to “unstoppable political momentum” resulting from the Bell/Boeing team lining up contractors in 45 out of 50 states.

Of course, the military contests Gaillard’s claims. It says that after the bugs were ironed out, the Osprey not only works – it’s revolutionary.

We at Defense Technology International are on the fence. On one hand, we’ve been around long enough to know that defense contractors sometimes lie … and that the Pentagon sometimes lets them get away with it.

On the other hand, last year DTI military editor David Axe heard a similarly scathing CDI brief on the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighter jet, a brief that turned out to be mostly b.s. once Axe had paid a visit to a Raptor squadron to see for himself. And while the documents Gaillard offers as proof – military evaluations, Government Accounting Office reports (PDF!), etc – are perfectly legit, the man himself lacks bona fides. He’s essentially just an experienced freelance writer. We’re not sure we trust him to put all this documentation in perspective, especially considering his lack of recent experience in the war zones where Osprey is slated to make its debut.

For context is everything. So the question we aim to answer in this series is: Is Osprey right for emerging missions in the Long War?

Cross-posted at War Is Boring

Size Doesn't Matter, Part Two

The U.S Navy today has around 280 major warships, fewer than at any time since the 1930s. For many officers, congressmen and industry leaders, that’s reason enough to call for a massive expansion. Current plans will see the fleet grow to 313 hulls over the next 15 years at a cost of around $15 billion annually.

But is it worth it?

Not if increased firepower is the goal, says Bob Work from the nonprofit Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Today’s Navy is the already the most powerful in the world by an unprecedented margin, he says, and the fleet expansion will mean only a slight boost in strength. How do we know? “Count the number of VLS cells,” Work advises.

Vertical Launch System cells are individual missile packs mounted vertically in a warship’s hull. Since the 1950s, missiles have comprised the primary armament of most major warships. In the early decades missiles were launched by mechanical launchers with singe or double rails. A missile would get fed from a magazine onto the launcher then fired – a system that required a minute or more per cycle and occupied a great deal of space inside a ship’s hull. In the 1980s, the U.S. Navy began switching to VLS, which let a warship carry more missiles – around 100 – and fire them faster. Today VLS is standard across the U.S. destroyer and cruiser forces; rail launchers have all but disappeared. Even many attack submarines boast VLS cells.

“We have 84 Aegis [radar-equipped] VLS ships bought and paid for,” Work says. When the last of the current generation of Aegis ships enters service in 2010, he adds, “We’ll have 8,460 VLS cells [in surface ships] plus another 1,000 in subs.” That’s nearly 10,000 VLS cells that might be loaded with: land-attack Tomahawk cruise missiles; surface-to-air Standard missiles, including the SM-3 models optimized for shooting down ballistic missiles; or anti-submarine rockets tipped with torpedoes.

According to Work, those 10,000 cells represent the greatest destructive force ever to put to sea, and “are a greater magazine capacity than the next 30 navies combined.” China, by comparison, has around 48 VLS cells in a handful of modern warships firing only surface-to-air missiles.

If VLS cells represent combat power, then the Navy is actually regressing with its latest classes of ships. The new Zumwalt-class destroyer, costing at least $2 billion apiece, is fitted with just 80 VLS cells versus the Burke destroyer’s 96 and the Ticonderoga cruiser’s 127. The $300-million Littoral Combat Ship features no VLS cells at all. Still, most of the current force of Burkes and Ticos is good for another 30 years of service, during which no other navy will even approach VLS parity.

Says Work, “The power of this fleet is unbelievable.” And he’s not even counting our aircraft carriers, the subject of part three of this series.

Cross-posted at War Is Boring

Boeing Still in the UCAS Game – Barely

Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles, or UCAVs, have a rather sad history in the U.S. military. When the General Atomics RQ-1 Predator proved, in the 1990s, that you could arm a medium-sized surveillance drone with air-to-ground weapons and turn it into an elusive, lethal and relatively cheap hunter-killer, folks in the Pentagon got real excited. They wanted to take that basic concept, throw some money at it and see what happened if you designed a drone from the ground-up to be a killer. Boeing was working on one of these so-called UCAVs, the X-45, for the Air Force. Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, had the X-47, which was beefed up for Navy use. Both programs were joint efforts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Looking to boost economies of scale, in 2003 the Pentagon brought both X-planes into the same program, called Joint-Unmanned Combat Air System. As J-UCAS picked up steam, Darpa relinquished control in 2005 and the military took over. A fly-off was imminent. The future looked bright.

Then, without warning in January 2006, the Air Force dropped out, effectively killing J-UCAS. The service said it had decided to focus money and effort on the new Long-Range Strike program to develop a new (perhaps unmanned) bomber. But folks inside the Boeing X-45 office said that was a load of bull and advanced their theories: that the Air Force was scared that the cheap, smart and lethal UCAVs might threaten the manned Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning fighter and start putting fighter pilots out of business; or that the Air Force was uncomfortable sharing technology with the Navy and letting the sea service call any shots in the UCAVs’ designs. (Navy airplanes have to be considerably bulkier and heavier than Air Force planes in order to survive repeated aircraft carrier launches and recoveries.)

Whatever the reason, the Navy was left to salvage something from J-UCAS. They renamed the program, first to N-UCAS for “Naval” then to UCAS-D for “Demonstration.” And they announced their intention to keep both industry teams in the running. It’s taken an entire year for the Navy to piece UCAS-D together; the request for proposals is due any day now. But whether it will eventually produce a real live combat aircraft is anybody’s guess. Technological hurdles are few – but cultural, fiscal and organizational obstacles abound.

Sources inside the Boeing X-45 program say that the office has been effectively split in two, with some staff still surviving on remaining J-UCAS funds and others spending company money while awaiting the Navy contract. Problem is, these two camps are prohibited from working together, for political reasons. And those residing the viable Navy half of the office are apparently being rather mismanaged – encouraged to do advanced work on X-45 despite the contract and prospects for government money being some months away. That’s risky, especially in light of the tenuous health of Boeing’s other drone programs, which have been stripped of people and money in order to keep UCAS-D going. No word on whether Northrop Grumman is suffering similar in-fighting. Probably not, considering that X-47 has long been Navy-optimized and also bearing in mind the firm’s tremendous success with the RQ-4 Global Hawk drone.

After a bullish decade, aerial drones are getting a reality check. The Pentagon has cast its lot with manned fighters over UCAVs and the Army is cutting in half its portfolio of future airborne drones in order to save cash; meanwhile, the Air Force seems to prefer a manned bomber for the Long-Range Strike mission. But if the Navy stands by UCAS-D, drones’ future just might turn around.

Cross-posted at War Is Boring and Defense Tech

Size Doesn't Matter, Part One

The new chair of the House Armed Services Committee’s sea-power subcommittee is calling for a bigger Navy fleet. “Numbers do matter,” Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss, said last week. Taylor’s district includes major shipyards. Noting that the Navy has shed around 50 major warships under the Bush Administration, Taylor added, “I want to turn that around.”

Taylor is not the first admiral, wonk or elected official to lament an apparent erosion of the Navy’s strength. Problem is that Taylor, like many others, is fixated on numbers of ships, which these days is one of the least reliable metrics for quantifying naval power. In fact, today’s Navy, while operating fewer warships than at any time since the 1930s, remains more powerful than the next 17 largest navies combined -- a “17-navy standard.” This is the greatest margin of superiority in modern history. The 19^th-century British Royal Navy, the world’s previous great naval power, was only slightly larger than its nearest competitor the French navy. What’s more, our 17-navy-standard lead is probably going to grow in coming years.

And it only grows further if you count ships operated by other U.S. services including the Coast Guard, Military Sealift Command and the Army. The Coast Guard alone has embarked on an expansion that will transform it into one of the world’s top 15 navies. Military Sealift Command operates the majority of the world’s large sealift ships.

Today’s numbers game started in the 1980s with President Ronald Reagan’s 600-ship buildup plan. We never quite got there, and post-Cold War cuts resulted in a shrinking force, which alarmed Navy types and resulted in the first of several plans establishing a minimum number of ships. The 1992 Base-Force plan called for 450 major combatants. But aging ships, rising shipbuilding costs and the 1990s “procurement holiday” steadily eroded numbers. “In 1997, the Navy said we’ve got to establish a floor and that’s going to be 300 ships,” says Robert Work, senior defense analyst at Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “So the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review says we’ve got have 300 ships.”

That’s slightly more that what we’ve got right now, if you count only major Navy warships. The problem, Work says, is that “the Navy was psychologically incapable of accepting that number.”

Why? Because of tradition, a very powerful force in today’s U.S. military.