Ares: A Defense Technology Blog

Breakfast with the General

Aviation Week & Space Technology Senior Military Editor David Fulghum went to a meeting of defense reporters with U.S Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and filed these reports.

+ Moseley says “something that looks like source selection” for the new replacement tanker will be announced “probably at the end of summer or early fall, [although] we’re going to take our time on this.” But the bad news is that the money available is only adequate for the current program which doesn’t take into account the anticipated growth of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. That will create a demand for more transports produced at a faster rate. “We should be buying the tankers at 25-40 per year for the best delivery price and to allow us to recapitalize faster. But in the [budget plans], we have scrunched and drawn out procurement. We may end up with 12-13 a year. Divide that into 500” and it will take more than 40 years to replace all the tankers.

The Other Arpa

It seems one advanced research projects agency isn’t enough for the Pentagon and intelligence community. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has asked his agencies and offices – known collectively as the intelligence community – to establish their own office to develop cutting edge technologies. Modeled after the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) -- which in the 1990s helped to develop unmanned aerial vehicle technology, much of which is being used now in the field to collect intelligence – the new Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Iarpa) will “work across agency boundaries, in the ‘white space’ between agencies, on activities that agencies may miss based on current business models and on ‘blue sky’ concepts too ‘distant’ for agencies consumed with current operations,” according to his 100-day plan McConnell instituted Apr. 9.

Radioactive News

Today's issue of the British newspaper The Guardian Unlimited reports on a "massive" U.S. government program to combat dirty bombs.

An excerpt:

But David McIntyre of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says: "To make a dirty bomb you have to be fairly sophisticated. When you extract the material you run the risk of exposure." Which means radioactivity detectors will spot them.

To reduce the chances of a nuclear or radiological dirty bomb attack, the US is currently leading a colossal effort to install a network of preventative defences at home and abroad. Within the next year or two, every person and vehicle entering the US, EU and many other countries will have to go through a portal that scans them for radioactive materials.

Darpa Wants Instant Print Translation

Say you're cruising around Baghdad on foot scoping out the area for signs of trouble when you pass some graffiti or a few flyers written in Arabic. Wouldn't it be handy if you could whip out a tiny little, lightweight box that would scan the literature and tell you what is says?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency thinks so. Darpa, which is always trying to think up ways to make soldiers lives easier and longer, has a new program to develop instant language translation tools for printed materials.

When I spoke to Alan Shaffer, director of plans and programs in the Pentagon office of Director, Defense Research and Engineering, at ComDef West 2007 last month, he listed better language translation, and particularly instant translation of printed materials as a major priority for his office.

Darpa says a broad agency announcement detailing the goals of the Multilingual Automatic Document Classification and Analysis, or MADCAT, program will be issued as soon as possible, and an Industry Day is planned for May 1.

--Catherine MacRae Hockmuth

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Ready for Primetime? Part Three

After more than 20 years of development – and seven years after two fatal crashes nearly killed the program entirely – the Boeing/Bell V-22 Osprey is finally prepping to actually do its job. This fall Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263 based at New River Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina will deploy to Al Asad in western Iraq for seven months with around a dozen Ospreys, replacing 1960s-era Boeing H-46 Sea Knights for ferrying and re-supplying Marines fighting in that huge, desolate province.

Despite the Corps’ apparent confidence in their new bird, skeptics in the media and at think-tanks continue to predict disaster – foremost among them, Lee Gaillard from the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., who last week weighed in with an email distributed to the media: "With lives at stake, the question bears repeating: how combat-ready and maintainable is the MV-22B Osprey?"

Restoring Trinity

Norway is making good on its promise to keep three aircraft in the running for its future fighter aircraft competition, and next month is expected to take the final formal step to establish the level playing field between competitors. Oslo found itself in a political pickle late last year when the deadline approached to commit to the next phase of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, even though the country does not need to start fielding aircraft until 2016-18.

The compromise:  In addition to putting a signature and money against the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Norway would do the same for the Saab Gripen (top photo) and the Eurofighter Typhoon. Oslo has now come through for the Swedes, with a two-year, $25 million cooperation agreement.  This will allow for the continuation of a “balanced competition” until Oslo makes its fighter choice in 2008.  A similar deal with Eurofighter is due to be signed May 15. Eurofighter first signed an industrial participation agreement with Norway in 2003.

Saddam's Databases Aid Cop Trainers

Biometric identification systems are one of those technologies that everyone in the military seems to want but that few can make work. Biometrics in theory might solve the problem of how you sort bad guys from throngs of innocent civilians in a place like Iraq: you ID them by their unique iris- or fingerprints or their facial patterns. The problem is that you have to know a person's prints and patterns first -- you have to "enroll" them -- before you can pick them out of a crowd.

Many handheld enrollment systems in use on an ad hoc basis in Iraq have proved too flimsy and sensitive for local conditions, as Paul McLeary will report in the next issue of DTI. But for one organization, enrollment isn't even an issue: the coalition advisors training the Iraqi police are using the Automated Fingerprint Identification System -- which is popular with U.S. police forces -- paired with old Ba'ath Party fingerprint databases, to screen police recruits.

Kryptonite Is Real

Most of the reports yesterday on the discovery of kryptonite in Serbia have focused on the Hollywood angle. Kryptonite being the nemesis of Superman and all. And we're not above a little Superman fun here. Chris Stanley, the minerologist who identified the new mineral said he discovered its relationship to the fictional kryptonite from Superman Returns by Googling its basic chemistry -- sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide--and discovered that it nearly matches the composition of kryptonite.

 

ArmsMart

The analysts at Stratfor have the details on North Korea's April 25 military parade to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Korean People's Army. The parade featured at least four types of mobile missiles, including the Hwasongs, which Stratfor describes as a Scud derivative; the AG-1 anti-ship missile, a derivative of China's HY-1 Silkworm and HY-2 Seersucker; and the KN-02, a derivative of the SS-21 Scarab short-range ballistic missile.