Ares: A Defense Technology Blog

4/26 Frago

+ Should airmen help with ground jobs?

+ Space debris: No big whoop

+ Defense Markets 1stQ summary

+ DARPA-scopes

+ Dems to boost shipbuilding?

Be Afraid

Congress is rapidly losing patience with the inter-service dispute over the USAF's bid to become the Pentagon's "executive agent" for medium and high-altitude UAVs. Army Times reports that the chairman of the House Armed Services air and land forces subcommittee, Rep.Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, "promised to settle the differences if the services don't". (Tip credit - Evan Sweetman.) According to the paper, Abercrombie told the service leaders that "I can make arbitrary decisions,"  and what's really scary is that he is in a position to do so.

No doubt those decisions will be based on Abercrombie's extensive UAV-related experience, including his degree in sociology, doctorate in American Studies, career in academia and 33 years as an elected official in Hawaii and in Congress. Perhaps those decisions will be better than the last-but-one time that Congress intervened in UAV development, which nearly strangled the Predator in its crib - fortunately, the CIA ignored Congress and funded the program in secret. With luck, though, the sepulchral voice saying "I'm from Congress, and I'm here to help" will frighten the services into taking action.

--Bill Sweetman

A Picture's Worth ...

Since everyone's getting excited about the artists' concept of Russia's PAK-FA follow-on fighter, let the record show that I was sitting on it for two reasons. First, it's a concept on the site of engine-maker NPO Saturn, who would probably not be the first people authorized to release a real PAK-FA image. Second, it first surfaced as a link in Wikipedia. Now, far be it from me to suggest that if a person wanted to get a deliberately inaccurate image picked up and widely published, letting people "find" it on Wackypedia would be a good way to do it - but there's a possibility that this is a plant, until we have reason to believe otherwise. There were a lot of subcontractor concepts of stealth aircraft released in the early 1980s, all of which bore no resemblance to anything real, and I will never forget the Polish-sourced "MiG-29" artist's concept from that era which had originated on my kitchen table.

Pretty picture, though.

--Bill Sweetman

(Photo credit)

Now It's Generation 4.5

The dogfight over the correct classification of fighter aircraft continues. As Ares noted earlier this month, the Navy's Super Hornet program manager resists Lockheed Martin's attempt to apply the "fifth-generation" tag exclusively to the JSF and F-22 -- implying that everything else is on the road to obsolescence. Now, in a Tuesday-morning breakfast meeting (scroll down to 'Chinese Airpower') with reporters, USAF chief of staff Gen. Michael Moseley has coined "Generation 4.5" to describe the latest Sukhoi Su-30MKK variants, China's J-10 and the Eurofighter Typhoon.

Without putting words into the chief's mouth, I'd suggest that 4.5 implies everything that the F-22 and JSF share, except all-aspect, broadband stealth -- fighters like the Super Hornet, Eurofighter, Rafale, Gripen and the latest Su-30s use a combination of radar cross-section reduction measures, onboard jammers and decoys for self-defense. Next month, I'll be talking at an IQPC conference on combat aircraft survivability in London -- a conference that replaced a Stealth-only event held in earlier years - and a big focus will be the extent to which digital jammers and decoys can defeat threats now and in the future.

The chief's words will encourage Eurofighter and Gripen marketeers, now that -- officially and at the highest levels -- the US military no longer places their fighters in the same group as the F-15 and F-16.

--Bill Sweetman

An Unlikely Threesome

Both the military and the media have lost control over how events in conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Iraq are being reported. Particularly the creative use of Internet websites by extremist and insurgent groups is of great concern to U.S. and NATO-led forces in those theaters.

This was the main message from the first-ever Defense Leaders Forum, held on Monday in a posh five-star beach hotel near The Hague. Interestingly, the Forum was an initiative of Microsoft, working in partnership with Britain's BBC and with NATO.

An "unlikely threesome," according to Dutch defense minister Eimert van Middelkoop, who delivered the opening address.

I was the only outside journalist present at the Forum, and I asked Ralph Young, Microsoft's World Public Sector vice president, what he thought of the minister's assessment of Microsoft's "menage a trois" with the "Beeb" and NATO.

Secret Is as Secret Does

QUEBEC - Tom Kean, who headed the bi-partisan commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, says the panel had a hard time getting access to some of the classified documents involving the terrorist attacks.

When the 9/11 Commission finally did get access -- Kean told a counterterrorism conference in Quebec, Canada recently - he had to go to a secured briefing room, where he could review the documents under the watchful eye of an FBI agent, who Kean called his "minder."

A former New Jersey governor who had never worked in Washington, Kean was amazed by what bore the SECRET stamp. The first thing Kean reviewed with his new "Top Secret" clearance was a hefty FBI report on the 9/11 plot. After reading the 200-page secret report, Kean thought in amazement: "I know all this!"

Kean said there was nothing in the file that he didn't already know from news reports or other public sources. When he told his minder "I know all this," the FBI agent replied: "Yes, but you didn't know it was true."

To review the most secret documents, Kean had to go to the Old Executive Office Building near the White House where he had two or three minders looking over his shoulder. When Kean asked if he could take notes. The minder replied: "Yes, but we keep the notes."

--John Doyle

No Nukes!

Apparently, the U.S. government's program to replace old nuclear warheads with new, modernized warheads is problematic, according to a report by a panel of independent scientists.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science was asked to evaluate the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, which is scheduled to deliver the first "new" warhead in 2012. However, the panel found that the lack of a defined program scope, costs and schedule make it impossible to adequately judge the trade-offs between maintaining the existing stockpile as-is or developing these replacement warheads. The panel also concluded that it is not possible to accurately predict the aging behavior of the existing stockpile.

SFGate.com reports that the panel is composed of 13 scientists, including several highly regarded nuclear experts with decades of experience designing and overseeing weapons programs.

4/25 Frago

+ RRW endorsement

+ F-22 export?: Australia, Israel, Japan

+ Eurofighter Typhoon special coverage

+ Next-gen Russian fighter pics [1] [2]

+ When buzz words attack: 'LandWarNet... joint net-centric information enterprise'

ONR Embraces Ambiguity

A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about an Office of Naval Research plan to combine 10 years worth of research into two Infantry Immersive Trainers at the Marine Corps installations in Camp Pendleton, California and Quantico, Va. It wasn't clear until now what an Infantry Immersive Trainer is. I guessed some sort of super simulation designed to create unstoppable Marines, but I was only partly right.

According to Cdr. Dylan Schmorrow, the ONR guy behind it all, immersive training is about preparing Marines for the sights and sounds of warfare before they get there. Sound likes something you've heard of already? That's what I thought too, but this is way better than the sort of gaming you see at defense conferences where you point a fake gun at projector screen and play hero.

Schmorrow told DTI in an interview that people who create simulations are benefiting from advances in a lot of different technologies (we'll get to those later), but mostly they've benefited from an understanding that training for warfare isn't like training to be a great baseball player or the next Tiger Woods. It's not just about muscle memory. Rather, it's about complex cognitive processes that are now better understood than they used to be. Taking that fact into consideration, what's the best way to prepare a soldier or Marine for battle?

CSAR Paper Trail

There's a lot of paperwork associated with major Pentagon weapons purchases. And the documentation can shed light on power plays and politics inside contested programs. Case in point: the $10-billion CSAR-X program to replace the Air Force's old H-60 rescue choppers. The Boeing H-47 Chinook won that contest last year, but losers Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky have forced the Pentagon to re-open the competition. They claim that the requirements document called for a medium helicopter -- and that the Chinook is in the "heavy" class and never even qualified. Now we can prove it -- maybe.