I just wanted to give everyone a head's up that I'll have a story running tomorrow AM about a new kind of body armor the Marine Corps is fielding to some of its troops in Afghanistan, the Western Pacific and to some vehicle crewmen.
The so-called "scalable plate carrier" was purchased after a March 2007 urgent needs statement from the field requested armor with less weight and coverage for troops in hot, high altitude or jungle environments.
I'm sure this will spark some debate about the pros and cons of ballistic protection vs. mobility. The SPC looks pretty cool (it's not exactly the one pictured above -- I'll reveal the actual one tomorrow) but I'm not sure I would wear it where IEDs are in play.
And, no, Systems Command still hasn't come up with a new design for an MTV replacement after the CMC requested they do so back in February.
Stay tuned to tomorrow morning's headlines on Military.com.
Blast from the past: Van HalenHagar's Blue Angels vid
Get Your F-15 Eagle Hybrid Now!
You know, with all the scandal surrounding the Air Force recently, it's refreshing to see that the service is breaking ground in areas that might be a little below the radar now, but will pay big dividends in the future for both the service itself and the general public.
F-15 Hits Mach 2 on Synthetic Fuel
History was made at Robins Air Force Base this week as an F-15 Eagle flew at more than twice the speed of sound using a blend of synthetic fuel.
The Aug. 19 flight was the world's first test of a high performance fighter aircraft powered by a 50-50 mix of traditional JP-8 jet fuel and a synthetic using natural gas as a source.
The Air Force already had tested the new blend on a C-17 cargo aircraft and B-52 and B-1 bombers. But Jeff Braun, director of the Air Force's Alternative Fuels Certification Office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, conceded that fighter aircraft offered a much different challenge.
"They are much higher performance and a much more demanding environment," he said during a late afternoon interview.
Braun said the daylong process included a 50-minute ground test Tuesday morning that pushed the aircraft's engines from military power to full afterburner.
"That was just another risk reduction step to prove the aircraft was not leaking fuel and the engines were behaving nominally," he said.
The actual test flight came in the afternoon. "It was a full functional check flight of about 55 minutes," the engineer said, "reaching speeds of Mach 2.2." Mach 2.2 is approximately 1,450 mph.
Immediate feedback came from the pilots.
"We asked them point-blank if they noticed any difference in performance and they said it was a 'non-event,' " Braun reported. "In other words, they couldn't tell the difference. The aircraft behaved the same."
For a service that's so fossil fuel intensive, it's amazing to see that something as high performance as USAF fighter jets can be powered by blended fuels seamlessly.
The U.S. Air Force is still confident a design will be selected as planned this fall for the armed service's controversial rescue helicopter replacement program, even though forthcoming draft findings of a Defense Department inspector general (IG) investigation could slow the process of announcing a winner.
Maj. Gen. Scott Gray, USAF director of acquisition for global reach programs, said he doesn't expect the IG's findings to impact the schedule of the contract award announcement. "We've heard nothing from the DOD IG that causes us concern," he told Pentagon reporters.
Service officials are folding lessons from Government Accountability Office's findings in the beleaguered aerial refueling tanker contest into future acquisition programs. In the case of CSAR-X, "we feel pretty confident that there was nothing...that needed to be fixed," Gray said.
The new aircraft are needed to replace aging HH-60G Pave Hawks now in service. Gray says that as of 2006, 7 percent of the Pave Hawk fleet of 101 helicopters was past its service life of 7,000 hr. He projects that in 2015, 58 percent will exceed their service life.
[Editor's Note: I wrote this story for posting this AM at Military.com. I know it's not a tech piece, but I thought for those of you in the service or with strong service affinity, it might stir some of that "rivalry" in ya...]
When the incoming Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway looked around the Corps, he didn't like what he saw.
No, it wasn't the Corps' aggressiveness, tactical savvy or combat acumen that worried him. Instead, it was the bulging gut, extra skin under the chin and the runaway waistlines that Leathernecks were squeezing into their cammies that got his dander up.
"Inspector General of the Marine Corps review of body composition programs indicates we still have Marines that fail to meet body composition standards," Conway wrote in an Aug. 11 Marine Corps-wide message. "This impacts combat efficiency and effectiveness and, unfortunately, is a clear indicator of some commanders' failure to enforce standards."
Marines have been at war for seven years -- rotating in a near-constant seven-month cycle of workups and deployment that leaves little time for physical training and all-around fitness. Come home, work out, pass the PFT, deploy.
Now, that's all changed.
Early this month, the Corps introduced a new fitness test that goes way beyond the current PFT that measures pull ups, crunches and a timed, three-mile run. The new "combat fitness test" -- which will be administered in addition to the standard PFT -- is more representative of what Marines are doing on deployment.
Divided into three events, the new test includes a timed ammo can lift, an 880-yard "movement-to-contact" run and a so-called "maneuver under fire" event that covers 300 yards.
Last week we had the laser gunship, this week it's the invisibility cloak.
Sounds a lot like science fiction but you'd be surprised how close Army researchers are to actually attaining the Holy Grail of invisibility.
According to Dr. Richard Hammond, a theoretical physicist with the Optical Physics and Imaging Science department of the Army Research Office, engineers are closer than they've ever been to developing a material that can bend light around an object rendering it invisible to certain wavelengths -- light being one of them.
So far scientists have successfully tested so-called "meta-materials" -- ones that are man made and built at the molecular level -- that can render an object invisible to microwaves, which has a larger wavelength than light, Hammond said.
"This is a new paradigm for the science of light," he said during a DoD bloggers' roundtable today. "It can be bent [using these materials] in an almost arbitrary way."
There are some significant obstacles to making a usable "invisibility cloak," however. The main one is the material itself. Since it has to be build at the molecular level, making enough material to cover, say, a truck is still out of reach, Hammond said. Also, so far the science is there to block one kind of wavelength, but not another. So you could render an object invisible on the UV spectrum but not the visible light one at the same time. And if you made something invisible to the human eye, it would be impossible without some kind of other sensor for whoever's behind the object to see anything since you're robbing him of light.
"But in early applications we could shield an object from radar," Hammond added.
Closer to fielding is a similar technology using meta-materials that can enhance optics to see things at the cellular or even molecular level -- "smaller than the wavelength of light," Hammond said, or less than .5 microns.
The massive Russian air, ground, and naval assault against the country of Georgia is certainly reminiscent of the earlier Soviet assaults against East Germany and Hungry, and, to some degree, the Russian campaign in Chechnya. But there are major differences in the cause of the current conflict and in the world political-military situation from those earlier military operations.
At this writing there were strong indications that the odd situation in the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia could have only led to conflict. The border provinces appear to have had Russian “peacekeepers” in them to “protect” the interests of the local populations that include many Russian citizens and sympathizers. According to Russian sources, Georgian troops attacked those Russian troops, although the exact circumstances of the initial exchange are unknown.
In response, after a brief delay, Russian forces invaded the two provinces, taking control after inflicting heavy civilian casualties -- some press reports cited approximately 2,000 deaths. But the Russian troops, carried in armored personnel carriers and supported by aircraft and helicopters, continued into Georgia, reportedly coming within 12 miles of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
In addition to civilian (and military casualties), Georgia has suffered perhaps 100,000 people being uprooted, and severe damage to towns and cities.
Georgian troops -- trained and partially equipped by the United States -- were unable to withstand the Russian onslaught. As this blog was written it appears that the Russian government has accepted the truce, brokered in part by the French government.
The Office of Naval Research held its annual partnership with industry conference last week here in Washington, DC. The envelop-pushing Navy lab is particularly keen on developing “game changing” laser beam and hypervelocity rail gun weapons. Much of the available funding is for early phase modeling and simulation. Some of ONR’s high-priority research areas include:
Solid-State Fiber Laser. Defined by ONR as: “A laser in which the active gain medium is an optical fiber doped with rare-earth elements such as erbium, ytterbium, neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium and thulium.” Okay. ONR says a fiber laser is the way to go for a 100 kW laser weapon that could fit into aircraft pods.
Free Electron Laser. A shipboard point defense weapon, the laser will fight off swarms of both high end anti-ship cruise missiles and low-tech, explosive laden small boats. The trick will be developing controllable laser beam strength for “graduated lethality and speed of light engagement.” An Innovative Naval Prototype program is scheduled to begin in 2010.
High-Power Microwave Directed Energy Weapons. A focused microwave beam transmits high levels of energy via concentrated radio waves that will knock out computers, sensors, most anything electronic. So far, ranges have been limited by weak projectors and a cluttered environment, but newer, compact high-power microwaves under development may eventually produce a “destructive” capability.
The physical world battle-space is well known and the parameters defined. Similarly an act of aggression or act of war in the physical sense is just as well defined and accepted. That is not the case when it comes to the cyber battlespace. Federal officials, military leaders, policy scholars and security experts are all looking at this issue and struggling to answer the question -- what constitutes an act of cyber war?
Cyber Warfare & Terrorism is defined as -the premeditated use of disruptive activities, or the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such objectives.
With that in mind we used real world events from the recent Georgian conflict to frame this issue and get your opinion.
Scenario:
The Georgian government relocated their President's website to a sever on U.S soil (in Atlanta Georgia) and connected to the U.S. Internet backbone. Would an attack on the Georgian President's web site (hosted within the U.S.) be considered an act of aggression against the United States and ultimately an act of cyber war?
Yes - is one point of view supported by the fact that the attack is against components of the internet infrastructure owned by a U.S. company and located on U.S. soil.
No - is one point of view supported by the fact that the attack is against the web site that represents an individual/leader of a foreign government.
This is a great opportunity for you the reader to voice your opinion and possibly even influence policy makers in Washington. I would encourage the full review of openly available information that may help you formulate your answer.
Who Cares? Iran says warplanes capable of reaching Israel
It's cookie cutter Iranian bluster, of course. Though some Iranian fighters do have the legs for such an operation, they'd have to drop most of their armament and load up on fuel to make the trip.
And that's assuming that Iranian warplanes had a straight shot into Israel. The minute the Mullahs sortie a strike package large enough to field against the razor sharp Israeli Air Force, the even sharper USAF and US Navy would make short work of it. That type of chest-thumping from Iran is the stuff that makes fighter jocks like Ward and Pinch drool.
