A source passed along these briefing slides after I ran the Imminent Fury piece yesterday, and I thought I'd share them with DT readers to slice and dice.
The presentation is basically an in-depth look at what the Navy's Irregular Warfare Office has been doing since it was established in 2008 to act as a sort of Navy version of the Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group.
Aside from the Imminent Fury brief, which is slightly different from what my sources told me about the origins and goal of the program, there are some semi-interesting UAV and UUV initiatives they're working on, primarily for air-to-sub intel gathering.
But on one of the last slides we find something pretty interesting -- and I may be behind the curve on this, but it's something that I think that MarSoc has been wrestling with as well. It's a call for 32 more MH-60S Knighthawk special operation helicopters. Now the brief shows several options for how to organize those additional aircraft, including the establishment of a two new dedicated Navy special operations aviation squadrons (which makes sense to me since they have SWICCs). The last alternative is to not buy any more helos and just fly 6,400 more flight hours on the ones they have -- which doesn't sound like much of an option.
So take a look at the brief and let me know what you think.
NX-Irregular Warfare Office
-- Christian
