The US has just gone and done something I really can’t see the point of besides politics: they’ve gone and chopped their air dominance fighter after a production run of under 200 aircraft.

Instead they want to lay their eggs in the F-35 JSF basket – which performs poorly against the current Australian F-18s and will be chewed up by mostly anything the Soviets have as well as the Eurofighter, Gripen and Rafale. Does the US really want their air cover to be provided by the next generation F-16: a poor man’s jack of all  trades but master of none? Yes, right now there aren’t many threats against the F-15C and F-18E/F but the Su-30s will spread through the world, and they do eat these aircraft for breakfast. Without a counter like the F-22 you can’t own the air space. Without air space, your military options are severely limited.

Obama: More F-22s an inexcusable waste – The DEW Line.

The Moray Eel Hunter is a drone that seeks out single swimmers closing in stealthily on your coast at 8 kts. Once it finds you it lights up, makes noise, sends signals and swims around you.
So how long before it gets armed?

Who’d have thought it? Pictures of the MiG factory online for all to see!

This is like a taser without wires. It has a maximum range of 27m.

How to shame your WWII veterans: don’t attend the D-day anniversary, or fund the 500 remaining troops the trip to attend. The UK prime minister, Gordon Brown, won’t be attending and claims sending the vets there will be too expensive. There will be no official recognition from London, even though the US, French and even Germans will be commemorating the event.

This is a huge list of the Army Field Manuals. From how to point a gun, to how to run an infantry brigade.

Mounting the ipod on the rifle and then adding the external ballistics calculator app Bullet Flight, allows you to set bullet profiles and enter environment information.

The Royal Navy has only lauchend it’s conversion to Windows for Warships a month ago or so, and allready they’re infected by virusses! Not that it would have been any different if it had been OS X for warships (yes, macheads, you do in fact get virusses too) but still… who didn’t see that coming?!

The missile shield will be upgraded by multiple kill vehicles being carried up by as a single payload in a rocket. There are two competing tenders: Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Lockheed guides the mini rockets from a central command unit, Raytheon’s system has each of the warheads acting as a seeker / controller in theory, but one of them becomes a master after launch and transmits the targetting plan to the other vehicles.

Yup, the USA military is definitely past it’s prime – first the grounding of the entire F-15 fleet, then the ongoing A-10 grounding, the ancient tankers which have no replacement coming and now the F/A-18s are being grounded and inspected for structural faults found in many earlier models around the aerolon hinges.
These kind of structural faults indicate one thing: ancient machinery.

After the F-15 grounding, which left the US without an air defence in the beginning of this year, now many A-10s have been grounded due to cracks in the wings. With the tanker acquisition being put on hold, it’s looking more and more like the USAF is an organisation filled with geriatric aircraft. And congress wants to scale down JSF acquisition and block F-22 acquisition!

The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) staged an excercise pitting the JSF against the 4th generation russian fighters and it got it’s arse handed to it in the turning game. Link goes to the movie. Memorable quotes are:

I’ve been saying it enough – JSF is a dud!

Apparently Bush has done something smart!
In July he signed an order allowing US troops to go into Pakistan and conduct gound assaults on known Al Qaeda / Taleban locations. They will notify the Pakistani government, but they won’t ask for permission.

And trick your enemy satellite intelligence into thinking you are way way mightier than you are – just try to use an electric pump, as this stuff’ll have you blowing for HOURS.

Earlier I’ve Boeing is threatening to quit the second bid, as they say they need 6 months to prepare their bid! If they don’t get that time, which the USAF isn’t really willing to give them due to the urgency of the project, Boeing is threatening to pull out of the race entirely, which will delay the bidding program by at least a year and the acquisition by quite some more of that. Way to pout, Boeing.

The US Navy is going laser crazy!
They want:
Solid-State Fiber Laser
Free Electron Laser
High-Power Microwave Directed Energy Weapons
The Revolutionary Approach to Time-Critical Long Range Strike (RATTLRS) Program
Next Generation Integrated Power Systems
Electromagnetic Railgun
Laser-based Landing Aids

and probably more. Where are the SWFLs*?
Anyway, this is all high on the Office of Naval Research’s list

*Sharks With Frickin’ Lasers – duh.

Foliage Penetrating Synthetic Aperture Radar

Lockheed Martin has developed a radar that strips away foliage and allows you to track targets under the treetops.

After trying to visit the factories of Rafale and Eurofighter, both companies have declared they will not be offering their products to the Dutch ministry of defence, leaving them with the Gripen, Advanced F-16 and JSF as options.

All of the fighters left in the offering are short range point defence fighters, designed to be cheap to build and used after the air dominance fighters (Eurofighter, Rafale, F-15 and F-22 in the West) have cleared the airspace.

Britain is training dogs to wear camera’s on their heads and do high altitude, high opening para jumps, so that they can work as point ‘man’ and stream information on targets back to the troops coming behind.

This has now gone into a total and utter farce. First there’s a competition, from which there’s a clear winner. This is what the USAF wants to have. The winner isn’t an American company, but will create and sustain more American jobs than choosing the American country. So Boeing sues on spurious grounds. Then the Government Accountability Office claws in and states they think the Air Force didn’t select properly. Now when the Air Force is expected to deliver its verdict (taking into account the GAO report), the DoD strips the Air Force of the ability to choose and the politicians will be in charge of deciding which hardware the military is going to have to go to war with. This sounds like a really very bad idea indeed. Of course with the contract valued at $35 billion, there’s understandably a whole host of politicians who want their grubby little hands on some of that action.

Lockheed’s Multiple Kill Vehicle-L space superiority platform promises to be the final word in the event of an intercontinental ballistic missile attack. Part of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense System, the MKV-L is designed to deal with the multitudinous targets an ICBM launch would provide, rather than take out a single warhead.

ICBMs can be tricky. They act as a far-reaching delivery system for a swarm of smaller warheads — some of which are dummies to confuse opposing countermeasures — that shower a broad area in booms, bangs, fire, and general badness.

The MKV-L would respond with a barrage of its own, firing a pathfinder seeker warhead that would keep track of the number of enemy projectiles and take no prisoners, eliminating every warhead, dummy and even the delivery vehicle. Now that the milestone of a calibrated pathfinder seeker has come and gone, Lockheed is setting its sights on the next step: running tests in a true flight environment in the next year or two, and getting the system online by 2017.

As a quick aside, Lockheed needs to work on its renderings. The odd assortment of bland space balls, cones and cans aren’t really inspiring a lot of confidence in me.

Official URL Link

A German inventor has developed a paint called AR 1 that can hide a vehicle from radar, and most importantly, “all militarily relevant frequencies.” How it works is unclear, though one test researcher proposes it’s either by reflecting radar waves in a pattern so they cancel one another out, or by utilizing microscopic magnets to absorb radar radiation.

Military: Camouflage Paint Hides Vehicles From Radar, Subsequent Missiles

We’ve been hearing rumblings about the U.S. Navy’s triple-hulled ships, but here’s one that was launched last month, the U.S.S Independence. Built by General Dynamics, it’s called a “littoral combat ship” (LCS), and the trimaran can move huge weapons around faster than any ship in the Navy. Ironic that with all that high tech built in, the ship reminds us of the Merrimac ironclad from Civil War days.

Littoral means close to shore, and that’s where these fleet-hulled babies will operate, tailor-made for launching helicopters and armored vehicles, sweeping mines and firing all manner of torpedoes, missiles and machine guns.

These ships were designed to be relatively inexpensive — this one’s a bargain at $208 million — and the navy plans to build 55 of them. This trimaran is the first of the new fire-breathing breed, ready to scoot out of dry dock at a rumored 60 knots. It’s like a speedy and heavily-armed aircraft carrier for helicopters.

The Department of Defense (DOD) relies on a global network of critical physical and cyber infrastructure to project, support, and sustain its forces and operations worldwide. The incapacitation, exploitation, or destruction of one or more of its assets would seriously damage DOD’s ability to carry out its core missions. To identify and help assure the availability of this mission-critical infrastructure, in August 2005, DOD established the Defense Critical Infrastructure Program (DCIP), assigning overall responsibility for the program to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs (ASD[HD&ASA]).

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