This article has links to how the US uses simulators and what their capabilities are. They talk about training for UAV’s, the network centric way in which they’re trying to link up simulators globally, how they’re used to train for large force employments, using them to practice 4 ship formations and of course, the limitations of the system in basic airmanship.
How far can simulations go versus live flying? – The DEW Line.
And all the experts were saying it would be years before they could do anything with it when it was delivered to the Navy on September 25th. It looks like the Chinese are serious about putting it in operation as soon as they possibly can.
China Lands First Jet on Its Aircraft Carrier | Military.com.
A group of aeromedical specialists saw problems with the oxygenation of pilots in the F-22 and came up with a package of fixes for it. The fix per aircraft would have been $100,000 but the costs were deemed too high and the group was disbanded in 2007.
Air Force Insiders Foresaw F-22 Woes | Military.com.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force received a brutal wake-up call when 15 insurgents broke through the wire at Bastion at about 22:00 local time. Dressed in US combat fatigues and armed with automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, they launched “a well-coordinated attack,” it says.
Once on the base, the raiders attacked the USMC flightline, destroying six AV-8B Harriers, significantly damaging another two and killing two Marines, including Lt Col Christopher Raible, commanding officer of the VMA-211 squadron to which the jets were assigned
Camp Bastion attack shocks ISAF – The DEW Line.
A group of researchers led by Professor Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas at Austin Radionavigation Laboratory recently succeeded in raising the eyebrows of the US government. With just around $1,000 in parts, Humphreys’ team took control of an unmanned aerial vehicle operated by the US Department of Homeland Security.
They used the same technique the Iranians claimed to have used to force the US’ latest and greatest stealth UAV to land on their territory: spoofing the GPS signal of the drone, lending a lot of credibility to that claim.
Texas college hacks government drone — RT.
Using lasers, they guide lightning to their targets:
“For very powerful and high intensity laser pulses, the air can act like a lens, keeping the light in a small-diameter filament,” said Fischer. “We use an ultra-short-pulse laser of modest energy to make a laser beam so intense that it focuses on itself in air and stays focused in a filament.”
To put the energy output in perspective, a big filament light bulb uses 100 watts. The optical amplifier output is 50 billion watts of optical power, Fischer said.
“If a laser beam is intense enough, its electro-magnetic field is strong enough to rip electrons off of air molecules, creating plasma,” said Fischer. “This plasma is located along the path of the laser beam, so we can direct it wherever we want by moving a mirror.”
“Air is composed of neutral molecules and is an insulator,” Fischer said. When lightning from a thunderstorm leaps from cloud to ground, it behaves just as any other sources of electrical energy and follows the path of least resistance.
“The plasma channel conducts electricity way better than un-ionized air, so if we set up the laser so that the filament comes near a high voltage source, the electrical energy will travel down the filament,” Fischer elaborated.
A target, an enemy vehicle or even some types of unexploded ordnance, would be a better conductor than the ground it sits on. Since the voltage drop across the target would be the same as the voltage drop across the same distance of ground, current flows through the target. In the case of unexploded ordnance, it would detonate, explained Fischer.
Picatinny engineers set phasers to 'fry' | Article | The United States Army.
The boat is 39 feet long and can reach a top speed of 28 knots. Using a modified version of the unmanned Shadow surveillance aircraft technology that logged 700,000 hours of duty in the Middle East, the boat can be controlled remotely from 10 to 12 miles away from a command station on land, at sea or in the air, Haslett said.
Farther out, it can be switched to a satellite control system, which Textron said could expand its range to 1,200 miles. The boat could be launched from virtually any large Navy vessel.
Using diesel fuel, the boat could operate for up to 72 hours without refueling, depending upon its traveling speed and the weight of equipment being carried. The fuel supply could be extended for up to a week on slow-moving reconnaissance missions. the boat could be operated in as little as 5 feet of water because of its shallow draft
The CUSV would be hard to sink by accident.
If the boat overturns, it shuts down its engines, rights itself, restarts the engines and resumes the mission. Should the boat lose contact with its command, it’s programmed simply to return to its launching point or another pre-determined location.
It’s not the first unmanned boat. But Haslett said others generally have been boats simply refitted with remote control equipment. The CUSV was designed from the first step not to have a crew.
Phys.Org Mobile: Unmanned vessel could soon be working for Navy.
Melville ten Cate of ECA, housed in Schiphol, claims to have secured EUR 283 million to finance the business plan I have been harping on about for the last 25 years: he wants to buy 24 light combat aircraft to start an Integrated Opposing Force (IOPFOR) which will be used as an agressor training service for NATO. Eventually he wants to add surface and naval assets to the force.
Melville ten Cate
via ECA secures funds for NATO aggressor aircraft purchase.
Their corporate website is here, where they state they’re looking for EUR 448 m to finance all the aircraft, so he’s a bit short, but able to pay for 14 aircraft.
The Financial Times ran an article which was picked up in august 2010 by other media. In the FT article he is in discussion with Iceland to use an airbase there. In this article he talks about using Sukhoi’s, in other articles he talks about using MiG 35’s, Chengdu J-10’s, Saab Gripen’s.
A Dutch paper that picked up the article and wrote its own tried to contact the company, but the contact address on the old website led to Fokker Aircraft Services, where no-one knew of the company.
In January 2011 it turned out that the Icelandic government had denied permission to use the Keflavik base. Jobs for 45 pilots at EUR 160K per year had been posted, but ECA was unavailable for contact. It turned out that the company wasn’t registered in the Netherlands. No one could contact the ten Cate brothers and no-one knows anything about their financers.
Melville ten Cate has an empty LinkedIn page.
Pprune has picked it up again here but not much activity in that thread.
Scramble has an old thread on the subject here which has been picked up again.
So it’s a mystery.
The Joint Forces Command has been established to ensure that a range of vital military capabilities, functions and organisations – such as medical services, training and education, intelligence, and cyber – are organised and managed effectively and efficiently to support success on operations.
On 2 April 2012, the following organisations transferred to the Joint Forces Command:
• The Permanent Joint Headquarters (known as PJHQ)
• The Permanent Joint Operating Bases in Gibraltar, Cyprus, British Indian Ocean Territory and South Atlantic Islands
• The Joint Force Headquarters
• The Joint Force Logistics Component
• The Joint Counter-Terrorist Training and Advisory Team
• The Directorate of Special Forces
• The Defence Academy
• The Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre
• Defence Intelligence
• Surgeon General’s Headquarters and the Joint Medical Command
• The Joint Arms Control Implementation Group
• The Defence Centre of Training Support
• The Defence Cyber Operations Group.
This is a move which is long overdue. Hopefully this can settle the huge inter service rivalries which cost not only money, but also effectiveness.
This technique by Intelligent Textiles has been developed for military purposes, but can obviously have benefits for everyone. Using a central battery pack, wiring is woven in such a way that it can charge several items at once.
“One of the problems with conventional cables is that breakages can be catastrophic. What we do here is build in redundancy, so that if the fabric gets cut, damaged or torn, we still have a way of re-routing the data.”
In addition, it removes the hindrance of the many wires and cables required in military equipment. These can add weight and can tangle and snag.
BBC News – Smart fabric for new soldier uniform.
Because of all the problems associated with carrying firearms or other weaponry into ports, private security firms convert barges into floating armories in international waters where no one will bother them.
APNewsBreak: Piracy Fighters Use Floating Armories : NPR.
The gun forms vortex rings by forcing air or some other gas at high velocity down the gun’s cylinder. The ring forms when the friction of the cylinder wall causes a thin layer of the gas to roll forward on itself like a donut. Imagine a tornado formed into a donut shape. The ring revolves on itself while traveling out the cylinder and it can maintain that stability for long distances. Depending on the size of the gun, Battelle data confirms that a ring vortex can exit a generator at 90 miles per hour and maintain a speed of at least 60 mph for more than 50 yards.
Battelle: Battelle Develops Vortex Ring Gun for Firefighters, Pesticide Delivery.
The EM Railgun launcher is a long-range weapon that fires projectiles using electricity instead of chemical propellants. Magnetic fields created by high electrical currents accelerate a sliding metal conductor, or armature, between two rails to launch projectiles at 4,500 mph to 5,600 mph.
via With a bang, Navy begins tests on electromagnetic railgun prototype launcher.
“The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran’s “electronic ambush” of the highly classified US drone. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”
The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.
Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer – CSMonitor.com.
the U.S. can’t track or fully account for 5,900 pounds of “weapons usable” nuclear material that it once shipped overseas. Instead, U.S. officials have to rely on foreign governments’ assurances that the potentially cataclysmic stuff is safe. And when those officials occasionally visit the sites holding the nuclear material, nearly half the places “did not meet International Atomic Energy Agency security guidelines,” according to the GAO, Congress’ investigative arm
via U.S. Can’t Track Tons of Weapons-Grade Uranium, Plutonium | Danger Room | Wired.com.
Developed by BAE Systems, the Adaptiv technology allows vehicles to mimic the temperature of their surroundings.
It can also make a tank look like other objects, such as a cow or car, when seen through heat-sensitive ‘scopes.
Researchers are looking at ways to make it work with other wavelengths of light to confer true invisibility.
via BBC News – Tanks test infra-red invisibility cloak.
The graphs in the link below show how much each aircraft type costs to operate per hour over the last 10 years.
EXCLUSIVE: US Air Force combat fleet’s true operational costs revealed – The DEW Line.
The Air Force’s fleet of F-22 super-jets has been grounded for more than two months now, but service officials had no details Friday about when the F-22s may fly again or even when engineers could finish the investigation into the fighters’ onboard oxygen systems.
via DoD Buzz AF: No word when F-22s could fly again.
After the F-15 fleet grounding the USAF fleet is looking more and more ramshackle!
On May 12, the Visegrad Group (Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary) announced the formation of a “battlegroup” under the command of Poland. The battlegroup would be in place by 2016 as an independent force and would not be part of NATO command. In addition, starting in 2013, the four countries would begin military exercises together under the auspices of the NATO Response Force.
This is interesting as it expresses the views held in these countries that the European Rapid Reaction Force, NATO and the US are not interested enough in them to defend them. It expresses a fragmentation of European foreign security policy.
via Visegrad: A New European Military Force | STRATFOR.
How do you steal 15 tonnes of aircraft engines from an Israeli military base?!
‘Stolen’ F100 engine caper at Israeli base – The DEW Line.
The collections contained within the Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library are largely composed of digital versions of paper documents from the Combined Arms Research Library collections and student papers produced at the US Army Command and General Staff College. We have recently partnered with several Army educational and historical organizations whose collections appear here also. The collections of digitized materials are uploaded in the CONTENTdm® Digital Collection Management System which allows for greater search and retrieval of the individual documents.
Combined Arms Research Library CARL Digital Library.
