Following the publication of new acquisition data it turns out that modifications have eaten up fuel capacity meaning it’s estimated that the current combat radius will be around 584 nm, which is 1/7th less than the original 690 nm estimate and 6 nm less than the 590 nm requirement.
BREAKING: Short legs on F-35A – The DEW Line.
The US Air Force has stopped flying all Lockheed Martin F-22s for an indefinite period over concerns about a possible glitch in the onboard oxygen generation system.The stand-down order issued on 3 May by Air Combat Command ACC chief Gen Will Fraser comes about six weeks after the F-22s were restricted to flying below 25,000ft due to the same problem.The order is in effect until “further notice”, the ACC says.
via Oxygen system concerns prompt F-22 stand-down.
This is an excellent current military affairs resource with a forum, blog and articles written by serving military officers.
Pictures from the 2nd flight show ground crew to give a sense of scale
China’s Stealth Jet Makes Second Flight | Defense Tech.
As every time someone clicks a bit.ly link that money goes into the coffers of Ghaddafhi, I’ve changed to tinyurl. No statistics on my clicks any more, but hey, I never used them anyway 🙂
TinyURL.com – shorten that long URL into a tiny URL.
This timeline shows all wars, seiges, battles ever with their location on a google maps api. You scroll through periods of time and see where they were fighting, doing what. You can choose a war and find a small precis on what the war was about, why they were fighting.
With a 6.5-inch wing span, the remote-controlled bird weighs less than a AA battery and can fly at speeds of up to 11 mph, propelled only by the flapping of its two wings. A tiny video camera sits in its belly.
The bird can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways, forward and backward. It can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise.
Most of all, it can hover and perch on a window ledge while it gathers intelligence, unbeknownst to the enemy.
“We were almost laughing out of being scared because we had signed up to do this,” said Matt Keennon, senior project engineer of California’s AeroVironment, which built the hummingbird.
via Tiny Spy Planes Mimic Birds, Insects.
The XO of the Enterprise used to hold movie nights featuring funny, sexually tinted skits. One or two people got upset, it got out and now the USN top is going nuts in a frantic attempt to show how humorless they are.
Enterprise Skipper Condemned, Defended.
They’ll share carriers as well as R&D, set up a joint military force comprising 5000 personell from each country to start off with, jointly fund UAV MALE acquisition and train together for the A400M programme. These agreements should last for 50 years.
UK–France Summit 2010 Declaration on Defence and Security Co-operation
Joint carrier operations, UAV developments in UK/France defence pact.
The silo missileers couldn’t communicate and so control the 50 nukes. Apparently this has happened before, but only with up to around 8 missiles at a time…
USAF Has Nuke Issues, Again. Really, Really?! | Defense Tech.
The navy loses a carrier and a helicopter landing ship immediately (no words on the planned acquisition of the next 2 carriers) and four frigates. The army loses a brigade as well as artillery (35%) and tanks (40%). The air force loses Harrier immediately and will lose C-130 10 years earlier than planned as well as losing VC-10 and three Tristar variants from 2013 and Sentinel after Afghanistan (whenever that may be).
Big cuts!
However, support for Afghanistan is unequivical and repeated. They’re going to stick that out and try to support the in country structure as much as possible.
Lockheed Martin’s objective is to deliver 15 field-testable and hardened prototype systems by October 2011 that provides the capability to profile downrange crosswind and range to target in near real time, at longer ranges, and improved probability of a first round hit.
The system’s integrated spotter scope ISS should measure crosswinds, maximum effective range of the weapon, temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, cant and pointing angles, and GPS coordinates, as well as allow direct day and night observation of targets with continuous updates of the aim point offset corrections, with no alignment verification of the laser/crosswind optics to the spotting scope necessary.
The rifle scope also should communicate the aim point offset and expected crosswind variability to the rifle scope using a wired or wireless data link
The visualising data blog has a few interesting graphs of how the wikileaks data shows the war in Afghanistan is spreading and getting progressively worse. They’ve also used data analysis to show that the data isn’t faked.
Visualising the wikileaks war logs using tableau public
Wikileaks War Logs: A triumph in ‘data journalism’?.
Wikileaks has released logs from the Afghanistan war covering 2004 – 2010. The amount of data is massive and Wikileaks is down
The Guardian has a good rundown going on about the data and has some analysis.
Afghanistan war logs: live blog | World news | guardian.co.uk.
This is what it looks like to be lasered down
Raytheon airs video at Farnborough Airshow of CIWS laser shooting down drone | News.com.au.
Unexpected deviations in gravity are indicative of differences in density. If you point your detector (a gravity gradiometer) in that direction, you can tell what kind of structure is underground. Lockheed Martin is calling this the GATE (Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure) programme.
Using Gravity to Detect Underground Threats | Lockheed Martin.
In order to reduce costs on the allready expensive F-35, they’ve decided to remove the shutoff valves for engine coolant and hydraulic lines and five of six dry bay fire-suppression systems. This means if they get hit by 30mm incendiary AAA rounds (very common), it’ll blow up instead of venting the extra pressure in these liquids.
Also it turns out that the stealth – well, it isn’t so very stealthy after all. Only from 35o from the front quarter, only to certain types of radar (commonly used by ground systems, not by aerial platforms) and don’t make a turn or you’ll get caught.
Gajillion-Dollar Stealth Fighter, Now Easier to Shoot Down.
Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the service’s technology development arm, announced today that LaWS (Laser Weapons System) had “successfully tracked, engaged, and destroyed” a drone in flight, during an over-the-water engagement at San Nicholas Island, Calif.
via Navy’s Drone Death Ray Takes Out Targets at Sea | Danger Room | Wired.com.
It’s a good document, showing that NATO is definitely heading in the right direction. However, you can tell that much of the experts are stuck in the mud a bit and that the US is using this document to flex its muscles in Iran’s direction.
NATO needs to form a new and clear strategic vision, one that not only updates it’s doctrine and relevance, but also shows this to the rest of the world.
Not only is the F-35 underperforming and overpriced, it’s also not an air dominance fighter. It’s a point defence fighter with the same limitations of the F-16 when it first came out. If you want to play with the big boys, you gotta have a big stick, and the F-35 just isn’t it.
Now it’s flayaway price is estimated at $135m, a lot more than the $60-$90m projected and a whole lot more than a new F-16 or even a latest model F-18.
Dump this programme, get F-22 back on the rails (if you’re American) or buy Eurofighter / Rafale / Gripen (if you’re European).
Last year, the US Air Force reported incremental unit procurement cost to buy one more F-22 in Fiscal 2010, assuming a 20-aircraft multi-year contract. The cost was $138 million.At the time, the F-35 seemed like a bargain by comparison. The official cost estimate, unchanged since 2007, pinned the average procurement cost for the F-35 between $60-$90 million, depending on the variant.Those assumptions for the F-35 now look almost ridiculously rosy. The Department of Defense released a document today revising the F-35 cost estimate by up to nearly 90% [read full story].We now know the F-35 will cost between $114 million to $135 million, adjusted for inflation. That average cost assumes the US Air Force will still buy 1,763 F-35As despite plans to draw-down to a total of 2,000 fighters, including 186 F-22s already on order.
via F-35 sticker shocks the $138 million F-22 – The DEW Line.
Opinion piece by a former CIA operative on its current lack of operational capability,
On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201004/dagger-to-the-cia
It used to be that you needed a huge cellphone network to start mapping changes in air currents, but now these guys have developed a sensor that can measure the movement and displacement of air particles using a sensor smaller than a matchstick head!
The Microflown
The Microflown is the worlds first and only MEMS technology based sensor that can measure the acoustic particle velocity. By measuring the temperature difference in the cross section of two extremely thin platinum wires placed in parallel, this extremely fast mass flow sensor is capable of monitoring the movement of air particles. Any sound field is described completely by both the (scalar) value sound pressure and the (vector) value acoustic particle velocity. Understandably, acoustic testing becomes much easier if both acoustic quantities can be measured. But the Microflown sensor platform can also be used to measure:
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structural velocity
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sound pressure
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temperature
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DC flow
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acceleration
via Microflown Technologies – Home.
well well well, not that we didn’t expect it – it’s now delayed by a year and development costs are $100m over budget allready.
Now if only the Netherlands had bought something like Eurofighter or Rafale.
F-35 Delayed Again | Defense Tech.
Looks like the Rafale provides a lot more bang for buck than the F-22, at least in close range…
In those six engagements, the F-22 scored one gun kill, but the other five dogfights ended in a draw, Air & Cosmos says. Another sources tells the magazine the F-22 scored two gun kills, with four nulls.
via UAE missile demands and more Rafale v. Raptor rumors – The DEW Line.