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Jura said:

the whole point is the Pentagon plus of course the vendor may just, LOL if my English doesn't fail now, 'put on a brave face'

(in case you didn't know what I meant, here it'd be the Pentagon and of course the vendor denying for example lasers wouldn't work against sea-skimming missiles:
and the Pentagon and of course the vendor offering 'future increments' in such a situation, LOL)

the connection to the USN LCSs is at one point the Pentagon knew 'single-role frigate' was a flawed idea, but the Pentagon kept spending tens of billions on the USN LCSs;

EDIT do you know what I mean?

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Jura said:

link to these numbers please:
(am just curious)

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Jura said:

LOL!

so why, according to you, they'll now add those Bushmasters:

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Brumby said:

Frankly I don't know what you are driving at.
I have two possible interpretation of your statement :
(1) The Pentagon/contractor knew that laser is not effective against sea skimming ASM but yet did not highlight this capability gap; or
(2)The Pentagon/contractor knew about the capability gap and falsely claim that laser can handle such a threat.

In either case, the program of record is clear that the laser testing at sea was against small boats and UAV (per CRS reporting). There was never any claim made about testing against ASM. As such I don't understand why you are brining up the issue of ASM. Further more, how is this connected to the issues of LCS and 'single-role frigate'? The original LCS program was not about building a Frigate. It has today become the FG(X) program for various reasons. You are conflating so many issues I don't even know where to start. I suggest you think through what you want to argue and then articulate the case. Expressing an opinion is easy because the hurdle you need to cross is very low. However objective criticism require facts and the threshold is more demanding.

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This is a very technical blog or radar concepts and require patience in reading through the materials.

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In a major departure from previous shipbuilding assessments, the Navy unveiled detailed plans to get to a 355-ship fleet two decades more quickly on Thursday. It also outlined a rough estimate of the $40 billion a year it will cost to maintain that fleet, just five days before the service’s posture hearings begin in the House and six days before the shipbuilding plan is debated in the Senate.

But this plan is clearly a stopgap measure until the Navy comes out with the real plan later this year, which CNO Adm. John Richardson has promised by the end of this year.

In its new

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, the Navy says it will kick off procurement of 55 new ships by 2024, while reaching 314 ships by fiscal 2024 and 355 ships in 2034.

The ambitious plan faces plenty of obstacles, not the least of which is a tight schedule to begin putting its $128 billion

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into the water by 2031, fixing

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with its next-generation Ford-class aircraft carriers, integrating unmanned vessels into the fleet and introducing new classes of frigates and cruisers in the coming years

In a clear signal to Congress, the Navy’s top admiral warned last month that the shipbuilding plan is very much a work in progress. Richardson revealed

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the 355-ship concept from top to bottom, and promised a new plan by the end of the year that would likely yield a new number of ships.

“We want to make sure that we are moving forward in a very deliberate way,”

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, “so that we’re not counting on something that hasn’t been relatively proven. We also want to make sure we’re moving fast so that we don’t get disrupted or beaten.”

The new study also revealed a rough estimate for how much a 355-ship fleet will cost to sustain. Initial, incomplete estimates put the cost at least $40 billion a year.

But that $40 billion, unsurprisingly, will surely change. The Navy admits that in arriving at that number, it left a lot on the table. “Equally important additional costs, but not yet included in the future estimate,” include operations accounts, modernization and ordnance, which are “threat and technology driven,” as well as infrastructure and training, aviation detachments, networks and cyber support, and other factors it does not name.

Protecting the Industrial Base

Underlying all of this proposed work is the shipbuilding and ship repair industrial base.

The report laments that over the past six decades, over a dozen defense-related new construction shipyards have closed, while another three left the defense industry, while only one new shipyard has opened. “We are at a level of fragility that, without consistent and continuous commitment to steady acquisition profiles as proposed in this plan the industrial base will continue to struggle and some elements may not recover from another ‘boom/bust;’ cycle,” the report notes.

n order to help alleviate some of those constraints, the Pentagon

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over the coming year shoring up the shipbuilding industrial base, though it has yet to detail its final plans for where that money will go.

The service also revealed Thursday that with the release of the fiscal 2021 budget it will roll out what it’s calling Private Shipyard Optimization (PSO) initiative “for optimal placement of facilities and major equipment in each region. This includes an investment plan for infrastructure needed to support availability maintenance in support of a 355-ship Navy.”

The Navy is working though plenty of issues, including extending the life spans of its DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in order to bump up the number of hulls it has without building new ships. In the fiscal 2020 budget,

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, the service requested money to fund two new Ford-class carriers, while forgoing the mid-life refueling of the USS Harry S. Truman carrier. It also wants to add an extra Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and a third Virginia-class submarine in 2020.

The plan, however, drops to just two Arleigh Burkes a year in 2021 and 2022 compared to the previously planned purchase of three a year. It

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amphibious San Antonio-class Flight II landing dock ships, known as LPDs, out past 2024 is part of a much wider reevaluation of naval warfare.

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The U.S. Air Force’s next tanker aircraft will probably be autonomous, the service’s top acquisition official says.

“We can see it in the tea leaves,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics.

The Air Mobility Command was scheduled by the end of last year to complete a capabilities-based assessment for KC-Z, the aircraft that the Air Force wants to follow the

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into production after 2027.

The assessment marks the first step in the Pentagon’s process for launching a new acquisition program. It should be followed by a roughly yearlong analysis of alternatives, which generates the data used to set requirements ahead of a solicitation.

But Roper already seems convinced that KC-Z will not use a human operator on board the tanker aircraft to guide the Air Force’s required refueling boom into a receiver.

“If KC-Z isn’t autonomous, I’ll be really surprised,” Roper said. The U.S. Navy is already developing an autonomous tanker with the

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MQ-25A, but the Air Force’s requirements are more difficult. The MQ-25A uses only a refueling drogue, which remains stationary while receiver aircraft connect to it. The Air Force’s bombers and airlifters need a refueling system with faster off-load capacity, which can only be provided by a refueling boom.

Despite that extra complexity, Roper’s certainty on KC-Z refueling technology is rooted in the painful experience of resolving flaws in the remote vision system (RVS) of the KC-46. To break a two-year impasse, Boeing agreed to redesign the KC-46’s remote vision system to detailed new parameters developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory.

The RVS now allows a human operator to steer the refueling boom into a receiver using a set of cameras. Boeing’s original design did not satisfy the Air Force, but it could not explain why. A team from the Air Force Research Laboratory then developed a set of standards for visual resolution and a desired configuration for the cameras. The knowledge gained by that team can help the Air Force move beyond human operators for the next tanker aircraft.

“In fixing the RVS we now have the knowledge in the Air Force to know how to go out and request an autonomous tanker and not just say, ‘give it to us,’ but specifically put on contract what we want to see,” Roper said.

Meanwhile, the Air Force is continuing to mature technologies for a new refueling aircraft. Newly-released budget documents show the Air Force plans to start designing a “small, pod-mounted tactical air refueling boom for future Mobility applications.” The Air Force is also continuing to assess “promising configurations for future Mobility applications,” budget documents state, with wind tunnel tests scheduled in 2020 for “practical laminar flow treatments and coatings for highly swept wings applicable to Mobility applications.”

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Jura said:

dated April 7, 2014
U.S. Navy to test futuristic, super-fast gun at sea in 2016

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:
"The U.S. Navy is planning sea trials for a weapon that can fire a low-cost, 23-pound (10-kg) projectile at seven times the speed of sound using electromagnetic energy, a “Star Wars” technology that will make enemies think twice, the Navy’s research chief said.

Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, the chief of Naval Research, told a round table group recently the futuristic electromagnetic rail gun had already undergone extensive testing on land and would be mounted on the USNS Millinocket, a high-speed vessel, for sea trials beginning in 2016.

“It’s now reality and it’s not science fiction. It’s actually real. You can look at it. It’s firing,” said Klunder, ..."

etc., and no such sea trials have occurred since then,

so you now might understand why to your line from #10835 Brumby, Yesterday at 10:16 AM

"Regardless of the history and your scepticism, the fact that they are moving ahead in putting a laser on board an operational destroyer is the strongest testament of progress. ..."

I added Yesterday at 8:16 PM

"... is your naïve opinion claiming a connection between installing some gear and "progress", just look at USN LCS"

as I now analogously could pull some official promise of 'future testing', related to USN LCSs, which didn't materialize;

do you perhaps see my point now?

I won't respond irrespective

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Deferral of the development of specific Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) classified technologies results in a realignment of $357M in FY 2020, and $6,646M across the FYDP, to fund the development of the most promising classified technologies, which improve lethality by providing expanded capabilities.

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This program element may include necessary civilian pay expenses required to manage, execute, and deliver NGAD capabilities. The use of such program funds would be in addition to the civilian pay expenses budgeted in PE's: 0605826F, 0605827F, 0605828F, 0605829F 0605830F, 0605831F, 0605832F, and 0605898F.

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