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HUNTSVILLE: The Army’s racing ahead on new

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to prepare for a

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. Within “weeks,” the Army will announce, not only the top three contenders to replace its Shadow recon drone, but issue the official Request For Information on

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for the UH-60 Black Hawk.

In fact,

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told reporters here at the AUSA Global conference, the service wants to accelerate the UH-60 replacement, the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA). And it can move faster, Rugen said, while still leaving time to completely test the Sikorsky-Boeing

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, which just

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, a year behind

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.

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the FARA is being designed specifically to take over

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. But that doesn’t mean the Army is getting rid of those Apaches altogether, and it doesn’t mean FARA will take on the much heavier, better-armored Apache’s primary role as a gunship.

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The Navy, by contrast, is apparently at least looking at a possible new helicopter in the same size class as Apache. That’s what the FVL program calls Capability Set 2, larger than scouts like FARA (CS 1), but smaller than transports like the Black Hawk or its replacement, the

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(CS 3). Army officials are watching the Navy effort but not focused on it, Rugen said.

“We’ve read their requirements documents and we’ve reviewed it, but noting’s shifted,” Rugen said yesterday. “Our goal is to bring FLRAA and FARA on through

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” — starting production — “by 2028.”

What about a replacement for the Apache? “It wasn’t our greatest need at this point,”

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Jura said:

...

what nobody asks is this:
had those subs been available earlier (thanks to no maintenance delays), what would the USN have gained? I mean what opportunities were missed

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US commanders facing off against growing Chinese and Russian fleets want more submarines in the water, and they want them now. That will be a major challenge as the Navy struggles to keep its subs in service and out of extended repair availabilities.

Not only are shipyards and parts suppliers straining under the

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, pushing back maintenance availabilities and placing new submarine construction at some risk, but

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see the number of attack subs dipping significantly before they slowly rise again late next decade.

The head of Indo-Pacific command, in particular, says he’s concerned. Of the roughly 400 non-US submarines operating the world, 75 percent of them work in the Indo-Pacific region, Adm. Philip Davidson told the House Armed Services Committee this week.

Around 160 of those subs are being operated by China, Russia, and North Korea. By 2020,

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, China will likely have 70 nuclear- and diesel-powered submarines in the water.

“Potential adversary submarine activity has tripled from 2008 levels,” Davidson said, “which requires at least a corresponding increase on the part of the United States to maintain superiority.”

But as

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, that isn’t likely to happen for years, if ever.

Any course change in long-range shipbuilding plans would take a massive effort — and investment — to push more hulls out of shipyards that are already straining to keep up with the volume of repair work, let alone bending steel on huge upgrades to Virginia-class subs and the start of work on 12 new the Columbia-class hulls.

In a sign of just how stressed the Navy’s repair schedule is, service leaders included $653 million for repair and refit of three Los Angeles-class submarines in

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it submitted to Congress last week. The document said that three subs waiting for maintenance in private yards are at the top of its list: $290 million for USS Boise, $306 million for USS Hartford, and $57 million for USS Columbus.

The backlog comes as the Navy is attempting to boost attack submarine production before they drop. The Navy expects to drop from 52 to 42 attack subs by the late 2020s, followed by a gradual ramp-up in subsequent years. The requirement, as spelled out in Navy doctrine and plans, calls for 62 subs.

To speed up that build and repair rate even slightly, the Navy added a third Virginia-class submarine in the fiscal 2020 budget request. Vice Adm. Bill Merz, deputy chief of naval operations told the HASC seapower and projection forces subcommittee this week that even with the backlogs at shipyards and bottlenecks with the supplier base he thinks the Navy has to keep to this more ambitious schedule or risk falling even further behind.

“We have been fighting very hard to get that [Virginia] program back on track, and no matter what we do — even with a third submarine in 2020 — it is still going to be the furthest away from its validated requirement for the next 20 years,” he said.

Rep. Joe Courtney pressed Navy acquisition chief James Geurts on the build schedule. Guerts said the service has been able to push down build times on Virginia-class boats down from 84 months to 66, but “we’ve been a little bit challenged” on pushing that number any lower.

Geurts, concerned about the drop in attack sub numbers next decade, said that adding a third Virginia next year means the Navy is taking “a little more risk than we did last year by adding that into the plan.”

Part of the backlog for the Los Angeles-class submarines comes from parallel work on upgrading Virginia-class submarines while beginning work on the new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine.

“We’ve seen improvement on the public yard in terms of reducing idle time and buying back maintenance days,” Geurts said. “We’re better than we were, but we’re not where we need to be yet in terms of having ships with idle time, not certified, waiting to get into maintenance.”

While ships wait to get fixed up, commanders are also waiting for those ships to get back into service.

“My day-to-day [submarine] requirement is met by slightly over 50 percent of what I ask for,” Davidson told lawmakers. “The capacity limitations, as we go down over the course of the next several years, is indeed a threat to day-to-day operations than I think we need to have in the theater,” he added.

The Navy has a goal of keeping around 30 submarines – over half of its total submarine fleet – working in the Pacific. But as the Los Angeles-class fast attack subs begin retiring in the coming years, and the total number of hulls drops to about 42 by 2026, those operational pulses in the Pacific will likely become even more urgent.

“The number of submarines is an area in which we hold an asymmetrical advantage over virtually, well, all our adversaries,” Davidson said. “It’s a critical advantage that we need to extend.”

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

Expect the OMFV RFI on friday.

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Some of the threshold requirements for OMFV are a 30mm cannon and a second generation Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) system.

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Objective requirements are a 50mm cannon and a third-generation FLIR.

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After years of planning, the Paladin Integrated Management program aims to upgrade the Paladin howitzer with an M109A7 chassis. From there, the ERCA program will upgrade PIM’s turret with a 58-caliber, 30-foot long gun tube capable of shooting farther than 70 kilometers.

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The exercise also demonstrated

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under expeditionary conditions. U.S. cruiser and destroyer’s Vertical Launch System launches anti-air, anti-ship, and land attack missiles as well as rocket assisted torpedoes. Typically, those vertical batteries must be reloaded at established naval arsenals. In a naval conflict in the East or South China Seas, that could require warships to return to Japan or Guam to rearm their primary weapons systems. During the exercise, an Expeditionary Reload Team simulated an expeditionary environment by embarking a landing craft with their equipment at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach and then reloaded the USS Michael Murphy with SM-2 anti-air missiles, a task normally done by dedicated weapons station personnel.

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