US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

In the end the truth will out.

HighGround said:

Lack of imagination. You can do more work with less people, but this requires investment and good leadership.

More importantly I think is their issues with hiring and training people. There is plenty of money in the defense industry. The inability to maintian wage competitiveness with other industries is indicative of poor C-Sec leadership. Also, it's not just about the money. Workers will take lower wages if they know that there is a solid upward trajectroy and a career path.

On the other hand, the Navy needs to have competitive bidding and create more competitive shipyards. Ingalls is lazy because they really don't have that much competition.

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It’s also just structural transformation.

Productivity growth elsewhere in the economy results in higher wages across the entire economy and firms that can’t match market wage levels will just go out of business (and that shifts the economy, generally, towards capital light service producers and highly productive manufacturing corporates).

The Pentagon simply is irrelevant for American public life (except as a fun political talking point: the U.S. has no real interests in foreign geographies) so mismanagement, cost overruns, etc don’t matter to anyone really

Scaled Composites Model 437 has flown for the first time. According to Scaled Composites the aircraft specs are:

The Model 437 Vanguard is… powered by a single Pratt & Whitney 535 engine with approximately 3,400 pounds of thrust. The aircraft has a wingspan of 41 feet and is 41 feet long with a gross takeoff weight of 10,000 pounds,” according to Scaled Composites. “After completion of envelope expansion, the M437 Vanguard will have a range of approximately 3,000 nautical miles and an endurance of 6 hours. The aircraft can carry up to 2,000 pounds of payload in multiple locations including an internal weapons bay sized to accommodate two AIM-120s

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The War Zone has an article on it for those who are interested in further reading.

US Army awards largest single-year Javelin contract to date: $1.3B​

The U.S. Army awarded a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon a $1.3 billion contract to produce antitank weapons, the companies announced Thursday.

The contract, which is the largest single-year deal to date in program history, is the first follow-on award of a production order dated May 2023. The Javelin Joint Venture (JJV) began to ramp up production activities of the man-portable, anti-armor weapon last year to boost production of all-up rounds, an industry term that describes complete munitions, to 3,960 annually by late 2026, a JJV statement notes.

AeroVironment wins nearly $1B to supply Switchblade munitions to US Army​

WASHINGTON — AeroVironment, the maker of the Ukraine has used against Russia in recent months, is planning to ramp up production of the heavier-duty version.

Ukraine has had repeated battlefield successes with the Switchblade 300 since the United States shipped it 400 of the lighter-weight loitering munition earlier this year, Charlie Dean, AeroVironment’s vice president of sales and business development, said in an interview with Defense News at the Association of the U.S. Army’s conference on Monday.


AeroVironment showed off several systems in use by Ukraine, including the Switchblade 300, during the 2022 AUSA conference. (Stephen Losey/Staff)

Both are overhyped weapon systems. Way too expensive for their their performance.
The Javelin proved easy to confuse and make miss the target, while the Switchblade relied way too much on GPS to work.
They need to redesign that junk.

Raptor with a new IR pod.

siegecrossbow said:

Raptor with a new IR pod.

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I wonder how it affects the different regimes of speed, LO/VLO-wise I reckon it is still competitive even with external loads since the pod is designed accordingly and the Raptor is famed for its unmatched low observability among current fighter aircraft.

taxiya said:

Besides being border case racist (the slur), you are aslo a sneaky person who sent personal insult in private message instead of making open response in the forum.

So do everybody a favor, keep your promise and never come back.

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I guess that's his habit: sending p.m. and try to point out your supposed mental defect to highlight his supposed intellectual brilliance and superiority.