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Pentagon's top enlisted adviser backs off comments on common camouflage
By Hope Hodge Seck
Staff writer
FILED UNDER
News
Uniforms
The Pentagon’s senior noncommissioned officer insists his comments made earlier this month critical of the hodgepodge of American camouflage patterns did not signal support for stripping Marines of their unique combat uniforms.

During an Aug. 5 town hall meeting with fellow Marines in Hawaii, Sgt. Maj. Bryan Battaglia said the variety of camouflage patterns in use today across the four services makes deployed U.S. forces look like an “American Baskin Robbins,” according to a Marine Corps news release posted online this week. Battaglia is the senior enlisted adviser to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey.

“The idea,” Battaglia told Marines, “is to find a universal uniform for the battlefield, whereas branch garrison uniforms will most likely remain the same. “Talks concerning a distinct universal uniform are currently a work in progress.”

A provision in the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act would require the services to transition to a single camouflage utility uniform by 2018, and military officials everywhere are taking sides on the move.

There are 10-plus camouflage uniforms in use within the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, where the issue is particularly contentious.

The Corps’ distinctive and proprietary Marine Pattern digital camouflage, commonly called MARPAT, is widely regarded as the U.S. military’s premier combat uniform. And the service’s most senior leaders have made it clear they will fight to retain it as exclusive to their service.

In July, during his visit to Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Jim Amos said the Marines were sticking to MARPAT like “a hobo on a ham sandwich.”

The top enlisted Marine, Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Mike Barrett, told Marine Corps Times earlier this year there is a reason Marines want to look distinct on the battlefield.

“Like our dress blues, the [combat uniform] is a visible indicator of our identity as United States Marines, globally,” he said. “It’s part of our Corps’ identity.”

Asked if his comments in Hawaii represent a disagreement with the position Amos and Barrett have taken on a universal battlefield uniform, Battaglia responded with a lengthy written clarification.

“First, there is no universal uniform being worked on,” he wrote in an email. “I am not aware of anyone trying to combine our service branches into one united armed force. I don’t believe in that nor do I think our chairman believes in it.”

Battaglia said he believes in the importance of individual service “identity, tradition, and culture,” but he is not opposed to displaying unity on the battlefield with a common camouflage utility uniform, just as all the services now use the same kind of flight suit.

“Additionally, it’s been asked by coalition members why do Americans need so many different colors of an American uniform when they are in a foreign land supposedly representing their nation not their service,” he wrote. “It was a keen observation and a sensible question.”

The authorization bill with the uniform provision has passed the House and now awaits passage in the Senate.■

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Sun Herald said:

PASCAGOULA -- Huntington Ingalls Industries' Ingalls Shipbuilding division launched its fourth U.S. Coast Guard National Security Cutter, Hamilton (WMSL 753), on Saturday.

NSCs are the flagship of the Coast Guard's cutter fleet and they will replace the 378-foot High-Endurance Cutters, which began service in the 1960s. Ingalls has delivered three NSCs so far. The NSCs are 418 feet long, have a top speed of 28 knots and can hold a crew of 110.

"Launching a ship involves quite a bit of logistics, and our team pulled this off in a very safe and efficient manner," said Ingalls' NSC Program Manager Jim French. "It's a week-long process to first translate the ship across land into our floating drydock and then going through an extensive ship-wide check-out process to launch. The team's performance was outstanding, and now we can focus on completing the ship and getting her to the Coast Guard next year.

"These cutter ships are the Legend-class, which is capable of meeting all security mission needs of the previous cutters.The Legend-class is the largest and most technologically advanced class of cutter in the Coast Guard, according a press release from Ingalls.

Its duties include maritime homeland security, law enforcement, marine safety, environmental protection and national defense missions.

"The NSC is a proven hull, and our Coast Guard customer is pleased with the performance of the first three ships currently operating in the fleet," French said.

The Hamilton will be christened Oct. 26 in Pascagoula by the ship's sponsor, Linda Kapral Papp, wife of Adm. Robert J. Papp Jr., commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.The keel laying for Ingalls' fifth NSC, James (WMSL 754), took place May 17 and it is currently 32 percent complete. It is expected to be launched in the spring of next year.

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16 August 2013 Last updated at 12:43 ET
Area 51 'declassified' in U-2 spy plane history
The CIA has officially acknowledged the secret US test site known as Area 51, in a newly unclassified internal history of the U-2 spy plane programme.
The document obtained by a US university describes the 1955 acquisition of the Nevada site for testing of the secret spy plane.
It also explains the site's lingering association with UFOs and aliens.
The remote patch of desert surrounding Groom Lake was chosen because it was adjacent to a nuclear testing facility.
"The U-2 was absolutely top secret," Chris Pocock, a British defence journalist and author of histories of the programme, told the BBC.
"They had to hide everything about it."
The U-2 plane, developed to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is still flown by the US Air Force.
Reports of UFOs
The document, a secret 1992 internal CIA history of the U-2 programme, was originally declassified in 1998 with heavy redactions.
Many of the blacked-out details were revealed this month after a public records request by the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in Washington DC.
The site was selected for the U-2 programme in 1955 after an aerial survey by CIA and Air Force staff.
According to the history, President Dwight Eisenhower personally signed off on the acquisition.
Officials from the CIA, Air Force and Lockheed, the contractor building the U-2, began moving into the facility in July 1955.
While a lengthy account of the development of the U-2 spy plane programme, the history also attempts to shed light on the public's fascination with the Area 51 site and its lingering associations with extra-terrestrials and UFOs.
It notes that testing of the U-2 plane in the 1950s - at altitudes much higher than commercial aeroplanes then flew - provoked "a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)".
"At this time, no one believed manned flight was possible above 60,000 feet, so no one expected to see an object so high in the sky," note authors Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach.
'Inclination towards secrecy'
The original request for the redacted portions of the history was made in 2005. It was released to the National Security Archive several weeks ago.
Jeff Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, said the long period of secrecy was notable because of the extent people across the world were already aware of Area 51's existence.
Mr Richelson speculates the CIA must have recently made a conscious, deliberate decision to reveal Area 51's existence and origins.
"There is a general inclination towards secrecy," he said, and the many US agencies and non-US governments involved in the U-2 programme would have had a say in the declassification process.
"As far as I can tell, this is the first time something must have gone to a high-enough level to discuss" whether or not to formally acknowledge Area 51's existence, he said

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Army to Rename XM25 Airburst Weapon
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Aug. 9, 2013) -- The XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement weapon system is now in development. But by this time next year, the system may have moved into low-rate initial production and if so, will lose the experimental "X" prefix.

Lt. Col. Shawn Lucas, the PEO Soldier program manager for individual weapons at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., said the XM25 is currently in the "engineering and manufacturing development phase," not yet ready for fielding.

"That's where we are developing the subsystems, which would be the weapon, the fire control, and the programmable ammunition," he said. "[We are] integrating it all to work together at the system level so we can meet the requirements the user has asked for. If we do that, we would look to go into production."

It'll be about August of next year, he said, when the Army would ask decision makers to move to a "milestone C" decision with the system. That will allow them to start low-rate initial production, or LRIP, and manufacture a little more than 1,100 of the weapons, along with the needed ammunition. The LRIP decision will help prove out manufacturing processes for the weapon, the fire control and the ammunition. Additionally, those systems would then be used to do operational and live-fire testing.

Additionally, he said when that happens they would do "type-classification" on the system.

"We'd take the X off," he said. "It's no longer experimental; it'd be the M25."

The XM25 was once called "the Punisher" by some of the Soldiers who initially evaluated it in Afghanistan, in November 2010. It allows Soldiers to engage defilade targets, those behind a barrier, protected from oncoming weapons fire. The system provides an advantage over traditional weapons.

"With traditional direct-fire kinds of systems that shoot in essentially a straight line, that enemy combatant would have cover from those types of weapons," Lucas said.

The XM25 measures the distance to the enemy's protective barrier, and can then program the round to detonate a user-adjustable distance past that, allowing Soldiers to put an air-bursting round directly above the enemy's head, inside their protected area, even if they are behind a wall or inside a building.

"There' s a lot of art and science in doing that, so you can get the air-bursting munitions exactly where you want in order to have the intended effect," Lucas said.

A Soldier may use the XM25's capability to determine that a wall protecting an enemy is some 100 meters away. The Soldier then might adjust that distance by a meter or two, so the round will travel in the air past the wall, and instead detonate directly above the intended target.

"Whoever was behind the wall would get a lot of fragments rained down on them," Lucas said. "It's a leap ahead, something that has never before been resident in the squad, or really our small tactical formations, squads, platoons or companies. That's the ability to engage, and have effects on targets that are in defilade."

The XM25 fires a programmable air-burst round that determines the distance it travels based on the number of times it rotates after leaving the barrel of the weapon. The system includes both the weapon, the rounds, and a fully-integrated day and night fire control.

Right now, Lucas said the Army is working to make more improvements to the design of the XM25, in particular to the fire control system. He also said there has been a lot of feedback concerning battery life, weight, and the size of the magazine.

Were a milestone decision to come in 2014, he said, much of 2015 would be spent testing the system, including initial operational tests, as well as the live-fire tests. They would also need to do weapons qualification, and additionally qualify the fire controls and ammunition produced off the manufacturing lines.

"Assuming success in all of those events, then you'd be able to field a unit that is then going to take those into combat operations towards the end of 2015," he said.

Lucas said he expects the weapon will be fielded to all brigade combat teams, as well as units in U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Special Forces detachments, and Ranger Regiments.

The cost for the XM25 and the rounds it fires is expensive today, Lucas said, because the weapons and ammunition are being manufactured by hand. But with development of automated production facilities, he said the price is expected to come down to about $35,000 for the weapon and fire control system, and about $55 per round.

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IHS JAnes said:

The Pentagon has awarded preliminary contracts for the US Navy's (USN's) planned Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) system to Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.

Each company received the same USD15 million firm-fixed-price contract for a preliminary design review assessment for the UCLASS air vehicle, according to a US Department of Defense (DoD) announcement at the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) conference on 14 August.

Work under these contracts is expected to be completed in June 2014, with the DoD saying the USN's fiscal year 2013 (FY13) research, development, test and evaluation funding - USD4.75 million per vendor - is to be obligated to this award and will not expire at the end of FY13.

"The objective of the UCLASS system is to enhance aircraft carrier/air wing operations by providing a responsive, worldwide presence via an organic, sea-based unmanned aerial system, with persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting, and strike capabilities," the DoD said.

The USN's outline of the UCLASS key performance parameters points to an autonomous carrier-capable unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) able to provide carrier strike groups with ISR and a limited strike capability; at least 1,000 lb of the UCAV's 3,000 lb payload is expected to be allocated to air-to-surface weapons such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition and Small Diameter Bomb II.

In July, the USN concluded its initial evaluations of UCAV carrier launch, recovery, and operability under the X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System - Demonstration (UCAS-D) programme. The first ever UCAV carrier landings and take-offs occurred in these trials, when an X-47B catapult-launched from USS George H W Bush (CVN 77) on 14 May and completed two trap landings.

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WASHINGTON — At first, the statement is shocking. “Reduce the number of carrier strike groups from 11 to 8 or 9, draw down the Marine Corps from 182,000 to between 150,000 and 175,000.”

But those words July 31 from US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel brought into the open some of the behind-the-scenes discussions that have been going on at the Pentagon for months. Senior Defense Department officials continue to stress no decisions have been made out of the Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR), but the everything-is-on-the-table nature of the discussions is becoming clearer.

Or is it? Beyond top-line statements, hardly any real details were released, leaving those outside the inner circles to speculate on the immediate and far-reaching effects of sequestration. One reason, many observers feel, is that talking about a specific potential cut could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even acknowledging that an eight-carrier fleet is on the table, some fear, could turn that once-unthinkable idea into a reality.

And it’s not just about cutting carriers — it’s air wings with seven or so squadrons of aircraft, it’s a cruiser and three or four destroyers, and it’s the crews. Substantial savings would be found from reducing nearly 10,000 personnel billets with the elimination of each strike group.

Reducing the air wings would ease carrier acquisition, maintenance and recapitalization. The fleet of legacy F/A-18 Hornet aircraft – mostly C models — could be swiftly retired, leaving an all-Super Hornet fleet of Es and Fs that itself could be smaller than what exists today. Retirement of older SH-60 helicopters could also be accelerated.

Dropping the carrier fleet could be done several ways. Two or three ships could simply be ordered to go — likely the oldest ships that have not undergone a refueling overhaul. The older Nimitz-class ships — Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson and Theodore Roosevelt — are likely safe, having completed their reactor refueling. Abraham Lincoln, which has just begun its overhaul at Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Va., is likely safe, as the three-year effort has already been largely paid for. But the George Washington, set to begin its refueling overhaul in 2015, would likely go, along with the John C. Stennis and possibly the Harry S. Truman.
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thunderchief said:

A US Navy With Only 8 Carriers?

The Drastic Consequences of Hagel's Fleet Options

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Naval Today said:

The U.S. Navy and Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) authenticated the keel for the future USS Portland (LPD 27) during a ceremony at HII’s Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard, Aug. 2.

The keel was authenticated to be “truly and fairly laid” by the ship’s sponsor, Bonnie Amos, spouse of Gen. James Amos, 35th commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Portland will be the eleventh and final ship of the current program of record for the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships.


”This keel laying is especially important as the final ship of the current San Antonio class,” said Capt. Darren Plath, LPD 17 class program manager for Program Executive Office (PEO), Ships. “Reaching this milestone is testament to the tremendous strength and perseverance of the Navy-Marine Corps team in bringing these eleven ships to the fleet.”

Keel laying is the traditional start of ship construction. In the age of wooden ships, “keel laying” referred to the laying down of the piece of timber serving as the backbone of the ship or keel. Although modern manufacturing techniques allow fabrication of portions of a ship to begin many months earlier, the joining together of modules is considered the formal beginning of a ship.

San Antonio-class ships are designed to embark, transport and land elements of more than 800 Marines by landing craft, air-cushioned vehicles, helicopters or MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. These ships support a variety of amphibious assault, special operations or expeditionary warfare missions, operating independently or as part of amphibious readiness groups, expeditionary strike groups or joint task forces.

LPD 27 is named in honor of Oregon’s largest city and will be the third Navy vessel to bear the name. Portland is planned for delivery in 2017.

LPDs 17-24 have been delivered, and the future USS Somerset (LPD 25) and USS John P. Murtha (LPD 26) are also under construction at HII. LPD 25 is scheduled for delivery later this year, and LPD 26 is planned for delivery in 2016.

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4 crew members eject, survive B-1B bomber crash in Montana after leaving South Dakota base
Published August 19, 2013
| Associated Press
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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – A B-1B bomber crashed in a remote area of southeastern Montana on Monday, but its four crew members survived after ejecting from the South Dakota-based aircraft, Air Force officials said.
The two pilots and two weapons system officers ejected before the bomber crashed near Broadus, Mont., said Col. Kevin Kennedy, commander of the 28th Bomb Wing. There were some reports of injuries, he said, though details weren't immediately released.
"We are actively working to ensure the safety of the crew members and have sent first responders to secure the scene and work closely with local authorities at the crash site," Kennedy said in a statement. "Right now, all of our thoughts and prayers are with the crews and their families."
The plane was based out of South Dakota's Ellsworth Air Force Base, one of only two bases in the U.S. that have B-1B crews. Kennedy said the Air Force will conduct a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the accident, which happened about 170 miles southeast of Billings, Mont.
The B-1B Lancer is a swing-wing bomber intended for high-speed, low-altitude penetration missions. The only other base with B-1B crews is Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas.
Broadus, Mont., is a town within the Powder River Training Complex, an 8,300-square-mile block of airspace centered just northwest of where South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana meet.
An Air Force plan to more than triple the airspace, which is used in training exercises for B-1B and B-52 bombers based in the Dakotas, has been in the works for more than six years. The Air Force wants to add three "military operation areas" to create a fly space of about 27,500 square miles — an area larger than West Virginia.
The last time a B-1B was destroyed in a crash was on Dec. 12, 2001, when a bomber involved in the war in Afghanistan slammed into the Indian Ocean near the island of Diego Garcia, said Air Force Lt. Col. Allen Herritage. A cause has never been determined. The crew had reported having difficulty controlling the bomber. All four crewmen ejected safely, including the pilot and co-pilot, who were from Ellsworth.
At the start of the war in Afghanistan, B-1Bs and B-52s were making almost daily bombing runs over the country and began pounding al-Qaida mountain hide-outs in the Tora Bora region.
In April 2008, an Ellsworth B-1B bomber caught fire after landing at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The crew members all escaped safely. A month earlier, an Ellsworth B-1B collided with two emergency-response vehicles during landing after reporting an in-flight emergency at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.
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Associated Press researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York and AP writer Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this story.
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