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Naval Today said:

Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Mitscher (DDG 57) arrived in Split, Croatia, on the Adriatic Sea, for a scheduled port visit April 12, 2015.

The port visit serves to strengthen ties between the U.S. and Croatia and improve relations as the two nations work together for a stable, secure and prosperous region.

This port visit will also provide the crew of Mitscher with an opportunity to meet with the people of Split and to experience the rich history and culture of Croatia.

Mitscher is expected to host Croatian Navy sailors for a seminar in the certification process of pre-deployment preparations, as well as demonstrate tactics and techniques of Chemical, Biological, Radioactive, and Nuclear (CBRN) defense.

Mitscher is enroute to its homeport in Norfolk after completing a multi-month deployment to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations. The ship left Norfolk in September 2014.

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Aviationist said:

On Apr. 2 two

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, one assigned to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, and the other assigned to Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, conducted round-trip missions from their home bases to the Arctic and North Sea regions respectively.

The two bombers were taking part in “Polar Growl”, an exercise aimed at testing the ability of the aircraft and their aircrews to operate with international partners in the northern part of the globe.

One of the aircraft, the one belonging to the 2nd Bomb Wing from Barksdale, flew in the North Sea and was intercepted multiple times by the Royal Canadian Air Force, the U.K. Royal Air Force and the Royal Netherlands Air Force.

The other “Buff” on the Arctic leg, belonging to the 5th Bomb Wing from Minot, flew with

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and around the North Pole.

Interestingly the

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of the RNlAF took some stunning photographs of the (quite rusty!) B-52 they intercepted over the North Sea.

The U.S. regularly conducts similar combined training and theater security engagements with Allies and partners. In October 2014, B-52s were involved in NATO Exercise NOBLE JUSTIFICATION while in June of the same year

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, in to train alongside regional partners.

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Jeff Head said:

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View attachment 12858
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Nice exercises for these B-52s. They were able to exercise their own long legs and allow three other nations the opportunity to exercise perfomring intecepts on them. Canad, the UK, and the Netherlands all got to play.

More pics:

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kwaigonegin said:

B52Ds ?
I don't know much about USAF inventory but I thought they are only running the Hs now. The Delta is long retired but maybe I'm wrong?

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Jeff Head said:

Hehehe...no, they definitely were not "D". That is what you call a Jeff Head fat finger...trying to type the "s" but hitting both the "s" and "d" at the same time. LOL!

I went back and fixed it. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

You are correct, the "H" are the ones that are used in service today. They have been extensively upgraded o course. Even though the "H"s were the latest built, still, the last one rolled off the assembly line in October 1962, 53 years ago this year!

The "D" are all retired. They were the ones most extensively used in Vietnam because they were a deddciated long range bomber version with no the recon provisions and therefore had more room in their bomb bay...and were used for carpet bombing missions.

As a result of that versions heavy use, of the 32 B-52''s lost over Vietnam in combat, 22 of them were B-52Ds.

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Jeff Head said:

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View attachment 12858
​

Nice exercises for these B-52s. They were able to exercise their own long legs and allow three other nations the opportunity to exercise perfomring intecepts on them. Canad, the UK, and the Netherlands all got to play.

More pics:

View attachment 12859

View attachment 12860

View attachment 12861​

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Air Force Brat said:

Actually that B-52 is NOT rusty, paint has blown off the zinc chromate primer, possibly even a little bare metal showing, but it is not rusty, could even be a little alodine wash showing through on the aluminum, it leaves a slight "cast" to the aluminum, but is an acid etch to help the paint adhere, which is a problem with all aluminum aircraft, David Cenciotti may call himself the aviationist???? but I think he's a little out of the loop, even though he has "access" to some very good sources?? LOL

Aluminum does not rust, but is does "oxidize", iron and its alloys "rust", and yes there is a difference?

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Jeff Head said:

Oh...I agree completely Brat..

I find the "Aviationist," makes a lot of these kinds of mistakes...but he does get some great pics on his site and that is why I post his stuff now and then.

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Amidst unabated budget gloom, Navy and Marine leaders aren’t looking for salvation in big new programs. They’re “repurposing and reusing existing capabilities” to get the maximum out of existing hardware for minimum cost. It’s a vision of the future in which

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might call for fire support from a ship-launched

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using a Samsung tablet.

Fiscal necessity is the mother of this inventiveness. The new meaning for R&R is “repurposing and reusing existing capabilities,”

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, chief of Naval Operations, said at the Navy League’s annual

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today. “In this fiscal environment we’re going to need to learn to live within the means provided [and] use the capabilities we have in new ways to confound the adversary.”

“We’re at historic low levels in ground modernization [particularly],” Marine Commandant

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,” [and] I don’t think anyone believes the budget will stabilize in the next couple years.”

“One of the things that we’ve adjusted to over the last few years without spending a lot of money — although we definitely will spend more on command and control systems in particular — is the nature of distributed operations,” Dunford went on during his own panel, citing “remarkable” innovation in coordinating far-flung forces.

“When I was a rifle company commander, we defended on a 1500-meter frontage and attacked on 300-meter frontage,” Dunford said. By contrast, on a single day in February, a single Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force had one company securing the embassy in Baghdad, another evacuating the embassy in Yemen, and a third training allies in Jordan. Meanwhile the SPMAGTF headquarters was working with Iraqi ground forces, its V-22s were flying rescue teams in case strike planes went down over Iraq or Syria, and its jet fighters were flying out of Bahrain. All told, said Dunford, “that’s a task force of about 2,500 marines spread over six countries in a single day.”

That’s a tremendous stretch for traditional command and control systems. Just to know where you are, Marine Maj. Scott Cuomo told me, “you would need boxes upon boxes of maps.” What’s more a Marine battalion traditionally has a single staffer assigned to make maps, using a single laminating machine — which in distributed operations is probably going to be in a different country from the Marines who need the maps. That’s where the tablets come in.

In his previous job at the Marines’ Infantry Officer Course, Cuomo led experiments in

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over jury-rigged military radios to and from Marines riding in V-22s.

In several years of “Talon Reach” wargames with the V-22, “one of the things we realized is that the Marines in the back just didn’t have the

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that we wanted them to have,” said Marine

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. “If the information or intel changed while they were in route, we really didn’t have any way of that information to them right away.” Once the Marines improvised the use of commercial tablets connected to their military radios, he went on, “we were doing chat, we were exchanging from one [aircraft] to another change in plans, and we’re also working on how we’re going to link that in to the capability of the F-35.

At Sea-Air-Space, Cuomo was showing off an Android app called

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. (Yes, it’s a highly contrived acronym). Able to run on a wide range of commercial phones and tablets — including a number of NSA-approved encrypted devices — KILSWITCH provides a Google Earth-like mapping function on which the user can overlay military graphics and planning diagrams, then share them over a network. You can also use KILSWITCH to call in fire support. In fact, it was originally designed for JTACs, the

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who call in airstrikes, but it’s now spread to Marine Corps aviators and infantry.

“When we talk about cheap innovation, the government made the software,” Cuomo said using Navy engineers to write KILSWITCH rather than hiring costly outside contractors. At the same time, the government gets to surf the wave of commercial development in mobile devices, rather than invent the underlying technologies itself as in (for example) stealth). “Samsung spends $13.4 billion roughly on R&D a year, Google spends roughly $9 billion,” Cuomo said. “How do you leverage that” — with a relatively small investment of government money — “to enable the warfighter?”

Ships and Missiles

Modest upgrades to electronics and hardware can get new life out of existing weapons, too. The Tomahawk Land Attack Missile was designed to strike static ground targets, as it name implies, but the military recently

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in (simulated) combat.

“It exists, we bought it, what can do to that warhead to adjust it?”

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said. That principle of getting more missions out of existing missiles doesn’t just apply to Tomahawk, Donegan told me after a panel at the conference: It holds for the Harpoon, historically an anti-ship weapon but capable of land attack; for the

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, designed for air defense; and even for torpedoes.

“Up here in the middle we have a picture of a missile leaving a tube,” said Greenert, showing a slide of a Navy warship firing its Vertical Launch System. “Is that a surface to air missile or is that a surface to surface missile?…. The enemy may not know. I think that’s pretty cool.

Conversely, Greenert cautioned, just as the Navy needs to get the most out of small investments, it may need to reign in big ones. After painful overruns on its next-generation aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, for example, the Navy is working hard to keep the cost of the next ship of the class, John F. Kennedy, under control — including by installing

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. That may not be the only performance requirement that gets dialed down.

“I am ready to descope as the case may be,” Greenert said. “‘As the requirements generator, I meet frequently with Mr.

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our acquisition executive…. What does it take to bring this thing under the cost cap? We’ll do that because we have to do that.”

The high cost of warships has the Navy exploring new uses for non-combat ships. For example, it’s installing or upgrading helicopter landing pads strong enough to take the V-22,

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and now

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. The Marines have also worked with allies to get the V-22 certified for landing on French and Spanish warships, Bailey said, further expanding the potential platforms.

Of course, the Marines would prefer to operate off

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, not off foreign or non-combat vessels. While ships like the new Afloat Forward Staging Base, derived from a civilian tanker, can fill in for amphibs in many peacetime missions, said Dunford, in even modestly dangerous scenarios, they will need a lot of careful handling and protection. But the Navy has 31 amphibious ships while theater commanders have missions enough for 50, a number the

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will never reach. Given that gap, said Dunford, “we can sit and admire the problem or we can take a look at the tools that we have available to us.”

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