US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Jura said:

have you heard yet?
The US Military Just Ditched Plans to Launch Satellites with F-15s

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and

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are investing heavily in cyber and electronic warfare, but they’re not

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US

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yet. Instead, we have met the enemy and he is us — we think.

“In 2015 thus far, we have had 261 cases where we have been jammed from getting information from our satellites down to the ground segment,” said

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head of Air Force Space Command, at the

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electronic warfare conference.

That’s 23 times a month. “How many were caused by an adversary?” Hyten asked. “I really don’t know. My guess is zero.”

The real cause is “almost always self-jamming” where our own transmissions, radar or radio, unwittingly interfere, Hyten told reporters after his public remarks.

“The moral of that story is the

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is unbelievably complicated and the smallest mistake can create huge strategic impacts,” Hyten said, “so you have to be able to monitor the electromagnetic spectrum, from the most tactical unit all the way up to the most strategic [level].”

Self-jamming shows we don’t have enough awareness of what our own forces are doing in the spectrum, let alone of what an adversary might do, Hyten said. “We have not had a focus on it,” he admitted, but the military is now working to build that awareness.

“We’ve just been assuming that the RF [radio frequency] spectrum is a benign environment and nobody’s going to threaten us,” Hyten told the AOC gathering. But as the US military has made ever more spectacular use of satellites and networks, he said, “The rest of the world’s been watching that too — China and Russia in particular.”

The most spectacular result was

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that filled orbital pathways with debris, said Hyten, but “you don’t have to shoot a satellite down to defeat it, all you have to do is cut off the link.”

“We have to be able to effectively operate in this contested, congested environment,” Hyten continued. “We’ve got to be able to fight in it and defeat any adversary that’s in there….but if we don’t train our airmen fundamentally differently to operate in this environment, we can’t do that.”

There’s a whole generation of cyber-savvy digital natives that can run electronic circles around their elders — but they’ve never had to operate with the network off.

“They haven’t had to deal with spectrum threats, they haven’t had to deal with an electronic warfare environment,” said Hyten. “I’m probably one of the last people in my command that was around when we had to deal with the Soviet threat that was there in the 1980s. We knew how to do that and somehow we forgot.”

One way Air Force Space Command is seeking to adapt is by putting its most experienced operators back at the console operating satellites. While aircraft pilots keep flying as long as they can, Hyten said, space career paths tend to promote veterans to staff jobs while leaving day-to-day operations in the hands of new recruits.

“The average age of the operator operating GPS today is 23,” he said. “Two 19-year-old airmen are the two guys that [were] flying GPS this morning — for the entire world. It’s amazing! — and it’s wrong, because we need to have the most experienced guys on that crew force.”

So AFSPC is dissolving its “day staff” and using those personnel to double the size of the “crew force” actually running the satellites. “It used to be the day staff was actually larger than the crew force,” Hyten told reporters. “[Now] everybody that was on day staff is going back on crew and they’re going back on operational positions.”

“So now you’re going to have no day staff but you’re going to have two crew forces,” Hyten continued. At any given time, one crew force will be running

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, while the other will doing “high-end training.” Every four months, they’ll switch, with the first such handover happening next spring. After enough cycles, Hyten said, Air Force Space Command will have highly trained, experienced crews capable of operating the satellites in the face of sophisticated and intense attack.

This initiative is separate from the new “

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,” as Hyten described the

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, whose future status remains uncertain. Through May, JICSPOC will work intensively on developing new ways of combatting future threats. Whether it will become a permanent feature of Air Force Space Command he can’t say, but “nine months from now when you ask that question, we’ll have a different answer.”

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The effort to put more weapons on more ships and find more ways to attack an enemy — and get it done in a timely manner — is key to “distributed lethality,” a concept being championed by Vice Adm. Tom Rowden, the US Navy’s commander of surface forces.

But an ancient obstacle remains: bureaucracy. And it’s no secret that Navy officials have chafed under competing requirements to identify and field new capabilities faster while complying with layers of evaluation and testing authorities that often slow things up.

“How do we deliver the capabilities going forward, what does it take to do that?” John Burrow, the Navy’s top civilian official for research, test and evaluation, asked a professional audience in Washington on Tuesday. “It takes investment, a willingness to take on risk, a willingness to fail.”

Efforts that fail in their immediate goals can still provide information, Burrow noted.

“I’ve never seen a project that we pushed forward that even if we didn’t deliver a capability, that we learned a lot from,” he said to an audience at an American Society of Naval Engineers symposium. “From an engineering point of view — a science point of view — if we don’t push the envelope, take it to the outer edge, we’re not going to achieve the capabilities we need.”

Without pointing to specific entities, Burrow decried critics who focus on defects.

“We need to be willing to go off road, to change direction,” he said, noting that it’s not always apparent at the beginning of a program what eventually will be needed.

“I don’t think we can get a group of people to deliver a requirements package that’s perfect,” he said, “and then at the end we have trouble with cost and schedule. I submit that with that linear process, we shouldn’t be surprised that we have problems at the end.”

A recent demonstration by the Russians in launching cruise missiles from small warships in the Caspian Sea to strike targets about 1,000 miles away in Syria is widely seen as an example of distributed lethality.

Rear Adm. Pete Fanta, the director of surface warfare at the Pentagon, was blunt in responding to a question about why the US can’t seem to field similar capabilities in a timely manner.

“We can get there, but get the hell out of my way,” Fanta declared, speaking to the bureaucratic obstacles. “I can get there fast, I can get with the same capability, I can get it on the ships, but I can’t do it in a risk-averse, fear-centric organization.

“That’s not you folks,” he said to the civilians in the room, “that’s us wearing the uniform. I’m willing to go be the chew toy for Congress if I fail. You let me go try it, I’ll go do it. You let me bolt it on, I’ll take the risk. I’ll find a [commanding officer] out there that’s willing to point it in a direction and fire it” and understand the risks.

“I can’t do it in an organization that spends three times as much on proving it might or might not work perfectly every single time, as I can if I just go do it. Every success we’ve had we just went and did. Every major failure we’ve had has been an opinion on the level of failure by someone else.

That may be a little too blunt, but it’s the truth,” Fanta said. “We need to get out of this risk-averse culture.”

Fanta was asked if the Navy is developing a new long-range anti-ship missile.

“We still have a requirement for a Tomahawk cruise missile to attack surface ships sitting on the books. In fact it’s been reiterated for the past 15 years,” Fanta noted.

The Navy in the 1980s developed an active radar-homing anti-ship version of the Tomahawk land-attack weapon, but dropped it in the 1990s.

“We know what Tomahawk is capable of,” Fanta said. “The reason we got rid of it was because our sensors were not long-range enough to keep up with the range of Tomahawk.

Now, he noted, “our sensors have evolved to where we can track and target things out to the range of Tomahawk. So now we have a need for something Tomahawk-esque to reach out that far.”

“We’re talking about evolving the capabilities that we have,” he said. “I got a great truck” — the Tomahawk. “It’s a big missile, it’s sitting inside my [vertical launch system] cells right now. What other things can we put on it or make it do, whether with a seeker, without a seeker, dumb seekers, smart sensors? We’re looking at all of that.

“This missile is going to be around until the mid-2040s,” Fanta noted. “I think I better figure out more things to do with it than just hit a spot on the beach.”

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Yahoo said:

From Business Insider:

Aircraft carriers are the ultimate symbol of a country’s military power and prestige. These floating islands of military power take years to build, and they do not come cheap. The first of the US’s new Ford-class of super carrier has a

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price tag.

Still, despite the cost, a number of countries have succeeded in building or acquiring a carrier. Although the US has the largest number of carriers with the most advanced technology and the largest flight decks, a variety of carriers of various sizes and sophistication are in use around the world.

The following graphics, created by US Naval Institute member Jeff Head at

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, breaks down the various carrier classes in use around the world today. The first class, Catapult Assisted Take-Off, Barrier Assisted Recovery (CATOBAR), are the largest and most complex carriers in use today.

The catapult-based launch system

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the carriers to fly a greater variety of heavy and lightweight planes and at a greater takeoff rate and velocity, compared to non-catapult systems. The majority of CATOBAR carriers are nuclear-powered.

Short Take-Off, Barrier Assisted Recovery (STOBAR) carriers differ from CATOBARs in more than just their launch technology. The carriers are equipped with “ski-jump” ramps that allow for aircraft to take off from the carriers. They are technologically simpler and thus easier to operate than CATOBAR carriers, although aircraft must be lighter to successfully take off from their decks.

STOBARs, like CATOBARs, still use assisted-recovery methods such as trap wires that help aircraft land and decelerate on a dangerously short runway.

Short Take-Off and Landing (STOL) carriers are the

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to build. Like STOBARs, they run off of conventional rather than nuclear power. Although the carriers sometimes feature a ski-jump to assist with takeoffs, the vessels do not feature any recovery systems to help aircraft land.

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The Defense Department will lift all gender-based restrictions on military service starting in January, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Thursday.

The historic change will clear the way for women to serve alongside men in combat arms units.

Carter's decision comes as a rebuke to an internal recommendation from the Marine Corps that sought to keep some jobs closed to women. In contrast, the Army leaders recommended opening all combat arms jobs to women.

"While the Marine Corps asked for a partial exception in some areas such as infantry, machine gunner, fire support reconnaissance and others, we are a joint force, and I have decided to make a decision which applies to the entire force," Carter said at a Pentagon press briefing Thursday.

"The important factor in making my decision was to have access to every American who could add strength to the joint force," he said.

In effect, Carter's decision will open to women about 220,000 jobs in all, or about 10 percent of the entire active and reserve force. Most of those jobs are in Army and Marine Corps infantry and armor units.

At its core, the decision means that as of Jan. 2, female service members — both current and incoming recruits — will be allowed to serve in any military job for which they meet the gender-neutral performance standards and other requirements.

"They'll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars, and lead infantry soldiers into combat. They'll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else that was previously open only to men," Carter said.

"And even more importantly, our military will be better able to harness the skills and perspectives that talented women have to offer."

Carter made the announcement at a Pentagon press briefing. Absent from the briefing was Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, the relatively new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was serving as commandant of the Marine Corps earlier this year when the Corps made its pitch to keep some gender restrictions in place.

Dunford was in the Washington area Thursday attending a series of meetings, officials said. His absence raised questions about his support for Carter's decision. The top general issued a statement Thursday that stopped short of agreeing with the decision.

"I have had the opportunity to provide my advice on the issue of full integration of women into the armed forces. In the wake of the Secretary's decision, my responsibility is to ensure his decision is properly implemented," Dunford said in the brief statement.

Earlier this year, the Marine Corps outlined a justification for that stance by publicly releasing some results of a yearlong study that concluded male-only units performed better overall than gender-integrated units.

Specifically, that Marine Corps-sponsored study found that male-only infantry units shot more accurately, could carry more weight and move more quickly through some tactical maneuvers. The study also found higher injury rates for women than for men.

Carter acknowledged that the Marine Corps' recommendation was based on a conclusion that allowing women to serve in combat units would jeopardize readiness and combat effectiveness, but said he disagreed with that assessment.

"I believe that we could, in the implementation process, address the issues that were raised," Carter said.

The Army, in contrast, has shown strong support for opening all military occupational specialties to women. So far this year, three female soldiers completed the prestigious Army Ranger School and earned the Ranger tab. In November, the Ranger School's first fully integrated class got underway at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For the Navy, the impact will be felt mainly in to the SEAL community, which was historically limited to men. The Navy integrated its fighter pilot career fields in the 1990s and began allowing women to serve on submarines several years ago.

For the Air Force, the change will affect six occupational specialties that had been closed to women: special tactics officer and combat rescue officer, and the enlisted fields of special operations weather, combat control, pararescue and tactical air control party. Those gender restrictions affected roughly 4,000 positions.

The contentious issue revealed a rare public disagreement between the Marine Corps leadership and the Department of the Navy, which technically oversees the Marines.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus voiced strong public support for lifting all gender restrictions, including those for Navy SEALs, yet Dunford, commandant of the Marine Corps at the time, disagreed.

The Corps' nine-month study compared all-male units to mixed-gender units and included battlefield simulations examining the impacts of integrating women into combat roles. The Corps released only parts of the study's final report, which highlighted unit cohesion problems and increased rates of injuries for women.

Critics said the Corps' study was flawed because it failed to take into account that many of the male Marines, unlike the females, had prior training in the combat arms, and also because it focused on average results rather than individual results.

Thursday's announcement was greeted with some skepticism on Capitol Hill. The leaders of the House and Senate armed services committees, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, issued a joint statement vowing to take a close look at the issue during Congress's 30-day review period.

"The Senate and House Armed Services committees intend to carefully and thoroughly review all relevant documentation related to today's decision, including the 1,000-page Marine Integrated Task Force report. We expect the department to send over its implementation plans as quickly as possible to ensure our Committees have all the information necessary to conduct proper and rigorous oversight," the statement said.

The Pentagon does not need direct approval from Capitol Hill to move forward on Carter's decision, but strong opposition from Congress could pose problems in implementing related policies.

The Pentagon leadership's final decision on lifting all gender restrictions has been influenced by a pending lawsuit from several former female service members who claim the combat exclusion rules violate their constitutional rights.

The change was also driven in part by support from the White House and President Obama's interest in expanding opportunities for all Americans to serve in the military. In 2011, Congress passed, and Obama signed, a law to end the prohibition on open military service by gays and lesbians.

And the change also was fueled by claims from women that the restrictions limited their ability to ascend to the military's highest level of leadership, which is often filled with officers who served in the combat arms.

It also comes after 15 years of counterinsurgency operations that made rules referencing "ground combat" seem out of step with missions targeting a shadowy enemy that used nontraditional, asymmetrical tactics.

During a decade's worth of conflict, more than about 300,000 women were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 9,000 female troops have earned Combat Action Badges. More than 800 female service members have been wounded and at least 161 have died from combat- and noncombat-related incidents, according to Defense Department data.

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Jura said:

December 3, 2015 here we go
All combat jobs open to women in the military

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Jeff Head said:

From the US Navy regarding the USS Zumwalt's 1st Sea Trial:

“We plan on a 7-day underway period for the first builder’s sea trials to shake it down as extensively as possible. In December, if we’re ready with a notional start of the 7th of December,”

“That is the critical milestone in terms of being able to deliver in the spring. We need a successful trial. We’ll learn things from the trial, we always do. First-of-class, we expect to learn a lot."

View attachment 22379

Folks, the 7th is this coming Monday. I hope they make that date. I am really excited to see this baby go to sea.

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