US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Jura said:

related to the above discussion, I guess:
WEST: NAVAIR’s Unmanned Aerial Tanker Acquisition Will Be Leaner Than Previous UCLASS Effort

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The Navy wants to change the Pentagon imposed designation of its RAQ-25 carrier-based unmanned aerial tanker with its own nom-de-drone – Stingray.

References to the RAQ-25 Stingray unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are found throughout draft written testimony submitted to Congress ahead of Department of the Navy budget hearings next week, several sources confirmed to USNI News.

The name change is not unexpected. Navy officials told USNI News earlier this month that the service was less than enthusiastic about the name big Pentagon came up with for the RAQ-25 – the Carrier Based Aerial Refueling System (CBARS).

“I’m not sure I’m too much in love with that CBARS name, we’ll come up with something better than that,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson

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The change in name for the Stingray – formerly: CBARS; UCLASS; N-UCAS; J-UCAS – is the third name for the RAQ-25 in the last three months and indicative of the churn surrounding the restructure of the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) led-program in the last year.

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, it was determined to dial back some of the higher-end strike and information, surveillance and reconnaissance requirements for the RAQ-25 and focus the effort on easing the burden on the Boeing F-18E/F Super Hornet fighters that currently serve as tankers for the carrier air wing.

“We’re probably going to drop some of the high-end specs and try to grow the class and increase the survivability [later],” Vice Adm. Joseph Mulloy, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources,

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.
“It has to be more refueling, a little bit of ISR, weapons later and focus on its ability to be the flying truck.

To indicate the shift in emphasis, CBARS was the name of the moment picked by big Pentagon over the holiday lull in December ahead of the Fiscal Year 2017 budget rollout but the service wasn’t “enamored” with the choice, Mulloy said.

A NAVAIR representative did not immediately return a Friday request for comment on the name change to USNI News.

A spokesman for Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus – the official in charge of naming service’s ships – would not confirm the name change to USNI News when asked Friday afternoon.

It’s also unclear if the name Stingray is a reference to Mabus – an advocate for unmanned aviation who said in 2015 the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter would likely be the

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.

Subtle honorifics in Navy program designations are not new.

The retired Grumman F-14 Tomcat, in part, pays homage to the late Vice Adm. Thomas F. Connolly who crafted the requirements for the interceptor. During development of the F-14, some on the program to refer to the fighter as “Tom’s cat.”

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for the Joint Requirements Oversight Council ahead of an anticipated draft request for proposal (RfP) this year to the four companies expected to bid on the RAQ-25 work – General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

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Raytheon's bet on a new radar for its Patriot air and missile defense system is now fully functional and ready for its public debut at the Association of the US Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, in March, company officials said.

Raytheon executives took a few reporters on a tour of the company’s Integrated Air Defense Center, where they build Patriot systems and the radar technology they pitched as the future of air and missile defense: Gallium Nitride (GaN) Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar. The facility houses a foundry for GaN and its predecessor Gallium Arsenide.

It's a sizable bet. Raytheon has invested over $100 million over three years to develop the GaN AESA radar, augmented with US government investment over time, Ralph Acaba, the company’s vice president of Integrated Air and Missile Defense, said Wednesday.

The Patriot system was fielded to the Army in 1982 and Raytheon has continuously upgraded the system with investments from the US and 13 partner nations. The system is expected to stay fielded until at least 2040.

But Raytheon has not been able to rest on its laurels. Lockheed Martin developed a competing air and missile defense system called the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) and is directly competing with Raytheon stateside and abroad for future deals.

“The future is about how do you continue to put in capability, how do you continue to allow for the growth of the system, how do you continue to bring the cost of the operating system down, the reliability up, how do you prepare it for the future of air and missile defense where it’s plugging into a network to be compatible with the Army’s [Integrated Air and Missile Defense] concept that is the future,” Acaba said. “Active arrays are key to that [and] GaN is the next technology that those arrays are going to be built out of.”

Patriot radars currently use Gallium Arsenide (GaAs), a semiconductor material. Raytheon believes GaN will bring exponentially more capability to the Patriot system and double the system's reliability. Moving to a GaN radar also frees up space in the system to add redundancy, or future capability like the Integrated Battle Command System, the command and control for the Army's future air and missile defense system.

And the “beauty of the active array technology, you’ve got distributed elements so that anyone of them dies, no big deal, you’ve got plenty of redundancy,” Acaba said.

Additionally, the GaN radar integration into Patriot required very few new software changes. “It wasn’t zero changes, but it was miniscule,” Acaba said, “and we were up and tracking targets, I think, within a few days.”

Raytheon didn’t decide to develop GaN technology to answer any future Army requirements, Acaba stressed. “It was really around continuing the process of always looking ahead, what’s next, not just take the next order, but where should we be headed and how should we be positioned so when the Patriot partners are ready to take the next step we’ve got the solution.”

The US Army and several foreign countries appear to be ready to take the next steps when it comes to bringing on new capability in air and missile defense.

The Army is funded in fiscal year 2017 to hold a competition for an IAMD radar. It hasn’t publicly laid out requirements or how it might conduct a competition.

Raytheon is waiting for the service to detail its plan and is “positioned to respond to anything from an immediate upgrade to the current radar to a clean-sheet, brand new radar to everything in between,” Acaba said.

Raytheon spent the last two years building a demonstrator and expects to be ready to get into a government test program within two years. “We’ve started burning not just technical risk, but started burning down schedule,” Acaba said. "I think we are less than two years from getting this capability ready to get into a [government] test program."

The GaN-based Patriot's trip to Huntsville in March will likely be one of the only times it’s displayed in public in the near-term. Afterward, it is set for tests, including field tests as early as late 2016.

“Once we get that into the test program we really do want to use the time wisely, so we are not going to put this radar on the road to go to a bunch of different shows,” Acaba said. The radar will "come back here and go deep into tests" with plans to get it out into field testing as early as later this year, he added.

The GaN radar development also comes at a time when other countries are taking serious looks at either upgrading missile defense capabilities or buying something new. Raytheon received export approval for the GaN AESA radar last year.

Acaba noted that Japan, Spain and Greece are looking into upgrading their Patriot systems while Sweden, Romania, Czech Republic and Finland are potential new customers in addition to Poland and Turkey.

Poland announced in the spring of 2015 that it had picked Patriot for its new air and missile defense program, called Wisla. Lockheed was also in the running but the Polish government excluded it from the competition because MEADS was not yet a fielded system.Germany and the MEADS team have since begun working to mint a continuing development contract while looking for more countries to partner with.

Poland and the US government began negotiations to purchase Patriot, but a Polish presidential election that ousted those in office when Patriot was picked has created uncertainty over the program's future there. The Polish Ministry of Defense has re-initiated discussions with the MEADS team.

Before news that discussions between Poland and the MEADS team had restarted, Acaba said Wednesday that Poland was “conducting its assessments,” and said a new government re-examining decisions from a previous government is a “natural process.”

He said the company and the US Army are working to provide all requested information about the Patriot deal to the Polish government and said he expects the government to finish its assessments in a couple of months.

“I’ve seen no indication this is going to be a six-month or a year assessment. I think they just want to do their due diligence on the process that was followed and what exactly the requirements are of the system that they are going to procure,” he said.

Turkey is also weighing its options after dropping an earlier decision to acquire the country’s first long-range air- and anti-missile defense system from a Chinese contractor. Both Patriot and MEADS are back on the table there.

In Sweden, “we’ve been talking with them for the past year or so and they’ve expressed significant interest,” Acaba said. “They see similar threats as others and so I think they are getting closer to identifying specific requirements, both dollars and funding, and I think they are close and they are closely following what is going on in Poland.”

Whether Sweden decides on a competition or to conduct a study, “is unclear to me, but I see enough evidence that they are looking, [but] they are not just talking to us,” Acaba added.

Romania, Czech Republic and Finland “are further behind,” Acaba said, but, “they have expressed interest.”

Acaba noted that Belgium has also shown an interest. And the countries listed as potential customers is not exhaustive, he added.

While it appears that Germany will develop the MEADS system, Acaba said the country is serious about upgrading the Patriot systems it already has in its inventory. Germany has said it plans to keep its Patriot systems until at least 2030 while it develops its next-generation system.

The Patriot Configuration 3+ is the latest version of the system. It includes a new radar digital processor, the "Modern Man" control station considered more comfortable for the operators, and a modern adjunct processor.

“I think they are headed down the Configuration 3+ path and in fact they have already started taking delivery of items to get there,” Acaba said of Germany.

Acaba said he expected Germany to make Patriot upgrade awards in the fiscal 2017 or fiscal 2018 timeframe.

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Jura said:

did you know
GaN-Based Patriot Prototype Preps For Public Debut
?

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Brumby said:

The US government I believe has already approved the sale (mid last year) of the GaN based Patriot system. This article is long on PR and entirely absent on system capabilities.

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Jura said:

thanks Brumby ... #1 hit in google a second ago, dated 20 February 2015:
US approves export of Raytheon’s GaN-based AESA Patriot sensor

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Jura said:

thanks Brumby ... #1 hit in google a second ago, dated 20 February 2015:
US approves export of Raytheon’s GaN-based AESA Patriot sensor

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Air Force Brat said:

YEAH, Mabus and Richardson are ...

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The Navy will reexamine the assumptions behind its 308-ship requirement, as the operational landscape has changed drastically since the previous Force Structure Assessment (FSA).

The Navy released a new FSA in 2012 and amended it in 2014, but Navy leadership and combatant commanders have expressed concern in the past week that previous assumptions about how many surface ships and submarines are needed to counter global threats are proving inapplicable to today’s world. For example, the Navy has a standing requirement for 48 attack submarines, but combatant commanders say they are only receiving about 62 percent of the subs they need to meet growing threats in Asia and Europe.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said Friday at a Brookings Institution event that the 48-sub requirement is based off of analysis from 2006.

“Last time we did that (FSA) we really didn’t have to account for a resurgent Russia, we really didn’t have to account for (the Islamic State), so we’re starting again,” he said.
“The strategic landscape has changed sufficiently that we have to constantly reassess.”

Last year the surface navy community expressed concern that a growing missile threat, particularly from China, would require an

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. This year, the focus in congressional hearings and Washington-based events has been on the attack submarine fleet.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said at the Brookings event that the Navy would reach its 308-ship requirement by 2021 and that budget decisions being made now would affect the shape and size of the fleet in the years beyond that. Mabus more than doubled shipbuilding in his seven years as secretary compared to the previous seven-year period, and several classes are in serial production today – but with a projected shortfall in the attack submarine fleet, an ongoing shortfall in the amphibious ship fleet, ever-growing demand for ballistic missile defense-capable cruisers and destroyers, and the need for smaller ships to conduct partnership-building activities, the shipbuilding budget has been strained to keep up.

Richardson said at the event that, despite the many needs the Navy has, the service is aggressively looking at ways to build more attack submarines.

“It’s also been pretty well known that even with that 48 (submarine) requirement we’re going to dip below that as the Los Angeles-class submarines come out of the inventory faster than the Virginia-class is coming in. And so managing our way through that trough, if you will, has been a topic that we’ve been watching closely and doing everything we can to mitigate that,” he said.
“That’s becoming a more urgent situation, and so we are examining everything that we can, working closely with the industrial base, with leadership in the department and in Congress, to see that we’re not missing a trick to mitigate that trough.”

During a House Armed Services seapower and projection forces hearing Thursday, Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley told lawmakers that the Navy is working closely with industry to make the Ohio Replacement Program ballistic missile submarines – a $100 billion program in design now and set to begin construction in 2021 – as affordable as possible so that perhaps the

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Also discussed at the Brookings event was the amphib shortfall – the Marines have 30 today, with a requirement for 38. Though the Navy and Marine Corps have worked hard to find alternative platforms to put Marines on, global threats are growing faster than the Marines’ ship count.

Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert Neller said at the event that the Marines needed a ship in the Mediterranean, rather than solely cover Europe and Africa with the land-based Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (SP-MAGTF).

Mentioning the new expeditionary mobile base USNS Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller (T-ESB-3), which is

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t late this year or early next year, Neller said he wanted that ship for his European SP-MAGTF.

“I would like very much for that ship to be based in the Med. Right now that’s not the plan, but we’re going to continue to work on that,” he said.
“The COCOMs, both AFRICOM and EUCOM, have written a letter saying hey we’d like to have this capability in the Med to service West Africa and the Med because there’s stuff going on there that we need to be able to move around. You don’t want to be tied to a land base.”

Mabus agreed, saying “the Lewis B. Puller, that’s an expeditionary seabase, it’s an incredible capability. It carries a lot of stuff and it’s got a flight deck. We need one in the Med, we need one for Africa and for Europe. We’re building two more because we need ones in other parts of the world too.”

Neller said having more amphibs and alternative ships to move Marines around is important because Marines are distributed over great areas and crises can pop up quickly. In Asia in particular, though, Neller said the need for ships is also about self-preservation.

Discussing the growing missile threat in the Pacific, he said “the survivability you mentioned because of the missiles, when we did the (Pacific) laydown and the plan, the capability that our potential adversaries have didn’t exist. So do we need to look at how we’re going to harden ourselves? Do we need to look at where we’re going to position ourselves? Ideally I think you’re much more survivable if you’re moving on a ship, and we’d like to be on a ship, so wherever we end up in the Pacific we have a requirement for mobility.”

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Jura said:

Brother, I think it was a rant anyway
Navy Revising Force Structure Assessment In Light Of Increased Attack Sub, Other Ship Needs

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Last year the surface navy community expressed concern that a growing missile threat, particularly from China, would require an

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. This year, the focus in congressional hearings and Washington-based events has been on the attack submarine fleet.

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