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Sea Waves said:

Pascagoula May 13, 2016 - Huntington Ingalls Industries delivered the company’s 10th San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, John P. Murtha (LPD 26), to the U.S. Navy today. The ship, built at HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding division, was delivered during an afternoon ceremony with shipbuilders and ship’s force together in attendance.

“Today we delivered our 10th LPD, and we have at least two more ships to complete in this class,” said Richard Schenk, Ingalls’ vice president, program management, who signed the official DD 250 document. “John P. Murtha is the culmination of four years of tireless efforts on the part of thousands of our shipyard employees and our Navy partner. I couldn’t be more proud of all of those involved, and they are showing that serial production pays dividends when it comes to providing affordable ships to our nation.”

The signing of the DD 250 document officially transfers custody of the ship from HII to the U.S. Navy.

“To the incredibly talented, dedicated and resourceful shipbuilders who built this ship from raw steel and cable into this awe-inspiring warship, please accept my personal thanks on behalf of the crew, U.S. Navy and the American people,” said Capt. Kevin Parker, the ship’s commanding officer. “You have fully reinforced the sincere belief that I have held for many years that the best shipbuilders in the world are found right here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. As we take this ship to sea, we will do our very best to make you proud and put this ship to good use in defense of our nation.”

LPD 26 is named in honor of the late John P. Murtha, who represented Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District from 1974 to 2010. In addition to his tenured history in the House of Representatives, Murtha was also a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He served for 37 years and received the Bronze Star with Combat “V,” two Purple Hearts and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry for his service in the Vietnam War. He retired as a colonel in 1990.

In addition to John P. Murtha, Ingalls has the 11th LPD, Portland (LPD 27), under construction. Portland launched on Feb. 13 and will be christened on May 21. Ingalls has received more than $300 million in advance procurement funding for the 12th ship in the class, Fort Lauderdale (LPD 28).

The San Antonio class is the latest addition to the Navy’s 21st century amphibious assault force. The 684-foot-long, 105-foot-wide ships are used to embark and land Marines, their equipment and supplies ashore via air cushion or conventional landing craft and amphibious assault vehicles, augmented by helicopters or vertical takeoff and landing aircraft such as the MV-22 Osprey. The ships support a Marine Air Ground Task Force across the spectrum of operations, conducting amphibious and expeditionary missions of sea control and power projection to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions throughout the first half of the 21st century.

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Navy is creating an offensive anti-surface network that will tie targeting information from satellites, aircraft, ships, submarines and the weapons themselves to form a lethal “kill web” designed to keep pace with the expanding lethal power of potential adversaries, service officials outlined on Tuesday.

The scheme will use information ranging from sensors in space to the undersea to share information in a so-called tactical cloud that will allow aircraft and ships to access a range of targeting information to launch weapons against surface targets, said Rear Adm. Mark Darrah, at the service’s program executive officer for Strike Weapons and Unmanned Aviation at the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), in a presentation at Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition 2016.

The All Domain Offensive Surface Warfare Capability is “integrated fires, leveraging all domains, the ability for us to utilize air-launched capabilities, surface launched capabilities and subsurface launched capabilities that are tied together with an all domain [information network],” he said.
“We call it the tactical cloud. We’re going to put data up in the cloud and users are going to go grab it and use it as a contributor to a targeting solution.”

The concept is a direct response the increased sophistication of adversary networked sensor systems.

“Specifically their ability to take all of their sensors and nets them together to project their ability to see me faster and farther away and [now] my sanctuary been decreased,” Darrah said.
“It’s about their ability to reduce the amount of space I have to operate in by tying their capability together and force me to operate from a farther distance from a threat.”

The scheme will allow the Navy to increase the effective ranges of their own weapons against surface targets.

The effort is being worked by Darrah’s office and PEO Integrated Warfare Systems in conjunction with the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and is slated to deploy in some form later this year, said Rear Adm. Jon Hill, PEO IWS on Tuesday.

“How do you bring in sensor data, how do you connect that to the weapon, how do you control it to make sure that you’ve got precision engagement?” Hill said.
“That has been tested and it will be ready to deploy later this year, we’re pretty excited about that.”

NAVAIR’s Darrah walked through an anti-surface scenario with information shared via the tactical cloud in which military space assets – known as National Technical Means — share data with aircraft like F/A-18s fighters, E-2D sensor aircraft and the unmanned MQ-4C Triton. In the scenario data was combined with surface ship information from a Littoral Combat Ship and an attack submarine that also feed into the tactical cloud.

“The important part is that the nodes are able to move in and out of this kill web over the time we’re prosecuting this threat,” Darrah said.
“What you got now is a thread that’s been run through a multitude of sensors. The important piece of these is they are nodes within domains. I can replace an F-18 with a Harpoon with a JSF and another weapon [in the future]. That’s the important piece. This is about [being] role based. Role-based means I don’t care what the platform is, what I care about is the sensor that generates the information.”

The anti-surface scheme is similar to the carrier strike group Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) concept in which aircraft and ships in the strike group share their targeting information on aircraft and cruise missile threats via high-capacity data links to other ships and aircraft that might be out of sensor but not weapons range of a target. For example, an E-2D could provide targeting information on an enemy fighter to an Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer that is unable to see the threat with its own radar.

“Using tactical data links is absolutely fine in this architecture, and that’s what we’ve used to go off and sink surface ships in another version of NIFC-CA,” Hill said on Tuesday.

While the concept shows promise, Darrah said there are long-term challenges to determine what data is relevant for units using the tactical cloud.

“We’re going to put data up in the cloud and users are going to go grab it and use it as a contributor to a targeting solution [but] what’s the pedigree of the data?” he said.
“Who generated it? How long has it been since it’s been refreshed? Is it actually a fidelity that’s meaningful to my weapon?”

Part of the solution to the problem will be building tools to allow users of the cloud to sort through the data.

“We have to figure that out,” he said.

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IAF overcomes challenges, takes best practices from RF-Alaska

U.S. Air Force, Navy and Indian Air Force fighter aircraft fly in formation during a training sortie in the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex during RED FLAG-Alaska (RF-A) 16-1 May 12, 2016, hosted at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. More than 75 aircraft and 1,400 participants were involved in RF-A 16-1; a Pacific Air Forces commander directed field training exercise for U.S. and allied forces, to provide joint offensive counter-air, interdiction, close air support and large force employment training in a simulated combat environment. (Courtesy photo by Jim Haseltine/Released)

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The oldest of the Navy's workhorse M-60 Seahawk helicopters are well into the final decade of their planned 30-year service lives, and Navy officials are starting a review to see what's needed to keep them in the air for as long as two more decades.

The two models, MH-60R and MH-60S, are responsible for everything from submarine hunting and vertical resupply to plucking a man overboard out of the water and the service will need to keep them in service until two decades from now when a suitable replacement helo is ready.

To keep the aging air frames flying, Naval Air Systems Command will first have to undertake a service life assessment to see how much wear and tear they've accumulated over the years.

"That will determine how long the aircraft will last, and what activities we need to take to make the aircraft last that long," said Capt. Craig Grubb, the H-60 program manager, at the annual Sea Air Space symposium outside Washington, D.C.

Right now, that's looking like the 2035 time frame, he said, before a follow-on helicopter hits the fleet, but they won't have a flight-hour count until the studies are done.

"If you asked any number of people, you would get a different number of hours," Grubb said

Once NAVAIR has figured out how much life they have left, the service life extension program will take over. The airframes were designed for 10,000 hours, or about 30 years — the MH-60R hit the fleet in 1984, followed by the MH-60S in 2001.

The S variant is up for overhaul first, as it's had the most intense workload since it replaced the CH-46 Sea Knight as a vertical replenishment, adding missions like search and rescue, anti-surface warfare and close air support since.

In March, NAVAIR put out a solicitation for a fatigue analysis report, part of the SLEP process, expecting to award the contract by the end of the year. That would put the SLEP on schedule to begin in early 2021.

MH-60R, though an older airframe, was one of several in the anti-submarine warfare and maritime strike game until the SH-60 sundowned last year. Now that it's the only helo doing that mission, it's going to need an extension as well.

An FLA contract is expected, Grubb said, with SLEP getting underway in 2022. The Navy has some idea of what to expect from the R variant, Grubb said, because they are modeled after legacy airframes like the SH-60B, SH-60F and HH-60H. The S is less predictable, he added.

Additional upgrades

Extending aircraft life is the top priority, but funding the plan opens up other possibilities.

"So as we’re going in and SLEPing the aircraft, it’s a great opportunity to go in and make upgrades beyond the aircraft and the airframe," Grubb said, including updates to avionics, mission systems and other capabilities.

The hope is that any new technology would then translate to whatever replaces the MH-60s in the 2030s, Grubbs said.

"Into 10 years and beyond, how do we build in capabilities to set ourselves up for whatever’s next?"

That could be an MH-XX program, a tiltrotor platform or another vertical lift airframe altogther, but Grubbs said he could not elaborate this early in the process.

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A recent incident involving a Chinese diesel submarine illustrates the advantage the U.S. Navy has because of the unmanned underwater systems (UUVs) it deploys, Capt. A.J. Reiss, commander officer of the Naval Oceanographic Office, said May 18 during a briefing at the Sea-Air-Space exposition.

A Chinese submarine commander was awarded a medal after averting an underwater disaster in 2014 when the boat suddenly began sinking due to a sudden change in the density of the water around it, Reiss said — a water hazard the Navy’s UUVs can spot with its persistent surveillance.

“What’s happening is the submarine, if you’re coming across here at about 3, 4, 5 knots, and you’ve got the buoyancy all right, all of the sudden you start getting into some less-dense water,” he said. “You’re not sensing that per se, and you start losing altitude, or the depth is increasing. All of the sudden, it’s getting strong and the bottom’s falling out on you.”

The Chinese submarine was able to escape the dangerous situation before it sunk to depths at which it could not operate, but the event offers a good illustration of the kind of competitive advantage the U.S. Navy has thanks to its UUVs, Reiss said, who noted that the Chinese reached out to the Naval Research Laboratory and expressed interest in the naval oceanographic ocean model code, which ultimately was not shared.

“That’s a great example of how you can understand the physical battlespace and have a competitive advantage over an adversary,” he said. “Sometimes there are things sticking out of the bottom and you know they’re there and they don’t, because you’ve surveyed the area with great accuracy with an autonomous undersea vehicle. Sometimes you know those features are in the water column themselves and you know they’re there because you’ve got persistent sensing through an unmanned underwater system.”

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VMAQT-1 bids farewell to its last EA-6B Prowler. Impressive paint job, Marines !

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