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The U.S. Navy completed a series of test shots using Raytheon Company's SeaRAM anti-ship missile defense system, taking out several targets in a variety of scenarios that mimic today's most advanced threats to naval ships.
The Raytheon SeaRAM Anti-Ship Missile Defense System is a low-risk evolution of the proven Phalanx Block 1B Close-In Weapon System and the Rolling Airframe Missile.
The series of two shots included one in which two supersonic missiles were inbound simultaneously, flying in complex, evasive maneuvers. In both flights, SeaRAM detected, tracked and engaged the threats, and fired Rolling Airframe Missile Block 2 guided missiles which successfully intercepted the targets.
"SeaRAM achieved a new level of success today, intercepting targets under high-stress conditions," said Rick Nelson, vice president of Raytheon's Naval and Area Mission Defense product line. "The system demonstrated once again that it can provide the sophisticated protection warfighters need."
The tests were conducted on the Navy's Self Defense Test Ship off the coast of Southern California.

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on May 25, 2016 at 3:44 PM

Coast Guard ice breaker Healy

WASHINGTON: After a decade of dithering, the White House and Congress have finally come close to agreeing that America

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. One congressional subcommittee, the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, has actually come up with the $1 billion needed to build it in less than a decade.

But the money wasn’t put in the Coast Guard’s budget. The defense subcommittee put the money in the Navy’s budget. But the Navy won’t operate the ship. So why should the Navy get the money? Is that a good idea?

It has a precedent. The most modern icebreaker in our fleet, the Healy, was built by NavSea, although some of those involved recall that the Navy didn’t much like it and only kept going under orders from the late Sen. Ted Stevens, towering master of all things to do with defense appropriations.

“The Navy tried to say, OK, we’re done,” when the program first faced difficulties,” retired Coast Guard Rear Adm. Jeff Garrett tells me. “Ted Stevens said, No — you’re not done. And they built it.” A Coast Guard captain was program manager and it was run by a mixed staff of Navy and Coasties. Garrett,

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and a Coastie who understands budgeting and acquisition, just wants the icebreaker built. The Coast Guard could build it, bolstered by their experience over the last few years building $500 million National Security Cutters, Garrett argues. Or the Navy can do it.

“Money is money. Congress can put the money wherever it wants,” he notes. Should the $1 billion actually be appropriated, it will actually push the White House faster than it currently plans to move. The 2017 budget asks for a paltry $150 million to begin icebreaker acquisition. Garrett says it loks as if the Office of Managment and Budget intends to do “incremental funding” and fund the icebreaker as the Navy does aircraft carriers over years as the Navy does with aircraft carriers.

Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star

“If you got the whole billion dollars up front that’s even better because you don’t have to sweat it out up front and get approval for smaller amounts each year,” Garrett notes.

Two experts at the Heritage Foundation don’t want the Pentagon to build the icebreakers, though Justin Johnson, their defense budget expert, and Brian Slattery support building the new ship. Slattery, who follows the Coast Guard for Heritage, thinks “the icebreaker should be appropriated through the Coast Guard acquisition, construction, and improvements (AC&I) budget, because we need to get over the imaginary ceilings on these acquisition accounts.”

Although Coast Guard Commandants have said for years that they need at least $1.5 billion annually to rebuild the service’s air and sea fleets, they usually get roughly $1 billion and there’s been deep reluctance both within the Obama Administration and on the Capitol Hill to break that habit.

“The administration has appeared incapable for years of requesting the $1.5 billion for AC&I that the Coast Guard has said is a minimum requirement for modernization funding. While Congress has done a pretty good job at adding funding where necessary for the Coast Guard the past few years, the White House still sets the tone for these priorities, and the Coast Guard (in the context of the overall DHS budget) has been pushed toward the bottom of the list for years,” Slattery says in an email.

What’s wrong with the Navy building the icebreakers? The Navy doesn’t fully fund its Shipbuilding and Conversion accounts (known as SCN), leaving the US with a shrinking fleet. “I worry that this $1 billion addition for the Coast Guard will similarly make the SCN account look robust but without actually making progress toward the Navy’s battle force fleet requirements,” Slattery argues.

But Garrett doesn’t care where the money goes as long as the ships gets built. “The whole issue with this icebreaker has been debated for decades,” says one of the chief co-authors of two National Research Council studies, “Polar Icebreakers in a Changing World ” in 2007 and

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in 2011. “The detailed procedural stuff. Well, that’s just procedural stuff. It can be executed by DoD or by DHS.”

Garrett argues “the real question has been the country’s commitment.” The SAC-D vote would seem to indicate there’s hope. But… “Will I bet all my retirement pay all this money will end up untouched at the end of the process, and be there on October 1? No, but it’s a hopeful sign,” says the former commander of the 420-foot Healy.

As Chinese ships sail between the islands of the Bering Sea, and Russia stakes claims to the Arctic, we rely on the Healy and its sister ship the

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a 399-foot heavy icebreaker commissioned in 1976, Garrett and virtually every American who’s sailed the Arctic,

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.

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KC-46A boom problem busts USAF schedule

The US Air Force has delayed a full-rate production decision for the KC-46A Pegasus until August and deliveries to the first operational unit will come about three to six months late, and even then will lack one critical system for at least another 12 months.

The announcement on 27 May on the eve of a USA federal holiday confirms months of findings by operational testers and government auditors that the five-year-old KC-46A development programme was unlikely to stay on original schedule, despite repeated vows by USAF and Boeing officials to the contrary.

The Milestone C decision, which determines the start of full-rate production, had already slipped from April to June and is now in August, the USAF says. Service officials blame a nagging hardware problem with unexpected loads on the fly-by-wire refueling boom for the move to delay the Milestone C decision another two months.

Boeing also is struggling to integrate a long list of engineering changes into a production system already supporting 20 aircraft derived from the 767-2C freighter in various stages of assembly, the USAF says.

The Cobham-made wing aerial refueling pods (WARPs) continues to face qualification challenges and are now expected for delivery to the USAF in October 2018, Boeing says. The first 18 aircraft delivered in the summer or fall of 2017 will come equipped with refueling booms and centerline drogue refueling systems, but the WARPs will not be available for another year.

“Throughout KC-46 development, the air force remained cautiously optimistic that Boeing would quickly address these issues and meet the original goal,” USAF programme executive officer Brig Gen Duke Richardson says in a statement. “However, we understand that no major procurement programme is without challenges and the Air Force remains committed to ensuring all aircraft are delivered as technically required.”

Since the $4.4 billion development contract for 179 tankers was awarded in 2011, the USAF has reimbursed an extra $500 million in contractually-allowed overruns and Boeing has recorded a further, combined $1.5 billion loss over several write-downs, including most recently a $243 million announced for the first quarter. Boeing won the tanker contract by submitting a bid priced $4 billion less than EADS North America (now called Airbus Group Inc).

Boeing says it continues to demonstrate its commitment to the programme, despite the losses and new delays.

“The KC-46 tanker will play a vital role in America’s air mobility forces providing both global power projection and unrivaled global reach for decades to come,” the USAF says in a statement.

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In coming days, the aircraft carrier

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and its carrier strike group will deploy to the Middle East to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State -- and they'll do it with the help of parts stripped off of other operational ships.

This was one of the revelations Thursday from

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operational commanders who testified to lawmakers about the readiness straits service ships and aircraft find themselves in amid maintenance funding shortfalls and the aftermath of sequestration budget cuts.

The commanders testified days after a congressional delegation made a fact-finding trip to Norfolk to speak with officers aboard the Eisenhower and tour other Navy units.

Capt. Scott Robertson, commander of the guided-missile cruiser

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, told members of the readiness and seapower and projection forces subcommittees of the House Armed Services Committee that 13 mission-essential parts had been cannibalized from the Normandy while it underwent maintenance to support the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group's upcoming deployment.

"One of the parts I had to give up was a cable harness from my spy radar, obviously a very critical function for an air defense ship," he said. "Even if I wasn't in a maintenance phase, I could not possibly surge right now."

Other captains who spoke to the lawmakers testified that cannibalization of parts from operations ships and aircraft was both a last resort and a daily reality for the Navy.

The commander of Submarine Squadron 6 out of Norfolk, Virginia, Capt. Gregory McRae, said parts were cannibalized from subs at the rate of 1.5 per day across the submarine force to fund current operations.

"If a part fails on a unit that's operational, we look in the supply system, and the supply system says, either there no parts available at all, or parts are not going to be available for a few months," McRae said. "In that case, the only resort we're left with is to look through a boat that has a similar piece of equipment that is not as high on the priority scale for operations, and we pull that piece from that boat and install it on the boat that's going to go out and do operations."

These last-ditch measures are the result of operations and maintenance funding shortfalls, residual maintenance backlogs from sequestration, and, in the aviation community, unforeseen program life extensions of aircraft due to

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delays and other factors, the Navy commanders testified.

Unforeseen operational tasking, such as the

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of the Truman Carrier Strike Group's deployment in April, further compounds these issues, said Adm. Phil Davidson, the commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, who introduced the panel Thursday.

That deployment extension also came with a price: Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic Commander Capt. Randy Stearns said three

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squadrons were notified they would be the parts "donors" if the carrier strike group were to need spares during the remainder of its float.

Between Fleet Forces Command and U.S. Pacific Fleet alone, Davidson said, the shortfall in operations and maintenance funding is $848 million.

In response to operational needs and maintenance shortfalls, he said, the Navy planned to delay four surface ship maintenance availability and one submarine major maintenance availability from the fourth quarter of the current fiscal year into next year. The flight hours of one of the Navy's carrier air wings would also be reduced, he said.

Maintenance shortfalls and delays are also having a negative effect on sailors who might spend an entire tour attached to a ship stuck in dry dock. Unforeseen delays in maintenance for the submarine

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resulted in a planned 28-month maintenance period stretching to 43 months, Stearns said.

"Many of the sailors that have reported in for their first sea tour on the Albany will start and end their sea tour in the shipyard," he said.

The commanding officer of the Albany, Cmdr. Robert Landis, will see the end of his command tour without seeing the sub leave the yard, Stearns said. In part because of that, he said, Landis is opting for retirement at the end of his tour rather than continued service in the Navy.

Overall, the commanders said, the ability of operational units to surge was severely reduced or eliminated by the shortfalls.

"Accepting these risks means accepting less readiness across the whole of the Navy," Davidson said.

The testimony comes as Congress debates next year's defense budget bill. The House this month

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that funded only a partial year of overseas and war activities in order to dedicate more money to maintenance and acquisition. But Defense Secretary Ash Carter has expressed his strong disapproval of this move and has said he will recommend a veto of the bill if it remains in its current form.

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FORBIN said:

KC-46A boom problem busts USAF schedule
...

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... a design that soon will be able to fire 10 times a minute through a barrel capable of lasting 1,000 rounds

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• in Russian: рельсотрон
• in Czech: kolejnicové dělo
• in Polish (and I guess in many more languages as well): railgun

• in Italian: cannone a rotaia
• FORBIN:
  Canon électrique