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Drone-Helicopter Teams Performing ‘Very Well’ Against ISIS

Future unmanned-human teaming looks a lot like the Predator’s little cousin.

Over the smoking sands of Iraq, the military is coming to rely on formations of 20-foot drones, working with Apache attack helicopters against the Islamic State. Such operations have just pushed the Textron Shadow UAV past 1 million flight hours, becoming the first of the Army’s mid-range, or

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drones, to hit that milestone.

The Army is now talking publicly about the first heavy attack reconnaissance squadron to deploy and return with the Apache-Shadow combination, the service’s Shadow product manager told reporters in a conference call on Monday. That would be 3-6 Cavalry out of Fort Bliss, Texas, which returned from Iraq two weeks ago.

“We are starting our after-action reviews with them, from an Apache standpoint and a Shadow standpoint, going and talking to the unit, how did the mission go,” said. Lt. Col. Tory Burgess. “The information that we’re getting back is that the Shadows performed very well.”
The Shadow that actually took the type past the 1-million-hour mark belongs to the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Germany, Burgess said.

“It took us a day or two, but we dove down and determined that that was the crew,” he said.
Compared to the more famous MQ-1 Predator or the larger MQ-9 Reaper, the Shadow, introduced in 1999, is smaller — small enough to launch from a catapult. It is also far less costly; Textron doesn’t disclose the price, but it’s a good deal less than the $5 million Predator or a $13 million Reaper. As a Group III drone, it lacks the range of the Group IV aircraft. It’s not a bird you pilot from the other side of the world, but that matters less to some of the potential government buyers of today’s ISR and armed drones.

Every service “would like the Group IV capability inside a Group III that’s runway-independent,” said Burgess. Read that to mean a drone that works like a Predator, but that you don’t need a runway to launch, and that’s what a smaller drone gives you.

They aren’t alone.

“There has been a lot of interest in this system or variance of this system in the Middle East region as well as several countries in Europe,” Textron senior vice president William Irby told reporters on a call on Monday. One of the Ukraine government’s

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is drones that can

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jamming from top-of-the-line Russian electromagnetic warfare equipment and techniques.

The Shadow can be armed; Textron has spent a lot of its

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with a light Hellfire-esque missile called the

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, modified from a Thales design. But the Army currently has no plans to missile-up the Shadow for combat and current arms trade restrictions prohibit Textron from selling armed variants of the drone to other militaries.

But the appetite is present in the Middle East. And rival weapons-making nations are anxious to meet new demand. Consider the burgeoning

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for small, armed Chinese drones in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.

Regardless of whether the Pentagon ever puts missiles on the Shadow, or allows it to sell armed variants abroad, the U.S. military sees the drone as a key part of the Army’s arsenal until 2030. They will look to improve the drone with more laser designators to help targeting.

“Currently, a platoon of four air vehicles only has two laser designators and two non-laser designators associated with it,” said Burgess.

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Croatia, Tunisia First To Receive U.S. Kiowa Warriors

Croatia and Tunisia are the first nations to receive OH-58D Kiowa Warrior armed scout helicopters retired by the U.S. Army. Tunisia, announced most recently as a recipient, will use the helicopters to battle Islamic extremists, according to the Department of Defense.

The Army is divesting approximately 340 single-engine Bell OH-58Ds over three years as a consequence of its

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, which shifted responsibility for the armed reconnaissance mission to AH-64D/E Apache attack helicopters in combination with unmanned aircraft. The Kiowas are being made available through the Excess Defense Articles and foreign military sales (FMS) programs, and multiple nations have expressed interest in the aircraft, according to the service.

Croatia became the first nation to acquire excess Kiowas when its defense ministry signed a letter of offer and acceptance for 16 helicopters in mid-February. “This first OH-58D FMS case represents a significant amount of hard work and research on the part of many organizations, including the Non-Standard Rotary Wing Project Office, the Armed Scout Helicopter Project Office and the AMCOM [Aviation and Missile Command] Security Assistance Management Directorate,” the Army said.
“While this first case is in a basic U.S. government configuration aircraft, many countries are expressing interest in fielding upgraded versions of the aircraft,” the service added.

In early May, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) notified Congress of the possible FMS to Tunisia of Kiowa Warrior equipment, training and support, including 10 AGM-114R Hellfire missiles and 82 Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System rounds, in a transaction valued at $100 million. Under a separate notification, Tunisia was approved to receive 24 OH-58Ds through the Excess Defense Articles program. That use case “is approved and set for execution,” the Army said in response to an AIN inquiry.

The helicopters “will improve Tunisia’s capability to conduct border security and combat operations against terrorists, including Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant in Libya, and Ansar al-Sharia, Tunisia,” the DSCA notice stated.

The OH-58Ds are being sent to both Croatia and Tunisia from the Army’s 1st Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment at Fort Bragg, N.C. In April, the 1-17th conducted a final flyover of Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, N.C., with all 32 of its Kiowa Warriors.

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

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Two carrier strike groups will operate concurrently in the Mediterranean Sea for about two and a half weeks, marking the first simultaneous carrier operations in the region in several years.

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Jura said:

Special Operations Command looks to U.S. companies for homemade AK-47s

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TE would you care to comment?

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“Building them here would normalize transfers, make oversight easier, and prevent ad-hoc type arrangements like we’ve seen in the past” said Matt Schroeder, a senior researcher with Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research group that tracks weapons.

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An aerial view of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake (Wikipedia)

Starting today, it appears the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. We say “appears” because officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the US Navy’s largest installation in the Mojave Desert. And the Navy won’t tell us much about what’s going on.

The FAA issued an advisory warning pilots on Saturday that global positioning systems (GPS) could be unreliable during six different days this month, primarily in the Southwestern United States. On June 7, 9, 21, 23, 28, and 30th the GPS

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will be taking place between 9:30am and 3:30pm Pacific time. But if you’re on the ground, you probably won’t notice interference.

The testing will be centered on China Lake, California—home to the Navy’s 1.1 million acre Naval Air Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. The potentially lost signals will stretch hundreds of miles in each direction and will affect various types of GPS, reaching the furthest at higher altitudes. But the jamming will only affect aircraft above 50 feet. As you can see from the FAA map below, the jamming will almost reach the California-Oregon border at 4o,000 feet above sea level and 505 nautical miles at its greatest range.


View attachment upload_2016-6-11_21-45-30.gif
Map released by the FAA showing the GPS jamming that will occur at different altitudes this month (FAA)
I gave the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division a call yesterday, but they couldn’t tell me much.

“We’re aware of the flight advisory,” Deidre Patin, Public Affairs specialist for Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division told me over the phone. But she couldn’t give me any details about whether there was indeed GPS “jamming,” nor whether it had happened before. Patin added, “I can’t go into the details of the testing, it’s general testing for our ranges.”

As AVWeb points out, Embraer Phenom 300 business jets are being told to avoid the area completely

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. The FAA claims that the jamming test could interfere with the business jet’s “aircraft flight stability controls.”

GPS technology has become so ubiquitous that cheap jamming technology has become a real concern for both military and civilian aircraft. And if we had to speculate we’d say that these tests are probably pulling double duty for both offensive and defensive military capabilities. But honestly, that’s just a guess.

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Lasers are the future of warfare. So it might come as a surprise to many Americans that the US…

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These tests are naturally going to fuel plenty of

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about mind control, weather modification, and aliens—especially with China Lake’s proximity to both large population centers like LA and Las Vegas, and the fact that Area 51 is practically just down the road. But it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to tell us we’re fucked if terrorists or shitty teenagers make it a habit of jamming GPS signals for everybody.


If you experience any significant GPS interference this month or know the “real” reason behind these test (aliens, right?) please let us know in the comments.

Correction 11:24am: This post originally misstated that one level of interference would occur at 4,000 feet. It’s 40,000 feet above sea level, and has been corrected. I regret the error.

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Jura said:

Feb 20, 2016

related:

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source:

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Attention, Congress: there are a range of alternatives to the RD-180, none of which run through Moscow.

Last week, the Pentagon sent a letter to Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., an influential legislator when it comes to American space policy. Within the letter, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who is highly esteemed within the defense analytical community, stated that the Air Force lacked the flexibility to adopt a new rocket design based around a replacement for the controversial Russian RD-180 in the short term. Nor could the Air Force afford to use other rockets, presumably the Delta IV, as a replacement, given its fiscal constraint. He went on to say that unless the Congress authorized the additional purchase of RD-180 engines, the DoD’s space launch schedule could be pushed back up to two years, depriving the country of critical communications and presumably reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities. Ironically, the letter included a plaintive cry from the wilderness to save America’s rocket industry, presumably by purchasing Russian rocket engines.

To set the stage for this little drama, we must remember that following the end of the Cold War, it seemed appropriate to reach out to Russia and build partnerships to help bring their nation along economically and carve out paths that would bring them into the society of modern nations. Out of concern that Russia’s rocket technologies would proliferate, the U.S. government at President Bill Clinton’s direction urged its commercial defense companies to investigate purchasing Russian-built components to help keep the scientists of the Russian space agency together during the troublesome 1990s. As such, American rocket manufacturer Lockheed Martin incorporated the Russian RD-180 engine into the design of its Atlas V medium-heavy rocket, which saw its first launch in 2002.

However, Russia’s recent occupation of a portion of Georgia, its illegal annexation of Crimea and its operations of the Donbas region of Ukraine led to a series of sanctions against Russia and the temporary suspension of the sale of rocket engines to the United States. These activities revealed the United States’ vulnerability to Putin’s coercion, and triggered an initiative to regain U.S. independence from Russia with regard to space.

To be sure, the RD-180 engine itself is a marvel of engineering. Its dual combustion chamber, dual exhaust nozzle design generates 900,000 pounds of thrust, enough to lift 5- to 20-ton platforms into orbit. It is also reliable, having performed more than sixty commercial or military launches with only one operational burp that nonetheless reached orbit. The cost for an Atlas V launch is around $130 million, which is not too expensive when compared with previous military-grade rockets. The problem, as identified by the Congress, was the degree to which the United States is dependent upon an outside power, with which it has many disagreements, for access to space. The Senate Armed Services Committee, under the leadership of retired Navy Capt. John McCain, has introduced language requiring the U.S. military to abandon its strategic dependence on the Russian engine and use rockets powered by American thrust, and there are more than a few available.

Aerojet Rocketdyne, a tried and true builder of rockets going back to the earliest days of the Space Race, offers the AR-1 engine as a direct plug-and-play replacement for the RD-180 within the Atlas V rocket. However, the AR-1 is not fully tested and would not be available for a few years. Press reports suggest that both the Air Force and the United Launch Alliance seem to prefer billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin BE-4 liquid methane-powered engine, which would be part of an entirely new Vulcan rocket with a 25-ton lifting capacity. The Vulcan rocket could be available by 2019 at a cost of $100 million per launch. Both of these options would require extending the United States window of vulnerability to Russian coercion until the early 2020s.

The nation does have other options, however. The Atlas V is not our only launching vehicle to space. The United Launch Alliance has the Delta IV rocket, capable of lifting five- to 30-ton platforms into orbit depending upon its configuration and has demonstrated the ability to launch multiple satellites per flight. The Delta IV is powerful, but also expensive, costing around $400 million per launch. Orbital ATK offers the Antares rocket, but it depends on Russian engines as well and does not answer the counter-coercion argument. Lastly, there is Elon Musk’s stunningly successful and innovative SpaceX effort.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with funds garnered from his early investments in PayPal with the goal of lowering the costs associated with access to space and leading the way towards the manned exploration and colonization of Mars. His initial rocket, the Falcon 1, reached orbit in 2008, and the company has since moved onto its Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX has pioneered the technologies necessary to land and reuse its booster stage and has recovered three of them on land and on a barge at sea. Such reuse promises dramatic mission cost decreases. As it stands, the Falcon 9, which can lift five to 25 tons into earth orbit, costs around $60 million.

SpaceX had to pursue legal proceedings against the Air Force to be allowed to bid for launch contracts, and the Air Force continues to meticulously and carefully review the reliability of the SpaceX design as a precursor for granting its authorization for using the rocket to launch national security payloads. The Falcon 9 has had 24 launches that resulted in 22 successful insertions into orbit. Of the two failures, one was a total mission loss due to a failed strut that breached a pressurized fuel cell during launch, and the second was a secondary payload failure that had no impact on the primary mission. Overall, the Falcon 9 system has demonstrated constant maturation and system reliability with the promise of dramatically lowered costs.

Dependence upon Russia for access to space is a bad strategic plan. As Senator McCain stated within last year’s NDAA, “The result will…deepen America’s reliance on these thugs for our military’s access to space.” At any point in time Russian instability and aggression could result in strains in the relationship that could sever access to Russian engines or even the Russian Soyuz launch vehicles that currently lift American astronauts to the International Space Station. We should remember that 20 percent of Georgia remains illegally occupied by Russia, Crimea remains illegally annexed by Russia, and 20,000 Russian troops remain as an occupying force on the ground in eastern Ukraine.

The world watches the United States, and we should not appease such aggression. Between SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV, which can be operated in a single-stick configuration, we have a range of options at varying costs that we can execute now, within this current budget cycle. We should not buy 18 engines as suggested by the House of Representatives. We should not buy nine engines as suggested by some in the Senate. With U.S. troops and its NATO allies conducting the largest deterrence exercise in a generation in Eastern Europe, it’s time to end our strategic schizophrenia, stop buying the RD-180 engine altogether, close our window of space vulnerability, and declare our independence in space again.

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Army ditches plans for additional M4 carbine upgrades

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, Army Times9:02 a.m. EDT June 12, 2016

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COMMENTEMAILMORE
As the Army continues it's in-progress upgrade of M4s to M4A1s, it has ditched plans for additional upgrades, referred to as the M4A1+ initiative.

The M4A1+ was intended to improve ergonomics and accuracy, but after reviewing proposals, the Army determined it was not worth the effort.

“The Army issues market surveys all the time to assess if there's any new technologies that it might want to look at. In this instance, there weren't,” Picatinny Arsenal spokesman Pete Rowland in an email. “Case-closed for now.”

The Army’s upgrade to M4A1 stands at about 25 percent complete and will continue into 2020. Barrels that warped in Afghanistan during extended firefights — causing guns to fail — served as the impetus for the change. That

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incorporated three core changes: a heavier barrel that better withstands extended use; ambidextrous safety controls; and conversion of its three-round burst mode to fully automatic. The Army is upgrading the M4s (and also replacing its larger forbear, the M16) base-by-base.

The M4A1+ market survey requested solutions that included an extended Picatinny rail (to both allow a shooting technique with a straightened forward elbow and more accessory-attachment options), as well as a floating barrel to enhance accuracy. Other improvements sought were: a flash suppressor; a brownish color for new parts to help camouflage; removable iron sights; and an optional sniper-style single-stage trigger specifically for squad marksmen.

The upgrades were to "seamlessly integrate with the current M4A1 Carbine ... without negatively impacting or affecting the performance or operation."

At

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Lt. Col. Terry Russell, project manager for individual weapons at Picatinny Arsenal, said the Army was “very confident that these already do exist, or that (companies) can develop them for us in short order.” But the offerings apparently did not add enough value for the Army to pull the trigger.

It wouldn’t be the first time in recent years the Army bailed on carbine changes. In 2013, the Army ended the Individual Carbine Competition; it said no competitors offered enough improvement to justify the cost of continuing the competition and of replacement.

Some, including former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., have spoken out against the M4, arguing for years that it lagged competitors in reliability. Some reports indicated that during testing some weapons had out-performed the Army’s carbines, but full testing results have not been released.

Meanwhile, a 2013 Defense Department Inspector General

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said the Army failed to justify the requirements for the new carbine and that the competition “wasted about $14 million."

“The Army plans to spend $2.52 billion over a 20-year life cycle to procure and maintain 501,289 carbines that its own analysis suggests can be delayed for 10 years with no impact on readiness," the report said.

The M4A1 rollout started roughly a year after Individual Carbine was cancelled, though that was a parallel effort, not a fallback plan, for the Army.

The M4 was introduced in 1994 as a more compact version (by about six inches) of the M16 first adopted in 1964.

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