US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Air Force Brat said:

Good Grief! give em a helmet and a pair of David Clark headsets and tell em to stay below 8,000 ft and 6 Gs,,,, what in the dang heck is going on?? These are Naval Aviators, they are not little school girls, get em in the airplane and fly that damned thing out to the boat and keep your quals up!

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Jura said:

Brother ... instructors were reporting issues, and reporting issues again, so I would think it's as serious as it gets, but the 'remedy' you posted, it's ... OK I'll give you Like

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Jura said:

source:

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The US Didn't Send That Carrier Group to the Korean Peninsula, But Did North Korea Know That?
The United States didn’t send a carrier to the Korean peninsula, but Pyongyang was under the impression it did.

By Ankit Panda
April 19, 2017

The Trump administration has left foreign policy analysts with no shortage of odd situations to scrutinize. The latest, however, was both particularly dangerous and a head-scratcher.

On April 8, U.S. Pacific Command released a press release noting that the Carl Vinson Strike Group, which includes the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, would “sail north” from Singapore to report to the Western Pacific. In the ensuing days. One thing led to another and that press release was mangled as it got picked up by the press, leading to reports that the United States had dispatched a carrier group to the Korean peninsula, all while tensions ran hot in anticipation of a North Korean nuclear test on or around April 15, the country’s most important public holiday.

It wasn’t until April 17, when Defense News‘ Chris Cavas published this important reality-check, that we learned the Vinson strike group was 3,500 miles south of the Korean peninsula all along, in the Tsunda Strait.

The press, however, wasn’t alone in drumming up the carrier strike group’s northbound journey. Trump, in an interview on Fox Business Network, remarked that the United States was “sending an armada” to the Korean peninsula when asked about the deployment. Maria Bartiromo, the Fox anchor, told Trump: “You redirected Navy ships to go toward the Korean peninsula. What are we doing right now on North Korea?”

Trump, slightly caught off guard, simply said, “You never know!” Gathering himself, he continued that “I don’t talk about the military,” going into his usual spiel against the Obama administration, which, in his view, was overly talkative about planned military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, Trump threw fuel on the fire when he declared:

We are sending an armada. Very powerful. We have submarines. Very powerful. Far more powerful than the aircraft carrier. And we have the best military people on earth. And I will say this, he is doing the wrong thing.

Trump wasn’t the only one in his administration seemingly confused about the deployment of the Vinson strike group. His defense secretary, Jim Mattis, had an opportunity to clarify the Vinson’s movements when a reporter asked about the Vinson strike group being “redirected towards the Sea of Japan in the coming weeks.” Mattis, instead, was rather noncommital, simply noting that the carrier was “on her way up there because that’s where we thought it was most prudent to have her at this time.”

Nothing Mattis said was actually inaccurate. The latest reporting in the past 24 hours has seen U.S. officials confirm that while the April 8 Pacific Command statement simply referred to the Vinson’s eventual movement to the Western Pacific, the carrier strike group will still eventually head to waters near the Korean peninsula.

In the end, this all seemed to be a uniquely Trumpian failure of strategic communications. The New York Times cited Pentagon officials who noted that the government made no effort to walk back the media reports given that Trump had chosen to play up the “armada.” Press Secretary Sean Spicer also alluded to the Vinson strike group’s operations in the Sea of Japan falsely as well.

What ultimately makes the entire episode even more bizarre is that the North Koreans bought the story and assumed that the U.S. carrier strike group was either on its way to Korean peninsula waters or was already there. An April 13 report in North Korea’s Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) cited a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson who noted that the “repeated dispatch of the Carl Vinson carrier strike group shows that the U.S. aggressive scheme has entered the risky practical stage.”

The article continued that the statement came “after the U.S. urgently sent a nuclear carrier strike group to the Korean peninsula waters.”

That the North Koreans took the broader misreporting of the PACOM statement (and Trump’s remarks) seriously should be concerning. Long before Trump was on the scene, Pyongyang believed that the United States and South Korea would look to launch a surprise attack to ‘decapitate’ the regime; this is part of why North Korea loudly protests annual U.S.-South Korea exercises. Given the particularly high tensions of late, North Korea took reports that the U.S. had dispatched a second carrier to Northeast Asian waters (in addition to the permanently forward-deployed USS Ronald Reagan very seriously.)

In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that North Korea’s failed April 16 missile launch may have been partly undertaken with the intent of signaling its capabilities against the carrier strike group. Consider that North Korea’s April 5 exercise came 48 hours after the United States, South Korea, and Japan held anti-submarine drills in the East China Sea, off South Korea’s Jeju Island.

As I observed yesterday, North Korea appeared to have tested a new anti-ship ballistic missile on both April 5 and April 16. While it’s impossible to ascribe intent with any certainty and North Korea tests new missiles for technical reasons primarily, any signaling effect to the United States and South Korea is likely taken as a nice bonus side-effect. The April 5 signal was no doubt received, but on April 16, there was no carrier group around to receive the signal, alas. Incidentally, that North Korea couldn’t determine if a U.S. carrier was present in the East Sea on its own doesn’t speak well to its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities — something that it would want if it’s serious about pursuing a long-range anti-ship ballistic missile capability.

So, what then are the takeaways from this episode?

First, this is not good deterrence practice. For all of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s huffing and puffing at the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) about Trump’s resolve, Trump’s missing “armada” reveals — to be quite blunt — simply incompetence. Is there a prescription to patch this? Well, Trump could begin filling key posts at the Pentagon with appointees that may keep him up-to-date on carrier movements, for instance. If the “three Cs” of deterrence used to counsel that leaders should “communicate capabilities credibly,” the Trump administration merits a “fourth C,” as MIT’s Vipin Narang suggested on Twitter: competently communicate capabilities credibly.

Such basic incompetence, combined with broader concerns about the Trump administration’s thresholds for the use of force after a sudden about-face on Syria policy leading to dramatic cruise missile strikes earlier in April, will sow concern among allies. Adversaries, meanwhile, will come to wonder if the Trump administration’s messaging on any matter can be taken seriously if the president of the United States himself can be goaded into manufacturing a carrier strike group’s trajectory by a leading question in an interview.

Second, what does it tell us that North Korea, between April 8 and April 17, was ostensibly operating on the assumption that a U.S. supercarrier was potentially steaming toward its shores to ready-up a potential U.S.-led preemptive strike on the basis of nothing but media reports? Foreign intelligence agencies bemoan the difficulty of extracting useful intelligence out of North Korea, but Pyongyang too is limited in its ability to glean what its adversaries are up to, often relying on open sources itself to guide action.

Third, if the stakes here weren’t ultimately nuclear war, there is some humor to be found in all this. Trump boasted of a U.S. armada without presumably appreciating the fate of the Spanish armada in 1588. North Korea may have hastily pushed ahead with a test of its new Scud-derived ASBM because of media misinterpretation of a PACOM statement. If nothing, we have an unfortunate case study in the salience of bounded rationality in decision-making.

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Jura said:

Mar 11, 2017

oops Lockheed Marine Helicopter Came With Unpublicized Cost Increase

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  • CH-53K decision memo shows 6.9 percent rise to $31 billion
  • Cost per copter increases to $138 million from $131 million

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The total acquisition cost of the U.S. Marine Corps’ new heavy lift helicopter has increased from $26.1 billion to $27.7 billion — a result of growing labor costs and the move of its production line, the service’s program manager said in an exclusive interview with Defense News.

Col. Hank Vanderborght, program manager for U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy heavy lift helicopters, confirmed that the CH-53K King Stallion program has run a 21 percent cost overrun against its 2006 baseline as of this month’s Milestone C decision. That puts it 9 percent away from a Nunn-McCurdy breach that would trigger a decision from the Defense Department on whether to re-baseline the program.

But as the program moves into production, Vanderborght is confident that cost-saving initiatives that the Marine Corps plans to put into place going forward can keep the King Stallion on track.

“I am not concerned about [the cost growth] because we’re doing a lot of good things to control it,” he told Defense News. “And I think that the things that we’re doing to control it are working.”

News of the cost growth was first reported by Bloomberg, which obtained a memo related to the Milestone C decision. But even before that, the CH-53K, manufactured by Lockheed Martin subsidiary Sikorsky, had come under fire amid questions from lawmakers about the price of the program.

According to Vanderborght, this is the estimated cost of the program as of Milestone C:

• While the CH-53K’s average recurring flyaway cost stayed stable at $87.1 million, the “program acquisition unit cost” — the total price per unit of the aircraft, when ancillary expenses and research and development costs are factored in — has grown from $131 million to $138.5 million.
• Total research and development costs now stand at $7.3 billion, up from the $6.9 billion figure Vanderborght cited at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference earlier this month.
• Procurement has increased from $19.2 billion to $20.4 billion.
• Total acquisition costs for the 200-helicopter program of record have shot up to $27.7 billion, from $26.1 billion.

But those figures don’t tell the whole story, Vanderborght said.

Two factors outside of the government’s control have driven the cost growth on the program: the increasing costs of labor and Sikorsky’s move of the helicopter’s final assembly line from Florida to Connecticut, he said. Under the Marine Corps’ current cost-type contract agreement with the company, the government is left footing the bill for those added expenses.

As the CH-53K moves from its research and development phase to procurement, Vanderborght believes he will have more opportunities to hold Sikorsky responsible for cost growth. The service intends to switch to a fixed-price contract during production, which will offload some risk onto its contractors.

'The war on cost'

The Marine Corps is aiming to knock about $1.5 billion off the $27.7 billion total program cost by working with Sikorsky to implement affordability initiatives. The service has isolated about 160 initiatives so far, and about half of those have already been approved to be put into practice.

Vanderborght estimates those cost-saving measures will shave off about $500 million during production and reduce costs by $1 billion during the operations and sustainment phase.

“[It’s not like] we’re sitting on our butts, just accepting that it’s going to cost this much. It’s like a war. We fight the war on cost every single day to get things at the best, absolute value for the taxpayer,” he said.

On the production side, many of those tactics involve breaking parts of the contract away from Sikorsky and managing them independently. For instance, beginning with the first production contract, the Marine Corps will begin buying CH-53K engines, manufactured by General Electric, separately from the rest of the aircraft. That will cut the engine’s cost by 14 percent, Vanderborght said.

“We are looking at other things like that to break out and go contract direct with the manufacturer and provide it as [government-furnished equipment],” he said, adding that avionics equipment or structural equipment could be good candidates.

“We weigh the risk very carefully because if you break it out and it shows up at the production line and all of a sudden it doesn’t fit or it doesn’t work, then the government is liable. So we have to be very surgical when we make those decisions and really think through the problems.”

The program office is also looking for opportunities to push as much work down the supply chain as possible, directing second- and third-tier suppliers to do tasks that would otherwise be performed later on by the prime contractor at a higher expense. For example, instead of having Sikorsky install a wiring harness on an aircraft, the cabin manufacturer could have that already done before it moves to final assembly.

On the production side, many of those tactics involve breaking parts of the contract away from Sikorsky and managing them independently. For instance, beginning with the first production contract, the Marine Corps will begin buying CH-53K engines, manufactured by General Electric, separately from the rest of the aircraft. That will cut the engine’s cost by 14 percent, Vanderborght said.

“We are looking at other things like that to break out and go contract direct with the manufacturer and provide it as [government-furnished equipment],” he said, adding that avionics equipment or structural equipment could be good candidates.

“We weigh the risk very carefully because if you break it out and it shows up at the production line and all of a sudden it doesn’t fit or it doesn’t work, then the government is liable. So we have to be very surgical when we make those decisions and really think through the problems.”

The program office is also looking for opportunities to push as much work down the supply chain as possible, directing second- and third-tier suppliers to do tasks that would otherwise be performed later on by the prime contractor at a higher expense. For example, instead of having Sikorsky install a wiring harness on an aircraft, the cabin manufacturer could have that already done before it moves to final assembly.

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CBO: 355-Ship Fleet Would Cost the Navy $102B Annually
The Navy would have to spend $102 billion annually build, operate and maintain a 355-ship fleet over the next 30 years,

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.

The report, prepared at the request of the House Armed Services subcommittee on seapower and projection forces, outlines cost scenarios in how the Navy buys and maintains the 355-ship fleet the service announced it needed in 2016 – up from its current fleet of 275 ships.

“The cost to build and operate a 355-ship fleet would average $102 billion per year (in 2017 dollars) through 2047, CBO estimates, or more than one-third greater than the amount appropriated for fiscal year 2016 for today’s 275-ship fleet… That amount would be 13 percent more than the $90 billion needed to build and operate the eet envisioned in the Navy’s 2017 shipbuilding plan,” read the report.
“Meeting the 355-ship objective would cost the Navy an average of about $26.6 billion (in 2017 dollars) annually for ship construction, which is more than 60 percent above the average amount the Congress has appropriated for that purpose over the past 30 years.”

According to the CBO estimate, “the Navy would need to purchase around 329 new ships over 30 years, compared with the 254 ships that would be purchased under the Navy’s 2017 shipbuilding plan. In particular, over the next five years, the Navy would purchase about 12 ships per year.”

The CBO’s figures also included the estimated cost of ship maintenance and personnel for the new fleet.
“By 2047, the annual cost in 2017 dollars of operating the Navy’s 355-ship fleet—regardless of whether the buildup took 15 or 30 years—would be about $38 billion (or 67 percent) more than the $56 billion the fleet of 275 ships costs annually to operate today. CBO’s projection of the steep increase in operating costs by 2047 results both from having a larger fleet and from the expectation that operation and support costs would grow faster than general inflation in the economy,” read the report.

Over the 30-year period the service would have to add 19,000 personnel and almost 50,000 civilians to handle the increased fleet size, CBO estimated.
The service called the number of ships the bare minimum it needed to undertake its strategic requirements and focused the plus-up in high-end combatants like guided missile destroyers and attack submarines.

While the Trump administration and the Navy agree on the basics of fleet size, the ability to get the money to pay for the plus-up is unclear. The CBO report makes clear how costly the new ships would be and notes the challenge of raising the funds, one naval analyst told USNI News.

The report “highlights the sustained greater investment needed to build up the fleet, both in procurement and readiness,” Bryan Clark, with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) who was the lead author of a fleet architecture study at the behest of Congress, told USNI News.
“Its estimates are

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, which projected the larger fleet would cost about 15-20 percent more than the navy’s shipbuilding plan and about 30 percent more than the current fleet.”

While the administration has promised the plus-up, the complications of even basic funding of the military have yet to be ironed out.

The new CBO estimates come as the Senate is still stalled in passing a $578-billion Fiscal Year 2017 Pentagon budget and a $30 billion readiness supplemental and days before a continuing resolution runs out.

“Overall, this [report] shows the potentially insurmountable challenge naval advocates will face in growing the fleet. The Congress is hard pressed to pass a modest budget increase, much less a 30 percent budget increase to grow the Navy,” Clark said.

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USAF C-130J Super Hercules flies above the Greek coastline

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Jura said:

after reading
Military brass warn Congress of budget gridlock's impact

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I expect the show to end two minutes to midnight

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