US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Equation said:

R.I.P. and my condolences to their families.

Pentagon identifies fourth U.S. soldier slain in Niger ambush

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

The military’s official investigation into a deadly Oct. 4 ambush in Niger is likely to extend into January 2018, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

Maj. Gen. Roger Cloutier Jr., chief of staff for U.S. Africa Command, is leading the 15-6 investigation to answer why the 12-person U.S. Special Forces team and 30 Nigerien partnered forces ended up in an hours-long firefight with what the Pentagon suspects were Islamic State-affiliated militants.

The high-profile ambush generated political controversy in the U.S. Overseas, it resulted in the U.S. military increasing its defensive posture in the area and Niger requesting the military operate armed drones above it.

Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson and Sgt. La David Johnson died in the attack.

“Families were informed that [U.S. Africa Command’s] investigation team will travel to locations in the U.S., Africa and Europe to gather information related to the investigation,” the Pentagon said in a prepared statement.

The Pentagon said the investigation could take additional time beyond January “if circumstances required.”

Click to expand...

Jura said:

the author should've started with "lawmakers will have to reconcile the cost of the measure with existing spending caps in place"
Congress' $700 billion defense authorization deal includes 20,000 new troops, rejects Space Corps

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

TerraN_EmpirE said:

Thank goodness... It may sound like a cool Idea but practically moving the Space assets from the USAF and USN to a new body was just going to be a mess of Bureaucracy without need.

Click to expand...

Despite a year of offering bonuses, trying to bring back former pilots and talking up the glories of being an Air Force pilot, the service’s

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

continues to dwindle.

At the end of fiscal 2016, the service needed 1,500 pilots. On Oct. 31 of this year, that number had swollen to about 2,000. Why, a colleague from Air Force Times asked

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

, has the shortage continued to worsen despite what the service has done?

To be honest, Wilson didn’t have a good answer, which isn’t surprising given the problem. She noted that the service has been, effectively, at war for 26 years. She met an airman last week who has deployed seventeen times. “At some point,” she said, “families make the decision they just can’t sustain it any longer.”

The only good news was that front-line units haven’t been affected yet, although Air Force Chief of Staff

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

said at a briefing here that he’s only sure about that for the next year. Goldfein and Wilson both pulled out the standard talking point that the Air Force is too small for its missions, which is probably true. But it doesn’t apply to the pilot shortage since it keeps getting worse in spite of their actions. To be fair, it may take another year or so for their new measures to begin to really affect the pilot corps.

And it’s a very expensive problem. “You do the math,” Goldfein said. “It takes $10 million to raise a fighter pilot and we’re a thousand short. That’s $10 billion of capital investment that has just walked out the door.”

Lost In Space?

In other news, Wilson sidestepped a question about the painful actions taken to reshape the space enterprise in the

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. “Actually, the language is just out and there’s no final vote,” she told reporters. “There are a lot of caveats in there and we want to look at it very carefully.” Of course, as a former member of Congress she knows that such a sensitive issue, agreed to by the four House and Senate defense policy leaders, is unlikely to change when the bill comes to a vote.

The NDAA took aim at the heart of the Air Force’s control of space. The

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. The Air Force’s new

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

is kaput. The

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

is dead. While Congress did not impose a

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

on the Air Force, it sent a clear message that they’ve lost the argument that they have a special claim to space and should prepare for even more bracing changes. For example, the Deputy Defense Secretary is asked to recommend who should oversee space acquisition, embodied in

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Wilson told the press she paid her second visit last week to the National Space Defense Center (NSDC). Goldfein made a point of saying Wilson, he and the senior leadership of the Air Force held a day-long tabletop space wargame. “We’re moving forward,” he said.

Click to expand...

Jura said:

in real world Navy Cutting Maintenance, Cannibalizing Planes Amid Readiness Crisis

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Just a third of the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornets were fully mission-capable and ready to “fight tonight” as of October, the head of Naval Air Forces told Congress on Friday.

Only half of the service’s 542 Super Hornets were flyable as of last month, Vice Adm. Troy Shoemaker told the House Subcommittee on Readiness at a hearing on aviation readiness.

The relentless pace of operations since 9/11, coupled with budget uncertainty in recent years, has forced the Navy’s aircraft and warship communities to do more with less, affecting overall readiness as a result, according to a copy of Shoemaker’s prepared statement to lawmakers.

Additional funding in FY2017 helped address immediate readiness shortfalls, Shoemaker said, but more will be needed as the service grapples with everything from an ascendant Chinese military to a belligerent North Korea and an Iranian force prone to incitement.

“Naval Aviation needs a multifaceted approach to readiness recovery that include aircraft procurement, consistent funding of readiness accounts and (military construction) and infrastructure investments,” Shoemaker said.

The Navy deployed four carrier strike groups this year to support combat operations and provide deterrence, he said.

Shortcomings meant the Navy had to “cannibalize aircraft, parts and people to ensure those leaving on deployment had what they needed to be safe and effective,” Shoemaker said.

“The demand for Naval Aviation forces greatly exceeds our ability to supply those forces,” he said.

There are 41 fewer ships and 90,000 fewer sailors in the service since 9/11, Shoemaker said, but the missions have only increased.

“We will always answer the bell to put combat ready forces forward,” he said. “However, we have been forced to do so for years at the expense of our long-term ability to train and prepare the future force.”

Click to expand...

Jura said:

let's face it
Report: Full cost of U.S. wars overseas approaching $6 trillion

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Jura said:

Oct 18, 2017

and
USAF still examining JSTARS recap cancellation
source is FlightGlobal

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

The Air Force remains undecided on the future of JSTARS and its light attack test, but is confident that its next generation trainer will be awarded early next year – and begin production before the year is through.


Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, alongside Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein, gave updates on the three programs to reporters during a Nov. 9 briefing.

JSTARS, the service’s battlefield management and control platform, was expected to get a traditional recapitlization, with a new plane selected and equipped with a large radar. Major defense firms have been pushing their designs for several years, laying the groundwork for what could be a lucrative project.

But this fall, the service seemed to dramatically pivot, with Wilson requesting a major review about whether the service can use existing platforms such as legacy aircraft, networked sensors and drones, to complete that mission without a bespoke aircraft.

Speaking on Thursday, neither Wilson nor Goldfein offered an update on a report that was supposed to be recently completed about the feasibility of that idea. But reading the tea leaves, the two appear more interested in a broadly networked solution than a traditional JSTARS design.

Wilson noted that the original JSTARS concept came online when she was working at the National Security Council in 1991, and that “technology has changed since then.” The current JSTARS design meets only 5 percent of the requirements for combatant commanders, she said, and offered an assessment that by the time a new JSTARS is up and running, it would meet “less than one percent” of the needs.

Moving away from JSTARS may be difficult, however, with members of Congress having put funding for JSTARS into recently completed National Defense Authorization Act conference, with about $400 million.

In a statement Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., rapped the Air Force for moving away from the JSTARS recap idea, over concerns that it could put troops in harms way.

“The sharp turn away from the current recap plan conflicts with everything I’ve heard from the Air Force and combatant commanders,” Purdue said. “If the Air Force changes their mind, they’ll need to answer some serious questions about how to meet this need and any gaps we’ll see.”

Goldfein, for his part, argued out that having a single high-end platform could actually make communicating with partners more difficult if they are flying older aircraft. But both vociferously pushed back at the idea that the Air Force is moving away from doing that particular mission, which is vital to coordination for troops on the ground.

“If anyone asked the question to the Secretary and I if we were walking away from supporting our forces on the ground and at the seas…. The answer is ‘absolutely not,’” Goldfein said. “It’s an obligation.”

Pivoting to the light-attack experiment known as OA-X, Wilson said the service is still awaiting the results of its flight demonstration between four designs that occurred at Holloman Air Force Base over the summer. The results of that assessment are expected before the end of the year.

Like JSTARS, OA-X received roughly $400 million in the NDAA, and leaders on the Hill have expressed the belief the program should continue past the prototype stage.

There was more concrete news for the service’s trainer aircraft modernization program, known as T-X.

T-X is the Air Force’s biggest ongoing aircraft competition, with about $2 billion at stake over the next five years. The program has been repeatedly delayed, but had been expected to select between three prime contractor offerings from Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Leonardo DRS.

However, Air Force Under Secretary Matt Donovan told Defense News in an October interview that he expected the T-X contract award to slip to Spring, probably towards the end of March.

Asked about that time frame, Wilson confirmed they are looking to award the contract early next year, although did not have a specific date on hand. More importantly, the delay in picking a winner for T-X should not delay plans to begin production before the end of fiscal year 2018.

“We expect to start production in FY18, and the decision on the request for proposal is kind of event based, it’s not schedule based,” Wilson said. “We don’t expect an impact on the production timeline. We’ll try to work the acceleration of that when we get the decision.”

Click to expand...

Jura said:

now SecAF extensively quoted inside

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

source is BreakingDefense

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Jura said:

related to what I posted in
Aircraft Carriers III Yesterday at 8:06 PM

is
Only one-third of Super Hornets ready to ‘fight tonight’ as of October, admiral says

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

but now I was appalled by

"There are 41 fewer ships and 90,000 fewer sailors in the service since 9/11, Shoemaker said, but the missions have only increased."

I mean I had lived in the US in 2001 so I remember the US Navy that strong, I'm unsure of what has been going on since then and why (here I blamed 'concurrency', I noticed Wednesday at 8:17 PM
but still)

Click to expand...

Boeing Missile Defense Team Loads Milestone Missile into Silo
United States missile defense strengthened to 44 interceptors

FORT GREELY, ALASKA, Nov. 7, 2017 – Boeing [NYSE: BA] and the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) team recently bolstered America’s defense against long-range ballistic missiles, ahead of schedule, with the installation of the 44th interceptor.

Placing the interceptor in its silo meets a U.S. Department of Defense requirement of increasing the inventory to 44 by the end of this year.

This interceptor includes features demonstrated in the successful intercontinental ballistic

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

conducted in May.

“The ballistic missile threat that our partners in the Missile Defense Agency are defending this country from requires always-ready capabilities,” said Norm Tew, Boeing vice president and GMD program director. “As the system architect for nearly two decades, Boeing continues to deliver through our expertise in developing, testing and fielding progressively advanced solutions for this vital mission.”

The interceptor is designed to launch and destroy ballistic missile threats after receiving detection and tracking information from land-, sea- and space-based sensors. Boeing has been the system’s prime contractor since 2001. The GMD system includes command-and-control facilities, communications terminals and a 20,000-mile fiber-optic communications network that interfaces with ballistic missile defense radars and other sensors.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...