US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Jura said:

Dec 8, 2017
interesting development:
The USAF Has Finally Released a Glowing Film About the A-10 It Tried to Suppress
January 3, 2018

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I just skimmed through it, but watched the first version of that movie:

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"A-10 savin' the day again, baby!"

That's what U.S. troops on the ground scream for joy after an

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pilot swoops down low for a "gun run" in Afghanistan.

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The stunning footage -- from both ground troops and from inside the cockpit -- has made its debut in the 2014 mini-documentary "Grunts in the Sky: The A-10 in Afghanistan."

The nearly four-year-old footage was recently made public after a Facebook group, Air Force amn/nco/snco, which is popular within the

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but isn't officially run by the service, pursued the footage through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Air Force hasn't fulfilled the FOIA, but the video recently appeared on Facebook and YouTube.

"There's just nothing that matches the devastation that that gun can bring," says A-10 pilot "Geronimo" at Bagram Air Base. Airmen in the video are mostly identified by their call-signs.

"My whole soul and being is that guy on the ground," says another pilot.

The pilots interviewed for the documentary make the case for the plane: The A-10 can not only shoot at enemy tanks like it did en masse during the Gulf War, it can trail a single, moving target and take that out with precision too.

But the main mission objective isn't to coordinate, seek out and track targets. It's aerial cover.

"We hear the bullets flying [from the ground]," Geronimo says. "We hear [a soldier] taking cover, we hear him breathing hard. It becomes a very personal mission."

Air Force leaders have repeatedly said the A-10 (known as the Warthog, or Hog) --

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in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria -- will remain

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But while many an A-10 enthusiast would like to see the planes flying "indefinitely," the Air Force more likely means "into the foreseeable future."

In September, Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, told Defense News that if the A-10 fleet does not receive new wings before the service life of the current wings runs out, some squadrons will begin retiring.

Nevertheless, Congress has maintained pressure on the service to keep the A-10 flying for as long as possible to keep troops secure on the ground.

"The ground troops that I work with -- when they think close-air support, they think A-10s," says Staff Sgt. Joseph Hauser, a joint terminal attack controller based at Forward Operating Base Ghazni.

"The reason for that is, they almost share the same mentality. If you were to say that there's a grunt in the sky, it'd be a Hog pilot," Hauser says.

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X-47B in transit from Edwards AFB to Baltimore

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Jura said:

and in the meantime (dated Nov 27, 2017)
Raytheon Protesting USAF’s J-Stars Northrop Radar Pick

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Raytheon is officially out of the Air Force’s JSTARS recap contest, leaving Northrop Grumman victorious as the radar provider to one of the three primes competing for the contract.

The Government Accountability Office on Dec. 28 dismissed Raytheon’s initial protest, filed on Nov. 20, as well as two supplemental protests filed Dec. 11 and 18, the GAO docket shows. Raytheon’s protest was both surprising and unusual, as the Air Force has not publicly announced or confirmed its downselect decision for the JSTARS recap radar.

As of Jan. 8, the GAO’s decision remains under protective order, and a representative from the agency could not immediately be reached for information on the decision. An unclassified version of the decision will be released in a few weeks, an Air Force spokeswoman confirmed.

Raytheon had offered its Archimedes radar for the JSTARS recap, the planned follow-on to the E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System ground surveillance aircraft. Companies vying for the prime contract spot — in this case Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop — were permitted to submit two proposals: one with Raytheon’s Archimedes and another with a radar manufactured by Northrop.

While companies are not allowed to appeal GAO decisions, Raytheon could take its case to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

A spokesman for Raytheon said the company is currently exploring its legal options and declined to comment on the decision, citing the protective order.

The GAO’s ruling is a major win for Northrop, ensuring the company will play a major role on the JSTARS recap program even if it loses the prime contracting spot. However, the Air Force is currently reconsidering whether the current recap program is the best strategy to replace the E-8C fleet and plans to make a final determination in the fiscal year 2019 budget, meaning that Northrop’s victory may be short lived if the program is ultimately canceled.

Raytheon and Northop were both awarded contracts in 2016 to mature their radar and scale their designs for a business-jet sized aircraft. Northrop was given $70 million and Raytheon got $60 million for risk reduction activities.

Since the protest was filed, the Air Force has remained mum on why it seemingly chose Northrop over Raytheon, and the service has refused to confirm whether it had made a final source selection decision regarding a JSTARS recap radar.

“We are in source selection, and we don’t comment on these things while that source selection is going,” Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the Air Force’s top uniformed acquisition official, said in early December. “We will allow that process to play out.”

Asked why the Air Force would choose a radar provider before choosing a prime contractor, Bunch refused to speak specifically to JSTARS, but added, “On multiple source selections, there are a variety of different things that you can look at and make decisions on how you want to go forward. So what I would say is, we need to let the source selection play out. We need to let the protest that has been filed to play out, and then as that plays out more, then we’ll be able to make more comments.”

The JSTARS recap program is worth about $6.5 billion and includes 17 aircraft to replace the E-8C fleet. The Air Force is expected to downselect to one competitor and award a contract for the engineering, manufacturing and design phase in fiscal year 2018.

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Jura said:

in another thread Nov 14, 2017


and now noticed, at the end of
Here are the top issues facing the US surface fleet in 2018

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:

For Callender, the service also needs to move out on a replacement for the Burkes.

“They are way behind the eight ball on this one,” he said. “We’ve done some great things in the Flight III Arleigh Burke [about to enter production], but we’ve kind of reached the technical limits of that design. We can’t continue to pack more power and capability into that design, so we definitely need to move forward with the future surface combatant.”

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The U.S. Navy’s surface fleet is developing a new class of ship that will replace the cruisers — but it’s not another cruiser.

The Navy’s director of surface warfare, Rear Adm. Ronald Boxall, told a crowd at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium that his team is building over the next year a capabilities document that will sketch out the next surface combatant, one that integrates new sensors and technologies that will make it relevant into the future.

“People are always asking: ‘What’s the next cruiser?’ ” Boxall said. “What I’m telling you is that it might not be a cruiser. What we are looking for is what do we need our surface ships to do at the big level, what do we need to do at the small level and what do we need to do with unmanned because it is a different Navy out there.

“And so we have to look at how we optimize our force inside surface warfare and then merge that outside of surface warfare with the other platforms and across all domains.”

The hull Boxall described incorporates the surface force’s emphasis on off-board sensors that radiate and target with active sensors, while using passive sensors on the ship to avoid detection.

The discussion of the next surface combatant was notable because discussion about the cruiser replacement has been conspicuously absent since the Obama administration canceled the Navy’s CG(X) program early in its tenure.

Analysts and observers have criticized the Navy’s seeming lack of a clear plan for the cruisers, some of which have been extended out to 40-year service lives to keep the robust missile defense and anti-air warfare capabilities in the fleet.

The need for a future surface combatant has become even more urgent, as it has become clear that the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer has maxed out that hull form, said Thomas Callender, a retired submariner and analyst with The Heritage Foundation, in a recent interview.

“They are way behind the eight ball on this one,” he said. “We’ve done some great things in the Flight III Arleigh Burke [about to enter production], but we’ve kind of reached the technical limits of that design. We can’t continue to pack more power and capability into that design, so we definitely need to move forward with the future surface combatant.”

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Jura said:

where do I start here ... I've read
Base Notice: RFI: FFG(X) - US Navy Guided Missile Frigate Replacement Program -
N0002418R2300

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already twice; I also read (but not twice LOL) the following articles (I don't repost the texts as I don't know if anybody cares about what's going on):

Frigate competition wide open: Navy specs reveal major design shift

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Navy Releases Details of New FFG(X) Guided-Missile Frigate Program in Request to Industry

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Exclusive interview: The Navy's surface warfare director talks frigate requirements

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I'm going to add my thoughts later

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Jura said:

Nov 28, 2017

but now GAO dismisses Raytheon's JSTARS recap protest, cementing Northrop as radar provider
source is DefenseNews

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Raytheon's Archimedes radar is out of the race to win a major contract after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirmed on 9 January that it rejected company's protest over the Air Force's decision to exclude it from a planned competition.

The decision leaves Northrop Grumman's wide area surveillance radar as the sole sensor option for three different aircraft being proposed by Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop to replace the E-8C JSTARS fleet.

During the early stages of the competition, air force officials awarded two contracts worth $60 million and $70 million for Raytheon and Northrop, respectively, to perform radar risk reduction work.

Despite the recent GAO decision, Raytheon is expected to conclude JSTARS risk reduction work by the end of the month, a company spokesman says.

Although the USAF says the source selection process for the JSTARS replacement is ongoing, service officials are also reviewing whether to delay or cacnel the competition.

Earlier this fall, Air Combat Command chief Gen Mike Holmes warned a traditional business jet platform would face challenges in today’s contested airspace. Instead, Holmes questioned if the next JSTARS aircraft should be designed to survive in contested airspace.

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said the Jan. 7 launch of the classified Zuma mission appeared to have been successful, but questions about the spacecraft’s health surfaced the following day.

Amateur satellite watchers spotted the rocket’s upper stage venting propellant over East Africa about 2 hr. and 15 min. after launch, suggesting Zuma might be in a 900-1,000 km high orbit, according to a post on SeeSat-L, an internet mailing list for visual satellite observers.

“It is impossible to estimate when it might be spotted. It could happen within a few days, but could easily take weeks or months,” Ted Molczan, a longtime satellite observer who administers the mailing list, wrote in an email to Aerospace DAILY. "Satellites have been known to fail spectacularly … but I suspect that Zuma is alive and well."

As of Jan. 8, Zuma was logged in the international registry of satellites, though it “remains to be seen if that is a mistake,” said Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, author of Jonathan’s Space Report newsletter. “My hypothesis is that Zuma did not separate from [the upper stage] and both stayed in orbit long enough to get a catalog number, but then was de-orbited. [It’s] still very unclear." The catalog listing provided no orbital details or re-entry information, both of which may have been withheld due to the classified nature of the mission.

However, other reports, citing anonymous intelligence and industry sources, say the spacecraft, built by

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for an undisclosed U.S. government customer, failed to separate from the Falcon 9’s second stage and did not reach orbit. Northrop hired SpaceX for the launch, which occurred at 8 p.m. EST on Jan. 7 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

"After review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement. "If we or others find otherwise based on further review, we will report it immediately. Information published that is contrary to this statement is categorically false. Due to the classified nature of the payload, no further comment is possible.

“Since the data reviewed so far indicates that no design, operational or other changes are needed, we do not anticipate any impact on the upcoming launch schedule," Shotwell continued. "Falcon Heavy has been rolled out to launchpad LC-39A for a static fire later this week, to be followed shortly thereafter by its maiden flight. We are also preparing for an F9 launch for SES and the Luxembourg Government from SLC-40 in three weeks."

“This is a classified mission. We cannot comment on classified missions,” Northrop spokesman Lon Rains said.

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