The US Marine Corps (USMC) is soon going to increase the laser power for a project meant to provide mobile air defence for ground forces.
Working with the Office of Naval Research (ONR), marines hope to eventually field a Ground-Based Air Defense (GBAD) Directed Energy On-the-Move system that encompasses a vehicle-mounted high-energy laser; mounted command, control, and communications (C3) suite; and mounted volumetric surveillance radar.
When do laser weapons finally become real? The low-hanging fruit for a near-term application looks like it’s shooting down enemy drones before they can target US forces. Both the Army and Marines are testing vehicle-mounted “counter-UAS” (Unmanned Aerial System) lasers, while the Navy already has a bulkier model aboard the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf.
The Marine Corps is moving towards a future in which small dispersed units can protect themselves from incoming enemy drones with laser weapons and from missiles and aircraft with Stinger missiles, with both weapons netted into a detection system and mounted atop Humvees, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and other combat vehicles.
The Navy is “fully committed” to developing and fielding advanced directed energy weapons to deal with emerging threats and to reduce the cost per shot, the Navy’s number two officer said today.
“We need to push technology forward” and do it faster than historic advances in fielding new weapons capabilities, Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. William Moran said at the Directed Energy Summit, cohosted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment.
Moran noted that the Navy had “already authorized a defensive weapon” and deployed it, citing the laser system mounted on the USS Ponce (AFSB(I)-15), which is on station in the U.S. Central Command theater.
The 30 kilowatt solid-state XN-1 laser on Ponce has been authorized for use as a defensive weapon, he said. The Navy “will field a 100-kilowatt system in the near future,” he added.
A detachment of U.S. Marines is on the ground in Iraq to support U.S. and coalition efforts against Islamic State, the U.S. military said on Sunday.
A group of Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, will add to the U.S. forces already in Iraq battling Islamic State, it said.
The 26th MEU is currently deployed in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations, which covers the Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and parts of the Indian Ocean.
The Navy and Marine Corps amphibious fleet is on the cusp of two major changes – the introduction of the Lockheed Martin F-35B Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter and the growth of the fleet from 30 to 33 ships – that will change the way the fleet trains and fights, the director of expeditionary warfare told USNI News.
Maj. Gen. Chris Owens, who took over the expeditionary warfare directorate (OPNAV N95) four months ago, said in a Dec. 10 interview that his biggest priority in this new job is amphibious fleet readiness – having the maximum amount of ships deployed or ready to deploy, and ensuring those ships are maintained and modernized to stay relevant throughout their entire service lives.
To that end, the fleet stands to make some important gains in the coming years. F-35B integration efforts will bring greater capability to existing ships, helping them leverage the fifth-generation fighter capability and operate more effectively with the rest of the Navy’s surface fleet. And the larger number of ships in the amphibious fleet open up opportunities for single-ship deployments, taking on more missions in the Pacific and providing better training to sailors and Marines.
An alternative policy would be to embed USMC personnel in their Filipino counterparts, while explicitly announcing that despite still not taking sides on the ultimate issue of sovereignty, the US considered the Second Thomas Shoal (and other disputed territories currently under actual control by Manila) to fall within the purview of the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. American policy would then be to actively seek to prevent changes on the ground, including expelling Filipino military personnel from the Second Thomas Shoal, while still pressing for a mediated (or arbitrated) solution, in line with US support for the international arbitration bid currently under consideration by the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Preserving the status quo requires extensive work on the BRP Sierra Madre, or its replacement by another ship or structure. In other words, America would be moving from passive neutrality to active neutrality. From merely declaring that differences must be settled peacefully in accordance to international law, to helping freeze the status quo so that revisionist powers are not tempted to gain in the field of battle what they should only be claiming in the diplomatic table or the courtroom.
The Marine Corps chose BAE and SAIC from a field of five competitors to build competing prototypes for the long-awaited Amphibious Combat Vehicle. BAE, a dominant player in tracked armored vehicles, had teamed with Italian armsmaker Iveco to offer a variant of the Italians’ wheeled SuperAV. SAIC, best known as a consulting firm, offered a variant of the Singaporean Terrex. “BAE’s contract is for $103.8 million, while SAIC’s is for $121.5 million,” the Marines announced at 5 pm.
The awards are a major step forward for the service. The Marines had struggled for years to replace their Amphibious Assault Vehicle — aging, lumbering, and terribly vulnerable to roadside bombs — whose ability to carry Marines from ship to shore and inland is central to the service’s identity. After early doubts about the ACV candidates’ capabilities, the Marines are now confident the winner will be as fast on the water as the old AAV and vastly better on land, with mobility similar to the Army’s eight-wheel-drive Stryker and — perhaps most importantly — protection equal to an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected) vehicle.
Each of the two winners will build 16 vehicles to be delivered from January through April 2017. (The current contract says 13 but Marine officials pledge to execute an option for three more once the funding is available). That unusually large number of prototypes will speed up testing and development of tactics, with multiple activities running simultaneously and allowing any broken-down vehicles to be quickly replaced, ACV program manager John Garner told reporters this afternoon. By the time the program enters its formal operational evaluation (OPEVAL) in late 2017 (early fiscal year 2018), said Garner, “the Marines will have already learned how they’re going to operate these vehicles.”
After that comes a downselect to a single winner, who’ll build up to 204 test vehicles at an average procurement unit cost (APUC) of no more than $6.5 million each. That and other costs to date will constitute the $1.2 billion “ACV 1.1″ program, which enters service ca. 2021. But immediately on 1.1’s heels comes “ACV 1.2,” which will produce up to 490 vehicles of multiple variants. (All ACV 1.1s are regular troop carriers; ACV 1.2s will also include command vehicles and recovery vehicles, essentially armored tow-trucks). The service wants the transition from 1.1 to 1.2 to be as smooth as possible, with as little new development and testing as possible, which means the winner of 1.1 will have a lock on 1.2 unless they drop the ball.
Naval Aviation rejoined the fight against ISIL Nov. 19 when AV-8B Harriers from Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron (VMM)162(Reinforced)launched from the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) to conduct their first missions over Iraq in support of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR).
The Navy and Marine Corps should explore ways to make Marine aircraft a more useful part of the naval battle force – using alternate mixes of aircraft types on amphibious ship flight decks, finding additional missions for those aircraft, and pursuing increased connectivity to the rest of the naval fleet, the deputy commandant for aviation told USNI News.
In recent memory, the aviation combat element (ACE) in the Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) has served to support the MEU’s ground combat element. The ACE brought Marines and their weapons ashore in combat situations and helped bring materiel ashore in humanitarian assistance missions.
But Lt. Gen. Jon Davis argues the MEU, and particularly the ACE – which already includes the game-changing MV-22 Osprey and will soon include the equally transformative F-35B Joint Strike Fighter – can and should do more.
“We have the finest aircraft carriers in the world, we have the finest submarines in the world, we have the finest amphibious ships – we might need those amphibious ships to be doing something a little bit different than we’ve asked of them in the past to be value-added to the subs and the cruisers and the carriers, to be more value-added episodically before we reconfigure to the traditional mission and force contribution you expect an amphibious ship to be able to do,” Davis said in a Nov. 16 sit-down interview in his office.
“At the end of the day, we need them to power project Marine ground forces, a MAGTF (Marine Air-Ground Task Force), ashore, and they need to be able to do that. But is there more that we can get out of those ships, and what do we have to do to those ships to get more out of them?”
First, Davis argued, the Marines need to rethink what should constitute the ACE onboard amphibious ships.
“You in your brain, and all of us in our brains, have, this is a MEU: six Harriers or six F-35s, 12 V-22s, three or four CH-53s, seven skids [light attack helicopters], some VMU [Marine Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadrons],” Davis said.
But what if that combination, which includes a little bit of everything, means that the ACE is not optimized for anything?
“There are many scenarios where we would want to have the L-class carrier loaded with F-35Bs – the full squadron, 16 airplanes or more, plus four to six V-22s with a tanker package,” Davis said.
The Spanish Navy (Armada Española) has claimed to be the first non-US naval service to embark a squadron of the US Marine Corps' (USMC's) Bell Boeing MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft on board one of its ships. The embarkation took place during Exercise 'Trident Juncture 2015' that started in early October 2015 and jointly hosted by Spain, Portugal and Italy.
The four Osprey transports, which combine the vertical lift-off capability of a helicopter with the higher speed and payload flight of a turbo-prop aircraft, are stationed at the Morón de la Frontera Air Base in southern Spain.
For 'Trident Juncture 2015' the aircraft were embarked with six of the Armada's AV-8B Harrier and an AB-212 helicopter from the 27,000-tonne landing helicopter dock (LHD) Juan Carlos I .
"This event is a historic achievement both for the Marines and the Armada Española," said the Spanish Navy. "Never before has an American [Osprey] squadron formed part of an air unit embarked on a ship that does not belong to the US Navy."
The Marine Corps aviation community is keeping busy preparing to send its first F-35B Joint Strike Fighters to Japan in January 2017, ensuring the training and logistics pipelines are ready for global deployment of the new plane, the deputy commandant for aviation told USNI News.
The first F-35B squadron, Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 121, reached initial operational capability (IOC) in July and could, in an emergency, deploy overseas today.
“if a contingency arose, and I’ve got an IOC squadron, I could put six or more F-35Bs on the [USS] Wasp and sail into harm’s way and do the job and basically do what our nation needs to do with a fifth-generation aircraft from a seabase, the first one ever,” Lt. Gen. Jon Davis told USNI News in an interview.
VMFA-121 is the lone F-35B squadron for now, though the Marines intend to transition Marine Attack Squadron (VMA) 211, an AV-8B squadron, this fiscal year and Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 122, an F-18 Hornet squadron, in 2018.
As the F-35B fleet builds out, Davis said the Marines have to ensure sufficient readiness for all the squadrons. He said he needs to “make sure as we build up 211 we don’t degrade the capability of 121 from the maintenance perspective, make sure we keep our training solid. Right now we’re in good shape, we have a good plan to build out 211.”
“Keeping the procurement ramp solid is imperative to do that,” he said, and the procurement of spare parts may be the most important and most under-emphasized.
The Auxiliary Platforms and Payloads Council at the Pentagon has focused its efforts on using the Expeditionary Fast Transport for Marines’ afloat command and control requirements, as well as looking at technical enablers to allow Marines to operate from the Littoral Combat Ship, the head of the amphibious warfare branch said last week.
Capt. Bryon Johnson said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Portsmouth, Va., that the council was not considering a formal Marine Corps mission package for the LCS but instead was looking at more ad hoc adaptive force packages for LCS and the Expeditionary Fast Transport ship (EPF), formerly called the Joint High Speed Vessel.
A particular interest is putting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets and unmanned vehicles on the EPF, he said.
“We are looking at ways to put adaptive force packages on [EPF], particularly for command and control … using the [EPF] maybe as an afloat command center” in humanitarian assistance missions, for example.
On LCS, he said the council is examining what enablers the Marines would need to operate from the platform – with extra berthing being a top concern, he said.
However, he made clear that these efforts were not meant to replace amphibious warships, but rather to help reduce the high demand on the amphibs.
The Navy and Marine Corps were able to design an LX(R) dock landing ship replacement with greater capability for less money by starting with the higher-end San Antonio-class LPD-17 design, stripping away unneeded features and adding back in desired ones, service officials said last week.
The Navy is still working through the process, having approved the capability design document – which includes key performance parameters and key system attributes – three weeks ago and forwarded it to the Joint Staff for approval, Marianne Lyons, deputy program manager for LPD and LX(R), said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Portsmouth, Va., last week.
The program is in the preliminary design phase now, she said, and will move to contract design in the spring and then detail design and construction in Fiscal Year 2020.
The Marine Corps' plan to fast track the development of its next-generation amphibious vehicle could mean some design and mechanical problems might not emerge until after the first systems hit the fleet, according to a government watchdog agency.
As the Marine Corps prepares this month to select two competitors to produce prototypes of its Amphibious Combat Vehicle 1.1, the Government Accountability Office commended the service for following best practices tied to major acquisition programs. But the GAO is also warning Marine officials to keep an eye on two key points.
Developing the first round of ACVs before the preliminary design review is complete “poses risk,” the Oct. 28 report states. That could result in costly modifications down the road.
The service's plan to combine preliminary and critical design reviews into one event — just 90 days after development begins — leaves too little time to address issues, the report states. GAO officials cited the canceled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program as an example of what the Marine Corps should not repeat. The EFV's critical design review was conducted at a similar stage, but prototype testing continued for three years — long after the findings could inform the design. After 15 years, the $3.7 billion program was deemed too expensive to maintain.
“If the ACV 1.1 does not demonstrate the expected amphibious capabilities, then more development than currently anticipated may be required for ACV 1.2 to achieve ship-to-shore amphibious capability and greater effort may be needed to retrofit ACV 1.1 vehicles to achieve the same capabilities,” the report said.
Lockheed Martin's Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES) is preparing to enter the third phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) Transformer (TX) vehicle development programme next year. Three months of test flights are scheduled to begin in June 2016, Lockheed Martin officials said during a 13 October interview at the Association of the US Army's (AUSA's) annual conference in Washington, DC.
Concerns about increased risk of injury to F-35 pilots during low-speed ejections have prompted the US military services to temporarily restrict pilots who weigh less than 136 pounds from flying the aircraft, Defense News has learned.
During August tests of the ejection seat, built by Martin-Baker, testers discovered an increased risk of neck injury when a lightweight pilot is flying at slower speeds. Until the problem is fixed, the services decided to restrict pilots weighing under 136 pounds from operating the plane, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, F-35 integration office director, told Defense News in a Tuesday interview.
“The bottom line is, they have to get into the realm where the seat allows that weight of a pilot less than 136 pounds [to] safely eject out of the airplane,” Harrigian said. “They found some areas that particularly at slower speeds they were concerned about, so that drove the restriction that we have right now.”
At least one F-35 pilot is affected by the weight restriction, according to Joint Program Office spokesman Joe DellaVedova, who added that the rule was announced Aug. 27. The issue does not affect the first and only female F-35 pilot, Lt. Col. Christina Mau, 33rd Operations Group deputy commander, he noted.
The U.S. Marine Corps will deploy its Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II strike fighters on combat sorties from Britain’s new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, a senior U.K. Royal Navy officer has confirmed.
Rear Adm. Keith Blount, who is responsible for delivering the two 65,000 ton ships, said that using Marine aircraft and pilots to bolster the U.K.’s nascent carrier strike capability would be a natural extension of coalition doctrine.
“We are forever operating with allies and within coalitions. It’s the way wars are fought”, the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Aviation, Amphibious Capability and Carriers) and Rear Adm. Fleet Air Arm told an audience at the DSEI defence exhibition in London on Wednesday.
“In order to get the best out of [the U.K. carrier program] we have to be able to situate it in a coalition context. That could mean that we operate with an American ship as one of the protecting escorts”, Blount said.
“But … given the fact that the U.S. Marine Corps are buying and will operate the same type of aircraft as we are buying and operating, it would make no sense whatsoever if we were to close down the opportunity and potential of the U.S. Marine Corps working from this flight deck.
“So yes, I expect the U.S. Marine Corps to operate and work from the deck of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier. We are going to get the most bang for the buck we can for the U.K. taxpayer, and that’s one of the ways in which we’ll achieve it.”
Think of it as Google Glass goes to war — only less nerd and more Marine. Budget cuts and readiness shortfalls have the US military looking at virtual reality as a partial replacement for expensive field exercises. But VR has real limits. So this month, young Marines at the Infantry Officer Course in Quantico tested a technology to get the best of both worlds: augmented reality.
While virtual reality puts the user in a completely computer-generated environment, augmented reality superimposes computer-generated elements — say, a tank, a helicopter, or a building — on the real world. That lets troops go through the actual, physical motions of the skill they’re training for and build muscle memory, without restricting the targets and support units.
Google Glass and football broadcasts already use a limited form of augmented reality, superimposing static elements like a yellow first-down line on the footage of the actual game. Military training requirements are much more complex. Ground combat is a team sport, so different users in different places need to see the same computer-generated component — and the perspective has to change realistically as the users move around. The computer-generated components themselves need to move and interact, for example by blowing up.
The Army awarded Oshkosh Defense a $6.75 billion contract for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) today, covering 17,000 vehicles for the Army and for the Marine Corps.
AM General, Lockheed Martin and Oshkosh have been competing for the contract for the largest recent ground vehicle program, which replaces the aging Humvee. The three were picked in 2012 to build prototypes for testing, and in February they submitted their bids for the low-rate initial production contract.
“Procurement of 5,500 USMC vehicles are front-loaded into the JLTV production plan. Initial USMC operating capability is expected in Fiscal Year 2018 with fielding to Marine Corps complete in FY2022,” read a statement from the U.S. Army.
“The Army anticipates having its first unit equipped in FY2018. Army procurement will last until approximately 2040 and replace a significant portion of the Army’s legacy light tactical vehicle fleet with 49,099 new vehicles.”
The Army anticipates having its first unit equipped in FY2018. Army procurement will last until approximately 2040 and replace a significant portion of the Army’s legacy light tactical vehicle fleet with 49,099 new vehicles.
During three years of low-rate initial production, Oshkosh Defense will build approximately 17,000 JLTVs for the Army and Marine Corps before moving into five years of full-rate production, according to a March Congressional Research Service report on the program.
