The Boeing Company has been awarded an estimated $90 million indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract for the development and delivery of an experimental laser pod. The contractor will provide research and development of high energy laser technologies through the next five years.
The Air Force moved ahead with two critical nuclear modernization programs on Friday, releasing requests for proposals for its intercontinental ballistic missile replacement and a nuclear cruise missile.
The Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), which replaces the 1960s-era Minutemen III ICBM, and the Long Range Standoff (LRSO) weapon, which will supersede the AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missile, are seen by the service as pivotal for maintaining the nuclear triad and an effective strategic deterrent.
However, both programs have come under fire by lawmakers and analysts who assert that the the weapons are too costly, duplicative or even that they could add to global instability.
The US Air Force is considering two new procurements to boost their close air support mission, including an off-the-shelf option for permissive environments and a cheap, clean sheet design aircraft that would replace the Fairchild Dornier A-10.
In a recent briefing, air force officials laid out their plan for the light-attack OA-X and the A-X2, a short-term replacement for the A-10. The service is looking at an initial order of about 20 aircraft for the OA-X mission a early as next year, with serious procurement launching in Fiscal 2018, Dan Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, tells FlightGlobal. To meet that rapid need, the service is examining two fully developed aircraft, Beechcraft’s AT-6 and Embraer’s A-29 Super Tucano, and are planning a “fly off” for this fall.
The air force has excluded Textron AirLand’s Scorpion, a dual light attack fighter and trainer aircraft still in its development phase, as an option for OA-X.
Last year, at the height of the F-35/A-10 close air support (CAS) debate, Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Mark A. Welsh III stated that the Air Force averaged 20,000 CAS sorties a year in Afghanistan. But was it really CAS? Within the fighter/attack community, the narrative of seasoned aviators who’ve “been there, done that” tout that airpower did not really perform CAS at all. Instead, they argue it featured glimmers of CAS sprinkled on what was actually ground-directed dynamic targeting. Not only are they right, but the distinction is even more important, as it biases and bounds the air support dialogue of the A-10, its potential successors (A-X2 and/or OA-X), and even the F-35. Air support in Afghanistan worked, but it is a mistake to think it was all CAS.
The (eventual) retirement of the A-10 Warthog has been a challenging issue for the Air Force. The original plan to replace the A-10 entirely with F-35 has fallen by the wayside, buttressed by the reality that the extended combat deployments undergone by the fighter/attack force were never envisioned when the F-35 plan was hatched. Twenty-five years of continuous conflict, most of it irregular in nature, has highlighted the utility of a relatively slow, heavily armed multirole aircraft. Our operations over the past decades have been largely very similar to the kind of counterinsurgency demands that led to the requirement for a new attack aircraft (then called A-X) in 1966.
As the Air Force has moved toward the position that a replacement attack aircraft (A-X2 or OA-X) is necessary, one persistent issue continues to arise: What kind of aircraft might be able to do “high threat” CAS? In a presumed environment where the air defenses are too lethal for the A-10 to survive, wouldn’t the F-35 be a better alternative? The question itself is highlights a persistent trend in Air Force concept development — a mythical set of conditions that is highly unlikely, fundamentally not credible, based on a misunderstanding of the air threat, or, in this case, all three. There is no reasonable case to be made for an aircraft that can survive in a high-threat CAS environment, because there is no credible case to be made that any aircraft can survive in such an environment. It isn’t that there isn’t a need to apply airpower in such an environment. Rather, it is that having a need doesn’t equate with delivering a capability. The idea that the Air Force can deliver effective CAS in a highly contested environment is a myth, one that the Air Force would be well served to get rid of.
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.
Air Force Space Command has created a blueprint for fighting and winning wars in space, known by the innocuous title of the Space Enterprise Vision.
The existence of the plan is not classified but many of its working elements are.
The SEV is “an all-encompassing look at all the things we need to do to create more resilience in our space forces, enhance them, and respond to threats,” Air Force Space Command spokesman Col. John Dorrian says.
It includes current weapon systems and those planned for the near future, as well as changes to training and organization. It isn’t a direct result of the government-wide Space Portfolio Review, according to Dorrian, but it is “related.” A large part of the reason for that distinction, I think, is because the SPR dealt in great detail with US spy satellites, which Space Command does not control.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) brokered an agreement among Senators who have been at sharp odds over how to transition U.S. rocket launches away from reliance on Russian RD-180 engines to a new American-made engine. The Nelson amendment passed the Senate this morning by voice vote as part of the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA itself then passed the Senate by a vote of 85-13.
In brief, the compromise sets December 31, 2022 as the end date for use of the RD-180 by the United Launch Alliance (ULA) for Atlas V launches of national security satellites. It also limits to 18 the number of RD-180s that can be used between the date that the FY2017 NDAA is signed into law (enacted) and that end date.
The Air Force wants to replace the aging but beloved A-10 “Warthog” with a robotic “flying coke machine” that loiters over the battlefield, dispensing firepower at the touch of a button, the outgoing Chief of Staff said this morning. (More on that concept below). Gen. Mark Welsh also wants a “sixth-generation fighter” that can defeat the most advanced air defenses. But he can’t afford either.
As the service downsizes, both dollars and skilled people are in too short supply, Welsh said. The force has its hands full fielding the new “fifth generation” F-35A Joint Strike Fighter and keeping all its aging fourth-generation (and older) planes in the air.
A US Air Force (USAF) programme to develop and field a new nuclear-capable Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) cruise missile has undergone a Pentagon review and appears poised to proceed to development soon.
Pentagon acquisition executive Frank Kendall "is looking at what the acquisition strategy is, and is having a discussion right now - is there a cheaper way to do it?" Lieutenant General Jack Weinstein, USAF deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, told a handful of reporters during a recent meeting. He said the remaining discussions are meant to ensure the acquisition strategy is as cost-effective as possible and "there was no question during the last meeting that we're going to do an LRSO".
The Air Force plans to arm its fleet of drones and fighter jets with high-tech laser weapons able to incinerate enemy targets from the sky, service officials said.
Aircraft-launched laser weapons could eventually be engineered for a wide range of potential uses, including air-to-air combat, close air support, counter-UAS(drone), counter-boat, ground attack and even missile defense, officials said.
Lasers use intense heat and light energy to precisely incinerate targets without causing a large explosion – and they operate at very high speeds, giving them a near instantaneous ability to destroy fast-moving targets and defend against incoming enemy attacks, Air Force Chief Scientist Dr. Greg Zacharias told Scout Warrior in an interview.
“The promise of directed energy is that electricity is cheap. Plus, you get the speed of light working for you so incoming missiles are easier to shoot at,” Zacharias said.
Air Force Research Laboratory officials have said they plan to have a program of record for air-fired laser weapons in place by 2023.
Ground testing of a laser weapon called the High Energy Laser, or HEL, was slated to take place last year at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., service officials said. The High Energy Laser test is being conducted by the Air Force Directed Energy Directorate, Kirtland AFB, New Mexico.
The first airborne tests are expected to take place by 2021, Air Force officials have said.
The head of Air Force Space Command said U.S. launch companies should be able to buy rocket motors from decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles to power commercial launches, but at a price that would not put the rest of the commercial small launch industry at a disadvantage.
Current U.S. policy says that launch companies cannot use the rocket motors to launch commercial satellites and can only use them for national security missions in certain instances.
“From a taxpayer perspective, wouldn’t it be better to get some value out of them rather than destroy it?” Gen. John Hyten, the head of Air Force Space Command, said during a press briefing April 14 at the 32nd Space Symposium here. “From an Air Force perspective, there’s a sweet spot there because those ICBMs actually have value.”
The United States plans to maintain a small but potent aviation force in the Philippines to balance against Chinese actions in the South China Sea.
Secretary of defense Ashton Carter said US allies in the region have asked the United States to intervene in the multi-country territorial dispute over islands in the South China Sea, particularly as China has been reclaiming land and conducting what Carter called a "militarisation in the South China Sea".
The United States now appears to be stepping up its military actions there as well.
The Air Force is moving forward with a key step in developing a dedicated close-air support plane to replace the A-10 Warthog, a top general said Thursday.
“My requirements guys are in the process of building a draft requirements document for a follow-on CAS airplane,” Lt. Gen. Mike Holmes, the deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements, said. “It’s interesting work that at some point we’ll be able to talk with you a little bit more.”
Defining the requirement is the first concrete step toward developing potentially developing a replacement A-10 for the close-air support mission, often dubbed A-X. The Air Force has been studying the idea of a procuring single-role A-X for at least a year now, hosting a joint-service summit in March, 2015, to work out options for the close-air support, or CAS, mission.
US defence prime contractors vying for the contract to build the nuclear-capable Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) missile that will replace the US Air Force's (USAF's) AGM-86 Air-Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) expect the service to issue a final request for proposal (RfP) in May or June, a Lockheed Martin official said on 15 March.
"We've already had two or three [draft RfPs] and expect a final [one] in May or June and an award next year," Frank St John, vice-president of Lockheed Martin's Tactical Missiles business, told IHS Jane's during a briefing at a company-sponsored media day.
Four prime contractors - Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin - are bidding for two Technical Maturation Risk Reduction contracts, according to St John.
He added that he expects each company to offer a unique technology solution. "Getting four prime contractors to work on something common is challenging, so I wouldn't be surprised if people went in different directions in the end," he said.
Lockheed Martin will draw heavily on lessons from its AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Stand-off Missile (JASSM) for its LRSO offering, he noted. However, the weapon will be an entirely new design not based on any legacy system.
"The requirements are such that nothing we have would fit that bill," St John said. "But I will say that a lot of the lessons that we've learned over the years on JASSM - in terms of survivability, in terms of aircraft integration, mission planning, and the like - are all things that are brought to bear in that competition."
Lockheed Martin’s unmanned SR-72 aircraft concept has surfaced again with renewed vigour, with company leadership now pushing a reusable, air-breathing hypersonic vehicle as an “affordable” way to validate a new propulsion concept for achieving speeds within the atmosphere between Mach 6.0 to Mach 20.
Speaking at a Lockheed media event in Washington DC on 15 March, company chief executive Marillyn Hewson confirmed that the company is building on “several breakthroughs” made during the short-lived HTV-3X Blackswift hypersonic testbed, which was de-funded by Congress in fiscal year 2009, to develop “a controllable, low-drag aerodynamic configuration capable of stable operation from takeoff to subsonic, transonic, supersonic and hypersonic to Mach 6”.
Hewson, while displaying an artist’s rendering of the SR-72, said it would cost “less than $1 billion” to develop and fly a demonstrator aircraft the size of an F-22 Raptor.
Devised by Lockheed’s Skunk Works division, SR-72 employs a turbine-based combined cycle propulsion system to get above "Mach 1.5 to 2.0," at which point it would begin converting to a supersonic combustion ramjet for speeds beyond Mach 6.
That’s according to Skunk Works head Rob Weiss, who confirmed that it would be an unmanned vehicle, at least at first. Hewson says the company’s long-term ambition is to “enable hypersonic passenger flights and easier access to space”.
The company’s militarised spinoffs could be an air-breathing, hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft, or perhaps even new fighters and bombers further along.
[...]
Lockheed revealed its next-generation version of the famed SR-71 Blackbird, the SR-72, in 2013 and has said it would hope to introduce a reusable hypersonic aircraft in the mid-2020s or so. The challenge is transitioning through Mach 3.0 – since modern turbojet engines are only capable of powering an aircraft to Mach 2.2, whereas typical ramjets don’t work below Mach 4.0.
The Pentagon’s emerging “Arsenal Plane” or “flying bomb truck” is likely to be a modified, high-tech adaptation of the iconic B-52 bomber designed to fire air-to-air weapons, release swarms of mini-drones and provide additional fire-power to 5th generation stealth fighters such as the F-35 and F-22, Pentagon officials and analysts said.
Using a B-52, which is already being modernized with new radios and an expanded internal weapons bay, would provide an existing “militarized” platform already engineered with electronic warfare ability and countermeasures designed to thwart enemy air defenses.
“You are using a jet that already has a military capability. The B-52 is a military asset, whereas all the alternatives would have to be created. It has already been weaponized and has less of a radar cross-section compared to a large Air Force cargo plane. It is not a penetrating bomber, but it does have some kind of jamming and countermeasures meant to cope with enemy air defenses. It is wired for a combat mission,” said Richard Aboulafia, Vice President of analysis at the Teal Group, a Virginia-based consultancy.
Flying as a large, non-stealthy bomber airplane, a B-52 would still present a large target to potential adversaries; however, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said part of the rationale for the “Arsenal Plane” would be to work closely with stealthy fighter jets such as an F-22 and F-35, with increased networking technology designed to increase their firepower and weapons load.
Such a scenario would likely rely upon now-in-development manned-unmanned teaming wherein emerging algorithms and computer technology enable fighter jets to control the sensor payload and weapons capability of nearby drones from the cockpit of the aircraft. This would enable Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance assets to more quickly relay strategic or targeting information between fighter jets, drones and “Arsenal Planes.”
The US Air Force has begun studying future close air support (CAS) aircraft to succeed the Fairchild Republic A-10 as the Pentagon evaluates the weaponry it needs for “prolonged operations” of one year or more.
The flying branch is looking at tactical air support platform alternatives for low-intensity “permissive conflict” like counterterrorism and regional stability operations, similar to the types of missions being conducted Iraq and Afghanistan today, where air superiority has been achieved and coalition aircraft can roam relatively freely in support of ground troops.
USAF officials say a portion of a "combat air force study” is dedicated to considering alternative CAS aircraft: everything from the Beechcraft AT-6 Wolverine, Sierra Nevada/Embraer A-29 Super Tucano, and the Textron AirLand Scorpion on the “low end” of the capability spectrum to more sophisticated clean-sheet attack aircraft or AT-X derivatives of the planned T-X next-generation trainer.
The study comes as the air force “re-phases” its retirement of the hardy A-10 "Warthog" that currently serves in the role. It has pushed back the fleet’s divestiture from this fiscal year to “between 2018 and 2022” at cost imposition of $3.4 billion.
Service officials admit that despite being an ideal close air support platform in high-end conflict with Russia, the long-delayed A-10 replacement, the Lockheed Martin F-35, will be too expensive to operate in the Warthog’s day-to-day role.
The US Air Force has no interest in restarting production of the Lockheed Martin F-22, partly because it's too expensive and because it wants to move quickly on a next-generation fighter.
The service’s deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements said as much during a congressional hearing on 8 March, suggesting that fighter jet manufacturers like Boeing, Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin may decide to offer modifications to existing technologies and platforms in the next F-X competition.
“Because we want to do it faster and don’t want to do another 20-year development programme for a whole host of reasons, we’ll try and go with technology that are at a high readiness level now with manufacturing capabilities that are at a high readiness level now,” Lt Gen James Holmes tells a Senate Armed Services subcommittee panel in response to questions about restarting F-22 production.
“I think it’s completely possible as we get the requirements that there may be competitors that bid on modification of an existing technology or platform like the F-22 and the F-35.”
Long before hitching a ride to the moon aboard Apollo 11, then US Air Force test pilot Neil Armstrong was zipping around in a rocket-powered North American X-15, which to this day remains the fastest manned, winged aircraft ever built. That flight record of Mach 6.72 or 7,274km/h was set by pilot William “Pete” Knight in 1967.
Now, some 59 years later, America still hasn’t fully realised the promise that experimental flight vehicle held for military operations.
Despite many breakthroughs in fields of hypersonic propulsion and high-temperature materials, the air force doesn’t imagine an affordable and operationally relevant surveillance and strike aircraft coming online until the late 2030s.
The storied Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird flew at Mach 3.2, or three times the speed of sound, which is now short of what the air force says it needs to outpace modern interceptors.
Instead, the air branch is pushing hypersonic missiles, powered by the type of air-breathing scramjet engine that propelled the and rocket-boosted Boeing X-51 WaveRider in 2013. Engineless boost-glide hypersonic weapon concepts are also being considered.
The US Air Force has offered the first artist’s impression of the Pentagon’s “arsenal plane” concept in a video presented by service secretary Deborah Lee James at an Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida.
Since no aircraft has been announced, air force graphic artists appear to have blended the eight-engine Boeing B-52 bomber with the body of a Lockheed Martin C-130 turboprop. The aircraft is seen in the video launching a barrage of networked Raytheon Small Diameter Bomb II glide bombs at mobile enemy radar warning and air defence targets.
The cargo-bomber airplane concept appears to be unmanned since it doesn’t have a cockpit window, but does have a side cargo bay door. It’s not known if the arsenal plane – based on an old, repurposed aircraft – will carry weapon specialists, similar to current AC-130 gunships.
