War, the military, COIN and stuff

Border Competition

We’ve been waiting since October for Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano to make a decision on the fate of SBInet, the Boeing-designed suite of cameras, ground sensors and radar systems that provide real-time, streaming intel to American border patrol officers standing watch over the U.S./Mexican border.

The program has cost $1.2 billion since 2006—with $800 million of that going to SBInet technologies, and the rest to road grading and fencing along the border—with only 53 mi. of the Arizona border having been covered by the gear. This led Napolitano to order a freeze on the program pending a top-to-bottom review in February, with orders for Customs and Border Protection to report back to her in October with their assessment of where the program stands, and where it can feasibly go in the near term.

While the October deadline was met, we still don’t know what the secretary’s decision is.

With many observers betting that the SBInet program won’t survive—despite the fact that agents in the field love the gear, as I reported in the November DTI—competitors are starting to enter the arena to fill the gaps in border security.

One contender is Raytheon’s Clear View, which a Raytheon representative says is essentially “a command and control system that manages situational awareness.” Designed as a modular system that can “plug and play” with a variety of other data systems, Clear View allows cameras and sensors to track moving objects automatically while storing the information for later use, allowing the operator to perform other tasks and analyze later, if needed.

Read the rest at ARES.....

Tough Cuts: Marines Have Choices to Make

In the December issue of DTI, Kimberly Johnson, Mike Fabey and I have a story about some of the USMC's big ticket programs, and the challenges they'll face in staying afloat in the upcoming budget squeeze:

Many in and out of the Pentagon thought the EFV was on its way to the junk heap by mid-2010. Gates had the program in his sights and no one was sure what kind of support Amos would lend. Like other programs that have been decades in development, the EFV became a target for defense industry reformers who questioned the relevance of equipment they say is more suited to warfare from another era.

For example, it is designed to carry a large enough gun to engage hostile armored vehicles but not—in its basic form—to withstand large mines or improvised explosive devices.

The kind of amphibious assault landings for which the EFV was initially designed no longer make sense, critics added. But Amos presents a new idea of what constitutes an amphibious landing. In his first planning guidance, released in October, he cites global disasters in Haiti and Pakistan that required the deployment of 5,000 Marines from seven amphibious ships. Amos also made clear in his guidance that he was for anything that bolstered the Marines’ expeditionary capabilities.

“The Marine Corps is America’s expeditionary force in readiness,” he wrote in the guidance, which mentions “expeditionary” 15 times. “To a Marine, the term ‘expeditionary’ is more than a slogan; it is our state of mind. It drives the way we organize our forces, how we train and what kind of equipment we buy.” The defining expeditionary tool now is the EFV.

Read the whole thing here.

Unmanned, Underground, Uncovered

One of the things that the Wikileaks diplomatic cables open up to view is the complicated and shadowy world of international arms transfers--how one sale might lead to another, and then another to an unfriendly power, or how two companies from different countries  might actually provide banned items to a third party. It's hardly shocking that these things happen, but it's facinating to see how they're handled quietly though some diplomatic arm-twisting.

One State Dept. cable from March 24, 2009 titled “SHIPMENT OF UAVS FROM IRAN TO VENEZUELA” shows how tight of a lid U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to keep on the export of arms to and from nations it considers unfriendly. The report states that

Venezuelan officials expected to receive a shipment of UNMANNED aerial vehicles (UAV) and related material from Iran, via Turkey, by May 2009. As of early March, Venezuelan officials believed that the equipment would be repackaged and labeled as electronic equipment, then transported overland from Iran to Turkey. Once in Turkey, the equipment would be loaded onto a maritime vessel for continued shipment to Venezuela. The U.S. believes this shipment constitutes arms and related materiel, which Iran is prohibited from transferring pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1747, paragraph 5.

In January 2009, acting on another tip from U.S. officials, the Turkish government stopped an Iranian attempt to ship drums of nitrate and sulphite chemicals and dismantled laboratory instruments to Venezuela, by shipping them through Turkey.

Read the rest at ARES...

Never Mind What's Been Selling, It's What You're Buying

Looking down the list of the names of the top five nations who make up the biggest international suppliers of conventional weapons, it reads pretty much just how you think it might. Over the past half-decade, the United States, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom have shipped the most weapons overseas, with the U.S. and Russia making up over half of the total, exporting 30 percent and 23 percent of all arms, respectively.

Of that total, combat aircraft accounted for a full 48 percent of all U.S. weapons exports, and 27 percent of the total exported by all countries overall—a number that rises to 33 percent when related weapons and components are factored in according to a new report released by SIPRI, a Swedish think tank that focuses on arms control and global conflict.

The author of the report, Siemon T. Wezeman, warns that unlike other conventional weapons, combat aircraft “are among the weapons with the greatest potential to cause instability” due to their ability to strike fast, and from long distances. Because such planes are so expensive to both purchase and maintain, their existence in any one country’s arsenal “may shape the direction of defence policy and doctrine for many years,” he adds. The numbers of aircraft that the United States and Russia have exported over the past five years aren’t insignificant, with the U.S. having shipped 331 new F-16C, F/A-18E and F-15E aircraft, while Russia has sent 215 Su-25, Su-27, Su-30 and MiG-29 aircraft overseas.

As it stands today, eleven different countries manufacture combat aircraft: China, France, India, Japan, Russia, Sweden; while Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK together produce the Eurofighter Typhoon, of which only 24 aircraft have been sold to other countries since 2005. China has manufactured and shipped “about” 41 F-7 and JF-17 aircraft, and “while it has a substantial order for the JF-17 from Pakistan (reported as 50–150 units), there is no great prospect of large orders from other countries and production of the J-10 and other combat aircraft for national use will continue to outnumber exports,” Wezeman reports.

Please read the rest at ARES...

Linked In: New Ad Hoc Networks In the Works

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the Pentagon’s experimental research and development arm that thinks up new ideas and then pushes them as far out on a limb as they can – is trying to come up with a new, relatively inexpensive networked radio system that can keep soldiers in austere environments connected. And according to one engineer working on the project, they’re pretty close to wrapping it up.

Called the Wireless Network after Next (WNaN), the idea is to take inexpensive, upgradable commercial off the shelf radio components, harden them for military use, and issue each soldier his own radio.

DARPA has tapped Raytheon’s BBN Technologies to work on the network and Cobham to work on the radios. Jeff Feinberg of Raytheon’s BBN Technologies explains that the goal of the program is to produce radios that cost about $500 each, and can be easily swapped out every few years as technologies improve. He compared it to how civilians treat their cell phones. “Your phone is just an access device,” he explains, “all the smarts are in the network itself, and they get you to throw your phone away every two years and get a new phone that can get more use out of the network. That’s really where this program is trying to head—to make that radio an access device and drive all the high level performance to the network so the Army doesn’t have to reinvent and reinvest in a lot of new hardware every year.” Essentially, the Army will buy the network once, while tossing the inexpensive radios out every few years for better models that can exploit more of the network.

Readthe rest at ARES...

Navy Facing "a new fiscal reality"

In the wake of Secretary of Defense Gates calling for Pentagon bean counters to find $100 billion in savings over the next five years, the services are scrambling to cut costs where they can. The process won’t be easy says Adm. Jonathan Greenert, vice chief of Naval Operations, who told the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday that upcoming budgets are going to introduce “a new fiscal reality for most of our [officers] and most of our senior executive service. They’ve gone fifteen years on supplemental appropriations. We’ve been on them since at least ’95…and we have really not had a lot of folks really need to be accountable for the fiscal performance out there because there’s always been a supplemental around the corner.”

Greenert didn’t single out any underperforming programs by name, but stressed that the Navy was going to have little patience for programs that are “just not going to get there.” He did say that the service sees multiyear procurement deals for programs as one of many ways to reduce costs, along with a greater focus on fixed-price contracts....

Read the rest over at ARES...

Waiting for the Ground Combat Vehicle

On August 26, the Army temporarily put the brakes on its $40 billion Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program, which by 2017 will start churning out a planned 1,450 infantry vehicles big enough to fit nine soldiers, tough enough to survive IED and RPG attacks, and maneuverable enough to fight in tight urban centers or in austere terrain. The vehicle fills the gap left by last year’s cancellation of the Manned Ground Vehicle portion of the Future Combat Systems program.

The Army said at the time that the program would probably be put on hold for about six months before it award the development phase contracts, but the overall schedule for the program would remain unchanged, with plans calling for the first production vehicle to be delivered seven years after the initial contract award. The Army also said that it expected to issue a new Request for Proposal in about 60 days, which means that we should expect that to drop any day now.

The fact of the suspended RFP made trying to report the GCV story at this year’s AUSA convention tough, to say the least. All three contractors heading up teams to win the contract— BAE; General Dynamics; and SAIC—were at the show, but new information was hard to come by. Well, that’s not exactly true. In one case information was simply not available. SAIC smiled politely and took my card both times I stopped by, with a promise to get back to me.

I’m still waiting for the call.

Still, I feel comfortable reporting—going solely by having seen the big “GCV” banner hanging at their booth—that the company is indeed still interested in submitting a proposal. SAIC actually announced back in May that it was submitting a modified Puma Infantry Fighting Vehicle, originally built for the German army by Rheinmetall, to the GCV competition. This means that we can be pretty certain about at least one thing: the vehicle will be tracked.........

Read the rest at ARES....