War, the military, COIN and stuff

Is Future Combat Systems Actually Making Progress?

At the Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment (JEFX) in this past April, run by the Air Force Global Cyberspace Integration Center, some critical technologies for the Army’s Future Combat Systems program were put to the test. According to Army FCS spokesman Paul Mehney, the initial tests—which sought to put FCS’s networking technologies through their paces, proved successful overall.

“Our role was to provide the ground maneuver network portion,” Mehney says, noting that the Army was able to take its “Build 1” software—which is part of the communications software that will allow FCS to communicate across the network—and use it to move images and data from sensors, whether they were unmanned aerial vehicles or ground sensors, to Air Force assets, which then allowed the Air Force to conduct fire missions based on near real-time intelligence from Unattended Ground Sensors operated by the Army. 

(The Build 1 software is scheduled to go live during FCS’s Spinout 1 in the 2011 time frame.)

While the Army and Air Force can obviously already communicate with one another, historically there has been no real way to move images over the network between the two services, or if it is done in special circumstances it’s not necessarily in real time. But the tests in April allowed the Army’s network and combat developers to take a look at how the FCS network can be used in future applications where there’s a call for a joint fire mission. According to Mehney, “it also allowed our combat developers and engineers to take a look at that Build 1 network and limited Build 2 which is ongoing right now, to take lessons learned at JEFX to say “OK, how can we better manipulate development of the network for joint missions?””

Read the rest at Defense Technology International ...

Canada going for it....

Yesterday, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that he’s launching a plan to more than double his country’s defense budget over the next two decades—to about C$30 billion ($30 billion) a year. As part of this, The Great White North will also increase its overall troop numbers to from 65,000 to 70,000 regular soldiers and go from 24,000 to 30,000 reservists, for an increase of 11,000 troops overall.

Much of this money will go toward replacing the country’s aging fleets of vehicles, ships and fighters:

Six of the military's core fleets, including destroyers, frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, fixed-wing and rescue aircraft, fighter aircraft and land combat vehicles, will need to be replaced over the next 20 years, Harper said. That's in addition to new and upgraded equipment purchases already announced, according to the prime minister.

Canada plans to acquire 65 fighter jets to replace its aging fleet of CF-18 planes, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said at the same press conference, according to Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for Harper.

The Vancouver Sun reports that “part of the plan will be the immediate allocation of money to buy six medium-lift helicopters to support troops in Afghanistan. The government is also purchasing 100 Leopard tanks, armoured vehicles and devices to protect troops from roadside bombs.”

Read the rest at Defense Technology International

New one

Posted over at ARES: JSF, Gripen and the PR Battle .

Working on leaving the living

Over at Defense Technology International's ARES blog, I've got a post  about the failures of our national missile defense (aka "Star Wars") program...

Splitting the Difference

For all of the squabbling between the Army and the Air Force over who should own—and thereby run—the military’s growing fleet of unmanned aerial assets, it looks like the Army is taking a page out of the Air Force’s playbook in Iraq and Afghanistan in the way it deploys its UAVs. According to the Air Force Times,

An Air Force team is rigging an Army RQ-7 Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle so it can be flown by operators who are thousands of miles from the aircraft itself, the same way the Air Force operates its Predator UAVs. 

This is a pretty big departure for the Army, which normally fields its UAVs as battalion-level assets that move in and out of theater with the units to which they’re assigned. Having the “pilots” based stateside will allow the Army to leave its UAVs in theater permanently, while allowing the Army to deploy fewer soldiers, since the operators can stay stateside, just like the Air Force does.

Read the rest at Defense Technology International's ARES blog.

Canadian tanks go 5-hole

So you think that heavy tanks—entire squadrons of heavy tanks—have no place in a counterinsurgency fight? You better take it up with Major Trevor Cadieu of Lord Strathcona’s Horse, the storied Canadian armored regiment.

Recently returned from his second tour in Afghanistan, Maj. Cadieu has taken to the pages (PDF!) of The Canadian Army Journal to argue that tanks are an integral part of the fight in Afghanistan. In December 2006, the Canadians deployed a squadron of Leopard C2 tanks armed with 105-mm L7A3 guns, which come with computerized fire control systems, thermal imaging, and a laser range-finder. The Major writes that “after deploying forward…the tank squadron and armoured engineers featured prominently in all major combat operations undertaken by the Canadian BG…Since May 2007, the tank squadron has fought almost constantly alongside Canadian and Afghan infantry in close combat with the Taliban.”

Maj. Cadieu quotes Lieutenant-Colonel Omer Lavoie, commanding officer of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group as saying, “If you’d asked me five months ago, ‘do you need tanks to fight insurgents?’ I would have said, ‘No, you’re nuts.’” But “Because [the Taliban] are acting conventionally, then conventional assets like tanks, armoured engineering vehicles, and armoured bridge-laying vehicles certainly have their place here.”

One of the big knocks against using tanks and heavy artillery in a COIN fight is that both weapons systems have the very real potential of killing innocent civilians and causing collateral damage. In Maj. Cadieu’s estimation, this isn’t the issue that many make it out to be. Since commencing combat operations nine months ago, he writes, “Canadian tanks have killed dozens of insurgents in battles throughout Kandahar Province, yet  there has been no  suggestion of civilian deaths attributed to tank fire during this entire period."

Read the rest at Defense Technology International's ARES blog.

The Dismemberment Plan

Even if the Pentagon isn’t tracking with any serious degree of specificity how much it will cost to rebuild the armed services after the bulk of combat troops are pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan; while at the same time funding new programs and transforming to the “modular Army” concept—which seeks to change the Army’s traditional division-based force structure to smaller brigade formations—you can count on the Government Accountability Office to step in to fill the gap.

In a new report , (PDF alert!) the GAO says that based on its own independent  analysis of Army cost estimates and cost data, it looks like though the price tag will for “equipping modular units, expanding the force, resetting equipment, and replacing prepositioned equipment sets will be at least $190 billion dollars from fiscal years 2004-2013.”

In case you missed it, that doesn’t include ongoing combat/stabilization missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total breaks down something like this...

Read the rest at Defense Technology International 's  ARES blog. 

99 Problems...

“It’s about the budget,” Army Aviation Task Force director Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Mundt told the audience during the “Future Developments Panel” at this week’s Army Aviation Association meeting when discussing aircraft development programs.

With two very expensive shooting wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s an obvious—and undeniable—tension in the military between funding troops in the field while still pouring money into research and development back home to ensure that new systems are developed and tested. And during the panel discussion between Maj. Gen. Virgil L. Packett, Maj. Gen. James R. Myles, Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Mundt, Col. Richard Stockhausen, DARPA’s Don Woodbury and PEO Aviation’s Paul Bogosian, this problem came up again and again. 

“How can you look at the future and the modernization of the force while you’re still trying to fight the war today?” Gen. Mundt asked, before answering his own question with, well, another question: “How can you not do that?” You’ve constantly got to be thinking about modernization.”

Read the rest at Defense Technology International's ARES blog.

FCS takes it on the chin

Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office uncorked its sixth annual "Assessments of Selected Weapons Programs"  (PDF!) report, which rates the progress and cost of various major weapons programs, and it isn’t pretty. The GAO found that of the 72 weapons programs it put under the microscope, “none of them had proceeded through system development meeting the best practices standards for mature technologies, stable design, or mature production processes by critical junctures of the program, each of which are essential for achieving planned cost, schedule, and performance outcomes.”

Ouch. 

In total, 95 weapons systems have exceeded their budgets by a whopping $295 billion, the report found, and are scheduled to be delivered an average of 21 months late, five months longer than in 2000. This comes despite the fact that the Pentagon has doubled the amount of cash it is spending on these new systems, jumping from $790 billion in 2000 to $1.6 trillion last year. What’s more, overall procurement costs came in 26 percent above original estimates.

And what, you ask, of everyone’s favorite “system of systems,” the Future Combat System? The GAO doesn’t pull any punches.

 

Read the rest at the ARES blog.

The Bridge

This past week,  I left my job as a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review to take a position as Senior Editor of Defense Technology International, the coolest defense mag in the biz. While I'll be cranking out longer pieces for the print magazine, I'll also post regularly at ARES, the magazine's awesome blog. If you haven't already done so, bookmark that  page right now. I'm going to keep at it on this blog, too, so don't abandon ship.

I finally blogged my my first post today on a look inside an American air strike inside Pakistani territory on March 12 that Long War Journal embedded reporter Phil Peterson witnessed from  inside Bagram Air Base’s Joint Operation Center's operation cell. Check it out.