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Virginia-class submarine USS Washington enters service
The US Navy has commissioned USS Washington (SSN 787) – its 14th Virginia-class submarine – in a ceremony on Saturday.

The commissioning ceremony took place on board Naval Station Norfolk
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After French now Spanish, few years ago the last retired and replaced by Typhoons

The American ESSD Draken buys Spanish F1 and raid the contract of the Air National Guard

Draken International signed an agreement with the Spanish Air Force on 8 September to purchase a score of Mirage F1 aircraft. If the French F1 had escaped (to the benefit of ATAC / Textron), those of the Spanish AA were transferred to him in a transaction whose details were not disclosed.

As of 1975, Spain had acquired 93 copies of the French plane that the Spanish pilots had nicknamed "La Abuela" (the grandmother). The last copies were withdrawn from active service on June 23, 2013.

Draken already has a respectable fleet (21 Aero Vodochody L-159E ALCA, 13 Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, 9 Aermacchi MB-339CB, 27 Mikoyan MIG-21BIS, 5 Aero L-39 Albatross, according to its website. ).

But in anticipation of future contracts in the United States and also in the United Kingdom, the company has started looking for combat aircraft. Cobham and Draken International joined forces in July to respond to the British call for tenders called ASDOT (Air Defense to Defense Operational Training). Read here.

In the USA, the company is already deploying 24 aircraft (13 Skyhawk and 11 L-159) to Nellis Air Base as part of an USAF Adversary Air (ADAIR) market.
In addition, it was learned on Monday night that the Air National Guard ADAIR contract had been awarded to Draken (see below):

"Draken International Inc., Lakeland, Florida, has been awarded a $ 38,000,000 firm-fixed-price contract for Air National Guard's Adversary Air Support outlets in order to assist Exercise Adversary Support. (W9133L-17-D-0003). "The National Guard Bureau is the contracting activity.

The call for tenders of August 4th for "adversary air support services" (solicitation No. W9133L-166R-0035) stipulated that the firm selected should be able to simultaneously align at least 6 aircraft simulating " non-Western threats in an air-to-air environment ".

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Lieutenant General
Registered Member
Homeported to Norfolk Submarine Squadron 12, 10 Virginia with Atlantic fleet
Colorado 788 very soon
Virginia-class submarine USS Washington enters service
The US Navy has commissioned USS Washington (SSN 787) – its 14th Virginia-class submarine – in a ceremony on Saturday.

The commissioning ceremony took place on board Naval Station Norfolk
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Navy to Commission Submarine Washington .jpg
 
for me close to impossible to understand LOL I mean the article
What just happened with Northrop and Marvel Comics?
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On Friday morning, Marvel Entertainment, the giant known for characters like Spider-Man, the Avengers and the X-Men, announced it would be partnering with defense giant Northrop Grumman.

The news, delivered in a cryptic tweet, promised more details would come at a 3 p.m. Saturday presentation at the New York Comic Con. But just after midnight on Saturday morning, Marvel announced the event was cancelled.

In a statement to
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, Marvel said “The activation with Northrop Grumman at New York Comic Con was meant to focus on aerospace technology and exploration in a positive way.


“However, as the spirit of that intent has not come across, we will not be proceeding with this partnership including this weekend’s event programming. Marvel and Northrop Grumman continue to be committed to elevating, and introducing, STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] to a broad audience.”

So ... what just happened?

It’s a strange story, one that is illustrative of how the defense industry is seen outside of its own bubble ― but also a warning of teaming with a partner from an industry you aren’t familiar with, as there were certain currents related to Marvel publishing that may have made this blowup predictable.

The event was going to unveil a new comic, commissioned by Marvel’s marketing arm, which would feature a team of Northrop Grumman-themed heroes, targeted at encouraging young people to go into STEM fields. It would also have kicked off a video series called “Real Science,” explaining the science behind the technologies used by various Marvel heroes.

But Marvel was flooded with responses to the tweeted announcement, the vast majority of them negative. Many comparisons were made between this event and the movie version of Iron Man, a billionaire CEO of a weapons company who, after seeing the effects his weapons have on innocents, turns his company away from developing weapons.

The Twitter comics community featured talk of an organized protest against “war profiteers” at the event, and there was speculation that some of the writers and artists associated with the company were opposed to teaming with the defense industry.

To those in the defense industry, these types of events are de rigueur. All major defense firms spend money to encourage STEM growth, and for the marketers at Northrop this likely seemed like a creative way to get that message across. Several Northrop employees online expressed bewilderment and frustration that what they thought was a cool way to reach young adults turned into such a disaster.

But the reality is that for many Americans, they hear the name Northrop Grumman and simply think of bombers and drones. While the company prides itself on high-tech innovations, it also drew in more than $20 billion in defense profits in fiscal year 2016, and for large numbers of Americans, defense contractors are simply war profiteers making a buck off of killing people abroad.

To be fair, there is some dissonance here. Marvel fans have no problem rooting on the X-Men, who famously fly around in a
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; one of the characters has a pet dragon literally named “
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.”

Iron Man may have renounced his defense industry profits, but he still flies around in an up-armored robotic suit and at one point served as U.S. secretary of defense. And anyone who read Marvel in the 90s, including comics written by Fabien Nicieza, who was
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, got used to seeing
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characters like Cable.

Still, the defense industry has had STEM-themed team-ups before without problems. Northrop’s mistake, in this case, may also have been one more of timing.

Introducing the concept at Comic Con, when the most enthusiastic (and, in many cases, reactive) of fans, probably wasn’t a great idea. It would have been easy to introduce the concept instead around a STEM celebration, at a major science event, or some other location where the audience would be more familiar with Northrop’s reputation as an advanced technology company, rather than a weapons merchant.

The company also picked an awkward time to team with Marvel in particular, as the entertainment giant’s comic arm is going through a period of intense fan and retailer angst, with sales dropping on even some of the company’s marquee books.

“Sales are down and they’re facing criticism from the right for what they believe is a liberal agenda, and from the left for a protracted storyline where Captain America was seemingly a Nazi sleeper agent,” explained Jesse Farrell, a retailer with the Somerville, Massachusetts- based Hub Comics.

On top of that, Marvel Entertainment, the parent company for the comic publishing arm, was already facing pushback for a decision to cancel a screening of its new Punisher TV show, in the wake of the Las Vegas shootings.

In other words, fans may have been poised to jump down Marvel’s throat for any reason, and the Northrop deal provided the proverbial spark.

Marvel maintains a special projects arm for corporate packages such as the one Northrop commissioned, and will likely have to return the money that the defense giant put forth. The fact Marvel changed course so quickly on a corporate partnership is notable to Farrell.

“Cynically, I think it means this licensing deal was relatively small scale. They wouldn’t have reverse had there been more money in it,” he added. “The backlash against Marvel’s planned project with Northrop Grumman was immediate and I have never seen them reverse themselves ― or do anything, for that matter―as fast as they just did.”

So are there lessons to be learned here? Probably ones about timing and remembering that the famous warning about the “military-industrial complex” still rings through the ages.

At the same time, the industry needs to not take the wrong lessons here and avoid doing public outreach in the future. If the defense industry wants to convince people it isn’t all evil, doing reach-out on STEM is an effort worthy of continuation.
 

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R.I.P. and my condolences to their families.:(


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Pentagon identifies fourth U.S. soldier slain in Niger ambush

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not sure what to say
The U.S. Navy will start losing its largest surface combatants in 2020
13 hours ago
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The U.S. Navy’s surface fleet will start losing some its biggest guns in 2020 at a two-per-year clip.

In 2020, the cruisers Mobile Bay and Bunker Hill will reach their service life of 35 years and are slated for decommissioning. But despite the age of the hulls, some observers are loathed to see the cruisers go, especially given that there is no immediate replacement for the 567-foot ship that bristles with 122 vertical launch missile tubes and two five-inch guns.

“I think the right idea is the put them in to a [service life extension program] and keep them in the fleet,” said Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and analyst with the Center for a New American Security. “It’s cheaper to do that than a new build.


“Furthermore you have 122 VLS tubes in there, and if you are replacing these with the [Arleigh Burke-class destroyers] you get a 25 percent decrease in the number of cells. We really need those tubes. We need the mass – we need the capacity.”

According to the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan, the Navy will continue to have between 98 and 100 large surface combatants in the fleet during the years the cruisers are decommissioning. The Navy is systematically putting its newest 11 cruisers in layup to modernize them and extend their service life into the late 2030s. But a decommissioning schedule obtained by Defense News shows the oldest 11 cruisers will be out of the fleet by the end of 2026.

The rest of the schedule is as follows:

2021: Antietam, Leyte Gulf

2022: San Jacinto, Lake Champlain

2023: None

2024: Philippine Sea, Princeton

2025: Normandy, Monterey

2026: Chancellorsville

Bryan McGrath, an analyst and consultant who runs the Ferrybridge Group, said decommissioning the cruisers would hurt the surface Navy and agreed that putting them in a SLEP is a better alternative.

“It is a sign of the Navy’s budget problem,” McGrath said. “In order to put forward a balanced program of modernization, maintenance, acquisition, personnel and everything else the Navy has to pay for: It’s not skin, it’s not fat, it’s not muscle, they’re cutting into bone now.

“The administration can talk out of one side of its mouth about the need for a 350-ship navy and then out of the other side they are talking about mortgaging current capacity to meet present needs. It’s sad, its irresponsible and it needs to stop.”

The cruisers, however, were only planned for 35 years and the ships in the fleet have been ridden hard for decades. The aluminum superstructure, for example, have had cracking issues that have been a constant issue for the fleet.

355 ships, missile tubes

What’s unclear is what affect decommissioning the oldest cruisers would have on the Navy’s stated, but unfunded, goal of 355 ships.

None of the Navy’s force structure assessments that get the fleet to 355 ships require that they keep the 11 oldest cruisers in the fleet past their service life date, per a source with close knowledge of the Navy’s shipbuilding program who spoke on background.

What is clear is that decommissioning cruisers has been politically tricky for the Navy for years.

In 2012 and in 2013, the Obama administration proposed decommissioning nine of the Navy’s cruisers as a cost-saving measure but was repeatedly blocked by Congress, led by then Virginia Republican Rep. Randy Forbes. But the cruisers the Navy was planning on decommissioning then had about a decade of service life left in them, and the cruisers now being planned for decommissioning are all up against their sell-by dates.

The Navy is currently executing what’s known as the 2-4-6 plan, a compromise hashed out between Congress and the Navy to keep at least 11 cruisers in the fleet to run shotgun on the air defense of the 11 carriers in the fleet into the 2040s.

Two-four-six calls for two ships at a time to be sidelined for no longer than four years and that no more than six ships will be in this inactive status at one time.

In a statement to Defense News, the Navy said the current decommissioning plan abides by the Congressionally mandated 2-4-6 plan and keeps the Navy within its budget.

“The Navy continues to execute the congressionally mandated ‘2-4-6’ cruiser modernization plan,” said Lt. Seth Clarke, a Navy spokesman. “The cruiser modernization plan provides the most effective balance of warfighting requirements, legislation and fiscal constraints.”

According to the schedule obtained by Defense News, the last cruiser, the Cape St. George, would leave the fleet in 2038, with 40 years in active service, accounting for the four-plus years she will have spend in what’s known has “phased modernization.”

As to the issue with reduced number of VLS tubes, a one-for-one swap of a cruiser with a new destroyer would reduce the Navy’s available VLS real estate by nearly 300 tubes. But what’s unclear is how, for example, the new Virginia Payload Module and a new guided-missile frigate program might offset the reduced number of cells currently being toted around by cruisers.

What is crystal clear is that there is no shortage of demand for the Navy’s VLS capability, especially as missions such as ballistic missile defense before increasingly important and put an ever-larger strain on the Navy’s surface ships.

The Navy currently has 34 ballistic missile defense capable ships, 32 if you subtract the two ships that are currently inoperable due to collisions over the summer. The Navy’s proposes to keep upgrading and extending the life the destroyers in its inventory to cover both its BMD missions, which can impact the Navy’s ability to use the ship in multiple roles because it has to stay in a certain location to ensure it can have a good shot at ballistic missile shot by North Korea or Iran.

Nowhere is the Navy proposing upgrading the oldest cruisers as a way of augmenting the BMD mission, however
 
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