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Navy tests new joint-air-to-ground missile on AH-1Z helicopter

Naval Air Station, Patuxent River, Md. – The Navy successfully completed its first
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flight test on the AH-1Z helicopter Dec.5 at Patuxent River.

During the flight, aircrew aboard the AH-1Z navigated the missile through various operational modes and exercised its active seeker to search and/or acquire targets, demonstrating its compatibility with the aircraft.

"Initial results from the flight indicate the missile performed as planned,” said Liam Cosgrove, JAGM flight test lead. “We will continue to conduct a series of tests to prepare for live fire testing of the JAGM off the AH-1Z scheduled for early this year.”

JAGM, a joint program with the Army, is a precision-guided munition for use against high value stationary, moving, and relocatable land and maritime targets. It utilizes a multi-mode seeker to provide targeting day or night in adverse weather, battlefield obscured conditions and against a variety of countermeasures.

“This missile will provide increased lethality and better targeting capabilities, beyond the Hellfire’s laser point designating capability that the AH-1Z currently has in theater today,” said
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, Direct and Time Sensitive Strike (PMA-242) program manager.

JAGM is managed by the Program Executive Office for Missiles and Space, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. It will initially be employed on the AH-64 Apache and Marine Corps’ AH-1Z helicopters and is compatible with any aircraft that can carry Hellfire missiles. The Army will complete a 48 shot test matrix by May 2018 on AH-64 Apache aircraft in support of Milestone C.

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Friday at 7:09 AM
there's an interesting paragraph inside
Navy’s Top Weapons Buyer Geurts Spells Out Acquisition Philosophy
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:

"Acquisitions are just part of the calculus when considering overall Navy costs. About 70 percent of program costs deal with the long-term sustainment of equipment, Geurts said. Evaluating how the Navy accounts for maintaining equipment after delivery, he said, will also drive program affordability by ensuring contracts handle sustainment costs."
somehow related is
Navy Acquisition Chief: ‘Reliably Deliver Capable Capacity’
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The Navy’s new acquisition chief aims to deliver systems to the fleet that are capable and affordable, delivered with increased agility.

Speaking Jan. 11 to reporters at the Surface Navy Association National Symposium, James F. Geurts, assistant secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition, listed his priorities as he settles into the job and absorbs the massive portfolio he has inherited. Geurts is a former Air Force colonel and acquisition chief at U.S. Special Operations Command, a job that required agile procurement to meet the needs of the special operations forces.

He said one priority is to “reliably deliver capable capacity … maximize the capability we have, whether new builds or extremely old builds.”

Another is to increase agility of procurement. Of the Special Operations Command procurement agility, Geurts described it as scalable to the Navy’s needs.

“What they [Special Operations Command] do well is speed of decision making,” he said. The Navy needed to “do the small things quickly and the longer things well.”

He said that even in large, longer programs, the Navy could build “agility cycles” within the progress of the program.

Geurts also pledged to drive a culture of affordability and address workforce concerns “that are going to allow us to do this for the foreseeable future.”

He noted that 70 percent of the cost of a program lies in the sustainment phase, saying that “making maximum use of what we have” is a priority.

He said that unmanned systems had a “huge future for the Navy” and that the future guided-missile frigate is “going to be critically important” to the Navy.
 
now noticed

"Vice Adm. David Johnson ... said, the pace of fielding new ships is accelerating, with 18 expected to be delivered and 10 commissioned this year."

inside
Ship Maintenance Improvements Mean Fewer ‘Lost Opportunity Days’
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Moderators:

I reported
#8959 timepass, Jan 7, 2018
for mocking the US President (later through Facebook contacted Jeff who didn't do anything, only God knows why),

then I reported what you apparently deleted in here, but is still in the UK Thread
#2721 timepass, Friday at 5:46 PM

now there's
#9005 timepass, Today at 7:00 PM
which obviously doesn't belong to
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

in a second I'll report
#9005 timepass, Today at 7:00 PM
too, but would you PLEASE talk to
timepass
before she floods Western military news threads with her anti-Western agenda
 
I'll try to carry on

now I read
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As the
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struggles to
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for
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, it’s adding a whole new type of training exercise called SWATT. Modeled on the Top Gun program for naval aviators — itself created to rebuild dogfighting skills after heavy losses in Vietnam — Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training involves mock sea battles of increasing complexity against other surface ships, submarines, and aircraft. It even includes instant replays to show skippers their mistakes, using temporarily installed data recorders on everything from weapons to sensors to how the crews stand watch.

“We’re already finding that the payback on this is huge,” said
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, director of the Naval
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(SWMDC),
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less than three years ago and not yet fully operational. Feedback both from alumni, like the
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and
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battle groups, and from
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overseas is “they were much better prepared” for both their final pre-deployment exercises and real-world deployments, Wade told reporters at the
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last week.

The Warfighting Development Center has also enhanced existing training exercises, for example when
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practice mock attacks on surface warships. “Up until two years ago, surface ships were kind of just targets (in submarine training). They told you to go drive from Point A and Point B,” Wade said. “The submarines were just crushing us.” With SWMDC’s help, however, surface officers have gone into that training better prepared, he said, forcing the submariners to sharpen their own tactics.

What SWATT Is (and Isn’t)

It’s important to note that SWMDC do not focus on the kinds of
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that were absent in this past summer’s at-sea
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. Those foundational skills are supposed to be covered in a warship’s “basic phase” train-up. What Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training does is add several extra weeks of intense training on how to fight the forces of a major nation-state, as opposed to bombing Islamic insurgents and chasing pirates, the primary enemies of the last 16 years.

Specifically, SWATT comes after individual ships go through their basic phase training but before the whole strike group assembles for its final exercise before deployment, called COMPTUEX (Composite Training Unit Exercise). Now, when naval aviators finish their equivalent of the basic phase, they have long gone on to
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, Nevada — home of the famous TOPGUN school — to train first as a squadron and then as an
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. Only then do the fliers come together with the ships for that final Composite Unit Training Exercise. But the ship crews haven’t had any equivalent to Fallon — until now.

“They’re doing some really significant advanced tactical training before COMPTUEX happens,” Wade said of aviators. “Well, SWOs (Surface Warfare Officers) aren’t doing any of that. “We developed this advanced tactical training to kind of be the SWO version of Fallon.”

Unlike aircraft, of course, ships can’t fly cross-country to a special training area, so Wade sends the trainers out to them. His Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center brings in top-performing junior officers from all over the surface navy and puts them through 13 to 19 weeks of intensive training, depending on their specialty:
  • The
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    course has been around the longest, predating the Warfighting Development Center itself, and lasts the longest, 19 weeks;
  • the combined
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    and
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    course takes 15 weeks; and
  • the newest program, the
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    course, currently takes 13 weeks but will soon expand to 15;
There’s no
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course yet, but there will once the Littoral Combat Ship’s Mine Counter-Measures (LCS MCM) module enters service.

The graduates are known as Warfare Tactics Instructors, WTIs, the same acronym as TOPGUN graduates. (That said, it’s a slightly different term: Fallon graduates “Weapons and Tactics Instructors”). The center has graduated about 150 WTIs of all three types since standing up, plus there are about 50 more WTIs who graduated from the pre-existing version of the air and missile defense course.

Warfare Tactics Instructors go back to regular naval units to act as in-house experts and help run SWATT. Typically, the WTIs will hold classes in port for five days. Then the ships deploy to sea for about two weeks of live exercises, starting with fairly basic scenarios — say, two ships vs. two — and building to include large numbers of surface vessels plus aircraft and either submarines (where available) or remotely-controlled underwater targets.

Instructors can adjust the program depending on what the crews involved do well and where they need help, and they provide detailed daily feedback.

“We’ve installed temporary data recording devices on our ships, (collecting) our sensor and weapons data and our performance data, actions of our watch standers, voice overlaid with the real truth,” Wade said. “What that allows us to is do the debriefs immediately,” just like at Fallon.

The data isn’t deleted when the training is over, though. Instead, after a SWATT exercise, the information collected is gone over by SMWDC instructors, other Navy training centers, and Navy
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to see if future SWATTs, training in general, or even equipment need to be changed.

“We’ve created this process called the DAWG, Data Analysis Working Group,” Wade said. “We sit down with the WTIs, with the technical community, with the training enterprise, and we say, hey are there systemic issues?

“(Do) we need to modernize particular weapons systems? It helps gives us data to drive
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. Are there TTP (Tactics, Training, & Procedures) or training issues we need to get after and inject in follow-on SWATTs or at the schoolhouse?” Wade said. “We are just at the beginning here, but we have uncovered so many issues.”
it's BreakingDefense
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Thursday at 7:33 AM
Friday at 10:07 AM
kinda quick update:

Does that mean things are headed for a shutdown January 19?
Not out of the realm of possibility.
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and one more quick update now:
"... to expect to vote on
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this week—the fourth since September. Lawmakers are still working out how to raise spending caps, avoid sequestration kicking in ..."
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Air Force Brat

Brigadier
Super Moderator
Thursday at 7:33 AM
and one more quick update now:
"... to expect to vote on
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this week—the fourth since September. Lawmakers are still working out how to raise spending caps, avoid sequestration kicking in ..."
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Lord I hope not, but the obstructionists and grand-standers in both parties love their microphones,, it will hurt the military and the Nation, but they really don't care???

in any regard, its sad that the American People seem to lack wisdom, and they all want "Santa Claus" to keep bringing them health-care, child care, and groceries... so our country is about equally divided between people with traditional conservative values or ideals, and those who expect big govt to "take care of everything??"
 
exactly one year ago (LOL)
Jan 17, 2017
Navy: Most Offensive, Defensive Upgrades Surface Force Will Be Fielded by 2023
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“If we have this missile out there and we can afford to do so, we will try to put it as many places as we can. Again, distributed lethality, the more shooters we have out there,” he said
he
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Rear Admiral Ronald A. Boxall
Director, Surface Warfare

hope you will have enough SPOTTERS, MID-COURSE CORRECTORS for your concept, then
did their in the meantime realize their 'distributed lethality' is a targeting problem, huh?
Surface Navy Working to Bring Firepower Over the Horizon Through Networking, F-35 Integration
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The surface Navy is looking to capitalize on recent successes increasing ships’ offensive range and lethality, with the next task being added sensing and targeting capabilities to support its new weaponry.

Rear Adm. Ronald Boxall, the Navy’s director of surface warfare (N96), said the Navy is looking for ways to do long-range intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (ISR-T) as a next step following recent advances in implementing the distributed lethality concept — where surface ships are better armed and conduct disaggregated operations to complicate the enemy’s targeting.

“We used to be able to say, ‘hey, we’d target out to the range of our helicopters,’” Boxall said at last week’s Surface Navy Association annual symposium.
“Now we’re looking, as our weapons’ range gets very long, the next order of effect is how do we target out to those very long ranges?”

Combinations of surface ships, unmanned systems, submarines, and aircraft are all being tried to determine how best expand range, Boxall’s counterpart, director of expeditionary warfare Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Coffman (OPNAV N95) said, citing recent technology improvements such as the
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Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) and
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as enablers of this new range.

Boxall cited as examples the Littoral Combat Ship, which has already tested an over-the-horizon missile that the service plans to field “over the summer,” and the Maritime Strike Tomahawk, which “we’re going to continue to field that going forward. Everybody who has vertical cell, if you have that you can field this.”

A key enabler going forward will be the Marine Corps’ Lockheed Martin F-35B Lighting II Joint Strike Fighters (JSF), which will be integrated into amphibious ready group (ARG) operations this year. Amphibious assault ships’ flight decks have already been upgraded to support F-35B operations, Coffman said, and now the operators will learn to use the planes to help the Navy and Marine Corps team fight farther inland.

Coffman said he wants to get away from the idea Navy ships are just busses that transport Marines. Instead, he wants Marines embarked on the ships to be an integrated part of the what he said was the “fight to get to the fight.”

He cited the new
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, an amphibious assault ship that does not have a well deck to deliver Marines ashore via surface connector. Instead, the ship can carry more F-35B aircraft and the offensive firepower and computing power they bring, and more rotary wing aircraft to bring Marines ashore from further distances away from threats in the sea or on land.

“No one else on the planet can do what we can do in scope and scale in the littoral battlespace or in warfighting from the sea,” Coffman said. “That’s just the facts.”
plus of course praising LCS

"... which has already tested an over-the-horizon missile that the service plans to field “over the summer,” ..."

while the LCS Project is the USN way to obscurity
Friday at 9:03 PM
keep dreaming about some vaporware and in the meantime check this:

about two and a half years ago, inside the USNI News (note the end of September below)
May 16, 2015

... Program Executive Officer for LCS Rear Adm. Brian Antonio ...
Overall, though, he was optimistic about achieving IOC by the end of September.

“We’ve proven that the systems work,” he said.
“Will we have issues every now and then? Yes we will. Some of these systems have been in development a long time, it’s time to bring them together and do the end-to-end run and prove them out.”

today,
inside
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quoting
Capt. Ted Zobel, the program manager for all three LCS mission modules. ...
... the
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(MCM) module will enter testing in 2020, reach Initial Operational Capability on Independence variants by late 2020 or early 2021, and IOC on Freedom variants by late ’21.
 
it's quite interesting B-52s to Replace B-1Bs for Latest Bomber Rotation in the Pacific
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The U.S.
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is deploying six
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bombers and approximately 300 airmen from
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, Louisiana, to
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, Guam, in coming days for the continuous bomber presence mission in the Pacific.

The service
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that the long-range bombers will replace
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from the 37th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron,
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, South Dakota, by the end of the month.
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The move marks a significant shift to bring back the B-52H, which held on to the CBP mission from 2006 to 2016, putting a nuclear-capable bomber in theater at a time when relations between the U.S. and North Korea are largely unpredictable.

Additionally, the swap comes as the B-1B bomber aircrews anticipate returning to the Middle East in coming months and have been training for the evolving battlespace in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, according to officials at
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, Texas.

Military.com sat down with leaders from Air Force Global Strike Command's 7th Bomb Wing -- responsible for producing combat-ready aircrews in the service's only formal B-1B training unit -- during a trip to the base last month,
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in a Lancer over training ranges in New Mexico.

B-1Bs from Ellsworth are likely to be the first
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, according to Lt. Col. Dominic "Beaver" Ross, director of operations for the 337th Test and Evaluations Squadron. The B-1s from Dyess would swap in a few months later.

The
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, known as the "Bone," left the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility
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, and were replaced by
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bombers at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, that April.

The B-1B, which made its first flight in 1984, has been the face of deterrence in the U.S. Pacific Command's area of responsibility for the last 18 months, marking the first time the B-1B has been housed at Andersen since 2006.

Officials at Dyess said the B-1 made strides during its
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to the Pacific, reassuring allies and acting as a deterrent against North Korea even if it no longer is a nuclear-capable platform.

"The feedback we receive from the bases and combatant commands we support is very positive in the sense that these Global Strike platforms, at the end of the day, there's a deterrent value, certainly our allies see the assurance value, and that we are ready strike. That's essentially, that's what we do," Col. Brandon Parker, 7th Bomb Wing commander, said during a roundtable interview Dec. 18.

"Basically, you're showing that you're there," added Lt. Col. Christopher Wachter, director of operations for the 345th Bomb Squadron at Dyess.

During a show of force -- which the supersonic
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with South Korea and Japan's air forces, carrying out simulated air-to-ground bomb drops in recent months -- "you're showing that, 'Yes, I have the capability, if national authority says so, to release weapons,' " Wachter said.

"You're reminding a potential adversary that their actions will have second- and third-order effects. You're assuring your allies that we're with them ... We're there to be hopeful in order to uphold those values of freedom. And if it's by a show of force, [we're] saying, 'We're here and we don't like your bellicose attitude, we don't like that you're firing missiles across one of our friends sovereign territories,' then that's what we'll do," Wachter said.

When deploying the bomber fleet to any theater, "It's a big deal," Parker said.

"Whether it's a
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[Spirit,] B-52 or B-1, there's still just great value when you send these planes abroad," he said.
 
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