US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

since I've now read it, I post
Major Pacific Exercise Preps Marines, Sailors for Large-Scale Maritime Battle
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Thousands of
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and sailors wrapped up a huge exercise that, in part, tested their ability to get the right people and equipment out to sea for a potential large-scale maritime battle.

About 10,000 sailors and Marines completed
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in California this week. The members of I Marine Expeditionary Force and several ships from the
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's 3rd Fleet carried out the exercise, which prepared them for a battle that looked a lot different than the ones they have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

After years of flying into the Middle East and getting gear from big stockpiles there, preparing to operate in a distributed maritime environment is a lot different, said Lt. Col. Ray Howard, I MEF's strategic mobility officer.

"The steady state that we've seen in the Middle East, the equipment's kind of already there, so we just put people on airplanes and fly people over there. But this has really made us take a hard look at 'How do you
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a large force?'"

It's a question so important to the Navy and
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that the services' top officers, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson and Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, paid the troops a visit during the exercise.

The Marines and sailors spent the past two weeks simulating how they would operate from the sea against a near-peer enemy such as Russia or China. That included not only striking mock-enemy ships with long-range precision fires from the shore, but also getting the right people and gear onto the ships and out to small posts where ground troops were operating.

"I think some of our skill sets need to be honed again without a big deployed capability set," Howard said. "Working the naval integration piece of that is critical to get our readiness where it needs to be and understanding just how complicated some of these things are."

Pacific Blitz combined two maritime exercises into one to prep Marines and sailors for fighting at sea and on and around the shore. Howard said it takes the maritime prepositioning elements of Pacific Horizons and amphibious nature of Dawn Blitz.

A pair of amphibious transport dock ships, the Somerset and New Orleans, along with the guided-missile destroyer Michael Murphy and maritime prepositioning ship William R. Button participated.

There were also sailors and Marines ashore at several West Coast military installations, including
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,
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and
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.

"I think if we were going to do this for real, time, space and logistics become extremely complicated," Howard said. "[It's one thing] to deploy up the road, but when you overlay islands in different places in the theater, it can become a lot more challenging, and we can't do that without the Navy."

Marines across the MEF participated, responding in real-time to the scenarios they were dealt. That forced them to think in real-time about what equipment they needed to employ to deal with a specific crisis, Howard added.

"It's hard to stand up forces and deploy the right capabilities at the right time," he said.

While this exercise was built around the idea of deploying to the Asia-Pacific region, practicing the way a maritime force would respond to a contingency helps the MEF prepare for a number of real-world threats, he said.

"The real benefit is the education part of it. I think it's being learned at all levels right now how hard it is to deploy a force of this size," he said. "Stand it up, deploy it and then integrate it with the Navy and become that capability that's able to fight anywhere.

"I've watched this exercise challenge my folks, from a private first class who's brand new to the Marine Corps, as well as ... my most senior [subject-matter experts] be challenged. I've really watched the whole MEF and also the Navy be challenged."
 

timepass

Brigadier
Two Marine pilots were killed in a helicopter crash during a routine training exercise near Yuma, Arizona, the Marine Corps said Sunday.

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The pilots, who weren't identified pending notification of their families, were in an AH-1Z Viper when the helicopter went down at about 8:45 p.m. Saturday, the service said.
No other details were immediately available as an investigation continues, said the Marines, adding the exercise was part of a weapons and tactics instructor course.
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
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So small but controversial program has closed the Subcompact Weapons program of the U.S. Army has selected.

B&T will manufacture 350 guns and accessories such as spare parts, slings and manuals. The Army has the option to purchase up to 1,000 under the terms of the contract, which is valued at more than $2.5 million
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the Swiss arms maker wind with the APC9 K
This is a weapon will be used by US Army MP security teams guarding VIPs.
 
Mar 23, 2019
Japan-based US Navy ships complete their “most demanding tactical drills ever”
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I liked that, sounded to me like an amphibious force properly escorted, no kidding about 'flying computers' LOL
more:
7th Fleet Ships Conduct First High-End Advanced Training Event with SMWDC
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Naval forces forward-deployed in the Pacific took a big step in raising their warfighting proficiency, completing their first advanced training event hosted by the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC).

Because Forward Deployed Naval Forces (FDNF) forces in Japan are already located in their warfighting theater, their training cycle differs from U.S.-based forces. Importantly, after a ship undergoes maintenance its crew is only put through a short basic training cycle before U.S. 7th Fleet commanders can begin tasking them with assignments.

On the other hand, U.S.-based forces undergo not only basic training but also integrated and advanced training exercises before heading overseas on deployments. Since 2016, that advanced training has been the Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training (SWATT) event hosted by SMWDC, which includes live missile shots and other high-end tactics to prepare the crews for whatever they may face on deployment.

In mid-March, four surface combatants and two amphibious ships conducted the first-ever SWATT in 7th Fleet, bringing this high-end training to the forces most exposed to interactions with foreign navies like China and Russia.

“Without going into the specific day-to-day schedule, advanced training events focused on multi-ship, multi-platform responses to complex threats. For example, there were several live-fire events involving multiple ships and targets,” 7th Fleet spokesman Lt. Joe Keiley told USNI News. Photos and videos from the SWATT show launches of the Standard Missile-2, Rolling Airframe Missile and Mk 46 torpedo, as well as live fire from the Mk 45 five-inch gun, among other components of the advanced training event held in the Philippine Sea.

“The recent Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training event is the closest FDNF-J ships have come in terms of parity with SWATT events for CONUS-based ships. Training events focused on developing the same advanced tactics and to the same standards,” Keiley said.
“Like SWATT events in CONUS, this SWATT involved senior mentors, warfare tactics instructors, and technical community representatives from Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SWMDC). Participating ships conducted the same types of advanced training events in surface, air, and subsurface warfare areas as their CONUS counterparts, to include live fire events.”

7th Fleet’s OFRP-J force-generation model, which went into effect in early 2018, keeps ships ready for planned or emergent tasking in their busy theater but also breaks out time for ship maintenance and training. Ships may return to Japan for short maintenance periods, but after any months-long maintenance availabilities the ship’s crew must undergo an 18-week basic phase training and certification.

“Unlike CONUS-based ships which are geographically separated from their area of operations, FDNF-J ships are available for operational tasking as soon as they complete the basic phase and enter sustainment. During the sustainment phase, ships will have opportunities to complete advanced and integrated training as part of their schedules,” whereas U.S.-based ships would do that integrated and advanced training before heading out on a deployment.

Though this OFRP-J model is subject to being refined as more ships go through the 36-month cycle and provide feedback, Keiley said that “incorporating advanced training into OFRP-J takes the model to another level and provides FDNF-J ships with more training opportunities in line with CONUS-based ships. This is the first time FDNF-J ships have participated in advanced tactical training like this and it will continue to be part of OFRP-J cycles going forward.”

Forces homeported on the East and West coasts of the United States have used a 36-month Optimized Fleet Response Plan to balance maintenance, training and operations since 2014. The cycle begins with a six-month maintenance period, followed by basic and integrated/advanced training, a seven-month deployment, and then a sustainment phase that could be used for either a surge deployment or readiness-maintaining exercises at home. Since 2016, SWATTs hosted by SMWDC have been woven into the training period, serving as a final high-end event before strike groups head out on deployment.

Keiley said the OFRP-J model was implemented early last year and that most 7th Fleet ships have already completed maintenance and basic phase training and certification under this model. He said the time was right, with that model now in place, to look at adding advanced training for 7th Fleet ships – even if during the sustainment rather than post-maintenance training like the CONUS forces.

“Combined with routine operations and exercises in 7th Fleet, this type of training carves out more time to sharpen skills and develop lethality at sea,” he said, adding that 7th Fleet ships conduct high-end training throughout the year but that the addition of SWATT allows them to work with SMWDC to ensure they are fighting with the best and newest tactics and to the same proficiency as East Coast and West Coast ships.

In contrast to the CONUS ships, which conduct separate SWATTs today for the surface combatants in a carrier strike group and the amphibious ships in an Amphibious Ready Group, the 7th Fleet SWATT combined the two. Included in the event were guided-missile destroyers USS Milius (DDG-69), USS Curtis Wilbur (DDG-54) and USS McCampbell (DDG-85); guided-missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG-62); Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship USS Ashland (LSD-48); and San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship USS Green Bay (LPD-20).

“7th Fleet operates cruisers, destroyers and amphibious ships independently, or aggregated as part of surface action groups, amphibious readiness groups, carrier strike groups and expeditionary strike groups. SAGs and ESGs are composed of both types of ships, and so advanced tactical training like this provides mixed forces more opportunities to train together and also focus on surface warfare commonalities across the force (e.g., ship-handling),” Keiley said.
“And so this SWATT was highly relevant to the way 7th Fleet operates its forces.”
 
OK
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But modernizing the Army will take decades and tough decisions about everything from online propaganda to the National Guard.
The Army’s experimental Multi-Domain Task Force is a “game changer” that’s turned the tide in “at least 10 wargames,” the
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says. “Plans are already changing at the combatant command level because of this.”

The key: the unit cracked the
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(A2/AD) conundrum, Russia and China’s dense layered defenses of long-range missiles, sensors, and networks to coordinate them. “Before, we couldn’t penetrate A2/AD. With it, we could,”
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said of the task force’s performance in “at least 10 exercises and wargames.”

“With the Multi-Domain Task Force,” he told me after his remarks to the AUSA Global conference here, “we could impact their long-range systems and have a much greater success against an adversary. If I go into any more, it’d be classified.”

In the future, Brown said here last week, “all formations will have to become multi-domain or they’ll be irrelevant, [but] it’s going to be years before it can happen.” The Army’s goal is modernize enough forces to wage multi-domain warfare against either China or Russia — but not both at once — by 2028. To get there, Brown and other officers said at the conference, the Army and the nation must make some tough decisions. Some particularly knotty examples:
  • What units should move from the National Guard and Army Reserve to the regular-active-duty Army — always a politically touchy question — to make them quicker to respond to, or, better yet, prevent a crisis? What regular units can move into the Guard and Reserves?
  • What new organizations, from field army headquarters to scout aircraft squadrons to cyber/intelligence battalions, does the Army need to create for conflict on a much larger scale than the brigade-based operations of Afghanistan and Iraq? What part of the Army should modernize first?
  • Who can push all four services — especially a reluctant Navy — to adopt Multi-Domain Operations as their joint approach to warfare? (To be fair, many in the Navy reply that they’re already doing MDO.) Who can bring in the State Department, civilian agencies, and foreign allies, all of which struggle to keep up with the US military?
  • What role should the military play in the gray zone between peace and war, the “competition” phase where adversaries use proxies, covert operations, hacking, and disinformation to achieve their goals without provoking US forces into opening fire?
The Army is just beginning to wrestle with these questions. We’ll be taking them on this week, because those early attempts at answers at intriguing, starting with the Multi-Domain Task Force itself.

Fire & Maneuver
Just how does the Multi-Domain Task Force change the game? Created just two years ago, its capabilities include intelligence-gathering, long-range attack and the ability to maneuver from island to island across the vast Pacific, Brown told me. It’s a pilot project, an experimental unit initially built around a
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. But, Brown told the AUSA conference, the original emphasis on “
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” has evolved into a much wider appreciation of the need to combine “fire and maneuver,” an ancient military principle the Army’s now trying to update for the 21st century.

Sometimes, Brown said, the task force is maneuvering in physical space. It can move elements among
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to position itself to deter adversaries, reassure allies, surveil targets, launch long-range missiles or hide from attack.

A small formation that is maneuverable is highly survivable,” Brown said,
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, where it can take shelter from surveillance in tunnels, jungles, mountains, and other cover that’s simply not available to air and naval units, let alone to static bases the enemy can find on Google Maps. On land, it’s also easier to put out decoys — from things like the inflatable tanks of World War II to high-tech emitters that mimic a full-size radar — since they don’t have to fly or float. A land-based unit can also stockpile missiles and other munitions without the limitations of space or weight that affect aircraft and warships, giving it much greater firepower over time.

Land forces certainly can’t substitute for air and sea, which are far more agile, but the Army can support the other services from land in ways it hasn’t done for decades — if ever. Long-range batteries on islands can provide an “umbrella” of covering fire for friendly forces well out to sea, Brown said, an American equivalent of Anti-Access/Area Denial. The Army can intercept enemy missiles aimed at the fleet. It can shoot down enemy fighters trying to intercept the Air Force. It can even sink enemy ships or force them to flee from the shallows into the open ocean where the US Navy awaits them, like beaters driving game into the huntsman’s path.

Invisible Warfare

Not all fire and maneuver is physical, however, Brown emphasized. In fact, the “heart” of the Multi-Domain Task Force is the recently created (and cumbersomely named) battalion for Intelligence, Information, Cyber, Electronic Warfare, & Space — I2CEWS, pronounced “eye two Qs.”

“Information ops is absolutely critical, [but] we didn’t originally have it in the ICEWS formation,” Brown said. “That was added [because] you’ve got to get it in there.”

As the first such unit in the Army, operating in highly classified fields, I2CEWS is still pretty mysterious. From what I’ve gathered, however, it appears to not only pull together data from outside sources — satellites, drones, spy planes — to inform friendly forces of threats and targets, it also wages war in cyberspace and across the electromagnetic spectrum, hacking and jamming the sensors and networks that tell the enemy where to shoot.

But some of the most important contributions of both the I2CEWS battalion and the Multi-Domain Task Force as a whole come before the shooting starts — hopefully, deterring anyone from firing the first shot at all. This is the period traditional US doctrine blandly calls Phase Zero and traditional US strategy calls “peace,” cold or otherwise. Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang, however, see peace as simply a continuation of war by other means: assassination, Little Green Men, economic pressure, online espionage, social media disinformation, and more. The US is belatedly recognizing this period as what the National Defense Strategy calls “competition,” as opposed to “conflict” — although our adversaries would consider both to be forms of conflict, complete with violent death, just on a different scale.

“Phase Zero…I never liked that term, it implied nothing was happening. Boy, stuff is happening all the time now,” Brown said. So for the I2CEWS battalion in particular, he said, “they must be present in the competition phase, that’s when they do their best work.”

To paraphrase Woody Allen, a big part of the conflict phase is just showing up. Since the 1990s, when the US largely withdrew its massive Cold War garrison from Europe, the US has adopted an “expeditionary” approach with few foreign bases. Most units deploy from the United States as needed. The problem is they’re increasingly needed all the time. In Europe, the Army now conducts back to back deployments of one armored brigade after another to deter Russian aggression. But in most parts of the world, even most parts of Europe, there are long gaps between international exercises or crisis operations where the US military simply isn’t around.

“Russia and China, they’ve been there the whole time,” Brown told me. “If you’re not there in the competition phase, you’re coming in late. You’ve got to be there to compete, [and] quite honestly, before we had Multi-Domain Ops, the Multi-Domain Task Force, that wouldn’t have happened.”

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the rest of
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from the post right above:
Competition & Perception

Much of the “competition phase” is the kind of high-stakes shadow-boxing familiar to veterans of the Cold War. The Army believes it needs not only to passively collect intelligence, but to actively test enemy systems, using both electronic transmissions and physical maneuver to “stimulate” enemy radars, jammers, cyber defenses, and physical units into responses that can be monitored, analyzed, and fed into targeting databases. It also needs to deter adversaries by consciously revealing some capabilities and concealing others, publicly flexing some muscles to show US strength while keeping secret weapons in the shadow so enemy planners are never sure what they’re dealing with.

“It’s really essential, something we’ve been good at a long time” — Patton’s fake army before D-Day — “but we’ve kind of lost a little bit: denial and deception,” Brown said. “You don’t want to be so obvious and predictable.”

That’s where the second “I” in I2CEWS, information, comes in. But information operations means different things to different audiences, from hacking networks to handing out leaflets.

Perception is very powerful,” Brown stressed. “A tweet can go around the world in seconds, and look at the impact.”

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media were certainly central to Russia’s 2016 campaign to influence US elections. They’ve been high-speed channels for propaganda, disinformation, calls to arms, and even bomb raid warnings from Syria to Venezuela. It’s a whole new form of conflict where the US government appears to be woefully behind.

But is this kind of information war one the Army should be fighting? That’s one of the knotty questions the service — let alone the wider government, Congress, and the public — has barely begun to untangle.
 
Mar 22, 2019
it's actually interesting (to me, hahaha):
SDF3_1.jpg

FY 2020 U.S. Navy 30-Year Maintenance, Modernization Plan
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Navy Needs More Dry Docks for Repairs, Says First-Ever Maintenance Report
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now
Navy Confident That Maintenance Workload Transparency, Better Business Practices Will Avoid Future Backlogs
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For all the struggles the Navy has today caring for its
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, the problem will only get worse: the fleet is set to increase by 60 percent between now and 2034, when the Navy
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.

The Navy’s top acquisition chief said he’s confident that transparently laying out those upcoming challenges will encourage industry to make the right investments in their infrastructure and workforce and avoid further ship maintenance troubles in the coming decades.

Today, the Navy does not have enough dry docks at its disposal to care for cruisers, destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships. A mismatch in the number of ships and number of dry docks is one issue; ships coming into the yards late due to deployment extensions and ships coming out of repairs late due to unplanned work popping up exacerbate the situation.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition James Geurts decided nearly a year ago that more analysis and discussion of long-range ship maintenance requirements was needed. To that end, the
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. Geurts remains firm that having this discussion now will help the Navy and industry create more capacity and more efficient processes by the time the surface fleet peaks in size in the 2030s.

“When I looked at it, we had spent a lot of time analyzing and building the 30-year shipbuilding plan, which gave the industrial base a real clear signal on what was to come and then they could start making capital investment decisions. We were less clear and less transparent about the repair work,” Geurts told reporters last week.
“And that, in combination with kind of awarding each ship repair individually, was causing us to sub-optimize performance. So my whole purpose for that plan was to make sure we were very clear for us with the Navy, with Congress, with all of our industrial partners, the workload coming forward and then get better at planning the work, which would allow our industrial partners to get more efficient at executing the work.”

The long-range plan does multiple things. First, it lays out the expected workload for the repair and modernization industry based on anticipated ship inventory. Identifying the number of availabilities, the number of man hours, and the dollar value of the work helps both industry leaders and Navy planners see the wave of work coming in terms that make sense to them.

It also outlines two ongoing initiatives with the private yards to help address today’s maintenance backlogs. The Private Shipyard Optimization (PSO) looks for opportunities to invest in the yards’ layout and capital equipment to create a more efficient place to do ship repairs and upgrades. The Private Sector Improvement (PSI) plan looks to create better workload stability and thereby be able to use new contracting models that promote efficiency and on-time delivery of ships.

Today, the Navy awards contracts an average of 90 days before the start of a maintenance availability, limiting yards’ ability to hire new people or rearrange their workload to accommodate a new ship. Geurts’ goal is to bring that average to 180 days to allow for better planning. Geurts also said he had already reduced the number of inspections associated with ship maintenance work by 30 percent and hoped to eventually bring that down to 50 percent. He’s also increased on-the-scene leaders’ ability to approve changes to the work package once an availability starts, helping to curtail what can be lengthy pauses in work while the approval request goes up the chain of command.

Geurts said he hopes these better business practices will help ships get in and out of maintenance in a timelier manner, as well as encourage companies to spend money on yard and workforce investments that will be pivotal to the Navy’s and industry’s ability to keep up with demand in the next few decades.

“Our on-time availability is improving out of both the public and the private yards, but it’s not yet to the point where we need it to be,” he said of efforts so far.

“It’s not done in a vacuum; recently I met with all the CEOs of the major ship repair companies to talk about other things we can do, and I think there’s cautious optimism,” he added.
“I’m starting to see performance improve, I’m starting to see we’re using shipyards we hadn’t used previously. As noted, the demand is there, the challenge is to meet that demand as efficiently as we can with the right acquisition strategy.”

The Navy is also looking to increase the number of certified dry docks that can work on Navy warships. Currently, just 21 dry docks can be used for the surface ship fleet – and just seven are located in the Pacific to service the 60 surface ships there.

The service is in talks with other shipyards that have dry docks to see if they want to do business with the Navy, and Geurts said his organization has offered to certify facilities before companies even bid on any repair contracts to reduce the risk the yard takes and to grow the field of possible repair yards. The Navy has also spoken previously of talking to industry to gauge any interest in existing yards adding new dry docks – such as BAE Systems’ addition of a floating dry dock in its San Diego repair yard that took in its first ship in February 2017.

Despite the efforts to find more dry docks to work with, it’s unlikely the Navy will increase its dry dock capacity by 60 percent to keep up with the 60-percent increase in ships needing them. Asked if the business practice reforms were enough to make up for the difference, or if the Navy would need to take additional measures going forward to deal with the upcoming surge in surface ship maintenance needs, Geurts told USNI News, “when we’ve looked at it, industry responds to the demand signal we put out there. We were not clear in showing the composite demand signal, so a key element of that 30-year maintenance plan was so we could show the entire demand signal. And my experience has been, when we clearly articulate the demand, industry makes really good decisions on how to invest to help us deliver on that demand.”
 
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