At least they seemed to have found a better glue to keep the rubber tiles on the hull. Or maybe they just decided to forget the EPA and go back to the old glue.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
At least they seemed to have found a better glue to keep the rubber tiles on the hull. Or maybe they just decided to forget the EPA and go back to the old glue.
Naval Today said:US Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus yesterday announced that the next Freedom-variant littoral combat ship will be named USS Minneapolis/St. Paul (LCS 21).
The future Minneapolis/St. Paul was named to honor the citizens of Minnesota’s Twin Cities who have a long and proud history of naval service. It will be the second ship to bear the name. The first, a submarine, was commissioned in 1984.
A fast, agile surface combatant, the LCS provides the required warfighting capabilities and operational flexibility to execute a variety of missions in areas such as mine warfare, anti-submarine warfare and surface warfare.
Minneapolis/St. Paul will be built with modular design incorporating mission packages that can be changed out quickly as combat needs change in a region. These mission packages are supported by detachments that deploy both manned and unmanned vehicles, and sensors in support of mine, undersea, and surface warfare missions.
The ship will be 388 feet long and capable of traveling at speeds in excess of 40 knots. The construction will be led by a Lockheed Martin industry team in Marinette, Wisconsin.
This naming means that all of the first 24 LCS have now been named.
US Coast Guard Statement said:“The President's announcement demonstrates that the United States is an Arctic nation and affirms the Coast Guard’s role in providing assured access to the Polar Regions. We look forward to working with the Administration, Congress and the many other Arctic stakeholders to ensure these platforms meet our national security objectives well into the 21st century.
“The Coast Guard has been the sole operator and custodian of the nation’s polar icebreaking capability since 1965, providing assured access in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions. National Arctic Region policy emphasizes the importance of the Arctic and the broad interests our nation has in the region and our icebreakers are a key component of our strategy there. The Coast Guard utilizes U.S. Coast Guard Cutters Healy and Polar Star to meet present day icebreaking needs in the Arctic and Antarctic.
“The missions of U.S. polar icebreakers are to conduct and support scientific research in the Arctic and Antarctic; defend U.S. sovereignty in the Arctic by helping to maintain a U.S. presence in U.S. territorial waters in the region; defend other U.S. interests in polar regions, including economic interests in waters that are within the U.S. exclusive economic zone (EEZ) north of Alaska; monitor sea traffic in the Arctic, including ships bound for the United States; conduct other typical Coast Guard missions (such as search and rescue, law enforcement, and protection of marine resources) in Arctic waters, including U.S. territorial waters north of Alaska.“
Jura The idiot
General
... updated, "The contract award for the bomber program looked to be set for late August but has now reportedly slipped to as late as October." etc.:
...
... the story goes on with
Bidders Submit Designs for New U.S. Air Force Bomber
source:Bidders for the U.S. Air Force’s new bomber have produced elaborate designs of their competing offerings, according to a congressional assessment.
Northrop Grumman Corp. and its rival, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., submitted “two robust designs” at “an unusually high level of detail and development for a system in which the prime contractor has not been selected, according to senior program officials,” the Congressional Research Service said in a report dated Wednesday.
The research service gleaned the information from a briefing that Air Force officials gave to about a dozen defense analysts on Tuesday, providing the most detailed assessment to date of the highly secret program. It may have been an effort to shape the thinking of widely quoted defense analysts before the award is announced. Jeremiah Gertler of the CRS was among those briefed.
The Long Range Strike Bomber will be the eventual successor to the aging B-1 and B-52. Air Force spokesman Edward Gulick said the briefing shouldn’t be seen as a signal the Air Force award of the bomber is imminent.
Air Force officials at the briefing said the award for the bomber contract is expected in October, although one of them added, “I’ve been saying ‘a couple of months’ for five or six months now,’” Gertler wrote in the assessment published Wednesday. Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, will be responsible for selecting the contest winner, according to the report.
Bomber Details
The initial bomber will be manned, “with unmanned operations possible several years after initial operational capability” in the mid-2020s, according to the assessment. The bomber would be qualified to carry nuclear weapons “two years or so after” the initial operational capability, Gertler wrote.
Air Force officials said both of the competing designs “use substantial amounts of existing subsystems,” reducing technological risk “and presumably, shortening the time required for” the engineering and development phase once a contract is awarded, Gertler said.
“They see the most challenging part” of the bomber program “as integration of technologies’ in the development phase, Gertler wrote.
Distributed Network
‘‘Air Force officials took great pains to emphasize’’ the bomber is ‘‘part of a family of systems, with the implication that it is the node of a larger, distributed, network of sensors and communications, not all of which may have been publicly disclosed,’’ he wrote.
The radar-evading stealth qualities of both aircraft ‘‘have been investigated in detail against current and anticipated threats and current designs are complete down to the level of, for example, individual access panels,’’ he wrote.
‘‘No mention was made of speed, although the combination of long-range, large payload and costs constraints’’ of $500 million per plane in 2010 dollars for basic construction ‘‘strongly suggest’’ that the bomber ‘‘will be subsonic,’’ he said.
Attendees at the briefing, which was reported earlier by Defense News, also included Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute; Andrew Hunter of the Center For Strategic and International Studies; Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group; Mark Lorell of the Rand Corp.; Rebecca Grant, an independent aerospace consultant; Moshe Schwartz, an acquisition analyst with the CRS; and James McAleese of McAleese & Associates.
Jura The idiot
General
Hunt for Sunk Red October LOL
Former CIA Spy Ship Becomes Victim of Oil Slump
Former CIA Spy Ship Becomes Victim of Oil Slump
source:A ship built by the CIA for a secret Cold War mission in 1974 to raise a sunken Soviet sub is heading to the scrap yard, a victim of the slide in oil prices.
Christened the Hughes Glomar Explorer, after billionaire Howard Hughes was brought in on the CIA's deception, the 619-foot vessel eventually became part of the fleet of ships used by Swiss company Transocean to drill for oil.
But the oil price rout means the former spy ship now called GSF Explorer is just one of 40 such offshore drilling rigs that have been consigned to scrap since last year.
It's the end of a story that began when a Soviet G-II sub called the K-129 sank in September 1968 "with all hands, 16,500 feet below the surface of the Pacific", according to an official U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) history.
The sub sank with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and nearly 100 sailors, according to declassified documents at George Washington University's National Security Archive.
According to the CIA history of the mission, called "Project Azorian", the Soviet Union failed to locate the sub in a massive two-month search, but the United States found it, 1,500 miles (2,400 km) northwest of Hawaii.
The CIA wanted to get its hands on the nuclear missiles, as well as cryptography gear to break Soviet codes, but needed a cover story because any recovery ship would quickly be spotted by its Cold War foe.
The CIA brought billionaire Hughes in on the secret. Under a meticulously crafted fiction, the ship was built for Hughes at Pennsylvania's building and Drydock Co, because he needed it to mine sea-bed manganese nodules.
"If the Russians had become aware of the real purpose of the mission, we'd have had to cancel it, and all the money would go down the drain," David Sharp, a 50-year CIA veteran from Maryland who was the 1974 mission's deputy for recovery operations, told Reuters in an interview.
Cover Blown
While the CIA has over the years lavished billions on covert planes and spacecraft, Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, told Reuters: "They have not built anything so elaborate as the Glomar for such a limited mission".
Too wide for the Panama Canal, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, also named after the company Global Marine Inc. that designed it, rounded Cape Horn to reach the Pacific.
In August 1974, its huge mechanical claw raised a 145-foot section of the K-129 Soviet sub.
Sharp, now 81, who published "The CIA's Greatest Covert Operation" in 2011 after years of wrangling with the agency over classified material, acknowledged the audacious mission was not a complete operational success.
The claw failed, he said, and only the sub's bow, with the bodies of six Russian sailors but no missiles or code equipment, was brought to the surface.
The operation's secrecy was shattered after a June 1974 break-in at Hughes' Los Angeles headquarters, where the haul likely included a memo linking the mission to the billionaire.
The circle within the government and law enforcement that knew of the project widened. The Los Angeles Times ran a story in February 1975.
"The source of the leak was never identified," the CIA said. "With Glomar's cover blown, the White House canceled further recovery operations."
The Glomar's mission has a Cold War postscript: In 1992, then-CIA Director Robert Gates gave Russian President Boris Yeltsin a decades-old video of the six sailors' burial at sea.
A Glomar Response
Converted to a deepwater drill ship in 1997 and renamed the GSF Explorer, the vessel was bought by Transocean in 2010 and has been deployed by the world's largest offshore driller from the Gulf of Mexico to Angola.
Its stern has a helicopter landing pad and the vessel is topped by a towering 170-foot tall derrick, so it can drill to depths of up to 30,000 feet.
In its heyday, the ship was hired out for more than $400,000 a day, could house a crew of 160 and was held steady for drilling in heavy seas by 11 powerful thrusters.
But with falling oil prices approaching $40 a barrel and demand for exploration from companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and BP plunging, old ships without contracts or facing hefty maintenance bills are being culled.
Transocean, whose Deepwater Horizon drill rig explosion in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico caused the largest offshore environmental disaster in U.S. history, condemned the GSF Explorer in April.
Altogether, the company is scrapping some 20 vessels, shelving deliveries of new ultra-deepwater drillships, forecasting $2 billion in writedowns and cancelling its interim dividend.
Houston's Diamond Offshore and London's Noble Corp have also consigned about a dozen ships to scrap since last year.
"We've seen the largest number of floaters being scrapped over two consecutive years," said Rystad Energy analyst Joachim Bjorni in Norway.
But no "floater" destined for the world's scrap yards is quite like the GSF Explorer.
Transocean declined to name the vessel's buyer, nor where it will be scrapped, fitting for a ship whose original name has become synonymous with U.S. government secrecy.
After the CIA's initial refusal to acknowledge its "Project Azorian" in 1975 with a "neither confirm or deny" reply, such answers became know as "Glomar responses".
US Navy Blue Angels overflight of USS Zumwalt, DDG-1000, September 4, 2015:
That hullform still looks strange to me, haven't yet really adjusted. I'm so waiting for an aerial view of that vessel.
Jura The idiot
General
tell me not to worry as
US Navy Considers Impact of a Yearlong CR
US Navy Considers Impact of a Yearlong CR
source:Summer is over and lawmakers are back in Washington amid the widespread belief that Congress will again fail to complete its budget work before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. As a result, a three-month continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government through the end of calendar year 2015 at fiscal 2014 levels is widely expected.
The Defense Department, along with most government agencies, has become adept at pushing key items to the later quarters of a fiscal year, mitigating some of the CR chaos. Asked about the potential effect of a three-month CR on the US Navy’s acquisition programs, one defense official said it would be “negligible.”
But that would not be the case should a yearlong CR be enacted, essentially funding all of 2015 at 2014 levels and imposing a widespread ban on “new start” acquisitions — programs for which there is no significant funding in the earlier year.
As on Aug. 23, the possibility of a year without a new budget has already been broached on the Hill, even though it’s never happened. A yearlong CR would likely turn into a five-quarter affair, since Congress typically can’t finish budget work before an election, leaving it to lame-duck lawmakers to do the dirty work after the November 2016 elections.
US Navy officials, along with other Pentagon offices, already are considering what the impact would be of a full-year CR. According to the defense official, the service could lose up to $4.6 billion from its operations and maintenance accounts, resulting in canceled or extended deployments, reduced flying hours and limitations on training.
The impact on shipbuilding and procurement could be significant. One Navy estimate forecast a loss of between $3 billion and $6.6 billion. Research and development funding would also face the potential loss of nearly $2 billion.
Programs at risk include the T-AO(X) fleet oiler, which is to begin procurement in 2016; the first year of advance procurement for the aircraft carrier Enterprise (CVN 80); the beginning of the carrier George Washington’s refueling and complex overhaul (RCOH) — a four-year overhaul done only once during a carrier’s 50-year lifespan; and initial production of the MQ-4 broad-area maritime and surveillance unmanned aircraft.
Several programs are scheduled for increases or shifts to new variants, all at risk, including the first Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer with the new Air Missile Defense Radar (AMDR); long-lead funding for the LHA 8 assault ship; and increased P-8A Poseidon aircraft production from nine to 16 units.
The loss of new R&D funding would impact the SSBN(X) Ohio-class replacement submarine; work on the Virginia payload module to install on future attack submarines; the LCS frigate development effort; the Joint Strike Fighter; the AMDR; work on E-2D and MV-22A aircraft; and the next-generation jammer.
Avenues exist that could provide relief for some of these programs in the form of CR anomalies — requests for adjustments on specific programs. For example, when the 2013 defense bills were held up by CRs, delaying the Navy’s authority to award contracts to begin the carrier Abraham Lincoln’s RCOH, an anomaly exemption was requested and granted, allowing the work to proceed. Navy planners subsequently adjusted other overhauls to generally avoid the first quarter of a fiscal year.
Jura The idiot
General
... I'm so waiting for an aerial view of that vessel.
only now I realized I hadn't seen the Zumwalt from top
so I quickly searched the Internet, the steepest angle (picture, not a chart of course) I found:
