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FORBIN said:

If Equation is mod i left the forum haha

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Don’t let Congressional fecklessness reverse hard-won combat readiness and upcoming leaps in capability.

America’s Army is growing, combat readiness is improving, advances in training are showing results and, after years of planning, the force is ready to move forward with some dramatic advances that will substantially improve its fighting capabilities.

Laser-focused on current and near-term requirements, the service is prioritizing incremental upgrades on systems that will have the greatest immediate impact and efforts that will put weapons and gear in soldiers’ hands quickly. And a careful review is underway to identify and eliminate equipment that is no longer required. Readiness and training efficiency are up, thanks to better home-station training and increased rigor at the Combat Training Centers, in large unit rotations like those to Europe and Korea, and from programs that allow Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Regular Army units to work together.

There is just one thing standing in the way of this effort to reset the Army after 16 years of war, and it threatens to halt or even possibly reverse the progress. The problem is the Washington, D.C., budget quagmire.

This issue isn’t solely that the Army doesn’t have enough money, although that certainly is an issue. The modest $600 million increase in research, development and acquisition funds proposed for fiscal 2018, for example, will go nearly entirely to replace spent munitions. What hurts more is the erratic, unreliable and downright harmful federal budget process that frustrates military planners, delays the start of major changes in programs, and leaves soldiers and Department of the Army civilians, defense contractors, military communities and our allies — and even potential enemies — wondering about our national security commitment.

We’ve just begun the ninth consecutive fiscal year without an approved budget, instead forced by Congress to manage a stopgap, short-term, piecemeal allowance with Dec. 8 looming as the next fiscal cliff. A slowdown in combat-related training, production delays in new weapons, and a postponement of increases in Army troop levels are among the immediate impacts of operating under this ill-named continuing resolution. It’s not continuous and it certainly doesn’t display resolve.

Sadly, the Army has grown to expect inaction by Congress and has found ways to minimize the harm by scaling back on spending, shrinking exercises, and accommodating delays in travel and training while remaining focused on the top priority of maintaining combat readiness. Skilled and quietly professional performance masks the damage of the disruption, giving the false impression that the Army’s needs really weren’t that urgent and that shaving a little budget off the top doesn’t really hurt. The Army’s “can-do” mindset may be protecting the nation but has also emboldened politicians who are willing to hold the Defense Department and national security hostage in budget battles.

There is no lack of military challenges in our world. Territorial disputes, rising powers, fragile states, an ever-increasing array of extremist organizations, global trends involving climate, economics, resources and population shifts, and conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia point to a world filled with hot spots and the potential for many more.

The Army isn’t yet fighting in all of those places, but there are more than 180,000 deployed soldiers supporting combatant commanders in 140 countries. Many more soldiers are in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands involved in humanitarian relief and recovery in response to devastation from Hurricane Maria. Others, mainly Army National Guard and Army Reserve, responded to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma or to wildfires, of which 40 burned in Montana alone.

As we at the Association of the U.S. Army prepare to launch our annual Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 9, we are calling for a bigger Army so that units can be fully manned and soldiers get more time to train, more time for professional development and even a bit more time to be with family and friends. Yet, we are also worried that the service may be authorized more soldiers than it can afford, which happens when Congress orders an increase in personnel strength without fully funding the personnel and support costs associated with each additional soldier.

Congress must fully fund the increases the Army requires. We also want the force to grow at a sensible pace so that quality standards are maintained, concentrating growth on first filling vacancies in existing units and then adding capacity and the capabilities that it requires. And, as it grows, maintaining family readiness and quality of life must remain a high priority for all components.

With a little extra money and some constancy in the budget process, the Army stands ready to move ahead with long overdue improvements in weapons and other capabilities that were put on hold while the force was shouldering the heaviest burden for the nation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The time is now to build the Army America needs.

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kwaigonegin said:

Basically a baby V22.

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Europe-bound: US Army to urgently field Abrams tanks with Trophy APS
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  20 hours ago

An Abrams tank equipped with the Trophy Active Protection System. (Army photo)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has decided to equip a brigade’s worth of Abrams tanks with the Trophy Active Protection System and urgently field them to the European theater, Col. Glenn Dean, the program manager for Stryker, who also manages the service’s effort to install APS on combat vehicles, told Defense News.

The service made a decision to buy Trophy for Abrams on Sept. 29, Dean said, and now the Army is moving out to deploy the systems to Europe by 2020. The decision marks a major step in achieving a capability that has been continuously out of the service’s reach for many years.

A little over a year ago, the Army determined it needed to field an interim APS solution for the Abrams, Stryker combat vehicle and Bradley fighting vehicle and decided to rapidly assess off-the-shelf APS systems to fulfill an urgent operational need.



“Over the last 20 years, we’ve never fielded an APS system even though we invested a lot of money in a range of development projects trying to get to one,” Dean said. “We could never get to the desired level.”

So to rapidly find solutions for three very different combat vehicles, the Army tapped into a consortium of companies participating in a science and technology effort to develop the Modular Active Protection System, the Army’s future APS solution, for readily available systems.

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Ultimately, the Army selected Israeli company Rafael’s Trophy system -- that is deployed in the Israeli army -- for Abrams; Iron Fist from IMI, another Israeli company, for the Bradley; and Herdon, Virginia-based Artis’ Iron Curtain for Stryker.

A brigade’s of Abrams tanks in Europe will soon receive the Trophy Active Protection System. (Army photo)
The Army got started with Trophy’s installation onto Abrams earlier because there was funding available within the program in 2016 to move forward. The other two vehicles didn’t receive funding until fiscal year 2017, Dean said, so Abrams is moving out ahead of Stryker and Bradley.

“Stryker is the next one in the chute,” Dean said. Artis has completed its work designing, installing and tuning the system to fit on the vehicle and the system has now entered government characterization efforts. Testing will continue into mid-December where a decision will be made whether to proceed with buying and fielding the system early next fiscal quarter, according to Dean.

Bradley is “a bit behind” Stryker because it is a much more challenging platform to integrate on because of the limitations of the vehicle in terms of space, weight and power. The Bradley could not support APS without an upcoming upgrade that helps restore power to the vehicle.

IMI has begun the tuning phase of characterization, having completed design and installation activity, Dean said. If all goes according to plan, government characterization will begin in the November time frame and will last roughly four months. Bradley’s government characterization phase is expected to last longer than the other two vehicles because of the added challenges of the platform, he added.

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With both vehicles, the Army will assess how the systems perform and then service leadership will decide “is this good enough and, if so, what do you want to do, do you want to push that for rapid deployment, do you want us to go back to the drawing board, do you want us to evaluate a different system,” Dean said. “All those options are on the table until we come back with data.”

All of the systems have gone or will go through rigorous characterization testing. In the case of the Abrams, it had two-live fire phases. One phase was a performance characterization, which is to assess how the system itself performs, and the second phase is to test it in operationally realistic conditions in a cluttered battlefield with moving vehicles against live threats.

“Unique to this evaluation that we, the U.S., hasn’t done before and, frankly, most nations and contractors evaluating their APS systems, we are shooting live threats at real vehicles,” Dean said, “not next to the vehicle, not at a test rig, at the actual platform. We are taking a fair amount of risk that, hey, if the system doesn’t perform as indicated, we are going to hurt some very expensive pieces of hardware.”

Fortunately for the Trophy system, it “exceeded our expectations, it performed extremely well,” Dean said. “Really the only issues we had were those things that were associated with the tank, not so much with Trophy and we worked out how to address and mitigate those to the point the tank crews we had evaluate it were happy with them.”

For example, installation issues on the tank weren’t so much related to the weight of the system but more the balance of the Abram’s turret, which was affected because of where the system had to be mounted on the vehicle, according to Dean.

“There were some concerns that, hey, this may have an impact on the tanks’ ability to engage targets,” Dean said, that pushed the fielding decision back slightly, by just a few weeks.

But the Army quickly went out and tested the tank’s ability to engage targets with Trophy installed on it and “all the crews said, ‘We would take this to war tomorrow,’” following the exercise, Dean said.

“This was to give more confidence,” he said. “There was never a question about performance of Trophy itself. This was about, okay, Trophy works great, does the tank still do all the things it needs to do.”

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Now that the Army is moving forward with fielding Trophy on Abrams, it will move into some more advanced testing and also begin production in parallel, Dean said.

The service has to procure more test hardware because it shot down a large amount of missiles and fired many countermeasures, “so we’ve got to replenish our test stock,” he said.

The second phase of testing Abrams and Trophy will enter is to prove the system is safe enough to deploy by running it through more complex conditions. One test, for example, will evaluate what happens when you have multiple tanks in close proximity on the battlefield all running an APS system at the same time, Dean said.

The Army will also buy the Trophy systems early during the second phase of simultaneous testing and production because there is nothing that is going to change in the design of the system, he noted.

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Dean said the Army remains interested in “at least one other commercially available system” -- a German system from Rheinmetall called the Advanced Defense System. “It was actually very close in the running for Bradley, but ultimately Iron Fist was selected because of the integration burdens of the platform,” he said. “If we had the budget to do a fourth system right now, we’d be doing a fourth system right now.”

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The future is little teams operating on land, in the air, and online, taking on enemies that haven’t declared themselves.

The U.S. Army’s new draft strategy for 2025 to 2040 expects enemies to attack ever more lethally in multiple domains — land, sea, air, space, and online — while blurring the distinction between peace and war. To meet these foes, the

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says, the Army of the future must be much more mobile, with small teams that can fight like today’s large units — and do it in every domain of warfare, simultaneously.

The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, or TRADOC, creates guides that the Army uses to draft field manuals and train troops for tomorrow’s fights. On Monday, they released a

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that lays out the Army’s best guess about the enemy of the future. Titled “Multi-Domain Battle: Evolution of Combined Arms for the 21st Century, 2025-2040,” it repeats one key point over and over again: Adversaries will make life as difficult as possible for U.S. troops by not declaring themselves to be the enemy, or, as the concept puts it, by “combining regular and irregular forces with criminal and terrorist enterprises to attack the Joint Force’s vulnerabilities while avoiding its strength.”

That idea is not entirely new. The world got a great glimpse of what modern, blended warfare looks like when thousands of

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invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014.

“Adversaries have blurred the distinction between actions ‘below armed conflict’ and ‘conflict,’ enabling the achievement of strategic military objectives short of what the U.S. traditionally considers ‘war,’” the document says.

The concept goes on to describe four other reasons the Army cannot successfully fight wars the way it has in the past:

1. The exponential speed of information technology. U.S. forces can’t assume that they will have the best phones, drones, or computer hardware on the battlefield. As computers get smaller, cheaper, and more widely available, U.S. tech advantages will disintegrate.

2. Warfare will be much more urban. Some 60 percent (

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) of the Earth’s population will live in cities in 2030, many in megacities with populations of more than 10 million. This is where adversaries will try to engage U.S. forces, not in open fields or deserts where today’s Army and it senormous battle vehicles have the advantage.

3. The internet will be a key aspect of the battlefield, not just in terms of trading cyber attacks with enemy hackers but in the need to constantly and expertly shape global opinion about the conflict. Troll armies spreading fake news and disinformation, coupled with enough social-media traffic to overwhelm open-source analysts, could “complicate the [Army’s] ability to gain and maintain an accurate, up-to-date, intelligence-driven understanding of the situation, as well as control of the information environment,” the document says.

4. Every bad guy becomes The Joker. The Army sees a rise of “Super-empowered individuals and small groups” who can “use access to cyberspace, space, and nuclear, biological, radiological, and chemical weapons of mass effects to change the battlespace calculus and redefine the conditions of conflict resolution.” Read that to mean: lone wolves and minescule teams with the power to rival many of today’s nation-states.

Even the spread of personal phones and the internet of things will make U.S. troops easier targets. “

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because the adversary’s forces will increasingly possess the ability to find and attack U.S. and allied forces at strategic, operational, and tactical distances simultaneously,” the document says.

To fight in this environment, the Army will move toward smaller, much more versatile, and more capable formations — somewhat like today’s special operations forces that can embark on a wide variety of missions. These “semi-independent” formations won’t just be tasked with winning territory and holding it. They’ll have to do everything from flying drones (and defending against them) to shooting missiles deep into enemy territory (and getting the targeting data to do it) to outflanking the bad guys in cyberspace. And they’ll have to do it with less protection. “Formations must maneuver semi-independently, without secured flanks, constant communications with higher headquarters, and continuous lines of communications,” the document says.

The “semi-independent” part is key. The Army still sees these smaller groups as connected to a much larger whole — perhaps even more so — but that doesn’t mean a return to large tank formations.

Nor does it mean that every tiny, mobile, Swiss-Army-knife formation will also carry an enormous missile battery. Rather, little teams will have to be able to access capabilities like drones and fire support from somewhere, but the capabilities themselves will likely be shared — similar to how people use Uber.

This idea of small, nimble, loosely connected nodes in sprawling networks fits well with what other services’ leaders

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as the future of the Navy and the Air Force. It’s a future where every nodes become smaller, and where connections grow in number even as connectivity itself is challenged.

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FORBIN said:

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