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US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
Jura The idiot
General
dated October 16, 2017
but I heard Sep 19, 2017
oh really? US considers non-combat-rated subset of F-35 fleet
18 September, 2017
now recalled Feb 16, 2017
US Air Force 'must' retrofit so that LockMart makes even more profit out of all copies including the oldest, huh? that's ludicrous (but real world hahaha) and the US Air Force would be better off if it ditched the old Lots and used the resources on moving on in the program ... is what I think
Jura The idiot
General
comes at whopping price Sep 1, 2017
but cool:Jun 21, 2017
and
NAVAIR Awards Sikorsky $304M For First 2 CH-53K Heavy-Lift Helos
source is USNI News
Yet arrived
2 US F-35A fighters arrive in Kadena Air Base
Two US Air Force state-of-the-art F-35A stealth fighters have arrived at the Kadena Air Base in Japan's southern prefecture of Okinawa.
They landed at the base on Monday afternoon.
The US military earlier announced that it would send a dozen F-35A fighters and 300 personnel from a base in the US state of Utah to the Kadena Air Base for 6 months, starting in November.
Japan's Okinawa Defense Bureau says the 2 fighters that arrived at the base are believed to the first of the 12 that the US plans to station at Kadena.
The first deployment of the stealth jets to Kadena is believed to be part of efforts aimed at increasing military pressure on North Korea.
As the US military has been sending many other aircraft to Kadena, the move is likely to trigger increased opposition among local residents, who are wary of the base's functions possibly being upgraded.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Note the Rocket pod and chain gun
Jura The idiot
General
"What this chart doesn’t show, the staffers warned, is a growing backup elsewhere: not in submarines needing mid-career maintenance, but in worn-out subs waiting to be decommissioned.":
source is BreakingDefenseA massive has idled 15 nuclear-powered attack submarines for a total of 177 months, and the Navy’s plan to mitigate the problem is jeopardized by budget gridlock, two House Armed Services Committee staffers told Breaking Defense.
That is almost 15 submarine-years, the equivalent of taking a boat from the 2018 budget and not adding it back until 2033.
While only Congress can and lift , the staffers said, part of the solution is in the Navy’s hands: outsource more work to , something the Navy does not like to do.
As the submariner community prepares to gather in Washington, D.C. for , a lot of subs are in rough shape. The most famous case is the USS Boise, which was scheduled to start an overhaul at the government-run Norfolk Naval Shipyard in September 2016 and is still waiting. The government finally gave up and awarded a $385.6 million contract for the work to privately run Newport News Shipbuilding – just across the James River – . All told, the Navy says the Boise will be out of service for 31 months longer than originally planned.
But Boise isn’t the only one. Figures provided to us by HASC show 14 other submarines are affected, with projected delays ranging from two months (USS Columbia, Montpellier, and Texas) to 21 (Greenville). And the Navy can’t simply send them back to sea, since without the maintenance work, the submarines can’t be certified as safe to dive – something the fleet takes very, very seriously ever since of 1963. “To ask Naval Reactors to bend the rules is heresy,” one staffer said.
The Navy does have a plan to mitigate the problem, but it can’t get rid of it. If the Navy were able to move money, reshuffle schedules, extend certifications, and take other steps, then it would get many of the suns into maintenance sooner and slash time lost across the fleet to 81 months.
That’s still almost seven years that submarines could be at sea but aren’t. If you put all this on a single notional sub, it would lose 23 percent of its normal service life. For comparison, pro-Navy legislators are struggling to increase the annual number of from two to three. Losing seven years of submarine time is the equivalent of taking a new boat from the 2018 budget and only adding it back in 2025.
And that, again, is with the mitigation plan.
The chart above shows these figures. What this chart doesn’t show, the staffers warned, is a growing backup elsewhere: not in submarines needing mid-career maintenance, but in worn-out subs waiting to be decommissioned.
It turns out that you can’t just toss out a nuclear-powered war machine when you’re done with it. There’s a complex process to deactivate the reactor, remove the parts of the submarine that remain radioactive, and hand off the non-irradiated rest of the sub for dismantling.
What’s more, there’s a period towards the end of a nuclear submarine’s life when its reactor core can no longer pump out enough power for operations at sea, but it still requires supervision by a full-up engineering crew. That means old subs waiting to be scrapped aren’t just parked somewhere: About half their normal crew is still aboard. As a result, delaying decommissioning wastes both money and highly trained personnel.
Deep Problems
So even assuming the mitigation plan for submarine maintenance can be implemented, there’ll be a growing problem in submarine decommissioning. But the mitigation plan itself is in jeopardy. Three of the overhauls are scheduled to start in fiscal year 2018, which began a month ago, without a federal budget. Instead, Congress has passed a stopgap , which puts government spending on autopilot, with little leeway to make the kind of adjustments the mitigation plan requires. Even if Congress passes the budget, it’s up against the Budget Control Act caps, which if not waived will undo much of the funding added for military readiness.
Past BCA-imposed cuts and Continuing Resolutions bear part of the blame for the Navy’s problems today, the HASC staffers said, as well as the mass retirements of Reagan-era craft. Today, the Navy has to meet an unchanged workload, meaning each ship must deploy longer. As a result ships not only miss their originally planned overhaul dates, messing up the maintenance schedule, but they also come in with more wear, tear, and breakdowns than projected, causing their overhauls to take longer. That means they can’t deploy on time, which means the ships they would have relieved must stay on station longer, which means those ships will have more maintenance issues, ad infinitum. (Training often gets cut as well, with potentially ).
The attack submarine force has an additional complication. It is nuclear powered. Key maintenance can only be done in a handful of specifically equipped yards by specially trained workers. The Navy prefers to do this in-house, but its nuclear-capable public yards have limited capacity, and they prioritize – which make up the bulk of the nation’s – and over the much more numerous attack subs. If maintenance schedules slip on a missile sub or carrier, attack subs get bumped down the list.
That’s why the Navy finally outsourced the Boise‘s repairs to Huntington-Ingalls Industries’ Newport News shipyard in Virginia. That’s one of two private yards in the country that can do nuclear work – the other is General Dynamics’ in New England. Unlike the public yards, the HASC staffers said, these private yards still have some spare capacity and will have it for “the next five years.” After that, work on the next ballistic missile submarine, the , will pick up and the will be too.
The Navy is telling Congress that private yards cost more and there’s no need to outsource any more subs after the Boise, but the HASC staffers are skeptical. Since Boise is getting a complete engineering overhaul, one staffer told me, that shows that “the most complex engineering event in a submarine’s life…can be outsourced.” There’s a “strategic window of about three to five years” to take advantage of the private yards being available, the staffer said, so why not take it?
Jura The idiot
General
I guess it's important E-2D Test Program Completes First In-flight Fuel Transfer
Another major milestone was reached on the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye program this summer, when the first E-2D equipped with aerial refueling successfully received its first in-flight fuel transfer from a tanker aircraft on July 14, Northrop Grumman said in an Oct. 31 release.
During the four-hour flight, the pilots performed 10 dry plugs and two wet plugs, resulting in the successful transfer of more than 1,700 pounds of fuel from a U.S. Navy KC-130 Hercules to the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye.
“Passing fuel for the first time airborne is a significant milestone in the development of this critical technology for the E-2D,” said Capt. Keith Hash, E-2/C-2 Airborne Tactical Data Systems (PMA-231) program manager, “which increases the range and persistence of command and control the E-2D provides to U.S. and allied forces.”
The aerial refueling-equipped E-2D made its first flight Dec. 15, 2016, at Northrop Grumman’s St. Augustine, Fla., facility. The aircraft was then transferred to Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 20 (VX-20) at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., where it will complete the aerial refueling test program.
“Developing aerial refueling capability for the E-2D is another demonstration of Northrop Grumman’s unwavering commitment to provide our Navy customer with increased operational capability,” said Jane Bishop, vice president and program manager of the E-2/C-2 program at Northrop Grumman.
There are two additional aircraft in the aerial refueling test program and while the first aircraft was making its first fuel transfer flight, the third aircraft to be modified made its first flight at St. Augustine. Two E-2Ds equipped with aerial refueling in flight at the same time marks a significant first for Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Navy’s Hawkeye community.
The aerial refueling system modification contains several subsystem upgrades to accommodate the refueling capability including adding the fuel probe plumbing, formation lighting, long-endurance seats, as well as flight control software and hardware changes.
The U.S. Navy awarded Northrop Grumman the aerial refueling contract in 2013. This capability gives the U.S. Navy the flexibility to conduct missions of more than seven hours. The planned production cut-in will be next year, and initial operational capability is planned for 2020. The E-2D aircraft already in the fleet will eventually be retrofitted with the aerial refueling system.
Equation
Lieutenant General
Thanks for the link. I was trying to see if I can find my cousin who works at the F-35 assembly plant over in Fort Worth, Texas.
