US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

I'm surprised the Lancer CAS is brought back here ... as I said Saturday at 5:52 PM "b-1b+close+air+support" google search quickly shows links I posted, for everyone to see if the Lancer is/isn't an active CAS platform ... now I add:
...

But they may not be able to hang around very long eother...depending on where refueling may take place, how long they have been in the air, etc.

...
"The B-1 is able to hold 84 500lb general-purpose bombs, and loiter up to 10 hours without a single refueling"
:
Coalition: Air Force B-1 bombers being used in Ramadi offensive
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I'm not going to post about it anymore
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
Army’s next squad weapon will fire a never-before-seen ammo combination
By: Todd South   May 7
rifle will bring a type of ammunition combination, from bullet to casing, that’s never seen the battlefield.

Army Lt. Col. Andrew Lunoff, product manager for the service’s small caliber ammunition program, said that the round currently under consideration is the 6.8mm caliber.

Lunoff was speaking on a panel on intermediate caliber development at the annual National Defense Industrial Association Armaments Systems forum here.

The 6.8mm round is the offspring of a project formerly known as the Enhanced Rifle Cartridge Program that put together Special Operations Command, the Army Marksmanship Unit and Remington Arms to create an alternative to the 5.56mm round currently in use across the force.


That size ammo falls in the sweet spot the Army is looking for, with all the good characteristics of the heavier 7.62mm but with more lethality and accuracy — and coming in at an automatic 10 percent weight savings.

But work doesn’t end with the projectile, which hasn’t been officially named as the caliber but is the basis for much of current testing.

Lt. Col. Loyd Beal III, product manager for the Army’s crew served weapons program, said the requirements to lighten the load will mean not just a new projectile for increased lethality, but a new case to carry that bullet.

“The requirement is going to drive us to a new type of ammunition,” Beal said. “It’s going to have to be lighter. You can’t just go out and get a brass type, which pushes us to a polymer or some type of steel or something I don’t even know about yet.”



Beal added that while there has been a lot of promise in the development of Cased Telescope Ammunition, advances in other configurations give the Army a menu of options for developing the cartridge combination.

The intermediate caliber development is a simultaneous project with the Army’s plan to make the replacement for the Squad Automatic Weapon, known as the Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle.

The NGSAR program, officials said, will inform not only a new machine gun, but it will soon follow with a new carbine for individual soldiers.

As the round is developed, Lunoff outlined the Army’s priorities.



First is a combat round, followed soon after by a blank round for training. Those are near-term goals.

Next, the service will need reduced range training rounds, tracer rounds, drill ammunition for weapon cycling, combat tracers and short range “paintball” type training rounds for close-quarter shooting.

SOCOM snipers will see barrel changes as early as next year to the commercially available 6.5mm round that will increase range, lethality, accuracy and reduce recoil.

Prototypes of the intermediate caliber for the NGSAR program are expected to be ready for testing by late 2019, early 2020, with the rifle being fielded to units by 2022, Beal said.
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timepass

Brigadier
Air Force adopts Army's Occupational Camouflage Pattern uniform..

Air-Force-adopts-Armys-Occupational-Camouflage-Pattern-uniform.jpg


"The U.S. Air Force announced Monday it plans to adopt the Army's Occupational Camouflage Pattern uniform starting in October.

The branch said it will move to the new single combat utility uniform in response to requests from airmen."

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timepass

Brigadier
Submarines are increasingly lurking in seas around the world, and the US Navy's high-tech Poseidon is there to hunt them

5af4cfddbd6fc21b008b47e1-750-375.jpg


"For NATO members and other countries, augmenting antisubmarine abilities means not only adding ships but also advanced maritime-patrol aircraft to scour the sea. A number of aircraft on the market fill this role, but the US-made P-8A Poseidon is among the most sophisticated

In 2004, the US Navy picked the P-8A Poseidon to succeed the P-3 Orion, which had been in operation since the 1960s. The first Poseidon entered service in 2013, and more than 60 are in service now."

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timepass

Brigadier
The Army Is Testing a Missile-Proof 'Iron Curtain'...


"The U.S. Army is testing a system designed to protect military vehicles smaller than tanks from attacks. The "Iron Curtain" uses a combination of sensors and downward-firing projectiles to stop incoming rockets and missiles from striking vehicles by setting off their shaped charge warheads. The result could be vehicles as small Humvees protected from anti-tank guided weapons.

The proliferation of anti-tank weapons with shaped charges has made the modern battlefield very deadly for any vehicle daring to cross it. High explosive, anti-tank (HEAT) warheads are found on everything from shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenade launchers of the Taliban to Kornet-EM anti-tank guided missiles arming the Russian Army. Defeating them is one of the Army’s top concerns, and a brigade of Abrams tanks equipped with the Israeli Trophy active protection system (APS) is headed to Europe in the near future."

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kwaigonegin

Colonel
The Army Is Testing a Missile-Proof 'Iron Curtain'...


"The U.S. Army is testing a system designed to protect military vehicles smaller than tanks from attacks. The "Iron Curtain" uses a combination of sensors and downward-firing projectiles to stop incoming rockets and missiles from striking vehicles by setting off their shaped charge warheads. The result could be vehicles as small Humvees protected from anti-tank guided weapons.

The proliferation of anti-tank weapons with shaped charges has made the modern battlefield very deadly for any vehicle daring to cross it. High explosive, anti-tank (HEAT) warheads are found on everything from shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenade launchers of the Taliban to Kornet-EM anti-tank guided missiles arming the Russian Army. Defeating them is one of the Army’s top concerns, and a brigade of Abrams tanks equipped with the Israeli Trophy active protection system (APS) is headed to Europe in the near future."

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Sounds very similar to the Trophy active protection system.
 
the last on 'low-risk, low-cost' (LOL) tanker was ... Apr 5, 2018
Tuesday at 9:16 PM
anyway Boeing tankers refuel each other in KC-46 milestone test

05 April, 2018
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getasset.aspx
now Boeing, U.S. Air Force At Odds Over KC-46

May 14, 2018
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If you ask
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, it is on the cusp of delivering a game-changing tanker capability to the U.S. Air Force. But if you ask the Air Force, Boeing has to resolve significant design flaws and is far from completing the required flight testing.

More than seven years after contract award, the aerospace giant and its U.S. government customer are at loggerheads over the new
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refueling tanker’s delivery timing and what work remains for Boeing to do.

The daylight between Boeing and the Air Force on the KC-46 refueling tanker was on full display during interviews with officials from both in the past few weeks. During a media visit to Boeing’s Everett, Washington, facility May 3 and an interview with Air Force KC-46 program manager Brig. Gen. Donna Shipton May 9 at the Pentagon, officials presented contradictory information on the long-delayed aircraft.

This is not the first time the two parties have clashed on the KC-46. Until last December, Boeing was promising to deliver the first of 18 required tankers by the end of 2017, although the Air Force was projecting it would not receive the aircraft before mid-2018.

Today, Boeing Defense CEO Leanne Caret pledges delivery of all 18 KC-46s will occur by year-end. But the Air Force now expects delivery in May 2019, 21 months later than originally planned, according to a recent report by the
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.

In the meantime, Boeing has racked up more than $3 billion in pre-tax charges on the program, including an additional $81 million in the first three months of this year.

Shipton attributes the delay to Boeing’s slower-than-anticipated pace in accomplishing the required test points. Progress has been impeded by a series of technical challenges over the course of KC-46 development, she says.

There are currently two deficiencies the Air Force characterizes as “Category 1—Urgent,” meaning the problem is not a safety issue but “has no known acceptable workaround” (as opposed to “Category 1—Emergency,” meaning the problem presents a safety risk).

The most pressing issue is improving the
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Remote Vision System (RVS), an advanced sensor suite that allows the crew to operate the refueling boom remotely from near the cockpit. In certain flight conditions, shadows or glare from the Sun can distract the boom operator, according to Mike Gibbons, Boeing’s KC-46 vice president and program manager. The Air Force is concerned that this can cause contact outside the receptacle, the formal term for what happens when the boom accidentally scrapes receiver aircraft.

“Learning will continue to take place once the aircraft is delivered. However, if limitations were to exist with the KC-46, they can’t be passed on to a 19-year-old boom operator to figure out,” says Air Mobility Command spokesman Col. Chris Karns. “This is more than an aircraft; it is a weapon system.”

Boeing recently began flight tests on a software “enhancement” to the RVS that it expects will reduce the number of such incidents, Gibbons says. The software upgrade sharpens the image displayed to the operator and eliminates the glare, he notes.

But the Air Force takes issue with the word “enhancement.” The change is a “fix,” says Shipton. “Something that’s an enhancement means that it’s gotten better above the requirement. We didn’t believe that the original system was going to meet the requirement, so for us this is a software fix because it fixes what we saw as a deficiency in the system in order for them to get to an acceptable level of performance.”

For the Air Force, the rate of “undetected” contacts outside the receptacle on the original RVS was excessive and did not meet the requirement that “the [air refueling operator (ARO)] shall have sufficient visual cues to safely refuel a receiver in all ambient lighting and background conditions.” The rate should be zero—any time there is contact outside the receptacle, it needs to be recorded, according to the Air Force.

Further, the contract also includes an “equivalency requirement” stating that the KC-46 must be able to refuel all receivers that are compatible with the KC-135, with no restrictions or modifications to the receiver envelope, Shipton adds. When the undetected contact issue was discovered, the Air Force was concerned that the KC-46 equipped with the original RVS would not be able to meet that requirement—including refueling stealth aircraft with low-observable coating that might be damaged.

“We did not believe that there was sufficient visual acuity in order for the ARO to safely aerial refuel on the old baseline,” Shipton says.

Boeing, by contrast, asserts that the original system met the Air Force’s requirement. “We are very happy with our camera system; it is a state of the art camera system,” Gibbons says. “Contact outside the receptacle, which has also been termed ‘boom scraping’ in some cases, actually is, unfortunately, a phenomenon that occurs in the fleet today and in test. As long as you have a person in the loop, you will end up in some conditions where you will end up contacting outside the receptacle.”

Sean Martin, Boeing KC-46 chief air refueling operator, moreover contends that the shadow and glare issue occurs in only 5-8% of tanking operations.

But that rate is too high for the Air Force. “We can’t have the 5% with restrictions because there may be very important missions where we have to refuel in those lighting conditions where a KC-135 can do it today but a KC-46 can’t,” says Col. John Newberry, KC-46 system program manager.

Boeing and the Air Force are also clashing over the results of their comprehensive joint study of the legacy fleet. Gibbons says the data shows that the rate of undetected contacts on the KC-46 is in the same range as on the existing KC-135 and KC-10 tankers. But Shipton disputes this, saying that, to her knowledge, Boeing has not yet delivered the results of the study to the Air Force.

Either way, Boeing is paying to upgrade the RVS software and will deliver the first aircraft with that modification in place, officials say.

The two parties also differ over the delivery schedule for the 18 aircraft contractually required by October. Boeing officials said during the media visit that the company could deliver all 18 tankers in quick succession. But Shipton says the two parties have agreed on a schedule after first delivery of accepting aircraft at a rate of three per month, or about every 10 days, which is a “surge” for the Air Force. The number of tankers the Air Force can accept at once is limited by the government’s rigorous acceptance process, as well as by the number of aircrew and maintainers that are trained on the aircraft, she says.

There may be opportunities to increase that rate, but not until at least after the first three aircraft are delivered, Shipton says.

“What we have said to Boeing is: first, let’s get to three; let’s show that we can do three repeatedly, and then we will look at potentially trying to do more,” Shipton says.

If you do the math, the three-per-month rate means Boeing is already late for the October deadline.

The Air Force and Boeing are united in working to expedite delivery of the first tanker. The program is considering changing a contractual requirement to certify eight receiver aircraft on the new KC-46 baseline before delivery to just three, Shipton says. All eight would be required by the start of initial operational test and evaluation, the aircraft’s final test period, she says.

Today, Boeing has 34 tankers in some stage of production and is about 95% complete with flight testing, according to company officials. The KC-46 program also has submitted the required flight-test data and reports to the
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for review in advance of the expected Supplemental Type Certificate award, the last of two FAA certifications necessary for delivery.

But there is still a lot of work to be done before first delivery, says Shipton. The KC-46 must also obtain a Military Type Certificate, which is based on the FAA certifications and requires additional flight tests.

If Boeing does not deliver the first tanker by October, it would be the second time the company has missed the Required Assets Available deadline, originally slated for August 2017. To compensate for the delay so far, Boeing is providing additional training for KC-46 aircrew and maintainers above the contractual requirement. If the aircraft maker misses the deadline again, the Air Force will likely require additional compensation.
funny is “enhancement” versus “fix” debate
 
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