Military Tech / Science

[Holman]

I know it happens all the time but it never fails to catch my eye.

UTC owns Sikorsky. They also own Pratt & Whitney (and UTC Aerospace which is the former Hamilton Sundstrand and Goodrich companies). UTC is a chief competitor to GE in the defense aerospace arena. But they'll be working together on these choppers for decades to come.

Military–industrial complex indeed.

That's how you slice pork.

[Isgrimnur]

Robo-fish

The Navy is testing a stealthy, 4 foot-long fish-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle designed to blend in with undersea life and perform combat sensor functions, service officials explained.

The so-called “bio-memetic” undersea vehicle is currently being developed as part of the Chief of Naval Operations Rapid Innovation Cell, or CRIC – a special unit set up by CNO Adm. Jonathan Greenert in 2012 to explore the feasibility of rapidly turning around commercially available technologies for Naval military use.
...
The robot-fish is highly maneuverable and can accelerate quickly, reaching speeds up to 40 knots, Loper said. Being propelled by its tail instead of a shaft or propeller helps it remain stealthy and energy efficient. The shark-like sensor is engineered to carry a range of payloads from acoustic sensors to underwater cameras, he explained.
...
The robot-fish UUV could, at least in theory, work well with another project currently being developed by the CRIC called Suspended Undersea Raw Fiber, or SURF.

SURF involves the use of underwater fiber optic cable used to create secure, seamless point-to-point communications possibilities for surface and undersea entities such as ships, submarines and underwater vehicles.

Navy developers with CRIC have been working closely with laboratory scientists at Penn State who have developed a special kind of buoyant fiber-optic cable.

“They have developed a way to make the fiber cable neutrally buoyant or at least able to suspend itself in the water column. The idea is to take this cable with a high data rate up to 10-gigabytes and be able to connect point to point with zero detectability. The idea is to facilitate low observable communications so you can have high speed communications without worrying about a radio transmission being detected,” Loper said.

Some initial tests of SURF attached to a buoy off of Virginia beach have assessed the ability of the cable to withstand the wind and waves and suspend in the water column above the bottom of the ocean while not floating to the top, Loper explained.

In theory, miles of spooled out underwater fiber-optic cable could connect ships to submarines in real time, allowing them to seamlessly pass combat-relevant sensor data, he added.

“In the future when we get this thing going, you could attach a ship and a submarine. The submarine can go several miles out of the way and do what it needs to do with a cable connecting it. All of the surface and air radar from a ship can be going back to a sub. Meanwhile, a sub can be passing all of its acoustic contacts back to the ship,” he said.

[Isgrimnur]

New camo for the Army

Combat uniforms featuring the Army's newest camouflage pattern will be available for sale in the summer of 2015, officials announced Thursday.

The Army is calling its new camo the Operational Camouflage Pattern, though it's been referred to in previous tests as Scorpion W2. The pattern, with a color palette of muted greens, light beige and dark brown, was developed by Army Natick Labs in Massachusetts.

The Army plans to transition to this new camo over time, phasing out the unpopular gray-green Universal Combat Pattern. The Army, in a statement, said a phase-out of the older uniform was "fiscally responsible."

The name "Operational Camouflage Pattern" is intended to emphasize that the pattern's use extends beyond Afghanistan to all combatant commands. It will also be worn in garrison. However, leaders have said it would be just one part of a "family" of camo patterns that will also include a dark jungle-woodland variant and a lighter pattern for desert environs.

The Army announced the service's newest camouflage pattern for combat: a palette of muted greens, light beige and dark brown. This swatch is based on an experimental design, because the actual design hasn't been released yet.

[Isgrimnur]

Scrutiny over cutting the LCS order:

A new Congressional report suggests the Pentagon may face further scrutiny over its direction to issue no new contracts for the controversial Littoral Combat Ship program beyond 32 ships.

The August report questions whether the Pentagon did the proper analysis before making the decision to truncate the Navy’s planned buy of 52 ships down to 32.
...
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced this past February that the Pentagon would offer no new contracts for the LCS platform beyond 32 ships. The report seems to ask for analytical justification for this decision.

“Has DOD conducted a formal analysis to show that the Navy now needs only 32 LCSs to provide sufficient capacity for fully addressing the fleet’s requirements in these three mission areas? What are the potential operational implications of attempting to perform these missions with a Navy that includes 32 rather than 52 LCSs?” the report asks.

In response to Hagel’s directive, the Navy has formed a special Small Surface Combatant Task Force designed to examine the needed requirements and available technologies sufficient for a new ship to replace the last 20-planned LCS vessels. Navy officials said the task force has completed the first segment of its work but has yet to announce any findings regarding what their deliberations might mean for the development of a new ship.

The report questions the rationale informing why the Pentagon said the new ship would need to be generally consistent with a Frigate and wonders if there is sufficient analysis to inform the decision.

Overall, the report says that the LCS program could have benefitted from more rigorous analysis on specific mission needs at its inception prior to 2001 and highlights a handful of strengths and weaknesses of the platform.

The report criticizes the cost growth of the LCS sea frames, saying they have turned out to be much more expensive to procure than the original target of $220 million each in constant fiscal year 2005 dollars. Some of the LCS missions could be successfully performed in a more cost-effective manner by other platforms such as Joint High Speed Vessels, amphibious ships, cruisers, destroyers and attack submarines, the report says.
...
While the report does say the LCS anti-submarine warfare package is potentially well-suited to counter diesel-electric submarines far from shore and in littoral waters, it criticizes the platform for not being optimized to address Chinese maritime threats such as anti-ship cruise missiles and larger surface ships.

[Isgrimnur]

Navy gets exoskeletons:

The Pentagon has acquired two high-tech exoskeletons designed to make it much easier for Navy shipyard workers to suspend and hold heavy equipment such as riveters, grinders and sanders.

The so-called FORTIS exoskeleton is an unpowered, lightweight exoskeleton that increases an operator’s strength and endurance by transferring the weight of heavy loads from the user’s body directly to the ground, said Adam Miller, director of new initiatives at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.
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U.S. Special Operation Command has also started researching the potential use of exoskeletons for the command’s planned Iron Man suit that would provide operators with super human strength on the battlefield. This is a separate program but an example of exoskeletons filtering into day-to-day military operations.
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With the FORTIS exoskeleton, a shipyard worker can hold a 30-pound piece of equipment in place for much longer periods of time without needing to rest, greatly increasing productivity, he added.

[Isgrimnur]

Lockheed: Want a better LCS?

Lockheed Martin is offering the Navy a slightly heavier, technologically re-configured multi-warfare variant of the Littoral Combat Ship that has added survivability features such as built in vertical launch tubes and a stronger radar.

It is part of Lockheed’s submission to the Navy’s Small Surface Combatant Task Force’s, or SSCTF, solicitation asking industry to come up with specs and designs for a new multi-mission surface ship engineered to address and correct some of the problems with the LCS.

Lockheed’s offering, which is based on their international variant of the LCS, is designed to engineer certain technologies into the hull itself, such as sonar. This approach is intended to prevent the need to swap out “mission packages” or sets of technologies as is currently the case with the LCS.
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The new ship design weighs 3,600 tons which is slightly more than the current LCS weight of 3,400 tons, North said.

Other technological adaptations include the use of a sophisticated anti-air radar than the one used by the LCS that allows for greater distance with air coverage, North added.
...
The SSCTF emerged out of a request from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel earlier this year stating that the Navy issued no new contracts for the LCS beyond 32 ships. The Navy had been planning to buy 52 LCS vessels as they were originally configured.

As part of this announcement, Hagel instructed the Navy to examine alternative proposals for the remaining 20 ships that, among other things, offered more survivable designs.
...
So far, Lockheed has delivered two of its Freedom-variant LCS vessels and six more are in production, North said. LCS 7 is slated to launch in October of this year, he added.

“The Navy will have eight of these ships in their hands by the end of next year,” North said.

The joys of military tech. Obsolete even before we get them all.

[LawBeefaroni]

Lockheed: Want a better LCS?

Well, after the F35s missed Farnborough they had to drum up new sales somehow.

[Isgrimnur]

MQ-4C Triton

The aircraft, which boasts a 130-foot wingspan and can reach altitudes of 60,000 feet, is engineered as a long-endurance surveillance platform, meaning it can stay in the air as long at 30 hours on a single mission.

Navy admirals plan to use the Triton to offer better situational awareness across the large swaths of ocean the Navy’s fleets cover. Triton will feature advanced radars that will help carrier strike groups identify enemy threats.

The Triton’s next-generation radar, called the Multi-Function Active Sensor (MFAS), is a 360-degree radar capability optimized to provide the identification of surface ships over vast areas covering thousands of miles..

Its sensors also include a high-definition, Electro-Optical/Infra-Red camera and a communications relay device so that it can function as a line-of-sight “node” connecting Naval forces dispersed over a large area.

Due for deployment in 2017, it is a naval version of the Northrup Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk. It beat out competition from Boeing's unmanned version of a Gulfstream G550 and General Atomics' naval version of the MQ-9 Reaper, the MQ-9 Mariner.

[Kasey Chang]

You can almost imagine a fleet of those Tritons can replace an AWACS...

[Isgrimnur]

The Marines are testing the MUTT.

General Dynamics Land Systems has developed the Multi-Utility Tactical Transport, or MUTT – a 54-inch wide, five-foot long, 750-pound four-wheeled amphibious unmanned vehicle engineered to help dismounted infantry units.
...
“The MUTT will carry 600-pounds on land and it is amphibious. It will swim. While it is swimming it carries 300-pounds. It works off of lithium-ion batteries. With those batteries fully charged and carrying a full 600-pounds,a Marine can walk 15 miles with the MUTT before there is any degradation in battery power,” Rash added.

MUTT is not an autonomous vehicle but rather navigates through what developers describe as “tethering” technology. The vehicle operator uses a high-strength fishing line, or tether, to direct the movements of the MUTT, Rash said.

A vehicle sensor detects the movements of the fishing line which is pulled by the vehicle operator.

“The marine or the soldier operating this system is controlling the vehicle where it goes. This is a non-autonomous system. There are two sensors in the system. Basically when the tether is pulled out to two meters, a sensor tells that system to move forward or backward. An angle sensor tells the vehicle whether to move left or right,” Rash explained.

[Holman]

Cool overview of the Zumwalt destroyer (more like a cruiser), including a slideshow of cool design features.

[Kraken]

Now where have I seen a ship like that before?

Spoiler:

The more things change...

[dbt1949]

I remember back when I was in the air force and the F-15 was just entering production. That would have been around 1974-75.
Now I see pictures of them bombing ISIS 40 years later.
Another weird thing is they were hailed as an air superiority fighter then.

[Kasey Chang]

I remember back when I was in the air force and the F-15 was just entering production. That would have been around 1974-75.
Now I see pictures of them bombing ISIS 40 years later.
Another weird thing is they were hailed as an air superiority fighter then.

It's the Strike Eagle that's bombing ISIS now. (The E model)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_ ... rike_Eagle

Rebuilt airframe with much strengthening under the skin, improved engines, always a two-seater, much improved radar, conformal belly tanks

[Holman]

I remember back when I was in the air force and the F-15 was just entering production. That would have been around 1974-75.
Now I see pictures of them bombing ISIS 40 years later.
Another weird thing is they were hailed as an air superiority fighter then.

It's the Strike Eagle that's bombing ISIS now. (The E model)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_ ... rike_Eagle

Rebuilt airframe with much strengthening under the skin, improved engines, always a two-seater, much improved radar, conformal belly tanks

I learned so much from those old Janes sims.

[Isgrimnur]

My family deployed to Bitburg in 1977 with the F-15. Dad was one of the first hundred crew chiefs.

[Isgrimnur]

New Sikorsky light attack helicopter

Helicopter-maker Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. unveiled its next-generation light-attack helicopter, the S-97 Raider, during a ceremony Thursday in Florida.

The coaxial design features counter-rotating rotor blades and a push propeller, among other innovations, that will allow it to fly much faster and farther than today’s choppers.
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The Raider was designed to target a potentially $16 billion Army weapons program called the Armed Aerial Scout to develop a replacement for the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, the smallest aircraft in the U.S. fleet. The service put the acquisition effort on hold due to automatic budget cuts.
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The inaugural Raider, rolled out during a glitzy ceremony Thursday at the company’s hangar in Jupiter, Florida, will be one of two built for demonstration purposes and is slated fly later this year from the company’s developmental flight center in West Palm Beach. Most of the flight testing will take place in 2015.

Sikorsky in 2010 and 2011 flew an experimental prototype of the design called the X2 that reached speeds of up to 250 knots, or 290 miles per hour. By comparison, the Kiowa Warrior has a top speed of about 120 knots, or 140 miles per hour.

Sikorsky has also teamed with Boeing Co., which helps make the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, in proposing the SB-1 Defiant, a larger coaxial design, for the Army’s Joint Multi-Role technology demonstrator program, or JMR.

[LawBeefaroni]

New Sikorsky light attack helicopter

Helicopter-maker Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. unveiled its next-generation light-attack helicopter, the S-97 Raider, during a ceremony Thursday in Florida.

The coaxial design features counter-rotating rotor blades and a push propeller, among other innovations, that will allow it to fly much faster and farther than today’s choppers.
...
The Raider was designed to target a potentially $16 billion Army weapons program called the Armed Aerial Scout to develop a replacement for the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, the smallest aircraft in the U.S. fleet. The service put the acquisition effort on hold due to automatic budget cuts.
...
The inaugural Raider, rolled out during a glitzy ceremony Thursday at the company’s hangar in Jupiter, Florida, will be one of two built for demonstration purposes and is slated fly later this year from the company’s developmental flight center in West Palm Beach. Most of the flight testing will take place in 2015.

Sikorsky in 2010 and 2011 flew an experimental prototype of the design called the X2 that reached speeds of up to 250 knots, or 290 miles per hour. By comparison, the Kiowa Warrior has a top speed of about 120 knots, or 140 miles per hour.

Sikorsky has also teamed with Boeing Co., which helps make the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, in proposing the SB-1 Defiant, a larger coaxial design, for the Army’s Joint Multi-Role technology demonstrator program, or JMR.

Less than 4 months after they turned it on!

[Kasey Chang]

I learned so much from those old Janes sims.

I'm old school. MicroProse sims. SE3, to be exact. I remember flying those missions... in real-time.

[Isgrimnur]

Lockheed Martin pitches atomic planes:

Experts were skeptical of Lockheed Martin Corp.‘s claims this week that it plans to build a fusion reactor small enough to fit on the back of a truck over the next decade.

The Bethesda, Maryland-based company — the world’s largest defense contractor, known for its stealth fighter jets and guided missiles — on Wednesday announced that it would test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, build a prototype in five years and deploy the system in 10 years.

Thomas McGuire, the man behind the project at Lockheed’s famously secretive Skunk Works laboratory in Palmdale, California, was bullish on his team’s approach to the nuclear technology, on which the company holds several patents.

Fusion energy has the potential to revolutionize how the military powers its fleets of ships, aircraft and ground vehicles, he said. “A next-generation airplane that doesn’t rely on fuel and can just stay aloft — unlimited range, unlimited endurance,” he said in a promotional video. “That’s what nuclear fusion can do for an airplane.”

McGuire goes on: “Ten years, we have great military vehicles. Twenty years, we have clean power for the world.”

Others were less optimistic. After all, creating a fusion reaction in a controlled environment that produces more energy than it consumes has challenged physicists since the dawn of the Atomic Age.

“I’m surprised that a company like this would release something that doesn’t have much context,” said Steven Cowley, a professor in plasma physics at the Imperial College London, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, and a leading expert in magnetic fusion energy.

[Cortilian]

Lockheed Martin pitches atomic planes:

Experts were skeptical of Lockheed Martin Corp.‘s claims this week that it plans to build a fusion reactor small enough to fit on the back of a truck over the next decade.

The Bethesda, Maryland-based company — the world’s largest defense contractor, known for its stealth fighter jets and guided missiles — on Wednesday announced that it would test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, build a prototype in five years and deploy the system in 10 years.

Thomas McGuire, the man behind the project at Lockheed’s famously secretive Skunk Works laboratory in Palmdale, California, was bullish on his team’s approach to the nuclear technology, on which the company holds several patents.

Fusion energy has the potential to revolutionize how the military powers its fleets of ships, aircraft and ground vehicles, he said. “A next-generation airplane that doesn’t rely on fuel and can just stay aloft — unlimited range, unlimited endurance,” he said in a promotional video. “That’s what nuclear fusion can do for an airplane.”

McGuire goes on: “Ten years, we have great military vehicles. Twenty years, we have clean power for the world.”

Others were less optimistic. After all, creating a fusion reaction in a controlled environment that produces more energy than it consumes has challenged physicists since the dawn of the Atomic Age.

“I’m surprised that a company like this would release something that doesn’t have much context,” said Steven Cowley, a professor in plasma physics at the Imperial College London, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, and a leading expert in magnetic fusion energy.

Now I'm no scientist but aren't we currently (knowingly) unable to even make a functional fusion reactor?

[Isgrimnur]

Oh, we can make a fusion reactors. We just can't make them put out more energy than we put into them.

Earlier this year, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reported a breakthrough by generating a fusion reaction that created more energy than it started with. But the experiment didn’t produce enough power to have practical implications.

What’s more, it required far more energy to get the reaction going. (Scientists concentrated 192 lasers on a pellet of hydrogen fuel to compress it and trigger a fusion of the isotopes deuterium and tritium. Only about 1 percent of the energy from the lasers entered the pellet, but the technique, known as “alpha heating,” created a series of nuclear reactions that generated a higher level of particles and heat.)

Even the best fusion experiment created less energy than it took in. The Joint European Torus, or JET, the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics project in Oxfordshire, in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of power for about two seconds while using 24 megawatts, Crowley said.

[Blackhawk]

[LawBeefaroni]

Swedish Navy, fans of Minecraft.



Also, they were looking for an unknown sub in their waters.

[Cortilian]

That .50 will be 100 years old soon and is still is active service. What a well designed piece of equipment.

[xwraith]

Delta on ice

[Isgrimnur]

The end to smelly submarines?

On a US Navy submarine, every breath you inhale has been repeatedly exhaled from the mouths of about 120 other people. This isn’t as suffocating, or gross, as it sounds, because submarines have ventilation systems that take the CO2 out of the air, and recirculate it with chemically catalyzed oxygen.

I take that back, the air is gross, because the chemical used to remove CO2 smells like old diesel mixed with a dash of sulphur, and it permeates everything on board. This chemical, called amine, is known by every submariner (I was one for 3 years), as well as every submariner’s wife, husband, or anyone else who encounters that sailor’s laundry. However, a new CO2-capturing nanomaterial could bring an end to this most notorious of submarine smells (trust me, there are others).

Unlike amine, which is a liquid, the new material looks like sand. In fact, it is sand, except it is covered with tiny pores, each filled with molecules that selectively pull CO2 out of the airstream. Together, sand grain and molecule are called Self Assembled Monolayers on Mesoporous Supports, or SAMMS. The pores create nooks and crannies that let even a small amount of the material soak up an incredible amount of CO2—a teaspoon of the material has slightly less surface area than a football field. And it’s reversible. “With a slight amount of heat, you can also open that molecule back up and release the CO2, making it possible to use the same material over and over again,” said Ken Rappe, an engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who worked on SAMMS.
...
Amine doesn’t just stink, it’s also highly corrosive and will ruin anything not made of stainless steel. This makes it a huge maintenance burden, as it needs to be flushed and moved into storage whenever it gets saturated with CO2. The sandy SAMMS would alleviate this, as it doesn’t need special storage. “When you go from a liquid to a solid, you’re able to get rid of all the pumps and tanks,” said Jay Smith, an engineer at the Naval Ships Engineering Station in Philadelphia who has been getting the SAMMS-based replacement ready for deployment. “It’s also safer, and more environmentally friendly to dispose of,” she said.
...
Rappe and his research partners spent years improving the material before turning it over to the Navy. Since then, Smith and her colleagues have been building a prototype SAMMS ventilation system specific for submarines. She says the prototype is currently going through long-term testing with lab-simulated sub air. Then, maybe, it will be deployed on a sub or two for sea trials before possibly percolating into the rest of the fleet.

[Daehawk]

The 0.5 gram drone

Wouldn't the wind just blow this little fella all over the place?

[Holman]

The 0.5 gram drone

Wouldn't the wind just blow this little fella all over the place?

I think your source got it wrong. A search for "0.56 gram drone" gives me lots of stories where the same drone is described as weighing 0.56 ounces (or 16 grams). Still tiny, but not half-a-paper-clip tiny.

[Isgrimnur]

Per the mfg:

Mass 18 g including cameras
...
Missions
...
Reconnaissance in confined areas

Yes, wind is certainly going to be an issue. I imagine the instructions have something to say about outdoor use in high winds.

[Isgrimnur]

Kepler for the intelligence set.

Over the next decade, the Pentagon plans to launch satellites that offer a revolutionary leap in surveillance technology by persistently staring at targets from space for long periods of time, an official said.
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The Air Force’s current Space Base Infrared System, known as SBIRS, and legacy Defense Support Program, or DSP, satellites support the Overhead Persistent Infrared Technology mission in such areas as missile warning, missile defense, technical intelligence and battlespace awareness, according to a Government Accountability Office report from January.

The service’s Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload, or CHIRP, demonstration sensor employed a wide field-of-view staring technology — which provided insight into the applicability for the mission area, the document states.

[Isgrimnur]

SOCOM wants to be able to run data dumps in the field.

U.S. Special Operations Command wants its operators to be able to drain intelligence from enemy computers, so they don’t have to lug them off the battlefield.
...
The command is inviting the defense industry to participate in an “assessment event for the next generation of document and media exploitation devices in March of 2015 at Fort Bragg, NC. All hardware/equipment submitted for testing shall be production models and capable of executing document and media extraction from a variety of electronic media devices,” according to a request for information posted on FedBizOpps​.gov.
...
The device should allow commandos the ability to extract, in 15 minutes or less under austere conditions, file names, hash numbers, personal identifying information like names, addresses, telephone numbers, email address, chat users names and be able to compare all that data with a watchlist of adversary information contained in the device, the Tribune reported.

Interested companies have until Nov. 19 to response to the RFI. In February, vendors will be required to deliver five “fully functional devices and associated items for technical assessment,” according to the RFI.

Vendors will be expected to train SOCOM testers so they can operate them during the assessment, scheduled for March 17–27. Vendors will not participate in the actual events conducted jointly by SOCOM and the Joint Interoperability Test Command, but may be asked to address questions or issues by phone or e-mail during the evaluation, according the RFI.

[LawBeefaroni]

The device should allow commandos the ability to extract, in 15 minutes or less under austere conditions, file names, hash numbers, personal identifying information like names, addresses, telephone numbers, email address, chat users names and be able to compare all that data with a watchlist of adversary information contained in the device, the Tribune reported.

Why do the need to do the bolded part in the field? Seems like overkill, plus that database is outdated as soon another commando runs his device.


The whole thing seems suspect. I'm a fan of primary sources and raw data. Teach a commando how to access a hard drive and RAM in 15 minutes rather than rely on a gadget and hardware standards. I would imagine that a device like that can be defeated by removing usb ports or other extremely simple hardware/software mods.

But it will work great domestically...

[Isgrimnur]

Yeah, that was my thought. SOCOM might enjoy its use in less-than-tech-savvy areas of the world. Of course, so will all levels of domestic law enforcement.

[Kasey Chang]

Not all countries are as tech savvy as Americans, and terrorists rarely enjoy top-level ciphers and security protection. They usually exploit obscurity instead.

I can see some sort of raw scanner that scans for unencrypted meta data for operational names (i.e. "the list") or such that can read SATA / PATA / USB. But given the size of HD keeps going up, it may actually be easier to teach the commandos how to remove the HD's and take them rather than exploiting a scanner.

[Isgrimnur]

I can see this being more useful for stealthy infiltration/monitoring. You want to leave the computers in place to keep them being used by the targets rather than a shoot & scoop operation.

[Isgrimnur]

Potential LCS construction freeze.

Congress has frozen the construction of several new Littoral Combat Ships until the Navy provides the House and Senate defense committees with specific analytical reports on the program, according to a newly released Congressional budget agreement.

The agreement on the National Defense Act for Fiscal Year 2015, which Congress will vote on before Christmas, emerged from conference session between House and Senate committees responsible for passing the defense budget.

Regarding the LCS, the agreement prevents the Navy from spending money toward the construction of LCS-25 or LCS-26 until certain reports are submitted by the Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.

[stessier]

I couldn't find a better place, so I'm putting it here.

The Delta launch was scrubbed today because of a stuck valve. Next window is tomorrow at the same time.

[xwraith]

Here is something retro:

Chuck Yeager sells the F-20

[Isgrimnur]

New bombers, submarines

Next generation bomber and submarine programs for the Air Force and Navy turned out to be the winners out of the Pentagon’s roll out of its fiscal 2016 budget proposal.

Both programs, designed to offer the U.S. the ability to evade advanced air defenses or underwater detection capabilities, received high levels of funding that don’t include what’s sure to be a significant chunk of funding in the classified budget. In fact, the Navy’s effort to replace its Ohio-class nuclear submarines received a fund designed by Congress that separates a portion of the program’s funding from the overall Navy budget.

The Pentagon requested an overall defense budget of $585 billion, including a $534 base budget and a $51 billion war budget. That’s an increase of about $25 billion, or 4 percent, in funding from this year.

The Navy received the biggest boost over last year out of all the services requesting $10 billion more compared the amount the Navy received last year. Out of the Navy’s $160 billion budget request, the service wants to buy two more Virginia-class submarines to go along with the $1.4 billion it plans to spend on the Ohio Replace program.

The Navy also requested $67.4 million for directed energy weapons and $242 million for a next-generation radar technology called Air and Missile Defense Radar, or AMDR.

Navy leaders also requested $2.5 billion for the Navy’s new Ford-class aircraft carriers, $3.2 billion for two new DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-Class destroyers, $1.4 billion for three Littoral Combat Ships and one new amphibious transport dock or LPD 17.

Meanwhile, the Air Force asked for $1.24 billion for its Long Range Strike program as the service plans to increase its level of funding over the next four years.

The Long-Range Strike Bomber program, or LRS-B, plans to have new planes in the fleet by the mid-2020s. The Air Force ultimately plans to acquire as many as 80 to 100 new bombers for a price of roughly $550 million per plane. The new aircraft will be designed to have global reach, in part by incorporating a large arsenal of long-range weapons. The LRS-B is being engineered to carry existing weapons as well as emerging and future weapons.

Northrop Grumman and a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing are competing for the contract to build the plane. In fact, Northrop aired a commercial hinting at its developed bomber during the Super Bowl on Sunday.