February 5, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By: Andrew Chuter
LONDON – The British on Tuesday began to restore their once-formidable capabilities for maritime patrol with the arrival to the Royal Air Force base at Kinloss, Scotland, of the first of a fleet of Boeing P-8A Poseidon jets.
Flown by a crew from the RAF's CXX Squadron, the first of nine P-8A's, ordered by the British in 2016 at a cost of £3 billion ($3.9 billion), arrived pretty much on cue at the Kinloss base that will be its temporary home until infrastructure and other work at its permanent base at Lossiemouth is completed later this year.
A recent tweet RAF tweet said the aircraft had already operated some tactical missions.
Doug Barry, the senior air analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank in London, says the aircraft landing in Scotland is a big moment for the Royal Air Force.
“The arrival of the first P-8A is symbolic in that it marks the UK beginning to get back into the fixed-wing anti-submarine warfare business after a gap of a decade,” he said.
The British are scheduled to ramp up their P-8A numbers rapidly as a resurgence in Russian submarine activity continues to challenge Western resources in the sector.
A second aircraft is due to arrive at Lossiemouth by the end of March, three further P-8A's will be handed over by the end of the year with the four remaining machines all due to arrive by the fourth quarter of 2021.
Full operating capability is scheduled for 2024. The aircraft are known as Poseidon MRA Mk1 in RAF service.
Late last year, commenting on Russian nuclear submarine activity, top US Navy officer Adm. James Foggo, commander of US Naval Forces Europe and Africa, reported 2019 as being “one of the busiest years that I can remember, and I've been doing this since 1983.”
First Sea Lord Adm. Tony Radakin said: “The arrival of the first Poseidon marks a significant upgrade in the UK's ability to conduct anti-submarine operations. This will give the UK the ability to conduct long-range patrols and integrate seamlessly with our NATO allies to provide a world-leading capability.”
In co-operation with the US sea service and the Royal Norwegian Air Force, who have purchased five P-8A's, the RAF will attempt to plug any gaps in anti-submarine defenses in the North Atlantic.
One of the British P-8A's main tasks will be to provide cover for Royal Navy Trident missile submarines emerging and returning to their base at Faslane in Scotland.
Barrie said that for the last decade the “UK has had to look elsewhere to support the deployment of its strategic deterrent to try to ensure there was no unwanted company.”
The US, France, Canada and others have all had to step in at times to provide reconnaissance and other capabilities to help glug the hole in British fixed-wing, anti-submarine defenses caused when a government strategic defence and security review in 2010 controversially cancelled the MRA4 program without looking to purchase a replacement.
The British have sought to retain their maritime patrol skills over the last few years by placing aircrew and operators with allies like the United States.
The new aircraft entered service with the RAF late last year but the platform has until now been based at the Jacksonville, Florida, naval air station where British crew training is taking place ahead of eventually transitioning to Lossiemouth.
Training and simulation facilities are part of a new £132 million ($171 million) infrastructure project at Lossiemouth jointly funded by the MoD and Boeing, which is scheduled for completion later this year.
Flight operations and planning, maintenance, crew rooms and space for three aircraft will also be included in the facility. More than 200 Boeing employees will be permanently based on the base.
Some £470 million ($612 mission) in total is being invested in Lossiemouth, which is also home to part of the Typhoon fighter fleet, upgrading runways, building a new air traffic tower and other improvements.
August 3, 2023 | International, Aerospace, Security
U.S. officials want to tinker with the mix of chemicals fueling missiles and rockets to gain an advantage in the Pacific by increasing the range of its frontline munitions so U.S. forces can operate farther away from China.
April 16, 2020 | International, C4ISR
Nathan Strout A new tool developed by NATO will help the alliance prepare for GPS jammers, allowing operational commands to see what impact the devices will have on their GPS receivers, the NATO Communications and Information Agency announced April 6. “NATO's adversaries have the ability to degrade or deny GPS-enabled capabilities," Jean-Philippe Saulay, a NATO navigation and identification officer, said in a statement. “NATO must take appropriate measures to ensure Allied forces can operate in a degraded or denied environment." The Radar Electromagnetic and Communication Coverage Tool, or REACT, is able to estimate how large an area will be affected by specific GPS jammers. By inputting technical information and location data about known jammers, users can see on a map what areas will be affected by the devices and prepare accordingly. The software also works for other global navigation satellite systems used by NATO, such as the European Union's Galileo constellation. According to the agency, REACT is only being used for testing and experimentation at the moment. It was shown to operators during the Trident Jupiter 2019 exercise for feedback. Developers are now working to ensure the software is interoperable with NATO's classified networks and available to operational commands. Sponsored by the NATO Navigation and Identification Programme of Work, REACT is available to NATO members free of charge. Tools like REACT highlight the alliance's dependence on global navigation satellite systems for accurate position, navigation and timing data, as well as the investments that China, Russia and Iran, among others, are making to develop and field jamming devices. And it's more than just a hypothetical issue for NATO: In 2018, Norway officials publicly claimed that Russia had jammed GPS signals during NATO's Trident Jupiter exercise. “NATO must maintain superiority in the electromagnetic environment, including but not limited to, positioning, navigation and timing services," said Enrico Casini, a communications and navigation engineer at the NCI Agency. “The electromagnetic environment has become even more contested in recent years." Meanwhile, the U.S. military has been pursuing efforts to overcome the threat posed by GPS jammers. For instance, the U.S. Space Force is working to enable a more secure military signal with GPS III, and just last year the U.S. Army fielded anti-jamming antennas to the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Germany. https://www.c4isrnet.com/newsletters/military-space-report/2020/04/15/natos-new-tool-shows-the-impact-of-gps-jammers
October 31, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Steve Trimble As the U.S. Air Force comes within weeks of the first operational laser weapons, the Defense Department is hatching new concepts to address the power and thermal management limits of the state-of-the-art in the directed energy field. In a largely secret dress rehearsal staged last week at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Air Force performed another round of tests of the deploying Raytheon High Energy Laser Weapon System (HEL-WS), as well as other directed energy options, such as the Air Force Research Laboratory's Tactical High Power Microwave Operational Responder (THOR), says Kelly Hammett, director of AFRL's Directed Energy Directorate. “All I can say is there were multiple systems. From my reading of the reports, it looked like a very successful exercise,” says Hammett, who addressed the Association of Old Crows annual symposium Oct. 29. The Fort Sill experiment was intended to put the weapons through their paces in a realistic operational environment. AFRL's Strategic Development, Planning and Experimentation (SDPE, which, despite its spelling, is pronounced “Speedy”) office called on the HEL-WS and THOR to engage swarms of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). The experiments also demonstrated new diagnostic tools, allowing AFRL testers to understand the atmosphere's effect on energy propagation in real time. SDPE awarded Raytheon a contract in August to deliver a “handful” of systems to the Air Force for a one-year deployment scheduled to conclude in November 2020. The HEL-WS will be used to defend Air Force bases from attacks by swarming, small UAS and cruise missiles, Hammett says. The Air Force is not releasing the location of the deployed sites for the HEL-WS. AFRL also is grooming THOR for an operational debut. Instead of blasting a UAS with a high-energy optical beam, THOR sends powerful pulses of radio frequency energy at a target to disable its electronics. Hammett describes THOR as a second-generation directed energy weapon. It is designed to be rugged for operational duty and compact enough to be transported inside a single container loaded into a Lockheed Martin C-130. Upon unloading from the aircraft, THOR can be activated within a couple hours, or broken down and moved within the same period, he says. Despite decades of basic research on directed energy systems, such operational capabilities have evolved fairly rapidly. The Air Force finally consolidated its strategy for developing directed energy weapons in the 2017 flight plan, Hemmett said. The document narrowed a once-fragmented research organization that attempted to address too many missions. “Directed energy zealots like myself have been blamed, rightly so, of saying directed energy can do almost anything you want it to do. And we pursued multiple applications to the effect that we were diffusing some of our efforts,” he says. The 2017 flight plan selected three initial use cases: Air base defense, precision strike and self-protect. The HEL-WS and THOR are addressing the first mission. The Joint Navy-Air Force High Power Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike (Hijenks) program is developing a missile to address the precision strike requirement, as a follow-on to the Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (Champ) that concluded five years ago. In the long-term, AFRL also plans to demonstrate the Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (Shield), a podded defensive weapon for aircraft. Although such technology has come far, researchers are still grappling with fundamental issues to make them practical. Namely, the power generation and thermal management requirement for high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves remains a challenge. “If you're willing to have very limited duty-cycle, very limited magazine, the power and thermal management aren't very challenging,” Hemmett says. “Of course, that's not what we want from directed energy weapons. We want deep magazines. We want to be able to handle wave attacks as favorably or more favorably that kinetic weapons.” The “rule of thumb” for a high-energy laser is an efficiency of about one-third, meaning a 300-kW generator is necessary to create a 100-kW laser beam, resulting in 200 kW of waste heat that must be dealt with in some way, says Frank Peterkin, a senior technologist on directed energy for the U.S. Navy who spoke at the same event. On Navy ships, that puts the laser in competition with the electronic warfare and radar subsystems for power and thermal management loads, he adds. “The challenge for the directed energy community is we don't really own the solution,” Peterkin says. “It does need to be a more holistic solution for the Navy. We are a customer, but we're not driving the solution, per se.” Although directed energy researchers cannot design the power grids for bases, ships and aircraft, they can help the requirement in other ways, says Lawrence Grimes, director of the Directed Energy Joint Transition Office within the Defense, Research and Engineering directorate of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The development of special amplifier diodes for fiber optic lasers are breaking the “rule of thumb” for high-energy systems, Grimes says. “They actually operate at higher temperatures and higher efficiency, so they can reduce the requirement necessary for the prime power and thermal management, and we're not throwing away 200 kW.” Other Defense Department organizations are pursuing more ambitious options. The Strategic Capabilities Office is selecting suppliers to demonstrate small, 10 MW-size nuclear reactors, as a power generation option for directed energy weapons at austere forward operating bases. Meanwhile, AFRL also is considering space-based power generation. Under the Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research program, AFRL will investigate using high-efficiency solar cells on a spacecraft to absorb the solar energy. The spacecraft then would convert the solar energy into a radio frequency transmission and beam it to a base to supply energy. AFRL has awarded Northrop Grumman a $100 million contract to begin developing the technology. If those seem like long-term options, the Air Force is not immediately concerned. The HEL-WS and THOR are designed to use “wall-plug” power or the military's standard electric generators, Hammett says. https://aviationweek.com/defense/era-laser-weapons-dawns-tech-challenges-remain