Contracts for March 22, 2021

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  September 18, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  Hypersonic weapons could give the B-1 bomber a new lease on life

  By: Aaron Mehta NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — It's been a rough stretch for the U.S. Air Force's fleet of 62 B-1B Lancer bombers, with a pair of fleet shutdowns over safety concerns and the confirmation of plans to start retiring the plane as the new B-21 comes online, even as the much older B-52 remains in service. But speaking at the Air Force Association's annual conference Monday, Gen. Timothy Ray, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, seemed to throw his support behind keeping the B-1 around for quite some time. In fact, in Ray's mind, the B-1′s capabilities might expand. Several times throughout the speech, Ray emphasized that while the B-21 is slowly spinning up, he can't afford to lose any capability. Indeed, Ray seemed to posture toward keeping the B-1 over the long term, according to John Venable, a senior defense fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former F-16 command pilot. “One of the major takeaways [from the speech] is that the B-1 is not going to go away nearly as soon as people thought,” Venable said, “and that's a good thing.” Under the Air Force's stated goal of 386 squadrons, the service's force mix requirement is about 225 bombers. The service currently has 156, Ray said, and even with the B-21 coming online sometime in the 2020s, planned retirements to the B-1 and B-2 would keep the bomber force under 200. Ray's belief in the B-1 spans from two broad assessments. First, freed from the heavy workload of B-1s performing regular close-air support activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fleet will experience less wear and tear, and hence survive longer than projected. “We're just flying the airplane in a way we shouldn't have been flying it, and we did for far too long. The good news is we're resetting that entire team,” Ray said. “What we thought was a very sizable load of structural issues” ended up being a “fraction” of issues to deal with, he added. Those structural issues have become particularly visible in the last 16 months, with the entire B-1 fleet grounded twice for mechanical issues. In June 2018, the fleet was grounded for two weeks following the discovery of an issue with the Lancer's ejection seat; in March 2019, another ejection seat issue grounded the fleet for almost a month. Members of Congress have since expressed serious concerns about the B-1's readiness rates, a number that was just more than 50 percent in 2018. Ray expressed optimism about the mechanical issues, saying that any fallout from the ejection seat shutdowns will be completed by the end of October, which is “must faster” than the service predicted. The second reason Ray believes there's still life in the B-1? The idea that there are modifications to the Lancer that would add new capabilities relevant in an era of great power competition. In August, the Air Force held a demonstration of how the B-1 could be modified to incorporate four to eight new hypersonic weapons by shifting the bulkhead forward from a bomb bay on the aircraft, increasing the size inside the plane from 180 inches to 269 inches. That change allows the loading of a Conventional Rotary Launcher, the same system used inside the B-52, onto the B-1. According to an Air Force release, first reported by Military.com, the bulkhead change is temporary, giving the B-1 flexibility based on its mission. Overall, the internal bay could be expanded from 24 to 40 weapons, per the service. In addition, the testers proved new racks could be attached to hardpoints on the wings. “The conversation we're having now is how we take that bomb bay [and] put four potentially eight large hypersonic weapons on there,” Ray said. “Certainly, the ability to put more JASSM-ER [Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile Extended Range] or LRASM [Long Range Anti-Ship Missile] externally on the hardpoints as we open those up. So there's a lot more we can do.” Said Venable: “I think it's a great idea. Increasing our bomber force end strength, we're not going to get there just by buying B-21[s] and retiring the B-1s.” “Adding a new rotary [launcher that] he was talking about, just behind the bulkhead of the cockpit of the B-1, freeing up the pylons to actually manifest more longer-range weapons and give it a greater penetrating strike capability — those are great takeaways from this particular event,” the analyst added. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/air-force-association/2019/09/17/global-strike-head-makes-case-of-b-1-survival/

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  September 3, 2019 | International, Naval

  These Tactical Glasses Could Give Marine Grunts an F-35 Pilot's View of the Battlefield

  By Matthew Cox Marine infantrymen may soon be able to see through the floor of an MV-22 Osprey and track terrain features as they approach their attack objective. It sounds like science fiction, but Marine Lt. Col. Rory Quinn of the Pentagon's Close Combat Lethality Task Force says it could become reality if the Marine Corps decides to field the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), a sophisticated Microsoft technology that the Army is developing to give soldiers a new level of situational awareness in combat. In October, the Army will hold its second round of soldier evaluations, known as Soldier Touch Points, on what will eventually consist of a special set of tactical glasses that will display a soldier's weapon sight reticle and other key tactical information they will take into battle. Army officials say IVAS will be ready for initial fielding in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021. Quinn said he sees IVAS as key to transforming Marine and Army infantry into a fifth-generation fighting force similar to the way fighter aircraft such as the F-35 Lighting II have evolved into fifth-gen technology. "Effectively, we have a third-generation infantry," Quinn told an audience Tuesday at the iFest 2019 symposium, put on by the National Defense Industrial Association. The lethality task force was stood up in 2018 by then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis with the goal of resourcing the U.S. military's close-combat forces to become far more deadly than they are today. "In the MV-22, the windows are [not that big] so if I am lucky, I am next to one and ... I can see ... the river path and I can see that we went on this side of the river, so that confirmed that we went in the right direction," Quinn said. "But the F-35 pilot has cameras on the outside of the airplane and looks through the floor of the airplane. ... He can look through the wing and see someone who is down low at six o'clock on his right flank. "IVAS is coming, and it's going to create an F-35 [technology] for grunts, so I will simply look through the skin of the aircraft and see that I have turned 180 degrees out. I otherwise wouldn't be able to see that, and it creates chaos," he added. The Marine Corps has not committed to IVAS, but officials at Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Combat Development and Integration, "are watching the [Soldier Touch Points] and watching to see how the results occur versus what the metrics had to be" on the system, Quinn said. Roughly 50 Marines participated in the first Soldier Touch Point and the same number of Marines will likely be involved with the second evaluation in October, he said. "The Marines often follow and trace the Army -- let the Army do the research and development," Quinn said. The Army awarded a $480 million contract to Microsoft in late 2018 to develop its HoloLens technology into IVAS. The system is also being designed to provide soldiers with a synthetic training environment that will feature enemy avatars capable of learning soldier tactics so training scenarios are never the same, Army officials say. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/08/30/these-tactical-glasses-could-give-marine-grunts-f-35-pilots-view-battlefield.html

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  August 9, 2023 | International, Land, C4ISR

  US Army mulls multiple versions of tank-killing drone for infantry

  LASSO would be carried by troops, use a tube for launches and be strapped with a lethal payload, according to PEO Soldier.