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  July 29, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  Clues Emerge In Search For Pentagon’s Classified Hypersonic Programs

  By Steve Trimble Beyond seven acknowledged projects aimed at developing long-range, maneuvering missiles with a top speed over Mach 5, the U.S. Defense Department is working in classified secrecy on at least two more hypersonic weapon programs, industry officials say. The mystery of the classified projects—including such details as their development or operational status and any gaps each fills in the Pentagon's unfolding hypersonic weapons architecture—remains unsolved. But a new clue embedded in the LinkedIn profile of a senior Defense Department hypersonic weapons expert may point to the answers. Seven U.S. hypersonic projects cover air-, land- and sea-based weapons Pentagon expert's online profile points to existence of two more programs Greg Sullivan, a well-regarded expert in the high-speed flight community, describes himself on the professional social media platform as an on-site supporter of air-breathing hypersonic weapons to the department's research and engineering arm. Sullivan's profile also cites his knowledge of “additional hypersonic programs,” which include a nearly comprehensive list of the Pentagon's acknowledged projects. Intriguingly, his original list also included two additional acronyms representing hypersonic programs: “HACM” and “HCCW.” Shortly after Aviation Week inquired to the Air Force Public Affairs office for details about HACM and HCCW, both acronyms were deleted from the LinkedIn page. The Air Force does not acknowledge the existence of any program named HACM or HCCW, and no reference to either acronym appears in the military's public documents, such as budget materials and press releases. Two sources say they have heard vague references to the existence of a hypersonic program called HACM, but had no details, including what the acronym means. The HCCW program was not known to any sources or analysts contacted by Aviation Week. The expert hypersonic community is an unusually tight-knit group, reflecting the technology's mostly experimental status for decades, until its recent rise as one of the Pentagon's top acquisition priorities. The existence of two new acronyms has prompted several speculative guesses. Richard Hallion, a former Air Force chief historian who specializes in the history of hypersonic technology, noted that the acronym HACM could be interpreted broadly to cover almost any type of hypersonic weapon, including scramjet-powered cruise missiles or air-launched boost-glide systems. “Well, the H is obviously [for] hypersonic,” says Hallion. “The rest suggests a mix of ‘A' for ‘Advanced' or ‘Air-Breathing' or ‘Air-Launched.' ‘C' for ‘Conventional' or ‘Capability' or ‘Concept,' [and] ‘M' for ‘Missile.'” The meaning of the HCCW acronym proves even more elusive. For Justin Bronk, a research fellow specializing in airpower at the Royal United Services Institute, one speculative interpretation conforms to his analytical view of a gap in the U.S. military's weapons arsenal. If the acronym stands for “Hypersonic Counter-Cruise Weapon,” Bronk says, HCCW could be a valuable interceptor specifically tailored against high-speed, air-breathing cruise missiles. Although the exact role and status of HACM and HCCW are unknown, industry officials have repeatedly said that at least two additional classified programs exist beyond the Defense Department's seven acknowledged programs. The public list leaves little room for gaps to be filled by new weapons, as they already span air-, land- and sea-launched options and include two different types of boost-glide systems—winged and biconic—and a scramjet-powered cruise missile. The plethora of planned hypersonic options are intended to serve tactical and strategic goals. On the tactical level, the Pentagon's war planners will gain a new option for striking mobile missile launchers and countering long-range attacks on the Navy's surface fleet by an adversary with hypersonic anti-ship missiles. The future U.S. inventory of hypersonic missiles also is intended to serve as a deterrent option short of a nuclear response, as adversaries such as China and Russia stock their arsenals with a range of new hypersonic weapons. The Air Force alone accounts for two of the acknowledged hypersonic weapon programs: a boost-glide system with a winged glide vehicle called the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW). Another called the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW) relies on a less-risky biconic glide vehicle. The ARRW, also known as the Lockheed Martin AGM-183A, is based on the Tactical Boost Glide (TBG) program, a risk-reduction effort funded by DARPA. The same winged glide vehicle also is being adapted for ground launch under DARPA's Operational Fires (OpFires) program. Raytheon says it is developing a more advanced winged glider under the TBG program, which could be fielded as a second-generation version of ARRW. HCSW, meanwhile, is the air-launched version of a biconic-shaped glider originally designed by Sandia National Laboratories. The Navy and Army are adapting the same original design for the sea-launched Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) system and the Army's ground-launched Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW). Finally, Raytheon and Lockheed are each designing different scramjet-powered missiles under DARPA's Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) program. Weaponized versions of HAWC are under study by the Air Force and Navy for air and sea launch. One possible gap in the weapons portfolio is the apparent lack of an operational follow-on program for HAWC, even though Air Force officials say the program is slightly ahead of DARPA's TBG program. The TBG demonstrator is intended to reduce risk for the operational ARRW system, but no such operational follow-on exists publicly for HAWC. Tom Bussing, vice president of advanced missile systems for Raytheon, acknowledged two hypersonic programs exist that he cannot speak about. “There are probably six different types of hypersonic programs that we have,” Bussing said in a recent interview. “Some are classified, so I can't speak [about] them because we are not at liberty to announce them.” But he named Raytheon's role in four hypersonic programs: TBG, HAWC, CPS and LRHW. DARPA has announced Raytheon's involvement as one of two weapon designers for TBG and HAWC, but neither the Navy nor the Army has explained Raytheon's role in CPS and LRHW. The Air Force has announced that Lockheed is the weapon system integrator for the HCSW variant, but no such role has been announced for the Army and Navy versions of the common glide vehicle. So far, Bussing can only acknowledge that Sandia remains the designer of the biconic glider for HCSW, CPS and LRHW. “That technology has been transitioned over to the CPS program and also to the Army's Long Range Hypersonic Weapon program,” Bussing said. “So we're involved in both, and we're working directly with Sandia.” The Defense Department has inserted $10.5 billion into a five-year budget plan released in March to develop and field the long list of offensive and defensive hypersonic weapon systems. But a detailed check of the budgets for unclassified programs reveals a significant surplus, which could be used to fund classified projects. The combined budget accounts for ARRW, HCSW, CPS and LRHW amount to $7.7 billion over the next five years. The Missile Defense Agency's $700 million planned investment in counter-hypersonics raises the five-year spending total to $8.36 billion. DARPA does not release a five-year budget, but proposed to spend $222 million in fiscal 2020 on TBG, HAWC and OpFires. That still leaves an unexplained gap of about $2.5 billion in planned spending by the Defense Department on hypersonic weapons over the next five years. https://aviationweek.com/missile-defense/clues-emerge-search-pentagon-s-classified-hypersonic-programs

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  May 3, 2019 | International, Naval

  The U.S. Navy Is Unbalanced. It's Time to Fix It.

  by John S. Van Oudenaren From a shortage of ships to munitions and carrier-based fighters which lack range, the U.S. Navy is ill-equipped to contend with a new era of great-power conflict. In the decades after the Cold War, the U.S. Navy absorbed sustained budget cuts resulting in large force reductions. The total size of the fleet dwindled from nearly 600 active ships in 1987 to around 285 today. During this period, naval planners focused their substantial, yet shrinking, budgetary resources on large, costly, high-end platforms such as aircraft carriers at the expense of smaller surface warfare combatants such as frigates. This approach perhaps suited the range of global expeditionary missions that the navy was called upon to support in the 1990s (e.g. Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo), a time when the United States faced no proximate military competitors. However, its lack of platforms currently leaves the sea service in a parlous state as it faces intensifying major power competition from China and Russia. At a recent Center for the National Interest event, two leading authorities on naval strategy, operations and force structure, explained how the navy can take steps to create a more balanced force that will adequately prepare the fleet for a new era of great power naval competition. According to Milan Vego, Professor of Operations at the U.S. Naval War College, “lack of understanding of naval theory” makes it difficult for the navy to develop “sound doctrine”, and as a result, to determine force requirements. For example, Vego notes that the navy has an ingrained offensive mindset, which contributes to neglect of the defensive elements of naval combat such as mine warfare and protecting maritime trade. At the strategic level, this conditions a preoccupation with sea control (offensive), as opposed to sea denial (defensive). However, per Vego, it is not inconceivable, especially as capable competitors emerge, that the U.S. Navy might be put on the defensive and forced to shift its focus from sea control to sea denial. For example, if “Russia and China combined in the Western Pacific,” the U.S. Navy would probably be on the defensive, a position it has not occupied since the early days (1941–1942) of the Pacific War against Japan. The challenge is that the navy faces different, conceivable scenarios that could require it to implement sea control or sea denial strategies. This makes planning difficult, because, per Vego, “in thinking about what kind of ships you have, what number of ships you have is all based on whether you are going to conduct sea control or sea denial; what focus will be on protection of shipping versus attack on shipping.” Furthermore, the efficacy of naval strategic planning is hampered by “a lack of joint approach to warfare at sea” said Vego, citing a need for working with “the other services to help the navy carry out its missions.” A repeated issue raised by both panelists is the imbalance in naval force structure between large, highly capable surface combatants, and smaller, cheaper platforms. This is the result of a series of budgetary and planning choices made in the two decades following the Cold War's end. During this period, the “navy was satisfied to ride its Cold War inventory of ships and weapons down, always believing that it could turn the spigot back on in a crisis. It also believed that if it had limited dollars, it should strategically spend them on high-capability ships rather than maintaining the previous Cold War balance of small numbers of high-capability ships and a larger capacity of less capable ships” observed Jerry Hendrix, a retired U.S. Navy Captain and vice president with the Telemus Group, a national-security consultancy. With regards to surface warfare combatants, this approach fostered an emphasis on cruisers and destroyers, while frigates were eliminated entirely from the fleet. The drastic reduction in ship numbers is only part of the navy's current problem. According to Hendrix, the navy employs many of the same missiles (with the same ranges and lethality, albeit with improved targeting technology) that it has used for over three decades. Furthermore, Hendrix lamented that the retirement of longer-range carrier wing aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat and S-3 Viking, has, since 1988, slashed the “average unrefueled range of the air wing . . . from 900 miles to just under 500 nautical miles.” The static range of the navy's standoff munitions and reduced carrier wing range is particularly detrimental in the current strategic context. China and Russia have, notes Hendrix, “invested in a new generation of anti-access, air-denial weapons that have sought to push the U.S. and its allies farther from their shores, establishing sea-control from land, and redefining territorial sovereignty over the seas.” This combined with the limited ability of U.S. munitions and aircraft to strike targets in potential adversaries' homelands, means that in the event of a naval conflict with China or Russia, the United States will face tremendous difficulty projecting conventional firepower ashore into the enemy's homeland. As a result, the navy could be forced to fight a bloody battle at sea in order to get within range of its enemies (the closest historical analogy would be World War II in the Pacific where the United States fought ferociously to acquire territory from which its long-range bombers could strike the Japanese homeland). China and Russia have been so successful at creating anti-access, area denial bubbles that it has forced the U.S. Navy to alter how it thinks about the nature of sea warfare. According to Hendrix, naval strategic thought has shifted from focusing on “power projection and sea control to an ephemeral concept called ‘distributed lethality,' which roughly equates to a long campaign of attrition at sea rather than short power projection campaigns that had characterized modern strategic planning.” A major issue in re-orienting the force around distributed lethality, which calls for dispersing combat firepower across a host of platforms, is the shortage of ships in the navy. As Vego observes, the current “battle force is unbalanced” lacking “less capable, less costly platforms.” Hendrix too, calls for a “series of investments” that re-establish a “high-low mix in our day-to-day force with an emphasis on the new frigate to [undertake the role] to preserve the peace presence, and submarines to provide penetrating, high-end power projection.” The current unbalanced force structure could put the navy at a disadvantage in a conflict with China or Russia. “The need for smaller ships is always shown in any major conflict. That does not change. If you have to protect maritime trade for example, you need smaller ships, you need frigates and corvettes,” said Vego. Unfortunately, he observed, due to the potentially, short, intense, contracted nature of modern naval warfare, the United States will probably lack the luxury, which it enjoyed in World War II, of having time to retool its industrial base to build up an armada of smaller combatants. In addition to building frigates again (Hendrix calls for upping the current U.S. inventory from zero to between fifty to seventy hulls) and scaling up submarine production, the navy should be investing in “unmanned aerial, surface, and subsurface platforms” that can enhance the range and accuracy of naval weaponry. Finally, the navy requires a new generation of weapons that have “increased range, speed and lethality” and to ensure that surface warfare ships are capable of mounting these platforms. In recent years, increasing the fleet to 355 ships has become something of a totemic target for American navalists, who argue that the failure to make the right investments will result in the diminution, or even, elimination, of American naval preeminence. While 355 ships is no panacea, a move in that direction stemming from an increase both in ship numbers, and from restoring a more balanced mix between high and lower end surface combatants across the fleet, would certainly constitute a move in the right direction. As leading proponents of American sea power, such as former Virginia congressman Randy Forbes, have emphasizedrepeatedly, the purpose of naval preeminence is not ultimately to wage war, but to ensure the free flow of trade and commerce, safeguard the rule of law across the maritime commons, and most critically, to preserve peace through strength. John S. Van Oudenaren is assistant director at the Center for the National Interest. Previously, he was a program officer at the Asia Society Policy Institute and a research assistant at the U.S. National Defense University. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-navy-unbalanced-its-time-fix-it-55447

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  July 8, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Coronavirus drives AFA’s massive Air, Space and Cyber conference online

  Stephen Losey The Air Force Association announced Monday that it will hold its massive Air, Space and Cyber conference virtually this September, due to the coronavirus pandemic. AFA's annual conference typically draws about 12,000 airmen, civilians, contractors and other attendees to National Harbor, Maryland, and features addresses from major Air Force, Defense Department and industry figures. For the first time this year, the virtual conference will feature a combination of live and on-demand conference sessions streamed online, beginning Sept. 14 and lasting at least three days. The events will include live addresses from senior leaders, and will allow viewers to ask questions and engage in other “unique opportunities ... with Air Force, Space Force and industry leadership,” AFA said. There will also be a virtual exhibit hall to display developments and demonstrations from industry, online meetings and interactive presentations, AFA said. Retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, the president of AFA, said the decision to move the conference online was “extremely arduous.” But with the pandemic still ongoing, he said, it would not be possible to safely host a conference in-person of the quality the association desired. AFA considered Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, state and county directives, and feedback from potential speakers, attendees, sponsors and exhibitors. “Our goal is to continue AFA's long tradition of hosting the premier event for defense and aerospace professionals around the world,” Wright said in the release. “Our virtual Air, Space and Cyber conference will offer the same exceptional line-up of speakers, world-class exhibits, professional development opportunities, and networking opportunities for industry, government, media, academia and the public.” Air Force leaders often use their addresses to the AFA conference to make major announcements, such as former Secretary Heather Wilson's 2018 “Air Force We Need” address laying out a plan for a major expansion of the service's operational squadrons. Past speakers and guests at AFA's conference have included the top leaders of the Air Force, defense secretaries such as Jim Mattis, and Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee, who last year helped unveil the name of the T-7A Red Hawk. Staff Sgt. Spencer Stone, the airman who charged a knife-wielding terrorist on a train in France in 2015, also was celebrated at the conference that year, when the Air Force announced he would be promoted two grades for his heroism. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2020/07/06/coronavirus-drives-afa-s-massive-air-space-and-cyber-conference-online/