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September 28, 2018 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land

Here’s how the Corps could shave about 6 pounds off your body armor

By:

The Corps is in the beginning stages of researching a new, lighter alternative ballistic body armorplate for counterinsurgency style conflicts that is nearly six pounds lighter than the legacy plates.

And on Thursday, it held an industry day with 16 companies vying to produce the Corps' latest body armor.

The goal is to reduce battlefield fatigue and provide commanders with flexibility on the type of armor protection they decide to carry into combat, according to Keith Pierce, the armor team lead for Infantry Combat Equipment at Marine Corps Systems Command.

While the current Enhanced Small Arms Protective, or ESAPI, have been highly effective in saving lives on the battlefield, they weigh nearly a combined 15 pounds, the Corps wants to shave that down to roughly 8.6 pounds for a medium-sized Marine, Pierce said.

But don't expect the ESAPI to disappear just yet.

The new plates are being crafted for low intensity threat environments like the counterinsurgency style wars that have embroiled American forces for nearly 20 years.

While the new plates will “defeat a preponderance of threats” in low intensity conflicts, the ESAPIs will still be “critical in some threat environments,” Pierce explained to Marine Corps Times.

But the changes to the new plates are still likely to be minimal.

The Corps has decided to keep the same basic shape of the ESAPI, and there's unlikely to be any major changes in materials used to construct the armor plates

“The materials for plates haven't had a big tech leap,” Pierce said. “A lot of people are trying to find that next leap.”

The Army recently fielded a new plate, but its relatively of the same construction as the ESAPI, according to Pierce.

“There may be incremental changes ... like the ceramic improving a little bit,” Pierce explained.

But Pierce said he didn't expect any major changes over the next five years.

“We are looking at some unique things,” he added.

A lot of data and analysis is being pored over, to include assessments of the threat environment by the intelligence community for the construction of the new plates.

So far, the Corps has tested a prototype of the lighter plates and found Marines had nearly eight percent faster mobility over the heavier ESAPIs.

The new plates — when combined with the new Plate Carrier Gen III system — will reduce a Marine's load burden by a total of eight to 10 pounds, according to Pierce.

The Corps expects to award a contract sometime in fiscal 2019 for the lightweight plates, and fielding might kick off in 2020, Pierce said.

https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/09/27/heres-how-the-corps-wants-to-shave-about-6-pounds-off-body-armor/

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  • Missile Defense Agency director lays out hurdles in path to layered homeland missile defense

    August 20, 2020 | International, Aerospace

    Missile Defense Agency director lays out hurdles in path to layered homeland missile defense

    By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The Missile Defense Agency is planning to develop a layered homeland intercontinental ballistic missile defense architecture, but it must clear a range of hurdles to get after an approach that addresses emerging threats and fills a gap while a next-generation interceptor is developed, according to the agency's director. The agency unveiled plans in its fiscal 2021 budget request in February to create a more layered homeland defense system that would include regional missile defense capability already resident with the Navy and Army to bolster homeland defense against ICBMs. The plan would include establishing layers of defensive capability relying on the Aegis Weapon System, particularly the SM-3 Block IIA missiles used in the system, and a possible Aegis Ashore system in Hawaii. The underlay would also include the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. The Army is already operating a THAAD battery in South Korea and Guam. The layered approach would buy time while the Pentagon scrambles to field a new interceptor to replace older ground-based interceptors — after canceling its effort to redesign the kill vehicle for the GBIs — in its Ground-based Midcourse Defense system located primarily at Fort Greely, Alaska. With little detail conveyed in MDA's budget request for a layered homeland missile defense plan, Congress is pressuring the agency to come up with a strategy and approach to putting the architecture in place in both the House and Senate passed FY21 defense authorization bills. Much is riding on the success of an upcoming test of the SM-3 Block IIA missile, Vice Adm. Jon Hill said during a Heritage Foundation virtual event on Aug. 18. The missile has seen several test failures in the recent past. “We're going to really stress the SM-3 Block IIA outside its design space,” Hill said. “It was designed for medium and intermediate range. 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That target will have “a lot of separation debris and that has a lot of countermeasures,” Hill said. “We want to make sure that the system in total, from the space assets to the radar to the engage-on-remote capability that passes that information to the ship, that ship can actually sift through all that and say, ‘That's the [reentry vehicle] and that's the where the missile's going to go,‘” he added. Success in the upcoming test doesn't mean the agency's work is done, Hill said. Upgrades will be required based on threats, combat system certifications will need to be conducted and work with the Navy to determine where Aegis ships would deploy will have to occur. The agency will also have to determine how quickly it can ramp up its production line for SM-3 Block IIA missiles. Then “if we succeed with Aegis, then we'll go right down the path with THAAD,” Hill said. The second big challenge, after ensuring all the parts work to provide layered coverage, is developing engagement coordination between the different layers, according to Hill. “Let's just say that step one is a ship off the coast as a complement to GMD. Those systems today talk already, but they're not talking in terms of being layered defenders,” Hill said. “So if GMD, for example, decides he's going to wait this first shot out and let the ship take it, we have to have the communication network to go do that. We have to have the technical architecture with the Command and Control Battle Management system, but in that context of layered defense and engagement coordination.” Aegis ships are already able to do engagement coordination among each other and the work the Pentagon is doing to get THAAD and the Patriot air-and-missile defense system to coordinate are “extensible to that problem,” Hill said, “but we still need to do that kind of engineering and that sort of architecture work.” And while a layered missile defense architecture for the homeland is an intricate one, “you don't have to solve the whole problem” at once, Rebecca Heinrichs, a missile defense analyst at the Hudson Institute, said during the Heritage Foundation event. But she cautioned that she did foresee challenges in establishing such an architecture on the political front rather than on the technical side. “Congress always wants to vet these kinds of things, so even though it is Congress that wanted the SM-3 Block IIA test, whenever you start talking about which district it is going to be in, where it's going to go and that kind of thing, that is a political challenge that takes a lot of debate and conversation.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/2020/08/18/missile-defense-agency-director-lays-out-hurdles-in-path-to-layered-homeland-missile-defense/

  • Submarines are poised to take on a major role in strike warfare, but is that a good idea?

    October 29, 2019 | International, Naval

    Submarines are poised to take on a major role in strike warfare, but is that a good idea?

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Bryan Clark, a retired submariner and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wonders if the surface fleet is the best place inside the force to house the strike mission. “I think the requirement may be changing,” he said in an Oct. 22 phone call with Defense News. “Over the past 10 years there has been a real emphasis on the submarine as the one tool we have that may be able to get into contested areas — the East and South China seas, up in the north Atlantic, etc. “That's changing now: These countries are investing in their own anti-submarine warfare systems. China has put a lot of money into ASW systems, they are installing surveillance systems akin to our SOSUS [sound surveillance system]. 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But some analysts say the mission is better suited for a large unmanned surface vessel. “I think this is going to one of the main things driving the design of the large unmanned surface combatant,” said Dan Gouré, an analyst at the Lexington Institute think tank. “We're back to arsenal ship: long-range, park it into a surface action group of carrier strike group — kind of like a surface version of the SSGN.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/10/28/submarines-are-poised-to-take-on-a-major-role-in-strike-warfare-but-is-that-a-good-idea/

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