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  May 30, 2023 | International, Aerospace

  Poland buys 800 Hellfire missiles to arms its new attack helicopters

  The weapons purchases coincide with a pending request to Washington to buy Apache attack helicopters.

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  February 27, 2020 | International, Land

  OMFV: Army Seeks Industry Advice On Bradley Replacement

  Having rebooted the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program, the Army is now is asking industry input on how to achieve nine goals, from survivability to mobility to streamlined logistics. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on February 26, 2020 at 4:01 AM Two months ago, the Army cancelled its original solicitation to replace the M2 Bradley troop carrier after no company could meet the strict requirements. This afternoon, the Army officially asked for industry input on how to achieve nine broadly-defined “characteristics” for the future Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle. “Feedback may be submitted in any form (concepts, information papers, technical papers, sketches, etc.),” says the announcement on SAM.gov. “The Army would like to obtain this initial feedback prior to 06 March 2020.” This call for suggestions on how to move forward comes just weeks after the Army issued a surprisingly apologetic survey asking industry what they did wrong the first time around. It's part of a newly humble approach in which the Army doesn't prescribe formal requirements up-front but instead lays out broad objectives and asks industry how best to achieve them. The chief of Army Futures Command, Gen. Mike Murray, gave reporters a preview of the nine characteristics three weeks ago, but the list announced today is much more detailed – though still leaving plenty of room for companies to brainstorm solutions. Our annotated highlights from the announcement – the emphasis is in the original: Background: The OMFV, as part of an Armored Brigade Combat Team (ABCT), will replace the Bradley to provide the capabilities required to defeat a future near-peer competitor's force. The Army is seeking a transformational increase in warfighting capability, not simply another incremental improvement over the current Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Concept of employment: As part of an ABCT, the OMFV will not fight alone, but rather as part of a section, platoon, and company of mechanized infantry.... “Near-peer competitor” is Pentagon jargon for “China or Russia” – chiefly Russia in this case, since the plains of Eastern Europe are a far more likely arena for armored warfare than Pacific islands. That the Army wants “transformational” improvements, not “incremental” ones, shows there's still some real ambition in the vision for this vehicle. At the same time, the OMFV will still fight “as part of an ABCT,” meaning the existing Armored Brigade Combat Team organization — not as part of some all-new organization with all-new equipment, as was once envisioned for the cancelled Future Combat Systems. Survivability. The OMFV must protect the crew and Soldiers from emerging threats and CBRN environments. The OMFV should reduce likelihood of detection by minimizing thermal, visual, and acoustic signatures. In other words, the vehicle needs to give the crew a chance of survival against cutting-edge anti-tank missiles, precision-guided artillery, attack drones and other such “emerging threats,” as chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear contamination (CBRN). That does not mean the vehicle itself has to survive intact. The way this is worded, if a hit totals the OMFV but the soldiers inside can walk away, the Army will count that as a win. (The JLTV 4×4 truck takes this same approach to roadside bombs). So the OMFV doesn't necessarily have to have heavy armor protecting the entire vehicle. It could have a heavily armored crew compartment, light armor elsewhere, and an Active Protection System to intercept incoming threats. (The Russian T-14 Armata uses this combination). It also should avoid being spotted in the first place by eye, ear, or thermal sensor, which might favor designs with hybrid-electric motors that can switch from hot, noisy diesels to a battery-driven stealth mode. Mobility. The OMFV must have mobility that can keep pace with the Abrams in a combined arms fight through rural and urban terrain. That's the M1 Abrams main battle tank, which the existing M2 Bradley and M109 Paladin howitzer were also designed to keep up with. This is another aspect of that “concept of employment” that calls for the OMFV to slot into existing formations and work closely with existing vehicles. Note also the reference to “rural and urban terrain,” which will come up again: Traditionally the Army has avoided city fighting, but as urban sprawl covers ever more of the planet, technology and tactics have to adapt to brutal close-quarters combat. Growth. The OMFV must possess the growth margins and open architecture required for rapid upgrades and insertion of future technologies such as mission command systems, protection systems, and sensors. This characteristic is really where you get the potential for “transformational” improvements. The M2 Bradley was originally introduced in 1980 and, after 40 years of upgrades, it has very little margin left to handle additional weight or – even more important nowadays – power-hungry electronics. The Bradley's lack of room to grow has driven the Army to try replacing it three times already: the original OMFV requirements cancelled this year; the Ground Combat Vehicle cancelled in 2014; and the Future Combat Systems cancelled in 2009. Hopefully, fourth time's the charm. Lethality. The OMFV-equipped platoons must defeat future near-peer soldiers, infantry fighting vehicles, helicopters, small unmanned aerial systems, and tanks as part of a Combined Arms Team in rural and urban terrain. This is a more ambitious hit list than the Bradley, which sports machineguns for killing infantry, a 25 mm autocannon to destroy light armored vehicles, and the obsolescent TOW missile for taking on heavy tanks. The Pentagon is increasingly worried about small drones, which ISIS terrorists have used as flying IEDs and Russian artillery has used as spotters for barrages. With Russia and China developing increasingly sophisticated anti-aircraft systems, there's also a concern that US fighters may not be able to keep enemy attack helicopters at bay, forcing ground forces to handle that threat themselves. These aerial targets require more sophisticated tracking systems, and drones may be best dealt with by electronic jamming or lasers rather than bullets. Weight. The OMFV must traverse 80% of Main Supply Routes (MSRs), national highways, and bridges in pacing threat countries, and reduce the cost of logistics and maintenance. Designs must allow for future growth in components and component weights without overall growth of vehicle weight through modularity and innovation. Weight is the issue that has bedeviled Bradley replacements for two decades. The FCS vehicles, optimized for air transport, were too light to carry adequate armor; GCV was too heavy; and the original OMFV couldn't meet its air transport requirements and its protection requirements at the same time. With most bridges in Eastern Europe unable to safely take weights over 50 tons, too much heavy armor can cripple your mobility. Logistics. The OMFV must reduce the logistical burden on ABCTs and must be equipped with advanced diagnostic and prognostic capabilities. Advanced manufacturing and other innovative techniques should be included in the design that reduce the time and cost of vehicle repairs. There are two big factors that make a vehicle hard to keep supplied and in working order. One is weight – heavier vehicles burn more fuel – and the other is complexity. High-tech is usually high-maintenance. The US military is hopeful that AI-driven predictive maintenance can detect and head off impending breakdowns, and that 3D printing can produce at least some spare parts on demand without a long supply line. Transportability. The OMFV must be worldwide deployable by standard inter- and intra-theater sea, waterway, air, rail, and road modes of transportation. The original OMFV requirement very specifically called for two of the vehicles to fit on a single Air Force C-17 jet transport, which proved undoable with the weight of armor desired. This time, the Army isn't specifying any particular aircraft. In practice, armored vehicles are almost always shipped by sea and, where possible, stockpiled on allied soil well before a crisis erupts. On land, since tracked vehicles aren't designed to drive hundreds of miles by road, they're usually deployed to the battle zone by train or tractor-trailer, both of which have their own weight limits. Manning. The OMFV should operate with the minimal number of crew members required to fight and win. The OMFV should allow commanders to choose between manned or remote operation based on the tactical situation. This is the objective that gave the OMFV its name: Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle. Now, since it's a Bradley replacement, the OMFV is supposed to be a troop carrier – specifically, the heavily armed and armored kind known as an Infantry Fighting Vehicle – so by definition it needs to carry people. But the Army is intensely interested in having the option to run it by remote control, or maybe even autonomously, to (for example) scout out especially dangerous areas or carry casualties back to an aid post without pulling healthy soldiers out of the fighting line. Training. The OMFV should contain embedded training capabilities that are compatible with the Synthetic Training Environment (STE). STE is the Army's total overhaul of its training simulators, drawing on commercial gaming technology to develop an array of virtual and augmented reality systems using a common database of real-world terrain. Instead of having to use a simulator in a warehouse somewhere, the Army wants troops to be able to run virtual scenarios on the same vehicles they'll actually fight with. All these characteristics are intertwined – and after its past troubles, the Army is acutely aware that maximizing one, such as protection, may compromise another, such as transportability. That's another thing the service wants feedback on, the announcement says: “The Army is interested in industry partners' ability to meet the desired characteristics and what trades” – that is, trade-offs – “may be necessary.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/02/omfv-army-seeks-industry-advice-on-bradley-replacement

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  June 11, 2019 | International, Security, Other Defence

  A Report from NATO's Front Lines

  by Michael O'Hanlon All is busy on NATO's eastern front. That was our main conclusion during a recent study delegation to Lithuania sponsored by the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defense and organized by the Atlantic Council. A lot is happening on the defense preparation front, and the overall security situation is improving considerably compared with a few years ago. But problems remain and work still has to be done, if deterrence and stability are to be ensured, and a potentially devastating war with Russia prevented. As many people will recall, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, with a combined population of some six million and combined military strength of some thirty thousand active-duty troops, joined NATO in 2004. All three border Russia, though in the case of Lithuania, that border is in the western part of the country (near Russia's Kaliningrad pocket). Lithuania's eastern frontier is shared with Belarus, a close ally of Moscow, at Vladimir Putin's insistence. Its southern border touches Poland, along the famed “Suwalki gap,” the narrow land corridor through which NATO would likely send most of its tens of thousands of reinforcements during any major crisis or conflict with Russia over the Baltics. All three Baltic states, plus Poland, are now among the seven of NATO's twenty-nine members that meet their obligations to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on their militaries, however imperfect a metric of burden-sharing that formal NATO requirement may be. In Lithuania's case, this represents a tripling of military spending since 2013. Give President Donald Trump and President Barack Obama some of the credit for recent increases if you wish. But give the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles the majority of the credit—with a nod, of course, to Vladimir Putin, who has done more to unify and motivate eastern Europeans' security efforts than anyone else this century. Since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea in Ukraine and stoked a conflict in Ukraine's east that continues to this day, NATO has been gradually fortifying its eastern flank, in the Baltic states and Poland. It now has a multinational battalion-size battlegroup (of about one thousand soldiers) in each of the three Baltic states, plus a larger U.S. brigade-sized presence in Poland (with occasional, but intermittent, American deployments into the Baltic states for exercising and signaling resolve). The battalion in Lithuania is backstopped by Germany, with additional major contributions from the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. These battalions are collectively described as the “enhanced forward presence” or eFP program, following NATO's Operation Atlantic Resolve; the U.S. element is often described as the European deterrence initiative. Adding in those rotational deployments, there are some thirty-five thousand total NATO troops in the Baltics, with only a smattering of Americans on most days. Russia has well over one hundred thousand of its own recently-improved forces just across the border and could probably muster closer to two hundred thousand with little effort under the guise of an exercise, if it wished. The Lithuanians' recent defense efforts need to be put in perspective. The nation is resolute, with 80 percent supporting NATO forces deployed to its territory and all of the recent major presidential candidates—and eventual winner—favoring the ongoing defense buildup. But it does not seem paranoid, or on serious edge, even as the officials we saw were clear about the challenge and legitimately focused on progress. While a military budget at 2 percent of GDP, headed towards 2.5 percent, is an impressive defense effort, it does not reflect the dire sense of urgency of a society expecting imminent war. After all, the United States and Russia each spend more than 3 percent of GDP on their armed forces; in fact, NATO aimed for a 3 percent minimum during the Cold War, when the United States typically spent upwards of 5 percent of GDP on its military. And for all the enhancements to its two main combat brigades, Lithuania has restrained from fortifying the eastern and western flanks of the country with smart minefields or other barriers to invasion. For its part, NATO more generally has stationed the eFP forces but has not tied them into a truly integrated combat force; nor has it deployed many helicopters or air defense systems into the Baltic states. It certainly has not prestationed the seven brigades of capability that a 2016 RAND Corporation simulation estimated as necessary to constitute a viable forward defense position. The current level of effort, vigilant but tempered, strikes us as roughly appropriate to the circumstances at hand. While there are still conflict scenarios that can be imagined, it is hard to think that President Putin believes he could really get away with naked aggression against any NATO member, including those in the Baltic region. Even if NATO does not have an adequate forward defense in place against hypothetical Russian aggression, it does have a rather robust forward tripwire, combined with increasingly credible ways of rapidly reinforcing that tripwire in a crisis. Still, there are three additional lines of effort that Washington and other NATO capitals should pursue in the interest of greater deterrence, stability, and predictability in eastern Europe. First, as a recent Atlantic Council report, “Permanent Deterrence,” underscored, NATO should strengthen key pieces of its modest military presence in Poland and the Baltic states. Much of this can happen in the Polish/American sector, but elements of it should extend to the Baltics as well. It makes good sense to combine greater combat engineering capability for military mobility, so as to better move reinforcements into the east in the face of possible Russian opposition, together with plugging gaps in areas such as combat aviation and air defense, and pre-stocking certain equipment. Moscow may complain, but it cannot credibly view such additions as major NATO additions or provocations, especially because they are modest, and because Russian actions have necessitated them. Second, nonmilitary elements of NATO resoluteness need to be strengthened, too. As discussed in The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War over Small Stakes, there are various types of very small Russian probing attacks that could leave NATO flummoxed and paralyzed over how to respond. These attacks might not reach the threshold where all alliance members would wish to invoke NATO's Article V mutual-defense clause and send military forces in response, yet they could be too serious to ignore. NATO should conceptualize such scenarios and exercise crisis decisionmaking in advance while honing various economic and diplomatic approaches to complement any military responses. NATO also needs to develop more contingency plans for economic warfare with Russia that would provide alternative energy sources in a crisis. Lithuania's recent development of a liquefied natural gas terminal is exemplary in this regard. Third, while projecting resolve vis-à-vis Moscow, including retention of the EU and U.S. sanctions that have been imposed on Russia in recent years, NATO needs to rethink its broader strategy towards Russia. This strategy should include options for bettering relations in a post–Putin Russia. Various types of security architectures and arrangements should be explored and debated. For now, with a new president in Kiev, a concerted effort to help Ukraine reform its economy and further weed out corruption makes eminent sense. Things are moving in the right direction in eastern Europe, but there is considerable work left to be done. Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the new book, The Senkaku Paradox; Christopher Skaluba is the director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/report-natos-front-lines-62067