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  June 19, 2019 | International, Other Defence

  15 extra pounds of gear can be the difference between life or death in a firefight, this Marine officer’s research says

  By: Shawn Snow The weight being humped by grunts into a firefight with a sophisticated adversary like Russia or China could be the difference between mission success or going home in a body bag, according to one Marine officer's award-winning research. Marine Capt. Courtney Thompson said computer simulations she ran showed that just adding 15 pounds to the “bare essential” fighting load carried by Marines resulted in an additional casualty on the battlefield when Marines were pitted against competent shooters. The Corps' fighting load varies between 43 to 62 pounds depending on the level of body armor a Marine wears. Military body armor protection ranges from level II to IV. Thompson's simulations were run with level II body armor — protection capable of stopping a 9 mm round. The weight range includes a carried weapon. She told Marine Corps Times in an interview that the results of the simulations were “eye opening," especially in light of a 2017 government watchdog reported that detailed Marines and soldiers were carrying between 117 pounds to 119 pounds on average. When she ran the simulations and added more weight “casualties just went up,” Thompson said. And “the better the [enemy] shooter got, the more the difference in weight mattered." In a near-peer fight, Thompson said, Marines will need to move faster on the battlefield to survive and win. “The slower they are, the higher the chance they have of getting hit," she said. But it's not just about reducing a Marine's exposure time to being shot, smaller weight loads aid in more precise shooting and quicker target engagement times. A 2018 report from Washington D.C.-based think tank Center for a New American Security, explained that heavy combat loads “not only slows movement and increases fatigue” but decrease “situational awareness and shooting response times.” Moreover, a 2007 report from Naval Research Advisory Committee on Marine combat loads recommended an assault load of just 50 pounds. As the Corps focuses on the near-peer fight, the weight carried by Marines into battle is a topic that will need to be front and center for Marine commanders, Thompson said. Thompson's research, which won the Military Operations Research Society Stephen A. Tisdale Thesis Award at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has the attention of officials at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory — where the Corps has been exploring ways to boost combat power while also reducing the weight burden on grunts. Marine Corps Times has reached out to the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory for comments on this research. Marine Corps Systems Command said its “Gruntworks” team spoke with Thompson about her research. The team handles the integration of equipment for Marine rifle squads. Thompson, a combat engineer, said she came up with the idea after seeing how “gassed” her Marines got during training as a result of operations tempo and weight. “I thought if I could quantify weight in terms of casualties and probability of mission success, that's what the Marine Corps understands,” she said. Thompson's computer simulations relied on Australian human subject data and infantry demographics supplied by headquarters Marine Corps. The Australian data was used because of the Australian Defence Department's rigorous study on its tiered body armor system, Thompson explained. The Marine infantry data included physical fitness and marksmanship. The individual Marines within the simulated 13-man rifle squads “represented the average for that rank for all 0311s [Marine rifleman] in the Marine Corps,” she said. Thompson said she ran the simulations nearly a million times. Thompson's research showed that reducing the weight burden carried by grunts could save lives and win battles. But she didn't make any prescriptive adjustments to the Corps' combat gear load outs. She told Marine Corps Times that she didn't want to “limit” a battlefield commander's decision-making. The Corps' various fighting loads are broken down in its infantry training and readiness manual into four different groups, fighting load, assault load, approach march load and sustainment load. The load type is dependent on the mission at hand. Thompson's research was aimed at the fighting and assault loads. The fighting and assault loads include combat gear for the “immediate mission” and the “actual conduct of the assault,” respectively, according to the Corps' infantry manual. The assault load weight varies between 58 pounds and 70 pounds based on level of body armor. The weight range includes a weapon being carried. The training and readiness manual excludes the weight of a weapon in its gear break down. Thompson isn't calling for particular pieces of gear to be thrown off the packing list, but she said commanders should throw the entire list in a pack, wear it, and “see if it is a reasonable amount of weight.” The Corps is already making a number of changes to reduce weight. Some of those include a new lightweight helmet, lighter body armor for counterinsurgency conflicts and polymer ammunition. But Marines also are packing on weight with new tech like tablets and drones, which have been dished out to rifle squads. At the end of the day, Marine commanders have a delicate balance of weighing risk verse capability, and it wont be easy for commanders to forgo pieces of equipment on a mission to lighten packs, Thompson explained. A commander “can't prove the lives they saved” from taking a particular action, Thompson said. https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/06/18/15-extra-pounds-of-gear-can-be-the-difference-between-life-or-death-in-a-firefight-this-marine-officers-research-says/

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  January 26, 2022 | International, Aerospace

  Antitrust regulators sue to block Lockheed's Aerojet acquisition

  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission says Lockheed Martin's planned $4.4 billion acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne will raise antitrust concerns, the companies said Tuesday.

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  June 16, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land

  Nuclear modernization speeding up as arms control on the brink: report

  By: Aaron Mehta   WASHINGTON — Overall nuclear warheads in the world decreased in 2019, but broad modernization efforts by the biggest nuclear countries — along with a degradation of arms control agreements around the world — could mean a dangerous mix for the future, according to an annual report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI. The organization estimated that at the end of 2019, nine countries possessed a total of 13,400 nuclear warheads, down from the 13,865 estimated in SIPRI's previous report, which in turn was a drop from 14,465 the year before. The reductions were primarily due to numbers dropping under the New START nuclear agreement between Russia and the U.S., which experts largely expect not to be renewed at the start of the new year. Russia is the largest holder of nuclear warheads, according to SIPRI's numbers, with 6,735 total, of which 1,570 are deployed. The U.S. follows at 5,800, with 1,750 deployed. The two countries account for over 90 percent of the world's nuclear arsenal. The United Kingdom (250 total, 120 deployed) and France (290 total, 280 deployed) are the other two nations believed to have deployed nuclear warheads. China (320 total), India (150 total), Pakistan (160 total), Israel (90 total) and North Korea, (30-40 total) round out SIPRI's list. Both the U.S. and Russia are engaged in expensive, widespread modernization efforts of its nuclear arsenal. America is upgrading both its legacy nuclear warheads with new designs, as well as updating its fleet of nuclear-capable bombers, submarines and ICBMs. Earlier this year, the Pentagon deployed for the first time the W76-2, a low-yield variant of the nuclear warhead traditionally used on the Trident submarine launched missile, and early design work is being done on another new submarine launched warhead design, known as the W93. Russia, meanwhile, has spoken openly about developing hypersonic weapons that could be nuclear equipped and has invested in novel weapons such as the Status-6, an underwater drone that could be equipped with a nuclear warhead. Moscow has also vocalized new deployment plans for its weapons and on June 2 made official a policy that it may use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack. Those investments by the world's two nuclear superpowers come against a backdrop of the collapse of numerous arms control agreements. 2019 saw the formal end of the Intermediate Range and Shorter Range Missiles (INF) treaty, and in May the U.S. announced its intention to withdraw from the Open Skies arms control verification agreement. The last major arms control agreement between Russia and the U.S. is New START, which is set to expire in February of 2021. In recent weeks the U.S. has announced its intention to start negotiations on a new arms control agreement that would include China. However, Chinese officials have repeatedly and categorically denied that it would be willing to join such an agreement, and experts largely view any efforts to create a trilateral nuclear arms control pact as a New START replacement are non-starters, leading to widespread agreement among analyst that New START is likely doomed under the Trump administration. “The deadlock over New START and the collapse of the 1987 Soviet–US Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate Range and Shorter Range Missiles (INF) Treaty in 2019 suggest that the era of bilateral nuclear arms control agreements between Russia and the USA might be coming to an end,” said Shannon Kile, Director of SIPRI's nuclear disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation program. “The loss of key channels of communication between Russia and the USA that were intended to promote transparency and prevent misperceptions about their respective nuclear force postures and capabilities could potentially lead to a new nuclear arms race.” https://www.defensenews.com/smr/nuclear-arsenal/2020/06/14/nuclear-modernization-speeding-up-as-arms-control-on-the-brink-report/