January 9, 2024 | International, Aerospace
June 27, 2018 | International, C4ISR
US military aims for $1 billion missile defense radar in Hawaii
By: Audrey McAvoy, The Associated Press
HONOLULU — The U.S. military wants to install missile defense radar in Hawaii to identify any ballistic missiles that are fired from North Korea or elsewhere, officials said Tuesday.
The $1 billion system would spot warheads on missiles headed for Hawaii and other U.S. states, and provide that information to ground-based interceptors in Alaska designed to shoot them down. It would be able to distinguish warheads from decoys that are designed to trick missile defense systems.
The radar would help give the Alaska missiles “better eyes,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii and a supporter of the project.
So far, lawmakers have appropriated $61 million for planning but not funds for construction. Schatz, who serves on the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he doesn't have much doubt about the likelihood of follow-on funding.
The radar would be about 30 to 50 feet wide and 60 feet to 80 feet high, according to the Missile Defense Agency.
It will likely to have a flat-face surface like one in Shemya, Alaska, instead of a ball-like appearance of other military radar. Experts say the larger the face, the more precisely it will be able to distinguish between warheads and decoys.
The agency is studying two possible locations for the radar, both of which are on Oahu's North Shore. It's collecting public comment through July 16.
Schatz said lawmakers discussed the radar with the previous commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. Harry Harris, who recently retired and has been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to South Korea.
“We already have robust capabilities, but working with Admiral Harris, we wanted to double down and make sure we have the most powerful combination of missile interceptors and radar systems anywhere,” Schatz said in a phone interview.
The radar would help identify long-range ballistic missile threats mid-way through flight.
David Santoro, a director and senior fellow for nuclear policy at the Pacific Forum think tank in Honolulu, said threats from North Korea were increasing as Pyongyang developed more sophisticated missiles and nuclear weapons.
“Over the past few weeks, we have seen a so-called peace initiative developing, but the reality is the threat is still there. It's not going away,” Santoro said. The U.S. would be expected to build a radar system to counter the threats, he said.
U.S. concerns about the threat from North Korean missiles spiked last year as North Korea test-fired long-range missile over Japan and threatened to launch ballistic missiles toward the Guam, a major U.S. military hub in the Pacific. President Donald Trump warned the U.S. military was “locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely” and that the U.S. would unleash “fire and fury” on the North if it continued to threaten America.
But then Trump and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, met in Singapore earlier this month and issued a declaration agreeing to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
The statement did not define a process, say when it would begin or say how long it might take.
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August 28, 2018 | International, Aerospace, Land
Can Army Futures Command Overcome Decades Of Dysfunction?
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. ARMY S&T CONFERENCE: How broken is the procurement system the new Army Futures Command was created to fix? It's not just the billions wasted on cancelled weapons programs. It's also the months wasted because, until now, there has not been one commander who can crack feuding bureaucrats' heads together and make them stop bickering over, literally, inches. “I have not always been an Army Futures Command fan,” retired Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr told the National Defense Industrial Association conference here. But as he thought about his own decades in Army acquisition, he's come around. How bad could things get? When he was working in the Army resourcing office (staff section G-8), Spoehr recalled, the Army signals school at Fort Gordon wanted a new radio test kit that could fit in a six-inch cargo pocket. The radio procurement programmanager, part of an entirely separate organization, reported back there was nothing on the market under eight inches. The requirements office insisted on sixinches, the acquisition office insisted they had no money to develop something smaller than the existing eight-inchers, and memos shot back and forth for months. At last, Spoehr warned both sides that if they didn't come to some agreement, he'd kill the funding. Suddenly Fort Gordon rewrote the requirement from “fit in a cargo pocket” to “cargo pouch” and the procurement people could go buy an eight-inch kit. That kind of disconnected dithering is what Army Futures Command is intended to prevent. “I had the money, but nobody really had control of all of this,” Spoehr said. As a result, he said, “we probably spent six months trading memos back and forth on the size of the radio frequency test kit.” Multiplying that by thousands of requirements over hundreds of systems, and the wasted time and money gets pretty bad. But what's often worse is when the requirements are unrealistic and no one pushes back. Most notoriously ,Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki demanded easily airlifted Future Combat Systems vehicles that weighed less than 20 tons but had the combat power of a 60-ton M1 Abrams tank. The designs eventually grew to 26 tons, and the performance requirements came down, but by then FCS had lost the confidence of both Congress and Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who canceled it in 2009. It was another casualty of overly ambitious requirements drawn up by staff officers in isolation from the people who'd actually have to build them. Army Futures Command is structured to force those two groups to talk to each other from the start. Full article: https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/can-army-futures-command-overcome-decades-of-dysfunction
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December 2, 2022 | International, Land
France qualifies Serval armored patrol vehicle variant for its Army
The green light signifies a step forward for realizing the ground service's large-scale Scorpion modernization program.