January 21, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
Lee Hudson
The U.S. Congress is providing the military with direct responses to the threat of climate change. The passage of defense policy legislation provides the military with new tools to address the effects of the warming globe on strategic security interests, installations and readiness.
That climate change is a threat to national security has been acknowledged by the military for nearly 30 years. In 1990, the U.S. Naval War College issued a report on “Global Climate Change Implications for the United States.” But in recent years, the issue has become politically charged, with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voting in 2016 on an amendment to block Pentagon action on climate change.
Now legislative support for addressing the security effects of a warming planet is growing. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) characterized climate change as a direct threat to national security. Two years later, lawmakers are uniting around potential solutions. Last month, President Donald Trump signed into law the 2020 NDAA, which includes 10 provisions related to climate security.
The bill made it through the Democrat-controlled House and the Senate, past Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who wrote a book in 2012 calling global warming The Greatest Hoax.
The 2020 NDAA mandates creation of a Climate Security Advisory Council within the intelligence community to ensure analysis is informed by the best possible science. Intelligence experts must incorporate the foresight scientists have in projecting stress on various regions to predict potential crises. Establishing a Climate and Security Council is a positive step, John Conger, director of the Center for Climate and Security, tells Aviation Week.
“If you know there is going to be a water shortage in some portion of the world, that would inform, for example, the assessment of whether that region is going to go unstable,” Conger says.
Another provision in the bill related to climate-security strategic interests for the U.S. revolves around the Arctic.
Section 1752 of the 2020 NDAA directs the Pentagon to consider sites for a strategic port in the Arctic and submit a report to Congress no later than June 2020. The document should include a cost estimate for construction and sustained operations at the site. For years, experts have rallied for the U.S. to have a more permanent presence in the Arctic as melting ice caps begin to open sea lanes to vessels from Russia and other nations.
As the Arctic continues to warm, extreme weather has hit hard at existing bases in the continental U.S. In 2018, Hurricane Michael decimated Tyndall AFB in Florida. Tyndall was home to the Air Force's fleet of Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors.
The Air Force is still coping with the aftermath. While Tyndall is undergoing repairs, F-22s assigned to the 43rd and 95th Fighter Sqdns. have moved to other installations. The jets assigned to the 43rd relocated to Eglin AFB in Florida, while the 95th's aircraft are being spread out across F-22 units at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, and Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia.
The military is not just concerned about its coastal bases. A few months after Hurricane Michael floodwaters reached 7ft. (2.1 m), damaging Offutt AFB in Nebraska and causing personnel to move aircraft and munitions to higher ground. The flooding damaged one-third of the Midwestern base, home to the headquarters of the nation's nuclear arsenal, U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) and the 55th Wing. The 55th Wing is Air Combat Command's largest wing, with an annual budget of more than $477 million, 45 aircraft, 31 squadrons and 7,000 employees. In total, the damage at Tyndall and Offutt will cost the American taxpayer an estimated $5 billion to rebuild.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein and former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson had to beg Congress for $5 billion in emergency funding to begin rebuilding the installations damaged by natural disasters.
Section 328 of the 2020 NDAA creates a dedicated budget line item for adaptation to and mitigation of extreme weather on military networks, installations, facilities and other assets. These include loss or obstructed access to training ranges. The bill defines extreme weather as recurrent flooding, drought, desertification, wildfires and thawing permafrost.
In 2019, the Air Force submitted to Congress a “Top 10” list of installations at risk of extreme damage from chaging weather. Six of the bases are in Florida—Eglin, Hurlburt Field, Patrick AFB, Homestead Air Reserve Base, MacDill AFB and Tyndall. The base taking the top spot is Vandenberg AFB in California, home to the Space Force's Space Operations Command. The remaining installations at risk are Dover AFB in Delaware and Langley-Eustis in Virginia.
“As developed, the above list reflects installations susceptible to the consequences of severe weather events: coastal and inland flooding, wildfires, and/or drought; not necessarily 50-100-year climatic changes,” the submission states. “This list does not look at any specific critical mission implications (i.e., even if the base is subject to flooding because a portion is within a 100-year flood plain, a mission-critical facility may not be impacted because of its location on the base or it is on high ground; e.g. the Stratcom Headquarters Building on Offutt AFB).”
The Army assessed six climate vulnerabilities on its military bases in the U.S. The service is most concerned about desertification, or land degradation caused by dry conditions, affecting its installations especially at Yuma Proving Ground and Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Fort Irwin and Camp Roberts in California, Fort Bliss in Texas, White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada, Tooele Army Depot in Utah and Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado.
“The analysis is based on climate science only and is not influenced by strategic or mission considerations,” the Army report says.
The majority of the measures to defend the military against climate change to date are reactionary, but Section 2801a of the 2020 NDAA is more preventative, directing the Pentagon to incorporate military installation resilience into master plans; it authorizes funding for climate resilience projects.
These installation master plans will specifically assess vulnerabilities to the bases and surrounding communities, identify missions affected by those susceptibilities and propose projects to address those weaknesses.
“Until you start incorporating these risks into your master planning process, you aren't going to fully appreciate what you have to do at a particular location,” Conger says. “You can't just throw money at a problem not knowing what you're supposed to do.”
The Navy paid attention to climate change early on because the service has the most coastal bases and infrastructures in its inventory. Separate from climate change, a few years ago Congress directed the Navy to study the infrastructure requirements of its shipyards. That assessment found that the dry docks at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Virginia were not high enough to deal with sea level rise, Conger says. The 2020 NDAA authorizes $49 million for a project at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to increase the height of the floodwalls around its dry docks. The shipyard's primary mission is the overhaul, repair and modernization of Los Angeles-class fast-attack nuclear-powered submarines.
Climate change is also affecting the U.S. military's readiness levels because of an increasing number of Black Flag days, when the temperature rises to 90F or higher, and training is suspended. This affects units being able to complete a training syllabus on time, Conger says.
“It's not like we've never done workarounds in training, but these are things where the training experts in all of the services will have to look at trends and figure out how to adjust what they have to do,” he says. “It is not something they're immune from; it's something they're going to have to accommodate and deal with.”
https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/us-military-given-authority-defend-against-climate-change
November 15, 2021 | International, C4ISR
Israel Aerospace Industries has unveiled its new Scorpius family of electronic warfare systems based on active electronically scanned array technology that provides the capability to detect and simultaneously confront threats over a long range.
August 16, 2019 | International, Aerospace
A-10s Get New Wings Workers at the Ogden Air Logistics Complex at Hill Air Force Base have installed the last of 173 new wings on A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft, finalizing a project that started in 2011 with aircraft 80-0173. The ALC's 571st Aircraft Maintenance Squadron swapped wings on 162 A-10s as part of the A-10 Enhanced Wing Assembly replacement program. The remaining 11 were installed at Osan Air Base in the Republic of Korea. The new wings are expected to last for up to 10,000 equivalent flight hours without a depot inspection. In addition, a better wire harness design was created for easier wing removal and to lessen the chance of damaging the wing during the process. “From a warfighter point of view, bringing this program to a successful conclusion was a significant accomplishment for the entire enterprise team,” said Stephen Zaiser, 571st AXMS director. Working on an aircraft that has been flying for nearly 40 years wasn't without challenges. The modifications included having to make new parts for the fuselage and having to bring other A-10 parts up from the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona. “At the end of the program, making sure we had all the pieces and parts that we needed to make that happen required a really significant team effort,” Zaiser said. “I think the fact that we produced the aircraft so successfully is a testament to the whole team, the special program office, Boeing and others that were a part of making it all work.” Lt. Col. Ryan Richardson, 514th Flight Test Squadron commander and A-10 test pilot, flew the functional check flight on the last A-10 to receive the new wings to deem the aircraft airworthy. “It flew great and passed all the FCF checks,” Richardson said. “It's unusual to have an airplane in production for as long as this one was and have it come out and fly as well as this one did.” Introduced into the U.S. Air Force aircraft inventory in 1976, the venerable A-10 is the only production-built aircraft for close air support. The aircraft was made to fly close to the ground in support of friendly ground troops, drop heavy loads of weapons, attacks armored vehicles and tanks, and can be called in to attack enemy ground forces. With heavy stresses put on the wings over the weapon system's lifetime and with its full-service life still unknown, the Air Force decided to replace some of the fleet's wings in order for the weapon system to remain airworthy. In 2007, Boeing was awarded a $1.1 billion contract to build replacement wings at its Macon, Georgia, plant that will allow the aircraft to continue flying into the late 2030s. “The A-10 Special Program Office, in partnership with the Ogden ALC, is poised to keep the aircraft flying for the foreseeable future,” said Michael Hackett, A-10 SPO chief engineer. http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=e3fe8bb4-6d74-4d69-845e-d6e204fcfbe7
January 7, 2019 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
BY PATRICK TUCKER An advisory board is drafting guidelines that may help shape worldwide norms for military artificial intelligence — and woo Silicon Valley to defense work. U.S. defense officials have asked the Defense Innovation Board for a set of ethical principles in the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. The principles are intended to guide a military whose interest in AI is accelerating — witness the new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center — and to reassure potential partners in Silicon Valley about how their AI products will be used. Today, the primary document laying out what the military can and can't do with AI is a 2012 doctrine that says a human being must have veto power over any action an autonomous system might take in combat. It's brief, just four pages, and doesn't touch on any of the uses of AI for decision support, predictive analytics, etc. where players like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are making fast strides in commercial environments. “AI scientists have expressed concern about how DoD intends to use artificial intelligence. While the DoD has a policy on the role of autonomy in weapons, it currently lacks a broader policy on how it will use artificial intelligence across the broad range of military missions,” said Paul Scharre, the author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. Josh Marcuse, executive director of the Defense Innovation Board, said crafting these principles will help the department “safely and responsibly” employ new technologies. “I think it's important when dealing with a field that's emergent to think through all the ramifications,” he said. The Board, a group of Silicon Valley corporate and thought leaders chaired by former Google and Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt, will make the list public at its June meeting. Defense Department leaders will take them under consideration. Marcuse believes that the Pentagon can be a leader not just in employing AI but in establishing guidelines for safe use — just as the military pioneered safety standards for aviation. “The Department of Defense should lead in this area as we have with other technologies in the past. I want to make sure the department is not just leading in developing AI for military purposes but also in developing ethics to use AI in military purposes,” he says. The effort, in part, is a response to what happened with the military's Project Maven, the Pentagon's flagship AI project with Google as its partner. The effort applied artificial intelligence to the vast store of video and and image footage that the Defense Department gathers to guide airstrikes. Defense officials emphasized repeatedly that the AI was intended only to cut down the workload of human analysts. But they also acknowledged that the ultimate goal was to help the military do what it does better, which sometimes means finding and killing humans. An employee revolt ensued at Google. Employees resigned en masse and the company said that they wouldn't renew the contract. Scharre, who leads the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said, “One of the challenges for things like Project Maven, which uses AItechnology to process drone video feeds, is that some scientists expressed concern about where the technology may be heading. A public set of AI principles will help clarify DoD's intentions regarding artificial intelligence.” Full artcile: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/01/pentagon-seeks-list-ethical-principles-using-ai-war/153940/