US military news, discussions and history

[Transhumanist]

 

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Continuing on with my "life on a carrier" pics

 

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[Transhumanist]

 

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[Indus Falcon]

Harris Corporation receives $3.9bn contract from the US Army for Rifleman Radios
Published: Monday, 04 May 2015

Harris Corporation has been awarded a 10-year (5-year base, 5 option years) $3.9 billion ceiling, multi-award IDIQ contract from the U.S. Army for rifleman radios and associated services under the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) Handheld, Manpack and Small-form Fit (HMS) program. Harris will deliver 50 radios for qualification testing with Full Rate Production fielding scheduled in U.S. government fiscal year 2017.

"The Army's selection of Harris as a provider of Rifleman Radios furthers our leadership position in tactical communications and networking," said Dana Mehnert, group president of Harris RF Communications. "With this contract, the Army is one step closer to putting the radios in the hands of warfighters. We have developed a fully compliant radio, the RF-330E, which meets or exceeds the Army's requirements. We are ready for full rate production orders today and look forward to the competition for delivery orders."
The Rifleman Radio — a lightweight, hand-held radio transmits voice and data using the Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW). Soldiers at all levels can use the RF-330E to send information up and down the chain of command as well as across the network backbone provided by the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T).

Harris RF Communications is the leading global supplier of secure radio communications and embedded high-grade encryption solutions for military, government and commercial organizations. The company's Falcon® family of software-defined tactical radio systems encompasses manpack, handheld and vehicular applications. Falcon III® is the next generation of radios supporting the U.S. military's Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) requirements, as well as network-centric operations worldwide.


Harris Corporation receives $3.9bn contract from the US Army for Rifleman Radios 0405155 | May 2015 Global Defense Security news UK | Defense Security global news industry army 2015

 

[Transhumanist]

I Wore the Navy's Oculus Rift, and It Showed Me the Future of Warfare

When we think of the future of the military, we think of bigger and better weapons. Laser canons and the like. But what about the people operating those lasers? How can a behemoth like the Navy ready its future sailors for the high-tech combat of tomorrow? Believe it or not, with an Oculus Rift.

At the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, a mix of real life, augmented reality, and virtual worlds come together to form a project known as BlueShark. It's an experiment to discover not only how the Navy of the future could work, but how it should work. I went there to train the way midshipmen will a decade from now.

What Is BlueShark?

BlueShark is the codename given to the Enhanced Environment for Communication and Collaboration (aka E2C2). As the true name suggests, despite being largely funded by the U.S. military (a division of the Office of Naval Research known as SwampWorks), the work done here has much broader implications. The project is essentially a collection of technologies and environments (both physical and virtual) that examine how we humans may collaborate in the future, whether we're in the same room or on the other side of the planet.

As for its Naval involvement, BlueShark's focus is to ensure that ships with 50-year lifespansand the generations of sailors manning them can work in harmony far into the future. A control room full of dusty analog switches and knobs may be perfectly functional, but will they be intuitive five decades from now? Or would it be like handing a rotary phone to a seven-year old?

It's a tall order. But considering that BlueShark's working on projects for 2025, it's amazing how far they've already gotten.

The Experience

On our recent trip to the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC, I had the opportunity to run through the BlueShark demo as it currently stands. It essentially mimics the type of training that a new sailor might go through.

The ICT's Mixed Reality lab practically overflows with gigantic screens, cameras, sensors, goggles, and more fun toys. Definitely not the kind of place you imagine when you think of classic "Navy training." It looks more like something out of a WarGames remake.

I was led through the demo by Senior Chief Foster, a human-sized virtual avatar displayed on a large flatscreen TV. When you step into your designated position a camera (just a cheap Logitech webcam) senses you, and Foster snaps to life. He gave me a brief overview, had me tell him my name, and then guided me to the first (and most impressive) station.

Command Center

The BlueShark Command Center is, as you might have guessed from the name, a simulated command outpost. It features four large screens in front of you, a swivel chair, and a tweaked-out Oculus Rift. The Oculus isn't just there because it's in fashion; its founder, Palmer Luckey, was a lab assistant in the Mixed Reality Lab before he launched his Oculus Kickstarter campaign.

Oh, and this also isn't your regular-old Oculus. The head mounted displays (HMDs) BlueShark us, as you might guess, has a few extra bells and whistles.

The BlueShark Oculus has been outfitted with several red LEDs. While they appear to be solidly lit to the naked eye, in reality each one is strobing at a different frequency. This enables cameras in the room to tell which LED is which, and thus give accurate positioning data, which in turn informs what you are seeing in your virtual display. If you lean in or out, the imagery matches, making the virtual world feel that much more real. Beyond advanced tracking, the lab is finding ways to create fields of view that go beyond the Oculus' current capabilities, virtually wrapping scenes around the user. For example, the photo above shows the Fakespace Labs Wide5, an experimental head mounted display that provides a more immersive 140 degree field of view.

The headset LEDs are matched by LED-covered straps that give accurate positioning data for your hands. It doesn't register finger-wiggles or anything that precise, but I was able to manipulate objects in the virtual world as easily as I would have been able to on a touchscreen.

In the photo at the top of this post, you can see my point of view, looking at a touchscreen with options for Crow's Nest Cam, Bridge, Combat Decision Center, and UAS Cam. In the real world, there was no interface. It was just a plain, cheap square of plexiglass on a stand. Yet, when I touched the spot where the buttons supposedly were, it registered the input perfectly and switched me to a different room.

This has profound implications. Let's say the Navy decides that a room full of touchscreens is the best way to control a new warship. Today, in order to train sailors on it, you'd have to build physical replicas of that control room. But what if you could just place plain pieces of plastic that approximate where the screens would be, slap an Oculus Rift on your face, and perfectly simulate what will be there? Outside of the VR headset, it's just a room full of cheap, blank plastic panels, but for the soldier in training, it would look and behave exactly as the real thing would. This would not only save a ton of money, but it would make the Navy far more adaptable.

The most incredible thing about this system, though, is how just a single press of a button can shift your perspective to a whole new vantage-point. When I hit that virtual button for Crow's Nest, I was instantly transported to the top of the ship's mast. It actually made me want to grab the sides of my chair at first. There I was, floating a hundred feet above the deck of the boat, and yet I still had all of my important screens and controls at my fingertips.

And then the best magic yet; another press of a button and I was even higher, looking down from a drone's point of view. I was flying high above the water, looking down at the boat that my physical body would be on, and looking out over enemy ships, too.

Obviously, this has profound implications. Imagine a drone pilot actually being able to see the entire world from the drone he or she is flying, not just from a single camera angle, but as if they were sitting in the cockpit. You would have so much more situational awareness. You might also have more of a sense that what you are doing is a part of the real world, not just some game, along with all of the moral implications that implies.

It stunned me silent.

A Flexible Future

Another advantage of this system is its extreme customizability. Maybe you're left-handed, and you want the ship's throttle over on the left. You can just drag and drop it to where you need it to be. When the next user logs in, it would reset to his or her preferred settings. In this way you can customize the ship itself to work in the way that makes most sense to you.

It also allows for fewer personnel to be physically on a ship. As long as the data speed could handle it, you could virtually pipe in an expert on any subject you needed, and they would be able to see the situation exactly as they would if they were on the ship with you. This could be extremely useful in specialized repair situations, or when a crucial translation is in need.

As incredible as BlueShark sounds—and will become—the system is a long way from perfect. There was occasional lag in the display, and when there's a slight disparity between what you are seeing and what you are physically experiencing, dizziness happens. I don't easily get motion-sick, but I definitely found myself getting queasy. At one point, when the screen froze completely, I became so disoriented I almost took a nose-dive out of my chair.

But we're at the very beginning of this technology. That it's this good at such a rudimentary stage is staggering.

Where It's Going

What remains to be seen is how the military adopts and implements BlueShark. One of the banner features of the Ford-class aircraft carriers is that they're made to be modular, so as technology progresses, theoretically entire control rooms could be swapped out. Might we see one that's just a bunch of lifeless glass panels that come to life when you look at them in virtual reality?

Even if that would make it endlessly customizable for the sailors using it, would the Navy ever trust a 100-percent digital system to pilot its boats? Would it be vulnerable to hacking? We asked the Navy these questions and got an official (and surprisingly candid) response from Lieutenant Commander Brent Olde, ONR Deputy, Human & Bio-Engineered Systems Division:

"Due to rapid advances in unmanned systems capabilities, the military is currently experiencing a paradigm shift in how it commands and controls its assets. With growing confidence and verified reliability in these new control mechanisms, I'd say yes, someday the Navy could have a completely new way of controlling large vessels - as depicted in BlueShark. However combat systems require multiple fail-safe redundancies to be in place in the case of system failures (some systems have quadruple redundancy), so if the Navy ever did replace the entire control system, it would only be after rigorous testing and redundant back-up mechanisms to maintain positive control."

Emphasis added, but suffice it to say that BlueShark could well be a reality, assuming it proved safe and reliable enough.

There are obviously also manifold applications for this technology outside of the military. You could put together a team of experts from around the world, who could collaborate in a virtual environment (with everything they say being instantly translated into the language of each individual listener) on a project. And, obviously, the gaming potential is off the charts.

But ultimately, seeing the world from the perspective of a drone, turning a blank space into the world's most high-tech command center just by looking through some glasses; these have huge implications for our military. If we aren't always ready to adapt, we lose. The more flexible we make ourselves, the more adaptable we'll be. BlueShark is the future—and it's closer than you think.

 

[Transhumanist]

Carrier wing 11, 1988

 

[Transhumanist]

 

[AMDR]

Hill To Navy: Hurry Up On Rail Guns, Lasers

WASHINGTON: Rail gun bullets move seven times the speed of sound. Laser beams fire at the speed of light. But Pentagon procurement? Not so fast. But with both Congress and theNavy Secretary expressing impatience, the Navy is accelerating its efforts to move bothlasers and rail guns from the test phase into the fleet.

“We’ve got a laser weapon now in the Arabian Gulf, we’ve got a rail gun under development,” Sec. Ray Mabus said Thursday at the National Press Club. “We’ve got some gee-whiz scientific stuff going on. Part of my job, part of our job, is to get those from the lab to the warfighter quicker….That rail gun, we’ve been working on that since the eighties; we’re gonna put it on a ship and test it next year,” with operational deployment sometime in the future. That timeline, Mabus said, is “way too long.”

Congress agrees. Just hours before, the House Armed Services Committee had passed its draft of the annual defense policy bill. Included: a provision that “directs the Secretary of the Navy” — that’s Mabus — “to develop a plan for fielding electric weapon systems” — meaning both lasers and rail guns, which rely on electric power rather than gunpowder — “and to provide a briefing on the results of this plan to the House Committee on Armed Services by March 1, 2016.”

“I like the legislation,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Studies senior fellow Mark Gunzinger told me today. “It says, ‘let’s move to actually establishing programs to deliver these capabilities instead of keeping them in the S&T world.'” (Science and Technology is the Pentagon term of art for research not tied to a specific piece of equipment the military plans to buy). Currently, he said, “they’re all S&T projects, [and]we need to transition them into the acquisition process.”

“Within two to three years, we could actually have operational directed energy weapons [i.e. lasers] on ships, at our forward bases, even perhaps ones that would accompany our maneuver forces in the field — if there was funding,” Gunzinger said. (A rail gun, he said, is more like 10 years away). At roughly $500 million a year across the defense Department for multiple S&T projects, “there’s been adequate funding for what they’ve done,” he said. “There’s been inadequate funding for testing these technologies,” let alone fielding them.

So what’s the current schedule? For all their similarities, lasers and rail guns are very different technologies on very different timelines. A laser consumes electricity and shoots out light. An electromagnetic rail gun also consumes electricity, but it shoots out a physical object, in the Navy version a 23-pound metal slug. A rail gun round impacts much more forcefully than any laser beam: That allows it to take down tougher targets like reentry-hardened ballistic missile warheads, whose heat shields would simply soak up a laser blast. But the physical projectile requires much more energy to launch, plus all the recoil-absorbing apparatus of a conventional cannon.

As a result the rail gun is bigger, heavier, and not as far along. Physical wear and tear on the barrel remains a major concern for rail gun development, Rear Adm. Mathias Winter, the new Chief of Naval Research, said. The weapon’s been tested so far at low rates of fire, allowing time for the barrel to recover, he said, while defense against incoming missilesmight take 10 shots a minute for minutes at a time.

“We still need to do that science,” Winter told me in a sidebar conversation at April’s Sea-Air-Space conference. On the upside, he went on, thanks to advances in power and cooling, the physical size of the rail gun has come down “over fifty percent [since] about five, seven years ago.”

Next year, the Navy will put a prototype rail gun on a support ship, the Joint High Speed Vessel Millinocket. JHSVs are fast, light, unarmed transports, and as transports they have lots of room. The rail gun itself will go on the deck while electrical generators and other equipment will take up the cargo bay.

Meanwhile, the Navy already has a 30-kilowatt Laser Weapon System (LaWS), powerful enough to shoot down drones and disable fast attack boats, installed on a ship in the Persian Gulf. But, again, the ship in question is a transport, specifically the Afloat Forward Staging Base Ponce. The AFSB is a repurposed amphibious assault ship, designed to carry a Marine landing force with all its vehicles and gear, so again there’s plenty of room.

An aircraft carrier has similar leeway for lasers, especially the new Ford-class flattops. Most warships are packed much tighter. What’s more, with power-consuming systems like jammers, radars, and other sensors advancing more rapidly than power-generating systems, warships rarely have much spare electrical power, either.

The big exception is the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class, the Navy’s new high-tech destroyer. A DDG-1000 actually turns its propellers electrically, rather than with a mechanical shaft attached to the engine, so it has plenty of power to spare when not moving at maximum speed.

In fact, the chief of Navy Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), Vice Adm. William Hilarides, hassaid publicly that his staff is studying installing a rail gun on the third DDG-1000 to be built. That would be the USS Lyndon Johnson, which is scheduled for delivery in 2018. (The first two ships are too far along). Because the ship has less spare room and weight than it has power, the rail gun will probably replace one of the destroyer’s two conventional 155 millimeter cannon.

The problem with putting a rail gun on the third DDG-1000 is that ship will also be the last in its class. The Navy decided the DDG-1000s are too expensive and truncated the buy at three, preferring to resume production of its workhorse DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyers. So the vast majority of the Navy’s destroyers are and will continue to be variants on a 1980s design, one packed tight by decades of upgrades.

“I don’t think a rail gun on the DDG-51 makes much sense,” said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy commander and former top aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, who now works with Gunzinger at CSBA. But lasers, he said, are entirely doable.

Next year, the Navy will buy its first Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyer, a majorly modernized model with a powerful and power-hungry new radar. To run the radar and other high-tech systems, the Flight III is being built with a lot more capacity to generate electricity than previous versions of the DDG-51. By Clark’s calculations, a Flight III could run its radar at full power and simultaneously blaze away at incoming cruise missiles with a 400-kilowat laser. That’s 16 times as powerful as the prototype now in the Persian Gulf.

Even existing Arleigh Burkes could manage a laser, Clark said, although they couldn’t fire continuously without turning down other power-hungry systems like the radar. As for physical space and weight, he said, the laser would not have to replace the destroyer’s deck gun. Because the bulk of the laser system can be taken apart into different modules and packed wherever they fit aboard the ship, as long as they’re appropriately wired together, he said, “the only piece that’s actually on the deck is the beam director.”

The Navy is now developing a laser they can fit on a destroyer. “It’s still S&T,” Rear Adm. Winter caveated, but the goal is to test-fire the weapon in fiscal 2017. The platform wouldn’t be an operational destroyer, but a retired one now in use as a test ship for self-defense systems. It’s not exactly representative of an Arleigh Burke, Winter acknowledged, but it’s a lot closer than the USS Ponce or a JHSV.

But Congress‘s question remains unanswered, for now: When will the Navy get these weapons on actual warships?

 

[Transhumanist]

Hill To Navy: Hurry Up On Rail Guns, Lasers

WASHINGTON: Rail gun bullets move seven times the speed of sound. Laser beams fire at the speed of light. But Pentagon procurement? Not so fast. But with both Congress and theNavy Secretary expressing impatience, the Navy is accelerating its efforts to move bothlasers and rail guns from the test phase into the fleet.

“We’ve got a laser weapon now in the Arabian Gulf, we’ve got a rail gun under development,” Sec. Ray Mabus said Thursday at the National Press Club. “We’ve got some gee-whiz scientific stuff going on. Part of my job, part of our job, is to get those from the lab to the warfighter quicker….That rail gun, we’ve been working on that since the eighties; we’re gonna put it on a ship and test it next year,” with operational deployment sometime in the future. That timeline, Mabus said, is “way too long.”

Congress agrees. Just hours before, the House Armed Services Committee had passed its draft of the annual defense policy bill. Included: a provision that “directs the Secretary of the Navy” — that’s Mabus — “to develop a plan for fielding electric weapon systems” — meaning both lasers and rail guns, which rely on electric power rather than gunpowder — “and to provide a briefing on the results of this plan to the House Committee on Armed Services by March 1, 2016.”

“I like the legislation,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Studies senior fellow Mark Gunzinger told me today. “It says, ‘let’s move to actually establishing programs to deliver these capabilities instead of keeping them in the S&T world.'” (Science and Technology is the Pentagon term of art for research not tied to a specific piece of equipment the military plans to buy). Currently, he said, “they’re all S&T projects, [and]we need to transition them into the acquisition process.”

“Within two to three years, we could actually have operational directed energy weapons [i.e. lasers] on ships, at our forward bases, even perhaps ones that would accompany our maneuver forces in the field — if there was funding,” Gunzinger said. (A rail gun, he said, is more like 10 years away). At roughly $500 million a year across the defense Department for multiple S&T projects, “there’s been adequate funding for what they’ve done,” he said. “There’s been inadequate funding for testing these technologies,” let alone fielding them.

So what’s the current schedule? For all their similarities, lasers and rail guns are very different technologies on very different timelines. A laser consumes electricity and shoots out light. An electromagnetic rail gun also consumes electricity, but it shoots out a physical object, in the Navy version a 23-pound metal slug. A rail gun round impacts much more forcefully than any laser beam: That allows it to take down tougher targets like reentry-hardened ballistic missile warheads, whose heat shields would simply soak up a laser blast. But the physical projectile requires much more energy to launch, plus all the recoil-absorbing apparatus of a conventional cannon.

As a result the rail gun is bigger, heavier, and not as far along. Physical wear and tear on the barrel remains a major concern for rail gun development, Rear Adm. Mathias Winter, the new Chief of Naval Research, said. The weapon’s been tested so far at low rates of fire, allowing time for the barrel to recover, he said, while defense against incoming missilesmight take 10 shots a minute for minutes at a time.

“We still need to do that science,” Winter told me in a sidebar conversation at April’s Sea-Air-Space conference. On the upside, he went on, thanks to advances in power and cooling, the physical size of the rail gun has come down “over fifty percent [since] about five, seven years ago.”

Next year, the Navy will put a prototype rail gun on a support ship, the Joint High Speed Vessel Millinocket. JHSVs are fast, light, unarmed transports, and as transports they have lots of room. The rail gun itself will go on the deck while electrical generators and other equipment will take up the cargo bay.

Meanwhile, the Navy already has a 30-kilowatt Laser Weapon System (LaWS), powerful enough to shoot down drones and disable fast attack boats, installed on a ship in the Persian Gulf. But, again, the ship in question is a transport, specifically the Afloat Forward Staging Base Ponce. The AFSB is a repurposed amphibious assault ship, designed to carry a Marine landing force with all its vehicles and gear, so again there’s plenty of room.

An aircraft carrier has similar leeway for lasers, especially the new Ford-class flattops. Most warships are packed much tighter. What’s more, with power-consuming systems like jammers, radars, and other sensors advancing more rapidly than power-generating systems, warships rarely have much spare electrical power, either.

The big exception is the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class, the Navy’s new high-tech destroyer. A DDG-1000 actually turns its propellers electrically, rather than with a mechanical shaft attached to the engine, so it has plenty of power to spare when not moving at maximum speed.

In fact, the chief of Navy Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), Vice Adm. William Hilarides, hassaid publicly that his staff is studying installing a rail gun on the third DDG-1000 to be built. That would be the USS Lyndon Johnson, which is scheduled for delivery in 2018. (The first two ships are too far along). Because the ship has less spare room and weight than it has power, the rail gun will probably replace one of the destroyer’s two conventional 155 millimeter cannon.

The problem with putting a rail gun on the third DDG-1000 is that ship will also be the last in its class. The Navy decided the DDG-1000s are too expensive and truncated the buy at three, preferring to resume production of its workhorse DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyers. So the vast majority of the Navy’s destroyers are and will continue to be variants on a 1980s design, one packed tight by decades of upgrades.

“I don’t think a rail gun on the DDG-51 makes much sense,” said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy commander and former top aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, who now works with Gunzinger at CSBA. But lasers, he said, are entirely doable.

Next year, the Navy will buy its first Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyer, a majorly modernized model with a powerful and power-hungry new radar. To run the radar and other high-tech systems, the Flight III is being built with a lot more capacity to generate electricity than previous versions of the DDG-51. By Clark’s calculations, a Flight III could run its radar at full power and simultaneously blaze away at incoming cruise missiles with a 400-kilowat laser. That’s 16 times as powerful as the prototype now in the Persian Gulf.

Even existing Arleigh Burkes could manage a laser, Clark said, although they couldn’t fire continuously without turning down other power-hungry systems like the radar. As for physical space and weight, he said, the laser would not have to replace the destroyer’s deck gun. Because the bulk of the laser system can be taken apart into different modules and packed wherever they fit aboard the ship, as long as they’re appropriately wired together, he said, “the only piece that’s actually on the deck is the beam director.”

The Navy is now developing a laser they can fit on a destroyer. “It’s still S&T,” Rear Adm. Winter caveated, but the goal is to test-fire the weapon in fiscal 2017. The platform wouldn’t be an operational destroyer, but a retired one now in use as a test ship for self-defense systems. It’s not exactly representative of an Arleigh Burke, Winter acknowledged, but it’s a lot closer than the USS Ponce or a JHSV.

But Congress‘s question remains unanswered, for now: When will the Navy get these weapons on actual warships?

I'm generally of the view that the US Congress should sign the budget, provide oversight to keep the military honest and on track, but not dictate how fast the military works. When rushed projects fail. It's a theme repeated far too often across the world. Unfortunately people seem unable to learn the basic axiom, "history repeats itself."

Keep the progress steady, keep to your working schedule and do it right. Don't rush due to the impatience of politicians.

Sometimes the military is a bit too slow though, especially on the procurement side of things.

 

[AMDR]