US Military Technology

New Guam defense system must include SM-6, implying major role for Aegis Ashore​

MDA official: New Guam defense system must include SM-6, implying major role for Aegis Ashore | InsideDefense.com

The Standard Missile-6 must be a non-negotiable component of whatever new air and missile defense system is designed for Guam because it is the only fielded counter-hypersonic capability, said a senior Missile Defense Agency official -- an assertion that implies the Navy’s Aegis Ashore should be...
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Air Force F-16 Carried Dragon's Eye Radar Pod Alongside B-1 Bombers On Red Sea Mission​

A U.S. Air Force F-16C Viper fighter jet was spotted carrying an AN/ASQ-236 Dragon's Eye radar pod during a recent sortie over the Red Sea with Air Force B-1B bombers and Royal Saudi Air Force F-15 fighters. This appears to be the first time this combination has been seen in the region and highlights how this pod, originally designed to be carried by Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles, has now become an operational tool for Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Vipers. The pod offers a way to quickly give F-16s significant additional all-weather targeting and surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities when required.

A total of two F-16Cs, a pair of B-1Bs, and four Saudi F-15s flew together to demonstrate "commitment to partners and regional stability" yesterday, according to the Air Force. The Dragon's Eye pod is visible underneath one of the Vipers in a picture from this mission that the Saudi Ministry of Defense released, a crop of which is seen at the top of this story and the full version of which is seen below. It's not entirely clear what unit the Vipers belong to, but the Wisconsin Air National Guard's 115th Fighter Wing sent some of these jets and around 300 personnel to Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia for a scheduled deployment in October.
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Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense

The F-16C carrying the Dragon's Eye Pod is visible at the top left of this photograph.

That the Viper in question belongs to an Air National Guard unit makes good sense. The Air Force announced in September 2020 that at least 200 F-16C/Ds in the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve had been upgraded to be able to carry this radar pod. Work to integrate Dragon's Eye onto these jets dates back to at least 2018.
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USAF

The Dragon's Eye pod is just barely visible on the F-16C at right in this picture that the US Air Force released from the mission over the Red Sea yesterday.

Dragon's Eye is a powerful sensor system that has an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar at its core that is capable of being rotated around the pod's center axis. The pod also contains geo-positioning and cooling systems. The radar has synthetic aperture functionality allowing it to produce high-fidelity imagery of a large area and is said to be sensitive enough to detect small and even shallow-buried objects, such as individual people and improvised explosive devices. It reportedly has ground-moving target indicator (GMTI) capabilities, as well, giving it the ability to track moving vehicles and ships below. What this all means is that system can be used to conduct general intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions and collect targeting data for actual strikes, all at extended ranges and in any weather conditions.
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USAF

An F-15E Strike Eagle carrying a Dragon's Eye pod, indicated by a white arrow, among other stores.

This is hardly the first time that Air Force aircraft have been seen carrying the pod in the Middle East, but previously it had been almost exclusively associated with the F-15E. The service's F-15E fleet is small compared to how many F-16s it has, and the Strike Eagles are in high demand. So enabling Vipers to carry Dragon's Eye expands the total number of platforms that can carry the system, offering greater operational flexibility, on top of just giving individual jets a major boost in capability.

Many Air National Guard F-16C/Ds are separately in the process of receiving new, highly capable AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radars (SABR), another AESA type. Pairing Dragon's Eye and SABR together would produce a very impressive set of capabilities, though it's not clear if this particular Viper carrying the pod over the Red Sea yesterday has a new AN/APG-83.

The focus of this mission yesterday appears to have mostly been about highlighting partnerships between the U.S. military and its Saudi counterparts. The Red Sea is a highly strategic body of water where the Dragon's Eye pod could have real operational utility. It lies between two major chokepoints, the Suez Canal to the North and the Bab Al Mandeb Strait to the south. An accident involving the container ship Ever Given left the Suez Canal blocked off for six days earlier this year and underscored how even relatively short disruption of commercial shipping in this region could have major negative economic impacts worldwide.

Accidents aren't the only potential threats to unfettered maritime movement and general security in this part of the world. Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen regularly launch attacks on commercial interests in Saudi Arabia, including against ships in the southern Red Sea and facilities along the coast there, in addition to military targets. There have been concerns in recent years that this group, and Iran itself, may be expanding its ability to strike farther north, including at targets in southern Israel. Iran, or at least proxies acting on its behalf, have launched a number of attacks on commercial ships in the Middle East in recent years, including vessels tied to Israel as part of a maritime shadow war those countries have been waging against each other.

F-16s with Dragon's Eye pods would be able to help keep an eye out for potentially hostile activity in and around the Red Sea, as well as help execute strikes on threats that pop up and conduct damage assessment after any such operations. The AN/ASQ-236 presents a particularly ideal tool for spotting and targeting small boat swarms, no matter what the weather down below might be like. Iran and its proxies routinely demonstrate how swarms of small boats are a very real threat in the region, as is highlighted in the video footage below from a recent altercation in the Gulf of Oman.

۳. تصاویری از عملیات برخورد نیروی دریایی سپاه با ناوهای آمریکایی pic.twitter.com/Nm0dmhV32l
— خبرگزاری فارس (@FarsNews_Agency) November 3, 2021​
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Flying from Prince Sultan Air Base, which is situated in central Saudi Arabia closer to the Persian Gulf, Vipers with these radar pods could perform similar missions elsewhere in the region, which has no shortage of potential hotspots.

With hundreds of Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Vipers now capable of carrying Dragon's Eye, seeing jets in the Middle East, as well as other locales, will likely only become ever more routine.
www.thedrive.com

Air Force F-16 Carried Dragon's Eye Radar Pod Alongside B-1 Bombers On Red Sea Mission

The advanced radar pod gives F-16s a major boost in target and surveillance capabilities that would be very valuable in this strategic region.
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Cutting-edge Space Force radar installed at Clear base

The $1.5 billion project south of Fairbanks is designed to spot and track ballistic missiles with a greater level of detail than currently exists.
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Cutting-edge Space Force radar installed at Clear base​

By Zachariah Hughes
Updated: 8 hours ago Published: 18 hours ago
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The Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) at Clear Space Force Station. Photographed Oct 26, 2021. (Ryan Keith / Missile Defense Agency)

A new milestone was reached Monday in the creeping militarization of space.

A ceremony at the Clear Space Force Base (formerly Clear Air Force Station) south of Fairbanks celebrated the end of construction and installation of a new Long Range Discrimination Radar, a sophisticated monitoring system designed to bolster American missile defenses.

“Once fully operational, LRDR will provide unparalleled ability to simultaneously search, track and discriminate multiple small objects, including all classes of ballistic and, in later iterations, hypersonic missiles, at very long ranges, under continuous operation,” heralded the Missile Defense Agency in a press release.

Now that the cutting-edge radar is installed inside a newly constructed facility nearly five stories tall, a testing and training phase will begin, with the device expected to be fully integrated and operational by 2023. Once testing is finished, control of the radar will change from the Missile Defense Agency to the U.S. Space Force.

“You have built an extra set of keen eyes that will paint the picture of any threat coming our way,” said Lt. Gen. A.C. Roper with the North American Defense Command.

The LRDR has an enormous field of vision over huge swaths of the Pacific theater and is touted for its ability to quickly spot and identify complex components from intercontinental ballistic missiles launched high into the atmosphere. For example, the sensors can track debris and decoy objects kicked out as a missile’s boosters drop away and a warhead descends back toward earth. The radar functions as the early warning system in the military’s missile defense strategy, with ground- or sea-based projectiles launched to hopefully destroy an incoming ICBM before it can hit its intended target.

After the brief ceremony and distribution of commemorative plaques, attendees were offered cake and punch before heading out on tours. Afterward, military officials held a roundtable with media calling in from around the country.

A number of questions focused on hypersonics, the emerging class of missiles that are super fast, highly maneuverable, and can fly low enough to evade many defense systems. While the U.S. has started developing hypersonic weapons, China and Russia are widely believed to be substantially further ahead in incorporating them into their military arsenals.

“The primary driving requirement,” said Vice Adm. Jon Hill of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency about the LRDR, “is against the ballistic missile threat. That is what the radar filters are designed to go after.”

It’s unlikely there would be additional hardware necessary for the LRDR to be reconfigured for tracking hypersonics in the future, Hill said.

The radar was specifically put in Alaska because of its vantage over the Indo-Pacific region to spot ICBM’s that could potentially be launched by North Korea.

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Aerial photograph of the Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) at Clear Space Force Station, Alaska, July 19, 2019. (Ryan Keith / Missile Defense Agency)

“Alaska gives us a field of view we need to do homeland defense,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Krumm, who is in charge of Alaskan Command, the Eleventh Air Force, and Alaska’s NORAD assets, including the radars that feed information back to bases in the Lower 48.

The price tag for the LRDR’s installation at Clear is around $1.5 billion. Construction and installation of the radar, which was built by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, was slowed because of the pandemic.

The LRDR will not replace the network of Long Range Radar stations across Alaska, which since the Cold War have been in place to monitor for encroaching aircraft and long-distance bombers. Krumm said the new capabilities are a complement to the existing radar systems.
 
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Congress Wants Answers On The Railgun It Just Funded Even Though The Navy No Longer Wants It​

er 27th, 2021. In addition, members of Congress are pushing for a full report on the exact status of the project, including how much has already been spent developing it, and what it would take to actually make the weapon operational on a ship.
The War Zone was first to report that the Navy, after years of broken timelines and hollow claims from its top officers, requested to formally defund its EM railgun program last June, writing:
The Navy's proposed Fiscal Year 2022 budget, which it released on May 28, 2021, as part of the larger U.S. military-wide request, zeroes out two separate line items related to railgun research and development. It also shows that the service did not ask for, or receive, any funding for the project through the Innovative Naval Prototypes (INP) Applied Research account in the Fiscal Year 2021 budget. It did, however, get nearly $9.5 million in requested funding, plus another $20 million that Congress decided by itself to add on top of that, through the INP Advanced Technology Development portion of the budget for that fiscal cycle.

Since the Office of Naval Research (ONR) formally began work on the railgun project in 2005, funding for it has come through a number of different line items. In the past, this sometimes caused confusion and led to erroneous reports that the program had been canceled. The Navy's plans now seem to be clear.
With regards to the INP Advanced Technology Development account, the budget documents say that "the decrease in funding from FY 2021 to FY 2022 is due to the completion of Advanced Technology Development efforts under this Activity." This line item also says that the objectives for this program in the 2022 Fiscal Year are "N/A" and does not make any mention of future work funded through other portions of the budget.
"Railgun technology and knowledge attained will be documented and preserved," according to a separate section describing the purpose of the extra funds Congress added to the program in the 2021 Fiscal Year, further indicating that the plan is now, at best, to shelve the project indefinitely. "Railgun hardware will be realigned to maximize its sustainability to facilitate potential future use."
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The Navy has also moved to abandon the railgun's primary ammunition after years of research and development. It was hoped that the high-speed projectiles would also play a role in the Navy's standard 5-inch deck gun arsenal, as well.

The 60 Minutes clip at the beginning of this video gives you an idea of the claims the Navy was making about its EM railgun program half a decade ago:
Jared Keller, the commerce editor over at Task And Purpose, pointed out to us that the House Appropriations Committee has asked for a report on the Navy's railgun within 90 days of the passage of the FY22 Defense Appropriations Bill. Clearly, the Navy's push to defund a program it has so heavily touted as the next big thing in naval warfare for nearly a decade had ruffled some feathers. The language reads:

ELECTROMAGNETIC RAILGUN PROGRAM

The Committee notes that the fiscal year 2022 budget request does not include funding for the electromagnetic railgun program after the Navy has invested in the program for several years. The Committee recognizes that the development of a functional railgun has the potential to provide the Navy with a safe, effective, and significantly less expensive offensive capability than traditional legacy weapons systems. The Committee directs the Secretary of the Navy to submit a report to the congressional defense committees not later than 90 days after the enactment of this Act that details the status of the electromagnetic railgun program. The report shall include, but not be limited to, the status of the development and testing of the program, the amount of funding invested to date, the funding level necessary to achieve a fully functional system in the future, and the plan to incorporate this program onto Navy ships.
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USN

Artist's rendering shows the Office of Naval Research-funded electromagnetic railgun installed aboard the expeditionary fast transport USNS Millinocket (EPF-3). Various high-ranking Navy officials promised the system would be ready for initial testing on such a craft throughout the mid-to-late 2010s.

The $10 million Congress stuck into the NDAA for the program is tiny for such a high-tech effort. This would likely put the program in a zombie-like state, in which it is funded by Congress even after the service wanted to cut its losses, but without enough money to really advance the technology in a substantial way, let alone pay for whatever needs to be fixed so that it can enter into a truly usable operational state — that is, if such a thing is even conceivable at all. This figure is also basically what the Navy asked for to keep the program in something of a dormant-like state for fiscal year 2021, before Congress slopped $20 million on top of it.

There are a number of factors that likely contribute to this situation beyond the standard pork. One of them is likely China, which has a known EM railgun program that has supposedly been tested at sea. Meanwhile, even after promises it would go to sea for testing a half-decade ago, the U.S. Navy's railgun prototype has not, and it appears totally dead in the water at this time.
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Chinese Internet.

China's EM railgun demonstrator.

So, as it sits now, it looks like the railgun program will flounder on, but at least Congress will get some direct answers as to the stark realities surrounding the feasibility of the technology even after such a heavy investment. Certainly, questions as to intelligence pointing to the validity of China's own EM railgun program will also be asked.
We will continue to report on the status of this program as we learn more.
www.thedrive.com

Congress Wants Answers On The Railgun It Just Funded Even Though The Navy No Longer Wants It

As a result of the Navy moving to defund its tortured railgun program, Congress wants an explanation, but still threw millions at it anyway.
www.thedrive.com www.thedrive.com
 
Well 2022 will be a big year for the USAF they will unveil the B-21, FA-XX/NGAD and more importantly its secret space weapon.

WASHINGTON: For months, top officials at the Defense Department have been working toward declassifying the existence of a secret space weapon program and providing a real-world demonstration of its capabilities, Breaking Defense has learned.

The effort — which sources say is being championed by Gen. John Hyten, the vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff — is close enough to completion that there was a belief the anti-satellite technology might have been revealed at this year’s National Space Symposium, which kicks off next week.

However, the crisis in Afghanistan appears to have put that on hold for now. Pulling the trigger on declassifying such a sensitive technology requires concurrence of the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, and a thumbs up from President Joe Biden, sources explain; with all arms of the national security apparatus pointed towards Kabul, that is almost certainly not going to happen next week. And until POTUS says yes, nothing is for certain, of course.

READ A FOLLOW-UP PIECE TO THIS STORY HERE.

The system in question long has been cloaked in the blackest of black secrecy veils — developed as a so-called Special Access Program known only to a very few, very senior US government leaders. While exactly what capability could be unveiled is unclear, insiders say the reveal is likely to include a real-world demonstration of an active defense capability to degrade or destroy a target satellite and/or spacecraft.

At least, that is what has been on the table since last year — when officials in the Trump administration viewed revealing the technology as a capstone to the creation of Space Command and Space Force. The plan apparently had been to announce it at the 2020 Space Symposium, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic; the arrival of the Biden administration also led to a reevaluation of moving forward with the reveal.

Expert speculation on what could be used for the demonstration ranges from a terrestrially-based mobile laser used for blinding adversary reconnaissance sats to on-board, proximity triggered radio-frequency jammers on certain military satellites, to a high-powered microwave system that can zap electronics carried on maneuverable bodyguard satellites. However, experts and former officials interviewed by Breaking Defense say it probably does not involve a ground-based kinetic interceptor, a capability the US already demonstrated in the 2008 Burnt Frost satellite shoot-down.

Requests for comment to the offices of Hyten, Haines, and SPACECOM were not returned by deadline.

Many military space leaders believe that Space Force and Space Command must publicly demonstrate to Moscow and Beijing not just an ability to take out any space-based counterspace systems they may be developing or deploying, but also to attack the satellites they, like the US, rely upon for communications, positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).

Notably, the second-in-command of the Space Force recently foreshadowed movement in the long-running debate about declassification of all things related to national security space — a multifaceted and complex debate which has pitted advocates against upholders of the traditional culture of secrecy within DoD and the Intelligence Community.

“It is absolutely a true problem,” Gen. DT Thompson, deputy Space Force commander, responded to a question about over-classification during a July 28 Mitchell Institute event. “I wish we owned our own destiny in that regard, but we don’t — it’s part of a broader activity and we just have to work through that. What I will say is, I think we’re on the verge of a couple of significant steps.”
breakingdefense.com

Exclusive: Pentagon Poised To Unveil, Demonstrate Classified Space Weapon - Breaking Defense

The push to declassify an existing space weapon is being spearheaded by Gen. John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
breakingdefense.com breakingdefense.com

Here's another article talking about possible unveiling in 2022.
www.thedrive.com

Secret Space Force Capabilities Could Be Declassified If New Bill Becomes Law

Less classification could help Space Force deter attacks on space-based systems and make it easier to promote its mission-critical work.
www.thedrive.com www.thedrive.com

I hope it's a big honkin space gun with a lot of pew-pew and kaboom power.
 
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