DARPA is spending millions of dollars to identify trash cans, which may have raised a few eyebrows, except these and other common urban objects could in the course of today's combat missions prove to be tactically significant.
BAE Systems received a $7.1 million contract to work on Phase II of the Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology (URGENT) program, which is designed to improve the quality and timeliness of geospatial intelligence U.S. troops receive when facing enemy threats in urban environments.
This phase of the program's goal will be to "develop a 3D reasoning engine to query over object shapes, locations, and classifications for rapid urban mission planning, mission rehearsal, and situation analysis," according to DARPA.
DARPA's contention is that since target recognition in urban environments is so far removed from what soldiers have historically focused on, i.e. military objects such as tanks and armored personnel carriers, that the need to preemptively identify urban objects has become an important requirement.
That's going to be news to veterans of Chechnya, Hue, and Sarajevo.
Still, the reasoning is that tanks and cannons have unique signatures and were usually positioned in relatively isolated areas away from civilians and that's not so with today's asymmetric threats, where troops are forced to engage enemy combatants in cities with large civilian populations.
"Even the most common urban objects can have tactical significance: trash cans can contain improvised explosive devices, doors can conceal snipers, jersey barriers can block troop ingress, roof tops can become landing zones, and so on," hence the need for an all-knowing system.
BAE contribution will be to fuse Light Detection, and Ranging and Geographic Information Systems' data to automatically detect and classify an urban object's attributes, function and geospatial features, company officials said.
The BAE team has already developed "a system that combines a suite of complementary feature extraction and matching algorithms with higher-level inference and contextual reasoning to detect, segment, and classify urban entities of interest in a fully automated fashion."
Next up could be the market to identify domestic urban threats-like errant shopping carts and guys with squeegees.
The Department of Defense's $1 trillion-plus plan to build and deliver multiple versions of the Joint Strike Force (JSF) aircraft to multiple customers is behind schedule, over budget, and upside down, according to a report from the Government Accounting Office (PDF).
Upside down because the military is accelerating procurement of operational aircraft before it has even taken delivery of test units, according to the non-partisan GAO.
(Credit:
Lockheed Martin)
"Procuring large numbers of production jets while still working to deliver test jets and mature manufacturing processes does not seem prudent," the report states.
The JSF program, personified by the F-35 Lighting II, is a joint international venture led by the United States and the United Kingdom. The report calls this the DOD's most complex and ambitious aircraft acquisition and the linchpin of the military's plan to modernize its tactical air forces.
Chronic manufacturing inefficiencies, parts problems, design changes, and a steep learning curve have slowed delivery of test aircraft, according to the watchdog agency, even as DOD wants to ramp up production of line aircraft. Speeding up the delivery of 169 aircraft by 2015 will require billions in additional funding, "magnifying the financial risk to the government" and adding years to the development schedule, according to the GAO.
Contractors say they'll have the problems fixed and all the test aircraft delivered by next year. But by that time, the DOD plans to have already purchased 62 operational aircraft, according to the report. As currently configured, the DOD is at liberty to spend $57 billion on 360 aircraft, even before it completes flight testing. The contractor has extended the manufacturing schedule three times.
In 2007, the DOD decided to cut back on test aircraft and flight tests and rely instead on "state-of-the-art simulation labs, a flying test bed, and desk studies to verify nearly 83 percent of JSF capabilities." Ground testing to this extent is not a proven substitute for actual test flights, the report warns.
The single-seat, single-engine multi-role strike fighter has something for everyone. It does stealth, air-to-air, close air support, tactical bombing, and air defense missions. It can take off and land on conventional runways, do short takeoff and vertical-landing, or land on a carrier. The project features a mixed bag of contractors as well, with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and BAE Systems leading an international team of suppliers and manufacturers.
(Credit:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory )
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are using low-cost titanium powders to develop lightweight, corrosion-resistant, bulletproof alloys for military vehicles and what they hope to be other military and commercial applications.
The latest project is a titanium door for the next-generation Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which is meant to replace the Humvee and other front-line conveyances.
"By using a titanium alloy for the door, BAE Systems was able to reduce the weight of its vehicle yet at the same time decrease the threat of armor-piercing rounds," said Bill Peter, a researcher in ORNL's Materials Science and Technology Division (PDF).
Titanium is the fourth most common structural metal around. There's more of it in the Earth's crust than all the nickel, copper, chromium, lead, tin, and zinc combined. However, the current multistep, high-temperature batch process method for refining the ore into metal is extremely expensive.
There's a push to change that. The new nonmelt processing technique employed by ORNL and partners could cut costs by up to 50 percent, making it feasible to use titanium alloys for brake rotors, artificial joint replacements, and armor and other defense applications, according to ORNL.
One of those partners is International Titanium Powders, a company that wants to use something called the Armstrong Process to produce titanium and titanium alloys at a cost and quantity it believes will radically change the market (PDF).
"Instead of using conventional melt processing to produce products from titanium powder, with the new method, the powders remain in their solid form during the entire procedure," Peter said. "This saves a tremendous amount of energy required for processing, greatly reduces the amount of scrap, and allows for new alloys and engineered composites."
Saving money on bulletproof doors is a start; now maybe they can find a cheaper way to make the Pentagon's gold-plated toilet seats.
(Credit:
Army Research Laboratory)
(Credit:
BAE)
The Marine Corps may have found an "interim" solution to the one of the V-22 tilt-rotor Osprey's many operational quandaries: How to shoot back.
This August, the Marines are expected to take delivery of BAE's (British Aerospace and Marconi Electronic Systems) Remote Guardian System, a GAU-17 7.62-millimeter, mini-gun-equipped, remotely operated weapon that swivels to squirt out 360 degrees of accurate, sustained, suppressive fire "throughout the aircraft's entire flight envelope," according to BAE. This would be a vast improvement over the aircraft's current protection, an M240D 7.62-millimeter gun manned by a crew member hanging on the open rear ramp. But it's a pea shooter compared to the once-contemplated three-barrel, GAU-19 Gatling gun, capable of spraying .50 cals at up to 2,000 armor-piercing rounds per minute (PDF).
(Credit:
BAE)
The RGS is belly-mounted in a retractable turret, which conserves cabin space and payload capacity. Because it receives input from the aircraft's vehicle management system and continuously computes the impact point, the gunner simply points and shoots, while a computer continually adjusts for wind and vehicle motion.
How quickly the RGS follows the Osprey into the combat zone will depend on how much testing the Marine Corp ends up doing before it commits. BAE tested the system off the back of a Humvee, and it worked for them--twice.
(Credit:
U.S. Navy)
The U.S. Navy is installing an electro-magnetic laboratory rail gun at its Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., bringing it one step closer to developing a ship-mounted version of this futuristic cannon.
The 32-megajoule weapon appears to be the largest rail gun ever built, according to defense contractor BAE Systems. A joule is what's needed to produce one watt of energy for one second.
It uses a magnetic "rail" instead of a chemical propellant like gunpowder to heave projectiles at Mach 7 for what could be up to 220 miles down range--that's 10 times farther than what contemporary naval guns. The projectile hits at Mach 5, destroying the target with kinetic energy instead of conventional explosives.
Ship building and design are expected to benefit should the new gun prove feasible, mainly because new vessels won't be forced to haul tons of explosives. But while the rail gun uses no gunpowder, it can hardly be called energy efficient. A planned 64-megajoule system would suck around 6 million amps.
In addition to developing new onboard capacitors or pulsed alternators to power the weapon, the Navy must come up with new materials to secure the gun, firing it can dislodge the conducting rails--or even rip the gun barrel apart, according to some reports. The Navy, which has already tested smaller versions, as seen in the video, wants a rail gun onboard a ship as early as 2020.
The USS Winston S. Churchill follows a suspected pirate vessel in the Indian Ocean.
(Credit: U.S. Navy)Pirates have grown mighty bold around the Horn of Africa of late--so bold that the Navy is reportedly considering the deployment of 30-foot, armed robo-boats to challenge the dusty buccaneers. Surely they'll mend their ways.
Pirate RPG round stuck in metal hull. No word on how Hypalon inflatable tubes would hold up to similar abuse.
(Credit: U.S. Navy)The Navy began testing the Israeli Protector unmanned surface vehicle (USV) last year. There is a civilian version of these rigid-hulled inflatables built by Rayglass Boats in New Zealand, a common enough sight around any harbor that's even used as the official chase boat for the America's Cup. But you'd hardly equate these with the unmanned version.
Extensively tweaked by defense contractors RAFAEL, BAE Systems, and Lockheed Martin, the Protector looks to be a full-on armed plug-and-play, anti-terror surveillance and reconnaissance marauder (PDF). It comes equipped with a stabilized mini-Typhoon, remote-controlled weapon station (PDF) cameras, radar equipment, and Toplite electro-optics.
And in this corner: Somali pirates generally operate out of a brace or more of what look to be 6- to 9-meter outboard-driven, open-fishing skiffs. Armed with RPGs and AKs, they either surround and intimidate a ship into stopping or lure them in with false distress calls, according to the International Maritime Bureau. In any case, it seems fair to assume that they would dearly like to get their hands on a remote-controlled Protector.
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