Meet the MULE, short for Multifunctional Utility/Logistics and Equipment, a 2.5-ton unmanned ground vehicle that's just one component of the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems. It's built to carry up to 2,400 pounds of gear.
(Credit: U.S. Army)The Pentagon is no stranger to overpriced equipment and cost overruns, but it may never have seen a program quite like the U.S. Army's long-running and hugely ambitious Future Combat Systems initiative.
For this fiscal year alone, Congress has allocated some $3.5 billion in funding for FCS, en route to what is expected to be a total tab of $160 billion or so by the middle of the next decade. But $160 billion doesn't buy what it used to: the Government Accountability Office has been lamenting recently that the overall estimated FCS tab remains at that level even as pieces have been lopped out of the program.
On top of that, the Army is apparently looking for an additional $251.8 million in funds for the current fiscal year to help speed delivery of some components. That money, according to a story this week in the Army Times, would allow the Army to "introduce some of the manned vehicles a year or two earlier, speed up delivery of networked sensors and UAVs, and field the first FCS brigade combat team in 2013, two years early."
That new money, which would come out of some other research programs, is somewhat more than the $230 million that Congress cut out of the budget for fiscal 2008. Lest the congressional budget minders take issue with that, the Pentagon last week sent FCS representatives to Capitol Hill for another in a continuing series of dog-and-pony shows on the benefits of high-tech battlefield gear, including the FCS cousin known as Land Warrior. (The gear is on display there through this week.)
This is a tactical unmanned ground sensor (UGS) gateway node, on display in February at a symposium and exposition in Florida put on by the Association of the United States Army.
(Credit: C. Todd Lopez/Army News Service)FCS is the Army's grand plan for becoming a 21st century fighting force in which superior information trumps mass of forces, and it comprises a wide array of systems, all of them still early in the R&D or prototyping stages. Key elements include artillery pieces, unmanned aerial vehicles, robots, software-based radios, battlefield sensors, and a high-speed wireless network to tie them--along with individual soldiers--all together.
The real challenge for FCS isn't just in developing those individual pieces. Eventually, it will be getting them all to work in unison--no small feat for a system that will encompass voice, data, and video communications among ground, aerial, and satellite assets.
"This new way of fighting can be achieved only if the data can be made available in near real-time at sensor processors, at the battlefield command nodes, and at the lethal systems," the GAO wrote in a March report (PDF).
But that real-world test remains quite a ways in the future. In the shorter term, the concern is much more about taming the R&D sprawl. "Today, the FCS program is about halfway through its development phase, yet it is, in many respects, a program closer to the beginning of development," the GAO wrote in a report (PDF) issued last week. "This portends additional cost increases and delays as FCS begins what is traditionally the most expensive and problematic phase of development."
Perhaps most significant is this statement from the April report: "It is not yet clear if or when the information network that is at the heart of the FCS concept can be developed, built, and demonstrated."
How complex an undertaking is this? Consider the network configuration: "Current plans call for the network supporting a BCT (brigade combat team) to include more than 5,000 nodes on over 1,500 radio sets running at least four different advanced networking waveforms, supporting networks and sub-networks interconnected by gateways, and carrying 3 million identified, point-to-point information exchange requirements," according to the March report. And all that would have to work over a wireless network in constantly shifting, unpredictable battlefield conditions.
A whole host of critical FCS technologies are also still "immature," the GAO said, "(and) software development is in its early stages." The estimate for the software code expected for full-fledged FCS now stands at 95.1 million lines, three times the estimate from five years ago and, the GAO wrote, "the largest software effort by far for any weapon system." (By comparison, Windows XP is estimated to have roughly 40 million lines of code, and Vista, more than 50 million.)
The FCS program faces a congressionally mandated "go/no-go" milestone review in 2009 in order to justify continuation; critera for that decision are to be set by the end of July this year. If it clears that hurdle, a planned production decision is scheduled for 2013.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been working on "low-rate spin-outs" of some FCS components, such as unattended ground sensors, to get that gear into the hands of soldiers today. It's just an educated guess, but we're likely to see a lot more of that in the next few years.
One shot was all it took for the Pentagon to decommission with extreme prejudice a spy satellite that first failed to operate and then started on a steady descent toward Mother Earth.
A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) streaked skyward from the USS Lake Erie late Wednesday and whacked the satellite while it was still 130 or so miles up in space--and whizzing along at 17,000 miles per hour.
Defense Department officials quickly pronounced the mission a success, not just in hitting the satellite at all, but also in apparently rupturing its fuel tank. The rationale for the target shoot was the possibility that the satellite's 1,000 pounds of hydrazine, a hazardous substance, might be dispersed by a crash-landing in a populated area.
In a briefing Thursday morning, Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cited three pieces of evidence: a fireball, a vapor cloud, and results from spectral analysis.
"We're very confident that we hit the satellite. We also have a high degree of confidence that we got the tank," Cartwright said.
The Pentagon has made several videos available so far, including the silent short "Missile Intercept." Another short (1 minute) version includes voice-over by Cartwright, and a much longer one (28 minutes) carries his full press conference.
The heat rays go marching one by one by...well, that's about it for now.
Raytheon said Tuesday that its Active Denial System 2 is now in the hands of the customer, the U.S. Air Force. Should it ever get beyond the evaluation stage, the ADS technology could be one of the very first directed-energy weapons fielded by the military. It looks like a satellite dish, works something like a microwave, and isn't supposed to cause any lasting harm.
Active Denial System 2 has been delivered to the U.S. Air Force.
(Credit: Raytheon)What it's intended to do is beam short bursts of millimeter waves (which are smaller than the better-known microwaves) at a suspicious or unruly target--a crowd gathered outside a U.S. embassy, say--and make make the recipients scatter because they can't stand the heat. Literally. The ADS, which operates at 95GHz, causes an intense but skin-deep burning sensation that lasts only as long as a person is in the way of the beam, which in tests so far has been a matter of just a few seconds at most.
Version 2 is an upgrade of the earlier system. It's bigger, more rugged and handles warmer atmospheric temperatures better, Raytheon says. And that version number is also pretty much the number of the systems that have been built so far: Raytheon has tallied up just one unit in each of the phases. ADS 0 was the initial technology demonstrator, and ADS 1 was mounted on a Humvee for further tests and for public demonstrations. ADS 2 is designed to be mounted on a variety of vehicles or to operate from a fixed site.
What happens next with ADS 2 is up to the Pentagon, specifically its Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, for which the Air Force is the lead service. But the decisions on when, how and even whether to deploy are political as much as they are technical--ADS may be nonlethal, but the Pentagon surely isn't eager to see headlines like "U.S. fries protesters with energy weapon."
Raytheon, meanwhile, has a smaller version called Silent Guardian, at one-third the size and one-third the power, that it says is available to interested buyers. Better hurry, though. There's just one of these, too.
This is how the Pentagon envisions the Airborne Laser in action.
(Credit: U.S. Missile Defense Agency)The Airborne Laser has taken another step forward in its long slog off the drawing board and into the Pentagon's arsenal.
The first-of-its-kind 747-400F this month completed a series of low-power test flights, using onboard infrared sensors to locate "an instrumented target board" on an Air Force NC-135E aircraft. Once the Airborne Laser(ABL) found the target, two solid-state illuminator lasers tracked the target and assessed atmospheric conditions--the later function being key to plotting a path to the target for the weapons laser. Since the high-energy COIL (chemical oxygen iodine laser) weapons system has yet to be installed, a low-power surrogate laser fired at the NC-135E.
The accomplishment, lead contractor Boeing said Friday, is proof positive that the ABL's battle management and beam control/fire control systems can support the plane's ultimate mission: intercepting a ballistic missile and destroying it in flight.
If all goes according to plan, and that's a big if, the ABL with a fully installed and tested high-energy laser will go up against a soaring ballistic missile in a test in 2009.
Many of the ifs are technical, but there are political considerations as well. The ABL program has been an expensive undertaking over the years, dating back to the mid-1990s. According to a report issued this summer by the Congressional Research Service, about $4.3 billion has been spent on the program so far (with $630 million allocated in the current fiscal year), but both the House and the Senate seem set to give the Bush Administration substantially less than it's asking for the upcoming fiscal year.
In time, the government is looking to field as many as seven ABL aircraft.
For the Airborne Laser, Boeing is working with fellow defense contractor Northrop Grumman, which is building the high-energy laser. But when it comes to truck-mounted laser weapons, the two companies are competing.
Force Protection's Cougar MRAPs ship out.
(Credit: Force Protection)The military-industrial complex is moving double-time to get tough new vehicles to troops in Iraq.
The MRAP (Mine Resistant Armored Protection) vehicles are on a mission to provide a better shield against roadside bombs. They achieve that protection in part through a V-shaped undercarriage that rides high off the ground. In terms of overall strength, they fall somewhere between up-armored Humvees (which were never intended to provide much in the way of armor) and the thicker-skinned M2 Bradley fighting vehicle.
While they can't defend against all types of explosives, they have proven effective against shaped charges designed to pierce armored vehicles.
"These large IEDs (improvised explosive devices) can destroy an Abrams tank," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week. "But I think the experience of the Marines in Anbar suggests that the MRAP, and particularly with the V-shaped hull, does provide significantly enhanced protection for the soldiers and Marines inside."
The Cougar 4x4
(Credit: Force Protection)One of the latest deliveries of MRAPs was airlifted to the Iraq theater of operations over the weekend, just a few days after a Defense Department panel recommended that the military procure as many of the vehicles as suppliers can crank out in the coming fiscal year. Typically, it can take 30 days to ship the vehicles by sea. The time needed for post-production work, such as rigging the MRAPs with communications gear, also usually takes about a month--but that has been trimmed by about a week.
"The department is embarking on an aggressive acquisition strategy to put as many of these armored vehicles into the field as fast as possible," Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, told Pentagon reporters Monday, according to the American Forces Press Service.
The weekend shipment was of an unspecified number of vehicles from Force Protection, of Ladson, S.C. The mainstay of the company's MRP line is the Cougar, which can be configured in either a 4x4 or 6x6 version, for duties ranging from troop transport to command and control to ambulance service. The larger model (weighing in at nearly 20 tons, plus a 13,000-pound payload) can carry up to 12 troops, while the smaller one (16 tons, plus a 6,000-pound payload), when assigned to bomb squad crews, can carry four troops and a large bomb-detection robot.
Both versions of the Cougar are equipped with a 330-horsepower Caterpillar C-7 diesel engine.
Force Protection says that to date it has received contracts for more than 1,800 MRAP vehicles. Production is scheduled to exceed 400 vehicles per month by February 2008, the company said in June.
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