Current Events in the Americas

SECNAV Names Navy’s Future Class of Guided-Missile Frigates (Seapower)

From Jane's Information Group USN considers army missile for Littoral Combat Ship By Scott R Gourley Last year's restructuring of the US Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) has brought one FCS element, the Non Line of Sight - Launch System (NLOS-LS), into contention for integration on the initial versions of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). Originally developed under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's 'NetFires' concept, NLOS-LS emerged as a family of artillery missiles fired from a vertical launcher that could be deployed by ground or air assets throughout a theatre and networked to quickly engage an enemy. System components originally included a …

Newsday.com Navy gets first "Growler" with Northrop Grumman radar jammer BY JAMES BERNSTEIN james.bernstein@newsday.com 3:09 PM EDT, June 2, 2008 The Growlers are coming. The EA-18G Growler, that is. The EA-18G is a new electronic attack airplane, and the first of them is to be delivered to the Navy Tuesday at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state. Northrop Grumman's facility in Bethpage is a major contributor to the Growler, whose airframe is made by Boeing Co. Northrop Grumman engineers and technicians in Bethpage designed an advanced system -- called ICAP III, for improved capability -- that will aid the EA-18G in jammi…

From here, EMALS and other Ford-class problems, "Naval Air: 2USS Truman Gets Dent": https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htnavai/articles/2025041502847.aspx#gsc.tab=0 Quote: "...EMALS less reliable than the older steam catapult. EMALS was also more labor intensive to operate and put more stress on launched aircraft than expected. Worse, due to a basic design flaw, if one EMALS catapult becomes inoperable, the other three catapults could not be used in the meantime as was the case with steam catapults. This meant that the older practice of taking one or more steam catapults offline for maintenance or repairs while at sea was not practical. The navy admitted that in …

Pearl Harbor may get amphib group By William Cole - Gannett News Service Posted : Tuesday Apr 17, 2007 16:29:19 EDT Hawaii didn’t get the Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group, but planning is underway that could bring a smaller cousin — an amphibious assault ship and its escort ships — to Pearl Harbor, officials said. An amphibious ready group “is almost as good as getting an aircraft carrier,” said Loren Thompson, a defense expert with the Lexington Institute in Virginia. “It’s fewer personnel, but it’s an entire war-fighting package of ships and aircraft.” Such a ship grouping typically has at its core a carrierlike assault ship with helicopters an…

From Aviation Week Pentagon Scraps USAF Tanker Competition Sep 10, 2008 By Jefferson Morris The U.S. Department of Defense announced this morning that it is terminating the U.S. Air Force refueling tanker competition, and has notified Congress and the competing industry teams of the move. Halting the current competition can be viewed as a win for Boeing, which complained that the quick pace of the recompete didn't give it enough time to substantively change its proposal. The deferment would allow the company to rebuild its proposal strategy around a larger aircraft like the 777. According to a DOD statement, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in consultatio…

From Stars & Stripes [excerpt]

Coast Guard to decommission troubled 123s By Patricia Kime - Staff Writer Posted : Wednesday Apr 18, 2007 7:33:57 EDT The Coast Guard will decommission eight recently built patrol boats because the ships suffer from hull deformations and other problems that would be cost-prohibitive to fix, officials said Tuesday. The decision to scrap the ships — eight 123-foot Island Class patrol boats that were refurbished between 2003 and 2005 — is the final nail in the coffin for the long-beleaguered program. The vessels were never fully operational and their troubles became central in a debate over the Coast Guard’s handling of its Deepwater modernization program. C…

From Defense Aerospace [excerpt]

From Time Magazine's Battleland blog [excerpt]

Nobody has keep an eye in the Venezuelan flag in the Argentine ship embargoed in Ghana ?

http://www.flightglobal.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/11619

From Jane's USN announces SIGINT aircraft replacement programme By Martin Streetly 11 December 2007 As part of its post-Aerial Common Sensor intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting (ISRT) recapitalisation effort, the US Navy (USN) published a broad agency announcement (BAA) in November 2007, regarding an Electronics Patrol Experiment (EPX) programme intended to find a replacement for the service's existing EP-3E signals intelligence (SIGINT) aircraft after Fiscal Year 2017 (FY17). The BAA document states that the programme is intended to "recapitalise the EP-3 aircraft to provide tactical, theatre and national level ISRT support to carrier s…

From Aviation Week Dual Sourcing Tanker Unfeasible, Wynne Says Sep 20, 2007 By Michael Bruno/Aerospace Daily & Defense Report Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said Sept. 19 that the service cannot afford to split the acquisition of its next fleet of aerial refueling tankers between Boeing and Northrop Grumman bids because of expected annual orders. "We still think we can't afford it," Wynne told a briefing organized by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments on Capitol Hill. "If we have to buy seven-and-a-half [annually] from each company, we're in trouble." The Air Force plans to spend about $3 billion per year on recapitalizing the agin…

From Aviation Week's ARES Blog Good Night Nighthawk Posted by Bill Sweetman at 3/11/2008 8:29 AM Today, March 11, the USAF is holding an official retirement ceremony at Holloman AFB, New Mexico, for the Lockheed Martin F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter. By the end of next month, all the remaining F-117s will have been retired into secure storage at the Tonopah Test Range base in Nevada, which was the type's first operational base. The F-117 has been on its way to retirement since the early 1990s, when plans for a modernized version were passed over in favor of the Joint Strike Fighter. A Serbian missile battery shot down a Nighthawk in March 1999, raising que…

Evaluating Novel Threats to the Homeland: UAVs and Cruise Missiles A report from the RAND Corp found in PDF format here.

Canada Revisiting Ballistic Missile Defense (DefenseNews)

From Defense Aerospace The Pentagon, JSF and the Sacrificial Goat (Source: defense-aerospace.com; published June 5, 2008) By Giovanni de Briganti PARIS –-- The Senate Armed Services Committee’s June 3 hearing on the cost of Pentagon weapon programs has thrown up a couple of nuggets that demonstrate just how politically vulnerable the Joint Strike Fighter program has become. In his opening statement , SASC Chairman Carl Levin quoted a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which estimated that recent cost overruns on the Pentagon’s 95 major weapons programs amount to $295 billion. To put that figure into perspective, Levin said, “For $295 bi…

From Flight Global [excerpt]