Raw Intel

Some FbF are so good ... you have to bring them back every few years. After a couple of week's FbF on other subjects, let's catch up with the Battle Off Samar. This time the USS HEERMANN (DD-532). HEERMANN screened transports and landing ships safely to the beaches of Leyte and then joined Rear Admiral Thomas L. Sprague's Escort Carrier Task Group 77.4 which was made up of three escort carrier task units, known as the three "Taffies" because of their radio call signs: "Taffy 1", "Taffy 2", and "Taffy 3". Destroyers HOEL and JOHNSTON joined her in screening Rear Admiral Clifton A. F. Sprague's unit, "Taffy 3" which also included his flagship FANSHAW BAY (CVE-70) and thre…

There are some DivThu that simply write themselves … and there are some Thursdays that I simply don’t know what to post because there is so much … often from the same place. This DivThu let’s turn our attention to USNA. Some of you may think I’m going to get involved with the 1/C MIDN who got a bit over his skis on twitter, but RedState covered it in great detail. Read it all here - but focus on the comments and actions of uniformed leadership and the interplay of football. It speaks loudly how much USNA has brought inside its lifelines all the worst aspects of civilian universities from the warping effects of alumni sports fetishes to fear of the Woke Red Guards. I’m…

Americas The US Army will suspend use of its new fitness test as a requirement for graduation from training programs because of COVID concerns. A new version of the six-event Army Combat Fitness Test went into effect last week. The Army will encourages taking and passing the strength and fitness test, but the requirement to successfully complete it will be delayed until at least September 2021, the end of the fiscal year. Suspension of the use of the test reportedly comes as the Army acknowledged constraints on training and testing due to the quarantining, social distancing and other protections required during COVID-19 pandemic. Boeing won a maximum $149.6 million deliv…

F-15C over DC (click to view full) “Array of Aging American Aircraft Attracting Attention” discusses the issues that accompany an air force whose fighters have an average age of over 23.5 years – vs. an average of 8.5 years in 1967. One of the most obvious consequences is the potential for fleet groundings due to unforseen structural issues caused by time and fatigue. That very fear is responsible for the #1 priority placed on bringing new KC-X aerial tankers into the fleet to complement the USA’s 1960s-era KC-135 Stratotankers. It can also affect the fighter fleet more directly. Following the crash of a Missouri Air National Guard F-15C aircraft Nov 2/07 (see crash s…

Americas FlightSafety Services won a $13.9 million contract modification, which exercises an option to provide aircrew training services in support of the TH-57B/C community, including instruction, operation, and curriculum support. The TH-57 Sea Ranger is a derivative of the commercial Bell Jet Ranger 206. Although primarily used for training, these aircraft are also used for photo, chase and utility missions. The JetRanger was initially designed to compete in a US Army light observation helicopter competition. Bell lost that competition but the 206 was commercially successful. The TH-57 Sea Ranger provides advanced instrument flight rules (IFR) training to several hundr…

PJ-10 BrahMos (click to view full) Back in November 2005, The Hindu newspaper reported that India’s government had given the go-ahead for exporting missiles, and that India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) was looking to market several of its products internationally. The missile systems in question included several products from the decades-long Integrated Guided Missile Program (IGMP) set of development programs, and one new success that used a very different approach. DRDO has led the long, turbulent development histories of the Trishul (“trident”) short-range surface-air missile (SAM), the Akash (“sky”) medium-range SAM, and the Nag (“cobra”) v…

The Russian supercavitating torpedo, the Shkval, has been with us for decades. Partly because it has not been used in combat and partially because we just don't think it is all that much of a threat because of our own biases and understanding of the technology, we have not given it all that much thought. We are very focused on defending against threats from the air, A2AD and all that jazz, and for those below, we have nifty little countermeasures and anti-torpedo defenses we are trying out - but those are focused on what we know and am comfortable with - traditional torpedoes. Via The Economist, I'm not quite sure we are that ready for this; WHEN introduced 40 years…

The Economist in the last six months published a series of interesting articles on the challenges of anti-submarine warfare. As long time readers may have figured out, I love - from a professional perspective - ASW. Neglected and unloved by most, but to me a passion. Though few really cared outside fellow fetishists, I was actually damn good at it - for an officer. It is all math and a little bit of instinct built by experience, but since I got too old to play tactical and was needed elsewhere - and then after leaving AD totally out of it - I've had to nibble what I can off of open source. For those of you who share this passion, one thing we are always looking for is …

GBU-12 Paveway II Paveway II kits convert standard Mk 80 family free-fall bombs into laser-guided weapons. Each guidance kit consists of a computer control group (CCG) guidance system with a semi-active laser seeker and pneumatically-controlled guidance canards for the front-end of the bomb, plus an air foil group (AFG) on the back end that provides lift and stability. Once a target is designated, laser guidance is more accurate than GPS, but it can be foiled by obscurants like fog, sandstorms, etc. At the beginning of August 2011, the US government issued a contract worth up to $475 million… “Paveway” is actually a US government designation for laser-guided bombs, b…

My recent post on how to counter Chinese anti-shipping capabilities between the First and Second Island Chains was heavily influenced by CAPT William Toti’s seminal article in last June’s Naval Institute Proceedingson the need to tackle anti-submarine warfare from a theater-wide, threat-tailored, combined arms campaign construct. If you haven’t read his article (which is outside the paywall), do so. It is a foundational work. Toti observes that the dramatic sensor advantages that allowed the U.S. Navy to thoroughly dominate Soviet submarines throughout much of the Cold War no longer hold. Our ability to detect and attack an approaching adversary submarine before …

A very neat poster. Very neat. (click for larger) Where is one for the surface forces? View the full article

What was that about not being able to fight once knocked down in plate armor again? View the full article

An F-22 Raptor takes to the sky during a demonstration of air dominance over Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., April 11, 2015. The event featured members of the F-22 Raptor Demonstration Team, the Air Force aerial demonstration team, the Thunderbirds, and the U.S. Army Parachute Team, the Golden Knights. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Javier Cruz View the full article

The Chinese navy has long been accused of not showing enough transparency. While that has certainly really improved in the recent year, there are still plenty of areas that's hard for a blogger like myself to follow. Certainly, most of the surface combatants are easy to track, since many photos are released of them. Most of the subsystems and weapon systems on these ships are also quite transparent with some version of them offered for exports. There are some many news reports giving even more information on various naval ships and their subsystems. So which programs are noticeably absent from all these photos and news releases? The most obvious answers would be the…

Over to you. View the full article

Over the past two years, the debate over U.S. military options for defending East Asian allies from potential Chinese aggression has primarily been between proponents of the Air-Sea Battle operational concept and proponents of the Offshore Control strategic concept. The conventional wisdom appears to be that the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Such a view makes no sense. Simply put, there is no reason why key elements from both cannot be integrated within a single holistic strategic concept that provides circumstance-based flexibility in covering the entire spectrum of potential Sino-American conventional conflict. In order to see why this is so, let’s first ex…

A few weeks ago I published aseriesofpostsanalyzing Maksim Tokarev’s outstanding Naval War College Review article that detailed the Soviet Navy’s 1980s-era doctrine for employing combined arms against U.S. Navy battleforces. At the end of my first post, I suggested that: With a finite number of bombers, missiles, and trained crews, it is reasonable to think Soviet commanders would have been somewhat hesitant to dispatch such irreplaceable forces into battle unless they had some degree of confidence in their situational picture’s accuracy; the operational-strategic penalties that would be incurred if they ‘got it wrong’ simply seem too high for this not to have b…

Note: I was originally planning on publishing a series of articles this week on the large-deck aircraft carrier's doctrinal roles, but I'm shifting that to next week as I need a little more time to make final edits. As a result, I'm moving up my series analyzing the DF-21 arsenal. Both series touch on my theme for the first part of this month: the implications of guided munitions inventory management and producibility. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Medium Range Ballistic Missile (MRBM) arsenal’s traditional primary role is supporting theater nuclear deterrence. China’s first generation DF-3 series (NATO Designation CSS-2) MRBMs were tasked with h…

Eric Lindsey of CSBA published an excellent monograph last month examining how the U.S. Army might field land-based anti-ship missiles and rockets, not to mention air and missile defense systems, to defend forward U.S. allies from aggression. I strongly agree with the concept in principle. Such capabilities would be extremely useful for constraining an adversary’s wartime use of the waters and airspace adjacent to a U.S. ally’s territory. They would definitely increase the adversary’s potential costs and risks of hazarding transits through maritime chokepoints controlled by the ally, conducting close blockades against the ally, or executing amphibious/airborne assau…

For previous installments, see Parts I, II, and III Ingredients of Counter-Deception How could a U.S. Navy battleforce then—or now—avoid defeats at the hands of a highly capable adversary's deceptions? The first necessary ingredient is distributing multi-phenomenology sensors in a defense’s outer layers. Continuing with the battleforce air defense example, many F-14s were equipped during the 1980s with the AN/AXX-1 Television Camera System (TCS), which enabled daytime visual classification of air contacts from a distance. The Navy’s F-14D inventory later received the AN/AAS-42 Infrared Search and Track system to provide a nighttime standoff-range classificati…