The DEW Line

JB Proposes the 'Infinite Wing'

Johnny Bombmaker: Ok. Suppose the US Air Force flips out and buys some counter-insurgency aircraft? What do you think they're going to do with it?

The DEW Line: Er, counter some insurgents, I guess.

JB: There happens to be a good reason for a counter-insurgency fleet, but it's not what you're thinking. It isn't just about squadrons of networked Warbirds roaming the earth in search of combined arms engagements against lightly armed opponents.

TDL: Ok, go on.

JB: Have you heard of the 1,000-ship Navy? It's the idea that the US Navy should muster the combined might of the allied navies into a relatively seamless operational force. Partly, that means their navies have to step up to play at the level of our navy. And, partly, it means that our navy has to step down to play at the level of some of their navies, which in reality are often coast guards and river patrols by another name. This is why the USN is suddenly buying high-performance fishing boats and converting them into "riverine vessels" for a new "riverine command".

TDL: So if the USN can buy fishing boats to play with less sophisticated foreign navies, the air force should buy single-engine turboprops to engage with the less sophisticated foreign air forces?

JB: Well, it's an idea anyway. Buy turbo-props so the air force can not only engage with the air forces that fly fighters, but also the air forces in some of the so-called "gap countries" that you keep hearing about these days. It at least gives the counter-insurgency fleet a reason to exist in peacetime. It's a little clumsy to call it the "1,000-aircraft air force", but maybe brand it the "Infinite Wing".

TDL: I kind of like that.

Contracts Round-up: 5/30

Today, you can:

1. Find out the Afghan National Army has commandos
2. Put in a bid for what's got to be THE WORST JOB ON THE PLANET ... hint: it involves driving trucks, riding in convoys and doing both in Iraq
3. Take a standard 120mm projectile round for a tank, add a seeker and a booster rocket and (drum roll ...) revolutionize tank warfare by allowing the tank gunner to shoot at targets he can't see. (Score for using the terms "revolutionize" and "tank warfare" in the same sentence for the first time since, oh, say, the Yom Kippur War)
4. Invent a system that can somehow detect a sniper before he can fire a shot ... and, while you're at it, help me find my keys

COIN Debate: The Cliff Notes Version

The counter-insurgency aircraft debate continues. Please join in by posting here. While you're thining it over, here's excerpts from the wonderful ongoing discussion on this blog. It's a debate based entirely on facts, reasons and good insight -- how original!

The debate all started when Johnny Bombmaker said:

There's a reason why single-engine turboprops almost disappeared after World War II. They get shot out of the sky faster than a duck flying over a South Texas shooting range. Do you realize how many A-1 Skyraiders got blown out of the sky in Vietnam? The threat in Iraq is even worse. Much better to do it the modern way: just park an F-15 or an F-16 with a targeting pod, a strafing cannon and a guided bomb up above 15,000 feet.

Joe Katzman replied:

Sometimes being slow isn't the worst thing in the world. The British got a Harrier shot out from under them in the Falklands because it was too fast, and had to keep coming back at low level to try and spot its target. If you keep throwing fastballs, folks eventually hit them.

Robot Economist followed:

Not to get too radical here, but why not consider something even lower tech/lower cost like a blimp. They can be virtually stationary over the target and achieve a pretty good altitude at a low operating cost (heck, the bomb and the spotter on the ground do all the work).

Joe Katzman went back to the original question:

If someone told you they had a system that would save 13 pilots and aircraft, but kill 300 soldiers and result in $300 million in economic dislocation due to areas not covered fully and attacked successfully... would that seem like a good deal to you? All aspects of this equation matter. It's not just about the aircraft.

Then HerkEng entered the discussion, siding with the turboprops:

I am not saying that a trainer aircraft is best for the mission but, it would be much better than an F-16 or even an A-10.

But Joe Katzman posted a new warning on tuboprops:

The Super Tucanos, AT-6Bs et. al. DO have an important issue, but it isn't speed. Rather, it's the turboprop engine up front that vents in the forward-center section of the fuselage. Wrong place to attract a missile - unlike, say, a Czech L-159 light attack jet, a missile that detonates behind target looks like a kill rather than a miss and some tail pipe damage.

Dan G joined in, also warning about the relative merits of turboprops:

Just how many JDAMs could a Tucano haul to 15,000' I wonder? Not many I bet.

Yours truly re-entered the discussion, taking issue with the notion that turboprops are too vulnerable for the CAS mission:

As long as helicopter pilots are flying even slower and lower than a Super Tucano every day in Iraq, I think we can dispense with the reasoning that fixed-wing pilots must be immune from taking any similar risks, if it is the most effective way to do the mission.

HerkEng made a good point that the turboprop's IR signature problems can be overcome:

Who said that they can't build a shroud around the exhaust like they do on the AC-130s? It is very effective for them and would not be that hard to make for the PT6A.

Dan C rejoined:

Don't forget how the roles of helicopters and CAS aircraft differ. CAS aircraft are deliberately routed into harm's way, while tranport helicopters fly around hot spots. The ones that do - gunships - carry heavy armour, just like the only other aircraft that operates at low level - the A-10. I don't see a titanium bathtub in the Tucano.

Contracts Round-up: 5/23

Today, you can: 

1. Help military doctors recognize the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder
2. Understand why the chemical properties of rubber insulation create problems for the US Air Force’s inventory of solid rocket motors
3. Read something that makes you ponder why the US Army is suddenly issuing RFIs on behalf of Boeing for the Future Combat System program. That used to be Boeing’s job. Has the army decided to assert more authority over the program, a la Deepwater?

4. Buy a system that can bring suspicious-looking vehicles approaching traffic checkpoints to a stop, hopefully reducing the need to shoot at the potentially innocent people inside the vehicle

5.  Hire a Catholic “director of faith formation”, whatever that is

My Wildly Irresponsibile Speculation on the Meaning of LSRS

No one knows his classified military hardware like my former colleague Bill Sweetman on Defense Technology International magazine's "Ares" blog, but I'm going to stick my neck out here and disagree with him.

Last week, Bill wrote on Ares about the existence of a quasi-classified new sensor called the Littoral  Surveillance Radar Surveillance (LSRS). I call it quasi-classified because the sensor's existence is a public fact (see here), but its capability and purpose are kept vigorously secret by the US Navy and contractors Boeing and Raytheon.

Bill wrote that the LSRS is a good fit for the Boeing 737-800-derived P-8A Poseidon, the submarine-hunting twin jet that remains in development. That's the part where I disagree.

Or, more precisely, that's the part where navy Captain Mike Moran disagrees. Moran is the deputy program manager for developing the P-8A fleet. I interviewed him today in Seattle to catch up on the P-8A program. I asked him if the navy was interested in the new radar sensor for the P-8A.

His response: "No. Not at this time." As Moran answered my follow-up questions, it became clear that "not at this time" really meant "never".

Moran's dismissal of LSRS rings of truth, if only because the navy is adamant about focusing the P-8A around the mission of hunting for submarines. It's not clear precisely what the scope of the LSRS capabilities are, but all the public evidence indicates that it is optimized to search for targets on the water's surface, not underneath it -- a la the P-8A.

So I'll not only boldly disagree with Bill, but I'll up the ante with a bit of my own speculation. The sensor may not be a good fit for the P-8A's mission profile, but it could be an excellent candidate for the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) fleet. BAMS will be a fleet of unmanned or optionally-manned aircraft primarily tasked with detecting and identifying surface vessels, which is really what the LSRS is all about. BAMS is usually thought of as an open-ocean-type capability, but perhaps LSRS could expand its competency into the littoral regions.

Or, well, I'm completely wrong. Darn these quasi-classified programs! They give you just enough to make you curious, but not enough to understand why they exist in the first place. (Hmm ... sounds very Catholic, doesn't it?)

Bad Press for FCS

Government Executive, which has nurtured deservedly top-rank military journalists like James Kitfield, has published an unsusually one-sided critique of the Future Combat System program by relatively new-hire Greg Grant, who jumped to GovExec from Defense News last year.

To the FCS-uninitiated, Grant's solid reporting will open their eyes to the genesis of a potentially deeply flawed program that is even now struggling for its life in this year's budget debates on Capitol Hill. However, Grant sticks mostly to published literature for his research, so if you're looking for any new insights on the program's many ills you may be disappointed.

It surprises me that Grant found no room to directly quote Army or Boeing officials offering a defense of the program. I also know of many independent analysts who would speak to elements of the program that may be beneficial, but no such voice is presented in the form of direct quotes.

Still, it is an admirable piece of research and journalism. I hope Grant soon turns his sharp eye on other fiscal and strategic conundrums in the military's acquisition backlog.

Talking Climate Change Blues ...

Unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans, the amount of carbon commercial airplanes spew mostly into the upper reaches of the stratosphere and lower regions of the troposphere is something of a scandal in Europe.

The aviation industry pumps about 600 million tons of the stuff into the atmosphere every year, which is roughly equivalent to the annual output of the whole of Great Britain, the world's fourth-largest industrial society.

(This fact is interesting to think about as I type this on my Blackberry somewhere in the sky between Washington DC and Seattle: my seat alone is individually accounting for a few hundred pounds of climate-changing carbon emissions! Another fun fact: one pound of jet fuel produces 3.16 pounds of carbon dioxide, as the combustion process fuses two really fat oxygen atoms onto a lonely little carbon atom.)

Right now, my seat's miniscule -- but measureable -- contribution to the world's carbon content costs me -- and the aviation industry -- nothing. But that will have to change if (or, really, when) the European Union enacts proposals to put a cap on airline carbon emissions, with the most efficient airlines allowed to trade "emissions credits" with the least efficient airlines.

This effectively forces the international aviation industry to join the emissions trading schemes imposed on most other industries already by the Kyodo Protocol.

As a (to put it mildly) Kyodo non-signatory, the Bush Administration is predictably very upset about these proposals, and is actively banding together with Third World and emerging countries such as China, and some industrial countries, such as Japan, to vigorously oppose the EU's plan for an aviation emissions trading scheme.

The aviation industry fears that such trading schemes will raise the cost of travel from 1% to 3%. The environmental lobby in Europe effectively hopes to slow the industry's growth. If left unchecked, aviation would grow by 500 million passengers per year by 2030. With emissions trading and other taxes, demand may instead fall to something like 300 miilion more passengers per year. (It's at about 140 million pax per year now.)

It's tempting to ask: will the aviation industry tolerate this artificial ceiling on growth? But the trend-lines suggest that the industry may have no choice and can only hope to influence the process at the margins.

Unlike other carbon-producing industries, aviation has no other source of power to fall back on. The electric grid can shift to nuclear energy. Automobiles can convert to hybrids. No such alternatives are viable for aircraft for at least another half-century, barring a miracle discovery that can unlock the energy potential of the hydrogen atom for aviation. The Fischer-Tropsch experiments by the US Air Force are also no help, as they also use a synthetic version of the same old carbon atom.

In a few weeks, I'll report my observations in more depth in a 10-page special report about the topic for Flight International magazine.

I raise the issue here because I am always impressed -- and sometimes embarassed -- by the knowledge of many of my humble blog's regular readers. If you'd like to discuss your thoughts, please email me at [email protected], or open a dialogue by posting your comments on this blog.

Contracts Round-up: 5/18

Today, you can:

1. Make a balloon that sits at the fringe of space, collecting intelligence data that is returned to ground via a detachable glider -- perhaps saving the air force billions of dollars otherwise spent on orbital satellites.
2. Build up to 10 of that long-awaited hunter-killer unmanned aircraft -- the General Atomics MQ-9B Reaper -- next year
3. Seriously ponder why the US Air Force needs to collect butterflies in Los Angeles
   
4. If someone ever figures out how to keep an aircraft aloft for five years or more, give them some electronics, engines and sensors that work for five years without breaking ... and then, please, donate this technology to the F-22
5. Fly Russian helicopters in Afghanistan for the US military

Ares Reveals Littoral Radar Surveillance System

Mad props to Bill Sweetman at the Ares blog for chasing down the details of the Littoral Surveillance Radar System (LSRS), an apparently quasi-classified new sensor for the P-8A MMA.

I first start noticing references to the LSRS last year here and here (see chart 5), but the Navy, Raytheon and Boeing refused to answer any questions about it. I gave up. Obviously, Bill didn't.

Tip: Check Facts, Then Mock

The DEW Line has a tip for Marion Blakey, the US FAA Administrator: make sure you're not reading a hoax news story before you poke fun at the environmental activities of another government.

See here.