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In 2019 the Army expects to roll out a new, lighter body armor system. The armor will provide at least as much protection as today's system, but with more comfort, and greater flexibility to adjust based on the mission, Army officials said.

The Torso and Extremities Protection, or TEP, program cleared the engineering and development phases last summer, and will move into a few years of limited production and testing. During that time and beyond, technology advances may be integrated.

Already, improved ballistics materials have allowed the Army to cut the weight of TEP, when compared to the Army’s current heavy-duty option, the Improved Outer Tactical Vest. The IOTV, when loaded with heavy plates, weighs about 31 pounds, while a comparable TEP system checks in at about 23 pounds, or  26 percent lighter.

via www.armytimes.com

The reduction in weight from 31 to 23 pounds is of enormous importance.

The maximum soldier load *should* be no more than 1/3 the soldier's weight. An average soldier weighing 175 pounds, therefore, should not have to bear more than 58 pounds. Of course, in reality, our troops often are forced to bear loads of over 100 pounds, greatly reducing their mobility, and causing sports type injuries far more often than they otherwise would occur.

Reducing the load by 8 pounds while improving mobility is statistically significant, and well worth the investment.

Dear International Editor:

Listen and understand. The game changed in Venezuela last night. What had been a slow-motion unravelling that had stretched out over many years went kinetic all of a sudden.

What we have this morning is no longer the Venezuela story you thought you understood.

via caracaschronicles.com

The end result of socialism, ever and always.

Students who were interrogated after holding a free speech event on campus filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the University of South Carolina for violating their First Amendment rights.

Student Ross Abbott and the campus chapters of the Young Americans for Liberty and College Libertarians filed the lawsuit, which challenges a number of the university’s policies—including its free speech zone and the requirement that students register in advance before they can exercise their First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit, sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), also challenges USC’s Student Non-Discrimination and Non-Harassment Policy, claiming it is a vague and overbroad restriction that prohibits “unwelcome” speech and “suggestive or insulting gestures or sounds.”

via freebeacon.com

Good for them. Universities are increasingly becoming tools of oppression against the rights of free citizens.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? But, depending upon your definition, this photograph, a team effort by 9 men, is the most honored picture in U. S. History. If you want to find out about it, read on. It’s an interesting tale about how people sometimes rise beyond all expectations.

It takes place in the early days of World War II, in the South Pacific, and if you’re a World War II history buff, you may already know about it.

via petapixel.com

Fly a mission that earns not one, but two Medals of Honor, and a fistful of Distinguished Crosses.

OK, now that the yardwork is done, back to blogging. Here it is, February, the dead of winter, and I had to wait for a relatively cool day to do yardwork without the risk of heat exhaustion.

CDR Salamander addresses the recent controversy over at Twitter regarding the suspension of blogger Robert Stacy  McCain. Having recently established the very Orwellian sounding Trust and Safety Council, with members such as radical left wing feminist Anita Sarkeesian, it came as no surprise that Twitter would quickly begin to label all criticism of the radical left as “hate speech” and “threatening.” Worse, Twitter won’t even tell you why you’ve been banned. They just put a bullet in the back of your account’s neck and that’s it. Facebook isn’t as bad as that, but it too has its issues, and has forced our favorite ‘phibian from its shores.

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LMT has withdrawn its complaint to the GAO about the DoD’s selection of Oshkosh as the winner of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle competition. Sadly, it’s become all too common for contractors to look at the complain process as simply another phase of the contracting competition. If you can’t win on performance, win by litigation. Of course, it isn’t always going to work, especially when Oshkosh entered a product that displayed a reliability more than three times greater than the Army/Marine Corps requirement, and five times that of the LMT entry, which failed to achieve the benchmark. 

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War is Boring has an interesting piece on the discrete airlift provided by the 27th Special Operations Wing in some interesting places.

In December, the Libyan air force inadvertently exposed a secretive U.S. Wolfhound transport plane on a runway. The passengers — American commandos — had arrived in the country for a covert meeting with the Libyan army. “While in Libya, members of a local militia demanded that the U.S. personnel depart,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Guardian after photos of the soldiers spread online. “In an effort to avoid conflict, they did leave, without incident.”

But the mission was only a glimpse at a fleet of transport planes with far greater reach — and which stays far busier — than previously thought. An official history of the U.S. Air Force’s 27th Special Operations Wing in 2013 shows these aircraft and their cousins operate well beyond North Africa and the Middle East.

It’s not so much that the 27th SOW is flying secret combat missions. It’s that they primarily aren’t flying combat missions. For combat, the Air Force relies upon the other squadrons of the 27th SOW and other SOWs. Using the C-146A, better known as the Dornier Do-328 turboprop airliner, the Air Force can provide operational airlift to units which, while not necessarily classified, we don’t wish to draw attention to. For instance, a major job of the US Army Special Forces is training with the armies of nations throughout Africa and South America. But while many of those nations are quite grateful for the training assistance, for political reasons, they wish to draw as little attention to it as possible. So rather than having a big grey C-130J in obvious USAF markings moving a couple of 12 man A-teams around, a C-146 can do the job, and no one really pays attention to it. Like I said… discrete.

A USAF C-146 Wolfhound- Photo courtesy of Marek Ślusarczyk of www.microstock.pl.

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So, Ron commented about the B-1 in the previous post:

I can see the B1 being used in a strike role. But CAS? Not sure I would trust any high altitude jet dropping ordy for CAS. Rotary and A-10's are about the only platforms that I've heard the guys that have been there talk about.

There’s a technical DoD definition for CAS, but for our purposes, it’s accurate enough to say that any airstrike conducted under the auspices of a Joint Terminal Attack Controller is CAS. That is, if you get on the radio and call for an airstrike, it’s  CAS. And virtually every bit of ordinance expended in Afghanistan, and in Iraq from 2004 to 2007 was CAS. And while grunts absolutely love the A-10 and the Apache and Cobra gunships, the fact of the matter is, most CAS has been provided by fast jets using either JDAM  or laser guided bombs.  And the key here is, it doesn’t matter all that much which fast jet the bomb comes from. Indeed, the B-1B has several advantages over other platforms in this role. First, it’s really, really fast. It can get overhead faster than almost any other platform. Second, it has a really, really long endurance. You might be able to have an F-16 loiter overhead for 45 minutes. A B-1B might offer as much as four hours of loiter time.

And the B-1B holds a lot of weapons, and with the newest bomb racks, actually holds a wide variety simultaneously as well.  B-1Bs also use the same Sniper targeting pod as other aircraft providing CAS to our troops.

Via Wikipedia:Six GBU-38 munitions are dropped by a B-1B Lancer aircraft onto an insurgent torture house and prison in Northern Zambraniyah, Iraq, March 10, 2008. The munitions drop was cleared by a USAF JTAC from Fort Hood Texas, and deployed with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division.

In the 1990s, as B-1B crews shifted focus from the nuclear deterrence mission to conventional strike, they refined their capabilities. Even before they had access to JDAM and other guided munitions, they had demonstrated a Circular Error Probably of a single dumb, unguided  500lb Mk82 bomb against a radar significant target (a tank, as it were) of less than 10 meters. That is, just using radar, 50% of the time, the dumb bomb would land within 10 meters of the target. That’s better than any other platform in the Air Force. Heck, that’s better than the A-10’s gun!

Today, the B-1B fleet is equipped with precision weapons, a fantastic communications and command and control suite, and a community with literally a decade and a half of experience in providing Close Air Support to joint and multi-national forces.  On the downside, the B-1B fleet is still plagued with reliability issues for the airframe, and a very high operating cost compared to other platforms such as the F-16 or the F-15E Strike Eagle.

Overall though, it still provides a theater commander with a powerful tool to support the fight.

B-1 Lancer bombers will be out of the mix indefinitely for the air campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the top air commander in the region said Thursday.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, said that the four-engine B-1s, especially valued for their long-range capabilities and heavy bomb loads of precision-guided munitions, had been rotated back to the U.S. for upgrades, mainly to their cockpits.

via www.dodbuzz.com

It's interesting that the B-1B was largely seen by the Air Force as something of a dud in strategic service, and by the late 1990s, they were willing to start sending them to the boneyard. But the introduction of precision conventional munitions to the B-1B has instead turned it into one of the most desired strike/CAS platforms in the inventory.

Russian borne Swiss supermodel and television personality Xenia Tchoumitcheva doesn’t get a lot of attention here in the US. Let’s change that.

Want a little more? Here’s a version of the 90s song Obsession by Animotion that just also happens to have a simply fantastic guitar outro. Watch it once for Xenia, then listen again for the guitar.

It's almost assured that no one will ever achieve as many carrier landings as Captain Brown. 2407. Understand, most career Naval Aviators retire with somewhere between 500 and 700.