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Two new types of flame-resistant uniforms are being tested by fleet sailors — and one prototype significantly boosts the cool factor.It is a dark blue flight suit designed to be worn by deckplate sailors that officials hope fits better and lasts longer than the current flame-resistant variant of coveralls. The flight suit includes all of the pockets, torso zipper, and Velcro closures on the waist, wrists, and ankles that pilots and aircrews have come to know and love.”Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing how that shapes up,” said Machinist Mate 1st Class (SW) Jonathan Griffith, one of the sailors participating in the wear test. “Because I don’t have a centralized office, I usually carry a lot of items in my pockets — tools, papers, books — as I walk around throughout the day. Pockets would be a huge help.”

Source: Sailors test flight suit for all hands, new coveralls

Everybody wants to look TOPGUN.

It’s rather amazing that the Navy has spent something like 5 years developing a Flame Resistant coverall. Which they had to do because they designed the super stupid “blueberry” camouflage patterned work uniform, which also just happened to turn out to be highly flammable!

**Quartermaster’s comments about dungarees and chambray shirts if 5… 4… 3…**

LTG McMaster has some thoughts on light infantry, and just how light they should be. Understand, LTG McMaster is an armor guy. He’s not talking so much here about the future of the Abrams/Bradley heavy team, but the Stryker mounted Brigade Combat Teams, and the (currently dismounted) Infantry Brigade Combat Teams.

The strength of dismounted light infantry is that it can go anywhere, particularly close  terrain such as forests, mountains, and urban terrain. The weakness is, they can only do it at about 3 miles per hour.  Moving a unit via foot is terribly slow. Yes, there is the option for helicopter movement, but helicopters are always in short supply, and often quite vulnerable to even primitive air defenses. You could move the unit by truck, but those are generally road bound, and vulnerable to IEDs or other defenses.

Accordingly, LTG McMaster and the Army is looking at buying an off the shelf “Ground Mobility Vehicle” that will allow infantry to move rapidly to its objective, and there dismount and fight as infantry.

There will always be tradeoffs in speed, mobility, protection, firepower and costs. For one thing, if you insist on greater and greater levels of protection, pretty soon you end up with an Abrams. On the other hand, if you go with little or no protection, you wind up with the debacle we saw in Iraq with units forced to cobble together hillbilly armor. Where exactly you strike that balance, I’m not entirely sure.

One other issue with mounting troops on vehicles is that it almost invariably drives down the size of the rifle squad. The manpower constraints on the Army aren’t going away, and vehicles mean assigned drivers and maintenance teams. With a cap on manpower, that’s almost certain to come from the rifle squads. The problem there is, a nine man squad is about as small an effective size you can field.

LTG McMaster also is looking at rearming the current Stryker ICV fleet.

For Stryker brigade combat teams, McMaster said the Army needs to provide additional lethality to vehicles. “We have a Stryker mounted with a World War II weapon,” he said. This means the Army would want half of its Stryker armored personnel carriers to have a 30mm cannon and a machine gun and the other half to be equipped with Javelin anti-tank missiles and a machine gun.

That kind of signals that the Army is not entirely happy with the 105mm armed M1128 Mounted Gun System variant of the Stryker.

My word of caution here though would be that it will become very tempting to fight the Stryker platoon or company like a Bradley unit. But the Stryker simply doesn’t have the armor to be treated like a armored fighting vehicle. Instead, it should be thought of as a truck for a rifle squad that simply happens to be less vulnerable to small arms fire.

A nuclear-armed U.S. ballistic missile submarine arrived in Scotland this week amid growing tensions with Moscow over Ukraine and Russia’s strategic arms buildup.The submarine, the USS Wyoming, arrived at the British naval base at Faslane, Scotland, Wednesday morning for what the U.S. Strategic Command said is a routine visit.However, ballistic missile submarine movements and port visits normally are not announced by the Navy or the Strategic Command, an indication the Wyoming’s port call is intended as strategic messaging to Moscow.The submarine visit “demonstrates the closeness of the U.S./U.K. defense relationship and our commitment to the collective security of all NATO member states,” Stratcom said in a brief statement.The submarine deployment followed an earlier unannounced visit by a British missile submarine to Kings Bay, Ga., the homeport of the Wyoming.

Source: U.S. Nuclear Missile Submarine Surfaces in Scotland

Port visits by SSBNs are rare in the first place. Normally, they go out on their 60 day patrols, and simply disappear for two months. Sending one to Scotland is a subtle message that the Navy can still send boomers where they want, and the Russians can’t really do anything about it.

Of course, the big advantage of the Trident II equipped Ohio’s is that they have a missile that has long enough range, and great enough accuracy, that they can provide a credible counterforce/countervalue threat just about from pierside. Earlier SSBNs, equipped with Polaris or Poseidon had to get much closer to Russia, due to their shorter ranged missiles, and only had the accuracy to provide a credible countervalue threat. That is, their missiles weren’t accurate enough to  target missile silos, only cities.

NATIONAL HARBOR: Matthew Broderick in his basement, playing Wargames over a landline, is still the pop culture archetype of a hacker. But as wireless networks became the norm, new-age cyber warfare and traditional electronic warfare are starting to merge. Hackers can move out of the basement to the sky. In a series of experiments, the US Air Force has successfully modified its EC-130 Compass Call aircraft, built to jam enemy transmissions, to attack enemy networks instead.“We’ve conducted a series of demonstrations,” said Maj. Gen. Burke Wilson, commander of the 24th Air Force, the service’s cyber operators. “Lo and behold! Yes, we’re able to touch a target and manipulate a target, [i.e.] a network, from an air[craft].”

Source: Wireless Hacking In Flight: Air Force Demos Cyber EC-130 « Breaking Defense – Defense industry news, analysis and commentary

This is pretty interesting. Compass Call was originally simply a broad band noise jammer. To actually be able to use network intrusion on enemy networks is the future of tactical cyberwarfare.

There’s been wide speculation that the Israeli strike on Syria’s nuclear weapons program in 2007 used a variant of the US program, broadly known at Suter. Suter is run by Big Safari, a classified program management office for the US Air Force that provides innovative (and almost always classified) reconnaissance technologies to the Air Force.

Now, when you say reconnaissance, you naturally thing of photography. But a huge element of the Air Force reconnaissance effort is towards SIGINT, or Signals Intelligence, and ELINT, or Electronic Intelligence.

Imagine, for a moment, a Syrian (or better, Iranian) air defense radar that is a part of the national, integrated, air defense system.

That radar both transmits radio frequency energy, and receives it. And that energy that it sends out can be shaped into a variety of waveforms. Further, the returned radio signal requires processing before it can be presented to the operator in a useful way. This is done by digital signal processing.

What Suter (and variants thereof) do, is slip in malware into the digital signal processor by means of the radar’s own antenna.

This not only corrupts the radar, but since it shares its feed with the integrated network, it  can quickly infect the entire system.

Now we see the Air Force demonstrating this capability against not just air defenses, but potentially virtually any combat network or datalink that uses radio frequency networking, even if they are secure networks.

That’s both nifty, and frightening, since no one uses networking to the extent we do, and if we can do it, sooner or later, so will our opponents.

SCOTLAND, S.D. (AP) — The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad says 10 ethanol tanker cars derailed and two caught fire Saturday morning in southeast South Dakota.BNSF spokeswoman Amy McBeth says the 98-car train carrying ethanol derailed at about 6:15 a.m. between the towns of Scotland and Lesterville. She says in a statement that there were no injuries and no nearby structures were threatened by the fire.

Source: 10 ethanol tanker cars derail, 2 catch fire in South Dakota

Since it’s in Scotland, SD, does that make it Scotch?

Say what you will about the Russians, they make some excellent aircraft cannons.

We mentioned USS Coronado firing a SeaRAM missile for the first time. We’re unimpressed, but the video is at least cool.

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We’ve long known the US Army used to operate a couple of P-51 Mustangs in a variety of roles. What we don’t recall is that they tested 106mm recoilless rifles mounted on the wingtips!

For many years, FiFi has been the worlds only flying B-29. Today, in Kansas, Friends of Doc took a major step toward changing that. They got all four of their restored B-29’s engines fired up, albeit, not without a little hesitation from Number 2.

The world desires and needs American leadership to confront the expansion of authoritarian regimes that seek to undermine the global economic system and the rule of law that so many have labored so hard and sacrificed so much to establish over the past 70 years. But from Central Europe, where Russian aggression has illegally occupied the Crimea and other regions of Ukraine, to the Middle East where ISIS seeks to destroy every aspect of stable order, to the western Pacific where China is attempting to bully other nations into accepting its historically unfounded claims of sovereignty over international waters, that system of governance is under constant attack. Hence it was a disappointment to read that Rear Adm. Jeff Harley said this about the South China Sea: “There is room in the maritime realm for multiple powers, really all powers”, even as a Chinese admiral on the same stage said, “The South China Sea, as the name indicates, is a sea area that belongs to China.” The contrast between the two voices could not have been more stark — or ominous.

Source: How This US Navy Admiral Gives In to China Is Exactly What’s Wrong With US Power Today – Defense One

Jerry and Bryan are two of the smartest naval strategists out there today. Interestingly, they have very differing views on many topics, and their arguments have been lively (though professional). To see them coauthor a piece tells you just how important they see this forfeiture of US leadership.

This comes on the  heels of reports that the Obama administration has forbidden US warships from cruising within 12 nautical miles of the Chinese artificial islands. That’s de facto recognition of Chinese sovereignty of those islands and waters. But international law (and long standing US policy) doesn’t recognize artificial islands as being sovereign. Nor has previous US policy ever bowed to reducing the freedom of navigation, anywhere.

But as we’ve seen so many times before with the Obama administration, the law doesn’t matter, and US leadership is seen as a force for evil.