Posts Tagged navy

New Small Versatile Missile From Raytheon

The missile is known as the Griffin and has applications for all branches of the military.

From Defense Industry Daily:

The Griffin’s estimated range is similar to the larger AGM-114 Hellfire: about 3.5 miles if surface-launched without a booster motor, rising to 12.5 miles or more if fired from an aerial platform at altitude. That’s fine for aerial platforms, as Griffin A/B offers them the ability to carry more Griffins than Hellfires, and achieve similar reach and precision, with less collateral damage.

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Secretive SEALs Moonlight as Movie Stars, With Navy’s Blessing

From: Danger Room

“It was done by real dudes so it actually looks real and in a lot of cases is real,” writes Danger Room pal Jim “Uncle Jimbo” Hanson, a retired Army Special Forces Weapons non-commissioned officer, who got an early peek at the film and loved it. “One of the best examples is when a couple of fast boats come to exfil them from a hostage rescue and the boat guys light up some bad guys and their pick up trucks with miniguns. Almost too beautiful for words.”

more from Danger Room

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Navy Commits To Renewable Energy

The President mentioned it in the state of the union speech, and the Military Times has reported that the Navy is committing to buy a large amount of renewable energy by 2020.

From Military Times:

The Navy will reach its goal by using a variety of alternative financing techniques, including:

• Energy savings performance contracts, where a company pays the upfront investment for energy-efficiency renovations and retrofits in exchange for payments from energy savings over time.

• Enhanced-use leases, where a company gets to develop government land with renewable energy or other projects in exchange for payment or in-kind services such as reduced-rate energy.

• Power purchase agreements, in which a power company constructs an energy system in exchange for fixed payments over a certain number of years.

I can only guess that when the power is actually needed for whatever the Navy needs it for, it will be a cloudy windless day and we will all be praying that we stuck with gasoline or CNG.

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Two Carriers Now in 5th Fleet

The Carrier Carl Vinson is now in 5th Fleet’s area of operation along with John C. Stennis.

From Military Times:

Vinson, as well as embarked Carrier Air Wing 17, cruiser Bunker Hill and destroyer Halsey, entered 5th Fleet on Jan. 9, where it is expected to support Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Navy and Defense Department officials said last week that threats and military exercises from Iran would not deter U.S. forces from continuing to work in the region and that operations were running as usual with no special response to Iran’s provocations.

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Flaws Continue to Plague F-35

Wired’s Danger Room has the coverage on the Joint Strike Fighter and it’s many problems:

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, meant to replace nearly every tactical warplane in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, was already expected to cost $1 trillion dollars for development, production and maintenance over the next 50 years. Now that cost is expected to grow, owing to 13 different design flaws uncovered in the last two months by a hush-hush panel of five Pentagon experts. It could cost up to a billion dollars to fix the flaws on copies of the jet already in production, to say nothing of those yet to come.

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Pentagon’s New China Plan

From The Washington Times:

The plan calls for preparing the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to defeat China’s “anti-access, area denial weapons,” including anti-satellite weapons, cyberweapons, submarines, stealth aircraft and long-range missiles that can hit aircraft carriers at sea.

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Guard and Reserve Need To Maintain Readiness

From the Army Times:

The Defense Department anticipates fewer warzone deployments for guardsmen as deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan slow down, but the skills those troops have learned over a decade at war must stay sharp, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told top National Guard leaders Tuesday.

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USS Bonhomme Richard, USS Sampson in Seattle for Seafair

USS Bonhomme Richard, USS Sampson in Seattle for Seafair

USS Bonhomme Richard, LHD 6 and the Destroyer USS Sampson, DDG-102 (foreground)

The Amphibious Assault Ship USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) and the Destroyer USS Sampson (DDG-102) arrived in Seattle Yesterday for the 62nd anual Seattle Seafair. Also seen in the the skys above Elliott bay were the Blue Angels and  Fat Albert. The Blues are scheduled to fly Aug 6th and 7th.

USS Bonhomme Richard

USS Sampson

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Development of Navy’s Advanced Weapons to End?

From Wired’s Danger Room:

The Free Electron Laser and the Electromagnetic Rail Gun are experimental weapons that the Navy hope will one day burn missiles careening toward their ships out of the sky and fire bullets at hypersonic speeds at targets thousands of miles away. Neither will be ready until at least the 2020s, the Navy estimates. But the Senate Armed Services Committee has a better delivery date in mind: never.

Both weapons are apples in the eye of the Office of Naval Research, the mad scientists of the Navy. “We’re fast approaching the limits of our ability to hit maneuvering pieces of metal in the sky with other maneuvering pieces of metal,” its leader, Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, told me in February. The answer, he thinks, is hypersonics and directed energy weapons, hastening “the end of the dominance of the missile,” Adm. Gary Roughead, the top officer in the Navy, told me last month. With China developing carrier-killer missiles and smaller missiles proliferating widely, both weapons would allow the Navy to blunt the missile threat and attack adversaries from vast distances.

 

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New Airforce Decoy

From Wired.com:

The Miniature Air-Launched Decoy, or “MALD,” is a cross between a cruise missile and an aerial drone, able to distract or confuse enemy air defenses to protect attacking U.S. jets. It was already on its way to becoming one of America’s most important unsung weapons when this happened: MALD-maker Raytheon figured out a way to “deliver hundreds of MALDs during a single combat sortie,” company vice president Harry Schulte announced in a recent statement.

 

It is good to see the military continue to think about different methods of attack other than stealth and “smart” bombs.

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Military Working Dogs

ForeignPolicy.com has a weekly column on working dogs in the military written by Rebecca Frankel. This is a nice photo essay she did on war dogs. It is being reported that a dog was with the team that disposed of Osama bin Laden.

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Electromagnetic Warfare

The Navy is in the process of replacing old EA-6B Prowlers with new EA-18G Growlers (a electronic warfare version of the Super Hornet).

Via Wired’s Danger Room blog:

The frontline weapon for this electronic war is a new airborne jamming system currently in development. The Next Generation Jammer should allow the Navy to blind the enemy’s radars, disrupt its communications and slip malicious code into computer networks.

Besides radar-jamming, the NGJ should allow the Navy to disable remotely detonated, improvised explosive devices — something the EA-6B already does — as well as insert viruses into command networks, a tactic Israel allegedly first used in combat during its 2007 air attacks on a suspected Syrian nuke site.

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Lt. Keith Gallagher’s Story Irish Luck – Surviving Partial Ejection from A-6 Aircraft

LT Keith Gallagher is seen above the canopy as the A-6 aircraft touches down on the deck of the Lincoln. Note that LT Gallagher's parachute has deployed and is wrapped around the tail of the aircraft. (Navy photo)

http://www.gallagher.com/ejection_seat/index.htm

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Directed Energy Weapons

The Navy is putting a lot of money into research and development of laser weapons. What was science fiction 20 years ago should be reality in another 10-15 years.

From Wired’s Danger Room:

The Navy is increasingly excited about building a superpowerful laser to shoot down missiles and rockets that might attack its ships. But don’t expect the long-planned Free Electron Laser weapon to replace the guns the Navy stations on its ships — or to be shipboard for years. And definitely expect the laser to do more than just zap stuff out of the sky.

Full article

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USS Green Bay fires a missile from the Rolling Airframe Missile launcher

The amphibious transport dock ship USS Green Bay fires a surface-to-air intercept missile from the Rolling Airframe Missile launcher during Combat System Ship Qualification Trials off the coast of Hawaii. The trials are a series of underway tests to evaluate Green Bay's combat readiness. Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Larry S. Carlson

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