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Marine Littoral Combat Regiment?

Sunday, May 3rd, 2020

In something of a follow-up to news that the Marine Corps is eliminating its tank regiments over the next decade, there are plans afoot to develop and field a Marine Littoral Combat regiment

The Marine Corps’ current force design conversations and planning will help develop the littoral regiment concept, Stephenson said.

If the past few months of public appearances by Berger and his top generals are any indication, a littoral regiment would likely find itself in the III Marine Expeditionary Force, headquartered in Okinawa, Japan, and consist of small teams of Marines armed with a host of unmanned air, ground and maritime assets along with long range fires and air defense systems.

Sounds like the Marines are going to go heavy into drones.

While details are not yet available, a regiment is a sizable unit to form in a limited manpower Marine Corps.

An infantry regiment can include up to nearly 2,200 Marines divided into three battalions along with a headquarters and support company, depending on the mission and configuration.

But there are different configurations for a regiment. The Corps also staffs combat logistics regiments to provide transport, communication and logistics assets to the ground combat forces.

In October 2019, Brig. Gen. Benjamin Watson said that the Corps was “no longer going to stick or take an uncompromising position on the sanctity of the MAGTF,” [Marine Air-Ground Task Force, a basic Marine organizational structure since 1963] while speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

“If what is needed is a piece of the Marine Corps that is not organized like a MAGTF or a capability the Marine Corps can bring that is not a MAGTF, then we are not too proud to provide that,” he said.

A retired Marine Corps officer now a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic & International Studies shared analysis at the same conference showing “no growth” for personnel in future Marine budget planning.

“Coastal defense, cyber, space,” Mark Cancian said. “They will have to take down existing capabilities to find the structure and the space to do that.”

I rather doubt the Marines are going to field localized cyberwarfare units out in combat regiments beyond some basic signal corps countermeasures. I suspect we already have a cyberwarfare unit up and running out of one or more three initial agencies in the greater D.C. area.

The Corps will need to cut and shift priorities for the next fight, Berger said at a November Marine Corps Association and Foundation dinner.

“We may need to get smaller, trade some parts we’ve had for a long time but are not a good fit for the future,” Berger said.

He looked to reduce or eliminate money going toward manned anti-armor ground and aviation platforms, manned and traditional towed artillery that can’t shoot hypervelocity rounds and short range mortar systems.

All other efforts are leaning into conducting sea control and sea denial operations from the sea and maritime terrain, he said.

To make that happen, the commandant said that he wants low cost, lethal air and ground unmanned platforms, unmanned long range surface and subsurface vehicles, mobile, rapidly deployable rocket systems, long range precision fires, loitering munitions across the echelons, mobile air defense and counter-precision guided munitions capabilities, signature management, electronic warfare and expeditionary airfields. [“Signature management,” in this context, means controlling your electronic emissions and observables. “To be detected is to be targeted is to be killed.”]

And it appears, the Marine littoral regiment may be the formation for many of those new capabilities and manpower.

All this seems both forward-looking and also very amorphous. It suggests “we’re adjusting our force mix to better face off against China, but we’re not sure quite how yet.” But China is just one part of the equation; the furious pace of technological change, budget pressures, and long simmering doctrinal debates all seem to be additional change drivers.

It’s also interesting that they’re using the word “littoral,” as the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program was hardly a smashing success.

Great power military conflicts of the future are likely to use weapons smarter, more autonomous, more lethal and probably lower cost than the weapons systems we’ve built our combat forces around today. Taking and holding contested shorelines is probably going to look less like Iwo Jima and more like battles between rival autonomous drone swarms.

The question is how long it will take to get to that technological plateau, and what the Marine Corps will look like during the transition.

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A Farewell to Marine Tanks?

Wednesday, April 29th, 2020

Evidently the Marine Corps is going to shed all its tank units over the next decade.

In the next decade, the Marine Corps will no longer operate tanks or have law enforcement battalions. It will also have three fewer infantry units and will shed about 7% of its overall force as the service prepares for a potential face-off with China.

The Marine Corps is cutting all military occupational specialties associated with tank battalions, law enforcement units and bridging companies, the service announced Monday. It’s also reducing its number of infantry battalions from 24 to 21 and cutting tiltrotor, attack and heavy-lift aviation squadrons.

The changes are the result of a sweeping months-long review and war-gaming experiments that laid out the force the service will need by 2030. Commandant Gen. David Berger directed the review, which he has called his No. 1 priority as the service’s top general.

“Developing a force that incorporates emerging technologies and a significant change to force structure within our current resource constraints will require the Marine Corps to become smaller and remove legacy capabilities,” a news release announcing the changes states.

By 2030, the Marine Corps will drop down to an end strength of 170,000 personnel. That’s about 16,000 fewer leathernecks than it has today.

In a certain way it makes sense, as the Marine Corps is a branch of the Navy and focused on amphibious operations, and you can’t fit a lot of M1A2 Abrams tanks on a Wasp class amphibious assault ship. On the other hand, the Marine 1st Tank Battalion predates Pearl Harbor. That’s a lot of tradition to leave behind.

The decision to de-emphasize rotor craft (presumably both helicopters and the V-22 Osprey) is also interesting, especially since the Marines are the only users of the new AH-1Z Viper.

“The future Fleet Marine Force requires a transformation from a legacy force to a modernized force with new organic capabilities,” it adds. “The FMF in 2030 will allow the Navy and Marine Corps to restore the strategic initiative and to define the future of maritime conflict by capitalizing on new capabilities to deter conflict and dominate inside the enemy’s weapon engagement zone.”

Existing infantry units are going to get smaller and lighter, according to the plan, “to support naval expeditionary warfare, and built to facilitate distributed and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.”

The Marine Corps will also create three littoral regiments that are organized, trained and equipped to handle sea denial and control missions. The news release describes the new units as a “Pacific posture.” Marine expeditionary units, which deploy on Navy ships, will augment those new regiments, the release adds.

In addition to more unmanned systems and long-range fire capabilities, the Marine Corps also wants a new light amphibious warship and will invest in signature management, electronic warfare and other systems that will allow Marines to operate from “minimally developed locations.”

Berger has called China’s buildup in the South China Sea and Asia-Pacific region a game changer for the Navy and Marine Corps. He has pushed for closer integration between the sea services, as the fight shifts away from insurgent groups in the Middle East and to new threats at sea.

Part of the reason for Marines getting rid of tank sis their increasing vulnerability to precision weapons systems:

Tanks and armored vehicles have had trouble surviving against the threat of precision strike and the plethora of drone and reconnaissance systems flooding conflict zones across the Middle East.

For recent evidence, a Turkish launched operation targeting Syrian regime army troops in late February decimated more than a hundred tanks and armored vehicles, dozens of artillery pieces and hundreds of Syrian forces, according to the Turkish National Ministry of Defense.

Turkey posted videos highlighting a mixed role of drones, Paladin artillery systems and aircraft pounding Syrian armor from the skies over the course of several days. The Syrian army appeared helpless to defend from the onslaught of long range systems. Even tanks camouflaged by buildings and bushes were no match for sensors and thermal imaging watching from the skies.

The problem is exacerbated by the number of sophisticated anti-tank systems flooding counterinsurgency conflicts across the globe and access to long range drones once only in control by state actors are now being operated by militia groups.

In Libya, the Libyan National Army has the upper hand in its drone war with the UN-backed Tripoli government. It’s equipped with an alleged UAE-supplied Chinese drone known as the Wing Long II that boasts a 2,000 km range through a satellite link and is reportedly armed with Chinese manufactured Blue Arrow 7 precision strike air-to-surface missiles.

So it once again gets back to China.

In a way it’s heartening that the U.S. military is preparing to fight the next war rather than remain stuck in the paradigms of the last one. But history shows that the next war has way of popping up where we didn’t expect it. U.S. and Soviet armor never faced off in the Fulda Gap, and in 1989, no one was expecting U.S. forces to be fighting in Iraq.

We still have the best military in the world, I just hope we retain the tactical and strategic flexibility to meet all the challenges of the 21st century.

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LinkSwarm for August 23, 2019

Friday, August 23rd, 2019

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Why evangelicals support Trump:

    Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”

    That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.

    Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.

    Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.

    Snip.

    Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.

    Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.

    Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.

    First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.

    He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.

    Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.

    Well, it’s about time!

    It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.

    Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.

    Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.

    No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Man goes to car dealership, finds it booming:

    “It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.

    He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”

    If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
    The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.

    The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.

  • The Trump Administration ends catch-and-release.
  • The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:

    Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.

    We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.

    Snip.

    In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.

    They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.

    But it won’t.

    It’s all a lie and a scam.

    And we know it.

  • How Boris Yeltsin defeated the 1991 Communist coup. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady.)
  • “The Department of Justice says one of its own “repeatedly” helped the Bloods street gang protect its interests by identifying and exposing informants and cooperating witnesses.”

    Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.

    If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.

  • Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
  • Israel reportedly hit a Hezbollah arms depot in Iraq. According to Wikipedia, Israel has 16 F-35s total.
  • Hong Kong’s leaderless protests:

    Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.

    Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.

  • WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
  • Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Still true: “Red-light cameras undermine rule of law.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.”
  • “Trump Executive Order Cancels Student Loan Debt for Disabled Veterans.” Bet none of them have degrees in feminist critical theory, either…
  • Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
  • “Robert Mueller crushed their dreams, so Democrats pivot to race.”

    They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.

    And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.

    Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.

    With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.

  • “Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
  • Reporter discovers, much to her surprise, that, yes, you do have to pass a background check before buying a gun. She fails.
  • The army wants microwave weapons against drones.
  • “Man Accused Of Shooting 6 Philadelphia Police Officers Was Federal Informant.” (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
  • Gregory Benford says that the Epstein smear against Marvin Minsky is baseless. (Hat tip: Instapundit, which is a backup source if you can’t get to Greg’s Facebook page.)
  • Borepatch says that red flag laws are malicious:

    False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.

    But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.

    This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.

    To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.

    And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.

    Malice.

  • Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
  • President Trump may have failed to buy Greenland, but we can all learn from the failures of Greenland’s public housing.
  • Lt. Governor Dan Patrick frowns on Bonnen’s shenanigans. (Hat tip: Cahnman.)
  • Republican John Lee wins seat on LA City Council, beating Green New Deal supporter.
  • What it’s like to be a roughneck in west Texas.
  • Miss Nevada banned from competing for Miss America over supporting President Trump.
  • First picture of light as both a wave and a particle.
  • “When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”

    I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.

    As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.

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    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    All Is Not Joy In F-35 Land

    Sunday, June 16th, 2019

    Given that we’re selling them to Poland but not to Turkey, the F-35 has been much in the news as of late, but frequently for the wrong reasons, mainly a long list of problems:

  • The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.
  • The spare parts inventory shown by the F-35’s logistics system does not always reflect reality, causing occasional mission cancellations.
  • Cabin pressure spikes in the cockpit of the F-35 have been known to cause barotrauma, the word given to extreme ear and sinus pain.
  • In very cold conditions — defined as at or near minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit — the F-35 will erroneously report that one of its batteries have failed, sometimes prompting missions to be aborted.
  • Supersonic flight in excess of Mach 1.2 can cause structural damage and blistering to the stealth coating of the F-35B and F-35C.
  • After doing certain maneuvers, F-35B and F-35C pilots are not always able to completely control the aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw.
  • If the F-35A and F-35B blows a tire upon landing, the impact could also take out both hydraulic lines and pose a loss-of-aircraft risk.
  • A “green glow” sometimes appears on the helmet-mounted display, washing out the imagery in the helmet and making it difficult to land the F-35C on an aircraft carrier.
  • On nights with little starlight, the night vision camera sometimes displays green striations that make it difficult for all variants to see the horizon or to land on ships.
  • The sea search mode of the F-35’s radar only illuminates a small slice of the sea’s surface.
  • When the F-35B vertically lands on very hot days, older engines may be unable to produce the required thrust to keep the jet airborne, resulting in a hard landing.

    • Let’s look at a couple of these in more detail:

  • The F-35 becomes difficult to handle in extreme situations:

    The U.S. Navy’s and Marine Corps’ F-35s become unpredictable to handle when executing the kind of extreme maneuvers a pilot would use in a dogfight or while avoiding a missile, according to documents exclusively obtained by Defense News.

    Specifically, the Marine short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing variant and the Navy’s carrier-launched version become difficult to control when the aircraft is operating above a 20-degree angle of attack, which is the angle created by the oncoming air and the leading edge of the wing.

    Pilots reported the aircraft experiencing unpredictable changes in pitch, as well as erratic yaw and rolling motions. The documents identify the issue as a category 1 deficiency and define it as something that limits the aircraft’s performance in such a way that it can’t accomplish its “primary or alternate mission(s).” In this scale, category 1 represents the most serious type of deficiency.

    A Lockheed Martin executive told Defense News in a statement that he expects the issue to be resolved or downgraded soon as a result of software fixes.

    “We’ve implemented an update to the flight control system that is planned for integration in the third quarter of this year — and we expect this item to be resolved or downgraded,” said Greg Ulmer, Lockheed Martin vice president and general manager of the company’s F-35 program.

    Like almost all modern fly-by-wire fighter jets, flight control and trim surfaces are automatically changed by advanced avionics software to maintain flight stability. The Marine VTOL (F-35B) and Naval carrier (F-35C) variants have always had more problems than the base Air Force model, a fairly predictable consequence of building plane for disparate mission roles on a single platform.

  • Flying at supersonic speeds can burn off the stealth coating:

    At extremely high altitudes, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps’ versions of the F-35 jet can only fly at supersonic speeds for short bursts of time before there is a risk of structural damage and loss of stealth capability, a problem that may make it impossible for the Navy’s F-35C to conduct supersonic intercepts.

    The Defense Department does not intend to field a fix for the problem, which influences not only the F-35’s airframe and the low-observable coating that keeps it stealthy, but also the myriad antennas located on the back of the plane that are currently vulnerable to damage, according to documents exclusively obtained by Defense News.

    The F-35 Joint Program Office has classified the issues for the “B” and “C” models as separate category 1 deficiencies, indicating in one document that the problem presents a challenge to accomplishing one of the key missions of the fighter jet. In this scale, category 1 represents the most serious type of deficiency.

    Both deficiencies were first observed in late 2011 following flutter tests where the F-35B and F-35C both flew at speeds of Mach 1.3 and Mach 1.4. During a post-flight inspection in November 2011, it was discovered the F-35B sustained “bubbling [and] blistering” of the stealth coating on both the right and left sides of the horizontal tail and the tail boom.

    During similar tests of the F-35C in December 2011, “thermal damage” that compromised the structural integrity of the inboard horizontal tail and tail boom were apparent.

    Vice Adm. Mat Winter, who leads the F-35 program on behalf of the Pentagon, told Defense News that the department has taken steps to mitigate the problem with an improved spray-on coating, but added that the government will not completely fix it — instead accepting additional risk.

    As justification for the decision, Winter noted that the issue was documented while the jet was flying at the very edge of its flight envelope. He also said the phenomenon only occurred once for both the B and C models, despite numerous attempts to replicate the conditions that caused the problem.

    Race conditions and intermittent bugs are frustratingly difficult to track down in ordinary code, so it must be several orders of magnitude more frustrating when they appear on a $100 million piece of hardware. But the fact this issued showed up in 2011 and not since suggests that the issues may have been fixed along the way.

    Everyone agrees that the F-35 is a marvel of engineering that contains amazing technical advances, but the $1.5 trillion program was almost cancelled in 2011 due being “bloated, over-budget and behind-schedule program.” But thing to remember is that pretty much all U.S. fighter aircraft programs are bloated, over-budget and behind schedule. (Well, at least since World War II; the first P-51 prototypes rolled off the assembly line 102 days after the order had been placed…)

    None of which kept House Democrats from demanding an extra dozen planes more than the Pentagon asked for in the 20/21 defense budget.

    A bigger long-term issue is how long before drones make the F-35 obsolete.

    Already, commercial firms are creating drones that use a variety of sensors to autonomously execute tasks ranging from agricultural spraying to ocean surveillance to air freight. With minor modifications, these drones can become improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that actively hunt U.S. forces. Because the systems are commercial, they are available to almost anyone.

    Even small numbers of intelligent, mobile IEDs would be a major problem for U.S. forces — yet tech trends indicate we could face tens of thousands of such drones on the battlefield.

    We’re several years past the ability to 3D-print a drone in a single day; researchers are now refining prototype systems that can print 25 to 100 times faster than that. A single small facility with only 10 such printers will soon be able to produce 1,000 drones a day. These will be autonomous weapons that can attack with precision to destroy vehicles, parked aircraft, fuel, and ammunition stores.

    Snip.

    When fully operational, the F-35 will bring a leap in capability. However, a creative enemy might choose not to fight the F-35 in the air but instead send cheap drones to hunt them at their air bases. These relatively inexpensive drones will rely on sheer numbers. If an enemy prints 1,000 a day, he doesn’t care if 500 suffer in-flight failures. Nor does he care you shoot down another 300 near your airfield. He still has 200 hunting a couple of dozen F-35 revetments. If those are not available, the drones can autonomously switch their aim points to radar antennae, fuel points, or ammunition sites.

    The United States cannot overcome swarms of autonomous weapons by increasing our production of old weapons.

    The author vastly overstates how easily combat-ready drones can be produced. You can 3D print drone parts, but right now you still need humans to assemble them. Factories still need to be set up and supplied, and are themselves subject to attack. The “1000 drones a day” factory is a fantasy unless we’re already three years into a total war economy, and the sort of drones that could theoretically be produced that way aren’t going to have the range to reach air bases in the rear. Cheap drone swarms will be more effective taking out ground troops near the front line or soft targets in the rear for the immediate future. But the time is coming when aerial combat drones will simply be more cost effective than an F-35. If ten $1 million drones, each non-stealthy but capable of high speed maneuvering that would kill a human pilot, can take out one $100 million F-35, or even just force it to expended all it’s air-to-air ordnance before retreating in critical battles, a lot of the advantage of having an F-35 is going to be nullified.

    Jerry Pournelle once said that “USAF will always retire hundreds of Warthog to buy another F-35. Always, so long as it exists. And it will never give up a mission.” But the days of high performance manned jet fighters may be coming to an end. Probably not in the next 10-20 years, but long before the projected end-of-life date of 2070. 51 years is a longer span of time than that between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Gulf War. And there were no World War II planes flying combat missions in the Gulf War.

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    Posted in Military | No Comments »

    The Inevitability Of Autonomous Drone Swarms In Combat

    Tuesday, April 9th, 2019

    Borepatch thinks it’s going to be a while until we get autonomous drones in combat. I think he’s probably mistaken, as he seems to be thinking about using them to pilot big, expensive things like tanks.

    I think we’re going to see autonomous drone swarms used in combat a lot sooner.

    Soldiers are expensive (at least for first world armies). Drones are cheap and getting cheaper. Imagine inserting a drone delivery system behind enemy lines and let them wreck havoc in bases and depots. Make some exploding, some small caliber anti-personnel, some with top-down anti-vehicle shaped charges. They don’t have to be perfect, they only have to be more discriminating than artillery barrages or cluster bombs. Give them a one-time encrypted activation code and some 30-60 minutes of juice. Make them low cost enough and no one cares if you lose them all; picking up depleted drones to be sent back and reworked after you take the objective is just gravy.

    Or use Mischief Reef as a concrete example. Have a stealthy submersible surface just long enough to unleash a thousand autonomous drones designed to attack personnel, ships or aircraft. It’s quite possibly you could destroy half a billion dollars worth of expensive combat aircraft and facilities using $500,000 worth of drones.

    Borepatch brings up the problem of hacking. It doesn’t matter if the enemy can hack one or two if you’re deploying a hundred at a time at a cost comparable to one M829 round.

    Done right, a drone swarm can be plenty dumb and plenty cheap and still be lethal. You don’t need to make them smart enough to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants if you limit their use cases to combatant areas.

    There are dozens of other use cases for drones in combat. Heavy refueling drones, each of which carry enough diesel to top off an M1A2 tank during a prolonged armor push. Small swarms of small drones that perform automated sweeps of restricted areas, sending up alerts (and possibly deploying non-lethal weapons) after detecting intruders. Automatic long-range search drones deployed for sea rescue operations.

    All this is coming sooner rather than later.

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    Posted in Military | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for December 21, 2018

    Friday, December 21st, 2018

    Welcome to the Winter Solstice LinkSwarm! Real news is popping everywhere, so try to hang on:

  • Hail the departing Mad Dog.
  • President Donald Trump says no to a continuing resolution with no border wall funding, so the House does an about-face and approves $5 billion worth. Now up to the Senate.
  • Related tweet:

  • Chinese hackers have penetrated deep into the navy:

    Chinese hackers are breaching Navy contractors to steal everything from ship-maintenance data to missile plans, officials and experts said, triggering a top-to-bottom review of cyber vulnerabilities.

    A series of incidents in the past 18 months has pointed out the service’s weaknesses, highlighting what some officials have described as some of the most debilitating cyber campaigns linked to Beijing.

    Cyberattacks affect all branches of the armed forces but contractors for the Navy and the Air Force are viewed as choice targets for hackers seeking advanced military technology, officials said.

    Navy contractors have suffered especially troubling breaches over the past year, one U.S. official said.

    The data allegedly stolen from Navy contractors and subcontractors often is highly sensitive, classified information about advanced military technology, according to U.S. officials and security researchers. The victims have included large contractors as well as small ones, some of which are seen as lacking the resources to invest in securing their networks.

    One major breach of a Navy contractor, reported in June, involved the theft of secret plans to build a supersonic anti-ship missile planned for use by American submarines, according to officials. The hackers targeted an unidentified company under contract with the Navy’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I.

    The hackers have also targeted universities with military research labs that develop advanced technology for use by the Navy or other service branches, according to analysis conducted by cyber firms as well as people familiar with the matter.

  • 33 convictions for voter fraud in Texas in 2018.
  • How Social Justice Warrioring and Trump Derangement Syndrome destroy literary friendships:

    While Brooklyn is known for liberal silos such as Park Slope and Williamsburg, the Brooklyn I’d known as a child was politically diverse. A number of my former classmates and colleagues remain Republicans. And some of them have come to my aid at the darkest, most tragic times in my life. Many are still my friends. They are police officers, nurses and combat veterans; they are Jews, immigrants, Asians, Latinos and African-Americans. Some would vote for Donald Trump: Conservative Jews who liked his pro-Israel stance; Wall Street workers who liked his business background; rank-and-file police who wanted to stick it to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; visible minorities who liked his “America First” rhetoric, and imagined that he’d bring back secure manufacturing jobs. These promises may have been empty and dishonest. But they resonated with a lot of people, not all of them “troglodytes.”

    I also witnessed something else that alarmed me. The charges of Russian collusion against Trump’s campaign—while being a completely legitimate (and ongoing) political concern—were curdling into Russophobic hysteria among some members of the New York literary caste.

    “I think Russians have been at the root of our discord for years,” Daniel announced at one point. “I think they own the government and the NRA.…They are the true enemy…Seriously, #russia, fuck you.” Caught up in these negative reveries, he would lapse into Swiftian absurdism, declaring at one point, “I hope we deport every single one of you motherfuckers back to Russia where you’ll live in gulags.” Eventually, Twitter deleted Daniel’s account after he allegedly posted threatening tweets against other users.

    On another occasion, after I refused to discuss my Soviet immigration experience via Facebook and suggested we talk in person instead, the daughter of a renowned American novelist told me to “honestly fuck off. Go translate media monitoring kits for Trump… How did you all get into our country? Jesus Christ…You are a great reason why we need immigration reform now.”

    As a New York writer, I’m supposed to be reflexively hostile to Trump voters—a political breed that often is caricatured as a bunch of racist Appalachian hillbillies. But because of what I do for a living, and who my friends are, I’ve learned that Trump’s enemies can be every bit as Manichean and hysterical as Trump’s supporters.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Americans are tired of political correctness say those infamous right-wingers at NPR:

    Americans are largely against the country becoming more politically correct.

    Fifty-two percent of Americans, including a majority of independents, said they are against the country becoming more politically correct and are upset that there are too many things people can’t say anymore. About a third said they are in favor of the country becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others.

    That’s a big warning sign for Democrats heading into the 2020 primaries when cultural sensitivity has become such a defining issue with the progressive base.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Of state temperature records, only nine states have set high temperature records in the last fifty years, but fifteen have set cold temperature records. Hmmm.
  • “Journalists working as factcheckers for Facebook have pushed to end a controversial media partnership with the social network, saying the company has ignored their concerns and failed to use their expertise to combat misinformation.” So Facebook evidently hates its own fact-checkers as much as it hates its users…
  • TPPF approves of the First Step Act.
  • Martha McSally to replace John Kyl in the senate.
  • Drones shutdown Gatwick airport. When they find the asshole responsible, instead of trying him, they should just turn him over to the people whose flights he’s delayed…
  • Socialist wave isn’t.
  • Followup from last week’s LinkSwarm: “College Student Running for Office Finally Beats the Chicago Machine.
  • “A prominent ‘Republican’ women’s political action committee that regularly receives national media attention for its criticisms of President Donald Trump and the GOP is bankrolled by three liberal billionaire donors and activists, Federal Election Commission filings show.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Indian government to intercept, monitor, and decrypt citizens’ computers.”
  • So what were congressional Democrats doing on an unpublicized trip to Qatar? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Social justice and the death gap.
  • “Trump Criticized For Breaking With Longstanding American Tradition Of Remaining In Middle Eastern Countries Indefinitely.”
  • How Fox changed the landscape of television by unexpectedly landing the NFL.
  • The story of Charles Barkley’s long friendship with a Chinese immigrant cat litter scientist. (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Republicans | No Comments »

    Venezuela Socialist President Nicolas Maduro Target of Drone Attack

    Sunday, August 5th, 2018

    The only thing surprising about this story is that it didn’t happen two years ago.

    Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez said in a live broadcast Saturday that several dronelike devices armed with explosives detonated near Maduro during his appearance at a military event, according to AP.

    It quoted Rodriguez as saying Maduro was safe and unharmed. According to Reuters, seven National Guard soldiers were hurt.

    Just think how much better off Venezuela might be if someone had taken out Maduro before he admitted socialism was a failure, or even before people started eating their dogs and children started dying because his socialist paradise can’t afford antibiotics?

    Here’s footage of the attack. You can’t see the drone attack itself, but you can see reactions to it and people running from it.

    It’s actually surprising we haven’t seen more drone assassination attempts. The technology is mature and the strike can be carried out from several blocks away, even out of line-of-sight with an onboard video camera. Get a medium-sized quadcopter, pack it full of Semtex and roofing nails, and detonate a few feet from your target.

    Not only have we been using Predator drones since 1994, the Predator has actually been retired in favor of the much larger and faster MQ-9A Reaper…

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Military, video | 3 Comments »

    Prototype Laser Weapon Shoots Down Drones

    Sunday, September 24th, 2017

    Lockheed Martin has developed a battlefield laser weapon to shoot down drones. Here’s video of it in action.

    Keep in mind all the caveats of corporate-produced weapon test videos (if a test run was a failure, you wouldn’t be seeing that video), and don’t expect these to be deployed in the battlefield anytime soon. But it’s still promising.

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    Posted in Military, video | 1 Comment »

    Islamic State Near Collapse?

    Saturday, September 23rd, 2017

    That’s what this headline implies. The truth is a little less dramatic: Raqqa is on the edge of full liberation and the Islamic State is in retreat everywhere else.

    Static lines of control that held for months in northern Raqqa have collapsed, as seen in this Syria Livemap screen cap:

    Compare that to this map from September 5:

    Islamic State fighters are running out of territory in Raqqa to defend.

    Here’s a video from the battle of Raqqa:

    Southeast of Raqqa, Syrian government forces and the SDF are both pushing toward Deir ez-Zor.

    SDF also say they have captured Syria’s largest oilfield from the Islamic State near Deir ez-Zor.

    Elsewhere in the theater, “Iraqi Security Forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces have cleared ISIS out of about 50,000 square miles and liberated more than 6 million people who were living under Islamic State occupation.”

    Here’s a map of Iraqi forces collapsing the pocket of Islamic State forces to the southwest of Kirkuk that have been cut off from the rest of the Islamic State at least since the investment of Mosul.

    Everywhere within it’s supposed caliphate, the Islamic State is in retreat, and nowhere is it counterattacking successfully. But it still holds a lot of territory, and there’s a lot more fighting left before declaring it dead.

    Bonus video: Royal Air Force drone stops Islamic State public execution:

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, video | No Comments »

    Light Attack Aircraft: A Niche That Doesn’t Exist

    Monday, August 7th, 2017

    The Air Force has an experimental program to deliver a low-cost light attack aircraft for ground support duties. The light attack aircraft experiment, or OA-X project, has produced propeller-driven aircraft that look like a cross between a Diamond DA40 and a rejected ME-109 prototype with modern weapons on underwing hardpoints.

    The program theoretically exists because it’s not cost-effective to use an F-35 (at $32,000 per hour of flight time) to kill poorly-armed insurgents.

    I think the entire program is bunk. (And not just because John McCain is pushing for it.)

    It’s not that the need for a light, low-cost aerial attack platform doesn’t exist, it’s just that there’s no military or technological justification (at least in the American armed forces) for that platform to be a manned aircraft. Those mission parameters are already satisfied by cheaper drones whose capabilities continue to improve by leaps and bounds. The problem isn’t that the Air Force can’t fly drones (the MQ-9 Reaper is extremely capable), but that the Army, the Navy, the Marines and the CIA can all fly them as well.

    The entire Light Attack Aircraft program exists because of an inter-service political issue: The Air Force neither wants to do close air support, nor wants to give up that role to the Army. Put a pilot in a fixed-wing aircraft, and the Air Force gets to keep the mission, along with the money and headcount that go with it.

    And as for why the Air Force keeps trying to kill the one plane they already have perfectly suited for ground support, the A-10 Warthog, well, I and others have already written about that at length. As Jerry Pournelle once put it, “USAF will always retire hundreds of Warthog to buy another F-35. Always, so long as it exists. And it will never give up a mission.”

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    Posted in Military | No Comments »

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