Josh Wolfe’s War: The Lux Capital founder blazes a controversial path in defense tech. (The Information) “Darting around Asia by boat, armed vehicle and helicopter, Wolfe’s assignment was to bring his Silicon Valley expertise to the U.S. military’s field operations and to tell the generals where their technology was failing them. Wolfe praised the American troops he had met, inspired by their ingenuity and how they acted like real-life MacGyvers in the field. But he was distressed about what the Pentagon gave them to work with. Their technology, he said, was woefully outdated, like using BlackBerrys in the age of the iPhone. He ended with a warning: “If I were [an enemy] mole in the Pentagon, instead of stealing anything that you guys are developing, I would make sure that you did nothing to your systems,” Wolfe told them. “Because they’re that bad.”” [Paywall]
New in 2023: here comes the first ever surface drone fleet. (Navy Times) “Task Force 59, stood up in September 2021 to oversee the effort, has in roughly the past year operated surface drones in area waters for more than 25,000 hours, and the Saildrone Explorer in particular logged 220 consecutive days at sea with no refueling or maintenance.”
Army green lights an advanced version of its mixed reality goggle. (Army Times) “The service announced today that it had awarded a “task order” to Microsoft to develop the 1.2 variant of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System. The goggle is based on the Microsoft HoloLens… The Army is receiving 10,000 units total, half of the 1.0 and half of the 1.1. That incremental fielding will begin in September.”
- “To date, the Army has conducted over 30 Soldier test events and more than 100 technical sub-tests with more than 1,000 Soldiers contributing nearly 100,000 hours of user feedback for IVAS.”
- The entire IVAS 1.0 system, excluding the radio, is about 3.4 pounds. Of that, 2.4 pounds is on the soldier’s head.
Navy buys 2 loyal wingman XQ-58A Valkyrie drones for $15.5M. (USNI News) ““The Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie is an experimental stealthy unmanned combat aerial vehicle designed and built by Kratos for the United States Air Force Low-Cost Attritable Strike Demonstrator program, under the USAF Research Laboratory’s Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology (LCAAT) project portfolio,” according to the KRATOS website.”
Lockheed Martin doubles joint-air-to-ground missile (JAGM) range in flight test. (Military Leak) “The company also incorporated a tri-mode seeker that pairs a low-cost imaging sensor with the seeker’s semi-active laser and millimeter wave sensors. The U.S. Army originally required the JAGM weapon to have a tri-mode seeker, but the service walked back to a dual-mode seeker requirement during a competitive development stage.”
- The new missile, which Lockheed is calling the JAGM-Medium Range, or JAGM-MR, traveled 16 kilometers (9.94 miles) in a flight test on Nov. 16 at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, California.
- Lockheed invested in the upgrades with no external investment, but would not say how much funding it put toward the effort.
China developing own version of JADC2 to counter US. (C4ISRNET) “China is pursuing a new military construct known as Multi-Domain Precision Warfare to align its forces from cyber to space.”
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Officials in Beijing have for years pursued an information-fluent force capable of dominating networks and bombarding targets from a sprawl of locations with a mix of weaponry.
China’s naval mothership for aerial drones looks to be operational. (The Warzone) “China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN, appears to have put an unusual catamaran drone mini-carrier into service as part of an experimental naval training force… intended ostensibly to simulate enemy drone swarms, as well as other threats, such as high-volume anti-ship missile strikes and distributed electronic warfare attacks.”
- In addition, a number of the uncrewed helicopters seen in both clips shown today on CCTV-7 are of a distinctive tandem-rotor design, a relatively uncommon configuration for uncrewed rotorcraft.
- U.S. military officials have become increasingly outspoken about the threats that drones, including lower-end commercial types, pose to its forces abroad and at home, even outside of traditional conflicts.
Turkish defense agency signs contract for ULAQ USV procurement. (Naval News) “ULAQ is the first USV developed by the Turkish defense industry. After completing all of the trials in January 2022, the production phase of the ASuW (Anti-Surface Warfare) and PS (Port Security) variants has started. As these processes have been continuing, SSB released a new video unveiling the significant capabilities of the ULAQ, including a new configuration for Anti-submarine Warfare (ASW).”
- The weapon and sensor configurations for ASuW and ASW: 12.7 mm RCWS; Tactical missile control system (laser-guided L-UMTAS and Cirit); ASW rockets; NG lightweight torpedoes; Towed array sonar; Dipping sonar; Telescopic sonar; Indigenous engine
New Army light tank under construction. (Defense News) “General Dynamics Land Systems began assembling the Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower system in November, after being selected in June to build the light tank.”
- The first new combat vehicle to join the force in nearly four decades.
- The service expects to spend about $6 billion over the course of MPF’s procurement process. Estimates suggest that the total life-cycle cost of the program will total around $17 billion.
- Army leaders plan on buying 504 vehicles meant to be in the service’s inventory for at least 30 years.
New in 2023: Air Force overhauls how it prepares for the next fight. (Air Force Times) “The Air Force hopes the plan, known as AFFORGEN, will be a welcome departure from the past two decades of nonstop deployments to the Middle East and Southwest Asia. That pace of operations has taken a toll on people and planes alike. Expect the push for “multi-capable airmen,” whose broader skill sets allow units to do more with less, to continue throughout 2023.”
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