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| I think this is one thing that will be missed with the ACV (or maybe not I don't know if it has these hatches). Being able to get the lay of the land with your own two eyes gives you a perspective on what's happening and where you're going better than any view/led screen... |
The U.S. Air Force needs the help of the Army to outsmart Russia's enhanced S-400 anti-air defense system, a top general said Thursday.Story here.
"Part of the emphasis with our multi-domain operations that we're doing with the Army is trying to find ways that we can defeat these systems together, so that we can get in there faster and be more effective sooner," Gen. Mike "Mobile" Holmes, commander Air Combat Command, told reporters during a breakfast in Washington, D.C.
While Holmes said the S-400's capability in comparison to its S-300 long-range predecessor is an incremental upgrade at best, his concerns stem from the upgraded range of the S-400, a new mobile missile battery called an "F-35 killer" by Moscow.
"Constantly evolving defensive systems, constantly evolving offensive systems, the big things that we see are increasing range and increasing sensitivity of the sensors that are deployed with the evolving surface-to-air defenses," Holmes said.
The Army went through a selection process through the Department of Defense Ordnance Technology Consortium to determine the best collection of vendors to build prototypes.Story here.
A Boeing-GDLS team was a front-runner for an interim SHORAD mission package, unveiling before any other vendor a solution in August 2017 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.
Using an Avenger system on top of the Stryker, which was the team’s solution, sought to take what was already in the Army’s inventory to create a system.
And a SHORAD demonstration at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, last September saw more possibilities for the interim solution including Rafael’s Iron Dome and South Korean defense firm Hanwha’s Flying Tiger.
But a dark horse emerged at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium, also in Huntsville, in March. Leonardo DRS showed an unassuming small-scale mock-up of its concept at its booth at the symposium that featured its partner Moog’s Reconfigurable Integrated-weapons Platform.
The platform would provide a choice of sites, direct-fire weapons and missiles, Ed House, DRS Land Systems’ business development manager, told Defense News at the show. The system would be able to integrate both Stinger and Longbow Hellfire missiles, requirements for the service’s IM-SHORAD solution.
It also would come equipped with a complement of direct-fire weapons and sites to include the M230 chain gun and the 7.62mm coaxial machine gun. But the solution also has non-kinetic defeat capabilities and Rada’s onboard multimission hemispheric radar.
And that dark horse has won the opportunity to provide the mission equipment package for the IM-SHORAD prototype program.
The system will also have Hellfire rails as well as an onboard sensor, according to Worshim.
The Army decided to choose DRS to provide the mission equipment package because of the flexibility of its reconfigurable turret, which allows for growth opportunities should the threat change or something else change that requires a new interceptor or another capability, Worshim said.
The solution also posed less intrusion to the existing Stryker platform, he added, and provided an increased level of protection as the crew reloads ammunition, which can be done under armor.
While the Avenger solution was deemed technically acceptable and met requirements, one of the reasons the Army decided against using the Avenger on Stryker as the solution was because the government felt it would require major modifications to the Stryker, according to Worshim.
The Army has a desire to keep the Stryker as common across the fleet as possible, Worshim said.
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| 30 Commando Royal Marines conducting mobility live fire training on Castlemartin Ranges as they take part in day and night shoots to test their abilities to provide force protection to deployed forces. |
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| A Challenger Armoured Repair and Recovery Vehicle (CRARRV) surges forward during an exercise in Canada in 2015. #ThrowbackThursday |
