Whither the US military

[tomahawk6]

The quality of the pilot is the big difference maker. Most of our potential adversaries dont log enough hours to make quality pilots IMO.

EA-18G Smokes An F-22

March 1, 2009: An interesting bit of intelligence misdirection played out at a recent public display of electronic warfare aircraft at Andrews Air Force base, outside of Washington DC. One of the items on display was an EA-18G electronic warfare aircraft, and under the cockpit, where there are normally little silhouettes of aircraft destroyed (silhouette of the aircraft downed) , or bombing missions flown (silhouette of a bomb), there was the silhouette of an American F-22. When pressed, navy personnel watching over the aircraft would only reveal that the EA-18G had "virtually" shot down an F-22 in a training exercise. Now, normally, this would be a big deal, because the F-22 is stealthy, highly maneuverable and the top fighter in the world. The EA-18G is based on the F-18G, a pretty potent aircraft, introduced a decade ago, and generally considered somewhat better than the F-15. But on paper, the F-22 should be able to make short work of an F-18E, or any F-15. 

What was implied by all this was that the EA-18G used some combination of the many electronic warfare devices it carries, to help get the drop on an F-22. Whether this is true, or not (and is just an intel misdirection scam to confuse potential enemies), it does get people wondering about what kind of electronic warfare gear would put an F-22 at a disadvantage in a fight. Anything is possible, given the large number of electronic warfare devices carried on an EA-18G, but what is definitely probable are efforts to keep potential enemies confused, or distracted, when it comes to exactly what an EA-18G can do, with or without an F-22 in the neighborhood.

 

[MarkOttawa]

Atlantic also has a video:

The View from the Cockpit
Pilots at Alaska's Elmendorf Air Force Base share their views on how to maintain American air superiority.
http://podcasts.theatlantic.com/2009/02/the-view-from-the-cockpit.php

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Something the article does not deal with: if the F-35 can deliver a dominant air-to-air capability versus fourth-generation (and 4 1/2) fighters, then the case for a considerably larger F-22 fleet is basically moot.

But excerpts from Defense Industry Daily:
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/The-F-35s-Air-to-Air-Capability-Controversy-05089/

...
The clear implication of the RAND study is that the F-35 is very likely to wind up facing many more “up close and personal” opponents than its proponents suggest, while dealing with beyond-visual-range infared-guided missiles as an added complication. Unlike the F-22, the F-35 is described as “double inferior” to modern SU-30 family fighters within visual range combat; thrust and wing loading issues are noted, all summed up in one RAND background slide as “can’t [out]turn, can’t [out]climb, can’t [out]run.”..

The F-35’s problem is that concrete reasons could be advanced to explain why Spey’s F-22 aerodynamic analysis parameters were wrong, such as the Raptor’s thrust vectoring and controllable tail surfaces to offset Spey’s unidimensional wing loading analysis, the tactical implications of having the ability to cruise above Mach 1 without afterburners, and stealth that has defeated AWACS aircraft and worked against international fighter pilots even at relatively short ranges. F-22 pilots have also racked up incredibly lopsided kill ratios in American and international exercises, far in excess of “normal” performance for new aircraft, that back up their pilots’ performance claims.

This is all much harder to do for the F-35, which remains a developmental aircraft and lacks key aerodynamic features like combat thrust vectoring (Harrier, SU-30 family, MiG-29OVT, F-22A), canards for fast “point and shoot” manevers with high off-boresight short-range missiles (some SU-30 family, Rafale, Eurofighter, Gripen), or loaded supersonic cruise (F-22A). The F-35 has also been designed from the outset to feature less stealth than the F-22A, though it will be stealthier than contemporary 4.5 generation European and Russian aircraft. Aircraft intake size and hence volume are set unless the aircraft is redesigned, and wing size, angle and loading can all be observed.

The F-35’s explicit design goal has been stated as being the F-16’s equal in in air to air combat, at a time when the F-16’s future ability to survive in that arena is questioned. The question naturally arises: what special features give the F-35 a unique ability to prevail against the kind of advanced, upgraded 4.5 generation and better fighters that it can be expected to face between its induction, and a likely out of service date around 2050 or later?..

Mark
Ottawa

 

[a_majoor]

Technological changes should be shifting the force structure:

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/02/obselete-military.html

WE ARE BUILDING A MILITARY SUITABLE FOR THE WAR BEFORE LAST

I was reading an article elsewhere which suggested that "there's some nasty conspiracy theories going around about the surprising lack of funding for the thus-far-successful Airborne Laser program. Once lasers get rolling, combat aircraft suddenly become a LOT less viable...". the conspiracy being that the US Air force would only be human if they were leery about seeing a weapon developed that could put them out of business.

We have also been seeing increasing numbers of cases where kids with laser pens have been seriously interfering with pilots landing at international airports. Scale that up & I find you get....

The Tactical High-Energy Laser, or THEL, is a laser developed for military use, also known as the Nautilus laser system. The mobile version is the Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser, or MTHEL.....

..was initiated by a memorandum of agreement between the United States and the Government of Israel on July 18, 1996. The THEL is a high-energy laser weapon system that uses proven laser beam generation technologies, proven beam-pointing technologies, and existing sensors and communication networks to provide a new active defense capability in counter air missions....THEL's low cost-per-kill (about $3,000 per kill, as opposed to the $444,000 cost of a Rolling Airframe Missile....

In 2000 and 2001 THEL shot down 28 Katyusha artillery rockets and 5 artillery shells.

On November 4, 2002, THEL shot down an incoming artillery shell. A mobile version has completed successful testing. During a test conducted on August 24, 2004 the system successfully shot down multiple mortar rounds....

Anything that can shoot down shells can clearly knock down aircraft which are larger, slower & stay there longer. Look at the time frame here as well - this was done in 2004, which in terms of high tech electronics is a generation ago. If it could be put on a trailer back then it could probably be put in a van next year. Think what could be put on a destroyer!

I don't know exactly what armed forces are going to look like when such things are widely deployed & I'm sure that is worrying the USAF too. However history is full of nations that invested purely in the sort of weapons they had in the last war & of how they lost the next one. There are further articles on laser weapons here but most of them are not currently practical like THEL.

Talking of which Britain's military flag carriers on which we are spending billions are to be...

The new UK CVF Royal Navy aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, are expected to enter service in 2016 and 2018.

CVF will displace 65,000t, a size between the USA's 100,000t Nimitz Class and the French 43,000t Charles de Gaulle Class aircraft carriers, and three times larger than the 20,000t UK Invincible class carriers.....

In December 2008, the UK MoD announced that the originally planned in-service dates of the carriers, 2014 and 2016, would be set back by about two years (2016 and 2018) to match the entry into service of the joint combat aircraft, the F-35B.

Anybody want to guess how, together they would do against one Chinese/Indian/Brazilian/Israeli/Singaporean destroyer armed with a heavy duty version of this laser & a few spare exocets? Exactly what happened to the previous Prince of Wales battleship.

I think we should cancel these ships & use the money to develop some new technology.

This is also going to (or perhaps already has) made the SDI programme realistic. After all it only requires scaling up & if the batteries on a truck can destroy incoming shells a 1GW nuclear reactor, diverted for a few seconds, could destroy incoming ICBMs or even spy satellites.

One happy result of this is that the threat of a military dictatorship based on the fact that in a space war those in space always have the physical high ground (common to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Space Cadet) may be gone because lasers are not affected by gravity.

And an entirely different piece of military hardware is this exoskeleton enabling somebody to run at 10 mph or carry a 200lb backpack which, if the bugs have been worked out of it will revolutionise infantry war & ultimately is a step towards the battle suits of the aforementioned Starship Troopers.

It is known as the HULC (Human Universal load Carrier so no copyright infringment) & the video is here.

There are other directions in which military capacity is changing - computer war, genetically modified diseases, miniaturised remotely handled bombs & assassination devices & I'm sure many more. None of these will, fortunately, enhance the power of scientifically backward terrorists like al Quaeda, quite the opposite. But they certainly will not enhance the power of states which think that "punching above our weight" in purely conventional weaponry, rather than scientific & economic progress will maintain a "top nation" status. History does not come to an end

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2009/Q1/mail559.html#Sunday

Well worth reading. The future composition of the fleet depends in large part on what missions it must accomplish. Before we do that we need to answer hard questions about what are our responsibilities, and where. For example, do we still have an interest in Taiwan, or is it time to give notice that the treaty with Taiwan will run out? The US Navy has always been involved in freedom of the seas and free passage for all nations; we certainly will continue that, but what does that take?

Does it require great carrier groups to carry out the foreign policy of a wealthy republic> How far must we be able to project power? Would it be more cost effective to develop nuclear power plants or nuclear powered warships? These are the hard questions, and I am not sure anyone is asking them.

Unlike standing armies, a solid Navy has never been considered a political problem for the republic: the questions are effectiveness and costs vs. benefits and missions.

One of the hard questions is the survivability of present design warships in different levels of warfare. But just as different missions require different kinds of army, different levels of warfare require different kinds of Navy. Piracy suppression missions are not best carried out by large carrier groups. Protection of the coasts against a nuclear-armed invader is an entirely different mission from protection of American interests in a Banana Republic or the Middle East. To what extent will be be involved in "humanitarian" missions, and is regime change of a horrible dictatorship that devours its own people but  is no threat to the people of the US an appropriate mission for the United States? We can all agree that disaster mitigation is a good thing, but how large a Navy should we maintain for the entirely predictable disasters that will take place in volcanic/earthquake typhoon regions? And so forth.

We need a new strategic survey on the future of sea warfare; a Strategy of Technology that looks into survivability and effectiveness in different combat environments and levels of warfare. I do not know how much of this is being done, but I don't see many results.

 

[MarkOttawa]

How many wars, of what type, to prepare to wage (usual copyright disclaimer)?

Pentagon Rethinking Old Doctrine on 2 Wars
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/washington/15military.html?ref=todayspaper

WASHINGTON — The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.

For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere.

To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.

A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama.

In an interview with National Public Radio last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made it clear that the Pentagon was beginning to reconsider whether the old two-wars assumption “makes any sense in the 21st century” as a guide to planning, budgeting and weapons-buying.

The discussion is being prompted by a top-to-bottom strategy review that the Pentagon conducts every four years, as required by Congress and officially called the Quadrennial Defense Review. One question on the table for Pentagon planners is whether there is a way to reshape the armed forces to provide for more flexibility in tackling a wide range of conflicts.

Among other questions are the extent to which planning for conflicts should focus primarily on counterinsurgency wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what focus remains on well-equipped conventional adversaries like China and Iran, with which Navy vessels have clashed at sea.

Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with “a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct.”

“We have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security,” Mr. Donnelly said. “The hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa.”

But Mr. Donnelly cautioned that the review now under way faced a familiar challenge. “If there has been one consistent thread through all previous defense reviews,” he said, “it is that once the review is done, there is an almost immediate gap between reality and force planning. Reality always exceeds force planning.”

It is already is obvious, a senior Pentagon official said, that the Defense Department will “need to rebalance our strategy and our forces” in a way that reflects lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq. Exactly how that happens will be debated for months to come and will then play out in decisions involving hundreds of billions of dollars, involving the size of the Army, as well as such things as the number of aircraft carriers and new long-range bombers.

Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist policy organization, said that senior Pentagon officials knew that the new review needed to more fully analyze what the rest of the government could bring to national security.

“We have Gates and others saying that other parts of the government are underresourced and that the DoD should not be called on to do everything” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “That’s a good starting point for this — to ask and at least begin answering where it might be better to have other parts of the government get stronger and do a bigger share, rather than the Department of Defense.”

Among the refinements to the two-wars strategy the Pentagon has incorporated in recent years is one known as “win-hold-win” — an assumption that if two wars broke out simultaneously, the more threatening conflict would get the bulk of American forces while the military would have to defend along a second front until reinforcements could arrive to finish the job.

Another formulation envisioned the United States defending its territory, deterring hostility in four critical areas of the world and then defeating two adversaries in major combat operations, but not at exactly the same time.

The Bush administration’s most recent strategy, completed four years ago, added requirements that the military be equipped to deal with a broad range of missions in addition to war-fighting, including defeating violent extremists, defending American territory, helping countries at strategic crossroads and preventing terrorists and adversaries from obtaining biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

But Pentagon officials are now asking whether the current reality, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq already outlasting World War II, really fits any of those models. “One of the things that stresses our force greatly is long-duration operations,” the senior Pentagon official said. “It’s the requirement to continue to rotate forces in over many, many rotations that really strains a lot of the force.”

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

SecDef Gates gets really serious about today's wars instead of all-round perfection for all possible wars.  Over to Congress and the lobbyists (usual copyright disclaimer):

Big cuts seen for F-22, other big weapon programs
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5idcsRSLw6_ppJCceAZXPgvBEfojgD97D8FEG1

The nation should stop pouring billions into futuristic, super-expensive F-22 jet fighters, pull the plug on new presidential helicopters and put the money into systems U.S. soldiers can use against actual foes, Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared Monday.

Major overhaul plans laid out by the Obama administration's Pentagon chief would slash several giant weapons programs — and thousands of civilian jobs that go with them. With recession unemployment rising, Congress may balk at many of the cuts in Gates' proposed $534 billion budget for the coming year.

Still, despite all the talk of cuts, the total figure would rise from $513 billion for 2009, and Gates spoke of using money more wisely, not asking for less.

Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, said he is gearing Pentagon buying plans to the smaller, lower-tech battlefields the military is facing now and expects in coming years. He also said he hopes lawmakers will resist temptations to save outdated system that keep defense plants humming in their home districts.

The Pentagon, he said, wants to move away from both outdated weapons systems conceived in the Cold War and futuristic programs aimed at super-sophisticated foes.

Gates said he would expand spending on equipment that targets insurgents, such as $2 billion more on surveillance and reconnaissance equipment. That would include funding for 50 new Predator drones [emphasis added] such as those that have rained down missiles on militants hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

"We must rebalance this department's programs in order to institutionalize and finance our capabilities to fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead," he said.

Major programs facing cuts include the F-22 Raptor, the military's most expensive fighter plane at $140 million apiece. An action movie come to life, sleek, fast and nearly invisible, the Raptor is ill-suited to deterring roadside bombs in Iraq or hunting insurgents who vanish into the Afghan mountains.

Gates says the Pentagon won't continue the F-22 program beyond 187 planes already planned. Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed, the nation's largest defense contractor, has said almost 95,000 jobs could be at stake.

Gates also said no to a new fleet of Marine One presidential helicopters [emphasis added] — with a price tag of $13 billion, more than double the original budget. He said new helicopters would be needed at some point but he wants time to figure out a better solution.

A $160 billion Army system of combat vehicles, flying sensors and bomb-hunting robots [FCS] would be reduced, too, as would plans to build a shield of missile interceptors to defend against attacks by rogue countries [emphasis added]. The Navy would revamp plans to buy new destroyers.

A new communications satellite would be scrapped, and a program for a new Air Force transport plane would be ended [bomber I think, see below].

Congress reacted cautiously.

Large defense contractors and their supporters on Capitol Hill scrambled to assess how the changes would affect them. Gates had demanded total secrecy during weeks of Pentagon discussions, even requiring senior military officers to swear in writing that they would not talk out of school.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, called the proposals an important and overdue attempt to balance want and need at the Defense Department.

"However, the committee will carefully review the department's recommendations in the context of current and future threats when we receive the detailed fiscal year 2010 budget request," Murtha said.

Some programs would grow.

Gates proposed speeding up production of the F-35 fighter jet [emphasis added, to reduce per unit cost of early aircraft I suspect]. That program could end up costing $1 trillion to manufacture and maintain 2,443 planes. The military would buy more speedy ships that can operate close in to land [LCS]. And more money would be spent outfitting special forces troops who can hunt down insurgents [emphasis added].

The recommendations are the product of Gates' frustration at weapons systems that take on lives of their own, even when their missions are no longer relevant or costs balloon. The frustration extends to military services and defense contractors accustomed to measuring success by how big a piece of the budget pie they can claim.

The Pentagon said it could not predict how much money Gates' proposals might save, if any. Gates read off a hit list of programs to be canceled or trimmed, but the Pentagon did not release details.

FACTBOX: Pentagon weapon plan's winners and losers
http://uk.reuters.com/article/usPoliticsNews/idUKTRE5356G220090406

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced on Monday a proposed 2010 budget for the Pentagon that makes changes to a broad swath of big-ticket weapon programs. If adopted by the White House and Congress his recommendations would:

-- Scrap a new presidential helicopter designed and built by Lockheed Martin Corp and its European partner AgustaWestland, a unit of Italy's Finmeccanica SpA. Gates said the program had nearly doubled in cost to over $13 billion and was six years behind schedule.

-- Restructure the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) modernization program run by Boeing Co and Science Applications International Corp, a program valued at $160 billion, scrapping a ground vehicle program valued at $87 billion.

-- Move work on three DDG-1000 destroyers to the General Dynamics Corp shipyard, while building more earlier-version DDG-51 destroyers at the Northrop Grumman Corp shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

-- Scrap plans for now for a new cruiser warship, which was initially planned to be based on the DDG-1000 design.

-- Cancel plans to build a new long-range bomber by 2018 [emphasis added--!!!], a $10-billion-plus program for which Lockheed and Boeing had teamed up to compete against Northrop.

-- Cut $10 billion in annual funding for missile defense programs by $1.4 billion. The Pentagon would cancel work on a second airborne laser being developed by Boeing and not fund additional interceptor purchases. But it would add funding for more regional missile defense projects run by Lockheed and Raytheon Co.

-- Buy four more F-22 fighter jets built by Lockheed Martin for a total of 187, but far less than the 60 additional fighters requested by the Air Force, while accelerating funding for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built by Lockheed, to $11.2 billion in fiscal 2010.

-- Buy 31 more F/A-18 fighter jets built by Boeing in fiscal 2010 to cover an expected Navy aviation gap until the Navy begins receiving larger numbers of F-35 fighters.

-- Terminate a new multibillion-dollar Transformational Satellite program aimed at improving military communications, a program for which Lockheed and Boeing have already been doing research work. Instead the Pentagon would buy two more Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites built by Lockheed.

-- Cancel a $15 billion competition for new Air Force [combat] search and rescue helicopters [emphasis added] for which Lockheed, Boeing and Sikorsky Aircraft, a unit of United Technologies Corp were competing. The Pentagon would review whether the requirement for the helicopter still existed, or if there should be a joint program for all the military services.

Mark
Ottawa

 

[tomahawk6]

Gates announcement was overall pretty good considering he is working for a President that feels the US is the problem in the world. Democrat presidents since the end of the Vietnam has cut the defense budget its what they do. Gates is trying to avoid Carter/Clinton cuts that created a hollow force. More cuts are on the way after Gates steps aside for the next SecDef. Kind of hard to tell the public we need to cut $60b from the defense budget when we are spending trillions on nationalizing the economy.

 

[MarkOttawa]

The overall picture:
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-pentagon-budget7-2009apr07,0,3973600.story?track=ntothtml

...
Under his plan, 50% of the budget would be used to counter conventional threats, with about 10% going to go irregular warfare and 40% to weapons useful to both types of conflicts.

"I'm not trying to have irregular capabilities take the place of the conventional capabilities," Gates said. "I'm just trying to get the irregular guys to have a seat at the table."..

Lots more detail at Defense Industry Daily, some excerpts:
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Gates-Lays-Out-Key-FY-2010-Budget-Recommendations-05367/

...
C-17 Globemaster III heavy-lift strategic transport, ended at 205 USAF planes. Production to end at the end of 2010, absent further foreign orders. Note that earmarked Congressional appropriations have been the C-17 program’s sole source of support for several years now – and that Congress has little confidence in the Pentagon mobility studies used to justify program termination [that should concentrate wonderfully the minds of those in Europe facing big problems caused by A400M delays]...
http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/77597/post-829610.html#msg829610

LPD 11 and the Mobile Landing Platform. Think of the MLP as a ship whose back half doubles as a pier in the ocean. Flo-Flo (float-on, float off) MLP designs have also been suggested. “We will delay amphibious ship and sea-basing programs such as the 11th Landing Platform Dock (LPD) ship and the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) SHIP to FY11 in order to assess costs and analyze the amount of these capabilities the nation needs.”

Aircraft Carriers. Moves to a 5-year build cycle for CVN-21 carriers, which will drop the total fleet number to 10 after 2040. Assuming that funds are provided for all of the carriers envisioned, despite a looming shockwave of medical and social security entitlements. The schedule change would delay CVN 79, but Gates did not formally announce any delay to CVN 78 Gerald R. Ford.

Army Brigade Combat Teams. The plan to grow the Army to 48 BCTs will stop at 45 – but the number of troops will not change. This will have follow-on consequences for basing and infrastructure...

Special Forces. “To grow our special operations capabilities, we will increase personnel by more than 2,800 or five percent and will buy more special forces-optimized lift, mobility, and refueling aircraft.”

Those aircraft expenditures could be substantial. Lockheed Martin’s C-130J Hercules, which the Pentagon tried to cancel several years ago over cost issues, is the likely winner – but not a certain one. Alenia’s smaller Joint Cargo Aircraft winner, the C-27J, has been discussed as a mobility and gunship aircraft. Less obviously military options like business or regional jets are also under consideration for the mobility mix.

Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). In addition to the Predator and propeller plane winners, R&D will rise for ISR enhancements, and for experimental platforms aimed at today’s problems. SecDef Gates has been focusing on this area for some time.

Light ISR Propeller Planes. The unheralded stars of Task Force ODIN, with capabilities that Gates has said will be needed all over the world for the forseeable future. The King Air 350-ISR turboprops will probably be the biggest winners...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Nicely timed, with the F-35 hacking story all around:
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-04/hackers-breach-joint-strike-fighter-program

New Military Command to Focus on Cybersecurity
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124035738674441033.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The Obama administration plans to create a new military command to coordinate the defense of Pentagon computer networks and improve U.S. offensive capabilities in cyberwarfare, according to current and former officials familiar with the plans.

The initiative will reshape the military's efforts to protect its networks from attacks by hackers, especially those from countries such as China and Russia. The new command will be unveiled within the next few weeks, Pentagon officials said.

The move comes amid growing evidence that sophisticated cyberspies are attacking the U.S. electric grid and key defense programs. A page-one story in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that hackers breached the Pentagon's biggest weapons program, the $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter, and stole data. Lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote to the defense secretary Tuesday requesting a briefing on the matter.

Lockheed Martin Corp., the project's lead contractor, said in a statement Tuesday that it believed the article "was incorrect in its representation of successful cyber attacks" on the F-35 program. "To our knowledge, there has never been any classified information breach," the statement said. The Journal story didn't say the stolen information was classified.

President Barack Obama, when he was a candidate for the White House, pledged to elevate cybersecurity as a national-security issue, equating it in significance with nuclear and biological weapons. A White House team reviewing cybersecurity policy has completed its recommendations, including the creation of a top White House cyberpolicy official. Details of that and other proposals are still under debate. A final decision from the president is expected soon.

A draft of the White House review steps gingerly around the question of how to improve computer security in the private sector, especially key infrastructure such as telecommunications and the electricity grid. The document stresses the importance of working with the private sector and civil-liberties groups to craft a solution, but doesn't call for a specific government role, according to a person familiar with the draft.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to announce the creation of a new military "cyber command" after the rollout of the White House review, according to military officials familiar with the plan.

The Pentagon has several command organizations structured according to both geography and operational responsibility. Central Command, for example, oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Special Operations Command is responsible for operations involving elite operatives such as Navy Seals.

The cyber command is likely to be led by a military official of four-star rank, according to officials familiar with the proposal. It would, at least initially, be part of the Pentagon's Strategic Command, which is currently responsible for computer-network security and other missions...

A mildly related post by Damian Brooks at The Torch:

e-warfare
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2009/04/e-warfare.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Clever Bob:

Gates defuses the Defense budget battle
Experts say Robert M. Gates' careful campaign and timing has outflanked lawmakers and lobbyists as he plans sweeping changes in military spending.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-pentagon-budget25-2009apr25,0,5862633.story?track=ntothtml

April 25, 2009

Reporting from Washington — In a carefully orchestrated campaign, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appears poised to push through what many consider a historic remaking of the military with relative ease, averting an expected battle royal with contractors and lawmakers.

"It really looks like he has played his cards well on this," said Todd Harrison, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank.

Gates unveiled a plan this month to shift money from big weapons systems including the F-22 fighter plane and invest more in programs geared toward unconventional conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

So far, lobbyists and lawmakers have been uncharacteristically quiet.

"My general perception is that Gates is going to get his way for 90% of these decisions," said Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Analysts credit the relative calm to Gates' policies and timing: He imposed strict Pentagon secrecy, making aides and commanders sign nondisclosure agreements, and he announced the plan just as Congress was starting a two-week break.

Gates' status as the Obama Cabinet's sole holdover from the Bush administration also has given his decisions an air of nonpartisanship, making it difficult for critics to charge political motives were at play. His proposal has won praise from President Obama and was endorsed by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

The Defense secretary even took steps to preclude opposition. For instance, in calling to cancel a new generation of Army tanks and transports, he promised to fund designs for different vehicles that would meet future needs...

Mark
Ottawa