News Story: Red Flag gives F-35A its toughest test yet

By: Valerie Insinna

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. — What happens when the F-35A goes to its very first Red Flag, the Air Force’s premier air-to-air training exercise? 

The answer, according to U.S. military and international participants, is that the event itself becomes more challenging than ever, with a greater number of more capable aggressors outfitted with advanced weaponry. 

Although the Marine Corps operated its short takeoff, vertical landing variant in the event last year, Red Flag 17-1 marks the debut of the conventional F-35A operated by the Air Force. After almost two weeks, 13 joint strike fighters from Hill Air Force Base in Utah have flown 110 sorties, said Lt. Col. George Watkins, 34th Fighter Squadron commander.  

“It’s a much more difficult adversary that we are fighting against here as a team than we would have fought against a year and a half ago, when I was here last,” Watkins said, referencing his previous Red Flag event, which he flew in as an F-16 pilot. 

“They have stepped up the number of red air that we’re fighting — the number of aggressor aircraft that are fighting against us — the amount of jamming and stuff that they’re providing against us, the skill level of the adversary that they are trying to replicate, as well as the surface-to-air missile threat.” 

Read the full story at DefenseNews

News Report: New Strategy Emphasizes High-end Surface Warfare

By: Sam LaGrone

A new strategy for the surface force – released today – creates an outline for a navy that anticipates a return to high-end warfare it hasn’t known since the Cold War.

The document will fill in gaps for several pushes the surface establishment has announced over the last two years to create a cohesive path forward for the force.

“There was a picture that we were building, we just had to get that picture into focus. You want to be impatient, you want it into focus as rapidly as you can, but you may focus on the wrong picture,” Vice Adm. Tom Rowden told USNI News last week.

“This is our North Star, if you will. All the conversations we’ve had over the last three, four years, and starts to focus them in a single direction that will drive resources.”

For Rowden, that direction is sea control.

News Story: False Alarm May Have Triggered U.S. Navy Warship's Missile Defense System

USS Mason (Image: Wiki Commons)

By: Andrew Tilghman

After several days of investigation, the U.S. Navy believes an urgent warning about an incoming missile aboard a destroyer Saturday night may have been a false alarm, defense officials said Tuesday. 

The guided-missile destroyer Mason, underway in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, detected a “possible inbound missile,” prompting the ship’s commander to activate the missile defense system and launch interceptor missiles, defense officials said. 

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said the commander’s decision to fire the missile defense system was “appropriate,” but there has been no confirmation of an inbound missile posing a threat to the U.S. ship. 

“We have not actually confirmed that that happened,” Davis said Tuesday. 

“We are not ready to call it an 'attack',” he said. “We are going back and reviewing the information to see what happened.” 

Read the full story at DefenseNews

News Story: New Army Long-Range Missile Might Kill Ships, Too - LRPF

MGM-140 ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile
System) [Image: Wiki Commons]

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.

“Outranged and outgunned” by Russian and Chinese missiles, the US Army wants a new long-range artillery rocket of its own. The nascent Long-Range Precision Fires program could do much more than replace the 25-year-old ATACMS missile, however. LRPF could become a linchpin of what the Army is calling Multi-Domain Battle, extending ground-based artillery’s reach not only to unprecedented ranges — hitting distant targets once reserved for airstrikes — but out to sea.

Why does the Army need to do this? Since 1991, when the Soviet Union fell and ATACMS entered service, the Army has largely neglected the artillery, so much so that one group of disgruntled officers called it a “dead branch walking.” Ground troops relied on the Air Force and Navy to dominate their own domains, prevent enemy airstrikes, and provide firepower on demand. But Russia, China, and even lesser powers like Iran have invested heavily in long-range, land-based anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to keep the US Air Force and Navy at bay. That means Army forces may have to bring their own in-house heavy firepower to the fight — not only to support its own units on land, but to help out the other services in the air and sea.

That’s where Multi-Domain Battle comes in. Against a high-tech foe with so-called Anti-Access/Area Denial defenses, where US fighters risk being shot down, the best way to take out an enemy airbase, missile battery or command post may be with a long-range land-based missile of one’s own. Likewise, when fighting an A2/AD adversary over a relatively narrow waterway — the Baltic and Black Seas in Europe, the East and South China Seas in Asia — the best way to destroy the enemy fleet may be from unsinkable missile bases on the land.

Read the full story at BreakingDefense

News Story: What Lessons Do China’s Island Bases Offer The US Army?

High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HiMARS)

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.

WASHINGTON: If ground forces are obsolete, why are the Chinese bothering to build all those artificial islands in the South China Sea? The answer to that is key to the US Army’s emerging vision of its future role, a complex combination of old-fashioned close combat, resilient wireless networks, and advanced long-range weapons that extend the Army’s reach well beyond the land.

China is “building land… to project power outward from land into the maritime and aerospace domains,” the Army’s chief futurist, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, argued yesterday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Much like the Japanese in World War II, he said, the Chinese see island bases as a means to dominate the seas and airspace around them, allowing them to sink ships and down aircraft. The Chinese strategy has only become more effective in the modern era with the proliferation of long-range precision-guided missiles.

The US Army needs to do as the Chinese have done, McMaster said. For decades, the Air Force and Navy have projected power onto the land to support the Army with airstrikes,reconnaissance, and jamming: Now the Army must develop the capability to project power “cross-domain” from the land into the air, sea, space, and cyberspace to support the Air Force and Navy.

Read the full story at DefenseNews

Think Tank: Filling the gap - Anti-ship missiles and the Royal Australian Navy

Christopher Cowan

On 4 February, US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that the US Navy had developed a new anti-ship missile (ASM)—the Standard Missile 6 (SM-6). But that ‘new’ missile isn’t as new as it might seem. The SM-6 has been in limited service with the US Navy as its most capable long range anti-air and anti-missile weapons system since 2013. The SM-6 is estimated to have a range of over 200 nautical miles (370km) and flies at Mach 3.5, giving it the ability to hit an adversary at a long range with little to no warning from defensive radars.

That news comes at a welcome time for many around the world lamenting the US Navy’s lack of a long-range ASM capability. Since retiring the anti-ship variant of the venerable AGM-65 Tomahawk in 1994, the US Navy has been in want of a long range supersonic ASM and has relied upon the slower and shorter ranged RGM-84 Harpoon and SM-2 (the SM-6’s predecessor which had a limited anti-ship capability) missiles to satisfy its surface-to-surface requirements. However, the US Navy isn’t the only state with this capability gap. Years of disinterest in surface warfare, caused by a lack of credible adversaries, have left many western navies (including Australia) far behind the likes of China and Russia in the development of those types of missiles.