Message Center

Communication through satellite link-ups has become an increasingly important element in the military’s bag of tricks, so having a portable satellite terminal can be a big asset.

That’s where an inflatable satellite terminal made by GATR Technologies in Huntsville, Ala., fits into the picture. The Department of the Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center has awarded GATR Technologies a one-year contract (with renewable options) for $26 million to deliver an indefinite quantity of the inflatable satellite terminals.

The terminal mounts a collapsible parabolic antenna on an inflated ball that can be set up on a satellite in 40 minutes. The reflector is available in 1.8 and 2.4 meter parabolic versions. “There’s a flexible reflective dish on the inside of the inflated ball,” says Dean Hudson GATR’s marketing director. “The ball has two chambers, and pressure is carefully managed to make sure the dish stays rigid and can support the feed mount which attaches to the outside of the unit. The larger the dish, the lower the power needed to transmit and receive.”

The advantage of the system is its portability, says Hudson. The system weighs 89 pounds ,and it fits into two checkable airline hard cases. “The system is reusable, quick to deploy, and easy to transport,” Hudson says. “After the recent earthquake in Haiti, we were the first to deploy a large aperture high bandwidth antenna. While others were trying to figure out how to get the crates onto a ship or cargo plane, we packed one into the back of a Cessna and flew in, helping the UN in support of search and rescue missions. The U.S Army had another of our units at the other end of the airport.”

Paul Gierow, president of GATR Technologies, says that besides Haiti, the firm has inflatable satellite systems in operation in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and Korea. “The unit enables missions that would not otherwise be able to be done, which is what makes it unique for military use,” Gierow says. “It’s transportability and reduced cube also are key and the unit opens up a lot of areas where users can get in quickly as opposed to waiting a week or two.”

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the mystery novel, Full Moon, and several books on historical military small arms.

…that MOAA is on Twitter!

And yup, we are! Follow @MilitaryOfficer on Twitter to get the scoop on military events, news, and other happenings in the military community. And all in 140 characters or less!

Fifty years is a long time to use any single design, but in the case of the Army’s T-10 parachute, it has stood the test of time. Yet change is inevitable and the Army’s new chute, the T-11, has undergone 3,200 test jumps and is starting to be fielded to units.

The T-11 — intended to be used in mass parachute assaults from altitudes as low as 500 feet above ground level — offers slower rates of descent, greater equipment carrying capacity, and decreased oscillation under the canopy. The maximum deployment altitude of the T-11 is 7,500 feet above sea level, and it can deploy at speeds up to 150 knots indicated airspeed.

The T-11 will replace more than 52,000 of the current chutes used by Army airborne units over a seven year period. Three firms — Aerostar International (Sioux Falls, S.D.), Airborne Systems North America (Santa Ana, Calif.), and BAE Systems (Phoenix, Ariz.), — share in the $200 million contract.

Greg Kraak, director of U.S. military programs for BAE Systems, calls the T-11 “something different” from its predecessor.

“The T-11 allows us to accommodate increased loads, which is necessary because the typical American’s physical size has grown in the last 50 years,” Kraak says. “And with the level of protective gear soldiers wear and carry, their protective plates, weapons, batteries, and equipment, they are heavier now when they come out of airplanes.”

BAE Systems will produce its first T-11 chutes in February and expects to deliver 2,200 by the end of the year. Approximately 10,000 T-11 parachutes are to be delivered to the Army by the end of 2010 by all three contractors.

Kraak points out that because the T-11 chute “brings the soldier down softer and with a slower rate of descent, it reduces the risk of injury, which is a great advancement over the older T-10 chute.”

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the mystery novel, Full Moon, and several books on historical military small arms.

Say the word “Vulcan” and many people immediately think of Mr. Spock, the pointy-eared human-Vulcan on the Star Trek television series and films. But for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Vulcan is a far different matter.

Vulcan is a propulsion system program to design, build, and ground test an engine capable of accelerating a full-scale hypersonic vehicle from rest to Mach 4+.

The Vulcan will be a constant volume combustion (CVC) engine and a full-scale turbine. Contractors working on the first phase of the engine development — Alliant TechSystems, General Electric, Rolls Royce, and United Technologies —  will be able to choose from CVC engine architectures such as pulsed detonation engines (PDEs), continuous detonation engines (CDEs), or other CVC engine architectures.

Contractors will use a current production turbine engine capable of operating above Mach 2, such as the F-100–229, the F-110–129, the F-119. or the F-414 engine.

Contrasted with traditional propulsion engines that burn fuel in a constant pressure manner, a CVC engine uses a combustion cycle based on combusting fuel in a constant volume manner. Such engine cycles, DARPA thinks, offer the potential for very significant performance improvements over conventional cycles and have the ability to operate statically through high Mach numbers and offer significant design flexibility.

But because CVC cycles typically are unsteady and incorporate multiple combustors and unique valving, several technical challenges have to be overcome.

These include developing low total pressure loss detonation initiation devices, low total pressure loss air valves, thermal management systems, efficient nozzles, and control systems, among others. However, DARPA believes recent advances will give the program a strong foundation.

A key program objective is to integrate the turbine engine into the Vulcan engine system with minimal modification to the turbine and to operate the turbine from rest to its upper Mach limit, and then cocoon it when not in use during flight. The CVC and turbine engines will share a common inlet and nozzle.

The Vulcan engine is expected to propel vehicles that could be used for payload transport, reconnaissance, or strike missions.

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the mystery novel, Full Moon, and several books on historical military small arms.

Bees swarm to protect themselves during a move to a new hive location — and the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) plans on using the concept of swarming for more offensive operations.

NAVAIR recently demonstrated autonomous operations of multiple swarms of unmanned air, ground and sea vehicles, unattended ground sensors, video cameras, and other devices.

The operations, conducted at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility on Wallops Island, Va., were powered by EdgeFrontier, a platform technology developed by Augusta Systems Inc. of Morgantown, W. Va., which was awarded a $1.3 million contract to test and enhance the intelligent network.

The EdgeFrontier network enables the vehicles and devices to act on their own, in an autonomous manner, based on the data sent from their own swarm or other swarms.

“This capability of managing multiple swarms of unmanned vehicles and sensors is a significant achievement,” says Patrick Esposito, Augusta Systems president and CEO.

He points out that during the demonstration, EdgeFrontier “enhanced real-time information sharing and response by enabling intelligent connectivity among the various unmanned vehicles and other surveillance devices. This integration was more robust than basic networking,” he adds, “as EdgeFrontier supported processing and sharing of data in the field and enabled the unmanned vehicles and other devices to respond to events based upon rules and policies configured within the software.”

In the Wallops Island demonstration, the EdgeFrontier system was used to integrate and normalize data and events and control functions from sensors and cameras on-board Aerosonde Mk3 Vice III small unmanned aircraft systems from AAI Corp., inside unmanned ground vehicles, and in the field with video cameras and unattended ground sensors from Crane Wireless Monitoring Solutions.

EdgeFrontier also created an operator system interface, featuring a map based display, relying on third-party geospatial software, for the real-time viewing of the unmanned vehicle locations and the status, as well as sensor and camera data.

Future military conflicts, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s SWARMS project, will see sensors and small, unmanned vehicles networked into groups that need little or no supervision from humans. The challenge will lie in managing large groups of such swarms.

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the historical mystery, Full Moon.

Can machines be taught to read? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) intends to find out with its Machine Reading Program.

DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory have awarded BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., $29.7 million in funding to develop an automated reading system that bridges the gap between naturally occurring text and the artificial intelligence reasoning systems that need such knowledge.

The initial use of such an intelligent learning system would be to automate military intelligence analysis, but BBN Technologies maintains the system would have civilian applications, such as providing access and automated analysis for libraries that have converted to digital texts.

Ralph Weischedel, principal investigator for the program, says, “One of our goals is to make knowledge available to machines much more cheaply, and the way to do that is by developing a machine that can read text and transform it into a formal representation the machine can understand.”

Weischedel notes the program is essentially a software project, using off-the-shelf hardware, that focuses on three subject matter areas — natural language understanding, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning.

“Our approach involves all three area and involves the premier scientists from those disciplines,” he says. “While we’ve just begun, we want to grow into a full-fledged reading system so a machine can solve problems and transmit knowledge, building on actual reasoning capability.”

Weischedel points out that because there are substantial software components to be built into the system, “we’re at the nuts and bolts stage of where they can communicate. And we’re coming up with applications program interfaces that allow the components we build to talk to customers’ system, so we’re at the level of basic software engineering integration.”

The Machine Reading Program has a five-year contract life.

The artificial intelligence systems that might benefit from machine reading are used in logistics, diagnostics, planning, prognostics, and situation awareness areas. However, because much of the material in such military systems is in natural language text, which artificial intelligence does not process, DARPA wants to bridge the gap that exists between those two information states.

“What we’re doing is groundbreaking,” Weischedel says. “There’s no software that can do this right now.”

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the historical mystery, Full Moon.

From the War in Iraq to the War in Afghanistan, U.S. military forces have been learning to deal with Improvised Explosive Devices (IED’s) in more technologically advanced ways, even as insurgents go back to simpler methods.

Learn about the latest attack strategies employed by terrorists, and how U.S. troops are learning to handle this ever-changing field in two stories from NPR News:

Battle Against IEDs Spreads From Iraq To Afghanistan
by JJ Sutherland

Despite High-Tech Help, Marines Confront IEDs
by Tom Bowman

Launching aircraft from a full-size aircraft carrier still is being done much as it was in World War II — by steam. But that is about to change.

The U.S. Navy is building an Electro-Magnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) that will provide a smoother launch with more launch energy potential.

While steam catapults require large and heavy maintenance-intensive ancillary systems, such as oil and hydraulic systems, water to brake the catapult, pumps, control systems and motors, EMALS has a smaller footprint and does away with most of steam’s auxiliary systems.

“EMALS basically is an electric motor, and while most are circular, ours is a linear electric motor,” says Navy Capt. Randy Mahr, program officer for the Aircraft Launch & Recovery Equipment Program Office PMA251. “These are motors that have been used on people movers, electric trains, and in the theme park industry, but the chief difference is ours is bigger and will accelerate things faster.”

Mahr says because EMALS has fewer moving parts than a steam catapult — essentially the armature that holds the plane on track is the only part that moves — the system will deliver higher reliability and require less maintenance, which will reduce the number of sailors required by about 20.

The EMALS catapults will look the same as steam-powered ones, Mahr says, but EMALS provides constant acceleration down the length of the catapult, putting less stress on the airplane. EMALS also handles launches of lighter and unmanned aircraft more smoothly, he adds.

Because EMALS must deliver so much electricity to launch an aircraft, it will require 12 motor generators on board to power the carrier’s four catapults. The CVN-78 Gerald R. Ford-class carrier, under construction in Newport News , Va., expected to launch in 2015, will be the first ship to use EMALS.

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the historical mystery, Full Moon.

The six o’clock position — directly to one’s rear — is the most difficult to watch and protect. So, in an effort to cover the “six,” the U.S. Army has begun outfitting M1 Abrams tanks and Stryker wheeled APCs with the Check-6 Infrared Rearview System made by BAE Systems. Check-6 allows a tank or APC crew to see behind the vehicle without leaving its confines.

The Check-6 system, developed through BAE’s work with thermal weapon sights, is essentially an infrared camera that fits into the lower section of a tail light housing. The camera installs without having to be welded or drilled and provides a field upgrade capability for existing and new vehicles.

The system provides day, night, and all-weather visibility.

“We found a space in the tail light and put a camera in there,” says Karen Spiller, BAE’s manager of media relations. “It’s pretty simple, but it’s a unique solution and something that the troops need.”

Spiller, who notes BAE is producing the units at its Austin, Texas, facility on a $45 million contract from General Dynamics, says BAE began delivering Check-6 systems in April. The company expects to deliver more than 12,000 of the units in the next decade. The system can be installed on 300,000 current and planned Army vehicles, she adds.

“Without the Check-6 system, the driver and crew of the vehicle cannot see what’s behind them without leaving the protective cover of their vehicle,” Spiller says. “Check-6 is basically a low cost solution that gives the vehicle’s crew a much-needed rearward situational awareness while reducing their exposure to deadly threats. Reliable visibility also increases vehicle safety and can save lives.”

Spiller notes that BAE has delivered 100 systems to Iraq and the response from troops has been positive.

“The soldiers love it,” she says. “It’s been credited with saving the lives of a U.S. Army colonel and a general in Iraq.”

BAE Systems also is seeking to develop Check-6 applicability to other types of vehicles.

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the historical mystery, Full Moon.

The United States Department of Defense just launched a revamped version of their Web site. They can now be found at Defense.gov.

New features include social networking tools, subscription services like RSS and podcasts, and the latest news from DoD. You can even give them your feedback on important issues, and submit questions to the Secretary of Defense. Check it out today!

What defense policy issues are most important to you?
What question would you like the Secretary to answer?
• Frequently Asked Questions

Love the new site? Hate it? We’d like to know what you think of the new Defense.gov site, too!