Here are your pics of the day; they show China’s latest infantry fighting vehicle equipped with new, thicker bolt-on armor up close and in action. These new tracs appear to be part of China’s new class of armored vehicles that recently entered service as an eventual replacement of the older Type 86 and 89 armored vehicles. Click here for older posts showing you the command post, engineering, recon and big gun versions of the trac.
Click through the jump for more pics.
“Britain had to plead with US to take part in Iran flotilla”
This headline from Britain’s telegraph newspaper shouldn’t shock anyone who has been following the latest developments of the British military.
Yup, both Britian and France apparently insisted on being included in the Pentagon’s military task force that is in the Middle East with the aim of discouraging Iran from trying any wild military moves. According to the Telegraph, the Pentagon simply didn’t see any need to include the Europeans in the mission to the Middle EAst.
It’s easy to see why; the contributions of Western Europe’s biggest military powers to the effort is pretty small, each nation supplied a frigate (the Royal Navy sent HMS Argyll, shown above) to join a U.S. carrier battle group. Symbolic.
Keep in mind that there are two American carrier strike groups in or near the Persian Gulf with a third on the way.
One source cited in the article described the Euros’ participation in the operation best; “classic willy waving.” Neither the French nor British wanted to appear irrelevant so they begged to tag along, according to the Telegraph.
If you want to see other ways the once-world dominating Royal Navy has been hurting lately, read this or this.
The Here’s what the Telegraph has to say:
Did Chinese cyber spying cause the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s cost spikes and production delays? That’s the question Pentagon budget officials are asking according to Aviation Week.
Chinese spies apparently hacked into secure conference calls and listened to meetings discussing the classified technologies aboard the jets. In particular, China may have stolen info about the F-35’s secure communications and antenna systems; leading to costly software rewrites and other redesigns to compromised parts of the plane.
The worst part, this problem isn’t just limited to the F-35, though the program’s size and the fact that it’s information systems were apparently designed without any concern for cyber espionage made it an easy target.
Anyone who has been following U.S.-China military relations and cyber warfare knows that China has been hacking into the networks of U.S. defense contractors and the Pentagon and rolling out brand new weapons like the J-20 stealth fighter.
Here’s the latest from Av Week:
As Iran and China and who knows who else scrambles to unlock the secrets of the U.S. Air Force’s stealthy RQ-170 Sentinel drone, North Korea is moving to reverse engineer some 1970s-vintage target drones.
Yup, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency is reporting that the North has bought up old MQM-107D Streaker target drones from Syria with the intent of developing high speed attack drones based on the tech. The hilariously named Streaker (its replacement, the BQM-167 Skeeter has a similarly amusing name if you’ve listened to hip hop anytime in the last decade) was developed in the 1970s for the U.S. Army to tow gun and missile targets. IN the late 1980s, Beechcraft proposed making a version of the Streaker that could carry electronic countermeasers and serve as a flying decoy over combat zones.
North Korea is developing unmanned attack aircraft using U.S. target drones purchased from the Middle East, a military source in Seoul said Sunday, indicating the aircraft will likely target the South.
“North Korea recently bought several U.S. MQM-107D Streakers from a Middle Eastern nation that appears to be Syria, and is developing unmanned attack aircraft based on them,” the source said on condition of anonymity.
The MQM-107D Streaker is a high-speed target drone used by the U.S. and South Korean militaries for testing guided missiles.
North Korea has conducted numerous tests on high-speed target drones mounted with high explosives, but has yet to master the technology, the source said, citing South Korean intelligence sources.
If it succeeds in developing the attack aircraft, the North appears likely to deploy them near the inter-Korean border to target South Korean troops stationed on border islands in the Yellow Sea.
Check this out. We’ve been wondering how the cancellation of the C-27J Joint Cargo Aircraft would impact the Army’s tactical airlift needs. While the Air Force says canning the JCA won’t hurt anyone, it looks like the Army is eying the optionally-manned K-MAX helo to carry realatively small but urgent loads of cargo to remote bases.
Now, the Marines have been experimenting with using the K-MAX for this role in Afghanistan for a while now and the Army is very interested in seeing how that effort goes, according to AvWeek.
And you can bet the Army is keeping a close eye on the program. In August, the service awarded the Lockheed/Kaman team $47 million to continue work on the K-MAX program—testing was done this past fall at Ft. Benning—while wrapping up a larger study on a full range of unmanned cargo options.
The tests will help the service build a formal program of record for an unmanned vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capability, a program which we already know Textron/AAI is very interested in. Steve Reid, the company’s senior vp and general manager for unmanned systems says that the company has signed a license agreement with Carter Aviation for a manned, four-person rotary winged asset that Textron is working on turning into an unmanned asset that the company feels “would do the cargo mission that’s being talked about” quite nicely. The Navy has also been busy with other unmanned options, including awarding Northrop Grumman a contract in September to supply twenty-eight MQ-8C Fire Scout VTOL-UAS’s (based on Bell’s 407 helicopter airframe), which the company has touted for its cargo-lugging capabilities.
Very interesting.
Via SNAFU
