A source passed along these briefing slides after I ran the Imminent Fury piece yesterday, and I thought I’d share them with DT readers to slice and dice.
The presentation is basically an in-depth look at what the Navy’s Irregular Warfare Office has been doing since it was established in 2008 to act as a sort of Navy version of the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group.
Aside from the Imminent Fury brief, which is slightly different from what my sources told me about the origins and goal of the program, there are some semi-interesting UAV and UUV initiatives they’re working on, primarily for air-to-sub intel gathering.
But on one of the last slides we find something pretty interesting — and I may be behind the curve on this, but it’s something that I think that MarSoc has been wrestling with as well. It’s a call for 32 more MH-60S Knighthawk special operation helicopters. Now the brief shows several options for how to organize those additional aircraft, including the establishment of a two new dedicated Navy special operations aviation squadrons (which makes sense to me since they have SWICCs). The last alternative is to not buy any more helos and just fly 6,400 more flight hours on the ones they have — which doesn’t sound like much of an option.
So take a look at the brief and let me know what you think.
NX-Irregular Warfare Office
– Christian
Christian, I am amazed that you continue to drudge up information on IF. While all(most) of the information you have mentioned and provided is unclassified, that does not mean that it needs to be spread around. You of all people should know how the internet can directly affect the battle field. For those readers who do not believe this, you are simply ignorant.
Yeah, in the face Concerned.
@Concerned
someone needs to read US constituion.. btw have you ever read this “unclassified information”? i mean READ not “WATCHING AT OLD LETTERS”..
Interesting post. I really like that embedded power point viewer. Makes reading those things so much faster.
There’s that Brazilian prop job again. I’ll get over it in time but I still prefer to “shop local”.
I’m almost surprised not to find a manned or unmanned lighter-than-air platform. I guess the Akron disaster still gets taught somewhere.
Good Afternoon Folks,
Two comments. First “unclassified” means just that. I have often wondered why some information is classified especially that dealing with the enemy after its operation use is no longer relevant, the enemy already knows we know so the only community being kept in the dark is the American public. After looking at the slide show Christian put I didn’t see anything not seen before. This appears to be an edited Power Point presentation, that might be give to a local Lions Club, or a Business Roundtable.
The second issue is the Operational objectives of getting involved in Transnational Activities and Law Enforcement Activities, this is a grey area where the military tends to get into trouble and might be best turned over to another agency.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
I like Mullins’ style; there aren’t enough officers like him out there.
For this, the ‘GN boats need a better defensive capability and that means both UIM missiles and Mk/Mod torpedoes.
I find this very interesting due to the fact there were already 2 existing squadrons which performed this missions precisely. They were top notch and fully qualified. Unfortunatley, someone near the top didn’t think these squadrons HCS-4/HCS-5 were needed.…should have thought twice!
Capt. Mullins,
Godspeed!
Semper Paratus
Semper Fidelis
Page 5 sparked my interest. Since there’s a grey area between warfighting and law enforcement, perhaps the Coast Guard would be better suited to tackle some of the FID/CT/LE tasks than would our DoD brothers? Given the growing capabilities of the MSSTs and the MSRT, coupled with the eventual return of some Coasties serving in the SEAL community, it sounds promising.
http://brainshavings.com/2006/10/its-time-to-designate-coast-guard-special-ops-forces.html
Amen, Houston.