The quest for a low-cost, low-tech, irregular warfare aircraft to provide ground pounders with long loitering, on-call recon and strike got a big boost recently when Joint Forces Command’s Gen. James Mattis threw his support behind the Navy and Air Force “Imminent Fury” effort. Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that he […]
From the monthly archives:
March 2010
As promised, Lockheed Martin pulled off the first vertical landing of the F35B today. LockMart’s test pilot hovered for a minute at 150 feet and then “rode 41,000 pounds of thrust” provided by the Pratt & Whitney F135 turbofan and dropped like a feather to the tarmac. The company said the F-35B featured in today’s […]
The failure of the Army’s Non Line-of-Sight-Launch System (NLOS-LS) Precision Attack Missile (PAM) to hit its intended targets in a recent series of live fire tests might not just be an Army problem. See, the NLOS-PAM system, also called “missiles-in-a-box,” is also supposed to outfit the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), giving the ships a […]
If there is a single overriding theme to Joint Forces Command’s newly released Joint Operating Environment 2010 report, it is the reminder that a critical component of national power is economic power; something often lost on military analysts and so called strategists. The JOE discusses at length perilous federal budget imbalances, oil dependency, the damage […]
Lockheed Martin released video today of the first ever F-35B “free air hover” over the tarmac at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md. Lead F-35B test pilot Graham Tomlinson slowed the aircraft from 200 knots to 0 knots then hovered 150 feet above the runway, said a press release. The aircraft then came in for […]
