The GAO just issued a brief report look­ing at the ser­vices’ efforts to mit­i­gate blunt impact trauma by replac­ing the old sus­pen­sion sys­tem in com­bat hel­mets with one that uses padding attached directly to the inte­rior of the helmet.

The report was issued to mem­bers of the con­gres­sional armed ser­vices and appro­pri­a­tions com­mit­tees to bring their staffs up to speed on how these padding sys­tems came about. It doesn’t look at the test­ing of the sys­tems or any­thing like that and, to be per­fectly hon­est, it’s pretty “no duh” except for a cou­ple things.

First, the report indi­cates the Army and Marine Corps have been push­ing indus­try to develop more advanced pads that can absorb nearly a quar­ter more impact than the ones in cur­rent hel­mets. So far indus­try hasn’t been able to meet the requirement.

Also, the ser­vices are exam­in­ing tech­nolo­gies used by NATO coun­tries, includ­ing entire padded lin­ers, meth­ods used by high impact sports and even advanced con­cepts like aque­ous lin­ers (a CamelBak on your head?)…I’m par­tial to the Russian Special Forces hel­met myself and I won­der if some of our blacker SOF units are using a sim­i­lar ver­sion (I remem­ber see­ing pic­tures of SF oper­a­tors wear­ing mod­i­fied flight hel­mets dur­ing the over­land push into north­ern Iraq in 2003)…

Take a look at the entire report for some good back­ground on how these padding sys­tems came about and make sure to read page five, which dis­cusses new techs being looked at.
GAO Helmet Pad Report

– Christian

We’re run­ning a story this after­noon on Military.com that talks about lan­guage inserted into the late 2009 war sup­ple­men­tal bill by Jack Murtha call­ing on the Army to study whether the cur­rent “ArPat” dig­i­tal all-in-one camo pat­tern is the best option for troops in Afghanistan.

According our reporter Bryan Mitchell, Murtha was jaw bon­ing with some Ranger types who com­plained about how the ArpPat camo stood out like a sore thumb in the craggy hills and forested vales of east­ern Afghanistan.

The move in Congress was prompted by Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), Chairman of the Defense Appropriations sub­com­mit­tee, who said he was first made aware of the issue dur­ing a visit with a group of non­com­mis­sioned offi­cer Rangers serv­ing at Fort Benning, Ga.

Murtha queried Army lead­ers and learned the con­cern was not reserved to a hand­ful of Georgia troops. Similar sen­ti­ments had been voiced through­out units with expe­ri­ence serv­ing in Afghanistan.

“The rea­son is that the cur­rent uni­form has been pri­mar­ily designed for a desert com­bat, like in Iraq, and obvi­ously the ter­rain is much dif­fer­ent in Afghanistan,” Murtha said in an e-mail to Military.com.

“I spoke to both General Casey and General Petraeus about the issue. They also have heard the same thing, said that the Army is look­ing into the sit­u­a­tion, and that fund­ing is avail­able for new uni­forms if the Army decides to go that route.” 

And I’ve heard the com­plaints as well. No one really under­stood why the Army picked the sort of old-school loden col­ored camo. Especially since the ser­vice had already devel­oped the MultiCam pat­tern with Crye Precision and Natick.

And isn’t that what it all boils down to? Everyone wants MultiCam. “Spec Ops guys get to wear it…why can’t I?” I even scoped out some pho­tos of Air Force PJs sport­ing MultiCam dur­ing a deploy­ment to Djibouti. And prac­ti­cally every cover shot from our friends at Tactical-Life.com fea­tures a MultiCam clad “oper­a­tor” fir­ing the high­est speed shorty car­bine around.

Look, I like MultiCam like the rest of them. But I also under­stand why the Army did what it did. They spent mil­lions of dol­lars and lots of time study­ing what would work best in a range of envi­ron­ments with an eye toward mak­ing the Soldier’s load­out eas­ier — one func­tional com­bat uni­form for a range of envi­ron­ments. MultiCam was tested along­side the cur­rent ArPat (I was at Army Times Co. when the ser­vice was decid­ing the pat­tern and was fol­low­ing it closely with my friend Matt Cox there) and sev­eral other options and the ArPat camo won out. It was new. It was rev­o­lu­tion­ary and it was unpop­u­lar. That’s what makes me think it might have been the right choice.

But I’m will­ing to be con­vinced otherwise.

Also, we don’t have a ton of cash lying around, and some in the Army argue that the ser­vice has spent bil­lions field­ing the new uni­forms and other gear in the pat­tern. Unless it sticks out like a sore thumb, why spend mil­lions more to inject another ver­sion? And keep in mind the flam­ing hoops the Army is being forced to jump through as a line inserted by one con­gress­man forces them to eval­u­ate all these uni­form alter­na­tives. Nothing’s going to come of it, I guar­an­tee you that. But Petraeus, Casey and Stevenson will have to pla­cate the Democratic bull by say­ing “that’s a very good idea. we’ll spend time, money and resources look­ing into it for you, but we’re still going to come up with the same answer…”

I liked the con­gres­sional inter­ven­tion on the M4 car­bine issue, but I don’t see the sense in this one.

– Christian

They’ve sure earned their keep…Hooah Army!

Two hun­dred and thirty-three years ago, the United States Army was estab­lished to defend our Nation. From the Revolutionary War to the Global War on Terror, our Soldiers remain Army Strong with a deep com­mit­ment to our core val­ues and beliefs. This 233rd birth­day com­mem­o­rates Americas Army Soldiers, Families and Civilians who are achiev­ing a level of excel­lence that is truly Army Strong both here and abroad. Their will­ing­ness to sac­ri­fice to build a bet­ter future for oth­ers and to pre­serve our way of life is with­out a doubt, the Strength of our Nation.

And a lit­tle history…

The June 14 date is when Congress adopted “the American con­ti­nen­tal army” after reach­ing a con­sen­sus posi­tion in The Committee of the Whole. This pro­ce­dure and the desire for secrecy account for the sparse­ness of the offi­cial jour­nal entries for the day. The record indi­cates only that Congress under­took to raise ten com­pa­nies of rifle­men, approved an enlist­ment form for them, and appointed a com­mit­tee (includ­ing Washington and Schuyler) to draft rules and reg­u­la­tions for the gov­ern­ment of the army. The del­e­gates’ cor­re­spon­dence, diaries, and sub­se­quent actions make it clear that they really did much more. They also accepted respon­si­bil­ity for the exist­ing New England troops and forces requested for the defense of the var­i­ous points in New York. The for­mer were believed to total 10,000 men; the lat­ter, both New Yorkers and Connecticut men, another 5,000.

At least some mem­bers of Congress assumed from the begin­ning that this force would be expanded. That expan­sion, in the form of increased troop ceil­ings at Boston, came very rapidly as bet­ter infor­ma­tion arrived regard­ing the actual num­bers of New England troops. By the third week in June del­e­gates were refer­ring to 15,000 at Boston. When on 19 June Congress requested the gov­ern­ments of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire to for­ward to Boston “such of the forces as are already embod­ied, towards their quo­tas of the troops agreed to be raised by the New England Colonies,” it gave a clear indi­ca­tion of its intent to adopt the regional army. Discussions the next day indi­cated that Congress was pre­pared to sup­port a force at Boston twice the size of the British gar­ri­son, and that it was unwill­ing to order any exist­ing units to be dis­banded. By the first week in July del­e­gates were refer­ring to a total at Boston that was edg­ing toward 20.000. Maximum strengths for the forces both in Massachusetts and New York were finally estab­lished on 21 and 22 July, when solid infor­ma­tion was on hand. These were set, respec­tively, at 22,000 and 5,000 men, a total nearly dou­ble that envi­sioned on 14 June.

The “expert rifle­men” autho­rized on 14 June were the first units raised directly as Continentals. Congress intended to have the ten com­pa­nies serve as a light infantry force for the Boston siege. At the same time it sym­bol­i­cally extended mil­i­tary par­tic­i­pa­tion beyond New England by allo­cat­ing 6 of the com­pa­nies to Pennsylvania, 2 to Maryland, and 2 to Virginia. Each com­pany would have a cap­tain, 3 lieu­tenants, 4 sergeants, 4 cor­po­rals, a drum­mer (or horn player), and 68 pri­vates. The enlist­ment period was set at one year, the norm for the ear­lier Provincials, a period that would expire on 1 July 1776. 

– Christian

The Wall Street Journal takes a tour today of the Pentagon’s clean energy plans. It’s a fair and bal­anced piece — in the old, pre-Murdoch sense of the term. And it throws some needed cold water on a (slightly over-) enthu­si­as­tic essay I wrote for the cur­rent issue of Good mag­a­zine. In it, I get all rosy-glasses, count­ing off the military’s alt-power projects:

In September 2005, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment decreed that 7.5 per­cent of its power should come from renew­able sources by 2013. The Pentagon is already there [and is headed towards 25 per­cent renew­ables by 2025]… In sunny San Diego, California, Naval Base Coronado’s solar power is sav­ing the annual equiv­a­lent of 6,000 bar­rels of oil. Wind tur­bines help Warren Air Force Base in gusty Wyoming, keep­ing 4,866 tons of car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from escap­ing into the atmos­phere per year. Then there are the nine mil­i­tary bases that are pow­ered geot­her­mally, by the heat of the earth. California’s Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake kicks off 270 megawatts of elec­tric­ity, keep­ing lights turned on as far away as Los Angeles.

True, true. But while clean power is nice, the Journal notes, it’s small pota­toes com­pared to the oil, gas, and jet fuel the Defense Department guzles:

In the past 20 years, [the mil­i­tary] has cut energy use at facil­i­ties 28%. Still, oil accounts for roughly 75% of total energy use. The military’s focus has been on sav­ing power — also a laud­able goal, crit­ics say, but not an answer to depen­dence on oil…
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have increased mil­i­tary fuel use by as much as 56,000 bar­rels a day. In addi­tion, the military’s improved abil­ity to deploy troops to bat­tle­fields comes at the cost of increased fuel use: today, more than half of the fuel con­sumed in com­bat the­aters is used not by front-line sol­diers but by sup­ply con­voy… The mil­i­tary uses fuel at twice the rate it did in the first Persian Gulf War and four times the rate it did in the Second World War.

Bottom line: It ain’t easy, get­ting to green.
UPDATE 5:10 PM: “The Air Force last month suc­cess­fully demon­strated how hydro­gen fuel cells could one day be used for gen­er­at­ing power at for­ward oper­at­ing bases and remote loca­tions to help reduce the depen­dence of U.S. forces on local energy sources and for­eign oil,” Inside Defense reports.

During the Dec. 14 test, offi­cials from the ser­vices Advanced Power Technology Office stud­ied how well a newly devel­oped hydro­gen fuel cell called the Multipurpose Electric Power System could pro­vide elec­tric­ity to halo­gen lights, com­par­ing the results to the per­for­mance of a diesel gen­er­a­tor now used in the­ater…
The demon­stra­tion was the lat­est in a series of tests under the offices tent city ini­tia­tive, which exam­ines new alter­na­tive energy tech­nolo­gies that may one day help U.S. forces in the­ater power equip­ment more efficiently.

UPDATE 01/10/07 11:38 AM: Last week, Defense News had an even deeper look at the military’s alt-fuel and alt-power conundrum.

With fuel prices esca­lat­ing, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., is urg­ing the Navy to go all-nuclear.
For now, only sub­marines and air­craft car­ri­ers are pro­pelled by nuclear power. Thats about 80 of the Navys 286 ships. But Bartlett, who chaired the House Armed Services pro­jec­tion forces sub­com­mit­tee, says its time for the nuclear Navy to grow. The line has already been crossed for big-deck amphibi­ous ships, Bartlett said.
When oil hit $60 a bar­rel, it became more expen­sive to oper­ate amphibs on oil than it would be on nuclear power, he said.
And we will shortly cross the line for cruis­ers, Bartlett said.
The Navy cal­cu­lates that nuclear power becomes eco­nom­i­cal for cruis­ers after oil costs $80 a bar­rel, and for destroy­ers when oil costs about $205 a bar­rel.
But…cost is a major road­block for nuclear-powered ships… Nuclear propul­sion sys­tems would add sev­eral hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars to each ship. The tim­ing is not good. Congress is already dis­tressed about esca­lat­ing ship­build­ing costs. Once they see the num­bers, it will be very hard to con­vince them to go all-nuclear, he said…
[In the mean­time,] the Navy also tak­ing [smaller] steps to reduce energy con­sump­tion. It has installed bul­bous bows and stern flaps on some of its ships. Each of these increases fuel effi­ciency by a few per­cent­age points, accord­ing to John Young, the Pentagons direc­tor of research and engi­neer­ing.
The Navy also is con­sid­er­ing apply­ing coat­ings to ship pro­pellers to poten­tially get 4 or 5 per­cent sav­ings in fuel effi­ciency and pos­si­bly some reduc­tions in main­te­nance, Young told the House Armed Services Committee in September. It looks like it pays for itself in no more than about a year.

The Defense Department buys more jet fuel than any other orga­ni­za­tion in the world. So the Pentagon’s higher-ups are just as sick as the rest of us — more so — about sky-high fuel prices. Small won­der that the brass is ask­ing for pro­pos­als to sup­ply 200 mil­lion gal­lons of syn­thetic jet fuel, as part of big-league field tests in 2008 and 2009.

The request, notes Inside Green Business, comes from the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), which over­sees the Pentagons fuel pur­chases. It’s part of a larger mil­i­tary inves­ti­ga­tion into an eighty year-old process for con­vert­ing coal or nat­ural gas into liq­uid fuel called Fischer-Tropsch. It’s what helped the German Army make 124,000 bar­rels of fuel per day dur­ing World War II.

The pos­si­ble pur­chase would send 100 mil­lion gal­lons each to the Air Force and Navy for test­ing on ships, air­planes and other oper­a­tional units, accord­ing to a DESC source. The alter­na­tive fuels would likely be blended with exist­ing DOD fuel types, such as the Air Forces JP-8 and the Navys F-76, in a 50/50 mix­ture or sim­i­lar ratio, accord­ing to the source. There wont be enough alter­na­tive fuels to do a one hun­dred per­cent [alter­na­tive] blend for at least a decade, the source says, but even reduc­ing petro­leum fifty per­cent in this coun­try is huge. What DESC is say­ing is we dont want [car­bon diox­ide] green­house gases emit­ted into the atmos­phere.
The source says each of the mil­i­tary ser­vices wants to main­tain its cur­rent single-fuel pol­icy, under which all vehi­cles are run with as sim­i­lar a fuel type as pos­si­ble. DOD offi­cials want to use 50/50 blends widely for the ser­vice tests at first, with an eye to poten­tially retool­ing the ratio for opti­mum effi­ciency later on…
There may… be prob­lems find­ing a sup­plier, or even a com­bi­na­tion of sup­pli­ers, that can sat­isfy the request for alter­na­tive fuels. No domes­tic infra­struc­ture can [cur­rently] han­dle that much demand, says the DESC source, adding that the pur­chase would likely be from a com­bi­na­tion of coal-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel and fuel derived from tar sands and oil shale, which have been eyed by gov­ern­ment and indus­try plan­ners as poten­tial sources of syn­thetic petro­leum. There cur­rently is no wide­spread mar­ket in the U.S. for such petro­leum alter­na­tives, although the source says hope­fully this will be an impe­tus for pri­vate indus­try to use syn­thetic fuels as well. Because the pri­vate sec­tor doesnt have the research and devel­op­ment bud­get we do, theyre wait­ing to see how our projects go so they can adopt what­ever we develop.

Not that long ago, the idea of the Sierra Club and the Army Corps of Engineers work­ing on the same side of an issue might’ve seemed silly. But these days, the Army sees depen­dence on for­eign oil as a major national secu­rity risk. And so the engi­neers are call­ing on DC to make a bunch of changes straight out of the envi­ron­men­tal­ists’ play­book — like man­dat­ing bet­ter gas mileage and giv­ing out tax cred­its for green energy. (Although the bit about “open[ing] up Federal lands for oil and nat­ural gas” might not exactly be met with huz­zahs at Sierra HQ.)
To sus­tain its mis­sion and ensure its capa­bil­ity to project and sup­port the forces, the Army must insu­late itself from the eco­nomic and logis­ti­cal energy-related prob­lems com­ing in the near to mid future. This requires a tran­si­tion to mod­ern, secure, and effi­cient energy sys­tems, and to build­ing tech­nolo­gies that are safe and envi­ron­men­tal friendly
Many of the issues in the energy arena are out­side the con­trol of the Army. Several actions are in the purview of the national gov­ern­ment to fos­ter the abil­ity of all groups, includ­ing the Army, to opti­mize their nat­ural resource man­age­ment. The Army needs to present its per­spec­tive to higher author­i­ties and be pre­pared to pro­ceed regard­less of the national mea­sures that are taken. The fol­low­ing steps by the national gov­ern­ment would help the Army with its energy challenges:

Increase sup­plies
- Pull renew­able tech­nol­ogy mar­kets to pro­duce more cost effec­tive solu­tions with tax incen­tives and large Federal appli­ca­tions.
- Provide incen­tives for green power pro­duc­tion through con­tin­ued and expanded tax cred­its.
- Open up Federal lands for oil and nat­ural gas har­vest­ing where envi­ron­men­tally appro­pri­ate.
- Encourage the devel­op­ment of LNG ter­mi­nals and infra­struc­ture by stream­lin­ing approvals and assist­ing with local approvals.
Modernize infra­struc­ture.
- Support mod­ern­iz­ing and expand­ing the elec­tric­ity grid.
- Support the con­struc­tion of a nat­ural gas pipeline from AK and Canada.
- Enhance the expan­sion of LNG ter­mi­nals and nat­ural gas infra­struc­ture.
Diversify sources.
- Invest in research and devel­op­ment (R&D) in clean coal tech­nolo­gies, renew­able tech­nolo­gies, car­bon seques­tra­tion, breeder reac­tor nuclear power.
- Invest in R&D in energy effi­ciency in the built envi­ron­ment.
Optimize end-use.
- Significantly increase Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) stan­dards and expand to all classes of motor vehi­cles.
- Expand rebate pro­grams for hybrid vehi­cles.
- Expand appli­ance and equip­ment effi­ciency stan­dards as many states are doing.

UPDATE 12:15 PM: This newslet­ter from the U.S. Army Environmental Center gives a good round-up of some of the service’s green projects — from Ethanol pumps at Ft. Benning to sus­tain­able con­struc­tion at Ft. Lewis.
(Big ups: RC)

Imagine if, in the mid­dle of World War II, the U.S. gov­ern­ment and its peo­ple gave Hitler bil­lions of dol­lars, to train troops and build new weapons. Sounds impos­si­ble, right? But that’s more or less the sit­u­a­tion we find our­selves in today, for­mer CIA direc­tor Jim Woolsey recently told the Naval Postgraduate School.
The U.S. is in the open­ing stages of a “Long War” with Islamic extrem­ists. And these adver­saries — whether they’re found in madras­sas in Riyadh or the gov­ern­ment in Tehran — are funded, in so small part, by oil rev­enue. Petrodollars go, more or less directly, to train­ing rad­i­cals. Petrodollars get fun­neled to those who make and plant bombs.
“Except for our own Civil War,” Woolsey notes, “this is the only war that we have fought where we are pay­ing for both sides. We pay Saudi Arabia $160 bil­lion for its oil, and $3 or $4 bil­lion of that goes to the Wahhabis, who teach chil­dren to hate. We are pay­ing for these ter­ror­ists with our SUVs.”
And we are pay­ing for them with our tanks, our Bradleys, and our fighter jets, observes Defense Technology International, which has a spe­cial issue out on “The Military and the End of Oil.” In 2004, the U.S. mil­i­tary gob­bled up 400,000 bar­rel of fuel a day, at cost of $6.7 bil­lion. A year later, those costs had climbed to $8.8 bil­lion. In 2006, the price tag is expect to total $10 bil­lion.
“Meanwhile, advanced green tech­nolo­gies like hybrid drive vehi­cles [despite their lim­i­ta­tions] offer both fuel econ­omy and stealth ben­e­fits in com­bat, a sig­nif­i­cant plus in the urban war­fare sce­nar­ios that appear to be such a big part of future wars,” writes Joe Katzman, who’s been all over this issue.

The truth is that the mil­i­tary can’t live with­out fuel, but every gal­lon of it is both a logis­tics bur­den and a finan­cial bur­den… Now add the fact that diver­si­fied “green infra­struc­ture” low­ers vul­ner­a­bil­ity to the kind of “sys­tem dis­rup­tion” attacks one sees in Iraq, and the military/security ben­e­fits become compelling. 

It sure does. Throughout the mil­i­tary today, there are lots and lots of indi­vid­ual R&D efforts under­way to find alter­na­tives to fund­ing our ene­mies. But a col­lec­tion of engi­neer­ing projects is not enough. If we’re seri­ous about fight­ing this Long War, break­ing the military’s addic­tion to oil has to become a top priority.