We sure do like being first…and beat­ing the NY Times to boot!

From today’s NYT front page:

In July, in a sharp break from tra­di­tion, the Army began encour­ag­ing its per­son­nel from the pri­vates to the gen­er­als to go online and col­lab­o­ra­tively rewrite seven of the field man­u­als that give instruc­tions on all aspects of Army life.

The pro­gram uses the same soft­ware behind the online ency­clo­pe­dia Wikipedia and could poten­tially lead to hun­dreds of Army guides being wik­i­fied. The goal, say the offi­cers behind the effort, is to tap more expe­ri­ence and advice from battle-tested sol­diers rather than rely­ing on the spe­cial­ists within the Armys array of col­leges and research cen­ters who have tra­di­tion­ally writ­ten the manuals.

For a cou­ple hun­dred years, the Army has been writ­ing doc­trine in a par­tic­u­lar way, and for a cou­ple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki, said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the direc­tor of the Armys Battle Command Knowledge System. The only ones who could write doc­trine were the select few. Now, imag­ine the chal­lenge in accept­ing that any­body can go on the wiki and make a change that is a big chal­lenge, cul­tur­ally.

And from Defense Tech’s front page (vir­tu­ally) on July 15 (nearly a month before the Times):

In a con­ver­sa­tion today with Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of the Army’s Combined Arms Center in Leavenworth, Kans., we learned that the Army is get­ting all Wiki on us.

Basically Caldwell is embrac­ing the Web 2.0 phe­nom­e­non of mak­ing ref­er­ence mate­r­ial avail­able online in an eas­ily updat­a­ble fash­ion by cre­at­ing so-called Wiki pages based on the pop­u­lar Wikipedia online ref­er­ence source.

Back at my old paper we used to whine and moan when the Times or the Post ran a story we’d reported months ago. The line went “it isn’t news unless it’s in the Times or Post or AP…” Well, I’m not going to engage in such child­ish behav­ior. I will say, how­ever, that this does in some way illus­trate the idea that blogs and online media are becom­ing far more agile and news­wor­thy than they once were. And it’s also a trib­ute to the new media cen­ter at the Pentagon which has gone to great lengths to arrange inter­views for blog­gers on a diverse range of sub­jects often long before they’re noticed by the MSM.

So bravo to us and naaa naaa na na naaa to the Times (see, no childishness)…

– Christian

OK folks, so I’m headed to the 2009 Annual SHOT Show in Orlando. It’s my first time there so I’m pretty psy­ched, if not a lit­tle intim­i­dated by its scope.

I will be updat­ing the blog on cool things I run across and other new gear news and infor­ma­tion. I’m tak­ing both still and video cam­era, so stay tuned for “multi-media” updates.

Also, sev­eral of our con­trib­u­tors will be there, includ­ing the mad-scientist Dave Woroner, the nut jobs at BreachBangClear and our friend, the edi­tor of SoldierSystems blog. Also, I’ll be hang­ing out with the folks from Tactical-Life.com and my old friend and com­padre Robert Brown from Soldier of Fortune mag­a­zine. It should be a great col­lec­tion of rogues and scoundrels.

In the mean­time, here’s the lat­est on the FNH-USA sub­mis­sion for the Marine Corps Infantry Automatic Rifle.
FN IAR Description

Also, feel free to send sug­ges­tions on things you’d like me to check out.

– Christian

With his deci­sion to tap Gen. Norton Schwartz to be the next Air Force chief of staff, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done two things. 

First, he has smashed an Air Force cul­ture ceil­ing by putting into the top job a pilot who does not come out of the fighter or bomber community. 

Second, Gates has put into place some­one who can help heal the rift between the Air Force and the Army, one that has grown in recent years over the Air Force’s heavy-handed move to take own­er­ship of the Joint Cargo Aircraft — orig­i­nally an Army pro­gram — its seem­ing stingi­ness in get­ting to ground com­man­ders badly-needed UAV assets and the service’s lack of inter­est in send­ing Airmen to help out on Army missions. 

“A cou­ple of things about ‘Norty’ Schwartz that a lot of folks didn’t real­ize [before] — he spent a lot of time in the spe­cial ops arena,” said a retired four-star who, like Schwartz, once headed U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill. “And any of our blue suit guys who have spent time in the spe­cial ops arena have a ten­dency to be closer to our Army brethren and oth­ers. I think that’s a pos­i­tive thing.” 

According to sev­eral for­mer field and gen­eral Air Force offi­cers, there does need to be some fence-mending after the last five or six years. 

Terry Stevens, a retired colonel and per­son­nel offi­cer famil­iar with Air Force man­power and bud­get issues, said it was Moseley who fought the “in-lieu-of” pro­gram that helped the Army flesh out its ranks in Iraq and Afghanistan with Airmen. Moseley also balked at aggres­sively get­ting unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles into the­ater until Gates and Congress recently insisted he deploy them. 

And at a time when Air Force mis­sions around the world already were stretch­ing its per­son­nel thin, Moseley ordered a force restruc­tur­ing that envi­sioned cut­ting 40,000 posi­tions so that the money could be redi­rected to weapons pro­grams such as the F-22 Raptor. 

Taken together with the more widely known con­tro­ver­sies — includ­ing nuclear weapon sna­fus, cor­rup­tion scan­dals and impolitic bud­get manip­u­la­tions — Moseley was seen as the head of a ser­vice with seri­ous problems. 

“I believe that General Moseley is an hon­or­able man with the best inter­est of the Air Force in his heart, but he was not as polit­i­cally aware as he should have been,” Stevens said. “He also couldn’t seem to see the big pic­ture from the Department of Defense’s perspective.”

(more…)

Raytheon Co. won a $400 mil­lion Pentagon con­tract this week to move a mis­sile defense radar from the Marshall Islands to the Czech Republic. 

So far, the com­pany has only received about $5 mil­lion to start plan­ning for the trans­fer. But more work under the con­tract could be in train before long — a Missile Defense Agency spokesman said Thursday that a per­mis­sion deal with the Czech Republic could come “within weeks.” 

The U.S. wants to put an X-band radar in the Czech Republic to work with a mis­sile inter­cep­tor site in Poland, to defend Europe against attack from Iran. Neither Poland nor the Czech Republic has given final go-ahead, how­ever, and Russia con­tin­ues to oppose the deal. For its part, the U.S. insists the inter­cep­tors would pose no threat to Russia, or even change the cur­rent mil­i­tary bal­ance between Russia and Europe. 

Raytheon’s new award is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity con­tract that extends through 2013. The ini­tial task order cov­ers money only for “site sur­veys, stud­ies, analy­sis, plan­ning, design, and sim­i­lar activ­i­ties,” as pro­vided for in the 2008 defense bud­get. Congress restricted what MDA can spend on the plan until the host coun­tries have given the all-clear.

(more…)

Sometimes I can pull a rab­bit out of a hat…

I had this sched­uled for the last day of my embed in Iraq but was grounded in Baqubah because of weather and missed it. But he gra­ciously resched­uled, and we’re happy to bring it to you lit­er­ally hours after we spoke with the man in charge on the ground in Iraq.

Click HERE to lis­ten to the PodCast from the Editor’s Desk with Gen. David Petraeus.

– Christian

Here’s a story we’re post­ing tomor­row morn­ing at Military.com, but I thought I’d give DT read­ers a lit­tle pre­view. It’s like manna from heaven: an M4 story and a body armor story all in one week!

FROM TOMORROW MORNING’S MILITARY.COM FRONT PAGE:

The Army has opted to delay test­ing of new body armor designs that can stop pow­er­ful armor pierc­ing bul­lets and vests that con­tain flex­i­ble plat­ing much like the con­tro­ver­sial Dragon Skin armor.

Citing indus­try requests, the Army’s top gear buyer told Military.com the test fir­ing on so-called XSAPI and FSAPI armor would be held off until March 2008.

“Some body armor man­u­fac­tur­ers told us they needed a lit­tle more time to get long-lead mate­ri­als and to test new designs before they could sub­mit them to us,” said Brig. Gen. Mark Brown, head of the Fort Belvoir, Va.-based Program Executive Office Soldier.

Brown said the new armor designs would likely be tested at Aberdeen Test Center, Md., begin­ning in March and fin­ished up by June. Testing on the new designs was pre­vi­ously set to begin last fall.

[Photo: HP White Labs]

– Christian

Well, the results are in…and it doesn’t look good for the M4 carbine.

You’ll remem­ber that Defense Tech and Military.com were on top of the story of wor­ries over the M4’s reli­a­bil­ity in the dusty con­di­tions found in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn insisted the Army con­duct side-by-side test­ing between the M4, SCAR, 416 and XM8 in an “extreme” dust environment.

Well, the tests are com­plete and it seems the M4 came in dead last against its com­peti­tors. And, guess what…the Army’s not budg­ing. The M4 is still the best.

I’ll have the full story posted tomor­row morn­ing at Military.com, but here’s a pre­view: Ten of each weapon; 6,000 rounds per weapon; 120 rounds fired per “dust cycle” (and when they say dust, they mean DUST…testers had to wear res­pi­ra­tors and Tyvec suits); wiped and light lube every 600 rounds, fully cleaned and lubed every 1,200 rounds.

XM8: 127 Class I, II and III stoppages.

Mk16 (5.56 SCAR): 226 Class I, II and III stoppages.

HK 416: 233 Class I, II, and III stoppages.

M4: 882 Class I, II and III stoppages.

Army top gear buyer, Brig. Gen. Mark Brown: “The M4 car­bine is a world-class weapon. Soldiers “have high con­fi­dence in that weapon, and that high con­fi­dence level is jus­ti­fied, in our view, as a result of all test data and all inves­ti­ga­tions we have made.”

An “in the know” con­gres­sional staffer: “These results are stun­ning, and frankly they are sig­nif­i­cantly more dra­matic than most weapons experts expected. It’s time to stop mak­ing excuses and just con­duct a com­pe­ti­tion for a new weapon.”

Be sure to check out the full story tomor­row morn­ing at Military.com.

– Christian

Here’s a piece I wrote today for the Daily Standard dis­cussing the turn­around in MRAP demand. Don’t say I didn’t tell you so…

It was the cause du jour for the 110th Congress; a sil­ver bul­let that would save lives in an increas­ingly unpop­u­lar war, make even the most super­flu­ous law­maker look like they were on top of defense issues, and bol­ster the mil­i­tary cre­den­tials of any Pentagon-hostile Capitol Hill denizen. 

It even had a catchy acronym: MRAP. 

The so-called “Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected” vehi­cle became the lat­est sym­bol of the Bush administration’s cal­lous treat­ment of men and women in uniform–it was the new “body armor short­age” issue. And the “V-shaped hull” behe­moths were easy to latch onto for law­mak­ers look­ing for a hard­ened steel club to bat­ter the White House’s han­dling of the war and equip­ping of America’s troops. 

“This is out­ra­geous and another exam­ple of this Administration’s gross mis­man­age­ment of this war. Our troops are being killed and these vehi­cles save lives. No more delays; no more excuses,” Democratic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and out­spo­ken MRAP advo­cate Joseph Biden (D-Del.) said in an August 24 statement. 

Most peo­ple didn’t real­ize that MRAP vehi­cles were already in the Iraqi theater–used pri­mar­ily by explo­sive ord­nance dis­posal units that cruised the main sup­ply routes for road­side bombs. When the issue exploded into the polit­i­cal debate, how­ever, Congress flooded the Pentagon with money and man­dates to out­fit nearly every patrol with the IED-hardened vehicle–with some call­ing for a one-for-one replace­ment of up-armored Humvees. 

A new defense sec­re­tary fresh out of con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings and eager to make nice with a Democratic Congress acceded to law­mak­ers’ demands and launched a crash pro­gram to get as many MRAPs to the field as indus­try and logis­tics could bear. 

But if any­one spoke for cau­tion in this plan (and I was one of them), they were quickly shouted down as chicken hawks–dismissed as igno­rant of the risks and deadly vio­lence of ply­ing Iraq’s bomb-strewn roads. 

But now the game has changed. Finally sober minds are begin­ning to pre­vail and the ser­vices are find­ing the courage to push back. Let’s say the surge gave them the “breath­ing room” to take a moment to really exam­ine whether these vehi­cles fit their bat­tle plans or were, as one defense researcher termed them, just a “mil­lion dol­lar Kleenex.” 

To be sure, MRAPs have their place in a coun­terin­sur­gency. The Marine Corps was blamed early this year for tak­ing too long to pur­chase their MRAPs. But the head of the Corps’ Systems Command, which buys all Marine gear, rightly called the MRAP a “bou­tique vehicle”–one that had very spe­cific uses but could not be employed in place of Humvees in all cases. In October, the first fis­sures emerged in the MRAP debate when Marine Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson revealed Marine com­man­ders in Iraq were ask­ing Pentagon lead­ers to slow down their ship­ment of the vehi­cles to Iraq. The vehi­cles come in three dif­fer­ent sizes–from 10 to 25 tons–and even the small­est ver­sions are too heavy for some bridges and roads and too wide for vil­lage streets. Nevertheless, the Pentagon, at the behest of Congress, began to flood the zone with orders, ship­ping the vehi­cles almost as soon as they came off the line. 

“I would say ‘relax.’ We don’t know how we’re going to use them, nobody does,” Nicholson told me. “And any­one who says ‘this is exactly how many we need and this is exactly how we’re going to use them’ is not being truthful.” 

Nicholson was speak­ing for Marine com­man­ders, but it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to fig­ure his sen­ti­ment was shared by Army lead­ers in Iraq as well. 

Many also won­dered how the large, intim­i­dat­ing vehi­cles would work in a coun­terin­sur­gency cam­paign that empha­sized inter­ac­tion with the pop­u­la­tion and a “hearts-and-minds” approach. Not to men­tion that if the surge strat­egy worked, the IED risk to troops would drop and bil­lions would have been spent on a vehi­cle that had out­lived its usefulness. 

“Our con­cern is there seems to be this rush to judg­ment on spend­ing a fairly large amount of money on a pro­gram that hadn’t been planned for and not much dis­cus­sion about how you actu­ally plan to oper­a­tional­ize this and incor­po­rate it into the force,” said Dakota Wood, for­mer Marine trans­port offi­cer and co-author of the CSBA analy­sis report “Of MRAPs and IEDs: Force Protection in Complex Irregular Operations.” 

Unfortunately, any rea­son­able approach to field­ing these vehi­cles was shouted down by war opponents. 

But since argu­ments against the surge are harder to come by these days, the ser­vices are tak­ing the first steps in slow­ing the MRAP freight train. Late last month, the Marine Corps announced it would cut 1,300 vehi­cles from its order, sav­ing the Pentagon $1.7 bil­lion and remov­ing the logis­ti­cal headache of mov­ing the weighty vehi­cles to the field and try­ing to find some­thing to do with them. 

“What’s hap­pened since September of 2006 has been absolutely amaz­ing by most counts. We have not lost nearly the num­bers of vehi­cles that we were expe­ri­enc­ing because attacks have gone down dra­mat­i­cally,” said Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway at a Pentagon press con­fer­ence a few days ago. “And I will say that in incor­po­rat­ing greater use of the vehi­cles, we found that espe­cially the heavy vari­ants don’t give us the com­bat flex­i­bil­ity that a smaller, lighter vehi­cle does. And com­man­ders in the field have said off-road, you know, it’s just a lit­tle prob­lem­atic in places.”

(more…)

One of the dis­tinct advan­tages of work­ing for a place like Military.com and Defense Tech is that on occa­sion you get to spend a day at the fir­ing range slin­gin’ lead from the lat­est in mil­i­tary weaponry.

Our boy Bryant Jordan went down to Blackwater USA to test fire the Kriss .45 cal. sub­ma­chine gun a cou­ple weeks ago, and I just had the plea­sure of spend­ing the day out at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland get­ting some trig­ger time on a vari­ety of weapons the ser­vice is push­ing to troops in the field.

First of all, it’s a big deal to even be allowed on base at Aberdeen. Some of the U.S. military’s most closely-held test­ing and eval­u­a­tion of armor, bal­lis­tics and explo­sives goes on there and offi­cials are loath to let any­one in — espe­cially the press — to get even a pre­lim­i­nary glance at what they’re up to.

But thanks to an invi­ta­tion from the Fort Belvoir, Va.-based PEO Soldier, Aberdeen opened its doors on Wednesday for a small group of jour­nal­ists to come out and learn more about Army weapons. On hand were pro­gram man­agers, test direc­tors, engi­neers and every­day Joes to answer ques­tions and give the ground truth on what’s being developed.

Testers showed off six dif­fer­ent sys­tems either already deployed to the field or ready to be fielded with units in the Sandbox, including:

XM320 Grenade Launcher — Pretty close to my favorite one to shoot, the XM320 is a major upgrade for the M203, 40mm grenade

slinger attached to the bar­rel of M4s and M-16s. Finally H&K has got­ten through to the Army about its side-eject under-barrel grenade launcher. The Army plans to field about 71,600 XM320s in a one-to-one replace­ment of the M203 begin­ning in late 2008 and it’s a good thing. The XM320 can be detached from your com­bat rifle and fired as a stand-alone weapon (which is how we fired it at Aberdeen) but I’ll tell you, it’s tough to han­dle in that con­fig­u­ra­tion for tall peo­ple like me since the butt stock doesn’t extend very far.

The best part of the sys­tem, how­ever, is the inte­grated elec­tronic sight­ing sys­tem that comes with it. Developed by Insight Technology, the optic uses an iron sight retic­ule that’s pre­ci­sion bal­anced. A sol­dier uses a hand-held range finder to deter­mine the dis­tance to a tar­get, dials in the yardage in five-yard inter­vals on the XM320 sight and a handy green/red light and dig­i­tal bar tells the shooter whether he’s on tar­get and shoot­ing level. I hit the tar­get at 150 yards on my first shot. The rifle-mounted laser illu­mi­na­tor can be used at night with the sys­tem to find a tar­get even in dark­ness, mak­ing the new grenade launcher far more effec­tive in all con­di­tions, said Maj. Larry Dring, assis­tant prod­uct man­ager for indi­vid­ual weapons with PEO Soldier.

M26 Modular Accessory Shotgun System (MASS) — Here was another mod­u­lar weapon that’s pretty cool, but a lit­tle more
dif­fi­cult to use than the grenade launcher. Mounted under the com­bat rifle — or con­fig­ured as a stand-alone weapon using a stan­dard M4 pis­tol grip and col­lapsi­ble butt stock, the M26 is designed to fire both stan­dard 12 gauge rounds and non-lethal muni­tions. The M26 has an extend­able choke-tube that allows the shooter to place breech­ing rounds against a door frame from a safe dis­tance with the shot­gun attached to his rifle — a method that eases the tran­si­tion between shot­gun and rifle in com­bat sit­u­a­tion, said Sgt. 1st Class William Kone, test and eval­u­a­tion NCO at Aberdeen.

That’s all well and good, but I found the cock­ing mech­a­nism to be clunky and inef­fi­cient. Instead of an under-barrel pump-gun style action, a metal bar attached to the bolt extends out to the side, forc­ing the shooter to tran­si­tion his hand posi­tion to load another round into the breach. I’m sure with prac­tice, I could have got­ten as fast on the action as Kone, but I wasn’t the only one with that com­plaint. The Army plans to field 38,000 MASSs begin­ning in late 2008 to replace its Mossberg 12ga. pump guns.

Read the rest of my weapons report from the Aberdeen range at Military.com’s Warfighter’s Forum

– Christian

A quick head’s up here. My friend Paul Solman, the eco­nom­ics cor­re­spon­dent for PBS’s News Hour show, just broad­cast his pack­age on the body armor pro­cure­ment controversy.

While he doesn’t men­tion Defense Tech by name, he did afford us a screen shot and pulled doc­u­ments from my pre­vi­ous work on the story with Marine Corps Times newspaper.

Follow this LINK to watch the program.

– Christian