More than a few years ago while at 20,000 in the mid­dle of the Med I fin­ished a fuel check and told my trusty nose-gunner, Jim “Rev” Jones “We’re fat on gas…2k above lad­der”. Rev, who cut his early cruise teeth in F-4 Phantoms off USS Midway, said “You’re never fat on gas”.

After that quick tuto­r­ial on fight­ers and air­borne gas, let’s look at some news that has come out regard­ing the sta­tus of the US Air Force Tanker ques­tion.
First, air­borne tank­ing is a vital ele­ment to our power pro­jec­tion capa­bil­ity. Aside from being a sig­nif­i­cant force mul­ti­plier, in many cases it is a required ele­ment for mis­sion suc­cess. Navy air­craft, even when car­ri­ers can be posi­tioned off­shore of the vast major­ity of hot spots around the world, need fuel to extend mis­sions and pro­vide that mar­gin for error needed when return­ing to your postage stamp of a land­ing field. Air Force air­craft, even when launch­ing from land bases or in the ful­fill­ment of their “global reach” tenet, often times have sig­nif­i­cant dis­tances to fly and loi­ter require­ments. Add in the “time sen­si­tive strike” capa­bil­ity that is vital in this asym­met­ric bat­tle­space and air­borne fuel is essen­tial to mis­sion suc­cess.
EADS North America, the branch of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company that is on our side of the pond, is mak­ing an aggres­sive move in the com­pe­ti­tion to be the US Air Force next tanker fleet with a report late last week that they have selected Bridgeport, West Virginia (no idea if Robert Byrd was included in site nego­ti­a­tions there) as the loca­tion for a new aer­ial refu­el­ing cen­ter of excel­lence, IF Northrop Grumman KC-30 Tanker is selected as the U.S. Air Forces next gen­er­a­tion aer­ial refu­el­ing air­craft.
I say an aggres­sive move because the hur­dles are high for Northrop Grumman in this sit­u­a­tion given the fact that their KC-30 air­craft is based on the Airbus A330 air­liner, cur­rently under deliv­ery to the Royal Australian Air Force and, accord­ing to the afore­men­tioned web site is the U.K. government’s pre­ferred bid­der for its Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft require­ment. One BIG plus in the KC-30’s favor would be the fact that the air­craft would be con­verted to the tanker role in Mobile, Alabama.
The com­pe­ti­tion in this deal is the Boeing KC-767A, cur­rently under production/delivery con­tract to the air forces of Italy and Japan.
Interestingly, both EADS and Boeing have agree­ments with Sargent Fletcher, Inc., of El Monte, Calif. to pro­vide tank­ing hard­ware for their sys­tems. Talk about cor­ner­ing the mar­ket on air­borne refu­el­ing equip­ment.
As a for­mer fighter guy, pulling up to a KC-767 or a KC-30 mat­ters lit­tle — as long as there is gas to pass. The details of which com­pany or which air­craft is selected to ful­fill the Air Force’s is bet­ter left to bean coun­ters and pencil-necked GS-types/contractors in the Pentagon. We need some­thing to replace the increas­ingly aging fleet of KC-135 and KC-10 air­craft, how­ever, and either of these new sys­tems will suf­fice nicely.

EADS North America and Cobham Select
Bridgeport, West Virginia for an Aerial Refueling Center of Excellence
Charleston, West Virginia; Arlington, Virginia, October 19, 2007 Bridgeport, West Virginia has been selected as the site for a new aer­ial refu­el­ing cen­ter of excel­lence that will pro­vide key com­po­nents for the Northrop Grumman KC-30 Tanker. The new facil­ity will pro­duce and sup­port EADS advanced Aerial Refueling Boom System and Cobhams under-wing hose and drogue refu­el­ing sys­tem, devel­oped with its U.S. sub­sidiary, Sargent Fletcher. The announce­ment was made by West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin at a press con­fer­ence held in the State Capitol build­ing.
The pro­duc­tion site, cho­sen after an eval­u­a­tion that con­sid­ered loca­tions in sev­eral states, will be estab­lished if the Northrop Grumman KC-30 Tanker is selected as the U.S. Air Forces next gen­er­a­tion aer­ial refu­el­ing air­craft. The facil­ity will employ at least 100 skilled work­ers, and is to co-locate the pro­duc­tion oper­a­tions of EADS North America and Sargent Fletcher into two adja­cent facil­i­ties at Harrison Countys North Central West Virginia Regional Airport.
EADS North America will sup­ply the KC-30 Tankers fly-by-wire Aerial Refueling Boom System from a new 32,000 sq. ft. pro­duc­tion site, while Sargent Fletcher is to build the air­crafts two dig­i­tal under­wing hose and drogue pods at an adja­cent 25,000 sq. ft. facil­ity.
We exam­ined a num­ber of sites across the coun­try and chose Bridgeport because it offers a solid com­bi­na­tion of loca­tion, com­mu­nity sup­port and skilled work­force nec­es­sary to exe­cute this crit­i­cal national secu­rity pro­gram, said EADS North America Chairman and CEO Ralph D. Crosby, Jr. In par­tic­u­lar, Governor Manchin and the West Virginia con­gres­sional del­e­ga­tion have a demon­strated record of sup­port for indus­try. This invest­ment deci­sion — along with our pre­vi­ous selec­tion of Mobile, Alabama as the poten­tial site of the KC-30 Tanker final assem­bly facil­ity — reflects EADS firm com­mit­ment to cre­ate jobs and insource advanced crit­i­cal tech­nolo­gies into the United States.
EADS North Americas Aerial Refueling Boom System (ARBS) is the most capa­ble in-flight refu­el­ing sys­tem avail­able today. Its fly-by-wire design fea­tures enhanced con­trol­la­bil­ity and incor­po­rates an auto­matic load alle­vi­a­tion sys­tem, which greatly aids the boom oper­a­tor and the receiver air­crafts pilot dur­ing refu­el­ing operations. 

(more…)

The lead story at Military.com this morn­ing adds a bit of clar­ity to why the Pentagon ordered moth­balled Tomcats to be crushed into lit­tle bits: They were cov­er­ing their asses.

A GAO report issued yes­ter­day states that roughly 1,400 parts that could be used to fix F-14s were sold in February. These sales hap­pened after the Pentagon announced it had sus­pended sales of all parts that could be used on the Tomcat while it reviewed the secu­rity situation.

According to the arti­cle “the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service, the Pentagon’s sur­plus sales divi­sion, told inves­ti­ga­tors the parts were sold because it failed to update an auto­mated con­trol list and remove the air­craft parts before they were listed on its Internet sales site.

“A Democratic sen­a­tor said the inves­ti­ga­tion shows why leg­is­la­tion he pro­posed that would ban the sale of all F-14 parts is needed.

“‘The Pentagon’s sys­tem is still rid­dled with holes,’ Sen. Ron Wyden said in a tele­phone inter­view with The Associated Press. ‘These are the very parts that they said they wouldn’t be sell­ing, and they still are, and so you’ve got to make sure the changes are going to actu­ally have teeth and work.’”

Sen. Wyden also added that his leg­is­la­tion rec­og­nizes “that the Pentagon has bum­bled to the point where they can’t make the dis­tinc­tion” between sen­si­tive and innocu­ous surplus.

So, again, the crush­ing of Tomcats was in essence a grand clos­ing of the barn door after the live­stock had escaped. As the GAO report cir­cu­lated around the Pentagon (weeks before you and I knew it was com­ing out) the pow­ers that be knew they had to do some dam­age con­trol to keep other pesky law­mak­ers like Wyden from mak­ing a big deal of their fum­ble. Okay … now it makes sense.

Of course, as mem­bers of the savvy DT audi­ence have pointed out before and as any­one who’s every worked around Tomcats knows first­hand, it’ll take more than a few Black Market items to keep the ridicu­lously old Iranian Tomcat fleet air­borne. Remember these are first-gen air­planes … like 158XXX bureau num­bers. Can you imag­ine their main­te­nance man hour per flight hour stat? Good frig­gin’ luck keep­ing those pup­pies FMC.

I say we slip ‘em just enough parts to keep the main­tain­ers pulling their hair out while the avi­a­tors twid­dle their thumbs in the ready room.

Here’s an AP video report on the GAO report:

Play Video

Pentagon Sold F-14 Parts Sought by Iran Associated Press — (APTN) Aug. 01, 2007. 11:13 PM EST Government inves­ti­ga­tors say roughly 1400 parts that could be used on F-14 ‘Tomcat’ fighter jets were sold to the pub­lic in February, a move that could jeop­ar­dize national secu­rity because Iran is seek­ing such com­po­nents. (August 1)

– Ward

Provincial Reconstruction Teams tasked with rebuild­ing ruined infra­struc­ture and insti­tu­tions are try­ing to take the lead in the U.S. strat­egy to sta­bi­lize Iraq and Afghanistan. But the PRTs’ seem­ingly peace­ful mis­sions belie the extreme dan­gers they face every day, with secu­rity con­cerns often hob­bling their efforts to make a sig­nif­i­cant impact.
Small, lightly equipped and often work­ing far from the pro­tec­tive umbrella of U.S. and coali­tion troops, more than one PRT has had a close call.
Just ask Air Force Capt. Rockie Wilson. From August to December last year, Wilson led a com­bined Army-Air Force PRT try­ing to rebuild roads and train local gov­ern­ment offi­cials in Qalat province, north­west of Kandahar, Afghanistan. The 70-mile road net­work the PRT was work­ing on fea­tured deep dips that Wilson says were per­fect spots to hide Improvised Explosive Devices.
But the first Taliban attack on his team involved small arms rather than road­side bombs.
“My life flashed before my eyes,” Wilson says, smil­ing shyly as he recalls his stereo­typ­i­cal response to get­ting shot at for the first time.
But the six-months of pre-deployment Army train­ing kicked in, and he maneu­vered his Humvees to cover while his machine gun­ners and an attached Afghan Army unit opened fire. They were able to keep the Taliban’s heads down long enough for Wilson to call in a pair of A-10 Warthog attack jets, killing many of the attack­ers and scat­ter­ing the rest.
But the engage­ment did not come with­out cost. One Afghan army sol­dier in the patrol died and two were wounded.

(more…)

When we think about mil­i­tary sys­tems com­mands we nor­mally con­jure up images of weapons ranges and test pilots. But the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center is involved in pur­suits arguably less glam­orous but no less impor­tant to the war effort.

Among NSRDEC’s mis­sions is the research, devel­op­ment, test­ing and engi­neer­ing of “com­bat feed­ing sys­tems.” The com­mand sums up this par­tic­u­lar mis­sion like this: “As long as there are wars, there will be boots on the ground; and where there are boots on the ground, there must be com­bat rations.”

Roger that. So let’s start with a quick bit of mod­ern mil­i­tary gas­tro­nomic his­tory, this from a recent Natick press release:

“The MRE replaced the Meal, Combat Individual, which some still refer to as the old ‘C-Ration,’ begin­ning in 1980.

“From its year of intro­duc­tion to 1987, the MRE con­tained such mem­o­rable items as: Ham and Chicken Loaf, Smoky Franks (aka ‘the Five Fingers of Death’), Chicken a la King (or Chicken ‘a la Death’) and the ever pop­u­lar freeze dried pork, beef and potato pat­ties. In 1988, eight of the orig­i­nal 12 entrees were replaced with entrees that were slightly more iden­ti­fi­able, to include spaghetti and meat sauce.

“The MRE had the oppor­tu­nity to go to war in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

“Unfortunately, the ini­tial feed­back on the accep­tance of the MRE wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t the four let­ter words we heard, but the com­bi­na­tion of 4-letter words! Gerry Darsch, then chief of the Ration Systems Division, was called to the Pentagon. It was ‘sug­gested’ by the for­mer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, that we explore how to ‘fix it!’”

In clas­sic Army fash­ion the first step in car­ry­ing out General Powell’s direc­tive was to include hot sauce in every MRE. Other devel­op­men­tal mile­stones included the Flameless Ration Heater (1993), the end of freeze-dried fruit (1994). (It was too expen­sive. You think FCS is a defense bud­get buster? You should see the pric­etag for dried apricots.)

Other high­lights over the years of the MRE Improvement Program include the “hot bev­er­age bag” (very pop­u­lar in Iraq dur­ing the sum­mer months, I’ll bet) and the “ergonom­i­cally designed drink pouch for dairy shakes.” (One won­ders what part of the anatomy the pouch is shaped for.)

So what does the future hold for com­bat feed­ing sys­tems? Well, even as I write this Combat Feeding Teams are in the­ater work­ing with front­line units to enhance what Natick calls the “fam­ily of com­bat rations.” Right now the teams are fine tun­ing two new “ration con­cepts”: the First Strike Ration and the Unitized Group Ration-Express (UGR-E). Natick’s release goes on to state that after these con­cepts are fielded they will enter the improve­ment pro­grams “to insure {sic} … the inclu­sion of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy drop-ins to fur­ther enhance both rations.”

True dat! S&T drop-ins … and sprin­kles! And while I’m all about warfight­ers sound­ing like warfight­ers, may I sug­gest that the labels “First Strike” and “UGR-E” (“ughereee!”) might need re-think by the PAO shop before they’re intro­duced to the troops.

But there’s a method to this dietary mad­ness. According to Natick, “In the not too dis­tant future, rations will con­tain nat­u­rally occur­ring con­stituents such as pro­bi­otics, which are ben­e­fi­cial bac­te­ria such as those found in yogurt, and, nutraceu­ti­cals, which are small nutri­tional organic mol­e­cules. It is antic­i­pated {love that pas­sive voice} that these con­stituents will pro­vide improved nutri­tion, cog­ni­tive and phys­i­cal per­for­mance enhance­ment using novel nutri­ent deliv­ery sys­tems, e.g. buc­cal (between the cheek and gum) deliv­ery of nutri­ents based on sci­en­tif­i­cally proven studies.

“Rations will be pack­aged using poly­meric films rely­ing on nan­otech­nol­ogy and con­tain entic­ing aroma emit­ting films. These will enhance con­sump­tion as well as pro­tect and main­tain extended shelf life to insure whole­some­ness and safety. New food pro­cess­ing meth­ods such as high pres­sure pro­cess­ing, pulsed elec­tric field, and microwave ster­il­iza­tion will bring more vari­ety and com­po­nents with higher qual­ity than those processed today via thermostabilization.”

Probiotics? Aroma emit­ting films? Novel nutri­ent deliv­ery sys­tems? Mouth-watering, indeed. The future din­ner bell will be a-ringing loud and clear. Get ready to come and get it, Soldier.

(The gouge: AD)

– Ward

You may talk of gin and beer
When you’re quar­tered safe out ‘ere
An’ you’re sent to penny fights and Aldershot it
But when it comes to slaugh­ter
You’ll do your work on water
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ‘im that’s got it

Some things have not changed since Kipling wrote Gunga Din about a heroic Indian water-carrier with the British Army; the Tommies are still fight­ing Afghans beyond the Northwest Frontier, and water sup­ply is still a vital ele­ment in the logis­tics chain. But back then the water came from a goatskin bag, “was crawlin’ and it stunk” — these days qual­ity con­trol has improved some­what.
According to one US Army esti­mate, up to 65% of mil­i­tary road traf­fic in Iraq is taken up with trans­port­ing water to the troops. Cutting the num­ber of trucks used for water will reduce the num­ber of con­voys that need pro­tect­ing, and Allied Command Transformation Headquarters aims to do that by gen­er­at­ing drink­ing water in the field. They recently demon­strated a mobile bot­tling plant that fits into a C-130 which can gen­er­ate, purify and bot­tle 700 liters of water an hour.
Further down the line, DARPA are pur­su­ing a project called ‘Water From Air’, look­ing at ways of extract­ing potable water from the atmos­phere or from vehi­cle exhaust (water is one of the by-products when any hydro­car­bon fuel is burned). Water gen­er­a­tion was also one of the many fea­tures included in the orig­i­nal plans for Future Combat System, all part of the goal of trav­el­ing light and reduc­ing the logis­tics tail.
But there is one big, rather sim­ple prob­lem, as explained in this piece on logis­tics in Iraq:

Dependence on bot­tled water in Iraq turned out to be a major sus­tain­ment and qual­ity of life issue, Chambers said. Bottled water made up 30 per­cent of the dis­tri­b­u­tion require­ment even though bulk water was avail­able, he said.

Because the bot­tom line is:

“Soldiers do not like to drink puri­fied water.”

Which is why the idea of recy­cling urine into drink­ing water is even less likely to catch on, some­thing that the Army has looked at on the grounds that “The tech­nol­ogy is there. NASA is doing it. However, Thomas Bagwell, act­ing exec­u­tive direc­tor for research at TARDEC, admit­ted that the last time he put this idea to sol­diers, they chased me out of the room.
Water may be tech­ni­cally safe and potable, but it can still taste ter­ri­ble and troops are under­stand­ably not going to want to drink it. If you can solve that prob­lem, you can take out a huge amount of the logis­tics over­head. Maybe they should look at addi­tives (fla­vor­ing? caf­feine?), or maybe it needs some brand­ing and an adver­tis­ing push (“Real Water For Real Men”). But I sus­pect it will take a lot more to per­suade peo­ple to give up bot­tled water for puri­fied. And if you can work out how to do that one, you’re a bet­ter man than I am, Gunga Din.
– David Hambling
UPDATE: The Water Generation require­ment was dropped from the FCS pro­gram dur­ing the last ORD review — thanks to Douglas Weber for the update.

If I were to ask you to name your all time favourite iconic con­crete struc­ture, you’d prob­a­bly come up with the same answer as me: the Seattle Kingdome.
But what if I were to ask you to name your favourite “low mass, strength­en­ing fibre matrix tem­po­rary con­crete shel­ter”? — again you’d prob­a­bly think Kingdome — but you’d be wrong.
Aside from the Ministry of Defence’s recent efforts to pop­u­late down­town Baghdad with giant blocks (pre­sum­ably to be chipped away in recon­struc­tion to reveal trib­ute art) some British design­ers see an alter­na­tive future for con­crete. The UK has its very own pair of Frank Lloyd Wrights — and they need your help.
You may have heard of the Concrete Canvas. The idea has received more press cov­er­age than Janet Jackson’s left boob, but oddly, remains as famous as the right one. (Check out this Wired arti­cle writ­ten over a year ago).
The idea is sim­ple. Create a tem­po­rary hard­ened struc­ture that can be trans­ported across the globe and erected with min­i­mal effort, train­ing and sup­ply in areas that need it most.
Literally, a “build­ing in a bag” (or my own terms: “Vatican in a valise”, “Kingdome in a con­tainer” etc) — each unit weighs about 500 pounds, mak­ing it light and easy enough to trans­port in a vari­ety of plat­forms. The bag is an inflat­able plas­tic inner bub­ble, wrapped in a spe­cially treated fab­ric and packed in plas­tic. The bag is then filled with water allow­ing the cement to hydrate, after which you cut, unfold and inflate. Inflation is achieved via a small chem­i­cal pack which moulds around the bub­ble, set­ting over a period of 12 hours. The shel­ter cov­ers about 170 square feet of floor space and cost is esti­mated at $2,100 per unit.
The aid ben­e­fits are clear, but could the Concrete Canvas, (or CC01), ben­e­fit troops? Current liv­ing con­di­tions seem var­ied depend­ing on where or who you are, and Defensetech’s own plethora of experts can pro­vide first-hand expe­ri­ence of liv­ing in the kiln. Perhaps com­bin­ing CC01 and the US Army’s own ideas about the sun would assist in the cur­rent cable quag­mire?
The Department of Defense has just annouced a juicy $120-million con­tract for Anchor Inc.‘s party-size shel­ters and the less-than-attractive Battle Boxes are already used by some European forces. Reconstruction efforts in Iraq require tem­po­rary hous­ing for res­i­dents, as do the count­less dis­as­ter and con­flict zones. So why can’t you buy one?
Critics argue that the 145 liters of water needed to fill the thing is too valu­able a resource in remote areas and oth­ers argue that CC01 is too per­ma­nent for relief efforts which should be help­ing peo­ple secure hous­ing rather than shel­ter. Personally I think its a great idea, like the Life-Straw, and wish Pete and Will luck try­ing to get their idea to those who need it.
Designers Peter Brewin and Will Crawford both have impres­sive track records for innvoa­t­ion and indus­trial design and the Concrete Canvas has recently won (among oth­ers) the Saatchi and Saatchi award for World Changing Ideas. Peter and Will are cur­rently seek­ing fur­ther fund­ing to bring CC01 into pro­duc­tion and can be con­tacted via their web­site.
–Steven Snell
Update, 04/26/06: Peter Brewin has kindly con­tacted me to offer some specifics about the mil­i­tary aspects of CC01:
The key advan­tage of CC from a mil­i­tary posi­tion is that as a com­pres­sive struc­ture it can be earth bermed (i.e., sand, earth, etc. can be piled on top to a depth of up to six feet). This has two main advan­tages:
* Protection from shrap­nel and blast.
* Thermal insu­la­tion — this mas­sively reduces the logis­ti­cal foot­print, par­tic­u­larly if air con­di­tion­ing is required for accom­mo­da­tion, as is the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in the Gulf. Better insu­la­tion means fewer air-conditioning units, hence less gen­er­a­tor capac­ity and fuel and fewer main­te­nance per­son­nel at the front line. Also it means a lower ther­mal sig­na­ture.

A new scale being tested by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) could end up giv­ing units a lit­tle extra time to train just before rapid deploy­ments in addi­tion to being a big safety boost.
Enough new sys­tems and tech­nolo­gies with bat­tle­field appli­ca­tions are being devel­oped that its pretty easy to dis­miss a new way to weigh vehi­cles as a rel­a­tively low pri­or­ity devel­op­ment (and not all too sexy). But it can mat­ter more than you think.
The lat­est Weigh-in-Motion scale is meant to improve the process for prepar­ing vehi­cles for air­load, as it auto­mat­i­cally iden­ti­fies the equip­ment, deter­mines the indi­vid­ual axle weights, dis­tance between axles, total vehi­cle weight, pro­file and cen­ter of bal­ance. It sounds bor­ing, but this is the cru­cial data that has to be iden­ti­fied to safely load vehi­cles on cargo planes for trans­port, and any slight change in the way equip­ment is loaded on a vehi­cle means recal­cu­lat­ing every­thing. Since the infor­ma­tion is cur­rently cal­cu­lated in a very low-tech man­ner by NCOs and offi­cers with min­i­mal train­ing in how to do so (I used to be one), this step in deployment-prep is often done well in advance and the pre­pared vehi­cles (and materiel on them) are then quar­an­tined.
Vehicle quar­an­tines aren’t a big deal for regularly-scheduled deploy­ments. But if youve just been given the warn­ing order for a con­tin­gency deploy­ment — at a time when you would oth­er­wise be train­ing — you want to spend as much time prac­tic­ing with your gear as pos­si­ble before you go. That’s not pos­si­ble with quar­an­tined trucks. Instead, you have to spend months try­ing to beg, bor­row and steal vehi­cles and equip­ment to train with, since your stuff is locked up on the flight­line. (A sit­u­a­tion my bat­tal­ion found itself in for a few months in the win­ter of 2002–2003.) A reli­able, sim­pli­fied means of prepar­ing vehi­cles for air­load could some­day insert a lit­tle more flex­i­bil­ity into that time­line and give units a few extra weeks of qual­ity train­ing.
This train­ing is, of course, a pos­si­ble extra ben­e­fit of the new sys­tem. The direct and bank­able ben­e­fit is equip­ment that is pre­pared more accu­rately. Airload plan­ning requires a lot of pre­ci­sion to be done safely, and every extra degree of accu­racy makes the trip that much safer for the air­men and sol­diers shar­ing the plane with the equip­ment. (Possibly avoid­ing, for exam­ple, the June 2002 C-130 crash in Afghanistan that was blamed on a load that wasnt prop­erly pre­pared.) ORNL esti­mates that cur­rent means of com­put­ing the data can often be off by 14% or more. The new sys­tem con­sis­tently per­forms with­out any mea­sur­able errors at all.
Theres room for skep­ti­cism, since Oak Ridge has been talk­ing about this for more than 6 years. But its now moved from the lab to test­ing at the Transportation Center at Fort Eustis and rapid deploy­ment posts like Fort Bragg and Fort Drum, so well get to see how it does in action.
– Matthew Tompkins

The U.S. mil­i­tary is rely­ing more and more on gear that’s older than the sol­diers who use it, Photonics Spectra notes. Which means the com­pa­nies that built the hard­ware — and orig­i­nally sup­plied spare parts — may be defunct. Blueprints and doc­u­men­ta­tion may be out­dated, or have just plain van­ished. So reverse-engineering firms, armed with laser scan­ners, are step­ping in, to re-create what was lost.”
“Laser scan­ning sys­tems work by pro­ject­ing a line of laser light onto a sur­face,” the mag­a­zine says. “A cam­era con­tin­u­ously tri­an­gu­lates the chang­ing dis­tance and pro­file of the line as it sweeps over the object… [And] a com­puter trans­lates the video image of the line into 3-D coor­di­nates, pro­vid­ing real-time data ren­der­ings.”
In other words, think Tron — the scene where Jeff Bridges gets zapped into the com­puter — and you’re on the right track.

In the reverse-engineering appli­ca­tion, a tech­ni­cian moves the scan­ner around the object in a man­ner sim­i­lar to spray paint­ing. The data is sent to soft­ware to con­vert the point cloud into a sur­face model that can be imported into computer-aided design soft­ware.
The result­ing model serves as the basis of a tech­ni­cal data pack­age for the part, and the com­pany sends the pack­age out for bid to con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ers. The win­ning bid­der uses the 3-D model to gen­er­ate a com­put­er­ized numer­i­cal con­trol pro­gram that either pro­duces the fin­ished part or that builds a mold for cast­ing it. 

Radian Milparts, out of Willoughby, Ohio, is mak­ing new M60 gun mounts for the Navy’s H-3 Sea King heli­copters. The Navy “had a sam­ple gun mount, but no man­u­fac­tur­ing source, and no accu­rate tech­ni­cal data,” the com­pany explains. So Radian scanned the mount, dumped it into the com­puter, and then pro­duced fresh mounts — and blue­prints — from the new, elec­tronic design. The effort “fol­lows an ear­lier, small pro­gram where Radian Milparts rein­vented, doc­u­mented and fab­ri­cated” an H-3 cir­cuit board.
Wixom, Michigan’s Nvision Inc. is using laser scan­ners at Boeing’s Phantom Works, to help main­tain the F/A-18 Hornet and the F-15 Eagle — and to build new planes, like the Joint Strike Fighter.

In this case, it is nec­es­sary to com­pare the phys­i­cal air­craft to the CAD [computer-aided design] model. An inter­fer­ence prob­lem, for exam­ple, may arise when the air­craft is being assem­bled. In this case, the need arises to com­pare the phys­i­cal air­craft to the orig­i­nal CAD design to deter­mine the exact cause of the prob­lem. The com­plex­ity of the geom­e­try of state-of-the art aero­space struc­tures makes this a very chal­leng­ing task. Even when a spe­cific prob­lem doesn’t exist, the need often arises to com­pare the air­craft to the model in order to con­firm that the design intent is being met.

Getting the gear may have been the easy part. The Army has quickly pushed more than 220 new tech­nolo­gies into the hands of sol­diers in Afghanistan and Iraq — stuff like bomb-detection bots and hand­held trans­la­tors.
“But much work remains to be done in the equally impor­tant sec­ond phase offer­ing spare parts, man­u­als and other impor­tant follow-on ser­vices, accord­ing to senior offi­cials,” National Defense mag­a­zine says.

The Army was able to pur­chase and deploy these items in rel­a­tively short time by skirt­ing the tra­di­tional pro­cure­ment bureau­cracy and, instead, rely­ing on so-called rapid field­ing orga­ni­za­tions.
Many of these new tech­nolo­gies, how­ever, were sent to war in such a hurry that the Army was unable to arrange the sup­port ser­vices usu­ally asso­ci­ated with mil­i­tary sys­tems, such as tech­ni­cal man­u­als and instruc­tions on how to obtain spare parts…
Products get fielded by the REF [Rapid Equipping Force], Brig. Gen. Roger A. Nadeau, com­man­der of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, said. After a while, sol­diers start ask­ing where are the parts? Where is the log [logis­tics] plan? Collectively, we dont have a good answer.