No posts ear­lier today because I attended a detailed brief­ing with Army offi­cials about their new pro­gram to field two new uni­forms in Afghanistan to see if an alter­na­tive to the UCP is needed. We reported this ear­lier with the help of our friends at Soldier Systems, and in the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I need to give credit to my good friend Matt Cox at Army Times who broke the story.

Here’s an excerpt of tomorrow’s lead story on Military​.com:

The Army is set to field new com­bat uni­forms to two bat­tal­ions in Afghanistan next month in an effort to bet­ter equip com­bat troops fight­ing in the var­ied ter­rain found in that rugged climate.

For years some Soldiers had com­plained about the cur­rent multi-​​environment Universal Camouflage Pattern, argu­ing the toned down grey and green stood out in desert envi­ron­ments, rocky ridges and forested val­leys found through­out east­ern Afghanistan where most Army units now operate.

The new camo schemes include the Crye Precision-​​made MultiCam and a new pat­tern designed by the Natick Soldier Systems Center in Massachusetts.

MultiCam was designed sev­eral years ago with the help of Natick and is pop­u­lar with spe­cial oper­a­tions forces in the Army and Air Force — with some oper­a­tors already wear­ing the squig­gly brown, tan and green uni­forms in Afghan combat.

Natick also devel­oped a new vari­a­tion of the UCP by adding coy­ote tan to the pat­tern, and will field the so-​​called UCP-​​Delta along­side the MultiCam one.

“We’re try­ing not to just deal with anec­do­tal infor­ma­tion,” said Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, chief of the Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier, dur­ing a Sept. 16 brief­ing with reporters at the Pentagon. “Just because some­one else might be wear­ing some­thing doesn’t mean that that is the best for all the environments.”

And Matt also broke the story of a 2009 study com­pleted by Natick that showed the MultiCam per­formed bet­ter than a bunch of pat­terns as a “uni­ver­sal” camo and that MARPAT, Desert Brush and a Syrian scheme killed the UCP in almost all scenes. I obtained a copy of the study and I’d like to share it with our read­ers to do their own analysis…there’s a ton of data, but here’s the jist:

Though Army offi­cials are loath to admit the UCP’s short­com­ings, a 2009 Natick study showed the cur­rent uni­form per­form­ing worse than four other com­mer­cially avail­able pat­terns in all envi­ron­ments, includ­ing urban, desert and woodland.

The study, which was first reported by the Army Times and a copy of which was obtained by Military​.com, said MultiCam per­formed best as a uni­ver­sal pattern.

“If Army lead­er­ship desires a to main­tain a sin­gle, multi-​​environment cam­ou­flage pat­tern for com­bat mis­sions, data from this eval­u­a­tion show the MultiCam pat­tern is the best over­all, read­ily avail­able pat­tern,” the study said.

The study indi­cated that the Marine Corps desert dig­i­tal pat­tern, or MARPAT, and another pat­tern called Desert Brush per­formed best in arid and urban envi­ron­ments, while the MultiCam “was not as good as MARPAT and Desert Brush pat­terns it was sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter than both pat­terns in two out of three wood­land scenes,” the study said.

Both desert MARPAT and Desert Brush per­formed bet­ter than the UCP in eight of nine scenes testers eval­u­ated, while MultiCam per­formed bet­ter than UCP in seven of nine scenes.

Photosimulation Camouflage Detection Test

Please be sure to read the entire story at Military​.com on Sept. 17.

(Photo: C. Todd Lopez)

– Christian

Okay, I’m totally fired up about this ambush in Ganjgal that need­lessly took the lives of three Marines, a Corpsman and nine Afghan secu­rity forces.

A huge thanks to Mike j who for­warded me Jonathan Landay’s audio report from the bat­tle. It’s about 15 min­utes long and I gotta say, it is a MUST lis­ten. I had a vis­ceral reac­tion to it.

The audio report fleshes out the ear­lier story (as does the accom­pa­ny­ing Landay piece) on just what hap­pened in the ambush and how the vil­lage was ori­ented. As usual, this sounded like a horse­shoe val­ley run­ning east-​​west with high hills on the north-​​south rims. From the story and audio, it sounds like a well-​​supplied enemy force with plenty of ammo and even some body armor and hel­mets — all con­duct­ing military-​​style flank­ing maneu­vers while press­ing the attack.

It looks like the force — which was not small by any means, com­pris­ing some 80 Afghan secu­rity forces and 12 train­ers — came from FOB Joyce. Judging from pic­tures of the base avail­able online and this video shot at the base, there was more than enough room for a COIN plane land­ing strip and the min­i­mal logis­tics to han­dle the upkeep and arm­ing of, say, a COIN con­fig­ured Air Tractor.

This bat­tle, like the Wanat COP bat­tle in 2008, should be a wake up call for bet­ter sup­port from CAS and arty.

Couple other things:

Pedestrian, please don’t tip me off to Danger Room posts…we’ve been talk­ing COIN air forces before they jumped on the band­wagon. And I agree with Ed on the UAV logic…too small, not enough weapons and I want human eye­balls in that cock­pit — pre­ferrably two sets. The way I see it, if this force was so well sup­plied, a low, slow, prop plane could have caught the action in time to snuff it out. And “asdfg” — we reported at Military​.com a few months ago that the Corps was look­ing to out­fit their KC-​​130Js into Spectre “lites” in the com­ing year. I’ll look into updat­ing that story for you…

I’m not let­ting this one go, folks.

– Christian

Sorry for the delay in post­ing, folks. Was on a much-​​needed vaca­tion with the fam­ily that recharged my bat­ter­ies and pre­pared me for what is cer­tain to be a very newsy fall.

One thing I wanted to make a note of with our read­ers is a story that ran last week on Military​.com from a well-​​respected jour­nal­ist whom I’ve known for years, Jonathan Landay. He writes for McClatchy news and was involved in a sud­den ambush and fire­fight that resulted in the loss of two senior enlisted Marines, a young Marine offi­cer and a Navy Corpsman — all on an advi­sor team for Afghan forces.

Jonathan’s take­away from the ambush and the hours-​​long fire­fight that ensued was that the Marines were beg­ging for some kind of fire sup­port to help get them out of the pinch in Kunar. Because of the new restric­tions placed upon forces there to avoid civil­ian casu­al­ties — or the per­cep­tion of civil­ian casu­al­ties — fire and air sup­port for the Marines (and their Afghan troops) was delayed for hours. Anyone read­ing this who’s been in com­bat knows how long an hour is when the bul­lets are fly­ing — most of the fights I’ve been in have lasted min­utes, and that was plenty.

…The U.S. troops had to wait more than an hour for attack heli­copters to come to their aid and their appeal for artillery fire was rejected, with com­man­ders cit­ing new rules designed to avoid civil­ian casu­al­ties, the report said…

When an Afghan sol­dier demanded heli­copter gun­ships, U.S. Major Kevin Williams replied through an inter­preter: “We are pinned down. We are run­ning low on ammo. We have no air. We’ve lost today.”

The Americans were assist­ing Afghan forces in an oper­a­tion that called for Afghans search­ing the ham­let for weapons and then meet­ing vil­lage elders to plan police patrols.

But U.S. offi­cers sus­pected insur­gents were tipped off about the oper­a­tion before­hand, as the coali­tion and Afghan forces were ambushed as they approached the out­skirts of the ham­let at dawn, the report said.

Aside from the pol­icy aspect of the screwup, there’s some­thing that might be worth con­sid­er­ing here that could have made the cru­cial dif­fer­ence. We’ve been cov­er­ing the larger issue of COIN air power and the micro issue of a COIN sup­port and recce plane. Would not have some­thing like this made a deci­sive dif­fer­ence in the ambush?

Let’s look at the key points:

The COIN plane would have 5 hours of loi­ter, more than enough time to recce the area before the meet­ing with the elder that was the bait of the ambush. The crew could have alerted the advi­sors and their Afghan charge well before they entered the vil­lage of the ambush setup.

Even had they missed the emplace­ments, the COIN plane could have pro­vided grad­u­ated lev­els of pre­cise CAS and could have worked as a FAC-​​A for artillery and mor­tar sup­port. Helicopters are great for this, but they were too far away and have lim­ited loi­ter time. A COIN plane can be based at FOBs or even COPs with only a few hun­dred meters of run­way and a skele­ton main­te­nance crew.

Sure there is greater risk to the pilots and there’s plenty of logis­ti­cal prob­lems to account for. But it seems the solu­tion to this prob­lem is well within our grasp and the Pentagon has been much too slow to send it down range.

This loss of life is a tragic (and pre­ventable?) shame and rest assured that Defense Tech and Military​.com will con­tinue to inves­ti­gate its cir­cum­stances and fol­low its conclusions.

– Christian

A top Pentagon offi­cial told a small group of defense reporters this morn­ing (July 23) that the upcom­ing QDR will likely pro­pose the for­ma­tion of an avi­a­tion cadre devoted solely to irreg­u­lar warfare.

The Pentagon’s guru for spe­cial oper­a­tions and low inten­sity con­flict, the renowned Michael Vickers, told us that he believes a light strike, light recon­nais­sance air­craft would be use­ful to troops in an uncon­ven­tional fight.

“That’s one of the issues that this QDR is look­ing at about how to cre­ate these sort of irreg­u­lar war­fare air units — should we do that, num­ber one, because noth­ing has been decided — then what that mix might be. But it might not reside in the spe­cial oper­a­tions forces, it might reside in the gen­eral pur­pose forces as sort of a coun­terin­sur­gency capa­bil­ity,” Vickers said.

Of course, this jibes with the Navy’s Imminent Fury ini­tia­tive and rum­blings from Norty Schwartz (USAF-​​COS) to cre­ate an irreg­u­lar air wing in the Air Force.

Vickers went on to raise an inter­est­ing point — one that the brief I posted yes­ter­day from the Navy’s IWO hinted at in the sec­tion on Imminent Fury — that an air­craft like that could also be an advan­tage to train­ing local forces in coun­terin­sur­gency air techniques.

“One of the advan­tages with that kind of air­craft being adapted to the coun­terin­sur­gency bat­tle­field is that they tend to be very inex­pen­sive and some­thing that a part­ner nation could afford. … They’re get­ting a look,” he said.

But before you think Vickers was hedg­ing on the cre­ation of an irreg­u­lar air force, lis­ten to what he said later when pressed.

“I think there is a need for that kind of capa­bil­ity. I think that capa­bil­ity is being looked at in the QDR. But the ques­tion is how much, and exactly the mix,” Vickers added. Notice he didn’t say ‘whether’ it would be cre­ated or part of the rec­om­men­da­tions from the QDR.

And then this more demon­stra­tive statement:

“I’m fairly con­fi­dent we’ll end up with some­thing. The ques­tion is how large a force and what capa­bil­ity to we put in there and whether we put it in over time. But some kind of irreg­u­lar war­fare some­thing or other — some Air Force unit, whether it’s a series of squadrons or a wing or a group or what­ever — I think is an idea whose time has come.”

Looks like the Spads will be back!

– Christian

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.

Caldwell told a group of mil­i­tary blog­gers on a con­fer­ence call today that he’s try­ing to neck down the num­ber of doc­trine man­u­als from nearly 550 to just below 100 and to include some of the TTPs derived from them on Wiki pages. The way it works is that you can exam­ine the tac­ti­cal doc­trine pages after log­ging in with your AKO account and you can update the pages with your own expe­ri­ences and prac­tices. Each area is mod­er­ated by a sub­ject mat­ter expert who edits entries and can chat with a Soldier updat­ing the post to have him clar­ify his addition.

To Caldwell, this is the most effi­cient way to reach experts and get their feed­back — the actual Joes in the fight.

“We want to take the exper­tise of the Soldiers who are out there and get the experts input,” Caldwell said.

So far the Army has posted seven TTPs in the last 10 days and received 5,000 page views. The goal is to have 230 man­u­als avail­able by Wiki so Soldiers can have bet­ter access to the most updated infor­ma­tion on how to win their fight.

– Christian

So, when does the civil­ian ver­sion come out?

Paris Airshow — Israeli devel­op­ers work­ing on a ducted-​​fan fly­ing hov­er­car say that a full-​​size, tur­bine dri­ven unmanned pro­to­type will fly “within two months”. Flight tests with a smaller electrically-​​driven model, they say, have val­i­dated their basic tech­nol­ogy.
The Reg flying-​​car desk spoke today with Janina Frankel-​​Yoeli, mar­ket­ing veep at Urban Aeronautics of Israel, at the Paris Airshow. Urban Aeronautics pre­fer to call their designs “fan­craft”, thereby dis­tin­guish­ing them from hov­er­craft, which can’t actu­ally fly.
“We’ve solved the three basic prob­lems of ducted-​​fan craft,” he says. “Our craft are sta­ble, they can lift heavy loads, and they can fly fast — bet­ter than 100 knots.”

The US Army and Air Force tried to get some­thing like this going for decades, but could never work out the kinks. The tac­ti­cal ben­e­fits, par­tic­u­larly in case­vac and urban com­bat, would be immea­sur­able — though I do won­der if it’d per­form in high alti­tude envi­ron­ments like the Hindu Kush. Either way, hats off to the Israelis for get­ting the ever elu­sive fly­ing car tech­nol­ogy this far along.
Exit ques­tion: who remem­bers this war­lock?
–John Noonan

Napoleon famously quipped, “An army marches on its stom­ach.” And any­one who’s been hun­gry in the field knows that few things out there are as big a deal as chow. So when I vis­ited Natick last week, I was espe­cially inter­ested in see­ing what was new at the DoD Combat Feeding Directorate.

Well, buf­falo chicken, for one thing. That’s right, warfight­ers; come FY ’09 you’ll have a new menu item in your MREs. And I had a chance to taste the stuff, and I’m happy to report it’s really good … and I’m a hot wing connoisseur.

Jeremy Whitsitt, Combat Feedings out­reach coor­di­na­tor, explained that the com­mand is con­scious of the morale ele­ments along with the nutri­tional value of menu choices . “An item like buf­falo chicken makes a Soldier feel in touch with life back home,” Whitsitt said.

Since 1992 Combat Feeding has added over 200 com­po­nents to the basic MRE.

Whitsitt described the “ration time­line,” which is the strate­gic plan behind com­bat chow:

- Initial wave eats MREs for 15–20 days. (No require­ment for heat or electricity.)

- After that “heat and serve” group rations (like the Unitized Group Ration — Express) will be used for the next 10–15 days.

- Then hope­fully things are set­tled to the point that a chow hall is up and run­ning and “A Rations” are being served. This assumes refrig­er­a­tors, boil­ers, and stoves are in place.

Speaking of the UGR-​​E, Whitsitt demon­strated how easy it is to fire one of those bad boys up. The box comes with chow for 18 folks, and with the sim­ple pull of a lan­yard, the auto-​​boiler starts heat­ing the entrees. They’re ready to eat in about a half hour.

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The idea of an exoskele­ton in a mil­i­tary appli­ca­tion con­jures up images of a dig­i­tal cam­mie robo­cop, per­haps; and one day we may treat “exos” the same way we treat body armor. But the nearer-​​term util­ity of exoskele­tons are some­what less glamorous.

In 2007 the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center assumed respon­si­bil­ity for the man­age­ment of the Exoskeleton project from DARPA. The Natick project is cur­rently funded through FY 2009 and its goals are as follows:

1) In con­junc­tion with the U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command, develop a set of per­for­mance spec­i­fi­ca­tions for a full body Exoskeleton that will be the basis for a require­ment for a ver­sion of the Exoskeleton that can assist Soldiers in accom­plish­ing phys­i­cally demand­ing tasks asso­ci­ated with load­ing and unload­ing sup­plies and heavy materiel, and per­form­ing vehi­cle maintenance.

2) Improve the human inter­face, bio­me­chan­i­cal effi­ciency and ergonomic accept­abil­ity of the Exosketeton.

3) Develop com­pact, portable, effi­cient, safe power sources.

4) Reduce the cost and ruggedize the system.

5) Demonstrate reli­a­bil­ity and safey for use by Soldiers.

During my recent visit to Natick, Exo-​​czars Jeffrey Schiffman and David Audet explained that they were focused on help­ing Soldiers make repet­i­tive tasks like load­ing boxes on racks and rolling oil drums up ramps eas­ier. They also have a vision of assist­ing Air Force and Navy ordies with load­ing mis­siles and bombs. Whereas it might take four guys to lift, say, a Sidewinder mis­sile onto an F-16’s wingtip sta­tion, an Exoskeleton would allow the same task to be per­formed by one guy.

Schiffman and Audet allowed that their main con­cerns right now were power sources and safety backup modes if the Exoskeleton suf­fers a mechan­i­cal fail­ure. (Not a good thing if you’re the ordie hold­ing a Sidewinder, for instance.)

But oth­er­wise Natick (in coor­di­na­tion with con­trac­tors like Sarcos and Raytheon) has the test plan on track. So main­tain­ers and log­gies every­where take heart. Help for that aching back is on the way.

(Photo: John B. Carnett /​ POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE)

– Ward

According to Walter Teal, an engi­neer in Natick’s micro-​​climate lab, through­out the U.S. Army in 2005 there were six heat-​​related deaths, 1,400 cases of heat exhaus­tion, and 2,500 cases of heat stroke. It’s bad enough if a Soldier col­lapses on the ground, but the con­se­quences can be even worse for Soldiers behind the con­trols of the Army’s helicopters.

Natick engi­neers lis­tened to the feed­back from pilots oper­at­ing in the hot envi­ron­ments of Iraq and Afghanistan and, with the assis­tance of pri­vate con­trac­tors, designed and pro­duced “liquid-​​cooled under­wear.” Basically, the gar­ment is a vest the pilots wear that hooks into a cool­ing sys­tem inte­grated into the heli­copter. The sys­tem is com­prised of a lunchbox-​​sized black box that houses the liq­uid cool­ing com­po­nents, a series of tubes routed to each pilot’s seat, a quick-​​disconnect fit­ting that allows the pilot to egress with­out wor­ry­ing about reach­ing down to detach the vest, and the vest itself.

As with any air­plane that has sys­tems added to it as it con­tin­ues its ser­vice life, find­ing the real estate to house the black box (one for each crew mem­ber) and tub­ing was an issue. The Blackhawk has six feet of tub­ing between the cool­ing unit and the respec­tive seat; the Chinook has twenty-​​two feet of tub­ing. But what­ever the design chal­lenges have been along the way, the heli­copter pilots have seemed happy with the results. One went so far as to pro­claim the liq­uid cooled under­wear sys­tem as “the best thing to hap­pen to heli­copters since the rotor.”

And Natick isn’t for­get­ting the guys on the ground either. They’re in the process of test­ing two dif­fer­ent types of indi­vid­ual cool­ing units. One is a sin­gle 1.5 liter cylin­der that weighs four pounds, the other is a pair of brick-​​sized devices, one hous­ing the com­pres­sor, the other hous­ing the fan and con­denser — not unlike the HVAC sys­tem in many homes. The units are designed to be worn at the hip. Both units are hop­ing to meet Military Standard 810 (duh …), which of course states that these sorts of devices have to pro­vide 120 BTUs/​hour of cool­ing. Both units pro­vide about four hours of cooling.

The Navy’s approach to the over­heated per­son­nel issue is a bit more basic. Blessed with the lux­ury of freez­ers on ships, they sim­ply use Steele vests, which are noth­ing more than vests with pouches that hold ice packs.

– Ward

I spent some time at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass. (about 20 miles due west of Boston) this week, and like any gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tion worth its salt they have their own set of acronyms. So if you were not wise in the ways of Natick and I walked into a room and said, “HRV,” you would say?

Exactly.

Well, an HRV is a “Human Resource Volunteer.” According to the HRV hand­book “Soldiers are the key ele­ment in research efforts. The results from test con­ducted by these vol­un­teers deter­mine which items the Army will adopt and how much energy a Soldier will use under var­i­ous cli­matic conditions.”

In other words, HRVs are guinea pigs — but they’re vol­un­tary guinea pigs … unlike, say, the Soldiers who may have been unwit­tingly used by the U.S. Army for exper­i­ments in the past.

Private Grant Huffman had just fin­ished advanced infantry train­ing and was cool­ing his heels around Fort Knox wait­ing to start learn­ing how to drive a tank when the Natick team headed by John Ward, who is an Army vet and for­mer HRV, approached him with their HRV pitch. Huffman was look­ing for a change of scenery and the idea of par­tic­i­pat­ing in stud­ies that might help other Soldiers appealed to him.

Soon enough Huffman found him­self walk­ing on a tread­mill in a cli­mate cham­ber in full com­bat gear with a next-​​generation pack strapped to his back. Durning the course of test­ing, the Natick staff might make the tread­mill go faster. They might make the cham­ber hot­ter … then colder. They could pelt Huffman with wind and rain … all in the name of mak­ing Soldiers safer, more effec­tive, or more lethal.

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