Lockheed exec Larry Lawson speaks at a 2011 rollout ceremony for an F-35 in Florida. Photo: Lockheed Martin

Sometime in the spring of 2012 Al Bunting received a message imploring him to publicly endorse America’s warplane of the future.

Bunting, a retired senior Air Force officer and administrator for the tiny New Jersey coastal town of Sea Girt, was not alone. Across the Garden State in 2011 and 2012, government officials, political organizers and even religious leaders received similar messages, all asking for the recipient to speak out on behalf of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, meant to replace thousands of existing U.S. warplanes at an immediate cost of more than $400 billion. The plane had run into serious technical problems that heaped cost and delays onto the program, and needed a public boost.

The messages were just one facet of a high-stakes public relations campaign, paid for by Lockheed Martin and overseen by an interlocking network of powerful PR firms. The paid, pro-F-35 advocacy also involved, to some extent, a mysterious blog with access to suspiciously high levels of F-35 testing data.

Read the rest at Offiziere.ch.

The targets were buildings packed with humming computers. A missile streaked overhead and, at preset coordinates, it fired concentrated beams of energy. Computers short-circuited, the lights flickered out and even cameras monitoring the rooms shut off. The missile had turned off all the power in the targeted buildings.

This first successful test of the three-year, $40-million Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) at a Utah test range on Oct. 16 marked a big step forward for technology that has been in development for more than four decades.

The potential of CHAMP and other so-called Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons is enormous, in theory. They could allow an army to bloodlessly disable select portions of an enemy’s military capabilities, potentially winning a fight without a lethal shot being fired.

But CHAMP itself, a collaboration between the Air Force Research Laboratory, defense giants Boeing and Raytheon plus Ktech, a small company Raytheon acquired last year, does not necessarily herald “a new era in modern-day warfare,” as Keith Coleman, the CHAMP program manager at Boeing Phantom Works, claimed in a press release. Boeing declined to comment for this story.

Experts disagree on the Boeing-Raytheon technology’s capabilities and readiness, and the vulnerability of military targets to its effects. “It’s an interesting program,” Norman Friedman, a respected military author and analyst, tells AOL Defense. But CHAMP “could be PR over reality,” he adds. A truly revolutionary EMP weapon might require more work.

Read the rest at AOL Defense.

An F-35 over Florida in October. Photo: Air Force

There have been a lot of sketchy claims made about the long-delayed, over-budget F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, history’s most expensive weapon program. But this one takes the cake. According to Stephen O’Bryan, a vice president at F-35-maker Lockheed Martin, the radar-evading jet fighter will actually get stealthier over time — without any upgrades.

To be clear, every other stealth warplane has steadily lost its ability to dodge enemy radars owing to wear and tear on the plane’s special skin coating. Not so the F-35, O’Bryan said.

In the latest issue of Air Force magazine, O’Bryan insisted the single-engine JSF, which is projected to cost a trillion dollars to develop, buy and maintain, is fundamentally different than its predecessors. “The surface material smooths out over time, slightly reducing the F-35’s original radar signature, according to the Lockheed Martin official,” John Tirpak  wrote.

With the older F-22, B-2 and F-117 stealth warplanes, the opposite happened. All three of the previous models saw their surfaces gradually degrade and all required expensive upgrades just to maintain their radar-avoiding qualities at the original levels. In light of other empty promises Lockheed has made regarding the F-35, it’s highly unlikely the new jet will buck this historical trend.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

The 3-D printer craze has taken off with everyone from hobbyists and amateur gunsmiths to giant corporations. Less known is how the U.S. military has caught the desktop manufacturing bug too, and is designing printable components for bomb detectors and prototype limbs. Even more radical: The Army has even gone so far to deploy a helicopter-borne 3-D printing laboratory to Afghanistan.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

An F-35 over Eglin Air Force base in 2009. Photo: Air Force

The latest high-level Pentagon review of the trillion-dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program did not go well for the Lockheed Martin-built JSF. But don’t tell the Air Force that. The flying branch is racing ahead with its own JSF training and evaluation, regardless of the Defense Department’s hang-ups.

Last week’s Defense Acquisition Board review by senior Pentagon officials was meant to approve a comprehensive plan for completing the stealthy jet’s more than decade-long test effort, but in a “very painful” four hours, the officials could not agree on the plan, Reuters reported.

The impasse is bad news for the ambitious effort to replace essentially all of the tactical jets flown by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps with a family of broadly similar F-35 models costing no less than $400 billion to develop and purchase and hundreds of billions more to operate and repair. Since its inception in the late 1990s, the single-engine JSF has grown steadily heavier and more complex, has suffered frequent program delays and technical problems and isn’t slated to be fully combat ready until 2018, at the earliest. At least one aviation expert expects the military to slash its total buy of JSFs.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

F-22 production. Photo: Lockheed Martin

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney promised that if elected, he would restart production of Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. “I would add more F-22s,” the former Massachusetts governor said in Virginia on Saturday. Don’t buy it.

The plan, if you can call it that, is totally possible. But just because a Raptor resurrection is possible doesn’t mean it’s realistic — let alone a good idea.

It’s actually easier to return the F-22 to production than it is to restart most discontinued warplanes. Lockheed and the Air Force carefully preserved all the tooling and blueprints to make the radar-evading jet. Usually, warplane manufacturers usually dismantle the bulky factory tooling once production wraps on a particular model. Still, reviving the F-22 would cost billions before a single new jet even entered production. It would also upend the Air Force’s carefully-laid plans for producing new drones, tankers, bombers and — oh yeah — the cheaper and arguably more capable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

It’s not clear how serious Romney is about his proposed Raptor re-start. According to Time, Romney mentioned the idea at a rally in the “rather modest” Military Aviation Museum outside Virginia Beach. “Perhaps he was just channeling the good vibes he was getting from all the museum pieces,” Time quipped.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

A soldier checks his radio headset in Iraq in 2009. Photo: Army

In key moments during the U.S. Army’s latest war game for advanced communications gear, the troops’ high-tech new radios failed them.

The setting was the semi-annual Network Integration Exercise in New Mexico in May and June. The radio in question: the General Dynamics Manpack, a backpack-portable version of the Pentagon’s ambitious Joint Tactical Radio System. Voice traffic from the Manpacks was “garbled” and “unintelligible,” according to Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester. In a memo dated July 20, Gilmore declared the Manpack “not operationally effective.” In other words, it didn’t work in mock combat — and it probably won’t work in real combat, either.

But the scathing review hasn’t stopped the Army from doubling down on the meager remnants of the once-mighty JTRS initiative, which aimed to equip the entire U.S. military with hundreds of thousands of cheap, high-tech radios whose smart processors would switch waveforms in an instant, making them the radio equivalent of Star Trek‘s universal translator. Just over a week ago the Army dropped $54 million on 13,000 copies of General Dynamics’ similar Rifleman radio, banking on engineers to work out any bugs like those identified in the Manpack in New Mexico.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

Via English Russia.

English Russia takes us inside the Novosibirsk factory where workers are hand-assembling some 90 Su-34 fighters for the Russian air force.

The facility looks, ahem, less than modern.

Staff Sgt. Reag Wood observes mock insurgents during an exercise. Photo: Fort Bliss Public Affairs Office

Leaving home while carrying a phone, an iPad and a laptop might also mean lugging along several tangled power cords. Now add radios and GPS devices. Now strap them to your person and wrap the cords around your body beneath your 30-pound armored vest. Oh, and you’re on patrol in Afghanistan, which means there’s no place to plug in when your phone’s batteries start to die. This explains why the Pentagon is keen on eliminating those cables with wireless chargers, and now wants to boost the range to more than 50 feet.

The plan involves spending $5-6 million using the branch’s research and development centers to “increase the efficiency of power transfer over longer distances,” according to an Army statement. If successful, it means that soldiers — instead of being limited to recharging their gadgets when returning to base, or by plugging into their vehicles — could go cordless. That means recharging by a wireless battery attached to their body — no plugs. The Army also hopes to build wireless transmitters on bases, allowing soldier gear to recharge passively, without having to plug anything in. And one day, it might be used on drones.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

Blue Devil 2 in its North Carolina hangar. The orange canisters contain helium. Photo: David Axe

ELIZABETH CITY, NORTH CAROLINA — Down the road from the Coast Guard air station, past the copse of oak trees, surrounded by fields of leafy collard greens, in a 1,000-foot-long steel hangar built during World War II here in coastal North Carolina, the unlikely dream of an upstart military contractor is about to be literally deflated. In the hangar’s musty gloom, underneath rafters where countless birds perch and spatter the concrete floor 200 feet below with their waste, a 370-foot-long, ultra-high-tech surveillance airship floats just a foot off the ground, tethered to Earth by three metal cables each weighing three tons.

But not for long. The $211-million Blue Devil 2 airship, built for the Air Force by the tiny, Virginia-based company Mav6, is slated for dismantling and storage at the end of this week, bringing to an ignominious end a two-year saga of technological ambition, bureaucratic waffling and vicious politicking. The Air Force no longer wants Blue Devil 2 or anything like it, a reversal from its official position just two years ago on a program that a former Pentagon chief said was “urgently needed.” Now tensions between the Air Force and Mav6 are bad enough that a company employee had to sneak me into the hangar past a pair of Air Force officers just to see the blimp.

There’s a slim a chance the story’s not over. The Pentagon — particularly, the Army and Navy — is still keen to build next-gen “hybrid” airships, which combine lighter-than-air buoyancy with thrust from propellers. Mav6 is talking to the Navy about picking up Blue Devil 2 from the Air Force. The company should have the thumbs-up or -down from the sailing branch by Friday, though we’re told it could be weeks before the Navy’s decision is made public. If the Navy passes, an alternative model for overhead military surveillance will deflate without ever taking off.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

U.S. and Romanian Special Forces train Afghan Provincial Response Company, Laghman Province, Feb. 9, 2012. David Axe photo.

The Special Operations Industry Conference in Tampa last week offered a rare glimpse inside the powerful, and growing, U.S. commando community. The three-day conference, jointly hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association and U.S. Special Operations Command, included presentations by senior special operators and bureaucrats and equipment demonstrations and displays by the military and industry. Among the disclosures …

Read the rest at Offiziere.ch.

SOFIC. Luanne Dietz photo.

TAMPA, Florida — Scandal. Political intrigue. Tricked-out assault helicopters disgorging masked Special Operations Forces. A noisy, smoky mock gunfight. These are just about the last things you’d expect to see at a trade show. But SOFIC — that’s the Special Operations Forces Industry Convention — had all this and more.

That’s not to say the show, held in Tampa over three days last week, didn’t also feature all the usual trappings of an industry confab. All the big defense contractors, plus plenty of little ones, were there showing off their latest radios, robots, weapons, vehicles and other gear. There were “networking breaks” over coffee and brownies. There were boring discussions of acquisitions processes. There were booth babes — models hired to lure the largely male attendees into chatting with company reps.

But the highlights of the show were the things SOFIC had that countless other confabs rarely do. The simulated battles. The surprise, high-profile speaking guest. The controversy over one general’s ill-conceived public remarks.

What follows is a visual sampling of the show’s people and products, with exclusive photos by Wired‘s Luanne Dietz.

Read the rest at Danger Room.