War Is Boring

Three years ago a physically disabled Chinese man unwittingly broke the law when he shot video of a military airbase in eastern China and uploaded the footage to his website. Huang Moumou’s subsequent arrest and conviction for leaking state secrets is a surprising wrinkle in the tale of China’s “accidental spies.” Civilians with cameras are Beijing’s preferred method of revealing military developments to the world. But only, it seems, when the civilians stick to the government’s script.

The past decade has seen an unlikely revival of a long-grounded technology. Military airships, last operational with the U.S. Navy in the 1960s, took back to the skies, propelled by soaring demand for long-endurance, low-cost aerial surveillance in Iraq and Afghanistan. Per flight hour, an airship costs a fraction of what a helicopter or a fixed-wing plane costs.

The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives is trying to reverse cuts announced by President Barack Obama earlier this year. The House’s proposed defense bill would reverse some of Obama’s planned cuts to ships, drones and warplanes. “The proposal is designed to put real combat power behind the President’s proposed pivot to Asia,” the House Armed Services Committee stated.

The U.S. Air Force’s new Long-Range Strike Bomber will be less complex and cheaper than the flying branch’s last bomber, the Northrop Grumman B-2. That’s the vow service leaders have been making in Washington, D.C., in recent months as the potentially $55-billion bomber program gets off the ground. (Congress approved the first $300 million in development funds last fall.) “The program will leverage mature technologies” to keep the per-bomber cost to under $550 million, according to Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, an Air Force spokesman.

America’s main air-to-air fighter since the mid-1970s is still going strong. The F-15 Eagle, originally a McDonnell Douglas product, now built by Boeing, entered U.S. Air Force service in 1976. Today a force of some 250 F-15Cs and Ds comprise the majority of the American air-dominance fleet alongside 180 or so Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors. With equipment and structural upgrades, the F-15s are set to fly and fight for another 20 or 30 years in Air Force colors.

The U.S. Air Force is quietly assembling the world’s most powerful air-to-air fighting team at bases near Iran. Stealthy F-22 Raptors on their first front-line deployment have joined a potent mix of active-duty and Air National Guard F-15 Eagles, including some fitted with the latest advanced radars. The Raptor-Eagle team has been honing special tactics for clearing the air of Iranian fighters in the event of war.

The U.S. military’s more than decade-old effort to produce a hypersonic global strike weapon just took a big step forward and a big step back. On April 20, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, published the results of an engineering review of a key hypersonic vehicle test.

On Dec. 22, 2010, someone apparently pointed a cellphone out of the window of a car driving along a public road outside the perimeter of a military airfield in Chengdu, an industrial city in central China. The person holding the phone, whose name has never been revealed, snapped a photo of a black-painted jet fighter taxiing through fog blanketing the airfield.

Four months after capturing a crashed U.S. stealth drone near the Iran-Afghanistan border, Tehran claims it has hacked into the ‘bot’s classified mission-control system. If true, it could mean Iran is making good on its vow to reverse-engineer the stealthy, Lockheed Martin-built RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone and produce homemade copies.

The Air Force’s premier killer drone could get a lot more dangerous, if the flying branch agrees to upgrades proposed by the robot’s manufacturer. California drone-maker General Atomics has figured out ways to nearly double the flight time of the camera-, missile- and radar-equipped MQ-9 Reaper by adding fuel pods, longer wings and stronger landing gear. With all three enhancements, a Reaper’s endurance jumps from 27 hours to a whopping 42 — almost two days of continuous flying, which makes a big difference now that the Air Force is scaling back its drone buys.

The U.S. Navy is beginning the planning process for its next-generation carrier air wing. New fighters, drones, radar planes and resupply aircraft are in testing or concept development. The result, sometime after 2030, could be an even more powerful naval air force.

In World War II, it could take up to 30,000 bombing runs over a period of weeks to destroy a thousand ground targets. On Monday in North Carolina, the U.S. Air Force’s 4th Fighter Wing hit 1,000 targets in a single sweep, using just 70 or so Boeing F-15E Strike Eagles capable of dropping large numbers of small, smart munitions. Estimated time of destruction: a couple hours.