Archive for February, 2010
Feb 27, 2010, post by awatrobski
The U.S. Air Force’s Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) B8 satellite, built by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), has surpassed its 10-year design life of on-orbit service in providing secure and reliable communications capabilities for the warfighter.
Launched from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 20, 2000, the B8 satellite is one of 14 DSCS III spacecraft designed and built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems for the MILSATCOM Systems Wing at the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif.
The satellite is also the first of four DSCS III satellites to feature Service Life Enhancement Program (SLEP) upgrades that enabled a 200-percent increase in communication capacity over original DSCS III spacecraft with its 50-watt Traveling Wave Tube Amplifiers.
“The high performance and longevity of the DSCS III constellation is direct testimony to a joint U.S. Air Force/Lockheed Martin team dedicated to providing the warfighter with secure and reliable satellite communications,” informed Kevin Bilger, Lockheed Martin’s vice president and general manager of Global Communications Systems. “The DSCS III constellation has provided the Department of Defense with its core communications capability for over two decades and will continue to make a significant contribution to our national security well into the future.”
The system delivers uninterrupted secure voice and high-data rate communications to Department of Defense users; essential tools in monitoring events and deploying and sustaining forces anywhere in the world. In 2009, the overall DSCS III constellation surpassed 200 years of on-orbit operations, the longest total operational experience of any U.S. military communications satellite constellation.
Lockheed Martin is also progressing on the Department of Defense’s highly secure communications satellite system, the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) program. As the successor to Milstar, AEHF will increase data rates by a factor of five, permitting transmission of more tactical military communications, such as real-time video, battlefield maps and targeting data. The first AEHF spacecraft has completed final testing and is planned for delivery to the Air Force in second quarter 2010.
Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin is a global security company that employs about 140,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, production, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The Corporation reported 2009 sales of $45.2 billion.
Feb 25, 2010, post by awatrobski
Utilicraft Aerospace Industries, Inc. (Symbol: UITA.PK) informed about a $780K Private Placement Memorandum to raise new capital to take the Company in a new direction as described below.
As part of the new direction of UITA as an aerospace technology development holding company, the Company is reviewing strategic acquisition possibilities – or the in-house development – of a Light Observation Aircraft (LOA) program intended for disaster “emergency first response” missions.
It is to be a “rapid deployment” observation aircraft, equipped with the latest electronic surveillance equipment for rapidly detecting life-signs of disaster victims trapped in debris or damaged structures over a wide search area in the shortest amount of time – as a search and rescue (SAR) airborne platform electronically transmitting coordinates to and from ground rescue teams.
John J. Dupont, President and CEO of UITA informed, “The ability of this aircraft to be shipped with wings detached (to fit in a container, or military transport aircraft pallet) will make it readily available to be air-lifted to nearby regional staging areas for immediate SAR sorties. Rapid global deployment is vital to the mission capability of this type of aircraft because time is of the essence when searching for survivors immediately after the disaster.”
The LOA Program also has a commercial, domestic law-enforcement, border patrol, and global military market potential.
What is more, the Company is reviewing strategic acquisitions of various developmental aircraft solutions for a “small STOL aircraft” to accommodate “tactical” humanitarian shipments to and from remote off-airport makeshift airstrip staging-hubs, with the capability of lifting and delivering the much needed food, water, and medical supplies directly into the heart of the stricken area — directly to disaster victims. The need to accommodate medical remote operations bringing immediate surgical relief to victims is also a consideration.
The Company has partnered with a veteran humanitarian shipper to further solidify its research and its operational capabilities. See more about UITA.PK at www.utilicraft.com.
This Press Release is for informational purposes only and is not intended as a solicitation of funds, and contains “forward-looking” statements.
Feb 25, 2010, post by awatrobski
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Police forces all over the UK will soon be able to draw on unmanned aircraft from a national fleet, according to Home Office plans. Last month it was announced that modified military aircraft drones will carry out surveillance on everyone from protesters and antisocial motorists to fly-tippers, and will be in place in time for the 2012 Olympics.
Surveillance is only the start, however. Military drones quickly moved from reconnaissance to strike, and if the British police follow suit, their drones could be armed — but with non-lethal weapons rather than Hellfire missiles.
The flying robot fleet will range from miniature tactical craft such as the miniature AirRobot being tested by Essex police, to BAE System’s new HERTI drone as flown in Afghanistan. The drones are cheaper than police helicopters — some of which will be retired — and are as wide as 12m in the case of HERTI.
Watching events on the ground without being able to act is frustrating. Targets often got away before an unarmed drone could summon assistance. In fact, in 2000 it was reported that an airborne drone spotted Osama bin Laden but could do nothing but watch him escape. So the RAF has been carrying out missions in Afghanistan with missile-armed Reapers since 2007. From the ground these just look like regular aircraft.
The police have already had a similar experience with CCTV. As well as observing, some of these are now equipped with speakers. Pioneered in Middleborough, the talking CCTV allows an operator to tell off anyone engaging in vandalism, graffiti or littering.
Unmanned aircraft can also be fitted with speakers, such as the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which could not only warn fly tippers that they were breaking the law but also be loud enough to drive them away.
The LRAD is a highly directional speaker made of a flat array of piezoelectric transducers, producing intense beam of sound in a 30-degree cone. It can be used as a loudhailer, or deafen the target with a jarring, discordant noise. Some ships now carry LRAD as an anti-pirate measure: It was used to drive off an attack on the Seabourn Spirit off Somalia in 2005.
LRAD makers American Technology prefer to call its product a device rather than a weapon, and use terms such as “deterrent tones” and “influencing behaviour.” Police in the US have already adopted a vehicle-mounted LRAD for crowd control, breaking up protests at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last year, although there have been warnings about the risk of hearing damage.
The LRAD has been tested on the Austrian S-100 unmanned helicopter, and the technology is ready if there is a police requirement.
But rather than just driving them away, a police drone should be able to stop fleeing criminals in their tracks. Helicopters already mount powerful searchlights, and strobe lighting capabilities can turn such systems into effective nonlethal weapons. High-intensity strobes can cause dizziness, disorientation and loss of balance making it virtually impossible to run away.
This effect was first harnessed in the “Photic Driver” made by British company Allen International in 1973. However, it has taken improvement in lighting technology (such as fast-switching Xenon lights) and an understanding of the physiology involved to make such weapons practical.
A “light based personnel immobilisation device” developed by Peak Beam Systems Inc has been successfully tested by the US military, and work to mount it on an unmanned helicopter in the States is under way.
This sort of light would be too dangerous for a manned aircraft because of the crew being affected. But an unmanned “strober” could be a literal crime stopper, and something we could see deployed within the next couple of years.
Even the smallest drones could be used for tactical police operations. As far back as 1972 the Home Office looked at model aircraft as an alternative to rubber bullets, literally flying them into rioters to knock them off their feet.
French company Tecknisolar Seni has demonstrated a portable drone armed with a double-barrelled 44mm Flash-Ball gun. Used by French special police units, the one-kilo Flash-Ball resembles a large calibre handgun and fires non-lethal rounds, including tear gas and rubber impact rounds to bring down a suspect without permanent damage — “the same effect as the punch of a champion boxer,” informed makers Verney-Carron.
However, last year there were questions over the use of Flash-Ball rounds by French police. Like other impact rounds, the Flash-Ball is meant to be aimed at the body — firing from a remote, flying platform is likely to increase the risk of head injury.
Another option is the taser. Taser stun guns are now so light (about 150 grams) that they could be mounted on the smaller drones. Antoine di Zazzo, head of SMP Technologies, which distributes tasers in France, says the company is fitting one to a small quad-rotor iDrone (another quad-rotor toy helicopter), which some have called a “flying saucer”.
Robots are already the preferred way of approaching possible bombs without putting officers lives at risk. In the future, police may prefer to deal with potentially dangerous suspects the same way, tackling them remotely using a taser if the situation requires it.
But tasers are controversial. In 2008 the Met rejected government plans for a wider issue of tasers to non-specialist officers because of the fear they could cause, and there have been numerous complaints of abuse. For some, the arrival of a hovering law-enforcement drone with a video eyes and a 50,000-volt taser at the ready might be a police technology too far.
Feb 25, 2010, post by awatrobski
Department of the Air Force Air Education and Training Command Specialized Contracting Squadron The Air Education and Training Command (AETC), Contracting Squadron, LGCI, is seeking sources for TRAINING AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER IN SUPPORT OF POTENTIAL T-6B AIRCRAFT for FOREIGN MILITARY SALES (FMS) acquisition programs located at Randolph Air Force Base (AFB), TX. This REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) is being issued to help determine the availability and technical capability of qualified companies capable of meeting the Government requirement.
THIS IS NOT A REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL (RFP), NOR IS IT A REQUEST FOR QUOTATION (RFQ). It is not to be construed as a commitment by the requesting party to issue a solicitation or ultimately award a contract. Responses will not be considered as proposals nor quotes. No award will be made as a result of this RFI. The Government will NOT be responsible for any costs incurred by interested parties in responding to this RFI. This FedBizOps sources sought notice is strictly for market research. Acknowledgment of receipt of responses will not be made, nor will respondents be notified of Government’s evaluation of the information received.
As a result of this RFI, the Government may issue a RFP; however, should such requirements materialize, no basis for claims against the Government shall arise as a result of a response to the RFI (e.g., use of such information as either part of its evaluation process or in developing specifications for any subsequent requirement). All respondents are asked to identify their firm’s size and type of business (e.g. large business, small business, service-disabled, HUB Zone, 8(a), etc.). The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code is 611512 with a size standard of $25.5M.
The source should be capable of providing T-6B aircraft maintenance training for all necessary maintenance specialties; T-6A to T-6B pilot differences academic and flight training, and aircrew simulator operator and maintenance training. Aircraft maintenance training would include academic and on-the-job training. Respondents should be aware that it will be the responsibility of each offeror to submit their 1 page capabilities statement, communicating their ability to provide the above mentioned training. The purpose of this notice is to identify capable, interested vendors.
Feb 25, 2010, post by awatrobski
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Since 2003, we provide satellite Internet in Iraq and Afghanistan globally enabling Iraqi and Afghan citizens, businesses and remotely deployed personnel to have broadband Internet access, enterprise connectivity, VoIP and videoconferencing services at affordable costs.
Contact: phone +48 22 630 70 70
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The bullet made a zipping, or fizzing sound. American soldiers, relaxing beside their vehicles and backpacks without body armor or helmets, looked around, bewildered. A moment passed. Then another zip, fizz.
“They’re shooting at us,” a soldier claimed. Laughing, giddy almost, they moved behind an armored vehicle that shielded them from the fields to the west. Somewhere out there, a sniper was trying to kill them. He was far enough away for the gunshot to be inaudible, or he may have been using a silencer.
The fight in southern Afghanistan between insurgents and NATO troops, along with Afghan forces still learning on the job, is not a conventional war. A lot of it is harassment, the deadly kind. The Taliban shoot, drop their weapons and walk off. They plant roadside bombs and disappear. They know that they will lose a head-on clash with Western firepower.
“We have all this great technology and everything,” stated U.S. Army Capt. Michael Kovalsky of Fords, New Jersey. “We overlook the little things like a piece of garbage in a tree,” which is sometimes used by insurgents to mark the location of a bomb.
As U.S. Marines press the Taliban in a five-day-old offensive against their stronghold of Marjah, insurgents are resorting to tactics that worked for them against the Soviet Army in the 1980s. Or much further back. Alexander the Great, the British Empire – Afghanistan has known many invaders throughout history.
The insurgents of today have radios and cell phones, but little more in the way of a sophisticated communications network.
When Kovalsky’s Alpha Company of the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Stryker Brigade moved into the Badula Qulp area, northeast of Marjah, last week, they occupied an abandoned Taliban compound. On some walls, they found cell phone numbers, possibly of insurgents, and drawings of American Chinook helicopters and other military hardware, said 1st Sgt. Gene Hicks of Tacoma, Washington.
The pictures appeared to provide a crude “running log” of American military strength in the area that could be consulted by other fighters as they moved from compound to compound, Hicks said.
The Taliban are patient and crafty when they plant roadside bombs, one of the biggest threats to American forces. They often do it in stages to avoid detection, according to American forces.
One man will drop off the explosives; the next day, a man will put in the charge; a day later someone will link up the materiel for detonation, and finally an insurgent will leave a marker – sticks across a path, a bundle of hay or rocks on the track.
Sometimes, they plant bombs – IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices – under puddles in the road. Or they create their own puddle, pouring water on the road to soften the earth for digging.
An insurgent’s bomb marker “could be anything. That’s the difficulty of it,” Kovalsky said. A rag on a branch could be a locator.
“Then again, who knows?” Kovalsky said. “On a windy day, it could have been somebody’s garbage blowing around.”
Alpha Company suffered casualties when it arrived in Afghanistan last year; the losses of new units are often higher when they first deploy because of inexperience. Alpha became battle-hardened in Maywan province and the Arghandab river valley of Kandahar province, other nesting grounds for the insurgency. They have yet to suffer a casualty in their current mission in support of the Marine offensive in Marjah.
Alpha Company’s commanders say they have noticed that Taliban cells operate locally, without much coordination with other groups of fighters, and that their leaders are, for the most part, not in the area.
Meanwhile, American technology – much of it high in the sky – scores successes, and falters at times. An Associated Press reporter and photographer accompanying a recent patrol heard a large explosion, one of many in the area. Soldiers said a Reaper, a pilotless reconnaissance aircraft with a weapons system, had killed a man who was apparently planting a bomb in the road.
The Stryker infantry carriers, designed for urban and open areas, can clock 110 kph (70 mph) on a highway. But they have had some trouble operating along a narrow canal road in Badula Qulp. The earth has caved in under at least three vehicles, pitching them at sharp angles in the mud and requiring hours to winch them out.
Instincts and experience, wedded to technology, help the Americans. One night, a gunner studying the thermal imaging screen of a Stryker’s weapons system spotted a man crouching and acting suspiciously in a field beside a compound. He was sure the man was planting a bomb.
Hicks took a look at the screen. Then the man stood up and wiped his hand on a wall. The sergeant had seen the same when he was deployed in Iraq. The man was no bomber; he was just going to the toilet.
Feb 25, 2010, post by awatrobski
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan supported a program designed to shoot down Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) which raised protest and skepticism — if such a technology was even possible — six years after the movie Star Wars debut. Billions of dollars were invested in a variety of research programs. The military has methodically researched a variety of concepts on how to defend against incoming nuclear missiles. SDI was established and now is managed by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.
Among the concepts: Using a high powered laser to hit an ICBM and destroy it. Ground based systems made no sense for a variety of logistical and technical reasons. Airborne-based platforms made sense. Spaced-based systems would have been ideal, many thought.
Ground-based systems were never seriously considered because of many obstacles that could occur between the ground station and the target and the limited amount of area that it could protect.
Spaced based systems are ideal, but posed significant technical, financial and security challenges. Throughout the 1990’s, the program evolved, and continues down two primary paths. One is using ground based missiles to hit opposing missiles such as the Patriot system and the second is using aircraft with the payload that is then fired to intercept an ICBM. The latter concept has continued development as a satellite attack platform.
Modifying the second approach evolved using large airborne platforms to house powerful high powered (as in multiple Megawatt) based lasers. The program offered several advantages. It’s rechargeable, it can be stationed anywhere over the United States and its allies, and it can be above any obstacles between itself and the target. In 2004, a B-747-400, heavily modified to be used as the test platform, known as the YAL-1A, was manufactured.
Feb 25, 2010, post by awatrobski
It’s the $64,000 question that Navy officials want answered: How many people does it take to operate an unmanned system?
The answer is important to the sea service because it is acquiring fleets of remotely-operated air, ground and maritime vehicles that will deploy from ships and collaborate on missions in the near-shore, coastal waterway and seaport environments in the coming years.
Unmanned vehicles are manpower-intensive technologies that require human control and monitoring often on a one-to-one basis. It typically takes two people — a pilot and a sensor operator — to fly and operate an unmanned aircraft from a ground control station.
“Taking two people out of the cockpit and putting them in the trailer is not where we want to go,” informed Adm. Jonathan Greenert, vice chief of naval operations.
The Navy is reducing the number of crew on its ships. On the newest warship class, the littoral combat ship, a core crew of 40 is expected to drive and man the vessel while a supplementary mission crew of about 15 sailors will handle and operate all of the unmanned systems and sensors that rotate aboard in mission packages. The LCS will accommodate one of three interchangeable mission packages tailored for surface warfare, mine warfare and anti-submarine warfare.
Determining the optimal number of sailors for operating unmanned systems and reducing their workload are two of the Navy’s top research and development initiatives, Greenert told the National Defense Industrial Association’s Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Panama City, Fla. “It’s very much a technologically-driven process,” he informed. “But it’s the people who will figure out how many people we need in the system. We need to do that right.”
The Government Accountability Office last month issued a report on the littoral combat ship that found the Navy still lacks a clear understanding of how LCS will operate with a smaller crew size. “The current Navy plan for a 40-person crew has not yet been validated by an analysis of the crew’s expected workload,” the report informed. “If the operational concepts for personnel, training, and maintenance cannot be implemented as desired, the Navy may face operational limitations, may have to reengineer its operational concept, or may have to make significant design changes to the ship after committing to building almost half the class.”
The service is planning to build a 55-ship class of the shallow draft warship (see related story).
As the Navy deploys its first littoral combat ship, USS Freedom, on her maiden cruise to counter narco-trafficking in the Caribbean, technology development efforts are underway at the Office of Naval Research to reduce the workload on forthcoming mission package crews.
ONR has funded a variety of studies and projects on topics including the launch and recovery of unmanned systems, intelligent agent-based scheduling algorithms and collaboration technologies for LCS mission crews, said Sam Taylor, product line manager on the program.
“All those technologies have focused on reducing the workload, adding automation and adding autonomy where we can on board that ship to help relieve the workload of those sailors,” he informed.
One of the prototypes is a collaborative command-and-control environment called SUMMIT, or Supervision of Unmanned Vehicles Mission Management by Interactive Teams. The system allows LCS mission package watch standers to display at their workstations the controls and video feeds for any of the unmanned vehicles that may be deployed off the ship, said officials at Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Advanced Technologies Laboratory, which is developing the technology. Operators also can bring up on their screens other task displays such as post-mission analysis tools.
The system will allow the crew to allocate their responsibilities in a variety of ways to fit a particular mission and the training of the individual watch team members, said Jerry Franke, manager for the lab’s human-robot interaction research area.
“If they’re able to do post-mission analysis at the same time as monitoring the sweep for the unmanned surface vehicle, for example, that would allow them to get through their tasking more rapidly. That improves the mission timeline,” he informed.
For the mine warfare mission package, a watch team consists of seven sailors who will man the computer consoles inside the mission control center aboard LCS. One sailor functions as the team leader, or evaluator, who assigns tasks and keeps tabs on the mission. He typically would assign two sailors to control each unmanned system — one to steer the vehicle and the other to monitor and move the onboard sensors. Using SUMMIT, the evaluator from his workstation can “look in” on any of the watch standers’ displays and reallocate tasks as necessary.
In experiments conducted at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City and at Naval Base San Diego, last year, lab officials discovered that not all of the seven watch standers would be constantly available in the control center. Some might be dispatched to help launch or recover unmanned systems in the middle of a mission.
“Evaluators would combine the unmanned surface vehicle control and the payload operations onto one operator because the sweep operation is typically a low workload operation,” said Vera Zaychik Moffitt, the principal investigator on the SUMMIT program. “In most circumstances one person is enough to do that job.” Both sets of experiments showed that the watch team accomplished its missions faster and analyzed more of the data with the system.
Lab officials said the technology could function aboard either competing version of LCS — Lockheed Martin’s steel monohull variant or General Dynamics’ aluminum trimaran. The Navy is in the process of downselecting to one design.
Taylor added that ONR this year is integrating the best of breed technologies, including SUMMIT, into a package that it plans to demonstrate in June 2011 in Panama City. Following the demonstration, the technology is expected to transition to an acquisition program for incorporation onto LCS.
In the meantime, there are other efforts underway in Cherry Hill, N.J., where Lockheed ATL engineers are developing technologies that add “brains” to non-autonomous maritime vehicles and devising software to make robotic systems smarter so that fewer human operators have to monitor them.
“We have a problem where it could take a large number of people to operate unmanned vehicles,” statedAdam Salamon, a member of the engineering staff in robotics control. “We are looking to invert that ratio so that a small number of people can operate a large number of vehicles,” he told an audience at an Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International symposium in Washington.
Engineers successfully migrated onto two commercial boats a technology initially developed to automate a Toyota Prius to compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Urban Challenge in 2007. The competition pitted robotic cars and trucks that could drive themselves in a race through a course that simulated military resupply missions.
The enabling technology, modular extensible toolkit for intelligent systems, or METIS, is a framework that provides autonomous vehicle control to a previously unintelligent machine. It functions as the machine’s brain, with algorithms that help the vehicle navigate, carry out tasks and make decisions when it encounters obstacles.
An 18-foot Sea Doo jet boat and a 34-foot Wellcraft Scarab boat automated by METIS participated in an experiment with the Navy two years ago to demonstrate how autonomous systems could help sailors conduct maritime and port security operations. The two boats along with a Desert Hawk unmanned air vehicle were tied together by a technology called intelligent control and autonomous re-planning of unmanned systems, or ICARUS. Developed by Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems, the autonomous mission management system dynamically planned and re-planned vehicle operations to meet task requests and enabled a single operator to play the role of a mission manager.
“ICARUS decreases UAS operator workload while enabling control of a team of unmanned assets performing complex missions in dynamically changing environments,” said Franke. Automation and human-robot collaboration tools are capabilities that inevitably need to be integrated into unmanned systems and operations, he added.
“The key thing that’s going to be a bottleneck to the use of unmanned systems … is the number of people required to operate them if we’re just having to operate them remotely through tele-operations,” Franke said. “There’s a certain level of autonomy that’s going to be needed to help off load the burden on operators.”
Feb 25, 2010, post by awatrobski
As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wraps up his tour of Latin America, Moscow is weighing its options in a turbulent region long dominated by American influence.
Although much of Lavrov’s trip – which took him to Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico – was dedicated to the promotion of Russian culture and pressing humanitarian issues, there were several information that could turn some heads in the region, and especially north of the border.
Feb 24, 2010, post by awatrobski
The Kremlin’s powerful Security Council says Moscow sees no reason to delay the sale of its S-300 anti-aircraft systems to Tehran.
“There is the signed contract that we must fulfill, but supplies have not started yet. This deal is not restricted by any international sanctions, because these are merely defensive weapons,” Russian Security Council Deputy Secretary Vladimir Nazarov told the Interfax news agency said.
“Any of our actions must facilitate global and regional stability, respect for international law and international commitments, including under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that is another matter,” he said.
The possible sale of Russian air defense hardware to the Islamic Republic is a major irritant for Israel and its close ally the United States. Both have pressed Moscow not to go ahead with a deal that may help protect Iran’s nuclear facilities from threats.
“Russia received and continues to receive many requests and even demands to supply or not to supply weapons. Those countries that are addressing such calls to us should better look at their own deals with Georgia,” Nazarov noted.
Nazarov also said a military strike on Iran would be a big mistake and the problems linked to Iran’s nuclear program should be resolved through diplomacy.
“Any military action against Iran will explode the situation, will have extremely negative consequences for the entire world, including for Russia, which is a neighbor of Iran,” he warned.
Despite Iran’s full cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog and the transparency of its nuclear program, the United States and its allies accuse the Islamic Republic of covertly seeking to produce nuclear weapons.
However, Iran denies the claims and insists its nuclear activities are only conducted for civilian applications of the technology and generating electricity in order to meet its soaring energy demands.
Feb 24, 2010, post by awatrobski
The country’s top defence scientist has, for the first time, revealed that India’s new Shaurya missile, which can carry a one-tonne nuclear warhead over 750 kilometers, is specially crafted to be fired from Indian submarines and could form the crucial third leg of India’s nuclear deterrent.
If launched from a submarine off the China coast, it could hit several Chinese cities like Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai.
Air and land-based nuclear weapons are delivered to their targets by fighter aircraft and ballistic missiles, respectively. Since these can be knocked out by an enemy first strike, the most reliable nuclear deterrent has traditionally been underwater, missiles hidden in a submarine.
V K Saraswat, the DRDO chief and Scientific Advisor to the Defence Minister, revealed to Business Standard at the ongoing Defexpo 2010, “We have designed the Shaurya so that it can be launched from under water as easily as from land. The gas-filled canister that houses the missile fits easily into a submarine. The underwater leg of the nuclear triad needs to be totally reliable and needs a state-of-the-art missile.”
India’s undersea deterrent had so far revolved around the K-15 ballistic missile, built with significant help from Russia. The K-15 was to equip the INS Arihant, India’s lone nuclear-powered submarine, which is being constructed in Visakhapatnam. But now, after rigorous underwater testing, the Shaurya could be the mainstay of Arihant’s arsenal.
“The Shaurya was developed from ground up as a submarine-capable missile,” confirms Dr Prahlada, the top DRDO scientist responsible for liaising with the military. “Every piece of technology for fitting it in a submarine is already in place.”
Shortly before the Defexpo 2010, Dr Saraswat had publicly stated that India’s missile technology was ahead of China’s and Pakistan’s.
Now top DRDO scientists have revealed that the Shaurya is not a ballistic missile, as it has been thought to be; it is actually a hypersonic cruise missile, which never leaves the atmosphere.
A ballistic missile is like a stone being lobbed towards a target. Rockets toss it upwards and towards the target; after the rocket burns out, gravity pulls the missile warhead down towards the target. Buffeted by wind and re-entry forces, accuracy is a problem; and, since the ballistic missile’s path is predictable, shooting it down is relatively easy.
The Shaurya has none of these issues. Its solid-fuel, two-stage rocket accelerates the missile to six times the speed of sound before it reaches an altitude of 40 kilometers (125,000 feet), after which it levels out and cruises towards the target, powered by its onboard fuel.
While ballistic missiles cannot correct their course midway, the Shaurya is an intelligent missile. Onboard navigation computers kick in near the target, guiding the missile to the target and eliminating errors that inevitably creep in during its turbulent journey.
The Shaurya, say DRDO sources, will strike within 20-30 metres of its target after travelling 750 kilometres.
Conventional cruise missiles, like the American Tomahawk and the Indo-Russian Brahmos, offer similar accuracy. But their air-breathing engines carry them along slowly, rendering them vulnerable to enemy aircraft and missiles. The Shaurya’s solid-fuel, air-independent engine propels it along at hypersonic speeds, leaving enemy fighters and missiles far behind.
“I would say the Shaurya is a hybrid propulsion missile”, says Dr Saraswat. “Like a ballistic missile, it is powered by solid fuel. And, like a cruise missile, it can guide itself right up to the target.”
Making the Shaurya even more capable is its ability to manoeuvre, following a twisting path to the target that makes it very difficult to shoot it down. In contrast, a ballistic missile is predictable; its trajectory gives away its target and its path to it.
