Army, ADA, and AirSea Battle

Galrahn has been discussing AirSea Battle for quite awhile, specifically focusing on the absence of any Army contribution to the overall public discussion.  It is quite sad that the Army has not publicly engaged on the AirSea discussion.  Only this month has the AUSA come out with a rebuttal to the Navy and Air Force's public discussions.

One big reason Big Army is not contributing to this AirSea concept is because of internal Army politics. Specifically the decline of Air Defense Artillery. It is quite paradoxical that, while Ballistic Missile Defense has taken on greater strategic significance, Army itself is institutionally moving away from ADA in general.

ADA is composed of two components, HIMAD and SHORAD. For much of the 90s, the active officer corps was split 50/50: 10 Battalion of HIMAD and 10 Battalion of SHORAD. Right after OIF1, though, Big Army saw that there was no low-altitude threat at all, so it moved decisively to eliminate the SHORAD formation. I think right now there's only 10 Stinger/Avenger batteries providing a residual capability, which is a 75% cut.

You'd probably say it's long overdue, but the key is that the loss of 30%+ of total ADA corps means that many fewer O4s and O5s writing papers to Parameters and other professional journals. Sure, we have several ADA generals at the Pentagon, including the current G-8, but where do you think the generals' talking points come from? It's those O4s and O5s.

The BMD mission has slightly increased the HIMAD side of the house, but it did not make a dent against the SHORAD loss. The unit manning the GMD missile field is a Guard unit (Colorado/Alaska Guard), whose officers do not worry about professional journals. Ambitious officers transfer to other hot fields to make their stars.

ADA probably will never attain the reverence of the Soviet PVO branch, but its preoccupation with self-preservation means that Big Army has little brainpower thinking about AirSea. Horror upon horrors, but sometimes I wonder if we should have folded ADA into the USAF like the Europeans have...

NCADE = A-AAM?

USAF's Chief of Staff, Gen Schwartz, has signalled his support for the air-launched missile defense concepts. This is good for missile defense. Additionally, the USAF will have an option to improve its air-to-air capability.

As I have talked about before, the USAF needs new air-to-air missiles to make up for F-35's inferior capabilities. Raytheon's NCADE and Lockheed's ALHTK will nicely address the shortfalls.

NCADE will give the AIM-120 an infrared seeker option. This will address the seeker diversity problem USAF and USN faces. NCADE's booster stage will also extend the range or improve AIM-120's kinematics. Even if NCADE does not pan out, Raytheon can quickly leverage its results into AIM-120 improvements.

ALHTK will introduce new missiles into USAF inventory, if NCADE doesn't pan out. PAC-3's radar seeker operates on a different band from AIM-120, so that will complicate threat jamming efforts. THAAD's IR seeker will address seeker diversity.

If air-launched missile defense progresses beyond the study stage, hopefully BAE will bring on its Meteor in the competition.

May the best missile win!

Chinese Weapon Engineering Textbooks

Just came back from a personal trip to Beijing. The bookstores there are very impressive. Of course they have the small hole-in-the-wall, mom-and-pop bookstores. The super-bookstores, though, are multi-story affairs. They have at least three floors dedicated to books, one or two floors for CDs and DVDs, and floor space for stationery and other products. The bookstore in Sidan district has 1.5 floors for consumer electronics, with a focus on electronic dictionaries. Each of these floors is about the size of a one-floor Barnes & Nobles. And these stores are all packed! The three super-stores I visited are all filled with people browsing and purchasing books. Even on a weekday during school hours the stores are still busy. I just don't know if I can go back to Barnes and Nobles anymore after this trip.

One particularly impressive area is in the engineering textbooks. As an engineer, I just had to go check that out. If you go to a Barnes & Nobles here in the states, you will find about 8 to 16 shelves (1-2 short aisles) for engineering, programming, and "technology" books. In the Beijing super stores, the engineering section takes up at least a quarter of a floor. Mechanical engineering itself takes up at least 8 shelves. Food processing/manufacturing takes up several shelves, too. Even weapons/military/aero/astro engineering has about 3 to 4 shelves, more if you include the shipbuilding shelves. Civil engineering and architecture/construction occupies half of the whole engineering section, which is notable from an American perspective, where the undergrad civil engineering departments are usually the small departments in the engineering schools (approx 10-20 students/class year).

The military engineering books seem good. You get some fluff there, like a "modern weapon catalog" that is the size of a pocket book, but the rest are pretty solid. I saw "Principles of Submarine Design", "Principles of Fire Control System Design", "Design of Automatic Firearms", and "Introduction to Propellant Design", to name a few. I flipped through these books and they all seemed to cover the basics, with plenty of equations to start component designs and instructions on how to make the design tradeoffs. Good textbooks. It is sad that books like these are not more accessible to the American public, or even the American engineering students.

Because of the current Chinese emphasis on space flights and ballistic missiles, rocketry is pretty big in the military/aero&astro engineering book section. The books cover all segments of rocket/missile design. They even have an "Artillery Rocket Design" translated from the original Russian textbook.

All in all, it was very impressive visiting these bookstores. They are definitely on the to-see list for anybody visiting Beijing.

Does any of you know how the bookstores are like in India's major cities? How are their engineering books selling?

PS: edited for grammar

Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles

Christian over at Defense Tech broke the story of a Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile program. It is an intriguing thought, but this idea just brings back too many memories of reading Payne Harrison's Thunder of Erebus.

We all know that you don't have a real Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile until you mate a torpedo to the warhead!! Close-In Weapon Systems cannot yet deal with torpedoes!

But in general, yeah, current generation CIWSs are designed to deal with the terminal "diving" maneuver of modern anti-ship missiles. So they have the maneuverability to acquire and track something diving down at them from space. The current technical challenge is that of mass: Can they pump out enough bullets/fragments to shred the re-entry vehicle?

At this time, the fastest countermeasure would be to network multiple CIWS together, and target one RV at a time. The current ammo capacity on the CIWS is definitely insufficient in a saturation attack scenario.

In the future, we can expect to see more multi-gatling CIWS like the Russian Kashtan or the Italian Myriad. They have to make up for the Gatling gun's low initial firing rate by adding guns.

Update: Yes, I know you're going to bring up Metal Storm as a potential solution. No, Metal Storm is NOT a solution to this. Their design has a serious limitation to ammo capacity. Just imagine lining up 400 20mm bullets from end to end, and you can see that they are unrealistic.