1st Two F-35Bs Delivered to USMC

The U.S. Marines' first two production F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters (JSF) arrived at Eglin Air Force Base (AFB), Fla., plane-maker Lockheed Martin announced Jan. 12.

BF-6, THE FIRST F-35B production jet delivered to the U.S. Marine Corps, arrives at its new assignment at Eglin AFB, Fla. (Angel DelCueto / Lockheed Martin)

The two short take-off vertical landing fighters were flown in separately by Marine aviators Maj. Joseph Bachmann and Lt. Col. Matt Taylor. The pilots flew aircraft BF-6 and BF-8 respectively.

Under an unorthodox arrangement, while the jets belong to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing's VMFAT-501 squadron, the unit resides with the U.S. Air Force's 33rd Fighter Wing alongside the Navy's VFA-101 and the Air Force's 58th Fighter Squadron.

The Marines could start training new students to fly the F-35B in August, a senior Defense Department official had said earlier. However, currently the Pentagon has not yet formally set a date for training to start at the Florida base.

The DoD has opted to use an approach based on reducing risks prior to starting training operations at Eglin, the official said. As such the Pentagon has not set a specific date to issue a military flight release. Instead, the start of training will be "event driven."

"[The U.S. Air Force and Department of the Navy] are waiting for aircraft flight clearance for test pilot maturation flights," the senior DoD official said. Further, "both services are still trying to determine how many maturation hours are needed by test pilots before instructor pilots and then students can be trained."

But if everything goes as currently planned, the Marine Corps students will probably start flying their version of the Lightning II around August 2012.

U.S. Won't Adopt E.U. Code of Conduct for Space

The United States will not adopt a European-written "code of conduct" for activities in space on the grounds that it is too restrictive, according to a senior State Department official.

"It's been clear from the very beginning that we're not going along with the code of conduct," Ellen Tauscher, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said during a Jan. 12 breakfast with reporters in Washington.

Asked why the U.S. government would not sign the document, Tauscher said, "It's too restrictive."

The European Union has been working the voluntary code of conduct for several years. The document lays out rules of the road for operating satellites and other space vehicles as space becomes increasingly congested, the idea being to minimize the chances of collisions or misunderstandings that could escalate.

The code also focuses on dealing with space debris, a problem that began getting greater public attention in 2007 after China destroyed one of its own orbiting satellites with a ground-launched missile.

"We made it very definitive that we were not going to go ahead with the European Code of Conduct; what we haven't announced is what we're going to do, but we will be doing that soon," Tauscher said.

Up to now, the U.S. government has been circumspect about its intentions with regard to the code. In April, for example, Ambassador Greg Schulte, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, described the code as a "positive approach" but stressed that the U.S. government had not yet decided whether to sign the document.

Some U.S. lawmakers have raised concerns that the nonbinding agreement would tie the U.S. military's hands in space. "We've advanced further technologically in development and actual deployment of these systems than anyone else, and agreements [and] codes of conduct tend to … constrain our military," Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said during a hearing on the subject in May.

"We had never said we were going to do it; we just hadn't said 'no,'" Tauscher said.

Hinting at new U.S.-written rules of the road for space, Taushcer said, "You wouldn't be surprised to find out that we've found a nice sweet spot."

The Pentagon had concerns with the European strategy for space traffic management, but there are also "ways to deal with it," according to Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Stimson Center, a think tank here. The U.S. Defense Department did a lengthy assessment of the code of conduct and reviewed particular provisions that "would make sense for our national security."

"If the satellite is stealthy, or we want it to be stealthy, how does that fit into a traffic management system?" he said. "Now you argue … major space-faring nations can figure out the orbital characteristics of objects in space, but it you want to move an object in space do you provide advance notice of this or how do you handle that?"

If the Obama administration is going ahead with a new strategy, then the Pentagon's concerns have likely been addressed, Krepon said.

In 2004, the Stimson Center published a draft code of conduct for space, which is similar to the document pushed by the European Union.

"I think the problematic piece that the administration was struggling with was that it was made in Europe and that the really important space-faring nation felt no ownership of it," he said.

Russia, China, India and Brazil have all distanced themselves from the document, Krepon said. At the same time, Canada and Japan have endorsed the document.

"I think the conundrum that the administration is facing is how to bring in major space-faring nations that have kept their distance from the E.U.'s handiwork," he said.

The Pentagon supports a space international code of conduct, Lt. Col. April Cunningham, a DoD spokeswoman, said.

Thales To Continue Rafale Electronic Gear Support

PARIS - France has renewed with Thales a 10-year service contract for an undisclosed sum to support electronic equipment on the Rafale fighter, the company said in a Jan. 10 statement.

The fixed-price contract includes a power-by-the-hour feature, with an agreed price for guaranteed availability of the equipment, a Thales spokeswoman said.

"The ten-year contract, known as Maestro, is a renewal of the current through-life support contract and broadens the scope of responsibility to ensure that Thales works more closely with operational personnel to guarantee fleet availability," Thales said in the statement.

The contract was awarded at the end of November, the spokeswoman said. No financial details were available, although the contract is understood to be worth several million euros.

The joint aircraft service support department, Structure Intégrée de Maintien en Conditions Opérationelle des Matériels, awarded the contract.

Under the arrangement, Thales guarantees fleet availability by boosting equipment reliability and will deploy company personnel on site to be closer to the operator, the spokeswoman said.

On the Rafales flown by the French Air Force and Navy, Thales will maintain the aircraft's phased array radar, electronic warfare suite, avionics, front-sector optronics and cameras, and communications

Bulgaria 2011 Arms Sales Total $380M: Report

SOFIA, Bulgaria - Bulgaria's defense industry has escaped unscathed from the general economic crisis, with its exports hitting $380 million in 2011, Pressa newspaper reported Jan. 12.

It cited figures by the Bulgarian Defense Industry Association (BDIA). Such statistics are usually kept secret.

The organization, which groups Bulgaria's major arms and munitions makers, refused to specify where its sales went to.

The newspaper however cited Algeria, Afghanistan, the United States and Iraq as traditional buyers of Bulgarian light weapons and ammunition.

Bulgaria's defense industry exports had stood at $200 million in 2008, Pressa said citing data from the same association.

"It is still hard to compare the situation with the years before (the fall of communism in) 1989," BDIA co-chairman Stefan Vodenicharov told the newspaper.

Before the end of communism, Bulgaria's armaments industry was around 10 times the size it is now, employing 115,000 people and shipped abroad an annual $700 million to $800 million worth of armaments - at prices from then.

But the advent of democracy, the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact and a number of international arms sales embargoes to countries in Africa and the Arab world plunged the industry into a deep crisis in the 1990s.

The majority of production facilities have since been privatized with the government recently selling its remaining stock in the Arsenal Kazanlak light arms and munitions plant, the only licensed producer of Russian Kalashnikov assault rifles during the Cold War.

It had also prepared a strategy to soon put on the table VMZ Sopot, its biggest defense firm to remain fully state-owned.

2nd U.S. Drone Strike in 2 Days Hits Pakistan

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan - A U.S. missile strike targeting a militant vehicle killed four rebels on Jan. 12 in the second drone strike in 48 hours to hit Pakistan's tribal region, local security officials said.

A drone strike on Jan. 10 signaled apparent resumption of the covert CIA campaign after a two-month lull to avoid a worsening of U.S.-Pakistan relations after a NATO raid that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, infuriating Islamabad.

The latest missiles struck in the New Adda area, 18 miles west of Miranshah, the main town of the North Waziristan tribal region.

"U.S. drones fired four missiles targeting a rebel's vehicle and killed four militants," a local security official told AFP on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media.

Another security official confirmed the strike and casualties. He said the identities of those killed were not immediately known.

On Jan. 10 two missiles struck a compound, also in the outskirts of Miranshah, in the first such strike since Nov. 17. Four people were killed.

The U.S. drone campaign has reportedly killed dozens of al-Qaida and Taliban operatives and hundreds of low-ranking fighters in the remote areas bordering Afghanistan since the first Predator strike in 2004.

But the program fuels widespread anti-American sentiment throughout Pakistan, which has been especially high since the deadly NATO incident on Nov. 26.

A joint U.S.-NATO investigation concluded last month that a catalogue of errors and botched communications led to the soldiers' deaths. But Pakistan rejected the findings, insisting the strikes had been deliberate.

NATO's probe said that both sides failed to give the other information about their operational plans or the location of troops and that there was inadequate coordination by U.S. and Pakistani officers.

The incident prompted Islamabad to block NATO supply convoys heading to Afghanistan and order the U.S. to leave Shamsi air base in western Pakistan, from where it is believed to have launched some of its drones.

Others are flown from within Afghanistan.

The region had served as the main supply route for NATO forces operating in Afghanistan before the suspension triggered by the November incident.

Boeing: U.S. Army EMARSS Delivery in December

Boeing is set to deliver four Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (EMARSS) intelligence gathering aircraft to the U.S. Army in December, a company official said Jan. 11.

With a contract award last June, Boeing is obliged to deliver an operational aircraft within 18 months, said Waldo Carmona, Boeing's director of networked tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).

"We have an 18 month contract to deliver four aircraft, fully integrated and tested to deploy, by December 2012," he said. "I tell you firmly today, that we're on schedule to go do that."

According to Carmona, the Boeing team has an internal target to beat that delivery date.

Dan Goure, an analyst at the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute, said that he was impressed at how quickly the program is proceeding.

"This was quite amazing in the sense of how fast they were able to get a program of record up, moving and, now, the first four vehicles in the field," he said. "It's quite impressive."

To make sure the company delivers on time, Boeing has purchased a Hawker-Beechcraft King Air 350ER which it will modify to aerodynamically match the actual EMARSS aircraft, said Carmona.

The modified aircraft will have an extended nose where the operational plane would have its retractable electro-optical infrared (EO/IR) camera ball and it would have all of the antennas mountings of the real thing.

"From an external configuration, our risk reduction prototype is going to look just like the real airplane," Carmona said.

The prototype will fly in May, said Carmona. He said he hopes the aircraft will be FAA certified by no later than early June.

"That's one of the reasons that will allow us to meet the schedule," he said, adding that the FAA certification will simplify testing for the Army when it receives the first aircraft.

Simultaneously, a Joint Integration Test Facility operated by Boeing and the Army will test the intelligence gathering hardware and software in a lab in Aberdeen, Md. The lab facility will also look at future upgrades to the system, Carmona said.

Flight testing with all of the hardware and software onboard the aircraft will happen later this year after the FAA certification is completed.

Once airborne developmental testing is done, the four EMARSS aircraft will be sent to Afghanistan for limited user trials, Carmona said. In essence, operational testing will be during real-life combat missions.

"The whole plan is to put it in a real environment and assess its capability," he said.

While the EMARSS is not a revolutionary leap in capability, it does offer better performance than older aircraft like those used by the Army Task Force ODIN or the Air Force's MC-12 Project Liberty planes, said Goure.

"It makes absolute sense in the long-run to now put together a program of record that gets you everything you want, replaces the existing aircraft and lasts 25 years," he said. "It's a substantial improvement in capability and maintainability."

Carmona said that in addition to its powerful Wescam 15 EO/IR camera, EMARSS will carry a signal intelligence and communication intelligence payload. It also carries line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight high bandwidth data-links and can link to the Army's Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A). There are provisions for three intelligence analyst stations onboard, one of which can be configured for special mission packages. The EMARSS has provisions to carry 400 pounds of special intelligence payloads that are not part of the regular aircraft suite, Carmona said.

In the cockpit, the pilots are afforded a Situational Awareness Data-link (SADL) display, which enables the aviators steer the aircraft onto the crew's intended quarry.

Despite the weight, drag and power requirements, the aircraft will have seven hours of endurance, Carmona said.

Currently, the Engineering Manufacturing Development (EMD) contract is for four aircraft only, Carmona said. The Army has a requirement for 36 production planes, but the money for those planes is not in the budget.

The EMARSS program's budget has been caught in a political battle between the Army and the U.S. Air Force, said Goure.

"The issue here is politics," Goure said. "The Army essentially zeroed this out of the [Program Objective Memorandum] because it was afraid that, like on the C-27s, that it was going to put up the money, the program was going to go to the Air Force and the Air Force would just walk away with the money."

The problem will persist until the Pentagon sorts out who runs manned tactical airborne ISR, Goure said. Moreover, the Air Force is not willing to guarantee the availability of the aircraft to the Army whenever it asks because it manages assets across the entire theatre of operations, Goure said. Logically, the mission should be part of Army's repertoire, he said.

"It's a fundamental issue of how you manage tactical ISR," Goure said.

The Army needs to push for the EMARSS program to prove that it can successfully acquire and manage a program properly and in less than a 10-year span, Goure said.

"You need a win," Goure said. "Why would you pick this program to torpedo?"

Goure noted that EMARSS is amongst the most successful of Army procurement efforts in terms of execution, budget and timeliness.

Carmona said hopes to convince the Pentagon of the value of the EMARSS by demonstration just how good the aircraft really is over Afghanistan. A Milestone C decision on whether the Army will ultimately buy the plane is expected in the first quarter of 2013, he said.

U.S. Army To Begin Apache Block III Testing

The U.S. Army will begin operational testing of its new Block III version of the AH-64D Apache helicopter gunship in March, a service official told reporters Jan. 12.

"We're got the initial operational test and evaluation - the IOT&E - is taking place in March," said Col. Shane Openshaw, the Army's program manager for the Apache, at a luncheon hosted by Boeing. "The results of that will feed analysis and ultimately support a full-rate production decision that is scheduled for July or August of this year."

In the meantime, the Army is finishing up production of the Block II version of the venerable gunship.

The Army is down a fleet of less than 18 A-model Apaches "in tactical units" which need to be rebuilt into Block II aircraft, Openshaw said. The last of those remaining A-model aircraft will begin being remanufactured in May, he said. They will be the last Block II Apaches the Army is buying and will be delivered next summer.

"This comes at the just the right time. You just slip this through just as the budgets were shrinking down," said Dan Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, Arlington, Va. "And now you have an attack helicopter fleet that will last you for quite a while."

Goure said the Block III will likely weather the looming budgetary cuts - which many expect will hit the U.S. ground forces the hardest - largely intact. "It's so close to being finished, if you don't, you'll end up with the additional cost for a very long time of a split fleet," he said, noting also that the AH-64D will be the core of the U.S. attack helicopter fleet for decades to come and will need to continue to be upgraded.

The Apache will continue evolve over the years, and will continue to add new technologies and new capabilities just as it always has, Openshaw said. The soon-to-be-operational Block III helicopter adds level-four control of unmanned aircraft, which means Apache pilots will be able control a drone's sensors and set way points for the remotely operated machine. By contrast the Block II offered only the ability to view video imagery from an unmanned aircraft.

An upgraded Apache might eventually pave the way for next generation helicopters that might emerge from the Army's Joint Multi-Role (JMR) project, Openshaw said.

"I believe that many of these kinds of technologies that we are current working on today will show up as subtle configuration changes to Apache overtime that will ultimately be the raw material, if you will, that will feed JMR," Openshaw said.