Month: June 2008

FCS MGV Update

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You can get a good summary of the progress of the NLOS-C howitzer and NLOS-M mortar here, and things seem to be proceeding well, with the tube and the autoloader performing well.

Some pics of the NLOS-C:

FWIW, I don’t think that the FCS MGV (Future Combat System — Manned Ground Vehicle) is a particularly good idea. These platforms will be more expensive than their predecessors, but lighter weight, half the weight of a Bradley, 1/3 of the weight of an Abrams, so they will be more vulnerable to things like IEDs.

The systems they contain, communications and sensors, not the hybrid drive system, do have military value, and I expect them to see service, but it’s cheaper, and to my mind more militarily advantageous to retrofit the boxes on existing systems.

As to whether the military will buy any of these, I think yes, but only the NLOS-C, because the artillery folks at the military are currently using a vehicle first fielded in 1963, the M109 Paladin, and with the Crusader cancellation in the late 1990s, it’s still their turn.

I don’t think that the rest will be manufactured, though the ICV (Infantry Combat Vehicle) is in one very significant way, it carries a full infantry fire team of 9, as opposed to the Bradley’s 6, because of space freed up by making the turret remotly operated.

You could retrofit a Bradley with a new turret for the same effect though.

Good Government Policy from The Last Place You Would Expect

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Specifically, the Washington, D.C. City Council, which has voted to double the property tax on vacant properties, to $10/$100 evaluation (that’s right 10%, it had been 5%, as compared to $1.85/$100 for commercial properties, and $0.85/$100 for residential properties).

Additionally, the Council has made it more difficult to get an exemption, cutting back on the numbers of exemptions granted, though there is still a 3 month exemption for a property for lease, a 1 year exemption for residential property for sale, and a 2 year exemption for commercial property for sale.

In many inner cities, vacant properties blight the landscape, and this is a very good way of dealing with it.

New Build An-124 Plans Proceed

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Demand for the services of the An-124 Ruslan airlifter has been growing by leaps and bounds, and now Russia and the Ukraine appear to be on the verge of restarting productions(Paid Subscription Required).

It’s not surprising. The aircraft offers an absolutely unique capability in terms of outsized and heavy lifting, and VolgaDnepr charter service for the aircraft has been doubling turnover annually.

It would be significantly upgraded:

The upgrade, known as the An-124-150, includes a glass cockpit capable of reducing the flight crew to four from six, along with airframe improvements, digital brake control, improved thrust reversers and major improvements in the aircraft’s Motor Sich D18-T engines. The 124-150 will have a maximum lift capacity at nominal range of 150 metric tons, compared with 120 tons for the basic aircraft. It will permit 10,000 flights and 45,000 flight hours with a first A-check required only after 500 hr. on the wing.

One item of note, is that this would theoretically mean that two, rather than one MBTs could be carried.

Eclipse Launches 4 Seat Single Engine VLJ.

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Since their twin engine 6 passenger Eclipse 500 is already a VLJ, should we call the Eclipse 400 a teeny-tiny jet instead?

FWIW, I noted that they showed a prototype almost a year ago, here are the pix from that prototype:


It’s going to sell for $1.35 million, and Eclipse is raising the price of it’s 500 by 33% to 2.15 million.

My guess is that this is being driven by two things, that the E-500 is costing more to build than they had hoped, and that there are some single engine VLJs our there, and they are attracting a lot of interest.

Looks Like Moore’s Law May Be Hitting AESA Radar Technology

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Active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars look to be approaching some major reductions in cost as the technology matures(paid subscription required). They are looking at the cost to drop from $5 million/m2 to $500K/m2 so “cheap” is a relative term.

Additionally, the use of an AESA with a parabolic reflector setup can give a much larger effective aperture, and hence resolution. It’s called AESA-fed reflectors (AFR), and it’s less agile than pure AESA, but a lot cheaper.

EADS, Euro Governments at Odds on A350 Outsourcing

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In an attempt to cut costs, and deal with the falling US dollar, EADS is looking at aggressively outsourcing to the US and cheap overseas countries, and the governments that generally back Airbus are saying that their backing is contingent on local manufacture (Paid Subscription Required).

This is not surprising. Boeing and its partners aggressively pursued all sorts of tax abatements and set asides with the 787, and you would never expect (for example) Georgia to pay for a plant in North Carolina.

I would also add, as Peter Hintze, the German aerospace secretary, that Boeing’s distributed base has thus far proved a major disappointment.

US Missile Defense Agency Solicits Bids for Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV)

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The MDA is looking about upgrading its interceptors to handle a missile penetrating with decoys and other penetrating aids.

While this technology sounds difficult and complex, basically it’s just this:

Aluminum coated mylar balloons. What’s more, it’s entirely possible to put the warhead inside balloon, as was stated by a WMD experts years ago (can’t dig up the link, I think that he was from MIT).

Lockheed and Raytheon are competing for the contract. (Paid subscription required) They are taking two different design approaches.

Raytheon is developing multiple vehicles that are largely autonomous, and the number can be therefore be taylored to the size of the payload bay, with the first vehicle ejected serving to direct the others:

Lockheed has a “bandoleer” of smaller interceptors grouped around a central “mother ship”, which, while less flexible as to payload size, allows for a better sensor, and more maneuverability, for the initial contact and tracking with the kill vehicles being dispensed relatively closer to the interception point:

According to this article(paid subscription required), Lockheed’s sensor on the carrier will have 4x the resolution, 512×512 pixel staring array, as versus Raytheon’s 256×256 staring array.

Of course, these things look to cost a few hundred thousand bucks a pop, and I can get a silver mylar balloon for a buck fifty from the party store.

Zimbabwe Seems to Be Getting Worst

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Tsvangirai was detained again, the currency crash inflation problem is accelerating, the Mugabe government has banned opposition rallies, and the so called “war veterans” threatened to burn diplomats alive.

Helen Zille, leader of South Africa’s opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has called for President Thabo Mbeki to speak out over what is going on in Zimbabwe.

Won’t happen. Mbeki won’t ever say a word against Mugabe, for reasons that are not clear to me.

UBS Under Pressure to Turn Over US Client Data, and Phil Gramm’s Name Pops Up

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It appears that about 20,000 wealthy Americans have accounts at the Swiss Bank UBS, and US regulators are now turning the screws to get this information out of them.

Under pressure from the authorities, UBS is considering whether to divulge the names of 20,000 of its well-heeled U.S. clients, according to people close to the probe, a step that would have once been unthinkable to Swiss bankers, whose practice of secrecy dates back to the Middle Ages.

U.S. investigators believe some of these clients may have used offshore accounts at UBS to illegally hide as much as $20 billion from the Internal Revenue Service. Doing so may have enabled these people to dodge $300 million or more in U.S. taxes, according to a government official connected with the investigation.

….

New revelations are likely to come Monday, when a former UBS banker is expected to testify in a Florida court about how he helped Olenicoff and other clients evade taxes. …..

The case could turn into an embarrassment for Marcel Rohner, the chief executive at UBS and the former head of its private bank, as well as for Phil Gramm, the former Republican senator from Texas who is now the vice chairman of UBS Securities, the Swiss bank’s investment-banking arm. It also comes at a difficult time for UBS, which is reeling from $37 billion in soured investments, many of them linked to risky U.S. subprime mortgages.

…

As the authorities zeroed in on UBS last January, the bank abruptly shut its three Swiss offices that sold undeclared offshore banking services to U.S. clients. Those offices catered to thousands of wealthy Americans, some of whom may now have their tax secrets put on public display.

(emphasis mine)

They are guilty as hell, and 90% of Americans know what it means to have a, “Swiss Bank Account”, and if Obama’s people don’t use this for Phil “Offshore Account” Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, they are idiots.

Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

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It appears that there is evidence that Iranian intelligence operatives infiltrated the various Iraqi and Iranian exile groups that called for war against Iraq in 2002-2003.

The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials’ contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had labeled a “fabricator” in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran’s Islamic regime.

According to the Senate report, the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity unit concluded in 2003 that Ledeen “was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar.”

There is also Achmed Chalabi and the INC, though they are not mentioned in this article.

The Pentagon started an investigation of it, but Rumsfeld shut it down when he heard of it.

Read the complete article, including the hair brained scheme to overthrow the mullahs with ….. traffic jams.

4 Years ago, Matthew Yglesias suggested, tongue in cheek, that GW Bush was an Iranian mole…I now wonder how funny it really was….I’m just saying.

Economics Update

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After 5 straight months of non-farm payroll job cuts, we are finally seeing an increase in the unemployment rate, ½% to 5.5%. It’s the biggest rise in 22 years, and it appears that the we’ve run out of discouraged workers, who are not counted as unemployed, to keep the rates low.

Oil, which had been trending down since May 22, reversed itself and hit a new record, peaking at $138.36/bbl. Retail gasoline, however, finally fell a bit (scroll down), down to $3.986 yesterday’s record of $3.989.

That’s the first time that gasoline prices have fallen in nearly a month.

Not surprisingly, all this has pummeled the dollar which has weakened to $1.5751 from $1.5592 yesterday to the Euro.

BTW, it’s not just monoliner insurers that are hurting, Fitch has downgraded mortgage insurers MGIC and PMI ratings, two of the larger mortgage insurers to to BBB+ from A.

If they go under, millions of people will technically be in default on their mortgage until they find another insurer.

Given all this, it’s no surprise that Federal Deposit Insurance Corp Chairman Sheila Bair is saying that we may see some failures of larger banks.

Hopefully, This is Obama Showing His LBJ Side

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This bit of Senatorial theater is making the rounds now:

Returning to the Senate after his securing the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama and Lieberman greeted each on the Senate floor in the Well as they were voting on the budget resolution.

They shook hands. But Obama didn’t let go, leading Lieberman – cordially – by the hand across the room into a corner on the Democratic side, where Democratic sources tell ABC News he delivered some tough words for the junior senator from Connecticut, who had just minutes before hammered Obama’s speech before the pro-Israel group AIPAC in a conference call arranged by the McCain campaign.

The two spoke intensely for approximately five minutes, with no one able to hear their conversation. Reporters watched as Obama leaned closely in to Lieberman, whose back was literally up against the wall.

(emphasis mine)

A source said that it was, “a cordial and friendly discussion”, but I’m inclined to think that that depends on how you define those words, and this sounds just like how LBJ used to work people.

If it’s true, I’m favorably impressed.