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A Case for Insertion
A Case for Insertion: There is a compelling need for Congress to fund the installation of a sophisticated new overhead monitoring radar on the Air Force’s fleet of E-8C Joint STARS aircraft, argues Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute. “Warfighters in Iraq have identified an urgent operational need for the new capability,” he writes in an April 8 issue brief. “The technology works, and it could greatly improve the ability of US forces to track ground vehicles, whether they are fast-moving tanks or aged Toyotas getting into position for a suicide attack.” But because of funding shortages, the Air Force does not have funds to install a larger variant of the Northrop Grumman-Raytheon multi-platform radar technology insertion program on its fleet of 17 Joint STARS platforms. MP-RTIP is a sophisticated active electronically scanned array radar for peering down on ground targets in all weather and tracking elusive moving targets with much greater precision than is currently possible with the Joint STARS’s existing radar. Instead the Air Force can only afford to install a smaller variant of MP-RTIP on 15 of its RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles. “The bigger, more capable version of MP-RTIP will disappear this summer unless money is included in the 2008 supplemental appropriation for the Iraq war,” Thompson writes.
4/9/2008
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Verbatim
Preemptive Action
"Since the [Defense] Department's acceptance of the independent estimates last fall, we've been, in just about every respect, acting as if the program were in a Nunn-McCurdy breach. ... We've been taking all of the mitigating and corrective action that we would take as if there were a Nunn-McCurdy breach."
—Air Force Secretary Michael Donley, discussing with reporters the restructure of the F-35 strike fighter program announced in February 2010 and the probability that the program will soon exceed Nunn-McCurdy cost-monitoring thresholds that would necessitate, per US law, a program review and corrective steps, Washington, D.C., March 2, 2010. |
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Verbatim
Message for Grandma
"She has working for her as a citizen in the United States an Air Force Reserve that has some very talented, capable, patriotic, and willing individuals doing the business to keep this nation free. Just like her generation—the 'Greatest Generation'—was, I am very proud of the folks that we have got. If not the second greatest, then they are an extension of the greatest generation and they are ready, willing, and able to do the things that she would want them to do to make sure we keep our freedoms."
—Lt. Gen. Charles Stenner, Air Force Reserve chief, responding to a reporter's question on what the reporter should tell his 85-year-old grandmother to convey to her the importance of Air Force Reservists to the nation's security, Orlando, Fla., Feb. 19, 2010.
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