After Copying F-35's Stealth, China's J-20 Duplicating its Non-Stealth Features

J-20 fighter

China's J-20 stealth jet, believed to be a copycat design of the US-made F-35, is now duplicating its non-stealth feature - to carry weapons on external pylons.

The F-35 and J-20 carry missiles and bombs in an internal weapons bay to avoid radar detection. However, for some missions requiring heavier weapons load, these are mounted on external pylons, at the expense of stealth.

On Monday, local media posted photograph showing a J-20 prototype undergoing a test flight with two external pylon adapters, one under each side of its wings.

The Chinese jet previously had the capacity to carry four PL-15 missiles in its main weapons bay and two PL-10 short-range missiles in its side weapons bay. The external adapters will enable the jet to carry four more missiles.

Based on the mission, different types of loadouts can be chosen. “Beast mode” with more munitions can be activated in low-risk and low-threat missions.

In addition, the Chinese media speculated that the J-20 fighters could also carry external fuel tanks for extended range.

Lockheed F-35 jet

The J-20’s sensor system also looks similar to the F-35’s Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) in terms of shape and placement. In 2007, Chinese hackers allegedly stole technical documents related to the F-35 from Lockheed Martin.

Daniel Coats, in a congressional testimony published in May 2017, named Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as “Cyber Theat Actors.”

“Adversaries will continue to use cyber operations to undermine U.S. military and commercial advantage by hacking into U.S. defense industry and commercial enterprises in pursuit of scientific, technical, and business information,” Coats stated.

“Examples include theft of data on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, and the MV-22 Osprey. In addition, adversaries often target personal accounts of government officials and their private-sector counterparts. This espionage reduces cost and accelerates the development of foreign weapon systems, enables foreign reverse-engineering and countermeasures development, and undermines U.S. military, technological, and commercial advantage.”

6 Types Of Submarines: The Russian Navy’s Extreme Modernization By H I Sutton

Russia and America do things differently. The U.S. Navy is currently building just one type of submarine, the general-purpose Virginia Class. From October it will be joined in the shipyards by the Columbia Class ballistic missile submarine, making it two types. In contrast, Russia is simultaneously building six distinct classes.

Despite budget challenges, and resulting delays, Russia is investing big in submarines. Together the six types represent the greatest modernization since the Cold War.

Russia has a history of building multiple classes of submarines going back to the Cold War. Each submarine fills a distinct role, but also there were often alternative designs meeting the same basic need. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent economic woes curtailed Russian submarine building. Many projects were cancelled, or continued at a snail’s pace. Now the submarine industry has began to recover.

1. Borei-II Class Ballistic Missile submarine

The first improved Project-955A Borei-II class submarine, ‘Knyaz Vladimir,’ was handed over to the Russian Navy on June 1. Six more are expected to be built, forming the backbone of Russia’s seaborne nuclear deterrent for decades to come. Each submarine can carry 16 Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles.

2. Belgorod Class Special Mission Submarine

After the famous Typhoon class, this will be by far the largest submarine in the world. Yet this ginormous submarine defies classification. It is at the same time a ‘special mission’ spy submarine and a carrier for the Poseidon strategic weapon.

As a spy sub it will act as a mother-ship for the famous Losharik deep-diving nuclear-powered midget submarine. This could be used for operations like interfering with undersea cables.

The Poseidon weapon is unique. It is best described as an intercontinental, nuclear armed, autonomous torpedo. It is twice the size of a typical ballistic missile, have virtually unlimited range and be armed with a nuclear warhead. Exactly how Russia plans to use it is unclear, but it appears to be a second-strike doomsday weapon to literally go under missile defenses.

3. Khabarovsk Class Strategic Submarine

The most enigmatic submarine on the list, Khabarovsk is expected to be launched this month. Public information is sorely lacking. What is known is that it will carry six of the massive Poseidon strategic torpedoes, like the Belgorod. This could be the defining submarine of 2020.

4. Yasen-M Class Cruise Missile Submarines

A powerful cruise-missile armed submarine, the Yasen class has a reputation for stealthiness. They are armed with three types of cruise missile which can be loaded in combinations. Kalibr is a land-attack missile with a very long range, generally equivalent to the U.S. Navy’s Tomahawk. The larger Oniks is a supersonic missile which is optimized against ships but can also hit land targets. And the smaller Zircon anti-ship missiles can travel at hypersonic speeds.

5. Lada Class Attack Submarine

This is the latest generation of non-nuclear submarine built for the Russian Navy. Unlike the America, Russia still values having a large number of smaller and cheaper non-nuclear boats in its ranks. In the future these boats may have Air Independent Power (AIP) like Sweden and other nations'.

6. Improved Kilo Class Attack Submarine

The Kilo Class goes back to the 1980s, but improved models are still being built. The latest versions can launch Kalibr land-attack cruise missiles. Unlike the Yasen Class they have to be put in the torpedo room, so only a few can be carried.

So many different classes of submarines has pros and cons. It is seen as less efficient, but equally each type can be better suited to its intended role. And the massive spy sub, and Poseidon related classes, fulfill roles which are unique to the Russian Navy.

Britain's Tempest Fighter Is Going To Leave The F-35 Far Behind. Sebastien Roblin

 The UK, France and Germany have all now proclaimed their intent to develop sixth-generation stealth jets and backed that up with initial investments. However, it will likely be a while before we can tell whether the respective governments can sustain the long-term financial outlays, international cooperation, and technically challenging development processes to produce Europe’s first stealth jet.

With a flourish of a silk curtain at the Farnborough Air Show on July 16, British defense secretary Gavin Williamson unveiled a full-scale model of the Tempest, the UK’s concept for a domestically built twin-engine stealth fighter to enter service in the 2030s. The Tempest will supposedly boast a laundry list of sixth-generation technologies such as being optionally-manned, mounting hypersonic or directed energy weapons, and capability to deploy and control drone swarms. However, it may also represent a Brexit-era gambit to revive defense cooperation with Germany and France.

London has seeded “Team Tempest” with £2 billion ($2.6 billion) for initial development through 2020. Major defense contractor BAE System is leading development with the Royal Air Force, with Rolls Royce contributing engines, European firm MBDA integrating weapons, and Italian company Leonardo developing sensors and avionics.

Design will supposedly be finalized in the early 2020s, with a flyable prototype planned in 2025 and production aircraft entering service in 2035, gradually replacing the RAF’s fourth-generation Typhoon fighters and complementing F-35 stealth jets. This seventeen-year development cycle is considered ambitious for something as complicated and expensive as a stealth fighter.

The Tempest mockup suggests a relatively large single-seat, twin-engine delta-wing fighter with a cranked trailing edge and two vertical stabilizers (tail fins) canted inwards as on the F-22 stealth fighter. According to analyst Justin Bronk, these last improve maneuverability and suggest emphasis on kinematic performance over pure stealth. The larger airframe also implies a desire for greater range and weapons load than an F-35 can muster in stealth mode. However, reportedly no performance parameters such as maximum speed, range, radar cross-section etc. were stated in the presentation.

Rolls Royce boasts that the Tempest’s stealthily recessed adaptive-cycle turbofans will be made of lightweight composite materials, feature superior thermal management and digital maintenance controls, and generate large quantities of electricity through magnets in the turbine cores.

Surplus electricity may be of particular interest for powering directed energy weapons, which could range from lasers to microwaves. The U.S. Air Force plans to test a defensive anti-missile laser turret for its jets in the early 2020s, but the Tempest presentation mentions using direct energy weapons for ‘non-kinetic’ purposes, which may imply disrupting or damaging adversary sensors.

The Tempest is to have a modular internal payload bay which can be reconfigured for various sensors or weapons. A Meteor long-range air-to-air missiles and a SPEAR-3 cruise missile were displayed next to the mock-up, and compatibility with next-generation “Deep Strike” missiles is also listed. The presentation at Farnborough also lists hypersonic missiles (which travel over five times the speed of sound, making interception extremely difficult) and swarms of deadly drones as offensive capabilities. To ease the workload on the pilot, the aircraft would utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize the drone’s behavior.

Like the F-35, the Tempest would employ a diverse array of passive and active sensors, and a Tempest pilot may able to gaze “through” his or her own plane using a helmet-mounted device, which may also replace conventional cockpit display panels. “Cooperative Engagement” technology would also allow a Tempest to fuse sensor data with friendly aircraft, ships or ground forces using “reconfigurable” communication systems and data links. This could allow one platform to hand off sensor data to another platform, which could then launch missiles without exposing itself.

However, the F-35’s networked computers have aroused fears that it is vulnerable to hacking—thus the presentation lists “resilience to cyberattack” as a characteristic of the Tempest. This could pose additional challenges given plans for the Tempest to be “optionally manned”—which means it can be flown remotely without an onboard pilot if preferred. Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles are generally thought to be the future of air warfare, but air forces so far are opting to test the waters by contemplating optionally-manned fighters. However, though optionally manned fighters offer a means to avoid putting pilots at risk on dangerous missions, they still come with the cost and performance disadvantages of manned aircraft.

The Tempest was unveiled alongside a new “Combat Air Strategy” document marking the UK’s reorientation to preparing for high-intensity conflicts and the danger posed by modern anti-aircraft weapons. However, the document largely focuses on industrial and financial matters, particularly on keeping British military aerospace sector sustainable despite constrained defense budgets and the steadily increasing cost of high-performance platforms like the Type 26 frigate.

In any context, seeing through the Tempest project to completion would prove daunting. The Tempest itself is a successor to the BAE Replica, a two-seat British stealth-fighter concept that was abandoned in 2005, though BAE leveraged technology used in its creation to become a major partner in the F-35 program. Currently, the UK is currently receiving forty-eight F-35B stealth jump jets for its Queen Elizabeth-class carriers, and theoretically plans to order another ninety F-35s for the Royal Air Force. While an RAF officer at Farnborough claimed Tempest would “have no impact” on F-35 acquisitions, it is difficult to foresee where else in the budget the money would come from.

However, at this stage the Tempest is surely a political game piece in a Brexit-bound UK, which risks being isolated from European markets. It happens that only a few months earlier, Germany and France trumpeted that Dassault and Airbus would work together on their own sixth-generation stealth jet program, Future Combat Air System—notably without inviting British companies, though their eventual participation was not ruled out, likely depending on how Brexit plays out.

In truth, both stealth-fighter program could easily prove prohibitively expensive without buy-in from multiple countries. Two billion pounds is a lot of money, but is far less than one-tenth of what a successful Tempest program would cost. The preferred scenario might be for a “European” stealth fighter combining the two stealth-fighter programs. A glance at the FCAS’s projected capabilities shows they are broadly similar to those of the Tempest.

The Tempest therefore may not only be an attempt by London to retain a domestic aerospace sector capable of building stealth jets, but also part of an elaborate courtship to entice EU nations into reconsidering joint-development of one. Indeed, Airbus Defense CEO Dirk Hoke made a comment “welcoming” the Tempest program. Possible British partnership with Sweden—producer of the capable Gripen fighter—is also frequently speculated for the Tempest, and it’s worth noting that BAE recently signed on to assist Turkish TAI in producing a TF-X stealth fighter.

The UK, France and Germany have all now proclaimed their intent to develop sixth-generation stealth jets and backed that up with initial investments. However, it will likely be a while before we can tell whether the respective governments can sustain the long-term financial outlays, international cooperation, and technically challenging development processes to produce Europe’s first stealth jet.

How a Supersonic Metal Spray Could Make Subs Even Deadlier “Cold spray” technology can speed repairs on submarines, keeping them at sea instead of the shipyard. BY KYLE MIZOKAMI

• The Australian Navy is researching cold spray, a form of additive manufacturing, to repair submarines.
• The tech blasts surfaces with tiny bits of metal at high speed, binding it to a surface.
• The process could keep submarines out of shipyards and at sea where they’re needed.

• The Royal Australian Navy is investigating so-called “cold spray” technology to repair its six Collins-class attack submarines (pictured above). The tech would allow the service to repair parts on submarines, even the pressure hull, while still at sea. A form of additive manufacturing, cold spray could revolutionize shipboard repairs aboard subs worldwide.

  Cold spray involves blasting a damaged metal surface with a supersonic gas filled with metallic particles. The particles fuse with whatever surface it's sprayed upon, forming a buildup of solid metal. The technique takes its name from the fact that, unlike repairs done with welding, the fusing is done far below the melting point. Here’s a video demonstrating cold spray released by ASC, the Australian government organization that builds and maintains the country’s submarine fleet.

• Cold spray is safer than welding, the traditional means of making repairs to metal ships. Unlike welding, there’s no flame that could ignite gasses such as hydrogen—a real danger on submarines where flammable gas buildup can cause a serious explosion. There’s no heat that could cause burns to ship maintainers (though being hit with a blast of supersonic metallic particles probably isn’t much fun either). There’s also no storing of flammable welding gasses because current cold spray processes use non-flammable nitrogen.

• From an engineering perspective cold spray is in some ways better than welding. Welding can damage cold-rolled steel, a type of steel known for its high strength and use in submarine hull construction. This could lead to restrictions on a repaired sub’s diving depth. Cold spray, on the other hand, doesn’t heat the repaired metal’s surface and risk damaging it.

  One major advantage of cold spray is that damaged ship parts can be repaired onboard a ship. According to Naval Today, the Australian government is developing portable equipment to be carried on the sub at sea. Submarines are notorious for traveling vast distances, and a submarine that must return to port for a relatively simple repair could lose days or weeks of deployment. Cold spray repairs made underwater would allow the Collins-class boats to remain at sea without having to travel hundreds of miles—or even thousands—of miles to a qualified shipyard.

  If Australia can bring cold spray printing to the underwater world of submarines, the technique will likely spread to other navies. We may never have a 3D printer in every home, but few would have thought that additive manufacturing might someday come to every submarine.

Presidents and 'presidents' BY JOSEPH BOSCO,

“The time has come,” the walrus said,
 “to talk of many things: 
of [Presidents, both true and fake,
and] cabbages and kings ...
And why the sea is boiling hot, 
and whether pigs have wings.”  
— Apologies to Lewis Carroll

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo congratulated Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen on the occasion of her Second Inauguration and called her “courage and vision in leading Taiwan’s vibrant democracy an inspiration to the region and the world.” It was the highest expression of support for a Taiwan president ever made by a sitting U.S. Secretary of State.

Deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, in fluent Mandarin, and other U.S. officials also sent congratulatory messages. The secretary and his administration colleagues all addressed her as President Tsai.

Predictably, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expressed its “strong indignation” and said Pompeo “seriously violated” the “one China” principle and the three communiques. It condemned all the officials’ references to Tsai as president of a separate political entity. But, unlike the occasion of Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996, it did not fire missiles toward the island to protest.

Former vice president Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, also tweeted congratulations but seemed to comply at least partially with China’s demands by referring to Taiwan’s newly reelected leader as “Dr.” rather than as president.

By happenstance, on the same day as Tsai’s swearing-in, the Washington Post ran a story on the annual meeting of the World Health Assembly, which has excluded Taiwan from participation under Beijing’s pressure. The Post article referred to “President Trump” (no Donald) and to “Chinese leader Xi Jinping”  (no President). 

Even more interesting, the caption to the montage of photos accompanying the Post story listed the national heads of state as follows: “Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga … Chinese leader Xi Jinping, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.” 

If avoiding the title of president for Xi was the Post’s intent, it could have used one of his other, more appropriate, positions such as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. While the Chinese Embassy in Washington surely reads the local/national paper every day, it has not revealed whether it noted the asymmetry in titles in the Post’s reporting and registered a protest. But, except for one later photo caption that referred to Xi only as “China’s top leader,” subsequent Post articles made sure to refer to him as “President Xi.”

Historians and scholars generally ascribe the title of president to a national government’s democratically elected head chosen directly or indirectly by the people. The position and the term originated in the United States in 1787 and the first head of state to bear the title of president was George Washington.

Several Latin American and Caribbean nations, after liberation from Spanish rule, soon set up republics and elected presidents as their national leaders. The first European ruler to adopt the title, but for distinctly nondemocratic purposes, was Napoleon Bonaparte, proclaiming himself President of the Italian Republic in 1802 before going on to become King of Italy and Emperor of France.

The first Asian government to make its national leader president was the Republic of China in 1912 and the man was Sun Yat-sen. 

After the eras of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping as Paramount Leaders, the CCP found it useful to seek the patina of international respect and democratic legitimacy that was accorded the title of president and enjoyed by leaders of the United States and other democracies. Jiang Zemin was the first Chinese leader to use the title of president on a regular basis with foreign audiences. But neither he nor his successors had any intention of adopting Western democratic methods to elect the Chinese president. Instead, they followed the authoritarian Napoleonic model and simply appropriated the honorific.

Xi clearly relishes Western officials and media calling him president and putting him on the same level of official respect and international legitimacy as the American president. Trump, who prefers to call most world leaders by their first names to show his personal familiarity with them, seems only too happy to address and refer to the Chinese leader as President Xi, rather than as Jinping. Xi so enjoys the title and the power that goes with it that he has discarded the CCP’s tradition of two five-year terms and made himself president-and-everything-else for life.

George Washington, America’s and the world’s first president and called “the indispensable man” for his time, was offered such a lifetime position. He declined it, believing that no man is indispensable and confident in the knowledge that the young country of less than half a million people eligible to serve had plenty of perfectly capable leaders who could move it forward on its freedom destiny. Xi and his CCP comrades do not believe the Chinese people are capable of finding competent alternative leaders among China’s 1.3 billion population. More likely, they fear that the real China dream is the same as the American Dream and of people around the world: freedom.

Perhaps some day “President” Xi will demonstrate the same political courage that President Tsai has shown twice by taking her case to the Taiwanese people and respecting their judgment.  President Trump also relies on the democratic process to pursue his vision of America’s future, and, like Tsai, is willing to have the American people judge his record and decide whether they want to continue with his leadership. He might want to suggest that his Chinese friend give it a try. After all, Xi is supremely convinced that only he is fit to govern China and that the Chinese people must surely agree, so Trump might ask him, “What do you have to lose?

Northrop Grumman's New B-21 Stealth Bomber: A Technological Powerhouse? By Kris Osborn

The new stealth U.S. Air Force B-21 bomber has taken yet another key technological step toward being ready for war, through integrated computer automation designed to streamline information, improve targeting and offer pilots organized warzone information in real-time.

Air Force and Northrop Grumman developers recently completed an essential software-empowered process intended to bring greater levels of information processing, data management and new measures of computerized autonomy,  according to published statements from Air Force Acquisition Executive Dr. William Roper.

Through virtualization and software-hardware synergy, B-21 sensors, computers, and electronics can better scale, deploy and streamline procedural functions such as checking avionics specifics, measuring altitude and speed and integrating otherwise disparate pools sensor information. In effect, it means war-sensitive sensor, targeting, and navigational data will be managed and organized through increased computer automation for pilots to make faster and more informed combat decisions.

Roper’s post on LinkedIn explained it this way… the “USAF innovation hasn't missed a beat during COVID-19. Our B-21 team just ran containerized software with Kubernetes on flight-ready hardware! Another step towards “DevStar”: our initiative to bring radical autonomy to software development, partnering with Northrop Grumman.” 

While most of the B-21 development is “black,” for understandable reasons, Roper’s comment offers an interesting window into some of what developers generally describe as a new generation of sensing, computing, targeting, and processing information made possible by rapid software modernization. He referenced a number of terms which, upon closer examination, point to some technical modernization methods able to massively improve combat performance.

Containerized software, among other things, refers to an ability to program computer operating systems to streamline and compartmentalize different functions simultaneously, yet without launching an entire machine for each app, according to “Kubernetes’” website.  Roper cited Kubernetes, which is a computer system for “automating application deployment, scaling, and management.” Much of this, as cited by Roper, is made possible through what’s called application containerization; it is defined as,an operating system-level “virtualization method used to deploy and run distributed applications,” according to Techtarget.com. Containerization enables multiple “isolated applications or services run on a single host and access the same operating system.”

By drawing upon software-enabled virtualization, systems can upgrade faster, reduce their hardware footprint, and better employ automation, AI, and machine-learning applications. In all-out warfare terms, this means B-21 pilots can share information and find and destroy targets such as enemy air defenses … much faster. This is something that can expedite precision weapons attack and identify approaching air and ground threats and, perhaps of greatest importance, keep pilot crews alive.

AI-applications, optimized by new algorithms, can absorb new war-sensitive information, bounce it off a seemingly limitless database and quickly perform comparative analyses to make decisions, prioritize information and streamline the organization and presentation of data for humans operating in the role of command and control. The concept is to, as Roper put it in his post, better expedite the famous OODA-loop decision-making process. OODA Loop, made famous years ago by Air Force fighter pilot John Boyd,  stands for Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action. It refers to the importance of getting inside an enemies’ decision-making process by completing the OODA loop faster and more accurately, therefore taking key life and death actions to destroy an enemy… faster.  

The concept behind increased automation is to ease the “cognitive” burden upon the pilot by performing time and energy-consuming procedural functions autonomously… all while leaving human decision-makers in the irreplaceable role of command and control. This way, dynamic, capable human problem solving can be more fully and effectively leveraged in combat. In summary, pilots will be able to make faster and better decisions, therefore “owning the OODA Loop” as Roper put it in his published comment. 

Not only will integrated next-generation software exponentially speed-up war-sensitive decision making, but it will also increase performance for weapons systems. Things like weapons guidance systems, weapons network security, processing speeds, and major war platform functionality. Long-range sensors for an airplane’s command and control systems and of course procedures to aggregate otherwise stovepiped data systems, can all be optimized through software upgrades.

All of this pertains to Roper’s reference to “DevStar,” a strategy through which the Air Force has been expediting technical development to bring a new generation of weaponry and technology to war much more quickly. Much of this, according to Roper’s strategic vision, relies upon software integration and innovation. An Air Force DevStar paper describes it as “speed, quality, focus and collaboration.” The idea is to, at least in part, circumvent or streamline lengthy, at time bureaucratic acquisition procedures to fast-track proven systems to war, all without compromising quality. Much of this, Roper has often explained, can be expedited through digital development, essentially modeling designs and technical systems prior to “bending metal.”

Roper has long emphasized the importance of rapid software development and integration, having at one time told reporters that software modernization may indeed “decide who wins the next war.”

UK warns China: do not cross the Rubicon on Hong Kong

The United Kingdom warned China on Tuesday not to cross the Rubicon over Hong Kong, saying the People’s Republic should step back and adhere to its international obligations over the former British colony.

“The ball is in the court of the government in China, it has a choice to make here,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told parliament.

“It can cross the Rubicon and violate the autonomy and the rights of the people of Hong Kong or it can step back, understand the widespread concern of the international community and live up to its responsibilities as a leading member of the international community.

“We don’t seek to prevent China’s rise, far from it, we welcome China as a leading member of the international community and we look to engage with China on everything from trade to climate change,” Raab said.

China withheld data on coronavirus from WHO, recordings reveal Complaints by officials at odds with body’s public praise of Beijing’s response to outbreak

edros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, meets the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in January. Photograph: Naohiko Hatta/AP

The World Health Organization struggled to get needed information from China during critical early days of the coronavirus pandemic, according to recordings of internal meetings that contradict the organisation’s public praise of Beijing’s response to the outbreak.

The recordings, obtained by the Associated Press (AP), show officials complaining in meetings during the week of 6 January that Beijing was not sharing data needed to evaluate the risk of the virus to the rest of the world. It was not until 20 January that China confirmed coronavirus was contagious and 30 January that the WHO declared a global emergency.

“We’re going on very minimal information,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist and the WHO technical lead for Covid-19, according to the AP. “It’s clearly not enough for you to do proper planning.”

The WHO’s top official in China, Gauden Galea, said in one of the recordings: “We’re currently at the stage where yes, they’re giving it to us 15 minutes before it appears on CCTV [Chinese state TV].”

The report comes amid growing international scrutiny of China’s handling of the outbreak and moves to establish an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, which has infected more than 6 million and killed more than 375,000 people around the world.

The WHO has been criticised for consistently lauding China, even as questions emerged over the suppression of early warnings and information. The WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has praised China for “setting a new standard for outbreak response” in its swift and aggressive measures.

The WHO’s office in China did not respond to a request for comment on the recordings. It said in a statement, reported by the AP: “Our leadership and staff have worked night and day in compliance with the organisation’s rules and regulations to support and share information with all member states equally, and engage in frank and forthright conversations with governments at all levels.”

In early January, Michael Ryan, the WHO’s chief of emergencies, said he feared a repeat of the Sars epidemic in 2002, which Chinese officials initially covered up.“This is exactly the same scenario, endlessly trying to get updates from China about what was going on,” he said, according to the AP report. “The WHO barely got out of that one with its neck intact given the issues that arose around transparency in southern China.”

Ryan criticised China for not cooperating and advised for applying more pressure on Beijing. “This would not happen in Congo and did not happen in Congo and other places,” he said, apparently referring to the Ebola outbreak. “We need to see the data. It’s absolutely important at this point.”

Warnings and reports of a mysterious Sars-like virus began to filter out of Wuhan city in December but were suppressed by authorities. On 9 January, Chinese state media announced the illness was the result of a new coronavirus but said it was not contagious.

Almost two weeks later, officials admitted the virus was transmittable, as hospitals in the city were already flooded with patients and cases were appearing across the region. Authorities locked down Wuhan on 23 January, but at least 5 million residents had left, travelling across the country as well as overseas before the lunar new year holiday.

The Air Force's Goal: Turn Cargo Planes into Makeshift Bombers The jets would carry cruise missiles to bombard enemy forces from the outside. BY KYLE MIZOKAMI

                  

• The Air Force is proposing turning unarmed military cargo jets into temporary bombers.
• Cargo jets, with their large internal volume, could launch missiles from safe distances, far away from enemy forces.
• The Air Force has already successfully tested dropping simulated munitions from the back of airplanes.

• The U.S. Air Force is looking at arming otherwise unarmed cargo planes, pressing them into service as makeshift bombers. The service believes future wars with adversaries like Russia or China will require plenty of aerial firepower and transport planes, loaded with pallets of cruise missiles, could provide an inexpensive solution.

  According to Defense News, the Air Force thinks aircraft such as the C-130J Super Hercules and C-17 Globemaster III could become part-time missile trucks.

• The unarmed aircraft typically shuttle troops and equipment, but in a pinch, would be equipped with “smart pallets” carrying long-range cruise missiles and other munitions.
  
  The pallets would be capable of feeding position, navigation, and targeting data to their onboard missiles. Once dropped from the rear of the aircraft, the pallets would quickly release their missile cargoes, sending them downrange to their targets. The larger the aircraft, the more missiles it could carry.

  

  A pallet of cargo loading aboard a C-130J Super Hercules transport

• The missile truck concept pairs aircraft with large cargo boxes, of which the U.S. military has hundreds, with advanced missiles like the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM). The latest version of JASSM, JASSM-XR, will have a range of 1,000 nautical miles—far enough for slow, lumbering, non-stealthy transports like the C-17 to launch dozens of missiles at enemy targets while staying out of missile and interceptor range.

  Once a mission is over, the aircraft could be loaded with more smart pallets or go back to its traditional cargo carrier role.

  The Air Force has been converting cargo planes into armed warbirds since the Vietnam War, when it added banks of Gatling guns to C-47 and C-130 transports. These gunships proved effective in providing close air support firepower and hunting Viet Cong forces traveling along the Ho Chi Minh trail.

• The Air Force is still modifying transports for gunship duty, with the latest AC-130J mounting a 105-millimeter howitzer, a 30-millimeter autocannon, and soon a 60-kilowatt laser weapon.

• 

• Most armed transport conversions are permanent, with an unarmed transport aircraft transformed into a heavily armed gunship for good. In 2010, however, the U.S. Marine Corps introduced Harvest Hawk, a conversion kit for its KC-130 transport/tanker planes. Harvest Hawk allowed the Marines to launch Hellfire, Griffin, and Viper Strike air-to-surface missiles from a KC-130 against targets on the ground. A KC-130 equipped with Harvest Hawk can still perform aerial refueling and transport missions.

  Ideally, the perfect choice for launching swarms of cruise missiles at an enemy is the upcoming B-21 Raider stealth bomber—the coolest plane we've never seen. A B-21 could penetrate enemy defenses, attack targets, and slip out of enemy territory, ideally all without being detected.

  But at $621 million per aircraft, the B-21 is relatively expensive, and large numbers of the aircraft are a decade away. The Air Force has hundreds of transport planes that are paid for and ready to fly right now.

• 

• A C-130J Super Hercules and JASSM cruise missile pictured alongside one another at the Farnborough Air Show, 2018.

• The Air Force expressed hesitation in the past in arming transport planes—after all, a future conflict will find them moving and resupplying their own far-flung forces worldwide. Recent tests at Dugway Proving Ground, however, seem to have changed the service’s opinion. The tests saw a MC-130J Combat Talon special operations transport successfully airdrop three pallets, each carrying a simulated load of long range cruise missiles.

  The bomb truck concept, if successful, could greatly increase the number of cruise missiles available to U.S. forces at the start of a conflict. After their initial combat mission, the transports could quickly return to their traditional roles. If the concept gains traction, the bomb truck concept could give the Air Force a tremendous boost in firepower—all without buying a single new plane.

U.S. Army’s New Drone Swarm May Be A Weapon Of Mass Destruction By David Hambling

Weapon of Mass Destruction’ is a term used in arms-control circles signifying something capable of damage on a large scale and subject to international treaties. Analyst Zak Kallenborn argues in a recent study for the U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies that some types of drone swarm would count as WMD. The argument might seem like the theoretical arms control equivalent of angels dancing on the head of a pin — except that the U.S. Army is working on a lethal swarm which fits Kallenborn’s description.

Current drones like the MQ-9 Reaper are controlled remotely, with a pilot flying the aircraft and a payload operator aiming and launching missiles. A battery of other personnel, including military lawyers and image analysts, look over their shoulders and argue what is or is not a valid target. (The movie Eye in the Sky brilliantly captured the military-political-legal wrangling during drone operations). Future drones may have more autonomy, flying and fighting with much less human supervision, in particular when many of them work together as a swarm.

Kallenborn, an expert in unmanned systems and WMD, describes one type of swarm that he calls an Armed, Fully-Autonomous Drone Swarm, or AFADS. Once unleashed an AFADS will locate, identify, and attack targets without human intervention. Kallenborn argues that an AFADS-type swarm is a genuine Weapon of Mass Destruction because of the amount of harm it can do and because of its inability to distinguish civilians from military targets. This is the type of swarm in the fictional 2017 viral video Slaughterbots released as a warning against autonomous weapons.

Like Terminators, such drones may look like science fiction. But the U.S. Army has been working on a Cluster UAS Smart Munition for Missile Deployment which looks like a real-world embodiment of AFADS.

The Cluster Swarm project is developing a missile warhead to dispense a swarm of small drones that fan out to locate and destroy vehicles with explosively formed penetrators or EFPs. (An EFP spits a high-speed slug of armor-piercing metal some tens or hundreds of meters). This is similar in concept to the existing CBU-105 bomb, a 1000-pound munition which scatters forty ‘Skeet’ submunitions each over the target area, each of which parachutes down, scanning the ground with a seeker until it finds a tank and fires an EFP at it; the picture above shows one test. CBU-105’s dropped by B-52 bombers successfully knocked out entire Iraqi tank columns in 2003, leading them to be termed ‘Cans of whup-ass.’ The Cluster Swarm would be vastly more powerful.

The Cluster Swarm involved drones packed into the Army’s existing GMLRS rockets, which carry a 180-pound payload and have a range of over 70 kilometers, or ATACMS missiles that carry a 350-pound payload over 270 kilometers. The original idea was that the missile payload would be quadcopter drones encased in an aerodynamic shell that would disperse them over the target area. However, the challenges of unfolding quadcopters mid-air may have been too great, as the Phase II development, recently completed, went to AVID LLC, who have a slightly different approach.

T-Hawk ducted-fan tactical drone

 U.S. NAVY

AVID are best known for their work with Honeywell on the T-Hawk drone, a tactical vertical take-off craft deployed in Iraq to help find IEDs in 2007. Affectionately known as the ‘flying beer keg,’ the T-Hawk has no external rotors but is powered by ducted fans inside the fuselage. AVID later produced the smaller EDF-8, an electrically-powered ducted-fan drone carrying a one-pound payload. The company would not provide comment on the drones developed for the new project.

The Cluster Swarm would be far more powerful than the existing CBU-105 ‘cans of whup-ass’ for two reasons. A CBU-105 can only hit targets in an area a few hundred meters across. The Cluster Swarm can go hunting for vehicles dispersed over many square miles.

The other advantage is efficiency. CBU-105 gives little overlap in search area for each warhead; many will not have a target, and where there is overlap two or more may attack the same tank and ignore others. A true swarm acting co-operatively will ‘de-conflict’ so forty drones always attack forty different targets.

If Cluster Swarm drones have EFP warheads similar to existing weapons, then each MLRS missile would release about ten drones. Each M270 MLRS vehicle fires twelve missiles in a salvo, for a hundred and twenty drones. So a battery of nine launch vehicles would deliver a thousand killer drones over the target area, enough in theory to stop an entire armored division in its tracks.

Would such a swarm constitute a WMD?

“The weapon could plausibly be classified as a weapon of mass destruction,” Kallenborn said. “However, it would depend on the number and payload of armed UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] within the swarm.”

Kallenborn says that as a rough rule of thumb, a swarm with munitions equivalent to a thousand M67 hand grenades would likely be in the WMD class. If it meets this threshold, then according to his new paper the swarm could be subject to international arms control law.

“Certainly off-course drones would have potential for considerable damage if they identified civilian vehicles as military ones,” says Kallenborn.

It is easy to see how an attack directed at a column of tanks might end up hitting a nearby refugee convoy with catastrophic results, destroying not just a few vehicles but dozens of them. This ought to be impossible, and the Pentagon ‘s Policy Directive 3000.09 is intended to ‘minimize the probability and consequences of failures in autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems that could lead to unintended engagements.’ But in war, mistakes happen.

However, proving whether it is a WMD or not could be difficult. How do you tell whether you are facing a single WMD-level swarm or a collation of smaller swarms?

“If swarms are WMD, verification and confidence measures might need to evaluate whether a set of drones are a single swarm or multiple. Evaluating whether the swarm is fully autonomous would also be a challenge,” says Kallenborn. 

Even if it is not deemed a WMD, any swarm with this sort of potential raises issues about how much autonomy is acceptable.

“The weapon illustrates the need to carefully consider what risks the United States is willing to accept,” says Kallenborn.

The Phase II development completed in March included “deployment…powered flight, acquisition of a representative target, and automated navigation to and landing on target” as well as a separate demonstration of the EFP warhead’s effectiveness. If the Army go ahead with Phase III and integrate the drones into a missile warhead, deployment could follow soon.

The U.S. is not the only player in this field, and may not even be the leader. Turkey has already fielded Kargu tactical kamikaze drones in small numbers on the Syrian border. Currently these are piloted remotely, but the makers claim the Kargu has autonomous swarming capability. China and Russia are not so far behind.

Unlike other WMD, drone swarms can be acquired at low cost and require relatively little technical skill. If there is a military advantage to be had, the U.S. may choose to delay discussions about whether their swarms should count as WMD. The situation may change if others deploy them – and if they start causing large numbers of casualties.