The Dawes Act Hammered Native Americans

In contrast to earlier United States policies of open war, forcible removal, and relocation to address the “Indian Problem,” the Dawes Act of 1887 focused on assimilation and land severalty — making American Indians citizens of the United States with individually-titled plots of land rather than members of collective tribes with communal land. Considerable scholarship shows that the consequences of the policy differed substantially from its stated goals, and by the time of its repeal in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all native land held in 1887 (86 million acres)—and nearly two-thirds of American Indians had become landless or unable to meet subsistence needs. Complementing rich qualitative history, this paper provides new quantitative evidence on the impact of the Dawes Act on mortality among American Indian children and adults. Using 1900 and 1910 U.S. population census data to study both household and tribe-level variation in allotment timing, we find that assimilation and allotment policy increased various measures of American Indian child and adult mortality from nearly 20% to as much as one third (implying a decline in life expectancy at birth of about 20%) — confirming contemporary critics’ adamant concerns about the Dawes Act.

Grant Miller, Jack Shane & C. Matthew Snipp, "The Impact of United States Assimilation and Allotment Policy on American Indian Mortality" NBER Working Paper #33057 (October 2024).

It turns out that suddenly switching from a communal land ownership regime to an individual land ownership regime is just as deadly as socializing individual land ownership.

Motorcycles Are Still Dangerous

 

The B-2 Is Rarely Used

Despite the small size of the U.S. B-2 bomber fleet, it isn't a heavily used resource despite its immense cost.

The U.S. bombing yesterday of five bunkers where Houthi rebels in Yemen stored weapons (which killed no civilians) was carried out by a B-2 bomber.

The last time that this class of bomber was used in combat before this week was seven years ago in 2017 in a January 18 strike on an ISIS training camp by two B-2s. 

Before that it was used to strike targets in Libya in March of 2011. 

They were used 49 times in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003. 

It was first used in combat in the Kosovo War in 1999 (where it was used heavily), two years after it entered military service in 1997. The first B-2 bomber flew thirty-five years ago on July 17, 1989, eight years before it entered military service.

The B-2's global range (6,900 miles, which can be greatly extended with aerial refueling), stealth capabilities, and heavy bomb payload (20-25 tons) is a combination unmatched in the world. It has a crew of two. 

Just 21 were built (driving up the per unit cost immensely) and 17 remain in service, while four had accidents or crashes that removed them from service. This is quite unimpressive for such a small number of aircraft when the number of combat missions it has flown in the 27 years it has been in military service is so small. 

The U.S. is in the process of fielding a replacement B-21 bomber which is quite similar in design and capabilities to the B-2. 

Electronic Warfare

General Dynamics has put an "Electronic Warfare" suite in its new squad sized dune buggy the Army called the "Infantry Squad Vehicle." This post isn't about that vehicle in particular.

Instead, this post is a short gripe about the term "Electronic warfare" which generally obscures more than it elucidates. It is about as clear as saying "explosive material warfare" to refer to everything from bullets, to tanks rounds, to artillery rounds, to missiles, to bombs. It might be accurate, but it isn't informative.

Electronic devices can be used in warfare in all sorts of ways. They can be used to jam enemy communications and guidance systems, to locate enemy radar, to spy on enemy electronic communications, to locate the source of enemy communications, to determine one's own location, to determine someone else's location with radar or electronic device homing, to jam GPS signals, to do calculations and coordinate information, to communicate, and probably far more. In a vacuum, it doesn't tell you much that is helpful.

As explained in the article in this case:

The electronic warfare kit is part of the Tactical Electronic Warfare System-Infantry Brigade Combat Team, or TEWS-I, which was initially a quick-reaction capability built by General Dynamics, providing a smaller system designed for infantry vehicles. It was a prototype activity to serve as a risk reduction and requirements pathfinder for the Army’s program of record, the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team (TLS-BCT).

That system was designed as the first integrated signals intelligence, cyber and electronic warfare platform and as initially conceived, was to be mounted on Strykers and then Army Multi-Purpose Vehicle variant prototypes.

The service has now decided to split up the platform, separating the signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities and pursuing a new architecture for its EW suite. That leaves a gap in vehicle-borne systems given there is now a man-packable capability for direction finding and limited electronic attack, and a larger system in development for higher echelons. . . .

The TEWS-I ISV technology is “a middleweight fighter in the electronic warfare space because it has the capability at distance to have an effect and be able to sense at a distance. It has a wide frequency range that it covers. It has an extensive peer-relevant set of signals that it handles,” Derek Merrill, chief engineer for tactical signals intelligence, electronic warfare and NetC2 at General Dynamics Mission Systems, said in an interview at the annual AUSA conference. “It has the capability to detect, identify, locate, report and attack targets … It also handles software-based signals integration from the government, so they can give us a signal [and] we integrate it very quickly onto the platform.”

So, yeah, the terminology could be more transparent. 

American Politics Right Now Are A Horror Story

This morning I read a guest essay in the New York Times by Eric Hagen entitled "I Grew Up in Bucks County, Pa. I Went Back to Try to Make Sense of the Election." 

It recounts what the author learned talking to sixty voters in an evenly split small town in rural Pennsylvania (in 2020, Trump got 276 votes and Biden 274), about 40 miles away from Philadelphia: precisely the sort of place where this year's Presidential election will be decided. The model at the FiveThirtyEight blog puts Pennsylvania's odds of being the marginal state that decides this year's Presidential election is 20.4% which is higher than any other state, with Harris's odds of winning currently at 53% as I write, nineteen days before the election.

Every single person he interviewed who backed Biden in 2020 backs Harris this year. Every single person he interviewed who backed Trump in 2024 backs Trump this year.

The justifications that Harris supporters have for backing their candidate are unexceptional, unsurprising, and mirror my own. A Harris supporter notes that: 

We were sitting at an outdoor table, overlooking the river. Riegelsville is in the far north of Bucks County, surrounded by corn and soybean fields, and only about 10 miles closer to Philadelphia than to New York City. “You see it’s so nice here,” he said. “It’s an amazing town. But politics has kept people a little separated. It has broken up some friendships.”

The horror comes from the Trump supporters, who make up about 47% of Americans, and about 49% of voters in the marginal swing states that are necessary for the winner to capture the electoral college in the latest polling averages. 

They utterly confound me and make me wonder how American politics became so broken, and how it can be fixed. In a better system, it would be the popular vote and not the electoral vote that would matter, but it would still be very close. I'll recount their side of the story in depth from this essay, in the hope of understanding it.

In Riegelsville, I was curious to know if the two-vote margin in 2020 was a signal that the town’s residents might be open-minded as they consider the candidates running this year — or if they are cleaved into two tribes like much of the rest of the nation. Would the fact that they live in proximity and actually mix with one another make any difference?

Over the course of five days, in two visits, I talked with 60 voters. All of them were white, reflecting the nearly all-white town. Riegelsville is, however, economically diverse: Among those I talked to were small-business owners, teachers, an architect, a retired stone mason and a couple of retirees from a now-shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant in nearby Easton, Pa. . . .

The more time I spent reporting, the more I realized I was not really writing about the numbers — or even the candidates. This election, more so than any I can remember, is about us, and how we think about our presidents. The people I talked to in this friendly little town expressed two starkly different visions of what a president should be — and what he or she represents in American society. . . .

Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion. They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.

“He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”

“I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.

The Trump supporters had a more complicated story to tell. They did not express fears that Ms. Harris would take away their guns — or, for that matter, even mention if they owned guns. None of them were QAnon-level conspiracy theorists who claimed that Democrats were pedophiles. In other words, they did not seem insane.

But in their defense of Mr. Trump — of his serial lying; his misogyny; his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.

“I think it was a crowd that just got out of hand,” Gary Chase, 72, said when I asked him about Jan. 6. “Some of it was set up. There were feds in the crowd who whipped it all into a frenzy.”

Mr. Chase is one of five members of the Borough Council in Riegelsville, an elected but unpaid position. He is a Republican, though the party affiliation is not, as he put it, “a nametag you wear here.” Like most of the Trump supporters I talked with, he gets his information from Fox News.

He viewed Jan. 6 not as a national tragedy but as a partisan event. “It was a political show, a distraction from the whole Hunter Biden scandal,” he said.

Those sentiments were echoed by others. Jon Libasci, 62, an architect, said, “How was it different from the police headquarters burned down during the B.L.M. protests?”

I first talked with Mr. Libasci and his wife, Yeyi, at the post office and then again one evening over drinks at their home. They had moved to Riegelsville several years ago from upstate New York, and live in the John L. Riegel House, built by a son of the town’s founder.

Mr. Libasci commutes by car to his office in Manhattan, a drive of about an hour and 15 minutes. “Gas was $2.25 a gallon when Trump left office,” he said. “I just paid $4 for mid-grade. You hear what Trump says: ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I’m OK with that.”

Ms. Libasci, who emigrated to the United States from Panama as a teenager, is an interior decorator who has been spending her time painstakingly restoring their home. I asked her about Mr. Trump’s long history of using language that denigrates women. “I have no concerns about his rhetoric,” she said. “I’m a big believer in you get the treatment you allow people to give you. I won’t let you cross that line with me. But I’m not a fool. I know that when men get together, they speak like men.”

I asked Trump supporters about his performance in the debate with Ms. Harris. None argued that the result for him had been anything other than a sound defeat. Several, though, observed that Ms. Harris had clearly spent more time rehearsing — as if preparing for an important event were not a quality you’d want in a president.

“I think she practiced very well,” John Shoemaker, 78, said. “Trump didn’t. And you could tell the moderators were out to get him.” 

. . .

I sat with this group two mornings. They reflected the town’s somewhat eccentric nature. Mr. Schaffer is a dressage trainer. Another man at the table had owned a tavern, which he referred to as a gin mill.

I asked them about Mr. Trump’s business history, which includes six bankruptcies, numerous instances of cheating his vendors and years of paying minimal or no federal taxes. Their responses were similar to what I heard from other Trump supporters: They accept that the rich play by different rules. Rather than resentment, they expressed admiration. “Every rich businessman goes bankrupt,” Mr. Shoemaker said.

A retired car dealer at the table, who asked that his name not be used, said he believed that Mr. Trump, as president, “took care of big business, and that’s smart because it’s good for all of us.”

On one issue — women’s reproductive rights — there was agreement at the table that Mr. Trump’s positions were hurting him and might cost him the election.

“It was a mistake,” the retired car dealer said of Mr. Trump’s role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. He said his wife, daughters and granddaughters were all voting for Ms. Harris, and some had contributed to her campaign.

“Trump puts his foot in his mouth just about every time he speaks, but on abortion it’s the worst,” the man said and added that “the abortion thing is going to kill him.”

In Riegelsville, several Trump supporters brought up former President Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office, which may have caused more damage to the institution of the presidency than many Democrats are willing to acknowledge.

I ended up talking to a pretty good chunk of the town’s voters. As I made my way around, what struck me was the difference in expectations. Ms. Harris’s supporters expressed a sense of hope that she might lead us into an era that feels sunnier. It wasn’t quite blind optimism, but they were willing to let her fill in the details.

Mr. Trump has activated darker impulses. His followers were unbothered by his constant denigration of women, of immigrants, of political opponents and even, if he loses, of Jews he says will be at fault for not having proper gratitude for how much he’s done for them.

A president is called on to lead, especially in times of crisis. But if Mr. Trump’s supporters remembered that his response to the Covid epidemic was an exercise in chaos, disinformation and divisiveness, that did not bother them, either. They were not looking to be led or inspired. They said they want him to lower gas and food prices and close the southern border.

The relationship seemed purely transactional — even if the specific things they expect him to deliver would be largely beyond Mr. Trump’s control. Presidents don’t set food and gas prices, and to truly solve the problems at the border would require an act from Congress — like the one Mr. Trump quashed in the spring for his own political benefit.

Character flaws in a national leader are not just about an individual — they speak to the character of a nation, its aspirations and ideals, and the type of government we want. Mr. Trump often isn’t campaigning on a recognizable version of recent Republican policies. He is not bound by any party-coalition give-and-take. He is the party, and whatever he says, those are its positions. His product, solely, is himself.

What if what his supporters really want, and do not express, is the Trump vibe? All the name-calling, coarseness and bullying? The hypermasculine, authoritarian rhetoric? Mr. Trump is peddling that poison like political crack, and half the nation is hooked, the other half repulsed. If it works and he is elected, it promises four more years of national political warfare. . . .

When I began to explore Riegelsville, I’m sure I had some of this in mind. As I walked its pleasant residential streets, Riegelsville really did, at times, feel like a Hallmark town. 

I figured that if there was a place that former Trump supporters might have grown sick of him — weary enough of all the ugliness and constant sense of grievance to cast him aside — this might be it. I was wrong. 

One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”

I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.

Active Defenses Are The Future Of Warfare

Offensive Weapons Can Overcome Any Passive Defense

There is no tank (or other armored vehicle or mobile ground based military system) on Earth that can't be destroyed with a hit from a single anti-tank missile launched from a device about the size of a golf club bag, that comes close to a one shot, one kill ratio, and has a range longer than the range of a tank's main gun. Often, it takes less to at least disable even a heavily armored tank, like a well placed tank round, an extended barrage of 25-40 mm canon rounds, some land mines, mortar and artillery rounds, IEDs, or even a well placed hit from a rocket propelled grenade or recoilless rifle, although heavy tank armor is pretty much impervious to small arms fire from assault rifles, machine guns, and the like.

There is no warship on Earth that can't be destroyed with a hit from a single, typical, anti-ship missile, which can have a range of 100 miles or more, and can be fired from land, from other surface ships, from submarines, from fighter aircraft, from bomber aircraft, from maritime patrol aircraft, and even from cargo aircraft like the C-17 and military helicopters. One or two torpedoes, or bombs are also up to this task. So are many anti-ship mines. 

A variety of torpedoes, sea mines, and anti-submarine missiles are capable of destroying or disabling any military submarine in the world with a single hit.

Most air to air combat involves the launch of a single guided air to air missile that the target aircraft is aware of for a few seconds before it hits, but too late in the vast majority of cases to evade. Jet aircraft sometimes evade air to air missiles or surface to air missiles fired within the range of the missile, with flares and extreme maneuvers, but this is the exception and not the rule to the point of being a minor miracle.

The largest conventional bomb in U.S. service at the moment, the MOAB has an explosive yield of 11 tons of TNT and a 0.6 mile blast radius (deployed via a C-130 intra-theater transport plane). This is about the same as the smallest nuclear weapons every built (which weighed about 60 pounds). While it may not literally be able to bust any bunker or fortification, it will destroy pretty much any building not buried deep within a mountain or deep underground.

The only modern aircraft to have any meaningful armor protection is the A-10 fighter, which while not really effective against modern anti-aircraft missiles provides meaningful protection against small arms fire from ground troops, shrapnel, and perhaps even somewhat against anti-aircraft guns firing grenade sized canon rounds. Other military aircraft rely entirely on active defenses (including staying out of range of enemy fire, and hiding and dodging).

Active Defenses

Because there are viable means of defeating any kind of passive armor that are available to pretty much any national military force worth its salt, and even select non-governmental insurgent forces (e.g. the Houthis right now, or the Afghan insurgents during the insurgency against Soviet rule there), war in the 21st century against any opponent of this caliber is all about not getting hit in the first place.

Hide and Dodge

One approach is to hide and dodge. 

For example, it is now standard for artillery forces to "shoot and scoot" before the volley of fire it launched is used to identify its location and fire back destroying it. 

A few U.S. aircraft currently in service (the F-22, the F-35, the B-2, and soon the B-21, as well as the out of service F-117), and possible a few very new Chinese and Russian planes, have radar stealth. But they can still be seen visually if one is close enough, they have significant heat signatures, make lots of noise, and have locations that can be tracked back from the bombs and missiles they drop. 

The SR-72 Blackbird spy plane can outrun and can stay about the maximum altitude of many war planes and even missiles, but it has no great offensive capabilities.

Submarines are good at hiding. Non-stealth aircraft, surface warships, and tanks, are not. Tracked vehicles and surface warships and submarines are all extremely slow. Wheeled vehicles are faster but don't rival missiles or aircraft. Helicopters, most smaller drones, and many transport aircraft are still much slower than a missile or a jet fighter.

Camouflage can help a little, but only on the margins in most cases for large military systems, as opposed to individual soldiers. 

Confuse

In the face of guided missiles and "smart bombs" and drones (and sometimes even manned aircraft), electronic jamming, dazzling visual sensors, sending out decoys and/or covering smoke, or even hacking the guidance system is sometimes possible. Indeed, these confusion oriented defenses are sometimes called "soft kill" active defenses.

U.S. Navy destroyers also have some soft kill type electronic warfare active defenses against income drones, smart bombs, and missiles, and torpedo defenses that use both soft kill electronic warfare type jammers, and decoys, all of which are active defenses designed to confuse incoming ordinance.

F-15 fighters sometimes carry ADM-160 MALD missiles which have electronic countermeasures and are used as decoys. Many aircraft have flare systems designed to be used as decoys against heat seeking anti-aircraft missiles.

Hard active defenses

Finally, there are "hard" active defenses, that destroy incoming ordinance before it gets too close.

Lasers

Laser weapons (and other directed energy weapons like microwave beams) are a class of "hard" active defenses that are just about ready for viable use on the battlefield. They prematurely ignite fuel or explosives, destroy guidance systems, or melt critical control surfaces. No practical laser weapons have the punch to pierce tank armor or sink a blue sea warship, but they can, in principle, prematurely ignite an incoming missile or artillery shell or naval gun shell or even a tank main gun shell, crash a drone, and can disable a speed boat or even a helicopter. It could even cause an externally carried bomb or missile on a fighter aircraft to explode and disable it. But the faster moving a target of a laser weapon is, the harder it is to get enough beam time on target to destroy it before it destroys you, during the possibly brief window when the target is in a line of sight.

Boeing's 5 kilowatt laser (shown above with the image from this link) intended for Army use against smaller drones, it typical of the state of the art, although these are still very novel and I'm not aware of any actually use of them in combat yet. There are some similar lasers that have been deployed on select U.S. Navy ships and experimentally in the Army up to 50 kilowatts.

Why military lasers are so low powered is a question I don't have an answer for. I have burners on my kitchen stove that use more than 5 kilowatts. There are ordinary civilian electric cars that use 350 kilowatts at full acceleration. There is no reason that I can see that a military laser defending a naval ship or forward operating base shouldn't have at least 1 megawatt of power, which would greatly reduce the amount of time that it would need to dispatch each target, making it more effective against swarms of targets and fast moving targets.

The pros of a laser weapon are that it is the cheapest per successful kill ($10 or so of electricity; it would still be cost competitive at 200 times that price), can be powered with batteries or super-capacitors charged with a military system's existing electrical power sources (so in the long run, its ammunition supply is basically unlimited), and the weapon itself isn't particularly large or expensive to build relative to conventional military guns. Improved battery technology may make it more viable going forward.

The cons are that the lower the wattage the more time the beam needs to be on target to destroy it (which makes it ineffective against targets that are approaching too fast like hypersonic missiles), it needs an energy source such as a battery or super-capacitor that is quite substantial (the exact demands depend on the wattage of the weapon), it can only hit targets in a line of sight (and struggles beyond about 2 miles in many cases), and it can be impaired by dust, smoke, rain, or mist.

Still, laser weapons could soon be a standard part of a layered active defense system. A powerful enough laser weapon could give an armored vehicle a fighting chance against an incoming anti-tank missile. It could be well suited to protecting a military base or artillery battery or naval ship against an incoming kamikaze drones or artillery shells or missiles. A fighter jet with an anti-air missile coming at it might be able to use a strong enough laser to shoot the income missile out of the sky before it hits, while it is trying to evade.

Guns

Another option is a "slug thrower" that fires "dumb" or minimally "smart" rounds (like grenades with timed fuses or proximity fuses). 

Historically, this was the idea behind cannon artillery style anti-aircraft guns, which are now mostly obsolete because of their limited range against high altitude fighter and bomber aircraft. 

The main example of this approach in the modern U.S. military is the Phalanx Close In Weapon System (CIWS) that shoots a rapid barrage of 20 mm (i.e. grenade sized) cannon rounds set to explode at a certain range if it doesn't make contact at incoming missiles and shells and drones. This was originally designed for the U.S. Navy where it is intended as a last line of defense against income missiles, and is in place on many U.S. warships, although a U.S. Army variant for point defense has also been developed on a limited basis.

The Phalanx CIWS (SEE-wiz) is an automated gun-based close-in weapon system to defend military watercraft automatically against incoming threats such as aircraft, missiles, and small boats. It was designed and manufactured by the General Dynamics Corporation, Pomona Division, later a part of Raytheon. Consisting of a radar-guided 20 mm (0.8 in) Vulcan cannon mounted on a swiveling base, the Phalanx has been used by the United States Navy and the naval forces of 15 other countries. The U.S. Navy deploys it on every class of surface combat ship, except the Zumwalt-class destroyer and San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock. Other users include the British Royal Navy, the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal New Zealand Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

A land variant, the LPWS (Land Phalanx Weapon System), part of the Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar (C-RAM) system, was developed. It was deployed to counter rocket, artillery and mortar attacks during the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S. Navy also fields the SeaRAM system, which pairs the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile with sensors based on the Phalanx.

These rounds are a bit more expensive each than a laser shot, and a barrage of rounds from a CIWS fires lots of rounds at some expense. Rounds fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each and the gun typically fires 100 or more when engaging a target. The ammunition has to be stored, loaded, and resupplied. The concept of any system like this it that most of the 75 rounds per second that it fires will never hit the target. The range is limited to less than one mile of effective range (although it has a maximum range that it can lob a round of up to about three miles) and has a radar to detect income targets with a range of about 4.5 miles. It weighs about 6 tons and draws 555 volts of electric power (apparently at about 250 amps which is 138.75 kilowatts) when fully operational. It isn't cheap either at about $12 million each for the system, before considering the ammunition (fully loaded it carries 1,550 rounds) or its power and transportation demands. It is also only effective against targets traveling at up to about Mach 2, so it can't defeat a hypersonic missile.

A much smaller and more precise version of the same concept is the Israeli Trophy system, an 1810 pound system used on armored vehicles like tanks (a lighter 1,080 pound version exists as well) that has a combination of "soft kill" electronic warfare defenses and "hard kill" explosively formed penetrators (basically anti-missile bullets) along with, like the CIWS, an automated targeting system. The system costs about 30% of the cost of a new Israel main battle tank (i.e., about $1.8 million domestically for Israel, and $3 million for foreign sales).

Trophy's radar and covered projectile launcher (via Wikipedia)

Trophy (Israel Defense Forces designation מעיל רוח, lit. "Windbreaker") is a protection system for military armored vehicles. It is termed an active protection system (APS) and is designed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

It is designed to supplement the standard armor of light and heavy armored fighting vehicles. The system is in active use on Merkava Mark 3 & 4 tanks and the Namer armored personnel carrier (APC). It is also found on the Abrams M1A1/2 tanks, and has been tested on Stryker APCs and Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

The Trophy system protects against a wide variety of anti-tank threats, while also enhancing the vehicle's ability to identify enemy locations.

Trophy is quite effective against anti-tank missiles (although not perfect), and has been used with success against them since the year 2011, but not so effective against "kinetic energy anti-tank weapons" (basically fast moving tank rounds with no internal explosives  and railgun rounds). As explained at the kinetic energy link:

Critics have liked Trophy to “a shotgun blast. It’s not,” the Rafael official insisted. “It’s a sniper shot…. a small number of EFPs in a very small area, aimed at a specific point on the warhead itself.” Rather than just blow the threat out of the air, Trophy tries to disable the threat so it doesn’t detonate.

It also has other vulnerabilities:

The system utilizes small EFPs which are projected towards the incoming threat; energy, debris and explosive pressure waves disintegrate the incoming projectile. As such, the system has a risk to dismounted infantry, and this system impacts traditional infantry supported mechanized warfare tactics.

The Trophy system have a donut-hole like window of vulnerability to attacks from directly above, or the slow speed of the drone and the gravity-dropped grenade might have caused it to be filtered out by the Trophy’s sensors. In October 2023, Hamas used civilian DJI and Autel quadcopter drones, which dropped shaped-charge grenades to damage several tanks.

According to an informational 'flyer' distributed by Hamas, the system can be defeated by firing an RPG-7 from within 50m, or using a weapon with a projectile that exceeds the speed of sound, such as the SPG-9 recoilless gun. 

Firing multiple rounds in quick succession is also a tactic for overwhelming this system. In October 2023, Hezbollah used AT-14 Kornet missiles during engagements with Israeli forces after the onset of the 2023 Israel-Hamas War. The missiles were used from the Tharallah Twin ATGM system, which is a quadripod equipped with two Kornets fired in rapid succession. This arrangement is designed to overwhelm the Trophy APS of Merkava tanks by having a second missile available before the APS can react after the first intercept (reloading requires at least 1.5 seconds).

The Trophy system protects only a single vehicle sized target, that needs some armor to protect it from shrapnel from the intercepted incoming ordinance, and operates only at a quite short range against subsonic targets. The EPFs used by the Trophy system are presumably similar to or less expensive than tank shells. 

Whether heavy passive armor beyond what is necessary to stop small arms, shrapnel (including active defense system related shrapnel), and perhaps canon rounds up to about 40 mm really adds much value in questionable.

Interceptor Missiles

A third kind of "hard" active defense system is a guided interceptor missile. Most modern warships have something of this kind, which is basically an anti-aircraft missile optimized for incoming anti-ship missiles. The are potent, effective, have long ranges in many cases, and are very expensive. And, while some of the cost is basically amortization R&D and intellectual property costs, the price of the oldest interceptor missiles suggest that the prices will remain high long after all of their relevant patents expire.

The U.S. Patriot Missile system, the Israel Iron Dome system, and some Russian and Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles are in this category.

The size and range of these missiles vary considerably, but they tend to be smaller than anti-ship missiles, surface to surface missiles, and air to ground missiles. They generally have longer range than lasers, directed energy weapons, or slug throwing guns, sometimes much longer. They can be fired from aircraft, ships, submarines, or ground launchers (often mobile ones). They are generally supersonic and have sophisticated guidance systems. At their best, as demonstrated in recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, they can be close to 99% effective at stopping relatively large and slow moving incoming ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and kamikaze drones. But these missiles are very expensive ($100,000 to $1,000,000+ each), often the total radar and launch system is quite large.

For example, the U.S. Patriot Missile system cost the U.S. $1.09 billion each as of 2022 (foreign buyers pay up to $2.5 billion each), plus $4 million per missile (up to $10 million each for foreign buyers). It has a 99 mile range and its missiles are hypersonic (3,500-3,830 mph depending on the missile). It entered service in 1984 and has been used in ten different wars (all of which, except the Ukraine War, were in the Middle East). Each missile is up to 2,000 pounds and a C-17 can carry just one of them (which takes about an hour to set up once off-loaded). A full system with six launchers requires about 600 soldiers to support it, although each launcher can be operated by just 3 people once it is set up, loaded and ready to go.

U.S. Navy surface combatants such as Arleigh Burke-class destroyers use a variety of anti-air interceptor missiles such as the:

•  RIM-66M surface-to-air missile (1558 pounds, 45-100 mile range, Mach 3.5, $238,000 each, entered service 1967)
•  RIM-156 surface-to-air missile (2980 pounds, 70-150 mile range, Mach 3.5, $409,000 each, entered service 1999 with prior version entering service in 1981)
•  RIM-174A standard ERAM (3330 pounds, 150 mile range against aircraft, 300 mile range against land targets, Mach 3.5, $319,000 each, entered service 2013).
•  RIM-161 anti-ballistic missile (1.5 tons, up to 720 mile range, Mach 13.2, $12 million each, entered service 2014)
•  SeaRAM (195 pounds with a six ton launcher which carries a 21 missile load, 5.6 mile range, greater than Mach 2, $905,000 each, relies on sensors for other weapons systems, entered service in 1992)

These are used in conjunction with the Phalanx CIWS sensors for the SeaRAM and the many other sophisticated sensors of the Aegis Combat system for its other missiles.

U.S. fighters like the F-22 (which cost about $360 million each including R&D cost and $191 million 2023 dollars as the marginal cost of each new plane) use air-to-air missiles including

• AIM-120C/D or AIM-120A/B AMRAAM (356 pounds, 110 mile range, Mach 4, $1,090,000 each, entered service in 1991),
• AIM-9M/X Sidewinder (188 pounds, 22 mile range, Mach 2.5+, $400,000 each, entered service in 1956).

The fighters have their own advanced avionic sensors in addition to those in the missiles themselves, but these missiles are primarily used against other manned aircraft or large, advanced drones. But fighter aircraft have been used as recently as this year to interdict the same kinds of threats that Patriot Missile batteries, the Iron Dome, and naval interceptor missiles are used against.

As far as I know, there is not an interceptor missile system for warplanes designed to intercept an air-to-air missile after it has been launched, as an active defense. These would presumably need only a small warhead allowing them to be fairly small, would need to be hypersonic, would have a relatively short range, would need advanced sensors and guidance systems, and would presumably be very expensive.

As far as I know, there is also not an interceptor torpedo designed to target and prematurely detonate or disable an incoming torpedo with a hard kill, as opposed to a decoy torpedo. One would imagine that a small, fast, super-cavitating interceptor torpedo would be technically feasible, however.

Implications

I'm weighing whether to expand this post, or to make a new one, working through some possible implications of the observations in this way in a narrative style context (i.e. brief near future fiction vignettes). I'm leaning towards a new post as this one is already long enough.

The Nobel Prize In Economics

The Nobel prize goes to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson for their work on institutions, prosperity, and economic growth. Here is a key piece summarizing their work: Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth.

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the world by European powers starting in the fifteenth century. 

We then develop the basic outline of a framework for thinking about why economic institutions differ across countries. Economic institutions determine the incentives of and the constraints on economic actors, and shape economic outcomes. As such, they are social decisions, chosen for their consequences. Because different groups and individuals typically benefit from different economic institutions, there is generally a conflict over these social choices, ultimately resolved in favor of groups with greater political power. The distribution of political power in society is in turn determined by political institutions and the distribution of resources. Political institutions allocate de jure political power, while groups with greater economic might typically possess greater de facto political power… 

Economic institutions encouraging economic growth emerge when political institutions allocate power to groups with interests in broad-based property rights enforcement, when they create effective constraints on power-holders, and when there are relatively few rents to be captured by power-holders.

From Marginal Revolution.

There is a strong school of thought in the economic development literature that argues that institutions and rules are not enough and that culture matters too.

Russian Casualties In Ukraine Exceed 600,000

Something on the order of 6-10% of casualties in the Ukraine war are deaths. But injuries still remove soldiers from the field. The entire active duty Russian military at the start of the conflict was about 900,000, of which 300,000-500,000 of which were naval and air force personnel. A huge percentage of Russian soldiers in this war have been killed or injured.

The losses mean that a lot of current soldiers on the Russia side in the Ukraine war are either recent conscripts or reactivated reserve forces who often had only relatively brief conscript service before moving to reserve status.

On one hand, Russia is notorious for having ill-trained enlisted soldiers anyway and having a very thin and ill-trained corps of non-commissioned officers. So, at those ranks, maybe the difference between a former career enlisted soldier and a new conscript might not be that great. But, the casualties appear to have affected officers as well as enlisted soldiers at very high rates, and skilled Army officers are very challenging to replace quickly. So, the casualties greatly degrade the competence of the soldiers currently serving, in addition to demoralizing them and stretching them thin.

Russia has suffered more than 600,000 casualties in the war with Ukraine, a senior U.S. defense official said Wednesday.

The number of Russian dead or wounded is significantly higher than the last official update from the U.S., which had estimated more than 300,000 casualties since the war began in February 2022.

The U.S. official said Russia sustained more casualties in September of this year than at any other point in the war, and explained it was important to disclose the casualties even if it is not a “definitive metric” of success in the conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “is trying to avoid a mass mobilization because of the effect that would have on Russia’s domestic population,” the official told reporters. “At this point, he has been able to significantly increase the pay of these voluntary soldiers, and he has been able to continue to field those forces without doing a major mobilization.”

“And I think we’re just watching very closely how long that stance can actually be one that he can maintain, and I think it’s an important one for all of us to watch very closely,” the official added.

Russia has also lost 32 medium-to-large naval vessels to Ukraine, which has hammered Russian forces in the Black Sea with drones, and “destroyed more than two-thirds of Russia’s prewar inventory of tanks,” according to the U.S. official. Ukraine has also destroyed hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds in targeted strikes.

The U.S. has not disclosed the number of Ukrainian casualties. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that some 31,000 troops had been killed.

Russian forces have continued to press forward on the battlefield stretching across a 600-mile front of eastern Ukraine, using a strategy of deploying mass waves of troops to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses despite the risk of high casualties.

Russia has made some progress in the eastern Donetsk region, taking the town of Vuhledar earlier this month and pressing toward the city of Pokrovsk, a railroad hub and critical supply station for Ukraine that could hinder Kyiv’s defense efforts if it falls.

A senior U.S. military official said the Russian strategy, particularly around Vuhledar and Pokrovsk, has incurred “substantial casualties” for minor gains.

“The number of Russians in [Pokrovsk] is astounding, it’s tens of thousands of forces,” the official said. “When you have that many forces in a very small area, indirect fire of any kind, or any direct fire, for that matter, it’s a target-rich environment.”

Heavy fighting is also in Russia’s region of Kursk, which Ukrainian forces invaded in early August in a largely failed bid to divert Russian troops from the front lines. Kyiv has said other goals, including preventing a Russian assault from Kursk, have been achieved in the incursion.

The senior military official said Wednesday that the Ukrainian troops can hold onto the territory in Kursk for months or longer.

The military official added there have been “overall minor changes” on the battlefield in both Kursk and Donetsk in recent weeks, adding that Russia is expected to continue its mass pressure campaign, but Ukraine is “thinking forward to 2025” with an eye on boosting brigades with recruitment. 

From the Hill.

Felony Disenfranchisement Prevents Four Million Americans From Voting

Felony disenfranchisement laws are wrong and were invented to suppress the black vote. These laws tip the balance of partisan power in places like Georgia, Florida and Arizona. They do, however, increase the relative voting power of women relative to men. And, they may even prevent Presidential candidate Donald Trump from voting in this year's election, since he is a convicted felon.

Laws in 48 U.S. states ban people with felony convictions from voting. In 2024, an estimated 4 million Americans, representing 1.7% of the voting-age population, will be ineligible to vote due to these laws, many of which date back to the post-Reconstruction era. . . . 

This report updates and expands upon a quarter century of work chronicling the scope and distribution of felony disenfranchisement in the United States. As in 2022, we present national and state estimates of the number and percentage of people disenfranchised due to felony convictions, as well as the number and percentage of the Black and Latino populations impacted. This year, we also present state-level data on the degree of disenfranchisement among men and women. Although these and other estimates must be interpreted with caution, the numbers presented here represent our best assessment of the state of U.S. felony disenfranchisement as of the November 2024 election.

Among the report’s key findings: 

• An estimated 4 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, a figure that has declined by 31% since 2016, as more states enacted policies to curtail this practice and state prison, probation, and parole populations declined. 
• Previous research finds there were an estimated 1.2 million people disenfranchised in 1976, 3.3 million in 1996, 4.6 million in 2000, 5.1 million in 2004, 5.7 million in 2010, 5.9 million in 2016, 4.9 million in 2020, and 4.4 million in 2022. 
• One out of 59 adult citizens – 1.7% of the total U.S. voting eligible population – is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction. 
• Seven out of 10 people disenfranchised are living in their communities, having fully completed their sentences or remaining supervised while on felony probation or parole. 
• In two states – Florida and Tennessee – more than 6% of the adult population, one of every 17 adults, is disenfranchised. 
• Florida remains the nation’s disenfranchisement leader in absolute numbers, with over 961,000 people currently banned from voting, often because they cannot afford to pay court-ordered monetary sanctions. An estimated 730,000 Floridians who have completed their sentences remain disenfranchised, despite a 2018 ballot referendum that promised to restore their voting rights. 
• One in 22 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than triple that of non-African Americans. Among the adult African American population, 4.5% is disenfranchised compared to 1.3% of the adult non-African American population. In 15 states, 5% or more of the African American adult population is banned from voting due to a felony conviction. 
• More than one in 10 African American adults is disenfranchised in five states – Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Tennessee. 
• Although data on ethnicity in correctional populations are unevenly reported and undercounted in some states, a conservative estimate is that at least 495,000 Latino Americans or 1.5% of the voting eligible population are disenfranchised. 
• Based on available correctional data that records an individual’s sex, approximately 764,000 women are disenfranchised, comprising about 0.6% of the female voting eligible population and approximately one-fifth of the total disenfranchised population. We estimate that approximately 3.2 million men or 2.7% of the male voting eligible population is disenfranchised, consistent with the overrepresentation of men in the criminal legal system.

From the Sentencing Project (via the Sentencing Law and Policy blog).

Economic Prosperity Is Not An Intrinsic Function Of Geography

Taiwan is the dominant producer of advanced computer chips in the entire world. One could ask "why?" One could also reframe the question and ask, "why aren't advanced computer chips manufactured in California or Michigan or Ohio or Massachusetts? 

There is a lot of concern that rare earth metals are predominantly sourced from China. If there was ever a war with China, that could be a problem, because a lot of advanced military equipment relies upon them. There has been a fair amount written about this issue. Despite the name, unlike diamonds and platinum group metals which have deposits only a few places on Earth, for example, rare earth metals aren't actually particularly rare. There are many places on Earth with abundant rare earth metal deposits and there was a time when they were mined in the U.S. and many other places. 

China is dominant in rare earth metal production because it is the low cost producer of a resource that there wasn't all that much demand for until recently. And, while it is the low cost producer, it isn't all that dramatically cheaper. The difference between the production costs for oil in low cost production areas like Saudi Arabia and high cost production areas like off shore drilling in the Arctic and fracking in the U.S. is greater than the differences in the cost of exploiting rare earth metals in China compared to doing so in the U.S. before the industry more or less withered away here.

There is no intrinsic reason that the dominant diamond cutting center in the world is a single city in India, or that it movie industry is concentrated in "Bollywood". 

There is no intrinsic reason that the financial industry in the U.S. is highly centralized around centers in New York and San Francisco, that the commodities trading industry in the U.S. continues to be highly centralized in Chicago, that a huge share of American actuaries work in Connecticut, that Delaware is the dominant player in the corporate law of big businesses, that the book publishing industry is centered in New York City, the U.S. movie production is concentrated in Los Angeles, that U.S. TV and music production is split between Los Angeles and New York City (except for country music which is centered in Nashville and Memphis in Tennessee), and that new musicals and stage plays in the U.S. are highly concentrated in New York City, that the U.S. robotics industry is centered in Boston, ands the the U.S. tech industry has its headquarters in San Jose. Vancouver, Toronto, and Prague have no intrinsic advantage that make them secondary centers for filming movies and mini-series.

Indeed, intrinsic availability of natural resources or intrinsic geographic advantages is something of a curse to economic development. West Virginia's abundant coal resources (like other centers of coal mining in Europe) did not make it rich. The unique in the world supplies of diamonds and platinum group metals in a small area of South Africa weren't all that important in its relative prosperity on the African continent. Yemen's optimal farming conditions haven't made it prosperous. Western Pennsylvania's oil reserves didn't bring that region lasting prosperity. The unique in the world supplies of ultra-pure quartz in Western North Carolina didn't make that region particularly affluent.  Bolivia isn't particularly prosperous despite having some of the richest supplies of lithium in the world. Panama's unique location and its canal have not made the country an economic standout with respect to its Latin American neighbors. Venezuela's rich supplies of oil haven't prevented it from being an economic basket case. Afghanistan's abundant poppy fields didn't stop it from being the poorest country in Eurasia. In India, the standard of living of a place is basically inversely related to its geographically determined agricultural productivity.

Economic prosperity does show sharp breaks at national and subnational borders. But it is even more tightly tied to particular, reasonably compact, urban centers, and sometimes even to particular neighborhoods within major urban centers. The boroughs of Queens and Staten island aren't the source of New York City's dominance in finance, entertainment, or publishing. When professionals and craftsmen with similar sets of skill are located close to each other there are synergies that benefit these entire economic communities and allow them to achieve excellence. Knowledge based economies have returns to scale.

Air Force Decides To Reinvent Helicopters

A new type of military airlifter is rising to the top of the U.S. Air Force’s list of modernization priorities: small, autonomous, electric-powered aircraft capable of short takeoffs and landings—and numbering in the hundreds.

Air Force Material Command (AFMC) is in the market research phase for the Next-Generation Intratheater Airlift (NGIA) concept. A five-year prototyping program could begin as early as fiscal 2026, leading to the start in the early 2030s of an engineering and manufacturing development phase for the first newly designed U.S. military air transport since the early 1990s debut of the Boeing C-17

“The Department of the Air Force’s goal is to enhance existing airlift capability and capacity with an intratheater platform that can fight through damaged infrastructure on responsive timelines,” the AFMC said in a request for information released on Sept. 24. Responses from the industry are due Nov. 1.

Although unclassified, the NGIA proposal is early enough in the acquisition process that Air Force officials are reluctant to elaborate on the concept. An AFMC spokesperson referred questions to the Air Force Futures organization on the headquarters staff. A spokesperson for Air Force Futures declined to answer questions, saying the NGIA concept is still in its infancy. . . . 

The Last Tactical Leg proposal envisions an autonomous, hybrid-electric short- or vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. This proposed airlifter would deliver small, urgently needed supplies from logistics hubs to forward bases, even with battle-damaged runways on both ends.

The market survey for the NGIA calls for industry “to achieve extremely short- or vertical-takeoff-and-landing capability with smaller payload weight.” . . .

Manassas, Virginia-based Electra.aero, for example, is developing a nine-passenger or 2,500-lb. cargo transport for the commercial market but also is working with the Air Force to incorporate military requirements.

From here.

Funny how this sounds almost exactly like an aircraft with the capabilities of the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter (apart from the hybrid-electric and autonomous flight parts - and the Army is well under way in making the UH-60 autonomous) that entered service in the Army in 1979. And, the Army is also, by the way, developing an autonomous successor to its CH-53K heavy lift helicopter, as well as smaller drone cargo helicopters, and the "U.S. Marine Corps, which has been completely restructuring itself around new expeditionary and distributed concepts operations in recent years, is pushing to acquire three different tiers of VTOL cargo drones." 

The Army invented and invested in this capability, of course, because as the article notes in more generous language, the Air Force abandoned its obligation to provide this service to the Army, and rid itself of its ample fleet of small, short takeoff and landing fixed wing C-7 and C-47 transport planes when the Vietnam War ended.

This same Air Force is also discontinuing the A-10 close air support attack fighter without a replacement, as fast as Congress will let it, because it doesn't trust the idea of having fixed wing aircraft within range of anti-aircraft weapons, even though the Army is carrying out essentially the same close air support mission with much more vulnerable AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. The Air Force does still have the AC-130 (a C-130 cargo plane outfitted with a howitzer that it shoots out a side door) to assist ground troops, but, only at night. Officially, the A-10 replacement is the F-35A, a supersonic stealth fighter that drops bombs and missiles from altitudes too high to be within range of anti-aircraft weapons. But this fig leaf of an argument isn't credible. (U.S. Special Forces are also buying a small fleet of light, lightly armed "armed overwatch" OA-1K aircraft for counterterrorism operations in "permissive environments.")

Apparently, however, a small, basically unarmed and unarmored military transport plane isn't nearly as vulnerable as the highly robust, armored, and heavily armed A-10.

Presumably, in a reflection of the odd dividing line between Army Aviation and Air Force Aviation, the NGIA will be primarily a fixed wing aircraft, rather than a true helicopter. But if it is to have vertical takeoff and landing capabilities, and a fixed wing, there are basically only two options: either some variant on the MV-22 Osprey with a tilt rotor, or some variant on the F-35B which can shift its thrust downward for vertical landings. And, no one has ever even prototyped an F-35B type vertical landing design for a transport aircraft.

The NGIA also seems to have a lot in common with an Army program that is just about ready for prime time and seems to fill almost exactly the same niche, right down to the fixed wing with a tilt rotor design.

Textron’s Bell has won the U.S. Army’s competition to build the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, the service’s largest helicopter procurement decision in 40 years.

The deal for the next-generation helicopter is worth up to $1.3 billion and is set to replace roughly 2,000 Black Hawk utility helicopters. FLRAA will not serve as a one-for-one replacement for existing aircraft, but around 2030 it will take over the roles of the Black Hawk, long the workhorse of the Army for getting troops to and around the battlefield.

Ultimately, the Army’s Future Vertical Lift pursuits will also replace around 1,200 Apache attack helicopters among other legacy aircraft through the pursuit of FLRAA, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and Air-Launched Effects working in advanced teaming formations.

The service wants FLRAA to be capable of traveling roughly 2,440 nautical miles (or 2,810 miles) without refueling, but also to be agile enough to maneuver troops into dangerous hot spots.

The engineering and manufacturing development and low-rate production phase could be worth roughly $7 billion. If the “full complement” of aircraft are purchased across the entire life of the fleet, the program could be worth in the range of $70 billion to include potential foreign military sales, the Army’s program executive officer for aviation, Maj. Gen. Rob Barrie, said during a Dec. 5 media roundtable.

Complicating the Army’s vertical lift modernization efforts, the Army is planning to develop and field FARA nearly along the same timeline to perform the scout mission. That duty was left vacant when the Army decided to retire its Kiowa Warrior helicopters in 2013. Since then, the Army has filled that gap with teams of Apache helicopters and Shadow unmanned aircraft systems.

The contract represents a milestone for the service as the Army hasn’t procured two major helicopters since the 1980s and multiple efforts to buy other helicopters over the last several decades ended in failure. . . . 

The FLRAA competition pitted two aircraft head to head: Bell’s V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor aircraft, and Sikorsky and Boeing’s Defiant X, which features coaxial rotor blades. Both aircraft were designed to fit into the same footprint as a Black Hawk. . . . 

In a Dec. 5 statement, Scott Donnelly, Textron’s chief executive, said the company is “honored that the U.S. Army has selected the Bell V-280 Valor as its next-generation assault aircraft. We intend to honor that trust by building a truly remarkable and transformational weapon system to meet the Army’s mission requirements.” . . . 

Before Bell retired its Valor flight demonstrator in June 2021, the V-280 flew more than 214 hours and showed off low-speed agility and long-range cruise capabilities, and reached a maximum 305-knot cruising speed. . . . 

FLRAA prototypes from Bell are due to the service by 2025. The initial contract obligation is $232 million, with a ceiling of $1.3 billion if options beyond the initial contract are exercised.

The initial phase allows the Army to continue preliminary design and then get to the design, development and delivery of virtual prototypes, according to Barrie.

FLRAA is expected to enter the fleet in 2030, around the same time as the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft is planned for fielding. . . . 

The service plans to field . . . FLRAA around 2030. The two teams building prototypes are aiming to fly them by the end of 2023. Each team’s aircraft are almost entirely complete, and they are waiting for the Army’s new engine to be delivered under the Improved Turbine Engine Program. The ITEP engines went into the testing process ahead of delivering earlier this year after a delay due to the pandemic.

From here. (The FARA program, meanwhile, has been canceled, and the Army is meanwhile upgrading the bid winning FLRAA design.)

The FLRAA meanwhile, looks a lot like a smaller and sleeker MV-22 Osprey.

Once again, the U.S. Department of Defense is vividly demonstrating why breaking up the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force in the way that it did was a bad idea.

DARPA on the other hand, is working on a very different kind of C-130 successor:

Aurora Flight Sciences on Oct. 8 unveiled new details of a notional operational variant of the fan-in-wing concept it is proposing for a high-speed, vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) X-Plane.

The operational version of the Boeing-owned company’s candidate for a DARPA demonstrator program would boast nearly the same wingspan and payload weight of a Lockheed Martin C-130J, yet fly up to 90 kt. faster and be able to take off and land vertically like a helicopter.

The Aurora concept includes two turbofan engines for horizontal thrust and four fans embedded into the blended wing body airframe for vertical lift. This “vision” aircraft concept also features cranked outboard wing sections and no vertical tails.

The concept depends on a successful Aurora bid to develop the demonstrator for DARPA’s Speed and Runway Independent Technologies (Sprint). Bell is working on a competing proposal based on a tiltrotor aircraft featuring stop-fold rotor technology. . . . The agency will . . . decide whether to move forward with building an X-plane and launching a flight test campaign in 2027.

Aurora’s one-third-scaled prototype calls for a tailed, blended wing body design, with the trailing edge of the wing positioned forward of the fuselage tail. The 45-ft. wingspan includes three lift fans. The top of the fuselage includes two auxiliary inlet doors for airflow in vertical mode. A pair of caret-shaped inlets on either side of the forward fuselage ingests air for a single turbofan engine to provide horizontal thrust. The prototype is being designed to carry a 1,000-lb. payload.

DARPA’s goal is to achieve a new standard in high-speed flight for a transport aircraft with VTOL capabilities.

The U.S. Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft plans to field a Bell tiltrotor in 2031 with a forward speed of at least 300 kt. The Sprint program aims to increase that top speed by as much as 50%, to 450 kt. By using that speed and vertical lift capability, the operational version of the Sprint prototype could present an attractive option for replacing the Bell Boeing CV-22 and Sikorsky HH-60W fleets. . . .

But the concept must first overcome the obstacles that have plagued development of high-speed, vertical-lift designs, including previous efforts to develop fan-in-wing aircraft, including the Ryan XV-5.

DARPA and program supporters believe that a combination of modern advances in lightweight structures and fly-by-wire flight controls could make such high-speed, runway-independent aircraft viable again. A fan-in-wing design still faces the complexity of achieving a stable hover with a heavy aircraft over unprepared landing sites using multiple lift fans. Aurora’s operational concept calls for a design with a 130-ft. wingspan and a 30,000-lb. payload.

From Aviation Week.