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Automated spectra acquisition on alert and identification (NMD algorithm)
Clear discrimination of risk category
No internal stabilization required
HDS-100G/GN are standard devices designed to search for radioactive materials and to respond to radiological threats such as illicit trafficking and RDDs.
They are able to identify radionuclides and classify them as medical, industrial, natural occuring radioactive materials (NORM) and special nuclear materials (SNM). They can be used to detect, localize and characterise threats during surveys or to complement with detection portal.
The HDS-100G/GN are ideally suited for First Responders, Border & Customs inspectors, Site Security in critical infrastructures, and for all applications related to the control of radioactive and nuclear materials.
Very sensitive nuclear detection and real time identification
For mobile use: car, boat, helicopter or airplane
Potential radiological threat search with Homeland Security algorithm
After event contamination mapping
Versatile configuration 1 to 4 detectors, 2 to 16 liters NaI(TI)
Rugged detection case and wireless tablet PC
GPS and mapping function
SPIR-IDENT system is a movable radiation monitoring system, developed for vehicle, helicopter and aircraft.
It is a ruggerized and friendly deployable equipment with the higher existing capability for both detection and identification or radioactive sources.
This system especially allows to detect artificial gamma isotopes among varying natural isotopes when used as an airborne or carborne system for the purpose of contamination evaluation and unattended source search.
SPIR-IDENT also exists as pedestrian portal monitor.
Description
1 to 4 detection units including 1 or 2 NaI(Tl) detectors (2 or 4 liter), MCAs and optional neutron detectors
1 interface unit with WiFi or wire PC link batteries, charger, DC and AC power supply
1 wireless ruggedized tablet PC with GPS
SIA identification algorithm designed for challenging Homeland Security issues
Simplified SpirMOBILE interface, based on GoogleEarth or RadiaMap interface based on ESRI Geographical Information System
Optional altitude acquisition module
Option remote transmission and remote commander station
Functions
1 second continuous elementary spectra acquisition and stabilization
Count rate/dose rate profile display
Single total channel or multi channels parallel operation
Continuous sliding spectra identification.
Alarm filtering according customer criteria
Simplied panel display ( level/ ID; instant or trend)
Expert display ( spectra, trend, raw and filtered ID)
Mapping: trajectory with level indication and alerts locations flags
Georeferenced database and replay capability
Performances
Typical 4 liters detector: for 137Cs, 8% resolution and 37cps per nSv/h sensitivity
1024 channels fast MCA, one per detector
Energy range 30keV to 3 MeV
Identification up to 4 isotopes mixed (in addition of background), with confidence level and quantification indication
Isotopes list according ANSI N42-34, N42-38, IEC62327, IEC 62484 draft, IAEA Tecdoc
User selectable alarm criteria
User calibration for quantification output
Characteristics
Polyester resin strengthened with glass fiber containers
Size:
Single detector case: 84x24x24cm (33x9x9 in), 18 kg (39.7 lb) (2l), 24 kg (52.9 lb) (4l)
Detection and warning of nuclear radiation for ships operating in a CBN threats environment
Complies with ANEP-57
Real-time monitoring of the nuclear radiation hazard inside and outside the ship (airframe ; decks ; CBN filtration units)
Operates fixed mounted and portable detection units
Includes RADIAC software for data acquisition, display and warning at the CBN console
Crew dose management
Interface with the on-board centralized system
Open system, allows extensions
RADIAC System
The system is built upon RADIAC LLR probes linked to a management software operated RADIAVIEW from the CBN console. Individual dosimeters and portable ratemeters can be also managed by the system. RADIAC System can also be embedded on CBN reconnaissance vehicles.
Ratemeter covering Tactical high range and Low Level Radiations (LLR)range
Measurement of gamma dose rate and dose calculation
Stand-alone internal detectors and complete range of external probes
Compact and lightweight
MULTIRAD has been designed to operate in harsh environmental conditions
Multirad LLR
The MULTIRAD system is built upon the MULTIRAD radiation meter equipped with a full array of accessories.
Integrating all the functions necessary for nuclear detection, and the required characteristics for various missions, this radiation monitoring system meets Low Level requirements.
It is currently used by Military and Civil Defense.
02/12/2011 – In December 2010, Second Line of Defense sat down with one of the leading US experts on the Arctic who has significant operational experience in both polar regions. Rear Admiral (Retired) Jeff Garrett remains significantly engaged as a national expert in various National Academy of Sciences and research efforts to shape approaches to dealing with a fluid Arctic situation in the coming decades.
Earlier we have posted a series of articles by our German correspondent on a European perspective on the problem. And she reported as well from the Moscow conference on the Arctic held this past September. She characterized the U.S. as the “reluctant” Arctic power, which is one of the challenges facing the U.S. as the Arctic dynamics reshape shipping, fishing, tourism and energy and other raw material exploitation in the 21st century.
A measure of the “reluctant” character of the U.S. as an Arctic power can be seen in the difficulty the country has committing to building new icebreakers, which, as Rear Admiral Garrett underscores, are the tools, which allow everything else to have mobility in the region.
Most other nations with polar interests are investing in new ice-capable assets for both polar regions: the Russians are announcing plans for new nuke icebreakers; EU has a huge icebreaking research drillship designed; Canada is designing ice-strengthened Navy patrol vessels and a new large icebreaker; China is building a 2nd research icebreaker and establishing new Antarctic stations; Korea has a new ice-capable research vessel; and South Africa is building a new Antarctic ship, among others.
The Polar Star Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uscgc_polar_star.jpg
SLD: Could you give our readers a sense of your background operationally?
Rear Admiral Garrett: When I came out of the academy, we were building the Polar Star, one of the first two modern polar icebreakers. I went to the commissioning crew of that ship as a young officer and experienced the headaches in getting that ship operational and getting it from the builder.
And then I went from Polar Star to an older, World War II-era icebreaker. At that point, the Coast Guard had become the sole operator of the nation’s icebreaker fleet.
SLD: This was in the 60’s?
Rear Admiral Garrett: Yes. In the mid-1960s we signed an MOU with the Navy when they wanted out of the icebreaker game. If you dial back to the World War II era, the Coast Guard designed the first modern polar icebreakers and ended up building seven of them. The U.S. lent three of them to the Russians as part of the war effort, who didn’t return them until early 50s.
But the main wartime threat back then was with Greenland and the threat of the Germans going into Greenland. And the rag-tag ice capable ships that we were able to put together were pretty much incapable of doing that.
President Roosevelt actually sent a note to the Commandant of the Coast Guard early in the war and said, “Build me the world’s best icebreakers.” An officer who had spent the prewar years studying icebreaking technology in northern Europe was assigned the task. He sat down and with a design firm hammered out the 269-foot Wind-class design. They ended up building seven of these icebreakers, with the ships split between the Navy and the Coast Guard. The Navy built another ship in the early 50s called the Glacier. It was bigger, and more powerful.
By 1970, there were eight U.S. polar icebreakers, and they were multi-mission naval assets. One of their primary postwar tasks was to support Cold War-era defense logistics. They also supported scientific efforts in Antarctica, as the Navy mounted a couple of expeditions and then led the massive effort to establish a permanent U.S. presence in the mid-1950s. As the DEW Line was eventually automated and consolidated, it was not necessary to support the whole string of manned sites all the way across northern Alaska and Canada with annual resupply operations. The polar work turned more toward science. [1]
SLD: So the fleet transitioned in the 1970s more into support for scientific missions? And by now there was a fleet of five icebreakers, some new, others old?
Rear Admiral Garrett: Yes. Right. By the time the two Polars were built (Polar Star and Polar Sea, in the 1970s), there were three Winds and these two big Polars. We had three old ones and two brand new ones.
One of the Polars went down to Antarctica every year to break a channel into McMurdo Sound and resupply the big base there. This important logistics effort still allows the U.S. to occupy the geographic South Pole and support the most robust research program on the continent.
The other Polar-class icebreaker would support a series of activities up north for defense logistics, defense science, and other research. When the Alaskan pipeline was built, the icebreakers were involved with supporting the construction in Prudhoe Bay.
By the 1980s, the three older ships were becoming unsupportable and increasingly difficult to keep operating. So Glacier, Northwind and Westwind were decommissioned and the fleet went down to the two Polars.
At that point, Congress funded the USCGC Healy, which is our most recent icebreaker. Money was put into the USN budget to build this ship. I was the commissioning CO for the Healy, delivered in late 1999.
SLD: So the lead ship is now 10 years old? And the other two ships?
Rear Admiral Garrett: The other two are pushing 35 years, coming up to 40 years. And the Healy, although a very innovative and efficient ship, is not as powerful as each of the Polars. It’s a very different ship, designed for modern science support.
SLD: Where would you build a powerful icebreaker today in a diminishing shipbuilding capacity in the United States?
Rear Admiral Garrett: Not too many places left. Probably Gulf coast yards, depending on what’s still going to be there. Perhaps a few other east or west coast yards might be able to build a heavy, complex ship of this type.
SLD: What kind of price are we talking?
Rear Admiral Garrett: The Commandant of the Coast Guard and others have estimated three-quarters to a billion dollars for the right kind of ship, depending, of course, on the level of capability.
SLD: But we could put that into perspective as well. First there are the logistics savings from having a new ship. Probably five years after the crossover point, you’re saving serious logistics costs. And second, if I spend $1.2 billion at a U.S. shipyard, I’ve employed X number of people, I’m going to get taxes off of those people; I’m going to get taxes off the yard. So my $1.2 billion is really a car sticker. Here’s the list price, but when I add in the taxes that will paid by fully employed U.S. workers, I get to the real price to the taxpayers.
Rear Admiral Garrett: And the intangibles, like preserving your industrial base, or some remnant of it anyway, to be able to do work of this sort. You would certainly save money you would otherwise spend trying to keep the older ships operational, and you would have the right capability for the job at hand.
SLD: Could you talk to the role of such an icebreaker, notably in the evolving conditions in the Arctic?
Rear Admiral Garrett: In an icebreaker, you are not up in the Arctic to break ice per se; you are there to permit mobility to accomplish missions of national importance. You are an enabler for transit and related operations. It’s really about mobility and being able to get to point A to point B or to wherever you want to go to do; whatever it is you’re out there to do. So what you need, is a ship with a lot of power, a very strong hull, and which has been designed to get through ice efficiently. In addition, people often overlook that you need significant endurance; there are no gas stations in the polar regions.
When you look ahead to what the Coast Guard needs to do its missions in evolving Arctic conditions, you see that there’s more open water, there’s more human activity, and there’s more maritime traffic. But the ice is still there, and its movements are becoming more unpredictable. You really need a ship that can operate in dynamic ice conditions to allow mobility and has the long legs to be there unreplenished for a reasonable length of time.
SLD: What about a nuclear-powered icebreaker?
Rear Admiral Garrett: Nuclear power is certainly attractive, but it’s based on an economic argument; you can pick a number for a price per barrel of oil in the out-years and can make the economic case. At a certain price, the nuclear power often looks attractive financially, but there are a lot of other issues involved.
The biggest issue I see against nuclear power for a Coast Guard icebreaker is the fact that it would be so environmentally opposed in so many places around the world that you would be really limiting what the ship can do and where the ship could go.
SLD: The Arctic is changing and I would assume that the demand for USCG presence would emerge as well. How ready are we for that?
Rear Admiral Garrett: If you look at the Coast Guard footprint up north, it’s all in southeastern and southern Alaska. The nearest base from which to deploy ships and aircraft into the Arctic is Kodiak.
The conventional, lower-48 force structure of the Coast Guard will not work in the Arctic. In most of the country you have a network of Coast Guard shore stations, air stations, boats, patrol boats and larger cutters, and marine safety assets located in each geographic region. Establishing a similar level of infrastructure in the Arctic would involve engineering costs that are just way too high due to the remoteness of the area and the engineering conditions such as permafrost.
And the demand for Coast Guard services is still on the low side. This demand will probably be more seasonal and situational than it will be steady state. So it’s not the Cape Cod or the Chesapeake Bay or the Pacific Northwest kind of model that you want up there; it’s going to be something else.
The demand will undoubtedly go up significantly as the Arctic changes, but the old model is not practical or cost effective.
But if you start thinking: What if I have an increasing SAR workload on the North Slope? What if I have security issues? What if I want to increase my maritime domain awareness up there? I want to be able to respond to anomalies or unknown ships that pop up, and I want to show a convincing national presence suitable for one of the five Arctic Ocean nations. How am I going to do that?
SLD: So the expanded demand for presence and operational capabilities by the USCG in the Arctic is not best done by trying to maintain shore based presence?
Rear Admiral Garrett: In my view, it is not the answer. Sure, you need some air operations sites ashore. But you are better off building many of your task force capabilities around a capable icebreaker, and to think of the icebreaker as a mobile command post able to provide mobility in difficult conditions. It’s a command and control facility with helicopters, extra berthing, configurable work spaces and heavy lift cranes; it’s got all kinds of boats; you can put containers onboard and modularize your mission suite.
It can patrol coastal and offshore waters, and it can go to a spot if you’ve got an oil spill or a suspected incident or something like that. And you can drop in any kind of special teams or expertise. For example, if you want to oversee an oil spill clean-up, you can send in a team of trained folks similar to the oversight structure that was working from the shore for the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf. You can have them on scene in the Arctic and able to move anywhere you need them along the coast. The big problem in deploying those kind of things on the North Slope is there’s little shoreside infrastructure.
SLD: That gets back to your endurance point.
Rear Admiral Garrett: As the Coast Guard has deployed people to the North Slope during the past few summers, finding a place for them to stay ashore has been reported as a major problem. In the Prudhoe Bay area you have to beg it off the oil industry. So you may have to depend on the very industry you’re regulating or monitoring for support, and they will be unlikely to have the capacity if a major contingency is in process.
Another benefit of having an icebreaker on scene is that they carry lots of fuel. An icebreaker can operate as a mobile gas station for other deployed USCG aircraft and cutters. So not just the endurance of the icebreaker itself, but the inherent capability to act as a force multiplier for other needed assets.
SLD: In effect, the new icebreakers are crucial to dealing with the evolving Arctic economy and to protecting U.S. interests. And your suggested con-ops is that the cost of the icebreaker has to be understood in the context of the overall cost of having a “mobile infrastructure” to anchor operations. It is not a ship; it is the foundation for operational capability. The alternative is to not play in the Arctic or to try to build a very expensive land based infrastructure with permanently deployed land-based assets operating in difficult conditions.
Rear Admiral Garrett: I believe that the strategic stake is going up dramatically in the Arctic and in the very near future we will not have adequate assets to protect our national interests.
We face a pending crisis with the Alaska pipeline. It is only half full now. Without offshore oil going into this expensive infrastructure, we will simply have to shut it down. And we would be doing this while other nations are drilling and exploiting the Arctic’s significant hydrocarbon resources. We may choose not to drill in our own waters, but we will nevertheless see the maritime traffic related to oil and gas drilling transiting through our waters.
SLD: If there’s a significant increase in cargo traffic, and the Coast Guard can’t have a decent presence there, in effect, we will have a highly unregulated transit route. That affects our interests, and would reduce our ability to secure the conveyor belt of goods and services that are coming into the United States.
Rear Admiral Garrett: Absolutely. In the western Arctic, there’s only one way in and out, and that’s the Bering Strait. Every ship that comes or goes from the Arctic Ocean on the western side will go through U.S. waters.
We could choose to just ignore all the traffic and say we don’t really care about it.
And there are other issues. We’ve got cruise ships going up there now. The Canadians had an incident this past summer of a cruise ship running aground in the Arctic; fortunately, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker was close by and able to assist. So you are starting to see bread-and-butter Coast Guard missions. The Canadians also had two tank vessels run aground in their Arctic waters this past summer. How are we supposed to respond to these basic maritime safety issues when the aging assets we currently have are no longer available?
SLD: The overall capability of the Coast Guard to do its tasks is dramatically reduced over the last ten years. And with the new Arctic demand, and the need to build icebreakers as mobile command posts, the absence of money to build these assets will lead to significant economic losses. An inability to play in the energy and resource efforts, the deep sea fishing issues, the container traffic and other issues, all pose significant economic threats and costs to the U.S. economy. It is too bad that the cost of an icebreaker is debated in and of itself and not placed in the broader economic, security and global context.
Rear Admiral Garrett: And as the USN increasingly thinks about its role in the evolving Arctic, without the icebreakers their mobility will be significantly limited. The defense side of the Arctic will return as a significant issue as well.
02/12/2011 – On January 14, the Russian newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta published an interview with Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, on what he called an issue of “an enormous strategic and economic significance.” Patrushev stated that the Council had directed that the government approve a long-term program to extract the mineral resources, especially oil and natural gas, located on Russia’s Arctic shelf by the end of 2011.
That same day, two of the world’s giant oil companies, Russia’s Rosneft and BP, announced an unprecedented partnership that will see them exchange shares and expand their joint ventures, including launching a new Arctic oil drilling project. Both companies bring important assets to their new alliance, but the deal has alarmed foreign governments and environments due to its potential commercial, security, and ecological implications.
The deal also raises interesting questions related to the Russian government’s economic modernization program. In terms of Arctic and energy security issues, the new partnership could mark the commencement of a major Russian government drive to develop the energy resources that fall within the boundaries of Moscow’s territorial claims in the Arctic.
In recent years, the Russian government has set forth ambitious territorial claims in the Arctic reinforced through recent scientific research expeditions and military measures. Despite losing considerable territory with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation still has the world’s longest Arctic border at over 17,500 kilometers, which amount to one-third of the entire length of Russia’s national frontiers.
The Russian Federation also possesses several Arctic archipelagoes, including Franz Josef Land and Wrangel Island. Furthermore, the Russian government claims its continental shelf extends up to the North Pole—and is taking steps to strengthen and enforce this claim in the face of opposition from Canada, Denmark, Norway, and the United States. For example, the Russian government believes that the underwater Lomonosov Ridge, which lies on the North Pole’s seabed, along with the Mendeleev Ridge and Alpha Ridge, are part of Russia’s continental shelf.
As with the case with Canada and the Northwest Passage, Russia also seeks to exercise exclusive control over a burgeoning shipping lane of the Northern Sea Route (NSR). The NSR is a system of sea-lanes from the straits between the Barents and Kara seas (south of Russia’s Novaya Zemlya nuclear test site) to the Bering Strait, a distance of approximately 5,000 kilometers.
This route connects Asia and Europe, and when navigable, saves transportation time and costs as compared with using the Suez Canal. Russia’s Arctic policy defines the NSR as a core national interest. (The U.S. government considers the NSR as an international shipping route.)
In an effort to bolster its claims of ownership over the NSR, the Russian Ministry of Transport announced on March 18, 2010, that it is drafting legislation to define the Route’s precise dimensions and to create a federal agency that would regulate and collect fees from foreign vessels using the NSR.
During the Cold War, the Arctic region was a place of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both operated nuclear vessels, long-range bombers, and tactical aircraft in the region. Following the USSR’s collapse in 1991, Russian government interest in the Arctic decreased considerably.
During the 1990s, Moscow’s concerns were maintaining the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation in the face of secessionist threats in the North Caucasus and elsewhere. During the 1990s, Russian military overflights and naval patrols in the Arctic declined significantly as the Russian military faced drastic funding and fuel shortages. The Russian army withdrew from many Arctic bases. The inward concentration of the Russian government’s attention and resources hampered the development of a comprehensive policy toward the Arctic. Furthermore, the economic problems that Russia confronted in the 1990s also made it difficult for Russians to conceive of resource-intensive plans to exploit the Arctic region’s mineral wealth.
But the rise in world oil and gas prices that began in the late 1990s simultaneously provided the Russian government with increased revenue and renewed Russian interest in developing the increasing valuable energy resources in the Arctic region. The renewed attention was evident on September 18, 2008, when the Russian government issued a “Framework for the Arctic to the Year 2020 and Subsequent Perspectives.”
More recently, the “Russian National Security Strategy for 2020” illustrates the growing importance that Russian strategists attribute to exerting control over the maritime domains around Russia, especially the resource-rich Arctic Ocean, Barents Seas, and Caspian Sea.
After a series of incidents in the late 1990s, in which several foreign research ships allegedly trespassed into Russian territorial waters, the Russian government began taking steps to secure its northern border. In recent years, Russia has taken more concrete measures than any other country to assert its Arctic claims. Russian warships and warplanes have increased their military activities in the region. The Russian government also began sending more scientific research expeditions to the Arctic.
In the past, Russia relied heavily on military personnel and equipment in its Arctic expeditions, but now is using primarily civilian technologies since these can be more readily detailed to the United Nations and other international bodies to justify Russia’s Arctic claims. Russia’s earlier submission to the UN regarding its territorial claim to the Lomonosov Ridge was rejected due to a lack of supporting evidence, which Moscow declined to provide for fear of revealing military secrets.
The 2007 Arktika expedition represented a dramatic, high-profile assertion of Russian interest in the region. In August, the research expedition climaxed when ship Akademik Fedorov and icebreaker Rossiya sent two specially designed submersible vessels, Mir-1 and Mir-2, 4,300 meters deep to the North Pole seabed. After collecting soil samples and further mapping the Lomonsov Ridge, the expedition planted a Russian flag made of titanium on its floor. Reacting to foreign criticism of the flag ceremony, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, “The aim of this expedition is not to stake Russia’s claim but to show that our shelf reaches to the North Pole.
Russian government claims and actions regarding the Arctic stem not only from economic and domestic political considerations, but also from offensive and defensive strategic considerations that encourage a greater Russian military presence in the Arctic. The Eurasian landmass of Russia is effectively “walled in” by Siberia and the Pacific to the east, Asia and the Middle East to the south, and Europe to the west.
The Arctic has for centuries served as the “fourth wall,” restricting Russian maritime activity to areas largely controlled by other powers. As the Arctic climate changes to open more waters to navigation and exploration, the Russian Federation can extend the range of its military operations. Russia’s Northern Fleet, the largest element of the Russian Navy, is based in the port city Severomorsk on the Barents Sea.
Although the Northern Fleet maintains year-round access to the North and South Atlantic, its mobility could be strictly limited to the Barents Sea by a Western naval power in the event of unrestricted warfare. An ice-free Arctic would negate this advantage, but also present new strategic challenges to Russia.
The opening of the Arctic Ocean makes vulnerable Russia’s northern ports, particularly those in the Kola Peninsula that house the majority of Russia’s ballistic-missile submarine fleet. Furthermore, the opening of the NSR could serve as a maritime link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through which warships could pass. At present, warships in the NSR are susceptible to structural damage from floating ice, weather conditions, and icing. These conditions will become less severe on a seasonal basis as climate change progresses.
Russia is partly able to address the issue of Arctic maritime conditions by maintaining a fleet of icebreakers. There are 18 icebreakers of various sizes in Russia’s military fleet. Seven of these are equipped with nuclear reactors, rather than conventional diesel engines, allowing them to break through ice twice as thick as can be breached by standard icebreakers.
The most capable Russian icebreakers are operated not by the Russian Navy, but by privately-owned mining giant Norilsk Nickel. Its icebreakers can penetrate ice up to 1.5 meters thick. But Russia needs to recapitulate its icebreaker fleet since all the existing ships except one are scheduled for decommissioning in the next decade. Russia’s economic troubles have delayed the construction of new third-generation icebreaking vessels.
Russia must acquire at least three new vessels of this type in the next several years in order to maintain adequate icebreaking capabilities. Russia must also expand its Coastal Border Guard to better accommodate increased commercial and military traffic.
In addition to Arctic regions, the Coastal Border Guard patrols the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas, as well as Russia’s Pacific coast. Changing Arctic conditions could double this area of responsibility. The National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation until 2020 includes provisions to strengthen and upgrade the Coastal Border Guard. In 2009, border guard units based on the Barents Sea began patrolling the NSR for the first time since the Soviet era.
Russia is also expanding its military presence in the Arctic region. The Russian Presidential Security Council has called for establishing an military force and several new bases in the Arctic, while the Federal Security Service (FSB) will use its coast guard ships to collect maritime intelligence in the region.
The Russian government is moving swiftly to expand its sea, ground, and air presence in the Arctic. Russia has resumed air patrols over the Arctic, and, in June 2008, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that it would increase submarine operations if Russian national interests in the Arctic were ever threatened.
In October 2010, Navy Commander Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky said that Russian naval ships and submarines had already conducted about a dozen military patrols in the Arctic during the first three quarters of that year. Vysotsky explained that, “In accordance with the Russian Armed Forces’ plan of strategic deterrence we take measures aimed to demonstrate military presence in the Arctic.”
Russia’s strategic ballistic-missile launching submarines use the North Pole region because the ice helps shield them from U.S. space satellites and other overhead sensors. In addition, launching a missile from the Arctic can reduce the flight time to U.S. targets. In July 2009, the Russian Navy boasted that it had succeeded in launching two long-range ballistic missiles from under the Arctic Ocean without the Pentagon detecting their preparations.
Supposedly Russian attack submarines prevented U.S. surveillance ships from learning of the arrival of two Russian strategic submarines before the missile launches. The state-run RIA Novosti news agency quoted a high-ranking Navy source as saying that the successful drill disproved skeptics in Russia and elsewhere that the Russian Navy had lost its combat effectiveness: “We slapped these skeptics in the face, proving that Russian submarines are not only capable of moving stealthily under ice, but can also break it to accomplish combat tasks.”
Nonetheless, for the past year or so, Russian officials have sought to downplay the prospects of military conflict in the Arctic region. In late 2010, the special representative of President Medvedev, Anton Vasilyev, stated that “Russia does not plan to create ‘special Arctic forces’ or take any steps that would lead to the militarization of the Arctic,” which contradicts provisions stated in Moscow’s security doctrine.”
In his year-in-review press conference, Foreign Minister Lavrov said that all Arctic border disputes could be settled through negotiations and that ” rumors that a war will break out over the resources in the North are a provocation.” Last year, after 40 years of negotiations, Russia and Norway signed a deal to delimitate their maritime border. The two countries have been disputing the 175,000 square km area in the Barents Sea and Arctic Ocean since 1970. The disputed maritime border has resulted in both parties seizing fishing vessels in the area. President Medvedev and Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg signed an agreement dividing the contested area into two equal parts. Meanwhile, while Russia still contests ownership of the Lomonosov Ridge with Canada, both countries have agreed that the United Nations would be the final arbiter of who owns title to the Ridge.
Verbal Statement of Lt General David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret)
U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission, January 27th, 2011
*** For General Deptula’s response to the written questions see the PDF file of the hearing.
02/12/2011 – Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify today on China’s active defense strategy and its regional impact. The work of the members of the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission is extremely important, particularly at this point in time, when difficult choices need to be made regarding investments in National Security that will prepare the United States for a future where China will play a much more active role around the world than it ever has in the past…..
With respect to the role of space operations in China’s antiaccess strategy, China recognizes the overwhelming advantage the U.S. has in the space domain and its key role in our ability to collect, analyze and rapidly share information. They understand how dependent U.S. warfighters have become upon space products and services for commanding deployed forces, passing ISR data, and enabling precision targeting and engagement.
China views that reliance as a significant, exploitable vulnerability, and has written extensively about the subject in both open source journals and military doctrine. As a result, they are actively pursuing a comprehensive array of space and counterspace programs intended to degrade, disrupt, deny or destroy our ability to gain and maintain access to the region in the event of a conflict.
China maintains a development and deployment program for space weapons including programs on direct ascent anti-satellite weapons — or ASATs — high energy laser and GPS and other types of jammers. The PRC is developing these weapons and technologies as a way to counter U.S. space superiority and to deny the use of space.
China understands the U.S. reliance on space for imagery, signals intelligence, communication, tracking of friendly forces and navigation. As such, they are developing the capabilities to deny the U.S. information at the time of their choosing. Additionally, the threat of space denial, such as through the testing of ASAT weapons, is also an effective counterspace strategy.
Implementation of these ASAT options requires not only the weapons themselves, but also information about the physical characteristics and orbits of the satellites to be targeted and attacked. China currently is developing a Space Object Surveillance and Identification network to improve its space situational awareness.
Publicly, China opposes the militarization of space, and seeks to prevent or slow the development of anti-satellite systems. Privately, however, China’s leaders probably view ASATs, and offensive counterspace systems as force multipliers.
As one Chinese defense analyst noted: “For countries that can never win a war with the United States by using the method of tanks and planes, attacking the US space system may be an irresistible and most tempting choice”. Continued Chinese investment in the design, development, deployment and employment of space and counterspace systems will increasingly challenge our traditional space dominance and could dramatically reduce our freedom of action in the event of a conflict in the region.
With respect to the cyberspace related aspects of China’s area control and antiaccess strategy, control and exploitation of the cyber realm is a key element of the Chinese information superiority strategy, which is an integral part of their overall antiaccess strategy. A key component of the PRC antiaccess strategy is denial of information to the enemy. Cyber capabilities can be used to deny information, either by network attacks or planting false information.
The Chinese have identified the U.S. military’s reliance on information systems as a significant vulnerability that, if successfully exploited, could paralyze or degrade U.S. forces to such an extent that victory could be achieved.
Cyber targets could include computer systems based in the U.S. or abroad, command and control nodes, and space-based ISR and communications assets. Noting the great distances that U.S. forces would need to travel in a conflict with China, attacks against logistics systems could be expected.
The goals of these attacks would be to delay the deployment of additional U.S. forces to the region and to render existing forces in the region less effective or more vulnerable by preventing timely supplies of the materiel needed for war-fighting.
Operations in the cyber domain have the potential to dramatically change the character of warfare. In a recent article by Richard A. Falkenrath entitled From Bullets to Megabytes, he observes that “STUXNET, the computer worm that last year disrupted many of the gas centrifuges central to Iran’s nuclear program, is a powerful weapon in the new age of global information warfare. A sophisticated half-megabyte of computer code apparently accomplished what a half-decade of United Nations Security Council resolutions could not.” Mr. Falkenrath goes on to forecast that warfare in the cyber domain “…will define the shape of what will likely become the next global arms race—albeit one measured in computer code rather than firepower.”
Cyber warfare has the potential to terrorize, isolate, demoralize and cast a country into disarray. U.S. military networks are constantly under siege, and in some cases, intruders have certainly made off with militarily useful data.
However, cyber attacks are not just limited to the military—civilian networks in the US and countries which host our forward deployment bases can be hacked as well. These networks—electrical grids, communications, water supplies, banks and more—provide essential services to military installations and communities around the world and are critical to the day-to-day lives of millions more.
While their impact on the military may seem indirect, any cyber attack which succeeds in creating widespread disruption on a national scale is certain to at least impede, if not debilitate military operations and critical military support functions.
Finally, let me highlight the importance of what the Chinese military calls the Three Warfare’s—that is, psychological operations, influence operations and legal arguments—or what some have called “lawfare.”
These concepts are widely discussed in PRC literature and the open source press. Psychological, influence and legal arguments are not new concepts for the PRC and first publically appeared in a book that many here know well, Unrestricted Warfare, literally “warfare beyond bounds.
For a copy of the book, go to http://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf (Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare)
For those not familiar with this work, it is a book on military strategy written in 1999 by two colonels in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. It describes how a nation such as China can defeat a technologically superior opponent such as the United States through a variety of means other than direct military confrontation.
It focuses on using international law and a variety of economic means to place one’s opponent in a bad position and circumvent the need for direct military action. The PRC is currently conducting psychological operations, influence and legal operations in an effort to create a favorable environment for current and future PRC actions.
PRC doctrine introduces the Three Warfare’s concepts also as a way to influence their enemy civilian leadership’s ‘will to fight’.
Additionally, in their document, the Science of Military Strategy, they note that “war is not only a military struggle, but also a comprehensive contest on fronts of politics, economics, diplomacy, and law.”
Each of the Three Warfare’s concepts are separate, but intertwined and many actions that fall underneath these operations are taking place now as the PRC prepares and influences the battlespace in which they will fight future wars, whether kinetic or non-kinetic wars.
Clearly, the PRC understands that achieving National Security objectives involves successful exploitation of all elements of National power, and they are actively planning on incorporating the informational aspects of National power in a way to achieve optimal advantage through their use.
China is currently not a “10 foot tall” threat, but our actions — both economically and militarily — must create the conditions such that they don’t aspire to become one. Our actions should shape a future where as great nations; both China and the United States can partner to seek stability around the world.
Current Chinese military and economic trends should be a wakeup call to the strategic complacency of those in the United States who assume continued United States air and naval dominance in the Pacific.
More directly, it is essential that we move beyond the perspective that appears to have captured many of the security elite in our country that since we’ve been dominant in conventional warfare over the past quarter-century, that we’ll remain so in the future. It’s a convenient presumption, particularly given the current economic environment, but a very dangerous one.
It may play to conventional wisdom to state that the biggest threat to defense is the deficit, and while accurate to a degree, the immutable nature of conflict, and deterrence, is more basic — strength prevails over weakness. The difficult position to take — given the current economic conditions and nation-building engagements that we have elected to pursue — is to articulate the kind of investments we need to make in all elements of our Nation’s security enterprise — diplomatic, information, economic, and military — to secure a position of strength in the next quarter-century…..
Laying the Foundation for the Future Through Current Investments
02/12/2011 – In December, Second Line of Defense sat down with Marty Jenkins of Lockheed Martin to discuss the Airborne and Maritime/Fixed Station Joint Tactical Radio System or AMF JTRS. This is a significant program which can help re-shape interactive connectivity. This is the second of a three-part interview.
The video shows how JTRS enables interoperability and connectivity across the deployed force.
Credit: Lockheed Martin
SLD: I think one of the key things that’s kind of lost in the current debate about financial restraints and difficulties is that you can invest in the past, which never gets you to the future or you can prudently leverage current requirements but invest towards the future. I’d like to talk about three different aspects of this that we could talk about how JTRS allows a platform for innovation.
But first is the introduction of the F-35, which is a flying combat system. Obviously, what remains on the table is how the F-35 is going to work with other assets.
The second issue is something we call “enduring Littoral presence.” You’re introducing an LCS, we’ll introduce robotics into the environment, we’ll back fit to the amphib, and with the F-35, and the Osprey on it; how do you enable these assets to work effectively over a network in a cluttered environment?
And then the third is just a question of the Army. The FCS was canceled and now we see a very platform-centric look about vehicles; and the Army is doing great innovations at Huntsville with Rotorcraft and UAVs. We should be in a position where those innovations can relate to the future vehicles that we buy and how we link those things together. Obviously, the Army needs to create the bubble that allows these things to be linked together.
Those are the three examples of where innovation is either going to be driven by new platform or the need to connect them, and all of this requires leveraging our investments if we put new platforms into play. But the MRAP myopia is dominant whereby DOD is taking the old stove pipe approach to connectivity. How can JTRS help move beyond the stovepipe and re-introduce cross cutting innovation associated with enhanced connectivity?
Marty Jenkins: The JTRS Enterprise is designed for the future, the present, and again bringing in the legacy of past. Why would you invest in hardwired infrastructure that has a single function and a time-defined life cycle of usefulness? Why not invest in infrastructure with the upside agility to grow into the future?
For example, F-15 pilots currently do communications by monitoring normally three voice frequencies; in priority they tune one all the way up; the second priority they’ll tune up the volume about the middle, and the low priority will tune it all the way down. And that’s how we’re monitoring communications in the air. We can invest in old or legacy radio hardware that will perhaps enable more range, greater fidelity, but we’re still in the past approach
SLD: You’re still limited in terms of the infrastructure.
Jenkins: You’re limited in the infrastructure. If we invest in JTRS infrastructure, then users will be able to use voice, chat, data, streaming video, and have the ability to find in real time how they want to interact with those systems. But it’s more than that; we have a defined series of waveforms that are part of the program; Link-16 is one of the waveforms, part of the program; we have a broadband IP, a narrowband IP. But the devices are agile enough that we have networking capability or new waveforms that are not yet defined that could ride on this infrastructure.
With the JTRS infrastructure today, you could enable IP connectivity to your choice of end user device…desktop, hand held, iPhone; or, looking ahead, what’s the next thing coming down? Is it 5G waveforms with higher data rates? Is it virtual holograph technology? This infrastructure, because it is looking ahead, has the agility to enable that kind of network connectivity as part of the design.
SLD: So it has a lot of modularity that facilitates communications growth over a variety of new platforms and platforms that do not yet exist?
The core capabilties which JTRS enables are shown in the video.
Credit: Lockheed Martin
Jenkins: Huge upside growth. Now the CONOPS, we’re just scratching the surface, and we’re working with Air, Surface and Space platform programs very closely as well as looking at operational scenarios that we work hand in glove with the Army, the Navy, Air Force, and Marines. We’re working with people just back from theater and going back into the theater; looking at a world beyond Afghanistan, we’re looking very closely at the air- sea battle concept that the Air Force and the Navy are working, and how can this kind of infrastructure alter the CONOPS.
And we need to adapt to the new communications culture of the young as we evolve the approach. Let me give a sort of vignette; if you and I are going to have a drink tonight, I’ll call you and I’ll say, “I’ll meet you at 7 o’clock at Applebee’s and we’ll have a drink. The younger people today that are brought up in this environment don’t do that. They text and they say, “I’m out on the street, where are you? I’m here. Let’s meet over there.” And they’re in the community of interest on their device and they’re talking to all their friends out there whether it’s a Facebook kind of application or a Twitter, it’s a community of interest and it’s sort of ad hoc but self-forming.
We think that when you enable combat troops and operational forces with a JTRS-like capability, operations are going to move the same way. Currently, a scenario might be “I have a medevac helo, I’m going to this point.” When you get to that point, the people that you needed a medevac may not be there anymore; they may have moved and now you’re going to have to go to another point. With AMF JTRS capability, we see people working in an operational community of interest and flexing in real time so that you actually get to where you’re needed, not to where you’re told to go to begin with.
The Contributions of JTRS to Integrating a Deployed Force as Discussed in the Video
Credit: Lockheed Martin
SLD: This is obviously part of the evolving shift in con-ops to distributed operations.
Jenkins: I think that’s exactly right. What IP infrastructure enables more than anything is peer-to-peer networking and information sharing. And we think that’s going to happen; it happens today.
It’s the same as the kids out on the street texting and tweeting. If you translate that to low end or Littoral operations where you could have Marines, Navy, Army, perhaps an Air Force; we think peer-to-peer networking will happen and it won’t necessarily respect chain of command or service nor should it.
So Army and Air Force will be chatting, Navy and Air Force will be chatting Navy and Army will be chatting. Sharing information and what that really enables is better visibility, higher level of fidelity on who is around us, across services, across COCOMs. AMF JTRS can provide situational awareness that can result in two, three, four orders of magnitude increase in speed of command.
