Technology of War - Air Power
how would you like to see into the future try looking up a planet facing dangerous new threats is turning to new technology and unleashing a bold new era in air power the stakes are Sky High so are the battle lines how is the air force of tomorrow going to rise to the challenge with unparalleled speed stealth and precision engagement we are seeing the dawn of a new era of air power unmatched in human history air space Global vigilance reach and power the blending of the new technology of War [Music] they strike without warning with precision and power they can elude locate and level the enemy they're fast very fast they are the flagships of a new age of aerial combat but today's Air Force is flying Uncharted Skies the nature of warfare has radically changed this enemy knows no borders and defies detection to the United States and its allies the challenge has fallen wars in the 21st century must be fought quickly one with minimal risk and driven by technology the military is being reshaped from the ground up way up how will Allied Air Command pull it off the eyes of the world are on the U.S Air Force research laboratory located at Wright-Patterson Air Force base near Canton Ohio where the future of aerial combat is taking shape when we look out to the future you know we've got to be 10 15 20 years out so one of the things we tried to look at is what is our North Star what are we guiding toward in the lab we've moved toward looking at a technical Vision which goes something like the following it will be to anticipate fine fix Target track and gauge assess anyone anywhere anytime that's a pretty you know audacious goal to think of in the future we're going toward but that is to enable us to have the ability to better prosecute environments like we are now in a global war on terror so rather than wait and have to react to an incident to see if we can't use all our information resources pull them together and intelligence assets deal determine what it's going to happen react to it before and then have the ability to quickly engage whatever that adversary is and whatever the conditions are no matter how far away we were when it started the Quest for the ultimate aircraft it must be stealthy it must be precise but there's one objective above all it's got to fly fast since the first plane was piloted the goal has always been speed in 1903 advances in the piston engine allowed the Wright brothers to successfully fly their airplane in the 1930s and 40s the work of Dr James Whittle and Dr Hans Von ohhein developed the turbine engine which eventually revolutionized aerodynamics in the way in which we operate today the 1940s In the Heat of the second world war the P-51 Mustang is flying 400 miles per hour and leading the Allies to Victory by decades end a young P-51 Ace flies faster than any human ever had Chuck Yeager in the X1 test plane cracks Mach 1 and flies 761 miles per hour or 1225 kilometers per hour faster than the speed of sound the most useful thing I ever did was was the X1 breaking the soundbarrow because up until that time we had we were hamstrung and and unless we could get above Mach 1 and find out how to fly through Mach 1 we would never go anywhere including space and after nine flights and 93 days we got the airplane above Mach 1. it's a boom heard round the world the age of the supersonic aircraft has begun in 1962 North American aviation's rocket-powered X-15 shatters all records when it flies Mach 6.7 almost seven times the speed of sound today's jet fighters routinely fly faster than the speed of sound the F-15 and F-16 can reach speeds of almost Mach 3. but they're about to be left in the dust thanks to a whole new approach to pushing the speed limit what moves any aircraft through the air is thrust all thrust is generated through some application of Newton's third law of motion for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction the Jets engine sucks in air pressurizes it and mixes it with fuel to make it ignite that combination blasts out the back and propels the aircraft forward turbojet engines have carried the speed load in a turbojet engine the high pressure in the combustor is generated by a compressor which compresses the air before the fuel is injected and then forces it out to create higher levels of thrust to add up to 50 more thrust fighter jets are souped up with afterburners to torch any remaining Oxygen by injecting fuel into the exhaust system but ultimately the speed of air-breathing jet engines reaches its limit now an Innovative new engine design May one day break all the speed records we've continued to also press out the envelope in terms of increasing speed by developing a thing called a Ramjet basically it's a device that uses the four body to compress the air and can operate from about Mach 2 up to Mach 5. one of the most legendary planes ever flown was the Lockheed SR-71 unofficially known as the Blackbird able to travel at speeds over a Mach III the SR-71 still holds the speed record for manned air breathing Vehicles able to fly from Los Angeles to New York in 64 minutes the aircraft flew so fast and so high that if the pilot detected a surface-to-air missile launch the standard evasive action was simply to accelerate no SR-71 was ever shot down the SR-71 also had another important distinction being one of the first air vehicles to use Ramjet technology the SR-71 is actually a combination cycle engine it's a high-speed turbine but it also then takes at the higher speeds and brings air around the turbine core and burns it as a Ram Jet we're going beyond that today we're developing a supersonic combustion Ramjet or scramjet that can operate from Mach 4 to Mach 7 on conventional jet fuels that could also be extended to higher speeds up to about Mach 14 if we were to switch to hydrogen as a fuel beauty of the Ramjet is its Simplicity its internal shape channels airflow and slows it for subsonic combustion the engine doesn't need a compressor so it's lighter the result the ability to reach even higher speeds but that's just the start air is pushed against the body panel and acts as a compression surface the air is then captured and compressed into the inlet of the engine where it mixes with fuel and is burned it then expands out and goes into a nozzle and shoots out the back of the engine creating thrust March 2004 NASA sets out to make aviation history with the first successful flight of an unmanned scramjet-powered aircraft the goal to achieve Mach 5 breaking through to the fabled speed range hypersonic high above the California coast the scramjet blows the doors off its designers every expectation it hit Mach 7 5 000 miles per hour or greater than 8 000 kilometers per hour just one year later a test flight scores an unprecedented Mach 10.
scramjet is a major breakthrough and not just in raw jet power the most feasible Hypersonic engines are relatively small consequently the most attractive application would be a Hypersonic cruise missile we've got subsonic cruise missiles today some countries are working on supersonic cruise missiles Hypersonic cruise missiles very fast very long range I think maybe an attractive application for this technology a decade down the road one day scramjets May revolutionize the way future spacecraft are lofted into orbit the space shuttle has to carry all of its oxidizers because it's purely rocket powered so it has this huge oxygen tank that you see the the actual shuttle strapped to and the two solid Motors then attach to it that oxygen tank is providing oxygen for the shuttle's main engines during Ascent while those boosters are still attached and a little bit beyond that imagine if we could use instead of carrying that big tank of oxygen if we could grab oxygen from the air and not have to have that large a tank that would then let us go from about four and a half million pounds sitting on the pad ready to go for a space shuttle down to less than 1.4 million pounds for a more conventional looking vehicle that would take off from a normal Runway accelerate up and then separate a second stage rocket and that would then go up in the not so distant future scramjets May transport tourists into space or carry airline passengers across the world in a single hour we're advancing that technology and we're learning how to make bigger better more efficient engines the same as Whittle and Von ohheim did with the turbans and the time will come when those engines are just as efficient and will allow operation in that regime Mach 5 to Mach 7 on a routine basis for bad guys scramjets will mean trouble someday enemy targets will be mere minutes away while speed will help future jet fighters take the Enemy by surprise sometimes that might not be enough to really arrive unannounced takes more the air force of the future has to be invisible 1974 the U.S military begins work on a top secret project code named Harvey after the invisible rabbit of movie Fame at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works facility Engineers try to do the impossible create an airplane that can't be seen a plane that will fly virtually undetectable to radar using a new technology that will become known as stealth filth is is the art of making something low observable people tend to think of it as a radar issue but it's really much more than that it's it's low noise it's low to the visual Spectrum it's low to the infrared Spectrum a lot of people think something just developed stealth happened it didn't just happen to the public it appeared that way but there was a long steady investment because before it becomes common practice it takes five ten or more years sometimes to get the fundamental science understood and brought into practice the SR-71 was the first operational aircraft designed around a stealthy shape and materials but it was still easily detected because of its exhaust stream more work was needed 15 very secretive years later in 1989 the Air Force's black jet is unveiled to the public it could pass for a set piece from a science fiction film but every aspect of the F-117 is designed to make it invisible to radar how first understand the way radar works electromagnetic waves are transmitted in pulses they bounce off objects and return the discrepancy between the time it takes for these Echoes to return tell Radar operators the altitude speed and bearing of an aircraft but scientists have discovered that by creating a skin made up of small angled panels they could make a plane virtually invisible the cockpit is also sharply angled and coated with reflective material bombs and other radar reflecting features are stored deep within and in a master stroke the engine's exhaust nozzles are located on top of the Wings and body making sightings from infrared guided anti-aircraft missiles below virtually impossible once the new technology has proven itself the Air Force one-ups it by commissioning two stealth bombers the notorious B1 and B2 at first the controversial projects would face cost overruns and criticism but eventually both planes would get to prove themselves in combat but the Batwing shaped B2 spirit is the most expensive plane ever built at a cost of two billion dollars each they have no high-speed afterburners no missiles to return fire nothing to protect them but sheer stealth and sometimes stealth is not enough imagine if the B2 was to fall prey to events that in 1999 downed an American F-117 an old russian-made missile Yugoslav Gunners shoot it down during fighting in Kosovo the attack calls U.S air superiority into question can a warplane be designed to do it all to dodge radar and launch an attack as well that plane would dominate the skies in the 21st century challenge that we face and working more now is how do you integrate sets of Technologies together so that you have a game-changing kind of capability at the system level we used to focus more on or if I had a faster propulsion I could enable this so if I had to understand myself I could enable that a lot of those Technologies get more mature it's how do you combine all those things together how do you look at getting the right information to the person what the right effect is you want on a weapon what is the kind of response and persistence that you want in that capability it's combining several different cross-disciplines multi-disciplinary Technologies together and sort of labs really pushing the state of the art in the next five to ten years it's going to be how do we combine things in ways we never thought of combining them before and linking those advancements to really make the steps right now a lot of our survival platforms like the B2 are subsonic I want to try to see if we can't go to doing supersonic kind of platforms which means flying faster than the speed of sound maybe two three times that so go more to some of the speeds that our Fighters have in our bombers combine that stealth and speed together other into the future in a way we haven't done yet one giant step in maintaining air power has already taken shape today designated as a future replacement for the F-15 the F-22 Raptor is the first military jet to harness both speed and stealth loaded with secret technology making it extremely difficult to track the Raptor is expected to be the first warplane capable of simultaneously conducting air-to-air and air-to-ground combat missiles with near impunity there's a little catchphrase called you won't see us coming but you'll know we've been there that means that we are in fact low observable but we're also lethal at the same time so so should the U.S ever have to employ this weapon
system in combat it will maintain that technological advantage and that superiority that we need to keep dominance in the skies in future it is a multi-mission fighter designed to fly surveillance and reconnaissance stories as well as missions of precision attack it has the ability to Super Cruise maintaining speeds Beyond Mach 1.5 for extended periods without the use of fuel guzzling afterburners thrust vectoring was added using nozzles in the back of the engine to direct thrust up or down this allows the F-22 to fly at a 60 degree angle an angle that would stall most aircraft its avionics control panels show the fighter pilot the whole picture on a series of displays an enemy aircraft is a red triangle an unidentified aircraft is a yellow Square a green square is a friendly aircraft wingmen are in blue the entire Battlefield is brought into Focus easily and effortlessly its weapon systems are hidden for maximum stealth capabilities along with its engines when and if this high-tech but highly expensive jet becomes fully deployed its advanced technology would ensure U.S and Allied air superiority for decades to come but the F-22 isn't the only stealth fighter promising to rule the skies foreign [Music] Ed as a Joint Strike Fighter the F-35 will be flown by the U.S Air Force Navy and Marine Corps along with the Royal Navy and Air Force of the United Kingdom all f-35s will feature the same stealth design yet each service has modified the plane to serve its own needs the distinguishing feature of the Marines version is its short takeoff and vertical Landing capability known as Stoker the Pratt and Whitney 119 engine turns a counter-rotating lift fan and produces a cool air lift Force allowing the jsf-35 to hover it can then transition into standard fighter mode and travel at supersonic speeds it can also do to reverse which will allow it to get to the battle quickly and land in places that don't have a Runway providing invaluable close air support unlike the Navy's Harrier and fa-18 and the Air Force's F-16 it is replacing the JSF like the F-22 has an advanced stealthy design the Navy's requirements are just as demanding its F-35 has larger wing and tail control surfaces to make low speed approaches onto aircraft carriers easier and that increased wingspan will also stock it with a monster payload along with the F-22 Raptor it will transform the Air Force into an almost all stealth fighter Force by 2025 speed stealth two down and one to go to make the grade in the 21st century warplanes must also be precise March 2003 America and its allies invade Iraq it is a broader more extensive operation than the first Gulf War but with half the number of forces never before in the history of Warfare have air power and precision Weaponry played such a decisive role Allied warplanes would use the same kind of smart weapons that premiered in 1991 but this time it's a whole new game new space and aerial surveillance technology make this the first remote controlled War officers as far away as the Pentagon just outside of Washington DC receive real-time data on enemy positions and give orders to commanders in the field day after day bombs and missiles obliterate key Iraqi military installations one after another some are Guided by lasers both on the ground and in the air sung by infrared systems others use television cameras on the Munitions that Pilots guide into their targets using joysticks still others use the global positioning system or GPS technology and can send the weapons to a highly specific location in the past bombing missions might have been scrubbed because of smoke dust or bad weather now using GPS the assault is Unstoppable the Air Force has also upgraded older non-precision bombs by hot wiring inexpensive GPS navigation systems to their tail fins some of these new smart bombs could now be dropped from a plane and then guided to their destinations in the war's opening week Precision bombs take out Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries and tanks time and again in the first Gulf War of 1991 just 8 percent of the air Munitions were Precision guided the second time around 12 years later 70 but the campaign is far from perfect Friendly Fire and accidental bombings take a toll those mistakes bear lessons coupled with an uncanny overall bombing accuracy they've since spurred development of smaller even more precise munitions most folks know we are able today to have some very precise GPS guided weapons the smallest size of that weapon right now is about 500 pounds that still creates a fairly large fragmentation and bond pattern we're working on one called small diameter bomb which will be a 250 pounder so by increasing Precision you're able to decrease the amount of kinetic energy you want from the explosive to have the same effect what that allows you to do is carry twice as many weapons so carry attack twice as many targets and reduce the amount of collateral damage so he can be even more precise the technology Trend may be towards smaller more accurate weapons but can smart bombs be made even smarter most people are familiar with laser guide and GPS kind of Munitions and the laser guided when you're basically following a beam down to a Target that some second person has to lays and hold there the future of that Technologies want to take lasers and now use them to be able to kind of take that laser beam and scan over time and literally come back with an image of what you're seeing so basically create a laser image that you can look at and actually process in the weapon so you could tell that weapon here's a picture of a tank I'm going to release you go over to Battlefield when you find that engage it so you have this kind of formable or adaptable weapon that will go out and will search for its Target identify its Target and confirm it back if it needs to to demand and say okay this is it how do I take it out these intelligent weapons will someday be able to adjust their strength to better suit the Target and be able also to shape the weapon that's inside of there because the way you might want to hit a tank or hit a Jeep are different a weapon smart enough to practice restraint is a weapon fine-tuned for ambush think also of a class of weapons that they call Dominator which should be able to go out and put several of these out they would fly like race track patterns over an area and they would never attack anything unless they needed to so they kind of are to deterrent you could put them in a pass on a Mountainside and say okay I don't want the enemy to come through that particular pass I don't want to have a man platform sitting there surveilling that all the time I'll launched a small group of weapons they'll stay out for some period of time if they find someone they are capable of engaging it if not they're cheap enough to just fall down there's no technology that's gained from their loss and you've accomplished your mission which was to hold that particular position a new class of weapons is being designed to stop the enemy in its tracks the sensor fused weapon is designed to strike enemy armor and support vehicles once released it hovers over the battlefield at a precise time it opens and dispenses 10 submunitions that are attached to parachutes submunition has four armor-piercing projectiles with infrared sensors to detect armored targets like tanks and trucks at a preset altitude a rocket motor fires it spins the submunition and they start to head downward the submunitions fire projectiles which search for heat sources like the exhaust from a tank 40 projectiles strike at once destroying an entire armored Battalion with one shot it's called the agm-130 and it utilizes Advanced Technologies to strike at hardened targets using an inertial navigation system coupled with GPS the agm-130 is extremely accurate once it is two or three miles from the target the pilot can lock on to strike at a specific point like a window and then it's steered in using a television camera on its nose perhaps the smartest weapon in the Air Force Arsenal is the j-a-s-sm it is a long-range missile that can be fired over 200 miles away from a Target a mission plan is programmed into jassm similar to cruise missiles once fired the device's navigation system takes over it's known as fire and forget Once In Flight the jasm is stealthy and has anti-jamming technology it can hit a specific spot on a Target like a cave or a ventilation shaft with Precision accuracy smart weapons are just part of the new technology story imagine an aircraft minus its pilot all the Earth is under watch but satellites don't tell the whole story the military needs a better view of its enemies flying over hostile terrain has its risks America learned that lesson first from the Cold War starting that dark day in 1961 when a U2 the first high altitude spy plane was shot down and its pilot captured by the Russians ever since the U.S Air Force has made a
priority of changing the way it does reconnaissance they're not much to look at peculiar aircraft that are slow and defenseless but the Pentagon is betting that uavs will become the linchpin of the Allied Arsenal unmanned aerial vehicles have already proven their medal in Iraq in Afghanistan in classified hot spots across the globe high-flying uavs are providing spy agencies and War departments with instant snapshots of their foes uavs ID targets for aviators and ground forces and can beam live pictures of battle to Allied command thousands of miles away for review like a lot of good ideas uavs aren't new there are folks that will claim that a UAV actually flew in 1901 for the Wright brothers the first powered flight was unmanned it's not new what has really evolved and enabled things to change dramatically was the revolution in information technology so the kind of sensors and the kind of intelligence that we can put on board these machines has really enabled the current Revolution that we see today that you know comes from predators now global Hawks and then looking into ju casts and other things into the future uavs have evolved from low-tech drones to high-tech tools of War it's called Hunter and it's been Airborne since 1999. its payload is strictly reconnaissance with television cameras and infrared radar it provides surveillance day and night for NATO and un missions the U.S Air Force has its own pocket-sized version a mini UAV for soldiers in the field launched with a bungee cord Desert Hawk flies at 40 to 80 miles per hour its cameras bring enemy positions and Troop strength into sharp focus and it can transmit real-time pictures straight to a laptop computer then there's the mega-sized global hawk with a wingspan of 116 feet or 35 meters and a dazzling array of high-res Imaging devices this high-flying UAV is designed to sweep wide Geographic areas with pinpoint accuracy but uavs aren't just Scouts November 2002 a vehicle speeds across the yemeni desert among its passengers a notorious Al-Qaeda leader operatives want him taken out quietly but how a Hellfire missile destroys the car courtesy of a remotely piloted predator drone a direct hit the era of the unmanned combat aerial vehicle or ucaf able to strike quickly and precisely anywhere in the world had begun the Next Generation unmanned fighter jets that can maneuver at g-forces that would overwhelm human Pilots battle plans and bombs will be pre-loaded and the new robot planes will carry out their missions what will they look like meet the Prototype the x-45 is an otherworldly aircraft with a jagged 49-foot batwing this stealth drone can cruise at nearly Mach 1. unlike traditional ucavs whose flight video and weapons are operated at a distant base with a joystick the x-45 is programmed to actually fly itself the future is to look out toward a different Vision where you have teams of uavs that cooperate and work with each other share information share intelligence share decisions on what Target to attack what a human supervisor but not someone who's directly touching the loop you can think of it the same way as we send out today a man to poorship we do an awful lot of training there's a lead in that fourship and they've got a set of rules of engagement and know what the mission is going to be once they cross the line of battle the mission usually changes the user training to react and adjust and complete the mission within the best sort of conditions that they can we want to put that same capability into a four ship of uavs one of the things that we're actively investigating in this room is set up to do that is how do you blend manned and unmanned systems in combat so we have behind us is we have some medium Fidelity simulations of a cockpit over on the other side we have a simulation of what is the mission control station and what this allows us to do is to figure out different parts of the mission how we communicate back and forth how we develop tactics so we really best utilize the capabilities and also to figure out what really who does what really best what you're trying to do is enhance the power of that battle manager you don't think of a UAV operator as being strictly a pilot although they need air skills what they want to be is a battle manager because they could be controlling four eight or more systems at once all linked by machine to act on their will of what they want to be able to prosecute that battle for so these environments are designed where we can bring in real Pilots real UAV operators put our best technology in front of them and kind of sim learn Sim learn Sim learn and then take it out on the ranges and fly it so we can kind of peel back that onion and understand what's the real art of the possible what makes sense and what doesn't a normal force package that goes out will have f-35s in the future with f-22s it'll have jucazes and they'll each be doing a part of that in a coordinated ballet and dance the way we do today and it shouldn't matter that somebody is in there whether that's a manned or unmanned system off their wing now the unmanned systems will have certain capabilities that they'll do better potentially just like an F-22 with certain capabilities and make it better than F-15 or an x16 or something like that but you'll be able to blend those and you'll be able to change so you won't just come in with a Road Mission planner you'll be able to plan as you engage the enemy and say okay here's how we're going to regroup uavs you're now going to go do this 22 you're now going to go do this and be able to manage that back and be able to figure out what's the best way to blend those systems together that's the future battle space it's stealthy precise fast and unmanned UAV aircraft of the future have it all but there's room for one more Improvement a new class of weapons that never needs to be replenished traditional weapons can be used once when you're out of bombs it's back to base you go to reload but what if your aircraft could have weapons Unlimited what if you could steal a page from James Bond with lasers the advantage that you have in a laser environment is that extremely precise so can I go and engage that particular Target with a laser for example be very precise be able to hit a particular part on a vehicle say and disable it without blowing it up also if you've developed an electric laser then you don't run out of munition in effect you run out of munition when you run out of gas so you basically use your turbine engine to be able to create electricity which Powers the laser so you in theory can have a more almost an infinite magazine the other inherent aspect that a laser could give you is kind of dial a yield so you can adjust the power of that laser from everything to having a non-lethal effect having a lethal effect so what it buys you is flexibility and persistence and those are things we're always trying to get in the battlefield give the commander more options on how they deal with that particular thread or Target another 20 years from now we could be looking at that kind of capability to have a offensive and defensive lasers on fighter-class aircraft and those lasers won't be chemical will be more electrical or liquid kind of lasers lasers on fighter jets are still years away but a high energy chemical iodine laser has been mounted on a modified Boeing 747 and is ready for use today the Airborne laser will locate and track missiles in the Boost phase of their flight from there it's just point and shoot a new technology is being used to help create the materials that will protect pilots and build better sensor Suites but you can't see this technology with the naked eye it's the science of nanotechnology the ability to work with particles at the molecular level and create new materials one atom at a time I think a lot of people hear the term nanotechnology and think of it as a technology that will deliver a device or a a unit that you can look at and point to and say that's Nano uh hearkening to even maybe uh crichton's Michael crichton's book about the gray goo and the Nano machine self-replicating Nano machines that is not nanotechnology that is what I would consider more science fiction or at the very least 50 hundred years out what what Nano more is is the ability to do things better our ability now to manipulate control matter place things where we want allow us to create new devices create new materials with properties and Suites of properties that we've never been able to before nanotechnology allows scientists at the Air Force research lab to design new materials from the ground up atom by atom layer by layer in this case represented by a geometric prism one example we're designing for an infrared sensor is a super loud material where we actually take different layers of atoms and build a structure from scratch something you couldn't actually find in nature in this case we're doing a structure that starts off with indium arsenide so we have indium atoms and arsenic atoms and we grow several Atomic layers of that structure then we switch to using gallium atoms and antimony atoms and we'll grow just a few Atomic layers of that and then we'll switch back to doing indium and arsenic again and when we build this up this gives us a new crystal lattice that you wouldn't find like say in a normal compound by how thick we grow each layer and which compositions we use in each layer is we can design in specific properties to that material and then in this case we're usually designing in specific kinds of wavelength ranges for different applications because there's a lot of different wavelengths that you use in the military sensing nanotechnology will one day allow scientists to make astounding improvements to aircraft for instance to modify lightweight materials like plastic or ceramic and give them conducting properties lighter weight wires means lighter weight aircraft nanotechnology will give optic materials like glass exceptional properties for example creating a multi-purpose lens to operate at many different wavelengths and one day also using nanotechnology scientists May create self-healing materials which may even allow an aircraft to repair its own skin [Music] the new technology of war and its promise of sweeping transformation faces one formidable challenge however the human factor how do you get Technologies and weapon systems to work together it calls for a whole new approach to maintaining order and command one that another branch of the military already coined network-centric Warfare is a term that originated with the U.S Navy back in the
mid-1990s it represented for the Navy a fundamentally different way of thinking about Warfare at Sea historically it was enormously difficult for ships at Sea to communicate with uh headquarters back on the shore difficult for them even to communicate with each other uh you could talk on the radio but that would give your position away so you tried not to talk on the radio and as a result the captain was Master of his ship but basically each ship was normally pretty much going to be on their own and then with the development of high-speed Communications in the early 90s the Navy began to realize that they could use satellite Communications to get large amounts of data to their ships and that they could use wideband Communications to get an enormous amount of data from headquarters to ships and from ship to ship and from airplane to ship and from satellite reconnaissance satellite to ship and suddenly they realized that rather than having a bunch of ships driving around out there that they had a fleet and that the fleet was a network of ships all operating as a single system of systems network-centric Warfare has since caught fire with the rest of the military for the Air Force its technological centerpiece is poised more than 22 000 miles up in space milstar is a constellation of satellites that connects air sea and land operations with secure jam-proof Communications satellite serves as a smart switchboard in Space by relaying traffic from terminal to terminal anywhere on Earth but like all its emerging Technologies the Air Force wants to revolutionize the design of satellites to come one of the key themes is moving toward what we call operationally responsive space and today's environment it takes months to be able to get a satellite put it up in orbit and get it to work even once we get up there takes a fair amount of time we don't always know where we want to put that satellite we don't know where that particular threat's going to be what we want to move toward is kind of following the information revolution and the IT Revolution allows to shrink and make things smaller now instead of these large satellites make the satellites smaller put it onto a smaller rocket launch it quicker have some of the same capability so be more responsive move toward operating in Space the way we kind of operate in air foreign as the Earth's orbit becomes a new Sphere for military operations space itself will become a Battleground imagine energy weapons anti-satellite missiles and scramjets doing mach 10 across the upper atmosphere space-based weapons like these May someday become as common as the aerial arsenal of today the Allied air forces are striving to reinvent themselves they're staking their claim to superiority on new technology on transforming their vast air fleets into ever quicker ever stealthier more precise and Powerful tools of War with every Innovation the battle lines are redrawn and the stakes are raised higher and higher with all the unknowns the future holds there is one sure thing Victory belongs to whoever rules the skies [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]
2023-07-10 15:07
