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C o n t e n t s

F e a t u r e s

11 Letter from the Editor

It’s a Dog’s World

Special Operations K-9s gear up like their human counterparts

By Elaine S. Povich

SFC Leroy Petry

A moment of courage, a lifetime of valor

By Tony Mecia

9/11, Ten Years Later

Eyewitness accounts of the attack on the Pentagon and how it changed their lives

By John Pulley

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Carbine Competition

A look at some of the options industry proposes to replace the Army’s M4 carbine

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38

Joint Light Tactical Vehicle

Three competing teams overhaul their designs

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Regional Command East picks its battles in Afghanistan

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Air Force: Space FenceBy Rich Tuttle

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E d i t o r ’ s N o t e


It became a bit of a writing crutch, I suppose, the use of a quotation at the beginning and sometimes the end of Tom Breen’s masterful stories about

America’s military heroes. As beautiful as his own words were, Tom nearly always chose to start his stories with someone else’s.

And so I do the same, a cloud in my heart at the passing this summer of my long-time friend and colleague Tom Breen.

Tom and his work were tightly woven into the DNA of DEFENSE STANDARD from the very first issue. But the second issue was when everything fell into place. We asked Tom to tell us the story of Lt. Michael Murphy, a SEAL who became the Navy’s first Medal of Honor recipient since Vietnam.

Tom swept us away to the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan, the place where Murphy drew his last breath, sacrificing himself to radio for help for his ambushed SEAL team. Nineteen SEALs and Army Night Stalkers died in the ambush and in the subsequent rescue attempt.

With each ensuing issue we asked him to take on another story of heroism and sacrifice. He did so with a zeal that sometimes took an emotional toll on him. He developed strong relationships with the families of the heroes whose tales he told, and he didn’t want to disappoint them.

He didn’t. Tom’s stories were not so much news features as they were essays -- tributes, really, to the lives of ordinary men who did extraordinary things.

Now I find myself in the same position, struggling for the right words. For Tom, too, did extraordinary things.

His impressive professional resume is too long to recount here, starting with decades of newspapering around the country and in the Philippines, where he was on the plane with deposed president Ferdinand Marcos as the dictator fled into exile.

I met Tom later in his career, when he became my editor at Air Force Times. He was passionate, driven and equally hard to please – I never met my goal of getting a story published without him rewriting the lead – yet was incredibly generous, and genuine, with his praise. We grew as journalists under his leadership.

By the time I recruited him to write for DEFENSE STANDARD, Tom had reinvented himself as a Ph.D. student in liberal studies at Georgetown University and an adjunct professor of humanities at a community college. His studies focused on the intersection of religion and politics. Leave it to Tom, who savored a good argument, to latch onto the two most controversial topics around.

He was a complex man, but at his core Tom believed in the simple truth that on any given day, any one of us can be a hero.

Tom was our hero, and we miss him.

Julie Bird EDITOR

Gone - flitted away, Taken the stars from the night and the sun

From the day! Gone, and a cloud in my heart.

-Alfred Tennyson


By Tony Mecia

LEROY PETRY:Sgt. 1st Class

A moment of courage, a lifetime of valor

Those decisive few seconds, behind a chicken coop in the Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan, are the ones people will always ask about. That one

moment, the one quick decision, will be talked about for years. And make no mistake: What happened that day should be remembered – for one Army Ranger’s bravery, for the way that day changed the lives of the men who were there and for the family of a Ranger who did not come home.

Focusing on just one moment – whether it’s in a Vietnam-ese jungle, a Middle Eastern desert or a mountainous region on Pakistan’s border – risks drawing incomplete conclusions about a warfighter’s character. Yes, actions in battle are cou-rageous. But long after the smoke of battle clears, after the welcome-home parades end and the TV cameras are packed, that’s when other challenges begin. Coping with battlefield memories, dealing with loss, facing the future – those can be trying circumstances.

Rising to those challenges is heroic, too.So it is with Army Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry. In July,

President Obama shook Petry’s prosthetic hand at a White House ceremony and attached the blue ribbon around his neck bearing the Medal of Honor, America’s highest mili-tary decoration. The president thanked Petry for his sacrifice, which saved the lives of at least two fellow Rangers. And he thanked the other men in Petry’s company for their service.

The ceremony that day was the rarest of events. Petry was only the fifth service member to receive the Medal of Honor for service in Afghanistan, and only the 11th since the U.S. withdrew forces from Vietnam in 1973. More notably, Petry is only the second living service member to receive the Medal of Honor since Vietnam, as most are awarded posthu-mously. (The first, Army Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, received his in 2010; a third living recipient, Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer, was to receive his in September – the first presentation of a Medal of Honor to a living Marine in 41 years.)

Petry joins an elite club. Fewer than 100 Medal of Honor recipients are still alive. For living recipients, the medal is more than a reminder of one day’s valor on a distant battle

The objective: Secure a high-value al Qaeda target in the compound.

1

2

WHAT HAPPENED...

3

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field. It marks them for life as role models, and they can use that perch to inspire others. That’s the role Petry is embracing.

Although he would later win honors for his distinguished service, Petry’s life growing up in Santa Fe, N.M., was indistinguishable

from that of many children. Family and friends remember him as a happy, helpful kid. “You ask him for a favor, he was always willing to do what-ever you wanted,” recalls Joe Griego, who raised one of Petry’s childhood friends.

The third of five sons, Petry was known to roughhouse with his broth-ers and cousins. He was active, playing youth football and basketball. At Santa Fe High School, he cut classes and got in fights. He was earning D’s and F’s and was at serious risk of flunking out. But then he transferred to the private St. Catherine Indian School. Under supervision of the nuns, his fortunes turned around. He pulled his grades up to a 3.0, played basketball and joined the community service club. Upon graduating in 1998, the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce presented him with its Bootstrap Award, given to students who overcame challenges and finished school.

“Now, I can be noticed for something good instead of people going, ‘There goes that kid that dropped out,’ ” Petry told the Albuquerque Journal at the time. “I tried a little harder, and now me and my parents are proud.”

A year after graduating, he and a cousin enlisted in the Army, something Petry says he had thought about from childhood. They both passed the rig-orous training required to become Rangers, and both were assigned to the 75th Ranger Regiment. The cousin later became a Blackhawk helicopter pilot, while Petry became a grenadier and weapons expert.

After six tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Petry and his platoon sergeant in 2007 were put in charge of forming a combat-ready platoon in just six weeks. The task was a lot of work, and the soldiers spent long hours train-ing.

Petry was to lead a nine-man weapons squad. Even in a battalion charac-terized as friendly and informal, Petry made an impression on his colleagues as a hard worker who always made time to teach the younger soldiers. They recall him as fun-loving, even borderline “goofy.”

“When I used to train with him, it could be freezing cold outside and raining, and he’d be smiling the whole time,” says Pfc. Luke Robinson, who since has left the Army. “He always had a good attitude, always had a smile on his face.”

In early 2008, the unit was certified as the 2nd Platoon of Company D, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. In April 2008, Petry and his colleagues shipped out to Afghanistan’s Paktia province, a mountainous area bordering Pakistan, and known to be filled with Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.

Before each deployment, Petry would call his family in New Mexico, his dad recalls. “We always told him, ‘Be careful, be safe,’ and he told me, ‘I’m going with the best. We always watch each other’s back,’” Larry Petry told Army Times.

By May 2008, Petry’s platoon was running raids nearly every day to root out insurgents. Though coming face-to-face with armed enemy fight-ers almost daily, the platoon had confidence in its abilities. Rangers don’t scare easily. “Part of the training you go through is that you’re the f-----g man and no one is going to touch you,” Robinson says. “There’s a mission. We’re going to take care of business. I don’t ever remember being scared. We were always pumped. That’s why Rangers are some of the best, because they’re so confident.”

ILLU

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.S. A

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Petry’s team clears an inner compound, then returns to clear the outer compound.

Petry and Pfc. Lucas Robinson are wounded by enemy fire.

Sgt. Daniel Higgins is assessing their wounds when a grenade lands.

A wounded Petry grabs and throws the grenade, but the explosion amputates his right hand.

14 DEFENSE STANDARD Fa l l 2011


BORN: July 29, 1979

ASSIGNMENT: Currently assigned to Headquarters and

Headquarters Company, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Benning, Ga.

HOMETOWN: Santa Fe, N.M.

FAMILY: Wife, Ashley; four children

HOBBIES: Golf, pheasant hunting, fishing

DECORATIONS: Two Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, three Army Commendation

Medals, two Army Achievement Medals, Valorous Unit Award, three Army

Good Conduct Medals, National Defense Service Medal, Afghanistan

Campaign Medal with Combat Star, Iraq Campaign Medal with Combat

Star, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism

Service Medal, Non-commissioned Officer Professional Development Ribbon

with numeral 3, Overseas Service Ribbon and the Army Service Ribbon

Sgt. First Class Leroy Arthur Petry

Sou

rce

: U.S

. Arm

y

“A lot of veterans don’t like to talk about their military service. But military service for me has been the greatest, so I’m going to talk about it for the rest of my life.“

— Sgt. First Class Leroy Petry

On May 26, the platoon prepared for a rare daytime raid. Most missions were at night, to take advantage of night-

vision goggles. But intelligence had identified a high-value target, and they couldn’t risk waiting till nightfall.

To some soldiers that day, attacking in broad daylight felt eerie. Arriving by helicopter, the platoon was working to capture an in-surgent believed to be one of the top al Qaeda leaders in the area. At 1:34 p.m., the platoon began to clear the target structure, which had two courtyards. As a squad leader, then-Staff Sgt. Petry ordi-narily would have stayed outside the courtyard supervising a heavy machine-gun team. But he saw a need and jumped right in.

After clearing one of the courtyards, Petry and Robinson began working to secure the second courtyard. As they entered it, a gun-man 30 feet away opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle. One round pierced both of Petry’s thighs. A second round hit Robinson in the side plate of his armored vest. The two took cover behind a chicken coop, the only structure between them and the insurgents. Petry radioed that he and Robinson were wounded and under fire.

Sgt. Daniel Higgins, Staff Sgt. James Roberts and Spc. Chris-topher Gathercole headed to the second courtyard to help. Petry lobbed a grenade at the insurgents, buying time for Higgins to join them behind the chicken coop, while Roberts and Gathercole bat-tled other fighters in a different part of the courtyard.

As Higgins evaluated Petry’s and Robinson’s wounds, an en-emy grenade landed about 30 feet from them. It exploded, spraying Higgins and Robinson with shrapnel.

Moments later, a second grenade landed. It was much closer. Just a few feet away. Right in the middle of them. It was behind Higgins and Robinson but right in front of Petry.

What happened next happened quickly, certainly in no more than a few seconds. But to the three men who were there, the mo-ment seemed longer. And in the months that followed, they slowed it down further in their heads, replaying the scene time and time again.

Says Higgins: “It’s one of those things you’ll always go over in your mind: What could I have done better? What could I have done

Petry with his son (below) during the 2004 2/75th Ranger Family Day event and again with his wife, Ashley, and their son (right).

PHO

TOS:

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to make it so things didn’t happen the way they did?”Says Robinson: “It was like in war movies. Time slowed down

for a second.”The typical kill radius of a grenade is about 15 feet. This gre-

nade, an old, pineapple-looking one, was less than 10 feet away. Petry spotted the grenade first. He didn’t hesitate.

“The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Get it out of here. Get it away from my guys and me,’ ” Petry recalled later in a television interview.

So he grabbed the grenade and started to throw it. Then it ex-ploded. The blast blew off his right hand.

“I grabbed my arm. It looked like a circular saw had taken it off,” Petry said. “It was flat at the top and was completely gone.” Surprisingly, Petry says he didn’t feel any pain at the time. He chalked it up to the rush of adrenaline. Then his training kicked in. He applied a tourniquet to his wrist – which doctors later said saved his life – and again radioed an update.

In a brief firefight, the Rangers in the courtyard killed the en-emy. Medics arrived to start treating the wounded.

Gathercole, who exchanged fire with the enemy in a different part of the courtyard, didn’t survive.

Looking back on that day, the Rangers always recall Gather-cole, an easy-going, fun-loving Californian who had been

making the best of a rough childhood. Yet they also acknowledge that without Petry, there would have been more deaths that day. “He saved my life. I’m thankful for him,” Robinson says. “I prob-ably would be dead or missing my brain if he hadn’t been there.”

Now, three years later, Petry is adjusting to his new role. And he’s thriving in it.

Like that day in eastern Afghanistan, he’s continuing to help. He’s continuing to sacrifice for a cause larger than himself. With his injuries, he could have qualified for a medical discharge from the Army. He says he received “phenomenal” job offers in the pri-vate sector. But he turned them down, and in 2010, he re-enlisted. He’s even served another tour in Afghanistan, over his wife’s ob-

jections.“At the end of the day, I said, ‘What’s going to make me hap-

py?’” he recalled at a recent news conference. “I’m going to do now what I can to continue my service, which I hold very dear.”

Petry now serves as a liaison officer with the U.S. Special Op-erations Command Care Coalition, where he helps wounded sol-diers and their families understand available benefits and services. Throughout it all, he’s kept his trademark sense of humor. His grandmother told a Santa Fe newspaper: “He loves putting out his prosthetic hand when he first meets people. The hand turns all the way around. He likes to see the look on people’s faces.”

Stops on his post-ceremony public-relations blitz included “The Today Show,” “The Daily Show,” “Fox & Friends,” a New York Mets game and Broadway.

Buddies from his old platoon say he’s the same man he was. But he’s taking on bigger challenges and applying the same self-lessness he did in battle.

“With the responsibilities he’s taken on, he’s definitely real-izing the importance of who he is now,” says Collin Snyder, who served alongside Petry as a private. “That’s definitely made him come to realize that while he was already doing great things, the bar has been raised. He’s definitely willing to rise to that occasion. It’s just as important, if not more.”

In a news conference after being presented with the medal, Petry said he was impressed by a quote he read in a book about Medal of Honor recipients: that the Medal of Honor is a lot easier to earn than it is to wear.

“I hope I represent it well and do the most positive things I can with it,” Petry said.

For now, that means working with injured soldiers, encourag-ing medical students to join the military and using his new plat-form to advocate for members of the military, their families and others.

For Petry, that means that despite his heroism and his sacrifice, his mission is not complete. And his biggest contributions to our nation might be yet to come.

President Barack Obama awards the Medal of Honor to Sgt. 1st Class Leroy A. Petry at the White House on July 12, 2011.

Petry signs an autograph for a veteran at American Legion Post 01 in his hometown of Santa Fe, N.M., a

few days after receiving his Medal of Honor.

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By Elaine S. Povich

When Navy SEAL Team 6 raided Osama bin Lad-en’s compound in Pakistan, one important mem-ber of the team had keen ears and eyes, a small

body, and … a tail. The Special Operations dog, possibly named Cairo or Turk, likely went into the compound wearing at least as much specialized gear as the human combat members in the unit.

President Barack Obama singled out the dog for praise, but when he went to congratulate the canine, according to news reports, the presidential Secret Service detail insisted that the dog wear a muzzle. President or not, he’s still a stranger to the specially trained dogs that have become increasingly important to Special Operations teams, as well as regular military units, airport security teams and local police departments.

In short, Cairo is not anything like Bo, the First Dog.

From his protective vest to his goggles, camera, harness and equipment, the SEAL Team 6 dog was likely “kitted

out” in gear made to protect what was an invaluable member of

the team.Jim Amann, owner of Trident K9 in San

Clemente, Calif., which supplies military and police dog gear, says the Secret Service was right to be cautious about letting the SEAL dog too close to the president. “There’s too much chance of a dog biting him,” said Amann, who was a SEAL for 20 years and also has a military police background. “You are talking about dogs who have bit-ten numerous people in the line of duty.”

While much of what is known about the dog working the bin Laden raid is speculative (Special Operations forces are neces-sarily tight-lipped), the dog could have tracked down members of bin Laden’s entourage in hiding, chased and held them while human team members caught up, sniffed out booby traps or bombs, or ferreted out drug caches.

“When the team goes into a house or a cubby hole, if some-one is hiding, they are trained on alert to let you know if some-one is there,” says Jason Ferren, operator of EliteK9 dog gear company in Boaz, Ky.

it’s a

Special Operations K-9s gear up like their human counterparts for sensitive missions like the Osama bin Laden raid

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“They could be behind a door, a false wall or a false door,” he says. In the bin Laden operation, he says, “They were on a short time frame; they didn’t have time to dissect that house if it had hidden walls or hidden doors. Look at Saddam Hussein – he was in a hole.”

Ferren, who has a military and police background, sells “everything for the working K9.” Among his many products, he lists Special Operations goggles and “mutt muffs” to pro-tect dogs’ ears from noise like explosions or heavy shelling. It keeps the dogs a little calmer, he says.

By far the most important piece of equipment the dogs wear is their vest. Some of the vests are made to ward

off blows from knives, other hand weapons or shrapnel. Oth-ers are bullet-proof. The vests also help insert the dogs into a combat zone – using the “fast rope” technique that may have been used to get troops from helicopters to the ground on the bin Laden raid – or as part of a human/dog parachute tandem jumping team.

K9 Storm Inc. in Winnipeg, Canada, makes custom vests sold to military units in 15 countries. While no one will say who made the vest the bin Laden-raid dog was wearing, K9 Storm vests are often tailored to specific missions, according to K9 Storm owners Jim and Glori Slater, a husband-and-wife team.

“We started the company solely to provide protection for dogs,” says Jim Slater, who has a German shepherd named Olaf. Slater worked as a municipal police officer during the 1990s and was part of an operation that quelled the Headingly

Jail riot in Manitoba in 1996. Eight guards were injured by inmates wielding homemade weapons fashioned from kitchen utensils and fire extinguishers.

“We went to take control of the jail and about 140 people were still running loose, and inside that environment there were a lot of weapons,” Slater says. “The dog was first into the building and he could have been stabbed or slashed. (He) had no armor whatsoever, whereas the team was well-armored. It made sense to me that we should minimize the vulnerable areas on his body and at the same time develop a harness so he could be raised and lowered.”

K9 Storm makes customized vests ranging in cost from a couple of thousand dollars to tens of thousands.

Combat dogs get specialized training before they are assigned to units. Many don’t make it. They have to

respond to commands, and, unlike most police dogs, have to be able to work with a variety of handlers because of the unpre-dictable nature of war. They grow close to their units, but they aren’t pets. It’s not like they retrieve Frisbees in their spare time or frolic on the floor with handlers. It’s strictly a working relationship.

(LEFT): Special Operations dogs can be carried by backpack in customiz-able K9 Storm tactical body armor.

(BELOW): The K9 Storm intruder vest has an integrated waterproof camera for amphibious assaults.

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Several breeds of dogs are used as combat dogs, but mostly Belgian Malinois, Ger-man shepherds and Dutch shepherds. Dutch shepherds and Malinois are a little more agile than the German shepherds, the experts say.

“It’s a matter of who can kick your butt better, Jackie Chan or Arnold Schwarzeneg-ger,” says Ferren. “The Belgian Malinois and the Dutch shepherd are more like Jackie Chan.”

Tim Crockett, a former Special Forces member in the British Special Boat Service (the British equivalent of the SEALs), says the dogs can essentially wear the same kind of protective ballistic type vest as their human counterparts. “And it is kitted out with other types of sensors as well,” says Crocket, an official with Pioneer Consulting Group in Marietta, Ga. “Like cameras, so information can be passed back from the dog to the handlers.”

Dog-mounted cameras can tell handlers what is around corners or behind build-ings several hundred feet away. Those cameras can be mounted forward- or rear-

facing, depending on what the dog is looking for. The dog on the bin Laden mission probably carried a camera, though reports that video was streamed in real-time back to the White House are said to be erroneous.

A bomb-sniffing dog can approach a vehicle in a way that a soldier could not, even if the soldier is outfitted in protective gear. The dogs are very good at detecting explosive devices, which then allows a human team member to go in and defuse the device.

Sometimes, however, there are unforeseen consequences. One of Ferren’s clients told him about a dog working in Iraq that, while searching a car, looked back at his handler when he smelled explosives. Seeing that reaction, an insurgent blew up the car, killing the dog.

Ferren says as hard as that is, most of the time the dogs are successful. “It’s not like they are sending dogs on a suicide mission,” he says. “If they search 20 cars, maybe one is positive. Would you rather the handler and the dog go, or just the dog?”J

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(RIGHT): The K9 Storm Intruder Vest is equipped with automatic infra-red lighting systems to allow the handler to see what the dog is

seeing even in darkened hallways or cave searches.

(LEFT): A special vest allows dogs to rappel or fast-rope out of a helicopter with their handlers.

If you were to choose ground to fight the final of-fensive of America’s decade-long war on terror, it’s doubtful you would pick a series of remote

valleys at the feet of the Hindu Kush mountains. Yet that imposing landscape is where the U.S.-led coalition in Af-

ghanistan has strewn roughly 150 combat outposts, many of them little more than rough collections of blast walls, container-

ized housing and weaponry set amid the dung-colored mountains that demark the Durand Line and the border with Pakistan. The remote valleys that spill from those mountains into Afghanistan serve as a natural infiltration route toward Kabul for insurgents and terrorists who enjoy sanctuary on the other side of the border.

For the past year, the troops in Regional Command East have fought what is essentially a blocking action near the border, trying to protect the approach-es to the capital even as they expand Kabul’s “security bubble” east. By every available metric, it has been a tough and bloody fight. U.S. and allied forces have lost more than 200 killed in action in RC East over the past year, even while capturing or killing an estimated 5,000-plus insurgents.

Along with the insurgents, the 15 local tribes and sub-tribes that inhabit the region are ideologically conservative and historically resistant to perceived invaders going back to the armies of Alexander the Great and the British and Soviet empires. In the past year and a half, attacks on U.S. forces in RC East increased by 200 percent. The assault on some U.S. combat outposts was so relentless that RC East commanders abandoned their foothold in the Koren-gal and Tangi Valleys altogether. Taliban propagandists predictably exploited the withdrawals as a retreat.

All of which explains why Regional Command East puts the “cautious” in the cautious optimism U.S. officials have lately expressed about progress in the war in Afghanistan.

“Our current focus, shoulder-to-shoulder with our Afghan security force partners, is to expand the Kabul security zone and interdict insurgent infiltra-tion along the 450-kilometer Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” Maj. Gen. Daniel Allyn, commanding general for RC East, said in a recent briefing with report-ers.

In more stable areas of the region, he notes, the main effort resembled a traditional counter-insurgency operation to establish security and build gover-nance for the approximately 7.5 million Afghans in RC East. Along much of the border, however, operations have consisted of fending off routine attacks on allied outposts and launching anywhere from eight to 10 targeted opera-tions each night against known insurgent leaders and cells.

By James Kitfield

After pulling back in the last

year, Regional Command

East readies what will likely

prove the final assault of the

frustrating, decade-long war

The view from a .50-caliber M-2 machine gun position at Firebase Phoenix overlooking the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. U.S. soldiers and paratroopers occupy several small firebases along the valley in one of the most hard-fought areas in eastern Afghanistan’s Regional Command East.

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“It’s been a very tough fight, with courageous actions by our troops and task forces,” says Allyn.

Just how tough the fight in RC East has proven became clear in August, when an insurgent in the Tangi Valley successfully

downed a U.S. Chinook helicopter ferrying Special Forces troops on a raid, killing 22 Navy SEALs and eight other Americans. The inci-dent resulted in the worst single-day loss of the long Afghan war, and highlighted just how “kinetic” the fighting was in some of the remote valleys of RC East.

Privately, U.S. military sources knowledgeable about operations in RC East concede that the roughly 31,000 troops and eight allied brigade task forces there are stretched too thin to seal a long, moun-tainous border against a determined enemy, while simultaneously conducting a counter-insurgency campaign in a region roughly the size of Pennsylvania. That was a main reason for abandoning some of the eastern valleys in the past year.

“In a battle space this large, with such challenging terrain, you simply can’t be everywhere at once all the time, so you have to pick your fights,” says a knowledgeable U.S. officer. “We also reposi-tioned our forces from some of those valleys because we discovered that our very presence was provocative and destabilizing, and that when we pulled out and let Afghan troops take our place, the violence dropped precipitously.”

The people in some of those valleys don’t want to join the Taliban, the officer says, so much as they want to be left alone. “So rather than maintain fixed outposts in some valleys, we shifted more towards targeted, offensive maneuver operations alongside our Afghan secu-rity force partners whenever we identified enemy concentrations,” he says. “So while we’re definitely making progress, in RC East it’s often two steps forward and one step back.”

When the United States “surged” 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan last year, the main effort was to break the

Taliban’s grip on its southern strongholds of Kandahar and Helmand with a classic counter-insurgency operation of “clear, hold and build,” even while accelerating the stand-up of Afghan security forces. U.S.

commanders believe both of those strategic goals have been largely met in the past year.

The Taliban failed to re-establish control of Helmand and Kan-dahar this fighting season, having lost much of their logistical infra-structure in the region, including more than 50 bomb-making fac-tories and hundreds of weapons caches. Perhaps most importantly, senior military sources claim the local populace in southern Afghani-stan has turned against the insurgents and, free of their intimidation, has given allied forces intelligence tips that led to the destruction of much of their logistical infrastructure. This past summer the Taliban retaliated with a campaign of assassinations and bomb attacks on soft civilian targets, but U.S. officials don’t believe they will regain their stronghold in the south.

Significant progress has also been made in standing up Afghan National Security Forces that are scheduled to take the lead in all operations by the end of 2014. Since December 2009, the alliance has increased the size of the ANSF by 100,000 soldiers and police, bring-ing the total to roughly 300,000, with an ultimate goal of 352,000 by October 2012. NATO’s Afghan training mission has also begun putting in place the recruiting, training, and support infrastructure that will make that force sustainable over time, though it will still require NATO “enablers” such as training, intelligence, communications, and logistics support beyond 2014.

The strategy all along was to transition the “hold” mission in the south primarily to Afghan security forces this year, shifting U.S. forces to reinforce the 31,000 troops and eight coalition task forces already in RC East in order to take the fight decisively to the Tali-ban and the allied Haqqani network. With all of the “surge force” of 30,000 U.S. troops due to leave Afghanistan by the end of next sum-mer, and the transition to full-Afghan lead-in operations scheduled for 2014, the operation to secure RC East will thus likely prove the final offensive of the decade-long war. And in terms of geography, population and a still-resilient enemy, it may well prove the toughest campaign of the war.

Before he handed over command of RC East earlier this year, Maj. Gen. John Campbell of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division frequently remarked that the fight there was “infinitely more diffi-

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Jorge Solano stands guard during a visit to Tepe Sardar, Afghanistan’s unique monument of sacred architecture, outside Ghazni City, Afghanistan.

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cult” than the battle to secure Baghdad during the Iraq “surge” of 2007-2008, which he helped lead. In contrast with Iraq, he noted, the complex web of relationships in RC East were even more tribal, and the primitive infrastructure “biblical.”

“Every single day in these valleys, we are either dropping bombs or shooting Hellfire missiles, because this is a very, very kinetic fight,” Campbell said in an interview conducted at Forward Opera-tion Base Joyce along the border with Pakistan, before relinquish-ing command last spring. “Out here we’re fighting the Taliban and a few al Qaeda, but probably the most dangerous enemy we face is the Haqqani network, because they have sanctuary in Pakistan,” he said. “We should make no bones about that fact. They go back and forth across the border at will.”

Once upon a time Jalaluddin Haqqani was a favorite of the CIA, and considered one of the most brilliant and coura-

geous of the mujahedeen commanders that the United States sup-ported in their fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan during the 1980s. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Haqqani’s long and close friendship with Osama bin Laden, and his tactical alliance with the Taliban government, made him a top target of U.S. forces.

Today, Jalaluddin’s son Sirajuddin has assumed the tactical lead-ership of the Haqqani network, which U.S. military officials consider perhaps the most skilled, dedicated and ruthless of all the insurgent groups in the region. U.S. drone strikes have killed several of the network’s operational commanders and hundreds of its fighters, and there is a $5 million reward on Sirajuddin Haqqani’s head. Father and son continue to operate with relative impunity, however, in the militant stronghold of Miranshah, the capital of Pakistan’s North Wa-ziristan province. The Haqqani network also has long and close ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI). U.S. officials believe the Pakistani military intelligence agency offers the Haqqanis protection, military and financial aid, and has even tipped off senior Haqqani officials to impending drone strikes.

“There is a lot of evidence that Pakistan’s ISI continues to provide

training, logistics and intelligence support to the Taliban and Haqqani networks, to include tipping them off to the movement of U.S. and coalition forces, undermining coalition operations, and even partici-pating in terrorist attacks such as the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008,” says Arturo Munoz, a long-time CIA analyst now working at the RAND Corp. think tank. “My impression is that the ISI considers al Qaeda a threat to Pakistan, but they don’t consider the Taliban or the Haqqani network as a threat.”

Haqqani network operatives have reportedly mastered the skill set of building sophisticated bombs and improvised explosive devices, and are reportedly behind many of the suicide bombings that have rocked Afghanistan over the past year. According to U.S. officials, the network has sent boys as young as 8 on suicide bombings. Afghan security forces recently seized two shipments of ammonium nitrate, the key explosive ingredient in many of the bombs, totaling more than 5,750 kilograms.

If anything, the mission to contest the Haqqani network’s sanctu-aries in Pakistan’s tribal areas has been set back by the near rupture in U.S.-Pakistan relations that resulted from the U.S. raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Since the secret raid against bin Laden, who had lived for years in a military garrison town in Pakistan, humiliated Pakistani military leaders have kicked out U.S. trainers and intelligence agents, and they continue to resist U.S. calls for a military offensive in North Waziristan. Nor have Haqqani leaders been willing to take part in recent reconciliation talks with the Afghan government, as have some of their Taliban allies.

All of which means that the final U.S. offensive of the war will test the assumption that you can defeat an insurgency operating es-sentially on its home turf, with the safety of a nearby sanctuary.

“Haqqani is clearly the most lethal threat to the government in Afghanistan and to the coalition,” Allyn recently told National Jour-nal. “Because of Haqqani’s bases in Miranshah, they clearly have a stronger regenerative capability than the Taliban. There’s no question that they’re a difficult, capable enemy.”

U.S. Army Capt. Lee Vandewater provides security at Observation Post Two during Operation Bull Whip in Galsuh Valley, Laghman Province, Afghanistan. U.S., Afghan and coalition forces conducted an assault mission to clear the area of insurgents and weapons caches in support of the International Security Assistance Force.

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A U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter lifts off after Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell and other service members disembark during

Operation Bull Whip in Galsuh Valley, Afghanistan.


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The impact of the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon still affects untold lives 10 years later

“The Loudest Noise I Ever Heard in my Life”We Will Never Forget

By John Pulley

Lt. Col. Steve Zappalla, an Army combat arms officer, had on many occasions dur-ing his 20-year career in uniform traveled

great distances to confront armed adversaries and face down his own fears. Yet on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Zappalla was home, ensconced in a cubicle in-side the Pentagon, the world’s largest office building.

At 9:41 a.m., his office became a crucible. A hi-jacked plane struck the exterior of the Pentagon at ground level, a direct hit on a section of the massive structure that had recently been renovated during the first phase of a 17-year, $4.5 billion overhaul. Breach-ing the western façade, American Airlines Flight 77 sliced into the building’s guts, exploded and obliter-ated most of what was in its path.

One flight up, Zappalla’s workgroup occupied a section of the second floor between Corridors Four and Five, two of 10 passageways that project spoke-like from the Pentagon’s hub to its perimeter. The ren-ovation had transformed the area into a vast cubicle farm, known as The Bay, that sprawled for 100 yards.

The violence of the collision and the ensuing blast generated the “loudest noise I ever heard in my life, followed by a rush of air,” says Zappalla. “The ceiling started falling down. I remember getting lifted up and hitting the wall. Something from the ceiling hit me on the head.”

Getting knocked to the floor saved Zappalla’s life, he says. Colleagues in the forward part of The Bay, nearest the point of impact, died instantly. Others per-ished in a secondary explosion of jet fuel propelled by the plane’s momentum into the building’s recesses. The fireball roared over Zappalla, who assumed it was a gas explosion caused by a careless renovation worker.

It was, of course, part of a well-coordinated assault -- the most destructive terrorist attack ever carried out on American soil.

On the 10-year observance of Sept. 11, millions of people will remember the horrifying images of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. For most, time has healed emotional wounds that once

“The Loudest Noise I Ever Heard in my Life”

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were jagged and raw. But for the relatively small group of men and women who were there, a decade has done little to soften the impact.

September 11 began unremarkably. Zappalla, a staff officer in Army headquarters, arose

at 5 a.m., showered, donned his uniform, walked to the bus stop, caught a shuttle at the Navy annex and made it to his second-floor office by 6:30. “It was a nice day,” he says. “A happy, normal day.”

Arriving at The Bay’s cubicle farm, Zappalla “said hello to a few buddies, had a cup of coffee, made phone calls.” When col-leagues began stirring and moving, he “sensed something was up.”

Someone turned on a television. One of the World Trade Cen-ter’s twin towers, in New York City, was in flames. “Chills were going through the back of my head,” he says, recalling the feeling of disbelief. Zappalla, who reported to Lt. Gen Timothy Maude, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel, instinctively went into action, gathering information he would need to brief the gen-eral on the attack’s implications for force mobilization.

After the team briefed Maude in his office on the Pentagon’s outermost E Ring, the gen-eral gave the order to fully stand up the Army Opera-tions Center deep in the bowels of the Pentagon. Zappalla retreated to his D Ring office.

Moments later, Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon. Maude and others closest to the point of impact died instantly. The three-star general would be the high-est-ranking military officer killed in the attacks and the most senior Army officer killed by enemy action in

more than half a century. In all, 22 of Zappalla’s colleagues per-ished, along with 103 others inside the Pentagon and 54 passen-gers and crew aboard the plane.

In an instant, offices became death traps. People who survived the initial hit struggled to escape. “It was dark. I couldn’t see,” says Zappalla. “The smell was horrendous, a terrible smell. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was suffocating.”

Someone asked Zappalla if he was OK. He couldn’t move, but he said “yes.” Someone helped him to his feet, and together

they made their way toward the center of the Pentagon, their movement blocked at one point by a mechanical firewall. They eventually made it to the Pentagon’s courtyard, which had be-come something of a field hospital. Medical person-nel performed triage, and ambulances spirited the wounded away. Zappalla, who had suffered a severe concussion, was treated at the hospital at Fort Belvoir, Va., several miles away.

“It started like any day,” says Navy Cmdr. David A. Taran-tino, a medical doctor, who recalls checking email in his

office on the A Ring, the innermost of the five concentric loops. “It was a beautiful day.”

Tarantino watched on television as a passenger plane hit the second World Trade Center. Not long afterward, he “felt a violent shuddering, like an earthquake. We knew we were under attack.” Making his way toward the direction of the blast, he discovered a gaping hole in a wall abutting a service corridor. “We could hear voices inside,” he says. “People were trapped.”

Stepping into the breach, Tarantino encountered an “apoca-lyptic” scene obscured by “thick, black jet-fuel smoke. … I could barely see my hands.” The partially collapsed ceiling had exposed electrical wires. Intense heat was melting shoes and clothing. “Get out! Get out!” he yelled.

He saw Jerry Henson, a civilian employee trapped by debris in his Navy Command Center office. Calling on his experience row-ing crew at Stanford University, Tarantino used his wiry body to “leg-press the debris off of him” and lead Henson to safety. “As we got back to the passageway,” he says, “that area collapsed.”

Former Army Sgt. Isaac Ho’opi’i, a member of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, had taken his K-9 partner, Vito,

to see the veterinarian at nearby Fort Myer, Va., that morning. He “heard a big boom and felt the ground shake,” he says. Seconds later, his radio came to life. “Emergency! This is not a drill,” blared the dispatcher.

Ho’opi’i sped to the Pentagon, sprinting on foot when he could drive no farther. “The helipad was in flames,” he says, and the

We Will Never Forget

Retired Lt. Col. Steve Zappalla

Former Army Sgt.Isaac Ho’Opi’i

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grounds on the west side of the building flared with “little fires here and there.”

People were crawling out of the building. Some jumped from the second floor. Windows bubbled in the intense heat. Inside, Ho’opi’i encountered smoke, running water, flickering lights and people yell-ing. It was, he says, “chaos.”

He used his booming voice as an auditory beacon to help lead vic-tims, some with severe burns, out of the building, repeatedly instruct-ing people to “come toward my voice.” One of the survivors, Wayne

Sinclair, told the story of his rescue to The Washington Post, which led to his meeting the man who had saved his life.

Maj. Heather “Lucky” Penney, an F-16 pilot with the D.C. Air National Guard, had eaten Cheerios before changing

into her flight suit and driving to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., that morning beneath “a gorgeous, crystalline-blue sky.” In the language of pilots, such conditions are known by the acronym CAVU: clear above, visibility unlimited.

Penney and her fellow pilots had just returned from a demand-ing training exercise at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., to ensure pilots possess the skills “to go to war in ‘bad guy’ land,” as Penney says. A routine scheduling meeting “immediately dissolved” when news arrived that the second World Trade Center tower had been struck. Shortly afterward, another plane flew into the Pentagon.

Her Air Guard unit is not part of the official response chain de-ployed by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which defends the country’s airspace. But the attack on

the Pentagon effectively “closed the loop between the chain of com-mand,” she says, allowing the Guard’s leadership at Andrews to work through the Secret Service on base and ultimately gain clearance from Vice President Dick Cheney to launch aircraft.

Lt. Col. Marc “Sass” Sasseville was already moving toward the flight line when he called out to Penney. “Lucky,” he said, using the nickname given to her by other pilots, “you’re coming with me.” Be-lieving a commercial airliner was still unaccounted for, they punched the afterburners of their F-16s, rocketed northwest along the Potomac

River and prepared to intercept a jetliner.There were no orders for engaging a hijacked

plane, no standing rules of engagement. Aside from a few rounds of training bullets that could not take down a large aircraft, the F-16s had no weapons. On the fly, they came up with a plan: Sasseville would ram the cockpit. Penney would take out the tail. “We simply knew what had to be done that day.”

After returning from their sortie, they learned the missing aircraft, United Airlines Flight 93, had been found. Passengers on the Boeing 757 had stormed its cabin before Sasseville and Penney ever took flight. The plane had crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

Shortly after noon, Lt. Michael P. Regan of the Fire & Rescue Department of northern

Virginia’s Fairfax County arrived at the Pentagon. He was part of Virginia Task Force 1, an interna-tional urban search and rescue unit with expertise in rescuing victims from collapsed structures. The unit has responded to crises all over the world, including

the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, an attack attributed to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Searching the Pentagon for people trapped in the rubble, the res-cuers experienced “intense heat” of a type they had “not encountered in collapsed buildings before,” Regan says. “At points [it] became unbearable.” Ten feet inside the building, the team encountered the first victim. They continued, finding “total devastation [and] victims just about everywhere we looked.” It appeared that people escaped quickly or not at all. “We did not find any live victims.”

On the day after the attacks, even as the destroyed section of the building continued to smolder, “almost everyone at the Pentagon was back at work,” says Dr. Tarantino, who later deployed with a Marine unit to Iraq. For him, the past decade has been “10 years of being part of the response. ”

Former Army Capt. Randy Schwartz, a firefighter, was on the roof of the Pentagon on Sept. 12, putting out hot spots. After he descended, his commander directed him to escort a pair of active-duty Army sol-diers to the roof. Scaling a truck ladder that had been extended to its full 100-foot length, soldiers and firefighters lugged a large garrison flag to the roof and unfurled it along the side of the Pentagon. It would


Air Guard Maj. Heather “Lucky” Penney

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become one of the iconic images of the attack and its aftermath. “I was in the right place at the right time to give something back

to my country, a small thing. I am thrilled that I was part of that,” Schwartz says. “I was very saddened about the events of the day before, but to give America something to cheer about, I’m awfully proud of that.”

Zappalla, the Army combat arms officer, was back at work two days after the attack. He was present when Maude’s grieving wife, Terry, spoke to the men and women who had worked for her hus-band. She told them that “Tim” would want his team to pull together and do what needed to be done. “She stood up and gave the most inspirational speech I ever heard in my life,” he says.

Of necessity, most of his colleagues relocated to temporary of-fices in Alexandria, Va., while workers rebuilt their offices, but Zap-palla’s job required him to work in the Army Operations Center, in the Pentagon. He spent much of the next nine months in the Penta-gon’s basement. Exiled colleagues considered him fortunate.

“People were fighting to get back in,” Zappalla recalls.

To a person, the men and women who were closest to the events of Sept. 11 say they still feel the impact.

“I think it affected all of us who are firemen,” says Schwartz. “We didn’t lose anybody here (at the Pentagon), but 343 guys in New York lost their lives. You think about it every day. When we’re going up the steps in a high rise, I can visualize what it was like. All of a sudden, their world came crashing down. … Yeah, I’d say it changed my life.”

Firefighter Regan concurs: “There’s no such thing as closure. … A lot of our people have sleepless nights. There’s not a single day that goes by that I don’t think about it.”

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, many people hungered for retribution. Years later, the death of Osama bin Laden was less cathartic than it might have been had it happened sooner. “That guy tried to kill me,” says Tarantino. “But there’s still a lot of work to be

done.”For Tarantino, being in the Pentagon during the attack led to “a

rededication of military values … honor, courage, commitment … not leaving anyone behind.”

Some suffer from survivor guilt. “Did I do enough?” asks Ho’opi’i, who served eight years active

duty in the infantry as a police investigator and another 10 in the Army Reserve. “Did I help enough people?”

The day burns within him. At times, when he is grilling and gets a whiff of charcoal smoke and lighter fluid, it all comes back.

“Even though 10 years have gone by, the thing that hits me is the smell. It’s more than just smoke,” he says of the odor inside the Pentagon that day, a mixture of jet fuel, construction materials con-sumed by fire, incinerated clothes and burned flesh. “I don’t wish for anybody to go through it.”

He copes by coaching youth sports and performing contempo-rary Hawaiian music with his band, The Aloha Boys. Ho’opi’i plays guitar and ukulele, and he sings. “I don’t take a lot for granted any-more,” he says. “Life is too short. … Waking up alive is always great.

For Penney, Sept. 11 provided perspective: “There are things in this world that are far more important than our individual selves. Those things are our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, our way of life, what it means to be an American.”

For Zappalla, Sept. 11 changed everything.He had grown up in the Italian neighborhoods of Bush-

wick in Brooklyn, Glendale in Queens and in Levittown, on Long Island. From those places he learned to aggressively stand up for himself.

“The Army seemed like a natural extension of that,” says Zap-palla, who was recruited to play on the lacrosse team at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and eventually became team cap-tain. “The environment there was familiar to me. Very aggressive. I


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would take chances and get rewarded.” During a summer break, he went to Ranger

School, at Fort Benning, Ga. He met challenges and handled fear by fighting back. “I’ve been in situations where I was afraid in the Army, many situations where I was afraid for my life,” he says. “The way I used to deal with it was to put my head down and charge with a lot of aggressions.”

After Sept. 11, fighting failed him. “I was angry that somebody did this to us.

I didn’t know what to do. I felt hopeless that I couldn’t fight back. It was frustrating.” He didn’t realize it at the time, but the attack on the Pentagon was also an assault on a deeply ingrained way of reacting to adversity.

“For months on end, I couldn’t escape the noise of it, the dealing with it and trying to escape from it,” says Zappalla, who lived close enough to the Pentagon that his street was closed to vehicles af-ter the attack. He became claustrophobic, unable to get into an elevator or walk around a shopping mall.

“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says. “It was the beginning of the end.”

Eventually, he put in his papers and retired from the Army. He took up meditation, became in-terested in Buddhism and began pursuing a more spiritual life. He enrolled in and graduated from a master’s degree program in counseling.

Today, he helps people struggling to recover from crippling fears, stress and addictive behav-iors.

Zappalla didn’t die in the flames of Sept. 11.He was reborn there.

OPPOSITE: (LEFT) Zappalla snapped pictures of the devastation when he returned to the remains of his Pentagon office on Sept. 27.(RIGHT): Zappalla’s photos showed the burned exterior of the building outside his former office.

(RIGHT): Fairfax County firefighter Randy Schwartz, a former Army captain, helped unfurl the large garrison flag on the roof of the Penta-gon on Sept. 12 in what became an enduring image of the attack and its aftermath.

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The Army has finally launched its long-awaited competition to build a new carbine, prodding small-arm makers from across the country to take

a shot at replacing the service’s M4 carbine.It’s a rare opportunity. The Army hasn’t held an open

competition to replace its individual soldier weapon since before the Vietnam War.

It’s also a risky undertaking. Dozens of small-arms firms have spent three years, and in some cases millions of dol-lars, preparing for the competition while knowing that the Army could decide to stick with the M4 in the end.

In late June, the Army invited industry to submit propos-als by the end of September for off-the-shelf carbines in a competition that will cost about $30 million and take more

than two years to complete. Senior Army leaders first announced a plan to hold a

competition for a new carbine in November 2008 in the face of congressional scrutiny over the service’s devotion to the M4, despite its shortcomings.

Some companies will be eliminated before the first shots are fired. In the first phase of the competition, the Army will review all the proposals and weed out companies that don’t have the manufacturing capacity to produce hundreds of thousands of weapons, or to manufacture inside the United States.

The carbine competition is part of a two-pronged strat-egy to improve soldier weapons. Army officials also are working on a product-improvement program to radically up-grade the current inventory of more than 500,000 M4s. The Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force also use the M4 and the

Dozens of gun makers lock and load for competition to build the Army’s next carbine

By Matthew Cox

Remington Arms Company’s Adaptive Combat Rifle, a weapon that features a gas piston system, quick-change barrel and adjustable stock.

Adcor Defense Inc.’s new Brown Enhanced Automatic Rifle, or B.E.A.R.

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M16, but are waiting for the outcome of the Army compe-tition before making any decisions on new weapons.

The Army began buying M4s from West Hartford, Conn.-based Colt Defense in the mid-1990s to replace the full-size M16, which has been in service since the mid-1960s. M16s still remain in the inventory, but weapons of-ficials say the M4’s collapsible stock and shortened barrel make it ideal for soldiers operating in vehicles and in the tight quarters of urban combat. It’s also highly accurate and extremely easy to handle.

The problem is its reliability.The M4, like the M16, uses a direct gas tube system,

which relies on the gas created inside the barrel when a bullet is fired to cycle the weapon. The system blows hot gases mixed with carbon residue into the firing mecha-nism, drying up lubrication and allowing extreme wear and tear on internal parts.

Many modern carbines rely on a piston-style gas sys-tem, which uses the weapon’s gas to push a piston rod to cycle during firing. The gas is vented without funneling through the firing mechanism.

Three piston-style carbines – Heckler & Koch’s 416 and XM8, and FNH USA’s Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle, or SCAR – outperformed the M4’s direct-gas system in an Army reliability test in November 2007.

The carbine competition represents a huge gamble for many small-arms makers, some of which have

spent millions of dollars to upgrade and test their weapons to join the competition.

“We invest a lot of research and development dollars to try to provide a better wholesale solution,” says Jason Schauble, vice president of Remington Arms Co.’s Global Military Products Division. “We do a lot of testing.”

The Madison, N.C.-based Remington makes the Adap-tive Combat Rifle, which features a gas piston operating system, tool-less quick-change barrels and a multi-adjust-able folding stock. It also makes an M4-style carbine known as the Remington Gas Piston system. Companies can only submit one design. Schauble declined to say which design it is submitting.

Some smaller companies worry they don’t have the re-sources to compete alongside bigger firms with experience at winning government contracts.

LWRC International isn’t taking any chances. The Cambridge, Md.-based company has entered into a part-nership with Anniston Army Depot in Alabama to use its government-owned small-arms repair facility in the event LWRC is chosen to make the Army’s new carbine. The company hopes that teaming with Anniston will put LWRC on a more stable footing when the Army evaluates pro-duction capability in the first phase, says Darren Mellers,

(BELOW): Adcor Defense Inc. designed its Brown Enhanced Automatic Rifle, or B.E.A.R., for the Army’s new carbine

competition.

(ABOVE): Concerned about reliability problems with the M4 carbine, used here by a soldier in Afghanistan, Congress prompted the Army to look for a more reliable weapon.

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executive vice president for LWRC, which specializes in M4-style carbine designs. “It’s their infrastructure; they have ownership,” he says.

Daniel Defense of Black Creek, Ga., and the much larger Heckler & Koch also are discussing a possible part-nership. The competition is “a huge gamble,” says Patrick Kisgen, sales manager for Daniel Defense, adding there’s a strong possibility of his company “never selling a single weapon, even if we win.”

Kisgen hopes to take advantage of Heckler & Koch’s proven track record. The German arms company makes the 416, an M4-style weapon that the Army’s elite Delta Force adopted in 2004. The Marine Corps also is buying a version of the 416, known as the M27 Infantry Auto-matic Rifle, as a replacement for the heavier M249 squad automatic weapon. HK USA, Heckler & Koch’s U.S. division, also could benefit from Daniel Defense’s new 92,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in South Caro-lina.

Gun makers aren’t the only ones taking an interest in the Army’s carbine competition.

Adcor Defense Inc., a small Baltimore-based firm with roots in the soda-pop industry, wants to be known as the maker of the next weapon soldiers carry into combat. While it’s new to the gun game, Adcor is a seasoned de-

fense contractor with experience making everything from precision missile components to small-arms parts.

“We saw and heard and read how much this weapon (M4) has come under scrutiny on Capitol Hill, and we took it upon ourselves as mechanical people to see if we could solve some of those problems,” says Jimmy Stavra-kis, president of the parent company, Adcor Industries Inc. Stavrakis has been running Adcor since he took over the family business from his father in 1990.

The company says its new Brown Enhanced Automatic Rifle, or B.E.A.R., prevents dust and debris from enter-ing the receiver with a special spring-loaded dust cover mounted on the carbine’s bolt carrier, improving reliabil-ity, durability and overall performance. Each time the weapon fires and the bolt carrier returns to the ready posi-tion, the dust cover moves into the ejection port, sealing out dust or debris.

Adcor subcontracts for defense giants such as The Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. and, at one time, made most of the sophisticated parts on the Navy’s Fleet Ballistic Missile System. But the company’s expertise in manufacturing highly technical machines for beverage companies such as Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. may be what gives it an edge in the Army’s carbine competi-tion.

“It is basically, for us, another mechanical machine,”


Adcor, a company new to the gun-making game, says it has devised a spring-loaded dust cover for the weapon’s bolt carrier, which protects it against dust and debris, and a gas piston system that doesn’t come into contact with the barrel.

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Stavrakis says. “It’s a very simple machine for us in com-parison for what we do in the bottling industry. When we build a piece of machinery for the bottling industry, it is comprised of 20,000 part numbers, and it is capable of

filling a 12-ounce can at a rate of 2,000 cans a minute. It’s basically a big Gatling gun.”

Adcor’s new carbine also features a gas piston system that operates without coming in contact with the barrel, a design the com-pany says makes it more accurate than other piston systems on the market.

Adcor’s openness about its new weapon design is unusual at this stage of the compe-tition.

FNH USA of McLean, Va., for example, which makes the highly respected M249 and M240 machine guns for the U.S. mili-tary and is supplying variants of the SCAR to U.S. Special Operations Command, con-firms it will be submitting a proposal. But that’s about all Mark Cherpes, executive vice president, is willing to say.

Performance might not be the only factor in play as the competition moves forward,

one likely competitor says.“There is an entire political side

to this that is never going to show up with the RFP,” says Steve Mayer,

law enforcement and government sales manager of Rock River Arms Inc. of Colona, Ill. All too often,

Mayer says, funding for defense programs depends on the number of congressional districts affected by the effort. “Hopefully, we will end up with the best weapon system and not the most political weapon system.”

The companies surviving the initial cut will move to the second phase, which involves firing about 700,000 rounds at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. Phase Two will end with the award of contracts to three gun makers, which will advance to the next phase. The Army will buy more weapons from the three companies to conduct limited user evaluations during Phase Three of the competition.

Army testers plan to shoot another 850,000 rounds be-fore a winner is selected sometime in late 2013. But even then, it’s not certain the Army will buy a new carbine. The service will conduct a business-case analysis to decide whether the winner offers enough of an improvement over the M4 to be worth the cost of replacing it.

Despite the risk, it’s a chance for smaller gun makers to gain a new level of recognition in the small-arms industry.

“It’s worth it to us just to have that opportunity,” says LWRC’s Mellers.

The Army’s elite Delta Force adopted the Heckler & Koch 416 to replace its M4A1 carbine in 2004, and the Marine Corps recently began purchasing another version of the 416, the M27 infantry automatic rifle, to replace the M249 squad automatic weapon shown here. The 416 will be HK’s entry in the M4 replacement competition.

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It was a difficult assignment from the start: Build a tactical vehicle that’s as light and maneuverable as a Humvee, but as tough against roadside bombs as an MRAP.

Now, after four years of designing and building and a year of testing, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicles developed by three competing teams are headed back to the garage for some overhauls.

“Right now we are fine tuning to ensure we get the requirements right,” says Mark McCoy, the Army’s JLTV product manager. The biggest change “is the protection level. We are increasing it due to lessons learned from Afghanistan and Iraq.”

About halfway through testing, the Army concluded that the vehicles’ underbody blast protection wasn’t adequate and would have to be beefed up. At the same time, the Marine Corps complained that the prototype JLTVs were too heavy. The vehicles, which have to be light enough to be lifted by military helicopters and C-130 Hercules cargo planes, were several hundred to a thousand pounds overweight.

How to make them stronger and yet lighter is a perplexity. And other obstacles have begun to crop up. Costs are increasing even as defense budgets tighten. Other blast-resistant vehicles have been rushed into service, possibly reducing the need for JLTVs. And the Army has announced program delays.

The JTLV “is going through a lot of program churn in terms of requirements, schedules and cost estimates. That’s not a good sign,” says Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The problems prompted two House committees to cut $50 million – nearly 25 percent – from JLTV program

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funding for 2012. The House Armed

Services Committee warned that “initial test results indicate that the JLTV program may face many operational and technical challenges.” The House Appropriations Committee says that “the operational niche to be filled by the JLTV appears to be shrinking.”

Five years ago the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle was an ambitious idea: Replace vulnerable flat-bottomed Humvees

– which were designed in 1980, before IED was even an acronym, let alone a deadly threat – with new vehicles whose V-shaped “hulls” are engineered specifically to direct blast forces away from troops who ride in protective “crew capsules.”

Unlike Humvees, which originally had no armor, JLTVs would be armored to protect against improvised explosive devices, machine-gun rounds and high explosive fragments. And more armor could be added as threats increase.

The Army, which heads the JLTV program for itself and the Marine Corps, says it wants vehicles that balance three key elements – payload, performance and protection. But for the Army, the emphasis is on protection. The new blast survivability requirement means that JLTVs will have to match the under-body protection provided by M-ATVs – the mine-resistant, ambush-protected all-terrain vehicles that were specially designed for the war in Afghanistan.

To accommodate these tougher requirements, the Army has delayed issuing contracts for the second phase of JLTV development from October this year until early 2012.

And the second phase – the engineering and manufacturing development, or EMD phase – has been stretched from 24 months to 48 months to provide more time for new systems engineering, subsystem design and testing, prototype building, contractor shakedown and time for “test-fix-test” of vehicle improvements, McCoy says.

So the vehicles the Army and Marine Corps once hoped might

deploy as early as 2010 now won’t be available until at least 2017.

Even with the two extra years, building a “light” tactical vehicle that’s as blast-resistant as a 25,000-pound, bomb-hardened M-ATV just might not be possible, says Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute.

Protection demands armor, and armor adds weight. Meanwhile, performance means agility on the

ground and deployability by helicopter, which requires lightness. The Army’s “iron triangle” of protection, payload and performance might be impossible to

balance, Goure says. “There’s no way around it. You might be able to get two of the three, but not all three.”

Back in 2006, the Army was hoping for JTLVs that weighed about 12,000 pounds. The basic vehicle

would carry four troops, 3,500 pounds of gear and tow a trailer. A larger version would carry six and a payload of up to 4,500 pounds. And a third variant would carry a crew of two and a payload of 5,100 pounds.

Among the three types, various JLTVs would be equipped for special purposes, such as reconnaissance, command and control, and to serve as gun carriers and as ambulances. The Army planned to buy 55,000 and the Marine Corps, 5,500.

In 2008, the Army awarded technology development contracts to three competing teams, one led by BAE Systems, one by General Dynamics and one by Lockheed.

Weight was a problem from the start. When the prototypes arrived in 2010, the lightest, Lockheed’s, weighed in at 12,650 pounds. BAE’s was 13,200 and General Dynamics’ was 13,400.

And that was “curb weight” – the weight without all of the protective armor and other combat gear. When fully ready for combat, the two-man and four-man JLTVs weighed 18,000 to 20,000 pounds. The six-man version weighed 23,000 pounds and was eventually terminated by the Army.

Weight is a particular sticking point for the Marines. In 2009 the former commandant, Gen. James Conway, warned that the Corps “will not buy a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle that’s 20,000 pounds. It doesn’t fit our expeditionary kind of capacity. We can’t carry it on our helicopters or even sling it.”

The JLTV’s weight is limited by the lifting capacity of CH-47F helicopters. That’s 15,600 pounds, according to the Government Accountability Office, which reviewed the JLTV program for Congress last November. Documents published by the JLTV program office say the CH-47F can lift 17,940 pounds.

But even at the higher lifting capacity, the JLTV prototypes “appeared to be very close to the maximum envelopes for aircraft

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transportability,” the Congressional Research Service reported in March. That’s a problem if the Army’s revised protection requirement means adding much more weight.

When it comes to force protection, “there are no easy solutions,” says Glen Lamartin, the BAE vice president

who oversees the JLTV program. “It’s both an art and a science” that involves materials, design and the ability to manufacture with attention to detail, he says. The JLTV program “set ambitious targets for weight.”

BAE’s “Valanx” JLTV has at various times been described as a “16,000-pound vehicle,” and as having a “13,200 curb weight” and a “20,850 combat weight.” Deepak Bazzas, BAE’s JLTV program director, says BAE is “well along the path to meeting the new [blast protection] requirement.”

Lockheed says it has already met the requirement. “We anticipated that these requirements would go to this level well over a year ago,” and designed that level of protection in, says Kathryn Hasse, Lockheed’s JLTV program director. Even so, Lockheed engineers continue working to reduce their JLTV’s weight, and its cost, she says.

General Dynamics, which has teamed with AM General to produce a JLTV, declined to discuss the new requirement or its vehicles’ performance in the Army’s tests.

It was not surprising that the Army changed some requirements during the technology development phase, Lamartin and Bazzas say. “You build, test, assess and fix – it’s continuous” during that phase.

One approach to tackling the weight problem is to use more composites, alloys and other lightweight materials. But that’s likely to aggravate another problem – rising costs.

The Army says it’s too early in the JLTV development process to know how much the vehicles will cost. But at the request of Congress last fall, the GAO took a stab at it.

“JLTV’s acquisition costs are yet to be determined, but are expected to be substantial,” the GAO reported. “Unit costs could be

over $800,000.” But that eye-popping sum was for the vehicle and the equipment that would go into it, not just for the vehicle, the GAO says. Without its mission equipment, JTLVs might cost $306,000 to $336,000 apiece. That compares with $186,000 for an up-armored Humvee, and $445,000 for each M-ATV, the agency says.

The cost estimates prompted Conway, the former commandant, to say, “There’s no way that the Marine Corps is going to be able

to afford $300,000 a copy” for JLTVs. The California-based think tank Rand added to the cost

controversy earlier when Rand analysts told Congress that “the most significant challenge to this [JLTV] program appears to be fiscal rather than physical.”

Cost could be a killer, says Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “We’re entering a declining budget environment and not every program is going to make it. And if something looks unaffordable, it’s in trouble.”

In search of other options, the Marines launched a Humvee survivability improvement program that aims to make Humvees less vulnerable to improvised explosive devices.

Improved Humvees aren’t the JLTV alternative. While the three JLTV teams were busy designing and building their prototypes, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan killed or wounded by roadside bombs increased dramatically. That sparked an emergency $12.5 billion acquisition spree to buy 8,104 M-ATVs. At 25,000 pounds, they’re not as light or as movable as JLTVs are intended to be, but they do offer the blast protection that JTLVs now are struggling to match.

With M-ATVs now in service, the GAO cautioned lawmakers of a possible “overlap in capabilities” between M-ATVs, JLTVs and the even bigger MRAPs. The Congressional Research Service, too, pointed to “a significant number of redundancies” that it says should be “examined in greater detail before the JLTV program enters production and procurement.”

And with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, there’s a question of whether JLTVs will be needed at all, Harrison says. A roles and missions review currently under way at the Pentagon could deemphasize the role of ground forces, and consequently their equipment requirements, he says.

In a speech at West Point in February, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggested as much. “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”

Designing a lighter yet blast-resistant vehicle is both an art and a science, a BAE executive says.

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Itʼs not just a bunch of hot air:Low-cost surveillance systems

aboard tethered balloons are saving lives in

combat zones

Floating high above the British base in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, the unmanned aerostat had a bird’s eye view of

the neighboring village and surrounding terrain. The surveillance package toted by the tethered, helium-filled balloon could look behind walls and into areas that couldn’t be seen by soldiers on the ground.

“A patrol was going out, down through the main street in the village, and there were two intersecting alleyways. We couldn’t see into the area” from the base itself, recalled Lance Bombardier Garth Edwards. But they had been watching the area with the Revivor aerostat.

“That morning as the patrol was going out, we saw insurgents moving into firing points. We were able to get on the [communications] net, stop the patrol, and then we eventually struck those targets and eliminated them, so that allowed the patrol to carry on,” he said at the Empire Challenge multinational demonstration earlier this year at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

Revivor is one of several types of tethered aerostats used by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are able to sit for weeks over a location, keeping

tabs on movements in local populations and detecting changes in life patterns that might be threatening to friendly forces. The U.S. had deployed about 60 in Afghanistan by March 2011, when former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Marines at a base in Sangin, “I want to put a bunch more in.”

Aerostats’ relatively low cost -- the balloon portion of a Canadian model demonstrated at Empire Challenge, for instance, costs about $25,000 and its payload comes in at about $1 million -- helps make them attractive.

Gates established the Pentagon’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task

Force in 2008 to rush desperately needed ISR assets, including aerostats, to U.S. troops in combat zones. They’ve shown their stuff by helping to save lives, although officials acknowledge that it’s hard to say how many.

They’re considered most effective when used with other ISR systems. Aerostats “allow you to understand what is going on within the enemy network, and that’s helpful to understanding where to look” for an improvised explosive device, or IED, according to U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael L. Oates, director of the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO. “Our

nd

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other intelligence capabilities allow us to do the same. But unless you employ all of these capabilities, it is very, very difficult to find these explosives,” he told reporters in Washington last December.

Revivor “works best in a village,” says Lance Bombardier Edwards. He says his aerostat team watched “target houses, alleyways and vulnerable points that the lads [British soldiers] were going through, obviously making sure that nobody’s mashing about there and doing things they shouldn’t,” like burying IEDs.

Aerostats doing combat duty in addition to Britain’s Revivor include the U.S. Persistent Ground Surveillance System, or PGSS, the larger U.S. Persistent Threat Detection System, or PTDS, and the Canadian Persistent Surveillance Aerostat, or PSA, which is based on an Israeli design.

PGSS has prompted accolades from troops. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Viet Luong, commander of the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade, called it a game-changer shortly after the first was launched from Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan in July 2010.

PGSS suppliers include Aerostar International Inc. of Sioux Falls, S.D., and TCOM of Columbia, Md. The program sprang from an urgent request in August 2009 for tethered aerostats that, unlike the bigger Lockheed Martin-built PTDS, could be operated from small- to medium-size forward operating bases. It went into service in April 2010. PTDS has been operating from larger bases since 2004. The systems complement each other in the field, according to the Navy, which developed and fielded PGSS.

PTDS is a U.S. Army system. It has been “very successful, and has provided over 230,000 hours of full motion video in support of missions in theater,” Maj. Robert Rugg, assistant product manager for persistent surveillance devices for the Army Program Manager Robotic and Unmanned Systems office, says in an email. “The PTDS systems have made a significant difference in not only protecting the warfighter, leading the way in helping reduce IED casualties, but also helping execute the mission.”

It’s true that an aerostat floating in the air is a sign there’s a base below. But it’s also true that if you can see it, it probably can see

you. In addition, aerostats are typically very low pressure systems, so gunfire has little immediate effect. In fact, says one soldier, “We like it when enemy forces shoot at the balloon because when they do, it tells us exactly where they are.” Aerostats also can be flown

Members of the Precision Threat Detection System (PTDS) crew put the fi nal touches on the aerostat’s cameras before its fi rst

fl ight Nov. 17, 2010, from Forward Operating Base Andar in Afghanistan’s Ghazni Province.

Aerostats see far beyond what a soldier can see during a typical base perimeter security check.

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without payloads to fool insurgents into thinking they are looking at an ISR system.

The Army and Navy work together on development of aerostats and their payloads, which typically include powerful electro-optical and infrared cameras. Northrop Grumman recently demonstrated a lightweight radar on a PTDS. It cued cameras to vehicles and people it detected.

PTDS aerostats have been deployed largely in eastern Afghanistan, where the Army says they have helped thwart insurgent activity. In January, for example, near Forward Operating Base Andar in the eastern province of Ghazni, an aerostat camera saw four armed insurgents on motorcycles near the village of Shamsay. Their location was passed to attack helicopters, which killed them as they drove through an open field, the Army says.

But aerostat-aided surveillance can’t always anticipate attacks. “No system is going to be perfect,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, which tracks defense programs and issues. A case in point may be the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul in June. A PTDS was launched over Kabul in August 2009, but it’s not clear whether it was on duty when the hotel was attacked; ISAF didn’t respond to an email query. But even if it was, it might not have been able to give real-time warning of attackers wearing local uniforms.

On the other hand, says Pike, videotape of the scene from PTDS cameras could be played back to see where the attackers had come from, which could ultimately lead to their demise. “It takes time to connect the dots,

but this sort of persistent surveillance is where you get the dots to connect.”

Persistent surveillance has often meant constantly monitoring a video screen to detect unusual activity -- a potentially mind-numbing job. In some forward operating bases, however, automated computer tools have been enlisted to help human operators whose knowledge of an area increases with time, says Ron Browing, business development lead for Lockheed Martin’s PTDS program. PTDS systems -- 37 deployed and 29 more just ordered -- are operated by Lockheed personnel.

“You get more bang for the buck with both,” he says. He declines to be specific, but does refer to “some tools in development that will continue to help limit the factors you get into with humans staring at screens.”

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Projects Agency is using cutting-edge technology to

develop such tools. The idea is to use software to pick out unusual activity in live as well as archived video. It’s a new field called activity-based exploitation.

“Bad guys do bad things, such as actions associated with burying an IED,” DARPA’s Mita Desai says in an email, and “the activity is what becomes important. This is especially true when bad guys look, dress, and drive vehicles like those around them. The tools to detect these activities and their underlying actions don’t currently exist, which is why there is such interest in activity-based analysis and exploitation.”

The Persistent Threat Detection System (PTDS) has been operational since 2004. Lockheed Martin recently received a $184 million contract for 29 more for use in Afghanistan. The company said it delivered 28 PTDSs last year for use in theater, bringing the number provided to the U.S. Army to 37.

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He says warfighters “are being inundated with data, especially from wide-area sensors, where one day’s worth of collection could be as much as 100 terabytes” -- a staggering amount, considering that the entire Library of Congress amounts to only about 235 terabytes.

“Reducing the amount of data or the number of sensors isn’t the answer, and there will never be enough analysts,” Desai says. “The solution lies in better automated video analysis and exploitation capabilities that can identify those areas that require a human analyst to review or respond to the most important aspects of the data and turn that sensor data into intelligence.”

Two DARPA programs managed by Desai -- the Persistent Stare Exploitation and Analysis System (PerSEAS) and the Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) -- are intended not to replace human analysts, “but to make them more effective and efficient by reducing their cognitive load and enabling them to search for activities and threat patterns quickly and easily,” Desai says. “Both programs are designed to be interactive, to allow an analyst to view data the system thought was important, but let the analyst make the decisions.”

PerSEAS will point to events of interest, such as “cars following each other or driving aimlessly, which in turn would be linked to activities like a vehicle-borne IED attack or an ambush,” he says.

VIRAT will quickly “find video content of interest from hours of archived data and from live video, providing online alerts as events of interest occur,” he says. It “finds actions and events that are short in duration and occur in small geographic areas…. Examples include carrying, u-turns, and digging.”

VIRAT isn’t “fully automatic, but employs user interaction to get the best results.”✪

ILLUSTRATIONS: Courtesy of DARPA

These slides from DARPA explain how its Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) might

work with aerostats or unmanned aerial systems. VIRAT helps human analysts fi nd threats more

quickly and easily, DARPA says.


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61Fa l l 2011 DEFENSE STANDARD

’12 AIR FORCE Preview

Space fenceAF pursues new space tracking system

By Rich Tuttle

J

The job of keeping track of thousands of objects in Earth orbit falls to the Air Force’s

Space Surveillance System, a network of six radar antennas stretching from Georgia to California that has been in operation since 1961.

The system works, but it sometimes shows its age. For instance, it signaled on June 28 that a piece of space junk was approaching the International Space Station. But the warning came too late for the station to take evasive maneuvers. The six astronauts had to climb aboard two Russian Soyuz capsules docked to the station, ready to return to Earth if the station was struck.

The debris whizzed by only 820 feet away -- reportedly the closest any space junk has ever come to the space station.

A new ground radar system, slated to begin operation in 2015, would have given an earlier warning, says Linda Haines, program manager of the new system. It’s called Space Fence because, like its predecessor, its radar beams will shoot straight up like a fence to detect objects passing through.

But with S-band radar instead of the old VHF radar, Space Fence will see smaller objects – important, because even a centimeter-sized object traveling at 20,000 mph could destroy a satellite. It will track

more than 100,000 objects as far away as 3,000 kilometers, well over the 22,000 objects being tracked today.

It won’t be perfect. There may be millions of pieces in low to medium Earth orbit.

Still, networked with other systems, Space Fence is expected to revolutionize the art of space situational awareness – knowing what is where in Earth orbit.

Haines declined to address whether the trackable objects include stealthy satellites.

Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. are competing for Space Fence, which is expected to have a lifetime cost of $4 billion to $5 billion. Each received $107 million earlier this year for preliminary design.

The companies have extensive experience with big, ground-based radars. The Air Force’s Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., which is

handling the program, is the service’s center of excellence for ground-based radar.

But that doesn’t mean Space Fence isn’t being scrutinized on Capitol Hill. The House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee has targeted the program

for budget cuts over the past two years, which Haines calls “very, very frustrating.”

She says her response is to “increase the confidence” of Air Force, Pentagon and congressional leaders “that you have a good plan and you’re executing to that plan and you’re keeping your promises.”

Congress’ Government Accountability Office, meanwhile, has been worried that Space Fence technologies aren’t mature enough. But Haines says the GAO used old data. “Basically the technologies for this program are mature,” or will be by the time the preliminary design

review is conducted next February.John Morse, Lockheed Martin’s Space

Fence program manager, says technology and manufacturing risks will be reduced “to almost nothing” by the end of the preliminary design phase next summer.

One of the technologies is digital beam forming, according to Doug Burgess, senior Space Fence program manager at Raytheon. He describes it as the ability to simultaneously put multiple beams of radar into a large volume of space.

To help reduce risk, both companies are building prototypes that will track space objects by the end of this year.

This still photo from a Lockheed Martin film dramatizes the collision of two satellites and indicates how debris can be added to Earth orbit. Space Fence operators would have earlier warning of potential collisions.

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’12 ARMY Preview

StrykersAnti-IED double-V hulls prove their value

By Matthew Cox

J

Mounting casualties in Iraq from improvised explosive devices prompted the Army’s move to equip newer models with double-V hulls on the bottom. Strykers equipped with the new hull will cost about $2.4 million each.

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For the first time in nearly eight years of combat de-ployments, the Army is final-

ly outfitting Stryker armored personnel carriers with armor that will stand up to some of the deadliest enemy bombs.

The Army now has about 50 new Stryker wheeled ve-hicles in Afghani-stan equipped with blast-deflecting hulls similar to those on the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle fleet.

The service ex-pects to spend up to $320 million develop-ing the new hull design through fiscal 2012, including the full range of testing, says Col. Robert Schumitz, who oversees Stryker development as the project manager for Stryker Brigade Com-bat Team. Fielding 450 new Stryker vehicles equipped with a double-V hull through 2012 will cost about $1.3 billion, with a per-unit cost of about $2.4 million.

“The unique hull design, combined with energy attenuating seats, provides significantly improved protection for Stryker soldiers,” Schumitz says in a written response to questions. “Sol-dier survivability is the Army’s No. 1 priority. Once we determined that the [double-V hull] effort was an achiev-able and acceptable risk, we swiftly engaged in executing the robust pro-gram.”

The Army began developing the

Stryker Brigade Combat Team in late 1999 to create a fighting force with the flexibility of a light unit and the stay-ing power of a heavier outfit. Since 2003 the service has fielded seven Stryker brigades, each equipped with about 300 Stryker vehicles.

But warfare in Afghanistan brought new threats. Afghanistan’s road net-work is less developed than Iraq, and enemy improvised explosive de-vices tend to be significantly larger, Schumitz says. Casualties to Stryker troops mounted. The Army began searching for ways to combat the IED threat in 2008, and accelerated the dou-ble-V hull program in 2009.

In late 2010, Stryker manufacturer General Dynamics agreed to deliver the first 150 new Strykers with double-V hulls by May 2011. “We actually de-livered 177,” says Mike Cannon, senior

vice president for General Dynamics’ Ground Combat Systems. “We had to redesign seven variants; that is a sig-nificant effort.”

The middle of the Stryker vehicle equipped with the new hull is no higher off the ground than the basic Stryker,

Cannon says. The V-shaped design de-flects the blast out and away from the Stryker.

Schumitz says that the acceleration of the double-V hull program prompted them to conduct survivability test-ing while the new Strykers were in pro-duction. Normally, testing would be completed before the system goes into pro-duction.

As of July 12, 205 of the 450 improved Strykers had been built and accepted,

says Schumitz.Cannon says the new hulls have

proved to be “outstanding” at protecting soldiers from bomb attacks in Afghani-stan. While he wouldn’t provide details, he said no soldiers riding in Strykers with the new hulls had been killed by IED blasts.

The new-style hull adds about 4,000 pounds to the Stryker’s weight and re-quires a beefed-up suspension, Schumitz says.

Cannon says the weight is not signifi-cant, and that the vehicle can still be trans-ported aboard a C-130 Hercules aircraft.

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’12 MARINE CORPS Preview

industry ready for competition to lift offBy Amy McCullough

New Marine One

The VH-60Ns in Marine Helicopter Squadron One are more than 20 years old and have an average of 6,500 flight hours. The squadron’s VH-3Ds are 15 years older. The competition for a next-generation chopper seems to be in limbo.

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Six months after Naval Air Sys-tems Command announced its intentions to move forward with

a competition to build the next-generation presidential helicopter, industry is still waiting on the Pentagon to take the next step.

Officials would say only that changes to the program were possible, but declined to provide further details. Some industry insiders wonder whether the controversial program might fall under the Pen-tagon’s budget ax, saying at the very least the highly politicized program may remain stalled until after the 2012 elections.

NAVAIR spokeswoman Capt. Cate Mueller says “the Navy renewed (its) fo-cus on improving function-ality of the in-service fleet” over the last few years, in-cluding reducing the over-all weight of the existing VH-3D and VH-60N air-craft, implementing a ser-vice life extension program, improving the lift and upgrading the cock-pit. The VH-3D fleet, first fielded in 1974, has an average of 10,500 flight hours; the VH-60N fleet, fielded in 1989, has an aver-age of 6,500, Mueller says.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates shelved the initial Lockheed Martin-led Marine One replacement program in April 2009 after costs ballooned from an estimated $6.5 billion to more than $13 bil-lion for a fleet of 28. Development lagged at least six years behind schedule. The ini-tial contract called for all 28 aircraft to be delivered in two increments by 2013. The Pentagon has already spent $3.2 billion on

development. The first nine birds are still sitting in the hangar.

In February, NAVAIR released a preso-licitation for the next-generation presiden-tial helicopter, which is operated by Marine Helicopter Squadron One at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. At the time, the pro-gram executive office confirmed the analy-sis of alternatives was in the final stages.

The budget environment has changed

significantly since then, and the Pentagon’s biggest challenge will be focusing the air-craft’s requirements and ensuring costs don’t get out of control again.

The now-canceled VH-71, manufac-tured by a Lockheed Martin/AugustaWest-land team, was loaded down with top-of-the-line communications equipment, hardened hulls, and antimissile defenses, all of which made the aircraft difficult to build.

This time around Lockheed has part-nered with Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp., to offer its H-92 medium-lift helicopter,

Sikorsky spokesman Frans Jurgens says. The design combines the S-92 airframe

and the CH148 Canadian Maritime Heli-copter’s flight control systems with Gen-eral Electric CT7-8 engines, says Jurgens. Advanced capabilities will include “low pilot workload, full authority flight con-trols (fly-by-wire), a state-of-the-art cock-pit, and fail-safe structural design and flaw-tolerant components.

Unlike the S92, which is a commercial aircraft, the AW101—the previous win-ner—was built as a com-bat aircraft for the United Kingdom and Italy, an Au-gustaWestland spokesman says. It boasts three engines and a unique rotor-blade design intended to provide “maximum performance” based on the aircraft’s flight profile.

“The 101 has a long op-erational history now. It has a couple hundred thousand hours on it and (it) will not throw any surprises” at the Navy because of its matu-

rity, says the AugustaWestland spokesman, who would speak only on background. “That’s why the Indian air force bought 12 to be its presidential helicopter because it’s extremely reliable.”

Boeing owns the rights to the aircraft and would serve as the prime contractor if awarded the competition.

Both the Lockheed/Sikorsky and Boe-ing/AugustaWestland teams responded to the Navy’s request for information last year, outlining how the team would de-sign and manufacture the aircraft, but of-ficials for each team say there has been little contact since.

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DestroyersDDG-51 sails through political turmoil

By John T. Bennett

’12 NAVY Preview

J

The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program was close to ending when Hun-tington-Ingalls Shipyards laid down the keel for DDG 107, the USS Gravely. A revived program includes plans for at least 10 of the Aegis guided-missile destroyers, splitting the work between Northrop Grumman’s Huntington-Ingalls and General Dynamics Bath Ironworks.

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These have been an eventful few years for the DDG-51 destroyer program. But it appears all is

well with a program that until recently was slated to stop churning out ships.

The Navy decided to build only a few models of an entire new class of ships -- dubbed DDG-1000 -- and restarted production of the Arleigh Burke-class war ship. The Obama administration made the Aegis Weapon System-equipped ships a central part of its missile defense plan. And one of the two manufacturers of the ships, Northrop Grumman Corp., spun off its shipbuilding business.

But with the smoke clearing from those moves, Navy and industry officials say the DDG-51 program is progressing on schedule.

The sea service made the call to revive Arleigh Burke production in 2008, and talked of building eight new ships.

But now, “the Navy’s plan includes at least 10 continuation DDG-51 class ships, and the number of platforms could ... increase,” says Beci Brenton, a spokeswoman for Northrop spin-off Huntington-Ingalls Industries.

Not bad for a program that just three years ago was on its last leg.

“The approach for the [DDG-51] restart leverages the cost savings of existing production lines, [and] reduces the potential for cost overruns and delays

through the incremental approach of developing new technologies,” Navy acquisition executive Sean Stackley and other service officials said in a recent joint statement prepared for leaders of the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee.

The restart plan also “strengthens and stabilizes the industrial base to more efficiently and cost-effectively produce ships to meet our national needs,” they told the panel.

Each new ship will cost around $3.5 billion, according to Congressional Research Service analyst Ron O’Rourke. That means both Huntington-Ingalls and General Dynamics stand to benefit from the revived production.

The Navy several years ago had every intention of ceasing production of the ships at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine and

Northrop Grumman’s Ingalls Shipyard in Mississippi.

Bath is working on the final pair of 51s awarded under previous contracts (DDG-111, the USS Spruance, and DDG-112, the USS Michael Murphy). Picking up work started under the Northrop banner,

Hunt ington-Ingal l s Industries is under contract to build DDG-113.

The Navy also has awarded Huntington-Ingalls a contract to build DDG-114. Bath will build DDG-115. The company offering the best price estimate for Arleigh Burke 116 would get the contract for that ship.

Despite breaking off from Northrop, Brenton says Huntington-Ingalls is focused on becoming the Navy’s “shipbuilder of choice in the design and build of future Aegis destroyers.”

But its top shipbuilding rival reports it has made big strides in ship design tactics. And that could give it an edge when pursuing future DDG contracts.

Jim DeMartini, a General Dynamics spokesman, says the shipyard’s work on the first vessel in the DDG-1000 class “is coming along better than any lead ship has before.”

DeMartini credits three-dimensional computer-aided design, a technology he calls a “game-changer” in improving the company’s shipbuilding process. General Dynamics is slated to build three DDG-1000s.

U.S. ARMY FORCES COMMAND

FORT BRAGG, N.C. -- The paint was not quite dry yet at U.S. Army Forces Com-mand’s new headquarters when acting

commander Lt. Gen. Howard Bromberg and several key deputies sat down with DEFENSE STANDARD for their first media interview in their new center of operations.

Earlier that morning, in a dedication cere-mony timed to beat the steamy eastern Car-olina heat, Bromberg had presided over the ceremonial ribbon-cutting and uncasing of the command’s colors. Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz, his counterpart at U.S. Army Reserve Com-mand, which shares the 631,000-square-foot building with FORSCOM, did the same.

And with that, the Army’s largest command – and the primary provider

of Army forces to combatant commanders world-wide – had officially relocated to Fort Bragg from Fort McPherson, Ga., a move set in motion by the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure legislation.

That was the easy part. The bigger question is how FORSCOM will manage emerging challenges such as shrinking defense budgets, industry’s role in resetting equipment returning from Iraq and Af-ghanistan, and a pending drawdown of the Army force structure.

Joining Bromberg in the interview were Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, deputy chief of staff for operations; Brig. Gen. (Maj. Gen. select) John O’Connor, deputy chief of staff for logistics; and Col. Darryl Murch, the command’s budget chief. (Gen. David Rodriguez since has taken over as commander, with Brom-berg returning to his role as deputy commander.)

The following was edited for brevity and clarity.

Nothing is easy as the Army’s largest force provider readies for life after Iraq and Afghanistan By Julie Bird

With combat operations and multiple deployments winding down and equipment returning home, FORSCOM intends to transition away from contract equipment maintenance at units’ home bases.

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Can you set the stage for the major issues FORSCOM is facing these days? Bromberg:. We had to readjust and reshape the Army after Desert Storm and after

9/11 and re-tailor capabilities. In this next phase, as we come down in Iraq and Afghani-stan, we’ll just take the mission and see what we have to do to change and adjust for it.

Graham: We have a major event four times a year called the Army Force Genera-tion Synchronization Resourcing Conference. We literally bring the Army together four times a year here at this headquarters and synchronize all that we do and have all the right pieces in the right places to go fight the nation’s wars or to do whatever, like sup-port the homeland or the Haiti mission.

What kind of challenges have those conferences tackled lately?Graham: One of the biggest challenges is when you have a high-demand unit, but

you don’t have very many of them, like intelligence or explosive ordnance disposal. You have to sort out how you build enough of those units to do what you need to do.

Bromberg: You might take an organization and reshape it, or you might go back to the combatant commander and see if the mission can be done in another way. We need to figure out how soldiers get adequate rest time to spend time with their families.

Graham: We always say the enemy gets a vote. Based on how the enemy is fight-ing, the commander on the ground in theater comes back and gives us requirements. We need to figure out how we can support him, so we sometimes combine units together or bring in different individuals to form an ad hoc unit to go do that mission.

Can you think of an example?Graham: IEDs. We had organizations that did explosive disposal, but we did not

have near enough that did those types of explosives. So we had to take other engineer units and train them to be route-clearance units. You need more capability than you had before because it’s a new mission set.

Bromberg: And we have to make decisions all the time about where we refurbish our equipment. Do we do it at the home station? Do we do it at Army depot?

O’Connor: We’ll send our equipment through an automated reset program out of theater. We will determine a deliberate plan well in advance, 180 days out from a unit coming home, exactly where every single piece of equipment is going to go. This fits our back-to-basics campaign for Forces Command that has allowed us to look at how we’re going to use our soldiers when they come back.

We actually had contracts in place to fill the (equipment maintenance) gap while soldiers were deployed. We’re going to start weighing those contracts out to right-size them to support missions, but get soldiers back to the basics.

Can you explain more about that?O’Connor: As we draw down, everything’s got to draw down simultaneously. We

want to synchronize it so we don’t create an imbalance. You can’t just take a $100 mil-lion contract that’s providing support to three installations and take it off the table. We want to do it smartly, so as a unit comes back it can pick up the support and responsibil-ity. We’ll bring down the contracts appropriately.

Bromberg: Let me give you an example. So I’m in a tank unit and didn’t need my tanks for my mission in Iraq. I’ve been gone for over a year and someone’s got to maintain those tanks, because in the interim a crisis could happen somewhere else where

Contractors’ role is at the heart of FORSCOM’s post-combat planning

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Lt. Gen. Howard Bromberg

Maj. Gen. Mark Graham

Brig. Gen. John O’Connor

Col. Darryl Murch

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FORSCOM trimmed its headquarters staff by 15 percent for the move to Fort Bragg, N.C., in anticipation of upcoming budget cuts.

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we need the tanks. Now those tank units come back and have soldiers who know how to fix and maintain those tanks. We don’t need those contractors doing that any more.

Another example might be our aviation. Aviation is in such high demand that they redeploy in about a year. They don’t have enough time to repair their own helicopters and to keep training for their next deployment, so we have to give them helicopters that are ready to fly, and fix helicopters at the same time so they’re ready to go. This involves the whole industrial base of the nation. You have large companies, Army depots, everybody involved all the way down to the sergeant with a wrench.

O’Connor: We’ve got to make sure our facilities here are ready to receive 10,000 MRAPs coming back from theater, that we’ve got the right maintenance institutions there. Until we can get that built we’ll have some contractors to help oversee that.

I would think it would take some time to requalify and recertify soldiers in certain skills.

O’Connor: We have to retrain the installations how to provide that support back to the soldier, where before they had complete control but now we have to work what we call an installation support plan. We have to blend our cultures and our automation and our systems with theirs.

Talk a little bit about the next war and how FORSCOM is preparing for that. Graham: We do have basic mission-essential tasks -- offensive operations, de-

fensive operations, stability operations. And inside those from a strategic level all the way to what a small unit does we’ve got manuals and automated systems now that lay out all the tasks from a system to a squad to a platoon all the way up to large forma-tions. So we’ve been using a lot of those skills in Afghanistan, but some we have not.

So when you come back and you start resetting, that’s the training you go through. You always train to the hardest mission – a full-blown fight against the enemy, a near-peer competitor.

Bromberg: We’ll have this basic block of capabilities and then we can add things on.

O’Connor: We’re projecting that 2012 is the first time we’ll have equipment on hand at the levels that the U.S. Army Reserve Command’s readiness levels will be at 90 percent, equal to the active component forces. That’s a huge progression that we’ve made.

Is there a crunch point where there’s not enough money or people?Bromberg: I think we’re very well resourced for the fight, but we do have to

look at doing things differently. There will be some things where we just have to be smarter about how we use our money. Because it’s very easy when you’re in the fight to resource everything without, a lot of times, the proper questioning.

Murch: Think of the left-behind equipment. As soldiers come back we’ll look at this and say instead of a using a bunch of contractors to maintain it, maybe we’ll hire some in advisory and accountability levels to take advantage of some of these soldiers who can be the wrench-turners. It also gets us back to basics of what soldiers do – take care of equipment.

Bromberg: The money we’re going to save is in the hundreds of millions.O’Connor: In Operation Clean Sweep, units are going to bring equipment back.

We call it the war on excess. Do we need all that equipment now or not? It costs us a lot to sustain it, to store it and maintain it, so let’s start divesting ourselves of things that we no longer require. That will drive down operating costs, overhead costs, man-agement costs.

I think we’re very well resourced for

the fight, but we do have to look at

doing things differently. There will be

some things where we just have to be

smarter about how we use our money.

- Lt. Gen. Howard Bromberg

“”

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By Sara Michael

When then-Staff Sgt. Leroy Petry lost his right arm throwing a live grenade away from his comrades in Afghanistan, his valor earned him a Medal of Honor. But his injury also earned him a far more

common distinction: that of a wounded service member who would come to rely on a prosthetic limb.

Petry’s new arm and hand are a bit more advanced than the standard pros-thetic technology, says Del Lipe, area practice manager with Hanger Prosthet-ics and Orthotics in San Antonio, who works with Petry. Petry’s prosthetic, made by Hanger, is known as a myoelectric limb, which uses signals trans-mitted from surface electrodes that read the muscle contractions and prompt open and close actions. He uses two kinds of hands, the i-LIMB Pulse from Touch Bionics and a hand from Bebionic, both in the United Kingdom. They have microprocessors that allow for more than the traditional three-finger pinch movement.

But with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increasing the number of amputees almost daily, the Defense Department, Department of Veterans Affairs and other federal agencies continue their push for more and better prosthetic technology. Private industry is doing its part as well.

“It’s unfortunate in prosthetics,” Lipe says. “Wars are always where our field goes wild.”

More than 1,033 service members from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had lost a major limb as of last year, and at least 375 more suffered a partial amputation such as a hand, foot, toes or fingers, according to a September 2010 Congressional Research Service report.

So far, says Lipe, “we are not replacing your hand; we are putting a tool at the end of your arm.”

It’s the little things – think nanotechnology – that will make a big difference

ProstheticsProsthetics

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is developing a neurally-controlled arm limb, with the help of funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that offers 22 degrees of motion, all controlled by brain signals.

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Prosthetics


Researchers around the country are doing their best

to change that, in many cases developing incremental advances

that help the body accept prosthetics or interface better with them.Incredible strides are being made in efforts to improve a user’s

control of a prosthetic by engineering limbs that can be controlled through brain signals. By improving the interface between nervous system and prosthetic, researchers are finding ways to mimic natu-ral motion and control – advances that will benefit amputees such as Petry, whose prosthetics are still somewhat limited in their control and capability.

In the case of an arm amputee, brain signals will travel to nerves that run down the arm, but don’t go anywhere, explains Mike McLoughlin, program manager at the Johns Hopkins University Ap-plied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore. “If you can pick up those sig-nals, those electrical impulses, then you can potentially convert those into telling the prosthetic arm to perform some kind of motion,” he says.

Last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded APL a contract for up to $34.5 million to man-age development of the Modular Prosthetic Limb. The limb offers 22 degrees of motion, including movement of fingers, all controlled by brain signals. “The idea is that they would be able, through an implant to the brain, to think about moving the arm and be able to move it,” McLoughlin says.

Similarly, brain signals could help control the sensation of touch, allowing an amputee some level of tactile perception, he says. An amputee could control the arm and interact with the environment thanks to basic sensations such as pressure. “Our goal is to make the ability to control that arm very natural,” he says.

One of the greatest engineering challenges facing researchers is the ability to make an arm with natural strength and dexterity in a manageable size and weight, McLoughlin says. Researchers also face neuroscience challenges in understanding what’s happening in the brain to process the information.

Five years into a seven-year program, researchers have devel-

oped a “very capable prosthetic limb,” he says. Over the next several months, they will be working with the first human implantations, and in the next couple of years, McLoughlin says he hopes to have devel-oped the technology that will be the basis of a commercial venture.

A t the University of Texas in Arlington, bioengineering pro-fessor Mario Romero-Ortega and his team are approaching

the brain-prosthetic connection by placing an interface in the pros-thetic, rather than in the brain. Researchers have built a neural inter-face — with the help of a $2.2 million DARPA grant, which is part of the reliable neural interfacing (RENET) program — to connect the prosthetic to the nervous system. Through this implanted interface, Romero-Ortega and his team aim to unlock the nerve channels that allow for better movement and control. But deciphering the various kinds of nerves (that is, those that signal heat versus those that deter-mine touch) is a major hurdle, he says.

“The work we do is directed to provide the feedback mechanism in addition to motor control,” Romero-Ortega says. “It’s a more natu-ral way to access the nervous system.”

Commercialization of such cutting-edge products isn’t far off. For example, with the help of federal dollars, the research of Hugh Herr, an associate professor and director of the Biomechatronics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., has resulted in a foot and ankle system known as PowerFoot BiOM. The system is developed by iWalk, a company Herr founded.

The prosthetic, which simulates the ankle, Achilles tendon and calf muscles and provides upward energy to mimic the natural effort put into walking, is already being made available to amputees, includ-ing U.S. service members.

S imilarly, the fields of regenerative medicine and nano-technology are gaining traction, and receiving interest and

funding from the federal government, which could significantly improve prosthetics by changing how the body attaches to and accepts then.

“We are not focused on prosthetics themselves,” says Dr. An-thony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenera-

Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry uses a myoelectric prosthetic arm similar to this one.

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Prosthetics


tive Medicine in North Carolina. “We are thinking of ways of connecting prosthetics to engineered tissues to bridge gaps where needed.”

Improving the connections between the human body and the implant or prosthetic reduces infections and inflammation, and increases the comfort, mobility and lifespan of the prosthetic. For example, if a nerve is too short to connect with a prosthetic, re-searchers can extract and cultivate cells to support the growth of new tissues and regrow the nerve into the prosthesis, providing more finite control of the limb. “That’s where the research is right now,” Atala says.

Atala directs the Wake Forest-Pittsburgh consortium of the Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM), which brings together researchers around the country to develop treatments for wounded service members.

With funding for the first five years totaling close to $300 mil-lion, AFIRM is a partnership between the Army, Navy, Air Force, Veterans Health Administration, Defense Health Program and the National Institutes of Health.

Although the field of prosthetics is one step removed from that of regenerative medicine, the efforts of AFIRM and others may one day benefit amputees, says Terry Irgens, director of AFIRM. “I think down the road some of our scarless wound healing and our artificial skin potentially would help,” he says.

At Brown University in Providence, R.I., a major academic partner with the VA’s Center for Restorative and Regener-

ative Medicine, associate professor of engineering and orthopedics Thomas Webster has dedicated his career to developing nanoma-terials to improve the human body’s acceptance of prosthetics. By modifying the prosthetic surface with nanomaterials, researchers aim to promote skin cell growth, which can create a better seal to the artificial limb.

Nanomaterials are fibers or particles with parts measuring less than 100 nanometers. To put that into perspective, a single strand of hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide.

All materials exert energy that dictates how the surfaces react with each other. By adding nanoparticles to a surface, researchers can increase the surface area (consider the amount of surface on a golf ball versus that on a marble), thereby increasing the surface energy. More surface energy is important because it increases the interaction with the other materials.

With nanoparticles, researchers are increasing the surface area of the implant and the energy of that surface, changing the reac-tion between implant and the human body. As the blood cells and proteins interact more with the surface of the implant or prosthetic, Webster says, nanoparticles can promote tissue growth and reduce infection and inflammation – all of which can benefit the field of prosthetics.

“We are looking at modifying implants we already use today with nanotechnology or creating nanofeatures,” says Webster.

Webster’s work started in 1995, when he started to recognize the limited life span of implants. A hip implant, for example, lasts 15 to 20 years. So rather than just focus on developing new implants, he and other researchers started trying to find materials that would mimic the body’s response, in hope that the implants or prosthet-ics would be accepted better and last longer. Nanomaterials, they found, do just that.

“Our initial thought was if we could mimic the natural rough-ness of our tissues in these synthetic materials, we should get a better cell response, and that’s what we’ve seen,” he says. For example, with funding from the VA and other sources, Webster and his fellow researchers focused on changing the landscape of the part of an implant inserted into bone. They roughed the sur-face, mimicking the natural skin landscape and encouraging the regrowth of skin cells.

Through the work of neural interfaces and nanomaterials, pros-thetic design and implementation will continue to improve, re-searchers say. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have infused inter-est and federal funding into the efforts, and researchers are working to develop products that offer greater movement and control and improved connection and acceptance with the human body. J

Researchers at Brown University are looking to nanomaterials to promote tissue growth, decrease infection and reduce inflammation, all keys to improving the connection and acceptance of prosthetics.

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One by one, young and strong, they flow

out of our nation’s vast prairies and

coastal farms, mountains and one-horse

towns, cities and villages, hell-bent on service -- not

only to the higher forces of god and country -- but to

each other. The old generals, who once were them, are

in awe as this new crop of warriors fights ferociously

in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just what is going on with this

hip-hop, video-game, wild-bunch of a generation mostly

in their 20s and 30s? This is supposed to be a generation

deemed incapable, by many, of repeating the exploits

and heroism of those coming before them.

The truth is, they are as tough and combat-savvy as

ever, say the older military people working with them.

By Tom Breen

Spring 2009 DEFENSE STANDARD 13

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DEFENSE STANDARD Spr ing 2009

12

COUNTRYA harrowing six-hour firefight

ends with 150 dead Taliban

and 10 Silver Stars

for a Green Beret unita NEW BaND OF BROTHERSFOR LOVE AND

THE ENDURING LEGACY OF

Paul Ray SmithBy Tom Breen

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12 DEFENSE STANDARD Fall 2009

BOOK_DS09V3.indd 12

9/11/09 2:31:21 PM

Fall 2009 DEFENSE STANDARD 13

Scores of soldiers survived

thanks to selfless choice

by first Medal of Honor recipient

in Operation Iraqi Freedom

A close up of

Paul R. Smith’s

Congressional

Medal of Honor,

awarded on

April 4, 2005, at

the White House.

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A few inches long, it weighs maybe an ounce or so, hardly impos-

ing in its physicality. It is cloth and fine metal: inanimate, life-

less, prone to material disintegration if left untended. Yet this

diminutive still form -- we know it as the Medal of Honor -- serves as

a lasting lens into the soul of our nation, from the Civil War, through

World Wars I and II, into Vietnam and Korea, the Persian Gulf War,

now Iraq and Afghanistan. Over and over, the medal tells a long, wind-

ing and enduring story of the “uncommon valor” of the 3,450 recipi-

ents honored since 1862 when it first was awarded to six Union soldiers

commandeering a Confederate locomotive. Since then, the medal has

grown in prestige and significance, inside and outside the military, a

symbol of sacrifice and selflessness.

It truly goes to only a heroic few, to those who lift themselves “above

and beyond the call of duty,” making free choices, not choices they are

ordered to make, but choices they make when the blood is rushing,

when their lives turn secondary to those of others at their sides, when,

as Rudyard Kipling once observed, they make their choices “for free-

dom’s brotherhood.”

One of the hallowed few, Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, rests

now, the chill of a Potomac autumn settling in at Arlington Nation-

al Cemetery, greeted sometimes by strangers, more often by family,

friends and his band of brothers and sisters, forever linked to a tomb-

stone that reads simply, “In Memory of Paul Ray Smith ... Medal of

Honor ... SFC USA Iraq .... Sep 24 1969 .... April 4 2003 ... Purple Heart

KIA ... His Spirit Lives Forever.”

The first person to receive the medal during the Iraq War (four have

come after him), Smith has been gone more than six years now, dying

at age 33 in an April 4, 2003, battle on the road to Baghdad.

Resolute and committed, Smith was a Southern boy who yearned for

a meaningful identity through the Army, finding it on an Iraqi spring

day when he barreled into a disabled M-133 armored personnel car-

rier, manned the vehicle’s 50-caliber machine gun to hold off advancing

Iraqi Republican Guard soldiers, falling forever in a fusillade of enemy

machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. By then, ac-

cording to Pentagon and firsthand accounts, Smith had slain up to 50

“In the Gates of Death rejoice!

We see and hold the good --

Bear witness, Earth, we have made our choice

For Freedom’s brotherhood!”

- Excerpt from Rudyard Kipling’s

1917 poem, “The Choice.”

BOOK_DS09V3.indd 13

9/11/09 2:32:48 PM

Lt. Michael P. Murphy and the Men of Operation Red Wings

Spring 2008 Murphy’s actions -- phone and rifle

in hand, blood spurting -- now are en-graved in SEAL lore, a lasting meta-phor for the valor and loyalty to one an-

other that defines Special Operations. Indeed, out there along the jagged cliffs of the Hindu Kush, Murphy and his team took on a myth-ic veneer. If it were another time in Ameri-can history, during World War I or II, their valor would be locked into the American psyche, right up there with Audie Murphy from World War II, connected to Michael by spirit if not blood, and Alvin York from World War I.

Yet military heroes in our current world seem to fade, recognized for a short

while and then cast aside, if not forgotten. Perhaps, however, as time passes, the Saga of Red Wings will occupy its proper place in military lore.

The Lion of Fallujah: Inside the Soul of an Unabashed Warrior

Summer 2008 Not far from where he rests now, arm and

arm with a legion of other warriors, Douglas Zembiec spent long days, sometimes nights,

working at Marine Corps headquarters in northern Virginia. It was 2005, and the 32-year-old Marine had come out of the Iraqi bloodbath -- which still was bubbling at that time -- with a slew of combat medals and shrapnel wounds. Promoted at that point from captain to major, he could have played it safe, far from combat, moving up through the ranks, perhaps even to Marine commandant.

He was that type of leader -- innately smart, gutsy, “absolutely magnetic,” said his friend, re-tired Marine Corps Col. John W. Ripley of An-napolis, Md. He did not have to return to com-bat. “Hey, Dougie,” many friends told him in unison: “Stay put, you’ve done your duty, give it up, and stay in one piece. They’re going to make you a general some day.”

“No way,” the 6-2, 190-pound Zembiec would say. “I’m going back. I have to go back. I can’t stay cooped up.”

In the end, no office could hold this guy, the guy they still call the “Lion of Fallujah.”

Operational Detachment Alpha 3336: A New Band of Brothers

Spring 2009

Immediately upon landing, (team leader Capt. Kyle) Walton’s head struck the ground after two bullets hit his helmet. He shook it off, and leaped into the battle. As the fight unraveled, Walton’s mom near Indianapolis and dad in Florida went about their daily routines, unaware until much

The Best of BREENI

n his work for this magazine, Tom Breen specialized

in crafting tributes to war heroes and the legacy

they leave. Tom leaves his own legacy -- his words.

We can think of no better tribute to Tom following his

unexpected passing this summer than to reprint some of our favorite

passages from his work. Farewell, good friend.


DEFENSE STANDARD 200830

The U.S. and the Philippines

Old alliesjoin forcesfor waron terror

By Tom Breen

(Top) An Army Special Operations soldier leads a security assistance training session for Armed Forces Philippines troops. (Middle) U.S. Army Col. David Fridovich, right, stands alongside Maj. Gen. Ernesto Carolina, commander of the Philippines’ Southern Command, during a ceremony in Zamboanga City.

PHOTO: Petty Officer First Class Edward G. Martens

PHOTO: JO2(SW) Stacy Young

(Bottom) U.S. forces and Filipino soldiers during the Balikatan joint military exercises at Crow Valley in Tarlac province, north of Manila.

PHOTO: Courtesy of Philippine Information Agency

News Analysis

Nearly 20 years after the United States shut down its bases in the Philippines, the American military has forged a strik-ing new presence in the Southeast Asian archipelago of 7,100 islands and nearly 100 million people.From the mountains of northern Luzon to the jungles and pineapple plantations of Mindanao and elsewhere in the south, American forces continue to train Philippine soldiers and police to contend with a decades-old Islamic insurgency, as well as building bridges, schools and roads to win civilian support and assist the Philippine government. In addition, the United States rushes in to help when natural di-sasters occur, such as in June 2008 when hundreds died in a ferry-boat accident. Under orders from President Bush, the U.S. contributed supplies and food in the rescue efforts.In short, the U.S.-Philippines relationship is as strong as it was during the Cold War days.In moving back into the Philippines, U.S. forces not only help control an insurgency that has some links to Al Qaeda, although in reality is far less potent than in the Middle East, but have produced a forward-basing operation that serves U.S. interests throughout the region.

later that one of the fiercest firefights of the Afghan War was taking place. That was the way it was throughout the day, with warriors’ families in places like Athens, Ohio; Fredericksburg, Virginia; Casper, Wyoming; and Smith-ville, Texas, oblivious to what was going on. Here they were, ordinary lives in America that were rolling on as ex-traordinary deeds were unfolding literally a world away. This juxtaposition, with the American people often in the dark as to the harsh reality of the conflicts in Iraq and Af-ghanistan, is the face of war in the 21st century.

Bob Howard: The Soldier Who Would Not Surrender

Summer 2010 As he lay dying at Waco’s St. Catherine’s hospice in

central Texas shortly before Christmas, Army Special Forces Medal of Honor legend Bob Howard — wounded and near death countless times in Vietnam as he became America’s most decorated war hero — fought for his life one last time with the same ferocity that marked every moment of his existence. He was damned if he was going off into the good night without a fight.

Salvatore Giunta: A profile in courage

Winter 2010 Their actions, not their words, speak for them now, the

seven Medal of Honor recipients in the Iraq and Afghani-stan wars who came before Sal Giunta, the ones who died so their buddies could live, so the rest of us could go about our lives back home. …

Now, as winter and the holiday season embrace us, we also can see Giunta, the only living Medal of Honor re-cipient from the two wars, dragging away his buddy Josh Brennan from enemy clutches. Now, Giunta, the 25-year-old Army soldier from the heartland, is the symbolic face of not only the seven Medal of Honor recipients from the two wars who came before him, but of the millions of troops, then and now, who go where they are asked to go, and do what they are asked to do.

SFC Jared Monti: Doing the Right Thing

Spring 2010 Up in Massachusetts now, with the deep

snows finally fading, Paul Monti eagerly awaits the day when his beloved baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, will start playing again. The Red Sox, a state religion of sorts in Massachusetts with Fenway Park as the Cathedral, were a love of Jared’s too. In August 2009 Paul Monti threw out a first pitch at Fenway in honor of his son. “They could have honored anyone, and they hon-ored Jared,” he said. “I was so proud.”

The Robby Miller Story: Standing Proud, to the End

Spring 2011

As they look back, they now think of a son who not only rose in combat, but one who shined as an informal ambassador of sorts for American values. He spoke Pashto, he rode horses across the Afghan countryside, he shared meals with vil-lagers, and even showed Afghan troops a video of snowboarding, telling them, if the war stopped, they too could snow-board along the ranges. Along the way, as with many Green Berets, he certainly turned himself into a Renaissance man of sorts, prepared to fight, but always leading, learning and broadening himself in a strange new culture, even in the face of imminent dan-ger. We can see him now, bubbling with energy and resolve: One moment, he is riding a horse through a village, smiling and waving to the local folk, and the next he is confronting evil and sacrificing himself without hesitation.

That is the way it is with warriors and their families: One second, the world is normal and predictable. The next second, it is not. J

FINAL FRAME

A Marine lays a wreath at a Pentagon ceremony honoring the 184 people killed when terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight

77 into the building 10 years earlier. The Pentagon memorial park includes a bench for each of those who died that day.

PHOTO: Mass Comm. Spc. 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley


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