Test, evaluation squadron receives first Guardian Angel Air-Droppable Rescue Vehicles

by Airman 1st Class Jason Couillard
99th Air Base Wing Public Affairs Office

11/14/2013 -  NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev.  -- The 88th Test and Evaluations Squadron received the first set of Guardian Angel Air-Deployable Rescue Vehicles in the Air Force's inventory Nov. 12.

The GAARV is a multi-purpose utility vehicle intended to help combat search and rescue teams retrieve individuals that have been isolated and can expand the ability to quickly reach further into the battle space to provide a more mobile rescue capability.

"The GAARV may provide capability enhancements for maneuverability, force protection, and technical rescue capabilities within the ground domain," said Capt. Francis Hallada, 88th TES Guardian Angel Test Division commander.

Operational testing of the GAARV will start in March 2014 to evaluate its suitability and effectiveness for the Guardian Angel [GA] weapon system. The GA is a non-aircraft, equipment-based weapon system and is organized into nine specific capabilities -- prepare, mission plan, insert, movement, actions on objective, medically treat, extract, reintegrate, and adapt.

"The GAARV is the first multi-purpose tactical ground vehicle intended to support combat search and rescue operations and other Guardian Angel missions," said Master Sgt. Michael Butler, 88th Test and Evaluations Squadron Guardian Angel Test Division section chief. "This delivery marks the first vehicles delivered for operational testing of a new combat search and rescue capability that ultimately may enhance the Air Force's personnel recovery core function."

The new vehicle can enhance mission effectiveness as well as have dual roles. The vehicle will be able to move amongst rubble/debris fields during humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts to transport survivors and rescue equipment.

"The [GAARV] may be employed in a variety of physical environments across the range of military operations," Hallada said. "During a major combat operation, the vehicle has the potential to provide a capability for the rescue team to keep terrain and distance separation from enemy forces in order to provide enough time for the recovery package to reach the objective area."

The mission of the 88th TES is to maximize HH-60 Pave Hawk, HC-130 Hercules, and the GA weapon systems capability by fielding combat ready solutions to combat search and rescue forces through innovation, test and evaluation, and tactics development in order to perfect lethality, survivability, and sustainability of the nations forces.

With the first GAARV on hand, the combat search and rescue team members who use this equipment will be able to remove isolated individuals quicker, which in the end could save lives.

Director: DARPA Focuses on Technology for National Security

By Cheryl Pellerin

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15, 2013 – Projects undertaken by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency may have some immediate applications, but what program managers there really look to do is blow open new sets of opportunities from deep research, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar said here yesterday.

Speaking to a large audience at the Defense One Summit and to viewers online, the electrical engineer with a doctorate in applied physics described DARPA-funded work underway to help the warfighter in information technology and brain function.

“Our focus is always breakthrough technologies for national security. We want to show that radically new things are going to be possible,” Prabhakar told interviewer Barbara Starr of CNN.

“I also think this is a great example of much broader societal issues that come up when you’re working at the forefront of these kinds of technologies,” the director said, naming synthetic biology, new materials and privacy concerns related to “big data” as DARPA research topics deserving of public debate.

For the warfighter on the ground today, DARPA research in information technology is more about using the kinds of capabilities readily available in civilian apps and smartphones in the combat theater, Prabhakar said. When soldiers on patrol in Afghanistan are trying to understand the local environment, she noted, they do that largely with paper maps.

“Yes, we have a lot of information about what’s going on,” Prabhakar said, “but it’s not down in the hands of the soldier.”

In the last few years DARPA initiated a program called Transformative Apps that dealt with some of the hard security and other challenges of using Android smartphone technology in theater, Prabhakar said.

“What we did essentially,” she explained, “was get these Android devices in the hands of soldiers who were going out on patrols every single day and gave them the ability to carry a lot of map data to know where they were, track what was going on in the local community, and share that information with each other.”

But DARPA went further, the director added.

“We’ve now got that ability in theater, so soldiers come back and say, ‘This really worked, I need this app. But what would be great would be this next capability.’ And our developers are working with them in real time to develop those new apps, so our capability keeps growing,” Prabhakar said.

Soldiers tell DARPA that what would be useful for the next generation of capabilities are things like getting records of what other foot patrols find as they do their work and combining that information into a data picture, she said.

“Or,” Prabhakar imitates a soldier explaining his or her needs: ‘I talked to this farmer, and I found out what crops he was growing and I want to be able to track that. But now I have information I know I can hand off to the next patrol that’s coming in for the next period of time.’ Those were the kinds of very pragmatic things that were extremely helpful once they got this basic tool,” she explained.

At the other end of the research spectrum, for the warfighter on the ground tomorrow and beyond, DARPA is funding research that combines its work in prosthetics and its research into brain function.

“I think we’re just at the beginning of a very long and interesting journey,” Prabhakar said. “There has been such an interesting set of advances in neuroscience in the last few years, and DARPA has started putting some of those advances to work.”

Some of the work is driven by DARPA program manager and physician Dr. Geoffrey Ling, an Army colonel who retired last year and who has been working for several years with DARPA on prosthetics for wounded veterans, the director said.

“Geoff returned from theater convinced that we had to find a way to advance prosthetics capabilities for our wounded veterans,” Prabhakar explained. Ling was trained as a neurointerventionist, she added, a surgical specialty in which doctors treat conditions and diseases such as cerebral aneurysms, head and neck tumors and strokes.

“To him, the starting point was to understand the brain,” she said. “He launched a program that did two different things we’re now bringing together. One was to develop a very sophisticated prosthetic arm. The other was to do the animal work to understand where the signaling for motor control happens in the brain and how we can start using those signals to control the world around us.”

Based on that work DARPA began human trials in the last year. One of the earliest patients was a longtime quadriplegic named Jan, Prabhakar said, describing how the woman volunteered to have a small array implanted on the surface of her brain.

At the conference, the director showed a video in which Jan, five months after surgery, used ports on the top of her head from which electrical signals are taken to use her thoughts to control a robotic arm linked to a computer.

In the video, Jan showed an amazed reporter that she could easily move the arm left and right, up and down, then shake his hand and even give him a fist bump as she sat smiling but motionless on the bed.

“Can you imagine,” Prabhakar asked the audience, “if we can do that kind of control of prosthetics -- very natural, graceful control, not one finger at a time, but the way we move our limbs today? Then, as you start thinking about what we’re learning, think about how we might build all kinds of complex systems because of what we understand about how the human brain interacts with them.”

Asked about applications of such technology beyond restoring lost limbs, the DARPA director recalled being on a Virginia-class submarine and watching its operation, which involved multiple large screens and interactive touch displays.

“Imagine if we could move beyond that in the future, without having ports on top of your head, but perhaps wirelessly going directly from brain signal to a very sophisticated level of control. Rather than pushing buttons on a screen or moving levers, being able to orchestrate a very complex system,” Prabhakar said.

“That is the door that is opened by this kind of research,” she added, “and frankly, it’s both exhilarating and terrifying.”

Still, she said, DARPA must continue to push the frontiers of

technology.

“That is literally our day job and our core mission,” she said. “We also try very hard to raise these broader ethical issues and societal issues, because well beyond the period of our research, society has some important choices to make.”

NOAA's Arctic mission comes to Eielson

by Senior Airman Zachary Perras
354th Fighter Wing Public Affairs

11/14/2013 - EIELSON AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska -- Miles north beyond Eielson rests the frigid waters of the Arctic. There, researchers and pilots from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration patrolled the airspace Oct. 19 - Nov. 7, collecting valuable data on the earth's atmosphere.

The mission is one of global importance due to the fact that the Arctic feeds weather for the entire Northern Hemisphere. The information collected is used to investigate climate change around the world.

During the span of NOAA's arctic mission, Eielson was the team's home. The base's proximity to the Arctic meant less time flying to the area of operations and more time with eyes on the mission.

"As a small government entity, we frequently rely on the support of other agencies," said Lt. Cmdr. Patrick Didier, NOAA WP-3D Orion pilot. "We had every aspect of support possible all in one place here at Eielson and we wouldn't be able to do this nearly as efficiently anywhere else."

NOAA's Arctic mission aimed to look into the effect of anomalous heat, specifically in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, and its effect on the overlying atmosphere. To do this required eight-hour missions, visibly inspecting the area.

"There are different variables in the air mass that relate to heat fluxes and how they have an effect on how much ice there is in the Arctic and how quickly it forms," Didier said. "We want to investigate the air mass over where the ice forms and see what's happening over time."

NOAA's P-3 aircraft is equipped with a myriad of sensors that detect different qualities of the air, including pressure, temperature and relative humidity. Whether flying at 20,000 feet or only 200 feet above the ice, the aircraft collects data for the team to decipher.

NOAA's research has shown there is less ice at this time of year than is typical of years past because of global climate change. In previous years, there would have been much thicker ice that's typically around two to three years old, but that sort of ice is scarcer now.

Ultimately, the goal is the see what this does to the atmosphere of the area, said Dr. Nick Bond, research meteorologist with the University of Washington.

"There's a certain thrill of discovery here because we're doing work that hasn't been done before and we're taking measurements that haven't been taken before," he said.

Every part of the research provides a valuable and interesting perspective because it shows a more complete picture of the regional situation.

Lt. Col. Andrew Lipina, 354th Fighter Wing Command Post and Plans and Programming chief, said Eielson was excited to support such a unique mission given the national interest in the Arctic.

"The recent release of the national strategy for the Arctic spurred multiple government agencies to research changes to the Arctic environment," Lipina said. "Eielson provided the optimal base of operation for this type of research. NOAA's Arctic flux missions staged from here proved invaluable to understanding the changes in the region."

PMEL prolongs equipment effectiveness

by Staff Sgt. Benjamin W. Stratton
92nd Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs

11/7/2013 - FAIRCHILD AIR FORCE BASE, Wash. -- There's no margin of error when lives are on the line making the Precision Measurement Equipment Laboratory here such an integral part of Fairchild Air Force Base's mission.

"PMEL is responsible for calibrating equipment used in virtually every phase of maintenance for nearly every piece of equipment the Air Force operates," said Barry Bigler, 92nd Maintenance Squadron PMEL site manager and a Spokane, Wash., native. "We provide base-level support of aircraft, precision guided munitions, ground systems and other equipment assigned to the base or geographically separated units."

These back shop warriors maintain, calibrate and certify test, measurement and diagnostic equipment in coordination with Air Force Primary Standards Laboratory, to the National Institute of Standards and Technology and other Air Force Metrology and Calibration-approved sources. The following areas are their primary focus: voltage, current, power, impedance, frequency, temperature, humidity, length, mass and radiation.

"The value of standards and calibration equipment here totals more than $10 million as we service 3,700 units locally while sustaining a 98 percent tool availability rate by a shop of seven," Bigler said.

This tool availability rate tops the Air Force standard by 5 percent. The all-civilian shop not only services units from Fairchild, but also supports Navy units in Idaho and even other bases and units across the Department of Defense.

And as Air Force platforms get older, so does their calibration equipment.

"Many of our systems are 20 to 30 years old," said Larry Loe, 92nd MXS PMEL physical dimensions technician, who has worked here for more than 26 years both on active duty and as a civilian contractor calling Spokane his home. "Our jets [KC-135 Stratotankers] are quickly approaching more than 60 years old and still flying with systems requiring calibration equipment no longer manufactured making our mission very important."

Just as people perform regular maintenance on their own car or truck, PMEL does this with their standards and calibration equipment to prolong equipment's useful life effectively saving the Air Force millions of dollars. Loe said they maintain equipment by means of a science called metrology.

Metrology is the science of measurement and required to ensure Air Force systems are accurate and can reliably perform their designated missions. Every system in the Air Force inventory requires some type of accurate and reliable measurement to be made.

"PMEL is absolutely vital as properly calibrated tools are essential for us to complete our mission correctly," said Airman 1st Class Marcel Acebo, a 92nd MXS crew chief and San Luis, Calif., native. "Without PMEL, there's the grim potential for damage to not only the aircraft, but anyone working on and flying them as well."

Prior to the 1950s, the Air Force had no formal, centralized calibration program. However, during this period of rapidly expanding technology, operational and testing accident rates increased dramatically and contractor conformance deteriorated. So in 1958, a project dubbed, "Test Shop," was established directing that test equipment repair and calibration activities be established at Air Force bases worldwide eventually becoming what is now PMEL.

"What we do is very important for getting those tankers in the air," Bidler said. "They can't do what they do without us."

DOD Engineer Urges Competition to Advance Technology

By Amaani Lyle

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12, 2013 – With technology doubling in advancement roughly every decade, the Defense Department needs to ensure capable and flexible weapons systems to meet future challenges, a Pentagon official said today.

“The military, while leaner, needs to be more agile, flexible, ready and technologically advanced,” Stephen Welby, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for systems engineering told the Defense Daily’s Open Architecture Summit.

Open systems and standard-based components, Welby explained, will enable the department to address obsolescence.

“We should be thinking about open architecture as the means to produce new capabilities and to address agility against emerging threats and … to expand and fill in the gaps.”

But, Welby added, if the government wants competition then it must plan for it. “The government needs to share the data that allows the players to come to the table smart.”

Building capacity to be more flexible in the face of an uncertain future also requires thinking about alternative futures, particularly affordability and its span of options, Welby noted.

As such, the science and technology base of each service now includes engineering resilient systems as a full-fledged topic of research and development, he said.

“It’s a key way to shape across future systems,” Welby said. “Those tools … really enable us to think differently, to think about how we shape designs and deal with threats.”

The deputy assistant secretary also acknowledged that many don’t recognize DOD’s most vital resource, as the single largest engineering organization in the world.

Today, the department employs more than 99,000 uniformed and civilian engineering professionals with about 35,000 in construction trades, he added, emphasizing the right capacity of people is critical to the department’s better buying power goals.

“Today we’re making a lot of hard choices in terms of cost,” Welby said. “We may find ourselves wanting to produce [certain] technologies and systems and we’d like to make sure we don’t have buyer’s remorse as we go forward.”

DOD Explores Standards-Based Approach to Information-sharing

By Cheryl Pellerin

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8, 2013 – The participation this week of DOD Deputy Chief Information Officer David DeVries on a panel of information-sharing experts is an example of department efforts over several years to make its information environment relevant in the 21st century and beyond.

DeVries, deputy CIO for information enterprise and one of four deputies under DOD CIO Teresa M. Takai, summarized DOD’s nearly five years of experience with a government-wide, standards-based approach to exchanging information.

The program is called the National Information Exchange Model, or NEIM.

The panel, part of a daylong conference on the program held Nov. 6 at the National Defense University, included several NEIM experts and addressed a large physical audience and online viewers.

“Three years ago you would not have had a senior DOD person sitting up here,” DeVries said, adding that NEIM now is one of the information-sharing tools in use at DOD.

“Inside DOD we’re saying consider it first when you’re building a need to share information with somebody, because my mission partners I share information with from inside DOD are not limited to inside DOD,” the deputy CIO said.

“Anywhere we where we go, whether it’s a single person or a small team or a larger group of folks, they exchange and they share information with other partners, whether it’s other governmental agencies or groups or other civilians,” DeVries added. “We share information. It goes both ways.”

The idea for the NEIM information-sharing framework began with a group of 20 states that started working together to overcome problems they had exchanging information across state and city government boundaries, according to the NEIM.gov website.

That effort, called the Global Justice Information-Sharing Initiative, led to the creation of an interoperable model for data exchange that solved a range of information-sharing challenges across government agencies.

By 2005, the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, the prerelease of the Global Justice XML Data Model in 2003, and collaborative efforts by the justice and homeland security communities to produce a set of common data elements for data-exchange development and harmonization had led to the launch of NIEM.

NIEM was formally initiated in April 2005 by the CIOs of the departments of Homeland Security and Justice. In October 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services joined as NEIM’s third steward. NEIM version 1.0 was released in 2006; NEIM version 3.0 was released this week.

All 50 states and 19 federal agencies, including the Defense Department, are using NIEM at varying levels of maturity, according to NEIM.org.

“I came onto the DOD staff about four-and-a-half years ago and in my first two months there I learned this new word called NEIM,” DeVries said. “I had to look it up and Google told me what it was … so we’ve come a long way in my 4.5 years of how to take NEIM and mature it.”

NEIM is not the only information-sharing mechanism DOD uses, the deputy CIO added, “but it’s a great toolkit for all of us.”

The hard work now, DeVries said, is taking the framework and making the information sharing happen.

“It’s kind of like … whatever your smart phone is, when I get an app today I’m amazed the app is on the phone,” he said. “I’m even more amazed that the app knows how to find my bank account and my deposits. How it did that I don’t know, but there’s a whole rich framework and schema behind it that allowed that to happen.”

In fact, according to a video on the NEIM.gov website by NIEM Executive Director Donna Roy, NEIM can be compared with many standards found in the banking industry, which standardized its exchanges for credit cards so no matter where cards or ATM cards are issued, they can be used anywhere in the world.

It’s similar for DOD, for cross-jurisdictional information moving back and forth among discrete exchanges within DOD or between DOD and its partners in law enforcement, natural disaster assistance, health, cyber, military forces, chemical and biological threats, and other communities.

At DOD, DeVries said, even after nearly five years of experience with NEIM, he and his team are still learning.

“There are a lot of you smart folks out there who live this data stuff day in and day out,” the deputy CIO told the audience. “But it’s the business people who have to take that and put it into the language that gets us a capability on the street. That’s our challenge.”

Capturing space: Air Force space surveillance system tracks satellites, provides data

by Tech. Sgt. Matthew Bates
Defense Media Activity

11/5/2013 - MAUI, Hawaii -- Pulling up the hood of his parka and bracing for the cold, Capt. Shahn Rashid opens the door and heads outside. The wind, near 20 miles per hour, is chilling, and he tugs on the parka's zipper, willing it to go higher.

The irony of this action isn't lost on the captain.

"This is ridiculous," he mutters. "I'm in Hawaii, and I'm wearing a parka."

He's OK with it, though. It's a small price to pay for the view.

Above him, as far as he can see, the sky is illuminated with stars. The Milky Way, which he'd only seen in photographs and movies, is directly overhead - so large and bright and real it's as if he could simply reach out his hand and touch it.

He stares up at the sky and is awed, and, even though he's seen this same view for the past few months, he said he feels like he's seeing it for the first time.

He forgets the cold and the biting wind and the fact that 10,000 feet below, hundreds of shorts- and sandal-clad tourists are drinking mai tais, taking moon-lit walks on white sand beaches and enjoying a pleasant, 75-degree evening on the island of Maui.

Then, tearing his eyes away, Rashid heads back inside to look at a computer monitor and gather data to help the Air Force make sure some of the stars he was just looking at don't crash into each other.

"Star" Tracker
In reality, these "stars" Rashid tracks aren't really stars at all. They are man-made objects orbiting the Earth - machine-like satellites, as well as spent rocket bodies and bits of space debris.

Rashid is commander of Detachment 3 of the 21st Operations Group, which belongs to the 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.; though Detachment 3 is nowhere near Colorado. It's a dedicated space surveillance unit located thousands of miles away atop the summit of Haleakala, a dormant volcano on the island of Maui.

Rashid is responsible for Air Force Space Command's Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep-Space Surveillance unit, which is located within the Maui Space Surveillance Complex.

The GEODSS network, operated by the 21st SW, can track objects the size of a basketball more than 20,000 miles in space, is made up of nine telescopes at three sites: One in Socorro, New Mexico, at the White Sands Missile Range; another on Diego Garcia, a small atoll in the Indian Ocean; and the one Rashid is responsible for on Maui. Together, these sites provide nearly complete coverage of the Earth's geosynchronous orbital belt and deliver nearly 80 percent of all geosynchronous observations.

"Currently it's estimated that approximately 500,000 objects orbit around Earth, and we only have the ability to track about 23,000 of them," he said. "Since 1982, this GEODSS site has been key in tracking orbiting objects to make sure they're where they're supposed to be and that they don't crash into each other."

This task is becoming increasingly difficult. A decade ago, there were only a few thousand objects - things ranging from weather, navigation, missile defense and communications satellites; to "space junk," such as spent launch vehicles and satellite collision debris - orbiting the Earth. The number being tracked has quadrupled since and is still on the rise.

GEODSS tracks space objects through the use of reflected sunlight, and thus can only operate on clear nights.

"If it's cloudy, then telescopes can't see the light reflected from objects in space," Rashid said. "So Maui works well as a location because we're so high above sea level and the clouds are typically several thousand feet below the facility."

Location, Location, Location
This isn't the only reason the Air Force chose Maui. There are actually some unique advantages to placing the facility atop a dormant volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

"The running joke is that the Air Force chose Maui as the location for the space surveillance complex because it was Maui," Rashid said. "But, while being stationed on Maui is nice, there are actually real benefits to the facility's location atop Haleakala."

One is the weather. The clear skies and stable air above Hawaii's volcanic peaks make for a prime location to view space - one of the best in the world, in fact. Since there is minimal light pollution from surface sources, astronomers have long held to the claim that Haleakala offers one of the "cleanest" vantage points to view stars, satellites, or anything else in the Earth's night sky.

"So those are the upsides to being up here on a volcano," Rashid said. "But there are some downsides - mainly for the people who work here."

The cold is one of them. While the average high on Maui is in the mid-80s and the average low is in the 70s, on Haleakala these numbers drop dramatically. The average high is in the 50s and 60s and lows can reach below freezing.

"Add to that the fact it is typically windy, and it can get pretty chilly up here," Rashid said.

Then, there's the drive, which can take upwards of two hours to traverse ... each way.

The drive is beautiful, however, passing from lush, tropical scenery and turning into a rocky, barren landscape with views of the Pacific Ocean and surrounding islands.

"I've spent a lot of time on that road," Rashid said. "And every time I get to the top, it still amazes me. The view of Maui is awesome."

The Final Frontier
It's the view of space the Air Force is interested in. Space, after all, is part of the service's domain and fits into several of its core missions. Satellites are used in intelligence gathering, navigation and communications. Situational awareness of what's occurring with those satellites in the space domain above Earth is critical to sustaining those systems and supporting our joint force commanders, the nation and users worldwide.

"Space situational awareness absolutely underpins all that we do in space, from launch all the way up through space operations. We depend on SSA to let us know what's going on in the space environment," said Gen. William Shelton, the AFSPC commander. "And almost every aspect of military operations involves space and cyberspace systems in some fashion."

Sitting atop a volcano, Rashid understands this. He knows the cold, wind and long hours are all worth it. Not because he gets to see some of the most spectacular views of space every time he goes to work, but because, miles above the Earth, he's helping to ensure space capabilities provide a decisive advantage for the nation's warfighters.

Rashid, and the rest of the folks at the Maui Space Complex make sure those objects are where they should be, doing what they should be doing.

"But, yeah, the view is a killer perk," he said.