Army Archives

The original post misstated the size of the LEMV. It has been corrected.

The Army's Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) airship has been inflated since last September and has been hanging around in a former dirigible hanger at the old Lakehurst Naval Air Station in southern New Jersey (which now goes by the awkward name of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst), according to John Cummings, a spokesman for the Army Space and Missile Defense Command.

Though the airship has been floating inside that hanger for close to six months, it has yet to make a flight, as various systems are integrated into the LEMV, which is the size of a football field.

Cummings declined to provide a flight date, but did say the command and contractor Northrop Grumman are pursuing "an aggressive schedule" to get it in the air. Not to be overly cranky, but Northrop originally predicted a test flight in the spring of 2011 and a long endurance flight acceptance test for the Army by the end of 2011.

The LEMV will carry a whole bunch of sensor widgets to monitor battlefields, and Stephen Kreider, the Army's deputy program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, has big plans for the airship. In a Jan. 11 presentation, Kreider envisioned the LEMV becoming a program of record, which could mean the Army could end up with a fleet of airships.

I look forward to eyeballing the 2013 LEMV when the Army releases its budget in a couple of weeks.

As I reported today, both the Army and TRANSCOM are eying development of a new class of airships that can carry up to 40,000 pounds of cargo 1,000 miles.

But that's not all, folks. Lockheed won a $400 million contract from DARPA in 2009 to develop an airship to carry a radar so powerful it could detect a car hidden under trees 185 miles away.

Though Lockheed lost an Army $517 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop an airship packed with sensors this June, the company says it "absolutely" sees other opportunities for new business.

The Navy, which operated large fleets of blimps during World War II, decommissioning the last in 1962, once again got back into the blimp game this spring when it took delivery of a new blimp, the MZ-3A airship manufactured by the American Blimp Corp. based in Hillsboro, Oregon.

The Thai Army has contracted for an airship from Aria International to perform border surveillance while the U.S. Air Force operates a fleet of tethered aerostats for border surveillance in this country.

All of the above goes to show that a concept first hatched by Jean Baptiste Marie Meusnier in France in 1783 still has currency today.

Strap a 40 pound PRC-41
To the pack frame
Four smoke grenades
Don't forget the extra handset
Stand up
Grrrrr
You're not done
Need to eat, add ten pounds of C-s
Drink too, hook three quart canteens
A six pound load to the belt
A two pound M1911A1 .45
Ammo mags and medical pouch too
Stand up
Grrrr
You're not done
782 gear, e-tool, poncho and pack
To hold socks, skivvies and utilities
Pens and message pads
Some pogey bait too
15 more pounds on the frame
Stand up
Grrrrr
You're not done
Put on flak jacket
Top off with helmet and liner
Yet another 12 pounds
Strap on the pack board
Stand up
Walk
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Now you have an idea where "grunts" come from.

The Army continues to push into the Buck Rogers Age.

The service tested eight displays that are worn like a watch. At Fort Dix in New Jersey, the soldiers used the devices to watch a real-time video from an unmanned air vehicle and other images sent from computers, UPI.com reports.

The Army has been testing other technologies in its ongoing effort to build a digital Army.

Be forewarned: This is a shameless plug.

I'm moderating a Government Executive webinar on Tuesday on the use of smart phones and smart phone apps, in the Army. I hope you can join me.

We'll get the 10,000-foot view from Carol Wortman, acting director of the Army
Architecture Integration Center, and the grunts' test perspective from Col. Marisa Tanner, chief of the mission command capability division of the Future Force Integration Directorate, and Mike McCarthy, director of the Mission Command Complex at the directorate. Tanner and McCarthy are Fort Bliss in Texas.

I believe this will be informative -- and because I'm involved, fun, too.

You can register here.

White Sands Missile Range, N.M. -- The Army is conducting pass-or-fail tests here of battlefield communications systems, including wideband versions of the Joint Tactical Radio System, and robots and sensors, said Paul Mehney, a spokesman for the service's integration operation.

The tests run through the end of September but have already attracted a bunch of high level visitors, including Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey. If successful, the equipment could provide some truly advanced and proven battlefield gadgets and gizmos.

On Friday, the Army hosted uniformed and civilian VIPs, reporters and analysts from the Government Accountability Office. I'll report back on Sept. 20 on what I saw and learned.

And, in case I forgot the Army still likes to do things real early in the morning, the press tour kicked off at 0600.

A Navy buddy of mine working on the Pakistan relief operation mused in an e-mail on Monday that for some odd reason Paris Hilton and her arrest for alleged cocaine possession received more media play over the past weekend than the fact that "we rescued thousands of people."

So, for those of you tired of Hilton coverage, here's an update on the Defense Department operations in Pakistan as that country struggles with one of the worst disasters in history.

On Monday, Marine and Navy helicopters rescued 625 people and flew in 114,000 pounds of supplies. Afghanistan-based Air Force C-130s delivered about 55,000 pounds of goods.

Since late July, Army, Navy and Marine helicopter crews have rescued 9,433 people and flown in 1.7 million pounds of goods, and Air Force C-130s have delivered 985,000 pounds of supplies since operations began.

The Pentagon has dispatched an additional 18 Army helicopters from the 1st Battalion, 52nd Aviation Regiment, 16th Combat Aviation Brigade, based at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, for the flood relief mission. They're expected to arrive in mid-September.

The Navy is operating the USS Peleliu amphibious ready group, home to the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, off the Pakistan coast and dispatched the USS Kearsarge and the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Norfolk, Va., to the same waters on Aug. 27.

All this is in addition to the Defense Department's primary day jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It's good to get some perspective on what counts and what does not.

As anyone who has served in combat knows, if a buddy is wounded, the first two things you need to do are make sure he can breathe and his bleeding is stopped.

For the past several years, troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq have used an advanced Combat-Application-Tourniquet (C-A-T) developed by Composite Resources in Rock Hill, S.C. The tourniquet features a nylon strap and a plastic rod to tighten the strap to stop bleeding.

The regulation C-A-T costs about $28. But about two years ago the Army detected cheap knock offs made by a Hong Kong company that had entered the military's supply chain in Afghanistan and Iraq. The imitation sold for about $8.50.

They're accurate looking fakes, right down to the label and national stock number.

But as Col. John Kragh, a doctor at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, pointed out in June, the rod on the fake tourniquet "is bendable to a point where it cannot work right. It's like bending Gumby's arm."

He said the fake tourniquet could be fatal because it cannot stop bleeding. Kragh added a decentralized ordering system probably accounts for the presence of the fake tourniquets in the field, with low-level supply personnel ordering the knock offs over the Internet based on price.

The Defense Department issued a warning about the knock-offs in April, Kragh said, and the Food and Drug Administration this month put out a safety alert about the tourniquets, which are also used by civilian first responders.

The lesson here is a good deal isn't always that; it can even be deadly.

Here's a loopy procurement that Defense Secretary Robert Gates should cancel immediately if he's serious about saving money: The General Officer Transition Course hatched last week by the Army Contracting Center of Excellence.

ACE wants to spend some taxpayer bucks to teach the about-to-retire generals such hard to learn stuff as proper civilian senior executive attire.

I'll make that easy (at no charge to ACE and the retiring generals): Take thyself to Brooks Brothers and ask a sale person to outfit you with a suit, matching shirt and tie, (or a fine dress and blouse for the women generals) and you will only need a small second mortgage to buy four complete rigs. Brooks even does underwear, which I find much more comfortable than military skivvies.

ACE also wants a contractor to teach generals how to write resumes, search for a job (including, I kid you not, how to look at job ads) and how to conduct a job interview. (My advice: Leave the Hooahs at home.)

How come there's no PFC Transition Course?

Update on the leak of military documents to the website WikiLeaks: The Pentagon charged U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, from Potomac, Md., with "eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for allegedly illegally transferring classified data, according to a charge sheet released by the military," CNN reported.

Wired's Threat Level blog first reported that Bradley had allegedly leaking military documents and video to WikiLeaks.com, which anonymously posts military information in the name of disclosure. One of the more notorious leaks was a 2007 video filmed by the Army of a helicopter mistakenly attacking and killing civilians in Iraq, including a Reuter's photographer.

Wired.com conducted an interview in April with a soldier who came onto the scene after the helicopter attack and provides useful analysis and perceptions of what happened.

Bob Brewin is on vacation and will return to writing What's Brewin' later this month.