Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Japan's air forces and U.S.

Japan's air forces and U.S. UCAV strategies

Mitsubishi Heavy is a licensed producer and integrator of (among others) the F-15 and Aegis system on behalf of Japan's Self Defence Force. Its most controversial project has been the FS-X / F-2 fighter project, a domestically designed air superiority fighter incorporating some US technologies.

A general description of the plane and the controversy can be found at FAS. Basically, the entire project became ensnarled in a Congressional controversy regarding technology leakage to Japan, based on issues of both civilian competitiveness and military security.

A more recent update on the F-2 situation was presented at a GLOCOM conference on the general US/Japan strategy situation in early 2001.

According to port of this survey of US/Japan relations in the context of the 2000 election, the F-2 has been several times delayed in entering production and deployment. So, it's probably understandable if MHI and other Japanese defense companies become concerned if after all of this, Rumsfeld starts initiatives to cut resources to our F-22, and divert to unmanned aircraft. MHI and Japan were presumably already facing an issue of obtaining access to some of the US stealth technologies in order to build an F-22 clone or competitor - now there is the spectre of the US leaping two generations ahead.

Providers of authentication/billing services to

Providers of authentication/billing services to WISPs

Some competitives I dug up while briefly looking at something that Doug at Selby sent my way:

HereUAre

Boingo - Sky Dayton's new fling

SoHoWireless - local venture

Joltage

And the market is accessible to previously existing telcoms/ISP roaming and billing companies:

GRIC is signing up hotspot carriers and others in Asia.

iPass makes an alliance with Wayport.

Unmanned helicopters are moving into

Unmanned helicopters are moving into procurement

Some DARPA technology is becoming real quickly:

April 22, 2002; The Army and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are running a project known as the Unmanned Combat Armed Rotorcraft. The intention is to find an aircraft that can attack masked ground targets autonomously. The goal is a system that will cost 30% of what an RAH-66 Comanche would cost, or 20% of what an AH-64 Apache would cost. Six companies are bidding for the project.--Stephen V Cole

Copied from Strategy Page, a cesspool of popup ads!

3G is going slow in

3G is going slow in Japan

According to the New York Times, DoCoMo's 3G service is being adopted slowly, at least partially due to costly handsets and lack of consumer 'pull'. KDDI is trying to stimulate demand with lower pricing.

How do remotely operated /

How do remotely operated / autonomous aircraft communicate?

According to this 1998 article they often use data channels hired from commercial satellites! It's also known that NRO reconnaisance satellites feed broadband data via the 'NASA' TDRS tracking and data relay satellites in geosynchronous orbits, so it's possible that more capable UAVs such as Global Hawk uplink there as well.

NY Times backgrounder on remote

NY Times backgrounder on remote operated / autonomous weapons

General audience material..

How CDMA really works An

How CDMA really works

An intelligent layman's tutorial on spread spectrum, chipping and all that.

European Counterpoint - Still Allies

European Counterpoint - Still Allies at Heart

From Michael Barone at US News, the Italian government seems solidly behind us, as with Blair. The nay-saying may be only skin deep, from French and German governments that are on shaky grounds with their electorates, or unelected Eurocrats like Patten.

JDAMs and scale economies in

JDAMs and scale economies in military hardware

Wonder where the GPS guided precision bombs used in Afghanistan come from? From a single Boeing factory near St. Louis, it turns out. When completed it was considered an exemplar of lean manufacturing. The salient facts from the linked article are that the factory is capable of 20,000 units per year, but was then operating at 1,000 per year. The unit cost is given as about $20,000.

The last JDAM procurement before the war broke out was $235m for 11,054 units in April 2001, to be produced at about 1,000 per month.

The unit costs of comparable 'smart bomb' electronic and adapter kits has dropped dramatically since the Gulf War, but it's still the dollar equivalent of dropping a mid-range Camry off the bomb rack with every shot. In Afghanistan, we started using these things as the equivalent of close support field artillery - unavoidably, since we didn't have any alternative. But we keep that up, then there's a problem with a national output capacity of about 60 per day.

Bush's new military budget adds onto that last procurement with a new $764 million order for 35,000 units. Do the math, and there is no price break over the previous order, which there should be since most of this is silicon and the volume is being roughly tripled. Either the taxpayer is getting ripped off or - more likely - the costs of one or more new production lines are buried into the buy. Quite likely considering that the original factory was already at 2/3 capacity shipping one third the production rate.

But even if capacity goes up by three, that may still be peanuts compared to peak requirements. These guys need to start thinking about design for manufacturing in the 100,000s of units range - something the aerospace industry doesn't seem very good at. Solectron?

A disturbing analysis of

A disturbing analysis of the EU's role in the war

From Instapundit,
an e-mail with a prima facie case that the Europeans are in fact playing balance of power politics vis a vis the US, using the Arabs as a counterweight. This right now seems far fetched, the notion of a really coordinated strategy among everyone from the Guardian's pundits to the ruling Eurocrats strains credibility. To be sure, there is a modest amount of supporting evidence to the theory, for instance the recent early funding of an EU-only alternative GPS network is a multi-billion commitment that makes sense only if its users want to be independent of US DOD policy. But it's more likely that writer is picking up on a broad, but shallow and uncoordinated cultural drift in Europe that could develop into a coherent policy bringing it into collision with the US.