XPost: sci.military.naval, soc.history.war.misc

from https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/12/14/as-russian-amphibious-ships-bore-down-on-southern-ukraine-in-february-the-ukrainians-sole-anti-ship-battery-opened-fire/?sh=27de454c6bb1

As Russian Amphibious Ships Bore Down On Southern Ukraine In February,
The Ukrainians’ Sole Anti-Ship Battery Opened Fire
David AxeForbes Staff
I write about ships, planes, tanks, drones, missiles and satellites.
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The Neptune anti-ship missile is one of the iconic weapons of Russia’s
wider war on Ukraine. Two of the 17-foot missiles, fired by a Ukrainian
navy battery, sank the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black
Sea Fleet.

But the April 13 strike on Moskva wasn’t the Neptune’s combat debut. In
his definitive history of the Neptune, Ukrainska Pravda reporter Roman
Romaniuk reveals the missile’s chaotic combat debut.

As Russian navy amphibious ships neared Ukraine’s southern coast in late February, the Ukrainian navy’s sole Neptune battery fired its first
missiles in anger.

The Luch Design Bureau in Kyiv had managed to produce just one
four-round Neptune launcher by Feb. 24, the day Russian forces attacked.
The Neptune crew speeded away from the Luch factory with their precious launcher on Feb. 20, just days before Russian missiles struck the facility.

The Neptune battery—the launcher, support vehicles and at least one
mobile Mineral-U radar—assembled near Odesa in southern Russia. On Feb.
26, three Russian navy amphibious ships sailed from occupied Crimea,
bound for the Ukrainian coast near Mykolaiv.

“It was to defeat these ships that the first three Neptunes were
launched,” Romaniuk wrote.


The missiles had to fly over Odesa to reach their targets, so—for the
safety of civilians on the ground—the crew programmed them to cruise at nearly 400 feet instead of the optimal 20 feet.

But that made them easier for the Russians to detect. Russian ships and
planes apparently destroyed all three Neptunes. But in the melee, a
Black Sea Fleet vessel also shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter,
according to Romaniuk.

The Ukrainian general staff also reported the Russian friendly-fire
incident, but outside analysts never have found any direct evidence of
the shoot-down.

In any event, the Neptune barrage apparently spooked Russian commanders.
They canceled the planned landing near Mykolaiv.

The persistent threat from Ukraine’s anti-ship missiles—which only grew
as Kyiv acquired Harpoon missiles from its foreign allies—since February
has deterred a Russian amphibious assault.

The Mykolaiv near-misses were the Neptune battery’s first victory over
the Russian fleet. The second, seven weeks later, was even bigger.
Taking advantage of unusual atmospheric conditions, the Neptune battery
zeroed in on Moskva, and sent her to the bottom of the Black Sea.

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David Axe
David Axe
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I'm a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina.

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Peter H.
1 hour ago

David, Are you using up articles that were saved to be posted . You're
waiting for the Big Move!


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Peter H.
49 minutes ago

I see this was news reported in Ukrainian Pravda. But I'm still waiting
the ground to freeze.


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TIM PANNELL/FORBES
BUSINESS
DAILY COVER
Meet The Unknown Immigrant Billionaire Betting Her Fortune To Take On
Musk In Space
Lauren DebterForbes Staff
Forbes Digital CoversContributor Group
Jul 12, 2018,06:00am EDT
Even in the bloated-budget world of aerospace, $650 million is a lot of
money. It's approximately the price of six of Boeing's workhorse 737s
or, for the more militarily inclined, about the cost of seven F-35
stealth fighter jets. It's also the amount of money NASA and the Sierra
Nevada Corp. spent developing the Dream Chaser, a reusable spacecraft
designed to take astronauts into orbit. Sierra Nevada, which is based in Sparks, Nevada, and 100% owned by Eren Ozmen and her husband, Fatih, put
in $300 million; NASA ponied up the other $350 million. The Dream
Chaser's first free flight was in October 2013 when it was dropped
12,500 feet from a helicopter. The landing gear malfunctioned, and the
vehicle skidded off the runway upon landing. A year later, NASA passed
on Sierra Nevada's space plane and awarded the multibillion-dollar
contracts to Boeing and SpaceX.

The original Dream Chaser, which looks like a mini space shuttle with
upturned wings, now serves as an extremely expensive lobby decoration
for Sierra Nevada's outpost in Louisville, Colorado. But the nine-figure failure barely put a dent in the Ozmens' dream of joining the space
race. Within months of the snub, the company bid on another NASA
contract, to carry cargo, including food, water and science experiments,
to and from the International Space Station. This time it won. Sierra
Nevada and its competitors Orbital ATK and SpaceX will split a contract
worth up to $14 billion. (The exact amount will depend on a number of
factors, including successful missions.) The new unmanned cargo ship,
which has yet to be built, will also be called Dream Chaser.

The Ozmens, who are worth $1.3 billion each, are part of a growing wave
of the uber-rich who are racing into space, filling the void left by
NASA when it abandoned the space shuttle in the wake of the 2003
Columbia disaster. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Richard Branson's Virgin
Galactic are the best-known ventures, but everyone from Larry Page
(Planetary Resources) and Mark Cuban (Relativity Space) to Jeff Bezos
(Blue Origin) and Paul Allen (Stratolaunch) is in the game. Most are
passion projects, but the money is potentially good, too. Through 2017,
NASA awarded $17.8 billion toward private space transport: $8.5 billion
for crew and $9.3 billion for cargo.

"We're doing it because we have the drive and innovation, and we see an opportunity--and need--for the U.S. to continue its leadership role in
this important frontier," says Eren Ozmen, 59, who ranks 19th on our
annual list of America's richest self-made women.

Until now, few had heard of the Ozmens or Sierra Nevada. Often confused
with the California beer company with the same name, the firm even
printed coasters that say #notthebeercompany. The Ozmens are Turkish
immigrants who came to America for graduate school in the early 1980s
and acquired Sierra Nevada, the small defense company where they both
worked, for less than $5 million in 1994, using their house as
collateral. Eren got a 51% stake and Fatih 49%. Starting in 1998, they
went on an acquisition binge financed with the cash flow from their
military contracts, buying up 19 aerospace and defense firms. Today
Sierra Nevada is the biggest female-owned government contractor in the
country, with $1.6 billion in 2017 sales and nearly 4,000 employees
across 33 locations. Eighty percent of its revenue comes from the U.S. government (mostly the Air Force), to which it sells its military
planes, drones, anti-IED devices and navigation technology.

Space is a big departure for Sierra Nevada--and a big risk. The company
has never sent an aircraft into space, and it is largely known for
upgrading existing planes. But it is spending lavishly on the Dream
Chaser and working hard to overcome its underdog reputation.

"Space is more than a business for us," says Fatih, 60. "When we were
children, on the other side of the world, we watched the moon landing on
a black-and-white TV. It gave us goose bumps. It was so inspirational."
Eren, in her heavy Turkish accent, adds: "Look at the United States and
what women can do here, compared to the rest of the world. That is why
we feel we have a legacy to leave behind."

T

here are plenty of reasons that NASA gave Sierra Nevada the nod. Sure,
it had never built a functioning spacecraft, but few companies have, and
Sierra Nevada has already sent lots of components--like batteries,
hinges and slip rings--into space on more than 450 missions. Then
there's Dream Chaser's design. A quarter of the length of the space
shuttle, it promises to be the only spacecraft able to land on
commercial runways and then fly again (up to 15 times in total) to the
space station. And its ability to glide gently down to Earth ensures
that precious scientific cargo, like protein crystals, plants and mice,
won't get tossed around and compromised on reentry. That's an advantage
Sierra Nevada has over most other companies, whose capsules return to
Earth by slamming into the ocean. Today, the only way the U.S. can bring
cargo back from space is via Musk's SpaceX Dragon. "Quite frankly, that
is why NASA has us in this program, because we can transport the science
and nobody else can," says John Roth, a vice president in the company's
space division.

uncaptioned
Space utility vehicle: Sierra Nevada’s unmanned Dream Chaser is designed
to haul 6 tons of cargo to and from the International Space
Station.COURTESY COMPANY
Sierra Nevada has acquired its way into space. In December 2008, in the
throes of the financial crisis, Sierra Nevada plunked down $38 million
for a space upstart out of San Diego called SpaceDev. The company had
recently lost a huge NASA contract, its stock was trading for pennies
and its founder, Jim Benson, a tech entrepreneur who became one of
commercial spaceflight's earliest prophets, had just died of a brain tumor.

Sierra Nevada had its eyes on a vehicle from SpaceDev called the Dream
Chaser. It had a long, storied past: In 1982, an Australian P-3 spy
plane snapped photos of the Russians fishing a spacecraft out of the
middle of the Indian Ocean. The Australians passed the images on to
American intelligence. It turned out to be a BOR-4, a Soviet space plane
in which the lift is created by the body rather than the wings, making
it suitable for space travel. NASA created a copycat, the HL-20, and
spent ten years testing it before pulling the plug.

Eleven months after the Columbia exploded, President George W. Bush
announced that the space shuttle program would be shut down once the International Space Station was completed in 2010 (in fact, it took
another year). In preparation NASA invited companies to help supply the station. By this point NASA's HL-20 was mostly forgotten and gathering
dust in a warehouse in Langley, Virginia. SpaceDev nabbed the rights to
it in 2006, hoping to finally get it into space.

Eren Ozmen puts their acquisition strategy in rather unusual terms. "Our
guys go hunting, and they bring me this giant bear, which is not fully
dead, and say, 'Now you do the skinning and clean it up.' "

But it was an expensive job, and later that year NASA declined to fund
it. Enter Sierra Nevada Corp., which was always hunting for promising
companies to buy. "The company had been very successful in defense but
wanted to get into space and had a lot of cash," says Scott Tibbitts,
who sold his space-hardware company, Starsys Research, to SpaceDev in 2006.

Soon the Ozmens were devoting an outsize amount of time and money to the
Dream Chaser. "It was very clear the space side was like a favorite
son," says one former employee.

E

ren Ozmen grew up in Diyarbakir, Turkey, a bustling city on the banks of
the Tigris River, where she was a voracious reader and serious student.
Her parents, both nurses, valued education and encouraged their four
girls to focus on schoolwork. As a student at Ankara University, she
worked full time at a bank while studying journalism and public
relations and spent her little free time studying English.

In 1980, as she was finishing her degree, she met Fatih Ozmen. A
national cycling champion, he had just graduated from Ankara University
with a degree in electrical engineering and planned to pursue his
master's degree at the University of Nevada at Reno. In 1981, Eren also
headed to America, enrolling in an English-language program at UC
Berkeley. She reconnected with Fatih and, at his suggestion, applied to
the M.B.A. program at UNR. After she arrived on campus, the two young
Turks became best friends.

uncaptioned
The husband-and-wife co-owners of Sierra Nevada Corp., Eren and Fatih
Ozmen, and their long-haired dachshund Peanut, at their home in Reno.TIM PANNELL FOR FORBES
The pair soon struck a deal: Eren, a talented cook, would make Fatih
homemade meals in exchange for some much-needed help in her statistics
class. They shook hands and became roommates. They both insist they
never even considered dating each other. "It was just like survival,"
says Eren.

More like survival of the fittest. Eren knew she had to get top grades
if she wanted a job in America. She was also broke and holding down
several part-time jobs on campus, selling homemade baklava at a bakery
and working as a night janitor cleaning the building of a local company
called Sierra Nevada Corp.

After graduating in 1985 with her M.B.A., Eren got a job as a financial reporting manager at a midsize sprinkler company in Carson City, Nevada,
just south of Reno. She arrived to find that financial reports took
weeks to generate by hand. She had used personal computers in school and
knew that automating the process would cut the turnaround time down to a
matter of hours. She asked her boss if they could buy a PC, but the
expensive purchase was vetoed. So Eren took her first paycheck and
bought an HP computer and brought it to work. She started producing
financial reports in hours, as she had predicted, and was promoted on
the spot.

In 1988, the sprinkler company was sold, and Eren was laid off. Fatih,
who was now her husband, had been working at Sierra Nevada since 1981,
first as an intern and later as an engineer, and told her they were
still doing financial reports by hand. She brought in her PC and
automated its systems.

Soon after starting, Ozmen was sitting at her desk late one night and discovered that Sierra Nevada was on the verge of going out of business.
The little defense company, which primarily made systems to help planes
land on aircraft carriers, had assumed that its general and
administrative expenses were 10% of revenues, but she calculated that
they were 30%. At that rate, the business couldn't keep operating for
more than a few months. She marched to her boss' office to deliver the
bad news. He didn't want to hear it, so she went straight to the owners.
They were stymied. The bank wouldn't lend them any more money. At Eren's suggestion, the company stopped payroll for three months until the next contract kicked in. Employees had to borrow money to pay bills. "It was
like the Titanic moment. We are waiting for this contract, but we didn't
know if we were going to make it or not," says Eren.

Since arriving in America in 1981, Eren Ozmen has gone from janitor to billionaire co-owner of Sierra Nevada Corp. "Look at the U.S. and what
women can do here, compared to the rest of the world."

That contract eventually came through, but Sierra Nevada was still
living contract to contract two years later, when Eren, who was eight
and a half months pregnant with her first child, got a call. The
government audit agency had looked at the company's books and declared
the company bankrupt and therefore unfit for its latest contract. Eren
got on the phone with the auditor (she remembers his name to this day)
and told him he had made a math error. He soon responded that she was
right and that he needed to brush up on his accounting skills but that
the report was already out of his hands. At that point Eren went into
labor. Less than a week later, she was back in the office with her newborn.

The company limped along until 1994, when the Ozmens borrowed against
their home to buy Sierra Nevada. Eren was sick of working for an
engineer-led company that was lurching from financial crisis to
financial crisis and figured she and her husband could do a better job
running the place.

A Glance At Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser
WATCH
0:48
It took five years for the company to stabilize, with Eren keeping a
tight handle on costs. "I can tell you, it wasn't a free-spending,
freewheeling company. Everything was looked at," recalls Tom Galligani,
who worked at the company in the 1990s. Eren worked for a time as the
company's CFO and today is its chairwoman and president. Fatih became
CEO and focused on creating relationships with government agencies and developing new products. He also began looking for companies to acquire.

A

s the sun sinks over the Rockies, Eren sits by the window at Via
Toscana, a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant outside Denver, sipping a
glass of Merlot and explaining in rather unusual terms the couple's
approach to buying companies. "Our guys go hunting, and they bring me
this giant bear, which is not fully dead, and say, 'Now you do the
skinning and clean it up,' " she says. Fatih, sitting beside her, joins
in: "There's a lot of screaming. And blood.

Fatih and his team search for companies that have some sort of promising high-tech product. Then they go in for the kill. "Of the 19 [companies
we've acquired], we've never bought a company that was for sale," he says.

"The first thing you do with the bear is to establish a trusting
relationship," Eren says, while reminding it of the benefits. "Every
company we bought is ten times bigger now." Over the years, Sierra
Nevada has bought companies that do everything from
unmanned-aerial-system technology to high-durability communications systems.

Its first acquisition was Advanced Countermeasure Systems, in 1998,
which made equipment that helped protect soldiers from improvised
explosive devices (IEDs). Revenues have since zoomed from $3 million a
year to $60 million, Eren says. A company is especially attractive to
Sierra Nevada if, like Advanced Countermeasure, it has so-called
"sole-source" contracts with the military, meaning it is awarded
contracts without a competitive bidding process, under the rationale
that only that specific company's product can meet the government's requirements. Last year the majority of Sierra Nevada's $1.3 billion in government contracts were sole-source.

Sierra Nevada's biggest source of revenue is from aviation integration,
which means folding new technologies into existing planes primarily at
its dozen or so hangars in Centennial, Colorado. Often that entails
stripping down commercial planes and turning them into jacked-up
military ones, cutting holes to install weaponry, cameras, sensors,
navigation gear and communications systems. "What we do is take someone
else's airplane and make it better," says Taco Gilbert, one of the many
retired generals on Sierra Nevada's payroll. For instance, it took the
popular civilian PC-12 jet ("That a lot of doctors and lawyers fly
around on," Gilbert says) and modified it so that Afghan
special-ops-forces could pivot from surveilling the Taliban to
conducting a medical evacuation in a matter of minutes. It sold the U.S. Customs & Border Protection a fleet of super-quiet planes that can track
the movement of drug traffickers without detection. When wildfires were
raging in California in 2017, Sierra Nevada aircraft, modified with heat sensors, thermal imaging and night vision, provided support.

uncaptioned
Sierra Nevada Corp. President Eren Ozmen stands next to Vice President
Mike Pence during the 2018 Space Symposium in Colorado.© 2018 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP
But it's not just Sierra Nevada's responsiveness that sets it apart;
it's also its prices. In their own version of the "80/20" rule, the
company strives to provide 80% of the solution at 20% of the cost and
time. In other words, "good enough" is better than perfect, especially
if "good enough" is cheap and fast. To deliver, Sierra Nevada spends 20%
of its revenue on internal R&D, coming up with creative ways to upgrade
the military's aging aircraft for less.

"This allows them to punch above their weight class and leapfrog the
large guys," says Peter Arment, an aerospace analyst at R.W. Baird.

"You can go to Boeing or Lockheed and take five or ten years and spend a
lot of money," Eren says. "Or we can provide you with something right now."

O

n top of the $300 million it spent on the original Dream Chaser, Sierra
Nevada has spent an additional $200 million so far on the cargo version
and expects to invest $500 million more by the time it's ready for
takeoff. To recoup its costs, Sierra Nevada is counting on things going smoothly. The company has already earned $500 million in milestone
payments from NASA as it successfully completed design reviews as well
as safety and test flights using the crewed Dream Chaser (which shares
80% of the same design and features) before it was retired. Much like
when Eren was counting on that key government contract to cover payroll
in 1989, Sierra Nevada is now waiting for the big payoff that will come
when it sends the vehicle into space. Its launch date is set for
September 2020, 11 months after rival Orbital ATK's Cygnus takes off in
October 2019 and a month later than SpaceX's Dragon 2. If the Dream
Chaser completes its six missions to the space station by 2024, Sierra
Nevada will pocket an estimated $1.8 billion.

Eren isn't blind to the risk that things could go wrong. But brimming
with an immigrant's sense of patriotism, she talks of the glory of
helping the U.S. reestablish its leadership in space. She thinks Sierra
Nevada and other private companies can help the government catch up on
the cheap. "Looking at what are the things we can do to make space
available," Eren says, "it's the commercial companies who are going to
come up with those creative ideas and help the country catch up."

Reach Lauren Gensler at lgensler@forbes.com. Cover image by Tim Pannell
for Forbes.

Lauren Debter
Lauren Debter
I am a staff writer at Forbes covering retail. I have been at Forbes
since 2013, first on the markets and investing team and then on the billionaires team. In the course of my reporting, I... Read More

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