Caine Confirmed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; First Air Guardsman in the Job

Caine Confirmed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; First Air Guardsman in the Job

April 11, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

Lt. Gen. Dan Caine was confirmed as the 22nd Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by the Senate early April 11, making history as the first Air National Guardsman to take on the nation’s top uniformed job.

Caine is the sixth Airman to be Chairman and succeeds Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who was abruptly dismissed from the job by President Donald Trump in February. He was approved on a wide bipartisan basis, 60-25. 

Because Caine retired as a lieutenant general in January, the Senate also granted him a fourth star. By law, the chairman typically must have experience in a four-star job, either as a service chief of a combatant commander, but the President can waive that requirement.  

Caine is the first three-star to ascend directly to the chairmanship, and the first retired officer in decades to return to service to be chairman. 

An F-16 pilot early in his career, Caine has perhaps the most varied and unusual background of any Chairman in history. He has spent time as a White House fellow with the Department of Agriculture, a policy director for the White House Homeland Security Council, a commander of a Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq, director of the Pentagon’s highly secretive Special Access Programs Office, and the Pentagon liaison to the CIA. He also had several stints at U.S. Special Operations Command, including time as Deputy Commanding General of U.S. Central Command’s Special Ops Component and concurrently as the Deputy Commanding General for Special Operations for the campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State group. 

At his confirmation hearing April 1, Caine touted that background as an asset at a potential pivot point in history. 

 “Yes, Senators, I acknowledge that I’m an unconventional nominee. … For many Americans, I’m an unknown leader,” Caine said. Yet, “these are unconventional times,” he added later. 

Now, Caine is set to be sworn in as the Pentagon confronts global crises—Russia’s punishing invasion of Ukraine drags on amid uncertain peace talks, Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen in continue to harass shipping vessels in the Red Sea despite a major air campaign against them, and China continues to build up its military and conduct aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan. 

As chairman, Caine will not have operational control over any troops. He will, however, be the senior military adviser to President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. 

“Congratulations to Dan ‘Razin’ Caine on his confirmation in the Senate as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Your leadership will be a welcomed/vital part of ensuring we return the Dept. of Defense back to the American warfighter,” Hegseth wrote in a post on social media.

During his confirmation hearing, Caine vowed to remain apolitical in his job. His focus, he said, will be on urging the military services to find faster ways to field technology that will preserve the nation’s military superiority. He also voiced support for the Pentagon’s nuclear modernization efforts and argued the military must rebuild its electronic warfare skills after years of decay. 

Despite the unusual circumstances around his nomination—Brown was the first Chairman dismissed from the job since Gen. Peter Pace was not renominated in 2007—Caine glided to confirmation with more than a dozen votes from Democrats and support from every Republican present. 

Defense industry groups were quick to congratulate Caine on his confirmation. 

“Lieutenant General Caine’s commitment to improving the speed and adaptability of the Department of Defense’s requirements and acquisition processes and to harnessing the capabilities of the entire defense industrial base will be an asset to our national security as we seek to deter our adversaries and deliver peace through strength,” Aerospace Industries Association President and CEO Eric Fanning said in a statement. “We look forward to working with him to keep the United States strong and secure.” 

Air Force Using Generative AI to Help Modernize Legacy Software

Air Force Using Generative AI to Help Modernize Legacy Software

April 11, 2025 | By Shaun Waterman

Military software developers are using generative AI-powered coding assistants to help them modernize decades-old legacy codebases, officials said this week.  

And the Department of the Air Force Bot Operations Team (DAFBOT), part of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, says it is leading the way.  

AI tools to assist legacy code modernization is “probably my biggest ask for industry right now, because that is the exact problem that we’re dealing with: Trying to find more efficient, effective ways to modernize that legacy [code] faster,” said Jason Hunter, digital transformation program manager at the Forge, a Navy software factory based in Riverdale, Md.  

Hunter told an audience of defense contractors at AFCEA Northern Virginia’s Innovation IT Day event April 10 that AI-powered code assistants can help modernize huge, decades-old legacy codebases in obsolete computer languages like Fortran and COBOL.  

“I do have a lot of interest in bringing AI, large language models [LLMs], some of the code assistant [tools] into our environment,” he said, noting the scale of the task.  

“We’ve got a couple of baselines that are anywhere from 7 million to 15 million lines [of code] that are developed over 30-plus years.”

On top of that, documentation is often incomplete or missing.  

“If there are any developers in the audience, or if you work with developers, you know: Sometimes they comment code well, sometimes that doesn’t happen. Sometimes there’s documentation. Sometimes … not,” said Hunter. 

DOD Chief Software Officer Rob Vietmeyer told Air & Space Forces Magazine on the sidelines of the event that these legacy systems have become “a boat anchor,” a huge drag on the department’s innovation efforts. He said AI-powered code assistant tools could “help us decompose some of these monolithic legacy architectures” and rebuild the code using modern IT architectures like microservices. 

Code assistant tools use large language models (LLMs) to generate computer code, in the same way LLM-powered chatbots like ChatGPT generate human language.  

These tools enable so-called low code or no code software development, where normal English instructions from the user are translated into computer language by the chatbot. Low/no code tools are widely available in the commercial marketplace, but the process of recreating one codebase in a different computer language, known as refactoring, is a different challenge. 

The Department of the Air Force Bot Operations Team (DAFBOT), announced this week that they had successfully refactored applications originally written in obsolete COBOL into Java using LLMs. 

It is a process DAFBOT Chief Technology Officer Jude Stanley compared in a statement to taking a document originally written in a combination of Sanskrit and Mandarin and translating it, first into Latin and then into English. 

“The challenge lies in ensuring that the English version conveys the same narrative as the original combined text, capturing all its nuances. Legacy code bases are highly customized and unique to their capabilities,” said Stanley. 

The military faces particular challenges because of security concerns about LLMs, which typically hoover up data to train themselves and their successors and may require specialized chips and other hardware to run, because of their massive computing demand. 

“What has been a struggle for us is that our code sits in a classified environment where … we have some limits and constraints from what type of hardware is necessarily available with that. So we’re looking at a couple of different models to bring in some things to pilot and investigate here over the next year,” Hunter said of the Navy software factory The Forge. 

“Maybe AI can help us modernize our legacy systems,” added Ana Kreiensieck, software modernization lead in the Department of Defense CIO’s office. “But legacy systems, that’s a complex situation, right? And it requires some governance and some decision-making.”

For example, how much of the old system had to be preserved? How much could safely be modernized? A step-by-step approach, even to AI-powered transformation, might be best, she suggested. 

“We’ve seen success,” Kreiensieck said, “with that strangler fig pattern where you take it piece by piece, until you modernize the [whole] system.” 

New Book Captures Minuteman Missile Art Before it Disappears

New Book Captures Minuteman Missile Art Before it Disappears

April 11, 2025 | By David Roza

A new coffee table book pays tribute to generations of Airmen by recording the art they created in nuclear missile facilities across the country. 

Released late last year, “The Silent Sentinels” is a 324-page feast of murals, patches, cartoons, poems, painted ceiling tiles, and even song lyrics that capture the lives of thousands of missileers, maintainers, security forces, chefs, and other Airmen who have kept a 24/7 watch over America’s Minuteman nuclear missile fleet since 1958.

The watch continues to this day, but the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile is due to replace the Minuteman III—already more than 40 years past its initial planned service life—within the next decade. The new weapon will require a massive infrastructure refresh, so the replacement plan included an agreement to preserve cultural resources in and around the old Minuteman sites.

The hallway leading up to a Launch Control Center at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via “The Silent Sentinels.”

The Association of Air Force Missileers took up the cause, which was a chance to preserve the art not only at the three active Minuteman bases, but also at installations that shuttered their silos over the years.

“The purpose of this book was not just for us in the association to gather our history, but to share that story with the rest of our country and for generations to come,” said retired Col. Jim Warner, executive director of AAFM and the author of “The Silent Sentinels.”

Warner hopes to get the book out to ROTC detachments and other places where Air Force hopefuls can learn more about a career in missiles. Warner would have benefited from a book like that when he first became a missileer in 1974.

“I had no clue what the job was,” he told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Now I look back at it as one of the best things I ever did. We want to share that story with the American public and with the Air Force.”

“Evolution of Missiles” by retired Maj. Jim Sneddon. Image courtesy “The Silent Sentinels”

The book starts with a history of the Minuteman stretching back to 1958, when the missile was first conceived as a “simple, low-maintenance, reliable, and highly survivable ICBM capable of maintaining alert status for long periods of time” and hitting targets more than 5,000 nautical miles away.

The first Minuteman wing stood up at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., in 1962, followed by Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., and Minot Air Force Base, N.D., in 1963, then Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., and F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo., in 1964, the same year a sixth wing began construction at Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D. 

By 1967, about 1,000 Minuteman missiles were on alert across the five wings, but by then the Minuteman II was already on alert at Grand Forks. The Minuteman II had better range, accuracy, and onboard memory than the first version. The Minuteman III, which first went on alert in 1970, was even better.

The wings at Ellsworth, Whiteman, and Grand Forks have since closed down, but about 400 missiles remain operational at Minot, Malmstrom, and F.E. Warren. The missiles are stored in underground silos called launch facilities. Every 10 launch facilities are controlled by a Launch Control Center (LCC), an underground capsule where missileers serve 24-hour shifts. About 60 to 70 feet above them is the missile alert facility (MAF), where missile crews and support staff live and rest when not on duty. Many take remote college classes on their down time there.

It can take hours to drive from the main base to a MAF, especially when snowfall makes driving over the dirt roads treacherous. The isolated conditions turn MAFs into heavily-fortified homes away from home, complete with chefs, security guards, and a facility manager who serves as a kind of den mother, handyman, and groundskeeper.

The interior wall of LCC Hotel 01 at Minot Air Force Base, N.D. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via “The Silent Sentinels.”

It’s not clear exactly when art first appeared on the walls of these facilities. Warner remembered art was not allowed during the early days of his career in the 1970s, so it may have first appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Pride in the unit is a common theme; Squadron emblems and mascots, including Red Dawgs, Screaming Eagles, and Wolf Packs, appeared on blast doors, blank LCC surfaces, and tunnel junction walls, often with American flags, missiles, skulls, or ruined Soviet flags in the background.

MAF-specific art tends to be light-hearted. The MAFs are designated by radio alphabet, such as Hotel 01, Oscar 01, and Golf 01, a prosaic system that nonetheless inspired generations of artist-Airmen. Oscar 01 at Whiteman, for example, featured Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch on one of its blast doors, and Hotel 01 at Minot has a “no vacancy” sign on the wall of its LCC.

“Fallout” game theme on an elevator shaft at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo. designed by Tech Sgt Raymond M. Kiser, and painted by Tech Sgt Donny Caffey and Tech Sgt Chris Morgan. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via “The Silent Sentinels.”

Elsewhere are pop culture references, including Star Wars, Looney Tunes, and Super Mario Bros. Life imitates art at F.E. Warren’s Golf 01, whose elevator shaft mural was inspired by the video game series Fallout, where players emerge from underground vaults into a world devastated by nuclear war. 

On the blast door of an LCC at Ellsworth is a reference to a Domino’s pizza ad promising delivery in 30 minutes or less, about the same amount of time it takes a Minuteman missile to reach its target. Originally the artist wanted to paint an American flag, but when he realized his shade of blue was off, he corrected with a Domino’s-style pizza box.

“A good artist knows when to pivot to get the job done!” Warner wrote.

The blast door of an LCC at Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D. painted by Capt Rob Drury and 1Lt Tony Gatlin. Image courtesy “The Silent Sentinels”

Slice of Life

Several cartoons capture the headaches of working with decades-old technology, which Warner could personally relate to. The LCCs are suspended on shock isolators meant to keep the capsule level in case of attack. Warner recalled one of the isolators gave way during an alert, so all of the maintainers and missileers stood on one corner of the capsule and jumped to try to level it out again.

“You do what you’ve got to do because the mission is so important,” he said.

From the K01 Captain’s Log at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont. Image courtesy “The Silent Sentinels”

Another theme was the long drive out to the MAF through wind and snow. Several MAF murals billed their locations as “over the edge” of the world or “to the end of the Earth … then left.”

“Every picture came with a story about the time they were stuck on alert because of a snowstorm, or the long drive over dirt roads to get to the middle of nowhere in North or South Dakota,” Warner said. “Life in that part of the country is very interesting, and when people get together to talk about it, it’s always those fun stories.”

A tunnel junction in and LCC at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via “The Silent Sentinels.”

Several such stories were captured by The Groobers, a group of missileers assigned to F.E. Warren who started a folk-rock band in the mid-1970s. Their songs depict life in the missile fields, from boredom in the capsule to the hard work of missile maintainers.

“I don’t think we’ll ever forget playing an afternoon show in the rec center … and seeing two young wives of maintenance troops in the front row wiping away tears,” wrote one of The Groobers about performing their maintainer song.

Bringing the book together also helped bring the missileer community together, as alumni dug through their archives to find images to contribute.

“It was a great ‘walking down memory lane’ kind of experience.” Warner said.

The retired colonel still gets images that he wishes he could have included in the book. But the archival effort continues as AAFM’s core mission.

“Our purpose is to retain the heritage of all of the nuclear missile systems in the Air Force, to keep that community telling their stories, and then to educate the public about what our missileers have done and do today,” he said.

More information about “The Silent Sentinels” and where to buy it can be found here.

Space Force Looks to Go Big on Commercial: ‘Everything’s on the Table’

Space Force Looks to Go Big on Commercial: ‘Everything’s on the Table’

April 10, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Space Force acquisition leaders were already looking to see if they could shift some of their biggest programs to use commercial services or technology, but one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, signed April 9, that could super-charge that effort. 

Now, the service’s vision for going beyond conventional Pentagon-industry partnerships has an even greater sense of urgency, those leaders said at the Space Symposium. 

“It’s a change in our culture, and it’s a change in our thinking,” Lt. Gen. Philip A. Garrant, head of Space Systems Command, said of the emphasis on commercial space capabilities. “It goes all the way back to the programming piece as we develop the budgets, because if we don’t pre-plan it, by the time it gets into their strategy, it’s too late. The PEOs need to make sure strategy is included as a forethought, not as an afterthought. That’s when the real power is going to happen. And [as] you’re seeing, we’re finally putting our money where the mouth is.” 

The Space Force’s embrace of commercial has been a long time coming. A year ago, leaders unveiled their first Commercial Space Strategy after months of work, pledging to build “hybrid architectures” of government, allied, and commercial satellites and systems across a wide range of missions.  

By the end of the 2024, Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael A. Guetlein and then-service acquisition executive Frank Calvelli issued guidance to program executive officers, said Col. Rich Kniseley, head of the Commercial Space Office: “Look over their mission area requirements and … see which ones of those can we now move over to commercial, international, and what has to be purpose-built,” Kniseley said. 

Calvelli left his seat at the change in administrations, but his military deputy, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, took things a step further in early 2025, when he assumed the role of acting SAE. 

“Every major program at SSC, all the traditional programs, have taken an excursion. They’re not stopping the program of record, but they’ve taken a side excursion,” Garrant said. “And the ask was, ‘if I, Gen. Purdy, were to cancel your program, how would you meet your requirements purely commercial?’ 

“So in my mind, it’s a fantastic exercise. It nests right with the commercial strategy. It’s aligned with the pivot we’re trying to make. And everything’s on the table. … Nobody got a pass. Everybody has to do this excursion of, ‘Could I start over and meet my requirements commercially?’” The results of those drills aren’t in yet, but “this wasn’t just an academic exercise.” 

Trump’s executive order, aimed at modernizing and reforming the notoriously slow Pentagon acquisition process, serves as an “exclamation point” to the message Space Force leaders had been sending, Kniseley said. It calls for the Pentagon to develop a plan for speeding up acquisition, to include a “first preference for commercial solutions.” 

In some areas, the Space Force and its predecessor organizations have already shown they can do it. Todd Gossett, an executive with satellite communications provider SES Space & Defense, said during a panel discussion that SATCOM companies have “seen, over the past decade, a much more purposeful integration of these commercial capabilities into the military alongside military purpose-built capabilities and what we now call hybrid space architecture.” 

A notional rendering of a mesh network in space. Photo Credit: Northrop Grumman

In a roundtable with reporters, Charlotte Gerhart, deputy director of military communications and position, navigation, and timing at SSC, confirmed that approach, saying she and her team are “continuously looking [at] ‘what can we pull in? How can we be faster and less expensive and more capable by pulling in the newest, latest technology commercial uses?’” 

Still, the U.S. military space enterprise is known for taking decades and spending billions of dollars to procure its own exquisite, custom systems. Simply the possibility of canceling contracts that are years along, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is a major shift. 

A “frozen middle” of procurement officers who resist a more flexible, commercial-friendly approach doesn’t help, Gossett said. 

Kniseley, himself a career acquisition officer, agreed, saying program managers are inclined to focus on cost, schedule, and performance without considering commercial alternatives. 

Those alternatives may not fulfill every requirement in a program, Kniseley noted, but they can speed help to warfighters in the field. That alone makes them valuable as the U.S. races to keep pace with its adversaries, said Air Force Col. Eddie Ferguson, chief of advanced warfighter capabilities and resources analysis division at U.S. Space Command. 

“We have a 2027 timeframe that [SPACECOM Commander Gen. Stephen N. Whiting] gave us,” he said. That demands using commercial partnerships, “preferably with dual-use technologies, because that’s what’s going to deliver in the timeframe that we’re looking at.” 

There are other hurdles besides procurement officer inertia, though.  

Commercial leaders frequently tout the innovation of American industry, but need to show they can meet the stressing demands of the military, which often go beyond what’s required for a commercial product. 

“The challenge is, can you develop enough trust? Because most of us are coming from Silicon Valley,” or other non-traditional backgrounds,” said Joe Morrison, general manager of remote sensing at Umbra, a sensing and imaging firm. “There’s been a lot of big promises, [but] a lot of under-delivery. Can you trust us enough to share with us what your actual needs are?” 

Once the government does that, industry still needs to fulfill its own, commercial purposes. 

“It is a fundamental tension in the relationship where we are developing something that we think is the best way to solve a problem, and may be different than what a government customer has asked for or has envisioned for that need,” said Michael Madrid, chief growth officer at Starfish Space, a satellite servicing company. 

The military, on the other hand, can’t afford to rely on a company that might go out of business or want to pull out of an agreement when the fighting starts and their satellites are being attacked. 

“As we start to work with new … companies, we evaluate their financial viability, long term, Garrant said. But they are then “part of our Department of Defense architecture. You’re now at risk. You’re a legitimate target, right? What are the implications there?”  

A clear and consistent message conveyed when dealing with companies is that those “providing services or capabilities to the United States military understand the risk,” added Ferguson. 

Nevertheless, the industry and military space officials agreed that the ties between them are set to grow. 

“It takes a lot of top-down pressure in order to change culture, while also building up from the bottom,” Kniseley said. “So having an executive order that says ‘go commercial first,’ having the Vice Chief of Space Operations and the SAE look to prioritize commercial, having Congress put it into the NDAA to prioritize commercial … you’ve got all the top-down pressure. But now it’s on the program executive officers to change how they procure things.” 

INDOPACOM Boss Stresses Value of, Risk to Air Superiority in the Pacific

INDOPACOM Boss Stresses Value of, Risk to Air Superiority in the Pacific

April 10, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

Just a few weeks after the Air Force unveiled the F-47 and with the Navy on the verge of awarding a contract for its sixth-generation fighter, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command warned that China is out-producing the U.S. in advanced fighters, and air supremacy, once the exclusive purview of the U.S., is now something that neither country can achieve in the region.

Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, in an April 10 hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, told lawmakers that the People’s Republic of China has “2,100 fighters [and] over 200 H-6 bombers, and they are producing fighters at a rate of 1.2 to 1 over the United States.” He also warned that “their advanced air-to-air missile/long range air-to-air missiles also present a tremendous threat” to the U.S.

Paparo was referring to the Chinese PL-15 and PL-17 air intercept missiles, the latter of which is reported to have a range of more than 200 miles, far outclassing the range of the U.S.’s main radar-guided dogfight missile, the AIM-120D Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), which has a range of about 100 miles.

The disparity in the range of these weapons is the main reason the Air Force is developing the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile, which will extend the reach of U.S. fighters to roughly match that of the PL-17. The JATM is highly classified; it was to have been fielded in 2022, but the Air Force has only said the missile is in test.

China is reportedly also building its premiere stealth fighter, the J-20, at a rate of 40-50 airframes per year. The top U.S. air dominance fighter, the F-22, has been out of production since 2010. The Air Force awarded a contract for the F-22’s successor, the F-47 to Boeing on March 21, and a contract for the F/A-XX, the Navy’s counterpart, is in the final stages of approval. Boeing and Northrop Grumman are the finalists.

The importance of these new fighters was clear in Paparo’s comment.

“If you don’t hold the high ground along the first island chain, you are vastly limited in your ability to operate,” he said, adding that “ceding air superiority is not an option if we intend to maintain a capability against our adversaries and the ability to support our allies.”

Asked by committee chair Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) if China “is now capable of denying us air superiority in the first island chain,” Paparo replied that “air supremacy is the complete mastery of the air” and “neither side will enjoy that.”

The first island chain refers to an arc of nations and islands including Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan that has traditionally been the limit of China’s military sphere of influence in the Pacific. In recent years, however, China has been expanding the reach of its aircraft, ships, and missiles to reach as far as Guam.

In addition to the new air dominance fighters, Paparo also touted the value of the existing F-15E and its upcoming upgrade, the F-15EX. Specifically, he praised the EX’s “dominant electronic warfare capability, in addition to the already dominant elements of range, speed sensors and payload of the Mighty Eagle.” Paparo noted that he is a fan of the F-15, having flown it as an exchange pilot with the Air Force.

Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) noted that F-15Es from the 336th Fighter Squadron from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in his state recently arrived at Kadena Air Base in Japan, and asked Paparo what mission it will perform and the value the F-15E provides INDOPACOM

Paparo said the air units at Kadena are “our on-point, contact layer, immediately able to impose costs” on a regional aggressor and to provide “immediate ability to achieve ephemeral air superiority in the [area of responsibility.]”

“The air wing at Kadena is a critical, mobile, dynamic capability that is just not fixed in Kadena, but has the ability to move throughout the AOR…under the principles of Agile Combat Employment,” Paparo added.

ACE, as the Air Force calls it, is an operational concept where small teams of Airmen disperse to operate from remote or austere airfields. It is “the foundation on which the larger forces would flow in, in the event of a conflict … so it’s absolutely crucial,” Paparo said.

Paparo said the Air Force will be working on ACE during this summer’s Northern Edge exercise, saying it is “the means by which we achieve more dynamism among the force.” He told Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) that Adak, one of the westernmost islands in the Aleutian Islands chain, will figure prominently in that exercise.

Sullivan urged Paparo that INDOPACOM should “re-open” disused facilities on Adak, because Chinese officials have approached the Aleut Corporation, which administers the island for native Alaskans, about using it as shipping hub with a 100-year lease, something Sullivan said should not be permitted to happen.

Paparo agreed: “I think it would be bad, because this is [China’s] modus operandi in the Belt and Road Initiative. Imagine having the Belt and Road Initiative include Alaska.”

DOD Plans Quicker, More Comprehensive Cybersecurity Standards for Contractors 

DOD Plans Quicker, More Comprehensive Cybersecurity Standards for Contractors 

April 10, 2025 | By Shaun Waterman

Defense IT contractors who can demonstrate an assured supply chain and secure coding practices will soon be able to get fast track approval to have their products operate on DOD networks, radically shortening a process that often takes months or years at present, Pentagon Chief Software Officer Rob Vietmeyer said April 10. 

The Defense Department will tell contractors, “if you want the fast path to get past these long [approval] cycles, if you want to demonstrate that your product is trustworthy and secure enough for these defense missions … demonstrate through independent testing that your products meet these types of controls, and we’ll get you on the fast test list,” he told an audience of industry executives at AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter’s Innovation IT day event in Herndon. 

He said the so-called “Swift Process” will build on the work done over nearly 15 years to build required system security standards into DOD contracts under the 7012 provision of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, and then to require contractors to certify compliance with those standards under the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program, which will come into full force later this year. 

But the Swift Process will be implemented much, much faster, he promised. 

“7012 was a seven-year process,” he pointed out, “Another seven years to get CMMC through the regulatory approval process, we can’t operate at those speeds anymore, right?” 

Despite being implemented more quickly, the Swift Process will also be more comprehensive than CMMC, he said, covering supply chain security and issues of foreign control or influence on the contractor and their suppliers, as well as incorporating the secure coding pipeline defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). And it would apply, not to whole organizations, as CMMC does, but to specific products. 

“So what we’re looking at is defining a set of controls, and if industry [partners] can demonstrate that their products and their pipelines meet those controls, that removes from us the burden from going through months and months of Risk Management Framework assessments. It can get us to understanding, yes, this software meets our risk posture. … Because we built that trust with industry that if we install this software, it will not bring unacceptable risk into our environment,” he said. 

Speaking to Air & Space Forces Magazine after his address, he said the new process is “a high priority for the current administration,” and the launch is “imminent.” 

“We are working on some of the details right now internally,” he explained. “What we’re going to announce is the objectives for this effort, and a kind of high level framework, and then rapidly—so I think a few months, not years—engage with industry about it.” 

He said the engagement will begin by collecting feedback via Requests for Information. They will ask industry “What are the sets of controls we should establish for software products? For foreign influence and control? For software pipelines? The aim is to work with industry so that they can demonstrate that their products are trustworthy, and then we can, based on that trust, give them the fast pass into the defense [IT] environment.” 

He said the Swift Process is driven by two concerns. First is the need to get cutting edge capabilities into the hands of U.S. warfighters, and the second is the need to extend the Pentagon’s security perimeter into the contractors who make up the defense industrial base and beyond them, into their supply chains. 

“We know adversaries are going after the software supply chain with increasing frequency, right? Sophisticated attacks. We’ve got to get much smarter as a community on what it means to secure software.” That includes tracking and vetting components in including open-source software packages that might be riddled with vulnerabilities, or susceptible to being back-doored by foreign cyber-spies posing as open-source coding volunteers. 

Even contractors’ own code isn’t safe, he said. “Attackers are actually going after the [software development] pipeline,” as they did in the Solar Winds attack. “So we’re looking at everything from memory safe programming languages to how you’re securing your developer identities [and] your repositories,” he said. 

Golden Dome Is New. But Plenty of Next-Gen Missile Warning Is in the Works Already

Golden Dome Is New. But Plenty of Next-Gen Missile Warning Is in the Works Already

April 10, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—The Pentagon’s plan to implement President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system is still in the works and nothing final has been decided, but at the Space Symposium here, military and industry officials alike touted partnerships and work already done that will feed into the initiative. 

Indeed, while many of the headlines around Golden Dome have focused on the groundbreaking technologies and new efforts required, officials said many of the other capabilities mentioned in Trump’s executive order about detecting and tracking missiles from space are things they’ve been working on for a while now. 

“President Trump’s executive order is a big policy shift, but I would say it is a recognition of what we’ve seen over the past years with the expanding missile threat,” Missile Defense Agency Deputy Director Maj. Gen. D. Jason Cothern said.  

Those threats include growing capacity for the likes of Iran and North Korea, plus the advanced arsenals of China and Russia with new technology like hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment systems. 

In response, Cothern said MDA Director Lt. Gen. Heath A. Collins was working to up the agency’s game even before the Golden Dome order came out. 

“For the last year, our director … has been leading us across multiple axes to be more agile as an institution, to retool us for great power competition, and to live his vision of ‘go fast and think big,’” Cothern said. 

Among those changes, Cothern cited a new strategic road map, an advanced capabilities office, and a renewed focus on program execution. 

Likewise, Col. Jon Strizzi of the Space Systems Integration Office and Col. Robert Davis of the Space Sensing directorate—both in the Space Force’s Space Systems Command—each noted that the Space Warfighting Analysis Center conducted a review of the missile warning mission several years ago and concluded that a change was necessary. 

“That’s when we pivoted to the [low-Earth orbit and medium-Earth orbit] architecture,” said Davis. “And those are hyperfocused assets on the hypersonic threat, the exact type of threats that are potentially against the homeland that Golden Dome is assigned to detect, track, and then engage and defeat. So we were already heading in that direction.” 

MDA has been pivoting too, Cothern said. It started with the agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor demonstration, which it has been working on since 2021. Two small satellites were launched into low-Earth orbit in February 2024 and have already proven itself valuable. 

“It has collected over 650,000 images, including specifically tailored hypersonic test events, but also interesting real world events,” Cothern said of the HBTSS program.

Trump’s executive order called for the “acceleration of the deployment” of an HBTSS layer. Officials from L3Harris, which built one satellite, say they’re basically already expanding its deployment via contracts with the Space Development Agency for its proliferated low-Earth orbit constellation. 

“SDA has taken the MDA technology and as part of the tranches, they are procuring copies of HBTSS,” said Ed Zoiss, the company’s president of space and airborne systems. “We’re not calling it HBTSS anymore, but SDA is procuring copies of HBTSS now.” 

At a congressional hearing April 9, U.S. Northern Command boss Gen. Gregory M. Guillot said he needs those new satellites, particularly to track hypersonic missiles.

“The most crucial step, I think, is to get the HBTSS robustly fielded, that would allow us to detect and track in ways that we cannot right now,” he said.

Like their government counterparts, L3Harris executives also say they were already working on some of the things Golden Dome is looking for. 

“I think it really started before the executive order came out for L3Harris,” said Zoiss. “L3Harris saw the move from exquisite single systems to proliferated, and we saw that that was going to be really a market shift.” 

Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told reporters that “mission analysis” on Golden Dome is ongoing, and the service is specifically looking at what it already has in development. Still, everything is “way predecisional,” he said. 

Trump’s executive order, signed Jan. 27, gave the Pentagon 60 days to submit an architecture and plan for Golden Dome. Counting business days, that gives leaders until April 22. Yet even as planning is ongoing, potential elements of Golden Dome are churning forward. 

On April 7, the Space Development Agency announced it was soliciting proposals for its latest tranche of missile warning satellites in low-Earth orbit, and Zoiss confirmed to Air & Space Forces Magazine that L3Harris will be pursuing that contract. 

At the same time, Space Systems Command is working toward awarding a contract for its next round of missile warning satellites, called Epoch 2, in medium-Earth orbit. The biggest issue there is not a technical issue, but a budget one, Davis said—because of continuing resolutions, the command has had to delay a contract for several months. Epoch 1, meanwhile, is still on track to start launching in 2027. 

Notional graphic of Resilient MW/MT MEO Epoch 1 Space Vehicles (Courtesy Graphic)

Meanwhile, the Missile Defense Agency is working on yet another prototype satellite called the Discriminating Space Sensor. 

“This is a critical new development for us that will provide birth-to-death tracking and discrimination of in-flight ballistic missiles,” Cothern said. “Our plan is to launch this prototype and demonstration by the end of the decade, but who knows how the budgets play out—we may actually be able to accelerate that.” 

Accelerating what’s already in development may prove to be the biggest effect of Golden Dome. James Mazol, performing the duties of chief technology officer for the Pentagon, told symposium attendees that the goal is to produce capabilities at a rapid rate. 

“We’re going to move fast, we’re going to deliver quickly and repeatedly across the President’s term,” Mazol said—Trump’s term will end in January 2029. “We’re going to leverage the full range of industry, and we’re going to push the limits of technological development.” 

Saltzman doubled down on that timeline when discussing what the Pentagon will be looking for at an upcoming Industry Days conference for Golden Dome. 

“It’d be great to say, ‘I’ve got the perfect solution, and I only need 12 to 17 years to develop it,’” Saltzman said. “OK, that’s great. Put that over here. Now, what can we do in the next two to four years? Let’s talk about that.” 

That timeline already matches some of what the Space Development Agency and Space Systems Command are doing. It remains to be seen if they will try to go even faster with an influx of resources. 

As programs in the works move forward, another key part of Golden Dome may be ensuring they fit into a larger framework or “system of systems,” as Saltzman called it. Strizzi said the Space Systems Integration Office isn’t actively working on that while it waits for a plan to be approved by the White House, but it has performed analysis on missile warning before, and he sees his office as a natural fit to make sure everything works together. 

“As things evolve and get more solidified with Golden Dome, I think we’ll see that there are specific programs and systems, both legacy and new, within the various PEOs of the space portfolio that are going to need to have some directive and prescriptive integrating functions that are not part of their current programs,” he said. 

Coordination and integration will be key, officials agreed. And just as they noted ongoing programs can feed into Golden Dome, they touted preexisting cooperation and relationships that will help the initiative. 

“Space and missile defense missions have always been coupled, overlapping Venn diagrams,” Cothern said, adding that MDA and the Space Force are “highly linked” and have a “growing collaboration.” 

Hiring Freeze Has Had ‘Severe’ Impact on Child Care: Air Force Personnel Boss

Hiring Freeze Has Had ‘Severe’ Impact on Child Care: Air Force Personnel Boss

April 10, 2025 | By David Roza

A defense civilian hiring freeze is undoing recent progress on child care wait lists, the Air Force’s top general for personnel issues told Congress on April 9.

Over the past two years, the service rolled out child care fee discounts to attract and retain staff for its child care centers, which pushed staffing levels from 72 percent in October 2022 to 86 percent in December 2024, Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller wrote in testimony for the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee. 

That increase knocked the unmet child care needs waitlist down to below 3,000 children by the end of fiscal year 2024, the lowest level since the Air Force started tracking unmet needs in March 2018, she added. 

“The first thing you do when you get a [permanent change of station] assignment is you look at, if you have children, where are my children going to go? What is the access to child care? How do I get on the list as soon as possible,” Miller told the subcommittee at a hearing last year. “I mean, it is mission readiness.”

But a recent civilian hiring freeze directed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 2 appears to be reversing that progress. A follow-up memo from the Pentagon on March 18 exempted schools and child development centers from the freeze. But the gap in hiring, while brief, made a dent at CDCs where staffing was already a challenge due to high turnover, a common issue across the military since most providers are military spouses who have to move every few years.

Hill Air Force Base, Utah, for example, had to disenroll 31 families last month due to low staffing.

 “The Air Force now has an exemption to hire new CDC staff members,” Hill officials told Air & Space Forces Magazine at the time. “However, the hiring, on-boarding, and training process will take time, and there is no set date for when the CDC East will reopen.”

Likewise, Peterson Space Force Base, Colo., asked some families to enroll their infant children at a civilian partner daycare since the infant classroom at the Peterson Main CDC had to close due to a staff shortage. 

Officials at both bases blamed the shortage in part on the freeze, and Miller said she is observing the effect service-wide.

“[T]he current hiring freeze has severely impacted our childcare centers by lowering our staffing levels and increasing waitlists, with the current DAF waitlist a little over 4,000 as of [March 19, 2025],” she wrote in her testimony. “With the projected reduction of the civilian workforce, we are still monitoring the enterprise impact this will have on DAF childcare.” 

One military child care expert fears Hill and Peterson could be a sign of things to come for CDCs across the country, especially as PCS season approaches and fewer spouses are available to work.

“What we’re seeing is kind of a perfect storm right now of things not coming together,” Kayla Corbitt, a leading advocate for military child care programs, told Air & Space Forces Magazine last month.

Corbitt said the hiring freeze is just one piece of the puzzle, a piece which exacerbated a pre-existing staff shortage that CDCs have struggled with for years. The staff shortage may have been particularly acute at Peterson, where a large number of Space Force units drive high demand, and Hill, where an abuse scandal had a chilling effect on hiring, Corbitt said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), ranking member of the personnel subcommittee, has flagged military child care staffing as a critical readiness issue at multiple hearings over the years. The senator was alarmed about the Hill closure, but she was also concerned that the services have not delivered on a provision in the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act that required a model for redesigning military child care staff compensation.

That provision was inspired by the Defense Department’s own recommendation that higher wages could alleviate child care staff shortages, she said. Miller was the only personnel boss with a developed model, which also affects the Space Force because the new service relies on the Space Force for CDC support.

“If military families can’t find child care, they just might not be able to serve,” Warren said.

USSF Brings Acquisition Reforms to New Nuclear Command and Control Program

USSF Brings Acquisition Reforms to New Nuclear Command and Control Program

April 9, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Some of the Space Force’s biggest acquisition reforms have made their way into the service’s new nuclear command, control, and communications satellite program, the officer in charge of the effort said April 8. 

Evolved Strategic SATCOM is one of the biggest pieces of the Space Force budget, set to replace the Advanced Extremely High Frequency constellation. Fielded mostly in the 2010s, AEHF is one of the last programs with an old-school approach to space acquisition: just six spacecraft, each the size of multiple school buses and weighing more than six tons, with software for the ground control stations delivered after first launch. 

In recent years, the Space Force has shifted toward buying larger numbers of smaller spacecraft with “commercial off the shelf” components, and former acquisition czar Frank Calvelli pushed programs to have their ground segment ready to go before the satellites launched. 

ESS is embracing that shift, Col. A.J. Ashby, senior materiel leader for strategic SATCOM, told reporters at the Space Symposium, starting with where its satellites will fly. 

“ESS will have a proliferated architecture, unlike AEHF,” he said. “AEHF is currently just in the geostationary orbit, and so we’ll be proliferated. We’ll be in diverse orbits, and there’s certain threats that we will address. But the most significant thing about ESS is that we’ll be able to service an increased number of strategic users that the current system doesn’t currently support.” 

Space Force leaders have touted proliferation as a way to make targeting harder for potential adversaries, challenging them to find different ways to attack objects in different orbits and narrowing the target window as spacecraft move relative to the Earth. 

The exact number of satellites in the ESS constellation remains a secret. Space Force budget documents reference the need for four space vehicles to achieve initial operational capability by fiscal 2032, but Ashby declined to comment further than that. 

Who exactly will build those satellites is still to be determined—the program is in source selection, with Boeing and Northrop Grumman as the top contenders after building prototypes. Ashby also declined to say when a contract might be awarded. 

However, Ashby did suggest whoever does win the contract won’t necessarily be building the exquisite systems that have defined strategically vital programs in the past. While there is no commercial market for nuclear command, control, and communications functions, existing commercial components and parts could be useful. 

“Spacecraft buses, we’re taking a hard look at that,” Ashby said. “With regard to crypto, we’ve got Viasat, we’re on contract with ViaSat right now for their chassis for our cryptographic units. Those are commercial products, right?” 

There are limits to how much commercial can be used for the program. Asked if SpaceX’s massive Starlink communications constellations is being considered for any part of the ESS requirement, Ashby said, “Not right at this point in time.” 

On the ground, though, ESS will embrace a commercial-like approach. Back in 2023, the Space Force awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin for what it calls the Ground Resilient Integration & Framework for Operational NC3, or GRIFFON, but Lockheed won’t be the only contributor. 

“You kind of liken the framework to your cell phone, and then you have different applications that would ride on that framework,” Ashby said, explaining that Lockheed will build the framework and then allow smaller software developers to work within that framework. 

“We have the best of breed, so leveraging the software acquisition pathway, we’re leveraging the Space Enterprise Consortium, other transaction authorities, we’re able to put the best of breed of software developers on contract to do that,” he said. 

That approach is one borne out of hard lessons learned from other ground segments the Space Force has tried to develop all at once, only to encounter years of delays that have limited satellites’ capabilities. 

The Space Force has outlined plans to spend $5.11 billion in research and development on ESS from 2025 to 2029, making it one of the service’s biggest programs.