Cropsey Wants to Keep Things Simple: ‘Complexity … Is Going to Kill Us‘

Aug. 1, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

DAYTON, Ohio—With a striking story and four basic guidelines, the Air Force’s command, control, communications, and battle management czar Brig. Gen. Luke C.G. Cropsey laid out his priorities for industry at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference on Aug. 1.

Cropsey, the Department of the Air Force’s integrating program executive officer for C3BM, is responsible for coordinating the department’s drive to connect sensors and shooters and the ambitious Advanced Battle Management System. The many elements will form the “DAF Battle Network,” the department’s contribution to enabling joint all-domain command and control.

Service Secretary Frank Kendall has called Cropsey’s job “the hardest acquisition job I’ve ever given anybody”—unsurprising given the technological and logistical complexity of integrating every kill chain as some have envisioned ABMS doing. Having spent his first six months setting a course, Cropsey is now out preaching his gospel, in this case an audience of industry and Air Force leaders. His focus, he said, is in making this concept work, not connecting everything.

To convey the idea, Cropsey reflected on his childhood in Africa, where his father was a surgeon. One day, his father asked him to bring a drill, a bit, and a medical textbook to the operating room.

“A patient had come in who had been hit by a car on his bike and had a massive head contusion,” Cropsey said. “And in the process of diagnosing this guy, he went through the basic diagnostics around what happens when you have a bleed on your brain, and this guy had all the symptoms. But he didn’t have any of the sophisticated diagnostic equipment that you would expect here in the States to tell him this is exactly what was going on. So he needed the book from his med school days to try to figure out some basic things about where this guy might actually be bleeding out of his brain.

“And then he needed the drill and the bit, because the only way to relieve that pressure was to literally drill a hole in this guy’s head.”

As his father did then, so Cropsey now faces his own extremely complex problem—one that does not hold a single life in the balance, but that nevertheless demands immediate action.

“Complexity in this space is a lot like that brain bleed … It’s going to kill us if we don’t figure out how right now we are going to deal with it, and we have to deal with it effectively,” Cropsey said. “But quite frankly, we don’t have time to go into all the nuances here. We’ve got to get down to the simple.”

Cropsey has spoken in the past of not wanting to “boil the ocean” when it comes to his job—trying to take on too much and being doomed to fail. Instead, he emphasized that starting simply is necessary to build progress. That extends even to the long-standing idea that ABMS must “integrate everything.”

“This has to get down to the details about how you’re actually going to do that mission,” Cropsey said. “How that mission is going to play out in terms of how you see the flow, the assets that you have available to do it, and the way that they’re going to be connected. When you do that, and you get down to the specifics, you find out that actually, you don’t have to have everything, everywhere connected. You don’t have to know where all the data is all the time, everywhere.”

Instead, Cropsey said he is following four basic principles as he presses ahead:

“Alignment around the operational outcomes we want to achieve.” Echoing Kendall’s push for operationally-focused ABMS, Cropsey said any offering from industry must meet a specific operational need.

“We do C2, we do all C2, and we don’t do any more than C2.” While Cropsey wants any solution he identifies to be scalable across the entire Air Force, he warned that getting away from command and control would cause the entire effort to “collapse” under its own weight.

“Architecture wins over products.” Given the desire to connect sensors and shooters, Cropsey said he favors contractors and products that can easily connect with the overarching system. “In order to win the long term, you actually have to have an architecture that’s relatively agnostic to the individual nodes or agents that you have in that architecture,” he said.

“Capability has to be continuously deployed over time.” Cropsey said he will push programs to produce and field viable capabilities, then iterate on them quickly—a model more like commercial software development than conventional military acquisition. “I’m pushing my team for quarterly deliverables,” Cropsey said. “Something needs to come out the door every quarter—what are we developing this for? Who is it getting delivered to? How are we making it better? I’m front-loaded to do 90-day sprints.”

Emphasizing rapid, continuous development echoes the approach championed by the Space Development Agency under Director Derek M. Tournear. Indeed, meeting with reporters after his keynote, Cropsey said he and Tournear speak regularly about their mutual pursuit of innovation.

“We are absolutely synched up with other aspects of the organization that have like-minded, similar perspectives,” Cropsey said. “We’re swapping stories all the time about what works and what doesn’t work.”

Just as SDA recently notched a major success with the first launch of its Tranche 0 satellites, Cropsey also shared progress his team is making.

At the unclassified level, Cropsey said, the Air Force has made progress on some lines of effort related to ABMS. For example, the KC-46 will get a palletized communications system that will allow it to better process incoming data and communications shared by other aircraft, and NORAD has received its first “minimally viable product,” ABMS cloud-based command and control.

Cropsey also hinted at progress in the classified arena on integrated kill chains. “In my quarterly update with SECAF [Kendall] in June, we actually gave him our first analysis around what that initial architecture would look like for this specific operational problem,” Cropsey said. He promised details in a classified briefing this fall.

Pentagon Seeks ‘Escalation Management’ With China, Top Policy Official Says

Aug. 1, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

Though a parade of senior American officials have visited China as of late to try to encourage a working relationship with Beijing, the Pentagon has yet to make significant progress in establishing substantive communications between the American and Chinese militaries—a tool for avoiding miscommunication and escalation during a potential crisis.

“Escalation management in the Indo-Pacific is so incredibly important, and we would be delighted to have increasing communication channels and connectivity with the [People’s Republic of China],” Mara Karlin, a senior policy official at the Pentagon, told reporters Aug. 1 at a Defense Writers Group event.

But so far, that has yet to happen. Beijing has repeatedly rebuffed attempts by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III to establish a channel for talking with his Chinese counterpart.

“Secretary Austin has requested multiple times to have communication channels, particularly crisis communication,” said Karlin, who is performing the duties of deputy under secretary of defense for policy. “It’s really important that the most senior folks can talk to each other as quickly as possible when something happens. So Secretary Austin keeps asking for that.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for “reunifying” Taiwan with China, perhaps by force if need be, and objected to U.S. efforts to improve Taiwan’s defenses with military aid. The Chinese have ramped up military drills near the island in recent years, including sending warplanes into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone.

Tensions between the U.S. and China in the region have also grown. A Chinese jet came within a few yards of U.S. Air Force RC-135 over the South China Sea in December. In February, an F-22 Raptor shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon that transited the continental U.S. And in May, the Pentagon released video of another “unnecessarily aggressive” maneuver by a Chinese fighter intercepting a U.S. RC-135.

Heightening the potential for miscalculation is the often opaque nature of China’s decision-making. That tendency was highlighted by dramatic moves in late July when Xi sacked the head of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, which is in charge of China’s land-based nuclear missiles, and his foreign minister in short order.

The reason for the moves are not clear. But it comes as China is engaged in a substantial nuclear buildup that could leave it with a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, according to a Pentagon report released last year on China’s military power.

In recent weeks the U.S. has attempted to stabilize the U.S.-China relationship. On July 12, Chinese ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng met with Ely Ratner, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs.

So far, however, the establishment of a military-to-military channel remains stalled despite recent visits to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and climate envoy John Kerry.

“We have been trying really hard to set up communication channels and they have not been enthusiastic about those,” Karlin said. “That’s really problematic. When we look at history, it is usually quite helpful for us to be able to sit down and speak with those whom we disagree, not least so we can get an understanding of what they’re doing, what we’re doing, what we all think is escalatory, and how we might understand it in different ways.”

Austin shook hands with his Chinese counterpart Li Shangfu in June at a Singapore security meeting but did not have a substantial exchange, Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said in a statement at the time. Li is under U.S. sanctions, though the Pentagon says those would not prevent talks between the two defense chiefs.

Austin met with the Chinese minister’s predecessor, Wei Fenghe, in November 2022.

Karlin pointed to how the U.S. has tried to manage the risk of escalation with Russia despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

She highlighted the example of the U.S. postponing a routine test of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile that had been scheduled for March.

“Now, this was just a regular old ICBM test,” Karlin said. “But understanding in that context was critical because the context was, of course, Russia’s military had just attempted this massive invasion. It wasn’t doing terribly well. Ukraine’s military was fighting a lot harder than perhaps some folks had expected. And so what would appear to be just a traditional old here’s what we do, not interesting, actually might be meaningful for escalation management.”

First E-7 Wedgetail Can’t Come Any Sooner. But Maybe USAF Can Complete Its Fleet Faster

Aug. 1, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

DAYTON, Ohio—Neither intense interest nor extra funding can move up the 2027 date when the Air Force takes possession of its first E-7 Wedgetail. But USAF acquisition officials said July 31 that actions taken now could help them aquire the 26-plane fleet more quickly.

“There’s a lot of fixation on how fast we can produce the first one,” Steven Wert, program executive officer for the digital directorate, said at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference. “[But] there are limitations to that. Boeing has to build a green aircraft and then they have to convert it to a configuration that can support the radar, and then the mission systems, and then you have to test and certify air worthiness and those things. There’s only so fast you can do the first one.”

How fast the Air Force can get the rest of its new E-7s, however, has been a topic of intense interest since USAF announced its decision to replace its aging E-3 airborne early warning and control aircraft with the Wedgetail.

Acquiring planes faster is still possible, said Thomas Ramsey, airborne warning and control system division chief.

“The rapid prototyping, the first two, we’re going as fast as we can,” Ramsey said. “The way to fill the fleet faster is to do it through production. Advanced procurement of the 737, the radar, the reinforced section will let us jump start each block buy by a year. So there’s definitely benefit there. And then the other way to go faster is to buy more per year.”

The Air Force fiscal 2024 budget request did not include that advanced procurement, but USAF did list a $600 million requirement on its unfunded priorities list for Congress. The funds would pay for long-lead items and help Northrop Grumman ramp up production capacity for the Wedgetail’s Multi-Role Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) radar.

Congress seems split on the matter. The House version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization bill included half that amount, $300 million; the Senate version includes none.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told lawmakers in 2022 “there are things that we could do … to maybe get access to aircraft earlier one way or another.” Just how was never clear.

Australia has six E-7s in operation, and the United Kingdom is in the process of buying three. At last year’s Life Cycle Industry Days conference, Wert suggested that “we see tremendous opportunities to accelerate test and evaluation, given that we’re buying a system very similar to the UK E-7. Much of the testing can actually be done on a UK E-7.”

The U.S., British, and Australian air chiefs signed a “joint vision statement” in July, pledging to work together to develop and deploy the E-7 Wedgetail, and noting a collective desire to “accelerate E-7 capability delivery.”

But that deal is mostly focused on long-term enhancements, not short-term deliveries, Wert said.

“The intent of that statement is looking to the future,” he said. “We expect, for example, Australia to leverage the work we’re doing on open mission systems on our rapid prototyping aircraft. So it’s looking at the future of modernization across the three fleets and how we can work together to leverage each other’s investments or even a coordinated program at some point.”

The urgency of the need to replace the E-3 AWACS fleet is no secret. The age and deterioration of the U.S. AWACS fleet makes the old Boeing 707-based aircraft hard to maintain.

But while simply acquiring new E-7s into service as quickly as possible remains the top priority, but Air Materiel Command is also keeping an eye on future enhancements. “I believe some of their future requirements will be things like even more improved radar, which some level of development funding Australia has already, … [and] but it would need to be further developed.”

Ramsey, the airborne warning and control system division chief, said communications enhancements are also likely. “Every battle management platform will always need more advanced communications—bigger pipes and more bandwidth and more radios to get information on and off,” he said.

KC-135 Recapitalization Requirements, Request for Information Coming in September

July 31, 2023 | By John A. Tirpak

DAYTON, Ohio—What is now officially known as the KC-135 Tanker Recapitalization Program—formerly called KC-Y or the “bridge tanker”—should clear the Pentagon’s joint requirements process by the end of September, at which time the Air Force will issue a Request for Information to industry for potential solutions, Scott Boyd, USAF’s deputy program manager for mobility aircraft, told reporters July 31.

However, Boyd said the service is not yet ready to discuss the timing and exact number of aircraft in the program, as much of that will depend on the success and timing of the Next Generation Air-refueling System, or NGAS, which will come after it.

The Air Force will complete an acquisition strategy for the KC-135 recap tanker in the third quarter of fiscal 2024, he added. It will be based on an analysis of alternatives that will also launch this fall.

The KC-135 recap effort should complete the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process next month. Around the same time, the RFI will be published, Boyd said during Air Force Materiel Command’s annual Life Cycle Industry Days conference.

“As soon as I get a systems requirement document,” the program will get underway, Boyd said. It will be the first official requirements statement for the program and will translate the requirements “into the language of industry,” he said. No additional time will be needed to write the RFI because the Air Force already has all the information that went into the requirements and no changes are expected, he said. Responses to the RFI would be due next year.

Boyd said “nothing has changed” with regard to the KC-135 recap, in that no particular airplane has been ruled in or out. Senior Air Force leaders have said they are leaning toward buying more KC-46s from Boeing as the KC-135 recap, but Boyd said the Air Force still has time to do “market research.”

Lockheed Martin is offering USAF a tanker based on the Airbus A330 Multi-Role Tanker Transport dubbed LMXT, and company officials have argued NGAS will likely not be ready by 2035, the Air Force’s target date.

When NGAS enters the fleet will affect how many tankers the Air Force buy as part of the KC-135 recap program, Boyd noted.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall says the service needs to get the NGAS as soon as possible. The original plan called for the future tanker—expected to be small, stealthy, and capable of accompanying combat aircraft in contested airspace—around 2040, but Kendall has “dramatically pulled that in and said ‘no, we need to go faster because it’s that NGAS capability … that scares China,” Boyd said.

With that updated NGAS schedule, Air Force acquisition executive Andrew Hunter said in March he thinks the KC-135 recap program will consist of around 75 airplanes, after the service had previously said it might buy 150. Lockheed officials, on the other hand, have suggested 2040 is a more realistic timeline for NGAS, which would necessitate more KC-135 recap tankers.

While Kendall and Hunter have hinted they may simply opt for more KC-46s instead of a tanker competition, some lawmakers from states where Lockheed would assemble its LMXT offering have tried to mandate competition through legislation.

Despite all this, “I’ve honestly not felt pressure from Congress or from within the Air Force to do anything different than what we were already doing,” Boyd said.

In response to questions from reporters, Boyd also offered little indication whether the forthcoming requirements will tip the program toward the KC-46 or LMXT. He said the JCIDS document for the recapitalization program will not include anything “revolutionary” and could “potentially be satisfied” by continued buys of KC-46s.

On the other hand, he also noted the document “is not going to declare that we cannot create a new logistics” tail for the airplane to be acquired—which LMXT would require, because there is no similar airplane in USAF’s inventory.

“It may speak to sustainability of the weapon system in ways that tell you that I probably don’t want to create a new [logistics and support train], but it’s not going to be clear that you can’t,” Boyd said. “It’s going to come down [to] … the business case analysis that we’re doing, and the final market research that we do to decide what is the best value approach for the Air Force. And that’ll be our recommendation.”

There will also be lessons learned from the KC-46’s troubled development—Boeing agreed to a fixed-price development and production program on the KC-46, but so far has borne more than $7 billion in overages on the project—that will apply to the new tanker program, noted Col. Leigh Ottati, chief of the KC-46 program office.

“Everyone needs to understand” the scope of a program like a new tanker, said Ottati. The KC-46, originally thought to be a simple conversion of a cargo jet into a tanker, turned out to be “more development than everyone thought,” and Boyd said that lesson will be front of mind as the Air Force pursues the KC-135 recap and NGAS.

Industry and government need to both understand “the scope of what’s being asked,” he said.

Brown: New CCA Drones Will ‘Break the Mold’ on Weapons Life Cycles

July 31, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

DAYTON, Ohio—The Air Force’s approach to developing Collaborative Combat Aircraft—the uncrewed, autonomous drones to fly alongside manned aircraft—will “break the mold” of traditional acquisition and sustainment, Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. said July 31.

For years, “we have just built and selected better versions of the aircraft we built before,” Brown said at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Industry Days conference. But CCAs will not follow a conventional life cycle with evolving requirements, development, deployment, and sustainment.

Developed as modular drones that can be configured with different sensors and weapons to supplement crewed fighter aircraft and complicate adversaries’ targeting challenges, CCAs are being developed in a whole new way. The program takes those stages and “mashes them together,” Brown said, pulling together operators, acquisition experts, and technologists to more rapidly develop new systems.

Through dialogue and collaboration, those experts can move away from the traditional model of developing “specific, detailed requirements, probably not informed by what was technically relevant or possible,” Brown said, and instead focus on delivering useful systems on an operationally-relevant timeline.

As Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has emphasized, the aim is to deliver meaningful operational capability, and that requires the service to willingly “trade requirements for what is technically feasible,” Brown said, “making sure that in the end, the system we build has what it needs to prevail.”

“We must make this the standard across the Department of the Air Force—requirements being formed and developed by operational necessity and technological reality,” Brown added.

Such a shift in development may lead to other changes in the acquisition “life cycle.”

“Do you provide CCA only on operational missions and execute our flight training in high-fidelity simulators, or somewhere in between?” Brown asked. “Depending on the answer, we may require a whole different approach to maintenance and sustainment. Instead of executing traditional maintenance tasks to prepare a CCA for the next training flight, maintenance might be executing a diagnostic test and pushing software updates.”

Brown’s suggestion that CCAs may not fly for training purposes echoes previous comments from Maj. Gen. Scott R. Jobe, director of plans, programs, and requirements for Air Combat Command, who said in March that “some of these may not be flown until we unpack them for a combat mission.” In that sense, CCAs are more like armaments than weapons platforms.

With the emphasis on rapid development and modular systems, the balance between sustainment and research, development, test, and evaluation may change, Brown suggested—“spending money to develop a capability and less for maintenance and sustainment costs, or maybe a completely different life cycle model.”

That could mean USAF could design systems to support upgraded technology as it is developed. CCAs are probably too expensive to to be “attritable”—that is, expendable in a fight—but by focusing on rapid development over optimal hoped-for performance, Brown said he hopes to stimulate innovation.

Recalling the example Col. Paul Irvin “Pappy” Gunn, who modified A-20 Havoc aircraft in World War II to make them more formidable against the Japanese, Brown said Airmen must work with industry to identify innovative answers to unsolved problems—and for leaders to foster that innovation by being willing to accept reasonable risk.

Biden Says Space Command will Stay in Colorado

July 31, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

President Joe Biden has selected Colorado as the permanent headquarters for U.S. Space Command, reversing a previous decision by his predecessor to move the combatant command to Alabama, the administration announced July 31.

“This decision is in the best interest of our national security and reflects the President’s commitment to ensuring peak readiness in the space domain over the next decade,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, and SPACECOM commander Army Gen. James Dickinson all supported Biden’s decision, according to a statement by Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder.

The White House said the decision to keep SPACECOM at its provisional headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs rather than making a cross-country move to Alabama would safeguard the readiness of U.S. space operations and made the most practical sense.

“U.S. Space Command headquarters is expected to achieve full operational capability at Colorado Springs soon in August,” Watson said. “Maintaining the headquarters at its current location ensures no risk of disruption to Space Command’s mission and personnel, and avoids a transition that could impact readiness at a critical time given the challenges we continue to face.”

The fight to host Space Command’s headquarters has been politically charged from the start. In his final days in office, then-President Trump announced SPACECOM would take up permanent residence at Redstone Arsenal, near Huntsville, Ala.

Critics cried foul and the Biden administration launched a review of the matter early in Biden’s tenure. That left the question of where the command’s permanent home would be in limbo. Colorado and Alabama Congressional delegations postured for advantage, with Colorado lawmakers trying to connect the debate to issues like abortion access.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, accused the Biden administration in a statement of “political meddling in our national security.” He promised to investigate whether the Biden administration “intentionally misled” Congress on its decision.

“This fight is far from over,” Rogers said.

Colorado’s Senate delegation, Democrats John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, praised the decision, saying it was grounded in the best interest of national security.

“Today’s decision restores integrity to the Pentagon’s basing process and sends a strong message that national security and the readiness of our Armed Forces drive our military decisions,” Bennet said in a statement.

The Government Accountability Office faulted the Trump administration in a 2022 review, saying the decision to move USSPACECOM to Alabama had “significant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility.” But GAO did not directly challenge the outcome.

In reversing that decision, Ryder said the Biden administration and the Pentagon “worked diligently to ensure the basing decision resulted from an objective and deliberate process informed by data and analysis, in compliance with federal law and DOD policy” in its final selection.

Space Command was established in the fall of 2019 as a geographic combatant command responsible for military operations 100 kilometers above sea level and beyond. In December of that year, the Space Force was established as an independent military branch.

The USSF’s service component to SPACECOM, Space Operations Command, is also located at Peterson Space Force Base. The state is home to much of America’s existing military space infrastructure.

Space Force Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, nominated to lead SPACECOM, is the current head of Space Operations Command.

Ryder said that keeping SPACECOM in Colorado will allow it “to most effectively plan, execute, and integrate military spacepower into multi-domain global operations in order to deter aggression and defend national interests.”

William Tell—USAF’s Ultimate Fighter Contest—is Back, After 19 Years

July 31, 2023 | By David Roza

The best air and ground crews from across the Air Force fighter enterprise will compete at the Air Dominance Center in Savannah, Ga., in September at the 2023 William Tell Air-to-Air Weapons Meet, the first fighter competition of its kind in nearly two decades.

“If you’re into football, this is the Super Bowl, if you’re into baseball, this is the World Series, and if you’re into golf, this is the Masters Tournament,” said Lt. Col. Stephen Thomas, commander of the the Air Dominance Center, in a July 27 press release. “The airspace we have here on our coast is a national treasure and will allow the competing pilots the ability to operate to their absolute full potential to show who is truly the best of the best.”

About 800 Airmen are expected to participate, Air Combat Command told Air & Space Forces Magazine, representing nine squadrons from the Active, Guard, and Reserve components. Among them will be:

Air Combat Command:

F-15E Strike Eagles from the 4th Fighter Wing, Seymour Johnson AFB, N.C., and 366th Fighter Wing, Mountain Home AFB, Idaho

F-22 Raptors from the 1st Fighter Wing, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va.

F-35 Lightning IIs from the 388th Fighter Wing, Hill AFB, Utah

Command and Control from the 552 Air Control Wing, Tinker Air Force Base, Okla.

Pacific Air Forces:

F-22 Raptors from the 3rd Wing, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, and the 154th Fighter Wing, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, HI

Command and Control from the 3rd Wing, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, and the 18th Wing, Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan

Air National Guard:

F-15 C/D Eagles from the 104th Fighter Wing, Barnes Air National Guard Base, Mass.

F-35 Lightning IIs from the 158th Fighter Wing, Burlington ANGB, Vt.

Aircrews will test each other’s offensive and defensive skills against simulated enemy aircraft. Ground crews will compete in loading weapons, maintaining aircraft, and intelligence operations. Fans and observers can track the action by following scoreboard announcements posted each evening on social media, the release said.

“We want our community to be excited about this upcoming event and include them as much as possible,” said Thomas. “Although this event will not be open to the public, there will be plenty of jet sighting opportunities in the local area as well as photo and video coverage of the event published for public viewing.”

f-22 — An F-22 Raptor assigned to the 325th Fighter Wing, Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida takes off from the Air Dominance Center for an air combat exercise at Sentry Savannah on May 10, 2022. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Erica Webster)

While individual and team awards are on the line, planners said the most important objective is to practice controlling the skies for future conflict.

“Air Superiority is not [an] American birth right—it’s a constant fight,” said Maj. Kyle Brown, the competition director, in an April release. “William Tell 2023 is about resurrecting our heritage, sending us your champions, and competing.”

From 1954 to 1996, William Tell was a biennial competition, but budget cuts in the wake of the Cold War ended the practice in the 1990s. With the exception of a 2004 revival to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first contest, William Tell was finished—until now. USAF’s renewed focus on China as a peer adversary fighting in highly contested airspace is the inspiration for bringing William Tell back to life.

“As we participate in the long-awaited return of the William Tell competition, we reiterate our steadfast dedication to maintaining control of the skies in support of our Joint Force and multi-national partners,” Gen. Mark Kelly, head of Air Combat Command, said in April.

If history is any guide, this promises to be an intense competition. The 2004 meet came down to the wire before a Pacific Air Forces team from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, pulled ahead on the very last flight. PACAF’s Capt. Pete Fesler, an F-15 pilot, took home the Top Gun title after earning the highest individual scores in the meet.

“We never expected a team to walk away with it, and nobody did walk away with it,” said Lt. Col. Ed Nagler, the 2004 competition director, in a release at the time. “It was incredibly close from the beginning to the end.”

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of the story reported that the 354th Fighter Wing from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska is participating in William Tell. It no longer plans on participating.

Microscopic Contaminants Pose ‘Low Risk’ to F-35 Engines, JPO Says

July 28, 2023 | By John A. Tirpak

Contaminated powdered nickel used to manufacture some Pratt & Whitney commercial engines—and prompting an accelerated pace of inspections—may also have made its way into F135 fighter engines, but the risk is considered low and the F-35 enterprise has “already taken significant steps to mitigate the risk,” the Joint Program Office told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

RTX, parent company of Pratt & Whitney, said in an earnings call this week that powdered nickel used to make parts for some of its commercial engines—notably the PW1100 that powers many Airbus A320neo airliners—was contaminated with other material in batches dating from 2015 to 2020. The “microscopic” contaminant could cause parts made with the material to fail. Officials called it a “rare” problem.

Company officials did not say at the time whether the material was used in the manufacture of other Pratt products, such as fighter engines, but said it would accelerate, at its own expense, the rate of inspections of commercial engines using parts known to have been made with the material. Many of these are high-pressure turbine discs. The issue was described by officials as a “quality escape.”

The problem was discovered and corrected in new items two years ago, and Pratt has been monitoring those parts made with the contaminated material since, during regularly-scheduled inspections. New testing has indicated inspections are needed sooner, company officials said.

Asked if the contaminated metal powder constitutes a problem for the F135 engine used on the F-35 fighter, a JPO spokesperson said its propulsion management office “has been aware of the powdered nickel contaminants issue since 2021 and have already taken significant steps to mitigate the risk. The suspect contaminants have been identified and were removed from the forging process in September 2021.” The JPO did not identify the steps it has taken.

Pratt’s assessment of the risk “was reviewed by the JPO and we concur with the preliminary assessment that the fleet is at low risk on the JSF Hazard Risk Criteria at this time,” the program office said. It expects “minimal maintenance impact to the fleet” and said it will work with Pratt “to ensure all safety protocols and mitigation plans are properly utilized.”

Neither the JPO nor Pratt identified specific parts on the F135 engine that may have the contaminated material.

In its own statement to Air & Space Forces Magazine, Pratt & Whitney said through a spokesperson that “we’ve had zero F135 maintenance issues related to powdered nickel contaminants. Our military customers are aware that we monitor for it, and they are fully aligned with our mature safety protocols and mitigation plans, which we will continue to update as required.”

RTX chairman and CEO Greg Hayes told financial reporters the inspections will inconvenience commercial operators and the company will compensate them for taking some of their aircraft out of service unexpectedly.

An inspection regime “focused on the high pressure turbine discs” of the PW1100 “is already in place and Pratt is developing plans to optimize shop … capacity within its network to complete these inspections as quickly and efficiently as possible,” he said.

“Current production of powdered metal parts is not impacted and Pratt will continue to deliver both new engines and new spare parts across all product lines,” he added.

“We’re on top of it, we’ve got this,” he said. “It’s going to be expensive. We’re going to make the airlines whole as a result of the disruption.”

But, he added, “it’s not an existential threat. …It is a problem [like] we have every day, and we’ll solve it.”

Company officials said the powder is manufactured in one of Pratt’s New York facilities, processed in a company forge in Georgia, and then made into parts such as turbine discs. They said that over 3,000 inspections of PW1100 parts have been made already, and about 1,200 more need to be made on commercial engines. The number of suspect parts found to be in need of replacement is “less than one percent,” Hayes said.

What’s at Stake for Air Force as Senate and House Work Out Final 2024 Defense Bill

July 28, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

The Senate overwhelmingly passed its version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act late July 27 in a bipartisan 86-11 vote. But the House version of the bill was passed largely on party lines, and the two chambers must resolve their differences before the annual defense policy bill can reach the President’s desk.

House Armed Services Committee Chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) will be the primary drivers on the House side, while Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and ranking member Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) will do the same for the Senate. Party leadership will also play a role in who gets to participate. The conference committee must work out the differences and present a bill that can pass, identically, in both chambers.

Committee members will have their work cut out for them. The House and Senate bills differ on dozens of issues, from whether or not to appoint an inspector general to oversee military aid to Ukraine to whether or not the nation needs a Space National Guard. They also differ on a number of hot-button social issues included in the House bill, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion education; a prohibition on the military paying for travel to receive reproductive and abortion services not available at certain duty stations; and medical care for transgender service members. The abortion issue was the most divisive, leading to almost every House Democrat voting against the bill, which passed only narrowly as a result.

Time is short. Lawmakers leave for the August recess this weekend and won’t return until September. Staffers will start the conference process in their absence, but with fewer than 20 working days in September, they are unlikely to pass a reconciled bill before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

Divestments and Procurement

Differences that must be resolved of particular concern to the Air Force begin with airframes. The House took a more prescriptive approach to its bill, aiming to limit the Air Force’s authority to retire older aircraft and to direct the service to assign some new aircraft to the Air National Guard. In each case, the House and conferees will have to choose whether to include or exclude provisions such as:

B-1 Lancer: The House bill would extend a prohibition on modifying “the designed operational capability statement for any B–1 bomber aircraft squadron … in a manner that would reduce the capabilities of such a squadron” until the B-21 Raider is fielded. If adopted in the final bill, no B-1s could be retired for at least the next four years.

F-16 Fighting Falcon: The House bill bars the Air Force from retiring any F-16s until it submits a report to Congress detailing how many F-16s it wants to divest in the next five years, the impact of those retirements on mission and budget, and the actions USAF plans to mitigate those impacts.

F-15EX: The House bill includes advance procurement funds for F-15EX fighters, which it wants assigned to the Air National Guard. The Senate provides funds for F-15EX, but not advance procurement funding for future years, as the House does. It is silent on where the planes should be assigned.

Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve fighter squadrons: The House bill bars the Air Force from ending flying mission of any fighter squadron in the Air National Guard or Air Force Reserve unless it offers a plan to recapitalize those missions, even by means of transferring existing aircraft in the interim, if necessary. The Senate version does not address this matter at all.

Tanker aircraft: Several House provisions related to retiring KC-135 Stratotankers are in the House bill, which would block tanker retirements in 2024 and require the Air Force to publish a recapitalization plan with “more realistic timelines” than its still-unclear plans for a future Next-Generation Air refueling System, or NGAS. Meanwhile, the House would also bar the Air Force from buying more than the 179 KC-46 Pegasus tankers already planned, an apparent objection to Air Force officials saying it might be wise to forego competition on a “bridge tanker” in favor of simply buying more KC-46s. Another provision requires the Air Force to certify that the Remote Vision System 2.0 operates as intended before it can be installed on any KC-46s.

RQ-4 Global Hawk: The Senate bill would prohibit the Air Force from retiring any RQ-4 Global Hawks until fiscal 2029, while the House was silent on the matter.

T-1 trainers. The Senate would bar retirements until the Air Force certifies that it has fully implemented Undergraduate Pilot Training 2.5.

U-28 Draco. The Senate bill bars retiring these aircraft until the Pentagon certifies that it is providing U.S. Special Operations Command with an equal or better intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability

F-15 fighters. The Senate wants to stall F-15C/D/E retirements until the Air Force reports back with details on the remaining service life, upgrades, and modifications done for the aircraft it wants to retire.

Both bills reduce the number of A-10 “Warthogs” the Air Force is required to keep, allowing the service to proceed with 42 planned divestments. And neither lifts a prohibition included a year ago to prevent the Air Force from retiring older Block 20 versions of the F-22 Raptor, ignoring USAF requests to shut down those planes.

Pay and Allowances

Both bills authorize the same 5.2 percent pay raise for troops, the largest year-over-year increase since 2002. They also agree on changing the way the basic allowance for housing (BAH) is calculated for junior enlisted members with dependents.

But the House and Senate disagree on several other pay and allowance changes:

Inflation. The House bill would authorize the Secretary of Defense to award “inflation bonuses” to junior enlisted troops throughout 2024, based on the rate of inflation. It also would change the formula for calculating who is eligible for the Basic Needs Allowance; by not including BAH, the House measure would greatly increase the number of families eligible for the extra pay. The Senate, however, sought to address inflation by changing the way cost-of-living allowances are calculated and paid, and by lowering the standard for what constitutes a “high-cost” area in the continental United States. The Senate bill would also reduce the size and frequency of COLA cuts for members outside the Continental U.S.

Housing costs. The House bill would authorize a trial program to outsource BAH rate calculations to a third party, applying artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to determine how much members should receive.

Basic Pay for junior troops. The Senate bill, addressing both inflation and recruiting, would authorize a study to determine whether “the current basic pay table adequately compensates junior enlisted personnel in pay grades E-1 through E-4.”

Compensating those in remote assignments: The House bill seeks a feasibility study of incentive pay for Airmen assigned to Creech Air Force Base, Nev. The Senate bill does not address Creech, but it would authorize the Air Force to pattern a program based on one the Army already has: The Remote and Austere Condition Assignment Incentive Pay program, which grants extra pay to service members in Alaska.