In Grassroots Effort, Airmen Worldwide Come Together to Grieve SrA Roger Fortson

May 16, 2024 | By David Roza

In a grassroots effort, Airmen around the world are coming together to remember Senior Airman Roger Fortson, 23, who was killed by a sheriff’s deputy in Florida on May 3.

While responding to a disturbance call at an apartment complex at Fort Walton Beach, Fla., a deputy for the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office shot Fortson six times after the Airman opened his apartment door while holding his legally-owned handgun at his side, pointing downwards.

The death of Fortson, who was Black, has sparked grief and outrage among many Air Force members and led to discussions about race, policing, and gun rights.

On the social media platform Discord, Airmen from more than a dozen locations as distant as Osan Air Base, South Korea; Travis Air Force Base, Calif.; and Ramstein Air Base, Germany shared advice for talking with base leadership, setting up memorial events, and raising money for Fortson’s family.

“It is so important that we express this is for a fellow wingman,” wrote one Discord user. “Choose your words very wisely when speaking to leadership so they support us supporting our wingman.”

Though many of the events are scheduled for the week of May 20, some are timed in coordination with Fortson’s memorial service, which will be livestreamed from Stonecrest, Ga. on May 17. Fortson’s home base, Hurlburt Field, Fla., will stream the service in its chapel, while Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., is holding a moment of silence at 8 a.m. Pacific Time to coincide with the start of the service, a base spokesperson said.

Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, is also hosting an observance honoring Fortson, according to a flier posted to the popular Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco, another social media platform where Airmen are discussing and processing Fortson’s death, along with the unofficial Air Force subreddit.

The unofficial Air Force web panel series Crucial Convo will host a Zoom call on May 20 “to listen, lift, love, and heal” in Fortson’s memory. Meanwhile, the head of Air Force Special Operations Command pledged to hold a town hall for his troops to discuss the incident. The event is open to Airmen assigned to Hurlburt, an AFSOC spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“[O]ur Air Commandos need an opportunity to be updated on this tragic loss, share their perspective, and be heard,” Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind said in a May 15 Facebook post. “We will host a town hall in the coming days to allow for just that.”

The post came after Bauernfeind met with leaders from Hurlburt Field, local pastors and community groups, the NAACP, and the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office. Bauernfeind said the meeting included an “explanation of the investigation process” being conducted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Footage from the deputy’s body camera released by the sheriff’s office shows the deputy at first knocking on the door and identifying himself while standing to the side. He then knocked again, and when Fortson opened the door, the deputy told Fortson to step back before shooting him six times. At a May 16 press conference, a lawyer for Fortson’s family, Ben Crump, said the deputy had been called to the wrong apartment.

By all accounts, Fortson was a solid Airman. A special missions aviator with the 73rd and 4th Special Operations Squadrons that fly AC-130 gunships, Fortson’s decorations included an Air Force Achievement Medal and Air Medal with a ‘C’ device, which indicates service or achievement under combat conditions, according to the 1st Special Operations Wing. He entered the Air Force in 2019 and deployed to Southwest Asia in mid-2023.

“He was one of one. Everything you wanted in a wingman, friend, and brother,” a fellow Airman, Aaron Rozier, told NBC News. The aviator was “someone who would see you at your lowest and wouldn’t judge you for it,” he added. “But you knew he would crack a joke about it that would make you laugh.”

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David A. Flosi wrote on Facebook on May 10 that Fortson’s “untimely and tragic death is weighing heavily on me. We’ve lost a teammate, and it hurts.” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin have not yet weighed in publicly.

Others have been more vocal, including Chief Master Sgt. Ronnie J. Woods, top enlisted leader for the 8th Air Force and senior enlisted leader for the Joint-Global Strike Operations Center.

“SrA Fortson is no different than SrA Woods back in 2001. A young man serving his country and trying to make his family proud,” Woods wrote in a Facebook post addressed to Fortson’s mother, Chantemekki Fortson.

Fortson’s death is a reminder for many Airmen that even military members can be killed in encounters with police, former CMSAF Kaleth O. Wright told the Associated Press.

“I doubt if that police officer knew or cared that Roger was an Airman,” Wright said. “What he saw was a young, Black male … That could have easily been one of my sons.”

In 2020, Wright, who is also Black, made headlines for speaking frankly about his own struggles with racism after the death of George Floyd. Wright’s comments came shortly after the Air Force was criticized for attempting to bury reports of racial disparities in its justice system. Combined, the two events contributed to a series of studies on racial and gender disparities in the service and a renewed discussion on how to talk about race, starting with Wright and then-Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein.

“Most of the systems in our Air Force have been designed by people like me, for people like me,” Goldfein said at the time. “So therefore, I’ve got blinders on that are going to keep me from seeing what others with a different life experience and background are going to see.”

Now, four years later, Wright was skeptical about the chances of long-lasting change from Fortson’s death, but he encouraged commanders to listen to the experiences of their Airmen. Several Air Force leaders called for similar discussions.

“I am thankful for all who took part in the difficult conversations on Monday,” Col. Patrick Dierig, commander of the 1st Special Operations Wing, wrote in a May 16 Facebook post. “Those conversations must continue and be part of our healing process. We are stronger united and we are united when we are heard but also when we listen.”

What Will USAF Do With the Money It Saves from Retiring a B-2?

May 16, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

After the Air Force recently revealed it will divest one of its 20 remaining B-2 bombers, deeming it uneconomical to fix after a December 2022 mishap, a service spokesperson said the projected savings associated with the move—some $176 million in operations and maintenance over the next five years—won’t be poured into the rest of the fleet.

That stands in contrast to what the Air Force did three years ago when it retired 17 of its 62 B-1 bombers. Rather than cut the B-1’s O&M funding, the service used the freed-up dollars to increase the Lancer’s availability.

“The fiscal year 2025 budget request invests in both building upon our modernization efforts and resourcing readiness,” a spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Potential savings in some areas”—including B-2 O&M—“must be managed at the enterprise level to account for increased costs in others to support National Defense Strategy priorities, which include defending the homeland, deterring strategic attacks, deterring aggression and building a resilient joint force.”

“We take a holistic view when developing the budget,” another spokesperson said.

The availability and remaining service life for both the B-1 and B-2 fleets are the source of much speculation as the Air Force has been cagey with details while it plans out the transition to the new B-21 Raider.

The spokesperson did say both the B-1 and B-2 fleets will be gradually drawn down as the inventory of B-21s increases, seemingly ruling out any mass retirements of B-2s or B-1s as fresh aircraft become operational.

Asked if the start of flight testing on the first B-21 coinciding with the divestment of the first B-2 indicates the Spirit will retire on a one-for-one basis as Raiders enter the inventory, the spokesperson said “the Air Force will incrementally retire existing B-1 and B-2 aircraft as B-21s come on line. For operational security reasons, we are not going to get into specifics.”

According to an April force structure report issued by the Pentagon, the Air Force stands to save $176 million in O&M and $34 million in associated personnel costs through fiscal 2029 by retiring just one B-2: more than $210 million total.

However, the spokesperson said no decision has been made about how much to cut or move the manpower footprint associated with the aircraft.

“The Fiscal Year 2025 budget request will divest one B-2,” the spokesperson said. “That divestment will reduce requirements for certain depot maintenance and contractor logistics support functions, but specific changes to manpower authorizations will be decided at a later time.”

The second spokesperson clarified that even though the condemned aircraft wasn’t considered part of the fleet when the 2025 budget was built, “it does not mean we were already planning to divest a B-2.”

The B-21’s first operating station will be at Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., where military construction to prepare for the new bomber has been underway for some time. The Air Force has previously said that manpower billets will shift from the B-1 and B-2 to B-21 as the latter program matures. The service has also said that the first B-21 test aircraft will be “usable assets” for combat “in the mid-2020s.”

The Air Force recently awarded an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract worth up to $7 billion to B-2 prime Northrop Grumman for depot and line maintenance to carry the B-2 fleet through to its retirement. Although the Air Force has been unclear about when exactly the B-2 fleet will be completely retired, the contract—as well as future years defense plan estimates for B-2 research and development and procurement—end in fiscal 2028.

The service declined to say how much it would cost to fix the damaged B-2 and bring it back into service, citing the “ongoing accident investigation.” For similar reasons, it won’t discuss the specific damages sustained by the mishap airplane.

After a B-2 was badly damaged in a 2010 accident at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, the Air Force said it couldn’t bear to lose even one B-2 from the inventory and undertook a repair effort that cost more than $100 million over four years. If the late 2022 mishap aircraft needed a similar repair time, it would likely serve only two years or so before the B-2 fleet is retired, potentially explaining why the Air Force has decided not to fix it.

Counting aircraft in depot, maintenance and test, the divestment of another B-2—the second lost out of an original fleet of 21—means the Air Force has about 13 of the bombers available for combat at any time.

Pentagon, USAF Report Decrease in Sexual Assault, But Most Women Don’t Trust System

May 16, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

Sexual assaults in the U.S. military decreased for the first time in nearly a decade last year, according to a new survey—but the Defense Department still faces deep mistrust among many women service members in how it handles cases.

“We know we have a lot more work to do to rebuild trust, especially amongst our servicewomen,” Beth Foster, the executive director of the Pentagon’s Office of Force Resiliency, told reporters.

The DOD puts out a yearly accounting of reported sexual assaults, but the biannual, anonymous survey of sexual assault prevalence, released May 16, is seen as a far better indicator of actual incidents because sexual assault is dramatically unreported in both military and civilian life. Officials said reported cases were just a quarter of the total estimate of sexual assaults involving a service member in 2023.

Overall, roughly 29,000 troops said they were sexually assaulted in fiscal 2023 in the anonymous survey, a 7,000-person decrease compared to the 36,000 in 2021. The Pentagon said the decrease was primarily driven by decreases in estimated cases of sexual assault against women serving in the Air Force—from 5.5 percent to 4.6 percent of female Airmen—and the Navy.

For the first time, the Space Force was included separately in the Pentagon’s survey—an estimated 6.1 percent of female Guardians and 0.6 percent of male Guardians said they were sexually assaulted last year. One percent of male Airmen said they were sexually assaulted in the past year, the same as in 2021.

“Its findings demonstrate that the department is making progress to prevent sexual assault and harassment in the military,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement on the report.

An estimated 6.8 percent of Active duty women experienced sexual assault in 2023—approximately a 1.6 percent decrease from 2021. Just over 1 percent of men said they were sexually assaulted, which Pentagon officials said was not a statistically significant change. Among women, the 2023 report still found the second-highest rate of sexual assault recorded since 2006—also 6.8 percent that year. However, the release of the 2023 numbers marked the first time since 2016 that there had been a drop from the prior report.

But while rates were lower, the report found the majority of women surveyed did not have trust in the military’s handling of sexual assault. Just 38 percent of women surveyed trusted the military to protect their privacy if they were sexually assaulted. Service members were also asked if they believed the military could “ensure your safety” and “treat you with dignity and respect” if they were sexually assaulted—only 43 percent of women said yes to those questions, which were asked separately. Those numbers were only slight improvements over 2021, despite a number of efforts in recent years to combat sexual assault in the military. In contrast, roughly two-thirds of men said trusted the military with their privacy and safety if they were sexually assaulted.

“There’s much more to do,” said Nate Galbreath, the acting director of the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, or SAPR. “We do know that climates of trust, where people can see that victims of sexual assault are treated well when they come forward to make a report often encourage others to come forward and make a report.”

There were 1,838 official reports of sexual assault received by the Department of the Air Force in 2023, a drop of five percent from 2022, a year which had a dramatic rise.

However, “this is the second highest number of reports received since the beginning of the SAPR program” roughly 15 years ago, the Air Force report stated.

The Pentagon has taken steps to improve how it handles sexual assaults. Since the end of last year, independent prosecutors outside service members’ chain of command now handle sexual assault cases, a long-awaited move that is intended to remove bias or potential retaliation from the equation. Pentagon officials said they hoped that would restore troops’ faith that cases would not be swept under the rug.

“Our hope is that we can regain some trust amongst our victims so that they know that their cases are being treated independently and with the professional nature that is required of these crimes,” Foster said.

The Department of Defense has also hired around 1,000 staff to focus on the prevention of sexual assault, with the ultimate goal of hiring 2,500 personnel.

“We’re focused on professionalizing our sexual assault response workforce,” Foster said. “A lot of these folks are performing that role in a collateral duty role, and while they may be very dedicated to that work, victim assistance is a full-time job. We also are focusing on making that workforce independent as well because we know there have been instances in which our service members haven’t trusted the people, the victim advocates, that they need to trust to take care of them because they’ve been aligned with command. And so a lot of those changes are underway, but we know it’s going to take some time before we start to see those numbers shift.”

F-22s Practice Dogfights over the Korean Peninsula with ROK F-35s

May 16, 2024 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

A pair of U.S. F-22s practiced dogfighting with South Korean F-35As on May 16, making a rare appearance over the peninsula’s inland airspace.

The training saw the four stealthy fighters engaging in close-range air combat maneuver, taking turns in offensive and defensive posture in simulated confrontation scenarios, the Republic of Korea Air Force said in a release.

Four Raptors arrived earlier this week at Kunsan Air Base, South Korea. The F-22s, assigned to the 19th and 199th Expeditionary Fighter Squadrons of Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, have been operating out of Kadena Air Base in Japan since mid-April.

Kunsan’s 8th Fighter Wing said in a release that it will house, facilitate maintenance, and project the jets into South Korea’s airspace over the course of the next week. For now, it’s unclear if the Raptors will participate in more joint drills alongside the ROK Air Force during its upcoming biennial training starting May 17, featuring its F-35As, F-15Ks, F-16s, and FA-50s.

The 8th Fighter Wing’s release did note the F-22s would help “test Agile Combat Employment (ACE) capabilities within the Indo-Pacific region.” Air Force leaders have championed ACE—defined by small teams of Airmen and aircraft operating from remote or austere bases and moving quickly—as a key part of the service’s pivot toward great power competition with the likes of China.

To that end, the Air Force has been ramping up ACE training for months now, and the F-22 is no exception.

The Raptors’ presence in or near South Korea is unusual but not uncommon. Last February, B-1 Lancer and F-22 Raptors flew alongside Korean F-35s over the Yellow Sea. In December 2022, F-22s and Korean F-35 and F-15K fighter jets escorted a B-52 bomber near the waters off the peninsula. Most recently, Raptors were featured in Seoul’s defense exhibition in October. However, the air dominance fighter rarely participates in exercises over the Korean Peninsula.

New Report: Electrical Issue, Poor Weather Led to Fiery F-16 Crash in S. Korea Last Year

May 16, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

An electrical power disruption wreaked havoc on an F-16’s flight and navigation instruments, and poor weather meant the pilot had no other way of gaining his bearings, resulting in a fiery crash in South Korea last year that destroyed the $29 million aircraft, according to a new U.S. Air Force report.

South Korean broadcasters released dramatic CCTV footage of the May 2023 mishap, which showed the pilot ejecting safely before the crash, but the cause of the incident was unclear at the time.

In a report released May 16, an Air Force Accident Investigation Board “did not find the [pilot] to be causal” to the crash.

The pilot and F-16 were from the 8th Fighter Wing at Kunsan Air Base, but they took off from Osan Air Base at around 9:30 a.m. local time on May 6, 2023, as part of a four-ship formation participating in a local exercise. The weather was rainy and too cloudy for the pilot to see his flight lead ahead of him and he had to use his radar to lock on.

Using data from the aircraft’s “black box,” investigators determined that just 11 seconds after takeoff, the F-16 experienced a partial electrical power issue. The exact cause of the problem will never be known, investigators said.

“Given the lack of available evidence, and the many potential causes of the partial electrical failure, to include any piece of electrical equipment or any stretch of wiring, it is not possible to determine the actual cause of the electrical power loss,” they wrote.

Regardless, in rapid succession—less than 30 seconds—essential systems started to fail, including:

the Inertial Navigation System, “which displays flight data such as aircraft heading and relation to the horizon,” the report states

the Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System (Auto-GCAS), which allows the aircraft to take over from the pilot if it senses it is about to crash

the Data Entry Display, which shows data inputted by the pilot

the horizon or attitude indication lines, or “pitch ladders” on the Heads Up Display

Communication with anyone outside the aircraft

All this prevented the pilot “from being able to accurately tell where the horizon (i.e. wings level attitude) is with his primary horizon display … from changing his navigation equipment settings and … from initiating an automatic aircraft recovery.”

While the systems did not display warning messages, the pilot recognized that the data from his primary horizon display, particularly airspeed and attitude, were inaccurate. A brief break in the clouds allowed him to fly using visual cues, but upon re-entering the bad weather, he tried to use the backup horizon display, only to find that that system was also displaying inaccurate data.

“Multiple attempts to try and determine where the horizon was by cross-checking between the primary and standby [Attitude Directional Indicator] were unsuccessful,” the report states. The investigators indicated the pilot was largely helpless at that point, and compared the situation to “when you push on the gas in a car and expect the speed to go up, but the speed goes down.”

By the time the aircraft dipped below the cloud cover, the pilot determined he was flying too low and at too steep of an angle to recover and ejected at 710 feet above ground level, less than three minutes after takeoff. The aircraft crashed close to where he landed, in an agricultural field. Debris flew some 300 yards, and “there was a significant localized post-impact fire at the impact crater,” the report states, but there were no casualties.

The accident investigation board cited two main causes for the crash, with no contributing factors: the power disruption’s effects on the F-16’s instruments and the poor weather conditions preventing the pilot from being able to fly visually.

“The mismatch in data provided by the primary and standby attitude indicators, due to the power disruption, caused the [pilot] to become spatially disoriented and unable to maintain aircraft control in the weather and at a low altitude,” the report concluded. “The absence of either factor may have prevented this mishap.”

The aircraft was completely destroyed, with the damages estimated at $29.39 million. The incident was the first of three USAF F-16 mishaps in South Korea in nine months, leading to a brief pause in flight operations. Officials have said they do not believe the incidents are related. This is the first incident for which an accident investigation board report has been publicly released.

Services Eye One Terminal for All SATCOM, But Lawmakers Fear Lack of Coordination

May 16, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

The Space Force is working on a “hybrid” satellite communications terminal that can use multiple frequencies to connect warfighters with military and commercial constellations alike across orbits. However, key lawmakers are concerned the effort is too focused on the Department of the Air Force and want a plan to integrate the other services.

In a draft version of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act released by the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee this week, the Space Force received its full budget request of $228 million for research and development of a hybrid SATCOM architecture, including $168 million for prototyping and testing of terminals. On top of that, the committee added $2 million for the creation of a pilot program to demonstrate how the hybrid structure would work.

According to budget documents, the Space Force plans to test its prototype terminals “at three ground installations and on nine different aircraft types.” Prototyping and integration assessments for some of the aircraft types began this fiscal year, and the first integration work is scheduled to begin in fiscal 2025.

However, the House subpanel wrote that it “remains concerned that there is not a broader Department of Defense effort to deploy hybrid SATCOM terminals on platforms outside of the Department of the Air Force.”

As a result, the committee wants the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment to provide a briefing by February 2025 “on any efforts being made to coordinate the development of hybrid SATCOM terminals for platforms across the Department of Defense.”

As part of that briefing, lawmakers are asking for “integration roadmaps” for how each military department will deploy hybrid SATCOM terminals.

While it will likely be months before the 2025 NDAA becomes law and the final contours of the bill are still hazy, Pentagon officials typically respond to directive reporting language regardless.

As a general matter, the Department of Defense wants to operate with a common operating picture in the future, allowing easy and quick communication between assets regardless of service through its Combined All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort.

The Space Force is eagerly pushing forward on new forms of satellite communications. The Space Development Agency is building out its “transport” layer in low-Earth orbit. In its new Commercial Space Strategy, the service highlighted SATCOM as one of the top areas of emphasis for working with private industry. Companies like SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb are all building out massive constellations of their own that can provide connectivity. Pentagon officials enthusiastically support connecting troops with crucial data and comms from anywhere on the globe.

To make that happen, service members will need terminals to connect with the satellites flying overhead, but procuring them is no small task.

“If you have 100,000 user terminals or more out there that are being used by the services and our allies, if we required each one of them to buy new kit to be able to communicate with the satellites, it just would never work,” SDA director Derek M. Tournear said in April at the Space Symposium. “There’s no way you could keep up this rapid pace.”

To get around that problem, SDA has focused in the short term on connecting its satellites with Link 16, the standard waveform used by U.S. and allied forces to transmit data for years.

But relying on one waveform and one satellite network may not work for every mission or in times of conflict, and getting different terminals for every constellation would be costly and impractical—hence the push for “hybrid” terminals that can adjust as needed.

The Air Force Research Laboratory has been working on the problem since 2018 through its Global Lightning program. It was able to produce terminals that could connect with one commercial provider at a time, tested with “partners from across the Air Force, Navy, Army, Coast Guard, and Marines to achieve communications to several hundred ground users, ships, military vehicles, and multiple aircraft types,” according to AFRL’s website.

The Navy has its own hybrid terminal program, Satellite Terminal (transportable) Non-Geostationary, or STtNG—though, as the name suggests, that terminal is not meant to connect with geostationary satellites.

The Army, meanwhile, is working on what it calls the Next Generation Tactical Terminal to connect with multiple commercial constellations. Defense One reported the service hopes to award a contract for the program by the end of 2025.

“The Space Force is developing this hybrid SATCOM terminal, working with the other services,” Tournear said in April. But left unsaid was whether each service would design and procure its own terminals.

LaPlante: ‘Nunn-McCurdy Or Not,’ US Must Have ICBM Leg of Triad

May 15, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

Regardless of what the Defense Department concludes in its Nunn-McCurdy cost breach review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program, the U.S. must still have a land-based leg of the nuclear triad, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William A. LaPlante told lawmakers May 15.

The fate of the Sentinel, the successor to the Minuteman III, has been up in the air since January, when the Air Force announced the program had suffered “critical” cost and schedule overruns as defined by the Nunn-McCurdy Act. By law, the Secretary of Defense must certify that the program is essential and that no alternatives exist, or it must be terminated.

Regardless, LaPlante said at a hearing of Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, an ICBM will be required to meet the National Defense Strategy.

“The modernization of our triad is the top priority of the Defense Department,” LaPlante said. The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review “reaffirmed the need for a triad, so Nunn-McCurdy or not, we have a policy of our country having and sustaining a triad.” The other two legs of the triad are bombers and the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, which has also experienced delays.

Some members of Congress—notably Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.)—have offered legislation or proposals to skip the Sentinel program and rely on a dyad of bombers and subs for strategic deterrence, though several members voiced concern in the hearing with delays to the Columbia too.

LaPlante said he is “committed to working with the Air Force and across the DOD team to go through the letter of the law and make sure that if we do recertify [Sentinel]—and it’s not a guarantee—that we certify a program that is executable and will meet replacing that leg of the triad.”

According to law, the Pentagon has 120 days from the submission of its fiscal 2025 defense budget request to decided whether it will certify the program. LaPlante said the review process has “about a month and a half” left. He previously told another Senate panel the work would be concluded by “July 10 or so.”

The Pentagon must work with an independent review team to find the reasons for the 37 percent cost overrun and two-year delay in Sentinel. In a previous hearing, LaPlante declined to discuss any preliminary findings of the review but said he thought the program suffered from a lack of competition for the contract, poor communication between Northrop and its subcontractors, and a lack of appreciation for the infrastructure cost.

Kendall, who is recused from taking any programmatic action on Sentinel or B-21 because of a previous financial relationship with Northrop, has also noted that the Air Force hasn’t undertaken a project of this magnitude in nearly 50 years and lost much of its expertise in cost estimating for it.

Estimated costs have ballooned from $93.5 billion to $118 billion, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has warned that the final bill “may be worse than that.”

But LaPlante was adamant that the ICBM requirement can’t simply be dismissed.

“Apart from the Nunn-McCurdy, we need a triad,” he said.

Senior Air Force officials—including Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and acquisition executive Andrew Hunter—have said program estimators did not appreciate the scope of work needed on the civil engineering portion of the Sentinel program, which requires massive overhaul of the control capsules, silos, trunking, and other infrastructure associated with the new ICBM. Large amounts of material that were expected to be re-used from the Minuteman III infrastructure—such as concrete structures and cabling—are too worn out or decayed to be repurposed for Sentinel, they said. Most of those infrastructure elements date back to before the Minuteman III was deployed in the 1970s.

However, USAF leaders said, the LGM-35A missile itself is on schedule and meeting requirements. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the Sentinel enterprise.

Responding to questions from Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) about keeping the Sentinel on track, LaPlante said “a lot of the focus, assuming we go forward, is going to be really on the localities,” and ensuring that there is sufficient workforce and infrastructure across the three bases and five states where the U.S.’s ICBM silos are located.

Hunter, also testifying, told the committee there is tight coordination between operators and ICBM modernization director Brig. Gen. Colin J. Connor in ensuring the resulting system meets operator needs.

“I work very closely with Gen. Connor, who leads that task force,” Hunter said. “[I] meet with him on a very regular basis, as we go through the Nunn-McCurdy process. But of course we continue to execute that program while we’re going through the Nunn-McCurdy process. So that’s a key partnership.”

Hunter said the B-21, also built by Northrop Grumman, is “the best model for integrating our operators and our requirers, and that is the model we are looking to execute with Sentinel.” He said the Air Force has not yet “reached quite that B-21-level of integration yet, but we are well on our way. We have staffed up in the program office with operators from Global Strike (Command), both operators and maintainers and we are starting to see the benefits of that, especially as we go through some of the design choices that we have to make, to get to where we want to be with the Nunn-McCurdy process.”

Deployments of the Future: Here Are the First 6 Air Task Force Locations

May 15, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

As part of an overhaul of its force deployment, the Air Force announced six initial locations on May 15 that will test a new model.

Command teams leading new “Air Task Forces” will begin to come together this summer, complementing existing forces there, at the following bases:

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz.

Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

Joint Base San Antonio, Texas

Dyess Air Force Base, Texas

Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash.

Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base, N.C.

A senior Air Force official told reporters that the locations were picked for their ability to host the new forces without any additional military construction, to minimize cost, for their existing personnel, and for their proximity to training areas.

“These preferred locations meet the criteria for both space, certain skill sets, and distance to training ranges,” the senior official said. “The ATF locations will have a certain amount of sustainment forces, either there or close by, and the mission forces may come from somewhere else, or they may be co-located.”

An Air Task Force will consist of a command element with an attached expeditionary air staff and special staff that work directly for the commander and a Combat Air Base Squadron that does base support. Mission Generation Force Elements come in to project airpower, for example. Mission Sustainment Teams support those forces.

The six locations comprise two different rotations—two for the Middle East and one for the Pacific. The first three task forces will deploy in October 2025. The other three task forces will rotate in to replace the first batch of forces in April 2026.

The command element is roughly 50 Airmen at each location, whose units perform a wide variety of Air Force missions. The Air Task Forces will led by colonels, personally picked by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin, an Air Force spokesperson said.

Air Task Forces will range in size from hundreds to thousands of Airmen. The design of Air Task Forces is “modular,” Air Force officials say, so the size will depend on how large its mission generation element is—for example, an ATF could have one fighter squadron or several.

“What we want is the command layer and the sustainment layer to be capable of accepting forces really of any type,” the senior official said.

Air Force officials say ATFs are “experimental” and “a pilot program” for the future.

Air Task Forces will lay the groundwork for Combat Wings—in which units could deploy overseas from a single base—seen as the Air Force’s future deployment model. The overhaul is designed to present forces to the Department of Defense’s 11 combatant commands in a more cohesive and easier-to-understand way instead of pulling together Airmen into piecemeal units to meet the requirements of U.S. military operations. Underpinning the changes is the Air Force’s new AFFORGEN deployment model of six-month cycles during which Airmen prepare, train, deploy, and reset.

The change is based on a need to deploy forces that can operate well together more quickly, driven by the threat posed by China. It informed Air Force’s efforts to “re-optimize” for so-called Great Power Competition, though the planning for Air Task Forces predates the re-optimization efforts.

“This is kind of walking us back towards this model that we had during the Cold War, where we know each other, we trained together, we’re building the team in peacetime and in preparation for deployment,” the senior official said. “These teams are able to train together for much longer.”

However, Air Task Forces are just part of that evolution. The Air Force has already deployed Expeditionary Air Bases of units drawn from fewer units. The first XABs were deployed to CENTCOM in October, followed by a rotation six months later in April.

But while there were positives, Expeditionary Air Bases “isn’t exactly where we want to be either,” the senior official said. The Air Force still had to draw from around 60 units for those deployments.

Air Task Forces take the consolidation a step further.

“The ATF, the Air Task Force, is really three layers that will be constant, and that we’re trying to get from as few places as possible,” the official said. “This is one of those steps in the evolution.”

F-16 Demo Team Rolls Out 50th Anniversary Paint Scheme

May 15, 2024 | By David Roza

The Air Force F-16 Viper Demonstration team rolled out a new paint job on May 15 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first flight of the YF-16, the prototype that took off by accident from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. on Jan. 20, 1974. The demo jet features the same iconic red, white, and blue livery as the YF-16, but with a few changes such as “Viper Demo” and “20th Fighter Wing,” the team’s home unit at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., written on the tail.

Usually a paint job like this would take about three months, but the demo team and the Edwards-based 412th Test Wing managed to do it in less than eight weeks, according to a press release.

“When I was hired to be the commander and pilot in the summer of last year, I had made it known that I hoped to find a way to get our airplane painted in the prototype scheme to take America back to the beginning of the story that started 50 years ago,” Capt. Taylor Hiester, the demo team leader, said in the release.

f-16 paint — U.S. Air Force Capt. Taylor “FEMA” Hiester, F-16 Viper Demonstration Team commander and pilot, taxis at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., May 13, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Meghan Hutton)

The new paint job comes about four months after Edwards painted the tail of one of its F-16s in the same colors, also in celebration of the jet’s first flight.

“These custom flashes represent the 50-year legacy of both the F-16 and the 416th Flight Test Squadron team who ensure the Viper remains a dominant presence for decades to come,” the California base wrote in a Jan. 22 Facebook post.

Tony Accurso, a logistics manager for the 416th Flight Test Squadron who directed the F-16 50th Anniversary event at Edwards, served as a historical advisor for the demo team’s paint project. The 412th Test Wing’s corrosion shop used archival imagery to re-create each detail of the original paint scheme.

“Everyone at Edwards has a big sense of pride for not only supporting the Viper Demo Team but also celebrating the 50th anniversary of the F-16 which began right here at Edwards in 1974,” he said in the release.

f-16 paint 2 — U.S. Air Force Capt. Taylor “FEMA” Hiester, F-16 Viper Demonstration Team commander and pilot, flies over Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., May 13, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Meghan Hutton)

Photos released by the base show Hiester taking the newly-painted jet for a spin over Rogers Dry Lake. Half a century earlier, that same lake saw General Dynamics test pilot Phil Oestricher take the YF-16 down the runway for a high-speed taxi test. The aircraft reached a speed at which it became unstable, with its wingtips hitting the runway and throwing off sparks. Oestricher decided the safest thing to do was to take the jet into the air, where he flew a six-minute circuit before landing.

After a tune-up, the jet made its first formal flight on Feb. 2, 1974, but an investigation commended Oestricher for saving the prototype, according to Edwards.

In a 2012 interview with Lockheed Martin, the pilot said he had always intended “to put a little bit of daylight under the wheels, maybe a foot or two, fly it about a thousand feet down the runway, and land it, and in the meantime checking out the lateral or the roll response sensitivity.”

U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Elias Sanchez, F-16 Viper Demonstration Team dedicated crew chief, performs a show launch at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., May 13, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Meghan Hutton)

In the years since, the F-16 has proven itself an adept platform in air-to-air combat, close air support, suppression of enemy air defenses, and aerial acrobatics, as proven by the Air Force Thunderbirds and the Viper Demonstration Team. The team has a history of eye-catching paint jobs: in 2020, they unveiled ‘Venom,’ featuring a snakeskin pattern across the wings and fuselage and yellow snake eyes near the cockpit.

Like Venom, the new YF-16 paint job will no doubt turn heads at the 25 shows the team will perform across four countries this year.

“The only way that we were able to get started was with the support of the leadership at the 20th Fighter Wing, the home of the F-16 Viper Demonstration Team, who believed in the importance of this project and supported the vision that we had in mind,” Hiester said.