Photos: Airmen and Aircraft Take Part in a Unique, Massive Elephant Walk at Sheppard

April 17, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

Air Force leaders often promote the skill of America’s Airmen as the U.S. military’s most powerful, if intangible, advantage. Officials at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, found a way to highlight the human element of airpower recently: an elephant walk with its aircraft and Airmen.

Elephant walks are used as a show of force, with fighters, bombers, and other aircraft coming together on the same runway to send the message that the USAF has plenty of powerful hardware at its disposal.

On April 7, Sheppard lined up 4,000 Airmen and 80 trainer aircraft on a runway to showcase the power of its people as well as its planes. The base said it was possibly the largest elephant walk in Air Force history—nearly 70 F-15Es took part in an elephant walk in 2012. Sheppard hosts technical and flying training, allowing for a unique display of man and machine. The base trains pilots in partnership with U.S. allies, many of whom were in their jets during the elephant walk, giving it an international aspect, a base spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Four thousand Airmen and 80 aircraft participated in a one-of-a-kind elephant walk April 7, 2023, at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas. Technical training students from the 82nd Training Wing joined 40 T-38 Talon and 40 T-6A Texan trainer aircraft from the 80th Flying Training Wing on the runway to shine a spotlight on the importance of training as the foundation of airpower. (courtesy photo)

“This elephant walk really illustrates the scope and magnitude of what we do here,” Brig. Gen. Lyle K. Drew, commander of the 82nd Training Wing, said in a news release. “The key to airpower is exceptional Airmen, and the key to exceptional Airmen is exceptional training. That’s what we do here at Sheppard, and this elephant walk was our message to the world that the U.S. and its international partners remain committed to delivering the best-trained Airmen in the world.”

Around 65,000 Airmen pass through Sheppard annually, and roughly 150,000 of the USAF’s Active-Duty Airmen were trained at Sheppard, the spokesperson said. The 82nd Training Wing is the Air Force’s largest technical training wing.

Airmen from the wing lined the runway in front of the horde of aircraft from the 80th Flying Training Wing, which brought out 40 T-6 Texan and 40 T-38 Talon trainers. The 80th Flying Training Wing hosts the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training Program—known as ENJJPT—which teaches foreign combat pilots through a partnership between the U.S. and its allies.

“The fundamental technical and pilot training missions that happen here every day affect literally every base and every combat sortie in the Air Force–not to mention the impact on our global partners,” Col. Brad Orgeron, the commander of the 80th Flying Training Wing, said. The base trains Airmen in 52 specialties, with a contingent of international students passing through at any given time as well. The 80th trains pilots in a partnership with 14 countries, with around 200 new pilots earning their wings there. Five NATO members—Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark—only train new fighter pilots at Sheppard, the base spokesperson added.

“We want our allies to know that we are committed to and value our shared training experience with them, and we want our potential adversaries to know that we are bound together with our friends and partners from the very beginning of our military careers as we train side by side to defend our way of life,” Orgeron said.

How to Detect Insider Threats: Stopping Leaks in the Digital Age

April 15, 2023 | By David Roza

The arrest and arraignment of Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira, 21, of the Massachusetts Air National Guard exposes the fragility of intelligence and security in the digital age. Teixeira, a cyber transport systems journeyman with the 102nd Intelligence Wing was accused by the FBI of leaking a trove of secret and sensitive information in court proceedings April 14.

Threats from trusted, cleared professionals pose the greatest risks and deepest challenges, because insiders like Teixeira already have security clearances and are therefore inherently trusted. The National Insider Threat Center at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, a federally funded research and development center, was created to study and combat such threats.

“If there were a perfect solution for this, I’d be out of a job,” said SEI’s Daniel Costa, technical manager of enterprise threat and vulnerability management, in an April 14 interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine.

In what Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen Pat Ryder described as “a deliberate criminal act,” Teixeira allegedly released a trove of classified details on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with sensitive briefing materials and analysis on the Indo-Pacific and Middle East theaters, on Discord, an online platform popular with video gamers. As in past incidents, such as that of Chelsea Manning, a soldier, and Edward Snowden, a technology contractor, both of whom used their clearances to gain access to classified documents, this case involves a trusted individual who allegedly ignored the inherent promise attached to a security clearance.

“Each of us signs a nondisclosure agreement—anybody that has a security clearance,” Ryder said April 13. “And so all indications are, again, this was a criminal act, a willful violation of those, and again, another reason why we’re continuing to investigate and support [the Department of Justice’s] investigation.”

In the wake of the Snowden and Manning leaks, President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13587, signed in 2011, required government agencies with access to classified computer networks to implement formal insider threat detection and prevention programs. But no program is 100 percent airtight.

“There’s an inherent risk that comes along with doing business,” said Costa. “What we’re talking about is human nature, and thinking about insider threats as an inherent risk to organizations requires real careful planning and organization-wide participation to reduce that risk to acceptable levels.”

The Insider Threat Detection Center at SEI maintains a database of more than 3,000 incidents where individuals with authorized access to an organization’s documents or other assets used trusted access to either maliciously or unintentionally affect the organization in a serious, negative way. Reducing risk within an organization starts with identifying the most critical assets, which is a challenge in institutions as large as the Department of Defense, Costa said. Once those assets are identified, the organization must strategized to protect and limit access to those crown jewels.

“One of the unique things about insider threat programs is that the threat actors that we’re talking about are our colleagues, our co-workers, our contractors and other trusted business partners,” Costa explained. “The challenges lie within the fact that this is not a risk that you can buy down to zero, by the nature of that trust relationship you entered into by bringing an individual into your organization.”

For security professionals, the key to protecting those trusted relationships and at the same time reduce risk is monitoring that can help identify warning signs and enable leaders to intervene before individuals actually violate access rules, he said. Malicious insiders may use access for personal gain, such as financial fraud, intellectual property theft, cyber sabotage, espionage, or even notoriety. Unintentional insider incidents are also possible, where individuals can become victims of cyber phishing or other social engineering attacks, or where simple mistakes lead to substantial losses of data, funds, equipment, or information.

Monitoring for warning signs is the central function of an insider threat program, with indicators ranging from repeated policy violations, to disruptive behavior, personal financial difficulty, changes in working patterns, such as when and where individuals access files, or job performance problems, according to SEI research. Unintentional incidents are best prevented through training. Securing against insiders takes a “whole-of-enterprise” approach to be effective, Costa said.

“This is not a technology problem, it’s a people problem,” he said. “We use technology to help us manage those risks, but at the end of the day—especially in terms of making the organization less mistake-prone—that largely comes down to management-related and HR-related activities.”

About one in three insider incidents involve malicious intent, Costa said. What exactly Teixeira’s intent may have been remains unclear. Reporting by the Washington Post and others indicates he seemed to crave attention and recognition for knowing national secrets. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) told Politico, “This really is an issue that sort of seems to be a Gen Z issue where you get some of our youngest members of the military who feel particularly self important and entitled and therefore the rules don’t apply to them.”

The military and the intelligence community routinely trusts young people with significant responsibilities, Ryder said, and they are often capable of handling it.

“Think about a young combat platoon sergeant and the responsibility and trust that we put into those individuals to lead troops into combat,” he said. “That’s just one example across the board. So you receive training and you will receive an understanding of the rules and requirements that come along with those responsibilities, and you’re expected to abide by those rules, regulations and responsibility.”

Security clearances require background checks and include some level of continuous monitoring, but that process is limited and does not unearth every possible motive or notion buried in individuals’ subconscious. As with other crimes, relative inexperience can often be a factor in insider threats. In a 2012 study on fraud, SEI found crimes involving personally identifiable information “tend to be committed by younger, less experienced, non-managers.”

On the other side of the coin, crimes involving non-personally identifying information tended to be committed by older employees, and can be far more harmful to organizations, SEI wrote.

Malicious insiders may join organizations with malintent; such individuals tend to act early in their tenure, Costa said. Older employees may feel more comfortable with those policies and procedures, but personal, professional or financial stressors might motivate them to carry out an attack.

SEI recommends organization “right-size” who has access to valuable or sensitive assets and when, a means to reduce the opportunity and temptations, Costa said. Those with greater access may fall under greater scrutiny. But simply establishing rules is not enough; they must be enforced to be effective.

“Some of the challenges we see with really large organizations, is just maintaining complete situational awareness of their current risk posture,” Costa said. “It’s easy to say that these are the rules that govern what authorized access looks like. But to ensure a complete coverage across, you know, really complex organizations with lots of different moving parts and independent security operations can be a real challenge.”

Independent security operations might include smaller organizations within the larger enterprise, just like a multinational corporation may have operations within individual countries equipped with their own information technology and information security departments. The military, with its large number of commands and bases, has plenty of such operations.

“It’s a challenging problem for organizations at DoD scale to have the granularity that is needed to effectively right-size permissions,” Costa said. “In really large organizations, all it takes is one slip-up. One blind spot with too much access, and those soft spots are the things that insiders inevitably take advantage of.”

Like aviation safety, sexual assault and harassment prevention, and suicide prevention, insider threats are another thorny problem the Air Force and the military write large is dealing with that is not easily solved but which may be reduced with greater analysis. SEI publishes its best practices to help those in both the government and the private sector reduce the risk of insider threats.

Why USAF’s New T-7 Trainer Won’t Start Production for 2 More Years

April 14, 2023 | By John A. Tirpak

The Boeing T-7 Red Hawk advanced trainer won’t be ready for a low-rate initial production decision until February 2025—six and a half years after Boeing won the initial contract in 2018.

The new date for the “Milestone C” initial production decision is as much as 14 months later than was anticipated as recently as late 2022, caused in part by concerns over the safety of ejection seats. Those and other issues are now or will soon be resolved, the Air Force said.

The first production aircraft will not be delivered until December 2025 at the earliest, USAF said. It is not clear how much the delays will push back initial operational capability (IOC), which was originally scheduled for 2024 and had more recently been promised for 2026.

Regardless, the ripple effect of T-7 delays could force the Air Force to invest in further life-extensions for its 60-year-old T-38 trainers, which the T-7 is supposed to replace. The Air Force continues to fund Pacer Classic III structural modifications for the aircraft, along with avionics upgrades, to the tune of $125.3 million in FY ’24.

The Air Force plans to buy at least 351 T-7A Red Hawks and 46 high-fidelity simulators. USAF’s new “Reforge” fighter pilot training plan could increase that total. Boeing’s contract provides for up to 475 aircraft.

The Air Force and Boeing “are confident improvements and recent testing are yielding a safe and effective escape system” for the T-7, a service spokesperson said.

Last year’s planning documents showed the service spending $321 million on T-7 production in fiscal 2024, but USAF zeroed-out T-7 production funding for fiscal 2024 in its recent budget request.

“Milestone C has moved to February 2025,” so procurement funding “for Low-Rate Initial Production is not needed in FY24,” she said. At Milestone C, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment decides if a program has met its exit criteria from EMD and is ready for production.

Ejection Seat Concerns

A principal cause of delay were concerns noted across more than a dozen ejection seat tests. Air Force officials have said that tests showed Boeing’s escape system exhibiting unsafe deceleration at parachute opening, potentially causing pilots to suffer concussions as their visors tore off. Industry sources suggest, however, that USAF’s crash dummies were improperly instrumented, suggesting inaccurate results. The sources said USAF is revisiting some of those data.

Under the initial 2018 contract, Boeing was to have delivered the first five production aircraft in 2023. Most of those are now complete, but developmental flight testing has been held up by the seat issue and is now anticipated to start in September, the Air Force spokesperson said. Boeing said last week that it expected developmental testing to start “this summer.”

Boeing ran into problems with the seats last year when they didn’t function as expected with pilots at the smallest and lightest end of the range. The T-7 is the first USAF aircraft to be designed from the outset to accommodate pilots in a wide variety of physical sizes. Ejection systems on previous trainers and fighter aircraft could accommodate only a narrow range of physiques and excluded too many potential student pilots, particularly small women.

Air Force acquisition executive Andrew Hunter said in March budget testimony that recent sled tests with the seats have given confidence that the ejection problems are on the mend.

“Minor changes to seat logic” have “already reduced system risk and increased pilot safety,” the spokesperson explained. Additionally, “the USAF and Boeing are studying the ejection seat performance throughout 2023 to identify additional enhancements, and Boeing will use the results of testing to inform changes needed to qualify the seat as safe for production.”

Supply chain issues have also contributed to T-7 delays, the Air Force said.

“Prior to the FY ’23 President’s Budget,” the Air Force and Boeing “recognized schedule impact to the T-7A ‘Red Hawk’ program partially attributable to developmental discovery and the COVID-19 global pandemic,” the USAF spokesperson said.

In June 2022, USAF and Boeing “began a schedule re-baseline effort to assess the collective impacts of all schedule delays to date, to include…ground [testing], pre-flight testing and hardware qualification challenges; contractor inability to rapidly correct deficiencies; subcontractor initial design delays; three aerodynamic instability discoveries; escape system qualification delays; and supplier critical parts shortages,” she explained.

After an “exhaustive” schedule risk assessment, “the T-7 office program office recommended a new [Milestone C] date of February 2025 and is awaiting final coordination of this change,” the spokesperson said.

The Air Force does not plan to accelerate testing to gain back lost time. The Air Force and Boeing “do not believe the delays can be overcome by more aggressive flight test,” the spokesperson said. The planned flight test schedule “is already success-based and aggressive.”

Boeing has been flying its first two T-7s—”T1” and “T2,” which the Air Force refers to as “production relevant”—at the company’s St. Louis, Mo., facilities, but Air Force pilots are not permitted to fly the pre-EMD jets for testing purposes until the seat and other issues have been resolved.

The first three engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) examples of the T-7 are complete and two further aircraft are in the final stages of construction, USAF said. These five jets “will be enough for flight testing.”

Air Force leaders have pointed to the T-7A as a pathfinder for how major systems will be bought in the future. Boeing and its partner Saab of Sweden managed to go from digital design of the T-7 prototypes to first flight in three years, and the mating of fuselage and wing sections was done with no shimming. The $9 billion T-7 contract was deemed to be about $10 billion below the Air Force’s estimates for the program, and far below Boeing’s competitors in the T-X contest. Company officials said the digital approach made their bid realistic and not a low-ball.

After Years of Trying, Air Force Retires First A-10 to the Boneyard

April 14, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

It’s finally happening—the Air Force has begun to retire its A-10 Thunderbolt IIs. An A-10 from the 74th Fighter Squadron at Moody Air Force Base, Ga., arrived at the Boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz. on April 5, the service said. The aircraft is the first of 21 A-10s that will be leaving service by the end of September.

“Air Combat Command is prioritizing the A-10s with the least combat effectiveness for retirement first to ensure the most combat capable airframes remain in service,” the Air Force said in a news release. The remaining 20 aircraft “will retire from various bases” by the end of the fiscal year.

The Air Force has sought to retire some of the close air support aircraft for years but was blocked by Congress. The service finally got its way in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act and was OK’d to divest 21 A-10s this year. The service is seeking to retire another 42 A-10s as part of its fiscal 2024 budget. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. has said the service wants to rid itself of the A-10 entirely by the end of the decade.

While the aircraft that arrived at the Boneyard left the 74th Fighter Squadron after 43 years of service in the Air Force, the Active-Duty unit is not winding down its A-10 operations. Instead, the retired A-10 sent to the Boneyard is being replaced by an Indiana Air National Guard A-10. The Indiana ANG A-10 unit, the 122nd Fighter Wing, also known as the Blacksnakes, is transitioning to F-16s. The unit’s nickname has led their A-10s to sport unique nose art, even by A-10 standards.

Aircraft at the Boneyard are preserved in the dry desert of Arizona and often cannibalized for parts. The A-10 that landed Davis-Monthan on April 5, tail number 80-149, is now in the hands of 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Squadron, which will “get to work preserving as much of it as possible while removing parts that can be used for replacements in other A-10s,” the Air Force said.

The Air Force’s planned divesture of 21 A-10s in the fiscal year 2023 will leave the service with around 260 aircraft by September. Brown said the service is ditching its 4+1 fighter model—with the A-10 as the outlier—and plans to sunset all A-10s by 2029.

“We’re retiring A-10s faster than we originally thought”, Brown said at the annual McAleese defense conference March 15. “I think that’s probably the right answer.”

But in the near-term, concerns over capacity have led to high-profile A-10 deployments. While the Air Force argues that the four-decade-old A-10s—which have been upgraded over the years—are not survivable against an advanced adversary, U.S. Central Command is using them to fill out its fighter squadron requirements in the Middle East.

A planned deployment of A-10s to CENTCOM was accelerated in the wake of attacks from Iranian-backed militias on U.S. bases in Syria. The command produced a slick video noting their arrival at the end of March and has continued to publicize recent A-10 operations in the region.

For the past week A10s from the 75th Expeditionary Squadron (EFS) have been flying missions over the CENTCOM region.#AirPower #Warthogs pic.twitter.com/XWTRfriTee
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) April 11, 2023

“The A-10s remain the most effective close air support platform in the world today even after 45 years,” Capt. Kevin Domingue, the pilot from the 74th Fighter Squadron who flew the now-retired A-10 to the Boneyard, said in the news release. “As long as the Air Force allows the aircraft to fly and be properly maintained, this community is ready to provide that expertise anywhere in the world against any adversary.”

For Space Systems, Cybersecurity = Systems Engineering

April 14, 2023 | By Stephen Bolish

When it comes to cybersecurity in space organizations, everyone has heard the statement, “Bake it in, don’t bolt it on.” The real question is, “How?”

There’s a straightforward answer: good cybersecurity = good systems engineering.

For starters, cybersecurity artifacts = systems engineering documentation. In other words, when the cybersecurity team asks for the software list, hardware list, and systems topology—those are simply systems engineering documents.

A Single Discipline

For decades, cybersecurity and systems engineering have grown into two separate job descriptions—creating a cultural gap—but it’s always been a single discipline. Cybersecurity is, and always has been, an integral part of the systems engineering lifecycle, from requirements to operations.

And that’s the key to building in cybersecurity into space systems from the beginning, to keep pace with today’s fast-moving threat environment. By bringing together cybersecurity and systems engineering teams in innovative ways, space organizations can turn them into a single, highly efficient team delivering more effective capabilities.

Wasted Time and Expense, Limited Functionality

In many organizations across both government and business, systems engineers focus their design efforts on a system’s critical functionality, without a full understanding of the cybersecurity requirements. Later, after the system is mostly or completely built, the cybersecurity team recreates artifacts (e.g., software and hardware lists, and data flow diagrams) to understand how everything fits together.

That’s just the beginning. The cybersecurity team then goes back to the systems engineers to tell them how to rework the system, shut down key parts, or close vulnerabilities, to properly secure the system. The result: wasted time and expense by both teams, with organizations sacrificing either functionality over security, or security over functionality.

Bridging the Cultural Gap

Space organizations can take a practical, step-by-step approach to bridging the cultural gap between cybersecurity and systems engineering. The first step is cross-training that helps each team understand the other team’s perspective.

Small groups of systems engineers, for example, are temporarily embedded with cybersecurity teams. The systems engineers get a chance to learn about the kinds of constraints the cybersecurity experts are under, and how their tools work. Over the course of the training, the systems engineers can see how they might design their systems to meet cybersecurity constraints more effectively.

At the same time, cybersecurity experts are temporarily embedded with systems engineering teams. The cybersecurity experts get a chance to see how difficult it is to design a system—and make the necessary tradeoffs—when you’re not sure where cybersecurity fits in.

Bringing the Teams Together

In the second step, the two teams are brought together, in tabletop discussions, as system design begins. They bounce ideas back and forth about the various functional, design, and cybersecurity issues. Once they agree on a design, they work together to build and test a prototype that—from the outset—is both as secure and functional as possible. Often, this is the first time cybersecurity experts get a “seat at the table” in system design.

A common outgrowth of this collaboration is that cybersecurity teams and systems engineers seek to gain more expertise in each other’s fields, and so get education, training and certifications. Over time, they move toward working as a single team that sees cybersecurity and systems engineering as a unified discipline.

Stephen Bolish (bolish_stephen@bah.com), BS EE, MS EE, CISSP, is a Principal at Booz Allen with more than 27 years of engineering and cybersecurity experience supporting commercial, defense, and federal clients. He and his team focus on demystifying cybersecurity, and building highly effective engineering teams.

Shyu: Pentagon’s 2024 S&T Budget Is Focused on Joint Warfighting

April 13, 2023 | By Christopher Prawdzik

Joint capabilities and maturing technologies topped the list of priorities as Defense Department leaders discussed the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2024 science and technology budget request at a National Defense Industrial Association forum April 13.

“Everything we’ve been doing is very much focusing on the joint warfighting capability and what we need to do to fight as a joint force,” said Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering.

The 2024 Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RTD&E) budget request, she noted, is 12 percent higher than 2023 at $145 billion. Of that total, the Air Force has the biggest piece at 32 percent, while the Space Force is at about 13.3 percent.

The S&T portion of the budget, which includes basic research, applied research, and advanced technology development has seen a surge in funding in recent years, and that will continue, Shyu saud.

“We are at … almost $17.8 billion, which is 8.3 percent over last year,” she noted.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory and technology executive officer for both Air Force and Space Force, said the services did pretty well in the budget throughout all of their eight RDT&E authorities. Total funding, she noted, was $49 billion.

“As far as what the Air Force Research Lab does in support of the Air Forces and the Space Force, we have enacted in the basic science portfolio, it’s about 2 percent of that overall RDT&E budget; applied research is 4 percent; and the [advanced technology development] budget is 2 percent,” she said, noting that it’s a small portion of the overall RDT&E budget. “We have some great seedlings of innovation and science ideas in our [basic science] portfolio that we grow and mature, with more robust capabilities and more robust investments in [the others].”

Pringle added that AFWERX and SpaceWERX will have a little more than $1 billion for small business research.

In addition to the budget itself, Pringle also addressed the challenges inherent in budget allocations and where funds and talent can be best utilized while determining future threats.

“We also know that the technological competition is here and it’s something that we need to plan for and get ahead of,” Pringle said. ”So the two sides of the coin—the military competition and the technological one—is how we assess the environment and, in turn, respond and plan and try to get ahead of the trends that we see out there.”

She reiterated Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall’s seven operational imperatives and noted that they are instrumental in the Air Force’s success moving forward.

“We’re trying to break this operational landscape for the Air Force to be successful, and we’re trying to translate it into the component technologies, so that we can start to think about what’s the science that we need to accomplish now in order to achieve those operational imperatives in the future,” Pringle said.

Much of this is knowing which questions must be asked now and what technologies should the force explore today to be successful in the next decade or more.

“Translating that battle space to technology space, we’ve really homed in on the common language of functional capability areas as our common language,” she said. “This enables us to speak to warfighters in a more specific way in a language that they understand, but it also translates multiple domains.”

Ultimately, she said, the Air Force S&T enterprise wants to see missions as Guardians and Airmen see missions, and use that to make decisions about how to invest in the future.

“We’ve been on this journey for the past little over a year, and we’re starting to use that to drive what our investment portfolio is, and so in the coming months, you’re going to see a lot more about how this translates,” Pringle added. “But I wanted to give you a sense of these priorities because these will stand the test of time.”

In Historic First, USAF Deploys B-1s to India for Exercise

April 13, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

A pair of B-1B Lancers from Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., will participate in a joint exercise with the Indian Air Force this week—the first time the BONE has participated in an exercise there.

F-15E fighters, C-130J cargo planes, and C-17 transport aircraft also are taking part in Cope India 2023, Pacific Air Forces told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Indian news outlets first reported the B-1s’ participation, citing PACAF commander Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach.

The visit is the second trip to India in three months—in February, Lancers conducted flyovers at the biennial Aero India air show. B-1s also participated in Aero India 21, the first time a Lancer had ever landed in India.

The Cope India joint exercise between the USAF and IAF began in 2004 and has subsequently been held in 2005, 2006, 2009, and 2018. Over the years, the U.S. Air Force has sent F-15s, F-16s, C-130Hs, C-130Js, and C-17s to the exercise.

The first phase of the 2023 edition began April 10, according to a release from the Indian Defence Ministry, with a focus on air mobility. C-17s from the 15th Wing at Joint Base Hickam-Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and C-130Js from the 374th Airlift Wing at Yokota Air Base, Japan, participated.

The second phase, which kicked off April 13, will include F-15Es from the 4th Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C., in addition to the B-1s. The Indian Air Force will fly Su-30 MKI, Rafale, Tejas and Jaguar fighter aircraft.

The exercise is slated to conclude April 24. The USAF has yet to release any imagery from Cope India 23.

The Biden administration has sought to foster ties with India recently, both as part of its broader efforts to bolster alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific against the influence of China, and in an attempt to further alienate Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. In particular, the U.S. Air Force brought a considerable presence to Aero India 23, including F-35 fighters, as the Indian Air Force mulls upgrades.

B-1s have also become a regular sight in the region as of late, thanks to Bomber Task Force rotations. Lancers have flown four times with South Korean fighters this year, as well as exercises with the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force.

Two U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancers, assigned to the 34th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, fly over Aero India 23 at Air Force Station Yelahanka, Bengaluru, India, Feb. 14, 2023. The weeklong biennial exhibition is Asia’s largest aviation event and hosts government delegations and corporate executives from 26 countries. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Richard P. Ebensberger)

The exercise is slated to conclude April 24. The USAF has yet to release any imagery from Cope India 23.

Air Force Futures Lays Out Four Scenarios for 2040 in New Report

April 13, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

Transformative advances in computing, far greater emphasis on information warfare, and increasingly scarce sanctuaries from adversaries’ reach are among the factors that will shape air warfare in 2040, according to a new report from the Air Force’s futurists.

The Global Futures Report released April 12 by Air Force Futures defines four very different potential states of the world in 2040, each shaped by different trajectories applied to data and other emerging trends.

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, director of Air Force Futures, and his co-authors say the scenarios do not aim to precisely predict the future, but rather to offer foresight to decision-makers preparing for whatever future is actually in store. Compared and analyzed against each other, they also offer takeaways on the trends leaders must watch in the years to come.

“Hubris warns that no entity can create the exact future it wants,” the report states. “However, organizations have a duty to discover opportunities and take advantage of them, make unforeseen disasters foreseeable and avoid them, and work diligently and disruptively to shape the future to their advantage. For the USAF and the DOD, the risk of a narrow vision and inaction is simply too high.”

Four Futures

The four scenarios envisioned are based on the Four Future Archetypes, a methodology developed by the Hawaii Research Center for Future Studies that defines four general paths the future might follow.

“A trend can either continue on its current trajectory (Continued Growth), encounter significant limits (Constrained), form a discontinuity to leap to a different market and growth curve (Transformational), or fail to adapt or become the cause of change (Collapse),” explain the report’s authors.

Applying those trajectories to identifiable trends, Air Force Futures examined the joint force’s core functions— Fires, Protection, Movement and Maneuver, Information, Intelligence, Command and Control (C2), and Sustainment. Unsurprisingly, the future trajectories vary wildly.

In a future of continued growth, great power competition between the U.S. and China continues, with more proxy wars enabling both sides to develop and test new technologies, such as hypersonic weapons, biological and chemical weapons, and even gene-editing to improve troops’ performance. Artificial intelligence and automation continue to progress, but ethical and political considerations limit the U.S. military’s use of it. More and better sensors, long-range fires, and kill webs force planners to abandon the concept of “sanctuaries” and focus on dispersing assets and troops. Supply chains remain vulnerable and interconnected.

In a “constrained” situation, biological and natural disasters have limited resources, and widespread anti-access/area denial systems have made it even harder for militaries to maneuver. Exquisite long-range fires mean the Air Force and other services have to disperse their assets to smaller, hardened bases, even within the U.S. The advanced weaponry also causes a stalemate between Great Powers, leading to more “gray zone” activities that fall short of open conflict, such as information warfare and the hacking of key infrastructure. However, due to polarization, limited resources for the military, and a focus on developing advanced weapons, the U.S. is ill-prepared to pivot to deterring and defending against gray zone activities.

In the “transformational” future, countries gain the ability to strike targets from space near-instantaneously, thanks to advancements in areas like directed energy. There are no “sanctuaries,” and countries also develop new weapons of mass destruction based on new biological and chemical breakthroughs. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing have advanced such that humans are out of the loop, and the speed of cyber is so fast that commanders are unable to change a course of action midway. The Air Force has consolidated its forces into small, hardened bases and increasingly relies on high-speed vertical takeoff and landing platforms enabled by advancements in energy technology.

In a “collapse” scenario, the effects of climate change threaten military bases and disrupt ground stations that control satellites, causing a collision in low-Earth orbit that creates massive clouds of debris and limits access to space. Technological advancements are proliferated throughout the world, giving smaller states and non-state actors outsized influence and capabilities. The U.S. is roiled by internal political and social division and steps back from the NATO alliance as isolationism builds, leading the Air Force and other military services to shrink with lower investment. Information warfare becomes increasingly crucial as communications degrade but technology advances, giving individuals the ability to manipulate the system.

Takeaways

Air Force Futures acknowledged that “readers should maintain healthy skepticism about each trend’s direction and velocity. … None of the trends are inevitable and few will occur in the manner laid out in this report.”

However, the authors noted six broad takeaways:

Transformational Computing. In every scenario, artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous systems and quantum computing were crucial factors.

The Myth of Sanctuary. Advances in sensors and weapons systems—especially without effective countermeasures—will likely make sanctuaries a myth, even within the U.S.

Cognitive Soft Targets. Information warfare leveraging artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and intelligence operations, will expand and become more effective.

Force Multipliers. Unforeseen developments will have cascading effects, creating potential force multipliers in areas that could include “AI/ML, Quantum Computing, Directed Energy, Energy Webs, Sensor Ubiquity, and Space Operations.”

Economic Interconnectedness. If global economy interdependence declines, the future world will be much different. What happens “defines the next 20 years,” the authors said, presenting vulnerabilities in the supply chain, breakdowns in trade, and declining intellectual collaboration.

Life Science Collapse. Between climate change, limited resources, nuclear weapons, chemical and biological warfare, and gene editing technologies, potentially dramatic changes could impact the fundamentals of life as we know it.

Such takeaways are intended to be a starting point for more analysis and discussion, the authors say.

“The report will be used to inform planners, strategists, and wargame scenarios positioning Airmen to anticipate, prepare, and operate in the future,” according to an Air Force release.

Army, Air National Guard Need a Strategy for Better Helicopter Safety, GAO Says

April 12, 2023 | By David Roza

The Army and Air National Guard need to sharpen their strategies for promoting safety and mitigating risk in helicopter units, the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report released April 12.

From fiscal year 2012 to 2021, there have been 298 accidents involving National Guard helicopters during noncombat flights. The GAO determined many of these accidents were caused by human error, with broader institutional issues that also need to be addressed.

Though some of the GAO’s report and recommendations apply more to the Army National Guard than the Air National Guard, the common ones include not routinely evaluating processes for preflight risk assessment; overworking unit safety officers; and pilots not getting enough flight hours due to lack of maintenance, funding, staffing, or other organizational shortfalls.

The report comes in the wake of two deadly Army helicopter accidents that occurred earlier this year. The first occurred in February when a Tennessee Army National Guard Black Hawk helicopter crashed during a training sortie in Alabama. The second occurred in March when two Black Hawks from the 101st Airborne Division crashed in Kentucky. Two Soldiers were killed in the first crash, while nine were killed in the second.

Though both the Army and Air National Guard have a range of safety and risk reduction measures, the components can do more to make sure those measures are being implemented effectively, the GAO report states.

The Data

Of the 298 helicopter accidents reported by Army and Air National Guard from 2012 through 2021, 45 were serious Class A or Class B accidents that involved death, permanent disability, prolonged hospitalization, or more than $500,000 in damages—40 involving Army National Guard helicopters, five involving Air National Guard helicopters.. The worst of those accidents killed 28 Guardsmen.

The discrepancy between the Army and Air Force Guards is likely due in part to the difference in flying hours between the two components—the Army National Guard flies helicopters for an average of 200,000 hours per year, while the ANG averages 3,500 flying hours. The Army National Guard also flies more types of helicopters, whereas the GAO report studied only the HH-60 Pave Hawk on the Air National Guard side.

Army National Guard helicopter accident rates were below those of the Army Active-Duty component, while the Air National Guard accident numbers were too small to make a meaningful comparison with its Active-Duty counterpart.

When the Army or the Air Force investigate an accident, the services look to see if it may have been caused by human error, material failure, environmental factors, or any combination of the three. Human error was listed as a contributing factor in most of the accidents, the GAO found. On the Army side, investigators detected that not following training procedures, a lack of situational awareness, and overconfidence contributed to many accidents, while on the Air Force side, “wrong choice of action during an operation” and “inadequate real-time risk assessment” were the most commonly cited factors.

The data informed GAO’s recommendations for how to more effectively implement safety and risk reduction measures.

What’s Going Wrong

The GAO found that while the Air National Guard has a stringent process for documenting the implementation of safety recommendations made after helicopter accident investigations, the Army National Guard has no such system. Creating such a system was the GAO’s first Army-specific recommendation. Another Army-specific recommendation was to regularly evaluate National Guard helicopter aircrew performance during training, also something the Air National Guard does.

Other GAO recommendations applied to both the Army and Air National Guard, such as a direction that the components both need to make sure their helicopter units continuously evaluate and update their risk management worksheets. Aircrews use risk management worksheets to gauge risk levels and mitigation strategies before a flight and, if necessary, receive approval for the flight from higher up the chain of command.

The flaw in the system is neither Army nor Air National Guard helicopter units regularly update their worksheets to reflect lessons learned in safety and risk reduction.

Service officials were hesitant to develop standardized worksheets for all units due to the diversity of aircraft and mission sets across the force, but Air Force officials said making sure those worksheets are continuously updated could be part of the service’s unit inspection program.

The GAO also found that unit safety officers in both the Army and Air National Guard were “hindered due to workload and staffing imbalances.” Between conducting safety briefings, analyzing hazards, coordinating with other safety organizations, recording accidents, and their regular flying duties, unit safety officers have a lot on their plates, and many who spoke with the GAO said they could better support safety if it was their primary duty or they were assigned to the role full-time.

“They will not let you just be the safety guy; you will always have additional duties,” one safety officer told the report authors.

The GAO found neither the Army nor Air National Guard have a consistent approach to staffing safety officers, though the Air Force Safety Directorate has recommended wing commanders assign full-time personnel to the wing Chief of Safety position.

The report also found that both Army and Air National Guard helicopter units suffer from low flying hours. On average, Army helicopter pilots did not meet the proficiency goal of 9 flight hours per month for the majority of helicopter types, while Air Force helicopter pilots often fall short of their goal of 12.5 hours per month.

Many factors contribute to the low hours. In some cases, Army and Air National Guard units used up most of their annual flying hours at the start of the year, often assisting with state and regional emergency support, which meant they could not fly as much through the rest of the year. In other cases, finding time to fly was difficult to juggle for pilots with full-time jobs.

To make matters worse, Guard units often do not have enough funding to bring in pilots for more hours, and they also struggle with maintenance and parts availability, all of which makes scheduling part-time pilots more difficult. There are also not many instructor pilots to go around, and the same problem applies to non-pilot aircrew, who are often essential for safe or realistic training.

Flying hours also rely on maintenance hours, which is another pain point for many Guard units. The GAO found that no Army National Guard helicopter type met its annual mission capable goals from fiscal year 2017 to 2021, while the Air National Guard Pave Hawk missed its goals in fiscal year 2017 and 2019. Air National Guardsmen told the GAO that two-shift maintenance operations are required for helicopter units, but they do not have enough people to staff both shifts.

Finally, Guard helicopter pilots often have trouble accessing simulators to meet flying hour goals and provide training even through bad weather and maintenance hiccups. The Air Force’s only Pave Hawk simulator available to Air National Guard pilots is at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.

Fixing It

Though the Army and Air National Guard have taken steps to address these challenges, their actions remain incomplete, GAO wrote, and neither component has established clear priorities to address the challenges preventing Guard helicopter pilots from reaching their flying hour goals. Nor do either of the components have comprehensive data for monitoring progress.

“The challenges are complex and require a coordinated approach to ensure that any resource adjustments are supportable and are aligned with priorities,” the GAO wrote. “By developing a comprehensive strategy that defines goals, priorities, and performance measures, the Army and Air Force would be better positioned to address the complex and inter-related challenges that have hindered National Guard helicopter pilots from achieving their training objectives.”

The GAO recommended the Army and Air National Guard:

Implement measures to make sure helicopter units continuously evaluate and update operational risk management worksheets.

Assess the resource and workload allocations of safety personnel to ensure helicopter units have enough staff and resources to implement operational flight safety programs.

Develop a comprehensive strategy including goals and performance measures for challenges that hinder helicopter pilot training.