Space Force Budget Would Soar by 15 Percent in 2024

March 13, 2023 | By David Roza

The Space Force gains the largest funding increase in percentage terms under President Biden’s 2024 budget request. The $30 billion proposal for the nation’s smallest military branch includes a 15 percent increase—$3.9 billion—over the enacted 2023 budget, fueled by investments in overhead persistent infrared missile warning systems, the global positioning system enterprise, and launch vehicles for both the National Security Space Launch and Rocket System Launch Program.

“The FY 2024 request continues aggressively integrating the Space Force into the fabric of national and international security by collaborating across the Department of Defense, interagency, commercial industry, and our allies and partners,” the budget documents say. “Space is a warfighting domain critical to the Nation’s security, economic prosperity, and scientific knowledge, therefore, the FY 2024 request reflects a substantial increase in funding over previous budget requests.”

The Space Force would expand from 8,600 Guardians to 9,400. Like all military personnel, Guardians would receive a 5.2 percent pay raise, along with a 4.2 percent boost for the basic housing allowance, and a 3.4 percent increase in the basic subsistence allowance.

Much of the increase in the Space Force budget would fund new Research, Development, Test & Evaluation. The service is budgeted to spend $16.6 billion for RDT&E in 2023, and the 2024 budget would add $2.6 billion for a total $19.2 billion. Development of new resilient missile warning and tracking satellites, space technology development and prototyping, and Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared missile warning are the primary targets of that new investment.

The Space Force would also invest $4.7 billion to buy new space vehicles and terminals, ground control systems, launch services and related communications security and training products.

The main focus of all that investment is modernization to respond to growing threats to space technology. “The fast-growing array of threats that can attack American interests in, through, and from space pose a challenge that cannot be addressed through enhancements to decreasingly relevant legacy space systems designed for an uncontested domain,” the service wrote in its budget highlights.

The 2024 budget would support procuring 10 National Security Space Launch Services, which are used to send medium and heavy lift systems into orbit. Five launches under the NSSL program would deliver Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 transport capabilities, which are responsible for communications and data transmission in orbit. The 2024 budget request asks for about $980 million more than last year for buying new launch vehicles and launch range upgrades.

The fiscal 2024 budget would also start up the production of Family of Advanced Beyond Line-of-Sight Terminals Force Element terminals for the Air Force’s B-52 bomber. The FAB-T program allows commanders to communicate with B-52 crews even in contested environments.

The proposed global positioning system enterprise budget emphasize RDT&E. The GPS enterprise “provides worldwide, 24-hour a day, all-weather 3-dimensional positioning, navigation, and timing information for military and civilian users,” according to the budget documents. The fiscal 2024 budget aims to continue developing ten GPS III Follow-on satellites and support the satellite constellation’s transition from a legacy operational control system to its next generation edition. The total $1.3 billion proposal for the GPS enterprise would also support the development of Military GPS User Equipment, which is meant to help service members keep using GPS-provided positioning, navigation and timing information even “in the most contested environments,” according to the Department of Defense.

As its official song, “Semper Supra,” intones, the Space Force is “the mighty watchful eye” of the nation, and the 2024 request seeks about $5 billion for space-based missile warning. The Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared Program (OPIR) and Resilient Missile Warning and Missile Tracking (MW/MT) systems are critical programs for identifying China’s most advanced missile threats even in the event of attacks on those space-based sensors.

Next-Gen OPIR will “rapidly deliver strategically survivable missile warning capabilities” to detect advanced missiles , while Resilient MW/MT is meant to ensure that the missile warning system can survive attacks by counter-space systems developed by adversaries.

The 2024 budget request also includes about $4.7 billion for satellite communications projects. The Space Force has three categories of satellite communications: strategic, for nuclear command, control and communications; protected tactical, for tactical-level communications in contested environments; and wideband and narrowband, which provide “large throughput in less contested areas,” according to the Department of Defense. The 2024 budget request would support continued SATCOM development and initiate engineering and manufacturing for a new “purpose-built high-throughput anti-jam satellite system” for protected tactical networks, according to budget documents.

Digital Transformation of Verification Process for Faster Aircraft Certification

March 13, 2023 | By Thierry Olbrechts

The certification of new aircraft programs is expensive. Whether it is an advanced air mobility system, a (hybrid-) electric aircraft or a military aircraft with new weapon systems, new and innovative aircraft programs are very complex. The application of new materials, additive-manufactured structures, electrical propulsion systems and an increase in onboard software requires extensive virtual and physical testing to verify whether the aircraft is safe, reliable and cost-effective to fly.

Managing verification from the start of the program, as soon as the requirements have been defined and validated, is a good practice. As the verification job is huge, especially for start-up programs, a digital verification management platform can significantly reduce the risk and related over-budget costs of aircraft certification.

Challenge – Aircraft Complexity

There’s a reason why airplanes are the safest mode of transportation: certification. For aerospace manufacturers, aircraft certification is everything. No certificate means no product to market.

In addition to already strict EASA, FAA, and other regulations, companies face additional demands for advancements, including – but not limited to – sustainability targets and the ambition to fly autonomously, which require more integrated systems driven by software and electronics.

New technologies like this are exponentially complex. They impact all aspects of product development, including design, validation, and testing. Instead of a few components and hundreds of interfaces, there are now thousands of components with tens of thousands of interfaces. More and more functions are implemented through software.

Implications – Aircraft Programs at Risk

Therefore, it’s no surprise that today, aircraft certification is more costly than design. This is a huge challenge. Many companies have great ambitions with new aircraft configurations. It is now technologically and financially feasible to build and fly prototypes and validate concepts. The big financial challenge and risks that a company faces are the costs of aircraft certification and industrialization. Indeed, Porsche Consulting estimated in 2018 that the series development and type certification of an eVTOL urban air mobility aircraft would cost between $500 million and $1 billion¹, and Archer Aviation CEO Adam Goldstein says, “the price-tag for one aircraft design to reach certification could be up to $1 billion”.²

This represents a serious risk to many companies. As an aeronautical engineer, I cannot be more delighted when I see all the initiatives taken to exploit the possibilities of new propulsion systems into radical new aircraft configurations. In that sense, the last 5 to 10 years are comparable to the 1950s, when a lot of new aircraft configurations were explored. However, I’m worried that many companies with exciting new ideas will financially fail before getting aircraft certification.

One should not forget that many of these companies have to build the elements for proof of compliance from a blank sheet. They cannot count on data from previous programs to alleviate the verification process by comparison. This puts them at a competitive disadvantage against legacy companies, which might be less innovative but have an abundance of verification data at hand.

Because of the above, new organizations tend to postpone addressing the verification and certification aspects.

Figure 1. Implications of increased program complexity and integrated systems: the current approach does not work anymore.

Opportunity – Certify During Development

Digitalization environments offer a lot of capabilities to pre-empt the aircraft certification aspects and associated risks.

Process-wise, companies should consider including the verification and certification process within the aircraft design, development production and quality process from the start of the program.

Figure 2. Building the verification and certification Digital Twin: actively manage the plan from start to finish.

Different digital platform pillars are key in this:

Figure 3. Key technologies to support aircraft programs.

It Starts with the Digital Twin

Throughout the development of aircraft, digital twin capabilities make it possible to design, engineer and optimize the aircraft and its systems. They provide engineering insight into how the aircraft is built and how it performs behaviorally. The use of a digital twin model enables manufacturers to become exponentially more accurate in all aircraft domains, covering all “engineering physics,” which define how well it operates.

Given good management and validation of the modeling assumptions, these digital twin models can be further exploited to verify the behavior of electro-mechanical systems, coupled to the software-based control functions. Indeed, once one gets confidence in how well the models represent reality, these models can be used to perform virtual testing and alleviate the burden and costs of physical testing.

The ability to author these virtual test models is dependent on having the necessary skill tools for generating the engineering analysis data.

An additional benefit of digital twin models is that they not only help with accelerating the verification based on virtual testing, but they also have an under-recognized value in preparing and de-risking the physical tests, which will be needed anyway.

Indeed, as long as innovation continues to occur in this industry, it will be necessary for companies to prove the accuracy of their modeling assumptions, methods, and processes to aircraft certification authorities and organizations.

Digital twin technology is essential when programs want to reduce the risks related to aircraft certification. However, there is a closed-loop process needed between virtual and physical testing in order to make this a viable strategy.

Digital Data and Process Backbone

The amount of engineering analysis data a digital twin generates is enormous and requires a digital data and process management backbone to control it, keep it in configuration, manage the processes and make sure all data is traceable.

This backbone is also very important for the next programs. Indeed, stored data does not only serve current programs, but also can be reused in future programs to avoid verifying aspects multiple times on different programs. This drastically reduces verification costs of future programs, whether by simply re-using data or proving digital twin modeling assumptions were right and avoids physical verification on these aspects on the next program.

Digital Thread

The generation of engineering data using digital twin technology along with excellent data management is a start, but to be truly effective, the digital platform needs to keep all data generated and managed in the context of the aircraft program, as it assures the digital continuity of engineering data with the engineering decisions taken. As part of a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach, a verification management digital thread can provide a traceable link between the requirements and the artifacts that lead to the proof of compliance of that requirement, including all its intermediate data like the eBOM, test-BOM, etc.

Solution – Verification Management

A verification management digital thread should be a vital part of the digitalization strategy of all aerospace and/or defense companies. It can help make certification an integral part of the overall product development process and enable companies to have a robust certification execution plan and incorporates all the needed certification activities within the overall program plan.

It is vital that companies embrace not only a verification management digital thread, but also a full digitalization strategy. Digitalization enables aerospace manufacturers and their supply chain partners to make better-informed decisions based on extensive data and analysis as well as full traceability. It is the only way to turn the increased level of complexity and integration inherent in new programs into a competitive advantage.

The aerospace and defense industry is going through a time of immense innovation, and I’m excited to see what the future holds as A&D companies and teams of all sizes adopt digitalization to deliver on the promise of this innovation.

References

1. The Future of Vertical Mobility, Sizing the market for passenger, inspection, and goods services until 2035, A Porsche Consulting study, 2018

2. Can UAM developers turn their electric dreams into a reality? Pilar Wolfsteller, 2022

About the Author

Thierry Olbrechts is the Director of Simcenter Aerospace Industries Solutions, Siemens Digital Industries Software. In 1996, he joined Siemens Digital Industries Software. Since 2000, Thierry has been responsible for Siemens simulation and test business development and go-to-market strategies for the aviation, space and defense industry segments.

Air Force, Space Force Push for Sweeping Modernization in 2024 Budget

March 13, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

The Biden administration is requesting $259.3 billion for the Department of the Air Force in its fiscal 2024 budget, an increase of more than $9 billion or about 4 percent over this year.

Not all that money would go to the Air Force and Space Force, however; $44.2 billion would pass through the department budget to other agencies. Funding for the Air Force and Space Force would be $215.1 billion, $9.3 billion over the prior year.

The proposal would:

Retire 310 existing aircraft and invest billions to develop and acquire replacements

Buy 72 new fighter jets—48 F-35As and 24 F-15EXs

Start the acquisition process for the B-21 Raider

Invest heavily in the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter and in a coming generation of uncrewed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA)

Increase the Space Force budget by nearly 15 percent, to $30 billion

The Department of the Air Force budget would grow slightly more than the overall defense budget. The president is seeking $842 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2024—a 3.2 percent increase—plus an additional $44 billion that mostly funds nuclear programs in the Department of Energy. That makes for total defense spending of $886 billion in the Presidential Budget Request.

The DOD budget includes a 5.2 percent pay raise for troops, a 4.2 percent increase in the Basic Allowance for Housing, and a 3.4 percent boost to the subsistence allowance. With inflation still running higher than budget growth, lawmakers in Congress are likely to press for further increases over the coming months.

In a briefing with reporters, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the budget plan reflects a shift to new capabilities over sustaining USAF’s ever-aging platforms. It funds 20 “major efforts” and a dozen new programs, he said. The Space Force budget rises $3.9 billion, or nearly 15 percent, to $30 billion under the president’s plan, while the USAF budget, totaling $185.1 billion, would grow by $5.4 billion, or just 2.9 percent.

Much of the new spending is to gain future capability, some of which may not arrive until the end of this decade.

“We’re in a situation strategically where we have to make a transformation to next-generation capabilities,” said Kendall. “If we stay where we are and emphasize keeping the current force strong … we’re going to be falling behind. And we’re going to be falling behind pretty rapidly.”

NGAD is already maturing in development, Kendall said, but the program remains shrouded in secrecy. The development of CCAs is also rapidly maturing, spurred by a combination of Air Force and industry investment.

The budget also pays for 15 new KC-46 tankers to continue replacing aging KC-135 and KC-10s, and invests in a new stealthy tanker, dubbed the Next Generation Aerial Refueling System (NGAS).

The Air Force is renewing its proposal to retire 32 early model F-22 Raptors, along with 57 F-15C/D Eagles, two E-3 Sentry AWACS, 48 MQ-9 Reapers, 42 A-10 close air support aircraft, and 24 KC-10 tankers, according to Maj. Gen. Michael A. Greiner, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for budget.

Congress balked at retiring the F-22s last year, but the Air Force maintains that those aircraft are not viable for combat operations and that the cost and time needed to upgrade those aircraft makes the idea untenable.

In a major decision regarding the F-35 fleet, the Air Force plan does not fund the Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP), which would have provided a new more powerful and potentially more reliable engine for the Air Force F-35A; the performance improvements were attractive, Kendall said, but the Air Force would have had to fund the change on its own and the service opted instead for a less costly and complex core upgrade to the existing Pratt & Whitney engines.

“I think we’ve got a good balance and we were able to get the resources through processes internally to allow us to move forward,” Kendall said.

‘The President’s proposed budget for the Department of the Air Force rightly prioritizes modernization of our Air & Space Forces,” said AFA President & CEO Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright (USAF, Ret.) “We are pleased to see a substantial pay raise, a 15 percent increase in Space Force spending to improve intelligence, communications, and resilience in that critical domain, and also robust investment for 72 new fighter aircraft, the B-21 bomber, the E-7 Wedgetail AWACS replacement, a new generation of Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and Sentinel ICBM modernization program.

“Yet at a time of grave threats and significant inflation, the rate of growth in the Air Force investment accounts is still not what it should be. Investments in airpower today will deter war tomorrow. Congress must work across party lines to ensure unfunded priorities are addressed and that budget legislation is completed in a timely manner this fall.”

Next Stop: Capitol Hill

Congress ultimately decides what resources the Air Force and Space Force get, and the debates will intensify there as the summer heats up. Republicans criticized the Biden administration’s overall defense budget request when the topline figures were released March 9, calling the investment too small, especially given persistently high inflation. Top Democrats, such as Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, were also hesitant to endorse the plan. Reed called DOD’s request a “useful starting point.”

Department of the Air Force leaders accept that there will be differences of opinion, but have been outspoken in public comments that whatever Congress wants to do with the budget, it should get it completed on time. Failure to produce a budget by the end of the calendar year, let alone the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is just “giving away time for free,” Kendall said.

DAF leaders say their budget reflects the required shift toward the future.

“Defending the nation requires constant vigilance in all domains,” said Kristyn E. Jones, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for financial management and comptroller. She cited investment in new fighters and “the acceleration of our acquisition of space-based missile warning architectures to improve our sensing and naval defenses against the full range of ballistic missile threats” as examples of that multidomain vigilance.

“National Defense also requires recapitalizing the ICBM missile and bomber legs of the nuclear triad,” Jones said. “The Sentinel program, or ICBM replacement, is continuing in development and the recently unveiled B-21 Raider is scheduled to achieve its first flight this calendar year. ”

The 2024 budget includes $3.7 billion for the Sentinel, formerly called the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, which is set to replace 400 decades-old Minuteman III ICBMs one-for-one. It also includes $3 billion for B-21. Both figures are broadly in line with what Air Force plans allocated to those programs in fiscal 2023. Spending will increase for missile warning and defense and for the Advanced Battle Management System.

Munitions development is funded, with increases in production of the AIM-120 AMRAAM and AGM-158 JASSM-ER, as well as its anti-ship LRASM variant.

Concerns over munitions shortages have come to the fore after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wargames over a potential conflict with China show that without an increase in inventories, the Air Force could exhaust its supply of LRASMs within a week. The service plans to purchase 550 JASSMs and 27 LRASMs. The Air Force also wants to allocate $1 billion to work towards multi-year procurement contacts to allow the defense industry to increase the production capacity of JASSM-ERs, LRASMs, and AMRAAMs.

“JASSM-ER we’re going to be at 550 quantity—that’s max production,” Greiner said. “This year, there’s also some facilitation dollars included in JASSM-ER and the goal is … to ramp us up to 810 production in the future.”

The Air Force and Space Force, however, still face the risk of no budget at all, or at least a delayed one, hampering work on their priorities. Republicans gained control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, while Democrats still hold the Senate. DOD is just one part of the $6.8 trillion budget unveiled by the White House on March 9, and the administration’s request will add fuel to the debate over the looming debt ceiling.

Kendall noted even before the White House released its request that failure to complete a budget on time has serious implications for the services. This year, with a dozen new programs, the stakes are even higher for the Department of the Air Force.

Kendall noted that Congress started the 13 of the past 14 fiscal years under continuing resolutions, which freeze funding at current levels while Congress hashes out a new budget. Likewise, the annual National Defense Authorization Act legislation has also been completed after the end of the fiscal year multiple times in recent years.

“We move at the pace of money and engineering,” Kendall said. “You don’t start until you get the money. If we have a year-long CR, or even just a very long CR … that’s giving away time for free. So I’m very concerned about that as we go into this. I’m very comfortable with what we’re asking for. I think we’ve got a good mix here. But I am worried about getting through a timely process and getting the authorities and the appropriations we’re going to need to move forward.”

Air Force Asks for Commercial Industry Support with Tech Modernization

March 12, 2023 | By Christopher Prawdzik

The Air Force’s Deputy Chief Information Officer called on commercial industry for help as the service looks to modernize its information technology programs and consolidate networks. Speaking at a Washington Technology breakfast with industry March 10, Winston Beauchamp outlined a number of opportunities for industry and emphasized the Air Force’s ongoing efforts to modernize in areas that have seen neglect in recent years.

The pathway to these modernization efforts, he noted, is the DOD’s Zero Trust Strategy and Roadmap, a “department-wide Zero Trust cybersecurity framework that will reduce the attack surface, enable risk management and effective data sharing in partnership environments, and quickly contain and remediate adversary activities,” according to the Air Force.

“We use integrated systems where necessary; we use federated capabilities where possible, to retain some flexibility across the services so we don’t have to force us into lockstep,” Beauchamp said. “That is going to be the key enabler to making sure we can exchange both identity information and role-based information across these applications to protect the data where it lives instead of the network it lives on.”

Beauchamp told attendees he wants industry to help the Air Force understand how it’s done. But such an effort presents many challenges, particularly the long-term impact of things like sequestration and the tough choices the force had to make in the early-to-mid 2010s.

“The problem is when you take a modernization holiday of about a decade, eventually it’s going to catch up to you, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now,” he said. “We’re seeing that in device failures, we’re seeing it in network latency problems. … It’s actually harder to modernize the older your equipment is, and it takes a larger amount of money and time to overcome that much tech debt.”

Beauchamp said the Air Force is about to start Enterprise Information Technology as-a-Service (EITaaS) Wave 1, which is the implementation of “consolidated network management and security help desk services,” which will be quickly followed by Wave 2, which includes base area network updates at 185 bases—with priority given to crucial outposts near conflict areas.

These modernization areas are where he wants help from industry, to help the Air Force identify “commercial best practices” and help the force understand how these things are executed in the commercial sector.

“In many cases, that means working that business case a little bit harder with our folks to make them understand where the things that you do on a regular basis—when you do these types of modernizations in the real world—how it can be applied to military bases, while still complying with all of the rules and regulations you have to do for a DOD acquisition,” Beauchamp said.

He also spoke to the Air Force’s major effort to transition to the cloud and highlighted Cloud One, the DOD’s first hybrid multi-cloud program. It contains development and security service layers that users can employ for application migration to the cloud or developing applications in the cloud.

Regarding Air Force culture, Beauchamp noted that EITaaS is quite a departure from earlier acquisition efforts, where a vendor would, for example, install equipment at a base or locality and then operations and support would be conducted by Air Force personnel and support. EITaaS is structured differently, in that the vendor would participate in the operation of the product—basically provide the service to the Air Force.

“We’re entering into a service-level agreement,” he said. “We’re enabling that vendor then to upgrade or replace the equipment as needed, within the cost of the contract to make sure they can meet that support agreement.”

Ultimately, Beauchamp said, this will free up service members to devote their expertise on other responsibilities and allow the Air Force to make better use of its talent.

Joseph “Mike” McWilliams, director of staff for the Air Force Small Business and Acquisition Program Manager, then provided a crash course on best practices for vendors to better connect their capabilities with the Air Force. Above all, McWilliams insisted vendors be clear and concise in their capability statements, what services they provide, and how their expertise can meet the Air Force’s needs.

McWilliams lamented the many proposals he’s reviewed over the years that are short on substance and long on “fluff.” He urged prospective vendors to understand those reviewing proposals typically need to make quick decisions and want specifics about vendor capability. He also strongly encouraged vendors to attend industry days.

“If you’re there in the audience and you have a better idea or you know what you can do, help the program manager and the contracting officer up there … develop that acquisition strategy to where there will be set asides to use small businesses,” he said. “Because they may not even be thinking about that until they find out there’s two or more of you out there in the audience who can do this.”

B-21 Will Be ‘Backbone’ of Bomber Fleet, AFGSC Boss Says as New Images Are Released

March 10, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

AURORA, Colo.—The B-21 Raider will be the “future backbone of the bomber fleet,” the head of Air Force Global Strike Command Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere said March 7. The new bomber, which is expected to fly this year, is just one part of a broad effort to modernize U.S. nuclear forces to deter China, Russia, and others, the AFGSC boss added.

“We need credible, modern systems,” Bussiere said in a keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “Fundamentally, it’s all about combat credibility. We deliver long-range strike, and we provide nuclear and conventional deterrence.”

Bussiere said the Air Force will field a minimum of 100 B-21s as part of a long-term plan for fleet of 220 bombers. B-21, a stealthy flying wing, will come in cheaper than its B-2 predecessor, which cost more than $1 billion per airframe. Bussiere said the program is exceeding expectations, and on track to meet all its cost, schedule, and performance marks.

The Air Force released new images of the B-21 the week of Bussiere’s remarks.

The B-21 Raider was unveiled to the public at a ceremony Dec. 2, 2022 in Palmdale, Calif. U.S. Air Force photo

The service hopes the aircraft will be airborne in short order.

“The B-21 is projected to begin flight tests later this calendar year,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in separate remarks. “Our goal is to get into production as quickly as possible … overlapping some testing production.”

The service is moving from a three-bomber fleet to a two-bomber fleet, as the B-2 Sprit and B-1 Lancer will come offline in favor of the B-21.

Bussiere said the B-21 is “on track to deliver operational aircraft to its first main operating base in the mid-2020s.”

The stalwart B-52 will remain, with a projected service life of around 100 years. The aircraft was introduced in 1955. But that doesn’t make it a legacy platform, according to Bussiere.

“We’re updating everything—new radar, engines, upgraded communications, and datalink capabilities,” Bussiere said. While the B-52 is not a stealth platform, its large payload makes it ideal for a wide variety of munitions, including long-range standoff missiles and hypersonic weapons.

The B-21, while state-of-the-art in the 2020s, is designed to be upgraded throughout its life as well to maintain its relevance.

“The technologies that are integrated and the open architecture system will provide any potential capabilities to advance, modernize, and keep that weapon system on the leading edge of a threat in the future,” Bussiere said.

Nor is the B-21 AFGSC’s only new system. The DOD has pledged to replace all its aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles one-for-one with new Sentinel ICBMs, as part of a multibillion dollar investment to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

Bussiere cautioned that the nation faces increasing atomic threats.

“Just two weeks ago, Russia withdrew from the [New START] treaty,” Bussiere said. “That was the last vestige of arms control treaty that the United States had. We do not have an arms control treaty with China. … China and the CCP are sprinting to parity with their nuclear force—diversifying, expanding, and modernizing at a pace that we haven’t seen since the Cold War. It is the most complicated international order I’ve ever experienced in my military career.”

That requires the Air Force to upgrade its current strategic forces, he said.

“There is no operational margin left,” Bussiere said. “We have no choice but to modernize.”

With Flying Hours Limited, Simulation and Data Analysis Aid Pilot Training

March 10, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

AURORA, Colo.—The Air Force’s pilot training and safety enterprise is in the midst of a pivotal transition, with data analytics and high-tech simulators gaining ground but limited flying hours and related budget pressures a continuing issue, top generals said at the AFA Warfare Symposium.

The Air Force’s continued pilot shortage is among the drivers for change, as leaders seek to accelerate pilot production using new training approaches and qualification procedures. Indeed, even if those changes do yield more new pilots, the Air Force isn’t necessarily ready for all of them, said Lt. Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife, deputy chief of staff for operations.

“We have a well-established construct for how we produce and absorb new pilots into our squadrons,” Slife said during a March 7 panel discussion. “You can’t have a C-17 Squadron full of copilots with no aircraft commanders. And so there’s a limit to how many new copilots that can come in.”

Those limits, he explained, are primarily the number of flying hours a pilot has and the standard of experience the service sets for a pilot to then be considered fully qualified and absorbed.

“And if the [Air Education and Training Command] production pipeline could produce more pilots, we would have a hard time absorbing them in the operational squadrons,” Slife said.

Limited flying hours available to keep pilots proficient remain an issue. Those numbers have been steadily declining for years, with the flying hours program having historically been a bill payer for other sustainment accounts.

There are three factors in play affecting the flying hours shortage, Slife indicated:

The daily cost of fuels and consumables;

The longer-term costs of weapons system sustainment in depots;

A shortage of maintenance manpower.

That final issue might be the most important. “It takes about seven years to create a crew chief,” Slife noted, a point reiterated in a separate event by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.: “As you look at our aircraft, they are breaking a bit more, taking longer to fix, and the experience level of our maintainers is not what it was over the past few decades,” Brown told reporters. “So that’s a combination of things that grind down aircraft availability.”

While giving more money to the flying hours program would provide a short-term boost, Slife warned that investments in sustainment and maintenance personnel are needed to prevent other long-term issues—and officials are working to quantify those risks so that decision-makers can make more-informed budget choices.

“All of these variables are knowable things. I mean, it’s not a mystery,” Slife said. “This is how it works. It gets complicated in the details. And what we need is we need to take advantage of all the data that we have collected over the years about how these variables interact and affect … the end result.”

Once tools are developed to interpret that data, service leaders can decide how to prioritize different accounts. Good data can be leveraged in numerous ways. Explained Brown: “Because of the data, we can now take a look at other things we can do, other levers we can pull to have a better understanding that will help increase the number of fight hours per month.”

Safety

Increasing flying hours is not a cure-all, said Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, the Department of the Air Force’s Chief of Safety. “Everyone would like to see a direct correlation because that makes it really easy—more flying hours [equals] less mishaps,” Leavitt said. “It’s not that easy.”

Instead, Leavitt highlighted other factors in improving safety—and helping the pilot corps improve. Her first example is one that Slife and AETC commander Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson also highlighted: advanced simulators.

“We’ve learned that the more often you stimulate the cognitive experience for anybody, either in flying skills or no matter how heavy or lightly the touch labor aspect is, the more comfortable the students are in training when they actually get into the platform … because they’ve seen it before, and expectations are shaped,” Robinson said. “They’ve heard it before. They’ve been able to make decisions on the scenarios that we’ve been able to present through immersive training technological solutions.”

Similarly, Slife noted that pilots now get into aircraft better able to focus on learning techniques instead of spending time getting acclimated.

The Air Force is counting on advanced simulators, as well as augmented and virtual reality, to play a key role in pilot production as part of its “Undergraduate Pilot Training 2.5” program

Still, Leavitt also emphasized the importance of “balance” in pilot training and safety.

“At the end of the day, we also need to get up there,” she said.

Yet even when pilots are up in the sky, there are ways for advanced technologies to make a difference, all three generals agreed. In particular, they cited a relatively new practice of analyzing aircraft flight data.

“When you think about flight data recorders and voice recorders, it’s typically in the aftermath of the crash, you go find the box, you pull it out, figure out what happened and why the airplane crashed,” Slife said. “But what we’ve found is we can actually collect data off these things, of each sortie, and look for training trends. And you can say, ‘OK, how many unstable approaches do we have inside the final approach phase? How many times can we see a bank angle that exceeds whatever it is? … And I’ll tell you, that really gives you some great insights into the training programs you have.”

Robinson said that in one instance, AETC went back and examined data leading up to a C-17 mishap and realized that, had they analyzed the pilot’s earlier flights, they could have identified a problem that contributed to the accident and made corrections before it ever happened.

With the ability to analyze data, Slife said, new ways of thinking about how to use it are needed. “We’re living in an interesting time because of the advent of technologies that are really going to change our historical models for absorption and production [of new pilots].”

Dispersed But Resilient: Air Force Gets to Work on New Basing Construct Under ACE

March 10, 2023 | By James C. Kitfield

Last month, the Air Force’s evolving Agile Combat Employment (ACE) doctrine received arguably its most rigorous test yet in the annual Cope North exercise, as Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps fighter and bomber aircraft, backed by aerial refuelers and airborne early warning and control aircraft and supported by Japanese fighters and French and Australian transports, fanned out across 1,200 miles of ocean and far-flung Pacific islands. They operated from a hub-and-spoke system of 10 air bases spread from Iwo Jima in the north, through Saipan, Rota, and Guam, and down to Micronesia and the Palau archipelago to the distant south.

“In terms of the scope and complexity of the basing challenge, the 2023 iteration of Cope North was nothing like its predecessors. What I saw during the exercise was night and day from some of the concerns I’ve heard expressed about ACE,” Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, commander of the 36th Wing out of Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, said while moderating a panel on “Defining Optimized Resilient Basing” at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 7. “We can now debunk some of those concerns, because [after Cope North] we now know exactly what the key elements of ACE are, and we know exactly what a resilient base looks like.”

The imperative driving ACE is the need to greatly disperse U.S. and allied air bases across the Indo-Pacific region in a way that complicates targeting for China and its massive arsenal of ballistic missiles. The Cope North exercise revealed both the promise of that doctrine, and the challenge of building resiliency with such a widely dispersed basing footprint.

air force basing — Japan Air Self-Defense Force, Royal Australian Air Force and U.S. Air Force aircraft are parked on the flight line during Cope North 2023 at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, Feb. 8, 2023. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Charles T. Fultz

For one, the exercise revealed that complicating an adversary’s targeting challenge is necessary but not sufficient, Birch said.

“We also have to generate airpower from the bases that is lethal and useful in helping us compete and win,” he noted.

The task of building a more dispersed yet resilient basing footprint is forcing the Air Force to relearn some lessons that atrophied in the permissive post-Cold War era of uncontested major operating bases.

For instance, the service needs to refine its prepositioning of materiel—the weapons, ammunition, fuel, and maintenance equipment needed to generate air sorties from austere bases. Base protection is also increasingly important, running the gamut from passive measures such as hardened aircraft shelters, camouflage, concealment, and deception, to active air defenses such as PATRIOT systems or other surface-to-air missiles. Rapid runway repair capabilities will also be needed to reconstitute damaged airfields.

“To be successful we need to have the right amount of prepositioned materiel, at the right scalability, so that it is available or arrives in time to meet the need, but not overdoing it to the point that it rots in the tough climate and environment that we face in the Indo-Pacific,” said Birch. “Base protection is also imperative, and it can take many forms. At the same time, being a target isn’t our main focus. Rather, the focus is getting our airpower off the ground in a way that is lethal.”

The model of dispersed basing dictated by ACE also puts added strain on command-and-control, logistics, and manpower. In each arena, the challenges of working in an austere environment will be greatly magnified in a time of conflict.

“When you think about having to operate in an austere environment where you don’t have a lot of the infrastructure and support associated with a main operating base, and then consider how that looks in a ‘contested’ or even ‘denied’ scenario, it can become really challenging,” said Ryan Bunge, the general manager for resilient networking and autonomous solutions at Collins Aerospace. “If you think of what the first nights of a conflict might look like, an expeditionary commander’s ability to pop up on the command-and-control network and get an intelligence update or a new air tasking order might be impaired. To help the Air Force meet that challenge, we’re looking at providing more resilient connectivity.”

Such resiliency could be offered by commercial and military satellite communications systems, or even high-frequency radio enabled by digital mesh networking.

Defense industry representatives also believe artificial intelligence and machine learning systems can help the Air Force can meet the logistical challenges raised by more far-flung operations.

“Optimization is key to creating more resilient supply chains, so think of a neural network that can predict before a human when there will be a supply disruption due to weather, a supply shortage, or an adversarial threat,” said Thom Kenney, technical director at Google’s Office of the CTO. “Having automated systems that can accurately predict in advance a break in the supply chain would be a huge advantage.”

With ACE and its focus on dispersed operations demanding more “Multi-Capable Airmen” who can operate out of their normal career fields, industry representatives also said AI and autonomous systems can help the service better deal with manpower strains.

“In order for these expeditionary bases to be protected, we’re already offering autonomous force protection solutions,” said Brad Reeves, director for C4I solutions for Elbit Systems of America. “Think of a single Airman operating a fully autonomous team of unmanned platforms that are able to conduct observation and sensing around not just an expeditionary base, but also beyond the base to the entire island or even beyond that to an entire littoral maritime region. Such multi-domain, air, land, and sea awareness would give a base commander the knowledge necessary in order for him to launch and recover aircraft in a safe manner.”

Defining Optimized Resilient Basing: Ryan Bunge, Vice President & General Manager Resilient Networking and Autonomy Solutions, Collins Aerospace; Thom Kenney, Technical Director, OCTO, Google; Brad Reeves, Director for C4I Solutions, Elbit America; and Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD., Commander, 36th Wing, Andersen Air Force Base, Guam Photo by Mike Tsukamoto/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Want to Grow a Beard? Not in My Military, Says Colón-López. Others Aren’t So Sure.

March 10, 2023 | By David Roza

The most senior enlisted service member stamped down on the push to allow Airmen and Guardians to wear beards in uniform without a waiver, saying beards don’t contribute to military preparedness and the push could have a negative effect on discipline.

“If you want to look cute with your skinny jeans and your beard, by all means, do it someplace else,” Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Ramón Colón-López said during a ”Coffee Talk” Facebook chat streamed live from the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 8. “But quit wasting our time on something that doesn’t have anything to do with kicking the enemy’s ass.”

Colón-López was joined by Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass and Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman, who expressed similar views.

“From a fashion perspective, it’s a very silly thing to worry about,” said Towberman. “We’re not here to be fashionable.”

A Hairy History

Beards are again a sensitive topic in the Air Force. Decades after the Air Force imposed a beard ban, the service recently began allowing religious exemptions for some Airmen and medical waivers for others.

Air Force medical research published in 2021 suggested the beard ban was discriminatory toward Black Airmen, who are more likely to suffer from pseudofolliculitis barbae, a skin condition, also known as razor bumps, caused by ingrown hairs that makes shaving painful and even scarring if skin is not given a chance to heal.

Researchers found that Airmen with shaving waivers took longer to earn promotions and often could not land high-profile positions as recruiters, military training instructors, Honor Guard members, or positions on the Thunderbirds flight demonstration team.

“[T]he promotion system is not necessarily inherently racially biased, but instead biased against the presence of facial hair which will likely always affect the promotions of Blacks/African-Americans disproportionately because of the relatively higher need for shaving waivers in this population,” the study said.

Bass said she wants to eliminate discriminatory policies against Airmen with shaving waivers. Her team repealed policies that had barred bearded Airmen and Guardians from serving in some positions and they made it easier to qualify for beard waivers. Bass said she is aware of the stigma against facial hair, and in a December Facebook post wrote about her desire to erase that stigma.

Yet Airmen and Guardians continue to press for a rule change on social media forums like the Air Force subreddit and Facebook’s Air Force amn/nco/snco page, where commenters frequently question the need the beard ban in the first place. Military leaders often claim that facial hair disrupts the seal of a gas mask or oxygen mask, though one Air Force doctor has found no direct scientific evidence to support the claim.

“It’s an unsubstantiated claim,” Lt. Col. Simon Ritchie, the dermatologist who led the 2021 study on beards in the Air Force, told Task & Purpose in May. Beard opponents “may have anecdotal evidence of one to five people who they see fail the fit test,” he said. But “that can’t be extrapolated to hundreds of thousands of Airmen.”

Fellow NATO nations Canada, Germany, and Norway allow beards and show no direct evidence that facial hair disrupts gas mask seals, said Ritchie, who was stationed in Germany at the time. The nearest thing to direct scientific evidence he could find, he said, was a 2018 study showing that 98 percent of study participants who had an eighth-inch of beard achieved acceptable fits on civilian half-face negative-pressure respirators, which Ritchie said are comparable to the M-50 gas masks used in the military today.

Ritchie told Task & Purpose at the time that the Air Force would need only a small study—perhaps 100 to 150 participants—to settle the issue one way or another. But Towberman and Colón-López seemed uninterested in pursuing broad acceptance of beards.

“I really feel pretty comfortable” with the policy as it stands, Towberman said. “It feels like we’re accomplishing what we needed to. I shouldn’t be discriminated against because of a glasses prescription, [and beards are similar]. So the medical requirement or the religious accommodation needed to be addressed and we’ve addressed it.”

‘Is There a Need?’

Colón-López was more blunt. A former pararescueman, he noted there was a “combat need” to grow beards in order to blend in with the local population in Afghanistan, but that need gradually fell away as the U.S. military established a longer-term presence there.

“You had GI-issue body armor, helmet, big American flag and a beard. Really? You blend in? So it became a stupid argument,” Colón-López said.

But in the 2016 book “Hammerhead Six”, Green Beret Capt. Ronald Fry wrote that beards were more than blending in—they were also an important means of gaining the respect of local elders.

“If I had shaved my beard, when I returned to duty in the Pech nobody would have talked to me,” Fry wrote. “The warrior king would have been reduced to juvenile status, and the respect that we were working so hard to gain would evaporate.”

Then-Senior Master Sgt. Ramón Colón-López wore a beard while deployed to Afghanistan in 2004. His beard then helped him blend into the population. Photo via the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

Still, as the operator look—beard, baseball cap, Nine Line t-shirts—caught on, beards became “a badge of pride because of our ass-kicking track record downrange,” said Colón-López. His view: The calls for beards in the Air Force derive either from the desire to fit that style and look or from laziness and the desire to not shave.

“Now the question is: Do we really need to be discussing fashion, when we’re preparing after 20 years of war, to best an opponent that can potentially have the best of us?” he said. “Is there a need for a beard, other than personal comfort to not shave?”

Colón-López said he opposed religious exemptions to the beard rule when he worked for the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

“We call this a uniform,” he said on the Facebook chat, pointing to his chest. “And what does uni mean? One. And that is part of the expectation of people, to put their personality aside for the betterment of the team. … The more we start requesting ‘well, I want,’ we start losing sight of that discipline and that commonality that we have as warfighters.”

Ritchie, the dermatologist, disagreed in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“This has never been about looking cute or about fashion, this has always been about eradicating every possible vestige of racial discrimination in the Air Force and also about allowing those with religious beliefs to express those while in uniform,” Ritchie said.

“We are forcing out talented Airmen (proven with data), we are not promoting our shaving waiver holders (proven with data), and because our waiver holders are predominantly Black this directly translates into racial discrimination,” he said.

Last year, former Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Kaleth Wright said in a panel discussion that he spent nearly his entire 32-year military career opposed to facial hair. “I had opportunities to hire all kinds of folks and I was adamant about not hiring somebody with a shaving waiver, just because I fell into that category of ‘this is Air Force policy, it’s not professional,’” he said. “I was willfully ignorant about the impact it was having on young Black men.”

But as CMSAF, Wright eventually changed his tune. At least one general officer shares Wright’s position. Maj. Gen. Kenneth Bibb, then-commander of the 18th Air Force, said on the same panel that for many years he did not want Airmen with shaving waivers to represent his wing or be in his Honor Guard.

“Man that hurts now that I think about the words that I said and the guidance that I gave,” said Bibb, now the deputy inspector general of the Air Force.

“I’ll be the first Airman to grow a beard” if the Air Force drops the ban, he said. “I think we have to take away the stigmatism that goes with this. Even if you change the rules, if we don’t see leaders that have beards,” the stigma will survive.

Biden’s 2024 Budget Seeks $842B for Defense, ‘21st Century’ Air Force

March 9, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

President Joe Biden’s $842 billion Defense budget request includes a 5.2 percent pay increase—the biggest in 22 years—“builds the Air Forces needed for the 21st century,” and “increases space resilience,” the administration said.

Topline budget figures released by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget offered scant details; the full budget is to be released March 13.

“The Budget funds the procurement of a mix of highly capable crewed aircraft while continuing to modernize fielded fighter, bomber, mobility, and training aircraft,” the OMB release said. “The Budget also accelerates the development and procurement of uncrewed combat aircraft and the relevant autonomy to augment crewed aircraft. Investing in this mix of aircraft provides an opportunity to increase the resiliency and flexibility of the fleet to meet future threats, while reducing operating costs.”

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall indicated earlier this week at the AFA Warfare Symposium that the Air Force will buy more F-35 Lighting II fighters than in fiscal 2023, new F-15EX fighters, and more KC-46 Pegasus tankers; it will also invest significantly in the B-21 bomber and Next-Generation Air Dominance systems.

The development and procurement of uncrewed combat aircraft—referred to by the Air Force as Collaborative Combat Aircraft—has been a well-known priority for the service. Kendall recently revealed notional plans to build 1,000 of the drones, which will fly alongside manned fighters.

Air Force generals and civilian leaders have argued CCAs are necessary to build what they call “affordable mass,” giving the service enough aircraft to match an adversary like China while not costing as much as an entirely manned fleet.

Space Force

The White House budget document highlighted funding to improve “the resilience of U.S. space architectures, such as in-space sensing and communications, to bolster deterrence and increase survivability during hostilities.”

Resilience or endurance of space operations under attack, whether by kinetic strikes or electronic jamming, is a defining aspect of Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman’s vision for the Space Force. He unveiled his theory of “Competitive Endurance” at the AFA Warfare Symposium, describing it as is a dis-incentivize to deter adversaries from striking first.

The Space Development Agency has emerged as the most high-profile contributor to diversifying the national defense space architecture, developing plans to launch hundreds of satellites into low-Earth orbit in the coming years—including “layers” for sensing and tracking missile launches, as well as for communications, and transporting data.

Budget Fights

The $842 billion topline for the Pentagon would be $26 billion more than the $817 billion appropriated for fiscal 2023—a 3.2 percent increase. Yet in an era of high inflation and increased threats, Congress may well up the ante, as it did in each of the past two years.

House and Senate Republicans will lead that charge. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, each released statements criticizing defense investment as insufficient.

“The President’s defense budget is woefully inadequate and disappointing,” Wicker said. “It does not even resource his own National Defense Strategy to protect our country from growing threats around the world.”

Rogers called the threats facing the United States “the most complex and challenging … in decades.” The president’s budget request “fails to take these threats seriously,” he added. “A budget that proposes to increase non-defense spending at more than twice the rate of defense is absurd. The President’s incredibly misplaced priorities send all the wrong messages to our adversaries.”

But Biden will have supporters. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised Biden for crafting a “strong budget,” even as he left open the possibility for change.

“Some will inevitably say the topline is too much, while others will claim it is not enough,” Reed said. “I say America’s defense budget should be guided by our values, needs, and national security strategy. This topline request serves as a useful starting point. I look forward to receiving the detailed budget request so we can get to work crafting a responsible, balanced National Defense Authorization Act.”