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.”

Air Force Faces 10 Percent Recruiting Shortfall in 2023—And Long-Term ‘Headwinds’

March 9, 2023 | By David Roza

AURORA, Colo.—The Active-duty Air Force is projected to miss its 2023 recruiting goal by 10 percent, amid a historic low unemployment rate and a growling lack of interest and eligibility to serve among young Americans, top service officials said earlier this week at the AFA Warfare Symposium.

“We are currently projecting about a 10 percent shortfall this year in the Active Air Force and more in the Guard and Reserve,” said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall in his keynote address March 7. “We are swimming upstream against a reduced propensity to serve nationally across the board and a limited percentage of qualified candidates.”

The next day, Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, the commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service, outlined some of the specific “headwinds” that his troops face as they try to sign up more recruits. These include a 3.4 percent unemployment rate, the lowest since 1969 according to the Department of Commerce. Only 23 percent of American youth are eligible to serve in the military, Thomas said, and only 9 percent say they are interested in serving.

The grim projections come in the wake of what was already shaping up to be a tough year for Air Force recruiting. The AFRS barely reached its fiscal 2022 goal for the Active-duty Air Force and missed its goals for the Reserve and Guard by about 1,500 to 2,000 recruits each. Last September, Thomas called the effort “a dead-stick landing” that would leave the service starting 2023 about 5,000 recruits short on the Active-duty side alone.

At the time, Thomas pointed to some of the challenges such as the lack of in-person recruiting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, low unemployment, and misperceptions about military service. Many of those long-term challenges persist.

“One area that I do want to highlight, which we believe is critical, is countering declining familiarity with the U.S. military,” said Thomas in a statement, citing research that 50 percent of American youth cannot name all of the military services, and 65 percent of young Americans said they would not join for fear of death or injury.

Thomas said the Air Force needs to counter misperceptions of military service by “increasing community outreach–getting out into the communities and re-introducing ourselves to America. I don’t just mean getting outside the gates of Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio or Altus, Oklahoma. We must get out and provide meaningful exposure to our men and women in uniform across the nation, in the hard-to-recruit areas, and in all the places where Americans are not likely to know anyone in the military.”

In the meantime, the general said there is no “silver bullet or game-changing strategy” that will reverse the downward recruiting trends. Instead, AFRS has to pursue every small advantage it can, whether that is revising Air Force tattoo policies, updating body composition standards, changing bonus structures or other mechanisms to bring in more recruits.

“What we have concluded is that there are multiple areas where we need to adapt and improve performance by single or double-digit percentage points,” Thomas said. “We will continue to take a hard look at ourselves and leave no reasonable option off the table.”

There are bright spots for the recruiting service. For example, AFRS is on track to meet its Space Force goals and the Air Force in general enjoys strong retention levels.

“Retention numbers look very good,” Kendall said in his keynote speech. “We’re keeping the people that we get, but we need to get more people. People coming into the Air Force are staying with us, so please reach out to your communities and help us counter negative perceptions of our military service and share our positive and accurate messages.”

Ground-Penetrating Radar and AR Guide Airmen to Spark Tank Win

March 9, 2023 | By Patrick Reardon

AURORA, Colo.—No one wants to stand up in front of the entire Department of Air Force leadership team and own up to being personally responsible for cutting vital communications lines in a war zone, but Tech. Sgt. Raymond Zgoda turned that error into an example of a much-needed, winning innovation March 8 in the 2023 Spark Tank Championship.

Zgoda and Master Sgt. Sarah Hubert (the originator of the winning idea), both of Yokota Air Base, Japan, won the competition before an audience of about 2,000 Airmen and Guardians with an idea for using ground-penetrating radar and augmented reality goggles to more precisely map underground pipes, wires, and fiber-optic lines on military bases to prevent accidental breaks caused by construction.

Spark Tank is an annual competition modeled after the “Shark Tank” TV program. Instead of entrepreneurs pitching investors for funding, Spark Tank enables DAF “intrapreneurs”—primarily Airmen and Guardians, but also including department civilians—to pitch innovative ideas and ask leaders to fund their projects. From an initial field of 235 ideas, or “sparks,” six finalists got to pitch their projects on the main stage at the 2023 AFA Warfare Symposium.

This year’s panel of judges included Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall; Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.; Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman; Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass; Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman; National Basketball Association Senior VP and Head of Referee Operations Michelle Johnson, a retired Air Force lieutenant general; and investor Michael Moe, founder of the merchant bank Global Silicon Valley.

Each of the six finalists were allowed a three-minute pitch explaining their ideas, their progress thus far, and the potential return on investment for the services. Panelists then had four minutes to question the presenters.

2023 spark tank — 2023 Spark Tank Winners Master Sgt. Sarah Hubert and Tech. Sgt. Raymond Zgoda present their proposal to the Spark Tank panel. Photo by Mike Tsukamoto/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Hubert and Zgoda won the day with a straight-forward pitch.

“I’m a dirt boy,” Zgoda said. “I dig ditches. I’m good at my job, but without the proper tools and information, I can become a liability and insider threat. Unfortunately, I haven’t been issued X-ray vision. I am relying on inaccurate maps. I have personally seen our maps be off by as much as 75 feet from what is actually under the ground.”

Digging into underground storage tanks, wires, fuel lines, and other buried infrastructure is costly and all too common, they said. But by mapping areas using ground-penetrating radar and then fusing those findings with augmented reality, the solution the team presented can eliminate the risk of digging blindly—saving time, labor, money, and even lives.

For example, Hubert cited a sinkhole at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in 2020 that took two years and $77 million to repair. Ground-penetrating radar could potentially “detect these sinkholes at low costs before they turn into sunk costs.” Avoiding accidental damage to underground infrastructure could save up to $750,000 on wasted labor at every Air Force and Space Force base, the two said.

“Airmen and Guardians can die from hitting natural gas and electric lines,” Hubert said. “We cannot put a price on that loss.”

Their pitch won over Kendall, Saltzman, Bass, and Towberman, good enough to take home the prize. But all the projects earned the judges collective approval.

The “celebrity” judges reveal their votes for the Spark Tank 2023 champion at the AFA Warfare Symposium, March 8. Photo by Mike Tsukamoto.

The crowd favorite, indicated by electronic voting, was also Brown’s selection: “Project Kinetic Cargo Sustainment,” a system for accelerating airlift operations by implementing new digital processes for weighing and measuring pallets, vehicles, and other cargo before loading cargo craft. The idea was conceived by Master Sgt. Brandon Allensworth and Master Sgt. Peter Salinas, both from Kadena Air Base, Japan, who said the system can reduce cargo processing times from around 20 minutes per vehicle to a matter of seconds.

Both guest judges, Johnson and Moe, voted for “Accelerated Development of Multi-Capable Airmen and Guardians,” a Special Warfare training project touted to provide linkages between human systems and operational tasks. The concept was developed by a team of Airmen, including: Maj. Caitlin Harris, Chief Master Sgt Michael Rubio, Capt. Andrew Antonio, Tech. Sgt. Ty Hatcher, and Lt. Col. Peter Dyrud. Although still a prototype, the project is estimated to save an annual $3 million through graduation rates and has already received interest from multiple groups and across the DOD.

The remaining three “sparks” were all well-received by the judges, who praised the innovative solutions and encouraged their further development. They included:

DOD civilian Michael Dolan of Space Base Delta 3 at Los Angeles Air Force Base, for his “Real-time Asset Management System.” RAMS integrates the Air Force’s seven existing asset-management systems for tracking systems, people, and workspaces into a common interface, potentially saving 50,000 hours annually in wasted effort needed to track and map those assets.

Master Sgt. Aaron Cordroch, Hurlburt Field, Fla., for “Advanced Maintenance & Troubleshooting Suite,” a maintenance-troubleshooting dashboard and information database. Cordroch said AMATS can save the Air Force thousands of hours of equipment downtime by using predictive analytics to anticipate parts replacement.

Staff Sgt. Michael Sturtevant, Kadena Air Base, Japan, for Project Oregon Trail, a solution for lifting and moving pallets and equipment in all terrains without need of a forklift. Particularly relevant to agile combat employment scenarios, Sturtevant’s simple solution consists of four tripods for lifting the loads onto small wheeled platforms so they can be more easily moved by small teams. He envisioned equipping all expeditionary cargo craft with this gear in order to minimize the need for forklifts, which themselves make up a full plane load to get them into theater.

For more information on the six finalists in the 2023 Spark Tank, visit the Guardians and Airmen Innovation Network.