After Long Wait, Guam’s Missile and Air Defense Is About to Get A Whole Lot Better

March 24, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

The Department of Defense is getting ready to overhaul its air and missile defenses on Guam, perhaps the most critical U.S. military hub in striking distance of China. DOD plans to invest $1.5 billion in a new missile and air shield for Guam in fiscal 2024, part of a long-awaited effort to better defend the territory.

“Current forces are capable of defending Guam against today’s North Korean ballistic missile threats,” Michelle C. Atkinson, the director of operations for the Missile Defense Agency, told reporters March 13. “However, the regional threat to Guam, including those from [the People’s Republic of China] continues to rapidly evolve.”

The new systems headed for the U.S. territory will include radars, launchers, interceptors, and command and control systems to counter the increasing capabilities of the Chinese cruise and ballistic missiles and other threats.

“Guam has the perfect air and missile defense problem,” said Tom Karako, an air and missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s wicked hard because we have to integrate all these different defenses because the potential adversary, China, is going to have a complex and integrated attack of everything from drones to cruise missiles to ballistics to gliders, etcetera. We have to put those things together so that they can’t attack the gaps and the seams of those several systems.”

Guam, the Westernmost U.S. territory, is a critical staging location for American forces in the Pacific, providing airfields and ports for nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and strategic bombers, as well as jungle warfare training for the Marine Corps. The Pentagon is investing heavily now in dispersing its forces, leveraging new basing agreements with allies that will allow U.S. submarines to forward deploy to Australia, for example, and Air Force jets to drop in and operate from remote air bases throughout the western Pacific under the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) concept. Regardless of how many “spokes” U.S. forces operate from in the region, Guam will remain a large and critical hub.

Yet there is still a long way to go to comprehensively defend Guam against aerial threats.

“The fundamental criteria are schedule and capability,” Karako said.

The island is currently protected by the Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense system and the Navy’s Aegis system off the coast, which will continue to be supported by the Missile Defense Agency. The MDA plans to invest $801 million for Guam’s defense in fiscal 2024.

“We’re on a very short timetable on Guam,” Vice Adm. Jon A. Hill, the director of the Missile Defense Agency said at a CSIS event March 24. “We’re doing it because of location, location, location. … It deserves to be defended.”

Most of the MDA’s money would not go directly to any one piece of kit, but toward working out an overall integrated air and missile defense architecture for the island through research, development, test, and evaluation.

“It is not simple—it is hard, hard work.” Hill said. “We’re running lots of studies right now to see which is best.”

The Army and Navy will continue to play a large role. Army plans provide Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensors (LTAMDS), the high-end PATRIOT system, and Indirect Fires Protection Capability (IFPC).

“There is no end state,” Hill told reporters at the McAleese and Associates defense conference March 15. “We’re going to deliver capability as it’s ready and we’re going to continue to build it out.”

The Navy’s Aegis system already exists, and it has been placed on land before in Poland and Romania as the so-called Aegis Ashore system. But while roughly one-third of Guam is controlled by the U.S. military, the island is a tourist attraction. China may clear islands to create militarized fortresses, but the MDA must consider Guam’s difficult Pacific island terrain and its natural beauty. Therefore, the Aegis Guam System will be tailored to the island, including the integration of new AN/TPY-6 radars as part of an effort to create a 360-degree ability to see and engage all threats to the island, a much desired but often difficult prospect in the air defense world. The plan is for Aegis to work alongside the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS).

“It really is combined, at the simple level, Aegis and IBCS working together on the island,” Hill said March 13. “We have a mix of launchers on the island.”

All these systems will then have to have a linked command and control network to see and shoot the right targets with the right interceptor at the right time—on architecture that will be evolving.

“It’s important to get that out there as quickly as possible while we simultaneously ascertain the best way to integrate or interoperate the several command and control systems for all of these elements,” Karako said. “That last piece, the command and control, is going to be a vexing challenge.”

US Air Strikes Hit Back at Iran’s Proxy Forces in Syria After Deadly Drone Attack

March 24, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

The U.S. Air Force stuck two Iranian-backed militia sites in Syria early on the morning of March 24 local time, responding to a drone attack that killed a U.S. contractor in northeastern Syria the previous day, the Pentagon said. The militia attacks are the latest in an escalating series of drone and missile strikes the U.S. blames on Iran-backed groups in Iraq and Syria. Iranian-backed forces have attacked U.S. troops in Syria around 80 times since the start of 2021, according to American accounts.

“We don’t seek conflict or war with Iran,” Pentagon Press Secretary Patrick S. Ryder told reporters. “Our focus in Syria is on the enduring defeat of ISIS. Unfortunately, what you see in this situation are these Iranian-backed groups—not only in Syria but conducting operations in the Strait of Hormuz, in the Gulf, in Iraq—conducting destabilizing operations that are meant to export terror and instability.”

The March 23 militia attack that killed a U.S. contractor also wounded five U.S. service members and another U.S. contractor. The one-way drone strike hit a facility in Hasakah, Syria at 1:38 p.m. local time, according to the Pentagon. U.S. intelligence officials said the drone was made in Iran and launched by a group sponsored by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

President Joe Biden was briefed on the attack on U.S. personnel while aboard Air Force One on his way to Canada, U.S. officials said. Biden ordered the air strikes, which the Pentagon called a “proportionate” response.

More than 12 hours after the attack, two F-15E Strike Eagles assigned to Air Forces Central (AFCENT) launched a nighttime strike against two “IRGC-affiliated facilities” in eastern Syria at around 2:40 am, which Biden later described as sites used for munitions storage and command and control. The Pentagon said the F-15s took off from a base in the CENTCOM region but did not specify exactly which one.

“Be prepared for us to act forcefully to protect our people,” Biden said in Ottawa March 24.

The U.S. launched the airstrikes not only because of the casualties suffered March 23, but because that incident was part of a “series of recent attacks against coalition forces in Syria by groups affiliated with the IRGC,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement. Around 900 U.S. forces are in Syria assisting local groups in the battle against ISIS militants.

“These precision strikes are intended to protect and defend U.S. personnel,” Austin said. “The United States took proportionate and deliberate action intended to limit the risk of escalation and minimize casualties.”

That did not end matters. Iranian-backed groups retaliated with four attacks on U.S. sites in Syria after the U.S. air stirkes.

The first of those four took place at Green Village, in northeastern Syria at 8:05 am local time March 24, the U.S. military said. According to CENTCOM, the rockets missed Green Village by around 5 kilometers and caused “significant damage” to a local house and injured four civilians, including two children.

U.S. military officials said there were three more attacks. At 10:39 pm local time on March 24, rockets hit Mission Support Site Conoco, injuring one U.S. service member, who was described as in stable condition. Less than an hour later at 11:23 pm local time, three drones targetted Green Village. Two of the drones were taken down by the sites air defenses, but one got through. It struck a building but did not cause significant damage or injure personnel. At 2:19 am local March 25 another drone targeted and struck Green Village, but did not cause any injuries.

Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the commander of CENTCOM, told the House Armed Services Committee March 23 that Iranian-backed forces have attacked American troops 78 times since the beginning of 2021. That testimony came before the most recent attacks came to light. U.S. personnel are typically not physically harmed by those attacks, as the rockets, missiles, and drones are usually shot down, miss, or only do minor damage.

However, U.S. defenses were unable to stop the deadly attack near Hasakah.

“My understanding is that there was a complete sight picture in terms of radar,” Ryder said. He said CENTCOM will review the incident to determine “what, if any, other type of mitigating actions need to be taken.”

AFCENT commander Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich has said the Iranian threat is a vast and complex one, posing serious dilemmas for U.S. forces in the region with potential for “thousands of ballistic missiles” and other aerial threats that AFCENT and U.S. partners are working to combat.

Kurilla said during his Congressional testimony that “Iran of today is exponentially more militarily capable than it was even five years ago,” fielding the region’s largest drone and missile force.

“What Iran does to hide its hand is they use Iranian proxies … to be able to attack our forces in Iraq or Syria,” Kurilla said.

John Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council, did not say whether there would be more U.S. air strikes in response to the additional militia attacks.

“We’re going to see where this goes,” Kirby said on CBS’s Face the Nation March 26. “I’m certainly not going to rule out additional U.S. action if the president deems it appropriate.”

This article was updated March 26 after U.S. officials provided details of additional attacks on U.S. forces.

DAF Outlines a New ‘Battle Network’ as Its Contribution to JADC2

March 23, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

The Department of the Air Force has identified 50 programs that will make up the core of its contribution to the Pentagon’s joint all-domain command and control concept, branding them part of the “DAF Battle Network,” according to newly-released budget documents.

The DAF Battle Network programs, which span multiple offices and agencies across the department, continue the evolution of the Advanced Battle Management System, the Air Force’s long-developing, ambitious attempt to replace a battle management aircraft with a network of systems and capabilitiesconnecting sensors and shooters around the world. ABMS investment is slated to accelerate. budget documents say, projecting $3.7 billion in research and development spending through fiscal 2028.

In 2024, the department is requesting $500 million for ABMS—not including millions of other dollars for programs identified related to the DAF Battle Network. Budget documents show ABMS funding rising in 2025 to $815 million, then peaking at $951 million in 2026, before dipping to $721 million in 2027 and $711 million in 2028.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall took aim at the highly experimental ABMS/JADC2 demonstrations when he became secretary, saying he saw them as falling short of his objective to deliver meaningful capability to warfighters in a finite period of time. Today, “operationally-focused ABMS” is one of his seven Operational Imperatives for the Air Force, and Brig. Gen. Luke C.G. Cropsey is the program executive officer for command, control, communications, and battle management (C3BM), perhaps the hardest job, Kendall says, he’s ever given anyone before. Cropsey, in effect, is responsible for defining and shaping the future of ABMS and JADC2 for the Air Force.

In a February interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine, Air Force Materiel Command boss Gen. Duke Z. Richardson said Cropsey was identifying the programs to include in that umbrella deciding what to leave out. At the AFA Warfare Symposium in early March, Cropsey shared with a panel of industry experts that his aim is to chart a course between today’s status quo and the dream of connecting every single sensor and shooter.

The Air Force’s 2024 budget documents lay out Cropsey’s path, pushing beyond earlier definitions of ABMS while trying to avoid duplication of effort across the department.

Cropsey “identified an initial set of 50 programs across the DAF that collectively comprise the core elements of the DAF Battle Network,” the budget document states. “The DAF PEO C3BM will work in partnership with the PEOs of these core programs to ensure the technical and programmatic integration necessary to achieve the required operational decision advantage needed.”

Those 50 core programs include programs under the Air Force’s Command, Control, Communication, Intelligence and Networks directorate; Digital directorate; DAF Rapid Capabilities Office; Space Force PEO for Battle Management, Command, Control, and Communication; Space Development Agency; Space Rapid Capabilities Office; the National Reconnaissance Office; the Missile Defense Agency; and more, budget documents state.

The ABMS portfolio under Cropsey includes four “thrust areas”:

Architecture and Systems Engineering, which will define the common standards and technologies necessary to integrate programs into the DAF Battle Network

C3BM Digital Infrastructure, which will cover programs that develop secure processing, connectivity, and data management

C3BM Software and Applications, which includes the planned Could-Based Command and Control network, known as CBC2, to integrate air defense data to support homeland defense

C3BM Aerial Networking, which includes ongoing work for the Airborne Edge Node, including Capability Release 1— aimed at enabling tactical aircraft to connect with command and control centers by turning airborne platforms such as the KC-46 Pegasus tanker into a data link.

Beyond that, Cropsey will have to coordinate with all those program executive officers to integrate them into the broader DAF Battle Network. At the same time, he’ll be responsible for the portfolio of programs still under ABMS, which will receive funding both for its own efforts and for the necessary technical work to integrate the other Battle Network programs.

“ABMS is therefore not just a weapon system platform or sensor,” the budget documents state. “It is the aggregate of materiel and non-materiel solutions to integrate the essential data network that connects and empowers current and future weapon system platforms and sensors to fight and win in the modern era.”

NORAD Boss Asks Congress for Better Domain Awareness, Faster

March 23, 2023 | By David Roza

Nearly two months after acknowledging that previous Chinese surveillance balloons slipped into U.S. airspace undetected by the Pentagon, the head of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) reiterated his warning to lawmakers that his command has major awareness gaps which could limit decision-makers’ ability to react to approaching threats.

To close the gap, Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck stressed the need for over-the-horizon radars; integrating space-based and undersea surveillance to form a more comprehensive defense picture; and accelerating the development process to put those capabilities in the field more quickly.

VanHerck has made such appeals throughout his tenure as NORTHCOM and NORAD chief, but the international uproar of the Chinese surveillance balloon transiting the continental U.S. earlier this year has driven new attention to the issue.

“I have concerns, as I have articulated for three years, about my ability to provide threat warning and attack assessment with the threats to our homeland,” VanHerck said during a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 23. “That increases the risk of escalation and strategic deterrence failure. Those are significant challenges for me.”

VanHerck voiced similar concerns last month after telling reporters that it was the intelligence community, not NORAD, which previously detected Chinese surveillance balloons approaching North America.

“As NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America,” he said at the time. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”

In a statement for lawmakers, VanHerck specifically mentioned over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) as a “proven, affordable technology that will ensure our ability to detect threats from surface to space in the approaches to North America.”

Both the U.S. and Canadian militaries have invested in OTHR systems, but VanHerck stressed that the two governments need to move as quickly as possible to put those systems in the field to detect growing threats from China and Russia such as cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons, and non-kinetic capabilities to target critical military and civilian infrastructure.

“Rather than fielding the capabilities in eight to 10 years, maybe we can shorten that to four to five years,” he said. “ … And by the way, I need Canada to do the same thing. A fielding of a capability a decade from now is not where we need to be.”

VanHerck also proposed investing $211 million in nine long-range mobile radars that would help NORAD and NORTHCOM “plug the gaps when we have radar failures or to get after critical defense infrastructure if tasked to do that,” he said. “As we move around the country, I can move those radars to get me additional domain awareness.”

Aside from missiles and balloons, though, VanHerck said his largest domain awareness gap and his biggest concern is actually cyber domain awareness. As NORTHCOM chief, VanHerck’s cyber authorities are somewhat limited: Much of the cyberspace for America’s critical infrastructure lies outside of the authority of the military’s U.S. Cyber Command and outside of federal cyberspace overseen by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency.

But federal law, specifically Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to conduct surveillance on foreigners outside the United States, has been a “crucial” tool for spotting possible threats to the homeland, VanHerck said. That capability allows U.S. cyber officials to “fill those domain awareness gaps,” he explained.

Future Capabilities

The future of homeland defense may look “vastly different than what we see today,” VanHerck suggested. “It’s likely including autonomous platforms, airborne, maritime platforms, unmanned platforms with domain awareness sensors and vectors that are kinetic and non-kinetic.”

Integrating the data generated by all those platforms and OTHR systems will require “fusing it into an integrated picture, a globally integrated picture that allows us to see threats globally before they become threats here in the homeland and tie that to an integrated air and missile defense and also into vectors which are non-kinetic and also kinetic.”

”Less kinetic” effects, such as deception, denial and electronic warfare will play a large role in the future, VanHerck predicted, with kinetic weapons still protecting critical areas. He also emphasized that defending the homeland will require not just NORAD and NORTHCOM, but also integration with state, municipal, and commercial entities.

However, sharing data between agencies may grow more difficult in areas like the Arctic, where long-distance communication systems are often unreliable, he explained. In the past, VanHerck has called for testing out SpaceX’s constellation of Starlink satellites to overcome those issues, and he made a similar call at this hearing.

“Alaska may be the most strategic location on the planet,” he said. “Short to the Indo-Pacific, short to the EUCOM AOR. Shortest avenue approach for ballistic missiles from Russia, potentially China and [North Korea] to our homeland.”

Receding ice has allowed Chinese and Russian ballistic missile submarines to approach closer to Alaska, making it a much more vulnerable space, so VanHerck hopes the Air Force can accelerate bringing the E-7 Wedgetail online to help give NORAD greater awareness of threats there. But responding to threats in the Arctic will also take a much more robust infrastructure, he said: icebreakers, longer runways, billeting, weapons storage, fuel storage, and platforms that can survive the weather.

“The bottom line is if you can’t detect something, you can’t defeat it, and you certainly can’t deter,” VanHerck said. “Russia and China particularly have developed capabilities to hold our homeland at risk, to reduce our decision space, delay and disrupt our flow … and my ability to detect those threats, whether they be undersea to on orbit and in cyberspace, has not kept pace with the threat.”

Kendall Says Budget is Adequate to Counter China; HASC Vice Chair Says It’s ‘Not Enough’

March 23, 2023 | By John A. Tirpak

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said he’s “comfortable” with the department’s fiscal 2024 budget request, saying it is sufficient when viewed alongside with the enacted 2023 budget—his biggest concern is not a matter of resources, but getting timely funding.

Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, disagreed, though, saying the budget should at least keep up with inflation, although he’s satisfied with the number of fighters the Air Force is buying.

In pre-recorded remarks streamed during a virtual event hosted by The Hill, Kendall noted “we had a pretty large increase in our budget in FY23. So we’re adding on to that increase, which has already taken place.” The Department of the Air Force is requesting about a four percent increase in funding from 2023 to 2024, with Space Force slated to get a larger bump than the Air Force.

“The increases we are getting are going to take care of the things that we need the most to move forward, modernize and transform,” Kendall said.

“We have got to respond” to China’s military advances, he added. For 30 years, China has developed counters to the U.S.’s small number of high-value assets such as aircraft carriers, forward air bases, “and a relatively small number of satellites in orbit, in very predictable paths,” Kendall said. “China’s been acquiring the means to attack all those assets, and others such as the logistics [and] command and control nodes.”

The Chinese have increasingly fielded a broad array of missiles to to attack those nodes, Kendall noted, and they have been “modernizing their conventional forces in order to take us on in some of the areas we’ve depended upon for a long time, like stealth, for example.”

Considering China’s surging capabilities in areas like hypersonic missiles, risk for the U.S. has risen Kendall said—and responding requires “some pretty fundamental changes in some cases,” he said, arguing the 2024 budget addresses many of those.

Kendall said one of the areas he’s most excited about in the budget are Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which will fly in formation as unmanned, autonomous wingmen to crewed fighters.

The Air Force’s 2024 budget request includes about $500 million for CCA research and development, and that total balloons to nearly $6 billion over the next five years.

Asked what causes him to lose sleep, Kendall repeated a quote from Gen. Douglas MacArthur he frequently uses that any military failure can be summed up by the words: “too late.”

“I’m concerned about us being too late to make the changes that we need to make,” Kendall said, and when Congress consistently fails to pass a budget on time, it costs billions and burns up time which cannot be recovered.

New starts and modernization “all start…with getting the funding,” he said.

A Different View in Congress

But while Kendall defended the budget request, Wittman—who also serves as chair of Tactical Air and Land Forces subcommittee—said the Pentagon’s overall spending plan is inadequate.

“I think it falls far short of what we need to do to make sure we’re countering China,” Wittman said, appearing separately during the virtual event. While the proposed DOD budget represents a 3.2 percent increase over 2023 funding levels, “we know the rate of inflation is six percent,” Wittman argued, saying the Pentagon’s budget should, at a minimum, keep up with the rate of inflation.

The budget is “just keeping up with what we did last year,” Wittman said, adding that China has already announced a defense spending increase of seven percent this year “and we know they’re not transparent about how much they spend.” China’s rate of producing ships and aircraft “are pretty startling and sobering for the nation,” and the U.S. should stay ahead of that outlay, he asserted.

Wittman also said he’s puzzled by the “invest to divest” strategy whereby the military services—including the Air Force—retire old systems to pay for new ones.

While he indicated that he is pleased by the service’s requests for F-35 fighters and B-21 bombers, “it’s hard for me to know how we do addition by subtraction.”

Building 85 F-35s in 2024, as the Pentagon wants to do across the services, “keeps us on track,” Wittman said, and he praised the B-21 bomber as a “a good news story” that is “staying on time and on budget.”

But expressing alarm at the stealthiness of China’s J-20 fighters, Wittman said he wants to make sure the Air Force’s Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program “stays on track.” He also voiced support for the CCA concept, but said it must be backed up by a sensor network “from space to Earth” that will be resilient enough to withstand Chinese attempts to disrupt it.

Wittman said he’s confident the House will be able to pass a defense budget this spring, despite disparate calls from his party for both more and less defense spending.

“I think people realize … with a slim majority, none of us are going to get everything we want,” he said. While many will want to force large-scale changes in overall spending, “realistically, we’re not going to be able to do that.”

“What we need to do is to find the bill that aligns itself with the largest number of members,” Wittman said. “I think that we can do that. I think people understand that. If we don’t do that … and have it gather 218 votes, it’s going to be very difficult for us to negotiate on anything with the Senate or the President. So that’s the starting point. And I feel very good about what’s happening in these listening sessions to take all this information and put together something that can get 218 votes, and I think we have to do that sooner than later.”

A-10s Headed to CENTCOM to Bolster Air Force Presence

March 23, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

As the Air Force’s broader focus shifts to the Pacific and Europe, the U.S. military will rely on aging close air support aircraft to meet the needs of its forces in the Middle East, according to U.S. officials.

A-10 Thunderbolt IIs plan to deploy to the region in April, a U.S. official told Air & Space Forces Magazine. The top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East confirmed the deployment in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on March 23.

“I have a requirement for additional air assets,” Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), said in testimony to the HASC, adding that A-10s “have been approved to come to CENTCOM.”

The Warthogs will make up a deployed force of manned aircraft that consists of F-15E Strike Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons.

The Pentagon now prioritizes the Pacific and Europe over the Middle East, limiting the forces available to CENTCOM. The influx of A-10s will enable CENTCOM to meet its requirement of two and a half squadrons, with a squadron in CENTCOM comprising around 12 aircraft. The U.S. is currently just under the two and a half-squadron requirement.

While the U.S. has pulled out of Afghanistan, it is still battling the remnants of ISIS trying to make a comeback in Syria. The U.S. has around 900 troops stationed in Syria.

Russia, termed an “acute” threat by the National Defense Strategy, has also become increasingly belligerent towards U.S. forces stationed in the region. Supporting the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, Russian fighters has been flying over U.S. forces, including the Al Tanf garrison in eastern Syria, according to the top Air Force commander in the region.

“There are some things that are concerning to me,” Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the commander of Air Forces Central (AFCENT), told reporters March 7 at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “We’ve seen an increase in Russian air activity where there was a pause.” The Russian flights picked up at the end of February, he added.

“These profiles are not just passing through,” Grynkewich explained. “They fly into the airspace that is nominally under the deconfliction protocols, supposed to be where we are primarily operating in and the Russians are not. But they fly in there and they orbit around for a bit, and they do whatever it is that they’re doing.”

A-10s were a hallmark of the Global War on Terror, often seen strafing insurgent positions with their trademark cannon. But the A-10 is not a viable aircraft for its future force, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. has said, and the service is dropping the A-10 from its so-called 4+1 fighter plan and plans to retire the aircraft by 2029.

“We’re retiring A-10s faster than we originally thought,” Brown said at the McAleese and Associates defense conference March 15. The Air Force has tried to divest A-10s for years, but Congress had pushed back against the effort before starting to soften its stance recently.

A-10s are unlikely to be useful in any attempt to counter Russia’s air force, which operates advanced fourth-generation fighters in the region. The average age of the A-10 fleet, which has been upgraded over the years, is more than 40 years old, and concerns over its survivability against modern air forces and air defenses are a main driver of the Air Force’s push to retire the aircraft. It could, however, fulfill strike missions against ISIS militants and Iranian-backed militant groups.

“Every day I’m looking at the missions I have, the resources I’ve been allocated, and dynamically balancing risks against those,” Kurilla told the House committee.

The U.S. has sought to deter Iran and reassure its Middle Eastern allies by conducting massive air exercises such as Juniper Oak, a bilateral live-fire exercise with Israel in January involving 100 American aircraft. CENTCOM has also stood up several task forces, including Air Forces Central’s Task Force 99, that are looking for commercial autonomous solutions and artificial intelligence to bolster traditional platforms. The U.S. has also deployed fifth-generation air-to-air F-22 Raptors to the region on short notice to deter Iranian attacks on U.S. partners.

“We supplement our force posture with partnerships throughout the region and the employment of innovation, specifically unmanned systems and AI-enabled systems,” CENTCOM spokesman Col. Joe Buccino told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

The US Thinks China Is a ‘Near-Peer’ Threat. Does China Agree?

March 22, 2023 | By David Roza

The U.S. military wants to reinvent itself to prepare for a possible conflict with China, a country which many experts believe poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security. But how do Chinese leaders assess the strength of the People’s Liberation Army relative to the U.S. military? Researchers sought to answer that question in a recent report.

The RAND Corporation report is one of the first analyses to study how the PLA understands and assesses military balance, in contrast to previous research that focused on quantitative aspects, such as how many pieces of equipment the PLA has and how its capabilities compare to those of the U.S.

Specifically, the report focused on how the PLA views itself in four areas Chinese president Xi Jinping is worried about: political reliability, mobilization, fighting and winning wars, and leadership and command.

“Ours is a much more qualitative look at the PLA and a look at the way the PLA sees themselves, but it really gets to those core issues that I think are absolutely critical for these ideas the Chinese have about systems warfare,” Mark Cozad, senior international defense researcher at RAND and the lead author of the study, told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “You can have an infrastructure, you can have an architecture, but the system actually depends on those four areas that Xi was so concerned about.”

In the report, Cozad and his coauthors wrote that, despite the PLA’s increasing progress and technological sophistication in recent years, Xi’s concerns “reflect many of the worst elements of China’s political system—corruption, unwillingness to show initiative, poor cultivation of talent, and bureaucratism, among others.” And changing such an institutional culture takes time.

It was beyond the scope of RAND’s project to determine whether Chinese perceptions of the PLA’s strengths and weaknesses are correct or incorrect. Even so, the fact that Xi “does not have great confidence in the PLA’s ability to ‘fight and win’ the informatized wars that it may face in the future” may affect Chinese calculations on whether or not to use armed force against the U.S. in a future conflict, the report notes. But that does not mean the PLA would never fight.

Chinese President Xi Jinping presented the first Friendship Medal of the People’s Republic of China to Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling him his “best friend” and “confidant.” CGTN

Reliability and Leadership

Having studied the PLA for years, Cozad was aware of many of the concerns Chinese leaders feel about the PLA’s capabilities. But even for him, it was a significant moment when Xi Jinping laid out his doubts in a 2017 speech.

“What I think about most is that when the Party and the people need it, will our armed forces always adhere to the Party’s absolute leadership, will our armed forces be able to mobilize and fight winning battles, and will leaders at all levels in our armed forces be able to lead their people into battle and command in battle,” Xi said at the time.

Those doubts were “really telling” coming from Xi himself, and served to highlight deep, persistent concerns about the PLA within high-level Chinese leadership, Cozad said. That worry about political reliability is one U.S. leaders have not had to deal with since the creation of the all-volunteer force, he said.

By contrast, the largely conscript-based Chinese military is struggling to develop the same level of motivation and competence, RAND found. In particular, Xi has criticized PLA training for falling into a peacetime practice of “formalities for formalities’ sake and bureaucratism” that gets in the way of more effective, realistic training styles, according to PLA news reports.

In communist China, the question of political reliability takes on the added dimension of whether the PLA will always adhere to the “absolute leadership” of the Chinese Communist Party, to use Xi’s term. Xi feels the PLA has drifted from party objectives, so since 2014 he has repeatedly directed the military “to return to long-standing PLA political work practices by upholding CCP ideology, providing officers and soldiers with substantial political education,” and other measures, the RAND researchers wrote.

However, as top Chinese officials try to foster greater adherence to party thinking, it could interfere with their efforts to encourage greater flexibility in the ranks to respond to a dynamic battlefield. Many analysts have pointed out that the Russian military’s lack of an effective noncommissioned officer corps has hampered its invasion of Ukraine. Historically, the PLA leadership model has been similar to Russia’s.

“Things that a fairly junior NCO can do in the U.S. military are done by officers in the PLA, and sometimes fairly senior officers,” Cozad explained. “That can clog up a system, make it more inefficient and sap the creativity you need for a dynamic environment.”

In modern-day warfare, PLA leaders want to push decision-making ability down lower than it has been before, which can be difficult to square with the push for greater party orthodoxy.

“You’re telling a PLA officer to be more innovative, be more willing to stick your neck out, make decisions, be more creative,'” Cozad explained. “At the same time you’re saying ‘there is a certain way of thinking in the PLA and you need to conform to that way of thinking.’ You’re sending competing messages there.”

RAND’s observations also help remind U.S. military leaders of unquantifiable advantages they might have in an armed conflict with the PLA.

“That’s one way that I hope this report gets looked at and interpreted: trying to find out what this tells us about areas of advantage that we may not always think about,” Cozad said. “I do see a lot of discussions in the United States where we focus on numbers and systems, which are all extremely important, but we focus less on those intangibles that really tie all those things together into an effective warfighting system.”

china pla — A boarding team from the People’s Liberation Army (Navy) Haikou (DD 171) board the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Waesche (WMSL 751) July, 16, 2014, during a Maritime Interdiction Operations Exercise (MIOEX) as part of Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) Exercise 2014. U.S Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Manda M. Emery.

Mobilizing and Fighting

Training is another intangible area that is vital for an effective military—Cozad said the PLA has attempted to emulate the large-scale training programs the U.S. military enjoys, like the Air Force’s Red Flag series of exercises, but without as much success.

Indeed, one of the chief criticisms cited in official PLA press is the problem of “lax and untruthful styles of training and preparation for war,” the RAND report notes. While new training regulations implemented in 2018 were meant to increase discipline and use inspection teams to check for compliance to standards, the problem persists today.

“Ultimately, Xi assessed that one of the most significant factors holding back PLA training was the lack of competence among Party committees and commanders in carrying out this strategically important and critical task” for fighting modern war, the report authors wrote.

One of the advantages of the U.S. military’s large-scale exercises is that they can help foster joint cohesion between U.S. service branches and their foreign allies. Joint warfare is still a weak spot in the PLA’s preparation to fight a modern conflict.

“Most notably, the criticism from PLA sources regarding current PLA training is that there are shortcomings in the effective integration of joint functions, including planning, firepower, and reconnaissance capabilities,” the report states.

The Chinese Central Military Commission sought to promote jointness “in large part by reducing the PLA Army’s long-held preeminence and elevating” the PLA Air Force and Navy, the RAND authors wrote, but the development of a joint culture has been slow to take hold. Another area not progressing as fast as Chinese leaders would like is mobilization, which officials believe involves not just military units but also protecting civilian populations and infrastructure.

Perhaps the most critical issue hampering Chinese mobilization programs “is the lack of clear authorities and specification for responsibilities” in its National Defense Mobilization system, the report notes, thanks to both organizational and technological challenges.

“[T]he contradiction between the constantly evolving demand for mobilization and the imbalance in mobilization preparation is still outstanding,” the report quoted one PLA observer saying.

On top of all that, the PLA also has persistent insecurity over not having fought any wars recently.

“This lack of experience has led to warnings from some PRC observers that the PLA must be ‘soberly aware’ that because it has not been engaged in combat for over 40 years … and lags behind some other military powers in terms of the quality and combat realism of its training,’” the report authors wrote.

Cozad pointed out that while some tend to downplay U.S. military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan since it was not against a peer or near-peer military, it is more useful for training purposes than no combat at all.

“The comment that I hear is ‘Oh, we fought the JV team,’” he said. “The PLA hasn’t even fought the JV team.”

All of these issues could limit the PLA’s success in a war with the United States. Still, Cozad cautioned against underestimating the PLA in a future fight.

“We tried to be extremely cautious, because we didn’t want to write a paper that was interpreted as ‘the PLA’s no good, they’re not making any progress,’” he said.

After all, U.S. military leaders share some of the same concerns about U.S. warfighting capabilities, such as needing better joint cohesion, faster mobilization, less bureaucracy, a refreshed industrial base, and better mechanisms for attracting and retaining talent. And even if Chinese officials feel they are on the back foot in some ways, they still have a very capable military machine for U.S. planners to prepare for.

“The PLA still has a lot of stuff: a lot of bombs, a lot of planes, a lot of missiles,” Cozad said. “When they get into a situation where the elegant doesn’t work, there are a lot of ways that they can still fight. And in some cases I think those might be even more dangerous, more damaging, more devastating than the more elegant approaches that they hope to be able to enact.”

The intent of the RAND report, then, was to focus on perceptions of military strength and how those perceptions inform political calculations and deterrence.

“The Chinese have been very heavily focused on us and the way we fight, and the report highlights that they’ve taken away some very important lessons,” Cozad said. “But I hope the report highlights for our leaders those areas that we have significant advantages that we need to make sure we protect and maintain.”

USAF Wants $5.8 Billion for CCAs Over Five Years. First Up: A Spectral Warfare Platform

March 22, 2023 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force has mapped out spending requests totaling $5.8 billion for research and development of Collaborative Combat Aircraft through fiscal 2028—$6 billion counting other experimentation tied to the program. And budget documents released by the service also suggest a “spectral warfare” platform will be one of the first variants of the autonomous drones.

The funding is contained within the broader Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, and consolidates previous research, development, test, and evaluation line items for Autonomous Collaborative Platforms and Autonomous Collaborative Technologies. The NGAD effort overall—including CCAs—is projected for $16.23 billion over the future years defense program.

The CCA figure is in line with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s assertion at the AFA Warfare Symposium in early March that “very, very significant” funding is being requested for the program, which will produce robotic wingmen to crewed fighters. They are meant to build USAF combat capacity without exacerbating the fighter pilot shortage, and do so at what Kendall has called an “affordable” price.

Kendall announced at AWS that he has set 1,000 CCAs as a “planning figure” around which service planners can develop CCA operational concepts, but he subsequently has said the actual number of aircraft could be far greater than that figure, which was derived from a notional two CCAs each to escort 200 NGAD manned fighters and 300 F-35s.

Kendall has also said the ultimate number of CCAs could be as high as five for every crewed fighter. He said the program will be competitive, but at the McAleese defense conference last week, suggested the Air Force will choose a single platform which can accept a variety of modular mission payloads.

The budget justifications suggest CCAs will be introduced operationally around 2030.

The CCA spending plan begins with $392.2 million in fiscal year 2024. It rises to $513.8 million in FY 2025, but takes an unexplained dip to $245.9 million in 2026. After that, though, it more than sextuples to $1.64 billion in 2027, then nearly doubles again to $3.03 billion in 2028.

The NGAD budget documents noted a particular emphasis on a “spectral dominance platform” CCA, which sounds like a programmatic descendent of the mid-2010s “Penetrating Electronic Attack” program, also associated with what has become NGAD.

During a March 22 Mitchell Institute event, Gen. Mark D. Kelly, head of Air Combat Command, said the the operational concept of the spectral dominance platform is still being determined.

“I think those are discovery items that will come out when we do our first developmental tests and operational tests and see what’s in the art of the possible going forward,” said Kelly. He added that whether the platform is a pure jammer versus an electronic attack aircraft that can also fire anti-radiation missiles is “all … in the discussion,” and that the developmental testing will reveal “the solution we’re looking for.”

At AWS, Kelly said electronic warfare was likely the most “urgent” mission for CCAs, listing sensing, jamming, and “signals intelligence” as his top needs for the platform. Size, weight and power requirements will also have a lot to do with whether a CCA can perform the mission, Kelly added.

“I think we’ll iterate from there,” he said at the conference.

Kendall said at AWS that the FY 2024 budget would contain money for experimentation using existing aircraft as stand-ins for the CCAs, in order to explore operational concepts and further refine requirements. Toward that end, there’s $50 million in the 2024 request for a new start called “Viper Experimentation and Next-Gen Operations Model (VENOM),” which will conduct “early risk reduction” on CCAs using autonomous technology aboard crewed F-16 aircraft as surrogates for CCAs.

Another $72 million funds an “Experimental Operations Unit” which will test-fly CCA concepts and flesh out the manpower footprint, doctrine, training and facilities needed to implement CCA technologies.

Yet another $51.7 million involves transition of the Air Force’s Skyborg autonomous flight technology to CCA platforms.

In budget justification documents, the Air Force said CCA activities “will include the employment of digital acquisitions through the application of digital engineering, agile software development, and open system architectures.” The requested funds would invest in “information technology/test/training infrastructure” as well as “operational concept exploration, technology studies, multi-domain integration, operational assessments, architecture development, and multi-level prototyping,” along with program management support.

All of this will go toward reducing risk and maturing CCA concepts “and air superiority-related technologies in support of the NGAD family of systems.”

Lack of Airpower in Ukraine Proves Value of Air Superiority, NATO Air Boss Says

March 22, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has proven that air superiority is vital to success in conflict, Gen. James B. Hecker, the top U.S. Air Force commander in Europe, said March 22.

“One of the things that we see is the lack of either side, whether it be the Russian or Ukrainians, the ability to get air superiority, has really changed this into a different fight that we haven’t seen in quite a while,” Hecker said during an event held by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Hecker laid out a sobering argument: if Russia had gained air superiority early in the conflict, Ukraine would have been finished off militarily long ago.

Instead, Russia was stymied by Ukraine’s air defenses and its own poor tactics, buying valuable time for Ukraine to gather international support. Since 2022, the U.S. has pledged over $40 billion to Ukraine. Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, the head of U.S. Transportation Command, said recently there had been 1,000 airlift sorties and an additional 65 shiploads of aid sent to neighboring countries, which then entered Ukraine via its land borders. Regardless of the will of Ukraine’s allies, the West would not have been able to come to Ukraine’s aid in that way if Russia had control of the skies, Hecker said.

“Let’s say the Russians had air superiority,” he said. “If they were able to, all the equipment … wouldn’t have gotten there because there would have been Russian close air support sitting over those lines of communication coming in from the other countries, and as soon as it got into Ukraine, it would have been demolished.”

Conversely, Ukraine has struggled to put its small air force up against Russian air defenses. Hecker said a more powerful air force on the Ukrainian side could have blunted Russia’s invasion in its initial phases.

Instead, a brutal conflict has slogged on for over a year. Both sides have suffered tens of thousands of casualties in the battle now taking place with 155mm howitzers and HIMARS rockets, two systems that the U.S. has been able to send over the border into Ukraine. Russia has resorted to Iranian-provided one-way attack drones and stand-off cruise missiles to pummel Ukraine from the air.

“At least from the Russian side, they don’t care if you hit hospitals, they don’t care if you hit schools, they don’t care if you hit malls,” Hecker said. “Massive destruction, massive casualties—just something that we’re not used to.”

Hecker’s determination about the importance of airpower carriers broad implications, given his position as commander of both U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and NATO Allied Air Command—making him the airpower point person for 30 countries. Since the conflict began, NATO has expanded from air policing missions, in which fighters fly combat air patrols, to exercises that approximate what NATO would do if Russia expanded its war to the West, triggering Article V, the alliance’s mutual self-defense clause.

“What we’re looking at and concentrating on at USAFE is what can we do to ensure that we get air superiority should we have to invoke Article V, and then what can we do to make sure that our enemy doesn’t get air superiority,” Hecker said.

Hecker’s focus is on ensuring that NATO can quickly suppress enemy integrated air defense systems (IADS).

“The number one priority to make sure that we’re able to get air superiority is to make sure that we can do the counter-IADS mission,” Hecker said. “What we’ve seen on both sides, both Russia and Ukraine, is their integrated air and missile defense is working pretty well, to the point where they’re shooting down the other’s aircraft and the aircraft aren’t as visible as they should if they’d concentrated more on air superiority.”

Ukraine has lost around 60 aircraft and Russia has lost over 70 aircraft, Hecker revealed at the AFA Warfare Symposium in early March.

NATO, in turn, must bolster its own air defenses, Hecker said. The Air Force must also increase information sharing among allies and focus on Agile Combat Employment (ACE) to disperse its targets, he said.

In Hecker’s role as commander of USAFE, he is helping the U.S. provide Ukraine with information to assist its targeting. The U.S. has also been providing hardware, including AGM-88 HARM anti-radiation missiles to attack Russian surface-to-air missile sites, and 500-pound JDAM extended-range guided bombs.

America has declined to provide long-range ATACMS missiles for HIMARS and has prohibited U.S.-origin weapons from being used against Russian territory. Ukraine’s air force will also be aided by the donation of 17 Soviet-era MiG-29s from eastern European NATO allies. But Russia’s air defense is largely located in Belarus and Russia, posing an additional challenge for the MiGs, Hecker said.

“Any more quantity is going to help,” Hecker said. “This will allow them to come at different axes, which will complicate the problem Russia has.”

There is one aspect of the war that Hecker thinks must remain the same.

“In the short term, we just need to make sure that Russia does not get air superiority,” he said.