Northrop Grumman Delivers First SiAW Missile for Air Force Testing

Nov. 20, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

Northrop Grumman has delivered its first Stand-in Attack Weapon, which will be used for captive carry and separation testing, to the Air Force. The SiAW is expected to be produced in high numbers and be carried by most Air Force strike platforms, with initial operational capability planned in 2026.

The company received a $705 million contract for SiAW in September 2023, and is on an aggressive timetable to develop, flight test, and integrate the missile. The company has said it can make the 2026 target because the SiAW draws heavily on the technology in its Advanced Anti-Radar Guided Missile-Extended Range (AARGM-ER), which is taking over the anti-radar/defense suppression role previously performed by the AGM-88 High speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM).

The AARGM-ER has been integrated with the F-35 fighter, which will also be the initial platform for the SiAW; the fighter can carry two SiAWs internally. Other platforms expected to receive early versions of the weapon include the B-21 bomber and the F-15E.

The SiAW will also, in part, succeed the Joint Direct Attack Munition, and is intended to provide stand-off capability against surface defenses and rapidly relocatable targets.

With the missile now in “Phase 2” of development, the Air Force and Northrop will look to conduct captive carry/separation tests, followed by a guided flight test. After that, Phase 2.2 will conclude with “three additional flight tests and the delivery of SiAW leave-behind prototype missiles and test assets,” Northrop said.

Air Force leaders have said they expect SiAW to be a large-scale acquisition program involving thousands of units with frequent technology updates, and will probably be available for export to close allies as soon as production reaches scale. The similar AARGM-ER is being supplied to Australia, the Netherlands, and Poland. Australia’s initial purchase was for 63 AARGM-ERs, which it will deploy on its F/A-18 fighters.

Northrop beat out L3Harris for the development contract; Lockheed Martin withdrew from the competition.

The munition is being developed using digital engineering, agile software development, and an open systems architecture to facilitate rapid upgrades. Northrop has said it will be the Air Force’s first all-digital weapons development and acquisition program.

The open architecture will allow contractors other than Northrop to propose updates for the missile.

Northrop describes the SiAW as addressing “capability gaps created by 2025+ threats.” Although branded a “stand-in” weapon, Northrop said the weapon can be delivered “from sanctuary,” meaning at distances outside the engagement zones of some anti-aircraft systems. Its actual range and speed have not been divulged, but the AARGM-ER is believed to be a Mach 4 missile with a range of 180 miles, and the SiAW may have better performance.

The SiAW has tail-control vanes and other means of being stealthy, according to Northrop, and has multiple sensors and an inertial navigation system that can take over if Global Positioning System satellite location signals are jammed. It can also communicate with other platforms and weapons and attack target coordinates supplied by another platform.

The company is developing and building the SiAW at its Northridge, Calif., facilities, and integrating it at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in West Virginia.

The HARM was an extremely effective weapon in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Iraqi ground-based search and track radar operators were deterred from turning on their radars because a HARM usually arrived a few seconds after activation and before the radar could be moved. The AARGM and SiAW are faster than HARM, but it’s unclear as to whether the weapon can achieve hypersonic speeds.

In addition to surface defenses, Northrop has said the SiAW will be a primary weapon for use against command-and-control sites; ballistic and cruise missile launchers; GPS jamming systems; anti-satellite systems and other high-value or “fleeting” targets.

How the Air Force Flew a 1,000-Mile Open Ocean Rescue: Part 1

Nov. 20, 2024 | By David Roza

This is the first in a two-part series based on exclusive interviews with five Airmen who helped save a patient’s life in a long-range rescue mission Oct. 9. Part 2 will publish Thursday, Nov. 21.

The bulk carrier Port Kyushu stretches the length of two football fields, but it looked like a toy against the vast, dark tablecloth of the Pacific Ocean. Peering down from the window of a C-130, Staff Sgt. Mike Scheglov offered up a simple prayer.

“I really hope that they speak Russian.”

About five hours earlier, Scheglov had been working at Moffett Field, home of the California Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing. It was the morning of Oct. 9, and Airmen were preparing to pick up a patient from a ship 500 miles off the coast of San Francisco. As an aircrew flight equipment specialist, Scheglov was prepositioning their gear when his supervisor asked an unusual question.

“Did you bring your lunch today?” Scheglov recalled.

The rescuers needed a Russian speaker to communicate with the ship captain. A native speaker, Scheglov was a perfect fit. He grabbed his lunch.

The 129th Rescue Wing is one of few organizations on Earth that can rescue patients hundreds of miles offshore, thanks to its fleet of HC-130J command and control planes and HH-60G helicopters. The HC-130Js refuel the helicopters via long hoses that trail behind the wings mid-flight, where an HH-60G plugs in with a long probe sticking out the front of its fuselage.

Air refueling gives extra range to the helicopters, letting them hoist patients out of anything from a fishing boat to a cruise ship and bring them back to a hospital. But it’s a high-risk job, said Lt. Col. Christopher Nance, who commanded the Port Kyushu mission.

“There are a lot of moving parts in a helicopter,” said the HC-130J pilot. “If you’re flying over land, helicopters can find a field to put down or C-130s can find an airfield, but there are no options over water. And the further out you go, the longer it takes to get back.”

air force rescue — An HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter assigned to the 129th Rescue Wing takes gas from an HC-130J during a rescue mission off the coast of San Francisco, Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo courtesy 129th Rescue Wing)

Once the aircraft reach the target vessel, they hoist down a Pararescue Jumper (PJ) to pick up the patient. A blend of commando and expert medic, PJs are trained to save lives under fire anywhere on Earth, but dangling from a helicopter over a moving vessel in the open ocean is dangerous for anyone.

“Anytime you put a human being out the back of your aircraft, that is immediately high risk,” Nance explained. “There’s just so many complexities to the mission.”

There’s also the fatigue of flying for hours at a time, often in darkness, sometimes low to the water, and usually in airtight anti-exposure suits.

The suits are designed to keep the Airmen alive if they have to bail into the frigid Pacific, but they can get pungent and uncomfortable after a 10 or 11-hour sortie, said Senior Airman Reese Williamse, a special missions aviator who works in the back of the HH-60. That’s led to a colorful nickname: “Poopy suits.”

Such challenges are nothing new for the 129th RQW, which has been flying open ocean rescues since 1975. The halls of the Moffett squadron buildings are lined with orange lifebuoys given to them by the crews of the dozens of ships from which they’ve rescued patients. The Port Kyushu mission would mark the wing’s 1,165th life saved, though that number includes deployments and non-ocean rescues.

“We’ve done it so often here that, to be honest, we’re really good at it,” Nance said. “So our comfort level is quite high compared to other units that may not have accepted a mission like this because it was too high-risk.”

Orange lifebuoys from past ocean rescues line the staircase of one of the 129th Wing’s squadron buildings at Moffett Air National Guard Base, Calif., Oct. 24, 2024. (Air & Space Forces Magazine photo by David Roza)

The Crew

The call for a rescue came in from the U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday, Oct. 8. A middle-aged man on the Port Kyushu was having what would later be diagnosed as an urgent neurological problem. The wing asked not to print exact details out of concern for his privacy, but at the time, the patient was generally unresponsive and not accepting food or water, so his crewmates worried he would not survive the rest of the voyage.

A rescue would risk four aircraft and more than 20 lives to save one, but medical experts and wing leadership deemed the gravity of the situation outweighed the risk. There was no issue finding volunteers.

“Sometimes we get guys out of state that are like, ‘hey, I’ll fly in,’” Nance said. “You get guys who will definitely take a day off of work to come out and support one of these.”

But there was a problem: the wing needed two HC-130Js to cut down on risk and haul all the gas necessary for the long flight, but due to maintenance issues only one was ready to fly. The next closest HC-130J unit is the Active-Duty 79th Rescue Squadron at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., which had just spent the past two weeks on the East Coast responding to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. But they answered the call, sending two C-130s just in case, while the co-located 55th Rescue Squadron sent two HH-60Ws if needed.

“When you’re dealing with long-range over water, you want to have spares,” Nance said. “It’s a testament to the joint force that one, they were willing to respond after everything they’d just gotten back from, and two, how seamlessly they integrated with us.”

At around 11 a.m. Oct. 9, the aircraft took off for the Port Kyushu, which would be about 500 miles off shore by the time they rendezvoused. Both HH-60Gs and one of the HC-130Js came from Moffett, while the other HC-130J came from Davis-Monthan.

“I wasn’t nervous or stressed because I knew all the guys in the other planes, and they’re all professionals,” Nance said. “They know what they’re doing.”

The Gear

A rescue package does not travel light. Besides the anti-exposure suits, the helicopter crews and PJs also wore orange inflatable life preservers, which sometimes called “water wings” or “Cheetos.” They also carried tiny bottles of compressed air to breathe from while escaping a sinking helicopter.

On top of that, the PJs brought IV fluids, drugs, oxygen, blood pressure cuffs, monitors, a litter, and enough other medical supplies to fill the bed of a pickup truck, all squeezed into a helicopter cabin not much bigger than a hot tub. It gets even more cramped with a patient aboard.

One of the PJs, Senior Airman Connor, whose full name was withheld for security reasons said he had “probably like a three-by-two foot space I was in for five hours.”

Airmen with the 129th Rescue Wing, California Air National Guard mobilizes for an overwater rescue operation at Moffett Air National Guard Base, Calif., Oct. 9, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Ray Aquino)

But there’s still room for a keepsake or two, which for some Airmen play as vital a role as their helmets and exposure suits. Nance carried a medallion his uncle gave him when he first got his flight wings—and a pencil-shaped tire pressure gauge tucked into the sleeve of his flight suit.

“When I was a brand new lieutenant, a bunch of guys talked me into buying a Harley, and they convinced me that I had to be checking the tire pressure all the time,” he said. “They were messing with me, but in 2009 I was deployed, and we almost had a midair [collision] with a Marine CH-53 [helicopter]. Our aircraft commander saved our lives, but my tire pressure gauge disappeared. After that I never flew without it.”

Flying the lead helicopter, Capt. Parker Imrie carried a challenge coin from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, the unit his late brother served with in Afghanistan. In the back of the helicopter, Williamse, the SMA, carried a fish keychain his wife gave him years ago.

Airmen with the 129th Rescue Wing, California Air National Guard mobilize for an overwater rescue operation at Moffett Air National Guard Base, Calif., Oct. 9, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Ray Aquino)

Into the Blue

The rescue package flew over the Pacific at about 5,000 feet, with broken clouds ahead and the marine layer, a low expanse of cloud and fog, below.

“The question is, does this marine layer go 10 miles out or 1,000 miles out,” Imrie said. “You don’t know until you fly out there.”

Early in the flight, the helicopters and C-130s tested out the refueling systems, a delicate operation where the helicopter pilot has to match the C-130’s speed and altitude while the gas flows, then back out slowly without yanking off the hose.

“If all the conditions are right, it’s not that hard. It’s just kind of a little video game: line up and plug in,” Imrie said. “But as you add weather, turbulence, fatigue, poor visibility, or having to plug on the right side of the aircraft, where you get a lot more turbulence coming off the wing, that difficulty ticks up very quickly. But it’s just a matter of practice.”

An HH-60G Pave Hawk pilot with the 129th Rescue Wing looks on as another HH-60G flies off the wing of a HC-130J during a open ocean rescue off the coast of San Francisco, Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo courtesy 129th Rescue Wing)

Staying calm is also key: the pilot might wiggle his or her fingers to avoid white-knuckling the stick, while the crew keeps their voices steady, almost a monotone.

“If one person starts getting tense and has an elevated voice, then everybody hears it, pilots will start gripping it tighter,” Williamse said. “Even for me in the back when I’m doing a hoist, if my voice is super fast and loud, you can feel it in the hover.”

“There’s a psychology to flying a helicopter with four people,” Imrie added.

Indeed, much like how the pilots routinely check their instruments to see how the aircraft is doing, the crew keeps up a low level of conversation during the long hours over water.

“There definitely were periods where everyone was silent for a while, which is OK,” Imrie said. “But you don’t want to let that go on for too long, because you don’t know: is this guy just silent because he doesn’t have anything to say, or did he fall asleep, or is he having a medical emergency?”

On the other helicopter, Connor the PJ enjoyed listening to the banter, but he and Tech Sgt. Sean, the more experienced PJ on board, had to save their mental strength for later.

“We just tried to relax, knowing that the next six, seven hours were going to be pretty exhausting,” Connor said.

Part 2 will publish Thursday, Nov. 21.

STRATCOM Boss: AI Useful, But Don’t Expect ‘WarGames’

Nov. 20, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

The head of U.S. Strategic Command has no interest in replicating the plot of the 1983 film “WarGames.”

Put another way, Gen. Anthony J. Cotton wants to use artificial intelligence to more efficiently process vast amounts of data related to America’s nuclear weapons. But what to do with those weapons will remain a human-made decision, he said Nov. 19 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In “WarGames,” an artificial intelligence program called WOPR—pronounced “Whopper”—located at Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Colo., controls U.S. nuclear weapons.

“WarGames, it has this machine called the WOPR,” Cotton said. “So the WOPR actually was that AI machine that everyone is scared about. And guess what? We do not have a WOPR in STRATCOM headquarters. Nor would we ever have a WOPR in STRATCOM headquarters.”

Cotton’s comments come just a few days after U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping met in Peru and agreed on “the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons,” according to a White House readout.

Last month, Cotton said at the 2024 Department of Defense Intelligence Information System Conference that “AI will enhance our decision-making capabilities. … But we must never allow artificial intelligence to make those decisions for us.”

Those remarks generated headlines and drew some pushback on social media, but Cotton said he was misinterpreted.

“When I spoke last month, that got some feedback like, ‘Oh my god … Cotton just wants AI to make the decision to go nuclear.’ That’s absolutely not what I said,” he said.

In fact, Cotton emphasized at the time that “advanced systems can inform us faster and more efficiently, but we must always maintain a human decision in the loop to maximize the adoption of these capabilities.”

At the CSIS event, he once again argued that AI can play a role for Strategic Command, by helping humans sort through the “terabytes of data that would otherwise hit the floor.” One example is intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) information.

“How do I get and become efficient on ISR products?” Cotton asked. “How do I get efficient on understanding what’s the status of my forces? … AI and machine learning can absolutely help us with those things and really shave a lot of time off.”

Ultimately, Cotton wants to use AI so that he can provide the president with options in a matter of minutes, not hours—something that might not be possible without AI as more data streams become available.

Still, he noted that extra caution is warranted when it comes to AI in STRATCOM.

“I do not take it lightly that what I’m responsible for is a little different than what other combatant commanders are responsible for,” he said. “I absolutely take it incredibly seriously, and so do the men and women of my team, understanding that we’re responsible for crown jewels of this nation.”

Before There Are Part-Time Guardians, USSF Needs to Figure Out Promotions, HR, and More

Nov. 20, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

Scores of different HR systems, a new model for how to handle promotions, and protections against conflicts of interest are all challenges the Space Force will have to resolve as it tries to bring part-time Guardians into the fold instead of a traditional Reserve component.

And until the service has a complete construct for how to make all that happen, it can’t offer a definitive timeline for eager service members, personnel chief Katharine Kelley said Nov. 20.

The Space Force Personnel Management Act passed by Congress last December gave the service five years to implement its new hybrid part-time/full-time construct. USSF spent the first year of that timeline laying groundwork and setting up the process for Air Force Reservists with space missions to join the Space Force full time, Kelley said during an event hosted by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“We’re excited on how that’s gone. We’ve got a huge amount of interest, and maybe more interest than we have space at the moment, but we will get there,” said Kelley, who serves as Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital. “And I think these next four years of the execution window are going to be focused on, how do we create the ecosystem in the IT world to support the HR that is now fundamentally different than what the Air Force has in place today.”

Officials have noted in the past that they will need to think through how to do pay, benefits, retirement calculations, and more in a combined component. Another question is how Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits would work for part-timers. Kelley highlighted the scale of the technical challenge.

“We think there’s easily over 300 systems in play today that somehow touch on the ecosystem of managing talent in DOD. And I’m emphasizing DOD here, and that’s not even discussing really where we go with external touch points that really matter for military,” Kelley said. “How your data flows to the VA matters. So think about all the external touch points as well as we go through this.”

These systems must either be adjusted to co-mingle part-time and full-time Guardians, or be replaced. That process is made all the more complicated by the fact that the Space Force relies on the Air Force for support functions, including much of its HR.

“The Space Force has to leverage the HR ecosystem that the Air Force has in place, by and large, and that ecosystem is pretty antiquated,” Kelley said. “The Air Force is doing unbelievable things right now to break free of some of the legacy models and really modernize the architectures. But all of those endeavors were preceding the Space Force Personnel Management Act. So a lot of what our limiting factors are to the execution side of our new legislation have to do with how we can manage and influence the system architectures to support these new talent models.”

Katharine Kelley, Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital, at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference on September 18, 2024. Photo by Mike Tsukamoto/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Besides pay and benefits, the Space Force will also have to adjust how it assesses Guardians for promotions—always a sensitive topic—so that part-timers can be evaluated next to full-time troops.

“We envision one promotion ecosystem, whether you have served in a full- or part-time capacity,” Kelley said. “The idea is that we’re going to highly value credentialing, certifications, qualifications and training, and those can be garnered whether you’re in full- or part-time work roles. And so the idea that the team is fleshing out for us right now is, how do we build a promotion ecosystem that values both types of work roles simultaneously?”

On top of that, there are ethical concerns about part-time Guardians with jobs in the space industry. It’s an issue the Reserve and Guard already deal with today, and Kelley noted that they have measures in place the Space Force will likely copy. Yet given that the Space Force wants Guardians to be able to flex between part-time and full-time work more easily, the service may have to do more.

“We’re going to have to be a little more mindful of what that person is doing in their personal capacity, and what the work role is that they may be performing in the Space Force,” Kelley said. “So we’ve got more work to do to really define what that looks like.”

Officials have made some progress in defining the kinds of jobs part-time Guardians will have in the new construct—test and evaluation, training, teaching, or planning—and what they won’t do—employed-in-place operations, i.e., operational roles that don’t require deploying, such as flying satellites or defending cyber networks.

But much remains unsettled. And until the service has a clearer picture on how it will all work, Kelley was reluctant to offer a timeline, even as she acknowledged intense interest in the topic.

“It’s a construct that has to be fully fleshed out before we can actually say, this date and this is how,” Kelley said.

There is urgency to make progress, though, given the demand the Space Force is seeing from combatant commanders.

“The size of our service today, coupled with what’s at stake for national security, we need to take advantage of every force multiplication option we have, and this is one of them,” Kelley said.

The Data-Centric Interdependencies that Make Battle Management Happen

Nov. 20, 2024

Joshua Conine, SAIC’s Director of Space Command and Control (C2) Growth, identifies the key elements in large C2 systems in the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, and how SAIC creates resilient and distributed architectures that support Battle Management.

INDOPACOM Boss Not Worried About China ‘Playing Chicken’ in Pacific

Nov. 19, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

The head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command doesn’t see 2027 as a definitive date for China to invade Taiwan, nor is he concerned that the increasing frequency of provocative Chinese naval maneuvers will lead to war with the U.S. But he is concerned about U.S. readiness in the region, especially after supplying Ukraine and Israel with billions of dollars in munitions.

Adm. Samuel Paparo, speaking Nov. 19 at the Brookings Institution, said “the closer we get to 2027, the less relevant the date becomes.” At that point, China will declare itself ready” to take Taiwan by force, Paparo said—but only if certain set conditions are in place.

China’s 2005 anti-secession law, aimed at Taiwan, says it will invade only if:

Taiwan declares its independence from China

A third power intervenes in the dispute

Beijing determies that “unification was irrevocably beyond its reach by any other means.”

None of those conditions are in play, Paparo said. U.S. policy is to preserve Taiwan’s “right to self-determination” he said, not necessarily to shape its governance. Moreover, Paparo argued China prefers to achieve its goals through coercion by other means instead of military conquest.

The real significance of the 2027 date was the shift in timeline for when the Chinese military had to be ready for a possible invasion, up from 2035, Paparo said.

“It was never a ‘sell-by’ date. It was never a date where the PRC had declared, ‘we’re going on this date,’” Paparo said.

Nevertheless, “I think it was a worthy benchmark to say … we had better pay close attention to this,” Paparo said. The INDOPACOM commander noted that he has to prepare his combatant command to be ready to respond every single day.

“The closer we get to it, the less relevant that date is, and the more we must be ready today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and onward,” he said.

Paparo also said he is not worried about a sudden escalation if China performs provocative maneuvers by bringing its ships and aircraft into extremely close proximity with U.S. aircraft and vessels.

“The way one controls for unintended escalation is by enhancing one’s understanding of the strategic environment or of the tactical environment,” he said. Observers have expressed concern about a scenario where “there are two vessels in close proximity to one another. They’re playing chicken on the high seas, and there is a collision. That collision results in some bravado … passions are inflamed, and this results in a conflagration with a big war.”

That scenario “does not keep me up at night,” he said, because U.S. units “are trained to be safe, to be within the rules.”

“They’re trained when making choices, to choose to be safe, because we’re a dignity culture and not an honor culture,” he said. “Nobody’s going to be out there counting coup over playing chicken. You don’t play chicken with a $2 billion warship over some transitory point of honor on the high seas. And if there were to be a collision … they’ll maneuver to a position of advantage where we’ll be in a safe position, and cooler heads can prevail. And I have that confidence in that.”

“That doesn’t mean that there’s zero chance of it,” Paparo added of a potential collision leading to greater conflict. “But I … view a very, very low probability of such a situation. I think this is the stuff of fiction.”

Other Concerns

Outside of China, Paparo was asked if North Korea—which recently tested intercontinental ballistic missiles with the range to reach the continental U.S.—has also equipped those rockets with multiple precision-guided, independently targeted reentry vehicles.

“Not yet,” he said, adding that he expects aggressive ICBM testing by North Korea to continue.

He called North Korea’s supply of weapons and now soldiers to Russia’s war on Ukraine as “dangerous and transactional.” In return, he expects North Korea will get “submarine technology and propulsion technology.”

Paparo said he is encouraged that China has voiced support for denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, but North Korea’s rhetoric and actions “adds complexity to an already dangerous situation” and the relationship with Russia “imparts more risk on the allies”

Paparo is also worried about general readiness due to low weapon stocks, he said. The U.S. has drawn from its own supplies to arm Ukraine and Israel in recent months and deployed troops and systems amid tensions in the Middle East.

“Now with some of the Patriots that have been employed, some of the air-to-air missiles that have been employed, it’s now eating into stocks,” he said. “To say otherwise would be dishonest.”

Weapons can be “moved with alacrity to any theater—none are reserved for any theater” but “inherently it imposes costs on the readiness of America to respond in the Indo-Pacific region, which is the most stressing theater for the quantity and quality of munitions, because the [People’s Republic of China] is the most capable” potential threat.

“We should replenish those stocks and then some. I was already dissatisfied with the magazine depth” before the two conflicts erupted, and “I’m a little more dissatisfied with the magazine depth. You know, it’s a time for straight talk.”

Cyber Guardians Get Some Friendly Competition While Training to Defend NRO

Nov. 19, 2024 | By Shaun Waterman

When Delta 26, the Space Force unit that defends the National Reconnaissance Office from cyberattacks and online espionage, wanted to stage competitive training exercises this year, they used a private sector cyber range for part of the contests and run them at an unclassified level, its commander said this week.

Space Training and Readiness Command is “still working to build out their cyber range, so we had to go commercial,” Col. Erica Mitchell told Air and Space Forces Magazine on Nov. 18 on the sidelines of CyberSat, the cybersecurity conference for the space and satellite sector.

At the unclassified level, “It had to be a more generic exercise” in defending an enterprise network, as opposed to one that specifically gamed out a cyber attack on the NRO, the secretive spy satellite agency, Mitchell said. Five teams, each drawn from one of the five squadrons in Delta 26, competed over the course of four days.

The exercises, dubbed Cyber Spartan 24-1 and 24-2, were staged in January and August and represented the “crawl” phase in a crawl/walk/run progression, she said. STARCOM issued a release with a few details of the first one in March, but the second has not been previously reported.

The exercises were “a great success,” she said, despite “a few technical difficulties with the range,” which she declined to elaborate on. Her big takeaway as commander was that “we really have to move towards getting ready for multiple attack vectors in multiple places, not all looking for the same attack in the same place.”

Both exercises included a so-called Capture-the-Flag, or CTF, component, staged by a private sector provider Hack The Box. CTFs are a long-standing cyber tradition in the private sector—hacking contests where teams compete to use knowledge of IT networks and their vulnerabilities to locate and gather pieces of computer code known as flags. In a CTF like the one in Cyber Spartan, the teams compete to collect the most flags but don’t directly attack each others’ systems.

Despite the gamelike elements, CTFs are a proven method of assessing cyber skills, said exercise director Maj. Ryan Galaz. “A capture-the-flag event, to me, is a really fun way to determine the knowledge and proficiency levels of our operators,” he said.

Both exercises also included a “blue team” element, Galaz said, in which each team was responsible for a network under attack, competing to see which could most quickly understand and report on the attack they were facing.

Each team went through six attacks in which they were given just 30 minutes to figure out what had happened.

“What we wanted to do,” explained Galaz, “was not only test the ability of an operator to assess correctly what’s going on, but really test their timeliness, because, in the midst of a contested, integrated environment … we need to know how quickly you can identify, detect and report in an accurate manner.”

Again, the teams didn’t compete directly, Galaz said: “They were just up against the clock and against themselves, really.”

“It was what I call parallel play,” said Mitchell, “where you have your toddlers playing side by side” rather than directly engaging with each other.

Cyber Spartan 24-2 also included a third element, another simulated attack, said Galaz, where “we put all the teams together so they could practice working as a team, because we’re all geographically separated, to then respond to an adversary.”

Rather than the one-off attacks of the blue team exercise, he added, this third element tested the teams’ ability to work together effectively to fight off a concerted campaign by a determined attacker.

“The aim was to really force them into a corner where they’re going to have to talk [to each other]. We started disabling machines, leaving some traces [of what we’d done] on one of the team’s assets, and then leaving others on another team’s. So they would have to then communicate,” he said.

Galaz said the objective was to create a more realistic analogue of the chaotic and confusing conditions that would transpire in a real conflict. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy. So their mission plan went out the window 15 minutes into the action,” he said, “They have to continue to evolve, to stay ahead of the curve.”

The eventual objective would be to fuse the various elements of the exercise together into a more realistic war simulation, said Mitchell, “where the squadrons may start each with their own individual fights, but then it’s all going to be aggregated up, and then we’re going to direct [things] the way we would in an actual war scenario,” she said.

Both competitions were won by the Delta’s 661st Cyber Operations Squadron.

“They did a fantastic job,” Mitchell said.

In 24-1, the blue team contest was close but 661 came out ahead. In the CTF, “they destroyed the competition,” said Galaz. The second time around, though, things were much tighter. “It was razor close on both” the CTF and the blue team simulated attack events, he said.

Planners are currently working on the next iteration of Cyber Spartan, to be staged next year, Galaz said: “Now we’re looking at what type of craziness can we do for 25-1 that still keeps the operators enjoying themselves, because that’s the best way [to get them] to pay the most attention or learn the most—and get all the training value we want from it. So we’re excited about that.”

SDA Will Be 6 Months Late Launching Next Satellites, But May Up the Pace After That

Nov. 19, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

The Space Development Agency will start launching its next batch of satellites in March or April 2025, six months later than originally planned, but agency director Derek Tournear suggested he may try to increase the pace of launches after that to get back on schedule.

Tournear offered the new timeline along with a host of updates on his organization’s low-Earth orbit constellation during an event with AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies on Nov. 19, including plans for future missile defense and position, navigation, and timing capabilities.

SDA first started launching what it called its “Tranche 0” satellites in April 2023 and finished in February 2024—a process that also included several months of delays. All told, Tranche 0 includes 29 data transport and missile warning/tracking spacecraft in orbit to demonstrate their concept for a large LEO constellation.

Tranche 1, consisting of more than 150 operational satellites, was supposed to start going up in September, followed by a launch every month for 10 months. But at the Defense News Conference on Sept. 5, Tournear revealed that the first launch would be pushed back to “around the end of this calendar year,” citing problems producing necessary parts at scale.

Two months later, Tournear pushed the timeline back once again to March or April, saying suppliers had been overly optimistic in how fast they could scale production and solve supply chain delays, particularly for key components like optical communications terminals and encryption devices.

“Tranche 0 was just getting the parts in hand. Tranche 1 is building up your manufacturing capability, which always goes slower than people anticipate,” Tournear said.

Moving forward, though, Tournear said vendors have started hitting their production goals, and “we have high confidence that the schedule we have now is going to hold.”

With satellites now being assembled “daily,” Tournear also suggested SDA may look for other ways to get back on schedule—and live up to its motto of “Semper Citius,” or “Always Faster.”

“We know SpaceX can launch faster than once a month, so we can bring this in,” Tournear said of the launch schedule. “The space vehicles will be ready faster than that once we start the initial launching, but it’s just a matter of how fast will it take us to get through launch and early operations and pull that in.”

To that end, Tournear said he would be willing to accept and store completed satellites from contractors if they are ready before a launch vehicle is.

SpaceX has already been awarded all the launches for Tranche 1, receiving orders in 2022 and 2023, and the company has come to dominate the market with its rapid cadence—it has launched 10 times in November already, including three launches in two days.

Regardless, Tournear said all of Tranche 1 will launch over 10 months at a “maximum.” That timeline would have launches extending into 2026—the same year Tranche 2 satellites are supposed to start going up.

Tranche 3

While Tranche 1 satellite production is ramping up and design reviews for Tranche 2 have finished, SDA is already moving forward on Tranche 3, with plans to officially ask industry for proposals starting in January 2025.

Each tranche is meant to include new easily available technologies and capabilities, a process officials call “spiral development.” For Tranche 3, that will mean a few things.

Among the 150 or so data transport satellites, a “fraction” will include a new “lightweight” position, navigation, and timing signal, Tournear said.

The Pentagon has been investing more and more in backups and alternatives for the Global Position System satellites, and Tournear said the new signal coming from SDA’s satellites will help in that regard.

“The details of that are still being worked out. We’re working very closely with the Army, because the Army is the one that would be fielding the receivers for these things,” he said. “And so I can’t go into more details, primarily because it hasn’t firmed up until we get more alignment with what the Army actually wants us to demonstrate and fly on Tranche 3. But it’ll be a very small signal in an L- or S-band that we’ll demonstrate.”

Meanwhile, Tournear also wants up to nine satellites in Tranche 3 that can do both missile warning and missile defense.

“Missile warning is launch detection: the old school, ‘now we can affect mutually assured destruction. Let the President know where we’re under attack.’ Tracking is not only can we tell you that the missiles have been launched, but as they maneuver, we can tell the impact point, so we can tell the people downrange to prepare theater air defenses, or in worst case scenario, at least tell them to prepare for duck and cover,” Tournear said. “Defense takes that one step further and says, not only can we detect the maneuvering missiles, we can detect them to such accuracy that I could send that data down to an interceptor with no other sensors needed.”

Tranches 1 and 2 will include a few satellites each that can do missile defense, and Tranche 3 will look to build on that by combining missile launch and missile defense on the same satellite.

“We’re really interested in hearing from industry on what those capabilities are,” Tournear said.

‘Blueprints’ for China’s New Fighter Similar to F-35, Air Force Chief Says

Nov. 19, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

The Air Force’s top officer said China’s new stealth fighter has one distinctive feature: It appears to draw its inspiration from the U.S.’s F-35.

“It’s still fairly new,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin said in a Nov. 19 interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine. “But, yes, it’s pretty clear; you could put it side-by-side and see, at least, where we believe they got their blueprints from, if you will.”

China’s J-35A was recently unveiled at the Zhuhai Air Show by China’s People’s Liberation Army. As Allvin noted, the plane looks remarkably similar to an F-35, though, unlike the American warplane, it is equipped with two engines instead of one.

U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Ridge Shan

Allvin declined to discuss details of what the U.S. knows about the J-35, citing a need to protect classified information. But much of Allvin’s program to bring about the “re-optimization” of the U.S. Air Force is driven by the need to deter China’s growing military.

“Overall I think we should just be very aware of the scope and the scale—if nothing else, the scope,” Allvin said, referring to China’s growing air forces.

China also operates another stealth fighter, the J-20 air superiority aircraft, and is working on the H-20 flying wing stealth bomber, according to a 2023 Pentagon report on China’s military forces.

In March, then-commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Adm. John C. Acquilino said that China’s People’s Liberation Army had “the world’s largest Navy, soon to be the world’s largest Air Force.”

China has over 3,100 aircraft in the PLA Air Force and PLA Navy of which about 2,400 are combat aircraft, the Pentagon report noted.

The U.S. Air Force has around 4,000 crewed, non-trainer aircraft. The U.S. Navy and Marines have thousands of aircraft of their own.

China has a long history of copying U.S. aircraft designs, though that doesn’t mean their combat aircraft are as capable as their American counterparts in other respects.

“The Chinese development of their capabilities is something we need to we need to respect and be able to account for,” Allvin said. “One thing that they’ll never catch up on us is the quality of our force, the quality of our entire total force, the quality of our [noncommissioned officer corps], the quality of our aviators, the maintainers, all of that. But I don’t want to make it a close fight.”

The Air Force has recently unveiled major structural reforms and a new force design designed to better counter China.

“We have to have an Air Force that can still survive and can execute effectively in many different threat environments,” Allvin said.