Outstanding Airmen of the Year: Senior Airman Monica Figueroa Santos

Sept. 13, 2022 | By Patrick Reardon

The Air Force’s 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year for 2022 will be formally recognized at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference from Sept. 19 to 21 in National Harbor, Md. Air & Space Forces Magazine is highlighting one each weekday from now until the conference begins. Today, we honor Senior Airman Monica A. Figueroa Santos, senior nuclear command and control emergency actions controller for the 341st Missile Wing Command Post at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont.

Air Force and command post regulations dictate that senior controllers must be NCOs or have a skill level of 7. So when Figueroa Santos was endorsed by the wing commander for a senior controller position at Malmstrom as an A1C, she was being asked to fill responsibilities two ranks above her paygrade. The grounds for such elevated trust: her extreme attention to detail and protocol, no matter the mission.

Those qualifications were recognized during a Nuclear Surety Inspection that occurred while she was still a junior controller. It was only her fifth week post-certification and although she was still green in her field, she was selected for inspection.

“I was really nervous,” Figueroa Santos said. “[My staff sergeant] really motivated me and prepped me. Even though I was certified, there was still so much that I didn’t know.”

During the three-hour higher headquarters scenario and exam, Figueroa Santos noticed an error they had made. She pointed it out to her senior controller and asked them to check the regulations—an “integrity move” that impressed the inspectors.

“Even though I did make mistakes during the inspection, I was able to prove to the inspectors that I know what I’m doing, and I’m not just going to blindly follow my higher-ups,” she said. “[One] inspector told me that a lot of times when he does the inspections, the junior controllers are too scared to speak up [and just] go with the flow. [But he] saw me challenging what others were doing. He was very impressed with that—[it was] something that he hasn’t seen somebody do before.”

SrA Monica Figueroa Santos, 341st Missile Wing Command Post senior nuclear command and control emergency actions controller, poses for a photo July 26, 2022 at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Mary Bowers. This photo has been altered for security purposes by blurring out identification badges.

Figueroa Santos’ integrity led to the team yielding zero write-ups and her recognition as a Superior Performer by the Air Force Global Strike Command Inspector General. The level of veracity she displayed during the inspection should be the gold standard for Airmen on a mission as sensitive as Malmstrom’s.

“We have a nuclear mission. We’re not allowed to make mistakes. So you just have to know your stuff,” Figueroa Santos said.

After demonstrating her competency during the NSI, Figueroa Santos was endorsed to become a senior controller as an Airman First Class. She continued to play by the rulebook, not the rank-book. Her meticulous adherence to rules helped avert wing mission failure by generating 74 emergency alerts, briefing four organizations, and securing $17.1 billion worth of assets spread across a 13,800-mile area of responsibility.

She also proved her ability to adapt to emergencies without compromising regulations. She led the support of six civilian search-and-rescue missions, one of which saved the lives of two active-duty Airmen who had fallen off a cliff while hiking.

“It’s very rare, actually, to have a search-and-rescue [be for] our own people,” she said. “It was a great team effort. And I was proud to be a part of that.”

While Figueroa Santos’ position defies standard rank regulations, her approach to those positions doesn’t. Compromising integrity to save face isn’t in her nature.

“I get that from my dad,” she said, adding that her ROTC training at the University of South Florida helped embed her “perfectionism” even deeper into her actions. She is upholding of the Air Force’s standards, and that makes her recognition as an Outstanding Airman of the Year markedly deserved.

“Prior to this, I didn’t even know the ‘12 Outstanding Airmen’ was a thing,” Figueroa Santos said. “It wasn’t something I was shooting for.”

“You know, one of the core values in the Air Force is integrity,” she added. “You always have to have integrity. You don’t ever want to get complacent with what you do. Because when you get complacent, that’s when mistakes happen. And it could really cost us a lot.”

Meet the other Outstanding Airmen of the Year in 2022 below:      

Tackling the Air Force’s Joint All Domain Training Needs

Sept. 13, 2022 | By Scott King

U.S. defense strategy anticipates increasingly joint operations in which Air Force jets, Navy ships and submarines, and Army and Marine Corps ground operations are so tightly integrated that rival forces will be overwhelmed. But to fight that way, the armed services must first train and practice, leveraging live, virtual, and constructive simulation elements to master the art of the possible – and they must be sure those systems are built with cybersecurity in mind.

HII has been working these problems for decades. HII’s development and operation of the Navy Continuous Training Environment (NCTE), the Navy’s Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) Training Program, provides scalable Government-owned solutions that facilitate unit- to fleet-wide, joint, and coalition training. HII is leveraging these solutions with their existing USAF DMO and range programs to achieve best of breed training architectures, providing DoD with a viable framework for Joint All Domain Operations training.

“The more we interconnect advanced training and weapons systems into a single environment, the greater the value of the data in the environment,” said John Bell, technical director of HII’s LVC Solutions Group. And the value doesn’t just rise for the Department of Defense, but to potential adversaries seeking an edge in future combat. “We recognize that as a critical consideration in our development of new simulation and training systems,” Bell said. If it’s digital, someone is going to try to hack it, so protecting the enterprise training solution is a primary concern.

“Protecting data is a major challenge,” Bell said. “It’s one of our highest priorities for our DOD customers, so we follow advanced cybersecurity engineering and architecture processes. We’re constantly working on new ways to secure our systems to ensure they’re protected.”

The Navy’s Enterprise Network Guard is a key part of that strategy, a cross-domain solution to connect classified information across multiple enterprise training networks for the Navy.

“The Enterprise Network Guard provides new capabilities that we don’t have in traditional cross-domain solutions,” Bell said. “HII has been conducting site certification and testing of the Guard by integrating and sharing data securely with our coalition partners in the NCTE.”

Armed services must leverage live, virtual, and constructive simulation elements to master the art of the possible – and they must be sure those systems are built with cybersecurity in mind. Here’s how HII has tackled this demand.

The Enterprise Network Guard is on track to become certified by the National Security Agency as a “Raise the Bar”-compliant cross-domain solution (CDS).

“’Raise the Bar’ is a new set of requirements for cross domain solutions to improve security and prevent the inadvertent disclosure of data,” Bell said. “We recently completed successful site-testing of the Enterprise Network Guard, which is significant because it proves the Guard meets Raise the Bar standards and is ready for use in distributed joint and coalition training exercises.”

According to Bell, the Enterprise Network Guard is well-suited to be a future cross-domain solution for the Air Force and other services.

“There are significant challenges that come with integrating multiple levels of security, from multiple domains and for a variety of training systems across networks,” Bell said. “This is one of the biggest challenges facing the Air Force today and our experience working with the Guard gives us the capabilities, insights, and experience needed to address those challenges.”

HII is also experienced in integrating live training ranges into a single enterprise solution for networking and communications. Recently, HII has been upgrading current USAF range architecture to an interconnected enterprise range infrastructure.

“Currently, the Air Force’s live training ranges are operating under legacy networks and legacy communication systems,” Bell said. “We’re applying our proven enterprise training architecture to the Air Force by integrating their live training ranges into a Live Mission Operations Network (LMON). This will enable the Air Force to train more effectively by bringing in the new live range training systems of the future with advanced platforms such as the F-35 and other fifth-gen fighters.”

An enterprise network for the Air Force’s Live Mission Operations Network will enable greater efficiency in operations because it can be run from a single network operations and security center.

“Our standardized solutions optimize the hardware and software at every range to meet individual requirements, while not having to reinvent the wheel at every single range,” Bell said. “This demonstrates that we can leverage our open architectures and standards to develop enterprise solutions that are applicable across the globe, both at-scale and for immediate use.”

HII has experience working with Air Force platforms, having already integrated the B-1, B-52, E-8C Joint STARS, E-3 AWACS, and RC-135 Rivet Joint into NCTE exercises.

“The integration of Air Force platforms into NCTE exercises was effective because we used our Joint Simulation Bus (JBUS) system to create interoperability capabilities between the platforms,” Bell said. “The Navy and the Air Force now routinely train in joint exercises using both Air Force and Navy assets, just like we would in war. This experience gives us insight into what it takes to bring multiple Air Force platforms into a single integrated environment that enables Joint All Domain Operations of the future.”

Bioweapons Designed by AI: a ‘Very Near-Term Concern,’ Schmidt Says

Sept. 12, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Artificial intelligence could bring about “biological conflict,” said former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who co-chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Schmidt spoke with defense reporters Sept. 12 as he helped release a new paper from his tech-oriented nonprofit think tank, the Special Competitive Studies Project. Schmidt launched the think tank with staff from the commission in order to continue the commission’s work.

AI’s applicability to biological warfare is “something which we don’t talk about very much,” Schmidt said, but it poses grave risks. “It’s going to be possible for bad actors to take the large databases of how biology works and use it to generate things which hurt human beings,” Schmidt said, calling that risk “a very near-term concern.”

Schmidt cited viruses as one example: “The database of viruses can be expanded greatly by using AI techniques, which will generate new chemistry, which can generate new viruses.”

The new paper, “Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness,” says advances in biology could empower individuals to formulate pathogens and, therefore, “increase uncertainty about which actions are taken by a state, by those acting on behalf of a state, or those acting on their own.”

Having recently been appointed to a new commission on bioterrorism that hadn’t yet met, Schmidt didn’t want to elaborate more.

His prediction echoes prospects described in a recent experiment by Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a drug company, which modified its AI for ruling out toxicity in new drug formulas to instead generate formulas for toxic substances.

Only “vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals” at the outset, according to the paper, the researchers tried the experiment after being invited to take part in a conference on chemical and biological weapons. They later concluded that they had been “naive in thinking about the potential misuse.”

“Even our projects on Ebola and neurotoxins … had not set our alarm bells ringing,” they wrote.

For the experiment, they trained commercially available AI, which they had designed, with data from a publicly available database of molecules. They chose to “drive the generative model towards compounds such as the nerve agent VX, one of the most toxic chemical warfare agents developed during the twentieth century.”

It worked: “In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold.”

Among those were not only VX itself “but also many other known chemical warfare agents”—and others likely more toxic.

The potential misuse of biological databases stays front of mind within DOD’s own in-house project to digitize decades of medical slides for AI-enabled research. The department’s Joint Pathology Center houses the world’s most extensive repository of diseased tissue samples. Its leaders envision AI algorithms learning to predict a patient’s prognosis—whether a cancer patient, for example, could get by with just monitoring or would need aggressive treatment.

Its director, pathologist Army Col. Joel T. Moncur, said in a past interview that the center had prioritized “privacy, security, and ethics” in designing the project.

The Defense Innovation Board, which Schmidt chaired at the time, recommended “enhancements” to the center’s repository to make the specimens even more suitable for AI research—beyond the center’s ongoing effort to create high-resolution digital images of physical slides—in part by linking the slides to the individual’s medical records. The records would undergo “de-identification.”

Brazilian Airmen Deepen Ties in U.S. Visit

Sept. 12, 2022 | By Chris Gordon

The Brazilian Air Force is increasing engagements with the United States in recent years, led by its partnership with the New York Air National Guard, which began in 2019. This week, more than 100 mid-career officers from Brazil’s Air Force Command and Staff College (ECEMAR) and Air Command and Staff Studies (CCEM) program are in the U.S. for meetings and briefings, beginning with a brief from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, president of the Air & Space Forces Association (AFA), framed the discussion around allied cooperation. “We have to be very focused together with our allies, with our friends, to defend our nations, to defend our citizens, and to provide opportunities of safety and freedom,” he said. “We know we share those values with the Brazilian Air Force.”

Mitchell’s dean, retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, explained to the officers that the U.S. Air Force’s emerging concepts of operations, including developing joint all-domain command and control systems and processes, the future Next Generation Air Dominance systems, and agile combat employment. He also discussed budgetary realities that have left the U.S. Air Force “the smallest, oldest, and least ready in its history.”

Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.), dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, greets members of the Brazilian Air Force at the Air & Space Forces Association headquarters in Arlington, Va., Sept. 12, 2022. Staff photo by Mike Tsukamoto.

While that smaller U.S. Air Force is still far larger than Brazil’s, the issues of technology, capability, and capacity to operate are common. “I know these numbers seem big to you, but we have different defense strategies,” Deptula said. The United States is a global power, and in global competition, he said, numbers matter.

But at the same time, “Many of the issues that America’s aerospace forces face are ones that are confronting Brazil’s aerospace community,” he said.

The Air National Guard’s engagement with Brazil is part of the Department of Defense’s State Partnership Program, which pairs units from DOD’s 54 state and territorial National Guard organizations with 93 partnered countries.

In August’s Exercise Tapio, more than 1,000 Brazilian forces and 100 U.S. Airmen took part. U.S. aircraft included an HC-130J, two C-17s, and three HH-60 helicopters. The exercise focused on combat search and rescue, aerial refueling, and close air support missions. A-10 pilots from the Maryland Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Squadron joined the mix, flying with their counterparts in Brazilian A-1 and A-29 aircraft. Members of the Oregon National Guard also joined in.

Deptula said international exercises help build crucial bridges between nations. “Friends and allies, in partnership with America, provide all involved mutual strategic advantages,” Deptula said. “The more thinking we share on issues regarding our aerospace forces, the safer and [more] secure we and our partners will be.”

In addition to Deptula, the Brazilians also were briefed on space and unmanned systems topics by the Mitchell Institute’s Chris Stone, senior fellow for space studies, and Caitlin Lee, senior fellow for UAV and autonomy studies.

President of the Air & Space Forces Association retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright addresses members of the Brazilian Air Force at the Air & Space Forces Association headquarters in Arlington, Va., Sept. 12, 2022. Staff photo by Mike Tsukamoto.

Sharing insight with allied air forces is part of the Mitchell mission to advance air power understanding. “We’ve hosted many air chiefs, leadership, and delegations from partner nations around the world—the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Australia, among others,” Deptula said. “Those interactions always bring us closer in understanding their challenges, and we reciprocate with the leading-edge ideas that our Air and Space Forces are pursuing. This was an opportunity to have a much broader officer-level interaction with future aerospace leaders on where we see air and space power evolving.”

Deptula noted that air and space power apply in all domains and all regions around the world. For example, while some might see the INDOPACOM region as being inherently naval in nature, owing to the vastness of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 100 percent of the region—including all of Asia—is covered by the air and space domains.

One of the ways the U.S. and allies will gain advantage in the future is through the development of new technologies that increase complexity for adversaries while improving the ability to communicate and share data and targeting information across domains and with international partners.

JADC2 is a defense-wide concept for connecting any sensor with any shooter across a “network of networks,” using machine learning and artificial intelligence, he said. The Air Force is working hard to figure out how to do that, he said, and its Advanced Battle Management System is its system for trying to achieve that aim. The other services are also pursuing the means to connect.

JADC2 will require secure communications essential to everything from targeting to timing for all services, using technologies such as new high-speed laser communications between satellites.

Outstanding Airmen of the Year: Senior Airman DeMarion N. Davis

Sept. 12, 2022 | By Patrick Reardon

The Air Force’s 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year for 2022 will be formally recognized at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference from Sept. 19 to 21 in National Harbor, Md. Air & Space Forces Magazine is highlighting one each weekday from now until the conference begins. Today, we honor Senior Airman DeMarion N. Davis, Wing TEMPEST Manager for the 48th Communications Squadron, RAF Lakenheath, England.

Davis, an E-4, filled an E-5 position for over a year amid a 40 percent personnel shortage due to a mix of lingering pandemic effects and low Air Force enlistment rates. The staff shortage is especially palpable for those in Davis’ specific career field—he estimates that the Air Force has only 1,200 to 1,300 cyber specialists who work in TEMPEST, a technology that prevents devices from emitting electromagnetic radiation (EMR) that might be intercepted and deciphered into confidential data.

“TEMPEST is kind of one of those overlooked programs where people don’t really keep it up because every space on base has to be certified, and after it’s initially certified … people will cycle and PCS, and it doesn’t get the [same] turnover that it necessarily needs,” Davis said.

The only Airman in Lakenheath’s Information Assurance Office, Davis was tasked with bringing the base’s TEMPEST certifications up to speed. The assignment required him to take a weeklong AFSEC manager course at Keesler Air Force Base, Miss., to learn the ins and outs of the technology and NATO’s standards. When he returned to Lakenheath, he tackled and completed the TEMPEST certification at 54 processing sites on base.

“I was happy to do it,” he said. “I look forward to passing [the program] on to whoever comes behind me and leaving it in an upstanding position for them.”

While chasing these certifications, Davis stayed busy with other pressing tasks. In response to Russian aggression, the 336th Fighter Squadron from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C., deployed to Lakenheath and needed an operations desk. With only a week of lead time for a project that might take weeks or months, Davis’s squadron stood up the desk and got it approved in a matter of two days.

These last-minute projects find their way onto Davis’ to-do list because of his track record of completing them. Among his other timely accomplishments was when he converted the enlisted club into a temporary classified area facilitating a nuclear summit, a project that earned personal lauds from the U.S. Air Forces in Europe commander. Davis also stepped up as the Air Force Ball subcommittee lead to host a “flawless” event for 1,000 senior enlisted leaders, and he headed the project “Wi-Fi the Wing” to provide wireless network connections across the entire Lakenheath base.

“I was excited,” Davis said about initially being asked to complete responsibilities typically reserved for staff sergeants. “I’m a go-getter. I don’t like sitting around and not being busy.”

The go-getter, workhorse spirit that Davis embodies was instilled in him at an early age, perhaps before he was even born. His father retired as a senior master sergeant after 26 years of service, and his grandfather was a private first class during the Korean War.

“As a young kid, I never understood why my dad was so hard on me about certain things,” Davis said. “’Make your bed in the morning.’ ‘Make sure that your pants are on the hanger properly.’ ‘Make sure you’re folding clothes properly’—[he was saying to] hold yourself to a certain standard.”

Thanks to those standards and his proven success with tasks beyond his duties, Davis’ rank will match his resume soon—he was selected for staff sergeant in August.

Meet the other Outstanding Airmen of the Year in 2022 below:      

CMSAF Wants Military Compensation Review of How to Calculate BAH, Other Allowances

Sept. 9, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Air Force and the rest of the Pentagon have to find faster ways to assess and respond to compensation issues that affect Airmen, two of the service’s top leaders said.

Rising inflation and housing costs that have left many service members and their families scrambling to make ends meet have highlighted that need—while the Pentagon’s response has taken time, acknowledged Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass and Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin in a “Coffee Talk” event streamed on Facebook.

“Where we are right now, I don’t think we anticipated it was going to be this bad two years ago, and our Airmen are the ones paying the price,” Allvin said.

Officials have taken some steps to try to help service members. In September 2021, the DOD approved a temporary increase in the Basic Allowance for Housing for certain markets to match surging prices. And in the 2023 budget, leaders proposed the largest pay increase for troops in 20 years, increases to BAH and the Basic Allowance for Subsistence, and the creation of a new Basic Needs Allowance.

But that temporary BAH increase took months to put in place after reports of families struggling first appeared, and then it expired at the end of the year. And Congress has yet to pass the 2023 budget and National Defense Authorization Act to put the proposed changes into effect, with little hope it will do so before the end of the fiscal year.

Looking to speed up some of those processes, Bass said she and her fellow senior enlisted advisers in the other services are pushing for a “holistic military compensation review.” DOD conducts a Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation—the last review went from fiscal 2018 to 2020 and was issued in December 2020.

With the new review slated to begin soon, Bass said she and the other SEAs have already identified several top priorities.

“And one of those things was we need a more modern way to be able to assess BHA, OHA, COLA,” Bass said. “The days of a survey? No. There’s better ways to assess it. And we need to figure out what that modern way is.”

It’s not enough to simply assess changes, Allvin added—“we need to be able to apply it so our Airmen don’t suffer while the money is catching up,” he said. “Which means we need to continue to engage with Congress to ensure that we have … ways of being able to compensate on more than just a two-year cycle.”

Cuts to Special Duty Pay

While the compensation review will likely begin soon, Airmen are still feeling the squeeze right now—and while the proposed 2023 budget does include an overall pay raise, it also includes a cut to special duty assignment pay.

SDAP is given to Airmen with “extremely difficult duties that may involve an unusual degree of responsibility in military skill,” according to budget documents. Currently, the Air Force has authorized SDAP for more than two dozen kinds of Airmen.

Officials want to cut the program by more than $1.4 million in 2023, “really across the board, for all of our special duties,” Bass said.

Allvin acknowledged the dissonance between that cut and concerns about inflation, but said it was part of the service’s effort to fund needed future capabilities.

“It’s tough to look at the Airmen and say, ‘Yes, we have tough economic times, but I’m going to cut your pay anyway.’ It is true that in the context of building the budget, sometimes you do lose touch, you lose some connection,” Allvin said. “And when we look at that, sometimes it’s framed, unfortunately, in terms of, ‘Well, do we want to be able to have the force we need in the future?’ And so we carve out little bits of money here and there to afford that next F-35 or to be able to do that development and testing. But that doesn’t resonate very well.”

Four Space Force Generals Nominated for Second Star

Sept. 9, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The ranks of Space Force major generals are set to expand, as Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced the nomination of four officers to get their second star Sept. 9.

All four of the general officers nominated will stay in their current positions. They are:

Brig. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon, deputy chief of space operations for intelligence
Brig. Gen. Christopher S. Povak, deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office and commander of its Space Force Element
Brig. Gen. Stephen G. Purdy Jr., commander of Space Launch Delta 45, director of the Eastern Range, and director of launch and range operations for Space Systems Command
Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney, military deputy for the Assistant Secretary of Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration

Purdy is the only general officer in the Space Force to currently command a delta.

Assuming they are all confirmed, Gagnon, Povak, Purdy, and Whitney will double the number of major generals the Space Force has. The fledgling service actually has more lieutenant generals than two-stars at the moment. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act gave the Space Force authority to vary the number of officers considered for promotion to major general.

These promotions are just the latest in a series that will bolster and reshape the Space Force’s general officer corps. In May, the Senate confirmed five new brigadier generals, and in June, Maj. Gen. Philip A. Garrant was nominated for a third star and to take on the job of Space Force deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs, and requirements.

Most significantly, President Joe Biden nominated Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman in July to become a four-star and succeed Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond as Chief of Space Operations.

Outstanding Airmen of the Year: Staff Sgt. Steven C. Peters

Sept. 9, 2022 | By Patrick Reardon

The Air Force’s 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year for 2022 will be formally recognized at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference from Sept. 19 to 21 in National Harbor, Md. Air Force Magazine is highlighting one each weekday from now until the conference begins. Today, we honor Staff Sgt. Steven C. Peters, a paramedic for the 60th Medical Group at Travis Air Force Base, Calif.

When Kabul fell in August 2021, Peters’ medical group supported Operation Allies Refuge at Hamid Karzai International Airport. On the day of the evacuation’s mass casualty event, his experience as a paramedic proved invaluable.

“[Our colonel] let us know that we had patients that still needed to be picked up on the other side of the flight line,” Peters said. “During this time, our entire base is still in lockdown. We’re still under fire.”

Peters stepped up to lead a team to confront the incoming attack and to recover the patients: nine seriously injured service members. Along with an Army medic and two pararescue members, Peters took a Turkish ambulance headlong into the melee to reach the flight line.

“There was a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “There was a lot happening around me. I had already seen the other casualties, [so we had to be] in the mindset of [finding] the best outcome for everyone.”

The patients weren’t in good shape—one had just gotten out of acute surgery, and the others were all critically wounded. There wasn’t enough time or cover to stabilize them on site, so Peters and his team loaded the patients into their vehicle to keep moving. With the Army medic driving, Peters and the pararescue members tended to the wounded in the back. His alertness and trauma expertise kept them stabilized until they safely arrived at a treatment facility.

“Two or three of them went to surgery immediately when we arrived,” Peters said, “but everyone survived.”

Evacuated families had become separated during the mayhem.

“We started realizing that a lot of children were left behind,” Peters said.

Peters, coordinating with joint service leaders and Norwegian Armed Forces members, worked to arrange bedding, rations, and entertainment to keep morale up among the isolated evacuees until they could be reunited with their families or relocated somewhere secure. But putting these Afghan children on planes “onesie-twosie” wasn’t efficient, and certainly wouldn’t ease the minds of parents or loved ones looking for them.

To expedite the process, Peters’ team managed to coordinate an entire Aeromedical Evacuation unit from Travis Air Force Base, Calif., to take a full flight of Afghan children to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

“We worked really hard to get that one flight,” Peters said. “I think that was the biggest win.”

Peters recently completed the rigorous and intensive six-month Paramedic Course at Pima College in Tucson, Ariz. He is working as an emergency room paramedic at Travis Air Force Base and is expecting a permanent change of station order in October. He said he likes the changes and challenges posed by his service in the Air Force and his paramedic career.

“My mom and all of my friends keep me on the straight and narrow,” he said. “If I’m making those people around me proud, that just shows me I’m doing the right thing.”

Meet the other Outstanding Airmen of the Year for 2022 below:     

Pentagon Acquisition Czar ‘Hoping’ F-35 Deliveries Will Resume Soon

Sept. 9, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Pentagon acquisition boss William LaPlante is optimistic that the pause in new F-35 fighter deliveries will not drag on for long—but the problem does highlight a “constant” issue with the supply chain, he told reporters Sept. 9.

The halt in deliveries, announced Sept. 7, came after Honeywell, a subcontractor for the F-35, informed Lockheed Martin that an alloy in a magnet in the jet’s turbomachine came from China.

LaPlante said the U.S. Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement mandates the pause until an investigation is completed.

“They’re moving pretty quickly,” LaPlante said of the investigation. “They’re looking at two things … impact on security, if any, and impact on airworthiness or safety, if any. Right now, so far, it doesn’t appear to be either of them, but I’m waiting for them to finish what they’re looking at and come to me. It’s likely, if in fact we find neither of those to be the case, we’ll be able to do a waiver and do the replacements and get the production line moving again. So I’m hoping this can be resolved pretty soon.”

Both Lockheed Martin and the F-35 Joint Program Office have said the magnet doesn’t transmit any information. It also doesn’t “harm the integrity of the aircraft, and there are no performance, quality, safety, or security risks associated with this issue,” according to a statement from JPO spokesman Russell Goemaere.

Goemaere also confirmed that flight operations for already delivered F-35s aren’t affected by the alloy issue, even though every F-35 delivered to date contains the Chinese material.

The Air Force became the first service to accept a production model F-35 in 2011, indicating the alloy issue dates back more than a decade—and that controlling the supply chain remains a challenge for the Pentagon and the defense industrial base, LaPlante said.

“I think there’s a bigger picture here, [on] which there is ongoing study a lot, which is called supply chain illumination. And that is the understanding of primes’ suppliers, of what is even in their supply chain,” LaPlante said.

Such a task is complicated by the fact that major defense contractors rely on massive, sprawling webs of suppliers—a recent DOD report cited an average of 200 “first tier” suppliers for American aerospace companies, with more than 12,000 suppliers in the second and third tier. The alloy provider was a fifth-tier supplier.

And even the contractors themselves don’t always have a full sense of all their suppliers.

“I had a CEO of a company tell me about two weeks ago that he thought he had 300 suppliers [and] he discovered, when he counted all of his suppliers, he probably had 3,000 suppliers,” LaPlante said. “And suppliers can change overnight. And so what this is becoming, and it’s been recognized for some time, [is] almost a real-time issue of tracking and making sure that there’s integrity in your supply chain.”

In fact, LaPlante said, “any company that says they know their supply chain is like a company saying they’ve never been hacked.”

Moving forward, though, the Pentagon hopes to leverage new technologies to work with contractors and help track their supply chains.

“The good news is there are tools coming out, using artificial intelligence and open source, that can dive in and maybe find some of these things,” LaPlante said. “But I think it’s going to be a constant issue for us, is understanding our supply chain.”