General Atomics: A Revolutionary Partnership

Aug. 29, 2022

Early Vision and Sustained Support Enabled the Air Force and General Atomics to Change Warfare Forever

One extraordinary thing about the U.S. Air Force’s unmanned aircraft revolution was that it almost didn’t happen.

True believers couldn’t always make others see the vision, and had to overcome “opposition from many in the service,” as retired Gen. John Jumper, a former chief of staff, told Congress earlier this year. Once the Air Force committed in the mid-1990s to the RQ-1 Predator, there were challenges.

“Introduction into the Air Force was not easy,” Jumper said.

But the service remained committed, and so did the aerospace pioneers at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., builder of the aircraft. Together they forged a partnership that went on to change warfare forever.

Initially, Air Force leaders focused on enhanced reconnaissance: With no human crew on board, the Predator could stay on station, orbiting areas of interest for many hours longer than conventional combat aircraft.

Commanders quickly warmed to the quantity and quality of real-time situational awareness these unmanned systems produced, more than had ever before been possible. During the air war over Kosovo in 1999, for example, officers were able to watch a Yugoslav target before, during, and after it was struck by munitions dropped from a B-52, as Air Force Magazine described. Commanders could conduct immediate bomb damage assessments from their op center.

Soon the issues shifted to new questions: How best to use a Predator’s view of a target to cue a strike aircraft quickly; how to operate the aircraft at greater distances via satellite; how to upgrade what the aircraft could do itself with its own sensors and—maybe someday—even its own weapons.

Those problems were solved.

“We were done crawling. We were walking, and we were getting ready to run,” says Dave Alexander, president of GA-ASI, who as a company aerospace engineer at the time was a central part of the process. “We knew then how much more this platform could deliver and we stayed focused in supporting the Air Force in getting it there.”

That phase of the story has passed into lore along with the names of leaders like Jumper; his predecessor as Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Ryan; retired Col. James “Snake” Clark, who later headed intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance innovations as a civilian—and the team at Air Force Materiel Command’s Big Safari office, led by William Grimes. Once they and other Air Force leaders saw the Predator in action in the Balkans, they knew what unmanned systems could do in future applications.

Teeth of the Predator

The Air Force, GA-ASI and its partners began addressing the needs: the Predator got better sensors and a laser designator so that it could spotlight targets for armed aircraft to strike with precision-guided munitions. Then it got weapons of its own: a pair of AGM-114 Hellfire anti-tank missiles. All that work was well underway by Sept. 11, 2001, when the use case for armed UAS stopped being theoretical.

Suddenly American officials needed more, ever more, sustained, high-quality intelligence about activities on the ground in Afghanistan, which sheltered the al Qaeda conspirators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And U.S. counterterrorism strategy began to rely heavily on the ability to find, pursue, and eliminate individual terrorists or small groups, knitting together all sources of intelligence available and then relying on the Predator to conclude the operation.

The aircraft, the Air Force and other U.S. government teams that operated it had their rendezvous with destiny. The Predator changed the battlefield in Afghanistan, and later Iraq and elsewhere. It became an icon, nominated as the one of the top 10 aircraft that changed the world. One important early aircraft hangs in the National Air and Space Museum and another Predator is on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

Before long, GA-ASI and the Air Force both recognized that the success of the Predator also revealed its limits. So even as GA-ASI workers were proving out and perfecting the Predator’s capabilities, they also developed a larger, more capable successor: the MQ-9A Reaper.

Enter the Reaper

Nine feet longer than the Predator and with a wingspan 11 feet greater, the Reaper’s take-off weight is 12,000 pounds, more than 4.5 times that of the earlier aircraft. Along with that, its speed, altitude, endurance, and payload are likewise greater, and its a Honeywell-built turboprop engine gives it the voice and power of a modern aircraft.

“Reaper defined what medium-altitude, long-endurance ISR could be, based on what the Air Force and the joint force needed,” Alexander says. “It still does, and it will for a long time.”

Aircraft followed for other services – including the U.S. Army’s Predator cousin, the MQ-1C Gray Eagle. Friendly nations followed the trend, including the United Kingdom, France, Italy and more. The mission envelope, which began as tactical ISR, expanded into border security, humanitarian assistance, disaster response, customs enforcement, infrastructure security, wildlife monitoring and beyond.

Hardware, software and other innovations only have grown as well, company officials say. In partnership with the Air Force, GA-ASI is redrafting the very same UAS handbook they wrote together with new practices that will transform military operations and air dominance again.

The Future Force

One example is with artificial intelligence and autonomy, and a new generation of aircraft that will do much of their work on their own, without constant, real-time attention by human pilots.

“We won’t need stick-and-throttle flying anymore unless we want it, and we won’t need to have human eyeballs watching the sensor feed every minute,” says Patrick Shortsleeve, a retired Air Force colonel who served as a director of intelligence at NATO and director of ISR operations for coalition forces in Afghanistan. Shortsleeve now works as GA-ASI’s vice president for DoD strategic development.

“You’ll push a button,” he says, “the airplane will take off and fly its mission, and if it sees something interesting it’ll tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, take a look at this.’”

Shortsleeve refers to this as a form of “supervised autonomy” – humans in command, but at a layer above unmanned systems working independently or collectively to perform ISR or support other operations. The aircraft could sortie in autonomous-only flights or team with crewed aircraft. In addition to ISR roles, future uncrewed systems might be the lead element in a fighter sweep, or defend tankers, early warning platforms, or larger surveillance aircraft.

Autonomy promises to reduce personnel costs and eliminate dependence on datalinks that adversaries try to jam and hack. With resilient new networks and other novel capabilities, the aircraft can fly, work, and burst-communicate only when needed.

GA-ASI‘s combat-proven, jet-powered MQ-20A Avenger UAS regularly notches new milestones in integrated autonomous operations when flying in support of Air Force exercises at Nellis AFB, Nev. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) is supporting the Skyborg Vanguard Program, and new, bigger, more sophisticated unmanned jets are in the works, promising more endurance, higher-quality ISR, and increased lethality.

The partnership between the Air Force and GA-ASI will continue to make history, Alexander vows.

“Supporting the women and men of the U.S. Air Force is our honor,” he says. “And we’re just getting started.”

-ISR/24/7/365-

Romania Is a Model for Training Ukraine’s Pilots to Fly F-16s

Aug. 28, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

The Ukrainian Air Force has withstood six months of war against a much larger and more sophisticated Russian force, but U.S. lawmakers worry Russia could gain air superiority as the war grinds on unless Ukrainian pilots are equipped and trained to fly modern Western aircraft, such as the F-16.

Romania, a NATO member, offers a case study for how that could go. Its air force is completing a transition from Soviet-era MiG-21s to U.S.-built F-16s, providing a model for training pilots for the switch, according to U.S. Airmen involved with the training. The U.S. Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command even has a course for partner and ally nation pilots that could be tailored for Ukraine.

At Morris Air National Guard Base, Ariz., Eastern European pilots from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia have been taking the six-month ANG International Initial Qualification Course (Advanced) for more than two decades. In fact, today’s young Romanian pilots have never flown MiGs, which are being phased out of Romania’s Air Force as it seeks to expand its fleet of F-16s and eventually to buy F-35s.

The United States and some 50 international partners are already helping Ukraine to modernize its military force with Western, NATO-standard weaponry. But while Ukraine has repeatedly asked for Western fixed-wing fighter aircraft, that request has thus far gone unheeded.

U.S. lawmakers, including Air Force veteran Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) have called for the Defense Department to begin training Ukrainian pilots on the F-16s, anticipating that airplanes will eventually be offered. A bill now stalled in Congress would provide $100 million for the training.

Col. Brant A. Putnam, vice commander of the 162nd Wing at Morris, has seen generations of Eastern European fighter pilots such as those from Romania graduate from U.S. training programs, and he believes Ukrainians would excel in the program.

“Based on what I’ve heard, I think that they’d fit right in with what we do here,” he told Air Force Magazine in a July interview.

After two decades of this kind of training, the students from former Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland and Romania have changed. “These young guys … haven’t flown any Russian airplanes,” said Putnam. “Typically, their English is better, and we run them through to the basic course, and they are, for all intents and purposes, just like the U.S. guys who train alongside them.”

Making the transition from Russian to Western aircraft, however, requires a mind shift. “It’s not easy,” he said. “It depends a lot on how long they’ve been trained in the MiGs, because a lot of what comes along with their training is their mindset,” he said. “They’re into the Soviet system that goes along with those aircraft, which is typically a lot of close control. They don’t make a lot of decisions. They’re not used to being super flexible.”

But in the U.S. Air Force program, pilots must learn to be decision makers. “They can’t sit up in the airplane and just drive and wait to be told what to do,” Putnam said. “They have to actively direct their aircraft and think about what it is they’re trying to accomplish.”

Pilots’ Experience

Romanian Air Force pilot Capt. Alexandru Beraczko, 28, is one of two Romanians now in basic combat flight training in Arizona. He previously participated in U.S. Air Force programs at Lackland and Randolph Air Force Bases, Texas, Columbus Air Force Base, Miss., and Vance Air Force Base, Okla.

“I’ve been trained in the mindset to fly the MiG-21 before,” said Beraczko of his Romanian Alpha Jet training, which has the same avionics as the MiG-21. He’s also familiar with the MiG-29 flown by Ukraine.

“Getting [to] the F-16 from the MiG-29—it’s a way different airframe,” Beraczko told Air Force Magazine by phone from Tucson. “The heads-up display, even the missiles they are running, they have different cool times, different intelligence. Bear in mind they need to apply different tactics. Air tactics are different.”

Romania joined the NATO Partnership for Peace in 1994 shortly after independence and became a full NATO member 10 years later. Each step was a shift to the Western way of warfare.

From trained pilots and maintainers to required infrastructure to a boneyard of spare aircraft, Romania has been working on its transition to the F-16 for nearly a decade.

“Even we struggle at this point, and we started enhancing and getting the F-16 like seven or eight years ago, and we’re still not yet there,” Beraczko said. “We are so close; we are wanting and willing to be there as personnel, as maintenance, as even a force.”

A U.S. Air Force spokesperson said foreign countries seeking to train fighter pilots in the United States would typically begin with a few weeks in the T-6 trainer aircraft before spending a few months flying the faster T-38. Once the training is complete, the pilot can enroll in the basic course for combat pilots.

The majority of the course uses the F-16C model, since most pilots will be flying single-seat aircraft when they return home.

Graduating students reach a wingman level and are expected to continue flying with close supervision for 500 hours.

“It still takes what it takes to create an experienced pilot who can go out and employ aircraft, make tactical decisions, and survive,” Putnam said. Graduates, he said, “will be combat ready, in a sense. [But] they will not have the experience to make tactical decisions in the scenarios that they might see.”

In Tucson, Putnam said AETC has created tailored courses to meet the needs of specific countries.

Congress Backs Training Ukrainian Pilots

In June, Rep. Houlahan and fellow Air Force veteran Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) introduced legislation to finance the training of the Ukrainian fighter pilots on the types of American aircraft that could be given to Ukraine.

Support for the bill has not waned, Houlahan told Air Force Magazine, but the administration has refrained from taking a decisive first step on a path that could take many months or years.

“Russia could turn the tide of the war at any moment, which means time is one of our most valuable assets and we must use it wisely to ensure the people of Ukraine are victorious,” she said.

In an Aug. 24 Pentagon press briefing, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin H. Kahl said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has directed a team from his office, the Joint Staff, and U.S. European Command to work with Ukraine to help design a future Ukrainian Air Force, but he expressed reservations that such a force can be assembled in the short-term.

Still, Houlahan and other lawmakers believe defense officials need to be having conversations about pilot training now.

“I’m frustrated by the lack of progress here on seriously considering this viable option,” she said.

Pentagon’s Plan to Reduce Civilian Harm May Not Work in Future Conflicts, Experts Say

Aug. 28, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan released Aug. 25 details nearly a dozen objectives creating institutions and processes to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties.

But critics say the plan’s objectives may do more harm than good, creating extra layers of bureaucracy for planners and operators to navigate, and that it won’t work in a large-scale conflict.

In a memo accompanying the release of the action plan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III called its objectives “ambitious but necessary,” and press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder told reporters that the plan will “enable DOD to move forward on this important initiative.”

Austin first ordered the drafting of an action plan in January, not long after a series of reports from the New York Times in late 2021 detailed the impact of airstrikes that led to hundreds of civilian casualties in the Middle East. Those reports followed the high-profile deaths of 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021, caused by an erroneous strike during the U.S. withdrawal.

Among the action plan’s objectives is the establishment of a civilian protection center of excellence; the incorporation of guidance for addressing civilian harm across the full spectrum of armed conflict into doctrine and operation plans; improved knowledge of the civilian environment and civilian harm mitigation capabilities and processes throughout the joint targeting process; and the creation of a steering committee to oversee the action plan’s implementation.

More practically, what that will entail for operators in the field is “having somebody or probably a group of people who are experts in this civilian environment, that are sitting next to the operators, the threat-focused intel folks, the lawyers, as they’re really developing whether it’s an individual operation or a campaign and building in this component of civilian harm throughout the overall process,” a senior defense official told reporters in a background briefing.

Among those who could be included in those plans are forward deployed experts from the new center of excellence, the official added.

Austin, Ryder, and the defense official all emphasized in their statements that the action plan is meant to be forward-facing—Austin called the reforms “scalable and relevant to counterterrorism operations and large-scale conflicts against peer adversaries.”

But retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, disagreed.

“I believe that this report and the recommendations that it contains are really backward-looking toward an era of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations,” Deptula said. “Conditions will be very much different in operations in a major regional conflict. That doesn’t mean that avoidance of, planning for, and having the understanding of how to execute operations while minimizing or avoiding civilian casualties changes in importance. It just means that the intensity of conflict is not going to allow for exquisite, centralized analysis for the prosecution of each and every target.”

Instead, the Pentagon should work to ensure that its operators and planners know and abide by the laws of armed conflict, particularly the principle of proportionality, Deptula said—in an attack for a military objective, any anticipated civilian harm should not be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”

Trying to create uniform processes and institutions that oversee all civilian harm reduction efforts also runs contrary to the Pentagon’s and Air Force’s philosophy of distributed control, added Deptula—Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. and others have said they want to fundamentally shift their approach to war by embracing “decentralized execution … It’s the aspect of being able to work small teams and trusting our Airmen to be able to do things.”

Using such an approach in a major conflict will mean “you’re going to be operating in environments where … connectivity between the leading edge of the combatant forces and the highest levels of command will be interrupted,” Deptula. “So you can’t stop the execution of operations. This is why it’s so important for the individual combatants to fully understand the laws of armed conflict.”

Conversely, adding more layers of approval to the targeting process will increase the amount of time it takes to make a decision and execute a strike, retired Col. Mark Gunzinger, the Mitchell Institute’s director of future concepts and capability assessments, said.

“That can lead to lost opportunities. That can lead to suboptimal operational results,” Gunzinger said. “And that could lead to actually more casualties, and not fewer.”

Beyond that, prioritizing the prevention of civilian harm over the accomplishment of military objectives could lead to a dynamic in which “the commanders and their staffs that do the planning for next day’s operations—they’ll be self constraining, in that the most important thing in the planning would be no collateral damage, rather than what effects do we need to make to achieve a battlespace objective, to get this over with,” said retired Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzriem, the Mitchell Institute’s director of research.

Such a dynamic would extend conflicts, Stutzriem warned, with the potential for more civilian casualties as a result.

Report: How Norms of Behavior Could Save Space Companies From Becoming Targets in War

Aug. 26, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

The rapid proliferation of commercial satellites is revealing increased potential for counter-satellite military operations and collateral damage.

SpaceX reported that its Starlink satellite internet service was jammed in Ukraine after the start of the war, and Viasat reported hackers attacking its satellite internet service there around the same time. In the wake of Russia’s debris-generating test of a ground-launched anti-satellite weapon in November 2021, operators with satellites in low Earth orbit saw risks increase as more than 1,500 new pieces of debris were scattered in that region.

The Russian act intensified calls to establish norms of acceptable behavior in space, and the U.S. government pledged not to perform any future debris-generating tests in space.

To help inform efforts to establish norms, the not-for-profit Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy studied other areas where civil and military activities converge. The study, “Commercial Normentum: Space Security Challenges, Commercial Actors, and Norms of Behavior,” published Aug. 23, notes that commercial satellites could make attractive targets in a space war and suggests that commercial operators should be involved in the issues raised as a result. The paper lists factors for companies to weigh when deciding whether to take an active role in establishing norms and ideas for how they might do so.

Aerospace’s Robin Dickey, the report’s author, writes that commercial participation in establishing security norms could be more important in space than in other domains because “the physics of debris propagation in space make it much harder to limit the effects of any single accident or conflict.”

Adding to the complexity and risk is the emerging intermingling of civil and military uses of satellite assets. The Space Force is increasingly interested in incorporating commercial constellations and data into its activities, both as a means to extend situational awareness and to ensure resilience in space in the future. Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond has called America’s and allied space industries a “great advantage” and said the Space Force must harness and leverage the “explosion of business that’s going on.” Commander of U.S. Space Command Army Gen. James H. Dickinson has said he is most interested in how commercial space firms can improve space domain awareness.

The risk, both to commercial entities and the U.S. military, is how military uses for those systems could turn them into legitimate military targets. “Were conflict to significantly escalate in space, the potential lack of distinction between military and commercial satellites could result in targeting of even commercial satellites that do not provide military services,” Dickey writes. Because they’re uncrewed, commercial satellites could also be seen as lower-threshold targets, making their destruction “less escalatory” than attacking crewed assets in other domains.

Dickey draws comparisons with past instances in which militaries targeted civilian property, organizing them into three categories:

Collateral damage from attacks on military objectives. Landmines roughly equate to how ASATs scatter destructive debris. The International Space Station provides an example of how the debris affects satellites: NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel reported in July that out of 681 conjunction notifications the ISS crew had received in 2022, to warn of closely approaching objects, 505 traced back to the Russian ASAT test.
Attacks due to misidentification or misinterpretation of a commercial activity. At least six commercial airliners were shot down before clear norms were established for mitigating against such commercial targets in the midst of combat.
Deliberate targeting in war. Historically, commercial maritime shipping has been targeted during military conflict, justified because such ships either carried legitimately targeted supplies or helped support military activity economically. In space, deliberate jamming, cyberattacks, or the “disruption of sensors” with directed energy could similarly apply pressure to commercial activities.

Dickey makes the case, in part, that because companies have a stake in space security, they should also get a say in establishing the security-related norms that might otherwise seem like the purview of governments.

But because norms will only work to deter bad behavior according to the extent that they’re accepted around the world, Dickey concedes that they may prove most useful in justifying a response—“providing a legal of political point around which other space actors can rally if a state goes rogue.”

Practices such as establishing minimum cybersecurity standards for satellites; transparently sharing mission data between the commercial sector and governments—even competing ones; and implementing formal lines of communication in case of problems all could help protect satellites and avert disaster.

Dickey’s paper proposes three styles of approaches to consider:

Protect all civilian/commercial assets. In this circumstance, any attack on commercial assets would be ruled out, regardless of the satellite’s purpose. Determining what constitutes an attack would also be necessary. “Are commercial satellites that sell services to militaries viable objectives?”
Protect all essential space services. In this approach, only certain kinds of services would be protected. The risk is that this plan would “exclude numerous commercial satellites from the highest degree of normative protection.” But it could get closer to legal and political common ground.
Protect only those commercial satellites that do not provide military services. This could be done by conveying to other countries “intentions and activities to de-escalate misunderstandings.”

Establishing normative behavior does not assure that satellites will never fall prey to military attack or collateral damage, Dickey notes. Norms “should not be the only approach to mitigating potential threats. However, they can be an important piece of the larger puzzle.”

Chiefs, Part 1: Discordant Visionary

Aug. 26, 2022 | By Tobias Naegele

In its 75-year history, 22 Airmen have led the Air Force as Chief of Staff. Each came to the post shaped by the experiences—and sometimes scar tissue—developed over three decades of service. Each inherited an Air Force formed by the decisions of those who came before, who bequeathed to posterity the results of decisions and compromises made over the course of their time in office. Each left his own unique stamp on the institution. As part of Air Force Magazine’s commemoration of the Air Force’s 75th anniversary, Sept. 18, 2022, we set out to interview all of the living former Chiefs of Staff, ultimately interviewing Chiefs from 1990 to the present. In this first in the series, we share the story of the first of those Chiefs: No. 14 Gen. Merrill A. McPeak (1990-1994). This period begins the pinnacle of American air power, the planning and execution of 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, in which the fruits of a decade of modernization were put on display to devastating effect: This was the first time the world saw how stealth could evade enemy air defenses and how the dream of precision bombing that motivated the Bomber Mafia in the interwar period leading up to World War II was actualized five decades hence.

Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, CSAF No. 14 (1990-’94)

Every Chief is unique, shaped by his time and the world as he rose through the ranks and the events and personalities defining the national security landscape when he takes office. To these circumstances each Chief adds his unique personality, style, and attributes.

When Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak arrived as Chief in October 1990, Iraq had, only months before, invaded and occupied Kuwait. The United States was assembling an enormous coalition against Iraq, and the Air Force would soon demonstrate a new era of American air power: Stealth aircraft that could evade enemy detection; precision weapons that could strike with pinpoint accuracy; and dominance like no air force had ever demonstrated before.

Yet McPeak’s job was not to fight that war, but to organize, train, and equip the Air Force for what would follow. By the time he became Chief, the Cold War that had defined his entire adult life was over. Born in 1936 in the midst of the Great Depression, McPeak had reached adulthood in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Soviet Union was suddenly no longer America’s archrival. In fact, the Soviet Union no longer existed.

“Desert Storm began a couple of months after my swearing in,” McPeak recalled in July. We’re on a video call and he’s in workout gear from his home in Oregon. A photo taken in the Oval Office in December 1990 of the Joint Chiefs meeting with President George H.W. Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney rests on the credenza behind him. McPeak wears a beard, and sounds very much like he did as Chief, still ramrod straight, still intense, still able to laugh at and with himself. “You would think that I spent a lot of time worrying about how to support [Gen.] Chuck Horner out in the sandbox, and I did. But I was also talking to the Secretary [of the Air Force] from Day One about how we were going to reorganize the Air Force. … [Secretary] Don Rice and I had agreed before the end of January ’91 on how we wanted to reconfigure the Air Force.”

The Air Force had 535,233 Airmen on Active duty when McPeak came to Washington. It had 426,327 when he left four years later. The drawdown was a dramatic reworking of a force that had been locked in a strategic competition for more than four decades and was anticipating President Bush’s “New World Order,” a unipolar world in which the U.S. was the sole superpower remaining. McPeak thought the entire military was ready to be reset at a much smaller scale than what the nation had been used to.

“My idea was to simplify the structure of the Air Force,” McPeak recalls. “Complexity is the enemy of success in combat. You’ve got to keep it simple. And that starts with a simple organization.” As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Colin Powell had already developed the “Base Force,” defining the scale of the coming drawdown. The aim was to avoid creating a hollow force that would retain structure devoid of capacity, but instead outline a force that could fight two wars on the scale of Operation Desert Storm simultaneously.

McPeak did away with Strategic Air Command, Tactical Air Command, and Military Airlift Command. Instead of three of these Major Commands, the Air Force would have two: Air Combat Command and Air Mobility Command. The change in acronyms was intended to help drive home the changes, which were driven by the notion that the distinction between tactical and strategic forces was anachronistic.

“I think how we organize to fight is the most important thing a leader can do,” McPeak says. “Then of course you’ve got to turn them loose to fight. And if they’re well trained, they’ll do well. But first, it’s how you organize to go to battle. That had been very important in my thinking for a long time, certainly before I became Chief. … And remember: the way you organize something is, first, you organize it, and then, second, you’re reorganizing.”

Gen. Merrill McPeak. **USAF via National Archives**.

First moves aren’t always right, and McPeak is quick to own his mistakes (at least where he sees decisions as wrong). “I put the ICBM force into Combat Command—that was a mistake,” he says. He changed his mind, altering people’s lives in the process, and moved it to Space Command. Later, it would be moved again, combined with bombers into Air Force Global Strike Command. McPeak was passionate about getting organization right, and achieving a viable structure that made logical sense. “When, I took over the Air Force it had 200 things called ‘wings,’” he says. “When I left, we had 100 things called wings. They were real wings.”

Organizational upheaval created turmoil. “Any organization that wants to stay at a high level of performance is in virtual reorganization all the time,” McPeak says. For example, there were two wings at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., south of Washington, D.C., and when asked why, McPeak was told it was too much for one colonel to manage. “I said, ’Well, let’s make it a one-star and put the whole wing under him and get rid of a headquarters and a staff car and a secretary.’ Man, if one person can’t run Andrews then what am I doing trying to run the whole Air Force?”

McPeak’s structural remaking of the force was, he recalls, about one-third drawdown and Base Force, “but two-thirds of it was closing superfluous wings.”

Cutting the force was an opportunity, if it meant the service could be more efficient. But getting the message across was difficult. McPeak saw the Base Force not as an objective floor below which the Air Force and other services would not go, but as a ceiling: the biggest it could possibly be when the cutting was finally done. That proved prescient. Service budgets that peaked before the end of President Reagan’s eight years in office continued to decline through most of the 1990s. At the same time, demand for Air Force operations remained constant. While the services returned to a massive homecoming celebration in Washington, D.C., in 1991, the Air Force found itself adapting to a new way of life, rotating forces and aircraft through the Middle East to enforce no-fly zones in the south and north of Iraq, protecting Iraqis from their own military.

None of that was clear when McPeak was still in charge. He was remaking the Air Force in his own image, and he was a different kind of Airman. He remains today a different sort of former Chief, still marching to the beat of his own drummer, still intimately familiar with the Air Force but from a greater level of remove than other former Chiefs. He is a Chief who sweated details others would ignore. He had the Air Force Band create a string quartet to play chamber music because he felt the Strolling Strings were outsized for his quarters at the Air House. He took part personally in the auditions.

He introduced a new uniform. If there’s anything most Chiefs won’t do, it’s work on uniforms. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone is an expert. The uniform McPeak introduced was derided both for being cut for McPeak’s wiry physique and for looking too much like a commercial airline pilot’s uniform. Yet while the decorations on that uniform would change, the basic suit remains the same.

“No guts, no glory,” he says of Chiefs who shy away from uniform controversy. “If you don’t want to take on big challenges, then you shouldn’t be in the Chief’s office. [The uniform] didn’t take up much of my time. It was easy. And by the way, that uniform is being worn today. That’s my uniform, except it’s been glitzed up. … My idea that simplicity is what works in combat? Well, it also works in uniforms. The blue suit with three Arnold patch buttons on the front is …. the uniform I helped to redesign.”

Others knocked McPeak as symbolizing the “fighter mafia” and favoring combat aviators. A former Thunderbird, McPeak had flown more than 200 sorties in Vietnam and 199 as a Thunderbird, surviving the team’s first-ever crash in front of a public audience when the wings of his F-100 sheared off on a maneuver in Del Rio, Texas, in October 1967. Pulling his jet heavenward at 6.5 Gs, he heard a loud bang as the wings came off, releasing fuel that turned into a fireball. That he survived the accident is a testament as much to skill as luck.

McPeak questions the fairness of the fighter mafia label. “I made Billy Boles a four star and sent him to run Training and Education Command. Not only was he not a fighter pilot, he wasn’t any kind of pilot. He wasn’t a navigator. He had a slick uniform right here where here you put your wings. First guy ever sent to Air Education and Training Command who was nonrated. I sent up to the Air Force Academy Paul Stein. First Air Force Academy Superintendent who was not a rated officer, not a pilot. I brought in a guy to be Vice Chief who was a space guy, he wasn’t a pilot. But he was a warrior. Billy Boles was a warrior. Paul Stein—go find me a warrior better than Paul Stein. I wasn’t so much interested in who’s a fighter pilot as I was in who’s a warrior. Turns out a lot of fighter pilots are in that category. Thank goodness!”

McPeak was no dictator when it came to selling his vision of the force. “I spent about one-third of my time in front of audiences, working on consensus,” he recalls. “No organization that I know of goes anywhere based on what Mussolini tells them to do. We all operate on consensus. And that’s true in the military. I never thought I could just come in and turn on the light switch and expect everybody to have all the lamps in the building go on. So I worked hard to build consensus, [but] I was only about 51 percent successful. Change is hard to do. It’s hard to lead.”

The reason it was so hard, he says, is that he wanted to do more than incremental change. “Look, you know how to create the best dictionary in the world?” he asks, pausing for effect. “Start with the existing best dictionary and then fix one mistake, one word. That’s what some people have as an idea of leadership. But that wasn’t my idea. I wanted to start building a new dictionary. That’s pretty ambitious.”

That would not work if every Chief wanted to do that, he acknowledges. “We can’t have an Air Force that every four years gets turned on its head and shaken hard. But every once in a while, it’s not a bad idea.”

McPeak blew up thousands of pages of regulations, calling in his functional Chiefs and asking them to boil down those regulations to four or five pages, double-spaced. He recalls it took multiple iterations to boil these down to their essence. “The idea was we should have instructions that say what is important to us. And if 100 things are important, it’s like saying nothing’s important.”

By going to the functional Chiefs—“the head cop, the head chaplain, the surgeon general”—McPeak sought to build consensus around a singular idea: “What is it that we’re in business to do here? What is the Air Force all about? With the central idea being that it’s about excellence,” he says. That vision is too often lost, he said, in other pursuits. “I hear way too much today about diversity. It is not the mission of the Air Force to solve society’s diversity problems. I’m not against diversity, but I am for winning in aerial combat. That comes first.”

When McPeak took office he had a four-by-six card in his desk on which he had written five simple, declarative sentences, five things he wanted to accomplish in that office. “Every day I was inundated by other things that other people wanted me to do,” he said. “People would come in and say, “Hey, boss, I’ve got a horrible problem. You’ve got to help me. I’d listen to them and say, go fix it. Come back and tell me how you fixed it. Then I’d open that top drawer and look at the little card to tell me about the things I wanted to do. …. Never got them done, by the way. Never accomplished those five things.”

What were they? McPeak won’t say. “Because I failed,” he says. “I’m not in the confession mode here, and you’re not my priest. I’m not willing to admit the depth and breadth of my failure.” But was it failure to be ambitious, to strive for things that remained out of reach? For an 85-year-old former Chief, the frustration is not that, but the reality of the constraints of time, which, like the constraints of gravity, limit most people to live life inside the lines. McPeak spent his life trying to break free of those constraints.

“You only have four years,” he continues. “To do the things that I had in mind would have required eight or maybe 10 years. Therefore I was too ambitious. You have to decide what mistakes you want to make in life. You don’t ever get it right. So the mistake I want to make is to be too much of X and too little of Y. … My five things were things I couldn’t get done in four years. And, so part of my problem as Chief was I tried to get them done in four years.”

Nuclear Advances by China Raise Questions on Command and Control, Structure

Aug. 25, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Pentagon and Air Force officials have repeatedly warned in recent months that China is making rapid progress in building up its arsenal of nuclear weapons. But as that growth continues, key questions are still unanswered about how the Chinese will structure their strategic forces, according to a new report.

The China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) at Air University issued the third edition of its PLA Aerospace Power Primer on Aug. 19, three years after its previous update. And in that time, the People’s Liberation Army’s nuclear capabilities have changed dramatically.

Then-commander of Air Force Global Strike Command Gen. Timothy M. Ray called the growth “breathtaking.” U.S. Strategic Command boss Adm. Charles “Chas” A. Richard termed it a “strategic breakout.” And the Pentagon had to revise its estimates of how many nuclear warheads the Chinese will possess by the end of the decade.

The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, which controls China’s nuclear and conventional missiles, “has evolved from a small, unsophisticated force of short-ranged and vulnerable ballistic missiles to an increasingly large, modern, and formidable force with a wide array of both nuclear and conventional weapons platforms,” notes the new CASI primer.

But while much has been made about the increase in silos and warheads, the grand totals still lag far behind the U.S. and Russia, noted Dr. Brendan S. Mulvaney, director of CASI and one of the primer’s authors. China’s new nuclear triad, however, deserves more attention, he said.

“You can say, ‘Oh, my God, they’re tripling their force. It’s a 300 percent increase,’ which is absolutely true,” Mulvaney told Air Force Magazine. “But it’s always been in the Rocket Force, so as you create a submarine force and an air force that are now nuclear capable, of course you’re going to have to increase the number of warheads.

“… But it is very telling that they’re spending that much time and effort in the nuclear forces, and diversifying, right? That’s the part that really makes people, or should make people, pay some attention to that.”

In particular, the beginning stages of China’s nuclear triad raise all sorts of questions for the PLA Air Force and Navy, the report suggests, as neither branch has dealt much with nuclear weapons.

“The open question, which China doesn’t talk much about, is as you build a triad, what are the roles and capabilities that you’re going to have in the air arm?” Mulvaney said. “Because for them, the PLARF have all the ICBMs, right. So traditionally, the PLARF has had control over essentially all the weapons in China for these last couple of decades, for a long time. And so as that changes, what role does the air force … play?”

For now, the report states, the “current role of the PLAAF … is nascent at best due to technical limitations and the relatively small size of its nuclear capable bomber fleet.”

But that may change in the future, particularly if the PLAAF develops its own nuclear command and control procedures and infrastructure, separate from the PLARF, Mulvaney said.

The Chinese could “simply cordon off within the air force and within the navy the nuclear [weapons]-capable portions … and have them create their own direct links, like the PLARF has, but just duplicating one for each service,” Mulvaney said. “So that’s possible, and all that would feed up to the Joint Operations Command Center for the Central Military Commision.”

Such an arrangement would create redundancy and flexibility but might also raise the possibility of poor communication and misunderstandings.

Alternatively, “it’s conceivable that they would come up with something akin to our Strategic Command, in which case, they would start to lump all the nuclear weapons or the nuclear release authorities,” Mulvaney said.

Such an arrangement wouldn’t be perfectly analogous to STRATCOM—“they’re organized differently, their command and control is different, so it’s not a one-to-one ratio,” Mulvaney said—but it would fit with a broader trend he noted in how the Chinese have reformed their military over time.

“Because China doesn’t have any real-world experience, they do a lot of studying other militaries, specifically the United States and our allies and partners,” Mulvaney said. “ … A lot of the changes that they made in 2015 and 2016 were basically to craft a new model kind of like the United States.”

While those questions remain unanswered, Mulvaney said the goal of the primer is to give personnel across the Air Force a basic understanding of China’s military aerospace capabilities, in line with Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s Action Order C, which pushes for Airmen “to understand their role in the long-term strategic competitions between the U.S., Russia, and China.”

A digital copy of the primer is available online, and hard copies will be distributed at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Air Command and Staff College, and Air War College, Mulvaney said.

DOD Denies Escalation With Iran-Backed Militants After Volley of Attacks

Aug. 25, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

The Pentagon said Aug. 25 that a battle with Iran-affiliated militants in northeastern Syria was over and that U.S. Central Command had taken measures to avoid escalation.

One U.S. service member was treated for a minor injury and returned to duty, and two others were under evaluation for minor injuries after a coordinated attack Aug. 24 in which several rockets landed inside the perimeter of Mission Support Site Conoco and in the vicinity of Mission Support Site Green Village, both in northeastern Syria.

U.S. Central Command reported Aug. 25 that it retaliated against that latest attack with AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, AC-130 gunships, and M777 artillery, killing four militants and destroying rocket launchers.

The exchange of attacks began when militants attempted to attack U.S. facilities in Syria on Aug. 15 with unmanned aerial vehicles possibly supplied by Iran.

The United States responded Aug. 23 when four F-15Es and four F-16s launched from bases in the region to fire at nine militant bunkers, avoiding militant casualties. Two additional strikes were removed from the target list when human movement was detected.

DOD denied that it had waited nearly 10 days to respond to the attack while the United States and Iran hashed out final details for Iran to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal. Instead, some 400 hours of intelligence was collected at the target sites.

“Separate from the JCPOA, we will defend our people no matter where they’re attacked or when they’re attacked,” said DOD Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder.

“The two really are not interrelated in that regard,” Ryder said. “Our forces were threatened. We took appropriate and proportionate response and will do so anywhere and anytime that we receive that threat.”

The battle with Iranian-backed and supplied forces came as the United States and Iran are close to bringing Iran back into compliance with the JCPOA and lifting U.S. sanctions that were reimposed when President Donald J. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. The JCPOA is intended to limit Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon. Since breaking away from the agreement, Iran has enriched uranium to levels consistent with the construction of a nuclear weapon.

Ryder declined to discuss the operational planning that led to the delay that occurred while JCPOA negotiations were ongoing. Ryder said Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and radar assets helped assure no militants were killed as a result of those American strikes.

“In terms of our objectives and the message we were trying to send, which was a proportional response to the [UAV] attacks against U.S. forces, none of our forces were killed,” Ryder said in response to a question from Air Force Magazine.

Ryder also drew a distinction between the decision not to target militants and the Pentagon’s Aug. 25 release of its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, a wide-ranging effort to reform military doctrine and operational planning to mitigate civilian casualties.

“In this context, no, I wouldn’t conflate the two,” Ryder said. “This was a concerted decision not to strike individuals, suspected militants, because, again, we were aiming to do a proportional strike.”

UAVs Traced to Tehran

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin H. Kahl said at an Aug. 24 Pentagon briefing that UAV pieces collected at the Aug. 15 attack sites were “traced directly back to Tehran.”

“We don’t want Iran to draw the wrong conclusion that they can continue just doing this and get away with it,” Kahl said at the briefing. “Our concern was that this might be an indication that Iran intends to do more of this, and we wanted to disabuse them of any sense that that was a good idea.”

The DOD policy chief said the United States has communicated through multiple channels with Iran against supporting the militants.

After the Aug. 24 rocket attacks and deadly retaliation by the U.S., Army Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, said the U.S. “will respond appropriately and proportionally to attacks on our servicemembers,” according to a press release. “No group will strike at our troops with impunity. We will take all necessary measures to defend our people.”

Ryder said the aerial response did not indicate that the battle with Iranian-backed forces was heating up.

“That does not necessarily indicate that things are escalating,” he said. “We maintain a variety of platforms in the region to provide whatever types of support we may need, and, of course, the AC-130 gunship is one of those capabilities.”

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said at an Aug. 24 press briefing that Iran has made concessions and that a deal to bring Iran back into compliance with the JCPOA is close.

“We are closer now than we were just even a couple of weeks ago because Iran made the decision to make some concessions,” Kirby said. “So that’s a positive step forward, but I would add very quickly … gaps remain. We’re not there.”

Drawing a distinction between the ongoing JCPOA negotiations, Ryder said the message of deterrence was conveyed in Syria.

“In terms of the strikes in Syria, again what I would say was our focus was on sending a message loud and clear to these Iran-backed militants in terms of what is not acceptable behavior, and that’s targeting U.S. forces,” he said.

B-2 Crew Successfully Tested Long-Range Cruise Missile, Northrop Grumman Says

Aug. 25, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

A B-2 bomber successfully released a long-range cruise missile during a weapons test in December 2021, contractor Northrop Grumman revealed Aug. 25, potentially giving the stealth bomber the ability to strike even deeper into contested areas.

The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range, or JASSM-ER, has a range of more than 500 miles and has been integrated onto the B-1B and B-52 bombers and F-15E and F-16 fighters, according to Pentagon budget documents.

The December test on the B-2, however, marks the first publicly known instance of the Air Force testing the JASSM-ER on a stealth aircraft—there are plans to integrate the missile onto the F-35A as well.

The B-2 has already completed testing with the missile’s shorter-range variant, the JASSM.

“The JASSM-ER further enhances the B-2’s ability to hit any target, anywhere,” Northrop Grumman’s press release states. “The integration of JASSM-ER enables the delivery of a low observable asset capable of traveling greater distances than its predecessor.”

The baseline version of JASSM has a range of roughly 200 miles. Not only can JASSM-ER fly more than twice that far, future versions will allow it to re-target midflight.

Northrop Grumman provided no other details as to where the test occurred or why it took so long to publicly announce it, and the Air Force did not immediately respond to queries from Air Force Magazine.

The successful JASSM-ER test was just one of three modernization efforts Northrop Grumman announced. The contractor also said it has integrated the new Radar Aided Targeting System onto the bomber.

The Air Force had previously announced a successful test of the system, which improves weapon guidance accuracy in a GPS-denied environment, in July. Northrop Grumman noted that the system allows the B-2 to fully use the B61 Mod 12, the latest version of the thermonuclear bomb.

Northrop Grumman also announced that it has installed modern cryptology on the B-2, giving the bomber more secure communications at “various high frequency transmissions.” The new cryptology was tested “earlier this year” in a flight from the contractor’s Oklahoma City facility.

How an Enterprise Approach Solves USAF’s Training Needs

Aug. 25, 2022 | By Scott King

Since 1999, the USAF has developed and evolved the most advanced and prolific high fidelity distributed training capability for aircrews (or “the warfighter”). USAF leadership is urging us all to “accelerate the transition from the force we have to the force required for a future high-end fight.” This will require rethinking our training approach as we look to integrate 5^th Gen platforms and merge test and training approaches.

In partnership with the Navy, HII developed and enhanced the resulting Navy Continuous Training Environment (NCTE) which was built on open standards and nonproprietary software, reducing costs and clearing away concerns about vendor-lock-in.

HII has been leveraging these proven methodologies to answer emerging Air Force training requirements on our growing USAF portfolio and range programs to prepare warfighters for joint all-domain operations.

Live, virtual, and constructive training allows warfighters to train as they fight in a distributed environment. Here’s how.

“The NCTE architecture integrates tools, standards, and a collaborative workforce to [create] a simulation network that enables the warfighter to train as they fight in a distributed environment,” said John Bell, technical director at HII’s Mission Technologies LVC Solutions Group. “It’s fully scalable, so we can train at every level, from single ships and small groups of aircraft to carrier strike groups with air wings and combatant commands. We bring live, virtual, and constructive simulation training systems together into a single integrated organization.”

Airmen might hear such a statement and imagine that ships and aircraft carriers aren’t their problem, but Bell says when it comes to simulation, it’s all computers and software. In the digital realm, the difference between a ship and a fighter jet is just ones and zeros. The cloud-enabled network hubs HII built for the Navy in Norfolk, San Diego, and Japan facilitate training in every domain, with every service, and even with coalition partners.

“Using our open standards approach, we can interoperate training systems in the same way that go-to-war systems operate. We can even connect to our coalition partners wherever their training systems are located,” Bell said.

That concept translates directly to Air Force requirements that aim to tie together the many different simulation and training systems owned and operated by Air Force major commands. Because HII’s enterprise approach is technology agnostic, it effectively bridges seemingly incompatible systems using multiple protocols. HII integrates systems by developing advanced Government-owned tools such as the Joint Simulation Bus (JBUS), which supports simulation and tactical protocols used by DoD training and tactical systems.

“JBUS is a gateway and protocol translation service,” Bell said. “It allows us to adapt different protocols, simulations and tactical systems to the same standards. The beauty of open standards is that everybody that implements to an open standard is capable of interoperating.”

Coding individual software solutions for every system would be prohibitive in cost and time. But with JBUS,” Bell said, “We allow these systems to connect to the NCTE easily so they can start training today.”

That kind of universal interface is exactly what the Air Force seems to be looking for, Bell said.

“The U.S. Air Force has many training platforms that are each built by their own vendor, which means they are not initially built to interoperate,” said Bell, who has spent more than two decades working these issues. “Our approach is a vendor neutral open system standard that any vendor can adapt to by using common tools and processes, so they can easily plug their systems into this common architecture. This open standards enterprise approach is the way of the future.”

HII proved the concept in the Navy’s Fleet Synthetic Training-Aviation exercises.

“Fleet Synthetic Training is the Navy’s premier training program—it is equivalent to the Air Force’s Distributed Mission Operations Training Program,” Bell said. “We integrate high-fidelity tactical trainers for aviation into the NCTE within a scalable training architecture.”

NCTE can support small-scale operations like one or two pilots and planes conducting maneuver drills, or massive exercises in which multiple airwings and carrier strike groups train with joint and coalition partners.

“Integrating live training systems with those high-fidelity tactical trainers gives us a lot of insights into how a fully-blended LVC environment would work for the Air Force,” Bell said. “Fifth Generation fighters require a lot more sophistication of tactics and capability,” he said. “We’re looking at the different ways we can integrate high-fidelity simulations for the Joint Strike Fighter for testing and training in a common synthetic environment, using some of the lessons learned in developing the NCTE.”

HII has experience working with the Air National Guard’s Distributed Training Operations Center, having integrated that support nationwide. “The insight we get from conducting [ANG’s] location-wide training missions on a single network and their network connectivity and interoperability with other USAF DMO networks including DMON and MAF DMO, gives us a lot of insight into how Air Force Distributed Mission Operations works,” Bell said. “So we understand what the Air Force’s challenges are in running large training networks and how the techniques and approaches we’ve developed for the Navy can be applied to the Air Force’s training needs.”

That understanding includes a commitment to continuous modernization and advancement.

“We’re investigating how we can use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to analyze training event data,” Bell said. The technology can help improve both after-action reporting and understanding, he added: “When were the targets detected? When did the bomb get dropped? How close was the bomb hit to the target? Why didn’t we detect the enemy at the appropriate range? From there, we can start comparing trends from one event to the next.”

HII is also using digital twin technology to help improve its digital models.

“For LVC training, digital twin technology allows us to build high-fidelity representations of weapon systems, which is critical because our modern weapons systems depend on communications with each other in a fused-sensor-centric environment. Injecting a digital twin into that environment allows us to train at a much higher degree of fidelity that we can do with traditional simulation technology today.”

HII, Bell said, is developing the training capabilities of the future today to better prepare warfighters to join the joint force fight.

“Joint all domain training capabilities are a major challenge for the Department of Defense today,” Bell said. But HII has been supporting joint training for years. “We built the Navy Continuous Training Environment alongside the government with the intent of supporting joint warfare,” he added. “Our enterprise approach, with its tools, open architecture, and standards, is very applicable to the Air Force for conducting their joint all domain training with the other services.”