After Yearlong Delay, MH-139 Ready for Military Utility Testing

Aug. 11, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

DAYTON, OHIO—After months of unexpected delays, the Air Force’s MH-139 Grey Wolf is set to enter military utility testing within the coming month, a service program officer said.

The Air Force first announced flight testing of the Grey Wolf, intended to patrol the service’s sprawling intercontinental ballistic missile fields, in February 2020, and the service was hoping to declare initial operating capability by 2021.

Those plans were delayed, however, when the helicopter ran into trouble getting Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification. As a result, the Air Force’s planned purchase of eight helicopters in fiscal 2021 was delayed, and the buy in fiscal 2022 was skipped completely, the service announced in June 2021.

The FAA certification process has moved slowly since then, but a number of key supplemental type certifications were approved recently, Joe Lask, deputy division chief of helicopter programs for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, told reporters at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference Aug. 10.

“We have actually completed our first three subtype certifications as of last week,” Lask said. “So one, two, and three are all done, which clears our way to start that military utility testing we talked about in the past, where we exercise our military capabilities that we put on this aircraft, so it’s no longer an AW139—it’s an MH-139.”

That testing will begin this month, Lask said, expressing optimism that the program is starting to make progress again.

It’s an optimism the Air Force has backed up with budget plans to buy five of the helicopters in 2023 and 80 in total, a figure that is largely in line with the 84 initially planned. The service has also announced its selection of Joint Base Andrews, Md., as the fourth location to receive the Grey Wolf, after Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.

Still, a recent Government Accountability Office report faulted contractor Boeing for “overstating the stability of the design” of the helicopter and warned that the company “has not submitted some contractually required data on time.” On top of that, the GAO report states that “given the design instability, there are risks that later design changes could result in significant rework of aircraft already in production and retrofit of aircraft already delivered.”

Richardson: Digital Design Is Making Old Review Processes Obsolete

Aug. 11, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The era of “three-day critical design reviews” of Air Force programs may be ending with the advent of digital design and development methods, Gen. Duke Z. Richardson, head of Air Force Materiel Command, told attendees at an industry conference.

Speaking at AFMC’s Life Cycle Industry Days in Dayton, Ohio, Richardson said digital design is “changing everything,” including the lengthy processes of advancing programs to their next milestone.

“This is completely transforming how we’re doing systems engineering,” Richardson said of the new technology. Delegating decision-making to “the lowest level” and having a constant, up-to-date digital model or twin of the system that all interested parties can review will likely “end these cataclysmic, three-day critical design review events where I’m at a table with all these drawings—like I’m supposed to notice if there’s [something] missing. C’mon. That’s no way to do business.”

Design reviews “I think are going to eventually become a thing of the past because they happen all the time; every single day. We’ve got programs that are doing this now, where we have design reviews happening as a normal part of the workday.”

Richardson said “we’ll probably still have something like a CDR where people like me go and give it the stamp of approval, but really, it’s been going on the entire time.”

Also wiped out will be the contract data requirements list, because they’ll be no need for “waiting for something to plop on my desk … the CDRL is happening all the time. And so the schedule” is being updated all the time.

“It’s a mind shift,” he said, and he is strongly encouraging all AFMC people involved in contracting to take training in the technology, but not enough are yet doing so, he said.

The same thing is happening with testing, he said: There’s “traceability of test verification,” and “if we do the models right, we can actually do more virtual-world testing and less real-world testing.”

All this translates to faster manufacturing, Richardson said, pointing to the example of Boeing’s T-7 trainer, which went together “with an 80 percent reduction of labor hours. It’s just fantastic.”

He also admonished contractors that “if you’re in the defense industry, you need to start examining how that might change your manufacturing operations.”

Richardson said he “loves” that digital technology is “pushing a lot of manufacturing off the critical path, and it expands the industrial base. If you’re a small business, these sorts of methods allow you to play in a much larger way.” Manufacturing can be “moved off premises and get more sources involved.”

The benefits are “just so pervasive,” Richardson said, adding that he can’t think of any “cons.”

Richardson said his audience should take away from the conference the understanding that digital materiel management “applies to new systems” such as the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter program, and the T-7 trainer but also applies to “our legacy systems, like B-52 commercial re-engining or F-15EX. We’re not digitizing the entire aircraft in those cases, we’re digitizing the parts” that are coming in for improvement or change “in a larger way.”

However, for small modifications, “frankly, this doesn’t make sense. I’m not trying to say this fits everywhere. But if it’s a moderately-sized [modification], this is important, and we should be doing it,” Richardson said.

He challenged the defense industry to “get on the bus, or you’re going to get run over by the bus.”

Air Force PEO Looks to Speed Up Program Start, Testing for Wedgetail

Aug. 11, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

With concerns growing that Congress will once again fail to pass a spending bill in time for the start of the new fiscal year, one Air Force program in particular could suffer—the E-7 Wedgetail.

While it’s likely that lawmakers would pass a continuing resolution to keep the Pentagon and the rest of the government open if they don’t meet their Sept. 31 deadline, spending would be frozen at fiscal 2022 levels. And that typically prevents new start programs from getting underway.

While the Air Force announced in April that it will buy the Wedgetail to replace its aging Airborne Warning and Control System fleet, it hasn’t finalized a contract award with the aircraft’s manufacturer, Boeing. Under a CR, that usually wouldn’t be possible.

At the same time, the Air Force is facing pressure to get the E-7 ready to fly as quickly as possible to close any gap in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities left by the aging E-3 Sentries as they head to the Boneyard. At the moment, the first rapid prototype of the E-7 is scheduled to be delivered by 2027.

Looking to get ahead of any potential problems, the Air Force has submitted an above threshold reprogramming request, seeking to take a limited amount of funding from fiscal 2022 to speed up the contracting process and get the Wedgetail program officially started.

Such a request needs to go through several layers in the Pentagon before also getting approval from the Armed Services and Appropriations committees in both the Senate and the House.

“That is intended to provide us some flexibility, if approved. But right now our best schedule is showing a contract award in February [2023]. We are actively working that right now,” Steven Wert, program executive officer for the digital directorate, told reporters at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference.

That February timeline could shift slightly if the request is approved.

“That new start reprogramming would give us the flexibility to potentially speed it up somewhat. It’s not going to be a dramatic speed-up, but we’re doing everything we can,” Wert said.

In addition to the reprogramming request, the PEO is also seeking an “anomaly” to any CR that is passed that would allow the Wedgetail program to start as quickly as possible.

Once the program is officially started, there are other ways the Air Force can compress the Wedgetail’s timeline to fielding, Wert suggested. The United Kingdom is currently buying three E-7s to replace its own AWACS fleet, and the aircraft is expected to be in service by 2023.

“We see tremendous opportunities to accelerate test and evaluation, given that we’re buying a system very similar to the U.K. E-7,” Wert said. “Much of the testing can actually be done on a U.K. E-7 or a Wedgetail. So tremendous opportunities, especially with test and evaluation.”

The Air Force conducting tests for a new airframe on another nation’s aircraft would underscore the deep relationship between USAF and the Royal Air Force. And it could also serve a purpose for the RAF as well. Wert noted that the British “would like a few more [E-7s] as well,” and testing new capabilities for the U.S. could aid that push.

The U.K. isn’t the only other country interested in buying the Wedgetail, added Wert. Other nations have expressed “a lot of interest,” he claimed, mentioning one in particular—Saudi Arabia. The Royal Saudi Air Force currently operates a fleet of AWACS.

F-35 Squadrons in Alaska Shift to Full Operations as ‘Advanced Threats’ Grow ‘More Lethal’

Aug. 10, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has two new F-35 squadrons at its disposal in Alaska just as “quite a bit of action” has taken place in the combatant command’s area of responsibility and the “advanced threats” there are becoming “more lethal,” said the squadrons’ wing commander, Col. David J. Berkland.

Berkland’s 354th Fighter Wing at Eielson Air Force Base received the 54th of its 54 F-35s in April, giving Alaska—when also counting the F-22s at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson—the “largest concentration of fifth-gen, combat-coded airpower in the world” within its borders, Berkland told AFA’s president, retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, in an Air & Space Warfighters in Action virtual conversation Aug. 10.

Berkland said the wing’s priority now is to “shift ourselves into full operational capability to conduct agile combat employment operations throughout the Pacific AOR at austere locations.”

Unlike a typical wing assigned to an Air Force major command, the 354th Fighter Wing—with its motto “We’re ready to go at 50 below”—belongs to the joint INDOPACOM combatant command, Berkland explained. Situated at Eielson, “we can really, in a single fighter sortie, range to just about any AOR in the Northern Hemisphere pretty easily.”

In terms of “advanced threats” posed by the Chinese military’s technology, he said “they’re becoming more lethal, and they’re becoming more lethal at further and further ranges in terms of the ability of an air defense system to detect, target, and then engage our joint forces.”

Without going into detail about already “deploying forces throughout” the INDOPACOM AOR, Berkland said the goal of the wing’s “dynamic force employment events is to ensure a free and open Into-Pacific.”

Since F-35s began to arrive at Eielson in 2020, a “combat-focused mentality” has taken shape among the pilots whose experience ranges from new pilots who “did a lot of virtual reality-type simulated flying” in their training—“and they have performed brilliantly, to be honest,” Berkland said—to others who have “a couple thousand hours in a different airframe.

“And those airframes run the gamut of fighter aircraft across the Air Force. We get people in from the A-10, the Strike Eagle, the F-15C, obviously the F-16 as well.”

Their variety of backgrounds has proven to be both a challenge for the F-35 community—“because to some degree we have baggage from a different aircraft and a different culture”—and a strength because of the ability “to take the best of all those cultures, take the best of all those tactics and techniques and procedures, and blend them into what we’re doing with the F-35.”

As more F-35 natives have started flowing in, Lt. Col. Ryan Worrell, commander of the 356th Fighter Squadron, said “the community has really developed and grown to point where it is sustaining its own culture now” and the focus “is less about trying to determine what the culture is and more about bringing new people in.”

Transitioning from the F-16 to the F-35 was like going from driving a 1969 Mustang to a Tesla, Worrell said. The degree of automation has freed him up to fly less and think more.

The Mustang “makes a lot of great noise, and it still does the job extremely well.” The F-35, on the other hand, with its sensors and automation, involves less “driving the car” and more “managing the decisions that you’re making.

“I’m no longer running the radar. I’m no longer trying to manage where my radar is looking to get the correct aspect on something,” Worrell said.

In an exercise over the ocean, for example, when a tanker is lost, “you just lost a hundred thousand pounds of gas … and so you’re constantly involved in continuing to solve that problem. And because it’s less about specifically flying the aircraft and managing the sensors and more about making those decisions, you have the brain space to actually start to work through that.”

At the same time that standing up the new squadrons has brought together a broad mix of aviators, flying the F-35 has also built bridges “across services and across alliances,” Worrell said. “We actually had the Australian F-35s up here, and we flew as mixed formations with them—so two of them and two of us in a four-ship … all doing the same tactics from our tactics manuals, and it was incredible to be a part of that.”

The same effect played out in “similar integrations” with Marine Corps F-35Bs, he said.

“When you start to put more F-35s together from different communities, it doesn’t matter where you come from … you’re able to speak the same language and execute the same tactics together.”

Air Force Set to Get Rid of Small A-29, AT-6 Fleets, Program Official Says

Aug. 10, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

DAYTON, OHIO—Just over two years ago, the Air Force announced it was buying limited quantities of Textron’s AT-6s and Sierra Nevada Corp.’s A-29s. Now, the service is seemingly set to get rid of the aircraft, most likely in the form of a foreign military sale.

Should such a sale occur, it would mark the end of a prolonged back-and-forth. At the moment, Air Force Special Operations Command and Air Combat Command operate three A-29s and two AT-6s, respectively.

“Right now those will end up being probably declared excess defense articles, and we’ll look for other mission partners that may want to pick those up,” Edward Stanhouse, deputy program executive officer for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and special operations forces, told reporters at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference.

Both aircraft were initially proposed as part of the Air Force’s Light Attack/Armed Reconnaissance (LAAR) program that started in 2009. The program eventually fell prey to budget cuts but was revived in 2017 as the Light Attack Experiment program.

The A-29 and AT-6 were both re-entered into the competition and named finalists. In 2020, the Air Force announced it was buying two each of the airframes, followed by the purchase of a third A-29 a few months later.

The AT-6 was used for additional light-attack experiments with the Marine Corps and partner countries, while the A-29 was used as part of Air Force Special Operations Command’s foreign advisory mission. All told, the five planes cost more than $200 million.

“They were used for demonstrations, proof of concept demonstrations by both SOCOM and Air Combat Command,” Stanhouse said.

Those limited purchases, however, fell short of the large-scale procurement program that some wanted, and the Armed Overwatch program, launched by U.S. Special Operations Command, was tasked with identifying a similar light attack/ISR platform. SOCOM selected both the AT-6 and A-29 among the five finalists for the program, but eventually chose the AT-802U Sky Warden.

The last of the three A-29s ordered by the Air Force was delivered in March, while the AT-6s were delivered in 2021. Now, Stanhouse said, they’ll likely be declared “excess defense articles,” a Defense Security Cooperation Agency term for equipment or platforms that are “in excess of the Approved Force Acquisition Objective and Approved Force Retention Stock of all Department of Defense Components.”

As excess defense articles, the aircraft could then be transferred to a foreign government, through either the approval of Congress or the usual Foreign Military Sale process.

“I think the probability is potentially FMS, because we currently have FMS partners who are flying both the AT-6 and A-29. So I think there’s quite a bit of foreign interest,” Stanhouse said.

Indeed, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the Philippines, among others, all have A-29s in their fleets. Thailand has also ordered the AT-6.

Air Force Was ‘Hyper Focused’ on Cybersecurity for IT Networks. Now Other Systems Need Protection.

Aug. 10, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

DAYTON, Ohio—Looking to address Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s operational imperatives, cybersecurity leaders with the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center recently analyzed their networks and systems to see how they would hold up against cyber threats.

The leaders came away with a “sobering” observation: Key IT networks and data centers were secure, but the networks that support base facilities, weapons systems, and infrastructure were less so.

“From a defensive cyber point of view … before we were hyper-focused on information systems and protecting them,” James Robison, materiel leader for AFLCMC’s Defensive Cyber Systems Branch, said in a panel discussion at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference. “Through the work on the operational imperative, it became clear that it was those control systems, weapon systems—we need situational awareness across that entire landscape.”

The importance of cybersecurity beyond IT systems has become a “great concern,” added Danny Holtzman, a cyber technical director assigned to AFLCMC.

“The fact is, the adversary is going to take the easiest path forward,” Holtzman said. “And if they can disrupt our facilities and turn on the fire suppression systems so our stealth fighters are covered with fire suppression material, that doesn’t help us, right? So I think that’s a great concern. We are aware of it. We are trying to work it at an integrated level.”

Certain corners of the Pentagon have been sounding the alarm on the issue for years now, highlighting the fact that as weapon systems and their facilities increasingly leverage new technologies and become connected, they also become potential targets for adversaries. AFLCMC’s work emphasized that those targets need more protection.

“One of those sobering things we found during the operational imperative work was that gap … the disconnect between a lot of the IT and the networks and the data centers that host capabilities that we rely on, [and] the actual base infrastructure and those control systems that are across many of our air bases,” said Brian Kropa, AFLCMC technical adviser for advanced cyber technology.

Experts had several suggestions for how to remedy that gap. On one hand, Kropa noted the importance of protecting the data that feed into systems. Adversaries seeking to disrupt base infrastructure systems could try to manipulate or corrupt data to cause unexpected, disruptive actions.

One of the Air Force’s key efforts in that regard is implementing zero trust, which makes it harder for hackers to move inside a network once they’ve penetrated its walls by interrogating traffic at every juncture as it tries to move inside the network.

“Zero trust is coming along,” Kropa said. “That term can mean many things to many different people. Part of zero trust in my mind is protecting the data and the data integrity piece and building access control into our system. So we really don’t need classification levels anymore or separate infrastructures or air-gapped networks, because we’re really trying to concentrate on the data in and of itself. Much harder problem—it needs a lot of R&D work and a lot of innovation.”

The problem can also be addressed by attacking it early in production cycles, added Matthew Aguirre, technical director of AFLCMC’s cryptologic systems group.

“We have all of these operational activities that need to be supported on the back end. But there’s a lot of processes and activities that happen on the front end, in terms of design, production, provisioning, certification, production, all of these activities,” Aguirre said. “What we’re trying to do as an organization is to think through how we support system concepts through modeling out all of the activities that need to happen in order to support that system. Whether it’s a control system or an operational weapon system, the idea is that we should understand all of the activities that go into producing, delivering, and sustaining capability, and then understanding where those operational activities are, what the inputs and what the outputs look like, what the threats are for each of those operational activities.”

B-52 Will Get at Least One New Designation With Radar, Engine Upgrades

Aug. 10, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The B-52H will be redesignated the B-52J or possibly B-52K when it gets a new radar and new engines, but the Air Force hasn’t yet decided what will constitute the new B-52 variant, according to Col. Louis Ruscetta, senior materiel leader for the program.

The program has also developed a new estimate of what the re-engining will cost and is about to submit it to Congress, as directed under last year’s defense bill, but Ruscetta said reports of a 50 percent overrun are far overstated. In fact, he said he sees no overruns on the horizon.

The radar and engine program represent “the largest modification in the history” of the B-52, Ruscetta told reporters at Air Force Materiel Command’s Life Cycle Industry Days conference in Dayton, Ohio. The change from B-52G to B-52H in 1961 was mainly the switch to the TF33 engine, but the new package includes radar, engines, communications, pylons, cockpit displays, and the deletion of one crew member station, meaning “it makes sense” to have a new designation, Ruscetta said.

The question is whether there will be two designations, because some of the new APG-79B4 radars will be installed on the bombers before the new Rolls-Royce F130 engines, Ruscetta said. The B-52 pilot operating manual and maintenance manuals will be re-written for the version with the new radar; and will be re-written again when the engines are changed, Ruscetta said.

“What the Air Force, along with Global Strike Command, needs to look at, is how do we define” the new variant, he said. The decision will be made sometime within the next two years, before installations begin, Ruscetta added.

Ruscetta described the new active, electronically scanned array radar as a “game changer” for the B-52, especially as the Air Force migrates toward the two-bomber fleet of B-21s and B-52s. The APG-79 is effectively the same radar as on the export version of the Navy F/A-18 fighter, with the array turned “upside down” so it looks more down at the ground than up at the sky, Ruscetta said.

“We will have fighter-quality radar … to support air-to-ground operations,” he said, and be better able to operate “with other coalition partners” because the bomber will be able to use the same sensor format. It will be able to scan farther, “guide weapons in flight,” and improve the bomber’s situational awareness, he said. The B-52 today is still flying with its 1960s mechanical-scan radar.

The radar mod just passed critical design review “a few months ago, so we are now in the next stage of this program,” he said. That entails “building up the systems integration lab” (SIL) that will vet the radar as it affects the other parts of the B-52, to ensure no harmful or unintended side effects of the new equipment ahead of flight testing. The SIL will be a full representation of the system, minus its cooling equipment.

The new radar will be “segregated” from the B-52’s electronic warfare suite, Ruscetta said, but the new gear takes up less volume than the old and “gives us some growth space” for additional EW functions.

The program office is working on how the installations of the radars, engines, and other gear will be staged. Some bombers will get new radars before they get new engines, but later, when both are available, the preference will be to do the mods together, organically, during regular depot visits, when the aircraft are already “opened up,” Ruscetta said.

“We have an integration team looking at … the dependencies” of all the new equipment from the perspectives of size, weight, and power, Ruscetta said, to fashion the most logical sequence of installations. Minimal downtime is necessary to make sure Air Force Global Strike Command doesn’t dip below the operationally required minimum numbers of bombers.

“We are looking for those friction areas” that could spell logjams in the process, Ruscetta said. “We’re looking to minimize and reduce what could go wrong,” he said, “and if things do go wrong, how can I still operate?”

At some point, there will be an aircraft that will have all the new mods on it, and “we may do some regression testing” at that point, but the goal is to have shaken out any problems before that milestone.

Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex at Tinker Air Force Base pushes out about 17 B-52s per year, Ruscetta said.

“It does not make sense to have multiple [installation] lines, with multiple aircraft down at once,” Ruscetta said, so the plan is to do as much of the mod as possible at once, during depot.

Flight testing with the new radar will start in late 2025, and the first production versions should be built around the same time. They’ll be installed in early 2027, Ruscetta said, and initial operational capability (IOC) with the radar will consist of 12 aircraft as the required assets available for the declaration. The first aircraft will be operational with the new engines circa 2030.

A major acquisition program doesn’t usually have to submit a Selected Acquisition Report until after Milestone B—and the B-52 Commercial Engine Replacement Program (CERP) isn’t there yet—but the program has developed a cost estimate and submitted it to Headquarters, Air Force, and it will go to Congress “in the very near future,” Ruscetta said.

Reports of a 50 percent increase in CERP costs were “taken out of context,” Ruscetta said. The business case analysis done in 2017 wasn’t comprehensive and didn’t anticipate all the ramifications of the upgrade, and cost-estimating models have been updated. The Air Force used the KC-135 re-engining as its model but is now using the more recent C-5 re-engining as a guide to costs.

“I don’t have one program related to the engine replacement … that is in overrun,” Ruscetta said, “and I don’t foresee an overrun … in the future.”

In a later email, Ruscetta said the program “has seen minor cost growth … of about 12 percent” since the first Air Force independent cost estimate in 2019.

“The FY22 NDAA established a cost baseline for the CERP program using the FY’20 cost estimate. Currently, we have seen estimated growth of 3% from the congressionally mandated baseline.”

The report will “give Congress a full update on the status of the CERP,” Ruscetta said. There has been cost growth discovered due to the complexity of integrating the new engines, controls, and displays needed on the B-52.

“It is more than just new engines,” he said. It’s “new pylons … generators … fuel lines … cockpit displays.” It is “a much bigger effort than just Rolls-Royce.” Boeing is the integrator of the all the B-52 upgrades.

“We just held our engine subsystem preliminary design review at Rolls-Royce … it was a very successful event,” he said, and showed a strong partnership with Boeing. The full system-level PDR will be held later this year. “The design is fairly stable,” Ruscetta said. The engine and radar upgrades were intended to have almost no new development.

The major challenge to program schedule now is not design, but the supply chain, Ruscetta added, “just like any program managing in a … COVID environment.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 9:20 p.m. Eastern time to include the Air Force’s estimates of cost growth on the B-52 CERP as well as the required assets available necessary to declare initial operational capability with the new radar in 2027.

Biden Signs PACT Act to Expand VA Coverage for Toxic Exposure, but Some Are Left Out

Aug. 10, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

For two decades, veterans of the Global War on Terrorism returned home and ended their service with headaches, difficulty breathing, and gastrointestinal problems related to toxic chemical exposure in the line of duty. Unable to prove their ailments were service related, the Department of Veterans Affairs often denied them coverage.

Thousands of veterans developed rare brain and lung cancers years after service and died, including President Joe Biden’s own son, Beau Biden, who was exposed to toxic fumes from a burn pit in Iraq during service in the Delaware Army National Guard.

After years of wrangling in Congress and more than a dozen failed bills, Biden signed a bill marking the largest expansion of VA health care in 30 years Aug. 10, adding more than 5 million eligible veterans but leaving some waiting up to 10 years for phase-in periods or without coverage for chronic conditions.

“Veterans of the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan did not only face dangers in battle, they were breathing toxic smoke from burn pits,” Biden said before signing the PACT Act into law.

The PACT Act immediately gives 23 conditions presumptive status, making service members eligible for care without proving that brain, respiratory, or other cancers were service-related.

“You could actually see some of it in the air—burn pits the size of football fields, incinerated waste of war such as tires, poisonous chemicals, jet fuel,” Biden said. “A lot of places where our Soldiers were sleeping were literally a quarter mile, half mile away from it. And where they ate their chow. I mean, it was there all the time.”

The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act expands eligibility for care to veterans of the Gulf War, to post-9/11 veterans, and to Vietnam veterans exposed to the toxic herbicide Agent Orange.

Post-9/11 veterans will be able to apply for VA care up to 10 years after their service ended. Survivors are eligible for monthly stipends and help with health care, life and home loan insurance, and tuition.

The wife and daughter of deceased Sgt. 1st Class Robinson, Danielle and Brielle Robinson, were on hand for the signing. Brielle, clutching a stuffed animal, stood beside the President as he sat at a desk to sign the PACT Act into law. Biden turned and spoke to her several times before handing her the pen he used to ink the legislation.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said the law would immediately empower the department to serve many of the millions of claims that have been denied in recent years.

“We encourage anyone who might be eligible for PACT Act benefits to apply right away,” McDonough said, citing the informational website va.gov/pact. “We’ll stop at nothing to make sure every veteran, every family member, and every survivor gets everything they’ve earned, and they deserve.”

‘A 70 Percent Solution’

Stronghold Freedom Foundation board chair and Army veteran Mark T. Jackson told Air Force Magazine that the law will not reach every suffering veteran.

“It’s a 70 percent solution,” said Jackson, who served at Karshi-Khanabad (K2) Air Base, a secret Uzbek staging base for the invasion of Afghanistan where he was exposed to toxins. On a separate tour, Jackson was later exposed to burn pit smoke in Iraq, and he now has chronic illnesses.

“The catastrophic diseases are now presumptive. But a lot of the chronic conditions you still have to kind of fight those piecemeal,” he said. “The folks that are profoundly ill, they’re going to be covered. They’re going to be covered for the first time, and they’ll be covered comprehensively.”

Jackson, who worked for years with congressional staffs on both sides of the aisle, said the bill signed into law by Biden draws on some 15 separate pieces of legislation that have been advocated for by senators including Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and representatives such as Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.).

“They took every conceivable type of toxic exposure and [gave] at least lip service to a lot of it,” he said.

Post-9/11 exposure sites on the list now include Afghanistan, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and the airspace above all those locations.

Radiation exposure will now be treated for service members who responded beginning Jan. 17, 1966, and ending March 31, 1967, to the collision of a B–52 bomber and refueling plane that released four thermonuclear weapons in the vicinity of Palomares, Spain. Similarly, those who responded between January 21, 1968, and September 25, 1968, to an onboard fire and crash of a B-52 that caused the release of four thermonuclear weapons near Thule Air Base, Greenland, will have a presumption of coverage. Many more toxic exposure sites are in the new legislation.

Jackson said there are no provisions for surviving family members, birth defects, and many chronic diseases beyond a set list of respiratory disorders.

He added, however, that the bill will mandate that the Department of Defense and VA conduct additional epidemiological studies that could be used in the future to add presumptive diseases to the list.

Stripping out some of the areas of coverage, while delaying eligibility for others, are some of the ways the bill won over budget-conscious Republicans, 41 of whom changed their votes and struck down an earlier version of the bill July 27.

“Money was the big holdup,” Jackson said.

“One of the compromises they came up with was everybody’s not eligible all at the same time,” he added. The number of presumptive illnesses was also limited. “They picked what they felt were either the most profoundly devastating or the most common that could be reasonably affiliated with the burn pits.”

The “phase-in” protocol limits which veterans will have access to VA health care over the next 10 years, making them eligible in two-year increments based on their discharge dates, locations, and toxic exposure risk activity.

“It means that there’s more delay. It means that help is coming, and you can mark your calendar, but you’re not necessarily going to be eligible the day President Biden signs the bill,” he said. “If you’re someone that is not ill yet, or perhaps who becomes ill at some point before your phase-in period, there’s going to be a profound effect because that care won’t be available to you when you need it.”

Jackson said even those veterans who remain outside of the coverage or whose chronic condition are not covered are eligible for toxic exposure screenings to know what ailments they may have. The VA and veterans organizations will be guiding veterans on how they can apply for the coverage.

“One of the larger victories in this is the explicit admission by the government that, yes, these places were toxic, they were dangerous, and they made people sick,” said Jackson. “The bullet moving through a lot of these bodies is disease from the toxic exposure.”

Richardson: TBG and HAWC Can Still ‘Inform’ Other Hypersonic Efforts

Aug. 10, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Tactical Boost Glide program and the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept still have value, even though the programs they support are either in source selection or flight testing, Gen. Duke Z. Richardson, head of Air Force Materiel Command, said Aug. 10.

The Air Force is pursuing the TBG and HAWC programs jointly with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Speaking with reporters at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference in Dayton, Ohio, Richardson said the technologies in the AGM-183 Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) and Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) “are mature enough that they don’t require the completion” of the TBG and HAWC.

The ARRW is being readied for an operational flight test by the end of the year, Richardson said. The HACM is set for a source selection in September, with a contractor to be chosen from among Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.

“I do think there’s value in completing” the two hypersonic projects with DARPA, Richardson said.

“We can reduce risk by letting those programs run.” He said there’s a difference between “whether they’re required, or inform” the operational systems. He said the research teams and the companies building the operational missiles are “linked up pretty tight.” The HAWC has had successful test flights in the last year; both with the Lockheed Martin/Aerojet Rocketdyne team and the Raytheon/Northrop Grumman team.

However, Richardson said that continuing the TBG and HAWC will not create leapfrog technologies that will set the stage for future missiles that will go beyond the capabilities of the ARRW and HACM.

Richardson said he’s unconcerned by the test failures that have plagued the ARRW program, or as he called them, “burps.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine and China’s belligerence and technological advancement in recent years have created a greater tolerance for test failures, he said, and even Congress “gets” the need to be able to fail as a way to learn. What’s trying the patience of both Pentagon leaders and Congress is the pace of testing, which Richardson said is too slow, largely driven by lack of range space and test facilities such as wind tunnels.

“I don’t think folks mind failing. I think they just mind four- to six-month gaps between tests,” he said. “The question is … how do we get through failures faster? Because we’re going to fail.” Programs learn from failures, he said; the key is to fail quickly, fix the problem, and press on. With every failure, “we go through a process to figure out why.”

He noted that the Air Force is moving toward using Global Hawk platforms to collect telemetry on hypersonic missile tests rather than use ships for this purpose. This should speed up the process, he said.

Even so, he said “our process is probably a little more deliberate” than “our pacing challenger,” China. “We’re probably not going to have as many failures” as China does, he said. How the Air Force will use hypersonic missiles is also different than how China will employ them, he said, suggesting that a comparison with China in hypersonic progress isn’t meaningful.

Also, ARRW and HACM are different approaches to hypersonic weapons: ARRW is a glider, while the HACM will be an air-breathing system with longer range but can be made smaller than ARRW.

“Their flight profiles are different. Their closing maneuvers are different. The platforms they reside on is different,” Richardson said.

It will be up to “national leaders” to decide if the Air Force needs to choose either the ARRW or HACM.

“I hope not,” he said, indicating a preference to pursue both. But, “it remains to be seen.”

HACM is “trailing a little bit behind” ARRW in the development process, he said.

If ARRW works well in upcoming tests, there will be some “residual missiles” the Air Force will have available for operational use, he said. But, “if we have to burn through the residual missiles, there won’t be.” The Air Force funded 12 ARRWS in the fiscal 2022 budget.