PACAF Ponders Inter-Pacific Academy for NCOs as Partner Recruitment Lags

Aug. 5, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

When top Air Force leaders graced the stage at a senior noncommissioned officers’ summit Aug. 1 to urge attendees from 65 nations to collaborate with the United States, one region was noticeably underrepresented: the Indo-Pacific.

Of the 39 partner nations that Pacific Air Forces identifies in the Indo-Pacific region, only eight were represented at the summit. Most there, such as Japan and Australia, were longstanding allies. At a similar event as part of the September 2021 Pacific Air Chiefs Conference at PACAF headquarters in Hawaii, only 13 Pacific partner nations sent their senior enlisted leaders to attend.

Pacific Air Forces is hoping an effort to create an Inter-Pacific Air Forces Academy for regional NCOs will help strengthen relationships and enhance interoperability in the region defined as the most important according to the National Defense Strategy.

“We have many regions that are here today,” including South America, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and Africa, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass told Air Force Magazine before the start of the weeklong event.

“What all of those nations will come together and see is kind of that shared purpose and that shared commitment that we have to one another,” Bass said. “Relationships aren’t built overnight. And so, we have to have touch points like this, where we come together and forge the relationships and trust that we’re going to need for years to come.”

Asked if she will be reaching out to new INDOPACOM partners, Bass said the ties already existed.

“I don’t think they’re new ties,” she said. “The ties have already been there with a lot of our INDOPACOM nations. We’re continuing to strengthen them.”

But Command Chief Master Sergeant of Pacific Air Forces Sergeant David R. Wolfe told Air Force Magazine that outreach to the region hasn’t been that easy. Especially for smaller nations dependent on their economic ties to China, fostering a security partnership with the United States could come with costs.

“Every country in the world has economic ties with China,” Wolfe said. “What we need from our partner nations is to communicate the value of the enlisted force, to their success in integrating militarily with all of the partnerships that we have out there already.”

Wolfe said the U.S. goal is for partner nations in the Pacific to value their enlisted corps in a way that will make them “relevant, ready, trained” with a level of competence on par with long-standing American partner nations in the region.

The eight attending states were Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Mongolia, Singapore, Thailand, and a representative from the island of Taiwan.

Together they represent a selection of U.S. partners in the Pacific that already have long-standing defense and security ties. They buy U.S. defense equipment, or in the case of Mongolia, they represent a country where PACAF intends to increase its defense assistance in coming years.

“We’re missing way more than I would like to,” said Wolfe, noting the absence from the summit of quad member India and growing defense partners Indonesia and Vietnam. “We did everything that we could to get as many countries as we possibly could here.”

Notably, none of the smaller Pacific nations were present. Recently, PACAF held the Valiant Shield exercise in the South Pacific nation of Palau and has been competing fiercely with China for defense relationships on smaller islands that would be valuable for employing the agile combat employment concept, whereby aircraft can land and quickly depart in austere environments with minimal equipment.

Wolfe said the lack of Indo-Pacific attendance at the NCO event was less a matter of countries being concerned about what China thinks than their own lack of investment in their NCO corps.

“The main reason is that there is a variable level of commitment to the enlisted force in our partner nations,” he said. “An event like this sends the message to our [partners]—we just had the Secretary and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force here spending an hour with just us.”

PACAF’s main objective for the senior enlisted summit was to take the steps to establish an Inter-Pacific Air Forces Academy for NCO training. Wolfe later said that an Aug. 2 PACAF breakout session discussed the fundamentals of the future school and what manpower and resources other nations might be able to contribute.

The academy is more than U.S. altruism—it’s about alignment with National Defense Strategy objectives.

“We can’t go into a partnership with a country that doesn’t at least have some terms of reference that are similar to ours for interoperability,” Wolfe said.

An example would be a country that also flies the F-35. To be interoperable with the United States, that country must be able to “do things like we do,” such as maintenance, launching, and turning the aircraft after landing to launch again the next day.

“It’s only a few countries in this room that could do that because they don’t have the workforce, the enlisted corps, to be able to be a 24-hour operation,” he said.

Interoperability enhances integrated deterrence as well, the concept promoted by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III whereby all the levers of national power are used to deter an adversary such as China.

“Integrated deterrence isn’t integrated if you don’t have countries that can do like things,” Wolfe said.

While only the eight nations present unanimously supported moving forward with the Inter-Pacific Academy, notably Canada and the United Kingdom indicated they wanted to have a role as well.

“Everybody’s worried about China—it doesn’t matter where you’re at on the globe,” Wolfe said, noting that many European nations are sending aircraft to joint exercises in the Pacific as competition with China steps up.

The academy idea builds on the successful National Guard State Partnership Program to train partner nations in the Pacific and a PACAF program that dispatches mobile training teams for professional military education and for sergeant training.

Wolfe cited the Philippines as PACAF’s most aggressive partnership at the moment. He said that even with a recent political change of government that has indicated a willingness to cooperate militarily with China, the Philippines is still deepening its integration with the United States.

Wolfe said Bass is working with the Philippines to help establish an NCO first sergeant position that would be proposed to the country’s military leadership.

“I would say small forward progress with the new government,” he said of the Philippines, adding that Singapore was also a “stalwart partner.”

PACAF views Brunei, India, and Sri Lanka as additional Pacific countries where it can deepen its NCO partnerships, the PACAF command chief indicated.

“We have a program to evaluate where everybody’s at kind of on the spectrum,” Wolfe said. “All we’re trying to do is help every country take whatever the next step is.”

Air Force Pilot Program Centralizes Resources for Sexual Assault, Harassment Survivors

Aug. 4, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Department of the Air Force launched a pilot program Aug. 1 to centralize resources for survivors of sexual assault, sexual harassment, domestic abuse, and other forms of “interpersonal violence.”

The Integrated Response Co-Location Pilot program is being tested at seven locations across the DAF to evaluate the effectiveness of a more-encompassing approach to responding and assisting survivors, an Air Force release stated.

Under the pilot program, five services for Airmen, Guardians, and their families will be gathered into one location:

Sexual Assault Response Coordinator
Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Victim Advocate
Domestic Abuse Victim Advocate
Victim’s Counsel
Religious Support Team

The seven bases where the pilot program will launch are:

Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas
Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif.
Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va.
Hill Air Force Base, Utah
Misawa Air Base, Japan
RAF Lakenheath, U.K.
Offutt Air Force Base, Neb.

Data from the next six months at those seven bases will be compared to data from seven “control” bases.

“This is about supporting victims, plain and simple,” undersecretary of the Air Force Gina Ortiz Jones said in a statement. “Co-locating support services for victims of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and other forms of interpersonal violence is meant to help victims easily navigate available resources. We’re committed to increasing awareness of response services, minimizing the number of times a victim has to tell their story, and collecting the data to improve response and prevention efforts.”

The pilot program follows on a November 2021 report from the Air Force’s Interpersonal Violence Task Force, which found that more than 35,000 Airmen and Guardians said they had experienced some form of behavior in the past two years that the task force identified on a “Continuum of Harm.” Those behaviors, 81 in total, included everything from physical violence to sexual harassment to workplace bullying and hazing.

The majority of those service members said they didn’t report the behaviors, with many saying they didn’t think anything would be done or that they thought it would make things worse for themselves. Of those who did report, the majority said they were not satisfied with the support services provided.

One of three recommendations from that report was to establish “a one-stop policy for victims of interpersonal violence.”

GE, Pratt & Whitney Publicly Pitch F-35 Engine Plans as Decision Looms

Aug. 4, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

FARNBOROUGH, U.K.—Meeting with reporters, industry leaders, and military officials from across the world at the Farnborough International Airshow, engine-makers GE Aviation and Pratt & Whitney laid out their competing visions for the future of F-35 propulsion in July.

While executives from both companies agreed that the fifth-gen fighter’s engine program needs a change, they continue to pitch sharply different approaches—and assessments of what the problem itself is.

GE is pushing to replace the current F135 engine with its cutting-edge XA100, developed as part of the Air Force’s Advanced Engine Transition Program and described by David Tweedie, GE’s general manager of Advanced Combat Engines, as providing a generational-level jump in capabilities.

Pratt & Whitney is offering what it calls its F135 Enhanced Engine Package, which Jennifer Latka, vice president of the F135 program, likened to a “block upgrade” that will be cheaper, faster to field, and more than sufficient for the Joint Program Office’s needs.

Both contractors took extra steps to publicly make their case, as Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has hinted that a final decision could be coming soon. Pratt & Whitney used advertising on London buses to appeal to decision-makers visiting Farnborough, while GE participated in a public forum session.

Need for Change

Leading Pentagon officials and lawmakers have expressed frustration with the F-35’s sustainment problems, particularly with the engine, for years now. And the issue seemingly reached a critical point when Air Force leaders said in July 2021 that more than 40 of the service’s F-35As were without an engine due to maintenance issues—nearly 15 percent of the fleet.

Acknowledging those problems, Latka pointed to several factors, including increased demand for power and cooling for other systems on the jet, delays in standing up maintenance depots, and a sustainment enterprise that differs from previous fighter programs.

Still, the program has improved as of late, she said.

“We continue to work on reliability improvements, to keep the engine on the wing even longer,” Latka said. “And we’re in a very, very good place right now. We have improved the aircraft-on-ground situation by 75 percent between January 1 and now, so we’re far, far exceeding the program’s objectives.”

Yet as leaders now look to the future of the F-35, they face a decision in how drastically they want to overhaul the engine, depending on whether they simply want better thermal management or even more.

Adaptive Engines

As part of AETP, both GE and Pratt & Whitney have developed prototypes of adaptive engines—propulsion systems that Tweedie says will provide “next-generation capability.”

In particular, GE is claiming that the XA100 would improve the F-35’s range by 30 percent, its acceleration by 20 to 40 percent, its fuel efficiency by 25 percent, and its thermal management capabilities by 100 percent.

Tweedie laid out three reasons for those jumps: the engine’s ability to transition between modes optimized for thrust and for range, a third stream of air to help with cooling, and “advanced materials and manufacturing techniques” such as ceramic matrix composites and 3-D printing that produce parts that are lighter and can withstand more heat.

Thus far, GE has built two prototype XA100 engines. Tweedie declined to disclose exactly how many hours of run time those engines have gotten during testing at both GE and Air Force facilities but said it was in the “hundreds.”

“We’re very pleased with the results so far on both the engine tests. And the more we run it, the more we really like this engine,” Tweedie said. “And it’s meeting the aggressive and challenging goals that were set out there. And when we conclude this phase of testing, we really believe we’ve met the objectives of the Air Force, which were to not do an incremental improvement but to fundamentally make that generational change.”

That generational change could be delivered “by the end of the decade,” Tweedie said. That timeline is slightly longer than one proposed by Congress in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which called for every Air Force F-35 to get AETP engines by 2027. Tweedie previously said such a goal is “certainly within the art of the possible.”

Getting there, however, would require coordination and cooperation between the Joint Program Office, the various services, and Congress, Tweedie acknowledged, and there is a significant problem in that regard: The XA100 will fit on the F-35A and F-35C, but its ability to integrate onto the short-take-off-and-vertical-landing F-35B is unclear.

“We really focused on doing the A and the C [models],” Tweedie said. “Now the B model does present certainly unique integration challenges, without question. But now that we have the prototype design laid flat, it’s in the test cell, it’s running, we know what we’ve got. … We are under contract from the Joint Program Office, working collaboratively with Lockheed and Rolls-Royce on the lift fan, to look at, what can we do with the XA100? And how can we leverage that into an F-35B? And what would be the capability improvements that we can provide to that platform? And what are the incremental costs in development and time associated with coming out with a B model capability leveraged from what we’re doing on the A and the C?”

The study is still ongoing, Tweedie said, but GE hopes to have data by this fall.

Pratt & Whitney, meanwhile, is adamant that neither the XA100 nor its own AETP engine, the XA101, will work on the F-35B.

“No matter what anyone tells you, it’s not going to fit inside a STOVL,” Latka said. “There’s a third duct in the XA engines, both ours and our competitor’s, and that physically doesn’t work. … There’s still a tremendous amount of design work to do on the aircraft because the new engine is 1,000 pounds more, and all of that structural analysis hasn’t been done yet.”

Tweedie declined to confirm how much heavier the XA100 is but said GE has worked with F-35 maker Lockheed Martin and the Air Force to ensure that the added weight will be “certainly tolerable and not a challenge from an integration perspective.”

EEP

While Pratt & Whitney is down on the idea of an AETP engine on the F-35, the engine maker believes it will be used on a future fighter.

“In my opinion, the AETP program, thank goodness for it, because we need to stay ahead of our adversaries as it relates to propulsion,” Latka said. “It’s one of the few advantages we have from a defense standpoint. And that program really matured sixth-gen technology for propulsion, and it will absolutely be used, whether it’s GE or Pratt & Whitney. That is what we’ll be moving into NGAD.”

But such technologies aren’t needed for the F-35, Latka argued, and installing them in only some of the F-35 fleet will create costly, separate supply chains and sustainment enterprises. In speaking with international delegations at Farnborough, Lakta said a common concern was maintaining “that international alliance, right, and keeping the glue together.”

In contrast, Pratt & Whitney is arguing that its “Enhanced Engine Package” will solve what it believes is the F135’s main issue—thermal management.

“The problem statement, even though there’s no official requirement, it’s sort of derived, is around this cooling issue. … You would never in a million years put a new engine, brand-new engine, into an aircraft to solve the cooling issue,” Latka said. “And that’s why Pratt & Whitney is offering the enhanced engine package, which is a core upgrade.”

That’s not to say that some elements of the XA101 couldn’t become part of the F135. Being part of AETP, as well as the Navy’s fuel burn reduction program, Pratt & Whitney has “the ability to leverage those investments and pull a little bit of the new stuff onto the existing engine,” Latka said.

Latka also claimed that the future block upgrades won’t be necessary over the course of the F-35’s life cycle—projected to reach 2070—because the core upgrade at the heart of the Enhanced Engine Package will produce more than enough thermal management to handle future systems that may be added to the fighter.

“In the future, if you want to bring even more into the jet, you don’t even need to do this again,” Latka said. “You’ve still got margin and headroom, and it allows the partnership to remain across the As, Bs, and Cs and the international partners because everybody maintains the same configuration [of] propulsion system.”

NRO Director: Agency Will Accept Instructions From Space Command

Aug. 4, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

The leader of the National Reconnaissance Office said the NRO will follow instructions from U.S. Space Command if needed. Meanwhile, the NRO awaits a finding by the Space Force on whether the office’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities “need to expand.”

In a webinar hosted by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies on Aug. 4, NRO director Christopher Scolese described how the office is formalizing its roles and relationships among the defense space and intelligence agencies.

Addressing the needs of both the Defense Department and Intelligence Community, the NRO gets its instructions—“what to look at and listen to”—from the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Scolese explained.

“They collect all the requirements from the combatant commands, from the broader DOD, and from the Intelligence Community,” Scolese said. The two agencies “then let us know where the priorities are, and then we go off and manage the constellation.”

The NRO has had “a longstanding relationship” with U.S. Space Command and its predecessors, Scolese said. Now the two entities are hammering out “the framework for how we’re going to operate under various conditions.

“Because it will be necessary for us to coordinate and, in some cases, take direction. And we have agreed to do that. We’re in the process of developing the strategies on how that happens, and when it happens, and under what situations it happens,” he continued. “For the most part, it’s a coordination effort, but it sometimes will be, ‘Hey, you need to do this.’ And we will do that.”

Like the Space Force, Scolese said the NRO is adding to its satellite constellations to make them more resilient against attacks—and that doing so is also making the system “more responsive” because with more satellites, the office can revisit sites for observation more frequently.

Smaller satellites built on common buses are also adding to the constellations’ resilience because they’re fast to replace and can be launched from more sites. NRO launches have now taken off from Rocket Lab’s New Zealand hub and NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in addition to the typical Eastern Range and Western Range launch sites in Florida and California; and an air-launched flight from the U.K. is coming up later this year.

“Having the capability to launch pretty much from almost anywhere in the world gives us great flexibility,” Scolese said. “Should we lose a capability either due to a mission failure or … if we should lose them due to some adversary action that would take them out, we now have more places to go off and launch from and, therefore, reconstitute the constellation.”

Scolese said he didn’t foresee big changes to the NRO’s role based on a study of its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities. He didn’t see a need for the Space Force to contract separately for commercial ISR products because it makes the information it acquires readily available.

“So the mechanism is there already for organizations to take advantage of,” Scolese said. Meanwhile the Space Force is “studying ISR in general. They will find out if we need to expand that, or if it’s fine as is, and then we’ll adjust, or adjust as a community.”

Ukraine Needs NASAMS to Defend Against Russian Cruise Missiles

Aug. 4, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Russia’s long-range bombers fire cruise missiles against Ukrainian civilian and military infrastructure nearly unimpeded, so Ukraine needs surface-to-air missile systems that can track and destroy cruise missiles, a senior Ukrainian defense official told Air Force Magazine.

Russian TU-160 and TU-135 strategic bombers take off in Russian airspace, off-limits territory for attack with the U.S.-supplied weapons that Ukraine now operates. Once airborne, they launch deadly cruise missiles capable of hitting targets across Ukraine. Then the bombers safely land, having never been in danger.

The destruction has been relentless. Civilian apartment buildings, recreation centers, shopping malls, and port facilities. Russia alleges to have also hit Ukrainian weapons depots.

Ukraine’s network of surface-to-air missile systems has helped. The Norwegian-built National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS), which is also used to protect Washington, D.C., will be an added advantage. But two systems announced by President Joe Biden on July 1 and under contract by the U.S. government for Ukraine are believed to be months away from delivery.

A Ukrainian Defense Ministry official told Air Force Magazine they are hoping the NASAMS will arrive by mid-September.

“We need specific systems that can track and shoot down cruise missiles,” Chief Master Sergeant of the Ukrainian Air Force Kostiantyn Stanislavchuk told Air Force Magazine on the sidelines of the Senior Enlisted Leader International Summit near Washington, D.C.

Stanislavchuk was on hand to tell NCO leaders from more than 60 countries how Ukraine’s NCO corps has been able to push back Russia thanks to U.S. and NATO standard training.

Still, the enlisted chief said there are limits to what Ukrainian forces can do against superior Russian aircraft and sophisticated cruise missiles.

“In the current air picture, we’re seeing the Ukrainian Air Force is dominant in the areas that they are controlling right now,” he said. “The Russians are not even getting close to actually pushing through it. They can’t because there’s too much defense, there’s too much coverage on that area.”

Stanislavchuk said he wanted to see all of Ukraine protected by the Ukrainian Air Force. He told a story from the early days of the conflict to demonstrate the will of Ukraine’s pilots.

Four Russian fighters were observed approaching Kyiv.

The Ukrainian Air Force launched two MiG-29s to intercept the aircraft. When the two pilots got airborne, they saw 12 Russian aircraft flying from four points.

“In air battles, we were significantly outnumbered by the enemy,” Stanislavchuk recounted to the NCO group Aug. 1.

“Two of our pilots did not deviate from the course and went straight to the enemy,” he said. “As a result of the dogfight, we lost one pilot who was killed, while the other pilot completed the mission and returned to base. The invaders lost three of their planes.”

Stanislavchuk said the Ukraine Air Force’s other main gap, in addition to SAMs that can shoot down cruise missiles, is modern aircraft. Ukraine now flies Soviet-era MiG-29s and Su-24s.

“With cruise missiles, it is more difficult for our air defense. Our only system of air defense of the state is no means of anti-missile defense,” he told the group, saying Ukraine’s air defenses are no comparison with the U.S.-made Patriot missile batteries operated by Poland and Romania.

“We only have anti-aircraft defense equipment,” he explained. “In addition to aircraft, we also shoot down cruise missiles, although this is a difficult target.”

Stanislavchuk said the Russian strategic bombers are launching their missiles while flying over the waters of the Black Sea, from inside Russia, and from the Caspian Sea in particular.

He added that new fighter aircraft could be quickly employed and used with great efficiency, similarly to how Javelin anti-tank missiles had helped destroy more than 1,700 tanks and more than 4,000 armed combat vehicles as of Aug. 2.

Still, Russia is believed to have fired more than 3,000 missiles, ballistic and cruise, at Ukraine since the conflict began Feb. 24.

“We were utilizing javelins so accurately, so efficiently, it was just destroying the enemy left and right,” he said.

“Just getting the planes is going to be filling a huge part of the efforts that we need right now,” Stanislavchuk said. “We can just destroy them right there on the spot and keep pushing them further and further. Overall, it’s going to provide us a huge superiority in the air.”

Stanislavchuk said the Ukrainian military has demonstrated its motivation to quickly train and effectively use the weapons provided by other nations.

“With the modern planes, they will be utilized immediately. We will train up our pilots as quickly as possible to hit and control the airspace,” he said. Ukrainian Air Force officials have said they can train 30 available pilots on the F-16 in six months’ time.

Efforts to pass U.S. legislation that would fund the training of Ukrainian pilots has stalled, and the Pentagon has said the focuses of air support to Ukraine right now are unmanned aerial systems and High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). The U.S. has already committed 16 HIMARS systems to Ukraine, and 12 are known to be in use.

“As soon as we get the planes in the air, we start destroying airplanes as quickly as possible and as efficiently,” Stanislavchuk said of the prospect of receiving modern aircraft—“just because there’s just the motivation and the spirit to fight and destroy.”

USAFE’s Only Tanker Wing: Increased Work, But ‘Increased Reward, Too’

Aug. 3, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

RAF MILDENHALL, U.K.—The 15 KC-135s of the 100th Air Refueling Wing have popped up all over Europe in recent months, from the North Sea to the Adriatic, and from the skies over Poland and the Baltics to other parts of eastern Europe.

As the Air Force’s only permanently based tanker wing in Europe, that’s business as usual. But demand has picked up since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, and U.S. and NATO air patrols ramped up over NATO’s eastern flank.

But with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine creating uncertainty and instability in the region—and greater numbers of U.S. and NATO aircraft patrolling the eastern flank of the alliance—the demand for aerial refueling has risen as well.

“What we do hasn’t changed: Providing a ready force at a strategic forward base, and essentially projecting air power through what we like to call unrivaled air refueling across Europe and Africa,” Col. Gene A. Jacobus, commander of the 100th ARW told Air Force Magazine. “The pace at which we’re doing it? Yeah, that has increased.”

Given the wing’s unique status in the region, the ops tempo “is kind of perpetually high,” said Tech. Sgt. Blake Soule, a KC-135 boom operator. But he said the wing is now flying “more sorties, longer sorties, … more on the weekends.”

Increased work can translate into increased job satisfaction, said Capt. Jori Ingersoll, a KC-135 pilot. “There’s increased responsibility, there’s increased risk, but there’s increased reward too—more experience across the force, and we do our best to give those days back. But there’s something to be said that we’re here to accept that responsibility of giving our weekends to the Air Force and what we’re supporting.”

With more refueling flights, Mildenhall’s KC-135s are getting tasked with fewer aeromedical evacuations and airlift operations.

“We have these young Airmen, young pilots getting that experience right off the bat, but it’s just normal for us, because we’re just ready,” Ingersoll said. “But it’s something that shouldn’t be taken lightly either. There’s weekends where we are tired. When you talk about day-to-day ops, there’s no normal day for us, especially when we’re flying as much as we are.”

Perhaps years from now, these Airmen will look back at this operation as a historic moment in Europe and their own Air Force history.

“These are the good old days that we’re going to remember, this is the impact that we’re going to remember out of being based at Mildenhall,” Ingersoll said. “All of the cool high-priority stuff that we’ve been doing.”

Soule agreed. “It’s incredibly humbling and sobering to be able to do what we do,” he said. “To do stuff that affects NATO and the greater AOR and people’s lives.” It’s busy—but worth the effort.

MQ-9 Reapers Prove Value in ACE Pacific Operation

Aug. 3, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Airmen on the South Pacific island of Palau watched intently as an MQ-9 Reaper flew in for an automatic landing recently. None grabbed the controls from the pilot, 7,000 miles away at Creech Air Force Base, Nev. The landing marked the first time in a major Pacific exercise that the Reaper landed without ground control.

The Reaper’s new automatic takeoff and landing capability (ATLC), made possible with just a pallet and half of equipment, was at work again an hour later, as the the Reaper launched again. The Reaper agile combat employment, or RACE, demonstration was part of June’s Valiant Shield exercise.

“It’s fundamentally shaking up how we present our force, because I don’t need everybody downrange anymore,” Lt. Col. Michael Chmielewski, commander of the 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron at Creech, which oversaw the MQ-9s, told Air Force Magazine. Only 10 Airmen made the trip, instead of 55.

“What we started doing was just full control over satellites,” he explained. “It turns out, you can do everything on the ground, except for start the aircraft.”

The demonstration means that the platform can be flown using satellites over the horizon for thousands of miles across the Pacific and then when it’s time to land, a small Reaper team—two operators and eight maintainers—using the ATLC system are sufficient to safely refuel and relaunch.

ATLC landings had already been proven at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, during exercise Northern Edge 2021, but Valiant Shield 2022 was about making RACE a reality.

“We proved out what we could do by just going up there and just flying the plane to a location that we’ve never operated from,” he said. The Reaper hopscotched from Hawaii to Guam to Palau. “There’s this monumental change in mindset, that I don’t need to pack all this stuff up and go. I can go places just with a very small piece of maintenance equipment and less amount of people.”

Normally, Chmielewski said moving Reapers to theater requires 3 to 4 days of preparation to break down the airplanes, ship them on C-17s, then reassemble the planes. That load out takes 55 maintainers and four “cockpits,” or antenna control towers, must be set up and tested around the landing strip to assure an uninterrupted signal to the platform for a pilot on the ground to land it.

With ATLC, however, all that’s needed fits in a 6-foot-square box. That negates the need for the C-17, and enables the package to move on a CV-22 Osprey or C-130 Hercules.

There is a price: Risk increases, the commander admitted, because there’s less maintenance and repair capability and equipment. But the exercise demonstrated that Reapers could be employed throughout the Pacific and can relocate quickly.

The demo was a small part of Valiant Shield, in which more than 200 aircraft and 13,000 personnel took part. All the the military services participated, operating on or from numerous islands, including Palau, Micronesia, Guam and other Northern Marianas islands.

The exercise used the Reaper’s Electronic Support Measure (ESM) pod to provide combat jets with long-range find fixed track (FTT) data. Since Valiant Shield had a large maritime component, the Reaper switched its radar to maritime mode and helped scan for enemy ships, relaying data to the carrier strike group.

The Reaper also showed it could protect manned aerial assets, and study pattern of life changes to alert commanders of potential preparation for an attack.

“For us, long range find fix track, you know, that’s your team, and being able to just accelerate the kill chain,” he said about employing the platform ahead of combat jets. “If you can put what we would say is a relatively low-cost platform on that leading edge, and the persistence stuff, you’re gonna build that pattern of life.”

Chmielewski said there still is some resistance in the Air Force to employing the Reaper in the Pacific theater. Budget is one of the big challenges since Reapers require expensive satellite communications and backend review by members of the intelligence community. Valiant Shield helped prove those costs can be cut.

“If you can’t prove yourself compelling, and lean logistically and monetarily right now, what’s the value you’re going to provide?” he posed. “The more automated you can make things and cut those, that’s how you win the platform over.”

Reapers have long been expected in the Pacific Air Forces region, but basing delays prevented their permanent employment. Instead, ISR is used by the PACAF commander on a rotational basis. Chmielewski said a permanent home will likely be stood up at an air base in Japan by the fall of 2022.

The commander also said that would put the asset in the first island chain nearest China with access to the East China Sea, but likely not the South China Sea.

The 556 TES is in the midst of preparing an after action report with its recommendations for how to better employ the Reaper in future exercises and real-world missions. Chmielewski said that the AAR will ask what tactical capabilities can still be added to the platform to meet the specialized needs of the Pacific theater.

Short of having a theater-specific information-gathering tool, the Reaper can provide value now to PACAF missions, he said.

“The persistence gives you that unblinking eye, you get to soak up stuff,” he said of a platform that can remain aloft for 20 hours.

This year’s Valiant Shield RACE demonstration offered commanders a new idea for how to employ ISR in the Pacific.

“With a platform like this, you know, we’ll set up shop for a week, run ops for a week from our location with reduced footprint, and then go back,” he said. “Take your smaller footprint, put that forward in a different location, then go persist there for however long you want to persist.”

New Air Force Reserve Chief Pledges to ‘Transform Our Design Processes’

Aug. 3, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy assumed command of the Air Force Reserve, succeeded Lt. Gen. Richard W. Scobee in a ceremony at Robins Air Force Base, Ga.

Healy takes command after a year as Scobee’s deputy at AFRC; Scobee is retiring from the service. Healy previously led 22nd Air Force, where he was responsible for the Reserve’s C-130 wings. Other prior assignments included helping to lead the Reserve’s strategic planning and future concepts, under the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs.

Healy said his priorities wold be “pretty basic and pretty straightforward,” and that his unifying mantra would be “ready now, transforming for the future.”

“We’re going to continue down the path of ensuring all of our Airmen have what they need to carry out their wartime requirements, the basic blocking and tackling based on their AFSCs,” Healy said. “Our Airmen will be accessible and resilient. We’ve always answered the call for volunteerism, whether it was for COVID response in 72 hours out the door, or most recently [Operation Allies Refuge in Afghanistan], where we had all those crews on the hook and truly, truly demonstrated … what I think is the epitome of resilient leadership.”

To keep more than 70,000 Reserve Airmen ready to surge, Healy promised to expand resiliency efforts across the MAJCOM.

“We’ll continue to develop what I think is the most effective resiliency strategy and approach in the Air Force, scaling the efforts that we’ve been pilot testing over the last year in a few wings, to provide a holistic approach to ensure that our forces and their families are ready in all aspects of life,” Healy said.

The Air Force Reserve’s Develop Resilient Leaders team has led much of that effort, including developing a Comprehensive Airman Fitness Reserve Assessment, a survey tailored specifically for the AFRC, and the Connect the Network initiative, which centralizes full-time first sergeants as the point of contact to help struggling Airmen connect with support programs.

Healy also said he wants to “transform our design and processes” to improve the Reserve’s capabilities, communications, and decision-making.

“Our reform efforts will leverage our DAF-level success in data maturity, by continuing to produce data-driven synchronized decisions focused on planning to execution of our resources,” Healy said.

The balance between modernization and maintaining current capabilities remains a matter of concern. Concerns about capability gaps opening up as older aircraft retire and new systems are brought on line has worried some, but Healy promised in March that all Air Force components are working together to ensure “we’re not going to have any bases uncovered.”

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. presided over the Aug. 3 change of command ceremony.

“For the men and women of Air Force Reserve Command, you fill a unique role by bringing diverse strengths and experiences gained from your dual civilian and military identities,” Brown said. “Not just to one area, but everything we provide to the nation. You support our nuclear deterrence operations … precision attack, provide rapid global mobility and provide combat ready forces to fly, fight, and win.”

Scobee’s four-year tenure at AFRC coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He praised Brown for his accessibility and support of the Reserve, and said his tenure was made easier by the support of his wife, Janis, and his command chief, CMSgt. Timothy C. White.

“Who knew four years ago we would be stepping into what we have, especially the last two years,” Scobee said. Commanders need the help of “somebody like a Chief White or Janis Scobee, [who] actually hear and feel what our Airmen are struggling with,” he said. “That’s what makes the difference. And that is why our United States Air Force is successful, because it starts at the top, and it filters all the way down to our supporting commands and our command chiefs. I’m very appreciative of that.”

AFRL’s Homegrown Cubesat Begins Mission to Test Cognitive Communications

Aug. 3, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

A new cubesat built and operated in-house at the Air Force Research Laboratory is set to demonstrate cognitive, beyond-line-of-sight radio networking via satellite while also giving AFRL’s researchers “intimate knowledge” of how the satellite works to apply in the future.

Its name, “Recurve,” refers to a recurve bow because the cubesat demonstrates a new communication technology to provide troops “with another tool in their tool belt (or arrow in their quiver, so to speak),” said Kate Yoshino, Recurve’s program manager.

The group Yoshino works in—the Small Satellite Portfolio within AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate—has found that advancing communication technology benefits both the Air Force and the Space Force, she said in a July interview, just as Recurve completed its launch and early operations phase.

“If we can do communication better, that enables is to do all kinds of other things better,” Yoshino said, calling it “one of the backbone technologies … in order for us to achieve other missions as well.”

As many as 50 people at a given time worked on Recurve’s development, but the numbers were shrinking as the process gave way to the ultimate mission. Two people at a time will operate the satellite out of 20 who were trained, with the hope that a degree of ground automation can take away some of the flight burden so the researchers can focus on the experiments.

Recurve’s experiments should show how beyond-line-of-sight radio communications are possible by routing the beams through the satellite.

Yoshino said the cognitive aspect of Recurve’s experiments “is really interesting to a lot of people.” She explained that in conventional communication systems, “you have a set frequency, a set bandwidth, basically a set configuration” to communicate “point to point between two preconfigured, predetermined radios.”

In the Recurve experiment, on the other hand, “the radio itself kind of auto-configures to meet the needs to the operator,” Yoshino said. Since the radios act as nodes in a network, “you jump onto the network, and then the network will route your data to your desired destination.

“And then on top of that, the cognitive piece is that it does change the parameters of the actual physical radio waves to better assist in those needs. So that includes things like, it’ll change the power scaling or change the frequency it’s operating on. And those types of things enable you to more effectively communicate either point to point or with multiple parties.”

As a “truly experimental test asset” within the cubesat portfolio, Recurve’s development emphasized speed over design life of the satellite, Yoshino said. She expected the tests to take six months to a year.

Designing, building, and operating Recurve in-house at AFRL means the researchers “can more pointedly understand how lessons learned can be used,” Yoshino said. “Specifically with communication systems, having such intimate knowledge of the developed vehicle helps us understand kind of how those communication systems can be better proliferated or used further.”

Recurve will also “assess an inherent positioning, navigation and timing capability under various operating and environmental conditions,” according to a news release announcing Recurve’s launch.

Recurve was one of seven experiments air-launched by Virgin Orbit from the Mojave Air and Space Port, Calif., for the Defense Department’s Space Test Program.