AFGSC Launches Second Minuteman III Test in Three Weeks

Sept. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Air Force Global Strike Command launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., on Sept. 7—its second test launch in three weeks.

The ICBM launched at 1:13 a.m. Pacific time with three test re-entry vehicles, according to an AFGSC release. The vehicles traveled some 4,200 miles before landing in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

That’s the same location where the previous test launch, which took place Aug. 16, landed.

This latest launch was overseen by the 576th Flight Test Squadron, stationed at Vandenberg, with support from Airmen from the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo., and 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, N.D. Space Force Col. Bryan Titus, vice commander of Space Launch Delta 30, was the launch decision authority.

“We have had a busy test schedule just in the past few months and I am in awe of the way our team has performed during each mission,” Col. Christopher Cruise, 576th Flight Test Squadron commander, said in a statement. “Today’s launch sends a visible message of assurance to our allies, and I couldn’t be more proud of the mission of continued deterrence this launch represents.”

The two tests come more than a year after the last publicly announced test launch in August 2021. Previously scheduled tests were either canceled or postponed by President Joe Biden’s administration in an effort to avoid potential miscommunication and escalation with Russia and China.

The first instance, in March, came in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as Russian President Vladimir Putin raised tensions by putting his nuclear forces on high alert. The second, in early August, came as China launched military exercises around Taiwan in retaliation for Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), leading a Congressional delegation on a visit to the island.

AFGSC has repeatedly emphasized that any test launch “is not the result of current world events.” The command has conducted tests in quick succession before. In May 2019, AFGSC launched two Minuteman IIIs in the span of less tha n two weeks.

Video by Farrah Kaufmann, Space Launch Delta 30 Public Affairs

Outstanding Airmen of the Year: Tech. Sgt. Alexander W. Messinger

Sept. 7, 2022 | By Patrick Reardon

The Air Force’s 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year for 2022 will be formally recognized at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference from Sept. 19 to 21 in National Harbor, Md. Air Force Magazine is highlighting one each weekday from now until the conference begins. Today, we honor Tech. Sgt. Alexander W. Messinger, the noncommissioned officer in charge of standardization evaluation at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas.

Messinger’s guidance provided security validation in direct support of the President’s humanitarian border mission, ensuring that quick response capabilities (QRCs) and valid procedures were in place before the arrival of more than 1,000 migrant children from the U.S.-Mexico border to Lackland.

“Lackland is a beast because it has so many different mission sets,” said Messinger. “So anytime there’s [one of] these big humanitarian efforts … Lackland [needs to be ready] for it.”

And that’s exactly what Messinger’s responsibility is: ensuring readiness. Security validation and QRCs of this nature are only part of his role as NCO in charge of standardization evaluation at Lackland. He oversees program managers and makes sure their programs are in compliance with functional area inspection standards.

So while the base was preparing to house and relocate the migrants, he and his four-member quality assurance team were also racing to bring all of the programs up to code before a Vertical Inspection and Unit Effective Inspection—a process that usually involves 10 months of prep time before the inspection.

But Messinger’s team prepared the programs in a short two months, ultimately overseeing 396 evaluations and 829 field exercises for 462 military and civilian personnel. His unit passed the UEI while Messinger was managing 33 programs and 65 checklists, earning the squadron two “Highly Effective” ratings with zero discrepancies, five strengths, and 26 Professional Performers awards. He was selected as the unit’s sole Superior Performer and as the Air Force Security Forces Support Staff NCO of the Year.

“We’re lucky to get the team that we had,” Messinger said. “They’re just a bunch of go-getters and super hard workers. I just can’t thank my team enough for doing what they did to help.”

Messinger was also the only NCO selected for a Flight Commander training course, in which his leadership propelled his team to winning seven annual awards at various levels. He credits his section chief for giving him the opportunities along the way to evolve into a leader in his own right.

“One of the qualities I think a great leader has is that they know where to put their people to make them grow,” he said. “[My section chief] would always find ways for me to grow. I just hope that I can pay it forward and just follow him, take his mentorship, and provide it to others.”

Messinger also gave a callout to his wife of four years, a Blue Rope military training instructor who “holds everything together” for him while inspiring him to improve daily.

“I remember meeting her and her just picking me up and motivating me to do my best,” Messinger said. “I couldn’t do it without her.”

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

DOD Stops Deliveries of New F-35s Over Material Sourced from China

Sept. 7, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Lockheed Martin said it is “developing mitigation plans” after the F-35 Joint Program Office announced Sept. 7 that it has stopped delivery of new fighters upon learning that a component relies on material from China.

The material in question is an alloy in a magnet in the F-35’s turbomachine. The turbomachine “integrates the functionality of an auxiliary power unit (APU) and an air cycle machine (ACM) into a single piece of equipment,” according to Lockheed Martin. “When the turbomachine acts as an APU (combusted mode), it provides electrical power for ground maintenance, main engine start, and emergency power. It also provides compressed air for the thermal management system during ground maintenance.”

Lockheed Martin said three F-35s are ready for delivery but on hold. Its spokesperson did not name the airplanes’ customers.

Sourcing the Chinese material is “potentially in non-compliance” with the U.S. Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement, according to a statement by the Defense Department’s F-35 Joint Program Office.

Honeywell, the turbomachine’s maker, notified Lockheed Martin that it had been “informed by their lube pump supplier for the turbomachine that one of their suppliers has been using alloy sourced from China in their magnets,” according to Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin and the JPO said the magnet doesn’t transmit any information. It doesn’t “harm the integrity of the aircraft, and there are no performance, quality, safety, or security risks associated with this issue,” according to the JPO. The F-35s already in service will “continue as normal.”

The JPO said it “temporarily paused acceptance” of new F-35s after learning that the contractors had found a U.S. source to replace the Chinese alloy.

Lockheed Martin said it’s “doing everything possible to gather the facts” on the source of the material, and the JPO said “investigation is underway” into “causal factors … and to establish corrective action.”

The Defense Department’s use of Chinese materials for key technologies and acquisition programs has become an increasing source of concern and legislation in recent years. And in 2019, U.K. media outlets reported that a Chinese-owned company was making circuit boards for the F-35.

AFSOC Commander Explains Why He Ordered CV-22 Osprey Stand Down

Sept. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Air Force Special Operations Command has known about the issue at the heart of the recent CV-22 Osprey safety stand down for years now, just as the Marine Corps and other stakeholders have.

But after two incidents in quick succession—including one that has left an aircraft stranded in a nature preserve in Norway—AFSOC commander Lt. Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife decided some action had to be taken to “draw attention” to the problem, even as the root cause remains a mystery, he said Sept. 7.

AFSOC first announced the grounding of the fleet Aug. 16, citing incidents of “hard clutch engagement.”

Such instances start with a “slipping sprag clutch inside the input wheels on the engines,” Slife said at an AFA Warfighters in Action event.

The Osprey is designed so that if one of its two engines fails, the other one can take over and power both prop rotors to avoid “enormous asymmetric lift, asymmetric thrust,” Slife said.

“But when a clutch slips, it causes the load to transfer to the other engine, and then when … it just slips momentarily and when it engages again, it brings that load back to the original motor,” Slife said. “And those large transient torque spikes exceed the limitations of the engines and the gearboxes to handle those transient torque loads.”

Such incidents result in “kind of a Christmas tree of lights, caution lights, in the cockpit, and some pretty squirrely flight control inputs,” Slife said. The crew typically lands as quickly as possible.

Air & Space Forces Association President retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright speaks with Lt. Gen. James C. Slife, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, Sept. 7, 2022. Staff photo by Mike Tsukamoto.

After AFSOC announced its stand down, however, the Marine Corps and the Navy both said they would not ground their versions of the V-22, with officials reportedly saying they felt they had appropriate procedures in place to handle such situations.

In the weeks leading up to the stand down, Slife said he was in regular contact with the Marines’ deputy commandant of aviation and the commanders of Naval Air Forces and Naval Air Systems Command. Ultimately, his decision to ground the Air Force fleet came down to his view on how the problem should be addressed.

“My stand down was really an opportunity for us to bring some attention to this in the engineering enterprise and with our industry partners, because the approach up to this point has been: Until we understand the root cause, there’s really nothing we can do about it,” Slife said. “And my view is we may not understand why it’s happening, but we absolutely know what is happening. And so we need to take a closer look at what is happening and maybe remove some of the precursor events to each one of these.”

After a little more than two weeks, the stand down ended Sept. 2. In that time, Slife said, AFSOC drilled down on the data and found that “virtually all of [the hard clutch engagements] occurred in the exact same regime of flight. Virtually all of them occurred with gearboxes with the same amount of flight time.”

It’s still unclear how those discoveries relate to the root cause of the HCEs, but Slife said they were enough for the command to craft new measures meant to reduce the likelihood of such incidents.

“It’s things like how we manage our power settings during takeoff, how frequently we do vertical takeoffs versus short takeoffs—if you’ve got a runway available, use the runway, those types of things,” Slife said. “And so I feel pretty comfortable we put appropriate mitigation measures in place.”

At the same time, the search for the underlying reason for the clutch problem continues.

Stranded in Norway

In its announcement about the end of the stand down, AFSOC officials said the entire fleet of some 50 Ospreys was cleared to start flying again—but there’s actually one CV-22 that’s still grounded.

That would be one of the Ospreys that experienced hard clutch engagement. The crew from RAF Mildenhall, U.K., landed the aircraft on an island in northern Norway, inside the Arctic circle, Slife said, confirming multiple media reports.

“These things never seem to happen at airfields. They always seem to happen in Norwegian nature preserves above the Arctic Circle at the onset of winter,” Slife joked. “So, it’s provided a really great tactical problem for that unit to figure out what to do with that airplane out in the middle of a nature preserve with protected ferns and salamanders and things like that.”

According to a local media report, the Norwegian defense ministry has said the removal process will involve constructing a road, ramp, and jetty on the island, all while doing as little as possible to disturb the nature preserve. Disassembling or airlifting the aircraft have been ruled out.

AFSOC Has a Design for Its Amphibious MC-130J; Aircraft Integration Set for 2023

Sept. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The schedule appears to have changed a little, but Air Force Special Operations Command is still working on developing an amphibious capability to go on its MC-130J aircraft, AFSOC’s commander said Sept. 7.

It has been roughly a year since Lt. Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife first detailed AFSOC’s plans to take the MC-130J—capable of personnel infiltration and exfiltration, logistics, resupply, and personnel recovery—and find a way for it to land on water. Such a capability was necessary, he said, as the command shifts focus to the Indo-Pacific theater, an area dominated by vast bodies of water.

At the time, Slife said the hope was for a demo flight by late 2022. But speaking at an AFA Warfighters in Action event Sept. 7, Slife said the plan now is to start integrating the capability onto aircraft in 2023.

A final design has been selected, Slife added, and it is currently undergoing “wave tank testing.”

“We’ve got a 100 percent digital design. We started out with a number of digital designs. We ran through a series of testing to figure out, do we want to do a catamaran, a pontoon, a hull applique on the bottom of the aircraft?” Slife said. “I mean, we kind of went through all the iterations of that. And we settled on a design that provides the best tradeoff of drag, weight, sea state performance—all those types of things.”

Slife did not specify what the final design selected was, but he did say the early returns from that testing have been positive, with everything performing “pretty much the way the digital design was predicted to perform.”

But while the design will soon be integrated onto aircraft for the first time, it won’t be a permanent modification, Slife clarified.

“The idea here is it’s an amphibious modification—it’s not a float plane. It will have the ability to land on both land or water. And it’ll be a field-installable modification kit. And so it won’t be every airplane; it won’t be all the time. It’ll be a capability that’s available to the fleet,” Slife said.

The Air Force currently has a little more than 50 MC-130Js, operating out of Cannon and Kirtland Air Force Bases, N.M., as well as Kadena Air Base, Japan, and RAF Mildenhall, U.K.

Slife did not offer an explanation for the delay in the aircraft’s first flight with the amphibious capability. In August, however, an Air Force official at the Life Cycle Industry Days conference in Dayton, Ohio, indicated that the effort had briefly been dropped before being revived.

“It started, then it stopped. And now it looks like it’s getting traction to start moving again,” said Douglas Gregory, a deputy division chief in the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s ISR/special operations directorate. “So it was all user required, based on the requirements, and they’re providing that right now.”

AFSOC amphibious MC-130J — A rendering of a twin float amphibious modification to an MC-130J Commando II is shown here. Air Force Special Operations Command and private-sector counterparts are developing a modification to allow the aircraft to take off and land in bodies of water, enabling runway-independent operations. Courtesy photo.

Rolls-Royce’s High-Speed Innovation Stirs an Airman’s Soul

Sept. 7, 2022

Darryl Roberson knows a little bit about flying jets. After flying F-4s, F-15s, F-16s, and F-22s over a 34-year Air Force career—a rarity in a modern, specialized world—he’s now helping to bring a new age of modern engineering and manufacturing to today’s warfighters.

As a senior vice president with storied engine maker Rolls-Royce North America, Roberson is an ambassador for some of the most ground-breaking technologies to emerge in propulsion in recent decades, including digital engineering, alternative fuels, additive manufacturing, and a host of other innovations.

“We apply digital engineering where it adds value,” Roberson says. “We have applied custom digital engineering analysis, leveraging Rolls-Royce digitally enabled rapid prototyping, virtual reality, advanced manufacturing, digital services for sustainment, and DaVinci – ‘design and validate in the computer investment.’ This significantly benefits our US DOD customers and program efforts.

“We have demonstrated that intelligent application of trusted, validated digital engineering capability significantly reduces risk within an engine development program.”

Computer-aided design has existed for decades now, but designing and modeling entire systems digitally is revolutionizing the ability to adapt, improve, and enhance modern systems, and do so at a pace unheard of in the past. “We can reduce costs, we can save time, and we can produce engines in a much more efficient way,” Roberson says.

An aerospace engineer by education, Roberson grew up as a Navy brat and immersed himself in the Air Force directly after high school, enrolling at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Over the next 34 years he rose to lieutenant general, commanding Air Education and Training Command in his final tour. Even now, he has a vested interest in the Air Force, with a son and son-in-law on active duty, and ensuring they are part of the best-equipped, most ready, most effective fighting force fuels his passion for his current role.

Contributing to training and readiness is one way Rolls-Royce fulfills that passion. “Our AE 2100 engine, which powers the C-130J, can now be maintained in a more effective and less costly way,” he says. “We created a virtual reality maintenance training system for the Air Force that maintainers can literally put on and then either train or actually perform maintenance using that. It’s like a digital assistant that can speed up processes, help them understand what needs to be done, verify that the processes are being done in the right way.”

The tool enhances inspections and can reduce wear and tear and potential injuries by reducing the necessity to remove engines from the aircraft.

Rolls-Royce has also invested in its own innovation and development arm, LibertyWorks, an engineering powerhouse created to tackle the most demanding requirements and come up with innovative solutions. “These are phenomenal engineers,” Roberson says. LibertyWorks projects span the range from wringing additional power from existing systems to developing propulsion technology for entirely new kinds of systems.

“When there’s a challenge that warfighters are facing, LibertyWorks is the place to go to solve that problem. They can take a requirement that sounds impossible and make it real.”

Case in point: LibertyWorks is developing engines to power small, attritable unmanned systems, which will have to fly as fast as an F-35 but won’t have to be as maintainable because the aircraft itself won’t be designed to last as long as a Lightning II. The unit is also working on reusable hypersonic engines and on energy initiatives.

“Look, just like the Air Force, Rolls-Royce is absolutely committed to the environment,” Roberson says. “We have publicly stated that we will be net-zero carbon use in our operations by the year of 2030, which is really not that far away. And we are working hard on alternate fuels for propelling flight and producing power—synthetic aviation fuels, bio-aviation fuels, even electricity and hydrogen, which when you burn it, becomes water.”

Rolls-Royce is already the leading producer of all-electric and hybrid-electric aviation systems and set a new world speed record for an electric propulsion aircraft.

The proof-of-concept aircraft—called “Spirit of Innovation” —set a world record for battery powered flight, topping 345 mph. Spirit of Innovation, about the size of a World War II Spitfire, is powered by liquid-cooled lithium-ion batteries. “It’s the start of a journey to make electrification happen,” Roberson says. “We’re propelling the future.”

DOD Plans to Pitch Tech Workforce Solutions in 2023

Sept. 6, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

The Defense Department plans to propose new workforce “solutions” to Congress in 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks said in a virtual address to a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency conference Aug. 31.

“Making sure that we can increase speed of decision—speed and quality of decision and action”—is Hicks’ top aim, an objective that covers “a lot of different organizational innovations and operational concepts that come together.” These include enterprise cloud capability, artificial intelligence, and the effective use of data. But it also includes improving the tech workforce.

In the Air Force, half of all billets requiring advanced academic degrees in science, technology, engineering, or math—STEM—are either vacant or filled by someone lacking the requisite qualifications.

Hicks said she and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III found it “pretty stunning” that the department lacked any “senior-level-focus set of processes or governance systems on workforce issues.”

The new Deputy’s Workforce Council set up in 2021, which she chairs, works with senior leaders “all across the department to look at workforce issues,” Hicks said. A new Innovation Steering Group, meanwhile, is connecting the “many wonderful flowers blooming on innovation across the department.” And a third group, “an innovation workforce tiger team,” is working on the intersection of the two to help get at “what you might call the innovation workforce—tech talent,” Hicks said.

Needs differ across the department, Hicks said. “Some organizations have a good sense of the tech talent that they need,” highlighting the research and engineering community as an example. “But there are other parts of the department where we don’t, and I’ll point to things like our data and AI work, where we really are starting to build from a much newer base of understanding … It’s going to take us a little time to work through those pieces, but it won’t take years. We’re aiming to … have a number of solutions to bring forward to Congress in their next legislative cycle.”

Tech talent and STEM education also concern the defense industrial base. According to DOD’s 2022 “State of the Space Industrial Base” report, China will outproduce the U.S. in STEM grads by 15 to 1 by 2030. The extent “of workforce issues threaten the viability of space domestically,” the report said, including “the ability to maintain a strong national security space posture.”

Space Force Maj. Gen. John M. Olson, the Department of the Air Force’s chief data and AI officer, was the lead writer on the study. He has assumed a hands-on role in cultivating the department’s tech workforce as a designated “champion” representing the University of Colorado Boulder in the Space Force’s University Partnership Program.

In a visit to the campus in April, he made clear the department’s interest in industrial innovation: “We want to buy commercial services as much as anything,” he said. “It’s a standard make-buy decision that any business would make. And if we can buy it from a rich commercial ecosystem, that’s even more wonderful for us because then we can focus our funding on those inherently governmental things.”

Olson, a reservist for a time, said that after working in the aerospace industry, he “came back to [full-time service] because we need people in government who know what EBITDA is.” The acronym stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and is a standard measure of corporate financial health. It’s important, he said, for the government to have people “who know what these things are from an industry perspective.”

Olson’s Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering, coupled with a military background in acquisition, further illustrates one of Hicks’ points—that the talent pool in question isn’t limited to STEM: “People can frame it up under STEM, but it’s beyond STEM talent,” she said. “It also includes how we think about the acquisition workforce—those who are going out and trying to determine what we buy and how we buy it.”

Hicks sees the opportunities in government as being part of the draw, and she seemed to make that pitch to the collegiate attendees at DARPA’s conference.

“Whether you’re interested in the future of autonomous vehicles or powering the next generation of communications technologies or building resilience in the face of a warming planet, at DOD we’ve got something for practically everyone,” she said. “We have some of the most fantastic problems to solve, and our mission is second to none.

“It’s not only a chance to make a difference, it’s a chance to be part of something bigger than yourselves, to change the future for the better, to make the world safer for everyone.”

Mutual Denial of Air Superiority Could Benefit US in Future Conflict, Top USAF Planner Says

Sept. 6, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Russia’s failure to seize control of the skies during its invasion of Ukraine raises serious questions about the concept of air superiority—and how the U.S. might actually benefit from a contested domain in a future conflict, the Air Force’s top planner suggested Sept. 6.

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements, detailed those questions as part of a virtual fireside chat with the Atlantic Council on the future of air warfare in light of the Russia-Ukraine war, which has lasted more than six months now.

In those six months, the airspace above Ukraine has been contested, as Russia’s more technologically advanced air force has been largely stymied by cheap, effective Ukrainian air defense systems.

Those results have led Hinote to conclude that “the barriers to entry for denial, for denying the use of airspace, are much, much lower these days than the barrier to entry for extending control and keeping control of the airspace,” he said.

Controlling airspace, or air superiority, has long been a central tenet of U.S. Air Force strategy. But given that the costs of achieving and maintaining that superiority have grown relative to what it takes to deny it for others, a “very interesting question” occurs, Hinote said.

“The question in my mind is, is there a chance, is there a situation in modern conflict, where mutual denial of a space is good for someone, operationally and strategically?” he said.

Given that the U.S. is interested in seeing the status quo preserved—China not invading Taiwan and Russia not invading a NATO ally—Hinote suggested that the low likelihood of any one nation achieving air superiority in a conflict might be a deterrent.

“Our potential adversary, China, has written deeply about what it believes are the prerequisites for victory, for success in military operations,” Hinote said. “They believe that you need to be able to establish air superiority, maritime superiority, and information superiority. … So, if we could prove that we can mutually deny air, maritime, and information, the logical conclusion is that our potential adversary never gets to the point where they’re ready to go, where they’re ready to start something we don’t want to see started. If that’s true, then I think this idea of mutual denial, especially in those three spaces, is key.”

And if the mutual denial of air superiority is an advantage for the U.S., “then we need to have a military that can achieve mutual denial, even at the edges of the battlespace, even on the doorstep of our adversaries,” Hinote added. “And clearly, that’s what we’re seeing when we see a place like Ukraine.”

While Ukraine is still seeking “fast and versatile” platforms such as the F-16 to challenge Russian positions in Ukrainian territory, the defenders have used weapons such as the Stinger short-range air defense system and the S-300 missile defense system to keep Russia’s air force largely “absent” from the conflict, in the words of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

The success of those weapons, Hinote noted, raises other questions about how to “project power into the air and affect it there.”

“It’s not going to matter what domain that projection comes from. And increasingly you’re going to not worry about it. Increasingly, you don’t mind if the effect of mutual denial comes from the land. Clearly that is happening today,” Hinote said.

Moving away from such a concern is part of a broader shift that Hinote—among many in the Pentagon—is pursuing as part of the joint all-domain operations concept.

“As somebody who is thinking about joint all-domain command and control and is thinking about how we get from our current doctrine, which was really very centered on domains, to a doctrine that feels very fluid in domains, I see a lot of challenge there,” Hinote said. “I also see a tremendous benefit if we can do it.”

As it specifically relates to air power, though, Hinote said he would welcome discussion with the Army and other services about the roles and responsibilities of each service. In the meantime, the Air Force is looking to change the “cost-benefit analysis” of air superiority.

“We want to get to the point where shooting a missile at something is more expensive than taking the missile shot. That’s the radical difference right there. Because typically, we have been thinking about using air power in ways that involve very exquisite platforms and capabilities, that are very expensive,” Hinote said. “And a missile, or sets of missiles, or even a dozen missiles coming at it are much cheaper than that one particular platform. We’re trying to turn that around, and we think we can, and when that happens, it has the potential to change the entire return on investment for both our adversary and for us.”

Outstanding Airmen of the Year: Tech. Sgt. Brianne E. Kelleher

Sept. 6, 2022 | By Patrick Reardon

The Air Force’s 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year for 2022 will be formally recognized at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference from Sept. 19 to 21 in National Harbor, Md. Air Force Magazine is highlighting one each weekday from now until the conference begins. Today, we honor Tech. Sgt. Brianne E. Kelleher, the command language program manager for the 655th Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

Kelleher is an Urdu linguist. Urdu is a tertiary language among the Afghan population—Dari and Pashto being the most widely spoken languages there—but its scarcity made Kelleher’s knowledge of it all the more valuable to those refugees for whom Urdu is primary. So when a tasker arrived to Kelleher’s Reserve unit to find Airmen to support Operation Allies Welcome, she didn’t need to be voluntold or even asked twice before signing up.

“My entire career is CENTCOM-centric,” Kelleher explained. “So … watching Afghanistan, watching Kabul fall … it rips your heart out.”

She was given 24 hours’ notice before heading to Task Force Holloman, which she described as “deployment conditions in the desert.” In just two days, Kelleher and her team assembled an entire language support cell to support a makeshift “village” of refugees. There was no infrastructure in place before the cell was created, meaning there were no existing plans for efficient communication with incoming refugees.

“These people that were coming in just went through the hardest situation in their entire life, and they want to make sure that they have support,” Kelleher said. “They’re actual living people that were counting on us.”

To remedy the situation and streamline the operation, Kelleher’s 23-member linguist cell created directional signage in Urdu, Dari, and Pashto and developed processes for translation and publishing dissemination. Over the two weeks of Operation Allies Welcome, her cell received 95 aircraft and processed more than 3,500 refugees through medical and visa procedures. Kelleher also developed a lost child alert system that distributed the information of lost refugees in their native language, ultimately reuniting more than 300 children with their families.

“It was chaotic, and messy, and things were not great,” she said. “[But] we all just worked in concert. It was [actually] quite a beautiful thing.”

Kelleher’s involvement with refugees and migrants extends beyond her support at Holloman. Back home in Dayton, Ohio, she and her husband, also an Urdu linguist, volunteer at local organizations to support Afghan and Somali families who are transitioning to American life. While the organizations support the families on “big picture” items such as paying for food stamps and finding jobs, Kelleher is able to fill in gaps and help refugees and migrants set up their internet at home, read their mail, or know where their local grocery store is.

“It’s very baseline, very intimate support,” Kelleher said. “[It can feel] a lot better than [helping with] the bigger stuff.”

In fact, one of the Afghan families she worked with closely in the Task Force Holloman “village” moved to Dayton. Kelleher visits them regularly to check on their well being, but also to play games, have dinner, and simply enjoy sharing time together.

“We consider each other family,” she said.

For Kelleher, having a heart for those people who need you is central to being a linguist. She said the Air Force’s culture helped shape her “get it done” attitude. That, combined with linguistic cultural training, is what made her and her cell’s efforts at Holloman so exceptional.

“I am not an island,” Kelleher added. “It’s all my linguists and all my leadership. All of us had to come together. I’m just the one who gets to wave and say thank you.”

Meet the other Outstanding Airmen of the Year for 2022:  