Air Force Leaders Explain 5-Year Divestment Plan and Smaller F-15EX Fleet

April 27, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on May 3 to include clarification from Rep. Rob Wittman’s office on which fleets he was including when discussing divestment numbers.

The Air Force plans to divest nearly 650 fighter aircraft over the coming five years while purchasing fewer than 250, reducing its fleet by exactly 400 tails, a pair of congressmen said during House Armed Services Committee hearings April 27. Those cuts would include a much-reduced buy for the F-15EX

The F-15EX is one of the few fighters the Air Force has planned on buying in the immediate future. But the overall decline of 400 aircraft would be part of a significant divestment plan over the next several years, as outlined by Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing several weeks ago.

During that hearing, Fischer said the Air Force was planning to cut 1,468 aircraft and buy 467, for a net decline of 1,001. The service declined to comment at the time, as the 2023 “J-books,” which justify programmatic line items, had not yet been released.

On April 27, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) and Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) both cited figures of 646 aircraft to be retired and 246 bought. A spokeswoman for Wittman later told Air Force Magazine he was referring solely to tactical fighter aircraft.

Lawmakers had plenty of concerns over the proposed decline of the fleet, even as Air Force leaders insist they need to sunset older platforms to free up funds to develop and field newer systems.

“I understand [Next Generation Air Dominance] and modernization and all the things that we want our aircraft to do, unmanned platforms. But 400 is one heck of a big vulnerability, capacity, and capability gap,” Wittman told Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.

“That operational deficit, … the numbers aren’t that simple. An aircraft—retiring and buying one aren’t equal. But it is an indicator. … What specifically caused the Air Force to accelerate this [divestment] so significantly?” Norcross asked Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, deputy chief of staff for plans and programs.

Brown acknowledged that shedding more airframes than it is taking on creates operational risk for the Air Force. But it’s worth it, he argued, because “there’s a balance between the operational risk we will see today as we make that transition, versus the risk we will have in the future if we don’t start to modernize.”

Nahom, for his part, echoed comments he’s made previously that competing priorities in the budget, particularly the need to modernize two legs of the nuclear triad, limited the number of aircraft USAF could buy in the coming years.

“There are some competing needs, as we look in the overall Air Force beyond the fighter portfolio, specifically the nuclear portfolio, which as we recapitalize two-thirds of the nuclear arsenal, and many of those articles now are in procurement, not just already RDT&E, in this FYDP. That does crowd out some investment that we have to be cognizant of as we look forward to the fighter portfolio,” Nahom said.

F-15EX Changes

Within those overall changes that the Air Force has planned for its fleet, one of the biggest shifts scheduled to take place in the next five years is with the F-15EX Eagle II, the fourth-generation fighter meant to complement the F-35 and NGAD.

Most immediately, the 2023 budget request asks to buy 24 F-15EXs, double the 12 it requested in 2022.

But in the longer term, the Air Force’s J-books reveal that the service plans to reduce the overall buy of the EX from 144 to 80—a 44 percent decline. It’s a move Air Force officials hinted at several years ago.

That combination of a bigger buy in this budget and a smaller one overall was intentional, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told lawmakers.

“We’re accelerating the buy to buy it out. We’re actually reducing the total quantity substantially. … So we’re trying to buy that out as quickly as possible. We made some other adjustments in order to do that. It’s a more efficient way to buy the capability.”

The need to get the EXs as soon as possible was necessitated by the degraded state of the F-15Cs currently in the fleet, Andrew P. Hunter, the Air Force’s acquisition head, told a HASC panel.

“We’re ramping up production. And we’re doing that to meet the fact that with the aircraft that the F-15EX is replacing in the near term … those aircraft very much need to be replaced, both from a threat perspective and just a sustainability perspective,” Hunter said.

The F-15C/D’s issues have been ongoing for years, and a recent Congressional Budget Office report found the aircraft’s availability had dipped all the way to 45 percent.

Meanwhile, despite not being fifth-gen, the F-15EX has several “unique capabilities,” Kendall said.

“It carries more munitions than the F-35 can. So for certain missions like cruise missile defense of the United States or defensive counter-air missions, it’s a superior platform, despite the lack of some of the full fifth-generation capabilities,” Kendall said. “It does have a number of fifth-generation components on it to give it more capability than a baseline F-15 would have.”

So why is the overall size of the fleet going to be smaller than anticipated? Nahom once again blamed competing budget priorities, saying the service would have to rely more on the F-15E, which is newer than the F-15Cs and Ds, but less advanced than the EXs.

“Right now, based on resources and based on trade-offs, we’re going to have to keep more F-15Es than we initially thought we would have kept,” said Nahom. “We’re going to have a certain size F-15 fleet. In a resource-unconstrained world, those would all be EXs—newer airplanes, better sustainability, more time on them, etc. Right now, as we look at the budgets moving forward, we’re likely to keep more of the F-15Es to be part of that F-15 fleet.”

NGAD Price Per Tail Will More Than Double That of F-35

April 27, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The manned fighter aircraft that will form the centerpiece of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance program will cost hundreds of millions of dollars per plane, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told members of Congress on April 27—but the service can reduce costs in development and sustainment.

Speaking before the House Armed Services Committee on the fiscal 2023 budget request, Kendall specified that the main NGAD fighter would cost “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars … on an individual basis,” acknowledging that such a price tag “is a number that’s going to get your attention.”

By comparison, the F-22 cost roughly $135 million per tail, making it the most expensive fighter the U.S. Air Force has ever developed. The F-35A, meanwhile, costs around $80 million per jet, but that number could rise.

NGAD, according to Kendall’s estimate, will dwarf those costs, at least when it comes to price per plane. But the sixth-generation platform will fulfill a key air dominance role, Kendall noted.

“It’s going to be an expensive airplane; F-22 was an expensive airplane. It was one of my aircraft in one of my earlier positions, but it’s also an incredibly effective aircraft. It’s been dominant in the air for decades now. And we expect NGAD to be the same,” Kendall said.

With such a massive cost per plane, though, work will have to be done in other areas to keep the program’s overall cost down.

“That starts in development,” Kendall said, highlighting the need to design the system so that “you can do upgrades and do maintenance very efficiently.”

That need has been highlighted by the sustainment costs and issues for the F-35, which have become a massive cost for the program and will surpass $1.25 trillion across its service life. Kendall, however, sounded optimistic that NGAD could avoid a similar fate, using new practices such as modular design and common interfaces.

On top of that, the broader NGAD program will include aircraft that are “much less expensive, autonomous, uncrewed … employing a distributed, tailorable mix of sensors, weapons, and other mission equipment,” Kendall has said in the past. These unmanned teammates will be attritable, Kendall told Congress: not expendable, but cheap enough that they can be employed for more risky tasks.

Exactly how cheap these platforms will be remains to be seen—Kendall told lawmakers the Air Force does not yet have a “hard estimate” like it does for the manned fighter.

But considering the costs associated with the sixth-generation fighter, as well as the relatively substantial costs of the F-35 and the F-15EX, these unmanned teammates will have to be inexpensive to fulfill the Air Force’s usual “high-low” mix of fighters, Kendall said.

“We need a more affordable mix for the future,” Kendall said. “And the question is, how do we get there? And that’s one of the reasons I’m introducing the idea of uncrewed combat aircraft that are much less expensive and can be attritable, … not necessarily expendable—they’re not munitions—but they can be used at a higher rate and help populate our force structure.”

Such a system is still a ways down the road, however. In the meantime, Kendall said, the Air Force remains committed to Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s vision of a “4+1” fighter fleet comprising the F-35, F-15EX, F-16, F-22 until NGAD is fielded, and the A-10.

Powering NGAD

In addition to the broader NGAD fighter, Kendall also shed some light on the program still in development that is likely to power the jet—the Advanced Engine Transition Program. Next-generation engines being developed as part of AETP are cutting edge, providing more range, greater acceleration, and increased cooling capability.

Those engines have proven intriguing enough that there has been interest in Congress in installing them on F-35s before the end of the decade, and the 2023 budget request from the Air Force devotes roughly $273 million to AETP. This led to questions from lawmakers concerned that the Air Force was creating a second F-35 engine program.

“It’s not a second F-35 engine. It’s a completely new and much-improved F-35 engine, potentially,” Kendall said. “It’s a technology that was in very early stages of development when I first saw it in 2010, that has matured fairly well. It offers the opportunity for, on the order of 20-25 percent cost savings or mission-range improvements. So it’s a substantial improvement and would be a replacement for the current engine, not a second one.”

However, like NGAD, the cost of AETP is likely to be high, Kendall hinted.

“There’s a [more than] $6 billion development cost associated with getting that engine completely developed and into production,” Kendall said. “So we’re looking at that. We’re funding the development this year, the next increment, but it’s going to have to compete in our budget for those resources going forward. But it would be a substantial improvement over the current capability.”

And like NGAD, observers shouldn’t expect AETP to be fielded in the immediate future.

“We’re a few years away from having a fully developed engine. There’s a substantial development program ahead of us,” Kendall said.

Poor Conditions, Disregard for Safety Still a Problem for Private Military Landlord Convicted of Fraud, Senate Report Says

April 27, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Even after one of the nation’s largest private military landlords, Balfour Beatty Communities, pleaded guilty to defrauding the Air Force, Army, and Navy for performance bonuses by submitting false information to the military, employees have continued to submit incorrect or incomplete work order information, a congressional investigation found.

In December 2021, Balfour Beatty, which is responsible for 43,000 privatized military homes across 55 installations, agreed to pay $65 million in fines and restitution as part of its guilty plea after investigations uncovered that from 2013 to 2019, employees maintained two sets of maintenance records at some bases—one detailing issues of mold, asbestos, and leaks that were not promptly fixed; and another set of falsified accounts of quick repairs that allowed the company to collect bonuses from the Pentagon.

At the time, executives told Congress that the company had undertaken “a significant reorganization,” firing employees and improving its training. But a report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ subcommittee for investigations released on April 26 concluded that recent actions by Balfour Beatty “bear striking similarities” to those the company admitted in its guilty plea.

In particular, the report cited “numerous examples since late 2019 of poor conditions in Balfour Beatty’s military housing and disregard of safety concerns and environmental hazards that put military families at risk.”

In a hearing accompanying the release of the report, two service members accused Balfour Beatty of prematurely closing work orders before problems had been addressed, changing work orders to eliminate mentions of mold, failing to make lasting repairs, and more.

Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jack Fe Torres, who is stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, told lawmakers that his wife and children began experiencing medical problems after moving into a Balfour Beatty home, raising concerns about mold. Those concerns were initially dismissed by maintenance supervisors, Fe Torres said, but subsequent tests revealed widespread issues with mold in the home.

At the same time, Fe Torres said, work orders were often marked as completed on Balfour Beatty’s online tracking platform, Yardi, before the actual repairs were made. Shoddy repairs also led to more work orders, making it seem as though different issues were happening, instead of the same problem reoccurring. Finally, work orders were sometimes changed by Balfour Beatty to eliminate mentions of mold.

“Originally when we looked at the report, it would be classified as something that’s in there. And then maybe a day or a couple of weeks later, the title will be changed,” Fe Torres said. “In terms of my background, I am a … heating and air conditioning technician. So I’m working on work orders all the time, and I’m able to track and look at these kinds of stuff. And I know for a fact that if a customer puts in a request for a work order, that title should not be changed, and it should not be closed before completion.”

As a result of the mold issues in their home and poor initial repairs, Fe Torres said, his family was forced to relocate to a hotel twice in three months—and Balfour Beatty classified the work order in Yardi as related to “carpentry.”

“What you’re looking at is what you’ll see across the board at all of the Balfour Beatty installations,” Rachel Christian, the chief legislative officer for Armed Forces Housing Advocates, told the Senate panel. “They are taking what is a hazard in a home and making it a simplified request. So that when the seven-year maintenance history … is provided to the next tenant, it’s not going to be correct. Also, it’s way easier to close out a carpentry request than it is to provide a full-scale mold remediation.”

In a separate panel, Balfour Beatty executives disputed the conclusion that the evidence provided by Fe Torres and others in the report constituted a broader pattern of misconduct.

“I reject the suggestion that it’s a systemic failure,” Richard C. Taylor, president of facility operations, renovation, and construction, told Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.). “You cited [a] case that you just read with 12 emails, 11 emails—As I shared with you, we’re a company that processes 280,000, on average, emails annually. Things go wrong. We don’t always get it right the first time. We’re not perfect. … What’s important for us is that we understand where our shortcomings are and we take action to correct those deficiencies.”

Taylor also touted the company’s customer satisfaction ratings. In 2021, he said, it received an average score of 4.53 out of 5 from more than 40,000 survey respondents.

Ossoff noted, however, that previous Balfour Beatty executives similarly pointed to high customer satisfaction ratings in 2019, when the fraud scandal was still ongoing.

“Why should a company convicted of major criminal fraud, that engaged in a scheme to defraud the United States, remain in a position of trust, responsible for the safe housing of the hero service members and their families on installations across the country?” Ossoff said.

In response, Taylor pointed to new practices introduced since 2019, including no longer linking bonus pay to internal performance reports and better oversight.

But for Fe Torres, Balfour Beatty still stands out as one of the most difficult privatized housing operators to work with.

“I’ve been stationed two other places and never once had any issues. Especially where they know my background, they know what I do, they’ve always, when we put a work order in, [they’ll say], ‘We’ll be there right away.’ They come out to fix it, and we never had any issues. My family never had any problems.

“I can be at work, and I have deployed twice, three times, and I’ve never had to be worried. I’m an instructor, and every time we put a work order in [with Balfour Beatty], I’m having to be at the house because my wife is scared that they’re going to blow her off, because they don’t want to talk to the spouse. They just want to talk to the military person, because if I see something wrong, they can just go ahead and tell my leadership, and then I get in trouble for it.”

Boeing Loses $1 Billion on VC-25B, T-7A; Calhoun Pledges to Rethink Lowball Bids

April 27, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Boeing took huge financial hits on its Air Force One and T-7A Advanced Trainer programs for the Air Force in the first quarter of 2022, chalking up the losses to the triple whammy of COVID-related labor problems, inflation, and supply chain issues. Company president and CEO David L. Calhoun also attributed the “messy” quarterly report in large part to the company’s lowballed bids for fixed-price development programs, an approach he said he’ll be avoiding in the future.

Boeing took a loss of $660 million on the Presidential Aircraft Recapitalization (PAR) program, also known as the VC-25B, or “Air Force One,” and a $367 million charge against its T-7A advanced trainer program, for a combined loss of more than $1 billion.

Boeing defense revenues were down 24 percent in the first quarter as the company also suffered a loss on its Navy MQ-25 refueling drone program.

Boeing didn’t report any hits on its KC-46A tanker—another fixed-price development program—on which it already has booked more than $5 billion in losses.

The VC-25B loss was the result of “a public negotiation that happened some time ago,” Calhoun told reporters on a quarterly results call, alluding to former President Donald Trump’s demands for lower costs on the jet that also resulted in one fewer aircraft, the deletion of aerial refueling capability, and the use of pre-owned aircraft for the mission. The VC-25B contract was signed in 2018.

As for Air Force One, “I’m just going to call [it] a very unique moment, a very unique negotiation, a very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn’t have taken,” Calhoun said, “but we are where we are, and we’re going to deliver great airplanes.”

Along with previous losses on the VC-25B, Boeing is now $1.1 billion over its $3.9 billion contract for the two presidential aircraft.

On the fixed-price contracts generally, “We took some risks, not knowing COVID would arise and not knowing the inflationary environment [that] would take hold, like it has,” Calhoun said. “Both of those things have impacted us fairly severely.” He pledged that Boeing will “continue to do our work and deliver first-rate airplanes to our customer in the government.”

While Calhoun was not in charge when the T-7 and MQ-25 fixed-price contracts were signed, he said he was on the board and, “Yes, they were written off the day we took them, knowing that we would be investing a fair amount of our own money in the future of those airframes.”

Nevertheless, he believes “those are going to be really good bets.” Even though development costs are “more than we had anticipated,” the aircraft “don’t go away.” They represent production programs of “many, many airplanes. And I think both airplanes are going to be very successful in supporting our military.”

The inefficiencies in the programs were “predominantly COVID-related,” and that exacts a greater toll on defense programs than commercial ones, Calhoun said.

“In the defense world, when a COVID line goes down or a group of workers steps out, we don’t have a whole bunch of cleared people to step into their shoes. So it has always been a tougher, tougher implication. And for VC-25B, where the clearances are ultra high, it’s really tough.”

Calhoun summed it up that Boeing “just got whacked in a number of different areas” and said the lowballed fixed-price problem is one “that I hope I never contribute to.”

Former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in 2019 that Boeing’s bid for what became the T-7 was nearly $10 billion less than what the service expected to pay. In light of that, Air Force Materiel Command chief Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr. said the service might have to change its cost estimating methods—but warned that, first, “you’ve got to see the performance” and whether the actual costs match the bid.

Boeing will roll out the first production example T-7A on April 28.

Airmen Aim to Promote Diversity in Aviation With Event at HBCU

April 27, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

An Air Force UH-1N helicopter will land near Cramton Auditorium on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C., on April 30, fulfilling one pilot’s dream and perhaps sparking a few more.

That’s the hope of 1st Lt. Dontae Bell, a pilot with the 1st Helicopter Squadron at Joint Base Andrews, Md. Bell, along with others, helped organize the “We Fly Too” event showcasing diversity in aviation that will be highlighted by the UH-1’s arrival and will include an appearance by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the service’s first Black Chief.

Speaking during an April 26 webinar hosted by Private Air Media Group, Bell said he first got the idea as an undergraduate at Howard, and he never quite gave up on it.

“I wanted to land on Howard’s field. And in the process of doing that, I wanted to also figure out a way to get back to my alma mater and really tell folks about the magic of aviation, which is something I didn’t really discover until later in the game,” Bell said. “One thing led to another. I wanted to see if we could get the Chief of Staff of the Air Force involved, and, of course, being a lieutenant, I didn’t really imagine how much it would take to get someone at that level onto a campus and speaking to students.”

It is Bell’s hope that the event, which will include panels and displays for students in college, high school, and middle school at a historically Black institution, will inspire young people to pursue aviation. It’s a hope shared by Lt. Col. Redahlia Person, commander of the Air Force ROTC detachment at Howard, one of the largest HBCUs in the country.

“It’s about opportunities and spreading that wealth and starting at a young age,” said Person, a career maintenance officer. “I think, had I been exposed to it a little bit sooner, I would have no problem wanting to fly. So I did the next best thing, which is to be responsible for fixing them and giving the pilots the keys.”

The Air Force has continued to struggle with a lack of diversity in its aviation career fields—a recent Air Force Inspector General report found that the operations career field is the least diverse specialty code in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, and the pilot speciality is the least diverse of them all. Roughly speaking, nine out of every 10 pilots in the military and in commercial industry are white, noted Lt. Col. Kenyatta Ruffin, an F-16 pilot.

“The problem isn’t the 90 percent … Like, I love all the pilots I fly with. They’re my bros, right?” Ruffin said. “It’s not about the 90 percent we have. It’s about the 90 percent that are stuck on the ground, that don’t have an opportunity, that are looking up to the sky and have no way to connect that dream or [of even] knowing it’s a dream.”

The general lack of opportunities for minorities even affects those who do get a chance.

“Anyone who goes through UPT, undergraduate pilot training, will face their set of issues. But I found that the reason why it was so challenging for me is because it felt particularly isolating,” Bell said, noting that he tried to quit several times. “And I don’t say that to say anyone treated me super unfairly—maybe there were moments that were a little awkward—but … I was the only African American in my cohort, in my class. So out of 20 people, it was just me. … And I felt … a lot of cultural differences when we would hang out outside of the specific classroom areas. And honestly, in the pilot training world, that’s where a lot of learning would happen.”

It was a feeling shared by Tech. Sgt. De’Mario Greene, a flight chief with the 1st Helicopter Squadron, when he went through training for special missions aviation.

“It was, ‘Well, I’m learning something new,’ so I also have the intimidation of being the best at one of the most difficult Air Force jobs there is, and then I also have, ‘Oh, it’s just me here.’ And sometimes we can be in our own heads and we can allow that to conquer us,” Greene said. “But I think it’s important that you have good leadership and good mentorship at the top. I ran into a similar situation down in New Mexico, and I had a lieutenant colonel pull me into his office. … He motivated me to stay in aviation. And to this day, that was one of the best conversations that I’ve ever had in my life.”

Mentorship is crucial, all four Airmen agreed—and with “We Fly Too,” they hope to encourage and connect more prospective service members with those who can guide them.

“Mentorship is one of my passions, and we often overthink it and make it too difficult,” Ruffin said. “And I say it all the time—I said it to my Airmen: If you’ve been in the Air Force for more than one day, you have something to offer to the person behind you.”

Air Force Announces It Will Buy E-7 Wedgetails to Replace AWACS

April 26, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force will buy some Boeing E-7A Wedgetails to replace a portion of its aging E-3 Sentry fleet, the service announced after evaluating two prototypes.

The Air Force “has decided to replace a portion” of the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) fleet with the E-7, the service said April 26, without disclosing how many it expects to procure. In its fiscal 2023 budget request, the Air Force asked Congress to let it retire 15 of its 31 Sentry aircraft, but a service spokesperson said not to assume those aircraft will be replaced on a one-for-one basis.

“That will be determined after the evaluation,” she said.

The fiscal 2023 budget proposal also included a request for $227 million in research, development, test, and evaluation for a “rapid prototype” example of the E-7, which, despite the description, will not be delivered until 2027. A second prototype will be requested in the fiscal 2024 budget, the service said—with a delivery date not disclosed. A “production decision” is to be made in fiscal 2025, well before the prototypes are even delivered.

The service said the savings obtained by divesting the E-3s will pay for acquiring their replacement.

“The E-7 system was developed by Australia for the Australian Defence Forces,” the Air Force said. “The unbreakable U.S. and Australia alliance and interoperability amongst the armed services enabled the Department of the Air Force to leverage this considerable investment and exceptional capability.”

The E-7 is “the only platform capable of meeting the requirements for the Defense Department’s tactical battle management, command and control, and moving target indication capabilities within the timeframe needed to replace the E-3,” the service said.

Air Force officials have previously said the Northrop Grumman E-2C Hawkeye and the Saab Erieye, both turboprop-powered AWACS-type aircraft, lack the speed, altitude, and capability USAF needs for the mission.

Senior USAF leaders have expressed their interest in the E-7 for several years. Last October, Gen. Mark D. Kelly, head of Air Combat Command, said he wanted them in the inventory “two years ago.” Complimentary comments have been offered by Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Pacific Air Forces commander Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach.

Due to its age, obsolete engines, and diminishing vendors, sustaining the E-3 fleet has become a “Herculean effort,” Kelly said, with mission capable rates dipping near 50 percent on “a 45-year-old airframe.”

Last October, the Air Force said it was entering a contract with Boeing to evaluate how the E-7, which was designed and optimized for the Royal Australian Air Force, could be adapted for USAF use.

Unlike the E-3, which uses an iconic rotating radome mounted ahead of its vertical tail, the Wedgetail uses an Active Electronically Scanned Array radar mounted in a blade-like structure on the back of a 737 airframe. Because it is digital, the blade antenna has a faster revisit time than the mechanical radome, which has some latency. It also requires less maintenance. The gaps at either end of the blade are filled in by sensors in an overhanging lip, called the “Top Hat.”

Australia, South Korea, Turkey, and the U.K. either have or plan to sign up to buy the E-7, but it would require different equipment and a different architecture to be compatible with USAF systems. Boeing has said it will supply an “open architecture” version of the E-7 to USAF, which would allow other companies to supply systems for the aircraft, but the existing version does not have this capability.

Inability to Quickly Replace Stingers and Javelins for Ukraine Highlights Industrial Base Problems

April 26, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Army has probably given a quarter of its Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine in recent months, and restocking them could take several years, former defense officials and Raytheon’s CEO said April 26. The issue highlights the industrial base’s lack of surge capacity at a time when Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is calling on partner nations to ramp up the flow of defense assistance for Ukraine.

In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the health of the defense industrial base, former Pentagon undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment Ellen Lord said that, according to public-domain sources, “We have probably given Ukraine a quarter of our stocks” of Stinger missiles, but “we cannot, within the next couple of years, produce more, because we have a problem with the government not paying to maintain production capacity.”

David Berteau, a former Pentagon official who oversaw logistics and materiel, now the CEO of the Professional Services Council, said, “We’re drawing down now. In some cases, I’ve seen about a third of our available stocks … in less than two months. If we’re one-third down in less than two months and we keep that rate up, that’s only six months” to deplete an entire inventory.

“There is no way a contractor is going to deliver replacements in less than that time, even if you started today. We’re behind. You guys [Congress] should push them [the Pentagon] to hurry up.”

In a first-quarter financial results call with journalists, Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes said that although “we’re currently producing Stingers for an international customer, … we have a very limited stock of material for bigger production. We’ve been working with the DOD for the last couple of weeks … actively trying to resource some of the materials, but unfortunately, DOD hasn’t bought a Stinger in about 18 years.” Some components are “no longer commercially available,” he said. “So we’re going to have to go out and redesign some of the electronics in the missile” to substitute newer elements, and that will take time.

“We’ll wrap up production of what we can this year, but I would expect” it will likely be 2023 or 2024 when “we actually see orders come in for the larger replenishments, both on Stinger as well as on Javelin, which has also been very successful in theater.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said, “I think we’ve lost the luxury of time, here. The closet is bare.” Blumenthal said the Army has handed over to Ukraine “one-third of its supply” of Javelin missiles, and to go from the current production rate of 1,000 a year to the “max amount,” which he did not specify, “would take about a year. And replenishing U.S. stocks of those weapons would require 32 months.” Without President Joe Biden invoking the Defense Production Act, “we will run out of these missiles …These weapons will not magically appear for us, or our allies, or Ukraine.”

Lord said that long gaps or extremely low rates on production of munitions and other defense goods worsens the reconstitution issue. With long breaks in production, test equipment breaks or becomes obsolete, supply chain links become “broken. … We have to reconstitute that.”

The Javelin anti-tank missile, also being provided in large numbers to Ukraine, is still in production, but “right now, we are still five years” from buying all the Javelins needed for the U.S. Army, she said.

“So I think the real issue here is, how we make sure we have a resilient supply chain to produce the munitions we need, and also for our partners and allies,” Lord asserted.

The Pentagon has not sent a “clear and consistent demand signal” to the defense industry that it wants the capacity for surge production of weapons, and there is a “two- to five-year lag” to bring weapons back into series production, she continued.

“We have that because we have not invested, as a nation, in infrastructure, the equipment and tooling to have the capacity and the throughput.”

Industry won’t create that capacity on its own without clear guidance from the Pentagon.

“As an industry, if you do not have a clear and consistent demand signal, you cannot justify the capital investment” to create it, Lord said. “No board of directors is going to OK that.”

Both Berteau and Lord said the Pentagon needs to change the way it buys items and get away from the ups and downs associated with things such as munitions, which Lord noted are a traditional “bill payer” for other priorities.

Berteau said, “It is definitely a problem, and we have yet to see a single contract in place to start on that replenishment. Discussions are going on, but there’s no definition of what the requirement is, yet, because we still don’t know how much we’re going to draw down” for Ukraine. He noted that there was a request for information put out April 22 seeking suppliers for materiel destined for Ukraine, but that is only a preliminary step in the process.

Both Lord and Berteau said the administration can rely on the Defense Production Act Title III to get the ball rolling, but Congress needs to provide the funds in a timely way.

They both also said red tape discourages many companies from becoming defense suppliers and that despite many high-level efforts to accelerate the process, it still generally takes at least two years for a company to get on contract, even for something deemed an “urgent” requirement.

“It is a choice” for a company to do business with the Pentagon, Lord said. DOD and Congress must make it a more attractive business opportunity, because companies need a “fast-paced, predictable” source of funding for development, production, and sustainment.

Both also said risk-taking in acquisition needs to be rewarded and that when it goes awry, the punishments should be less onerous. Otherwise, acquisition professionals will tend to stick with “by the book” methods instead of taking advantage of swifter contracting vehicles Congress has made available in recent years.

Hayes, in the earnings call, said Raytheon will lose about $750 million worth of business due to sanctions on Russia, about half of which was for Pratt & Whitney engines for Russia’s airliner market.

“That accounts for about one and a half percent of our total sales,” he said, and could be up to $900 million for the year.

“We’re going to be able to mitigate some of that through higher sales elsewhere. But you really do lose some sales associated with aftermarket activity into Russia … It is not a small number for us.”

Raytheon is making a total break with the Russian market, he said.

“We’re done. We’re done in Russia,” he insisted. “We had a joint venture there, where we built commercial heat exchangers for Boeing and Embraer. We closed that facility. We sold our share. We aren’t going back.”

Hayes added, “I think this is crossing the Rubicon, here, as far as we’re concerned, for Russia. We’re not going to support the airlines. We’re not going to support the development programs. We’re not going to support any Russian customers going forward, while this [the invasion of Ukraine] is going on. You got it? … We’re not shipping engines there. We’re not shipping engines to Airbus that would otherwise go into Russia” for Russian airlines.

The sanctions have also cut off supplies of titanium from Russia, and that will cause Pratt and other Raytheon units to be late on some products.

“It is, I think, the biggest challenge that we have as we think about these global sanctions on Russia,” Hayes said. “We did have a … significant portion of titanium forgings and castings coming from Russia. Many of those are now on the sanctions list.”

He said that as warnings about Ukraine mounted in the fall, “The good news is … we actually started advanced purchasing back in the fourth quarter, and we were able to get ahead of some of the sanctions. So we have inventory for a big chunk of that … through the end of this year.”

But, “it’s going to take us some time to re-source some of the [titanium and aluminum] castings. And that’s going to impact some of our customer deliveries this year.”

Producing New B-21 Bomber Will Cost $20 Billion Through 2027

April 26, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force expects to spend close to $20 billion on producing the B-21 Raider through fiscal 2027, but it doesn’t say how many of the advanced bombers it will buy for that cost. Including research and development, USAF will spend more than $32 billion on the Raider through fiscal 2027, according to service budget documents.

Justifications for the Air Force’s fiscal 2023 budget request include spending estimates across the future years defense plan, or FYDP, stretching through 2027. B-21 procurement, which does not include military construction or research and development, is requested at the following amounts:

Fiscal Year	B-21 Procurement Funding Request
2022 (enacted)	$108 million
2023	$1.787 billion
2024	$3.551 billion
2025	$4.429 billion
2026	$4.638 billion
2027	$5.023 billion

Source: USAF budget documents

The 2022 amount is likely to be for materials and long-lead items for initial production. For the period ’23 through ’27, the planned B-21 production total request is $19.536 billion. Northrop Grumman is building the B-21.

The Air Force has opted to classify how many B-21s it plans to buy for the requested amount. However, at the outset of the program, the cost of the bomber was capped at $550 million each in base year 2010 dollars, or $729.25 million in current dollars. That figure was intended to be an average unit cost over a production run of about 100 airplanes, and early examples of a new military aircraft always cost the most, when the learning curve is highest and the most tweaks tend to be made to the design.

Meeting the price cap was deemed a “critical parameter” of the program, the Air Force said. The B-21’s predecessor, the Next-Generation Bomber, was canceled because Pentagon officials deemed its cost too high and its capability too “exquisite.”

If production costs were fixed at the current level, the Air Force could buy 2.5 B-21s in fiscal ’23; nearly five in fiscal ’24; six in fiscal ’25; and between six and seven per year after, or just over 20 for the five-year period. Those figures roughly agree with initial revelations about the B-21 contract, which calls for 21 Raiders to be built in the first five production lots. However, that would not include further cost escalation due to inflation or new capabilities demanded by changing threats.

The amounts suggest that the fiscal ’25 budget achieves something of a plateau for the bomber, with rapid growth in the near years slowing to more modest growth in the latter part of the FYDP. The Air Force has said early versions of the B-21, although designated for testing, will nonetheless be “useable assets” available for combat operations.

Research and development of the Raider doesn’t stop, though.

Fiscal Year	B-21 Research and Development Funding
2022 (enacted)	$2.873
2023	$3.254
2024	$2.322
2025	$1.708
2026	$1.527
2027	$1.262

Source: USAF budget documents

From fiscal ’22 through ’27, the Air Force expects to spend $12.946 billion on B-21 research and development, making the six-year grand total for both procurement and R&D $32.482 billion.

Randall Walden, head of the Rapid Capabilities Office, which is developing the B-21, has said the first example could roll out of the Northrop Grumman plant at Palmdale, Calif., in the next few months.

Emerging Emphasis on Missile Tracking Reflected in Space Force’s 2023 Budget Request

April 26, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Detailed justification for the Space Force’s fiscal 2023 budget request revealed facility expansions for new radar and intercontinental ballistic missile programs and the breakdown of how the service would like to spend $1 billion on missile warning and tracking.

The Department of the Air Force published the detailed “J-book” documents the week of April 18. It is requesting $24.5 billion for the Space Force, an increase of $6.5 billion over the $18 billion enacted by Congress for fiscal 2022. The Space Force’s $24.5 billion makes up 12.6 percent of the Department of the Air Force’s $194 billion request for 2023.

Most of the Space Force’s increase—$4.5 billion—is in research, development, test, and evaluation, including $1 billion in new line items for resilient missile warning and missile tracking.

In its fiscal 2023 budget for military construction, the Space Force would like $68 million to build a three-story, 84-person dormitory at Clear Space Force Station, Alaska, for people who will be assigned there with the new Long Range Discrimination Radar for ballistic missile defense. The remote base, a 77-mile drive from Fairbanks, doesn’t have enough room in its current dorms or in the community, according to the budget documents. The dorm will also require an above-ground passageway connecting it with other parts of the base so Guardians can move around in severe weather.

The service also asked to move ahead with building a “multi-story Consolidated Maintenance Facility” at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., for the forthcoming successor to the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. The department is requesting $89 million in fiscal 2023 for the facility “to support Ground Based Strategic Deterrent test, launch Operations, and accommodate a crew of 250 personnel.” The department announced earlier in April that it had renamed GBSD the LGM-35A Sentinel. The Sentinel will require all-new “test, support equipment, training and processes,” according to the budget documents.

In line with Secretary of the Air Force Force Frank Kendall’s No. 1 “operational imperative”—to define a “resilient and effective space order of battle and architectures”—the department is requesting $1 billion in new line items for “resilient missile warning missile tracking.” These include money for the Space Development Agency’s already-out-for-bid, low-Earth-orbit “Tracking Layer” of its National Defense Space Architecture; plus the transition of a sensor demonstration experiment to a program of record for another “layer” of missile warning and tracking in medium Earth orbit.

Kendall addressed the items during his speech at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in April, saying the new constellations will “be able to track objects like China’s hypersonic weapon systems, or [China’s] potential fractional orbital bombardment system.”

Of the $1 billion for resilient missile warning and missile tracking in fiscal 2023, $499.8 billion is for SDA’s Tracking Layer in low Earth orbit, or LEO.

SDA director Derek Tournear told reporters at the symposium that his office expected to award multiple contracts in June for 28 total satellites—Tranche 1 of the Tracking Layer—to launch in May 2025. Congress gave SDA an extra $550 million in fiscal 2022 to accelerate the Tracking Layer, and SDA officials told reporters in June that they expected Tranche 1 to total $2.5 billion and to be in orbit by 2025. The budget documents show the annual appropriations for the Tracking Layer totaling $3.7 billion through fiscal 2027.

SDA’s “new acquisition model,” described in the budget documents as “utilizing rapid spiral development,” calls for de-orbiting and replacing tranches, or batches, of satellites within the constellation every two years.

The constellation fits into the Space Force’s overall force design for missile warning and tracking. The service’s Space Warfighting Analysis Center recommended a design of 135 of SDA’s LEO satellites and 16 in medium Earth orbit, or MEO, with the two layers “working in concert through an integrated ground solution,” according to the budget documents. “With space assets distributed in multiple orbits, the overall architecture and mission is more resilient in a contested environment.”

Space Systems Command, one of the Space Force’s three field commands, will oversee the development of the MEO layer, which arises from a “prototype effort” the command spearheaded under its previous designation the Space and Missile Systems Center. The service would like $139.1 million in fiscal 2023 and would expect to spend $827.1 million through fiscal 2027.

The budget documents say ground demonstrations of hardware and software took place in fiscal 2022.

“Transitioning development into this program element expands MEO development from a single satellite demonstration into a multiple satellite prototype system that will deliver at least 4 MEO satellites … for a minimum viable product combined warning and tracking architecture” by fiscal 2028.

The final $390.6 million, of the $1 billion for resilient missile warning and tracking in fiscal 2023, is for the LEO and MEO ground systems.