Watch, Read: Implications of Unmanned and Autonomous Systems

March 13, 2022

Air Commander John Haly of the Royal Australian Air Force Air hosts Krystle J. Carr, senior director, autonomous aviation and technology, Boeing defense, Space, and Security; Tony Bacarella, vice president of advanced programs, Elbit Systems of America; and Chris Pehrson, vice president for special programs, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, for a discussion of “Unmanned and Autonomous Systems” at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 3, 2022. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

Air Commander John Haly: Hello, everyone, my name is John Haly. If you aren’t planning on hearing anything about unmanned systems, you’ve come to the wrong place. But welcome. Thanks for coming and interest in the next 40 minutes. We just saw briefly the names on the board, but I’d like you to welcome Krystle Carr, the Senior Director for Autonomous Aviation and Technology from the Boeing Company. We also have Tony Bacarella, the Vice President for Advanced Systems from Elbit America. And Chris Pehrson, the Vice President for Special Programs from General Atomics, who are here today. So thanks very much. And we’re going to leap right into it with a handful of questions. So looking forward to what they have to say.

Air Forces across the world have been refining concepts and requirements for autonomous systems for some time, and we’re seeing them used more and more. We know that autonomous systems can lead to cost savings. It can lead to better use of our workforce across our air forces, and services across the joint force.

And I think importantly, and it was touched on this morning in a bunch of the discussions particularly by COMPACAF and COMACC. The use of these systems as a way to have force preservation and importantly, to look after the women and men that otherwise would be in harm’s way if it wasn’t for the use of these systems.

So with that as a little bit of a scene setter, let’s go straight into the questions. I’m going to I’m going to ask first, Chris, to talk to us so I just as I just said, the proliferation of these unmanned autonomous systems, you know, brings with a greater roles and advancements, but they’re clearly implications in what and how we do things we structured ourselves within the domain with our plans and with C2 [command and control]. That was based on what we knew of aviation, right. And it was based on the way we knew air forces fly, fight and win. So can I get you first, Chris to talk to us about what you think the implications are for us with what we have otherwise known as our approach to things like mission command, commander’s intent, rules of engagement, or even centralized command decentralized execution concepts that we think we’re comfortable with, but may need to [unintelligible]?

Pehrson: Great. Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. That’s a complex question. Forty minutes is not going to do it justice. But briefly, just to set context, General Atomics is kind of synonymous with unmanned systems. We’ve been in the business for about 30 years that we’ve delivered 1,000 platforms and 7 million flight hours. So quite a bit of pedigree there.

In the early days, you mentioned automation, and it was more about increasing the productivity of the efficient efficiency of the pilot. Things like automated checklists, automated takeoff and landing, very deterministic decision trees that would follow with automation, but that’s more evolved into an autonomy where the airplane is actually sensing the environment, reacting to the environment non-deterministically and making decisions—mission command decisions—following commander’s intent, but doing it with its own decision making logic.

I think key to the question is trust. We have to build trust that a loyal wingman with a fighter or type of aircraft, first of all, is not going to have a mid-air collision, that it’s going to be able to do the mission that you’re tasking it to do and do it reliably. And then have the mission assurance built into the system. As you’re managing the air battle, you’re guaranteed that it’s going to be able to perform mission.

That’s going to start with things like maybe adversary air or target drones, just flying in close proximity to manned aircraft or other unmanned aircraft. But eventually it’s going to evolve into a fully autonomous system where you’re going to give it a mission, and that’s going to go out and prosecute that mission. You’re going to have high success and high confidence that it’s going to get the job done, and then come back to do it again the next day.

The unmanned systems—they talk about different groups and give us group one to group five males, the hails, that’s kind of an artificial taxonomy. It should be really driven by mission capability, the mission you’re trying to perform. I think unmanned systems are going to be integral to the force because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to cost effectively have the qualitative advantage that we need to bring to the fight.

We want Dorito chips, these really exquisite platforms, but as much as we can afford, we’re just going to get the snack pack of Doritos. We need the family size bag of potato chips, not just a few exquisite breaking places in case of glass.

So I think that unmanned systems are going to be integral to the daily ops tempo of everything that we do. And it’s going to be an extension of the pilot or the battle managers, situational awareness, you’re going to provide that disaggregated sensing, you’re gonna have defense in depth because you can put unmanned systems at risk and put them closer to the fight. You can have a breadth of awareness because you’re expanding your sensor grid and your sensor web. And actually the new mode melt modalities for sensors are going to require unmanned systems because it’s not going to be a single monolithic platform with one sensor onboard. It’s going to be a disaggregated network. And they’re all going to be feeding data with precision timing and precision communications and just really bringing all that together for a shared situational awareness and in a true combat web net centric warfare, you know, these concepts we’ve talked about, theoretically for years are finally coming to reality. And trust again, trust is the foundation we have to build trust that it’s not going to put our own crews in danger, but it’s also had trust that it’s going to perform the mission may assign it Thank you.

Haly: Thanks. So in the concept and of integrating these things together, I think, in the best case, right? We all go out in our flight shops around the world and through the different [unintelligible] and we come with these elaborate for structure plans that have this beautiful system-of-systems kind of approach to it and it all gets put together. But in reality as we come together as different services different nations we form coalitions. We get into the joint force where we’re more likely to find ourselves with a force structure within a coalition. That’s a bit of an odd coupling of marriages of different bits of equipment from different OEMs or coming together to try and work for common purpose. So I guess, Tony, could you talk to us about what you see as what can be done to ease those sorts of integration things both in advance of needing to and in the worst case, as we cobbled together coalition’s such as we see in flashpoints around the world potentially agreed.

Tony Bacarella: Absolutely. Elbit Systems of America [is] heavily focused on the artificial intelligence side of the UAV-UAS area and mainly we focused on how do you deal with trading these APIs. That’s going to be when you think about every interest service and really quite intra-country. The reality is there’s so many different mission sets, so many different platform requirements, so many different ways to deal with teaming, that training the AI is going to be one of the biggest challenges we run into. So creating a modular approach that allows fast and rapid training so that you can have the competence the trust that Chris was talking about a little while ago is going to be pivotal to making these all making this work and especially talk about going across the boundaries that you just discussed. We have to come up with a modular approach that allows you to go into a synthetic environment to get the training on these multiple missions and the different environments that every one of these nations sees. And these inter forces see and how do we go create that confidence by creating a synthetic environment that does that? So we’ve done that and we think that’s an important part of this is to have the AI be trainable and the synthetic environment and drop the operator and the team and the command structure to that so that you can go permutate it over and over again so you can get the confidence required to deal with these things—both inter-force and inter-nation.

Haly: So just to follow on from that, so if we’re training the AI in a synthetic environment ideally ahead of its use, how sensitive then are we to essentially being trained down an ideal case, which is not fit for purpose when we actually cobble together a coalition and find ourselves in something that where the enemy has a vote and it doesn’t go according to our plans or expectations?

Bacarella: If I understand the question, if I don’t just please clarify the question … the way we look at it is you nailed it. The corner cases are going to kill you. Okay. You come in and you train for something very specific. They do something just a little bit crazy at you. You don’t know how to react to it. Your AI does not react. Your team doesn’t know how to react to it. So creating the synthetic environment that allows you to run those permutations and the processing capability to do that right now in a training environment or are constrained as we go towards quantum computing, etc. That allows us to go do these permutations and run them over and over and over again, so that your command structure gets vetted. Your artificial intelligence algorithm algorithms get better. How do you do your teaming gets vetted and it’s pivotal to being able to get the trust and the confidence that’s required to move out from that.

Daly: In fact, it sort of goes back to what we were talking about there because we then also need to circle back and start training those who set or expect certain rules of engagement, operational seats, who the way that we intend to command these forces when they’re presented to the component commands.

Bacarella: Just one quick comment: Autonomy is not a one size fits all. There’s platform autonomy, there’s multi-ship autonomy, and your small-package formation. Then there’s also the mission autonomy, the wider perspective of all the assets working together systems and systems.

Daly: Great. So Krystle, let’s talk about digital engineering, because not only is there the sort of training of AI components, but there’s also essentially the testing elements as well as well as I guess, adapting. So how do you think digital engineering is? Well, could you first start by telling us how it’s being applied, I suppose in this sort of autonomous systems market, and how it’s helping, you know, ultimately us as your customers to be better prepared to win that fight using these sorts of systems.

Krystle J. Carr: Right, thanks for the question. And I think that you’ve layered on very well all the different pieces of what makes autonomous systems work. So it’s really important that as we have these autonomous systems, part of what makes them great is that they are when you look in the mission context, you’re willing to let them go. And so they have a different kind of way you would train way you would employ them, way you would maintain them, all of that. And so if you’re going to have this kind of capability that you don’t necessarily want to want to keep for a long time.

It needs to be an efficient and affordable price and Secretary Kendall spoke this morning about loyalty means being at least half the price of whatever it is that they’re protecting. And I think that’s fair. I still wonder if that’s even a little bit more expensive than where we really want to be.

And so Boeing is doing it taking great strides in digital engineering, and from multiple programs we are implementing it and where we’re going with it is being able to have the digital twin [unintelligible] from the moment you put a bolt on an airplane to the moment you retire it out of the service. So having a full set of information that is at your fingertips to be able to understand to learn quickly.

And therefore, therefore you’re reducing. You’re reducing the amount of testing that has to be done you’re reducing the number of hours and spent doing just the engineering pieces of it the cycle of trying something fail-fast, becomes a lot more affordable when you’re when you can do most of the testing in a virtual environment.

That doesn’t mean that you don’t ever bend metal it doesn’t mean that you don’t go fly and test your prototypes to make sure that what you’re seeing in the digital environment is real. But you can do a lot more digitally first. And so we’re doing this not just in the autonomous systems market.

So we’ve got the T-7 program that is fully digital. XL UUV is in our autonomous systems bucket and that’s our better underwater vehicle. Air Power Teaming System, which is my baby in particular, is fully digital, and as well as in [MT?] 25. And what we’re seeing we saw both on T-7 and Air Power Teaming System with using these digital tools, we’re able to get from concept to first flight in 36 months on both.

So that to me that shows repeatability. And where your Power Team system is concerned it is a much smaller vehicle than any of the fighters or other vehicles that it might protect. And we can put a wing together and about a day and it’s all digital. We’re using our full size determinant assembly which is reduces all of the manufacturing time. The touch labor goes away. And then because it’s so simply produced, it’s easy to go and maintain and repair in the field and that is exactly what we’re looking for. So we have kind of started to test the what does it take to put a vehicle together that’s already been produced in not knowing what the learning curve was going to be. We assume that it would take about seven days to do that. Wel,l with mechanics that hadn’t seen the instructions before they were able to put an airplane together in two days. And we expect those types to continue to go down as we train and we learn more about the airplane. So by using the digital tools, you’re able to get things done a lot faster, which really for the warfighter means that we are going to be able to acquire that capability to employ it much faster than we would have with traditional engineering methods.

Daly: So just for the record, I’m clearly as the stupidest person on this topic on this on this stage, so I’m gonna I’m not lead the witness with any of these questions. But are the regulators, are the bureaucrats’ acquisition processes—are they keeping up and giving enough credit to the what the benefits of digital engineering can bring? Or are we essentially holding ourselves back from realizing all those types of benefits because we are prepared to trust in the magic just yet?

Carr: I think it’s a journey and we’re on that journey together. We have those conversations about is this really real. So being able to show the production line being able to show the product and let people touch it and see how it comes apart or how it is put together and then go and kind of look at the digital twin and see how everything that was predicted is as measured. I think those are the important conversations that we have to continue to have but it is on us to continue to perform and show the benefit so that the services will be more likely to trust and believe that this is real.

Haly: Yeah, right. So I think that same sort of journey, it’d be fair to say that we’re also on that just broadly with autonomy, writ large.

Chris, could I get you to to expand a little bit on probably the fundamental differences that exist between air vehicle autonomy versus mission autonomy that you were talking about before? And where you think we in uniform, or we across government, need to catch up or need to grow and learn to meet the opportunities?

Pherson: Sure. So I think foundational to the autonomy is going to be an open mission system configuration to open architecture between the different platforms, not only heterogeneous, different types of platforms manned, unmanned, but also on the platform itself. And we’ve flown our Avenger with both the Code and the Odin autonomy court system as part of the skyward program. And in order to enable those to fly we also have what we call an open OFP.

So there’s a there’s a flight safety boundary basically. So the checks and balances on flight safety are with our open OFP core flight management system onboard the aircraft. But because of the open systems architecture and the OMS messaging and such we can communicate with the autonomy engines that are actually giving us the flight behaviors.

So if we’re given a say, a bounding box of airspace to stay within, that’s being commanded by the Odin or Code software, but the open OFP is actually providing the checks and balances to make sure the aircraft behaves in a safety of flight manner.

At mission level autonomy, this is more like your more non-deterministic reaction to the threat environment if you have a stare threat pop up or adversary air, this is dynamically sensing the environment and then in a collaborative manner, autonomously reacting to it. So I’d say that [unintelligible] autonomy is keeping the aircraft in a safe box that’s telling him to search out this way and look for adversary air. Once that’s detected, the mission autonomy has to take over now has to be able to command the constellation of aircraft to reposition themselves to get the right firing solution, the right targeting tracking solution, whatever it may be, and work more of a system of systems approach to the autonomy.

One is different behaviors, I guess, different characteristics, but it’s all about the intent of what you expect and want the platform to do. So from the friendly side it’s acting predictably have that trust that it’s going to do the mission. But from the adversary side, it’s going to have enough dynamism in the in the force presentation to defeat the adversary basically.

Haly: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s, you know, we’re talking about mission sets. That are so varied, that this technology will help with. We spoke this morning, we heard COMACC talking in particular about things like, you know, defensive static bases, where mobility is not available and what autonomy can do there, all the way through to the high end warfighting things that we were touching on a second ago.

Tony, talk to us a little bit about what, what Elbit is doing to kind of position themselves across that sort of range of mission goals so that we can have the future we deserve for this.

Bacarella: So at Elbit Systems America, we’ve really focused as I said before, on the artificial intelligence side of it and all the all the ecosystem that surrounds us so that you can go through this and synthetic embedment into that. But that’s one aspect that we’ve invested in as well.

We see that there’s a huge need to go to new power sources, and they’re investing heavily in new power sources so that we can get the ranges required for new mission sets where we’ve obviously been invested. I think a lot of you are maybe familiar, maybe not, but our EW [electronic warfare\ capability sets are very strong and so we put a lot of focus. The RFC can destroy, the EOC can destroy—methodologies, the mesh networking for teaming.

All of that comes together into a comprehensive capability set that we are able to modularly put in place in different areas. So we’ve created subsets for the EW side that can go out into the RF, the EO, the AI all separately, so that they’re modular, and they’re open so that people can utilize them in different mission sets.

And then we take all those and we can go validate those through our synthetic environment as well. So that’s the heaviest area that we’ve gone in focused.

We’ve also put a lot of time and effort into airframe development for the different mission sets as well. But we see we see things really focusing on modularity more than anything else, and then being able to validate that through a model based system. So those two things in concert I think are going to cross the line too.

We talked about going you know, across different forces, across different missions, and then, working with our partners in other countries, your area they were talking about just a moment ago, I think it’s gonna be critical. When you’ve got a digital embodiment, you’re gonna be able to go take that now and Australia will have a different mission set in some ways or another. And once you’ve got that digital platform, you can go validate that.

The same thing happens with the AI in the synthetic environment. Now you can go validate the platform, and go validate the AI algorithm you want, you can validate the target and make sure that you’ve got a 3D vision of that, that you can go permutate and validate that you’re gonna hit the corner case as we talked about earlier. So those are all the key areas that we’ve really focused on.

Daly: Okay, thanks. Krystle, we’ll get on to one of one of our favorite topics in Australia. I’d like to talk about the or give you the opportunity primarily to talk about the airpower teaming system that Boeing is bringing forward. So can you talk about that in a context not just of what we hope it to be, but both the opportunities as well as the challenges associated with that, and in the manned, unmanned teaming kind of concept.

Carr: I think, to get to man-to-man teaming, so we’ve done between industry and the government studies over the years on what the capability gaps are, and it showed that [unintelligible] wing men in certain spaces make a lot of sense. And so the opportunity that that our company took was to employ the engineering team in Australia to go and figure it out. … The threat is all of our threat. The threat is in Australia’s backyard.

And so there’s there was a different sense of urgency when we started that program on going and making that happen quickly. So part of going and making things happen quickly also does present some challenges. So there are things that then become inherent and a design that you’ve got to go back and figure out how do I advance that at design to make it more operationally relevant for the long term?

And so those are the some of the challenges that we’re working through.

But the way that we’ve set up our program is that there are kind of generational cycles for design. And because it is digital, we have more of an opportunity in a short timeframe to cycle in new technologies, kind of like Tony was talking about, where if I’ve got the digital environment, what I can do is, this subsystem is important here, but maybe I want to go do a different mission. How will that integrate into the system? Where’s the right the best right place for it? How can I and then go and validate that.

I think that that’s really important. And then the way that we are doing things is we’re setting up the right production line, The platform itself is modular, which gives us the ability to move quickly continue to move forward and even be able to retrofit things that we need to on previous platforms.

And so I just I think we have a lot of freedom to go and do that. I’m really excited to see its scale. So right now we’re still in the theory phase, we’ve got kind of low rate, let’s kind of catch up, let’s put stuff together. But scaling to an actual at-rate production line, I think, is the thing that I’m most excited about on that program. And really any of our new development programs that are focused in the digital world because being able to prove out that these things can work is going to be where we get the best bang for our buck. As you know, coalition nations, right? We’ve got the challenges ahead of us. And I think making sure that we don’t get lost in just the technology advancement and we continue to remember why this matters is what’s going to help us to make sure we’re doing things safely, efficiently, simply providing the right capability that warfighters can trust. Because is about the trust and autonomy.

But what we want to make sure is as we get these, we darken the skies with the loyal wingman. What they’re not doing is creating other challenges for the pilots. The pilots need to be able to focus on their particular mission—not be worried about whether or not the other plane next to them is doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The ideal situation is that a pilot sees a loyal wingman on their radar and goes,: That’s mine and I know that it’s going to do exactly what I want it to.”

But I will say that the other challenge there then is making sure that as we trust we also do question because if there is for any reason there’s been tampering, something has been taken over, we want to be able to respond quickly to that too. So challenges on the warfighting side as well as challenges on the scaling side, but I’m really excited to see where it goes.

Daly: Great. What about the challenge of integrating these types of capabilities and perhaps you might all contribute to this. Again to you, Krystle, when you’re having to integrate it with manned systems from different manufacturers or different generations of aircraft, potentially different pedigrees, and I guess concepts.

Carr: I think that gets back to the open systems architecture, but open systems architecture across the entire fighting force. Being able to have interoperable platforms. It’s why all of the efforts that have been going on around making sure that things can talk to each other and that there’s not vendor lock is critical to our success. And if we don’t do that, if we kind of sit in our silos and continue to say, “Well, if you layer on these 15 other things, then it can talk to the other platforms.”

I think we all have to accept that none of us have all of the solutions that are going to meet the needs. And so we’ve got to figure out how to work together and having that just open systems architecture, I think is the way.

Bacarella: I totally agree. It’s really hard to do a one size fits all right. It’s virtually impossible. So having an open systems architecture is going to be important there. But there’s always going to be the puzzle that has to that piece that’s going to have to change to make that work. I don’t know I don’t think there’s a lightning bolt that can come in and fix that regrettably. And how you work as a company with companies together to go overcome that I think it’s going to be critical. The whole point of that digital architecture, like you were talking about before, would be great if that was transitioned to the platforms as well. So that we were also taking when you go to bring a new platform in every one of the platforms that’s existing, had the ability to go be a digital model as well. You know, that’s the one best thing I could see going forward that would have a big impact, although I haven’t seen it.

Pherson: I think the digital … modeling and simulation is so critical to that interoperability and integration. I think autonomous systems will breathe new life into fourth generation assets. It’s going to enhance the relevance of your rivet joints and your AWACS and the legacy systems we have today. But augmenting them initially, providing them greater sensor range, greater coverage, greater situational awareness and eventually probably superseding them. Disaggregated network of unmanned or collaborative systems is the future to survivability and resilience that we need in the future fight. But if you have high fidelity models for things like AP SIM or the war games that we’re playing, that’s how you experiment and test these out. Air Force and industry, we think, we’re narrowing down on the right solutions, but we still don’t know yet. We’re still defining the problem set I think. But eventually as we invest dollars and resources and commit to something we’re going to drive down to a point solution. We better be at the right point solution when we do.

Daly: Great. I’d like to give you I guess each the opportunity to talk about how your respective companies are positioning yourselves. Some of that we’ve already touched on a little bit but probably the I guess to package it and wrap it because we have companies that are in very different areas of what’s a broad church have this sort of capability. And I think more importantly, I’d love to hear what you’re most excited about for the next five years or so, about showing to the world and developing. I’ll start with Krystle.

Carr: Okay, let’s see. So, going autonomous systems is positioning itself in a number of ways. We’re starting with the kind of that digital thread, so our purpose or desire is to have digitally advanced simply inefficiently produced products so that as needs are come to bear we’re able to meet those needs and with the autonomous market, I think things move fast. I don’t think there is a one size fits all for any solution, but the quicker we can move to provide any kind of capability to fit each of those different use cases or gaps is really important. And I think that that’s one of the ways that we are positioning ourselves.

In addition, in the autonomous division, we’ve got products that connect from seabed to space. So we’ve got the extra large undersea vehicle. We’ve got MT-25. We’ve got we’ve got a parent teaming system. We’ve got even Liquid Robotics’ Wave Glider. All of these things … can either help connect and can help be forward and saying be able to just be in different pieces of the greater fight. That’s what we’re doing and how we’re positioning, and it’s really about speed and it’s about being a force multiplier and giving the warfighter the ability to go focus it on high value to asset and targets. And so for me, still very excited about how we’re going to continue to move forward, being able to move fast. And for me, in particular, seeing airpower teaming systems scale to the greatness that it could be. I know we’re laying the groundwork for that now and so that is those are the things that keep me going every day.

Pherson: The future is exciting. Yeah, we’ve been very successful with the permissive persistent MQ-9 family—the Reaper, the Gray Eagle, the Predator. Probably so successful that we’re identified as the poster child for that counterinsurgency fight. We’re breaking out of that paradigm. You know, the MQ-9 is going to be bread and butter for the company for quite a while it was going to stay relevant. It’s repurposing and reinventing itself for the great power competition, whether that’s in a maritime role. I think there’s a great potential in the maritime arena with antisubmarine warfare and surface search. We’re repurposing it for standoff SIGINT and electronic warfare capabilities. That’s proving itself today and in the real world.

But I think what’s really exciting now is some of these projects we’ve been working on for decades, investing in the technology the human capital, we have a [unintelligible] facility now to do more of the sort of survivability type work that started over a decade ago when we started U class. And we’re bringing some of these to fruition. You probably just saw the announcement for Gambit [unintelligible] will be assessed platform today. You know, these systems that previously where we worked as a single ground station with a single aircraft on a single target is kind of a stovepipe, in the theater, doing its mission and very tight with the Special Operations and ground forces.

Now we’re taking that persistence and reliability and affordability to the air domain with defensive counter air and base defense and really getting that MTI situation awareness in a persistent affordable way to the wider fight. And that requires integration, the collaboration, the autonomy. So like Gambit, that platform, we have a next gen one called MK-9 replacement because the mechanics can be around but something that can persist in a less permissive environment and do what the MQ-9 does today for ISR and precision strike. It is very exciting for us in the future.

Bacarella: At Elbit Systems America, we’ve already talked about how many times the AI side of things, the synthetic side of things, is a big part of this. But we as a company have everything from the platform down to all the sub modules to do [unintelligible] capability set.

We don’t look at it like we want to go out and be just the total platform solution guide. We think that the future really comes down to there’s going to be a bunch of different solutions and a bunch of different areas that are going to need tools from every company to make a successful route forward and being highly modular and having that model-based capability so that you can integrate easily across the different companies is critical.

And so we have brought a range of solutions that they range from all the way across the spectrum, to be able to go provide those into the different solution providers out there and look to work with those as we have in the past. But in addition to that, I think that you know, going back to the AI side of things for just a moment, the 4-D world synthetic environment capability that we built is not to be understated. It’s is a multispectral capability so that you can model any target or any environment like a real world condition and then emulate and simulate the actual sensor that you want to use in a given environment and do it in any permutation that you want.

And it goes back to this validation in this trust and digital environment that we talked about. It’s all really all hitting on the same centered focus of how do we go make an AI system actually be trusted and utilized in the field. And so we’ve really focused on that and created an environment that’s going to help validate that. I think that’s the thing that we bring that’s different and compelling into the market space right now. We have all the building blocks for everything else and obviously love to collaborate with everybody and continue to do that in the other areas. But that’s the thing. I think this is most compelling.

Daly: Great, thank you. And then I guess, to pass comment from a government perspective. It’s really clear the opportunities that we have in front of us but the challenges I think, you know, they’ve been touched on today and they can’t be understated and, and it’s they’re not new challenges. The challenge of how do we integrate systems that were designed for different domains so that they can work or design for different nations or designed around different requirements? Those are, those are challenges that we see in so many of the other elements of what we do as we build our forces in whichever nation you’re in.

We will always—us, me as an Australian—with the United States, with all of our friends and partners around the world, we will always sound like we have an accent when we talk to each other. But if we can build the systems that don’t have a digital accent, when they talk to each other, then we give ourselves the preconditions for the interoperability and the interchangeability that fundamentally we need if we’re going to meet the challenge of our day. And so, I think, where we’re concerned that vendor lock between companies within the same nation, within the same industrial base, may prevent integration that problem is just as large if not larger, when we talk about what we do together.

And in a fundamental mathematical sense, the United States has about 330 million people. The United States has treaty allies together. Just the treaty allies have 1.3 billion people—excluding your population.

So there’s a lot of people in the world who are bound by treaty to share the same ideals, the same values and to defend the same things, if we are provided the capacity to make a meaningful difference and stand side by side and do so together.

And so, insofar as we need to have open architecture for the things that we build, as we develop this technology, we need to have an open architecture in our relational approach to each other, as we all prepare to meet the challenge and ideally do that in a way that doesn’t bring populations into the line of fire.

So that’s my that’s my soapbox discussion, which launches from what we’re just talking about. We’re going to take a couple of minute early mark before we do that, let me first say, as has been said in many of the sessions this morning, in lieu of speaking gifts. AFA instead diverted that into opportunities for more guardians and more airmen to join us this afternoon for the barbecue. So that’s wonderful. And if you could all join me in thanking these guys and importantly, the representatives of General Atomics Assistance of America and the Boeing Company for the contribution today and in what is a challenging field, but certainly the start of something that I think will be unquestionably a part of the Future Force of tomorrow. So thanks very much.

Watch, Read: Bringing Space Superiority Into the Light

March 13, 2022

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Guetlein hosts Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt, senior director, global sales and marketing, Boeing Satellites; Erich Hernandez-Baquero, executive director of Raytheon Intelligence and Space; and Sherman Johns, director of space strategy and growth, SAIC, to discuss “Space Superiority” at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 3, 2022. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Guetlein: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for this afternoon’s mission capability area session on space superiority, a subject that until recently we really couldn’t talk much about. Before I turn the floor over to our esteemed panelists, let me briefly introduce them. First, Mr. Stu Eberhardt is the Senior Director for Global Sales and Marketing, Satellites, Space and Launch Defense and for Space and Security at the Boeing Corporation. He’s a retired Air Force officer and was previously a Program Manager for Boeing Phantom Works. He now oversees development programs supporting both commercial and US national security customers. Dr. Erich “HB” Hernandez-Baquero is the executive director at Raytheon Intelligence and Space and is a retired Air Force Colonel. Before joining Raytheon he was a senior material leader for the National Reconnaissance Office ground enterprise, and holds a PhD in imaging sciences from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Last but not least, Mr. Sherman “Papa” Johns, is the director of Space Strategy and Growth at SAIC. Mr. Johns is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, and before joining SAIC, he served in numerous space operations assignments, including as the commander of the 4th Space Operations Squadron and as a director of operations at the National Space Defense center. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. Okay, without further ado, let’s get started with HB. HB, how do you define space superiority? And how do both industry and government partners influence that definition?

Erich Hernandez-Baquero: And sir, at first, I like to say I’m so privileged to be here with you and with the panel members. And thanks to the AFA for letting me be part of the program. I think we have a pretty good working definition and doctrine today for what space superiority is—basically freedom of action and denying the adversary that freedom of action. But really the dialogue that we should have is, how do we achieve that. And you know, to do that, you need that space mastery. And I think industry can provide a lot of resources and capabilities to enable that. And so thinking about the space domain more deeply, and thinking about it in terms of the physical network and the cognitive dimensions of that domain, we can look at, you know, some major trends that are happening that are going to require us to, really rethink how we deploy our capabilities in the physical domain. What used to be fairly stable orbital strategies for how we would deploy our systems now are more dynamic trajectories that have to be put into place. So maneuvers becoming increasingly more important, as well as all the logistics and supply chains that are going to support any sort of responsive action that we need to provide. So those are going to be some factors to consider. And then network dimension—General Whiting, this morning, emphasized the threat of cyber attack that we’re going to have to protect against, but also the network is what’s going to link the space domain to the other domains. And it’s going to enable joint effects. And I’m primarily thinking the long-range kill chains that are going to be necessary for stressing scenarios like the defense of Taiwan. So the the network dimension and the mastery of that is going to be important. And then finally, in the cognitive area, where we’re now talking about the OODA loop and getting ahead of the adversaries’ OODA Loop. Leveraging technologies like AI and machine learning, enabling autonomy in a distributive framework are things that industry is prepared to provide. And as we work with the Space Force, these are some concepts that I think we need to come to the front as we think about space superiority.

Guetlein: Okay, thank you, HB. Stu, how does industry find their place in space superiority market and the mission area? And what best practices can be utilized either from a business case or government incentives to foster beneficial government and industrial partnerships?

Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt: Thanks, sir. Thanks for the question. First, honored to be here and, you know, AFAWS, you get to run around and see all the young Airmen and Guardians that are the future leaders and this exchange is just phenomenal. So I really appreciate the time and the ability to be here with these folks and be able to talk about these, these are issues that we’re all staring into today. And when I think about how we fit, how does industry fit into the space superiority market or mission area, I like to chunk-ize things and I would I would break it into four areas. Starts with culture, secondary would be capability. Third one would be capacity. And the fourth one would be readiness and somewhere in that readiness and capacity arena, you get your availability, your Ao, right, and all our air brethren kind of really resonate with Ao. So you sit here and go, you know, to be brief, I’ll just focus on two, I’ll focus on culture and capacity. And if you go with the definition that he talked about, you kind of go, OK, freedom of action in space, and you go, we always had that freedom of action in space. And I think we’ve all recognized that that freedom of action is under threat, right? So culturally, now, you sit here and go, OK, how do you need to think about space, you got to think about a whole lot different if that’s the case. And you got to start thinking in maybe in terms of red kill chains, maybe in blue resiliency capabilities. And I would offer that industry’s role there is let the engineers start thinking that way. Right? Classically, the engineers that were designing space systems weren’t thinking too much about what kind of resiliency features do I need to have? And classically, they weren’t thinking about what kill chain do I need to stop or prevent from happening. But when you do start putting them into those mission threads, and you start running vignettes with engineers, it’s amazing the kind of innovation that they can come up with and design into the system, whether they’re designing the actual capability of the system, or they’re leaving hooks in there for future capabilities to counter the counter. And I would offer that that’s where we fit in, that culture piece. And you know, you could probably add some other chunks, but I’ll lean into the capacity really quickly. The footing and the posture of industry to manufacture at the speed of relevance that the warfighter is demanding is an investment that industry has to make, right. And that’s going to be resounding across all the industry partners. And I can tell you that you know, that we’re all stepping up, we all recognize what has to occur and the and the changes that have to occur. And analogous to that, you could look at the air domain and go, OK, what incentives do you guys provide to bring industry along, and I would tell you that those incentives are already there. The incentives of the exchanges that we’re having, the incentives of how you have been messaging, the systems that you want to buy, how you’re asking for resiliency, those are the types of messaging we need to make those investments in the capabilities to shift the manufacturing base and be able to provide the capacity you need. Right, we used to play those war games where you kind of look at reconstitution. And it would take you two years to reconstitute a satellite. That’s totally unacceptable. So where are we reconstituting from on orbit? Or are we going to reconstitute on the ground and have that capability ready? And that’s a capacity function that really does lean into where’s your Ao? Where is your availability, to either be resilient against the threat or to counter it?

Guetlein: Thanks, Stu. Papa, so Stu talked about incentives and manufacturing capability. What do you see as some of the fundamental enablers for the space of priority missions, specifically, the resourcing and actions needed prior to weapon system delivery and operations? And how can industry help with these?

Sherman Johns: Thank you for the question, sir. I appreciate it. First, I’ll say thanks to FAA, for allowing, you know, all of us to sit on this panel and for this venue, really appreciate it. As to the question. So, Stu, I’m glad you brought up culture. Right. So I will answer that question three ways. The first one is digital engineering is a thing. Digital engineering needs to be applied and digital engineering is a foundational enabler to provide systems for space superiority. The next one is a robust infrastructure for testing. OK. Now, the culture piece that Steve just talked about is the third one and that’s essentially a robust infrastructure, not just for testing, but a robust infrastructure for training. OK. So I think we’re all aware here that we no longer operate, or the United States no longer operates in a benign environment. And as such, it’s threats-based operations. And so we need to train, industry needs to help our government partners, train Guardians, to essentially operate in that threat-based environment. And that requires a robust training infrastructure. So I’m talking about mod & sim that’s physics based, right. I’m talking about visualization tools that allow commanders to look at a problem and actually make decisions in a timely manner to where it matters. And I’m talking about a robust, I’ll call it a training range. OK, so both virtually and physically, and I think industry can help with all those things. Let the warfighters do the warfighting and let us help with those three things.

Guetlein: Thanks, Papa. So HB, how do you having just retired, having a new perspective now being on the other side of the aisle, if you will, in talking about incentives and capacity and digital engineering, etc. How can industry best support the acceleration of the development and acquisition processes?

Hernandez-Baquero: I think some of the process Stu was talking about and Papa was talking about are definitely key. You know, this whole investment in digital engineering is critical for us to accelerate the way we bring solutions to the fight. In just a short time I’ve been in industry, I’ve been pleased to see there’s been a lot of energy applied to really learning that craft, which is very different than how we used to do system engineering. And, you know, when you couple that with agile processes that are designed to deliver modern software, that really is what we need to be able to leverage to bring, you know, the digital revolution to bear against these problems. You know, the live virtual constructive environments, the modeling and sim, I think that’s also key, you know, some of the things that I’m seeing, the space warfare and analytic center doing, where they’re sharing threat analysis with industry, and then we have the dialogue about what the force design should be. I think we need more of that, we need to do that more frequently. I would like to see industry provide a little bit more capacity for that analysis, so that we’re not so throttled in terms of how fast we can make those trades across the domain. And, you know, those are things that when we know the threat as an industry, we can then really align our investments to make sure that we are ready with the capabilities that the government’s gonna need. And, you know, if we’re going to do more buy before build, right, there needs to be a good market signal, that industry can then say, OK, if I put the investment in this area, I’m going to get a return because I know this is a capability that the government needs to do. And so we can do a lot of work ahead of time rather than react to a solicitation when it comes out. So you know, getting ahead of that need, understanding the thread working closely. And, you know, the other thing we’re doing is, you know, we advocate open architectures, modular open architectures, because that allows you to change the right places where and adapt to the threat. And that’s another way in which you can continually adjust and improve your systems. On the flip side, I think it’s not a panacea, we’re never going to get to a pure plug and play where I can just bring my box, it goes in, and it does what it needs to do. So we need to have a really good understanding of how the various capabilities that we provide play into the overall system of systems. And so what we’re doing, at least in our case, we’re looking to expand the number of offerings so that we can cover the whole system architecture that’s needed for space, all the way from sensors to the spacecraft, through the transport and into the ground and in the processing. That way, we know the government is going to not buy a fully integrated system, right? We got that. But at least we know, okay, when we design each piece, we know whether its contribution is going to be into that architecture.

Guetlein: Thanks, HB. So to get after some of these, these capabilities you guys are talking about, we really need partnerships. So for Papa, what barriers to entry exist that the government can help remove to aid industry and delivering space superiority capabilities?

Johns: OK, I’m gonna, I want to talk about one. So thank you for the question, sir. And I think we’ve all heard this one before. And that’s classification. OK. I will say, though, that, you know, I’ve been with industry for three years or so. And in that time, I’ve seen sort of warp drive advancements when it comes to sharing information with industry. So kudos to the government on that. Absolutely. But there’s still work to be done, I think, and so, I completely understand the need for classification. But in order to help out industry, you know, obviously bring down some of that to the lowest level that you can possibly get to, and then, obviously share that sort of information often and early. And like I said, recently, industry has seen that this has worked really well. And I would say, to continue to do exactly that.

Guetlein: Thanks, Papa, For Stu, so Papa brought up the classification problems that we have, often with space superiority. And, been talking about the partnerships. Are there any specific technical areas, for example, manufacturing capabilities, or technologies that need to be maintained within the US to enable the best industry support to US space superiority?

Eberhardt: I’m pretty passionate about that. I would offer that—I’ll give you a contextual perspective on why I’ll hit on some of the things I’ll hit on. Right. So when I think about the space systems of the future, we classically used to think they were hardware systems that had software and that was a model right and we had old spaghetti code and when you went to go break that out, you had to retest the entire line again and run it through. And we all know how that goes. I think the future to provide the flexibility that you’re going to require for a space superiority system, I think you’re gonna need to think in terms of software systems with hardware nodes. And when you start going down that road, and you start thinking through the flexibility of applications and what you can change, and what functionality can you adjust on the fly of a given system that oh, by the way, archaically, we left up in space, instead of bringing it home? Right, it’s there, you can’t go get it, you have to have that flexibility. So if you start thinking that way, you start going okay, well, now, I’ve opened myself up to a lot of interesting threats and vulnerabilities in and around cyber, right. So if we’re so dependent on the software being advanced, we’ve got to then think through the cyber threat. And so when you start pulling that thread, and the value stream, you then eventually get to processing capability. And you need that zero trust capability in house needs to be in US borders. I think that’s something that we really need to focus on, we need to focus on being able to do FPGAs and ASICs on our soil. If you want to get to zero trust, and I get zero trust, right, it’s kind of a, it’s perfection. But I might achieve excellence, while I’m trying to get to perfection, right? We probably won’t get there with any kind of zero trust capability. But at least you’ve got it in house and you can control because that really drives you down into the supply chains. You want to be inherently trustworthy of as you’re building these systems, not let any vulnerabilities go outside. So I think that’s one capability that we really need to focus on and have a little national conversation around it. Because it’s a big deal. I think there’s others out there, I won’t elaborate too much. You know, we have a subsidiary, Spectra Lab, right. And I’m a true believer that the development of our solar panels and our solar arrays needs to be done in house in the US. And we shouldn’t even consider trying to outsource that anywhere. Again, it’s a supply chain issue, critical element of the system to operate in space. And so as you as you pull that thread, you can kind of see the theme, right? These are all critical things, as we think through, you know, what, what’s required for these to operate and you start drilling down into those technologies, and you start getting down to the lowest levels. And you can start seeing, Hey, these are the supply chains we all need to be focused on. And we need to be making the capital investments to keep them in the US.

Guetlein: Thanks, Stu. I’m going to actually build and ask you to think on the other side as well. So the secretary this morning talked about the “One Team, One Fight.” And as you talked about zero trust, a big item for myself, Space Systems Command and the Space Force is allied by design. How can industry better support the U.S. in establishing and operating with international coalition partners for space superiority?

Eberhardt: Yeah, so this is a great one. You know, we sell commercial satellites to commercial service providers, some of them out of Germany, some other foreign countries. And one thing that I would say that I’ve seen some recent success in is ITAR right, so I’m talking about supply chain issues. And obviously ITAR you know, the International Trade Arms Regulation, right, restricts technology from going overseas. And that’s all good. However, when you start talking about your allies and friends, and you want that similar coalition capability, right, you want to be able to work well with your allies and partners, right? Some of them want to actually buy U.S. systems. Right? And I’ll tell you, when we were working through the Boeing, Boeing Defense Australia, we have an office down in Australia, and we’re working with the Australian Defence Force on a SATCOM program called JP 9102. Right. Everybody’s put their bids in for the SATCOM system. I saw huge success and advancements in the government’s response in helping us to justify why we could sell what we were selling to the Australians. Number one, they’re an ally. Number two, you’re not actually—you’re delivering the technology into space. And number three, a lot of the technologies that we were selling were actually commercially available technologies. It’s just that that wasn’t well understood. And the government opened the door for us and said, Hey, you guys have to make the case. We’ll help open the door for you to make the case on why is this not ITAR restricted? And we were able to go in and work through all the demands that that ITAR require from you. That partnership that came out of Deanna Ryals’ office, actually for you, sir. That partnership was great and it—She helped all the all the folks that were working through those challenges. And that is part of the role and responsibility that she’s taken on, is to do that huge, huge benefit to the industry to, to have the government in partnership and working through it or like, read the regulations to get that capability into our allies hands. I think it’ll be game-changing, the more we kind of exercise that process. I think the better it’ll get.

Guetlein: Thanks, Stu. So for the audience here in about two or three minutes, we’re gonna open up to your questions, if you want to be thinking about your questions. There’s a microphone right there in the middle. So I’m gonna go over to HB. You talked a little bit about the commercial services, how that markets kind of maturing, you and Papa both did. What do you see as the capabilities that industry should be investing in today to support the market needs of tomorrow? Do you see on orbit servicing as one of those? Do you see data as a service? What do you see?

Hernandez-Baquero: Yeah, that talks to not only technology, but the business model, right, that we’re going to be providing capabilities on. And so I think that’s important to consider, because I do think that there are some inhibitors, when it comes to the business model that’s not allowing us to take advantage of some of these commercial technologies. And, you know, whether it’s data service, and you know, you talk about software being kind of the dominant element of this being, when you look at the capital investment that’s happening in the commercial world on software, digital technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, modeling and simulation, autonomy for vehicles, and 5G networking. I mean, there’s just huge capital, right, that’s going into commercial, going for that. And when you look at the value that warrants the investment that commercial puts into these technologies, it’s because there’s scale, and you’re able to pay as a service. But when you look at the way we’re selling these sort of technologies in the government, we’re not doing it that way. In fact, sometimes we’re even reticent to even take on a license. There seems to be kind of this mental model that I should just be able to buy an app with a two-pizza team. And some apps you can write, and actually, I do think we want to be able to drive to a lot of capabilities where we can, in fact, just either buy COTS or have a two-pizza team develop that right? Using DevSecOps, those are all the right sort of objectives for sure, some technology. But if we’re talking about it, for instance, distributed battle management and command and control capability, that’s going to have to be resilient to threats and operate in a very dynamic environment and overwhelm the enemy’s OODA loop. I don’t think you’re going to be able to plug and play that. And so there needs to be, you know, this kind of business model in play. And then I think industry will respond accordingly. And it’s going to be those investments and modeling and simulation that’s going to enable really that high-end AI. And we’re going to hear from Eric Schmidt, in the keynote here after this. How do we accelerate AI? And I think, that is one area that we’re significantly undervaluing right now. And I’m not talking about the basic automation of, you know, current existing processes, or even the pattern recognition kind of work. I’m talking about the AI that’s going to drive to that sort of distributed autonomy, that’s going to massively increase the scale of operations that we can levy on the enemy. And I think I think those there is an opportunity there, but we need to have a frank dialogue about the business model to enable that.

Guetlein: Thanks, HB. So Papa, what is industry’s role in delivering space superiority services, and products at speed?

Johns: Okay, thanks for that, sir. So I’m still an operator at heart. Right? So I’m going to speak through three things here. And one of those are very operationally, I guess, focused. The first one is, say, processes resources—the three are processes resources, and sort of systems of systems. And I mean that in a different way, I’ll get to that in a second. So the processes essentially adopt modern approaches to delivering systems, right. And so what I’m talking about there, again, we can talk about digital engineering, specifically digital twins, right? And when we start talking about digital twins or models of systems, I’m talking about to the to the entirety of the lifecycle of that system, and I think industry can help there. Right, so I’m talking all the way from analysis to procurement into testing and training operations and full circle back. So that’s the first one. The second one is sort of my, I’ll put on my old operator hat, right, revolves around resourcing. Okay. And so what I’m talking about, there’s industry partnering with the government on things that are support to warfighting, but are not warfighting. OK. So if I’m looking at an operational squadron, for example, that could be something like engineering services, training, those sorts of things that support that squadron, right. But it frees up the operators to actually do warfighting to do mission analysis to execute those things, and then debrief afterwards. So that’s the second one. And then the last one I mentioned is, so we’ve sort of touched on this one already. When I say system of systems, I’m really talking about how do we, how can industry help the government sort of integrate the military piece into the bigger space domain? So I’m talking about all the stakeholders, right, so I’m talking about SDA, NASA, Space RCO. And then we can keep going on the list. And I think industry’s sort of unique, they’re a little bit because we tend to have our tentacles everywhere, right? We have them in all those organizations. And I believe that industry can help when it comes to integrating into the bigger space domain.

Guetlein: Thanks, Papa. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask one more question. And then I’m going to open it up the audience. But I want to build upon what you just said, and for Stu as well. So you talked about how we would be using commercial in a time of conflict. And there’s been a discussion about blurred lines during conflict, when we were in Afghanistan or Iraq, it was very clear to tell what was Title 10, Title 50, what was commercial, what was allied, and we drew very bright lines between those lines. As we start going into the space fight in space superiority. There are those of a camp that says the government has to own all the capability on orbit for space superiority. However, as we start having mixed constellations of both commercial buy before you build, allied by design, etc., those blurred, those lines are going to be very blurred about, is this a commercial asset and allied asset? Or is this a DoD asset? Given that blurred lines, how do you as developers propose that we should design the systems and the RFPs to enable you to be successful? Stu?

Eberhardt: Yeah, so. So assuming the blurred lines exist, right, because there’s obviously, the government has a policy debate on their hands there on the use of commercial assets and what happens during the time of war. I would offer that I have a general agreement with the use of commercial assets for space superiority, because I think of space superiority in a much broader context. You know, going back to the original definition that you guys put out there, right, the freedom to operate in space. That being said, when I stare across the line of the commercial satellite business, and I stare across the line of the government satellite business, we do run into some roadblocks that we’ve seen. I think first and foremost, I have not seen from the US government a request for capabilities that cross Mil Ka and Commercial Ka. Just haven’t seen in the US. I’ve seen it from Allied partners. technically possible. Right. But haven’t. haven’t been asked for that. I do know that when we sell our commercial services, satellites, right. We’re all dealing with a lot of the same things, they run into interference, right. And you got to geolocate, fine, what’s interfering, because they’re losing revenue. Well, you know, translate that into the contested warfighting domain on a on a purpose-built, you know, asset. There is some hardening that happens on the government side, right? That CapEx decision on the commercial, the business case doesn’t necessarily hold water for that hardening unless you can pull an anchor tenant, like multiple allied government customers, to justify the investment they’re going to make to harden a commercial asset. Right. So when you think through the requirements and how you write those RFPs, right, you have to think in in those types of terms, right? A business case needs to be made for someone to go invest in a commercial company and provide a commercial service and it might be a commercial service that you want to be there. So if you want that to be there, but you have a little bit more stringent requirements for standoff distance, maybe its anti-jam capability, those kinds of things. You have to decide if you’re willing to bring some of that investment dollars there, because you are staring into that scenario. And then on the flip side of that, you also got to, you know, look through the system of systems. I think there was a really great discussion by HB and [inaudible] here on exactly the the terminal population of the of the forces crossing between that commercial Ka and mil Ka, right? And the cost that comes with that as well, right? You have to think through that requirement, right, you can put that capability on orbit all day long. But if you haven’t thought through the ripple effects of what happens to the rest of the system, and where the other buyers are in the system, all the way down to the end user, you then start running into trouble there too. So that was one example. And I’ll leave it as one single example to kind of walk through as you’re thinking about the commercial versus government. You do have to get down to what’s the minimum viable product the warfighter needs to win the war. Right? What do you need to win the war? It might be more than you think. But certainly, when you’re in peacetime, expand that capabilities all day long into the commercial market space, and then maybe even have some commercial backhaul that you’re going to rely on during the war that you know isn’t vulnerable.

Guetlein: Thanks, Stu. Papa?

Johns: As the warfighter, I would say. Okay, so this this this is a question that’s been sort of asked forever and has really not been, we haven’t cracked the code. Right. I would say this is sort of a policy question. Right. And my opinion is that policy needs to be defined. And industry will obviously follow suit. Now as to, you know, minimum viable products and commercial versus not. It’s just, uh, this one’s just hard, and space is hard as we all know. Right? And so I really don’t have a good answer to be honest with you, other than I would say, yes, absolutely. The policy on this one needs to be defined by the US government, and then industry will follow suit.

Guetlein: Okay, thank you, for HB. So we’ve seen a significant explosion and innovation across industry, like we have not seen since the drive to the moon, and a renewed sense of energy within the US population. We are see an enormous amount of investment capital go in and talent rushing into the space market. How do we continue from two big primes, for you and for Stu, to continue to grow the small businesses? How do we embrace the non-traditionals? But more importantly, the valley of death that they talked about this morning? How can we as the government knowing how the budget process works help bridge that valley of death?

Hernandez-Baquero: Yeah, that’s a simple problem to fix. But no, we are seeing these trends. And I think we have an opportunity, obviously, because I haven’t seen this kind of energy around space, just out there and the outside of the fence that we’re seeing now. So that’s really good. And so one of the things that, that I’ve seen recently, as we’ve just recently joined industry, you know, the typical defense model for how we do human resources and manage careers, and all that is not really aligned to attracting and retaining the talent that we’re talking about. And so it puts the onus on us really to think differently about how we do HR in our businesses, as well as thinking differently about how we partner with those non traditional institutions. And we’ve got some good experiences recently, where we’ve been providing some innovative solutions to the government, and frankly, leveraging, right, the innovation is coming out of these small, non traditional providers. And that’s working pretty well. So we don’t necessarily have to own that workforce, right? We just need to be able to establish those commercial relationships with them. And what we find is that they really don’t want to take on, right, the big, you know, what it takes to contract with the government? They want to continue to innovate and say, OK, well, we’ll do that part of it, and you bring your innovation and we’ll, you know, there’s some agreements that we can set up for that. And I think that’s a that’s a pretty good model. But I still think that we need to do more in terms of how we do HR and how we attract and retain that that sort of talent in house because ultimately, if you don’t have that you can’t have an effective buying or partnering activity that you do with the rest of them. Today is really tough. There’s a really tight labor market out there right now. And so we’re feeling the pinch on that, and the classification requirements don’t help either. And so that that’s another challenge that we have, in terms of the valley of death. I think, in part, it’s being able to wade through all of the myriad of technology that’s out there and being able to apply it, and show how it actually will support an operation or a capability. So going back to the earlier discussion on the threat analysis, and the force design and the modeling and simulation, you know, creating more opportunities where we can bring those technologies and have—I know the SecAF is kind of turning the crank away from just aimless experimentation, and more towards very conscious return on investment for operational effectiveness. That’s all goodness. But I think there’s some level of experimentation that’s focused on a hypothesis that’s derived from some operational analysis that we could do to help bridge that gap in terms of what the technology can provide and how we how we implement it into operations.

Guetlein: Thanks, HB. So Stu, the last question. Talking about your long, long duty title. When HB defined what is space superiority, talked a little bit about disaggregation, talked a little bit about proliferation. But as we start to disaggregate and proliferate, we cannot replenish the constellations that we have up there, we started talking about mil Ka and civil Ka, how do you in this transition period during the proliferation and the segregation, horizontally integrate across the legacy systems and the emerging systems to make sure that they’re going to be survivable in a fight?

Eberhardt: So the short answer is not an answer I think people want to hear, but I think it’s kind of danced around a lot, right? The air domain accounts for attrition. You know, you’re if you’re going to get into a fight, you’re accounting for losses. And they build that into their acquisition process. I think I think that’s a place to start. And that’s kind of a short answer. And I don’t mean it to be blunt. But I think if you pull the thread a little bit more on the on the rest of the question, I do believe that you’re going to be able to integrate in modern ground software systems. That’s not to say that eventually you don’t want that pushed out to the edge. And that you don’t want a mesh network that’s coordinating all the activities of these systems—you eventually want to make ground irrelevant, right? You should, ground should be the place where the HMI is usable by a young Guardian, who needs to be able to fly these systems, but really all the processing is happening in the mesh network amongst all the different systems. And that gives you that resiliency, and I think if you pull the thread, you know, I go back to some of the original teachings of Doug Loverro and General Pawlikowski on mission assurance and you start breaking down, are you are you really trying to get asset resiliency, or are you trying to get mission resiliency, because those are two different things. And so it depends on what you’re trying to do. Right. But solving that is probably going to drive down into, the horizontal area is going to be through the ground. And that’s today. But tomorrow, it could be, you know, that ground becomes somewhat irrelevant because you’ve networked this out to the system that’s proliferated and disaggregated.

Guetlein: Thanks to I do want to thank all of our panelists for attending today. This is a subject that we typically haven’t been allowed to talk much about. So I greatly appreciate you three braving to come up here and have that conversation. And also want to thank the AFA for teeing up this discussion. It’s a discussion that we’re going to have to have a lot more as we start to get after the fight. So AFA asked me to do quick, two quick announcements: First, instead of the speaker gifts this year, AFA has made donations to enable additional Airmen and Guardians to attend the poolside barbecue events. On behalf of you three, there’ll be some cadets that get to attend the event tonight. And our final session of the day is a keynote speaker with the entrepreneur and philanthropist Eric Schmidt, to discuss accelerating artificial intelligence at 1640 in the Gatlin Room. And have a great afternoon. Thank you.

Watch, Read: The Right Mix of Munitions for Tomorrow’s Wars

March 13, 2022

Retired Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzreim, director of research at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, hosts John D. Corley, ordnance sciences core technical competencies lead, Air Force Research Laboratory and the Mitchell Institute’s dean, retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, and director of future concepts and capability assessments, retired Col. Mark Gunzinger. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

Retired Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzreim: I’m Larry Stutzreim, retired major general, Air Force, and I’m director of research at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. And today we’re going to talk about the munitions of tomorrow. We’ll be discussing the need for a cost-effective mix of precision-guided munitions to meet the work time demands of near-peer conflict. I have to echo the words of Air Combat Command commander, [Gen.] Mark Kelly. He said something from last September—that we’re not going to be a fifth-generation Air Force until its fifth-generation fighters have picked fifth-generation weapons and fifth-generation sensing.

Well, the same holds true for our bombers. And while we made a lot of headway and aircraft types like the F-35, and the B-21, we need to arm them for success.

On top of this, we lack a deep bench of stores for them to be successful when it comes to key weapons. We’ve also sized the munitions industrial complex to lack ability to surge production in time of need, especially in some of the more exquisite systems that we’ll need in large numbers when the shooting starts.

This all adds up to the conclusion that it’s time to have a concerted focus on munitions. So we will, so let me introduce our panel.

First, I’d like to welcome Lieutenant General Dave Deptula, also from the Air Force, retired. He’s our dean at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. I’ve worked for him for the last 20 years on and off and those of us who have worked for him refer to him as the avenging angel of airpower. And he is.

And we also have with us from Mitchell Institute my friend here, Mark “Gonzo” Gunzinger. He’s the bombastic Big Bopper of the bomber, flying the B-52. But later in his career, both in the military and as a civil servant, he became deeply involved in policy and planning. He was a deputy assistant [unintelligible] for force planning.

And then we have to my far left here we have Dr. John Corley. He’s lead for ordnance science at AFRL Munitions Directorate. And you might refer to him as Mr. Peabody and Sherman of things that go boom, there we go. Yeah, okay. And a piece of history that’s interesting about him is back in Desert Storm, he’s the man that brought GBU 28 across the finish line.

John D. Corley: One of many.

Stutzreim: That was the, for you youngsters, that was the bunker buster that brought Saddam Hussein to his knees. So we’ve got a distinguished panel. And of course, Gonzo Gunzinger has done recently a report about the need to have the right cost-effective mix of precision-guided munitions to meet the future demands of conflict. And Gonzo, I’m going to ask you to give a short summary of your findings of that report and then I’d like to offer general deputy and Dr. Corley, make some opening comment.

Retired Col. Mark Gunzinger: Hey, thanks for coming. I really appreciate you showing up on this critically important topic. I’ve been engaged in examinations requirements for whole probably 20 years in the Air Force, and then the office of the Secretary of Defense where I had oversight of that portfolio for Secretary [Robert] Gates. So in talking about future requirements, it’s always important to ground them in our strategy, our national defense strategy. Our strategy requires the services. First slide.

To size your forces to defeat a pear adversary’s invasion of an area that they seek to dominate, much as we’re seeing right now in Ukraine, now that’s going to require our forces to go on the offensive within hours—not wait weeks—to build up a force structure in theater before kicking off a campaign.

Of course, by then China or Russia will have achieved their objectives. And that means that aerospace power will be the predominant means to rapidly respond from inside and outside of theater to strike those thousands of targets in hundreds of hours. They’re needed to blunt an invasion.

Next slide. That said, it’s well known that our PGM inventory has been sized in the past for lesser regional conflicts. And DoD has chronically underfunded its weapons programs. And undersized PGM inventory means our forces may not have the weapons they need for a high-intensity conflict, especially one that is not short, sharp. Now this example shows our Air Force could quickly expand it’s in theater JASSMs and LRASMs on the residence in an operation to blunt invasion of Taiwan. But the real question is, if you looked at the chart, what kind of weapons would they have to use after day 12 or 13? Have that kind of campaign as using non-stealth, non-survivable weapons would decrease the effectiveness of our strikes. And going back to relying on direct attack weapons like we’ve used in Iraq or Syria and Afghanistan the past 20 years, we increase risk to our air forces operating in highly contested environments.

Next slide. So in addition to capacity, DoD’s current PGM-mix is unbalanced, which is why we’re hearing so much about the need for a different mix of weapons in the future. The preponderance of the Air Force’s PGMs are direct-attack weapons, which are best suited for strikes in permissive environments, like I said, plus a much smaller number of those longer range standoff weapons.

Now, that made sense in the past, where our aircraft were not threatened by advance IADs. Strikes with short-range, direct-attack weapons will not be the norm in a fight with China. And as the slide says, very long range weapons tend to be larger, which reduces the number that can be carried per sortie and more constantly, which reduces the number that our military can afford to buy.

So an unbalanced PGMs can reduce the number of targets that we can attack with acceptable risk. And that’s why we need a family of next generation mid-range weapons. So as you see on the chart, weapons that are sized to fit internally in our fifth and sixth generation aircraft to maximize their lethality and bring to the flight what no other service can and as the penetrating strike capacity, they’ll be decisive.

Next slide. So, our force planners must also consider the characteristics of future target sets as they develop weapons requirements. Now to cite Secretary Kendall, our target set in a war a China would be very different in the target set that China is preparing to attack—which is why simply replicating the kinds of weapons that China’s investment doesn’t make sense for us.

So I actually … adapted this chart for one use 12 years ago, to illustrate the need for a new penetrating bomber. [It] shows some of the advantages and disadvantages of penetrating and standoff weapons. Many of which are related to their attributes such as their warheads sizes, their flight times and so forth. China, as is Russia, as is North Korea and Iran, [are] using mobility hardening deeply buried facilities camouflage and other means to degrade our strike effectiveness. Our best long range standoff weapons simply can’t carry warheads that are large enough to penetrate very hard people vary targets and their longer flight times can reduce your effectiveness on mobile targets which is what you see on the slide.

The point is, it’s those kinds of assessments that are needed to define the right mix of weapons in our future inventory. Next slide. So also touch on survivability, which John I think you’re going to get into, but by that I mean the ability of individual weapons to survive to reach their aim points. Now this [is] based on simple math. It shows it as enemy defenses become more capable of tracking and interdicting our weapons, individual PGMs, the number of weapons and sorties needed to strike a given target set increases. It’s logical. The point is, simply throwing more sorties and legacy weapons at this problem isn’t feasible. Our Air Force, the [unintelligible] is about half the size of the force was on the ramp during Desert Storm. We simply can’t generate those kinds of sorties needed to overcome these weapons losses. A better choice is to acquire a new generation of PGMs that are low observable, can maneuver, fly at higher speeds and so forth, otherwise designed to survive. Next slide. For wrap up, it’s also important to seek the right balance between the range, the size, the survivability, and the cost of our future PGMs. Now as Secretary Kendall has said, cost effectiveness is a major consideration for our weapons investments, especially for weapons are going to be used in peer fights, where we may have to expend tens and tens of thousands of them. So as this chart shows, weapon unit costs tend to increase with their range and their [unintelligible]. And that’s why in our report, we recommended investing in a family of those mid-range weapons range between 50 to 250 nautical miles after release, that a unit costs somewhere in the range of $300,000 or maybe even less. And that’s what the little table on the chart shows: how many of those weapons can we buy for $5 billion, which is really pretty reasonable for a munitions program. And how many days a combat could they support if launch at a reasonable rate of 500 per day?

And finally, next slide. While DoD should certainly field some hypersonic weapons, their high cost could constrain how many you can afford to buy, especially if you’re looking at very expensive boost glide weapons on the order of the long range hypersonic weapon the Army is investing in, which could cost somewhere between $40 [million] and $50 million per shot or per target, if you will. So that’s back to you for questions. Again, thanks for coming.

Stutzreim: General Deptula, response?

Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula: Well, greetings everyone. As you might expect, I fully support the work of Col. Gunzinger, more affectionately known as Gonzo. His paper, for those of you who haven’t read it, I’d certainly committed to you as it provides a foundation for I think the Air Force ought to be planning. After decades of deferred and canceled modernization programs, the Air Force’s lead over pure competitors is eroding. And we’re just simply undersized for the operational demands that we’re asked to meet. Unfortunately, during peacetime, one of the places that programmers go to find funds for other priorities are the munitions accounts. Now that’s because there are very few advocates for increasing munition inventories during peacetime therefore, when conflict does break out, we find ourselves facing munition shortages just when we need them in great or at least sufficient quantities.

You know as you get older you tend to tell more war stories, but I vividly recall during the opening months of Operation Enduring Freedom when I was the combined air operations … commander, [I] basically got a message saying hey, stopping using so many PGMs every day, you know, our stocks are getting low. And I’m thinking to myself, hey, we’ve only been doing this for three weeks. And we’re only hittng 70 to 80 DMPEs a day—desired mean points of impact. I mean, you’ve got to be kidding me. We’re starting to run low. This is Afghanistan. You know, these are 16th century tribesmen that we’re going against, not the Russians or the Chinese. The bottom line is, imagine a modern major regional conflict was on the order of 100,000 aim points in a matter of a few months. But as Gonzo alluded to in this day, and age, it’s not just about quantity. We’re faced with issues of manpower to build up weapons, survivability characteristics, range, adaptability to various targets, and many, many issues as those of you who are experts in munitions in here are aware of. So what the Air Force needs to do—it’s got to move out smartly to develop a new generation of mid-range standing PGMs that cost less than long range standoff weapons, to help develop a sufficient PGM inventory. Look, we’re not going to do 100,000 plus aim points with standoff. There’s not enough money in the Department of Defense to be able to do that. But we do need to be able to prepare to take care of that number of targets. So the next-generation stand-in PGMs, designed with low observability and other features to penetrate advanced integrated air defense systems, are kind of key to our ability to maintain that kind of deterrent effect that hopefully we’ll get back to being able to accomplish so we can prevent the kinds of things that we’re seeing in Europe today happening in other places around the world. Combining the range survivability and ability of penetrating aircraft to complete kill chains independently with next-generation standing PGMs will significantly increase the Air Force’s lethality and is something we got to move off of PowerPoint into production.

Stutzreim: Thanks, boss. Dr. Corley, comments.

Corley: Well, again, thanks for the opportunity to be here and to speak to AFA [and] to represent AFRL munitions directorate at Eglin Air Force Base, and Colonel Meeks as the director there. I’d say yes. And so I think, obviously, we need something between hypersonic weapons and standard in, you know, direct attack munitions, and something that’s affordable. And I’d say a subset of affordable mass would be affordable standoff. So I think we don’t have to necessarily go hypersonic to get in. To get in quick we can have a high speed cruise missile, that for Mike that’s much more affordable using much more mature technology in the near term, something like a high-mach turbine engine that could not only get us to the target at supersonic speeds but also generate power on the way to the target so that you could even increase this range.

So I think it’s not unimaginable that you could have a you know, excess of 1,000 miles’ range, you know, if you’re just at the warhead, and you’re trading trading fuel for warhead space.

Matter of fact, we’re working on a concept at AFRL called the affordable excuse me, it’s called the air launch response to strike missile. And it does just that, and it’s a feeder to a study that’s going on for the advanced long range affordable munition that’s in works and being studied right now.

But you can’t have a Gucci weapon just going after one targets that you got to have a multi-mission warhead, that for any of these cruise missiles … is pretty good at taking out not only your surface targets and your antennas and tails and those sorts of things, but also it was okay at bunkers and buildings and more recently maritime targets.

So we’re developing technologies that can go after all those.

A second approach to achieving this affordable mass would be I use the term organized chaos. And we’ve all talked about the ability to overwhelm and confuse the enemy by having network collaborative weapons. Thousands of them in the air, at least hundreds of them the air integrated. You know, this is a long term vision. I’m AFRL—I’m the long-term vision guy, right? May have Eurail on the long term vision guy, right?

So we are you can imagine having hundreds of these in the air network together. Making decisions on the fly target each other communicating back and forth with each other. But not only swarming, but having a loitering capability so we don’t want to just get to the target area and go right in we want to have some gas left for loitering as well.

And I’ll use the term and this was one that was coined at AFRL a few years back—heterogeneous integrated vehicle ensembles hives.

So it goes with a swarm theme so you have hives of that launch the swarms that are not only lethal packages, but they may have other payloads as well. You might have as supplies or payloads, you might have decoys, and some of them and some of them might have lethal and other types of payloads including you know, comm relay packages. You could even get—now bear with me, in know this is way-out thinking—you could even have sub-munitions that were powered as well, that you want from these cruise missiles to extend the range of those even further. So that would be swarms of swarms, to create confusion and give you some additional ability.

You mentioned the idea of capacity. And you know, we talked about the peace dividend, but I say there’s a precision weapons dividend that we incurred after Desert Storm where we got precision weapons [and] now we don’t need as many platforms. And guess what, we don’t have as many platforms now, so we don’t have as many hardpoints.

We cannot, you know, hang hundreds of these munitions just on conventional aircraft. So I think you’re gonna have to do something to take advantage of the broader launch platforms that we do have. Well, they may not even be launch platforms today. Think about transport aircraft. Think about palletized munitions. We’ve all seen the AFRL booth. Hopefully if you haven’t been, go by and see what they’re doing with Rapid Dragon for instance. I want to give a shout out to the Blue Horizon team. Do you have any the you are all here in the room today? Blue Horizon is a group that was started [unintelligible] at the Air University. And they are kind of a think tank within the Air Force of mid-grade officers that are going to be the leaders of tomorrow. And they have some concepts beyond Rapid Dragon. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically palletizing JASSM—a pretty expensive missile—but it was you know it was an F 117 replacement. So it was a good trade in terms of cost when at the time it was developed. But it’s probably not the exactly right missile for palletized ammunition to be affordable.

But think about concepts where you could have a less exquisite, more fragile missile that would be capable of being delivered in mass and at a lower cost and quantity and being able to produce you know, if you make them into economies of large quantities. You can realize economies of scale.

But back to Blue Horizon—they actually have some concepts besides pushing these out of transport aircraft with manned platforms. They’ve been talking about droning planes out of the Boneyard, and then using them to launch swarms of palletize munitions. And then you don’t have a return flight. You know, you just drone them into a target as well. So the vehicle itself becomes the target.

When we look at you think well how are we going to get to a … cruise missile that could be affordable enough to palletize we’ve actually got a concept. Again, it’s a blank-sheet concept … at AFRL called Cleaver, which is all about affordability, you know, making things that are survivable to the extent that they need to be but also more affordable.

And there was a compliant, so you can plug any payloads in there. You don’t have to crack them open, which is it doesn’t matter if you crack them open, you can crack them open and replace the chamber payloads and change them out. But, you know, update the warheads after their 20-year period. And essentially you come up with and they don’t have to have all of them have large 1,000-pound payloads in them.

They could essentially be flying fuel tanks where you have … reasonable sized payload that you’re trading … range and then have something left in the gas tank when you get there. And then the final part that I like to talk is about agile, competent, combat employment. I think we talked about direct attack munitions, but if you think about containerized munitions. Right now our direct attack munitions are shipped over and multiple containers into the field. And there it is a logistical nightmare to ship all of those random, these big shipping containers, unpack them, reassemble them. And now you got to do that if you want to highland hop, you’ve got to do that again, every day. No, you know, let’s just have containers and we can pull them out. Take unitary munitions are already built up, and all up rounds and hang them on the aircraft. And so we’re working concepts like that as well.

Gunzinger: Hey, John. Just real quick before we get to the questions. I didn’t want to imply that standoff weapons are bad, right? And right now, we need both. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. But that hole is missing those mid-range weapons. The other point is not about weapons costs. It really is cost per target, which is hard to show on ROI. That’s the metric.

Stutzreim: And we’ll talk about that a little bit. Dr. Corley, it’s great that you’re thinking logistically to develop this very important tool. Let me ask you, you know, we have been talking about how important it is to get this right mix PGMS for a long time. And everybody’s been talking what’s different today? Why is it so important to get this right now?

Corley: Two words: Russia, Ukraine. The threat a pure conflict today is real. Now, Desert Storm involved about 45,000 aim points. That was our last real major regional conflict. Afghanistan, Iraq because we’re small scale contingencies. They go back to Desert Storm, only about six percent of all the weapons employed were precision guided munitions. If you fast forward 25 years to Operation Inherent Resolve, operations against the Islamic State. Over 95 percent of the munitions used were PGMs. But since the numbers of weapons applied were very small, on average, between 10 and 15 strike sorties a day, with about one weapon drop per each, we could handle that.

But imagine a repeat of a major regional contingency on the order of a Desert Storm with a China or Russia. That’s what bumps up those aim points to on the order of 100,000 or more. So do we have that number of weapons on hand to deal with that magnitude of a threat? No, we don’t have the capacity to either to generate that number of weapons in a matter of weeks, so we need to get to stockpiling more munitions, with the capabilities that we desire.

Now, … you heard John already talk about some of the desired capabilities. Let me highlight what I believe we need to use as guidelines to shape this new standard in weapons inventory.

Five items. Broad-sense adaptability, locality, simplify logistics, reliability, and then reduce total cost. I’m not going to go into each one of them because you know, we could dig down into a level of detail and we just need not to do here, but let me just give you an example. What I mean by adaptability incorporating a universal arming, interface, platform language, resilient GPS INS in terminal secret capabilities, so we’re not tied to just one data-linked enhanced standoff. I mean, we’re looking at something minimum range of 50 miles, multi-mission capability, blast frag penetration, blast, low collateral damage, open system architecture, all up around and compatible with almost any bomb dropping platform in the inventory. So those are the kinds of things that I think we need to be aiming toward.

Stutzreim: A similar question, and I’ll go to Dr. Corley. And that is, in this regime Gonzo talks about in the direct attack, that shorter range piece, what attributes are you looking for, in addition to this, to get the right capability there and what operational factors drive those attributes? Can you prioritize those?

Corley: Well, I think, you know, as we spoke, there’s going to be, it has been said there’s been thousands of DMPEs and hundreds of hours that we’re going to have to go after. And do we have the stockpiles today even to do that, and every drop is going to have to count right. So I think reliability is job one. You have to make sure that every strike is going to survive the impact of the target. And the fuse is going to function right now.

You know, we know that we launched several weapons time sometimes to take out a single target we got to up our reliability of our weapon, so to make sure that we can trust that that one shot will do and that goes in really in line with what part of the reason we’ve launched multiple weapons is because our lethality tools are somewhat lacking.

So we you know, we don’t have enough confidence in the process that we use to characterize our weapons through static arena tests and then say, we let’s do three arena tests and then we’re good to go. But we’re not sure so we’re going to drop two weapons just in case and we’re just not going to have the luxury of doing that in future cons in future in future fights with a with a peer competitor.

I already mentioned … the idea about it being unitary and containerized that makes you know, the implication is that they would have transportability as another “ility” [to] be able to get them into the fight. Of course, smaller is always good for larger loadouts and we’re looking at you know, more lethal blast mechanisms.

People always talk about having the need to have larger warheads for more lethality. And I always say, as long as you’re in the right place at the right time, you can have a pretty small weapon and make and do the lethal effect, and so it’s all a cost, cost trade. And as I mentioned, we got to have weapons that we can build in mass and leverage those economies of scale because we’re producing a single type of weapon not multiple weapons for different targets sets, but single weapons that can do a lot of different things. And obviously, they all have to be have open system architecture, so they can be upgradable and drive towards—now this is something that you have to think about this a minute—but a PK greater than one. If your weapon can take out more than one target in process, then you you’ve won the calculus there. So those are some of the attributes that I would I would talk to

Stutzreim: Very good … We don’t have much time left. I’d like to ask General Deptula a cost-per-effect question, if we could … move on to that. I’ll come back to discussion on hypersonics with Dr. Corley and Gonzo if that’s okay. But General Deptula, you know, these budgets have a huge impact on our munitions, both in terms of capacity and capability. And how does this concept that we’ve been talking about for a while now virtual Institute, how does this concept cost per effect, enter the mix in that regard? How does it fit?

Deptula: Well, it’s no secret that as you describe that, we need to refocus on the effectiveness piece of the cost effective equation. Because for too many years now, we’ve only focused on cost. And so when we talk about cost per effect you need to consider in compare the cost and effects that each weapon can create, for the purpose of maximizing the value of desired operational outcomes. So it’s sort of like you want to start it in game at the target and then work backwards from there from there. For airstrikes, these comparisons should include not just the number and cost of the PGMs but the aircraft needed to execute the missions as well as the direct support assets, such as refueling tankers, electromagnetic jamming platforms, SAM suppression efforts, and including air crews and infrastructure like basing and maintenance support. Let me use as an example John’s already mentioned, and that’s the whole concept of agile combat and engagement because it’s got to be a huge driving factor and it’s great in terms of an example.

So in this particular case, think about it we’re looking at dispersed operations. So reducing manpower requirements becomes huge. As we will first in the first place, we’re not going to have the manpower to build up all these JDAMs as we’ve become used to in the past. We need all up rounds that you can pull out of a container and jam to an aircraft with no additional hands on time. So that’s what cause per effect in the context of munitions is all about one point. On cost effect. This is something that we were both in general depth to. The analyses that took place determine whether or not our nation needed a new penetrating bomber, and they took cost per effect into account as they did analyses, the various options standoff versus penetrating payloads and all that and well, the results are classified. We’re getting a new penetrating bomber and there is a very good reason for that.

Stutzreim: Pretty good. Let me skip to hypersonics real quick, and this is for both Gonzo and Dr. Corley. I’ll start with Gonzo, just talk about this mix. Where does it factor in in terms of the mix you’re talking about in your findings? Go ahead and just I know you absolutely talked about weapons survivability and hypersonic speeds can give us more survivability. As Secretary Kendall has said, there are a lot of ways of improving the survivability of our weapons so not just speeds. So our hypersonic weapons must be affordable enough to buy in quantity. And you take a look at boost glide weapons, I cited one—the Army’s—so $40 to $50 million a shot. Those two targets could buy an F 35 that we can reuse over and over and over again. Or they can buy a heck of a lot of those mid-range weapons like I talked about. But there are another class of hypersonic weapons and that’s scramjet air launched weapons, and I think [its] moderate range is 500 to 600 nautical miles. [There is] a good chance that scramjet-powered hypersonic weapons can be procured. It’d be much, much, much more affordable. I look forward to your thoughts on that.

Corley: Well, I think the role for hypersonic weapons, really, is that first of all deterrence and strategic messaging. But from a practical standpoint, it really … should it come to that they’re, a piece of rolling back the [uintelligible acronym] along with subsequent waves of crewed and uncrewed platforms to unlock that joint force. But nobody goes into the World Series with the strategy of, we’re going to win it with home runs. You know, so I think you’ve got to have that balanced approach. We know I think we were headed there, you know, okay, hypersonics is gonna solve everything. And I think now we’ve got to take a more balanced approach and I think you point that out in your in your paper very, very well. You know, I think hypersonics could be used to support swarms. So, you know, they can be very distracting. It can be very striking, distracting, you know, as you’re as they’re monitoring an incoming hypersonic weapon and you have a swarm come, you know, to really do the effect on target or vice versa. You have a swarm distract them while you’re engaging with the hypersonic target. So I think there’s some synergies there, that can be used together. So I think, you know, both hypersonic boost glide, and the cruise missiles have a have a role. But I think from a practical standpoint, really accelerating the ability of the cruise missiles to provide that shorter range, more affordable application of hypersonics is just as important that there’s all sorts of strategic targets that you need the long range for, but that would be what I would say about the mix.

Deptula: Yeah, let me jump in here just real quick and remind folks, that if the decision cycle takes longer than the time of flight of the missile would you use an hypersonic weapon for?

Corley: It really comes down to survivability that point, right? I mean, save a lot of money. We say time we you know, I think the argument to say that hypersonics for time critical targets just as you are implying, that does not solve the equation because there’s much longer portion to the equation, but it doesn’t you know, it is a means of enhancing survivability, but I think you can do that with supersonic weapons and maybe aren’t as expensive as well.

Gunzinger: Yeah, the key really is, I mentioned earlier to my briefing, understand your target set. And ours is not the same as China’s. So replicating what they’re doing by buying lots and lots hypersonic weapons and [unintelligible] doesn’t make sense except to a small crowd of policy, non-operational people and people trying to solidify their portion of the budget. There you go, and I’m your loan is cheaper. So let’s get rid of the surface launch stuff.

Corley: And one more three C’s. We’ve heard China, China, China, I’ll say capacity, capacity, capacity.

Stutzreim: Well said. We’re going to move to we got like four minutes left, but we’ve got to get to this discussion. I’m sure all three of you will have some things to say about this. But I’ll start with Gonzo.

You know, there’s this debate in town between the advocates for a penetrating strike and those advocating for these long range missiles that we’re talking about right now. So the outcome of this though, like General Deptula said, is really going to have a huge impact on how the money’s spent and what the portfolio looks like—and how effective it is against a threat. So talk to us you did a lot of work in this report about this debate.

Gunzinger: I’m a fan of some standoff weapons, no question about it. They have advantages that a direct attack these mid-range weapons can’t provide. But that said, very long range, service launch weapons that extremely expensive, logistics intensive huge footprints on the ground, problems closing the kill chain in a timely fashion, especially against targets that are mobile and that is our problem, China. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I like the PrSM [precision strike missile system. Army should buy the PrSM—for Europe. That’s the right theater that’s the right target set us the right time of flight, etc.

Corley: That your goes back to what was said this morning. You know, putting previous-generation weapons on future generation aircraft just doesn’t make a lot of sense. I gave a talk several years ago, looking back 30 … This was 10 years ago, looking back 30 years and say, 30 years from now—do we want to have the same weapons that we had 30 years ago on our on our airplanes? But that’s what we’re kind of doing. It kind of was sobering. This morning when he was talking about Desert Storm and 30 years ago, and I’m like, oh, my goodness, I’m getting old. But you know, I think that’s the reality. We’re still fighting with yesterday’s weapons on tomorrow’s platforms.

Stutzreim: While you’ve got the mic, Dr. Corley, one last question for you. On the horizon, do we have technologies that will increase munitions lethality, but not inflate the cost? Do we see that on the horizon?

Corley: Well, we are always trying to drive that calculus down and put more capability … into a less expensive platform like a weapon that’s expendable, and dial back some of the margin that we haven’t that’s built into today’s weapons because we want to pull them out of a box after 20 years and make sure they work the first time when you hang on an aircraft. That’s what we asked if our weapons today and if you can make more affordable weapons. That are going to be used and replaced, you know, parts of them those expendable parts more readily. We can we can drive that cost down. And again, not making so many different weapons, but cooperating as an industry base to develop more and more of the same things and it leverages economies of scale.

Stutzreim: We love what you do at the munitions directorate. General Deptula, do you have any closing comments by chance?

Deptula: No, I just emphasize the importance of this area and it’s one of the places I’ll finish where I started. Munitions tend to get neglected during peacetime. But given the kinds of challenges that we’re facing, potential peer level fights in the future, we’ve got to modernize and increase our munitions accounts to be able to handle the size of the kinds of challenges that we’re sure to face

Stutzreim: Thank you, sir. And thank you Dr. Corley. Go ahead, one last closing comment.

Corley: I’ve got one last closing comment. I just want to because you can’t go the recession without talking about digital engineering. I think that is really going to be a key to us going faster and cheaper as well in the future. And we’re starting to see that in the weapons community as well.

Stutzreim: Gonzo?

Gunzinger: We can have the best fifth- and sixth-gen force in the world. We’re going to have the largest bomber force in the world we can have NGADs out our ears. If they don’t have weapons, that does not translate into combat power. And Gen. Deptula is exactly right. The time to buy those weapons is now.

Stutzreim: Okay, folks, this comes brings us to the conclusion. If you are interested in this discussion, you can download Gonzo’s paper at mitchellaerospacepower.org. But I’m asking you sign up and you’ll get [unintelligible] on all of Mitchell Institute’s announcements or events. We’ve got a podcast you can listen to every week for 30 or 40 minutes. That’s aerospace advantage. But go ahead and sign up. It doesn’t cost you think we’d like to have you on our on our team.

5 Changes to Acquisition Focusing on Threat, Talent, and Tech

March 11, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Defense acquisition must evolve to address changes in the threat environment, the rate of technological advancement, and the demand for connectivity, among other shifts—while preserving a commitment to core values, integrity, and transparency, said the Air Force’s uniformed acquisition chief, Lt. Gen. Duke Z. Richardson.

Speaking at the annual McAleese conference in Washington, D.C., on March 9, Richardson outlined—based on his 39 years in acquisition—five major changes that have already happened that are forcing the process to evolve, and which he doesn’t think “anyone would dispute.”

‘The quality of the threat is higher’

The quality of the weapon systems the U.S. faces is “very, very different” from “20-30 years ago.” The details are classified, Richardson said, but “you’re going to have to trust me if you haven’t seen some of that information.”

Moreover, “the scope of the threat is changing,” with cyber “playing a large role in everything we do.” Those two changes are profound, and “we’re feeling it,” he said.

‘Solo operations’ won’t work anymore

And “this is a big one,” Richardson said. “This idea that you can take an F-22 fighter or an F-35—or pick your platform—and you can kind of just work … without help. … Those days are gone, for lots and lots of reasons.”

The acquisition system must get away from thinking about platforms discretely and focus on “the entire fighting system, working together.” Closing kill chains without the Space Force or even the other services “is not going to be done by the United States Air Force” alone. He said systems such as the F-22’s inter-flight datalink (IFDL) “that only speaks to other F-22s … really, those days are gone. We’ve got to get away from that.”

And, “it’s not just that—it’s really everything. Think about logistics systems, enterprise IT, simulators, support equipment,” Richardson continued. He was a program executive officer for four classes of systems, and “PEOs just like to be left alone, right? They like to manage their risk, and they do that best by sort of shielding themselves from connections to other things. That’s going to have to stop. We’re not going to be able to do that anymore—not if we’re going to keep up.”

‘Expectations of the workforce are different’

The acquisition system will have to recognize this, Richardson said. “And certainly COVID contributed to that. I’m not sure it wouldn’t have happened anyway.” Employees want meaningful work, he said, and they may want to do it in different ways and locations.

“And … it’s not just an Air Force thing [or] … DOD thing. It’s not just the defense industrial base. … It’s a commercial thing, too.” This doesn’t mean employees don’t want to work, he added, but “they … require meaningful work. So we’ve got to make sure we give meaningful work. We’ve got to find new ways of having them do their work and maybe even new locations. And so that’s something that’s definitely weighing on me.”

Software-defined hardware adds agility

“And this is a good thing,” Richardson said—“the maturity of the hardware.”

Hardware is now software-defined, he said, even to the point of “changing the way the waveform looks without actually changing the hardware. … The hardware is much more agile, in terms of edits, so to speak. … I think that’s great.”

This transition has also changed “warfighting capability” because of accelerating computing power and the ability to do digital acquisition and digital engineering—which, he pointed out, is not “taking paper and turning it into a PDF.” Instead, going digital is changing design and support systems and will open up “a lot of opportunities … to meet those workforce expectations that I mentioned.”

The pace is accelerating—which presents risks all its own

“I’m an engineer. We all know what the rate of change is,” Richardson said—”it’s called acceleration.”

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s mantra of “accelerate change or lose … [is] exactly right,” Richardson said, allowing that this has “weighed heavily on my mind.”

He also warned against calls to go faster to achieve speed for its own sake.

“This idea that, ‘Oh, just take risk … ’ Well, we don’t take risk. We manage risk, OK?” The acquisition system must never simply dive into a program and “just hope it works out. … That doesn’t work. So we manage it. We do smart things.”

The constants—and what’s next

What won’t change in acquisition, Richardson said, are the Air Force’s “core values”; a focus on “what’s best for the nation” and the taxpayer; the need for transparency with Congress and “making sure programs are justified”; technical leadership; and a thorough and comprehensive “risk and test program management.” The basic “blocking and tackling” skills of acquisition will always be needed, he said. The Air Force will also always need a “professional, competent workforce” and “systems engineering.”

Richardson said no one is more qualified to oversee the Air Force’s technical program than its Secretary, Frank Kendall, “who wrote the book” on acquisition. In his first months on the job, Kendall “took a wire brush” to USAF programs, and, Richardson allowed, “we probably needed it.”

What must change, Richardson said, is a shift to “enterprise solutions” across the Department of the Air Force. While programs have been easier to manage when they don’t have to tie into other things, “that’s not the time we’re in anymore,” he said. “We need a lot more system-level thinking.” The Advanced Battle Management System, for example, must work across multiple commands, services, and technologies, and it will integrate logistics, information technologies, weapon system sustainment, mission planning, business systems—the gamut of what USAF does.

“We’re working on what’s called the digital infrastructure right now, the consortium approach to design what that should look like,” Richardson said. “And then once we get that, … we’ll start competing the parts and pieces to it.”

All weapon systems “need to be” integrated with and serve the enterprise, he asserted. “We can’t have single-purpose systems. … We are going to lose to adversaries that are more advanced than that.”

The Air Force must also shift away from a platform focus to “the mission systems on the platform,” he said. “I’ll know we’re there when the mission systems are the ‘co-stars’” with the platforms on which they ride, Richardson said.

The acquisition system must also change the way the industry and government collaborate, he said. The old system of calendar-driven preliminary and critical design reviews and other “Big Bang deliverable” events must give way to narrower-focus, more rapid updates that take advantage of new digital tools and make speed a given.

“This idea of Big Bang meetings, Big Bang design reviews … where the process kind of waits until a monthly deliverable comes … is not dynamic. It’s not flexible. That needs to change.” Rather than major milestones, “you’ve been doing it all along. And these new … digital engineering tools have allowed us to do that. And they allow us to do it in different locations so we can go to different locations.”

North Korea Has Tested New ICBM System, Pentagon Reveals

March 11, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has intensified its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance efforts and increased its ballistic missile defense readiness in response to North Korea’s tests of a new ICBM system, the Pentagon announced March 10.

According to a statement from Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby, the North Koreans conducted a pair of tests Feb. 26 and March 4 of the new intercontinental ballistic missile system known as Hwasong-16, which North Korea first revealed in an October 2020 military parade.

“The purpose of these tests, which did not demonstrate ICBM range, was likely to evaluate this new system before conducting a test at full range in the future, potentially disguised as a space launch,” Kirby’s statement read.

The prediction of a full-range ICBM test in the near future follows an October 2021 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which assessed that “it is possible we could see a test of a long-range missile” from North Korea “over the next year.” Shortly after that report was released, North Korea tested a submarine-launched missile.

North Korea has announced missile tests in the past but did not make these latest two public—the U.S. chose to do so “because we believe it’s important to call out the behavior that we’ve been seeing, particularly in the last few weeks, and we believe it’s important for the entire international community to speak with one voice about the concerns that we know they have over the DPRK’s continued ballistic missile program,” Kirby told reporters in a March 11 briefing.

Pressed on exactly what actions INDOPACOM has made in response to the new tests, Kirby declined to discuss specifics.

“What has changed is we’ve increased ISR coverage in the Yellow Sea, and INDOPACOM has increased their ballistic missile defense readiness, and I think you can understand why we wouldn’t detail every bit of that effort,” he said.

The tactic of publicly revealing adversary actions they had not disclosed has become an increasingly common one for the Pentagon as of late—in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies repeatedly released intelligence indicating what President Vladimir Putin’s next moves might be, hoping to preempt and foil his plans. That tactic has, to an extent, continued after the invasion.

However, Kirby downplayed the notion that in revealing the North Korean ballistic missile tests, the Pentagon is following the same playbook.

“I would be careful drawing a direct bright line between these revelations about this program and revelations that we made early on, even before the invasion of Ukraine,” said Kirby. “When we believe that information should be in the public, we’re going to put it in the public. We’re going to state it as best we can. Obviously, there’s some stuff we know that we’re not going to talk about. But we believe that calling them out publicly for these tests was the right thing to do.”

Automating Launch Safety Is Helping the Space Force Speed Up the Tempo

March 11, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, Fla.—Air Force and Space Force personnel and systems have stood at the ready to remotely destroy a rocket if it were to go off course from the Eastern Range and endanger the public.

Now as launch companies adopt autonomous flight safety systems, Space Launch Delta 45 is saving on mission control chairs and looping out about a dozen facilities across the base per launch.

Streamlining the launches is letting the Space Force do more of them.

The delta’s leadership views the autonomous flight safety systems, or AFSS—which end an awry rocket’s flight automatically— as “the fundamental enabler” of the service’s “Range of the Future” vision.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond’s “Range of the Future” initiative requires autonomous flight safety systems, or AFSS, for launches by 2025.

“We’ve already seen the tremendous benefits of that with SpaceX. The numbers are dramatic,” the delta’s commander, Gen. Stephen G. Purdy Jr., told Air Force Magazine during a recent visit to Patrick Space Force Base, some 15 miles south of Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic.

Purdy estimated that a command-destruct mission involves some 16 range systems that must be used or staffed. That number drops to about five if the launch vehicle has an autonomous flight safety system to automatically blow it up, with onboard ordnance, or otherwise terminate the flight.

The Space Force’s Space Systems Command said the “significantly lighter instrumentation/manpower footprint” will lead to more launch capacity.

“This will be significant in processing our packed launch manifest,” a command spokesperson said. “We look to launch more missions to orbit in 2022 than in any previous year in the history of launch from the Cape.”

Purdy said that’s a welcome change from the mentality of years past.

“Many years ago, we were the range of the ‘No’ from a safety perspective and a scheduling perspective. If it was difficult, if it was painful, the answer was kind of ‘no’ first and then ‘no’ second,” said Purdy, a trained engineer and acquisitions professional. “You could do that when you only launched four or five rockets a year, right? If you’re launching a bunch more, you’ve got to figure out better ways to do things.”

SpaceX and Blue Origin already have the autonomous systems on their rockets, while legacy provider United Launch Alliance does not, but Space Force expects ULA’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket to have the feature.

Part of realizing Raymond’s vision is to get rid of unnecessary equipment and bureaucracy in order to run America’s space ranges more like commercial airports.

De-coupling public safety from Eastern Range instrumentation requirements is helping Cape Canaveral fast-track Raymond’s vision, said Col. Mark A. Shoemaker, vice commander of Space Launch Delta 45.

“That is probably the fundamental enabler of the big Range of the Future vision,” said Shoemaker, speaking from his office suite, which is still decorated with an open-mouthed shark logo carpet emblazoned with the motto, “We are ‘Go’ for launch,” representing the delta’s 45th Space Wing predecessor.

Reconfiguring the command-destruct range for every launch “is one of the key pacing items today,” Shoemaker said. Without the requirement, the delta can conduct launches more often.

“Command destruct requires an entire room of folks, actually, right past that glass,” said Space Force Col. Pat Youngson, the delta’s chief of safety, pointing to a room just off Mission Control Room 1 in the Morrell Operations Center at Cape Canaveral.

“They sit on a console and actually [are] the man in the loop when the rocket goes the wrong way—they would actually turn a key and destroy the rocket,” he said. “We can turn range faster by not having all those extra pieces and parts. And that’s something Gen. Raymond has mandated for all of us to do.”

Once all the launch providers have autonomous flight safety systems, Space Systems Command estimates that 13 personnel will be freed up along with divestment in associated equipment.

For now, maintaining that equipment is a challenge in beachy conditions, including salt water, winds, sunshine, and even hurricanes.

“This is the Space Coast. We are in Florida. There’s a lot of water just over there,” Youngson explained.

“That water has salt, and the salt just starts eating away everything we have. As soon as you paint it, it’s going to start rusting tomorrow. And so that’s a lot of upkeep,” he said, noting that sometimes radars will be found inoperable.

Then there are the critters.

“There’s stuff that’s going to start breaking. There are animals here that like to dig, and so they’ll start chewing through wires,” he said. “You name it—there are things that are happening here.”

The best way to fix the problem, Youngson said, is less infrastructure. And that is achieved by autonomous flight termination.

“A lot of systems on the range we’re just not going to need anymore,” Purdy said. “We’re going to … squeeze out a lot of the older tech.”

Austin Set to Visit Belgium, Slovakia Amid Russia-Ukraine Conflict

March 11, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is set to visit Belgium and Slovakia the week of March 13, his first visit to Europe since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon announced March 11.

In Brussels, Belgium, Austin will take part in a meeting with NATO defense ministers as the alliance continues to track the war unfolding in Eastern Europe. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country, many pouring into neighboring NATO states, while members of the alliance continue to ship weapons and aid into the country.

President Joe Biden has pledged to defend “every inch” of NATO territory while remaining firm in his insistence that the U.S. will not send any troops into Ukraine itself. Still, thousands of American troops have deployed to Europe.

After the ministerial in Brussels, Austin will go to Slovakia, where he will “visit with senior civilian military leaders there to again make clear our firm commitment to NATO’s eastern flank and to talk about ways to deepen the U.S.-Slovakia relationship,” Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby told reporters in a briefing.

At the moment, Slovakia, which borders Ukraine, has no permanent U.S. troop presence in Slovakia, but the two countries have increased cooperation as of late.

In early February, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Slovakia’s defense minister, Jaroslav Nad, signed an agreement for the U.S. to use two Slovak air bases for 10 years. Slovakia will receive American funds to modernize those bases, according to the Associated Press.

Then, Reuters reported that a contingent of American troops were headed to Slovakia as part of NATO’s Saber Strike exercise. Roughly 2,000 troops were scheduled to drill with Slovak soldiers in the first few weeks of March. Officials said the exercise had been long planned and was not in response to increasing Russian aggression.

Austin’s visit to Slovakia follows a previous trip he made to Eastern Europe in the fall of 2021, when he made stops in several Black Sea nations in a show of support against Russia’s influence.

Now, he will arrive in a region grappling with its largest conflict in decades—one that is growing increasingly brutal as Russia is accused of shelling civilian structures and areas and committing war crimes.

Fears are growing that Russia may use chemical or biological weapons against Ukraine. In remarks to the press March 11, President Joe Biden warned of a “severe price” if that happened.

“I’m not going to speak about the intelligence, but Russia will pay a severe price if they use chemicals,” Biden said.

Kirby likewise declined to discuss any intelligence reports but said he didn’t “have anything to report with respect to specific Russian chem-bio capabilities inside Ukraine.”

“I would only say two things. … One, this is a country that has a reputation for using those kinds of weapons on people, and we know they have a program,” Kirby added. “And two, we continue to watch for the potential—and I want to stress the word potential, potential—that they could be banging this drum with the intent of creating some sort of false flag event that they could use as an excuse to escalate the conflict even more.”

Kirby did confirm reports that Russia has conducted airstrikes on two airfields in western Ukraine, a region that has mostly been removed from the main fronts of conflict. Whether that signals a shift by Moscow to expand the scope of the war, however, Kirby wouldn’t say.

“It’s difficult to know with great certainty what the Russians are doing here. Our assessment is that they struck a couple of airfields in the west,” Kirby said. “It’s not like there hasn’t been any airstrikes in western Ukraine since the beginning of this operation 16 days ago. It’s just that we haven’t seen that as a routine matter. Now you’ve got two in one day—that’s notable.”

Congress Approves 2022 Spending Bill for Federal Government, Sends it to Biden’s Desk

March 10, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Late on the evening of March 10, the Senate passed a massive omnibus spending bill to fund the federal government for the rest of fiscal 2022, sending it to President Joe Biden for his signature.

For the Defense Department, in particular, the bill will provide $728.5 billion in discretionary spending for defense-related activities—roughly 5 percent more than the funding in fiscal 2021 and above the $715 billion requested by the Biden administration. It also includes $13.6 billion in aid to bolster Ukraine in its response to Russia’s invasion.

The 68-31 vote in the Senate comes after months of delays, disagreements, and negotiations that led to the federal government operating under continuing resolution for more than five months—one of the longer periods in recent history. The fiscal year will end Sept. 30.

While the government never shut down, top Pentagon officials repeatedly pleaded for lawmakers to pass a full-year budget and bemoaned the effects of operating under a CR, saying it hurt readiness, hampered their ability to start new programs, and slowed modernization.

The delayed process began in May 2021, when the the Biden administration released its budget request late, as has become typical for Presidents in their first year in office.

Democrats and Republicans then took months to make progress in negotiations—a bipartisan framework for the appropriations bill wasn’t announced until Feb. 9, and the actual text of the bill wasn’t released until the early hours of March 9.

From there, however, lawmakers pushed the bill through Congress at breakneck speed. The House passed the $1.5 trillion bill the night of March 9, and the Senate followed suit the next day, avoiding the need for another short-term CR—the previous one had been scheduled to end March 11.

Now, with regular funding restored, the Air Force should be able to proceed with 16 new starts and four production increases that it previously said had been delayed by CRs. And the Space Force will be able to move forward with the transfer of satellite communications capabilities and personnel from the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

The bill will fund a 2.7 percent pay raise for service members, previously authorized by the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. It will also provide funds for military families struggling with housing and food because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it includes nearly $100 million for the DOD to implement the recommendations of the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military.

The funds in the spending bill will also buy 48 F-35s, 12 F-15EXs, and 14 KC-46s for the Air Force, all equal to its budget request. It also pays for the procurement of 20 extra C-130Js, 16 for the Air National Guard and four for the Air Force Reserve; and four MQ-9s, despite the Air Force not asking for any.

While the 2022 budgeting process has finally come to an end, the fiscal 2023 cycle is set to begin soon. Defense Department officials have said they expect their budget request for the upcoming fiscal year to be released in the coming weeks. With the ongoing war in Ukraine and continued concern over competition with China, the topline will be closely watched—Republicans are likely to push for a large increase, while Democrats may argue for smaller growth or even cuts.

Russia, China Developments Ending Debate Over Nuclear Modernization

March 10, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with China’s threatening moves toward Taiwan and its new campaign to build up its strategic nuclear forces, likely signal an end to debate about modernizing the full nuclear triad, according to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

“I think that sort of removes some of the arguments that maybe we should have a smaller nuclear deterrent, maybe without as many legs of the triad, Kendall said at the annual McAleese conference March 9. “I think those arguments are pretty well put to bed now, given what China’s doing.”

The Air Force, Kendall said, is likely to get the green light to move forward with the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missile system, B-21 bomber, nuclear Long Range Stand Off missile, and command and control modernization.

“You’ve all seen … that China is modernizing its nuclear [force] and expanding it significantly,” Kendall said. “That’s a problem we have to deal with.”

Russia’s move on Ukraine was unthinkable to some in government just a few weeks before but has demonstrated that the unthinkable can happen and that the U.S. must do what’s necessary to deter them both, Kendall said:

Russia’s invasion shows that war between big nations “still happens” and that war with China in the Pacific is a “real … possibility.”

“A lot of people didn’t think that he would do it,” Kendall observed of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. “We’ve been watching this. I’ve seen him build up his forces multiple times on the borders of Ukraine. And as we watched this one, this time was different. It was clearly not a show of force this time. He was serious about it. And a lot of people didn’t expect that.”

Now, however, “I think, for better or for worse—certainly for worse for the Ukrainian people, ultimately, for worse for the Russians—we’ve had a wake-up call. We’ve had an emotional event that says that, ‘Yes, war at scale, among great powers, among modern powers, can actually happen.’ It can also happen in the Pacific.”

Despite the Ukraine invasion, Kendall said his priority is still “China, China, China” because that country has invested for 30 years in creating a military capable of challenging the U.S. in every domain, including space. Making America’s space assets “resilient” is the top priority of Kendall’s seven “operational imperatives.” Also, “we cannot give the other side impunity to operate in space,” and other countries’ assets there must be held at risk by the U.S., Kendall asserted.

“So, we’re in a whole new world, there.”

That said, “there is a huge unfunded requirement coming in space,” Kendall warned. “When you look at what we need to have”—and some of those space architectures are being built now—“there’s a bill there, that’s coming. “We’ll start to pay it … when you see [the fiscal year 2023] budget,” but bigger bills will come later. In answer to a question, Kendall said he’s “not terribly worried” about the Space Force being able to absorb a lot of new funding, should it be appropriated. “We’re pretty good at spending money in the Pentagon,” he dryly observed.

Kendall said he is “comfortable” with the fiscal 2023 budget.

“I think we’ll be able to balance those things that we’ve talked about … and move forward. But as I look beyond that, I do see challenges ahead. We have tough choices ahead of us in the next several years as we better define the things we need and then figure out how we’re going to pay for it.”

Although he would not discuss particulars about the unreleased fiscal 2023 budget, Kendall hinted that it doesn’t have as much in it for missile defense as he would like.

“What I became alarmed about in 2010 … and what I’ve been watching progress ever since, is the purchase of ballistic and cruise missiles” by China, “targeted at our high-value assets.” The Air Force needs “good warning and tracks, particularly for ballistic missiles. So if there were one area where I think we would need much more robust capability” and funding, “that would probably be it.”

More generally, he said, if he had “extra” money, he would spend it on more analysis to make sure the programs being selected to pursue, “and modernization in general,” are optimized to USAF’s true needs. Although in the past few years, “‘going fast’ has been emphasized … it’s really important that you go in the right direction … about where you make those investments.” His seven “imperatives” are about “making sure we get all that right.”

Kendall also said there will not be as many efforts to divest aircraft, meant to free up money for new programs, in the fiscal 2023 request as there were in the fiscal 2022 budget plan.

“We made the case last year,” he said, and Congress “came through pretty well. I’m pretty happy with what they did last year. The exception was the A-10.” But “I will tell you … I don’t think you’re going to see the same scale of requested retirements in this budget as you did last year. There will still be some. Going forward, there will be some hard choices, further out.”

Kendall said his new imperatives for tactical and strategic uncrewed aircraft are priorities because the manned aircraft force now envisioned is just too expensive. He also said the F-35’s sustainment costs are not going down to where the Air Force needs them to be.

“What we’re looking at is a force in which the F-35 is the ‘low end’ of a ‘high-low mix.’ That is not going to work,” Kendall said.

“We’re not going to get the F-35 sustainment cost down to a level where that’s realistic.” While he hopes production costs will keep going down—something the program office and Lockheed Martin have said are unlikely—even at $80 million a copy, the F-35 is “not a cheap airplane. So we’ve got to figure out a way to get the capacity and quantity that we need.” He quoted the trope that “quantity has a quality all its own,” and added, “that’s very true.”

The Air Force, he said, “needs numbers, particularly in a situation where you can expect attrition. You need the ability to expand to deal with these threats. The higher-end, more expensive aircraft are not going to get you there.”

In the omnibus defense bill, the hypersonic AGM-183 Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) took a major cut, giving up half its funding to longer research and development. Kendall noted that “there was a lot of enthusiasm for hypersonics in the previous administration, and I think I’ve made the comment why I think China is developing hypersonic capabilities. And we have to think more carefully about what we need” in that arena, and not just “mirror what they’re doing.” Kendall said. “We need to take a look at our whole portfolio, not just hypersonics.” But with regard to ARRW, he noted a series of test failures and said he’d spoken to Lockheed Martin recently, saying, “They think they’re working their way through that” and will get back to flight testing “shortly.”

However, “ARRW still has to prove itself,” he said.