Air and Space Force Chiefs: Defense Industrial Base May Be Too Fragile to Surge Production

March 4, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

The aerospace industrial base could pose a risk to U.S. national security because of lack of parts for aging systems, inattention to the future workforce, and the uncertainty that’s historically surrounded the success of space companies.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond addressed issues at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., on March 3.

Raymond cited a report by the Air Force Research Laboratory and Defense Innovation Unit that called the industrial base “tactically strong but strategically fragile.” He said in the past, proposed activity in the space sector has fizzled out.

“We need this to materialize,” Raymond said.

The report “State of the Space Industrial Base 2021: Infrastructure and Services for Economic Growth and National Security,” published in November 2021, posits that increasing Pentagon spending on commercial space technology would prompt private investors to invest even more. Its authors deemed that sustaining investors’ confidence was a “major concern” requiring “urgent action.

Raymond told the crowd at AWS22 that the Space Force perceives “opportunities for a national-level vision on the industrial base.”

On the Air Force side, Brown says he worries about the age of the fleet and “manufacturing resources where the company that actually built … whatever it is doesn’t exist anymore.” Not only is he concerned with DOD’s external suppliers but “bits of our depot as well that may not be effective.”

“If we had to surge, we’d be challenged,” Brown said.

The ability to diversify—to work with more, smaller companies—could help.

“They’re all patriotic, and they want to work with us, but we can’t make it so hard,” Brown said, referring to the hassle of navigating the DOD’s acquisition processes.

Brown also brought up the future workforce as “something we need to pay attention to” by emphasizing education in the STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math.

“We do not want it to atrophy,” Brown said. “We want that workforce to be here when we need them.”

Former Google CEO: AI Will Be ‘Force Multiplier Like You’ve Never Seen Before’

March 4, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Defense Department needs to upgrade its IT, add more software specialists, and empower certain programs to be more innovative—especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, the former CEO of Google said March 3.

Eric Schmidt, who led Google and its parent company Alphabet from 2001 to 2015 and chaired the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, delivered a keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., offering what he called several “blunt” criticisms and recommendations for the Pentagon.

“In the tradition of the military, I will be direct and I hope that’s OK,” Schmidt told an audience of Airmen, Guardians, and industry leaders. “If I look at the totality of what you’re doing, you’re doing a very good job of making things that you currently have better, over and over and over again. But I’m an innovator. And I would criticize, if I could say right up front, that the current structure, which is an interlock between the White House, the Congress, the Secretary of Defense’s [office], the various military contractors, the various services, and so forth, is a bureaucracy in and of its own. And it’s doing a good job at what it has been asked to do, but it hasn’t been asked to do some new things.”

Schmidt did note one exception to that criticism—the B-21 Raider program. Praising the Rapid Capabilities Office, Schmidt said the Air Force developed the new stealth bomber in a “new and innovative” way.

The challenge now is to take that approach and apply it to programs across the DOD, Schmidt said, especially to non-hardware platforms.

“Every time you try to do something in software, one of these strange scavenging groups within the administration takes your money away. It’s insane,” Schmidt said. “The core issue here in the military is you don’t have enough software people. And by software people, I mean people who think the way I do. You come out of a different background, and you just don’t have enough of these people.

“These are hard people to manage. They’re often very obnoxious—sorry, welcome to my field. They’re difficult. They’re sort of full of things, but they can change the world, and a small team can increase your productivity of whatever you’re doing.”

This issue is particularly glaring when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), Schmidt said. And not only does the military lack the necessary personnel, the defense industrial base does too. Touring the symposium’s exhibition hall, Schmidt said he only saw “like two AI companies, … and by the way, they’re the little ones in the corner.”

Just like the B-21 program has been innovative, there are some examples of good software development, Schmidt said, pointing to Project Maven, a DOD AI project that ignited controversy among Google employees, but which Schmidt said has had “very successful classified use in the right ways.”

But Project Maven was just one project, and “to be very blunt, you don’t have enough people, you don’t have the right contractors, and you don’t have the right strategy to fill in this,” Schmidt said of the Pentagon’s work in AI. “We need 20, 30, 40 such groups—more, more, more. And as that transformation happens, the people who work for you, the incredibly courageous people, will have so much more powerful tools.”

Schmidt’s intense enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is born out of his belief that “AI is a force multiplier like you’ve never seen before,” he said. “It sees patterns that no human can see. And all interesting future military decisions will have as part of that an AI assistant.”

Schmidt is hardly alone in predicting AI will have a seismic impact on warfare. But advocates say they’ve also encountered resistance and inertia within the Pentagon.

Such doubts are preventing the U.S. military from fully embracing AI’s possibilities and forcing service members to “spend all day looking at screens doing something that a computer should do.”

Potential uses include precision weapons targeting, precision analysis, and autonomous systems, Schmidt said. But to get there, there’s something the Pentagon has to do first.

“The real problem you have is that you don’t have enough bandwidth, … which no one ever tells you this,” Schmidt said. “Your networks, excuse the term, suck. You’ve got to get the networks upgraded. You just have to, because all of these things depend on that kind of connectivity, right?”

Schmidt’s comments were met with applause from his audience—the issue of poor network connectivity and IT systems is a constant source of frustration among Airmen and Guardians.

Yet despite all this, perhaps the biggest issue facing the Air Force’s software and AI efforts isn’t really about software.

“We love to talk about strategy, and we need more money over here, and by the way we do, and we need more partnerships over here, and yes we do, and we need more of this over here, and every state has to have its money and all of that’s fine,” Schmidt said. “But what we don’t have and we need a lot more of is the kind of talent to drive this world.”

To attract and retain talent, Schmidt said, the military needs to empower innovators instead of holding them back, granting them a certain level of autonomy to make decisions and take risks. In that regard, his comments echo ones made by Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who has made empowering Airmen one of the key themes and goals of his tenure.

Legacy Aircraft Are Aiding US Response to Ukraine Crisis. They Still Need to Be Retired, CSAF Says

March 3, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, flight trackers noticed the skies over Eastern Europe filling with U.S. aircraft.

Tankers such as the KC-10 and KC-135 and ISR planes such as the E-8C JSTARS, RC-135, and RQ-4 all flew over eastern NATO allies including Poland and Romania, presumably supporting intelligence-gathering efforts before the Russian attack.

All these airframes are ones the Air Force is currently seeking to retire—its 2022 budget request called for sending 18 KC-135s, 14 KC-10s, 20 RQ-4s, and four E-8Cs to the boneyard.

The use of these planes for such an important mission highlights the tension currently facing the service: The Air Force says it needs to get rid of such legacy aircraft to modernize, but those same aircraft continue to be called upon frequently.

“This is the conversation I have inside the building on balance and risk between the combatant commands and their current demand signal,” Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. told reporters at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla. “Because if it was up to them, in some cases, they’d want us to keep all the stuff. As we keep it, it gets older. It’s more expensive to operate. And so we’ve got to make some transitions there, and then at the same time, look at how we operate differently.”

Brown has previously acknowledged that retiring legacy systems will mean assuming some risks. And at AWS, he said the debate over those risks continues.

“We hear people talk about, you don’t want to operate like we did for the last conflict or contingency. We’ve got to … leap ahead and start thinking how we would look at things differently,” Brown said. “So there’s a balance, and there’s a bit of tension, and if there was no tension, I would be concerned. And I think there’s good dialogue that goes back and forth between the service Chiefs and combatant commanders.”

Brown’s continued belief in the need to retire old planes and modernize is rooted in the fact that China remains the pacing threat to U.S. airpower—Russia is a short-term threat by comparison, he said, cautioning against letting its recent actions dictate long-term plans.

Brown said he can’t let “a near-term event completely reshape everything else we need to do for the future.”

“Does it add additional things into context? Yes, it does,” he added. “And you know, the things we’re looking at with the last National Defense Strategy [are] the same kinds of things we’re looking at with the current National Defense Strategy we’re drafting, and I don’t see that it’s going to drive a major shift in anything we’re doing because the capabilities that look into the future don’t really change.”

That’s not to say the Air Force should look to dump all of its legacy airframes right away. Citing one of his favorite slogans, Brown noted that to provide “airpower anytime, anywhere,” the service will have to “balance between capability and capacity” and maintain enough flexibility to fulfill what is asked of it.

“I think when you look at current events today with Russia and Ukraine and our pacing challenge, we’ve got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” Brown said. “And we’ve got to really think about how we preserve some of that readiness while at the same time, assure and deter.”

US Should Define the Critical Infrastructure It Wants to Protect, Says General in Charge of Homeland Defense

March 3, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

The U.S. needs to prioritize the protection of certain critical infrastructure in light of potential cyberattacks and the fact that both China and Russia possess peer-level nuclear weapons, said the general in charge of homeland defense.

The commander of U.S. Northern Command Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck spoke at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., on March 3. VanHerck, also the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said the current “strategic environment” represents a shift.

“The strategic competitors that we face today have watched the way that we project power for at least two decades, if not longer than that, and they understand if we’re allowed to project that force forward, that won’t turn out well for them,” VanHerck said. “So they’ve developed capabilities below the nuclear threshold with the idea that they can delay [or] obstruct our force … or destroy our will.”

That’s resulted in other countries “ruining our decision space and our deterrence options from the homeland, especially, and it’s decreasing our senior leaders’ decision space,” he continued.

“And why we’re worried about that is the risk of strategic deterrence failure goes up dramatically.”

Therefore the U.S. needs to start “figuring out what we must defend” by defining the critical infrastructure that if attacked, could “bring us to our knees in a crisis or conflict,” VanHerck said.

“And that’s a broad decision across the interagency, in my mind, that requires some significant analysis looking at, “what are those key infrastructure areas that we need to focus on, and why do we need to focus on them. Is it to protect our finance capability? Is it to protect energy and economics?”

VanHerck mentioned that laws prevent the government from collecting intelligence inside the U.S. that could shed light on “which pieces of key infrastructure might be vulnerable” and said the command is building relationships with Congress, the National Security Council, and U.S. Cyber Command to try to figure out how to deal with that issue.

Details Emerge on New Unmanned Long-Range Bomber and Fighter Projects

March 3, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force’s “4+1” fighter plan is still intact despite Secretary Frank Kendall’s new “imperative” to develop a fighter-like unmanned airplane, and the Air Force is well into developing a concept of operations for a new unmanned long-range bomber that might be attritable, if the price is right.

The 4+1 plan—a roadmap for fighters that includes the Next Generation Air Dominance system, the F-35, the F-15EX, and the F-16, with the A-10 as the “plus one”—“is still valid … as part of near-term plans, … even mid-term plans,” Kendall told reports at the AFA Warfare Symposium. That’s because “it’s early … to commit” to uncrewed combat aircraft of the scope he’s contemplating.

In his keynote speech, Kendall said the NGAD system “will include a crewed platform teamed with a much less expensive, autonomous, uncrewed combat aircraft employing a distributed, tailorable mix of sensors, weapons, and other mission equipment.” It will “very much be” a “system of systems” approach for air-to-air combat, he said.

The unmanned bomber, on the other hand, is “more speculative.” There’s “more work to do” to flesh the idea out, he said. He clarified that the aircraft he has in mind isn’t necessarily an unmanned version of the B-21, which was “designed with an option to be unmanned.” But it could be.

The unmanned bomber is to have “comparable range” to that of the B-21, with a “payload to be determined,” but it must be “operationally valuable and cost effective.” It might accompany the B-21, he said.

The new bomber is in “concept definition,” he said. He maintained that it is a classified project, and while it will be “acknowledged,” not many details will be forthcoming. It will likely get underway with funding in the fiscal 2024 budget, he said.

The new aircraft would not substitute for any of the 120 or so B-21s now contemplated, Kendall said. It would be “additive” to the planned bomber fleet, but he specifically declined to discuss any numbers.

Both projects will rely on the Skyborg program, the DARPA ACE (Air Combat Evolution), and Australia’s Advanced Teaming System as “technology feeders,” Kendall said.

“How exactly those programs will transition hasn’t been sorted out, yet,” he added. “But obviously, they’re part of the overall picture we were looking at when we decided to move in this direction.”

In his keynote speech, Kendall said he’s looking for an unmanned bomber concept that would be half the cost of the B-21 and told reporters later, “I’d love to have it be less than half. I’d love to have it be a quarter or an eighth.” But half is “the minimum we should shoot for at this point.” It’s crucial that the Air Force “reduce the unit cost of the aircraft in the inventory” because, he asserted, all the manned aircraft on the books aren’t affordable in the numbers needed.

The B-21’s ceiling cost, under the contract with Northrop Grumman, is $550 million in base year 2010 dollars, or $713.6 million in 2022 dollars.

It wasn’t a “detailed analysis” that led him to the half-cost figure, Kendall said, but “I have an awful lot of experience with weapon systems and their cost.”

The B-21 will be the “mainstay” of the bomber fleet, Kendall predicted, offering cautious optimism that the program is doing “reasonably well” and that “we may end up buying more than we’ve currently planned.”

The Air Force “is going to need perhaps more long-range capability … at some point in the future,” he said.

Randall Walden, head of the Rapid Capabilities Office that is developing the B-21, told Air Force Magazine the unmanned bomber has to “match” the B-21 in terms of its “range, endurance, speed” and to also “extend the strike capability” by flying ahead of the B-21 in contested airspace. It has to be far less costly because “we would take more risk with an unmanned system that is not as expensive as the manned system.”

There’s “a pretty wide swath of things that could fit” that description, one of which is an unmanned B-21, he said. The aircraft may have to have large wings to carry the fuel necessary to do the mission, he said, but cost is the key variable.

“Once you put cost on there, just like we did with the B-21, that really tells what the design’s going to be,” Walden said.

Kendall noted that the B-21 followed the Next Generation Bomber project that was dropped because it was far larger and “cost about twice as much” as the B-21, noting, “we ended up with … a more affordable option.”

Walden said if companies can get “close” to the half-price level, “we’re interested.”

The Air Force has been working on an operations analysis to determine what the right number of unmanned bombers would be, but “we’re not there, yet,” Walden said. “The analysis will give us more insight.”

Asked if the new unmanned bomber could spell the beginning of the end for manned bombers, Walden said, “I don’t know. We’ve been doing bombers a long time. They’ve all been manned, and they’ve all been from the air. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do global strike from other means.” While he didn’t elaborate, the Army has been touting its land-based hypersonic missile as an instrument of “long-range strike,” and China has been experimenting with an orbital bombardment system.

The advantage of a manned bomber, though, is “you can actually recall it, if you choose,” Walden said.

After the concept of operations is set, there would be discussions with companies as to whether
“they … can build it,” Walden said.

“We’ve got the top-level requirement from the Secretary of the Air Force” to get things rolling, Walden said. There would be a risk-reduction phase followed by a preliminary and critical design review, and “from there, you figure out the source selection criteria by which you would downselect.” The RCO is “pretty good at doing that piece in a relatively fast way,” he said.

PACAF: China May See Opportunity in European Crisis, Calls for Upgrades Now

March 3, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

As the world watches Russia in Eastern Europe, concerns are rising that China could find opportunity in crisis when it comes to Taiwan and the South China Sea, Pacific Air Forces commander Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach said March 3 at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla.

“I’m watching them like a hawk,” Wilsbach said at a media roundtable, noting the Chinese could see the crisis as “dangerous” while also acknowledging “there might be an opportunity here.”

He said he hopes global condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine will deter China but that PACAF still needs to be ready to deter and fight. This includes everything from improving agile combat employment operations to upgrading detection and the fifth-generation weapons systems of allies.

“The first thing that I need is a way to establish and maintain air superiority,” Wilsbach said.

Enhancing U.S. capability in the air-to-air fight includes the ability to reach support aircraft with fifth-generation weapons systems, he said. It also “means stealthy capabilities, and extending a long-range kill chain, and … breaking the long-range kill chain of the adversary,” he said. Fifth-generation weapons and tracking capabilities that can reach an excess of 200 miles are needed, and Wilsbach wants to see policies lifted that limit the selling of the latest weapons technologies to allies.

The replacement for the E-3 Sentry AWACS is one focus area for the commander, who supports a move to the E-7 used by Australia, South Korea, and soon, Great Britain, for better detection and tracking of airborne moving targets.

“The E-3 is challenged with maintenance, reliability. But once it even gets airborne, it can’t see that far out, especially when you start talking about stealthy platforms,” he said. “The E-7 gives us a very quick capability.”

America’s European allies are increasing their participation in the Pacific “as a result of the nefarious activities that they’re seeing China execute over time that could be impacting their interest in the Pacific,” Wilsbach said.

Germany is one of the countries increasing its participation in Indo-Pacific exercises following the release of its own Indo-Pacific strategy in September 2020.

“This is the whole government comprehensive approach, because a lot of our trade [is] going into this region,” German air attache Brig. Gen. Frank Graffe told Air Force Magazine at an AWS pull-aside interview.

“We enforce the free and open Indo-Pacific with this strategy,” he said. “This year, we will send Eurofighter to Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan.”

Graffe said Germany will also deploy its A330 MRTT refueler and A400M transport aircraft to the theater.

Wilsbach commended Great Britain’s sailing of the Queen Elizabeth II aircraft carrier in Indo-Pacific waters, even though it roiled the Chinese, and he called on the French to increase their presence in the region.

“You see the value of having like-minded nations coming together in mass and acting with solidarity to create effects,” he said. “We see information effects. We see political effects. We see economic effects. We see defense and weapons effects.”

The PACAF commander said the same could be done in the Indo-Pacific to mount pressure on the Chinese modus operandi.

“It bothers them because we’re challenging their claims,” he said. “We are challenging the Chinese way of doing business versus the accepted international rules-based order. That’s why they don’t like it. Because we’re challenging their illegal assertions.”

First B-21 Moves to New Hangar for Loads Calibration

March 3, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The first B-21 expected to fly is largely assembled and has moved to a calibration facility, one of the last steps before powering systems and making final checks ahead of first flight, Rapid Capabilities Office Director Randall Walden reported.

On the sidelines of the AFA Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., Walden noted that “we’ve taken the first one out” of the production facility.

“It’s got landing gear. … It’s got wheels on it. … It’s got the wings on it. It really looks like a bomber,” Walden said. Six B-21s are now under construction at Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale, Calif., facility, he said.

The loads calibration test is a “normal thing you do” and ensures the structure “is designed and built to what we actually meant it to do.” Once that’s done, “that gives us great insight into, ‘Did the actual design meet our needs, and did the manufacturing of that meet our needs?’”

The calibration test aircraft has not yet been assigned a tail number or name, he said, but it’s expected to be the first to fly. Walden said supply chain issues have not significantly affected the production program, but he declined to predict when the rollout and first flight would occur.

Though Walden said it’s “not my final call,” he thinks there will be a formal rollout “with senior leaders and press” because “it will be an historical event.”

Then, there will have to be some “event driven, data driven” activities, such as putting power to the aircraft, starting the engines, testing the hydraulics, “everything you normally do in a ground test to make sure it’s working properly.” There also will be slow- and high-speed taxi tests, he added.

“Once all that data informs where we stand from a design [standpoint] is when we’ll schedule that first flight,” Walden said. The first flight will likely be a hop to nearby Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

Service Chiefs on Pattern of Continuing Resolutions: ‘We Can’t Keep Doing This’

March 3, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

With just over a week left before the latest continuing resolution to fund the federal government runs out, the service Chiefs of the Air Force and Space Force bemoaned the frequent use of CRs to keep the Pentagon funded, calling the practice “bad,” “frustrating,” and “absolutely devastating.”

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, making a joint appearance at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., didn’t appeal directly to Congress to pass a new budget for fiscal 2022 like they did during a January hearing in front of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

But they painted a grim picture for the Department of the Air Force if continuing resolutions continue to be commonplace in the years to come.

“I almost want the whole audience to repeat after me: CRs are bad,” Brown told former Chief of Staff retired Gen. John P. Jumper, who served as moderator for the discussion. “They’re frustrating, just the aspect of what we’re not able to do because of a CR.”

Under continuing resolutions, funding is frozen at the previous year’s spending levels. In the past 13 fiscal years, the Pentagon has started the year operating under a CR 12 times.

“If you add up all the time we’ve been in a CR, it’s been over three years,” Brown said. “ … If we’re in a race with somebody, we’ve just spotted them three years. We can’t keep doing this.”

As continuing resolutions have become a regular feature in the budgetary process, “we’ve gotten good at bad behavior,” added Raymond. “We’ve gotten good at pushing contracts to the end of the year. We’ve gotten good at doing things that we had to do because we didn’t have the resources or a law that allowed us to do it.”

A Government Accountability Office report from September 2021 found that across the Defense Department, the services “tended to obligate … a lower percentage of their total annual obligations in the first quarter of the fiscal year—when DOD is most likely to be operating under a CR.”

The impact is especially key for the Space Force, Raymond said.

“A yearlong CR for the Space Force is a $2 billion hit on the top line,” but for the new service, which Raymond likened to a startup company, “if … you can’t do new starts, it’s really difficult,” he noted.

The continuing resolutions are also preventing the startup Space Force from expanding. Raymond warned back in September 2021 that without a budget, the transfer of 350 new Guardians, as well as units and missions, including satellite communications capabilities from the Navy and Army, would be delayed.

More than five months later, those units and missions are still waiting.

“I’ve been on the road here recently visiting them overseas and in CONUS,” Raymond said. “They’re eager to come. We can’t bring them in until the law is passed. So it’s something that we’ve got to get done. A yearlong CR would be absolutely devastating to us.”

And though the Air Force may be more established, it needs funding to acquire new systems and build up its capabilities, Brown argued, especially as demand for those capabilities continues to grow.

“I feel like a chew toy between different combatant commanders, where they’re pulling and asking for more Air Force capability to go to different places because the Air Force is the one service that can get there faster than anybody else, except for the space portion,” Brown said.

To that end, Brown said the service needs to be “a little more bold.”

“We’ve got to speak up for ourselves and show what the impact is. And that’s something I don’t know that we’ve done very well,” Brown added. “It’s something I’m focused on. … We’ve got to do a better job of talking about what happens to our readiness if we continue to use our capabilities at the rate we do and we don’t modernize.”

Beyond modernizing and building out new systems, CRs bring other, more intangible effects, Brown said.

“We’ve got to get past this because it slows us down from being able to have trust and confidence with our Airmen, trust and confidence with industry, and trust and confidence with allies and partners to be able to provide the capability we’re going to require as we move forward,” Brown said.

With the latest CR set to run out on March 11, Congress is currently reckoning with how to finally push through an “omnibus” package funding the entire government.

Democrats and Republicans previously announced they had reached a “bipartisan breakthrough” on such an agreement, but following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the two sides have differed on how to go about passing an aid package for the Ukrainians. Democrats want to include the package in the omnibus, while Republicans want the two separated. There is also debate as to whether the aid will go to the Pentagon to cover previous spending or for the purchase of new weapons.

Yet the need for such aid underscores the danger of more continuing resolutions, Jumper argued from the stage.

“It’s hard to accelerate change or achieve the speed of relevance if you don’t have the means to do the acceleration,” Jumper said. “And I just hope that you know the current events of the world can help us realize that this acceleration and these developments … we need to move on with it.”

Kendall on How the Air Force Plans to Modernize its Force to Compete With China

March 3, 2022 | By Amy Hudson and Amanda Miller

The Air Force is closely monitoring the unfolding war in Ukraine and is committed to deterring—and defeating—further Russian aggression, but the forthcoming National Defense Strategy will maintain that despite the current threat environment, the pacing threat is still China, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said March 3.

Kicking off the AFA Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla., Kendall touted the resiliency of Airmen and Guardians who have weathered a tumultuous two years and “never stopped working,” but he also lamented the department’s aging aircraft, which now average 30 years old, and said that despite recent pushes to improve operational capability rates, they remain too low.

The Air Force is “stretched thin” as it tries to meet “combatant commander needs around the globe,” Kendall said. And, though he appreciates the funding Congress has provided, the Air Force must finally be able to shed some legacy equipment so it can properly invest in the technology of the future, he added.

“We’re not flying and training enough, sacrificing in part a significant historical advantage of superior flying experience for our pilots and aircrews,” Kendall said. “We’re carrying the costs of a roughly 20 percent excess capacity of real estate. We have a significant number of programs in the Air Force that are not fully funded beyond the budget year. We have a Space Force that inherited a set of systems designed for an era when we could operate in space with impunity.

“Overall, we start more programs than we can afford, and we don’t prioritize the most promising ones early so that we can ensure they cross the valley of death to production and fielding,” Kendall said.

There is an urgent need to modernize to keep up with the pacing threat—“China, China, China,” Kendall emphasized.

To do that, he outlined seven imperatives and encouraged members of the defense industry in attendance to “please pay attention. This is where the DAF will be investing, and this is where we need your expertise, intellectual capacity, and creativity.”

Defining a resilient and effective space order of battle

Kendall acknowledges that of all the imperatives, this is the broadest, but also could have the biggest impact.

“The simple fact is that the U.S. cannot project power successfully unless our space-based services are resilient enough to endure while under attack,” Kendall said. “Equally true, our terrestrial forces, joint and combined, cannot survive and perform their missions if our adversary’s space-based operational support systems, especially targeting systems, are allowed to operate with impunity.”

The department intends to build on efforts already underway by the Space Warfare Analysis Center and the Space Development Agency; and is working closely with the Intelligence Community and “especially, the National Reconnaissance Office.”

Achieving operationally optimized ABMS

The Advanced Battle Management System is the department’s component of the overall joint all-domain command and control effort and is intended to use modern networking and communication capabilities, along with new technologies such as artificial intelligence, to improve how the Air Force collects, analyzes, and shares data.

“But we can’t invest in everything, and we shouldn’t invest in improvements that don’t have clear operational benefit,” Kendall said. “We must be more focused on specific things with measurable value and operational impact.”

Specifically, Kendall said he wants to see a program aimed at modernizing the command, control, and communications battle management systems “more generally.”

“This imperative will finish the job of defining that program,” he said.

Defining the Next Generation Air Dominance system of systems

“On its current trajectory, the tactical air force is not affordable,” Kendall surmised.

The department needs a next-generation manned fighter to be paired with a “much less expensive autonomous uncrewed combat aircraft, employing a distributed, tailorable mix of sensors, weapons, and other mission equipment operating as a team or formation.”

Achieving air and ground moving target identification at scale

Without the ability to timely and efficiently acquire air, ground, and maritime mobile targets—in an “act of violent aggression, such as the one we just saw in Europe or an invasion of Taiwan”—ABMS and JADC2 won’t be worth much, Kendall pointed out.

The DAF’s current inventory of “aging and vulnerable legacy systems” such as the Joint STARS and Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft provide air and ground moving target indication, but ABMS will require “the ability to acquire targets using sensors and systems in a way that allows targeting data to be passed to an operator for engagement,” Kendall said.

“Ideally we’d prefer to do these functions from space, which should be more cost effective as adequate resilience could be provided, but that isn’t the only possibility.”

Defining optimized resilient basing

The Air Force’s dependence on a few forward operating bases hasn’t been lost on competitors, Kendall said.

“China, in particular, has acquired a large number of precision conventional rockets and is working on fielding large numbers of hypersonic weapons, which are even harder to defend against,” he said.

The Air Force’s concept of agile combat employment “is absolutely an important step in the right direction” to “make forces less easily targetable because of their disbursement.”

The B-21 long-range strike family of systems

Although the technologies exist to introduce an unmanned bomber escort, more study is necessary to determine not only a “cost-effective approach” but also the right operational concepts, Kendall said.

“One of the things that people often miss about uncrewed systems is that if you’re going to use an autonomous platform with a crewed system, it has to have the range capability to go as far as the crewed system goes and support that system with a reasonable payload when it gets there,” he said. “We’re looking for systems that cost nominally on the order of at least half as much as the manned systems that we’re talking about for both NGAD and for B-21. Together, with the B-21 and NGAD platforms, uncrewed systems would provide enhanced mission-tailorable levels of capability. They could deliver a range of sensors, payloads, and weapons, or other mission equipment, and they can also be attritable or even sacrificed if doing so conferred a major operational advantage.”

Ready to transition to a wartime posture against a peer competitor

The U.S. has never had to mobilize against the cyber threats it might face against a peer competitor, “or even the kinetic threats we might face,” Kendall said. The department will “analyze the entire mobilization and support ecosystem” and prioritize secure networks as well as transportation, logistics, and troops’ physical security.

“Languishing in never-ending, small-scale experimentation does not get the warfighters what they need, but neither does wasting time and money on dead ends,” Kendall said.