F-35 Sustainment Is Improving, But Lawmakers’ Patience Is Growing Thin

April 28, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The troubled F-35 sustainment enterprise is getting better but is still falling short of the services’ goals for the program, officials told Congress on April 28. And lawmakers are running out of patience.

Leading the charge, House Armed Services Committee readiness panel chair Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) offered sharp criticism of the F-35 Joint Program Office, the Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney, and even others in Congress who he said “get off on buying new planes” without considering their sustainment.

“The message for me—and I hope from my committee, and I know I’m going to raise hell in the full committee—is we’re not going to buy more planes until we figure out how to maintain them,” Garamendi warned. “It is a fool’s errand. It is a waste of money by the taxpayers. It’s a bright, shiny machine until it doesn’t work.”

Garamendi wasn’t alone in airing frustrations. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) called the program a “cash cow” for Lockheed Martin and argued that “we are incapable of turning off the spigot when something doesn’t work.” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), the subcommittee’s ranking member, cited a Government Accountability Office report also issued April 28 that found the F-35’s overall mission capable rate at less than 68 percent, calling it “unacceptable.”

In particular, lawmakers pressed Lt. Gen. Eric T. Fick, head of the JPO, and Steven J. Morani, acting assistant secretary of defense for sustainment, on two main issues related to F-35 sustainment—the F135 engine and the Autonomic Logistics Information System.

Starting in 2020, the F-35 program entered into what Fick termed a “power module crisis.” At one point, more than 40 fighters were grounded without an engine due to maintenance issues, then-acting Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Darlene Costello told Congress.

Engine Woes

The GAO report noted that as of February 2022, that number of grounded fighters is still at 36—and has stayed above 30 for months now. Those figures earned the ire of Garamendi, who blamed contractor Pratt & Whitney, the manufacturer of the F135 engine.

“If [Pratt & Whitney] is in the audience, and if they’re listening, watch out. I’m coming at you in a very angry mood,” Garamendi said. “You gave us an engine, and it doesn’t work. Or it worked for a little while until we get some dust around it, and then it doesn’t work. What the hell? What’s going on here?”

Fick previously said in July 2021 that the JPO is taking a three-pronged approach to address the issue of F-35 sustainment by shortening repair times at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., where the heavy maintenance center is, standing up repair operations at other facilities and keeping engines in planes longer. He reiterated that approach before the subcommittee, saying Tinker has reduced its turnaround time on engines by nearly half and that the “collective repair network, including our international facilities,” will deliver 122 power modules in 2022, compared to 77 in 2021.

Still, Fick also acknowledged that the fleet’s non-mission capable rate due to engine issues is too high, at 5 percent. And the new GAO report paints a grim picture of the future fleet if the Air Force and the JPO can’t get the engine problem under control. A baseline projection from January 2021 based off engine removal rates and depot capacity put the percentage of the F-35 fleet grounded in 2030 due to engine issues at 43 percent.

That figure would be much lower, a subsequent projection shows, if the Defense Department implemented its plans to reduce maintenance issues and funded solutions—down all the way to 3 percent. But the report warns that the projection is “highly dependent” on assumptions about funding, risk management, and that no more issues arise in the coming years.

Fick argued that the three initiatives from the program office are already having an effect and that the projections in the GAO report are outdated.

“The combined effect of those three initiatives all together brought our recovery from the power module crisis back from sometime in the 2030s to 2026,” Fick said. “So we have very, very deliberately worked … to back that crisis and turn it into something we can manage and not something that’s going to ground [43 percent] of the fleet. Now, a lot of those numbers weren’t in place by the time [GAO] wrote that report, because we have been moving that fast to make a difference across those three different lines of effort. So it’s not surprising to me that the report says what it does.”

The author of the report, Diana Maurer, also said “it looks like” the situation in 2030 will not be as “dire” as once feared. The director of the GAO’s defense capabilities and management team added that “we are waiting to see the full execution of what they want to do. But we have seen some improvements.”

ALIS Issues

Another major issue facing the F-35 sustainment enterprise has been the Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, the logistics system intended as a vast information-gathering system to track F-35 data in flight, meant to predict part failures and otherwise keep maintainers abreast of the health of each individual F-35.

Instead, the system was crippled by outdated technology, false alarms, laborious data entry requirements, and clumsy interfaces, and in January 2020, the JPO announced that it was dumping ALIS in favor of the new Operational Data Integrated Network.

At the time, Fick characterized the move from ALIS to ODIN as akin to flipping a switch. It’s a comparison he regrets now.

“Think of it as the dimmer switch now, instead of a binary light switch, as we move from one to the other—increasing capability, increasing cybersecurity, decreasing weight, increasing responsiveness—as we add those capabilities into the ecosystem,” Fick said.

That gradual process reached a key milestone recently, with the installation of 14 ODIN hardware systems to replace first-generation ALIS servers. And moving forward, Fick said, the JPO plans on delivering software updates faster and more regularly and “disaggregating the software from the underlying hardware” to reduce the labor associated with updates.

But while ALIS has been performing better, Maurer agreed, there is still no defined metric or goal for the program to meet, making any assessment of changes harder, she said. Establishing such standards is one of more than 20 recommendations the GAO has made on the F-35 that are still open.

“We do know that when we go out and we talk to maintainers in the field, they say that there’s still a good level of frustration in working with the system. … They will say that it’s getting better, but it’s not what it needs to be currently,” Maurer said.

Boeing Rolls Out Production T-7A, First New Jet Trainer in 60 Years

April 28, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Boeing unveiled the first T-7A Red Hawk advanced trainer for the Air Force at its St. Louis, Mo., facilities April 28, revealing a jet bearing the tail flash of the 99th Flying Training Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, Texas, which will be the first unit to operate the new airplane. The first T-7A squadron is to be operational in 2024.

The “Red Hawk” name, its red tail, and the 99th all pay recognition to the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, some of whom were on hand for the ceremony. The canopy rail of the rollout jet was painted with the names of Red Tails commander, the late Brig. Gen. Charles McGee, and Lt. Col. George Hardy, who attended the event. Boeing showed videos honoring the Tuskegee Airmen and linking the jet to their legacy.

The first production Boeing T-7A Red Tail is pictured April 28, 2022. Boeing photo.

The T-7A has “already … revolutionized” how aircraft are designed and built, Boeing bombers and fighters vice president Steve Parker said, noting its digital design and the fact that the T-7 went from drawing board to first flight in 36 months. It “won’t be the last” new airplane designed this way, he said.

“It is history in the making,” Parker added, noting that the T-7 is the first new jet-powered trainer the Air Force has bought in more than 60 years.

Lt. Gen. Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, head of Air Education and Training Command, said AETC is in the process of “re-envisioning” how pilot training is done, and it is doing it “with the T-7 in mind.” The jet will take on the “fighter fundamentals” syllabus, along with much of the fighter and bomber training normally done on front-line equipment, thus freeing more front-line aircraft for battle and saving some of the cost of operating those more-expensive aircraft.

Webb called the T-7 “the relief pitcher” for the T-38, now in service more than 60 years. “We need the T-7,” he said. “We will have it for decades.”

Micael Johansen, president and CEO of Saab, Boeing’s T-7 partner which builds the center and aft fuselage, said the first aircraft shipsets from St. Louis and Sweden came together “in a precision join … in 30 minutes,” in a further testament to the soundness of the aircraft’s digital engineering. Saab is building new facilities in West Lafayette, Ind., to build T-7 components. The T-7 is the anchor for the company’s expansion into the U.S. market.

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, superintendent of the Air Force Academy, said the T-7 is “the right tool” to put in the hands of USAF student pilots and called it a “game-changer” that will re-write pilot training.

Lt. Gen. Duke Z. Richardson, USAF’s top uniformed acquisition official and nominee for promotion to four stars and command of Air Force Materiel Command, also attended, although he did not make remarks. Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. could not attend but was represented by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Brown. Former and current program managers and acquisition officials who worked on the T-7 also attended.

The rollout came a day after Boeing revealed that it lost $367 million on the T-7A in the first quarter of 2022. Company president and CEO David L. Calhoun said the company bet big on fixed-price development contracts such as the T-7; and that he will think twice about doing so in the future. But he said the aircraft will be in service “for decades” and will be built in large numbers, and should eventually be profitable for Boeing. The jet also represents new work at St. Louis as programs such as Boeing’s F/A-18 wind down there.

New B-21 Raider Being Accelerated With Overlapping Development and Production

April 28, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force is accelerating the B-21 program, Northrop Grumman President and Chief Executive Officer Kathy Warden told reporters on a quarterly earnings call. The Air Force apparently permitted Northrop to discuss more of the highly classified program’s progress than in recent years.

Warden, talking with financial reporters April 28, said “the government is looking at layering” production of the Raider “on top of” its development phase. Despite the acknowledgement that the program is speeding up, production rates on the B-21 remain classified, she said. She noted that the B-21 effort has been successful enough to warrant a $67 million performance incentive fee for meeting an unnamed target in the first quarter.

Inflation has been playing havoc with other companies’ earnings because of fixed-price contracts, and to allay investor concerns, Warden also pointed out that while low-rate initial production of the B-21 is fixed-price, development is not.

Moreover, costs for full-rate production aircraft “have yet to be negotiated,” said David Keffer, Northop Grumman’s executive vice president and chief financial officer.

As for the production phase, “you can think of that as notionally around the ’25-’26 timeframe—he middle part of the decade,” Warden said.

Air Force budget documents released earlier in April show the Air Force will spend $20 billion to build B-21s over the five-year future years defense plan.

The LRIP phase will begin in 2023, Keffer said, “and run in parallel with the EMD [engineering and manufacturing development] for a period of time.” He didn’t say when EMD would be concluded. Warden later said she doesn’t expect a “peak year” when revenues from the two phases will overlap. The company expects steadily increased revenues from the B-21 franchise through the decade, she said.

Keffer said the company marked “a $67 million favorable adjustment on the B-21 program, related to performance incentives” in the first quarter.

The B-21 is “currently in its cost-type EMD phase, with a variety of incentive fees which we accrue based on anticipated achievement.” The program is now in “a critical integration and test portion of the EMD phase, … and we continue to focus on production efficiencies,” Keffer said.

Under the initial 2015 contract, LRIP will include 21 aircraft in five lots. Warden confirmed that the B-21’s cost will come in under the Air Force’s initial ceiling production unit cost of $550 million in 2010 dollars. The last time the Air Force officially re-set the figure was in 2019, she said, when it was “a little over $600 million” average procurement unit cost. Using the CPI escalation method from 2010, it would be $741.69 million today. That, however, is the fixed-price limit of the initial contract, and full-rate units will have more recent inflation factored in. Still, Warden said she expects inflation will “modulate” in coming years.

“We continue to expect production to be priced and profitably executed within the program’s average procurement unit cost target,” she said.

She noted that the Air Force has “confirmed that the first aircraft has entered the ground test phase, paving the way for first flight. And there are five additional aircraft in various stages of assembly.”

This progress “is partly enabled by our digital design capabilities and advanced manufacturing technologies, which reduce risk ahead of the aircraft’s first flight,” Warden said. “Looking forward, we expect sales on the B-21 program to grow, as the EMD phase [progresses] into low-rate initial production. This assumption underpins our expectations for aeronautics revenue to be flat next year and return to growth in 2024.”

Warden said the greater detail provided had to do with making sure inflation’s role in the program is understood.

“This is an important thing for us to touch on, and it’s why we provided a bit more clarity on what production looks like on the B-21 program, as we are approaching that phase.”

Warden said, “We did bid a set quantity. That quantity is not something I can share, but it is a small portion of the overall program of record, … and that was bid as fixed-price. And as we put that bid together, of course, we at the time laid in some expectations about growth in inflation to adjust to the time period.”

She said, “We will continue to look at whether those assumptions still hold. I’ll remind you, we’re not really going to be into the production phase for a couple of years, in any significant way, and so we still have a good bit of time, and we expect that inflation is going to modulate. And we’ve not seen—based on the assumptions we’ve made today—a material impact to the program.”

Northrop Grumman will work to make sure it “executes to those quantities profitably.”

Asked if she thinks the government will shift away from fixed-price contracts, Warden said, “I think we’ve already seen that.”

The Air Force has shifted its thinking on the B-21, initially saying it would build 80-100 of the aircraft, then 100, and of late “at least 100,” although Air Force Global Strike Command officials have said the likely requirement is on the order of 145 aircraft.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has also set as an “operational imperative” the need to complement the B-21 with uncrewed aircraft that will escort it, providing electronic jamming, additional weapons, and likely defense suppression. No costs for that aspect of the program have been shared.

USAF Manpower Nominee Would Skip Rank of Major General if Confirmed

April 28, 2022 | By Amy Hudson

President Joe Biden has nominated Brig. Gen. Caroline M. Miller to be the next deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel, and services. If confirmed, Miller would completely skip the two-star rank and pin on her third star, becoming just the third actively-serving woman in the Air Force to wear three stars.

Though skipping ranks, especially that high up in the chain of command, is extremely rare, it’s not unprecedented.

In 2014, Brig. Gen. Christopher F. Burne skipped major general, becoming a lieutenant general. And in 2010, Brig. Gen. Richard C. Harding did the same thing. Both Burne and Harding became Judge Advocate General of the Air Force.

The Air Force has said that improving diversity and inclusion in all ranks and specialties is one of its top priorities, and the Biden administration has committed to “ensuring that women are represented equally at all levels of the federal government.” But Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said Miller is being fast-tracked simply because she’s the best person for the job.

“She is the most highly qualified officer with a steep understanding of how to care for the service’s most unique asset—its people,” Stefanek said.

As the commander of the 8,000-person 502nd Air Base Wing and of Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, Miller oversees 49 installation support functions, 266 mission partners, 80,000 full-time personnel, and a facilities and infrastructure portfolio worth $37 billion to ensure the Defense Department’s largest joint base runs smoothly.

Since her commissioning in 1994, she’s held command and staff positions from the base to the Air Staff and Joint levels. She previously was the director of manpower, organization, and resources for the position she was tapped to hold.

If confirmed, she will replace Lt. Gen. Brian T. Kelly, who has held the position since September 2018.

Biden also nominated Lt. Gen. Steven L. Basham to serve as deputy commander of U.S. European Command. Basham is currently the deputy commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa. Lt. Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, commander of 16th Air Force, is nominated to be deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command.

USSF’s Combined Full- and Part-Time Component Would Be Called the ‘Space Component’

April 28, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Leaders of the Space Force reinforced their idea to depart from the typical military component structure of separately organized Active and reserve forces in favor of a single hybrid component structure they called the “Space Component.”

Both Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond and Chief Human Capital Officer Patricia Mulcahy referred to the theoretical new organization as the “Space Component” in separate congressional hearings April 27. A Space Force spokesperson confirmed that Space Component is the organization’s envisioned name.

The Space Component would merge full- and part-time Guardians into one component. How it might incorporate existing Air National Guard space troops remained up for debate.

Raymond implied before the House Armed Services Committee that the hybrid component structure would benefit Guardians and their families based on knowledge gleaned from two years of overhauling “how we recruit, assess, train, develop, promote, employ, and take care of our Guardians.”

Describing the plan as “bold and transformational,” he said the hybrid structure is the service’s “No. 1 legislative proposal.”

Mulcahy explained that the service needs to compete for talent “with the well paid and dynamic space industry.” The leaders hope to achieve more individual flexibility through the hybrid structure.

“This approach could ensure our members do not have to choose between their military careers and their personal lives by encouraging continued participation,” Mulcahy told the SASC’s subcommittee on personnel April 27. This Space Component would extend the continuum of service and enable us to recruit and retain the exquisite, highly technical force we need in an efficient and effective and fiscally sound manner.”

The Space Force’s personnel guidelines emphasize “digital fluency,” which the service’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Lisa Costa has said applies to all Guardians.

“I don’t care if you’re in acquisition—you cannot acquire things well if you don’t understand the tech that you’re buying, right?” Costa told reporters at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., on April 5.

Her office, focused on “asymmetric, disruptive technology,” oversees the Space Force’s University Partnership Program, which exists in part to recruit future Guardians with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math. The office also set up the service’s Digital University, which offers about 23,000 higher ed courses from contracted vendors, to “help make everyone more digitally fluent,” Costa said. Students can take sets of courses that add up to “microdegrees.”

The flexible structure of the Space Component could help the service retain some of that expertise, Mulcahy said.

Raymond said the service is still evaluating, as instructed in the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, options for whether or how it will incorporate existing space-oriented Air National Guard units into the Space Force.

He laid out possibilities for what could happen to the existing “836-or-so” members of Guard space units:

“You could keep the Guard [units] in the Air National Guard and have the Air National Guard continue to provide support,” Raymond said. “Option 2 is you could take the men and women out of the Air National Guard and set up a separate Space National Guard. Or you can take those capabilities out of the Guard totally and put them in this one component.”

Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) spoke for the units, such as the California Air National Guard’s 148th Space Operations Squadron based out of Vandenberg Space Force Base that provides satellite command and control for military satellite communications. Carbajal said the Guard units would like to be brought into the Space Force’s fold.

“My understanding is they’re not the only National Guard unit around the nation” that wants to do so, Carbajal said.

Biden Calls for $33B Aid Package to Ukraine as Money Runs Out

April 28, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

President Joe Biden called on Congress on April 28 to pass a supplemental aid package worth $33 billion to replace the nearly-exhausted $3.5 billion Ukraine aid package passed in March. The multi-faceted replenishment includes weapons and humanitarian and economic assistance, and it would deliver $16 billion to the Department of Defense in support of the Ukraine war effort.

“The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly, if we allow it to happen,” Biden said from the White House, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

In the months that led up to the Feb. 24 invasion, NATO eastern flank allies worried about the buildup of 150,000 Russian troops near their borders. The also worried that Putin—if he were allowed to move unopposed in Ukraine—might attempt to retake countries that were once within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

“We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom,” Biden said. “Our NATO allies and our EU partners, they’re going to pay their fair share of the costs as well. But we have to do this. We have to do our part.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III threw his support behind the bill at an afternoon Pentagon press conference alongside his Canadian counterpart.

“The President has now requested $16 billion for the Department of Defense to address Ukraine’s self-defense needs in the crucial weeks ahead,” Austin said.

The defense Secretary said the new package included $6 billion more for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which procures weapons and systems for Ukraine; $5 billion for additional presidential drawdown authority, which allows for the transfer of material from U.S. stocks; and $5 billion to help pay for security on the NATO eastern flank. Another $4 billion will go to the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program, which helps Ukraine buy American-made weapons.

Some of the DOD money will create a “critical munitions acquisition fund” for the department to establish a strategic reserve of munitions, including anti-aircraft and anti-tank munitions.

Steady Stream of Weapons to Ukraine

The administration has committed more than $4 billion in defense aid to Ukraine so far, including millions of rounds of ammunition and an ever-increasing litany of weapons targeted to Ukraine’s battlefield needs, including anti-tank Javelin and anti-air Stinger missiles.

Ukraine claimed on April 20 that the weapons have led to heavy Russian losses, including 171 aircraft, 150 helicopters, and 850 tanks. Ukraine also claims that more than 20,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far.

In the past week, the U.S. aid to Ukraine has included 90 long-range artillery fire 155 mm Howitzers intended for the Donbas front line, a flat terrain in southeastern Ukraine where soldiers in trenches have been pitted against Russian-backed separatists for eight years, since Russia first invaded in 2014 and began to equip separatists. After being pushed back from the capital, Kyiv, where Russia faced logistics and sustainment failures, Putin directed his forces at Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine.

A senior defense official said April 28 that after regrouping, “Russian forces are making slow and uneven, … incremental progress in the Donbas.”

Russia has pounded Ukraine with more than 1,900 missiles to date, including a heavy barrage that has nearly leveled Mariupol, a port city on the Sea of Azov, a key transit point between Russian-occupied Crimea and the Russian border with Ukraine that is now in Russian hands.

Austin met with chiefs of defense and other officials from more than 40 nations April 26 at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, rallying new levels of support and establishing a monthly “Ukraine Contact Group.”

“We’re facilitating the significant flow of weapons and systems to Ukraine from our allies and partners around the world, including tanks, artillery, and other weapons,” Biden said. “Thanks to the aid we provided, Russian forces have been forced to retreat from Kyiv.”

The assistance has included 10 anti-armor systems for every Russian tank on the battlefield, he said.

The President, however, warned that the “drawdown authority,” which allows him to transfer excess U.S. defense material to Ukraine, is running out.

“Basically we’re out of money,” he said. “I’m sending Congress a supplemental budget request that’s going to keep weapons and ammunition flowing without interruption to the brave Ukrainian fighters.”

Armed Overwatch Contract Coming This Summer, AFSOC Boss Says

April 28, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

A contract award for U.S. Special Operations Command’s Armed Overwatch program is likely coming before the end of the summer, the head of Air Force Special Operations Command told Congress on April 27.

Testifying to the Senate Armed Services emerging threats and capabilities subcommittee, Lt. Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife said the timeframe on the decision was within “months.”

“All the back and forth with industry [is done]; the proposals have been received; all the questions have been answered; and the source selection team is going through their deliberations and is going to make a recommendation to the milestone decision authority at SOCOM here in the coming weeks,” Slife told Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) “And then a contract will probably be awarded prior to the end of the summer.”

SOCOM wants to buy 75 light aircraft as part of the Armed Overwatch program to deploy in support of ground forces for “close air support, precision strike, and SOF intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in austere and permissive environments,” according to a SOCOM contract document.

Slife had previously predicted in February 2021 that a procurement decision would come as soon as fiscal 2022, and the timeline he articulated to Congress would stay just within that window, as fiscal 2022 ends Sept. 30.

The decision on Armed Overwatch would also come a little more than a year after SOCOM awarded a total of $19.2 million to five companies for prototype demonstrations for the program.

That includes, Leidos’ Bronco II, MAG Aerospace’s MC-208 Guardian, Textron Aviation Defense’s AT-6E Wolverine, L-3 Communications Integrated Systems’ AT-802U Sky Warden, and Sierra Nevada Corp.’s MC-145B Wily Coyote. One of those five contenders is expected to replace the Air Force’s U-28 Draco fleet.

Congress, however, has expressed skepticism about the Armed Overwatch program in the past, questioning the need for it and refusing to fund procurement in the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. Kelly seemed to address some of that skepticism in questioning Slife, asking him to explain why the program would be more “affordable and effective” than existing aircraft it would likely replace, such as the A-10 and the MQ-9 drone.

Slife pointed to the versatility of the platform.

“Our methodology for supporting our forces on the ground over the last several decades has really boiled down to the development of what we call an “air stack” over objective areas. And so you’ll typically have single-role specialized platforms—AC-130s, A-10s, MQ-9s, U-28s—you have a stack of airplanes over an objective, each platform providing a niche capability to the force on the ground. That averages, in terms of cost per flying hour, over $150,000 an hour … to generate kind of the typical stack for that,” Slife said.

By comparison, Armed Overwatch’s cost per flying hour will be “something less than $10,000,” representing savings of 93.3 percent, Slife said.

And, “It allows us to push those platforms further forward into more austere areas where they can operate co-located with the ground teams that they’re partnered with,” Slife added.

Kelly pushed further, asking Slife how the Armed Overwatch platform would compare to an aircraft such as the AC-130J gunship.

“Clearly there will be missions that require more deep magazine fire support than what an Armed Overwatch platform might have,” Slife acknowledged. “But the idea of the Armed Overwatch platform is [that] it’s a modular capability and so you can outfit the aircraft with a robust suite of sensors that will exceed what is available with most dedicated ISR platforms today. Or you can outfit the platform with a robust suite of precision munitions.

“It really depends on the mission, and so clearly, the Armed Overwatch platform is not a panacea for every tactical situation that a ground force might find themselves in. But for what we envision the enduring counter-[violent extremist organization] mission looking like, we think it’s a prudent investment.”

Armed Overwatch prototypes — Top row, left to right: L-3 Communications Integrated Systems’ AT-802U Sky Warden; Textron Aviation Defense’s AT-6E Wolverine; MAG Aerospace’s MC-208 Guardian. Bottom row, left to right: Leidos Inc.’s Bronco II; Sierra Nevada Corp.’s C-145. (Aircraft not to scale) Staff illustration by Mike Tsukamoto.

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

April 27, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F-15EX Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 27, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Powering NGAD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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