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

April 27, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 27, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Airmen Aim to Promote Diversity in Aviation With Event at HBCU

April 27, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 26, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 26, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 26, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

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

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

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

Source: USAF budget documents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: USAF budget documents

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

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

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

April 26, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooley to Be Reprimanded, Forfeit Nearly $55,000 in Pay for Sexual Assault Conviction

April 26, 2022 | By Amy Hudson

Maj. Gen. William T. Cooley will be reprimanded and forced to forfeit $10,910 a month in pay for five months after being convicted of abusive sexual contact for forcibly kissing his sister-in-law in 2018.

Col. Christina M. Jimenez, the senior military judge in the case and the chief circuit military judge, provided the sentence, which came three days after Cooley’s historic court-martial concluded. He is the first Air Force general officer to be tried and convicted in a military trial.

Cooley was charged with one count of sexual assault under Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, with three specifications. He waved his right to a jury trial, and Jimenez found him guilty of one specification of abusive sexual contact for forcibly kissing the victim, who agreed to let the media identify her relationship to Cooley without naming her. He was found not guilty of two other specifications related to allegedly forcing the victim to touch him and for groping her.

Although Cooley will now lose nearly $55,000 in pay, with the conviction he faced a maximum sentence of dismissal from the service, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and seven years’ confinement. Air Force lawyers representing the victim wanted him to be dismissed from the service without pay or retirement benefits, and a reduction in rank, according to media covering the trial.

Cooley has served as a special assistant to Air Force Materiel Command boss Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr. since Bunch removed him from his position as head of the Air Force Research Laboratory in January 2020. Bunch, as the general court-martial convening authority, will now author the “formal admonishment, which … likely will document Cooley’s conviction and departure from Air Force standards and core values, as well as articulate Gen. Bunch’s expectations of behavior by Maj. Gen. Cooley moving forward,” said AFMC spokesperson Derek Kaufman.

Based on the abusive sexual contact conviction, Kaufman said Cooley is “subject to administrative discharge,” though he may still request to retire.

“Whether he requests to retire is a personal choice,” Kaufman said. “An officer is not automatically entitled to retire at the highest grade held. Instead, an officer is retired in the highest grade in which the officer served satisfactorily as determined by the Secretary of the Air Force.”

In an unsworn statement offered before the sentencing, Cooley apologized to his sister-in-law, wife, family, and members of the Air Force.

“I can honestly say I have come out a better human being than I was in 2018 … I will work for the rest of my life to be a better person than the one who was portrayed in this trial,” he said, according to the Dayton Daily News.

He also asked the judge to consider his wife. “Whatever I deserve, she did not deserve this, and I pray to God that she will not be left with nothing.”

Lt. Col. Matthew Neil, the government lead trial counsel, also presented an unsworn statement on behalf of the victim and her family.

“If this result influenced just one survivor to know that his or her attacker’s rank or status would not prevent them from being held accountable, that is a win for the United States and the military justice system,” said Neil after the sentence was delivered, according to a USAF release.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 4:28 p.m. on April 26 with additional information from AFMC on what happens to Cooley after sentencing.

Austin: Partners Must ‘Move at the Speed of War’ to Help Ukraine

April 26, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany—Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III called on more than 40 nations providing defense aid to Ukraine to “move at the speed of war” at a meeting at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, focused on better coordinating the rapid transfer of weapons to the front line of Ukraine’s war with Russia.

“We’re all determined to help Ukraine win today and build strength for tomorrow,” Austin said in closing comments at Ramstein’s Officer’s Club. “We’ve got to move at the speed of war.”

Assembled in less than a week, Austin opened the Ukraine Defense Consultative Workshop describing a “sense of urgency,” and he committed April 26 to keeping the momentum going with the creation of a monthly Ukraine Contact Group, which will be open to any nation willing to help meet Ukraine’s evolving defense needs so it can “win” the war against Russia.

“The Contact Group will be a vehicle for nations of goodwill to intensify our efforts, coordinate our assistance, and focus on winning today’s fight and the struggles to come,” Austin said.
The group of nations made “tangible” progress at Ramstein, including new assistance from Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries that want to remain anonymous, according to a senior defense official.

Those new weapons include air defenses and armored vehicles. Germany committed 50 Cheetah anti-aircraft systems, and the UK will provide new anti-aircraft capabilities.
The meeting included a battlefield update from Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov and his staff, a description of the U.S. European Command coordination center by Air Force Gen. Tod D. Wolters, a sober briefing by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley, and a plan for Ukraine’s long-term security needs.

U.S. Air Forces in Europe commander Gen. Jeffrey R. Harrigian told Air Force Magazine that the sense of urgency led the nations to come to Ramstein to solve the problem of timely and catered defense aid.
“I don’t think anyone could have predicted the level of dedication to this mission set,” he said during a pull-aside interview. “It’s impressive to see all the nations come together on such short notice.”
Harrigian said explaining the EUCOM coordination mechanism to those in attendance will improve delivery of Ukrainian aid going forward.

“We just needed to make more people aware of it,” he said of the EUCOM Control Center Ukraine (ECCU) at EUCOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.

Harrigian also said air power was an important topic of discussion at Ramstein.
“Collectively, we’ve got to step up and understand what the Ukrainians’ requirements are, and find a way to get it to them and get it to them quick,” he said.

Estonian Chief of Defense Gen. Martin Herem told Air Force Magazine that Milley said “the next three weeks will determine how we live in the next 15-20 years.” NATO eastern flank defense officials told Air Force Magazine the meeting was necessary to encourage reticent nations to give more.

“I’m sure that more defense assistance is needed for Ukraine,” Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak told Air Force Magazine during a pull-aside interview before the start of the conference.
“Poland is participating in this process from the beginning of the war, and now it’s the best time to coordinate this cooperation with Ukraine,” he said. “We should motivate other allies in our alliance and like minded countries to speed up this support.”

Black Sea NATO ally Romania, which borders Ukraine to the north and east, also called for broader assistance.

“It’s necessary for more action … to support Ukraine from all the countries,” Romanian Defense Minister Vasile Dincu told Air Force Magazine.

Some 29 ministers of defense and 21 chiefs of defense turned out from across the globe, including EU member states, North Africa, and the Middle East.

“The first step is to end this conflict,” Austin said. “We leave tonight strengthened, and so does Ukraine.”