Department of the Air Force Leaders Will Pick Tech Winners, Losers Based on What’s Fieldable, Kendall Says

Feb. 15, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Secretary Frank Kendall and his two service Chiefs are sifting through Department of the Air Force technology efforts in search of the ones most likely to “make a difference” and be fielded, with plans to discard the ones that might be a lab success but impractical for operational service. The culling will be concluded in time for the fiscal 2024 budget request.

“In a world in which we were by far the dominant military power, we could afford to let a thousand flowers bloom,” Kendall said in an event streamed by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “We can’t do that anymore. We’ve got to focus our efforts on the things that we really need, or that are going to make the greatest difference on the battlefield.”

“We’re going to try to do some sorting, if you will, to make sure we’re focused on the things that have the highest payoff,” he added.

Kendall said he’s trying to bridge the so-called “valley of death” between laboratory successes and programs of record that lead to fielded systems. Too many concepts have “piled up” to pursue them all, he said.

“You have to be disciplined about the things you start,” Kendall said. “I’ve seen a few projects—I’ll be blunt—that I don’t think are ever going to go to the field, whether they’re successful or not. I’ve seen a few others that almost certainly should go to the field if they’re successful. And we need to distinguish [between] those two and emphasize the ones … in the latter category.”

Kendall, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., and Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond “are all going to be sitting down, looking at all of our programs in the [science and technology] world, particularly the demonstration projects, and trying to make a determination about whether we think that they will make the cut,” he said. The criteria will be cost effectiveness and affordability, “whether they would be operationally viable,” and whether “they’re going to confer an operational advantage that matters,” Kendall added.

Those that “meet those tests, we’re going to make sure they’re funded to go on” in the coming five-year plan, Kendall said. “And we’re going to try to accelerate the transition wherever we can.” Those not making the cut will get more analysis with an eye toward cost-effectiveness.

Many such projects sound good on paper, but those pushing them “don’t necessarily think through all the implications” of what fielding them would entail.

Kendall said there’s “no shortage” of innovation or technology, but “we need to make smart decisions” about what to pursue. While it’s too late for these choices to affect the fiscal 2023 budget submission, now in its final stages, Kendall said the work will be done in time for the 2024 budget request.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall speaks with retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, during a streamed event on Feb. 15, 2022.

“Enough work has been done on the tactical level” to convince Kendall that the time is right to launch programs that will produce unmanned flying teammates for manned fighters and bombers.

“The technologies are coming together” in machine learning, autonomy, and aircraft design so that an unmanned fighter teammate could emerge at the same time as the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, Kendall said. Such an unmanned fighter will be able to work with the F-35, he added.

“There are a lot of possibilities,” he asserted. Manned-unmanned teaming “opens up to you … some really interesting technical options that you don’t have when you only have manned aircraft, so we’re going to go forward with that,” he said.

“We’ll need a platform upon which to embed those technologies as they mature … [to] get to what I’ll call a minimum viable product.”

A bomber escort would be a different kind of platform, he said.

“I think there’s a lot of potential there as well, but I’m not as certain about what the rules of the uncrewed platforms are,” Kendall said. Would the unmanned platforms simply be off-board carriers of munitions, “or do they have more sophisticated functions? … And what degree of stealth might be appropriate?” Conceptual work is underway to make those determinations and “what the right mix is there.”

While he wouldn’t give a timeline as to when these systems would be in the hands of developmental testers and doctrine-writers, “My mantra for acquisition is, ‘Get meaningful military capability to operate as quickly as possible.’ And some of the programs I mentioned earlier, the technology programs, they’ll continue in parallel.” The unmanned aircraft, for example, will come along in “roughly the same timeframe” as NGAD.

“I believe operator experimentation is going to be a big part of this,” he added. Operators are very creative about “ways to use things that engineers like myself didn’t necessarily think about. And so we need to make that opportunity available as soon as we can.” He said it might be possible to do this work in simulation before the hardware is available, and “I hope we get the opportunity to do that as well.”

He also noted that his top seven technology priorities all have “co-chairs” leading them—“an operator and an engineer.” That way there will be constant feedback between what the operators need and what engineers can feasibly provide.

“I’ve felt for decades that this is the right way to approach this,” he said. Handing requirements to an engineer and waiting for the ultimate product “doesn’t work very well.”

Kendall’s imperatives, which he laid out in December, are:

The space order of battle
Air base resiliency
Advanced Battle Management System
Air and ground moving target indication
Supply chain
The new unmanned fighter escort
The unmanned bomber escort.

USAF Should Take Advantage of Secondhand Parts Market, Pentagon Nominee Says

Feb. 15, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

As the Air Force looks to boost its aging aircraft’s mission capable rates and to control sustainment costs, the Defense Department should encourage the service to take full advantage of the secondhand market for parts, the nominee to lead the Pentagon’s sustainment enterprise told Congress on Feb. 15.

Christopher Lowman, nominated to serve as assistant secretary of defense for sustainment, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing that “used serviceable material,” or USM, which includes everything from engine parts to avionics systems, could be part of “addressing supply chain risk and building resilience” for the Air Force fleet.

Lowman’s comments were prompted by a question from Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who noted that the Pentagon already has a used serviceable material program, whereby the Federal Aviation Administration provides the DOD with parts from Boeing’s 737 and 767 aircraft. The Air Force’s C-40 Clipper and KC-46 Pegasus are based off those planes, respectively.

The USM program’s savings are projected at $1.5 billion over the next seven years, Duckworth claimed. But it is not standardized and, in some cases, is harder to use than more costly options, she added.

“I’ve seen reports where purchasing officers have a program … function on their keyboard F7, where they just hit a function and it populates a form and they can buy brand new parts. But it is multi steps to use this program that exists for used parts,” Duckworth said, asking Lowman how he would incentivize or even require offices to use the USM program.

USM programs are nothing new in the commercial sector, Lowman noted. Indeed, the market accounts for billions of dollars, and observers have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to a surge in secondhand spare parts available.

The Air Force and the other services should be free to pursue that market, Lowman said.

“If confirmed, I’ll work closely with the services … to make sure there are no policy barriers to use of the USM,” said Lowman. “And I would work with the interagency community, in particular the FAA, to make sure that the necessary airworthiness documentation is available to guarantee the life of the part—the repair history, for example; the hours currently consumed by that particular part. So I look forward to taking this on.”

Lawmakers in Congress have become increasingly concerned about the cost of spare parts, as programs such as the F-35 and KC-46 have run into issues with sustainment that have cost tens of millions of dollars.

Sustainment of legacy fleets, meanwhile, has become a contentious topic at the Pentagon and in Congress as the Air Force looks to retire older aircraft and take the money used to keep them flying to procure new systems. Observers have noted, though, that this may result in a short-term decrease in readiness, with Duckworth expressing particular concern about the service’s airlift capabilities.

“It’s really a balance … between modernization and sustainment, and the need to appropriately allocate the resources to sustain our current capabilities, especially in the inter- and intra-theater lift, as you noted, but also to modernize those fleets in a sustainable fashion over time,” Lowman said.

“The second balance … is the balance across the Active and reserve components, to make sure that the resources the reserve components need to sustain their fleets [are available], and that they have the sufficient lift capability built into the [combatant command] logistics plans, so that the Department not only sustains the lift capability that they need, but also modernizes that over time.”

UCMJ Changes

Also during the Feb. 15 confirmation hearing, the nominee to become the Air Force’s top lawyer pledged to review staffing levels to ensure the Department of the Air Force has enough people and resources for its special victims office.

Peter J. Beshar, nominated to be general counsel for the DAF, made that commitment after being prompted by questioning from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). Gillibrand noted a 2020 DOD inspector general report that found that the Air Force had assigned special victim-certified prosecutors to six percent of eligible cases, “by far the lowest among the services,” she said.

“Fostering a culture of integrity and inclusion within the department is extraordinarily important. I think that diversity is what makes the Armed Forces the greatest in the world. I am not familiar in my current position outside of government with the level of staffing, but certainly trying to have a number of qualified investigators able to look into those types of matters would be important, and if confirmed, I would work toward that goal,” Beshar told Gillibrand.

Earlier in the hearing, Beshar seemed to agree with comments from Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who noted that recent reforms to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which takes the decision to prosecute certain crimes like sexual assault out of the chain of command, will take time to implement. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act gives the Pentagon two years to enact those changes.

“The changes that the Congress [has] approved, taking specific crimes out of the chain of command, as well as the IRC recommendations that have been embraced by the Department of Defense, are substantial undertakings, and they’re going to require really sustained commitment from military commanders across the field, as well as the other senior leaders within the organization,” Beshar said. “And so the goal is to get it right, naturally, and if confirmed, that’s what I would try to do.”

Inhofe added, “And to get it right, it does take time, sometimes.”

‘Cautious Optimism’ as Moscow Hints at Diplomacy, Withdrawal Ahead of NATO Meeting

Feb. 15, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

NATO defense ministers from across the alliance arrived in Brussels on Feb. 15 eager to verify Russian claims that it is withdrawing forces and open to a diplomatic solution to end the Russia-Ukraine crisis, even as tens of thousands of Russian troops remained on Baltic borders.

With more than 130,000 Russian troops surrounding Ukraine on three sides and a continuous buildup of military equipment, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to change course Feb. 14. In a televised exchange with Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested a diplomatic solution was still possible. Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced Feb. 15 that some units had completed their tasks and were returning to their military garrisons.

But NATO is hesitant to take Putin at his word.

“What we need to see is a significant and enduring withdrawal of forces, troops, and not least [of which] the heavy equipment,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said at a pre-ministerial press briefing Feb. 15, in response to a question about Lavrov’s comments a day earlier.

“So far, we have not seen any de-escalation on the ground from the Russian side. Over the last weeks and days, we have seen the opposite,” Stoltenberg added. “A continued military buildup with more troops, more battlegroups, more high-end capabilities, artillery, air defense missiles, and a lot of support elements that makes it possible for Russia to move into Ukraine for full-fledged invasion or a more limited military incursion with hardly any warning time at all.”

However, Stoltenberg said there is “some ground for cautious optimism” based on the signaling from Moscow.

A Russian Ministry of Defence article Feb. 15 describing joint exercises with Belarus and planned live fire exercises Feb. 19, also mentioned that some troops were preparing to return.

“The units of the Southern and Western military districts, having completed their tasks, have already begun loading onto rail and road transport and will begin moving to their military garrisons today,” the story read.

U.S. permanent representative to NATO, Ambassador Julianne Smith, told reporters early Feb. 15 that she was hopeful for a diplomatic solution and that claims of a drawdown by Russia must be verified.

“This is something that we’ll have to look at closely and verify in the days ahead,” Smith said during a teleconference from Brussels, noting that Russia made a similar claim in late December.

“What’s important is that we try to verify based on the fact that we’ve seen other instances in the past where Russia has claimed to be de-escalating, and in fact, facts on the ground didn’t prove that to be true,” she added.

After the comments, reports emerged that Ukraine’s defense ministry and two banks came under cyberattack. Defense officials have of late voiced concerns that Russia would commence any conflict with cyber, informational, and hybrid warfare tactics.

Meanwhile, the ranking members of House committees for Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence introduced a bill to sanction Russia now instead of threatening sanctions should Putin order an invasion of Ukraine. The bill cites Russia’s military buildup and the hybrid warfare tactics already committed against Ukraine, and calls for additional support to Ukraine and allies on NATO’s eastern flank.

U.S. Force Movements to Deter Russia

Smith underscored that the U.S. and NATO position was two-track: to pursue diplomacy by welcoming continued dialogue with Russia; and to reinforce NATO against potential Russian aggression.

The U.S. has already unilaterally reinforced eastern flank allies by sending 5,000 troops to Central and Eastern Europe, including 3,000 Soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to Poland and 1,000 from a U.S. Stryker squadron at Vilseck, Germany, to Romania.

Stoltenberg said the U.S. additions are meaningful.

“I saw the Stryker units coming into Romania, coming into Constanta, and there are more U.S. planes, there are more German, Italian, and other allies [who] have also stepped up,” he said.

In addition to troop movements, the U.S. Air Force has now sent eight F-16s and 16 F-15s to the eastern flank.

Eight additional F-15s from the 336th Fighter Squadron, 4th Fighter Wing, at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C., deployed to Lask Air Base, Poland, on Feb. 14 to augment the eight F-15s already there from the 48th Fighter Wing at RAF Lakenheath, U.K., U.S. Air Forces in Europe confirmed to Air Force Magazine. Eight F-16s from the 52nd Fighter Wing at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, deployed to Fetesti Air Base, Romania, on Feb. 11. The fighter jets in both locations will take part in NATO enhanced air policing missions and joint training.

The U.S. also maintains on high alert an additional 8,500 troops in the United States to act as a NATO Response Force if called upon.

A NATO official from the eastern flank told Air Force Magazine the alliance has “not seen anything specific” with regard to threats emanating from Russia, but that hybrid activities, including propaganda against border areas of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, continue.

A heavy Russian troop presence in Belarus, which borders the Baltic countries, is also worrying because it has shrunk indications and warning time.

The official said the Alliance is watching Russian activities closely to see if actions match recent statements.

“I think everybody is waiting and watching with caution for those messages to be confirmed,” the official said.

A Feb. 14 move by the Russian lower house Duma to draft resolutions recognizing the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, in southeast Ukraine, as independent states also worries NATO.

“That would obviously be a new shift in in the escalation,” Smith said, adding that the recognition would violate Ukraine’s territorial integrity and break Russia’s commitment to the Minsk protocol, which reduced conflict in 2014 after Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

The NATO eastern flank official also cited the Duma resolutions as concerning.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III was scheduled to leave Washington, D.C. Feb. 15 to attend the Meeting of NATO Ministers of Defence, scheduled for Feb. 15-16, before traveling on to Poland and Lithuania, where he will meet with his counterparts and American troops. Before leaving Brussels on Feb. 17, Austin and the other defense ministers of the 30-member Alliance will meet with the defense ministers of aspiring members Ukraine and Georgia.

Putin has made clear that he does not want NATO to expand eastward, and he has specifically called for barring Ukraine and Georgia from entering the alliance. NATO and the United States have stood firm on the so-called NATO “open-door policy” that allows any country to pursue membership.

Still, NATO leaders believe there is a possibility of averting a Russian invasion.

“We believe the best path is through dialogue and de-escalation. And we have urged them at every turn to come back to the table,” Smith said of dialogue with Russia. “We do not understand fundamentally, none of us do, what is inside President Putin’s head. And, so, we cannot make any guess how, where all of this is headed.”

Electronic Warfare Guardians’ New Homegrown, Fast-Deploying Spectrum Monitoring Tool

Feb. 15, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Members of the Space Force’s 16th Space Control Squadron put their heads together to figure out the features they’d want on a mobile spectrum monitoring tool to detect electromagnetic interference, and they’re building the system themselves.

Described as experimental, the Multiband Assessment of the Communications Environment, or MACE, can load up onto a single aircraft pallet. Once it’s in the field, no one need stick around—the Guardians have designed it to run remotely and for linked MACE systems to ferry data from one to the next.

The squadron is part of Space Operations Command’s Space Delta 3, which is dedicated to space electronic warfare. Space Delta 3’s headquarters is at the Peterson-Schriever Garrison, Colo.

Paying for the project with “delta innovation funding,” the creators—Tech. Sgt. Vince Couch and Master Sgt. Robert Hicks III—wanted MACE to be able to deploy quickly to tough places, according to a news release. Their design incorporates a Giggasat FA-150 antenna to “aid in detecting and identifying electromagnetic interference.”

“Due to its small size, MACE has the ability to significantly cut down on deployment timelines while increasing the ability to access challenging deployment environments,” Tech Sgt. John Idleman, the squadron’s mission assurance engineer, said in the release. “MACE can be deployment ready in one day following ops checks.”

The squadron stated that the spectrum monitoring tool could help the Space Force “compete in strategic competition.”

“It is truly a story of grassroots innovation at the tactical level,” said the squadron’s commander of operations Maj. Kevin Aneshansley in the release. Members “worked hard to think outside the box to develop a capability that could inform defensive space electromagnetic solutions.”

The Space Force has flagged the prospect of electromagnetic warfare as “a tremendous risk to the viability of military spacepower,” according to the service’s “Space Capstone Publication: Spacepower Doctrine for Space Forces.”

In addition to detecting interference, the command causes it. Space Delta 3’s 4th Space Control Squadron operates the Counter Communications System Block 10.2, which went into service in 2020, and is the service’s “first offensive weapon.”

Russia Paves the Way for Ukraine Invasion as Austin Travels to Eastern Flank

Feb. 14, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III departs Feb. 15 for a NATO defense ministerial meeting in Brussels and for meetings with his Polish and Baltic counterparts that will take him to the Russian border just as U.S. intelligence predicts an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“This will not be bloodless. This will not be easy,” Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby said from the briefing room podium Feb. 14 while discussing the implications should Russian President Vladimir Putin order an invasion of Ukraine.

“[Russia] clearly has shown aggressive tendencies here,” he added—”an alarming buildup of military capabilities. And certainly [he] has shown no sign yet of being willing to de-escalate … to take those capabilities off the table and to find a real diplomatic path forward.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a televised Feb. 14 exchange with Putin, seemed to suggest that a diplomatic solution was still possible.

When asked by Putin whether there was a chance of reaching an agreement to address Russia’s security concerns, Lavrov said:

“It seems to me that our possibilities are far from exhausted,” he said, according to press reports. “At this stage, I would suggest continuing and building them up.”

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden spoke to Putin by telephone with no resolution to the crisis, while on Feb. 11 from the Pentagon, Austin spoke to his NATO ally counterparts in Poland, Germany, Canada, France, Romania, and Italy about the Russian military force posture around Ukraine.

Austin also ordered the remaining 1,700 Soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to Poland for a total of 3,000 troops, and he directed 160 members of the Florida Army National Guard who had been deployed to Ukraine since November on a training mission to re-position elsewhere in Europe.

“It is obviously not the safest place for them to be,” Kirby said in response to a question from Air Force Magazine. “Given the mosaic of the information that we’ve been getting over the course of the last 48 hours, and the information we continue to receive even as early as today.”

Russian Preparation Continues

Kirby also described Russia’s military buildup on the Ukrainian border, citing an estimated 130,000 Russian troops rounding Ukraine on three sides, including Russian “infantry, its armor, its artillery, its air missile defense, as well as offensive air.”

Kirby said Putin’s sizable naval power on the Black Sea includes at least six Landing Ship, Tank (LST) vessels designed for delivering troops ashore. The spokesman also said Russia is expected to precede any conflict with cyber operations, information operations, and hybrid operations that could cut off Ukrainian communications to the outside world.

In recent weeks, Ukraine has been approved to receive third-party transfers of American-made air defense systems from its eastern flank neighbors, including Stinger man-portable air-defense systems. However, Kirby confirmed to Air Force Magazine that no U.S. personnel would be in Ukraine to help train on the air defense systems.

Currently, the U.S. Air Force with Ukrainian permission flies a variety of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft in Ukrainian airspace, including the high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk, the RC-135 Rivet Joint, and P-8 Poseidon, among other aircraft, a Ukrainian defense official told Air Force Magazine.

“Global Hawk is flying regularly over Ukraine,” the official said. “All types of ISR aircraft are flying regularly.”

Kirby said the U.S. government has been transparent in its intelligence sharing with Ukraine. That would cease if Russia invades and controls Ukrainian airspace.

Political Preparations for Invasion

The Russian lower house Duma Council began drafting two resolutions Feb. 14 for the recognition of the two Russian-backed breakaway republics in southeastern Ukraine. In 2014, Donetsk and Luhansk once received “little green men,” Russian troops and military hardware that helped push back Ukrainian forces.

While the hot war ended with the signing of the Minsk protocol that year, a low-intensity conflict has continued for seven years and involved Russian elite snipers and entrenched Ukrainian soldiers who perish on a weekly basis. A formal declaration recognizing the breakaway republics as independent states could be a violation of the Minsk protocol and a provocation to Ukraine.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and other administration officials have warned of a “false flag” operation to be conducted inside Ukraine by Russian operatives as a pretense for invasion.

The Donbas region of eastern Ukraine is known to have a sizable Russian ethnic minority. Putin in the past has stated that Russia has an obligation to protect Slavic peoples even beyond the borders of Russia.

Kirby said Russia is likely to “begin to sow the seeds for potential armed conflict to include creating some sort of pretext that the Ukrainians would react to that then they could claim [it] was a threat to their national security.”

Kirby confirmed to Air Force Magazine that an incursion of Russian forces into the Donbas would constitute a “new incursion” by Russia, the often-cited trigger for new U.S. sanctions against Russia and additional reinforcements of NATO eastern flank Allies.

Austin travels to the region for a defense ministerial meeting Feb. 16-17 in Brussels, followed by travel to Poland and Lithuania, countries that both share land borders with Russia. Lithuania also borders Belarus to the north, the country where Russia has amassed some 30,000 troops for joint military exercises scheduled to end Feb. 20, but that many believe to be a pretext for positioning an invasion force just north of Kyiv.

In both eastern flank countries, Austin will meet with U.S. troops who have been sent to the NATO front line to support U.S. Article 5 obligations to defend NATO allies.

The U.S. has readied an additional 8,500 troops as part of a NATO response force that could deploy to the eastern flank, if necessary.

Kirby said the U.S. troops that have already been sent to Poland and Romania, including fighter jet squadrons participating in NATO enhanced air policing, are meant to deter aggression against the alliance and to conduct joint training. The troops in Poland may also assist from within Poland should Americans attempt to evacuate Ukraine across the land border.

“The President has made clear that U.S. troops are not going to be fighting in Ukraine,” Kirby said. “They’re not going to accidentally be drawn into Ukraine.”

Airborne Lasers, New Kinetic Weapons Paired in Virtual Test

Feb. 14, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Air Force Research Laboratory has already experimented with airborne lasers on the virtual battlefield. Now the lab’s latest test has combined those lasers with next-generation kinetic weapons to see how they could work together.

Seven pilots, weapon systems officers, and air battle managers took part in one of AFRL’s Directed Energy Utility Concept Experiments from Jan. 24 to 28 at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. The DEUCE series of experiments aims to test how operators use directed energy weapons in simulated situations. This most recent experiment, however, went a step further in trying to explore “synergies between directed energy and kinetic concepts,” according to an AFRL release.

The experiment, dubbed the Directed Energy and Kinetic Energy Directed Energy Utility Concept Experiment, or DEKE DEUCE, featured collaboration between AFRL’s Directed Energy and Munitions directorates as well as work by the Office of Naval Research.

“An urgent need exists to rapidly field and integrate viable next-generation weapons, both [directed energy] and [kinetic energy], in response to increasing capabilities and aggressive intentions from our adversaries,” said Darl Lewis, the DEUCE lead and wargaming principal investigator. “This DEUCE focused on identifying capability and joint integration gaps that can be addressed by systems under consideration, as well as potential future tactics and procedures.”

Using computers and simulators, Airmen were placed in situations in which the mission called for the combined use of directed and kinetic capabilities. Specifically, the simulations focused on “an airborne high energy laser pod and two future kinetic concepts,” per the AFRL release.

All three weapons were simulated on an F-15, Lewis told Air Force Magazine.

“Experiments like the DEKE DEUCE allow critical collaboration between the warfighter and the developers of our future capabilities,” said Col. Matthew Crowell, chief of aviation safety at the Air Force Safety Center and the leader of five aviators who took part in the experiment. “It provided an amazing opportunity for both communities to learn from each other and keep our Air Force out in front of our peers with technology.”

A previous version of DEUCE simulated a weapon similar to the Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD).

The conceptual laser simulated as part of DEKE DEUCE, called the Advanced-Flight High Energy Laser (AF-HEL), “builds on the lessons learned during several previous high energy laser programs. However, it is not expressly tied to any single predecessor,” Lewis told Air Force Magazine. Data gleaned from DEKE DEUCE and similar experiments will help to “drive requirements for a physical system that is optimally aligned with the needs of the warfighter,” Lewis said.

AFRL’s release did not specify which future kinetic concepts were tested in the experiment, but in response to an Air Force Magazine query, Lewis said the kinetic systems were used in both defensive and offensive capacities.

“DEKE DEUCE gave the Munitions Directorate a great opportunity to put our kinetic weapons concepts in front of the warfighter,” said Rusty Coleman, the unit’s technical adviser for the modeling and simulation team. “It allowed us to see novel employment concepts that we could not have seen otherwise. The pilots virtually flying the aircraft provided feedback beyond what we could have gotten from any other venue.”

DEKE DEUCE also featured the AFRL’s Weapons Engagement Optimizer, “an artificial intelligence-based battle management system” aimed at analyzing data and helping decision-making in complex battlefields, as well as the Navy’s ELEKTRA, a similar AI-based battle management concept.

Lockheed Martin Walks Away From Deal to Buy Aerojet Rocketdyne

Feb. 14, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

The world’s largest defense contractor says it’s given up on trying to buy the only U.S. maker of certain propulsion components of missiles and missile defense kill vehicles.

The Federal Trade Commission announced in January that it was suing Lockheed Martin to block the company from acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne. On Feb. 13, Lockheed Martin announced in a press release that it had terminated the purchase agreement.

“Our planned acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne would have benefitted the entire industry through greater efficiency, speed, and significant cost reductions for the U.S. government,” said Lockheed Martin chairman, president, and CEO James Taiclet in the release. “However, we determined that in light of the FTC’s actions, terminating the transaction is in the best interest of our stakeholders.”

Suing to block a defense merger for the first time “in decades,” the FTC argued that if the deal went through, Lockheed Martin could “use its control of Aerojet to harm rival defense contractors and further consolidate multiple markets crucial to national security and defense,” according to a statement published Jan. 25.

“If consummated, this deal would give Lockheed the ability to cut off other defense contractors from the critical components they need to build competing missiles,” Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova said in the statement.

In Lockheed Martin’s quarterly earnings call Jan. 25, Taiclet said the company would consider options for the $4.4 billion it had set aside for the purchase, such as research, capital improvements, and other mergers and ventures.

“Moving forward, we will maintain our focus on the most effective use of capital with the highest return on investment, including our ongoing commitment to return value to shareholders,” Taiclet said in the Feb. 13 release.

In a statement released Feb. 13, Aerojet Rocketdyne looked to reassure its own shareholders, touting its role in “advancing hypersonics and strategic, tactical, and missile defense systems.”

“We are confident in our future performance with an impressive backlog that is more than three times the size of our annual sales and a strong macroeconomic environment underpinning our portfolio,” according to the company statement. “We look forward to providing further details regarding our financial performance and strategy on our fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings report on Feb. 17, 2022.”

Space Force Wrestling With ‘Digital First’ Culture

Feb. 14, 2022 | By Shaun Waterman

The U.S. Space Force—the only military branch born in the information age—has declared itself a “digital first” service. But its leaders are still wrestling with the challenges of digital transformation and working to build a 21st century service culture, they recently told attendees at an industry conference.

“One of our biggest challenges is getting all of our folks’ heads around a new way of doing business,” said Brig. Gen. Kevin G. Whale, a Royal Canadian Air Force officer on assignment to Space Operations Command, or SpOC, to serve as deputy commanding general for transformation. Whale spoke alongside other Space Force and U.S. Space Command leaders during AFCEA’s Space Force IT Day on Feb 10 as part of a panel discussion titled “Focus and Priorities from the Field.”

SpOC is the pointy end of the Space Force spear, the service’s field command—occupying the equivalent organizational rung of a major command in the Air Force—that provides capabilities to U.S. Space Command, the unified combatant command for the battlefield beyond the atmosphere.

“Just to give you a flavor of the kind of challenges we’re working through,” Whale said, SpOC was “trying to move from old ways to new ways” in its business processes, ”transitioning from PowerPoint, quad charts, Excel, and email … to dashboard single source of truth, and … collaboration tools” such as Microsoft Teams.

At 16,000 strong, Whale pointed out, Space Force is dwarfed in size by the Air Force, which has 330,000 Active-duty Airmen and more than double that counting Guard and Reserve members and civilian employees. “We are lean,” Whale said, which makes the Space Force more adaptable.

In an earlier session, Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David D. Thompson even joked that his staff had “asked me what the definition of ‘lean’ is. And oftentimes they asked me to define the difference between ‘lean’ and ’emaciated.'”

For such a small service, automation is a key issue and one of the Space Force’s top use cases for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), Whale added. “Even at a staffing level, we are lean enough that the more we can save our staff time with automated processes, we can free up their brain space to be focused on warfighting and operations,” he said.

Whale noted that by assigning one of three deputy SpOC commanders to take charge of transformation, alongside the deputies for operations and training, “our commander has chosen to carve out a team to focus on the future business,” showing his commitment to the digital first ideal.

SpOC was not alone in facing those cultural challenges, Army Col. Mike Teter, chief data officer for U.S. Space Command, told the audience in the room and online. “Our first line of effort is really about the culture and shifting that culture within the space enterprise to pull away from defaulting to emails and defaulting to quad charts,” he said.

It was “odd,” he said, that Space Command had bleeding edge networked technology on orbit “but we use a PowerPoint quad chart to describe it.”

Space Command is the warfighter employing the force presented by SpOC and other service elements, said Teter, and as such, it’s the command’s job to provide requirements to the services so they know how to train and equip their forces.

“What we are is the squeaky wheel. And we have to squeak, because if we’re not squeaking, then that leads to a vacuum for the services. And so they’re not sure what the requirements are,” he said.

But warfighters have to lay out requirements in a future-proof fashion, in a way that describes “the effects that you’re looking for” rather than any particular capabilities,” Teter said. “If I articulate based on today’s capability, by the time that’s delivered in the pipeline, it’s going to be outdated. That’s how we end up with 20-year-old technology,” Teter concluded.

The creation of a service culture was also a top line of effort for Space Training and Readiness Command, or STARCOM, the Space Force field command responsible for testing, training, doctrine, and education for the new service. Col. Aaron Gibson, the director of cyber operations for STARCOM, said the field command is asking itself, “How do we grow Guardians? How do we develop them … so they understand how they contribute to the overall fight?”

Gibson noted that the vast majority of Space Force personnel had joined from another service, and that with an average age in the early 20’s, they were digital natives.

“They came in wanting to make a difference, wanting to not be deterred by a hierarchical structure or bureaucratic process,” Gibson said. The challenge was, “How do we give them the tools and give them the access to the information to be able to make decisions at that speed of relevance to feel like they’re really making a difference? That’s really what we’re trying to get at with the Guardian experience.”

To retain the talent the service needs, the Space Force is focusing on Guardians’ experience the way technology companies focus on user experience. “It’s ultimately our responsibility to ensure that we give them the experience that they are looking for so that they can make a difference,” Gibson said.

The Guardian experience also means, “We have to train like we fight. And in order to do that, we need realistic high fidelity environments,” he said.

And, to train like we fight, those environments will have to include private-sector partners: “You need to have a common environment that everybody can operate off of. We cannot do live virtual constructive training in individual silo environments that are not connected,” Gibson said.

Partnership on commercial satellite communication services was already being taken to the next level by SpOC, Whale said. “At the combined space ops center at Vandenberg [Space Force Base, Calif.], we have a Commercial Integration Cell … with half a dozen or more SATCOM partners [who] have a representative on the operations floor.”

The setup enables commercial SATCOM providers and SpOC commanders to check in with each other in real time about emerging concerns or threats, and Whale predicted it would prove to be a model for other elements of the Space Force. “So that level of integration is just going to keep growing. And I think you’ll see that Commercial Integration Cell concept expanded to some of our other other missions,” he said.

Air Force to Field MRAPs Fitted With Laser, Robotic Arm to Blow Up Unexploded Bombs

Feb. 11, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force will begin fielding reconditioned armored vehicles this fall that are equipped with lasers to detonate unexploded ordnance on airfields following a $40 million development program. If the 13 planned bomb disposal vehicles are a success, the Air Force could order another 21 of them, the service’s Life Cycle Management Center said.

The Recovery of Airbase Denied By Ordnance vehicle, or RADBO, is based on a “Cougar” Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP) with four crew stations. The 18-ton vehicle has a robotic arm, with which it can investigate runway craters for unexploded ordnance, and a three-kilowatt Zeus III laser that can detonate “heavily cased” unexploded bombs from as far as 300 meters away. Lighter-cased munitions could be destroyed from even farther away “depending on atmospheric conditions,” an LCMC spokesperson said. The laser heats the casing to “initiate” the explosive fill.

The vehicle is not intended to defuse ordnance, the spokesperson explained.

“Disposal by detonation is often the safest and preferred procedure” for explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) Airmen, he said. After an airfield attack, time will be of the essence in getting it back up and running, so ensuring the field is safe for repairs as quickly as possible is the top priority, he added. The RADBO would be used when the “the area can withstand a high-order detonation.” Research is being done by the Air Force Civil Engineering Center on techniques that could “increase the probability of a low-order detonation over a high-order,” but that effort is still in its early stages, he said.

The RADBO is considered an air superiority asset because “maintainers can’t take care of the aircraft and the aircraft can’t get off the runway” with unexploded bombs on the field, RADBO program manager Tony Miranda said.

EOD technicians will use the vehicles to blow up unexploded bombs “from a standoff range, so we can get back to the business of flying airplanes,” Miranda said. The program is run under the Agile Combat Support Directorate’s support equipment and vehicles division.

The RADBO will be able to quickly assess the airfield after an attack, find unexploded ordnance, and “neutralize” it, according to Al Bello, Mobility and Vehicles Branch chief.

“Once that’s done, heavy equipment can come in and safely repair the damage, to get the airfield back up and running to generate sorties,” he said. The first stage is to create a Minimum Airfield Operations Surface (MAOS), so aircraft can start flying again. After that’s done—and while aircraft begin using the field—the rest of the base would be cleared and repaired “in a prioritized order to get airmen back in the fight,” the spokesman explained.

The RADBO is a new asset that doesn’t replace any existing system; it is “the first of its kind in the Air Force,” the LCMC spokesperson said. Current procedures require an EOD technician in a bomb-resistant suit to place a charge on unexploded ordnance or to attempt to defuse it, a procedure that is “time- and manpower-consuming” as well as highly dangerous, he said.

“Depending on the amount of unexploded ordnance encountered, this can take days or even weeks,” he noted. The RADBO is meant to “prosecute explosive threats in rapid succession, from a safe distance, and from a blast- and fragmentation-protected platform.”

The Air Force is evaluating the laser against an assortment of ordnance, but Miranda asserted it is “quick and absolutely effective.”

The robotic arm—or “interrogator” arm—can move bombs or investigate craters where unexploded ordnance may not be visible from a distance. Although two people can operate the vehicle, it has four stations: for a driver/commander, an arm operator, a laser operator, and an additional technician. The fourth person would potentially control Rapid Mass Mechanical Clearance systems “built to physically plow smaller” unexploded ordnance from the field “without having to engage each one individually.”

The RADBO cannot be operated remotely, but USAF may develop such a capability in the future, the spokesperson said.

The Air Force has been exploring how to rapidly disperse small groups of combat aircraft, supported by Airmen with multiple specialties, using a minimum of transport aircraft, to a wide variety of locations in a war; an effort called agile combat employment. But the RADBO is not meant to be an ACE platform, the spokesperson said.

The “primary mission” for the vehicle is to defend “established airfields,” he said. However, the Air Force EOD community has developed “light and mobile equipment sets to support ACE with small, 2-3 person EOD elements” to be part of an expeditionary force. Joint EOD science and technology programs are also “developing more portable directed energy systems that could also facilitate the ACE concept of operations.”

The vehicle was developed under a $40 million contract to Parsons Government Services in 2020. The contract calls for two prototypes/training vehicles and 13 operational vehicles. The Cougar platforms, which were “divested by sister services,” are already in the inventory of the Air Force, which reconditioned them, and Parsons will install the laser on them. The Cougar was chosen for the RADBO because its armor “mitigates the risk of injury.” A fully-manned MRAP might be the EOD Rapid Explosive Hazard Mitigation (REHM) command-and-control vehicle of the future, the spokesperson said.

The locations where the RADBO will be deployed are still being determined.