Why a Civilian Defense Employee Died After a C-17 Test Flight Last Year

April 18, 2024 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

The Air Force blamed the death of a 33-year-old Missile Defense Agency civilian employee after a C-17 test flight in August on decompression sickness complicated by his underlying medical conditions, including obesity, hypertension, an enlarged heart, and cardiovascular disease, according to the results of an accident investigation board released April 12.

However, the report leaves several questions unanswered, such as how the employee was cleared for the flight, why medical specialists aboard did not recognize his symptoms, and why the test flight continued as planned, even after it was clear he was experiencing a medical emergency.

The C-17 took off from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson at about 10 a.m. on August 21, flying over the Pacific Ocean past the Aleutian Islands. The MDA employee was there to help test out a simulated high-altitude, medium range ballistic missile launch. Following procedure, the crew donned helmets and oxygen masks to start pre-breathing pure oxygen 30 minutes before the test to prevent decompression sickness.

At about 2 p.m., the crew opened the C-17 cargo doors, conducted the test, then closed the doors after about five minutes and repressurized the jet. But after the doors closed, the MDA employee began sweating excessively and making “motions of distress,” the report wrote. Crew members flagged down High Altitude Airdrop Mission Support (HAAMS) physiological technicians, who oversee crew safety on un-pressurized high altitude flights. Barely able to breath, the MDA employee used a whiteboard to communicate, but he could only scribble illegibly, the report said. He also indicated pain and a lack of mobility in his right arm.

All of those symptoms indicate decompression sickness, investigation board president Brig. Gen. Derek Salmi noted in the report. Also known as “the bends,” decompression sickness is when changing air pressure forms nitrogen bubbles in the body that can pressure nerves, damage tissue, and block blood flow. The procedure for decompression sickness is to put the patient on pure oxygen, descend to normal air pressure, land immediately at the closest airfield, and, if necessary, put the patient in a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber.

But the HAAMS technicians failed to recognize the symptoms of decompression sickness and instead treated the patient for hyperventilation. They placed him on an emergency oxygen mask as the aircraft cabin altitude decreased below 10,000 feet, where oxygen masks are not required. One of the HAAMS technicians thought the employee was stable and removed his mask, but his right arm was “droopy,” he had difficult standing up and “looked like a guy that had been drinking all night,” according to a crew member.

The crew notified the pilot but said the MDA employee was in a stable condition, then moved him to the floor near the front of the aircraft. The flight deck trusted the HAAMS techs to care for the ill employee and provide updates, but it is unclear how often those updates were delivered, and the patient continued to slur his words, breath heavy, appear in pain, and look pale. The mission was planned for seven-hour duration, and the flight landed at 5:00 p.m. as originally scheduled without any indication of rushing to land.

The instructor pilot recalled feeling shocked at seeing the MDA employee’s condition for the first time, saying he “looked like he had a stroke,” and did not appear stable. Doctors at a nearby hospital said he needed a hyperbaric chamber, but the nearest one was in Seattle and air transport would not be available until the next morning.

Over the next 12 hours, the patient’s blood pressure dropped, and his lungs, liver, and kidneys failed. Despite the physicians’ best efforts, the employee went into cardiac arrest at 8:06 the next morning and was pronounced dead 26 minutes later.

Analysis

Salmi said the initial misdiagnosis “likely delayed available treatment measures such as continued oxygen use … as well as descent by the aircraft to a lower cabin altitude.” Another problem was the lack of follow-up care during the return flight “despite the persistent and significant symptoms” exhibited by the MDA employee.

Even so, the general said the employee’s case of decompression sickness, combined with his underlying conditions, was so severe that the outcome may have been the same. The report cited a history of hypertension, an enlarged heart, and blockage of the coronary arteries as contributing factors. How was an employee with such conditions allowed on the flight?

The MDA employee had a current Federal Aviation Administration Class III physical, “the simplest medical certificate for private, recreational, and student pilots to obtain,” according to Flying Magazine. He had been flying high-altitude test airdrop missions for a little over a year, and the August 21st sortie was his sixth such mission. In fact, he was considered “an expert in this mission set … and was actively instructing another MDA colleague as part of the mission.”

Even had he been in better shape, the employee may still have developed decompression sickness: Salmi wrote that recent medical studies found a 30 percent chance for anyone taking part in high-altitude operations to develop some symptoms, ranging from mild to severe. The Air Force did not respond before publication to a question of whether anyone was held accountable as a result of the report.

Earlier this month, the Air Force released an investigation into the death of a contractor who was killed last year when she walked into the moving propeller of an MQ-9 during ground tests. The death was blamed on a confluence of factors, including inadequate training, poor lighting, noisy conditions, and a rush to finish testing, all of which contributed to the victim’s loss of situational awareness while she took telemetry readings.

The deaths of the two civilians helped make fiscal year 2023 a difficult year for aviation accidents. Air Force Times reported two deaths, 10 aircraft destroyed, and 75 major non-combat aviation mishaps in total: a five-year high. Those mishaps occur as maintainers and aircrew try to meet mission requirements with a dwindling number of aging aircraft.

Meanwhile, the Air Force is recalculating its approach to risk as the service adopts agile combat employment (ACE), concept where small teams of Airmen launch and recover aircraft at remote or austere airfields, then relocate to avoid being targeted by enemy missiles. Many Airmen expect to carry out those operations without support and without connection to higher command. On April 2, the Air Force Safety Center unveiled a new plan to keep pace. Part of the plan is to use machine learning models to review safety data and provide better analysis for safety officers to improve their processes.

“Mishap reporting data is a lagging indicator and limited tool,” the center wrote in a release. “Our intent is to develop analytical tools to assist commanders with proactive risk reduction, mishap prevention, and maximized readiness.”

Q&A: Outgoing AFCENT Boss Grynkewich on the Future of the Middle East

April 18, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

When the National Defense Strategy was issued in 2022, the U.S. military mission in the Middle East took a back seat to the ongoing challenges of deterring China or Russia. But since then, no region has been more combustible. From Iran and its proxies to the Islamic State, American forces have had to contend with multiple threats.

As head of Air Forces Central, Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich has been at the heart of almost all U.S. military action in the Middle East, from overseeing airstrikes against Iranian proxy groups to protecting troops as America’s air defense commander for the region. In addition to his critical role in combating immediate threats, he set up a task force to develop future capabilities.

Just before handing over his command to Lt. Gen. Derek C. France on April 18 to become director for operations (J3) on the Joint Staff, Grynkewich played a pivotal role in the successful effort to help Israel defeat a massive Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel from April 13 into the early morning hours of April 14. Later that day, he spoke with Air & Space Forces Magazine and reflected on his tenure as head of AFCENT. This transcript has been edited for length.

Q: Where do you see the region going forward? Are we going to get stability? Should we be hopeful or not?

A: All three of the world’s major monotheistic religions have deep, deep roots here, and it is an absolute, just phenomenal place. The people of the region are also some of the most hospitable people that I’ve ever met. They open their homes, they open their hearts, they open their countries, and they’re very proud of all the cultural and religious aspects of their particular nations, and they should be. So I find it to be a region that is just full of hope.

Now, it has also been a region that has historically had challenges with stability. Everyone has seen that, everyone talks about it. If we back ourselves out of the current crisis and we take the long view, I think we’re on a trajectory over time that leads us to a better future for all the people of the region, no matter what country they come from, or what their religious or ethnic background is. We clearly saw that we were on that trajectory prior to October 7th. This is a major crisis with tons of opportunity for things to get set back a bit. But over the long arc of history here in the region, it’s inevitable that we’ll get to the point where we find a prosperous, peaceful area.

Q: CENTCOM has focused on improving integrated air and missile defense in the region for a while. Where does that stand now?

A: We’re trying to stitch together partners in the region who share a perspective of a threat, share concern of the threats to stability in the region, which primarily emanate from Iran with a large number of ballistic missiles, and be in a position where we’re able to share information, share threat warning. And the ultimate goal is to get to a much deeper and fuller integration. We’ve made tremendous progress. There is a lot that’s been accomplished.

Q: How have you managed your role as the area air defense commander, and how did the progress you mentioned come about?

A: We have always had a very tight relationship across the joint force in the air defense community. And a lot of that tight relationship is physically present in the Combined Air Operations Center, in the CAOC. We’ve got broad expertise, both from an air perspective but also from an air defense perspective that’s right here. The doctrine on joint air defense is very mature. It’s something that I felt the need to get very smart on very quickly. What fundamentally our role is as the area air defense commander is to look at what our posture level should be across the region, set the appropriate posture and readiness level based on the threat that we see, and then take whatever assets we have that are either under our tactical control or in a direct support role across the joint force, in the coalition, and stitch them together, so that we can synchronize the fires and effects when we get into that air defense fight. We’ve done a lot of work synchronizing all the way down to the base level.

There have been a ton of exercises that we’ve done. A lot of those in the counter-UAS realm, a number against ballistic missiles over time, and it’s been really valuable.

Then the one other thing that gets into the regional missile defense is we coordinate with adjacent capability—so even if they’re not directly supporting the CENTCOM area air defense commander, if there are adjacent coalition or allied capabilities, we’re able to have enough connectivity with other nations’ air defense operations centers or their AOCs, depending on what their architecture is, to go, ‘Hey, we see something coming, are you going to take it or we? We share threat warning, share the picture that we see, and make very rapid decisions across an even broader coalition than those forces we directly control and command.

Q: Task Force 99 was stood up to be an experimental unit with small drones, but what are they operationally doing? And how you envision them operating in the future?

A: They’ve got a couple of tasks from me that have really stayed consistent since we stood them up in the fall of 2022. I asked him to work on improving our air domain awareness, I asked them to look at how we could improve our targeting cycle, and asked them to look at how we could present dilemmas to the adversary. And we’ve made different amounts of progress on each of those.

Air domain awareness has proven very difficult. We’ve done some experimentation with high-altitude balloons, trying to see if there were particular sensors that we could launch on them that would be able to fill gaps in our surveillance coverage. That work is still, I would argue, in the experimental phase. It’s more expensive, it takes more time, so that’s going to be something that they continue to work on. We haven’t really closed any major technologies yet or brought them into the field. But they do continue to work on that.

The second area was to improve our targeting. We have made some pretty good progress on that. In the first six to 12 months of Task Force 99, back in a period where we had some significant threats to our forces in certain areas, we were able to use this small short-range drone and go out and do some tactical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, ISR missions, and go out and find some things that were threats to our forces. So operationally, we’ve used some of those very short-range drones.

As the environment evolved over here and we kind of shifted our focus on what we’re defending, I asked Task Force 99 to look at longer-range, more persistent, and higher-fidelity platforms without bumping up the price point significantly. The idea for the ISR work is to get to some level of affordable mass, is what I would call it. I need a volume of ISR capacity that I don’t have with our traditional platforms. Particularly in some of our operations we’ve been conducting in Yemen, more ISR is always going to be helpful. So that’s where their main focus is now. We’ve got several platforms that are in evaluation right now. I think over the coming months, you’re going to see some of them get to the field. They have been putting a ton of effort into that targeting cycle and the ISR platforms that we might be able to get and improve our capability there. I think there’s going to be real gain there.

I think this has the opportunity to give us, as an Air Force, a new approach to platform acquisition and a new way to think about capacity that we might not have thought of in the past. So those are some of the things that I’ll take forward as I go out of this job and provide back to Air Force leadership on some insights from our lessons.

The last one was to cause dilemmas to our adversaries. In that case, you can think about any number of one-way UAS attacks and large swarms of UASs that you have to deal with, it can be a big operational problem. What I would like to do is be able to turn the tables and provide one-way attack UAS capability or one-way UAS harassment capability that I could use against our adversaries. We’re making some progress in that area. It’s still work that’s ongoing. But there is a potential for real capability and capacity here that would have uses not just across the U.S. CENTCOM [area of responsibility], but I think in a number of different areas.

Q: So have some of these capabilities been used operationally?

A: Some of them have been used operationally and we have several more that I think will be used operationally in the next six months.

Q: How is Task Force 99 being formalized, because you have pulling Airmen from many different jobs. How is it going to work as a unit going forward?

A: We do have plans to make it more permanent. Those billets are being aligned right now. There’s some real benefits to rotational manpower and people coming over for six months rotations, and that you get new ideas and fresh looks at problems, if you will. So we want to preserve some of that. But we also recognize that there’s a need for some stability in terms of how you run the program and how the tasks are metered out.

The plan we’ve got moving forward is to move from a purely rotational model, where almost everyone is swapping out every six months, which has some benefits, to now a model where you’ve got kind of a mix and match. You’ve got the stability in some key leadership positions and some key technical positions. But at the same time, you leverage the advantages you get from those new looks. We’ll have to make some decisions of where we go from there. It’s something that I think will sustain and potentially become a model for other parts of the Air Force as well.

Q: What was the biggest lesson you learned as AFCENT commander? What is your takeaway?

AFCENT is a microcosm of the U.S. Air Force, because we have Airmen that deployed here from every other part of the world, every major command of the Air Force. We get to see Airmen of all walks of life, every background, as they all come together for a cohesive team here operating in an AOR in what still very much executing combat operations.

If you asked me what I’m most proud of, it’s that those same Airmen have made tremendous strides and adapted to the new realities of the region and particularly here in the headquarters. We shifted from our focus on the missions that we’ve been doing for a long time of counter-[violent extremist organization] and counterinsurgency. That is not our main concern anymore. We still support some of those operations, but we are much more focused on long-term campaigning and readiness should that campaign require it for major combat operations.

There are a couple of things that, as an Airman, I’m very proud that we’ve accomplished. We clearly provide exceptional command and control capability to the U.S. Central Command commander. The CAOC, as distributed as it is between our forward headquarters and back at Shaw Air Force Base, that distributed node of capability has tremendous ability to synchronize joint fires and effects, to plan and to think through hard problems, and to accelerate the joint targeting cycle at speeds that we haven’t been able to do for decades.

The Air Force has had core functions or core missions that have changed over the years. One of them was always command and control. The conversation has evolved to talk about JADC2 and the future of C2. I think you see the future of C2 here, and you see the value of our long history of providing that exquisite operational-level command and control and the benefits that it brings to the joint force.

Q: You’re also in the only place where you’re fighting a war. What lessons can you teach the U.S. military broadly about preparing for so-called Great Power Competition—or preparing for anything? We all talk about future war, but what can we learn from the fight that’s happening now?

A: The world’s a very unstable place. There’s tremendous benefits from serving anywhere, whether you’re up in Europe, focused on the Ukraine-Russia threat, or you’re in the Pacific looking at our pacing challenge. I think what AFCENT has to offer is a place where you can gain real-life combat experience. Wherever it is, you’re executing mission command, you’re executing Agile Combat Employment, your execution of tactical actions in the cockpit or repairing a runway, or whatever it happens to be, you get real-world experience with all of that.

In some cases, unfortunately, you also come under fire. And those Airmen who have come under fire over here will know when they go to other fights, they will know what that feels like. In the years ahead, the A1Cs and senior Airmen and the lieutenants and captains who have done that will be better combat leaders because they’ve experienced it once before. So I think we bring value to the Air Force in terms of gaining that combat experience at the tactical and operational level. Being able to practice in a real world, austere environment, a harsh environment. That’s fundamentally different from some of the other harsh environments, but harshness is harshness. We give the Air Force a place for Airmen to prove their mettle, hone their leadership skills, and be ready for the next fight.

Q: What does “campaigning” mean to you? That can be an amorphous term.

A: It’s about our longer-term actions and posture here in the region; it’s about building those partnerships and deterring our adversaries. It’s thinking through what are the operations, activities, and investments that we need to do every single day that will have positive long-term outcomes, as opposed to just thinking about what’s coming down the pipe in the next [air tasking order] cycle. That is significant, but I think it is really going to pay dividends in the future.

Q: What do you expect in your future role as J3?

A: I know I’ve got a lot to learn. As I mentioned, I’ve been in U.S. Central Command for a while. I know that there’s a lot that I’ve got to dig into and fundamentally understand as much as I can.

Q: Do you have any parting thoughts as AFCENT commander?

A: Thanks to the Airmen that served over here with me over the last few years, and there’s been a lot. Thanks to the leaders that have been willing to come over here. Thanks to my sister component commanders and U.S. Central Command for all the support that they’ve given. And finally, a thanks to my own family for continuing to support me and allowing me to serve. It has been the honor of a lifetime. I’ve learned and grown as a leader myself in this position, and wouldn’t trade the experience for anything else.

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, Ninth Air Force (Air Forces Central) commander, thanks Airman 1st Class Chelsea Kindle, 79th Fighter Generation Squadron assistant dedicated crew chief, for her support to his final flight as the AFCENT commander April 9, 2024, at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Christopher Hubenthal

Upset with Divestment, Congress Impatient for Fighter Recap Strategy

April 17, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

Top Air Force leaders may have to provide Congress with extensive justification for further cuts in the fighter force, after being grilled in budget testimony by members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees unhappy with divestitures in various fleets.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) complained to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin that a Fighter Recapitalization Plan, mandated in last year’s defense bill and due to Congress March 30, has not yet appeared.

“We need to make sure we have fighters in the air” in sufficient numbers to deter China and other world adversaries, Slotkin said, echoing remarks of many members who complained of fighter cuts in their districts. Under the Air Force’s fiscal 2025 budget request, the service would shrink its fighter fleet to historic lows.

Slotkin noted that she “co-led an amendment last year in the NDAA” that mandates the fighter recap strategy, and “There will be a number of us who are working on a bill in this year’s [National Defense Authorization Act] which will say, before you can retire fighter aircraft you must show your math on your plan. So we are taking this to the next step.”

Slotkin added that swift provision of the fighter recap strategy would “help us understand” the Air Force’s thinking and “give us more confidence” that the service is not recklessly reducing near-term capacity in favor of longer-term modernization, at a time when armed conflicts are flaring in numerous places.

Kendall said he and Allvin have reviewed a “final draft” of the strategy and that it will be “over here as soon as we finish coordination.”

Members on both the HASC and SASC also complained about cuts to fleets like the E-3 AWACS as well as smaller-than-planned buys of EA-37 Compass Call aircraft, in addition to persistent questioning about the decision to divest the A-10 fleet.

Allvin said the advance of Chinese weaponry have turned platforms like the E-3 into “cannon fodder” and most of those aircraft being divested would wind up “at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean” if they went to war.

Kendall and Allvin also told lawmakers that they had to reduce their purchase of new fighters—F-35s and F-15EXs—to comply with the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which snipped a further two percent from USAF’s budget for 2025.

A number of members noted the success of F-15E units—notably the 335^th Fighter Squadron from Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina—in shooting down drones and missiles fired by Iran against targets in Israel April 14. Numerous reports posit that more than half of the 160 or so weapons that made it most of the way to their targets were shot down by U.S. assets. They said the success of the jets shows they are not irrelevant.

Kendall responded that Iran’s attack against the combined capabilities of Israel and its allies—a “highly contested” action—is comparable to the U.S. going against China’s forces, and that the U.S. must come up with far better means to hold Chinese targets at risk.

The Air Force plans to about halve its F-15E fleet to 99 airframes. Service leaders have said they must use the savings from operating older and often obsolescent aircraft to rapidly modernize the force with new equipment.

Kendall said he is less concerned about short-term deficits in capacity than the need to modernize as rapidly as possible, noting that for the first time since World War II, the U.S. confronts an adversary in China “whose purchasing power exceeds our own.” He also reiterated that “we have run out of margin” and the Air Force has no time left to prepare counters for China’s armed forces, which he said are being purpose-built to defeat the U.S. military.

Kendall came under heavy criticism from Rep. Don Davis (D), who represents North Carolina’s 1st District near Seymour Johnson AFB, where USAF plans to divest a squadron of F-15Es.

Davis complained about the late fighter recap report, and said it’s needed to make thoughtful decisions about what retirements Congress will allow. He said the divestiture of a squadron of F-15Es would cost 520 jobs in and around the base, which “would have a tremendous impact on our community in eastern North Carolina,” among the “most economically distressed” areas in the state.

Kendall promised the report “shortly” and said the Air Force does take into account the economic effects of divestiture decisions.

“We try overall to minimize those impacts. Unfortunately, sometimes they are unavoidable,” Kendall said, adding that the Air Force tries to make such transitions “as painless as possible for the community.”

Davis pressed Kendall about what other missions will be brought to Seymour Johnson to make up for the cuts, but Kendall said that he is “not aware of an alternative” mission to substitute for the F-15Es. When Kendall said he could not immediately explain what alternatives had been explored, Davis, who described himself as a proud Air Force veteran, said “we really have to look hard at the decisions that are being made. And I’m not satisfied today with your answers.”

The discussion was reminiscent of painful debate over various rounds of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) that took place in the 1990s and 2000s, which was not lost on Kendall. He said he knows there’s “no interest in a BRAC in this body” but that the Air Force has “about 20 percent excess capacity in our installations” and “we do need to take a look more fundamentally, frankly at our installation posture and try to address it just as a whole.” Budget constraints are only allowing the Air Force to fund facilities refresh at 1.6 percent of replacement cost, and “we’d like to be at two percent.”

“What that leads to is slow deterioration; eventually you end up doing emergency repairs only” on USAF’s real estate.

DOD Still Has No Plan To Stop Using Russian Gas in Europe

April 17, 2024 | By David Roza

Nearly four months after the deadline, the Defense Department has not fulfilled a congressional mandate to submit a plan for weaning U.S. military bases in Europe off of Russian energy. That reliance could “be helping to fund the Russian war effort to the tune of a million dollars a week,” Brown University researchers wrote in a 2022 analysis.

The Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act called the issue “a critical challenge for national security activities” and directed the department to make plans to reduce and eventually eliminate reliance on Russian energy for each base across Europe. Specifically, the bill called for a description of steps that each base in Europe could take, including investments in technology, infrastructure and renewable energy, to be submitted no later than 12 months after the bill was enacted on Dec. 23, 2022. The goal was to eliminate use of Russian energy within five years of each base writing its plan—but progress has stalled.

“Our bases are still running on Russian gas, which I just find mind-blowing that we have to talk about this and, frankly, that Congress is having to push the department on this,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Readiness, said at a hearing April 16. “One would think that this would be something that the department would be pushing itself on.”

At the hearing, Waltz presented a map published by Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab that charts the estimated flow of Russian oil, gas, and coal to U.S. bases across Europe in 2020. Researchers estimated that before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in 2022, U.S. bases in Europe relied on Russian fossil fuels to meet 30 percent of their annual energy needs, which translates to about half a million barrels of oil from Russia every year.

That supply “represents a serious threat” to security, the Lab wrote, since Russia has the option to cut off a major source of energy. But it also “fuels Russia’s war machine,” Waltz said.

Waltz is not the only one concerned: despite a ban on Russian oil products, the European Union continues to buy millions of barrels of refined fuels originating at least in part in Russia, according to Politico. Loopholes allow countries to buy the banned Russian crude as long as it is refined into fuel somewhere else, such as India or Turkey. In November, the Washington Post investigated how the loopholes affect U.S. military supply chains, finding that the Pentagon paid nearly $1 billion in contracts since March 2022 to a Greek refinery that receives crude from Turkey, a step which obscures the crude’s origins in Russia.

“The fact that those shipments contained material that originated in Russia underscores the porousness of the sanctions and the failure to aggressively enforce them,” the Post reported.

When Waltz asked for the status of energy plans, Brendan Owens, the assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment, said the topic was at the front of mind of installation commanders during a recent trip through Europe.

“This was a significant point of conversation everywhere we went,” he said. “They are posturing themselves to bring the energy resources that they need increasingly closer to the fence line.”

However, Owens did not have a timeline for the delivery of the plan, saying that it was still “under development.” Waltz pressed him to submit a timeline this week.

“Can you imagine if I took this to one of my town halls?” the chairman asked, referring to the map. “Right now, as we’re talking about billions and billions going to Ukraine … and their [taxpayers’] money is basically fueling the other side of the war through our bases and, oh by the way, making our service members vulnerable.”

Waltz’ critique comes as the Air Force and the Pentagon writ large seeks to shore up the vulnerability of its energy infrastructure to enemy attack and to climate change. Dr. Ravi Chaudhary, assistant secretary of the Air Force for energy, installations and environment, said bases are looking to use microgrids to sustain their own power through on-base sources such as solar panels, wind turbines, biomass, nuclear microreactors, and/or fossil-fuel powered generators. The idea is that if one source fails, the system overall can keep chugging.

“By building redundancy into your installation in terms of power and energy … it’s like putting a power bar into your room because now you can plug in power sources that you want,” Chaudhary said in March.

Implementing a similar mindset could help in Europe, Waltz said.

“You get two for one,” he said. “You’re off of gas, you’re off of oil and you get an operational resiliency—and gee—you start impacting Putin’s war machine, for which we’re asking the American people to keep digging deeper into their pockets to combat against.”

Air Force Unveils First Picks For New ‘Quick Start’ Funding Stream

April 16, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall revealed two high-priority programs to be funded with new authority circumventing the traditional lengthy budget process.

First up are resilient position, navigation, and timing capability and command, control and communications (C3) battle management for moving target indication, Kendall told the Senate Armed Services Committee April 16.

The new authority, granted in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, allows the Pentagon to spend up to $100 million to begin work on urgent capabilities outside of the Congressionally-passed budget. Though the law applies to all services, Kendall and his team conceived of the idea and pushed hard for its adoption.

“The DAF deeply appreciates the ‘Quick Start’ provision placed in the FY24 NDAA and will take full advantage of this opportunity to save precious time,” Kendall, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin, and Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman wrote in written testimony to the SASC.

Kendall, who formerly served as the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, has expressed frustration that programs take years to begin, as they must first make it into the defense budget, which even under the best of circumstances does not start until the next fiscal year. The current budget passed six months late, forcing the government to operate under a continuing resolution as a stopgap measure.

“Thanks to the support from Congress, this initiative will leverage the success of rapid acquisition authority, marking a pivotal moment in advancing national security objectives with unprecedented speed and efficiency,” Kendall said in a press release. “Quick Start will kickstart efforts intended to develop solutions to emerging problems, ensuring rapid progress from concept to implementation.”

Kendall’s original proposal sought up to $300 million for urgent programs, but Congress ultimately approved up to $100 million. However, Kendall and other service officials have stressed that the authority is not about maximizing funding but rather about enabling relatively inexpensive early development work and evaluation, potentially saving significant time compared to waiting for an entire budget cycle. The programs unveiled as part of Quick Start will likely appear in the fiscal 2026 budget.

The secretary of defense must approve the programs after each service submits detailed proposals about the programs’ capabilities and why they need to move fast. The services then need to shift the programs from Quick Start to the regular acquisition process within a year.

Details of the new programs and initiatives are scarce. How much money was allocated to each new program was not specified, and Kendall described the capability in broad terms. But the secretary sees improving battle management as a necessity, appointing a C3BM czar, Brig. Gen. C.G. Luke Cropsey, to accelerate and streamline the branch’s efforts. Meanwhile, the rest of the military relies on precision, navigation and timing systems to conduct day-to-day operations, which could make them a tempting target for China or Russia in a conflict.

“We selected these projects because we recognized their potential to benefit the Joint Forces and the nation and we’re appreciative that the Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense expedited their review and approval—resulting in less than four months between enactment of the authority to execution of the first projects,” Kendall said in the release.

F-35 Program Says GAO Report Title Misleading; Sustainment Costs Coming Down

April 16, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

The F-35 Joint Program Office is challenging the title of the Government Accountability Office’s most recent assessment of the multinational fighter, saying it implies the F-35 is getting more expensive to operate when the opposite is true.

The GAO report: “F-35 Sustainment: Costs Continue to Rise While Planned Use and Availability Has Decreased,” issued April 15, “highlights affordability and readiness challenges, all of which are known to the F-35 enterprise,” the JPO said in a press statement. It also said the report accurately notes “key program affordability and sustainment progress,” including good news on sustainability.

“We are aggressively executing near-term initiatives and long-term strategies to drive down cost and maximize availability and mission capability across the F-35 fleet,” the JPO said in a statement. “The reality is that actual aircraft Cost Per Tail Per Year and Cost Per Flight Hour continue to decrease.”

The program “achieved a 34% improvement in DoD F-35 Cost per Tail per Year (CPTPY) between 2014-22 ($9.4M to $6.2M) and a 61% improvement in DoD F-35 Cost per Flying Hour (CPFH) between 2014-22 ($86.8K to $33.6K)” all in constant year 2012 dollars, the JPO said.

“Despite economic and supply chain headwinds, we are continuing to inject affordability into this program,” it added.

While the GAO accurately notes overall program cost increases, those are due to “an extended F-35 service life and requirements growth.” Between 2018 and 2023, “the F-35’s estimated lifecycle end date [was] extended from 2077 to 2088,” and that 11-year increase in operations and continuation of the logistics enterprise drove increases referenced by GAO. The F-35 program is required to calculate comprehensive overall costs from spare parts to fuel to organic maintenance hours over a 52-year period.

“The F-35 JPO remains an open and committed partner to the GAO’s oversight mission. We will continue our productive relationship with auditing and accountability stakeholders as we work together to maximize F-35 affordability and readiness,” a JPO spokesperson said.

The key hangup on the F-35 are delays in getting the Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) hardware and software tested and approved for fleet use. While testing is underway, newly-built F-35s are being sent directly into storage.

Testifying before the tactical aviation panel of the House Armed Services Committee April 16, F-35 Program Executive Officer Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt declined to say how many F-35s are now in storage, or where they are, not wanting to “advertise” this information to adversaries.

But he acknowledged the TR-3 has “taken too long to deliver” and said his Software Architecture Independent Review Team estimates it will be August or September before F-35 deliveries can resume, and when this happens, it will likely be with a “truncated” version of the TR-3 software. The TR-3 delays are due to an overall problem with concurrency: trying to develop, test, and operate the jet all at once, he said.

“We … find ourselves using software to overcome hardware design maturity challenges,” Schmidt said in an opening statement submitted for the record at the hearing.

“The Software Independent Review Team’s initial conclusion is that we have a solid software architecture, but until the underlying hardware is fully mature, the F-35 Program will continue to struggle with software integration efficiency.”

However, Schmidt also said in the same opening statement that the long-overdue declaration of Milestone C and full-rate production, announced last month, “gives credence to the acquisition maturity taking place within the F-35 Enterprise.”

With Milestone C “behind us,” the program is now focused on an “unrelenting push to modernize this platform for the future and drive sustainment excellence throughout the fleet. TR-3, a Reimagined Block 4, propulsion modernization, and the upgrades that will follow, depend on the work we must execute today.”

Schmidt did not elaborate on what a “reimagined” Block 4 upgrade means, and the JPO was not immediately able to explain that term. However, he reiterated that a “truncated” TR-3 may be approved in order to get jet deliveries moving again and provide F-35 capability to the users.

The Block 4 upgrade comprises some 80 changes to the F-35, a figure that has nearly doubled in the last few years as the design has had to be adapted to a toughening threat.

For First Time Since 2022, Austin Talks to China’s Defense Minister

April 16, 2024 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III conducted virtual talks on April 16 with his Chinese counterpart, Adm. Dong Jun, Beijing’s Minister of Defense, marking the first direct talk between defense chiefs of the two nations in close to two years.

In a readout, the Pentagon said Austin stressed freedom of navigation in the air and at sea, as Chinese warplanes and ships have intercepted U.S. and allied aircraft, continuously harassed Philippine vessels, and nearly collided with a U.S. destroyer in the past year.

The call signals more open military communication channels between the two nations, an imperative stemming from talks between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden in November. The Austin-Dong conversation follows a phone call between Biden and Xi earlier this month. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. talked to his counterpart in December.

The teleconference represents Austin’s first conversation with Dong, who assumed the role of China’s defense minister in December. Austin last talked to a Chinese defense minister in 2022, a post then held by Wei Fenghe.

Beijing put high Philippine level talks on ice after a visit to Taiwan by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in August 2022. The trip drew condemnation from China, which asserts the democratic, self-governing island is a breakaway province. Chinese later claimed U.S. sanctions against former defense minister Li Shangfu prevented high-level talks, though the Biden administration said that was not a restriction imposed by Washington.

Biden reiterated a desire for more dialogue during a recent phone call with Xis and highlighted the importance of talks with China to mitigate any “misunderstandings or miscalculations” during a joint conference with Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio.

During the video call, Austin talked about the importance of respect for high seas freedom of navigation guaranteed under international law, especially in the South China Sea.”

“The Secretary also reiterated that the United States will continue to fly, sail, and operate—safely and responsibly—wherever international law allows,” the Pentagon said.

Military tensions escalated between the two nations in early 2023 when a Chinese surveillance balloon breached continental United States airspace without prior warning. After a week of heightened tensions, the balloon was downed. Beijing rebuffed Austin’s attempt to engage in dialogue with his Chinese counterpart, asserting that the balloon was not a spying platform.

Last year also witnessed incidents involving Chinese fighter jets executing aggressive maneuvers near American aircraft, including one Chinese fighter within 10 feet of a B-52 bomber in the South China Sea. The Pentagon’s annual China report revealed there have been 180 instances of “coercive and risky behavior” between the fall of 2021 and fall of 2023, more than all of the previous decade combined.

The South China Sea remains a hotly contested region. China claims expansive sovereignty over almost the entire area, including territory claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. U.S. forces, meanwhile, continue to operate in the region, even as the Pentagon has noted an uptick in unsafe and unprofessional incidents by Chinese ships.

Washington has ramped up its military presence in the region in recent years, featuring the B-52 bomber in an ongoing series of joint aerial exercises with Philippine fighter jets. This prompted Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army to condemn the bomber patrol, accusing the Philippines of collaborating with outside countries “to stir up trouble.” The U.S. Navy also continues maritime patrols alongside the Philippine Navy in the waters of the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

Pentagon said that the two defense ministers discussed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and North Korea, which the U.S. wants to more effectively sanction.

Allvin: USAF Sticking to 100 B-21s as It Considers Something New

April 16, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force isn’t looking to buy more than 100 B-21s because it may come up with something better by the time all those aircraft are built, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin told the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 16.

While the B-21 “is the future of our bomber force,” Allvin told the SASC that fresher, more effective technology may appear before the planned B-21 production run is complete, making the Air Force hesitant to commit to any more just yet.

One hundred B-21s “is the program of record,” Allvin said under questioning from Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). Northrop Grumman is the B-21 prime contractor.

“I think we’re not going to reach that number until probably the mid-2030s and beyond,” he said. “I think there are other technological advancements that we would see to be able to augment that and have a better mix … before we commit to that as being the platform” that will serve as the backbone of the future bomber force “beyond that.”

The original, 2015 requirement for the B-21 was 80-100 airframes, and it was upgraded to “at least 100” in more recent years. Heads of Global Strike Command and various think tanks have voiced a requirement for as many as 225-250 B-21s, but the Air Force has stuck to 100, as part of a fleet that also includes 75 B-52s and 45 B-1Bs until the early 2030s. The Air Force’s stated goal has been to neck down to just the B-21 and the B-52 as its bomber force.

Allvin did not elaborate on what other technologies the Air Force is considering to “augment” the B-21 force.

His comment that the full B-21 production run of 100 will not be achieved until the mid-to-late 2030s underscores that the bomber won’t be built at a very aggressive rate, suggesting an annual production of less than 10 airframes per year. Pentagon acquisition and sustainment chief William LaPlante recently said that the B-21’s production rate was deliberately set at a low level to protect it from budget cuts.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, also testifying before the SASC, said the largely secret B-21 is “moving forward.”

“We’re pretty happy with the progress,” Kendall said. “I’m always very careful about saying positive things about programs and development … they all have risk.

But Kendall did express cautious optimism.

The “B-21 has been performing close to the original schedule and costs and delivering capability,” he said. “It’s in testing. We just had the milestone C approval to enter low-rate production.”

That approval was given by LaPlante in December after the B-21 made its first flight in November of 2023. The Air Force has subsequently acknowledged only one further test flight, although more are likely to have been flown. Northrop officials have said that once the airplane flew the first time, a high-frequency flight test schedule would ensue.

In announcing the low-rate production schedule, LaPlante said through a spokesperson that “one of the key attributes of this program has been designing for production from the start—and at scale—to provide a credible deterrent … if you don’t produce and field to warfighters at scale, the capability doesn’t really matter.”

The Pentagon did not specify any of the terms of Northrop’s B-21 production contract, citing classification. To date, the Air Force has still not even disclosed whether the bomber has two or four engines.

Two years ago, Kendall voiced the idea of developing an uncrewed adjunct to the B-21 in the conventional deep strike/nuclear mission, but later shelved that idea as being “not cost-effective.” However, the B-21 has been characterized from its inception as being part of a “family of long-range strike systems” acknowledged to include some kind of flying armed or electronic warfare escorts communications relay aircraft, or both.

‘This is a Sport’: F-16s Pilots Use New Sensors to Max Out Human Performance

April 15, 2024 | By David Roza

Air Force F-16 pilots are testing out new sensors that could help maximize their performance and avoid deadly accidents while flying fast under heavy G-forces and stressful conditions.

Developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Integrated Cockpit Sensing (ICS) system measures a pilot’s blood oxygen levels, heart rate, breathing rate, skin temperature, and other markers that show how their bodies are faring in flight. F-16 pilots from the Air Force Test Pilot School (TPS) at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., and the 59th Test and Evaluation Squadron and 422nd Test and Evaluation Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. took the system for a spin in a series of tests from January to March.

“We wanted to be able to help the ICS team accelerate their technology through flight tests,” said Wei “Fug” Lee, TPS director of research and the lead adviser for the project, said in an April 15 press release. “The goal is to demonstrate the ICS’s ability to measure physio and environmental data and assess its utility in recognizing physiological insults,” which is the medical term for physical or mental injuries or maladies.

While military cockpits are full of instruments reporting the health of the airplane, there are not as many tools for objectively assessing the health of the pilot. That can be a problem given the high physical demands of combat flying and the small margin for error when flying high-performance aircraft.

“This, contrary to popular belief, is a sport in all the sense of the physicality of the word,” Capt. Travis Worden, an F-16 pilot with the 422nd TES, said in a 2022 YouTube video about human performance sensing with Hasard Lee, a former F-16 pilot who currently flies the F-35.

Under the G-forces and mental focus of dogfight training, “my heart rate is going to increase, my bodily response and my temporal distortion is going to increase, and you are going to see how much more difficult it becomes for me to think, talk, and communicate,” Worden added.

Indeed, sensors on the pilot’s ears, forehead, and torso showed that his heart rate, which averages 50 beats per minute at rest, rose to around 120 during takeoff and spiked to nearly 160 during defensive dogfighting practice.

“I had no idea that our heart rates are like 120 just when you’re taking off, not doing anything extreme,” Lee said in the video.

f-16 pilots — U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Joshua Arnall, director of operations, 59th Test and Evaluation Squadron, adjusts the Integrated Cockpit Sensing, or ICS, system prior to flight testing at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, Jan. 30, 2024. U.S. Air Force photo / Senior Airman Megan Estrada

That lack of fidelity on aircrew human performance data leaves holes in many investigations of deadly aircraft mishaps.

“Due to poor data collection and analysis, the services and the Department of Defense are missing out on valuable opportunities to reduce risk, prevent mishaps, and optimize human performance,” wrote the National Commission on Military Aviation Safety in a 2020 report.

Jet pilots across the military have long struggled with hypoxia (low oxygen), dehydration, temporal distortion, mental exhaustion, spatial disorientation, and hyperventilation. But the wide range of physiological episodes, plus pilots’ own reluctance to report episodes for fear of being grounded, and the lack of coordination between the services to study the problem “made finding root causes extraordinarily challenging for researchers,” the commission wrote.

To make matters worse, pilots may not be aware they are having an episode until it is too late. For example, one of the symptoms of hypoxia, which can arise if there is an issue with the pilot’s oxygen system, is a “sense of euphoria,” according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

“These subjects can’t write their name intelligibly, or even sort a deck of cards by suits … yet, they think they’re doing just fine!” the FAA wrote about people experiencing hypoxia.

Since pilots often lose awareness of their own condition, human performance systems need a way of alerting them when something is wrong, much like how pilots hear an alarm or a horn when their altitude is too low or they are approaching stall speed or running low on fuel. In the YouTube video, the system included headphones that emit a beeping noise when it detects hypoxia symptoms such as low blood oxygen levels.

“For once with these key low-cost innovations, I, as the most lethal aspect of this airframe, can maximize my own lethality and survivability by knowing when I might be in a life-threatening situation,” Worden said.

The findings of the report and a long run of hypoxia-related mishaps in the late 2010s inspired AFRL and the test community to start working on the problem, said Lt. Col. Robert Russell, commander of the 422nd TES.

“There are a lot of qualifiers like ‘likely’ and ‘possibly’ because while we collect millions of data points on the airplanes we fly, we monitor and collect zero data on pilots,” he said in the release.

The British defense manufacturer BAE Systems helped build ICS, which integrates sensors in the cockpit and in the pilot’s helmet, oxygen system, and clothing. According to BAE, the cockpit sensors track air quality, pressure, and other factors while the body sensors monitor blood oxygen levels, heart rate, body temperature, humidity, breathing rate, and other metrics. A smartphone-sized processor on the pilot’s chest rig processes and stores that data and alerts pilots when something is wrong.

“It aggregates … basically a bunch of markers that provide context and help us understand how the pilot is responding to what he or she is asked to do,” Chris Dooley, lead ICS engineer with the AFRL Human Effectiveness Directorate, said in the release. “This data helps us look at risks such as hypoxia and cabin depressurization as well as stress responses to different phases of flight.”

AFRL created an initial prototype in 2022, then got clearance to start flight testing in 2023. The lab will apply the lessons learned from the tests at Nellis and Edwards earlier this year to refine the system, and hopefully connect it to the aircraft itself “to enable proactive safety measures in the case of incapacitated pilots,” the release said. Those measures might resemble the Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System, which prevents pilots from accidentally flying into the ground. Auto-GCAS saved the lives of 11 Air Force pilots between 2014 and 2020, the Military Aviation Safety commission wrote.

A BAE graphic breaks down the systems that makeup Integrated Cockpit Sensing. BAE courtesy image

Beyond saving lives, a human performance sensing system can also make pilots fly better. In the 2022 video, data from his body sensors showed Worden that the oxygen levels in his brain dropped more than he expected during high-G turns, which could indicate he needs to improve his anti-G straining maneuver, a breathing and muscle tensing technique to keep blood from draining out of the pilot’s head.

Eventually, AFRL wants to test ICS on other aircraft, and there might be a receptive audience in the Air Force airlift and tanker communities. In December, Air Mobility Command hosted its first-ever human performance industry day conference at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., where Airmen and health tech companies discussed how to manage the mental and physical stresses of the non-stop long-distance flying they might be asked to do in a possible conflict over the vast Pacific Ocean.

“We’re going to max-perform humans, and I want all the insights and assistance possible,” AMC boss Gen. Mike Minihan said at the conference. “Nothing’s off the table.”

Even if such a conflict never materializes, better health data can keep pilots safer in training.

“Our team’s work is about ensuring the cockpit environment they’re operating in is safe so pilots can complete the mission and come home safely,” Dooley said in the AFRL release. “There’s a lot of possibility with this system. ICS produces a very rich data set that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.”

Another F-16 pilot, Lt. Col. Alex Goldberg, voiced a similar opinion in the 2022 video.

“As pilots, we’ve had people that we’ve lost, and we’ve had incidents ourselves where we’re not able to understand why we’re not feeling good that day,” he said. “Maybe it’s a hypoxic situation. Maybe we grey-lock or G-lock or we’re having issues with our vision based upon the G-forces of the aircraft. Now in real-time we have actual monitoring to provide us what is happening with our bodies to increase our human performance.”