North Korea Claims Hypersonic Missile Test—INDOPACOM Says Otherwise

Jan. 6, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

The North Korean official news agency claimed Jan. 6 that the regime successfully fired a hypersonic glide weapon the day before, but U.S. Indo-Pacific Command called the test a “ballistic missile launch.”

An official statement from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) claimed that its Academy of Defence Science fired a hypersonic missile Jan. 5.

Unlike a ballistic missile, which follows a predictable arc to hit its target, a hypersonic missile can change direction midcourse and travel much faster.

“The test launch clearly demonstrated the control and stability of the hypersonic gliding warhead which combined the multi-stage gliding jump flight and the strong lateral movement,” the DPRK statement said.

The statement said the missile made a 120-km (75-mile) lateral movement in flight from the initial launch and hit a target 700 km (435 miles) away.

Hypersonic weapons, which travel at speeds more than five times the speed of sound, launch like a traditional ballistic missile but can fly at lower altitudes, another feature making them more difficult to track and intercept. Both Russia and China claim to have developed hypersonic weapons, and the United States is conducting tests on a variety of its own.

Among the many challenges of fielding hypersonic weapons are the high temperatures at velocities greater than Mach 5 and tremendous forces on flight control surfaces.

INDOPACOM’s Jan. 5 statement condemning the “ballistic missile launch” said the missile test highlighted “the destabilizing impact of the DPRK’s illicit weapons program” and panning it as another ballistic missile launch in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

“We are aware of the ballistic missile launch and are consulting closely with our allies and partners,” the statement read.

“While we have assessed that this event does not pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel or territory, or to our allies, the ballistic missile launch highlights the destabilizing impact of the DPRK’s illicit weapons program,” the statement continued.

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Martin Meiners told Air Force Magazine the Pentagon is still assessing the specific nature of the launch.

“We take any new capability seriously, and, as we’ve said, the U.S. condemns the DPRK’s continued testing of ballistic missiles, which are destabilizing to the region and to the international community,” he said.

Meiners added that DOD will consult with allies as it determines next steps.

North Korea has been under the control of Kim Jong-Un for the past 10 years. Its last missile test was a submarine-launched cruise missile in October 2021. The Jan. 5 test was believed to be North Korea’s first ballistic missile launch of 2022.

DOD Wants Data Management Capabilities on the Front Lines

Jan. 5, 2022 | By Shaun Waterman

The Defense Department’s most advanced and successful initiatives leveraging its huge troves of data involve back-office or support functions—not warfighting, according to the department’s chief data officer. But DOD is pushing ahead with a recent program to bring data management capabilities to front-line combatant commands.

“We’ve moved to a place now where regularly in the senior-most decision-making forums led by [Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks], we are bringing up live data, instead of PowerPoint slides, to drive the conversation … to make decisions that typically would have taken hours if not days, in minutes,” Pentagon Chief Data Officer David Spirk told the George Washington University Cyber Media Forum on Jan 5.

Spirk spoke in the wake of an announcement Dec. 8 that his CDO office would become part of the office of a new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer (CDAIO). Upon stand-up Feb. 1, the new CDAIO office will also serve as the “successor organization” to the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the announcement said, and manage the Defense Digital Service. The CDO will continue to report to Hicks through the chief information officer as required by law but be “operationally aligned” to the new CDAIO.

The changes were designed to reduce the bureaucratic burden by bringing all these technological transformation efforts together “under one vision that a CEO can come in and lead,” explained Spirk. “It’s about speed. And if you don’t organize your data, if you can’t create repeatable, testable, and trusted data workflows from the tactical edge, all the way up to your senior-most decision-making boardroom activities, then you will just lag behind,” he said.

Entities such as the Deputy’s Workforce Council and the Deputy’s Management Action Group regularly make decisions using a set of DOD big data tools called Advana. Built with contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, Advana provides real-time information about finances and contracting, logistics and maintenance, and personnel and readiness, Spirk said.

Advana was developed in the DOD comptroller’s office, Spirk noted, adding, “When I first arrived [as CDO], everybody assumed I would build a competitor to Advana or try and bring it into the CDO, but I saw no need to. I saw a lot of promise in what they were doing and in their ability to scale to other types of [data] that weren’t just comptroller-related.”

Expanding, Spirk said, amounted to a current total of about 45,000 daily users across DOD, and Advana could form the heart of a huge effort to discover, list, and describe all DOD data sources in a single “federated data catalog.”

“Every PSA [principal staff assistant—presidentially appointed senior officials reporting directly to the Secretary or deputy secretary] is in the executive analytics realm and leveraging data and establishing their goals and monitoring those [goals] based on live data in the [Advana] system,” he said.

But Advana provided much more than just business analytics, Spirk added. “It’s an opportunity to transform how the principal staff assistants can prioritize their data requirements and how we can go ahead and begin leveraging [Advana] to gain access to those data requirements as we build the first-ever federated data catalog, with Advana’s data catalog being the hub of that.”

On the warfighting side, Spirk said his office was moving ahead with a program Hicks launched last year to push data management capabilities out to the combatant commands. The DOD AI and Data Acceleration initiative, or ADA initiative, aimed to provide a five-person team of data specialists to all the U.S. combatant commands to help them make use of Advana, Project Maven, and other big data platforms. Spirk said his deputy CDO, Clark Cully, was visiting each of the 11 combatant commands, “spending two days discussing what decisions they want to make—not the data management platform, not the tools, but really focusing on the unique decisions that each combatant command needs to make … based on geographic or functional missions.”

Those discussions—eight already completed and the other three slated for January—will lay the groundwork for the deployment of specialist teams that could bring the capabilities of Advana to front line warfighters, Spirk said.

But he added that the real value is in fusing “boardroom data” such as that provided by Advana with traditional warfighting data from sources such as intelligence collection platforms. He highlighted a series of exercises championed by Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, dubbed the Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE.

“The magic really happens when we bring the boardroom data and the battlespace data together in real time,” Spirk explained. “And we could go into that single pane of glass, understand availability of resources—where those resources were associated with a threat, indication, and warning. So we could conduct an interdiction … before it became a problem,” he concluded.

The New $1M-a-Year Research Grants AFRL Hopes Will Speed Up Space Tech

Jan. 5, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Proposals combining both basic and applied university research, with manufacturers looped in, could get technology to the Space Force faster. The theory is one that the Air Force Research Laboratory is testing in the pilot year of its Space University Research Initiative.

The lab’s leaders hope the SURI pilot program will also help it modernize how it manages space-related science.

AFRL awarded two teams grants worth $1 million a year for three to five years. A team led by the University of Buffalo will figure out ways to inspect and repair satellites and do some on-orbit manufacturing. Its counterpart led by Carnegie Mellon University will work on algorithms for tracking manmade space objects.

AFRL commander Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle stressed that AFRL is “one lab” serving “two services” in a press call in December announcing SURI. She pointed out that “many technologies are domain-agnostic.”

Research performed under SURI theoretically “can go directly to industry for transition,” said AFRL’s Andrew Williams. “We can take it into flight experimentation with our advanced technology funding line because we’ve already integrated the university researchers with the AFRL researchers to accelerate that transition.”

On-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing

Williams’ role of deputy technology executive officer for space, science, and technology is also new. Pringle described the role as bringing together space research “from all the nooks and crannies across the research lab.” For SURI, he’ll take part in the research landed by the proposal “Breaking the ‘Launch Once, Use Once’ Paradigm.”

Entered by Carnegie Mellon’s Howard Choset, the proposal draws on the expertise of fellow team members from Texas A&M University, the University of New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman. Williams said the proposed research includes aspects of:

Intelligent on-orbit inspection—in other words, “How can we use machine vision to … detect anomalies,” Williams said.
Dexterous on-orbit maintenance, meaning robots for repairing or upgrading vehicles.
Agile on-orbit manufacturing such as “using technologies like some 3-D printing concepts in order to add additional capabilities on orbit.”

Space Domain Awareness

The topic of space domain awareness is front of mind for the Space Force, especially as it expands to cislunar space around the moon.

With USSF being “responsible for tracking all of the manmade objects in space and providing information to all satellite operators on potential collisions … this responsibility becomes more complex,” said Shery L. Welsh, director of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which is part of AFRL.

Led by the University of Buffalo’s John L. Crassidis, the SURI proposal, “Space Object Understanding and Reconnaissance of Complex Events,” or SOURCE, includes team members from Pennsylvania State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Purdue University.

The team is “really pushing state-of-the art techniques for analyzing sensor data,” Welsh said. She said the team will:

Create “sophisticated methods to detect the thousands of objects, confidently identify them, and predict their trajectories and understand their correct characteristics and activities.”
Develop “a scalable framework that has the ability to fuse data from many different disparate sources with orbital dynamic models.”
Conduct “studies to significantly improve … dynamic modeling capability beyond geosynchronous orbit … while incorporating tools from astrodynamics and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques as well.”
Investigate “new tracking approaches, which we desperately need, that significantly advance uncertainty quantification methods to enable accurate forecasting of space objects—as well as the tracking of maneuvering satellites.”

RAND to USAF: Don’t Take GBSD Support for Granted

Jan. 5, 2022 | By Amy Hudson

A new report by the RAND Corp. cites support from the White House and Congress for modernizing the nuclear triad, but its authors also offer a stark warning to the Air Force, which owns two of the triad’s three legs, to “not take this support for granted.”

The Biden administration’s original fiscal 2022 budget requested an additional $1.2 billion for the Air Force’s Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, the replacement for the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. That’s “a figure slightly higher than had been predicted during the final year of the previous administration,” according to the RAND report, “Modernizing the U.S. Nuclear Triad: The Rationale for a New Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.” The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act said “the ground-based strategic deterrent is necessary and in the national security interest of the United States.”

Throughout the Cold War, the United States consistently updated all three legs of the triad, with each deployment introducing significant new capabilities, safety, and security features. At the same time, the stockpile continued to grow, reaching a peak of 31,255 warheads in 1969, write the report’s authors, retired Lt. Gen. Frank G. Klotz, former commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, and Alexandra T. Evans, a RAND researcher and professor of policy analysis in the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

But while Russia and China have spent the post-Cold War years modernizing their nuclear capabilities, the United States has repeatedly pushed off that modernization. Now multiple big bills are coming due, with a new nuclear-capable submarine, a new nuclear-capable bomber, and the GBSD, plus updated nuclear command and control, creating a budget conundrum. The most-cited fix is to either completely cut the ground-based leg of the triad or to once again attempt to extend the service life of the Minuteman III. Introduced in 1970, the fleet is already well past its intended 10-year service life.

“Several prominent NGOs have expressed disappointment at the President’s first budget request for nuclear modernization and they continue to urge the administration to defer or adjust the scope and pace of the GBSD program,” states the RAND report. “Additionally, some members of Congress have introduced legislation to pause or cancel development of the GBSD program. Others have indicated that they would support delaying or reducing funding for a new ICBM.

“Even if they are ultimately unsuccessful in the near term, critics of GBSD will likely continue to press for substantial changes to the existing programs of record during future budget cycles.”

Defending Nuclear Modernization

The latest Nuclear Posture Review, which will be “nested” within the Biden Administration’s forthcoming National Defense Strategy, expected to be released in “early 2022,” will look to balance a desire to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategy while also updating and maintaining a safe and reliable strategic deterrent. It also should determine whether the U.S. sticks with the triad or shifts to a sea- and air-based dyad deterrent policy.

The Air Force must be able to articulately defend the GBSD program, cautions RAND. This includes explaining why nuclear deterrence remains a core part of the Air Force’s mission as well as justifying the need for a new ICBM.

“The Air Force would benefit from being more forthcoming in publicly describing the new capabilities that GBSD is expected to provide, both operationally and in terms of sustaining day-to-day operations over the long term,” states the report. “Admittedly, classification issues present complications in openly discussing the evolving threat environment (including adversaries’ missile defense and cyber capabilities) and the ways in which GBSD might mitigate current or future developments. But the arguments currently put forward in defense of GSBD do not convey sufficiently the importance of modernization over proposed alternatives or the potential risks associated with delaying recapitalization.”

Klotz and Evans argue that more transparency is also needed on the cost analysis used to justify modification. It’s not enough, they say, to simply state that it’s more expensive to maintain the Minuteman III.

“Senior defense officials have publicly stressed that the projected cost savings informed the initial decision in 2014 to proceed with the development of a new ICBM, and they have implied that additional calculations undertaken since then have confirmed the original [analysis of alternatives’] findings,” states the report. “However, they have not publicly released information on the breakdown of costs for either extending Minuteman III or fielding a new ICBM. A more-detailed discussion of the methodology employed, paired with more-specific numbers on the program’s historical and projected costs, would help to address lawmakers’ outstanding questions about the adequacy of existing evaluations and inform the debate over whether an independent assessment on costs is necessary.”

Although the report did praise the Air Force for progress it’s made over the last decade touting the importance of its role in owning two of the three legs of the triad, it also pointed out that not so long ago the service “lost its focus on the nuclear mission and on the Airmen who carry it out with serious consequences for the service’s reputation and credibility.”

The RAND report encourages the Air Force to ensure that GBSD program management is “properly supported and resourced” to keep the program on time and on budget.

“The technical, managerial, and resource challenges associated with developing and fielding multiple new nuclear systems—while simultaneously continuing to operate and sustain existing systems until they are fully replaced—are daunting,” states the report. “It will require sustained, high-level leadership attention for many years to come to ensure success in this most important endeavor.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 4:40 p.m. on Jan. 7 with the correct link to the report.

US F-16s Train with Polish, Belgian F-16s in Lithuania

Jan. 5, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

U.S. F-16s from Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, deployed to Poland on Jan. 4 to train with Eastern European allies on air policing, according to a NATO press release.

While deployed, the American F-16s will fly with Polish F-16s in Lithuania as part of their Baltic air policing mission; and with Belgian F-16s in Estonia for their enhanced air policing mission.

The training is aimed at increasing interoperability and rehearsing rapid deployment of aircraft to alternate bases, the press release stated. That’s in line with USAF’s increasing focus on agile combat employment, a concept that relies on multi-capable Airmen who can operate in austere locations and move quickly.

The F-16s from the U.S., Poland, and Belgium will “practice advanced airborne maneuvers and work closely with Combined Air Operations Centre Uedem (CAOCUE) to enhance command and control procedures,” the release said.

“The supplemental U.S. fighters will provide improved capabilities in the region and demonstrate a seamless integration into the long-standing Baltic and enhanced Air Policing missions,” USAF Brig. Gen. Joel L. Carey, deputy chief of staff for operations for Allied Air Command, said in a statement. “These deployments demonstrate the Alliance’s ability to rapidly and effectively deploy assets to vital regions, to assure partners, and safeguard Allied airspace.”

NATO’s press release stressed that the F-16 deployment was “long planned” for the U.S., but it comes at a time of increasingly high tensions in eastern Europe. Russia has maintained a troop presence of some 100,000 along the Ukrainian border, with sophisticated air force and anti-access/area denial (A2AD) capabilities that experts believe would allow for a swift invasion.

U.S. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has warned his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, of a “heavy price” if Russia does invade Ukraine, including sanctions and reinforcements to NATO’s eastern flank.

Still, those allies along NATO’s eastern flank have pushed for more support from the U.S. in recent weeks, with representatives from the Bucharest Nine (B9) group of nations telling Biden and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on a Dec. 16 call that more American presence is needed now to deter an invasion of Ukraine. Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania are all members of the B9; Belgium is not.

NATO’s air policing mission is focused on monitoring for “airspace violations, suspicious air activity close to the alliance’s borders, or other kinds of unsafe air traffic,” with fighters being tasked to scramble in response to any threat.

Cost of Rebuilding Offutt Will Top $1B, Congressman Says

Jan. 5, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Inflation, imperfect early estimates, and rising construction costs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have combined to significantly raise the expected cost of rebuilding Offutt Air Force Base from the floods of 2019, said the Nebraska lawmaker who represents the base in Congress.

In an interview, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.)—a retired USAF brigadier general—said the new estimate is between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion. That’s roughly $300 million more than currently authorized by Congress for the base’s reconstruction.

It’s not the first time estimates of the rebuilding cost have risen. In the months after heavy rainfall and melting snow combined to flood the Missouri River and cover one-third of Offutt, including the runway, projections put the reconstruction at more than $650 million. That number then rose to $790 million, with the base’s commander warning it could go even higher.

There are multiple reasons for these increases, Bacon said, citing discussions he has had with base leaders.

“Those floods occurred in March [2019], and [Congress members] did the markup that spring. We sort of pushed the 55th Wing team to give us an estimate, because I wanted to get some of that money in the NDAA, and we ended up getting just under $800 million for Offutt through that 2019 markup. … But since then, between inflation and—I would say they did the best they could on the estimate—but as they scoped it out more, they realized it was going to be more. On top of that, you’ve got building costs going up,” Bacon said.

Knowing the base needed more funds to rebuild, Bacon and other Nebraska lawmakers pushed for an extra $100 million in the 2022 NDAA. That leaves, he said, “probably about $300 million more to do in the next year or two.”

Bacon declined to speculate on whether the cost might continue to rise in the years ahead, noting the extent of the destruction caused by the floods and the extra steps the Air Force is taking in rebuilding. But he did indicate that he would support whatever funding is necessary.

“I know the wing commander and the folks working. I know they’re doing their very best to get it right,” Bacon said. “I want to have a strong Offutt Air Force Base. STRATCOM headquarters is important to America’s security. They’re one of the biggest reconnaissance wings in the Air Force. It’s the second-largest employer for Nebraska. And I’ll just be blunt about it: I’m going to be a guardian angel for that base.”

Bacon has a long history with Offutt, dating back to the early days of his career as an Air Force officer. He first served at Offutt from 1986 to 1990, returned from 1998 to 2000, and went back once more as commander of the 55th Wing in 2011-2012.

And as wing commander, Bacon witnessed firsthand a precursor to the 2019 floods. In 2011, floodwaters crept to within 50 feet of the base’s runway. During his time in the Air Force, he said, it became clear that the base was in need of repairs even before the destruction of 2019.

“I was a base commander at Ramstein, base commander at Offutt, worked at the Pentagon as a general. Offutt had been falling behind repairs, I would say, for a while,” Bacon said. “So I see this as an opportunity to get Offutt to be state of the art. And I’d love to see it be the flagship for the United States Air Force.”

A member of Congress since 2017, Bacon said he’s been pleased to see that the 2019 floods haven’t affected Offutt’s operational readiness. But the real impact, he said, has been on morale. Because of damage to facilities in the flood, some units have had to relocate to a World War II-era bomber plant with questionable safety.

“A lot of these folks are operating in a place that was actually built as an airplane factory. The plan is to tear that building down at some point.,” Bacon said. “So you’ve got hundreds, I don’t know the exact number, but hundreds upon hundreds of people working in decrepit facilities, and so we need to get them out of there and get them a better work environment. I think it’s good for the morale. I think their work productivity will go up. And [if] we want to retain America’s best, give them a good working condition.”

Austin Streamlines Authority to Deploy DC National Guard

Jan. 4, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Ahead of the anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol Riots, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III issued a memo to streamline authority for deploying the D.C. National Guard.

The Dec. 30, 2021 memo would give the Defense Secretary sole authority to authorize the deployment of the D.C. National Guard in lieu of the Secretary of the Army, who previously had that authority. National Guard forces in the 50 states are commanded by the governor of the state unless activated under title 10, which federalizes the Guard to serve under the Commander-in-Chief.

Since the District of Columbia does not have a governor, activation authority rested with the Secretary of the Army with no clear protocol for communicating a request during a crisis.

“Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense is the approval authority for D.C. government requests for the DCNG [DC National Guard] to provide law enforcement support,” the memo states, modifying an Oct. 10, 1969 memorandum.

The memo provides for several conditions, including a 48-hour window from receipt of the request to deploy, and the support requested would involve direct participation in law enforcement activities.

The DOD executive secretary is the single point of entry for D.C. government requests and the authority may not be further delegated, the memo states.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots, former Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy was accused of waiting several hours as rioters stormed Congress to order the D.C. National Guard to respond, even as members of Congress called for Guard help and the governor of Maryland offered his own Guard members.

In the melee of Jan. 6, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan offered his Guard members and claimed his requests were denied or delayed by McCarthy. The Pentagon issued a timeline indicating approval for National Guard was granted by acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller at 3 p.m.

On that day, some 340 D.C. National Guard members were deployed at traffic stops without riot gear or weapons. Guard members had to return to the National Guard Armory to equip and await new written orders before they could respond. Order was restored by law enforcement at 8 p.m.

Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby told defense reporters Jan. 4 that Austin’s memorandum had nothing to do with an expectation that the D.C. National Guard would be needed on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots.

“This was really about streamlining the decision making process,” he said. “I’m not aware of any formal or informal efforts to look at a Guard presence in the Capitol region on the 6th.”

US Repels Attacks in Iraq, Syria on Anniversary of Soleimani’s Death

Jan. 4, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

The danger faced by American troops training Iraqis and those fighting the Islamic State group in neighboring Syria remain high with U.S. Central Command repelling a drone strike Jan. 3 and destroying a rocket site Jan. 4.

Two armed drones flew near an Iraqi military base hosting U.S. forces near Baghdad International Airport Jan. 3 when they were detected and shot down, according to press reports. The attempted attack came on the second anniversary of the assassination by a U.S. drone strike of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.

Some 2,500 American service members remain in Iraq on an “advise, assist, and enable” mission since the combat mission in Iraq ended Dec. 9, 2021. The attempted drone attack is still under investigation.

At approximately 3:40 p.m. local time Jan. 4, Coalition forces near a military base used by American troops in Deir ez-Zour, Syria, known as Green Village, observed several launch sites of indirect fire rockets that posed “an imminent threat,” according to a Coalition official.

“Acting in self-defense, coalition forces conducted strikes to eliminate the threat,” the official said in a statement provided by CENTCOM to Air Force Magazine. “Indirect fire attacks pose a serious threat to innocent civilians because of their lack of discrimination.”

Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby told journalists at a Jan. 4 briefing that U.S. forces in the region are in continuous danger.

“Clearly, our men and women remain in harm’s way, and we have to take that threat very seriously,” he said. “One of the reasons why these sites were hit was we had reason to believe that they were going to be used as launch sites for attacks on Green Village.”

Kirby said the responsible group had not yet been identified, but the available evidence suggested the same Iranian-backed militias that have frequently fired rockets at U.S. forces.

“We continue to see threats against our forces in Iraq and Syria by militia groups that are backed by Iran,” he said.

“We’ve seen in just the last few days that there have been acts perpetrated by some of these groups that validate the consistent concern that we’ve had over the safety and security of our people,” Kirby added.

Iran-backed militias have killed and injured Americans in the region and prompted former President Donald J. Trump to strike Soleimani on Jan. 3, 2020.

“These kinds of attacks are very much in keeping with the kinds of attacks we’ve seen from Iran-backed militias in Iraq and in Syria,” Kirby said. “So obviously, our working level assumption is that such groups were responsible for these.”

South Korean F-35 Conducts Emergency ‘Belly Landing’

Jan. 4, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

A South Korean air force F-35 pilot was forced to make an emergency “belly landing” but managed to escape unharmed Jan. 4, according to multiple media reports.

The incident was caused by “avionic system issues,” South Korean air force officials told news agency Yonhap, which caused the landing gear to malfunction and resulted in the pilot landing on a runway with the gear up.

Before the landing, a fire engine deployed a special foam on the runway, “which prevented the jet’s fuselage from sustaining any serious damage,” officials added. The full extent of the damage has not been reported.

The emergency landing occurred around 1 p.m. local time at a South Korean base in Seosan, some 70 kilometersfrom Osan Air Base. According to media reports, it is the first known instance of a belly landing by an F-35 since the U.S. began selling the fifth-generation fighter to partner nations.

South Korean officials have reportedly said they are suspending flights for all its air force’s 30-plus F-35 fighters while it investigates the emergency landing.

There have been other incidents involving allies and partners in the F-35 program—members of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force have had to make at least seven emergency landings in F-35s, news agency Nikkei reported. There was also a nighttime crash into the ocean in April 2019 that killed a Japanese pilot.

More recently, a British F-35B crashed just after takeoff from an aircraft carrier in November 2021, falling into the Mediterranean Sea.

U.S. Air Force pilots have also dealt with problems. In May 2020, a pilot at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, crashed while landing due to excessive speed, as well as issues with faulty flight control logic, the helmet-mounted display, the jet’s oxygen system, and ineffective simulator training. A month later, an F-35A’s landing gear collapsed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah.

In addition to South Korea and Japan, U.S. ally Australia also operates F-35As in the Indo-Pacific, and Singapore is slated to receive F-35Bs starting in 2026.