Hack-a-Sat Organizers Pledge to Improve Scoring Transparency

Dec. 16, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

The Space Force’s second-ever Hack-a-Sat competition challenged hackers to find vulnerabilities in earthbound satellite hardware, drawing eight hacker teams to vie for tens of thousands of dollars in cash.

But while last year’s inaugural competition proved inspirational, this year’s ended amid complaints by participants, who said rules changing on the fly and poor communication by the organizers undermined the event.

Even those who performed well were frustrated. “We had really high hopes … for the contest, but at the end the disappointment and frustration completely took over, even after finishing second and winning a big cash prize,” wrote Michał Kowalczyk on CTFTime, a blog where contestants rate and review different capture-the-flag (CTF) competitions. Kowalczyk, whose hacker handle is Redford, is a co-founder the team “Poland Can Into Space,” which was the runner-up both this year and last. “I wish it was different, but I have to say that this was a pretty bad CTF.”

Organizers said they are working on the issues and trying to communicate directly with participants to ensure problems this year can be addressed ahead of future competitions.

CTFs have grown since the 1990s into an international hacker subculture, with hundreds of contests every year.  The competitions build teamwork and develop a collaborative muscle memory while at the same time helping security researchers hone and practice defensive and offensive skills.

The Space Force said the contest is “designed to inspire the world’s top cybersecurity talent to develop the skills necessary to help reduce vulnerabilities and build more secure space systems.”

Hack-A-Sat 2 was organized by representatives from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, and Cromulence, a contractor. Organizers said they will address the criticisms in follow-up meetings with the eight teams.

“We appreciate feedback and just as we did last year, we plan to have individual feedback sessions with each team to learn what worked well and what can be improved on for next year,” organizers wrote in a statement to Air Force Magazine.

Disappointment and Frustration

In an “attack-defend” CTF such as Hack-A-Sat, teams of “white-hat” hackers compete over an intense and often sleepless 24 to 48 hours. Each team must both defend its own satellite replica while attacking the replica systems defended by the other competitors.

“Hackers tend to be very direct people, very open about their opinion,” said Rubin Gonzalez, a founder of FluxRepeatRocket, a team based in Germany and the fourth-place finisher this year. “So if something went wrong they will generally have no problem with publicly stating that something was wrong.”

Gonzalez said his team wasn’t invited to the Slack channel used to communicate with competitors until well after the final round began, an oversight that left the team blind. “So for the first three hours, we had no idea what was going on,” he said. “We weren’t getting any of the information or announcements.”

Tyler Nighswander of Plaid Parliament of Pwning, a storied team connected with Carnegie Mellon University, complained that “lots of things regarding how the game operated were not explained clearly.”

Joshua Christman of Pwn-First Search described “a lack of communication and a lack of transparency.”

Poor communication made it hard for competitors to understand scoring awards and other decisions that, left unexplained, appeared arbitrary.

“Part of the problem is that organizers were and are ignoring our questions,” Kowalczyk said. “So we don’t really know the explanations and details for some of the things which happened.”

The organizers, in their statement, defended their communication style, noting that answering competitors’ questions had to be done in a way that didn’t unfairly influence the competition.

“Due to the nature of an attack/defend CTF, where teams are progressing at their own individual pace through the challenges, we have to address all [teams’ questions] in a manner that doesn’t disclose the solutions [to] the other teams because this would provide unfair advantage to the inquiring teams. If one team has figured something out, then it’s unfair to them to provide any hints or additional information to other teams,” the statement explained.

The organizers said that—as they did last year—they would publish an archive of all the Slack messages during the game.

Some participants defended the organizers. “No CTF is without its flaws/mistakes, but these organizers have always run good competitions in the past,” said Jonathan Elchison, one of the founders of SingleEventUpset, a team put together especially for Hack-A-Sat.

Atypical Challenge

All CTFs are technically challenging to stage, noted Elchison, but running one on hardware systems such as satellites, with embedded software and very different architecture from the conventional IT systems that most CTFs stage their competitions on, is “particularly difficult.”

Organizers used eight centrally located flat sats—real satellite hardware, but earthbound—as the systems that each team had to attack and defend. But they also provided teams with a digital twin of the satellites, a software emulation of the hardware systems on the flat sats.

“The contest goals were very ambitious,” agreed Nighswander, noting that “with such a complicated game to create, there was certainly a higher amount of technical effort than usual needed.”

“In a typical CTF,” explained the Hack-A-sat organizers, the different parts of the competition, known as “challenges,” tend to be independent from one another. But satellites—even the ground-based simulators or “flat sats” used in the contest—are “systems of systems” in which functions, also called services, depend on each other.  

“For HAS2, the challenges were interrelated and sometimes dependent on each other due to the nature of the flight software running on the flat sat hardware,” the organizers said. “This architecture drove many of the decisions made about scoring and the rules of engagement for the competition.”

Most criticism centered on these two elements. Gonzalez and other competitors said rules of engagement changed mid-game; and that the scoring system lacked the accustomed transparency—teams couldn’t tell why they were gaining or losing points.

A dashboard representing the flat sats’ systems and subsystems showed a system in green if it was functioning normally or in red if it wasn’t. Teams thought red meant they were losing points, but the organizers announced during the course of the game that if a system turned red, “that does not necessarily mean that you are losing points for it, it is simply a basic visualization.”

The organizers said they had to strike “a delicate balance in releasing just enough information about the scoring so that teams cannot game the system.” In a contest centered on hacking satellites, their statement continued, “the expectation was that teams knew what services on the satellite are critical.”

Nonetheless, they promised to do better next year. “With that said, we could improve our dashboard in the future to be more representative of the SLA metrics that were a factor in scoring.” Most of the points contestants could earn came from a service-level agreement, or SLA—they got points for keeping the various systems on their satellite functioning at a certain minimum level.

High Expectations

In the end, said Nighswander, the contest reached the right result: “I think the first and second placed teams Solar Wine and Poland Can Into Space were the ‘correct’ teams. They both did a great job, and they deserved their places, and I think that is very important.”

He suggested that expectations for Hack-A-Sat were high. “I think all of the participating teams have played in CTFs which were run worse than this contest was,” he said. But given that Hack-A-Sat was backed by the resources of the U.S. military, competitors expected a flawless execution. “There was an expectation level that I don’t think was cleared,” he said.

Gonzalez said the contest this year took “a step in the wrong direction,” but he hoped the organizers would listen to the criticisms because it’s “a really cool event.”

Solar Wine, the multinational Francophone team that won the contest and the $50,000 first prize, declined to comment on the controversy. “We will communicate our feedback to [the organizers] privately, as we did last year when we missed the podium for a technicality,” said team member Aris Adamantiadis.

He hoped the controversy wouldn’t overshadow their victory. He noted that, as well as a personal achievement for Solar Wine team members, the result also represented something of a breakthrough. “The big American CTFs are usually led by American teams,” he said, noting that Hack-A-Sat 1, although won by a U.S. team, had Polish and German teams in second and third places.

Solar Wine has members from France, Belgium, and Mauritius, Adamantiadis said, but the diversity that helped them win was their “diversity of skills. We have people specialized in the security aspects of reverse engineering, exploit development, cryptography, networks, IT infrastructure, scripting languages, and now even space packets, astrophysics, and satellite operation. All of these skills were key to navigate through Hack-A-Sat,” he said.

Winning, Adamantiadis concluded, was “an achievement that we are very proud of on a personal level of course, but there’s a bit of nationalistic pride, too!”

Minot B-52s Fly to Canada Then Calif. to Practice the Bomber Version of ACE

Dec. 16, 2021 | By Abraham Mahshie

Preparing for conflict in the Pacific will require more than learning to fly fighters out of austere locations—it will also call for small bomber crews to go on quick consecutive missions to unfamiliar places.

In a kinetic “bomber agile combat employment” (BACE) exercise Dec. 6-8, two B-52s from the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., conducted a mission in Canada then flew to Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., for a second mission, this time working alongside Navy counterparts.

“This was laying the foundation and the bed for getting to that austere and unfamiliar location,” Air Force Capt. Austyn Wilson, a weapons system officer in the wing’s 23rd Bomb Squadron, said in an interview. Wilson flew on one of the B-52s from Minot to Edwards and back for the two missions in three days.

Pacific Air Forces has spent decades adapting to operations in contested environments, first under the dynamic force employment concept and now under the Air Force’s new priority, agile combat employment (ACE).

Wilson said bomber ACE is about flexing new muscles and adapting to situations that were not part of prior operations and planning.

“You’re challenging assumptions, previous predictability, and you’re allowing the Air Force, and really our joint defense operations, to have adaptability that we haven’t seen in previous years,” she said.

Wilson said some of the questions the mission sought to answer were tactical: How are we going to conduct these missions? How are we demonstrating that flexibility? How are we sending a set of bombers to an austere location, making sure that they are self-sustained and able to execute combat out of an unknown location?

Answering those questions was exciting to the small maintenance team and aircrew of less than 20 who took part, she said, motivating them even as they prepared to board the aircraft Dec. 6 with temperatures hovering at negative 10 degrees with a negative-20-degree wind chill factor.

The bombers first flew to the range at Canadian Forces Base Shilo, Manitoba, working with Canadian Joint Tactical Ground Stations to drop 54 weapons. The aircrews then set course for Edwards for mission planning and an aircraft turnaround of less than 48 hours.

“One of the things that upgraded this mission … is our ability to operate jointly with the Navy,” Wilson said.

“Not only did we take off with our own weapons, and employ them en route to Edwards, but we were able to get the Mark 62 Quickstrike mines,” which are delivered into the water by air, “that we would also potentially be tasked with to support the Navy,” she added. “We were able to get those … built for us at Edwards, loaded, and employed the very next day.”

Speaking Air Force bomber language to Navy personnel was something she had to be ready for.

“Two different branches, two different languages, and two different ways of operating, processes, regulations,” she said. “Making sure that you’re speaking very clearly with what your intent is, and the meaning, the requirements.”

After landing at Edwards, a minimal support crew, some that flew ahead and some with the bombers, prepared the aircraft for its next mission at the Navy’s San Clemente Island Range Complex, a range off the California coast rarely used by B-52 pilots.

“We flew low level, at 3,000 feet over the water,” Wilson said, noting that the B-52 is one of the few platforms that can deliver mines. “We are getting our aviators ready to do so, if we’re called upon.”

Wilson also pointed out how bomber ACE was meant to challenge the assumptions of adversaries.

“I think our adversaries have seen us, especially B-52s, go to known locations over time, at predictable cycles,” she said.

“With bomber ACE, we are challenging that predictability. We’re making sure that our fleet is flexible, and that increases and strengthens our survivability,” she explained. “So now, when you send bombers to demonstrate these mission sets en route, and land somewhere else, you’re distributing the fleet. You’re decentralizing that control, and now you’re completely complicating the targeting solution for any of our adversaries.”

For Wilson, the sense of accomplishment and the excitement of the mission came from the series of milestones that had to be met by a small, willing 5th Bomb Wing team working with the Navy.

Bomber ACE milestones included getting into the aircraft within 20 minutes, getting off the ground in the next hour, dropping the bombs, and loading the mines. Each milestone was an accomplishment within a more complex mission set.

“Once we land at Edwards, you know, you want to take a sigh of relief of, ‘We did it,’ but that was only half the job. You have to do an entirely different mission set within 24 hours and get back home and get back home safely, with two B-52s that really are STRATCOM assets,” she said.

“The most exciting portion for me is [saying], ‘Hey, I want to challenge this tactic, this assumption. I want to go to the next level. Can you go here with me?’ And every single person that was involved in the planning and execution absolutely did that,” she said.

Air Force’s Enterprise, Warfighting IT Networks Have to Merge, Says Information Dominance Director

Dec. 16, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

To achieve the military’s vision of a totally networked multi-domain force, the Air Force must merge its enterprise IT networks, which join the computers on people’s desks and the smartphones in their pockets, with its aerial networks, which connect the sensors and weapons systems on planes.

That was the message from Kevin Stamey, the director of information dominance for the assistant secretary for acquisition technology and logistics, who spoke at the AFCEA of Northern Virginia Air Force IT Day on Dec 16.

The U.S. can’t simply outspend China or other potential peer adversaries, Stamey said, but must rely on an information advantage. “And if we don’t find ways to eliminate stovepipes between our IT networks and our aerial and our terrestrial layers, then we’re not going to have the information our warfighters need to dominate,” he said.

Modernization initiatives ranging from Flightline of the Future and smart depots to joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, “depend on our ability to collapse those stovepipes between the terrestrial and the aerial network layers,” Stamey added.

He called the separation of the two kinds of networks “one of the most glaring stovepipes we have today.”

The JADC2 vision, as Stamey laid it out, requires seamless connectivity between the sensors and weapons systems on a plane or other platform, the rear echelon commanders and planners, and the land or sea forces on the front lines, so that targets can be identified, assigned, and struck.

“Today, that process relies on things like chat [services] or voice calls or single ship-to-shore data links,” he said. “Largely still today, frankly, we complete the kill chain with a very linear process. And there’s a lot of manual manipulation of moving data. …. Weapon systems, ISR sensors, data networks, frankly, still, to this day, operate very much in stovepipes.”

But in the networked force of the future, warfighters will “need to close thousands of kill chains on time-sensitive targets, that are sometimes moving at hypersonic speeds from mobile launchers. And so there’s not going to be time for analysts to gather data and fuse that data and assess that data from all kinds of sources in that same linear fashion that we have in the past,” he said.

Yet the separation between different networks was ingrained in the culture of the Air Force and its industrial base, he said, noting that the title of the conference was “Air Force IT Day.”

“When you signed up … what kind of things were you expecting to hear? … Did you think about email and business systems and cloud migration? You probably didn’t think about bombs on target or warfighting capability or air battle management. But my point is, you should,” he said.

But he added a cautionary note, introduced with a familiar video of an office worker smashing a computer in frustration. “If you couldn’t relate to this guy just a little bit, I’ll just say you probably haven’t worked in the Air Force, or the Department of Defense, for very long,” he joked.

“Many of us, frankly, in the Air Force, have better bandwidth and ubiquitous mobile access to our data at home than we do from our Air Force networks,” he said.

But he was making a serious point, he added. “Imagine you’re sitting in a cockpit, you’re sitting in the air operations center, you’re sitting in the back of an AWACS … And you’re relying on that same IT backbone that we rely on for our desktops. That day is upon us. And the frustrating experience we have with our desktops isn’t going to win wars. We are taking IT right to the combat edge. So we can’t have those same kind of experiences with our warfighters.”

Stamey said the Air Force was experimenting with outsourcing that IT backbone through a program called Enterprise IT as-a-Service (EITaaS), being piloted at nine air bases. “The pilot bases have experienced significant improvement in their user experience,” he said.

Ultimately, EITaaS could encompass everything from desktop equipment and network connectivity to software and network services ranging from email and video conferencing to accounting, personnel, and logistics systems.

Air Force Adds Situational Judgment Component to WAPS

Dec. 16, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

Airmen looking to become NCOs will face a new-look test in 2022, the Air Force announced Dec. 16, as the service emphasizes good judgment in its promotion system.

In previous years, the Promotion Fitness Examination included 100 knowledge-based questions. Now, potential E-5s and E-6s will have to answer 60 knowledge questions and 20 “situational judgment test” questions.

For the situational judgment questions, test-takers will “read the description of a situation relevant to their potential rank and duties, examine four possible responses to the situation, and then select the most effective and the least effective response,” according to an Air Force press release.

No study references will be available for these questions, the service said. Instead, Airmen should focus on foundational competencies and the recently-released Airman Leadership Qualities.

“This is another critical step in our talent management transformation, moving us away from using strictly knowledge-based questions while providing more agility in the way we measure the competency level and leadership abilities of our Airmen,” Lt. Gen. Brian T. Kelly, deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel, and services, said in a statement.

Behavioral scientists and senior enlisted leaders in the Air Force collaborated to formulate the situational judgment questions.

Despite the PFE’s overall reduction in questions from 100 to 80, the test will still amount to up to 100 points of an Airman’s total score in the Weighted Airman Promotion System.

“These changes are needed as we better assess and develop our Airmen for the Air Force of 2030,” Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass said in a Facebook post.

The Air Force already includes a section on situational judgment for its Officer Qualifying Test, and in 2019, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Human Resources Research Organization released a report detailing how the service might implement such questions into the WAPS.

The revamped PFE is just the latest change the Air Force has made to WAPS. In October, the service announced it was changing how enlisted performance reports were scored in the system, tweaking the scoring system to value experience as well as “sustained performance.”

These changes are part of Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s effort to revamp the service under his “Accelerate Change or Lose” action plan. As part of that plan, he wrote that the Air Force needs service members who are “multi-capable and adaptable team builders, as well as innovative and courageous problem solvers, and demonstrate value in the diversity of thought, ingenuity, and initiative.”

Allies May Join Experiments to Solve Interoperability Issues With JADC2

Dec. 15, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

A pair of Pentagon officials working on joint all-domain command and control say an effort is needed to address “a lack of synchronization” on the project across the services—and to potentially expand cooperation.

Speaking at Defense One’s Tech Summit on a panel called “JADC2 and the Future Warfighter” on Dec. 14, Army Col. Corey L. Brumsey, a member of the Joint Staff’s JADC2 cross-functional team, cited interoperability, or lack thereof, as one of the biggest challenges currently facing the team.

“For example, we have issues as far as the joint messaging format—so being able to send messages from the Navy to the Army and vice versa. We weren’t able to fully do that because of incompatibility with some of the software,” Brumsey said. “We know what to do. But we have to accelerate the process of how we can get it done quicker so we can have that full interoperability across the board.”

Brumsey witnessed the problem firsthand at Project Convergence 2021, an Army experiment in Yuma, Ariz., in October and November that sought to incorporate the other services’ JADC2 projects such as the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System. The results weren’t perfect, Brumsey said, but the effort was worthwhile.

“Some certain notes that were brought back from the exercise were saying, ‘OK, hey, we didn’t achieve all of the goals that we set to accomplish, but we’ve learned a lot, and so this is a learning campaign,” Brumsey said. “As we continue to move forward, looking at Project Convergence ‘22, we’re looking at bringing in some of the Five Eyes partners.”

Five Eyes is the intelligence-sharing alliance between the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Incorporating allies and partners into JADC2 experiments has been pitched by the Army before, but there’s a push right now to define and tackle the problem through an effort dubbed the “Interoperability 2.0 Challenge” by Marine Corps Col. Noah Spataro, the chief of the Joint Assessment Division.

With “current C2 systems, developing C2 systems, the weapons and effects and capabilities that those things tie to, and the legacy components—whether they’re sensors or the C2 environments—[we’re] trying to really understand exactly what are all the different versions and message sets and cross-capability sharing that we need to be able to do,” Spataro said.

Brumsey and Spataro’s concerns about interoperability and JADC2 are not the first time the issue has been raised. In August, defense analyst Todd Harrison wrote in a brief for the Center for Strategic and International Studies arguing that the lack of coordination between the services on JADC2 was a “recipe for disaster,” with stovepiped approaches potentially never getting connected.

At the time, Harrison advocated for one service to take the lead in a joint program office to ensure the connectivity efforts were coordinated. He suggested that the Air Force or Space Force take charge, reasoning that many of the sensors necessary to make JADC2 work will be based in space and that communications will likely involve space as services turn to free-space laser communication, also called lasercom.

A policy paper from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies published Dec. 15, “The Backbone of JADC2: Satellite Communications for Information Age Warfare,” largely echoed Harrison’s thoughts.

“Communications may not be sexy, but it is fundamentally the basis of JADC2, ABMS, Project Convergence. It is fundamental,” retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute, told reporters. “Without this kind of assured connectivity that’s going to be provided by our space-based architecture, it just will not happen, period.”

One of the major challenges to that interoperability, the policy paper contends, has been a lack of JADC2 coordination across services.

“Interoperability—I think this is sort of a DOD-wide problem. There’s a lot of different elements to this, and a lot of the different things—whether it’s ABMS, Project Convergence, Project Overmatch—they’re all looking at ways to get different systems to communicate better with one another,” said one of the paper’s authors, senior analyst Lukas Autenreid. “You need these systems to be able to interact effectively. But I think this issue is particularly bad in the [satellite communications] enterprise. You have a lot of systems that are highly integrated, but they’re incredibly stovepiped.”

To address that issue, Autenreid recommended that the Space Force take the lead in developing open standards and launching a constellation of hundreds of low-Earth orbit satellites to reduce latency in communications, increase coverage, and ensure resilience. The policy paper lists promising experiments within DOD to advance satellite communications in low Earth orbit, including the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Blackjack program and the Transport Layer of the Space Development Agency’s plan for a National Defense Space Architecture.

Connect that network of satellites and ensure even better coverage and faster speeds, Autenreid said, with laser communications—such as those planned for SDA’s Transport Layer.

“Some of you may say, ‘Well, these communications have been around for a while, you know, what’s changed to make this so important now?’ And I think what we’ve been seeing is both in terms of the advancement in the technology itself, in terms of being able to miniaturize it,” Autenreid said, and dramatic improvements in the quality of laser optics.

BAE Gets $493 Million Contract to Upgrade F-35’s Electronic Warfare Suite

Dec. 15, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

BAE Systems will upgrade the F-35’s electronic warfare system for the jet’s Block 4 upgrade under a $493 million contract awarded by Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems said Dec. 15. The new system will go into F-35 production starting with Lot 17 in 2024.

“This contract provides funding for the development and maturation of the Block 4 EW hardware baseline” for the F-35, Lisa Aucoin, BAE Systems’ vice president for F-35 solutions, said by email. When complete, the upgrade will bring “discriminating capabilities to outpace emerging and evolving threats,” she added. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the F-35.

The EW upgrade has been described as the centerpiece of the F-35 Block 4 improvements, made possible by new processors installed under the Tech Refresh 3 program.

The contract will provide more powerful core hardware for the AN/ASQ-239 EW system, along with engineering support services and test infrastructure. The upgrade will “improve superior situational awareness and electromagnetic attack and countermeasures capabilities with new sensors and more powerful signal processing,” BAE said in a press release.

The AN/ASQ-239 “collects and processes electromagnetic energy in signal-dense and contested environments,” Aucoin said. “It combines offensive and defensive EW capabilities, including broadband radar warning and radar suppression, targeting support, and multi-spectral countermeasures to provide situational awareness and self-protection.”

The system is designed for continuous capability development, or CCD, which enables “rapid future upgrades,” BAE said, adding that the system has modular architecture for more efficient upgrades “across the global F-35 fleet.” The system also includes the Non-Intrusive Electronic Warfare Test Solution (NIEWTS) fault isolation and diagnostics capability, which “enables precise troubleshooting that further reduces maintenance costs,” BAE said.

The capabilities in the upgraded AN/ASQ-239 “will be leveraged to other platforms to ensure all warfighters have the most advanced EW capability at the ready,” Aucoin said in the news release. It will allow friendly forces to “outpace evolving threats.”

In addition to the EW system, BAE also manufactures the jet’s aft fuselage, “active interceptor control system,” and vehicle management computer at plants in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. The company is also producing the Eagle Passive Active Warning and Survivability System (EPAWSS), which will protect the F-15C, F-15E, and new F-15EX.

The contract for F-35 Lots 15-17 was expected in late October or early November but has still not been announced.

RAF Lakenheath Becomes the First European Base With a US F-35

Dec. 15, 2021 | By Abraham Mahshie

RAF Lakenheath on Dec. 15 became the first European base to receive a U.S. F-35A Lightning II, six years after plans for the delivery were announced as part of an eventual basing of two squadrons of the fifth-generation aircraft.

A 2015 decision to close RAF Mildenhall and realign its missions led to the plan to base 48 F-35As at Lakenheath, with deliveries to start in 2020. COVID-19 and base infrastructure improvements forced the timeline to slip, but USAFE still got its first F-35 before the end of 2021.

“The Valkyries are leading our F-35 integration across Europe,” said Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa, in a statement.

The 495th Fighter Squadron was nicknamed the Valkyries in 2020 for the female figure in Norse mythology who chooses who will live or die in battle.

“We’ve come a long way, and now we’re extending our reach as a coalition force and what we will accomplish together,” Harrigian said.

RAF Lakenheath’s selection was based on existing infrastructure and combined training opportunities with the United Kingdom. The U.K. is critical for training and combat readiness for Air Forces in Europe due to its participation in the F-35 program and excellent airspace, noted USAFE.

The new F-35 squadron will consist of 60 personnel and 27 F-35s, delivered in a phased approach. Lt. Col. Ian D. McLaughlin assumed command of the 495th on Oct. 1. New range infrastructure and training are projected to be in place by 2022, Harrigian previously said.

Speaking to reporters at a media roundtable at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September, Harrigian highlighted the number of European partners and allies choosing the F-35.

“We’ve already got some pretty good plans as we start thinking about how we leverage that capability, particularly with many of our partners that already have F-35s in the theater,” he said. “I really think it’ll be a truly important step as we continue to demonstrate the importance that the F-35 has baked into it from an interoperability perspective.”

The F-35 is the high-end fighter of choice for the United Kingdom, Norway, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Israel. Switzerland announced in June that it will purchase the fighter, and non-NATO partner Finland ordered 64 of the jets Dec. 10 to replace its aging F/A-18 fleet.

Congress Passes 2022 NDAA, Sending Bill to President Biden

Dec. 15, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

The Senate passed the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act on Dec. 15, sending the annual policy bill to President Joe Biden’s desk and ensuring that Congress’ long-standing record of passing an NDAA every year remains unbroken.

“I am pleased that the Senate has voted in an overwhelming, bipartisan fashion to pass this year’s defense bill. Our nation faces an enormous range of security challenges, and it is more important than ever that we provide our military men and women with the support they need to keep Americans safe,” Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said in a statement shortly after the 88-11 vote.

“This bill provides our military with the resources and authorities they need to defend our country—which is more important now than it’s ever been before, at least in my lifetime,” SASC ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said in a statement. “This bill sends a clear message to our allies—that the United States remains a reliable, credible partner—and to our adversaries—that the U.S. military is prepared and fully able to defend our interests around the world.”

The bill’s passage was also hailed by the National Defense Industrial Association, which issued a statement saying it contains provisions that “support the Defense Department’s continued modernization efforts and, in concert with our highly skilled industrial base, provide the necessary resources for a strong national defense.”

The NDAA authorizes spending levels and allows Congress to exercise oversight over the Pentagon, setting policy and requiring reports each year. This year’s version authorizes $768 billion in spending, $740.3 billion for the Defense Department, well above the $715 billion DOD budget requested by Biden.

However, the bill does not appropriate any funds—the government is currently operating under a continuing resolution, keeping spending levels frozen at fiscal 2021 levels. And in a speech on the Senate floor shortly before the NDAA’s passage, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) urged his colleagues to back up their support of the NDAA with an appropriations bill to fund it.

”Now, the NDAA is an important piece of legislation … it sets overarching policy for the Department of Defense and guides our national security,” Leahy said. “But, but, make sure people understand, what it does not do provide the funding to implement the policies it sets. It says what the policies will be, it declares what the funding should be, but there’s not one penny, not one penny in this bill.”

Among the policies the 2022 NDAA authorizes are a 2.7 percent pay increase for service members and an overhaul of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, removing the decision to prosecute certain crimes such as rape, sexual assault, murder, and kidnapping, from the chain of command. The bill also changes the UCMJ to include sexual harassment as a punishable offense.

Those changes to the UCMJ were touted by House Armed Services Committee chair Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) as “sweeping” and transformative, but they were panned by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a longtime advocate on the issue, as insufficient.

“Commanders can still pick the jury, select the witnesses, grant or deny witness immunity requests, order depositions, and approve the hiring of expert witnesses and consultants,” Gillibrand said at a press conference, per NY1.

In addition to the those changes, the 2022 NDAA contains numerous provisions related to the Air Force fleet. It funds the service’s request to procure 48 new F-35s and adds five F-15EXs to an initial request for 12, while prohibiting the retirement of any A-10s but allowing certain C-130s, KC-10s, and KC-135s to be sent to the boneyard.

The bill also promises to revamp the F-35 program in a number of ways. It calls for a report from the Pentagon on how it will install engines from the Adaptive Engine Technology Program in the current and future F-35 fleet starting in 2027. It also sets up the transfer of sustainment activities for the F-35A from the Joint Program Office to the Air Force in 2027, followed by acquisition activities in 2029. Another provision limits the size of the F-35A fleet starting in October 2028 if sustainment costs don’t come down.

Still another provision requires the Pentagon to conduct testing on aircraft that have the Onboard Oxygen Generating System, starting with the F-35, to assess the system’s safety and effectiveness after pilots reported relatively high rates of hypoxia-like events. Another safety-focused section requires the Air Force and Navy to submit reports every six months on the state of their ejection seats after a 2020 incident in which an F-16 pilot died when his ejection seat malfunctioned after a botched nighttime landing.

As the Space Force continues to stand up, the 2022 NDAA also contains provisions related to the new service. It gives the Secretary of the Air Force the authority to delegate senior procurement executive duties to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.

It also requires a study and a report on how the Space Force should structure its reserve components, including a look at how much a Space National Guard would cost. Another required report will study the issue of over-classification in the USSF, something Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond has bemoaned.

The final bipartisan vote on Dec. 15 brought an end to a lengthy legislative process that started in July.

After the Senate and House Armed Services Committees both reported their markups of the bill in September, the full House approved its version Sept. 23. The Senate, however, did not take up the bill for months, leading to some bipartisan criticism of Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Finally, the Senate began the process of considering the NDAA in mid-November. But while Schumer attempted to move the bill quickly to start the conference process, his efforts were thwarted by Republican lawmakers who accused him of rushing and not allowing “open and robust” debate on amendments.

The setback led to leaders of the HASC and SASC announcing Dec. 7 that they had drafted a compromise version of the bill outside of the conference process, combining elements of the version passed by the full House and the version agreed to in the Senate Armed Services Committee, as well as some of the hundreds of amendments proposed by senators after the SASC reported the bill to the full chamber.

However, several notable provisions were stripped out of the new compromise bill. Both the House and the SASC versions would have required women to register for the draft, but that was dropped. An effort to repeal the long-standing 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force was taken out as well.

Still, the same day the new NDAA was unveiled, House members passed it in an overwhelming 363-70 vote, and the Senate voted 86-13 on Dec. 14 to end debate on the bill, setting it up for a smooth final passage.

Air Force Releases First Doctrine Note on Agile Combat Employment

Dec. 14, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

The Air Force announced the release of its first doctrine publication on agile combat employment Dec. 14, laying out its core frameworks and concepts as the service looks to codify and develop the new operational approach.

The new doctrine note, signed by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., defines ACE as “a proactive and reactive operational scheme of maneuver to increase survivability while generating combat power throughout the integrated deterrence continuum.”

The approach relies heavily on multi-capable Airmen who can operate in austere locations and move quickly, and is defined by five core elements in the doctrine note: posture, command and control, movement and maneuver, protection, and sustainment.

Taken together, these elements “complicate the enemy’s targeting process, create political and operational dilemmas for the enemy, and create flexibility for friendly forces,” the doctrine note reads.

The Curtis E. LeMay Center for Doctrine Development and Education, the Air Force’s principal organization for developing and assessing doctrine, created the doctrine note in consultation with experts across the service.

“Rapid development of guidance is essential to accelerating change for our service and our joint teammates,” Maj. Gen. William G. Holt II, LeMay Center commander, said in a statement. “This doctrine note represents another milestone in our ability to develop and leverage emerging doctrine.”

The hope is that this new doctrine note will serve “as a point of reference to help build new best practices we can then integrate into current doctrine and use to inform future doctrine,” Lt. Col. Richard Major, Air Force doctrine development director, said in a statement.

ACE was developed as a concept by Pacific Air Forces in recent years in response to threats from China, North Korea, and Russia. Fewer main operating bases in the region and growing threats to those bases from new technologies put Air Force assets in danger.

The solution advanced by Brown, then the commander of PACAF, was to be “light, lean, and agile”—distributing forces across a greater range of locations to simultaneously reduce the threat to the USAF and increase unpredictability for adversaries.

Over time, both Pacific Air Forces and U.S. Air Forces in Europe have incorporated ACE exercises into their regular training, though neither major command has declared initial operational capability of the concept.

Air Force Doctrine Note 1-21, “Agile Combat Employment,” lays out the reasons ACE is needed, defines key terms for the concept, and sets out a framework for how it should work.

Informing the whole concept is posture—the placement of forces such that they establish deterrence “by being strategically predictable, but operationally unpredictable.” This increases adversaries’ strategic considerations, but it also requires coordination and interoperability, both across the services and with allies and partners.

With a distributed force, command and control becomes about “centralized command, distributed control, and decentralized execution,” the note states. The development of joint all-domain command and control will increase connectivity and commanders’ ability to coordinate, but “it is highly expected that elements conducting ACE will lose connectivity with operational C2.” As a result, Airmen will have to be trained to understand commanders’ intent and execute based on that.

Movement requires careful posture planning as well as coordination within and across theaters to ensure assets can be maneuvered quickly and at scale when needed.

Protection is necessary to harden the bases and other locations where forces operate, working under the assumption “that air bases are no longer considered a sanctuary from attack” and require both active and passive defenses.

And finally, just as ACE’s posture distributes forces, sustainment is predicated on diversification—using multiple sources to reduce stress on the logistics and infrastructure.

“ACE sustainment plans should focus primarily on aircraft sortie generation but should also include the ability to execute implied tasks such as receiving airlift or sealift for resupply, executing [base operating support] functions, and contracting local services, supplies, and equipment,” the doctrine note states.

All told, ACE “requires a revolutionary change in how the Air Force thinks about and conducts operations within the modern operational environment,” the note concludes, and the concept’s doctrine will continue to be refined over time.