Air Force Grants First Religious Accommodations to COVID-19 Vaccine

Feb. 8, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Department of the Air Force has approved nine religious accommodation requests to its COVID-19 vaccine requirement, it announced Feb. 8, marking the first such accommodations approved by the department since the requirement went into effect late last year.

Eight of the religious exemptions were approved by the service members’ major command or field command, while one was granted via an appeal to the Air Force’s surgeon general.

“The Department of the Air Force determined the service members’ accommodations could be supported with no impact to mission readiness,” spokesperson Ann Stefanek said in a statement.

The Air Force released no other information about the service members who received accommodations. Stefanek declined to say whether any of them are in the Space Force or what set the nine apart from the thousands of religious accommodation requests that were denied or still pending.

Prior to these nine approved requests, there had been only three religious exemptions announced across the entire Armed Services—the Marine Corps approved two requests in mid-January and another a week later. The Army and the Navy have not announced any approved accommodations.

Within the DAF, thousands of Airmen and Guardians have sought religious exemptions. As of Feb. 7, more than 3,000 requests had been turned down at the major/field command level, and more than 400 had been denied on appeal as well.

According to a memo signed by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, service members whose religious exemption requests are denied at the major command or field command level have five days to exercise one of three options:

Start the COVID-19 vaccination process.
File an appeal with the Air Force surgeon general.
Request to separate or retire, “if able, based upon the absence of or a limited Military Service Obligation.”

If an appeal is denied, the five-day clock restarts. If the service member still refuses to receive the vaccine, the Air Force will start the discharge process. As of Feb. 7, 142 Active-duty Airmen had been administratively discharged. Under the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, those booted from service solely for refusing the vaccine will be discharged under honorable or general conditions.

In addition to the nine religious accommodation requests granted, the DAF has also granted 1,476 medical exemptions across the total force, along with 1,837 administrative exemptions. Nearly half of those medical exemptions have been granted to the Active-duty force, while most administrative exemptions have been granted to the Guard.

The vast majority of Airmen and Guardians have received the COVID-19 vaccine—97.9 percent of those on Active duty, 93.1 percent of the Reserve, and 93 percent of the Air National Guard, according to the most recent data.

CENTCOM Nominee: Artificial, Human Intelligence Key to Countering Threats in Region

Feb. 8, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

As the U.S. looks to pivot in the Middle East to over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and countering the threat of Iran and its proxies, both artificial and human intelligence will be critical, according to President Joe Biden’s pick to lead U.S. Central Command.

Army Lt. Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, speaking during his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 8, called Iran the “No. 1 destabilizing factor in the Middle East right now.” At the same time, monitoring terrorist groups such as ISIS-K and al-Qaeda from afar will be “extremely difficult, but not impossible,” he said.

If confirmed, Kurilla, who currently leads the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C., would assume command from Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., who has led the command since March 2019. Kurilla appears to be on a glide path to confirmation, earning bipartisan praise during the hearing. Still, as CENTCOM faces a pivotal moment, lawmakers offered up plenty of concerns for him to tackle.

Iran

In recent months, Iranian-backed militias have become increasingly aggressive in firing rockets and other weapons on American allies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—in some cases, the strikes have even targeted bases with U.S. personnel.

To counter these actions, Kurilla said, the U.S. needs to provide more evidence of Iran’s support of these militias.

“I have found anytime Iran’s hand behind this is exposed, it is helpful,” Kurilla said, adding that when that happens, “they try to hide their behavior, and it can cause them to not take action for a period of time.”

Exposing Iran’s support, as well as countering its conventional weaponry, will require investment, though. In written responses to advance policy questions from the committee, Kurilla wrote that CENTCOM needs to keep developing “technology, to include artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms and programs, to increase our ability to detect, defend, and respond” to Iran.

Asked to expand on that answer during the hearing, Kurilla noted that the 18th Airborne Corps has taken a four-pronged approach to embracing artificial intelligence under his leadership, centered on “culture, data literacy, data governance management, and our infrastructure, i.e. cloud computing and cloud computing on the edge.”

The culmination of that has been the Corps’ quarterly Scarlet Dragon exercises, which involve all six services, Kurilla said. These exercises have principally focused on target detection—using AI to sort through hundreds of targets and identify the most important ones in a matter of seconds and minutes, instead of hours and days.

“The last exercise had over 40 aircraft … and it culminated in a Marine F-35 dropping a live 1,000-pound bomb on an artificial intelligence-derived grid that was one meter off from the surveyed grid,” Kurilla said. “And we do these exercises quarterly to improve the capability of the targeting ability of the Corps. I would like to take that, if confirmed, down to CENTCOM and expand upon that.”

A key lesson from these exercises, Kurilla said, has been that humans need to work in conjunction with the AI systems to realize the greatest possible benefit. When that happens, the results have been encouraging.

“We were able to exponentially increase that capability to sort through hundreds of targets, to pick the right targets, to be able to strike, moving machine to machine and directly to an aircraft,” Kurilla said.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) was quick to note that the usefulness of such technologies wouldn’t be limited to countering Iran, and Kurilla agreed.

“It has capabilities for counterterrorism as well,” he said.

Afghanistan

The counterterrorism mission in CENTCOM has taken on a new look in recent months in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In keeping with comments from other top Pentagon officials, Kurilla said Feb. 8 that the administration’s plan to rely on over-the-horizon operations to monitor terrorist threats will be hard, but doable.

One of the main reasons for that difficulty, Kurilla noted, is the geography of it all.

“The biggest challenge for Afghanistan is that it’s a landlocked country, so we rely on other nations to be able to enter Afghanistan,” he said. “The distances required to fly is great. We spend approximately two-thirds of the time just flying there and getting back.”

Even before the final withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. officials were reportedly working to secure basing agreements with neighboring countries to reduce those long flight times—currently, the closest base is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, hundreds of miles away.

However, those talks have still yet to yield any agreement. Kurilla noted that “there are discussions happening right now.”

And though he said he would need to do a further assessment once confirmed, Kurilla acknowledged, “It is resource intensive, to be able to do the finding and then the fixing, and the finishing of those targets that you’re going after. I think we need to reinvest in a lot of our intelligence capabilities, our human intelligence capability, that was lost during the withdrawal.”

Inflation to be 2023 Budget Request Headline, Experts Say

Feb. 8, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Biden Administration’s inflation estimates will be the big story related to the fiscal 2023 defense budget submission, experts said in a Center for Strategic and International Studies “budget preview” streamed Feb. 7.

Todd Harrison, CSIS budget analyst, said if the Consumer Price Index quotes “a realistic number”—officially acknowledging that “we’re going to have higher than historical inflation … continuing for years to come”—that will be a “downer” for the stock market. If the administration quotes an escalation of just two percent, it could be criticized for lowballing the number and being unrealistic, he said. Either way, the choice will be the headline of the budget stories.

“It’s an impossible situation” for the administration, he said, and the inflation estimate will have “ripple effects” in both defense and non-defense parts of the budget.

Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation predicted that Biden will forward a defense budget increase of two percent or even less, having “paid no penalty for submitting a very low defense budget for 2022.” Congress, he said, “did the heavy lifting for him,” raising defense spending substantially above the administration’s request. Biden may “run the same play up the middle” in 2023, he said.

Experts on the panel offered guesses as to when the budget, which is traditionally released in February, would be sent up to Congress. Harrison chose a date of April 15, saying the administration will likely want to “bury” the announcement on a Friday just before Easter, the IRS tax filing deadline, and college spring break. “Internal turmoil” in the administration about the non-defense budget “is gumming up the works” and delaying the budget’s release, he said, and the goal may be to bury it among bigger headlines “like they did last year.” The 2022 budget was released in late May, which was later than normal, even for a brand new administration.

Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute guessed a date of March 21, because Congress is likely to approve a third continuing resolution that will persist until March 11. There is, she said, a “chance of a yearlong” CR, but Harrison said he sees no “coupling” of the fiscal 2023 budget release to a final move on the fiscal 2022 budget. There’s no law that says the new budget can’t be submitted before the previous one becomes law, he noted.

Spoehr said the administration also will want to release the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy before the budget, as they will underpin what the budget says. That could add two weeks to the process, more if the new strategies are released separately.

The panelists said there likely won’t be too much of a break from the 2018 NDS. Stacie Pettyjohn of the Center for a New American Security said the big difference will likely be on nuclear posture, with a possible no-first-use declaration. She also speculated that to assuage the concerns of defense doves, the administration may cancel the low-yield sea-launched nuclear missile or the Long Range Stand Off missile.

Travis Sharp of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments said he expects the budget request to tout the “highest ever” investment in research and development, which would make a virtue of necessity if inflation continues to be high.

Spoehr said he expects that blunting climate change will be the new top priority for defense, “two will be fighting COVID,” and the third priority will be China as the pacing threat and verbiage about “integrated deterrence,” of which he said, “nobody has a firm definition.” The all-of-government approach to security is useful, he said, but, “and I hope I’m not right in this, … they’re going to … emphasize the role of allies, particularly in Europe, and the United States is going to do less and the allies do more.” He said that’s a bad idea since two-thirds of NATO countries don’t meet the target of spending two percent of their gross domestic product on defense, he said.

Eaglen said she doesn’t see a major change in the NDS without some kind of “forcing function,” such as a Russian invasion of Ukraine, because it would be hard to get a consensus across the national defense and intelligence enterprise on a different path for national security.

The panelists expressed some consensus that end strength might be cut in the 2023 budget because of the downsizing of operations in the Middle East and a change from counterinsurgency to great power competition. The money saved could be applied to investment in modernization, but there will still likely be a push for divestiture of old systems to pay those same bills. There is also a pay raise in the 2022 defense bill that needs to be paid for.

Sharp said there will be “discussion” if not termination and possible divestment of the MQ-9 Reaper, as it is symbolic of the kind of operations the U.S. is shifting away from.

“There’s a feeling we need to transition to the Great Power competition, or whatever we’re going to be calling it in a few months,” and the MQ-9 is ill-suited to those kinds of roles, he said.

Harrison speculated that a new Army scout helicopter could be on the chopping block because “they’re going to have a real hard time justifying that” in a high-end fight, because helicopters “aren’t going to get anywhere near the fight.” He also said the Army tends to prefer cutting modernization programs to cutting end strength, if pushed.

Panelists also said they expected that if there are operations needed for Ukraine, or even just to pay for U.S. materiel provided to that country, those would be funded by a supplemental bill.

Sharp predicted a topline of $733 billion, which is close to what the Office of Management and Budget called as the growth line for 2023.

“They had placeholder projections in there, and it was … $731 billion,” he said. A difference of $2 billion is “fairy dust” in the context of the full defense budget, he said. Spoehr picked $735 billion, if there’s “no agreement” on FY ’22 and there’s a full-year CR. But if there is, he said the budget would be $750 billion, a two percent increase. Eaglen and Pettyjohn concurred on a level of around $735 billion.

Harrison was the outlier, saying the budget topline will be about $765 billion, an increase of seven percent over fiscal 2022.

“They know Congress is going to appropriate around $740 billion this year,” he said, and “then another three and a half percent from there.” The administration knows it has to fund a 4.6 percent pay raise, he said, with commensurate increases for housing and subsistence allowances, so “personnel costs, civilian and military, are going up,” as are services and goods.

A military budget at that level would remove defense from debate during the summer, he said, and leaves the field clear to argue about infrastructure and other non-defense spending.

“No one is going to criticize them for $765 billion,” he asserted. “It takes [defense] off the table in an election year.”

STRATCOM General on Facing Nuclear China and Russia: ‘We Have No History of This’

Feb. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Facing a moment with no historical precedent, the United States needs to recalibrate to deal with two nuclear peers in China and Russia—and to modernize its entire nuclear enterprise, a top general with U.S. Strategic Command warned Feb. 7.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Ferdinand B. Stoss, STRATCOM director of plans and policy, issued his warning while appearing virtually at the 2022 Nuclear Deterrence Summit. Speaking to an audience of industry officials, academics, and others, Stoss painted a picture of a strategic environment that, in some ways, goes beyond even what the U.S. faced during the Cold War.

“I think we can agree that the United States, our allies, our partners—we have not faced this type of threat in over 30 years,” he said. “And not just a threat, though. Like I mentioned before, this is the first time ever that we have a three-party nuclear peer dynamic. And we have no history of this. This is epic. And I don’t think we’ve fully dealt with all the ramifications that this is going to have as we march into the future, but we absolutely need to.”

For decades now, Stoss added, the U.S. has been engaged in conflicts in which it could mostly control the level of violence. Now, however, that’s changed.

“Today, both Russia and China have the capability to unilaterally escalate at any level of violence, across any domain, into any geographic location, … and to do so at a time of their choosing,” Stoss said.

Of the two, Russia is the greater shorter-term threat, Stoss said, as it develops “novel weapons” with awesome destructive capability but questionable safety.

The Russians are building “everything from their … hypersonic anti-ship vehicles to their Skyfall nuclear-powered intercontinental-range cruise missiles,” Stoss said. “I’ve heard others opine, they call it a ‘flying Chernobyl.’ And it’s not far from the truth, what with their safety, or lack thereof, with that capability.”

China, meanwhile, is building up its own capabilities in a manner that Stoss called “breathtaking,” echoing the words of his boss, commander of U.S. Strategic Command Adm. Charles “Chas” A. Richard.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2021, satellite images revealed that the Chinese were building hundreds of missile silos, and the Pentagon’s own report on Chinese military power estimated that China could possess 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, a number Stoss repeated.

“’Why are they doing this strategic breakout?’ Well, we don’t exactly know. They are very opaque as to what they are doing with nuclear, and they always have been,” Stoss said. “But, you know, perhaps this is just one more brick to put into the wall to cement their capacity to play a much bolder role, certainly in the region and around the world, and they think that they need this nuclear underpinning.”

What’s important to remember, Stoss added, is that this kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident or without heavy planning and investment.

“To be sure, to have this type of a breakout and the capabilities they’re bringing online would have taken them years to plan, to develop, and then to actually build,” Stoss said.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, is in the midst of trying to develop a host of new programs, including the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, the Long-range Standoff Weapon, the B-21 bomber, the Columbia-class submarine, and a new nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) network.

The need to modernize so many different capabilities at the same time, Stoss said, is something the U.S. brought on itself.

“One common thread that I think we have across the department: The three legs of the triad, our NC3, and our nuclear weapons complex is, we took a knee on these systems,” Stoss said. “And, unfortunately, now that we’ve taken that knee and we’ve accepted these risks, we’ve found that … we no longer have the option to take that risk, that we’re doing just-in-time modernization, really across the board. That may not be applicable to each and every system, but it certainly is when you look at the whole.”

Andrew Hunter Takes Over USAF Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics

Feb. 7, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

A member of President Joe Biden’s transition team who was recently a fellow at a defense policy think tank swore in Feb. 7 as the new assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics.

Andrew Hunter will lead the Air Force’s research, development, and acquisition activities worth more than $54 billion a year across more than 550 acquisition programs, according to an announcement.

“He will have a fairly big inbox,” said Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby in a briefing Feb. 7.

“Andrew will be responsible for all matters pertaining to acquisition, contract administration, logistics, and material readiness, installations, and environment,” Kirby said—not to mention “operational energy, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, the acquisition workforce, and the defense industrial base.”

A senior fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, Hunter had directed the center’s Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group since 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile. From 2011 to 2014, he was at the Defense Department working as director of the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell.

Hunter replaces Will Roper, who landed a job in July 2021 as CEO of Silicon Valley-backed startup Volansi, a logistics and drone building company.

Hunter will also serve as the acting undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Biden has nominated William LaPlante—who held Hunter’s job from 2014 to 2015—to the OSD spot. LaPlante would replace Ellen M. Lord, who held the OSD’s top acquisition and sustainment job from 2018 to 2021.

DOD Spokesman: Russia Adds More Options to Invade Ukraine Day by Day

Feb. 7, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Russian President Vladimir Putin continued to “add to his force capability” Feb. 5-6, and “with each passing day, he gives himself a lot more options from a military perspective,” said Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby.

Kirby said in a public briefing Feb. 7 that “sizable forces continue to be added to the forces Mr. Putin has arrayed in the south in Crimea and alongside Ukraine’s borders, including in Belarus.” He estimated the number of Russian troops at “well north of a hundred thousand, and it continues to grow,” but he said combined arms capabilities in Belarus are also giving Putin options.

“That means not just infantry or tracked vehicles, but artillery and long-range fires, and air and missile defense, as well as special operations,” Kirby said. “He has a full suite available to him, and it continues to grow every day, including just over the last two days.”

Russia also sent two Tu-22M3 nuclear-capable bombers on a patrol over Belarus for a four-hour joint mission Feb. 5, according to The Associated Press.

Kirby said Putin has also added logistics and sustainment to support the troop buildup—“in other words, the ability to keep them in the field for longer and longer periods of time. It’s a whole panoply of things that we’re watching.”

Of the U.S. troops going to Germany, Poland, and Romania, Kirby said only a few hundred had arrived there as of Feb. 7. Kirby reported no “additional threats” anywhere “directly from Russia to NATO’s eastern flank.”

Yet, Kirby said there’s still been no sure sign of an invasion.

“We could not say with specificity, now, A: that he’s made a final decision one way or another; or B: if he does, what it’s going to be,” Kirby said. “We don’t have anything specific that we can point to as an ‘aha’ moment and say, ‘Well, that’s it. Now we know that he’s definitely going in and he’s definitely going in on such-and-such a date.”

Kirby said that in spite of everything, U.S. officials haven’t ruled out convincing the Russian leader to back off from Ukraine by diplomacy.

“We still believe there’s a diplomatic path forward that should and can be pursued,” Kirby said. He said Putin can easily “deescalate the tensions by just taking some of that force presence away.”

Some experts have predicted an invasion.

A panel of defense experts said in an event streamed by the Atlantic Council on Jan. 25 that Russia could be ready after its Atlantic Resolve 2022 exercise with Belarus, expected to conclude around Feb. 20. Separately, a senior Air Force official told Air Force Magazine that Russia was likely to invade Ukraine in the coming weeks.

Congress Set to Extend CR into March Despite Pentagon’s Warnings

Feb. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Congress will consider yet another continuing resolution—the third this fiscal year—to keep the government funded into March, as lawmakers continue to haggle over the fiscal 2022 budget.

The Further Additional Extending Government Funding Act, introduced in the House Committee on Rules on Feb. 7, would keep the government open through March 11, with spending mostly frozen at fiscal 2021 levels. The current CR is slated to expire on Feb. 18.

The act does include additional funding for the Defense Department’s response to the jet fuel spill at Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii—some $350 million in total, including $250 million from the services to address drinking water contamination. The Air Force’s contribution is just over $27 million.

The additional CR has been widely expected for some time now. Senate Appropriations ranking member Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and House majority leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) both indicated as much in recent interviews.

However, it does come after a concerted effort by Pentagon officials to push lawmakers to pass a new budget. Every service Chief and DOD comptroller Mike McCord appeared before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee on Jan. 12 to testify on the effects of a yearlong CR. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. warned that it would be “shattering,” and Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond said it would be particularly devastating for a new service such as the Space Force.

Under a CR, new programs are stalled, production increases are delayed, and funds are stuck in the wrong accounts, Pentagon officials and budget experts warn.

The latest continuing resolution would mean the Defense Department, along with the rest of the federal government, will have been operating under a CR for more than five months, one of the longer CR periods in recent history. However, there is still a ways to go before a full yearlong CR, which last occurred in 2013.

Congress has already passed two continuing resolutions for fiscal 2022, and appropriators say they have yet to reach an agreement on topline funding.

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act authorized, but did not appropriate, $740 billion, an increase of some $25 billion over President Joe Biden’s budget request. Democrats, however, have also sought to increase funding for other non-defense programs to an even greater degree, while Republicans have argued there should be “parity” in the increases for defense and non-defense spending.

Single ISIS Bomber Using ‘Disturbing Lethality’ Killed 170 Civilians, 13 US Troops During August 2021 Evacuation

Feb. 6, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

A single suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghan civilians during the August 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial report that described a “complex” attack, according to senior military leaders following the completion of an investigation.

After interviewing more than 100 witnesses and receiving reports of examinations of all the bodies, investigators found that all those who died in the August 2021 suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate leading into Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, had died from a bomb “explosively directing ball bearings through a packed crowd and into our men and women,” Commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. said during a Feb. 4 Pentagon briefing. The troops wore body armor and helmets, but those couldn’t stop “catastrophic injuries to areas not covered,” he added.

The ball bearings made wounds that looked like gunshot wounds, “and combined with a small number of warning shots [by U.K. and U.S. troops], that led many to assume that a complex attack”—one involving both the bomber and gunmen—“had occurred,” McKenzie said.

Officers who took part in the briefing cited accounts by Marines—disoriented from the blast and from leaks caused when the blast punctured their own tear gas canisters—as contributing to the confusion about what really happened.

However, others were in a better position to see what happened, “especially those witnesses in observation towers, both American and British, who were in locations unaffected by the blast and that had commanding views of the scene before, during, and after the explosive attack,” McKenzie said.

The troops in the towers saw no ISIS shooters, and neither did analysts of drone footage trained on the area 3 minutes, 8 seconds after the explosion.

Military officers involved in the withdrawal mission corrected the record in a Pentagon briefing late Friday.

The day after the attack, McKenzie had said “two suicide bombers, assessed to have been ISIS fighters, detonated near the gate.” He was referring to the now-confirmed bombing and one thought to have exploded near a building that sheltered British evacuees. The initial attack “was followed by a number of ISIS gunmen who opened fire on civilian and military forces,” McKenzie said at the time.

But after an investigation, he and others now say a single suicide bomber killed 170 people in the crowd along with a U.S. Sailor, a Soldier, and 11 Marines who were screening the evacuees.

The crowd being so tightly packed, along with the bomb’s “disturbing lethality,” McKenzie said, added up to so many deaths.

DOD leaders have also recanted their story, in the months following the evacuation, of the mistaken drone strike that killed 10 innocent civilians, including seven children, at a home in Kabul three days after the bombing.

The officials first said they had targeted “a vehicle known to be an imminent ISIS-K threat,” referring to the ISIS-Khorasan branch. Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley said three days later that he believed the strike was “righteous.”

But media outlets reported otherwise, and DOD leaders eventually admitted that the military had made a series of wrong assumptions and targeted an innocent aid worker.

Fighter Pilot Lawmakers in Congress to ‘Speak on Behalf of Airpower’ With New Caucus

Feb. 4, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

In May 2020, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) was sworn into Congress and became part of a select group of lawmakers to with experience as a military aviator—he flew F/A-18s as an officer in the Navy.

Now, nearly two years later, that group has expanded significantly, and they’ve come together to form a brand new caucus.

The Mach 1 Caucus, officially announced Feb. 3, will unite Garcia, Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Texas), and Rep. Scott Franklin (R-Fla.) as advocates for fighter jets and their pilots—with firsthand experience in the matter.

“The reality is, we went from, really in the House, not having any members who had a fighter pilot background or tactical air background in the military, to four of us in the span of a year or so,” Garcia told Air Force Magazine in an interview. “And so we got together and we just started to talk about how do we optimize this? How do we turn our experiences into something that can benefit not only other House members, but also our nation’s security?”

Like Garcia, Ellzey and Franklin were both Naval aviators—Garcia and Ellzey even flew together in combat operations. Pfluger is the lone Air Force representative of the bunch; he flew F-15s and F-22s over the course of nearly 20 years in uniform.

All four lawmakers are relatively new to Congress, but given their fairly unique backgrounds, they believe they have an especially powerful voice when it comes to airpower issues.

“It’s really important that people who have been there, who have flown really, really advanced weaponry—myself, the F-22, the other guys, the F/A-18 and some other planes—it’s important that we act as translators,” Pfluger told Air Force Magazine in an interview. “That we synthesize some of the threat information, and then really speak on behalf of airpower to the appropriate committees and to the leaders.”

Their decision to band together and advocate for air dominance, both Garcia and Pfluger said, was driven principally by the threat posed by competitors like China.

“This conversation is really focused on China. We need ‘big A’ Airmen … everyone in the joint air fight, in the air dominance side of warfare, we need to provide them every tool possible to defeat whatever threat is coming out of any country, but specifically as we focus on China,” said Pfluger.

Their goal is to be a “Rosetta Stone” for their fellow lawmakers, capable of explaining the complexities of the military services’ fighter and attack platforms. That could be especially important as the Air Force and Navy look to retire their older assets and procure funds to buy new ones, like the F-35.

“In this environment, where we have a major threat in the form of China, the airpower, the air superiority, and the planning and budgeting and appropriations behind these programs becomes extremely critical,” Garcia said. “And the average member, especially in the House, really doesn’t understand what these programs are, what they do, what these platforms are, what their missions are.”

But it’s not just the planes themselves that will get the Caucus’ attention. Garcia said he’ll also look to advocate for more flying hours to improve pilots’ training, saying focus on training has “atrophied” in recent years during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“You need a significant bump in in flight hour funding to get the proficiency levels up to where they need to be,” Garcia said. “And you know, in some squadrons right now, they’re flying 10 to 20 hours a month. And that’s unacceptable, even against a lower intensity conflict kind of mission, but to go against something like China requires a lot more than that.

Both Garcia and Pfluger said they want the Caucus to help address the services’ pilot shortages, by working to ensure better pay and quality of life for military aviators. Doing so, they said, is a competitive necessity.

“Our government spends anywhere from $2 to $3 million per pilot, getting them trained to go to the fleet, and after seven or eight years, they have the option to get out,” Garcia said. “And if we can’t provide the quality of life to incentivize them to stay in, we effectively lose that investment and we’ve got to start all over with new pilots.”

One quality of life issue that has become an increasingly public concern for the fighter pilot community is the rate of cancers among aviators. A recent Air Force study showed fighter pilots between 1970 and 2004 were statistically more likely than their non-flying peers to be diagnosed with and die from certain kinds of cancers, particularly melanoma skin cancer and prostate cancer.

“I see the Mach 1 Caucus as championing several issues this year. We’ll pick our priority issues, and there probably will be technical issues. But I can guarantee you that this will be one of them; we will be looking very closely at the cancer rates,” Pfluger said.

Already, the caucus has had a meeting with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to “make sure that we understand where his head is at and how we can help,” Garcia said, and the members plan to continue connecting key figures in the Pentagon and industry with other members of Congress.

But while other Congressional caucuses like the Airborne ISR Caucus, Joint Strike Fighter Caucus, and Long-Range Strike Caucus include a broad range of Representatives, not all of whom are veterans, the Mach 1 Caucus will likely keep its membership list short, limited to those with fighter pilot experience, Garcia said.

There could be at least one addition later this year though—one of Garcia and Ellzey’s fellow Navy pilots, Matt Stoll, is currently running in a special election in California scheduled for its first round of voting in April.

Should Stoll win, it would give the caucus a decidedly heavy Navy tilt, not that Pfluger seems to mind.

“It takes three Navy pilots to compete with one Air Force pilot,” Pfluger joked about the current group.