From Warning to Tracking: Defending America Against Hypersonic Missile Attacks

From Warning to Tracking: Defending America Against Hypersonic Missile Attacks

Jan. 10, 2022

China’s August launch of a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile that circumnavigated the globe before reentry demonstrates the need for innovative solutions to spotting and tracking such threats. Unlike conventional intercontinental ballistic missiles, which follow a predictable ballistic arc, China’s hypersonic glide vehicle circled the world at low-Earth orbit, a path current missile warning systems cannot easily track.  

Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, called the missile test akin to a “Sputnik moment,” highlighting China’s rapid advancement and raising the stakes for missile defense in the modern age. 

Millennium Space Systems, a subsidiary of The Boeing Company, sees this challenge in line with the U.S. Space Force’s Track Custody Prototype program.  

“The threats are here now and they’re getting more advanced, so that’s why the Space Force pivoted to this Track Custody Prototype contract,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Millennium Space Systems.  

Today’s Space-Based Infrared System (SIBRS) satellites fly in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) some 22,236 miles above the Earth and use infrared sensors to detect heat from the missile plumes of ICBMs during launch. 

“[SBIRS] was developed more for the traditional ballistic threat that focuses on being able to identify missile boosters and make a prediction of where that threat is going,” said Dr. Kevin Paxton, Senior Technical Fellow at The Boeing Company. China’s weapon changes that equation because it does not follow that same path. “Hyperglide vehicles can be deployed from that booster and seeing those hyperglide vehicles without a rocket plume behind them becomes much more challenging. That’s really the crux of the problem: Being able to identify these dimmer threats and transition from missile warning to missile tracking.” 

Tracking is critical because the hyperglide vehicle has navigational capability. 

“The hyperglide vehicle can actually change directions, so now we need to follow and contain its entire trajectory within our tracking system,” Paxton said. “That pushes us toward using a much more proliferated network of satellite constellations so we can have more eyes in the sky to follow these threats through their entire trajectory, compared to just the beginning of that trajectory.” 

Millennium Space Systems’ proposed satellite constellation is flexible across orbits, including medium-Earth orbit (MEO) and low-Earth orbit (LEO). 

“Most of these target threats are flying at a fairly low altitude compared to some of the more traditional ballistic threats,” Paxton said. “So instead of being out at GEO, we’re lowering the altitudes of those orbits down to the MEO and LEO regimes to get closer to the target threat so that it’s easier to see.” 

Flying at MEO—between 1,243 and 22,236 miles above Earth—and LEO—altitudes up to 1,243 miles—has its own unique challenges. 

“The GEO altitude is very specific, because the satellite is going around the Earth at the same rate that the Earth is turning so that when the satellite looks down, it sees exactly the same place on Earth all the time,” Paxton said. “As you move to these lower altitudes, however, the satellite is actually going faster than the Earth’s rotation, so you end up with relative motion between the satellite and the places on the Earth you’re trying to watch.” 

That relative motion is similar to the blur experienced when looking out the side windows of a moving car. 

“From a technology perspective, we have to find creative ways to suppress that relative motion so that we can find those target threats,” Paxton said. “Going back to the car analogy, if you look through the window and focus on a tree as it goes by, you can see the tree very crisply. This is because your eyes are tracking that spot—called ‘back-scanning.’ We can do the same thing on a satellite. The idea is that we’re just going to look at one spot on Earth at a time and change where we’re looking as the satellite flies along.” 

The complex nature of this solution doesn’t stop at relative motion, however. Each orbit comes with its own distinct advantages and disadvantages. 

“The beauty of GEO is that you can cover the entire Earth with fewer satellites—but if it’s a dim target, you may not be able to see it,” Paxton explained. “If you go to the other extreme, at LEO, you’re close enough that you can identify a dim target, but the target may move outside of your field of vision, so you end up needing a lot of satellites to cover the Earth. MEO almost strikes a balance in between, where you pick up the advantages of being closer so that we can track dim targets, but also have the opportunity of being able to see more of Earth with fewer satellites.” 

Millennium Space Systems sees an opportunity to strike a balance by building its tracking constellation using satellites across multiple orbits.  

“It definitely requires a layered, robust architecture where it’s not just a single orbit of systems to do this mission,” Kim said. “Consequently, we’re developing commonality across our spacecraft and payload designs where there’s potential for a lot of economies of scale across all those orbits. That way, when you look at a layered architecture to address all these advanced threats, there’s a potential to be efficient.” 

Millennium is also applying the latest design and engineering technologies to ensure its design and manufacture is as efficient and proven as possible before launch.  

“We’re doing model-based systems engineering and digital engineering upfront so that we can manufacture these large constellations smoothly and efficiently, delivering them on faster schedules than before,” Kim said. “Then once launched, we’re end-to-end, so we‘re able to operate those systems more efficiently in-orbit with more autonomy and onboard processing, which enables us to reach a future where we need fewer humans to operate these systems and speed up the timelines from sensor to shooting.” 

This digital design process follows the conclusion of Phase 1 of the Track Custody Prototype program, in which various approaches were considered. The Space Force awarded Millennium Space Systems a Phase 2 contract, and the company began in May an 18-month Payload Critical Design Review of their mission architecture. 

“This program enables Space Systems Command to ‘try before you buy,’” Kim said, referring to Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond’s preference for greater assurance before committing vast resources to a project.  

If the design review is successful, the Space Force can pursue Phase 3, which would be to build and host the technology on a bus for flight-tests and demonstrations in space.  

“We are well-positioned to meet the ultimate delivery timelines of 2025 on our Track Custody Prototype contract and we can accelerate the schedule with the appropriate funding and resources,” Kim said. “We have the expertise, the processes, the manufacturing capabilities, the digital design, digital engineering and model-based systems engineering capabilities that have been proven in multiple domains. We’re positioned to provide high-performance in these high-stakes critical missions like missile warning and missile tracking on very fast timelines, and we look forward to seeing progress on fielding systems for the Track Custody Prototype program that will address these advanced threats.” 

Boeing’s Updated Valkyrie Reveals Evolving Hypersonic Design

Boeing’s Updated Valkyrie Reveals Evolving Hypersonic Design

Jan. 7, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Boeing has revealed an updated concept for its Valkyrie reusable, unmanned hypersonic aircraft that indicates new design approaches for inlets and shaping.

Shown in an artist’s concept illustration provided to Air Force Magazine—and in the form of a model at this week’s American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics meeting in San Diego—the aircraft shows several design departures and revisions from Boeing’s previous concept, made public in 2018. The previous iteration showed an aircraft shaped much like the 1980s National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) concept, with a pointed nose, deep spine, and “2-D” rectangular intakes co-located under the fuselage. The new version shows more of a “waverider” shape with a blunt nose, flattened top, and rounded, separated intakes running the length of the aircraft to twin booms with nozzles apparently using aerospike technology.

Boeing provided a comment about the design to Air Force Magazine, saying that “over the past several years, we have advanced our vehicle design concepts, developed innovative integration solutions, and matured enabling technologies in the challenging areas such as propulsion, thermal, materials, guidance, navigation and control, and engine/airframe integration.” The company noted that it has “successfully designed, built, and flown hypersonic vehicles for the last 60 years” and that its research and technology units have been “developing hypersonic vehicle concepts and technologies in support of potential future defense applications.”

The previous iteration was revealed in a seeming effort to counter Lockheed Martin’s release of a design concept it dubbed the “SR-72,” intended to be a reusable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft.

Though Boeing designed and flew the X-51, the first vehicle to sustain air-breathing hypersonic flight, it was not selected in a series of mid-2010s contracts for a variety of potential hypersonic vehicles and missiles. Last year, however, Boeing was funded to develop HyFly2, a Navy program for a hypersonic missile. The Valkyrie seems meant to remind the defense industry that Boeing is very much in the hypersonic game, even though the aircraft is not aimed at any known unclassified program.

Analyzing the Design

Air Force Magazine asked Mark J. Lewis, executive director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute, to offer observations about Boeing’s concept. Lewis, a leading hypersonics authority, was director of defense research and engineering under the Trump Administration and had previously been briefed on the company’s hypersonics efforts.

“Boeing has been working on this for a while,” Lewis said. “I think that previous configurations that they were showing at conferences and meetings did not accurately represent the configurations that they’ve been developing.” However, the latest model is probably “a little bit closer to what they’ve been working on.”

Boeing’s aircraft is a combined-cycle aircraft, Lewis said, meaning the vehicle can take off from a runway using a gas turbine engine and, when sufficient supersonic speed has been achieved, transition to hypersonic air-breathing flight using a scramjet engine. Boeing officials have previously suggested that the gas turbine air flow path is closed off, allowing hypersonic airflow to move through the scramjet engine.

“Designing a propulsion flow path that goes from Mach 0 to Mach 5 or Mach 6” is a daunting task, Lewis said, and “the devil is really very much in the details. Boeing, I know, has put a tremendous amount of effort into studying that propulsion flow path. And … I think the most recent model reflects their understanding of the challenge.”

Lewis said Boeing’s design draws on lessons learned from NASA’s X-43 program.

“We did a large number of design iterations,” he said, “and we discovered that the most important driving factor in picking a new configuration was actually not the hypersonic performance, but actually the transonic performance.” Various hypersonic shapes, “once you got into the high mach range, they all did about as well. The real question was how much drag they had when you get to Mach 1, and could you even push through Mach 1 with a hypersonic shape? The Boeing folks really understand this well.”

While the overall waverider shape is consistent with other hypersonic concepts, Lewis said the unusual cranked-arrow wing planform and its odd step-join with the fuselage likely has to do with subsonic or transonic control and performance.

The departure from the “2-D” inlet to an ogival, or rounded “3-D” shape, tracks with what other hypersonics technology efforts are doing, Lewis said.

The 2-D inlets were used on the NASP—which never got to a flying prototype—in part because “they were easier to analyze,” but computational tools for more complex shapes make more efficient designs possible now, 40 years later, he said.

“NASP was a large enough vehicle that it was very well known that you’d have to do parallel engine modules,” he said, referring to the gas turbines to get up to speed and the scramjets for hypersonic travel.

“You couldn’t do one engine module to power the vehicle. And the best way to stack engine modules side by side is to have them be two-dimensional.” Also, NASP had to fly from Mach 0 up to Mach 25, so there had to be a variable-geometry inlet. Also, a rounded shape means less contact between the air and the inlet, and lower weight.

“For a given volume of air moving through the inlet, a round shape has less surface area than a squared-off shape. So that’s an advantage,” Lewis said.

A rounder inlet is also a “more efficient pressure vessel. So if you’re worried about loads inside the inlet leading into the combustor, round shapes have advantages.”

While it was initially thought that rounded inlets had to be optimized for a particular speed, that has since turned out not to be true, Lewis noted. It was also thought that rounded inlets would be prone to engine unstarts, also since proven not to be true, he said.

“The bottom line is, if you look at almost every … hypersonic configuration that we’re looking at today … they’re all rounded inlets. So it’s not surprising” that Boeing’s fresh concept has them. “And in fact, I think it’s safe to say that the squared-off inlets were always kind of a red herring.”

Pluses and Minuses

He called the separation of the inlets an “interesting design choice,” with a “lot of pluses and minuses.” While separating the engines offers “packaging advantages” providing “a lot more internal volume,” separated engines pose a danger of sudden violent yaw torque if one engine unstarts. This was a periodic problem with the triple-sonic SR-71. “The pilots describe that as a fairly harrowing experience,” he observed.

The biggest challenge with a combined-cycle aircraft such as Boeing is working on “is having those engine cycles overlap with each other. The big technical issue you face is … when the gas turbine engine stops working at a mach number below the mach number at which a scramjet can take over, you have to bridge this gap in some way.”

One option is to push the gas turbine to as high a mach number as possible; the other is to reduce the startup speed of the scramjet as low as possible. Or, “You might have what’s called a dual-mode operations, so you’ve got one engine which can be both a ramjet and a scramjet.”

Declining to offer further comment on whether Boeing has solved this conundrum, Lewis said the company “has paid a lot of attention to this.”

A lot of the solution is “not just the propulsion, but it’s the entire flow path. So it’s optimizing design of the inlet, optimizing the design of the nozzle, being able to adapt the inlets and the nozzles to whatever mach number you’re operating in.”

The SR-71, which flew at a high mach number but not at hypersonic speed, accomplished this with an inlet cone that shifted position depending on its speed.

To deal with the high temperatures encountered at hypersonic speed, Lewis speculated that Boeing has resorted to a “hot structure.” He explained that a “cold structure” uses materials that don’t handle high temperatures well but have some kind of thermal protection. The space shuttles, for example, had an aluminum structure protected by silica tiles that absorbed and dispersed heat.

The SR-71, the F-15, and the never-built X-20 all used a “hot structure,” in which the materials themselves are high-temperature tolerant. They are also better for maintenance, an important consideration—“remember what a nightmare those space shuttle tiles were. But I honestly don’t know which approach the Boeing folks have converged on.”

The SR-71’s materials expanded during the high temperatures in flight, meaning that it had to have gaps on the ground and leaked a lot. “But you know, our structural design tools are so much more sophisticated than they were back in the 1950s when the SR-71 was designed.”

The half-conical boom-like exhausts are “very straightforward,” Lewis said. “That’s a classic design for any of our individual hypersonic configurations.” The reason has to do with equalizing the pressure of the exhaust with the ambient air.

Unlike a rocket bell, “you essentially do what’s called an aerospike design,” he explained. “An aerospike design is, you take the nozzle and you turn it inside out, so instead of having a bell-shape, and the flow is expanding inside the bell, you’ve got a spike, and the flow is expanding along the spike.” While at slower speeds, the thrust would come out somewhat sideways. “The nature of a supersonic flow is such that you’ll maintain basically a contiguous stream of air … coming out of the engine, and it will gradually expand.” The stream is contained “because it’s moving so fast … And the beauty of that is if you do it right, it expands to atmospheric pressure, or pretty close to it.”

So, “for any hypersonic configuration, you’re almost certainly going to use an external expansion nozzle of the type the Boeing folks show.”

Lewis declined to offer much comment on the canted verticals, saying they could have something to do with yaw stability or “artistic license.”

The flattish shaping of the vehicle is also good for stealth, Lewis said, and its thermal signature will not be as much of a giveaway as one might think.

It’s “kind of a misnomer that you often hear, that a hypersonic vehicle is going to be glowing super hot. … But if you have designed it correctly, really, only the leading edges are going to be super hot. In fact, the sorts of shapes that lend themselves to efficient hypersonic flight tend to actually have relatively small cross section. So they tend to be these really slender shapes.”

Lewis agreed that the Valkyrie release is likely a reminder that Boeing is still a player in hypersonics.

“Remember, Boeing built the X-51. They know how to build a hypersonic airframe. They were eliminated from the DARPA competition. They are now back in the game,” he said. “The Joint Hypersonics Transition Office is funding Boeing to do a hypersonic air-breathing missile concept called HyFly2. And they are, to put it bluntly, kicking butt in their design. They’re doing a really nice job.”

Proliferated Architecture Necessary for Future Satellite Communications

Proliferated Architecture Necessary for Future Satellite Communications

Jan. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

When it comes to the Defense Department’s plans for satellite communications, the Pentagon will need all different kinds of space architectures, two top Pentagon officials said during a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies webcast Jan. 7.

David Voss, director of the Spectrum Warfare Center of Excellence at the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, and Stephen Forbes, Blackjack program manager at DARPA, addressed the need for proliferated architectures while discussing a recent Mitchell Institute policy paper, “The Backbone of JADC2: Satellite Communications for Information Age Warfare.”

The paper by retired Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton and senior analyst Lukas Autenreid recommended that the Space Force “distribute, disaggregate, diversify, and expand its SATCOM options,” particularly by building out a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites and linking them with laser communications to create a mesh network. 

Such moves, Chilton and Autenreid argued, would complement DOD’s current satellite systems, most of which are in geosynchronous orbit and use radio frequencies (RF). Geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) satellites, Chilton argued, are “incredibly capable, but they’re incredibly vulnerable,” quoting former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John E. Hyten in calling them “big, fat juicy targets.”

But that’s not to say that GEO satellites don’t have some value, Chilton and Voss agreed. Indeed, while Voss spent much of his early career working on small satellite low Earth Orbit (LEO) architectures for the Air Force Research Laboratory, he said his perspective on the larger, more distant satellites has changed.

“I have come to really grow to appreciate and understand a lot of the value that GEO brings to the community,” Voss said. “When you look at an information architecture as a whole, each of the orbits bring a value function that is nice to have at an enterprise level. And so, the ability to see the entire globe from GEO, as your paper highlighted, really was why we went there from the first point. It gives you an efficiency both within the networking architecture, and it gives you the ability to see a very large geographic area.”

Similarly, analysts and observers have been warming to the idea of free-space laser communication, or lasercom, as key to future satellite communications due to it being faster and more secure than radio waves. And in their paper, Chilton and Autenreid recommended that DOD use lasercom to link its LEO satellites, increasing coverage and resilience. 

Yet even as he touted the benefits of lasercom, Forbes said RF can’t be abandoned.

“As soon as you start moving out of single-digit spacecraft, the ability to stitch them all together in a resilient communication mesh is going to be a critical enabler to overcome the threats and the challenges that we face and build a much less brittle architecture. And optical is a great way of doing that,” Forbes said. “[But] it’s not well suited for serving mass users. It is not well served for folks that have weather … And that’s why I also believe that, especially when you get out of the … backbone class of the portion of the network, that RF will always have its place to serve the users.”

The Space Development Agency is currently in the midst of developing the National Defense Space Architecture, a constellation of satellites that will be used for tracking targets as well as missile warning, communications, data coverage and sharing, and other capabilities. And as part of that, the agency has looked to procure dozens of satellites. 

At the same time, the Space Force has indicated an interest in using commercial satellite communications, too. And in developing its broader architecture, the Pentagon will need both, Voss said.

“This foundational layer—it’s critical that it embraces the multi-orbit aspects that are highlighted [in the paper], that it takes advantage of the global perspective that GEO brings as well as the proliferative nature that LEO brings,” Voss said. “This foundational layer [has] the natural inclusion of commercial capabilities within a diversified architecture. It gives us that path-agnostic capability that was identified, not only within a contested environment, just to the nature of the complexity of delivering these communications systems for either 5G or even future 6G applications.”

The emphasis on using every available technology, orbit, and asset available is necessary for resiliency, Chilton said. Based on their recent actions and developments, China and Russia will seek to disrupt the U.S.’s space-based communications in a potential future conflict, he predicted.

“I find it hard to believe, given that they’ve demonstrated the capabilities to reach those orbital altitudes with anti-satellite weapons, that our adversaries would not be planning on doing such to put themselves in an advantage in the area of operations where we’re going to be fighting,” Chilton said.

Beyond resiliency, though, a proliferated satellite architecture is also helpful for offensive capabilities, Autenreid said. And as the Pentagon continues to develop its joint all-domain command and control concept to connect sensors and shooters more efficiently than ever, having different capabilities to meet different situations is critical, Voss added.

“I think that the challenge we’re at right now as we’re doing some of these big data analytics is, what is the recipe and how much of each do you need against that JADC2 problem, as you look up provisioning the various types of users across the different services?” Voss said.

DARPA’s New Public Tools Teach AI Developers to Defend Against Attacks

DARPA’s New Public Tools Teach AI Developers to Defend Against Attacks

Jan. 7, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

For the military to trust commercially sourced or even internally developed artificial intelligence, the technology will have to be defended. Now developers have a set of open-source tools to learn new defensive techniques and to test their products against simulated attacks.

Techniques to defend already-trained AI algorithms, or models, are as new as the attacks themselves—in other words, “brand new,” said Bruce Draper of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 

In an attack, “the goal is to fool an AI system—make it behave incorrectly,” said Draper, DARPA’s program manager for the newly available set of tools called GARD. (It’s Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception.) In an interview, Draper said an attack might trick an AI system into misidentifying faces, for example, or even interfering with AI systems that detect conventional attacks.

Similarly to how AI is so broadly applicable, the team surrounding GARD hopes a common set of techniques will apply broadly across AI models.

“We’re trying to get the knowledge out so developers can build systems that are defended,” Draper said. That includes the military itself, other parts of the government, and the private sector. A related program will address the military more specifically. When utility companies upgrade their networks to protect from cyberattacks, for example, AI will likely factor in.

DARPA brought together researchers from IBM, Two Six Technologies, MITRE Corp., the University of Chicago, and Google Research to assemble the elements of GARD: 

  • Building on a pre-existing open-source library of tools and techniques by IBM, the Adversarial Robustness Toolbox, GARD “made it better,” Draper said.
  • Google Research pitched in a self-study repository with so-called “test dummies” to teach developers common approaches to defensive AI.
  • Data sets within GARD’s APRICOT library (Adversarial Patches Rearranged In COnText) are there to help developers try to attack and defend their own systems, such as by altering what an AI system observes in its environment.

DARPA isn’t alone in questioning the security of AI. 

The Air Force’s cyber policy chief Lt. Gen. Mary F. O’Brien has said that to be effective, AI has to be reliable—troops have to trust it. In using AI to augment human decision-making, for example: “If our adversary is able to inject any uncertainty into any part of that process, we’re kind of dead in the water.”

Western militaries—already “late to the party” in the creation of AI—risk unforeseen consequences by adopting AI made for the commercial sector, said NATO’s David van Weel. 

Meanwhile, the now-concluded National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recommended in its 2021 final report that the Defense Department incentivize offices to adopt commercially available AI for business processes. The commission also acknowledged that “commercial firms and researchers have documented attacks that involve evasion, data poisoning, model replication, and exploiting traditional software flaws to deceive, manipulate, compromise, and render AI systems ineffective.”

For now, the defenses of commercially developed AI remain questionable.

“How do you vet that—how do you know if it’s safe?” Draper said. “Our goal is to try to develop these tools so that all systems are safe.”

Army’s Kurilla Tapped to Lead CENTCOM, Get Fourth Star, Reports Say

Army’s Kurilla Tapped to Lead CENTCOM, Get Fourth Star, Reports Say

Jan. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The next leader of U.S. Central Command has reportedly been identified. Army Lt. Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla has been nominated for a fourth star by President Joe Biden, according to Congressional records.

And while the Senate Armed Services Committee record specifies only that Kurilla will be “assigned to a position of importance and responsibility,” reports from the Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press indicate he will take over as commander of CENTCOM if confirmed.

Kurilla currently serves as commander of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C.—the Corps deployed thousands of Soldiers to Afghanistan this past summer as part of the evacuation process. 

Prior to that, Kurilla worked as chief of staff for Central Command. He also spent every year from 2004 to 2014 in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, commanding forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to his official bio. In 2005, Kurilla, then a lieutenant colonel, was wounded in Iraq during a firefight.

Kurilla’s nomination comes as current CENTCOM commander Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. is set to retire in the coming months. McKenzie’s tenure began in March 2019. He oversaw the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of war, culminating in the August evacuation that ended with 13 service members dying from an ISIS suicide bomb attack.

McKenzie also later acknowledged that a U.S. drone strike during the withdrawal mistakenly killed 10 innocent civilians. He, along with Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, faced a bipartisan grilling on Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the withdrawal.

Kurilla is likely to face plenty of tough questions in his own nomination hearing, as he is poised to take over a combatant command facing an inflection point. 

Pentagon leaders have increasingly emphasized competition with China and Russia as the major challenges facing the U.S. in the years ahead, as the American troop presence in the Middle East continues to shrink. At the same time, though, officials have said the military’s task of countering terror threats from the region is far from finished. In recent days, CENTCOM has had to repel drone strikes and destroy a rocket site, presumably belonging to Iranian-backed militias.

With a reduced troop presence, officials have said they plan to rely on “over the horizon” capabilities to monitor terror threats. For places such as Afghanistan in Central Asia, the closest base from which the U.S. can conduct ISR operations is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, hundreds of miles away. There have been reports that the Pentagon is working to secure basing rights in other nearby countries, but thus far, no agreement has been announced.

Stoltenberg: NATO’s Open-Door Policy Must Stay; Risk of Conflict in Europe ‘Is Real’

Stoltenberg: NATO’s Open-Door Policy Must Stay; Risk of Conflict in Europe ‘Is Real’

Jan. 7, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Emerging from a virtual meeting with allied foreign ministers, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared ahead of a meeting with Russia that NATO’s open-door policy is sacrosanct. He also detailed the reasons why NATO believes new conflict in Europe is imminent.

“The risk of conflict is real,” Stoltenberg told members of the media Jan. 7 after a meeting to discuss Russia’s troop buildup on the border of Ukraine, which is believed to number some 100,000 with growing military capabilities.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said NATO is a threat to Russia’s national security and that expanding eastward by admitting Ukraine and Georgia would only further heighten that concern. The treaty alliance, in turn, claims it is defensive in nature. It provides that any nation may pursue admittance, though all member nations must agree.

Russian and U.S. officials are set to meet in Geneva Jan. 9-10, followed by meetings of the NATO-Russia Council on Jan. 12 and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on Jan. 13, to discuss Ukraine border tensions and to hear Moscow’s concerns about the alliance. The NATO-Russia meeting is the first since the summer of 2019.

“Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified military buildup in and around Ukraine” has serious implications for European security and stability, the secretary-general said. He said Russian forces are only strengthening a noose around Ukraine.

“The Russian military buildup has not stopped. It continues and [is] gradually building up with more forces, more capabilities,” Stoltenberg said, describing armored units, artillery, combat-ready troops, electronic warfare equipment, and other military capabilities.

Avoiding ‘Second-Class NATO Members’

Stoltenberg was clear that the alliance would not heed Russia’s demand to withdraw the invitation for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO—or for any country to pursue the path of its choosing.

“There’s no way NATO can compromise on the principle of the right of every nation to choose his own path, and that was very clearly stated by allies today,” Stoltenberg said, citing the NATO founding charter and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. The act, signed by 35 European countries including the Soviet Union, plus the United States and Canada after two years of negotiations, was a non-binding set of articles that included respect for territorial integrity and refraining from the threat of use of force.

Stoltenberg said Russia’s military buildup, rhetoric, and recent history of invading Ukraine and Georgia made the possibility of new conflict in Europe serious but that NATO would not give into Russian demands. Among Putin’s recent demands has been that former Soviet member states or Warsaw Pact members who are not already in NATO not be allowed to join; and that NATO troops and capabilities in eastern flank countries be withdrawn.

Stoltenberg said that would create “second-class NATO members” devoid of the same defense and deterrence capabilities. There were other areas where compromise could be made with Russia, however, but only on equal footing.

“Balanced, verifiable arms control, yes. One-sided demands on NATO, no,” Stoltenberg said.

Ahead of the meetings with Russia, a Ukrainian defense official told Air Force Magazine the United States and NATO should hold their ground with Putin.

“There should not be any compromise with Russia,” the official said. “They recognize only force. Weakness will provoke them.”

The official also underscored the open-door policy that led to Ukraine’s invitation to join NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008.

“NATO must show that doors are open and promises kept,” the official said, adding that no decision has been made to provide air and missile defense systems to Ukraine following the December visit of an American air defense team to Ukraine.

While Putin has sought to stymie the growth of NATO, create divisions within the alliance, and weaken defense and deterrence on the eastern flank, Stoltenberg said only the opposite have happened and that peace and democracy in Europe have benefited.

“The enlargement of NATO and the European Union has really helped, over the last decades, to spread and to strengthen democracy and freedom in Europe,” Stoltenberg said.

Following the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO reinforced the eastern flank, tripling the size of the NATO Response Force to 40,000 troops, adding air policing and battle groups, and increasing its presence in the Black Sea region. If Russia were to move on Ukraine, NATO would only further strengthen its position in the East, Stoltenberg said:

“We have significant capabilities, we have troops, we have forces, we have the readiness, we have the plans, to be able to defend and protect all allies.”

Court-Martial of Air Force 2-Star General Postponed Amid COVID Concerns

Court-Martial of Air Force 2-Star General Postponed Amid COVID Concerns

Jan. 6, 2022 | By Amy Hudson

Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 6 to include the new start date for the trial.

The court-martial of Maj. Gen. William T. Cooley Jr., former head of the Air Force Research Laboratory, is postponed until April 18 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is surging across the country. The trial was slated to begin Monday, Jan. 10, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

Cooley faces a single count of abusive sexual contact, with three specifications, under Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The charges stem from an Aug. 12, 2018, off-duty incident in Albuquerque, N.M., in which he is alleged to have made unwanted sexual advances toward a civilian. The civilian is not a military member or DOD employee, according to the Air Force.

Air Force Materiel Command boss Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr. relieved Cooley of command Jan. 15, 2020, following the conclusion of an investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. After reviewing the evidence and convening an Article 32 preliminary hearing, Bunch referred Cooley to stand trial in April 2021.

Cooley has remained on Active duty during this time, working as Bunch’s special assistant pending the start of his trial. He is the first Air Force general officer ever to be court-martialed for sexual assault, according to an Air Force spokesperson. If the trial goes to completion, he will also be the first to ever face a full court-martial proceeding; only a few general officers have previously been referred to court-martial for any charge.

Jury selection in Cooley’s court-martial is set to begin Monday. A court-martial in a non-capital case can have as few as five and as many as eight jurors. Because a fair trial calls for a jury of one’s peers, the jurors will presumably have to be general officers. An Army one-star’s trial on sex charges in 2014 featured a jury of five two-star generals.

Cooley’s unprecedented court-martial proceedings are slated to last up to 14 days, according to an Air Force release. It comes as the Air Force is specifically focused on lifting barriers to women and minority groups. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall expressed alarm in September 2021 after recent climate surveys found that one-third of all USAF women have reported sexual harassment. He promised to address the issue with urgency.

Past DOD Leaders Say the Next National Defense Strategy Should Encourage Data, Tech Sharing

Past DOD Leaders Say the Next National Defense Strategy Should Encourage Data, Tech Sharing

Jan. 6, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Former four-star generals and a Trump administration acquisitions chief said the next National Defense Strategy, expected this spring, must create a framework to break down barriers in data sharing and to enhance tech transfer with allies and partners to maximize America’s deterrence.

Speaking in an Atlantic Council virtual discussion Jan. 5, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retired Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright; former head of the CIA and U.S. Central Command retired Army Gen. David Petraeus; and former Pentagon acquisitions chief Ellen Lord said talk is not enough to confront the complex set of security challenges posed by two nuclear-armed adversaries, Russia and China.

“Where’s the beef?” said Cartwright, indicating the NDS must outline measurable steps to broaden sharing with partners and allies. “If we can start to share unprocessed sensor data with all of our friends and allies—not just exclusive groups, but all of our friends and allies—then we bring to the table the one thing that our adversaries can’t: diversity,” he explained.

Cartwright argued that America cannot fear “giving up some piece of intellectual property.” Likewise, old practices to protect data must be modernized.

“We do have a cultural issue of ‘deny people the access to the knowledge and control it yourself.’ And that just doesn’t work anymore,” he added.

Lord extended the argument to expanding the defense industrial base to allies and streamlining technology transfer in the forthcoming NDS.

“We are not leveraging the defense industrial base, the manufacturing capability, all the know-how out there,” Lord said, calling for clear objectives for making technology releasable. “Then, being able to export, without getting too tied up in [International Traffic and Arms Regulations], to our closest allies and partners.”

Petraeus made the case that allies first need to be reassured after the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, of which he claimed allies “felt they had been informed rather than consulted.”

“We want to classify in order to share rather than to exclude,” Petraeus said, pointing to successful examples in the Iraq surge and Afghanistan coalition.

Petraeus also said a gulf of interoperability is growing in areas ranging from weapons systems to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

Cartwright emphasized military space investment and warned that the adoption of commercial space technologies is not keeping up with China’s use of space.

“If we don’t start capitalizing on space the way our commercial sector has, we’re going to be left behind,” he said, citing recently departed Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten’s comments about China’s aggressive military space ambitions.

Cartwright identified commercial advances when it comes to reusing and and disaggregating space assets that he believes need to be incorporated into the government. He also argued for making all platforms maneuverable in all phases of flight to avoid threats.

Lord pointed to AUKUS, the nuclear-powered submarine technology agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States as an example of sharing data and technology that needs to be more widely utilized.

“I think what we need to do is take that NTIB framework and build it out a bit,” Lord said, referring to the National Technology and Industrial Base, a group of vetted suppliers from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada—”so that we can much more easily export data and technology, so that we can build interoperable systems, so that we can sell a lot of the systems that we now use in the U.S,” she said. Selling systems used by the U.S. military would allow easier communication with allied and partner defense forces.

Broadening the defense industrial base and two-way sharing of research and insight also means an acknowledgment that good ideas come from beyond U.S. shores.

“Cybersecurity, intellectual property—these are complications—but we need a framework, and a lot of brains in the world are places other than the U.S.,” she added.

Air Force to Announce Working Group to Study Resilience, Mental Health

Air Force to Announce Working Group to Study Resilience, Mental Health

Jan. 6, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Air Force is set to announce a new team in the coming weeks to study barriers to resilience and mental health, Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass said Jan. 6.

Speaking during a “Coffee Talk” event streamed on Facebook, Bass said the new group, called the Fortify the Force Initiative Team, or FIT, will fall under the Air Force’s Barrier Analysis Working Group, or BAWG. FIT will be officially unveiled early this year, “probably within the next few weeks,” Bass added. 

The BAWG has previously established seven subgroups to study specific barriers facing minorities in the service and to propose efforts to address those barriers. This new group will focus more broadly on the issue of resilience, Bass said, and will have advocates in herself and Chief Master Sgt. of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman.

“That’s going to be a team of Airmen and Guardians, for Airmen and Guardians, to help identify lines of effort that we can do to get after resiliency, mental wellness, mental health—all of those things,” Bass said. “And the goodness of those BAWGs and the goodness of FIT that we’ll have is myself [and] Chief Toberman will champion that and be able to provide a direct [contact] to our senior leaders so that we can actually kind of cut down the bureaucracy—to be able to get some solutions that you all see that we need to do when it comes to resiliency.”

The focus on resilience, not just mental health, is deliberate, added Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.—leaders’ goal is to address resiliency “in different forms and fashions” before Airmen reach a crisis point.

“The key part here, and this is one of the areas that the CMSAF and I are working on, is we want to actually help provide our leaders with the tools to engage before a member has to go to see mental health,” Brown said. “At the same time, we want to make sure that we have mental health capability available to all our Airmen, and [we are] really looking and paying attention to those high-stress career fields.”

The Air Force’s issues with mental health have become increasingly prominent in the past few years. In July 2019, then-Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein ordered a one-day stand-down to address the rate of suicide in the ranks. The number of suicides among Active-duty and Reserve Air Force and Air National Guard members jumped from 80 in 2018 to 109 in 2019, then stayed there in 2020, according to Pentagon data.

And recently, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall indicated that he believes the issue of mental health is tied to other issues such as racial disparities and interpersonal violence, which the department has studied in the past year or so.

“I think every one of these is in some way an institutional failure,” Kendall said during a Facebook town hall in November. “It’s a leadership job to make sure people are educated about the issues they face. It’s a leadership job to make sure that people understand that when they do have a problem, that they can get help and that it’s OK to do that.”

Other Announcements Coming

The establishment of the new BAWG subgroup isn’t the only news that’s set to arrive in early 2022, Brown and Bass said during their talk. 

Most immediately, Brown said, will be a memo “in the coming days” addressing the ways Airmen express themselves online. 

“We often talk about dignity and respect,” Brown said. “We’re doing so much more on the internet, through cyber means, through social media. The things that we would say in person are the same things we’ve got to pay attention to … online. And I had a friend in college who said, ‘Never throw a brick and hide your hand,’ and I’ve always believed that—in the fact that … if you can’t say it to my face, don’t put it online. And it’s something that we’ve got to pay attention to as we go forward.”

Beyond that, Bass said the service will make its new enlisted force development action plan, previously distributed to command teams, more widely available.

“It is going to be a framework that keeps us grounded on: How do we develop the Airmen that we need in the future with a whole bunch of objectives?” Bass said. “We put ourselves on a two-year time period on that, but every one of us has an opportunity to be part of that development on how we’re developing the force of the future.”

And finally, Brown said that by the end of January, he hoped to issue modifications to the four action orders he released in December 2020 to support his “Accelerate Change or Lose” strategic approach. Brown offered only a few details on how the action orders would change, saying one order focused on bureaucracy needing to be adjusted to “actually flatten communication [and] … to increase collaboration.”

The Veterans Crisis Hotline is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for veterans, service members, and their family members and friends who need help. Call 800-273-8255 and press 1, text 838255, or visit www.veteranscrisisline.net.