GAO Expects Space Command Findings by Spring; Colo. Lawmakers Want Basing Work Stopped

GAO Expects Space Command Findings by Spring; Colo. Lawmakers Want Basing Work Stopped

The Government Accountability Office expects to report findings in the spring of 2022 in its investigation into the Defense Department’s choice of Alabama as the likely permanent home of U.S. Space Command.

The selection of the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, announced in January 2021, has prompted objections from members of Colorado’s congressional delegation and subsequent investigations by both the GAO and the DOD’s Office of Inspector General. Members of the delegation registered their latest complaint Sept. 30 in the form of a letter to Department of the Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall calling the selection process for the headquarters of DOD’s 11th combatant command a “significant departure” from the norm and alleging, as in past letters, that political angling played a role. 

The members of Congress want Kendall to “formally suspend any actions to relocate the USSPACECOM headquarters” until the investigations are complete. The letter is signed by Sen. Michael F. Bennett (D), former Colorado governor Sen. John Hickenlooper (D), and representatives Lauren Boebert (R), Jason Crow (D), Diana DeGette (D), Joe Neguse (D), and Ed Perlmutter (D). Rep. Ken Buck (R) did not sign the letter.

“Congressman Buck has long supported the U.S. Space Command staying in Colorado, having signed multiple letters on the topic in recent years,” spokeswoman Allie Woodward told Air Force Magazine. “Rep. Buck will send his own letter to express his support for keeping it in Colorado, as his priorities remain our country’s military readiness and national security, rather than politics.”

U.S. Space Command’s temporary headquarters is at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., which was home to Air Force Space Command until it inactivated with the creation of the Space Force. The delegation argues that Colorado makes the most sense for the new combatant command, created in parallel with the new military branch, because Colorado is already “the epicenter of operational integration between military and intelligence space assets” and home to numerous military organizations oriented around space. “Additionally, significant evidence exists that the former President’s political considerations influenced the final decision,” according to the letter.

Then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper assigned the Department of the Air Force the task of evaluating prospective sites in March 2020. He “directed a different approach” from the Department of the Air Force’s usual strategic basing process that also incorporated aspects of the basing process used by Army Futures Command, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson told Air Force Magazine in an email. The department had already announced six locations as finalists but had to start over. The reboot expanded “the number of locations under consideration … by allowing communities to self-nominate,” according to the department spokesperson. The process also provided an opportunity for local communities to pitch incentive packages.

The Department of the Air Force is currently performing an environmental review of Redstone Arsenal’s appropriateness. The review is required before the selection becomes official.  

In emailed replies to requests for comment:

A GAO spokesperson said, “GAO’s review of the methodology and scoring of the Department of the Air Force’s decision making process for the location of the permanent headquarters for U.S. Space Command is ongoing. We will be looking into the steps the Air Force took to identify the permanent location and the extent that its process conformed to best practices for analyzing alternatives. We will not have any findings to report until our work is complete. We expect to issue our report in spring 2022.”

A DOD OIG spokesperson said the office had no comment on the delegation’s letter nor the letter’s assertion that the selection process deviated from the norm; and said the office’s work is ongoing: “We do not have a timeline [for completing the investigation].”

A Department of the Air Force spokesperson said, “The Secretary will respond directly to the congressional delegation.”

In addition to alluding to “political considerations,” Colorado’s members of Congress have questioned whether all costs were taken into account in the selection process.

In a December 2020 interview with Central Florida’s Spectrum News, U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) took partial credit for upending the original search that had resulted in six finalists being announced in 2019: “Myself, the governor, our senators, [and] a lot of our local officials started asking a lot of tough questions about how this decision was made, what’s the process,” said Waltz, an Army veteran.

In August, former President Donald Trump made headlines by claiming sole credit for the final decision.

PHOTOS: Fairchild Sets Record Launching 20 KC-135s Following Impressive Elephant Walk

PHOTOS: Fairchild Sets Record Launching 20 KC-135s Following Impressive Elephant Walk

The 92nd Air Refueling Wing at Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash., simultaneously launched 20 KC-135s on Sept. 29, marking the largest-ever minimum interval takeoff event for the base, according to a spokesperson.

“This was an impressive feat boasting the largest take-off of a KC-135 fleet at Fairchild Air Force Base,” according to a Fairchild press release. “Today we launched more Refuelers than are owned by whole countries.”

The readiness exercise, which included an “elephant walk” as the aerial tankers lined up before takeoff, tested Fairchild’s maintenance generation capabilities and its ability to launch multiple aircraft in short order.

Fairchild is home to the Air Force’s only super tanking wing, with four KC-135 squadrons and 63 total aircraft. As such, the 92nd ARW nearly always has a squadron deployed downrange.

The Air Force announced in May that Fairchild is one of two candidate locations being considered for the next Active-duty KC-46 basing location. If selected, its 60-plus-year-old KC-135 fleet would be replaced with the service’s newest tanker.

Space Force Selects 670 More Soldiers, Sailors, Marines for Transfer

Space Force Selects 670 More Soldiers, Sailors, Marines for Transfer

More than 600 Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines have been selected to transfer to the Space Force, the service announced Sept. 30, forming the second tranche of transfers from outside the Air Force to join the nation’s newest armed service.

When the Space Force first opened the transfer application process to members of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, more than 3,700 service members applied. In June, the first 50 selections were announced—40 from the Army, seven from the Navy, and three from the Marine Corps.

Of the 670 selected for transfer Sept. 30, 455 were selected from the original pool of 3,700. The other 215 were chosen from Army and Navy units that are set to be transferred over to the Space Force, along with 259 civilians assigned to those units.

All told, 603 Soldiers, 49 Sailors, and 18 Marines will be transferring during fiscal 2022, which begins Oct. 1, 2021. The original group of transfers “have begun executing their transfers and are beta-testing the process for this larger group,” Patricia Mulcahy, Space Force chief human capital officer, said in a statement.

The military transfers have all been matched to a specific Space Force career field—space operations, intelligence, cyber, engineering, or acquisition. Upon their transfer, most will be assigned “broadly” into Space Force organizations, the service said in a press release. Those transferring in from units being reassigned to the Space Force will remain in their current positions.

Those Army and Navy units being realigned under the Space Force are mostly related to those services’ satellites, in particular the Naval Satellite Operations Center and U.S. Army Satellite Operations Brigade. They were scheduled to start the transfer process beginning Oct. 1, but that process will in all likelihood be delayed as Congress is set to pass a continuing resolution to freeze spending levels before passing a defense budget for 2022 later in the year.

Once the transfers do come aboard, however, they and the 50 original transfers will make up roughly seven percent of the service, which currently has nearly 13,000 service members and civilians combined. In addition to transfers, the Space Force is set to recruit nearly 500 more enlisted Guardians in fiscal 2022 and add around 260 more officers through direct accession, according to the service’s 2022 budget request.

580 Service Members Die by Suicide in 2020, New Pentagon Report Says

580 Service Members Die by Suicide in 2020, New Pentagon Report Says

Five hundred and eighty service members died by suicide in 2020, the Pentagon announced Sept. 30, when the Defense Department released its annual suicide report.

Those 580 deaths mark the most the DOD has recorded in at least five years, with the Active-duty component accounting for 384, the Reserve for 77, and the National Guard for 119. In the Air Force, 81 Active-duty members, 12 Reservists, and 16 Air National Guard members committed suicide in calendar year 2020, according to the report.

“The findings are troubling. Suicide rates among our service members and military families are still too high, and the trends are not going in the right direction,” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “This is a paramount challenge for our department. We must redouble our efforts to provide all of our people with the care and the resources they need, to reduce stigmas and barriers to care, and to ensure that our community uses simple safety measures and precautions to reduce the risk of future tragedies.”

While the total numbers increased, the Defense Suicide Prevention Office found that the rate of suicides per 100,000 individuals did not increase by a statistically significant margin from 2019 to 2020, assuaging some fears that the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to a surge.

“But that doesn’t mean we are standing by,” said Army Maj. Gen. Clement S. Coward, acting executive director of the Office of Force Resiliency, in a press briefing. “When we start talking about the data and what it could indicate, we have always known that COVID and the measures to respond to it have presented unique challenges that would include risk factors for some folks. That’s why we’re not only continuing to monitor this, but we’re also continuing to be relentless to mitigate the [effects] as much as we can.”

Based on rates per 100,000, the only component to see a statistically significant increase from 2019 to 2020 was the National Guard, which had seen a drop from 2018 to 2019—the increase now puts the rate at roughly the same level it was in 2018.

From a longer-term perspective, though, the Active-duty component has seen a statistically significant increase in suicide rates since 2015, going from 20.3 deaths per 100,000 to 28.7.

As in years past, the rate of suicide continues to be highest among young enlisted men—enlisted men younger than 30 years old made up 42 percent of the total force but accounted for 63 percent of suicide deaths in 2020.

The primary method also stayed the same; firearms were used in nearly 69 percent of suicides in 2020.

“Part of it has to do with impulsivity; younger individuals and males tend to have a higher level of impulsivity,” Defense Suicide Prevention Office Director Karin A. Orvis said in a press briefing when asked why young men make up such an outsized portion of suicide deaths. “And when we’re talking about our military community, I mentioned that the primary method of suicide death is by firearm. That is the most lethal method, about 90 percent lethal. … This can be an impulsive act, and you can go from thinking to acting, if you have that capability or that means, within 10 minutes.”

Department of Defense Annual Suicide Report, Calendar Year 2020. References to the Air Force include the Space Force unless otherwise noted, according to the report.

Next steps

While impulsivity is a factor, significant life events can play a role as well. Orvis noted that in the most recent data, about 40 percent of service members who died by suicide had had what she called a “relationship challenge” within the 90 days prior to their death. Financial issues have also been noted as a challenge in the lead-up to some suicides.

Those factors can be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has generally led to more isolation for many people. Looking to combat that, Orvis said, her office plans to expand some initiatives and introduce new ones.

“Part of that emphasis continues forward to this day,” Orvis said, namely, “checking in one on one, whether it’s face to face or whether it’s through a phone call, or a video message, or text messaging, to know what’s going [on] as a leader with your folks—so you can identify if there may be challenges going on at home in terms of relationship challenges or financial challenges,” Orvis said. “That’s absolutely critical, and that’s something we’re stressing.

“Then we do have a number of new initiatives in place … the new outreach campaign really targeting those healthy relationships and trying to change the perception of, ‘We all have relationship challenges,’ so we should be seeking out support and seeking help.” 

Military families

For the third consecutive year, the annual suicide report also included data on military family suicides, though the data, based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s national death index, was from 2019, not 2020.

The data showed an increase in the total numbers, to a three-year high of 202 deaths, but Orvis noted that there was no statistically significant increase in rate. 

“Our military families often feel the stress of military life,” Orvis said. “We’re teaching healthy relationship skills and conducting outreach to normalize relationship help-seeking and to connect military couples to resources, including counseling.”

Misconceptions

Also as part of the annual report, the Pentagon included results from its first ever Quick Compass Survey of Active Duty Members, in which the department asked service members about their beliefs on firearms and suicide risk.

The survey, Orvis said, revealed that the majority of respondents held beliefs about firearms and suicide that run contrary to academic research and data.

In particular, 56 percent of respondents said having a firearm in the house did not increase the risk of suicide, and 66 percent said the way the firearms are stored had no impact on suicide risk. Studies have shown the opposite to be true.

“While the presence of a firearm does not cause someone to be suicidal, research tells us that storing a loaded firearm at home increases the risk of dying by suicide up to four to six times,” Orvis said. “… Such misconceptions can hinder suicide prevention efforts in our military community and across the nation. Knowing the facts may allow us to take life-saving steps to help our loved ones.”

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

Nearly 94 Percent of Airmen, Guardians Now Vaccinated Against COVID

Nearly 94 Percent of Airmen, Guardians Now Vaccinated Against COVID

As the Nov. 2 deadline for members of the Air Force and Space Force to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 approaches, the percentage of vaccinated service members in the department has jumped significantly, the latest data show.

In a Sept. 28 update, the Department of the Air Force reported that 75.1 percent of Active-duty Airmen and Guardians are fully vaccinated, with another 18.8 percent partially vaccinated, for a total of 93.9 percent that have received at least one shot of the vaccine.

On Sept. 6, the day after the Nov. 2 deadline was announced, 66.5 percent were fully vaccinated and eight percent were partially vaccinated, a total of 74.5 percent, meaning nearly 20 percent of Guardians and Airmen have received a dose of the vaccine in the last three weeks.

While there is still more than a month before Nov. 2, the process of getting fully vaccinated takes time—two-dose vaccines such as Pfizer-BioNTech’s, the only vaccine approved for full use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, require three weeks between shots, followed by an additional two weeks after the second shot to be considered fully vaccinated by the department. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, however, has received emergency use authorization, which the department will accept, and requires just one shot, followed by two weeks.

While the percentage of those unvaccinated has shrunk, thousands of Airmen and Guardians still need to get the shot. That group becomes even larger when considering the Guard and Reserve. When those two components are added to the Active duty, the entire department’s vaccination rate falls to 86.5 percent. 

That figure still represents a substantial increase from Sept. 6, when it stood at 68.4 percent. But with a slightly slower rate of increase, it does suggest that Guard members and Reservists remain slightly more reluctant to get the vaccine. The department will not require them to be fully vaccinated until Dec. 2.

The Air Force set the earliest deadline among the Defense Department for its troops to be fully vaccinated. The Navy and the Marine Corps aren’t requiring Active-duty Sailors and Marines to be vaccinated until Nov. 28, and the Army is giving Soldiers until Dec. 15.

Airmen and Guardians can apply for an exemption to the vaccine requirement on medical or religious grounds. To those who don’t receive one, however, a range of punishments may apply, from non-judicial punishment to courts martial. Air Force and Space Force leaders have not yet said how they plan to handle those situations.

Pentagon Wants Industry Input on Risks to Supply Chain

Pentagon Wants Industry Input on Risks to Supply Chain

The Pentagon is seeking industry comments about defense supply chain vulnerabilities in the areas of “select” kinetic weapons, power storage, microelectronics, and castings and forgings. The Biden administration wants the information to develop policies that can head off single-point failures in defense supply.

The call for input came in the Federal Register and was announced by the Pentagon on Sept. 28. Comments will be collected through Oct. 13 and will be available for public viewing at a later date. The information will support the Annual Industrial Capabilities Report mandated by Congress.

Biden directed six federal agencies to assess their respective industrial bases in a February executive order. The Pentagon is to supply a report to the White House describing “key vulnerabilities and potential courses of action to strengthen the defense industrial base.” The information follows up on a 2018 assessment, “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States,” and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for industrial Policy is conducting it.

  • Select kinetic capabilities” covers precision-guided munitions, hypersonics, and directed energy. The concern is that key components, such as “critical energetics” and microelectronics are “almost exclusively produced by foreign entities, including adversarial nations.”
  • “Energy storage/batteries” is on the list because they are critical to all kinetic capabilities and constitute an “evolving” requirement. Risks to the supply chain stem from defense-unique requirements with low production volumes that cause “high local costs.”
  • Microelectronics are used in nearly all defense systems. Defense-specific challenges in this supply chain are due to “acquisition processes, obsolescence, and the need for secure suppliers.” The one-year assessment will focus on military-specific applications and the “ongoing challenges between commercial and defense requirements.”
  • “Castings and forgings”—domestic capability and capacity in this area have declined, the Pentagon said, which limits the industrial base’s ability to “develop, sustain, or expand production.”    

The Pentagon also wants input on “system enablers” as they affect the focus areas, since “gaps or fragility” in these areas can create strategic or operational risk. The enablers are: workforce, at all levels, from wrench-turners to those with engineering degrees; cyber posture, to include cybersecurity, industrial security, and counterintelligence; interoperability, among systems within the Defense Department and with allies; barriers to small businesses entering and staying in the “defense ecosystem;” and manufacturing, both traditional and “additive” methods.

The request for comments offers specific questions that the Pentagon would like respondents to answer, as well. These include, how globalization has affected company supply chains and ability to respond to the Pentagon’s needs; the greatest challenges facing companies “in a distributed environment;” how the DOD can help; where the federal government is “effectively” mitigating supply chain risks; what the government can do better to mitigate vulnerabilities, especially in PGMs and microelectronics; and what government can do differently to attract cyber expert talent, implement standards, and “incentivize” the adoption of modern technology.

Does AI Present a New Attack Surface for Adversaries?

Does AI Present a New Attack Surface for Adversaries?

Increasing reliance on artificial intelligence to augment human decision-making raises the risk of attacks targeting critical data and AI algorithms, the Air Force’s cyber policy chief warned at AFA’s Air, Space, & Cyber Conference.

“If our adversary is able to inject uncertainty into any part of that process, we’re kind of dead in the water,” said Lt. Gen. Mary F. O’Brien, deputy Air Force chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and cyber. Speaking on a panel on information warfare along with 16th Air Force boss Lt. Gen. Timothy D. Haugh and Air Force Chief Information Officer Lauren Barrett Knausenberger, O’Brien said AI is like any other new weapon system: Getting it is only half the battle. Defending it is just as critical.

”Once we do get the AI, what are we doing to defend the algorithm, to defend the training data, and to remove any uncertainty?” she asked. To be effective, AI must be reliable, and warfighters must trust its insights and recommendations.

But if hackers can infect the data to undermine that trust, confidence would evaporate in an instant.

Accelerating the decision cycle to identify and cue targets rapidly in the heat of battle, AI will be essential, said Yvette S. Weber, Department of the Air Force associate deputy assistant secretary for science, technology, and engineering, speaking in a separate session on autonomy.

“Advancements in [AI and autonomous systems] are critical to accomplishing the core missions of a high-end fight,” she said.

In “highly contested environments, human-machine teaming enables Airmen to process massive amounts of data and more rapidly assist in human decision-making to arrive at targeting decisions,” Weber said.

O’Brien, however, sees risk in the midst of those potential rewards. “There’s an assumption that once we have the AI, we develop the algorithm, we’ve got the training data, [and] it’s giving us whatever it is we want it to, that there’s no risk, that there’s no threat,” she said.

O’Brien mentioned Maj. Rena DeHenre, a young officer who advocated for a Defense Department AI Red Team in a recent post on the Over the Horizon blog. Citing a Cornell University research paper titled “Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale,” she argued that establishing Red Teams to hunt for vulnerabilities in military AI implementations is essential.

“With a dedicated AI Red Team, DOD would have a central team to address and assess AI and ML vulnerabilities,” she wrote.

DeHenre is precisely the kind of maverick that O’Brien says she’s been encouraged to “protect and promote.”

In her post, DeHenre lays out the ways in which an enemy could seek to twist U.S. reliance on AI to poison its decision-making processes.

“Adversarial machine learning (AML) is the purposeful manipulation of data or code to cause a machine learning algorithm to misfunction or present false predictions,” she wrote, citing the final report of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI).

The NSCAI report notes that “even small manipulations of these data sets or algorithms can lead to consequential changes for how AI systems operate.” Indeed, the commission wrote that “the threat is not hypothetical: Adversarial attacks are happening and already impacting commercial [machine learning] systems.”

Worryingly, the commission notes that “with rare exceptions, the idea of protecting AI systems has been an afterthought in engineering and fielding AI systems, with inadequate investment in research and development.”

Just as with any other software code, security will never be as good as it could be if it’s not built in from the start.

“There has not yet been a uniform effort to integrate AI assurance across the entire U.S. national security enterprise,” the commission concludes.

Manipulations do not even have to be intentional. AI needs to be able to flex to handle anomalous data in its training and real-world sets, as well.

Hacking AI systems can be easier even than hacking conventional IT systems, some experts maintain.

“Machine learning vulnerabilities often cannot be patched the way traditional software can, leaving enduring holes for attackers to exploit,” notes a research paper from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. The paper goes on to point out that some hacks don’t even require insider access to the victim’s networks, since they can be accomplished by poisoning the data the system is collecting.

Defending AI, the paper argues, requires both building resilient systems and making them transparent and subject to human oversight so that the way they reached their outcomes can be understood. “Policymakers should pursue approaches for providing increased robustness, including the use of redundant components and ensuring opportunities for human oversight and intervention when possible,” the paper states.

Ed Vasko, director of Boise State University’s Institute of Pervasive Cybersecurity, expressed similar concerns during a session on 5G networking and cyber operations at AFA’s conference. “Every single technology transformation platform that I’ve ever seen and experienced” has become a target by collecting data, he said.

“Every time that we take the data elements and expand them out and find even more and more telemetry data to make use of, the challenge that we end up with is that we create more and more data environments and more information environments for our adversaries to potentially attack.”

The risks go beyond vulnerabilities created by cloud architectures or application programming interfaces, Vasko said, because the sheer volume of data being collected and processed makes up the biggest attack surface.

“The amount of data is going to explode beyond anybody’s expectations at this point,” he said. ”I’m not talking about access, I’m not talking about API platform connectivity. I’m actually talking about just the sheer collection of that data, and what that enables our adversaries to do and to think about.”

Vasko said the key difference between these new technologies and the processes they replace is that they effectively require Airmen and Guardians to relinquish their own judgement and instead trust the algorithm to interpret the data correctly and reach a conclusion. Joint all-domain command and control creates the opportunity “to actually change up how our fighters and our Guardians are thinking about leveraging their own senses,” Vasko said.

On the flip side, however, adversaries gain the potential to interfere in battlefield decision making at the same machine speeds that these decisions can be made. Just as misconstrued intelligence might have informed—or misinformed—a decision in the past, altering the data that underlies a machine decision in the future could have disastrous consequences.

“If our adversaries are able to achieve any of that, and impact … the JADC2 elements that are engaged to support our fighters, it’s game over,” he said.

Senate Panel Wants the Services to Manage F-35 Sustainment, Not the JPO

Senate Panel Wants the Services to Manage F-35 Sustainment, Not the JPO

For more than two decades, a joint program office has overseen the development, acquisition, and sustainment of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. In the next few years, at least part of that could change.

The Senate Armed Services Committee released its markup of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act on Sept. 22, and in the bill, the panel called for the Department of Defense to transfer sustainment management to the military services for their respective variants by no later than Oct. 1, 2027.

As part of the provision, the Pentagon would be required to submit to Congress by February 2022 a plan for making such a transition, in which the Air Force would be responsible for the F-35A and the Navy for the F-35B and F-35C.

The committee’s markup still needs to be passed by the full Senate, reconciled with the version of the NDAA approved by the House, and signed into law. But the potential change would mark a key turning point in the history of the program, which was officially established in 1994 as the Joint Advanced Strike Technology Program.

Since the F-35 was first delivered to the Air Force in 2011, key management aspects of the fighter program have remained under the joint program office—the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, for example, helps to organize, train, and equip the JPO but is not directly responsible for the F-35’s procurement, fielding, sustainment, and modernization, as it is for the other fighters in the Air Force’s portfolio.

Plans to transfer authority away from the JPO and to the services have been discussed since 2018. At that time, the Pentagon’s acquisition boss, Ellen Lord, wrote to Congress saying the services would eventually develop their own program offices in a transition process. She did not, however, lay out a timeline for that to occur.

Sustainment for the F-35 has been a hot topic in recent weeks, after the joint program office agreed to a deal with Lockheed Martin that could last through 2023 and cost up to $6.6 billion, with the long-term goal of a performance-based logistics contract to help manage the ballooning sustainment costs that have led to fierce criticism. 

At the same time, the Air Force has faced questions about whether it will integrate engines from its Adaptive Engine Technology Program into the F-35. The House Armed Services Committee, in its version of the 2022 NDAA, directed the joint program office to develop a plan for using the newer engines by 2027. It did not, however, make any reference to transitioning management for the F-35 to the services.

There are other differences between the House and Senate panel markups related to the F-35. The Senate bill would provide funding for one extra F-35A beyond the Air Force’s request for 48 new planes, despite the fact that the service did not include any additional F-35s in its unfunded priority list. The House bill would limit the number of F-35s the Air Force can buy starting in 2028, depending on how far sustainment costs come down. And the Senate version would provide an extra $1.7 billion for the Air Force to upgrade the fleet of F-35s it has now with the Block 4 and Technology Refresh 3.

Bridge Tanker Hold-Up?

The Senate Armed Services markup also addressed the Air Force’s recently announced request for information on a “bridge tanker” to follow the KC-46

While Lockheed Martin has already unveiled its bid for the tanker, called the LMXT, the Senate bill would block the Air Force from spending any money in the 2022 budget on such a tanker until the KC-46’s Remote Vision System 2.0 begins operational testing. The Air Force has said it hopes to start installing and retrofitting the RVS 2.0 into planes starting in 2024.

Low-Cost Attritable Plus-Up

The Senate committee report accompanying the 2022 markup indicated support for the Air Force’s Skyborg “Vanguard” program, an artificial intelligence-based system intended to fly unmanned aircraft. And as part of that support, the committee recommended the service buy 12 more Valkyrie drones, low-cost attritable aircraft, boosting the budget by $75 million to do so. The XQ-58A Valkyrie, developed by Kratos Defense, has been used in several Skyborg demonstrations.

Here Are Some of the Lessons Pentagon Leaders Say They’re Taking from Afghanistan

Here Are Some of the Lessons Pentagon Leaders Say They’re Taking from Afghanistan

Constantly shifting strategies, an Afghan military built in the “mirror image” of U.S. forces, and poor intelligence are all lessons that American military leaders can take from 20 years of the Afghanistan War, top Pentagon officials said Sept. 28.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, and U.S. Central Command boss Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. appeared together before the Senate Armed Services Committee for the first time since the end of the Afghanistan War and faced more than five hours of questioning on the conflict, from years of stalemate, to a withdrawal that turned deadly, to where things stand moving forward.

In his opening testimony, Milley said there were “many lessons to be learned” from the war, not all of them related to the military. But for the DOD in particular, Milley said there were already some takeaways to consider and more fully explore.

“One of them, for example, is the mirror-imaging of the building of the Afghan National Army based on American doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures,” Milley said. “And that made a military that … may have been overly dependent upon us, our presence, contractors, and higher tech systems in order to fight a counterinsurgency war.”

Over two decades, the U.S. spent some $83 billion to train and outfit the Afghan armed forces. In particular, the Afghan Air Force was considered to be the military’s main advantage over the Taliban. But as U.S. troops and contractors withdrew, that air force quickly lost readiness. Plans to conduct remote advising from over the horizon were ambitious at best—especially in a society with extremely limited access to technology. 

“You’re talking to people who are coming out of rule by the Taliban, who imposed Sharia law, a Stone Age approach to these things,” McKenzie said. “You cannot impose technological literacy quickly. So that’s why it took a long time, and we were still not finished with the Afghan Air Force. There’s a lot of contract maintenance done for a lot of air forces around the world. The Afghan Air Force is not unique in that regard. Although in this case, it was particularly telling because they were so dependent on it.”

Not all of the mistakes lay with the Afghan military, though. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) pressed Austin on American military leaders who repeatedly shifted strategy year after year, unable to break a stalemate, noting that one observer called the result “20 one-year wars,” not one 20-year war.

Austin, for his part, said leaders “have to ask ourselves some tough questions,” among them: “Did we have the right strategy? Did we have too many strategies?”

“If you’re reshaping that strategy, every year, one year at a time, then that has consequences,” Austin said.

Toward the end of the war, as the Taliban made rapid advances across the country, estimates of how long the Afghan government would survive repeatedly shrank. Milley, however, has repeatedly said those estimates from the Intelligence Community never predicted the stunning final collapse of the Afghan armed forces and government in the span of less than two weeks.

On Sept. 28, senators pressed Milley as to how the intelligence erred so badly, which he tied back to another military lesson: A lack of understanding of the Afghan Army’s morale and willingness to keep fighting without the U.S. 

“We pulled our [military] advisers off three years ago,” Milley said. “And when you pull the advisers out of the units, you no longer can assess things like leadership. And we can count all the planes, trucks, and automobiles, and cars, and machine guns, and everything else, but you can’t measure the human heart with a machine. You’ve got to be there.”

The importance of military advisers was key in other conflicts, Milley added, such as in El Salvador and Colombia, when the U.S. offered technical support to governments fighting insurgencies but let their armies take on “the burden of all the fighting.” By contrast, the Afghanistan War became “Americanized,” Milley said.

Moving forward

Beyond the lessons cited by Austin, Milley, and McKenzie, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) said she would introduce legislation to create an independent commission to study the full scope of the Afghanistan War, starting from its background and looking ahead to the future, an approach Austin endorsed. 

But while the U.S. presence on the ground is over, both Milley and McKenzie warned that the military’s task of preventing terror threats is far from finished. Under questioning from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Milley said the task of defeating terror threats from Afghanistan has only gotten harder now.

The principal reason for that is the current state of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities in the region. At the moment, the closest base from which the U.S. can conduct ISR operations is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, hundreds of miles away. 

The Pentagon has been working to secure basing rights in a neighboring country to Afghanistan for months now, and Austin confirmed Sept. 28 that the U.S. had spoken to a seemingly unlikely partner for such an agreement—Russia.

Asked about a recent Wall Street Journal report that Milley had spoken with his Russian counterpart about using Russia’s Central Asia bases to monitor Afghanistan, Austin said he had done so after Russian President Vladimir Putin offered the idea to President Joe Biden.

While those discussions continue, ISR operations are “very hard” but not impossible, McKenzie added.