Does AI Present a New Attack Surface for Adversaries?

Sept. 29, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

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

Sept. 29, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

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

Sept. 28, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

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.

VIDEO: Air Combat Command’s Gen. Mark D. Kelly’s Update on the Future Fighter Force

Sept. 28, 2021

Air Combat Command’s Gen. Mark D. Kelly told attendees at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber conference the U.S. is in real peril of losing a potential war with China if the Air Force cannot shed obsolete gear and rapidly regain a solid advantage in control of the air.

“We have to focus our fighter force to the basic realities of a new threat environment,” Kelly said. “And that requires the fighter force to change to be successful.” Kelly said the joint force “requires air superiority” and doesn’t know how to fight or function without it—so this mission area should get priority for resources.

If you missed his speech last week, catch up now or read Air Force Magazine’s coverage of the event.

CMSAF: Airmen Remain Most Competitive Advantage Over Adversary

Sept. 28, 2021 | By Amy Hudson

The U.S. military is at an inflection point, and if it fails to adapt to the current threat environment, it very well could lose the next fight. And while new platforms such as the B-21 will play a critical role in competing, deterring, and winning in a high-end fight, it is U.S. Airmen who are the true secret weapon, Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass said.

“We are indeed at an inflection point in history where the choices that we make today will have a lasting impact on the world that we have tomorrow, and every Airman needs to know that,” Bass said during her keynote address at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 20. “More importantly, we need to know what’s at stake if we just simply stay the course. We are serving in a time where we don’t have time for spectators. This is a time for all of us to step into the arena and to get to work.”

Like the other Air Force and Space Force leaders speaking at the conference, Bass cautioned that time is running out. China, she said, is wrapping up its marathon and is now sprinting to the finish line to claim what it believes to be its “rightful position as the world’s dominant power”—a title it intends to hold by 2049.

“They seek to create a world where America as a global power is a distant memory and where the rules of power are set by China,” she said. “And today we are in the last 30 years of China’s 100-year marathon, and under the leadership of Chairman Xi, they are sprinting to the finish line, because they think we are too weak, and broken politically, economically, and militarily to stop them.”

That is why it’s critical that every Airman not only understand the threat but also their role in deterring and defeating potential adversaries, Bass said. China is not only focused on defeat, it wants to break the United States’ will to fight—and will do whatever it takes to make that happen.

“They don’t feel bound by rules, laws, or norms that govern warfare,” she said. “This requires us to change our way of thinking and how we prepare our Airmen for the future. It is what is driving us to refocus our readiness efforts from contingency operations to a future high-end fight. Again, every Airman needs to understand that future conflict will look very different from what we have seen in the past 20 to 30 years. It will span across multiple domains, using any and all advantages and tactics on both military and non-military targets. The high-end fight that we must prepare for could be unlike anything we have ever faced in history, and it will require us to accelerate the change we need today to win tomorrow.”

The service last spring released a series of core competencies expected of all Airmen, such as job proficiency and adaptability, that will serve as the roadmap to empowerment, Bass said. These skills will serve as the foundation of the future force, so Airmen will be able to competently execute the mission, lead at all levels, manage resources, and improve their units.

“We must trust and empower them to do so from the most junior Airmen all the way up because it’s our Airmen, our Airmen, that remain our most competitive advantage over any adversary that we may have,” Bass said.

Air Force Reserve Plans for Gaps Between Retiring Old Aircraft, Bringing in Modern Planes

Sept. 28, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

If Secretary Frank Kendall and other Air Force leaders get their way, the service will be retiring older aircraft in the near future as it looks to modernize. Specifically, legacy systems such as the A-10, KC-135, F-16, and C-130H are all primed for the chopping block, based on the USAF’s recent budget requests.

Should that happen, as Kendall has insisted it needs to, the Air Force Reserve stands to be affected in a major way—roughly two thirds of the Reserve’s 324 aircraft are C-130Hs, KC-135s, F-16s, and A-10s.

What’s more, replacements for those aircraft are not necessarily on a one-for-one basis, at least not right away. The F-35 fleet is still being filled out. The KC-46 tanker has faced steep challenges, most of which have yet to be fully resolved. The Next Generation Air Dominance program may not be ready for years to come.

The result, Air Force Reserve chief Lt. Gen. Richard W. Scobee acknowledged, will likely be a gap between old airplanes going away and new ones arriving.

“In a perfect world, it would be heel to toe, you would have one butting up against the other,” Scobee said during a media roundtable at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. “On a regular basis, I am reminded we do not live in a perfect world.”

Scobee, who served as the Reserve’s director of plans, programs, and requirements back in 2013-14, is familiar with the challenges that come from programs shifting. In his eyes, there’s a distinct timeframe for which he would feel comfortable handling any sort of gap between old and new.

“What I can do is if there is a year gap, from when one thing starts to another thing ends, I’d like them to be heel to toe, but I can gap a year,” Scobee said. “And the way I do that is I don’t own one of anything. I have to have at least two of anything that goes on.”

Indeed, the Air Force Reserve has multiple units with F-16s, A-10s, and KC-135s. Should one of those units lose their aircraft, Scobee said the others will help pick up the slack to ensure pilots and maintainers can keep up their training.

“If you look at the fighters and those kinds of things, I’ll have another unit,” Scobee said. “So what we’ll do is we’ll share airplanes, we’ll share flying hours, we’ll share the opportunities to turn wrenches, and we’ll be able to turn up some of the flying hours in order to keep people on the staff.”

Should the gap last longer than a year, Scobee said, “It becomes very hard, because then, even with attrition, I’ll lose a lot of people and it’ll take me a few years to gain them back.” At the same time, the Active-duty Air Force and the Air National Guard should be able to help, as they have done in the past.

While the coming years will likely mark the biggest weapons systems changes facing the Reserve in years, Scobee noted that AFRC has experience changing over to other new equipment and readjusting its organizational structure.

“What it really boils down to is we have a plan for how we go forward,” Scobee said. “As these changes occur, what we want everybody to understand is we have done this before. It’s not that new to us, and we’ve been very successful. And everybody whose job may transition or change because of the new weapon system, we’re going to take care of them individually.”

Scobee compared the situation to the most recent Base Realignment and Closure Commission in 2005.

“We didn’t lose one person because of BRAC, unless they wanted to retire [or] they wanted to transition to something else,” Scobee claimed. “We were able to get them positions within our organization. Especially because in the Reserve we don’t have any state borders to worry about, we can move people to other organizations. So I’d say we have a plan for that.”

There is one system, however, that Scobee admitted he is “really concerned about”—the B-1B. The Air Force is down to 45 of the bombers, with no plans to retire any more until the new B-21 is ready for duty. The Reserve has just one B-1 unit, the 489th Bomb Group, which flies B-1s at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, part of the 7th Bomb Wing.

“B-1 is a tougher example, because I don’t own two B-1 units. … So the B-1 will be a heavy lift, but one that I’m confident we’ll succeed in, because no matter how hard I try and make it on our people, they succeed,” Scobee joked.

Hypersonic HAWC Missile Flies, but Details Are Kept Hidden

Sept. 27, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) vehicle, developed under a partnership of the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, made a free flight the week of Sept. 20, a DARPA spokesman said, but most details are being withheld. The vehicle, which was built by Raytheon Technologies with a hypersonic engine built by Northrop Grumman, flew faster than Mach 5, but DARPA declined to say how long the vehicle flew.

The engine “kicked on” seconds after being released from an aircraft, which DARPA and the Air Force declined to identify, although DARPA expressed appreciation to “Navy flight test personnel.” The Navy has been conducting hypersonic missile research with F/A-18 aircraft.

The engine “compressed incoming air mixed with its hydrocarbon fuel and began igniting that fast-moving airflow mixture, propelling the cruiser at a speed greater than Mach 5,” DARPA said. In order for the scramjet engine to ignite, the vehicle must be moving at hypersonic speed, so a booster is used for that portion of the flight.

All of the “primary” goals of the test flight were achieved, including “vehicle integration and release sequence, safe separation from the launch aircraft, booster ignition and boost, booster separation and engine ignition, and cruise.”

The HAWC is exploring air-breathing hypersonic flight in parallel with the Air Force’s AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid-Response Weapon (ARRW), which is accelerated to hypersonic speed by a rocket before being released and gliding toward its target.

“The HAWC free flight test was a successful demonstration of the capabilities that will make hypersonic cruise missiles a highly effective tool for our warfighters,” said DARPA tactical technology office program manager Andrew Knoedler. The test “brings us one step closer to transitioning HAWC to a program of record that offers next generation capability to the U.S military.”

A DARPA spokesman quoted Knoedler as saying, “We are readying our next vehicles and working toward additional flight tests later in the year.”

Knoedler said the test is “the culmination of years of successful government and industry partnership, where a single, purpose-driven team accomplished an extremely challenging goal through intense collaboration.” He credited a partnership of the Air Force and “Navy flight test personnel who persevered through the pandemic to make the magic happen.”

HAWC builds on previous hypersonic scramjet projects, including the X-30 National Aero-Space Plane “as well as unmanned flights of NASA’s X-43 vehicles and the U.S. Air Force’s X-51 Waverider,” Knoedler said.

The Air Force has said it plans to pursue both the ARRW and the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM), as initial and future hypersonic attack capabilities, respectively. The HACM will be an air-breathing system, which would have longer range than the ARRW because it can use ambient air for oxidizer, rather than relying on the boost effects of a missile. As ARRW glides to its target, it will lose energy because it is no longer powered. While the Air Force plans to put the ARRW on the B-52 in early iterations, it has said the HACM will be smaller and carried on fighter-sized aircraft.

The HAWC flight test data “will help validate affordable system designs and manufacturing approaches that will field air-breathing hypersonic missiles to our warfighters in the near future,” DARPA said.

DARPA announced one year ago that it had just completed captive-carry tests of HAWC and would make a free flight by the end of 2020, but that test was scrubbed, and apparently it took another 10 months to re-attempt it. Recent efforts to fly ARRW have not been successful, and an investigation into a July failed attempt is still underway.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said last week he’s not satisfied with the pace of achievement in USAF’s hypersonic missile programs and pledged an upcoming “deep dive” into the various programs underway, looking for ways to improve and accelerate them.

Lockheed Martin is also working on HAWC, but DARPA did not mention the company in its release.

‘Jury’s Still Out’ on How Air Force Will Handle Specialty Codes With Multi-capable Airmen

Sept. 27, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

Air Force leaders have spoken extensively over the past few years about their desire to empower Airmen to be multi-capable, training them through Agile Combat Employment exercises to operate in small groups in austere locations, using broader skillsets to do whatever is necessary.

What exactly that means for Air Force Speciality Codes, however, is still being debated, Lt. Gen. Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, head of Air Education and Training Command, said Sept. 22 at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“The jury’s still out on that,” Webb said when asked in a panel discussion if the service planned to start combining AFSCs for multi-capable Airmen. “We’re split really, even at the senior levels of the Air Force, on how we’re going to proceed.”

On one hand, Webb said, some skills need a person dedicated and trained specifically to do that job, and therefore a combined AFSC wouldn’t make sense. On the other, though, certain skills can apply to different competencies, Webb said, and could “leapfrog” across AFSCs.

While senior leaders debate the approach and definitions that will undergird the system, Webb offered a prediction for the near future.

“I think we’re gonna see it, at least in these early stages, play out episodically and differently across AFSCs, just like Agile Combat Employment and multi-capable Airmen definitions are playing out differently in the theaters as well,” Webb said.

Webb was also asked how the Air Force plans to develop top-notch “software developers, data scientists, and AI engineers” to go along with pilots and maintainers, and he pointed to changes in speciality codes as part of that shifting focus.

“Probably we will see AFSC migration to some extent towards the things that make sense in a digital Air Force,” Webb said. “And I mean that departmentwide, where we don’t have the exact same AFSC linkage that we have today going forward.”

Regardless of how AFSCs look in the future, Webb added, competencies will continue to be the foundation of Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s push to “empower Airmen.”

“The essence of empowering our people—there’s one little caveat that you have to have up front so that you don’t have ‘Lord of the Flies,’ and that is competence,” Webb said. “And so these competencies, whether they’re foundational competencies or occupational competencies, become very important.”

Foundational competencies, in particular, are key to crafting a new force, Webb said—one that can compete with China and Russia.

“At some point … we have to get to what is foundational. What is common to this approach, this agility of mindset, this understanding mission-type orders, being able to understand that you’re empowered to go out and you get after it, becomes very important,” Webb said. “These are the kinds of skills when I talk about foundational competencies that we’re focused on from the very get-go—Basic Military Training through technical training.”

Indeed, ensuring every Airman possesses core competencies and is empowered to make decisions is how the U.S. cannot just compete but separate itself from China, Webb said.

“When you look at China, in particular, with all its focus on space, cyberspace, hypersonics, developing their military … they could do that because they have a very authoritarian regime and not a lot of friction,” Webb said. “They fundamentally do not trust their people. The difference in America, and certainly the United States Air Force, is that we do trust our people.”

Security Demands Challenge Air Force, Defense Contractor Collaboration With Academia

Sept. 27, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

Deeper partnerships outside the traditional defense industrial base are needed to help the Air Force deliver cutting-edge technology to the warfighter, but relationships with academia can be challenging, according to panelists at AFA’s Air, Space, & Cyber Conference.

Both the military services and the traditional defense contractors that serve them are going to have to learn to work with a much broader spectrum of partners if they are to “meet the requirements of the Air Force’s core missions in fulfilling the interim national security strategy … in a very challenging budgetary environment,” said Brig. Gen. Robert K. Lyman, the assistant deputy chief of staff for cyber effects operations, who moderated the conference’s closing session.

Partnerships with academia were among the issues at the forefront of panelists’ concerns, highlighted by the rare presence of an academic among them. Ed Vasko, director of Boise State University’s Institute of Pervasive Cybersecurity, offered a “shout out” to AFA members who had “pushed for Boise State to be here.”

“Academia really hadn’t been at the table” at previous Air, Space & Cyber events, Vasko said.

But there were challenges in working with academic institutions, the panelists acknowledged.

Steven Marker, the vice president for strategy and business development, cyber systems, at General Dynamics Mission Systems noted that his company signed master research agreements to collaborate with a number of universities. One issue that came up a lot, he said, was security: Would only graduate students who were U.S. citizens be allowed to work on projects with General Dynamics? And would the data from the project be specially segmented and protected on the university network?

“As part of our qualification of which universities we’re going to establish master research agreements with, this is one of the things we specifically addressed with them is their ability to bring on board U.S. citizen graduate students and their ability to segment the data,” said Marker.

Academic institutions that could not or would not meet the security requirements ended up being cut out of the GD ecosystem, he said.

“Honestly, there’s been universities where we’ve wanted to partner with them, because we see them as the world-class institution for [some particular technology] but they just can’t get over the hump of providing the type of graduate students that are needed to work it or guaranteeing the [data] protections [on their networks]. And so we’ll move to a different university,” Marker said.

The academic culture of universities tended to resist such security measures, said Vasko, although that was changing. “There’s been a degree of willingness to recognize the need to ensure that protection depending upon the specific partner or agency or funding source. That’s needed for protection of key intellectual data. And then the right to publish simply goes in the back seat,” he said.

The key to successful partnerships was being clear upfront about any expectations, explained Dan Rice, vice president of 5G.mil programs at Lockheed Martin.

In the company’s relationships with academic institutions, “we do ensure that through the terms and conditions, either formally or informally, that we get the ability to review the staff that’s going to be applied, that we have the ability to do security reviews on publications. Without restricting the desire of universities to publish research work, even if it’s funded by the government or by industry, to at least have that opportunity to review it and go through and provide feedback on things that should or shouldn’t be disclosed in the open press,” Rice said.

He suggested that academic institutions should employ the kind of insider threat detection tools made mandatory for Intelligence Community and DOD agencies following the June 2013 Snowden leaks and the Navy Yard shootings later that same summer. The tools track public information about employees, such as arrest warrants, debts, and any court records, as well as logging network activities on their work computer in a more timely manner than the traditional annual or five-yearly reviews.

“I think one other thing that industry and government can do is extending our insider threat practices to also evaluate the team members that we have on our university research activities. And I know this is something that Lockheed Martin does to ensure that when we see red flags, those get addressed, and we take the appropriate actions,” Rice said.

These broader partnerships are the key to unlocking the potential of new technologies for the warfighter, he added. “There’s no one source of innovation,” he told Air Force Magazine in an interview afterward.

Such partnerships had existed for decades but were changing, he said. “I think that they are becoming deeper. They’re becoming more enduring. They’re less transactional. It isn’t just about what technology can you give me today to solve my immediate problem, but it’s really about a strategic relationship.”

Those longer-term relationships could yield significant value, and industry members had become practiced at building them, said retired Air Force colonel and an AT&T executive vice president, Lance Spencer. “If you look under the hood of AT&T, you will see a lot of companies … We may have the AT&T globe and logo on it. And we’re the ones bringing it together. And we’re operationalizing it and scaling it and delivering it. But we have incubation environments where we’re working with startups. And we evaluate how they might grow and scale. And then we invest in those companies to solve problems like zero trust,” he said.

Although conventional wisdom painted a picture of the traditional military contractors as the consumers of innovation produced elsewhere, by startups or digital consumer giants, the reality was more complicated, Rice said.

“There are technology areas that we invest in because of the types of businesses we’re in that are also of great interest to the commercial industry,” he said. Niche technologies such as antennas capable of using many different parts of the spectrum—developed to operate in contested environments—could also be useful in congested ones. “Commercial industry is trying to optimize their use of spectrum,” he noted, so the capability of a single antenna to take advantage of different pieces of the spectrum is of “great interest” in the commercial sector.

Innovation, he said, “becomes a two way relationship.”