Air Force Adds Situational Judgment Component to WAPS

Dec. 16, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allies May Join Experiments to Solve Interoperability Issues With JADC2

Dec. 15, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec. 15, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec. 15, 2021 | By Abraham Mahshie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress Passes 2022 NDAA, Sending Bill to President Biden

Dec. 15, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Air Force Releases First Doctrine Note on Agile Combat Employment

Dec. 14, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lockheed to Offer ‘Competitive Pricing’ on T-50-Derived Advanced Fighter Trainer

Dec. 14, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

Lockheed Martin will offer a variant of its T-50A in the competition to build the Air Force’s new tactical fighter trainer rather than a clean-sheet design, the company said Dec. 14, insisting it will achieve “competitive pricing” with the aircraft. The jet was second in the T-X competition that Boeing won with a fresh design three years ago.

“Lockheed Martin has responded to both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy for their respective advanced tactical training programs,” the company said in a press release, referring to the Air Force’s Advanced Tactical Trainer and the Navy’s Tactical Surrogate Aircraft. “And, we look forward to developing competitive pricing for TF-50 aircraft programs that would meet the requirements as defined today.” A spokesperson elaborated that this goal will also cover “any new requirements that emerge in the future.”

The company’s T-X proposal “was based on a low-risk solution, the T-50A configuration that was aggressively priced to meet the requirements, including a 2023 [initial operational capability] date,” she said. “Since then, we have made significant advances in digital engineering and open architectures that are enabling affordability and at the same time, accelerating development, production, upgrades, and responsiveness.”

When queried about the ATT fighter trainer in October, Lockheed Martin said it would offer a solution to the ATT query but was reviewing the requirements and not yet ready to say if it would offer a new airplane, as Boeing did in the T-X.

Lockheed Martin and Boeing went head to head for the Air Force’s T-X, with Lockheed Martin offering the T-50A, a derivative of the T-50 jet trainer it developed with Korea Aerospace Industries. When the Air Force announced that Boeing had won that contest in September 2018, it said the company bid nearly $10 billion less than what the service itself expected to pay. Boeing has chalked up its win to advanced digital design, a streamlined software plan, and open-system architecture.

Lockheed Martin did not elaborate on why it is again offering the T-50 rather than a new, tailored design.

Lockheed’s ATT nomenclature of TF-50 is a hybrid of its T-50 trainer and the F-50 light fighter based on the T-50. Lockheed and KAI have sold variants of the airplane to Indonesia, Iraq, the Philippines, and Thailand.

“The designation depends on the configuration and the customer requirements,” the spokesperson said, noting that South Korea operates the jet in four configurations: T-50 for advanced jet training; TA-50 for lead-in fighter training; T-50B for the “Black Eagles” demonstration team; and FA-50 for light combat aircraft. The T-50A offered in the T-X competition was a “block upgrade to the baseline aircraft” with a fifth-generation cockpit, advanced avionics, and an embedded training system, aerial refueling capability, and “other enhancements to meet” Air Education and Training Command’s needs.

“The TF-50 is configured as a light attack fighter/trainer with additional enhancements to include radar, [electronic warfare] system, tactical data link, and other capabilities” to meet Air Combat Command requirements, she said.

The Air Force announced the ATT competition Oct. 12, saying it wants between 100 and 400 airplanes to serve as a bridge between undergraduate pilot training and frontline fighter squadrons. The goal is to offload much of the training now done on actual frontline fighters to the new aircraft, saving money and freeing the frontline aircraft for combat assignments. The program dovetails with ACC’s “Reforge” concept for overhauling fighter training. The Air Force wanted responses by Nov. 23 describing what companies could offer in terms of “feasibility, estimated cost, and schedule” for the first 100 aircraft. USAF has not said when it expects to introduce the new airplane.

Because the Air Force and Navy’s needs are so similar, USAF said contractors could simply submit the same information for both. The Navy wants a trainer to succeed its T-45, but its concept currently calls for student pilots to perform only touch-and-go’s on an aircraft carrier, not fully arrested traps. Consequently, the aircraft need not have an arrestor hook and associated equipment.

Air Force leaders have suggested—even before Boeing won the T-X—that the winner of that contest would likely see a secondary USAF market for tactical trainers and companion trainers, akin to the application of the T-38 in those roles over the last five decades. However, the Air Force has said the ATT is not a lock for Boeing and that the service wants competition.

Moreover, while Boeing has said the T-7A could be modified for combat tasks, it lacks the external hardpoints the Air Force wants in the ATT and has only an optional aerial refueling system. The T-7A design was focused on Air Education and Training Command’s requirements for the T-X and not toward future derivatives, Boeing said at the time it was selected.

The ATT requirements specify that it must be able to carry various sensor or electronic warfare pods and/or external fuel tanks.

Air Combat Command is also looking at buying or leasing a handful of advanced trainers to prove the Reforge concept before the T-7A is available, and Lockheed is a competitor offering the T-50 for that requirement.

The Air Force requires that the ATT have a secure open architecture. Preferred capabilities—desirable but not mandatory—include a zero-zero ejection seat and an automatic ground collision avoidance system as well as a helmet-mounted display system.

AFRL’s ‘Fight Tonight’ to Prototype AI and Gaming Tech for Attack Planning

Dec. 14, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

The Air Force is looking for ways to combine artificial intelligence and interactive gaming technology to revolutionize and dramatically shorten the process of planning complex air attack operations.

At two industry days Dec. 8 and 9, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate in Rome, N.Y., asked interested vendors to submit white papers by Jan. 10 explaining how they would use each of these new technologies to augment human decision-making in the planning cycle and slash the time taken to produce a master air attack plan (MAAP) from 36 hours or more to four. The program, called Fight Tonight, provides a total of $99 million in funding, which AFRL expects to hand out in two phases, each featuring two or more separate awards of between $3 and $40 million.

“These master attack plans are at the theater level,” Jeffrey Hudack, the Fight Tonight technical director, told Air Force Magazine. “They cover all our forces in theater—resource and target allocation, materiel and logistics, airspace management—there are thousands of assets …. Tasking them all together, figuring out the most effective way to achieve objectives, is an incredibly complex undertaking.”

The length and complexity of the MAAP planning cycle means commanders don’t generally get presented with more than a handful of options, added Fight Tonight Program Manager Lt. Col. Sean Carlson. “Because the process is incredibly cumbersome, you really have to commit to one course of action early on so that you can effectively plan your logistics and align all the other pieces to make it happen.” But that comes at a heavy price: “Because the process takes so long, and the environment is so dynamic, oftentimes, by the time [the planning] is done, the landscape has changed so much that your initial plan has lost effectiveness.”

Artificial intelligence could dramatically shorten that planning process, Hudack explained. “AI is very good at situations where we have known quantities—managing fuel requirements, matching weapons to targets, knowing how many aircraft of which type you need for a particular task,” he said. For instance, making a series of incremental adjustments to a plan, which would involve recalculating fuel demands and multiple other cascading changes, currently takes many hours. Fight Tonight would make it possible in minutes.

On the other hand, Hudack said, humans are better at assessing less easily quantifiable factors. In drawing up the MAAP, there may be “political considerations, or other considerations that aren’t really amenable to being read by a machine,” he said. “What we’ve come to realize is that there are certain things AI is good at, and there are certain things humans are good at, and navigating that line is really where the value comes.”

The announcement says that, based on the white papers, AFRL may invite one or more vendors to submit detailed technical proposals by Feb 25. Fight Tonight is sponsored by AFRL’s Transformational Capabilities Office.

The biggest changes from Fight Tonight, said Carlson, will come in the ease with which alternative possible options can be generated and assessed, making it possible to explore the trade-offs between different courses of action. “You’re talking about going from two or three possible options to hundreds,” he said.

Assessing those much larger collections of options is where the second kind of new technology, interactive gaming, comes in, Hudack added. “You can’t just hand over a bunch of spreadsheets and say, ‘Here’s all the data you need to make your decision.’ … The gaming industry has decades of experience designing user interfaces that take you right to the high-level information you need and then allow you to drill down into the finer-grained data.”

The idea is to integrate the two kinds of technology into a single user interface that can be connected to the real-life data sources available to mission planners in an Air Operations Center, or AOC.

The program envisions a two-stage development process. In Phase 1, vendors will spend two-and-a-half years developing and prototyping the technology. In Phase 2, they’ll have two years to test, integrate, and eventually install it in a real AOC.

Fight Tonight will have a radical impact on the way planners do their jobs, said Hudack, which was why the two-phase process was important: “You have to co-evolve the technology and the concepts of operations” that employ it, he said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 10:08 a.m. Dec. 16 to correctly refer to master air attack plans (MAAPs).

UN Addresses Lethal Autonomous Weapons—aka ‘Killer Robots’—Amid Calls for a Treaty

Dec. 14, 2021 | By Amanda Miller

The United Nations’ secretary-general advocated for new restrictions on autonomous weapons as a U.N. group that negotiates weapons protocols started a week of meetings, in part, to discuss the matter.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressed the Review Conference of the U.N.’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Taking place in Geneva, Switzerland, the Review Conference happens every five years. Guterres preceded the weeklong meeting with a Dec. 13 message encouraging conference members “to agree on an ambitious plan for the future to establish restrictions on the use of certain types of autonomous weapons.”

He described autonomous weapons as those “that can choose targets and kill people without human interference.” The conference has identified artificial intelligence, for one, as an “increasingly autonomous” technology.

The Air Force has experimented with autonomous weapons such as the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Golden Horde, which did not become a program of record but did succeed in getting Small Diameter Bombs to collaborate with each other after receiving and interpreting commands mid-flight. The experimental Perdix micro-drones, under the DOD’s Strategic Capabilities Office, rely on AI. And although the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Gremlins drones don’t rely on AI yet, they’re designed to accommodate that level of computing.

Some countries and international rights groups want the convention to negotiate a treaty that would ban what the U.N. calls lethal autonomous weapons systems—and what others call “killer robots”—but diplomats told Reuters that’s not likely to happen this week. It would require a consensus, and the U.S., for one, has already rejected the idea. Russia was expected to do the same.

The U.N. group began convening experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems in 2014. It could agree on other guidelines short of a treaty, a diplomat told Reuters.

Speaking during an American Enterprise Institute webinar about AI on Dec. 7, NATO’s David van Weel articulated why countries such as the U.S. might oppose a treaty on autonomous weapons.

Van Weel put the issue in terms of a hypothetical attack by a swarm of drones. “How do we defend against them? Well, we can’t, frankly, because you need AI in that case in order to be able to counter AI,” he said.

Van Weel represented a minority on the panel. His counterparts—an Oxford scholar and a tech attorney—supported a treaty to “de-weaponize” AI. The University of Oxford’s Xiaolan Fu, professor of technology and international development, thought that even to start a dialog would amount to progress.

Considering AI to have “the risk to be as toxic as a nuclear weapon, if not more,” Tech Group co-head Jonathan Kewley of the firm Clifford Chance said AI-enabled weapons need people in the loop the same way nuclear weapons do.

AI “doesn’t have a conscience. It doesn’t have a moral fiber unless it’s programmed in,” Kewley said. “AI has the risk to be as toxic as a nuclear weapon, if not more, and if we don’t have the equivalent of that moral compass, the finger on the button designed in through a treaty—because we’re not going to design the technology to prevent this unless there is a treaty involving China, the U.S., and others—we’re going to have a similar issue to nuclear risk.”

NATO’s van Weel suggested he might stop short of AI-assisted activities that the U.S. has already acknowledged, at least in experiments.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall revealed in September that the Air Force’s chief architect’s office “deployed AI algorithms for the first time to a live operational kill chain … for automated target recognition,” though neither he nor an Air Force spokesperson at the time provided details about the target. Meanwhile in October, the Army-led, joint-service Rapid Dragon exercise relied on AI analysis of satellite images for targeting and reportedly shortened the decision-making from what might have taken as long as five hours to just one hour while also improving accuracy.

However, van Weel suggested that current AI, which he described as “very preliminary” and “very rudimentary,” is “by no means capable of making such important decisions,” even just “using AI to enhance the decision-making process.”

In its Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence, the DOD says its AI will possess “the ability to detect and avoid unintended consequences, and the ability to disengage or deactivate deployed systems that demonstrate unintended consequences,” but the document stops short of specifying humans’ role in its principle covering governability.