Black Sea NATO Allies Call for Added Security Amid Russian Buildup

Dec. 17, 2021 | By Abraham Mahshie

The Russian troop buildup on the Ukrainian border and in the heavily militarized Black Sea region has led to calls by Black Sea allies to increase NATO and U.S. deterrence to prevent further Russian efforts to divide and isolate some of the alliance’s newest members.

With over 100,000 Russian troops surrounding Ukraine on three sides and activity consistent with combat preparation, the Biden administration has opted to pursue diplomacy with Russia following a Dec. 7 virtual summit between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But NATO allies who are members of the Bucharest Nine (B9) group of eastern flank nations have indicated to Biden and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on a Dec. 16 call that more American presence is needed now to deter an invasion of Ukraine.

“If the U.S. and NATO are not careful, the Black Sea will be a Russian lake,” Romanian military attaché in Washington, D.C., Col. Catalin-Constantin Mihalache told Air Force Magazine, noting how Russia has increased and modernized its Western region forces.

“The goal in the Black Sea is to isolate NATO regional partners, Georgia and Ukraine, by taking advantage of the lack of strategic and comprehensive day-to-day NATO presence and strategy,” he added.

Following a Dec. 10 B9 call with Biden, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis took to Twitter to highlight the case he made to Biden.

“I … underlined [Romanian] support for an increased NATO & US military presence in #Romania & at the #BlackSea,” he wrote.

Mihalache said the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a national security concern for Romania and NATO. Russian-occupied Crimea, which has become a heavily militarized anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) bastion in the Black Sea since annexation in 2014, is just 200 miles from Romania’s shores.

“It’s closing the distance,” he said of a potential further Russian incursion of Ukraine. “Russia will approach not only Romania but will be close to the NATO border.”

An Oct. 27 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Black Sea security detailed an uneven NATO policy of enhanced forward presence in the Baltic nations and tailored forward presence in southeastern Europe. Experts suggested that directing more robust assistance to the north led Russia to concentrate its aggression in the south. Romania established a NATO Multinational Corps South-East headquarters in Sibiu in part to encourage an increase in allied presence.

“We are very determined to build our capability and to have NATO and the U.S. join us in this effort and support us,” Mihalache said, noting that Romania also awaits a decision about global force posture that could lead to additional U.S. troops in the country. About 1,000 U.S. troops are present at any given time in Romania.

In his role as the air attaché, the Romanian official highlighted the importance of the NATO Black Sea posture and current cooperation with the U.S.

“The air domain is key for the credibility and effectiveness of the allied regional collective posture,” Mihalache explained. “The U.S. presence and persistent contribution of ISR and situational awareness is making the allied regional progress.”

The U.S. began basing MQ-9 Reapers at Romanian Air Base 71 in Campia Turzii in January. Romania maintains a small Air Force of F-16s and Soviet-era MiG-21s upgraded with Israeli technology. Romania also benefits from NATO air policing.

Mihalache said Romania’s Air Force plans a purchase of two squadrons of F-16s from Norway that will eventually replace the MiG-21s.

Romania also has the first Patriot missile defense system on the eastern flank. Some of the seven batteries contracted are operational, while others have yet to arrive.

Mihalache highlighted the recent presence of an American bomber task force supported by Romanian F-16s.

U.S. Pursues Diplomacy, Holds Back Military Aid for Now

A senior administration official briefing reporters Dec. 17 said the 2014 Minsk negotiations, which led to a quieting of hostilities with Russian-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine, are the principal format the U.S. is advocating for to resolve the crisis on the border.

“But the U.S. is prepared to use our bilateral channels to Moscow and to Kyiv to support, if we can,” the official said.

In recent days, State Department officials have visited Moscow to entertain Russian proposals for moving forward. In the past, Putin has said Ukraine or Georgia entry into NATO is a red line, and he has discouraged military assistance to the countries.

Members of Congress have nonetheless urged Biden to answer a November request from Ukraine for additional military assistance, including air defenses that the country says are necessary to deter a Russian invasion. A Ukrainian defense official recently told Air Force Magazine that an American air defense team was in the country to assess needs, but no announcement of new assistance has been made.

“We are also in intensive dialogue with the Ukrainians at all levels, including DOD and EUCOM [U.S. European Command], with regard to their needs,” the administration official said, adding that the conversation included allies who may be able to offer defense assistance. “We will continue to keep those lines open as necessary and as we see what the Ukrainian requirements are.”

In a Dec. 16 congressional hearing titled “Defending Ukraine, Deterring Putin,” Andrew Bowen, an analyst in Russian and European affairs at the Congressional Research Service, identified the U.S. NATO Black Sea presence as the rationale for Russia’s hostility.

“Russian political and military leaders assert that the increased expansion of NATO and the presence of … European and U.S. military forces on its border and Black Sea are an existential security threat to Russia,” he said.

Bowen said the leaders are concerned that NATO and U.S. military forces will eventually place long-range precision strike missile defense systems nearby. Romania already has a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), a light multiple rocket launcher.

The defense official also said the southeastern flank needs better investment in command-and-control capabilities and access to satellite reconnaissance data. Adding the capabilities to the southeastern flank, he argued, would make protection and deterrence at the eastern border of NATO more uniform.

“The allied approach needs to be firm and credible and requires united and coherent deterrent efforts to the entire flank,” he said.

“This is an unprecedented challenge in the post-Cold War because we didn’t have such an escalation since the end of the Cold War,” Mihalache continued. “It requires our allied and U.S. immediate reaction and attention.”

Air Force Names New Chief Information Security Officer to Lead Cyber Innovation

Dec. 17, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

The Department of the Air Force has a new chief information security officer, filling a post that’s been without a full-time occupant for nearly a year.

The appointment of James “Aaron” Bishop was first announced Dec. 16 at the AFCEA of Northern Virginia Air Force IT Day by his boss, Department of the Air Force Chief Information Officer Lauren Knausenberger.

“His experience combines military experience and private-sector experience, and I believe he is the type of leader who can move us forward quickly while also building and developing our workforce to run with him,” Knausenberger wrote in reply to a query.

At the AFCEA event, she said Bishop will have a mandate to drive and highlight cybersecurity innovation across the department, which encompasses both the Air and Space Forces. In particular, she mentioned the novel tools and policies provided over the past two or three years to ease the process of getting authority to operate (ATO) for new IT systems. The Fast Track ATO process laid out in March 2019 allows for ATOs to be issued after penetration testing of a system rather than via extensive paper documentation of security controls. And under a blanket purchase agreement signed last year, any office can hire a certified “red team” to conduct that pen-testing and then use the results as the basis for an ATO.

But the new process hasn’t caught on as quickly as Knausenberger would have liked. “Across the big enterprise, we need to do a better job of governance of the [ATO] boundaries,” she said, adding this would be a priority for Bishop. “I think he’s going to be the right guy to grab that and to move [it] forward. So I think we’ll have some improvement on just the brass tacks side of that over the next year,” she said.

Bishop started Nov. 22, Knausenberger said in reply to the query. He was the top choice of the three-person Senior Executive Service selection panel. The post has been without a full-time occupant since previous incumbent Wanda T. Jones-Heath was dual hatted as acting principal cyber adviser in the Air Force Secretary’s office in December 2020, according to her official biography. Her transfer to an acting position meant a replacement couldn’t be hired until she was given the permanent appointment as PCA, Knausenberger explained.

Bishop’s role, according to his biography, includes “oversight for the Freedom of Information Act, Privacy Act laws, and cryptographic modernization supporting cyber operations for the department.”

Prior to his appointment, Bishop was CEO and founder of the Quantum Security Alliance, a public-private partnership research organization. Before that he held several posts, including CISO with massive federal IT contractor SAIC. He was general manager of Microsoft‘s National Security Group for a decade before that.

Adm. Grady Confirmed as Joint Chiefs Vice Chair, Filling Monthlong Vacancy

Dec. 17, 2021 | By Abraham Mahshie

The Senate confirmed Naval Fleet Forces Commander Adm. Christopher W. Grady as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff late Dec. 16. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is tentatively scheduled to perform Grady’s swearing-in Dec. 20, the office of the Joint Chiefs confirmed.

The Senate voice vote assures the vacancy created by the retirement of the former Vice Chair, Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten, is filled before Congress adjourns for the holidays.

Grady brings a personnel and nuclear background from his current position in Norfolk, Va., overseeing the naval leg of the nuclear triad. His call for “ready-relevant learning” also became part of the Navy’s modernization doctrine.

In addition to serving as commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command/U.S. Naval Forces Northern Command since 2018, Grady has served as commander of U.S. Naval Forces Strategic Command and U.S. Strategic Command Joint Force Maritime Component Commander since 2019.

Grady previously served as commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet and commander of Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO.

At his confirmation hearing Dec. 8, Grady warned that competitors have a new ability to “attack below the threshold of armed conflict,” and he promised to work with allies and partners toward whole-of-government deterrence, a concept known as “integrated deterrence” and often cited by Austin.

“We are faced with overt challenges to the international rules-based order and our national security in every domain,” Grady told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing. “Now, more than ever, global integration is essential,” he said, referring to “integrated deterrence in those multidomains, leveraging all elements of national power.”

Hack-a-Sat Organizers Pledge to Improve Scoring Transparency

Dec. 16, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

The Space Force’s second-ever Hack-a-Sat competition challenged hackers to find vulnerabilities in earthbound satellite hardware, drawing eight hacker teams to vie for tens of thousands of dollars in cash.

But while last year’s inaugural competition proved inspirational, this year’s ended amid complaints by participants, who said rules changing on the fly and poor communication by the organizers undermined the event.

Even those who performed well were frustrated. “We had really high hopes … for the contest, but at the end the disappointment and frustration completely took over, even after finishing second and winning a big cash prize,” wrote Michał Kowalczyk on CTFTime, a blog where contestants rate and review different capture-the-flag (CTF) competitions. Kowalczyk, whose hacker handle is Redford, is a co-founder the team “Poland Can Into Space,” which was the runner-up both this year and last. “I wish it was different, but I have to say that this was a pretty bad CTF.”

Organizers said they are working on the issues and trying to communicate directly with participants to ensure problems this year can be addressed ahead of future competitions.

CTFs have grown since the 1990s into an international hacker subculture, with hundreds of contests every year.  The competitions build teamwork and develop a collaborative muscle memory while at the same time helping security researchers hone and practice defensive and offensive skills.

The Space Force said the contest is “designed to inspire the world’s top cybersecurity talent to develop the skills necessary to help reduce vulnerabilities and build more secure space systems.”

Hack-A-Sat 2 was organized by representatives from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, and Cromulence, a contractor. Organizers said they will address the criticisms in follow-up meetings with the eight teams.

“We appreciate feedback and just as we did last year, we plan to have individual feedback sessions with each team to learn what worked well and what can be improved on for next year,” organizers wrote in a statement to Air Force Magazine.

Disappointment and Frustration

In an “attack-defend” CTF such as Hack-A-Sat, teams of “white-hat” hackers compete over an intense and often sleepless 24 to 48 hours. Each team must both defend its own satellite replica while attacking the replica systems defended by the other competitors.

“Hackers tend to be very direct people, very open about their opinion,” said Rubin Gonzalez, a founder of FluxRepeatRocket, a team based in Germany and the fourth-place finisher this year. “So if something went wrong they will generally have no problem with publicly stating that something was wrong.”

Gonzalez said his team wasn’t invited to the Slack channel used to communicate with competitors until well after the final round began, an oversight that left the team blind. “So for the first three hours, we had no idea what was going on,” he said. “We weren’t getting any of the information or announcements.”

Tyler Nighswander of Plaid Parliament of Pwning, a storied team connected with Carnegie Mellon University, complained that “lots of things regarding how the game operated were not explained clearly.”

Joshua Christman of Pwn-First Search described “a lack of communication and a lack of transparency.”

Poor communication made it hard for competitors to understand scoring awards and other decisions that, left unexplained, appeared arbitrary.

“Part of the problem is that organizers were and are ignoring our questions,” Kowalczyk said. “So we don’t really know the explanations and details for some of the things which happened.”

The organizers, in their statement, defended their communication style, noting that answering competitors’ questions had to be done in a way that didn’t unfairly influence the competition.

“Due to the nature of an attack/defend CTF, where teams are progressing at their own individual pace through the challenges, we have to address all [teams’ questions] in a manner that doesn’t disclose the solutions [to] the other teams because this would provide unfair advantage to the inquiring teams. If one team has figured something out, then it’s unfair to them to provide any hints or additional information to other teams,” the statement explained.

The organizers said that—as they did last year—they would publish an archive of all the Slack messages during the game.

Some participants defended the organizers. “No CTF is without its flaws/mistakes, but these organizers have always run good competitions in the past,” said Jonathan Elchison, one of the founders of SingleEventUpset, a team put together especially for Hack-A-Sat.

Atypical Challenge

All CTFs are technically challenging to stage, noted Elchison, but running one on hardware systems such as satellites, with embedded software and very different architecture from the conventional IT systems that most CTFs stage their competitions on, is “particularly difficult.”

Organizers used eight centrally located flat sats—real satellite hardware, but earthbound—as the systems that each team had to attack and defend. But they also provided teams with a digital twin of the satellites, a software emulation of the hardware systems on the flat sats.

“The contest goals were very ambitious,” agreed Nighswander, noting that “with such a complicated game to create, there was certainly a higher amount of technical effort than usual needed.”

“In a typical CTF,” explained the Hack-A-sat organizers, the different parts of the competition, known as “challenges,” tend to be independent from one another. But satellites—even the ground-based simulators or “flat sats” used in the contest—are “systems of systems” in which functions, also called services, depend on each other.  

“For HAS2, the challenges were interrelated and sometimes dependent on each other due to the nature of the flight software running on the flat sat hardware,” the organizers said. “This architecture drove many of the decisions made about scoring and the rules of engagement for the competition.”

Most criticism centered on these two elements. Gonzalez and other competitors said rules of engagement changed mid-game; and that the scoring system lacked the accustomed transparency—teams couldn’t tell why they were gaining or losing points.

A dashboard representing the flat sats’ systems and subsystems showed a system in green if it was functioning normally or in red if it wasn’t. Teams thought red meant they were losing points, but the organizers announced during the course of the game that if a system turned red, “that does not necessarily mean that you are losing points for it, it is simply a basic visualization.”

The organizers said they had to strike “a delicate balance in releasing just enough information about the scoring so that teams cannot game the system.” In a contest centered on hacking satellites, their statement continued, “the expectation was that teams knew what services on the satellite are critical.”

Nonetheless, they promised to do better next year. “With that said, we could improve our dashboard in the future to be more representative of the SLA metrics that were a factor in scoring.” Most of the points contestants could earn came from a service-level agreement, or SLA—they got points for keeping the various systems on their satellite functioning at a certain minimum level.

High Expectations

In the end, said Nighswander, the contest reached the right result: “I think the first and second placed teams Solar Wine and Poland Can Into Space were the ‘correct’ teams. They both did a great job, and they deserved their places, and I think that is very important.”

He suggested that expectations for Hack-A-Sat were high. “I think all of the participating teams have played in CTFs which were run worse than this contest was,” he said. But given that Hack-A-Sat was backed by the resources of the U.S. military, competitors expected a flawless execution. “There was an expectation level that I don’t think was cleared,” he said.

Gonzalez said the contest this year took “a step in the wrong direction,” but he hoped the organizers would listen to the criticisms because it’s “a really cool event.”

Solar Wine, the multinational Francophone team that won the contest and the $50,000 first prize, declined to comment on the controversy. “We will communicate our feedback to [the organizers] privately, as we did last year when we missed the podium for a technicality,” said team member Aris Adamantiadis.

He hoped the controversy wouldn’t overshadow their victory. He noted that, as well as a personal achievement for Solar Wine team members, the result also represented something of a breakthrough. “The big American CTFs are usually led by American teams,” he said, noting that Hack-A-Sat 1, although won by a U.S. team, had Polish and German teams in second and third places.

Solar Wine has members from France, Belgium, and Mauritius, Adamantiadis said, but the diversity that helped them win was their “diversity of skills. We have people specialized in the security aspects of reverse engineering, exploit development, cryptography, networks, IT infrastructure, scripting languages, and now even space packets, astrophysics, and satellite operation. All of these skills were key to navigate through Hack-A-Sat,” he said.

Winning, Adamantiadis concluded, was “an achievement that we are very proud of on a personal level of course, but there’s a bit of nationalistic pride, too!”

Minot B-52s Fly to Canada Then Calif. to Practice the Bomber Version of ACE

Dec. 16, 2021 | By Abraham Mahshie

Preparing for conflict in the Pacific will require more than learning to fly fighters out of austere locations—it will also call for small bomber crews to go on quick consecutive missions to unfamiliar places.

In a kinetic “bomber agile combat employment” (BACE) exercise Dec. 6-8, two B-52s from the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., conducted a mission in Canada then flew to Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., for a second mission, this time working alongside Navy counterparts.

“This was laying the foundation and the bed for getting to that austere and unfamiliar location,” Air Force Capt. Austyn Wilson, a weapons system officer in the wing’s 23rd Bomb Squadron, said in an interview. Wilson flew on one of the B-52s from Minot to Edwards and back for the two missions in three days.

Pacific Air Forces has spent decades adapting to operations in contested environments, first under the dynamic force employment concept and now under the Air Force’s new priority, agile combat employment (ACE).

Wilson said bomber ACE is about flexing new muscles and adapting to situations that were not part of prior operations and planning.

“You’re challenging assumptions, previous predictability, and you’re allowing the Air Force, and really our joint defense operations, to have adaptability that we haven’t seen in previous years,” she said.

Wilson said some of the questions the mission sought to answer were tactical: How are we going to conduct these missions? How are we demonstrating that flexibility? How are we sending a set of bombers to an austere location, making sure that they are self-sustained and able to execute combat out of an unknown location?

Answering those questions was exciting to the small maintenance team and aircrew of less than 20 who took part, she said, motivating them even as they prepared to board the aircraft Dec. 6 with temperatures hovering at negative 10 degrees with a negative-20-degree wind chill factor.

The bombers first flew to the range at Canadian Forces Base Shilo, Manitoba, working with Canadian Joint Tactical Ground Stations to drop 54 weapons. The aircrews then set course for Edwards for mission planning and an aircraft turnaround of less than 48 hours.

“One of the things that upgraded this mission … is our ability to operate jointly with the Navy,” Wilson said.

“Not only did we take off with our own weapons, and employ them en route to Edwards, but we were able to get the Mark 62 Quickstrike mines,” which are delivered into the water by air, “that we would also potentially be tasked with to support the Navy,” she added. “We were able to get those … built for us at Edwards, loaded, and employed the very next day.”

Speaking Air Force bomber language to Navy personnel was something she had to be ready for.

“Two different branches, two different languages, and two different ways of operating, processes, regulations,” she said. “Making sure that you’re speaking very clearly with what your intent is, and the meaning, the requirements.”

After landing at Edwards, a minimal support crew, some that flew ahead and some with the bombers, prepared the aircraft for its next mission at the Navy’s San Clemente Island Range Complex, a range off the California coast rarely used by B-52 pilots.

“We flew low level, at 3,000 feet over the water,” Wilson said, noting that the B-52 is one of the few platforms that can deliver mines. “We are getting our aviators ready to do so, if we’re called upon.”

Wilson also pointed out how bomber ACE was meant to challenge the assumptions of adversaries.

“I think our adversaries have seen us, especially B-52s, go to known locations over time, at predictable cycles,” she said.

“With bomber ACE, we are challenging that predictability. We’re making sure that our fleet is flexible, and that increases and strengthens our survivability,” she explained. “So now, when you send bombers to demonstrate these mission sets en route, and land somewhere else, you’re distributing the fleet. You’re decentralizing that control, and now you’re completely complicating the targeting solution for any of our adversaries.”

For Wilson, the sense of accomplishment and the excitement of the mission came from the series of milestones that had to be met by a small, willing 5th Bomb Wing team working with the Navy.

Bomber ACE milestones included getting into the aircraft within 20 minutes, getting off the ground in the next hour, dropping the bombs, and loading the mines. Each milestone was an accomplishment within a more complex mission set.

“Once we land at Edwards, you know, you want to take a sigh of relief of, ‘We did it,’ but that was only half the job. You have to do an entirely different mission set within 24 hours and get back home and get back home safely, with two B-52s that really are STRATCOM assets,” she said.

“The most exciting portion for me is [saying], ‘Hey, I want to challenge this tactic, this assumption. I want to go to the next level. Can you go here with me?’ And every single person that was involved in the planning and execution absolutely did that,” she said.

Air Force’s Enterprise, Warfighting IT Networks Have to Merge, Says Information Dominance Director

Dec. 16, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

To achieve the military’s vision of a totally networked multi-domain force, the Air Force must merge its enterprise IT networks, which join the computers on people’s desks and the smartphones in their pockets, with its aerial networks, which connect the sensors and weapons systems on planes.

That was the message from Kevin Stamey, the director of information dominance for the assistant secretary for acquisition technology and logistics, who spoke at the AFCEA of Northern Virginia Air Force IT Day on Dec 16.

The U.S. can’t simply outspend China or other potential peer adversaries, Stamey said, but must rely on an information advantage. “And if we don’t find ways to eliminate stovepipes between our IT networks and our aerial and our terrestrial layers, then we’re not going to have the information our warfighters need to dominate,” he said.

Modernization initiatives ranging from Flightline of the Future and smart depots to joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, “depend on our ability to collapse those stovepipes between the terrestrial and the aerial network layers,” Stamey added.

He called the separation of the two kinds of networks “one of the most glaring stovepipes we have today.”

The JADC2 vision, as Stamey laid it out, requires seamless connectivity between the sensors and weapons systems on a plane or other platform, the rear echelon commanders and planners, and the land or sea forces on the front lines, so that targets can be identified, assigned, and struck.

“Today, that process relies on things like chat [services] or voice calls or single ship-to-shore data links,” he said. “Largely still today, frankly, we complete the kill chain with a very linear process. And there’s a lot of manual manipulation of moving data. …. Weapon systems, ISR sensors, data networks, frankly, still, to this day, operate very much in stovepipes.”

But in the networked force of the future, warfighters will “need to close thousands of kill chains on time-sensitive targets, that are sometimes moving at hypersonic speeds from mobile launchers. And so there’s not going to be time for analysts to gather data and fuse that data and assess that data from all kinds of sources in that same linear fashion that we have in the past,” he said.

Yet the separation between different networks was ingrained in the culture of the Air Force and its industrial base, he said, noting that the title of the conference was “Air Force IT Day.”

“When you signed up … what kind of things were you expecting to hear? … Did you think about email and business systems and cloud migration? You probably didn’t think about bombs on target or warfighting capability or air battle management. But my point is, you should,” he said.

But he added a cautionary note, introduced with a familiar video of an office worker smashing a computer in frustration. “If you couldn’t relate to this guy just a little bit, I’ll just say you probably haven’t worked in the Air Force, or the Department of Defense, for very long,” he joked.

“Many of us, frankly, in the Air Force, have better bandwidth and ubiquitous mobile access to our data at home than we do from our Air Force networks,” he said.

But he was making a serious point, he added. “Imagine you’re sitting in a cockpit, you’re sitting in the air operations center, you’re sitting in the back of an AWACS … And you’re relying on that same IT backbone that we rely on for our desktops. That day is upon us. And the frustrating experience we have with our desktops isn’t going to win wars. We are taking IT right to the combat edge. So we can’t have those same kind of experiences with our warfighters.”

Stamey said the Air Force was experimenting with outsourcing that IT backbone through a program called Enterprise IT as-a-Service (EITaaS), being piloted at nine air bases. “The pilot bases have experienced significant improvement in their user experience,” he said.

Ultimately, EITaaS could encompass everything from desktop equipment and network connectivity to software and network services ranging from email and video conferencing to accounting, personnel, and logistics systems.

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.