“Each generation of Americans calls on its best to come and serve. In today’s all-volunteer military, not many need to answer that call. Those few who do, hue to a higher call,” says AFA president retired Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright in his Veterans Day message. “We are all citizens, but only some have earned the privilege to be called veterans.”
JOINT BASE MCGUIRE-DIX-LAKEHURST, New Jersey—Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sen. Bob Menendez opposes Turkey’s proposal to buy F-16s and modernization kits, calling for human rights improvements first even as the NATO ally is threatening to deepen its ties with the Russian defense industry.
“I personally am not supportive of giving them F-16s,” Menendez told Air Force Magazine during a visit to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.
“I just really have a problem,” he said. “This is not the Turkey that we aspire for, is not the type of NATO ally that is behaving in a way that we should be able to go ahead and give it some of the most sophisticated fighting equipment.”
At issue are Turkey’s human rights record and foreign policy positions.
Menendez said Turkey has jailed more lawyers and journalists “than almost any place in the world.” He also said Turkey takes adverse positions to U.S. interests in places such as Libya, where it has violated sanctions to send military aid to the UN-backed Government of National Accord. Turkey also has menaced U.S. support for the Kurdish militia group YPG in northern Syria, calling the group terrorists and pushing it back from the border as the U.S. tries to coordinate with the YPG to fight the Islamic State group.
The F-16 letter of request to the State Department would help Turkey modernize its aging fleet of F-16s.
In October, Turkey made public its desire to purchase 40 F-16s and about 80 F-16 Viper block 70 and 80 modernization kits with a total price tag of some $6 billion. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also indicated that he wanted credit for the $1.4 billion already paid into the F-35 program that Turkey was removed from in 2019 when it bought the Russian S-400 missile defense system.
The State Department declined to confirm or comment to Air Force Magazine on the proposed F-16 acquisition. The Defense Department is separately in a dispute resolution channel regarding the canceled F-35 purchase.
The Turkish President met President Joe Biden in Rome Oct. 31 to win in his support for the F-16 deal, with Biden reportedly saying he would do “his best.” But Congress may still stand in the way when the proposal reaches Capitol Hill.
“It’s not Turkey, it’s Erdogan,” Menendez said. “At the end of the day, he needs to change course. We’ve given him off ramps.”
The New Jersey Democrat has the power to hold up foreign military sales and stymie the formal notification to Congress. Erdogan, for his part, has said publicly that he would be willing to go to Russia for new jets if the U.S. delays.
The threat did not move Menendez.
“I am not deterred that they may go somewhere else,” Menendez said. “If they do so, then, you know, the interoperability gets diminished dramatically at NATO, and they further erode their position.”
Some strategists have urged America’s cyber warriors to think more like a hockey team than a football team. But the second-in-charge at U.S. Cyber Command prefers a different sporting analogy—the gladiatorial combat known as mixed martial arts.
“I’ve heard people say we probably want to get closer to what you see in hockey, which has much quicker transitions [between offensive and defensive plays],” Cybercom Deputy Commander Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles L. Moore Jr. said, discussing the relationship between offensive and defensive campaigns carried out as part of Cyber Command’s strategy of persistent engagement. But he added that neither football nor hockey properly captured the freewheeling essence of cyber combat.
“In my mind, we want to get something a lot closer to mixed martial arts—you have people that are fighting one another, they’re not thinking, ‘Hey, right now I’m on defense, and I’m going to do something defensively.’ Or ‘OK, now I’m going to try some offensive moves.’ It is much more inherently blended in and seamless. So that’s how I would suggest we need to think about it and where we need to go.”
In his remarks at C4ISRNet’s CyberCon virtual event Nov. 10, Moore also touched on the need to defend U.S. military space assets in cyberspace; the vulnerabilities inherent in the Defense Department’s joint all-domain command and control (JADC2) operating concept; the posture of North Korea’s state-backed hackers; and the difficulties in measuring the effectiveness of cyber campaigns.
Moore said persistent engagement has been successful both defensively and offensively since Cyber Command adopted it in 2018. The strategy involves continuously infiltrating adversary networks, not just to prepare to take them down in a future conflict, but also to engage the adversary now and try to change their decision calculus about the use of cyberattacks in “gray zone” or hybrid war strategies.
Defensively, the command has been able to block some enemy cyber campaigns before they were even launched, Moore said, “In many cases, … we’ve been able to stop operations and attacks from happening to begin with.” He added that U.S. operations into adversary networks have revealed “what they may be trying to do to our country, and to our friends and allies; what infrastructure they may be using; what tools; what malware or cyberweapons they may be developing.” He said by publicly providing samples of malware being readied for adversary campaigns, “we’ve been able to … inoculate not just ourselves, but the broader cybersecurity enterprise against them.”
Moore said Cyber Command’s presence on adversary networks put it in a position “to achieve the effects that we want to achieve on behalf of the … nation in times of crisis or conflict.” But it’s also “given us more opportunities for access, more opportunities to impose cost.” In many cases, he added, it’s exposed campaigns in the planning stage.
Touching on the need to defend the nation’s space assets in cyberspace, Moore said that of the 14 additional cyber combat teams funded in the current year budget, half of the them were specifically earmarked “to help us address defending our space capabilities, and also to present any type of offensive capabilities from a cyber perspective that we may need in that [space] domain.” He said the teams would be up and running by the end of 2024 and fully trained within a year to 18 months after that, “So we’re working very closely with the U.S. Space Command to get those teams stood up to get them bedded down and get them operating,” he said.
On the Pentagon’s plan to create a fully networked and connected Internet of Military Things—known as JADC2—Moore said Cyber Command would have two key roles: first, to contribute the “cyber picture” to the common all-domain operating picture JADC2 requires. But also to defend the infrastructure that would make the common operating picture and decision-making tools of JADC2 available to commanders. Moore said the integration of all-domain sensing and decision-making would greatly multiply the potential cyberattack surface for adversaries.
“As you can imagine, potential vulnerabilities exist across all the different domains in the way that we gather the information and transport the information, make it visible to decision makers; and then how … directions go back out to the broader force.” Joining all those vulnerable systems together made them much harder to defend, Moore said, and added complexity—often seen as the enemy of cybersecurity.
“For every unit of increase that we have in effectiveness and efficiency gained by integration, which is really the goal of [JADC2], you probably have an increase in potential cyber vulnerabilities [of a power of two] at least,” he said, jokingly analogizing his own rule of thumb to Moore’s law, which famously predicted that computing capacity would double every 18 months. “Maybe I’ll name that Charlie Moore’s law,” he said, “the point being that you have an increase in that net surface area of vulnerability that we have to make sure we’re postured to help defend from the ground up.”
Responding to a question about North Korea’s prolific state-backed hackers, Moore said that they appeared more focused on financial cybercrime to provide hard currency to the regime, rather than more conventional computer network attack activities. “The North Koreans mainly seem to be focused really on revenue generation,” he said. “They’re not too focused, from what we see from a day-to-day perspective, … on trying to perform operations against the United States, against our Defense Department Information networks, but rather very much trying to generate money to support the regime.”
Although it was often hard to measure the effectiveness of cyber campaigns, Moore said, Cyber Command leadership sometimes got feedback “directly from our adversaries about what they’re thinking and how they’re responding” because U.S. cyber warriors had infiltrated the networks they use to communicate.
“That’s very informative and tells us when we’re on target or hitting something important,” he said.
The Air National Guard badly needs to modernize its fleet, not only for operations in the homeland but also for its warfighting mission, the head of the National Guard said Nov. 10.
Army Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said the ANG’s “entire fighter fleet” needs to be modernized, with aging F-15C/Ds and F-16s swapped out for newer F-15EXs and fifth-generation F-35s.
“We want to … make sure that we have a pathway to modernization for each of our fighter squadrons because it’s an incredible capability,” Hokanson told reporters during a Defense Writers Group event in Washington, D.C. “But it’s also a capacity issue for our nation, to make sure that whatever we get asked to do, that we can do that.”
As of fiscal 2021, the Air National Guard had some 470 F-15C/Ds and F-16s, with an average age of over 30 years, compared to just 19 F-35s. Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh, Air National Guard director, said in September that roughly 20 F-15Cs in the fleet were grounded because the backbones of the aircraft were cracked.
A number of Air National Guard units are slated to receive either the F-35 or F-15EX in the coming years. In 2020, the ANG announced that bases in Alabama, Florida, and Wisconsin would receive F-35s in addition to the Vermont unit that has already accepted them, while Portland Air National Guard Base, Ore., would get an F-15EX squadron. F-15C/D bases in Massachusetts, California, and Louisiana are set to receive one of the two new fighters.
But it’s not just fighters that need to be upgraded, Hokanson said. Increasingly, the Guard has been called upon to combat wildfires in the West, and to do so, several of its C-130s have been outfitted with the Modular Airborne Firefighting System (MAFFS).
With MAFFS, C-130s are able to drop 3,000 pounds of retardant on a wildfire in less than five seconds, fly back, refill, and be in the air again in under 20 minutes. But the system needs improvements to keep up with the increasingly high tempo required.
“We’ve got to make sure that we’re completely modernized so that they can perform the missions that they’re being asked to do. And when you look at firefighting, another piece of that is the MAFFS system. … It’s basically a series of pallets they push in the back of a C-130,” said Hokanson. “The Forest Service owns that, … [but] we also need to … continually upgrade those systems as well so they can perform as we need them, really, in the middle of the forest fires.”
The Air National Guard’s C-130H fleet is also being upgraded with a new propeller system to increase thrust and reduce maintenance hours. And in various versions of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, Hokanson noted several C-130Hs would be replaced by more modern C-130Js.
Replacements are good, but Hokanson wants to make sure there is no reduction in the ANG’s overall airlift capacity. In 2018, U.S. Transportation Command’s Mobility Capabilities and Requirements Study proposed that the Air Force needed 300 C-130s, a slight reduction from its current fleet size. A new MCRS was completed in June and has yet to be publicly released, but Hokanson said he hopes it will take into account the broad mission set of the Air Guard.
“In the past, it didn’t account for what we did in the homeland—that’s flying to forest fires, to disasters, and moving troops in a timely manner,” Hokanson said. “And so it’s supposed to be accounted for this year, and it will be interesting to see where it goes. I know right now we’re scheduled to have one of our C-130s come offline, in Mansfield, Ohio, and transfer to a different mission set. But we think the remaining aircraft is probably about what we need. But, of course, we need the data to support that. So we’ll watch very closely for that.”
Even beyond humanitarian and disaster relief responses, the ANG’s modernization needs to continue to boost the Guard’s operational effectiveness, Hokanson said.
“We really need the modernization for our warfighting mission. And if I can kind of just take a step back, that’s another thing that we constantly have to try and share, is that the whole reason the National Guard exists is the combat reserve of the Army and the Air Force, and we’re manned, trained, and equipped to fight our nation’s wars,” Hokanson said. “And when you look at the states, probably 98 to 95 percent of their budget is federally funded. So in that respect, we need the aircraft modernized so that they can be interoperable, no matter where we ask them to go on the globe.”
Tens of thousands of Airmen, Guardians, and civilians within the Department of the Air Force reported experiencing some form of interpersonal violence that resulted “in psychological or physical harm or that detracts from a culture of dignity and respect,” according to the results of a survey released Nov. 9.
In the fall of 2020, the Air Force’s Interpersonal Violence Task Force sent out a survey that garnered some 68,000 responses, roughly 10 percent of the department. Of those 68,000, 55 percent of respondents—more than 35,000—reported experiencing some form of behavior in the past two years that the task force identified on a “Continuum of Harm.”
Those behaviors, 81 in total, included everything from physical violence to sexual harassment to workplace bullying and hazing.
“Some of the experiences are not what we would traditionally be tracking, based on the Department of the Air Force’s definition of interpersonal violence, but we want to understand what is going on, especially at that left side of the continuum, so that we can get after that,” said Brig. Gen. April D. Vogel, the Interpersonal Violence Task Force lead. “Because it is proven that when lower-level behaviors that are inappropriate are allowed to flourish, it creates an environment where worse, more egregious types of behaviors can happen.”
In a briefing with reporters, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall noted that those who responded to the survey were self-selecting, likely pointing to an over-representation of those who said they had experienced such behaviors.
“But if you only take the fact that in the 10 percent that reported, roughly half reported some type of interpersonal violence, that’s still 5 percent of the total people all by itself, which is too much,” Kendall said. “So we know we’ve got a problem to address.”
The survey also found that the majority of those who experienced interpersonal violence did not report the behavior. When asked to select the reasons they did not, a quarter of respondents said they didn’t think anything would be done, and roughly a fifth said they thought it would make things worse for themselves.
Of those who said they did report it, the majority indicated they were not satisfied with the support services provided. This stood in contrast to more than 80 percent of command team members who indicated they felt they had the “resources, training, and authority” necessary to address interpersonal violence in the chain of command.
From those findings, the task force formulated three recommendations:
Undersecretary of the Air Force Gina Ortiz Jones has advocated for a “no wrong door” policy, with one office of primary responsibility within the department to address domestic violence, harassment, and stalking. That policy, leaders said, will be included in the one-stop policy recommendation, rather than duplicate efforts.
Also on Nov. 9, the Air Force released an addendum to its two previous disparity reviews. The addendum identified further disparities facing female minorities.
The most recent disparity review, released Sept. 9, found that women were generally equally represented or overrepresented when it came to promotions, enlisted leadership positions, and professional military education designations.
But the addendum, drilling down on the intersection of race and gender, found that some disparities “were basically masked or hidden by better performance of white women, for example, relative to women of color,” Kendall said.
Specifically, white women were promoted at or above the overall rate for the Active-duty force from E-5 through E-8 and O-4 through O-6 from fiscal year 2016 to 2020, with the exception of O-6 below the promotion zone, while Black women were underrepresented at E-5, E-6, and E-7; Native American women at E-5 and E-6; and Asian American woman for E-8 and E-9 promotions, as well as most officer promotions.
The disparities were particularly apparent in operations career field officers, where most Air Force leaders get their start—white men remain by far the most common group in that category, while “except for Hispanic/Latino female [company grade officers], all female minority groups had below 1 percent representation of the entire operations career fields’ force for all rank groups.” In particular, there were no Black, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, Native American, or multiracial female general officers.
Other disparities also came to light, Air Force Inspector General Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said told reporters. As an example, he cited a finding that while Black Airmen as a whole are underrepresented in wing commander positions, Black men are actually overrepresented in those leadership roles—Black women, more specifically, face the disparity.
“In this slice and dice of the addendum, you could see the disparity becoming much more pronounced at higher officer ranks on the female side of the house, and that’s critically important for the folks trying to deal with those problems instead of just aggregating male and female,” Said said.
The addendum was championed by Ortiz Jones, herself the first woman of color to hold her position within the Air Force. When the second disparity review was released, she said it “very clearly talks about some of the disparities for minorities and for women. But it’s not talking about disparities for female minorities. And when we think about having a very targeted approach to ensure that we are addressing some of the unique challenges, some of the unique barriers faced by some of our Airmen and Guardians, we have to understand the intersectional challenges that are presented.”
On Nov. 9, Ortiz Jones noted that further parsing the data meant dealing with smaller sample sizes—roughly 10 percent of Airmen and Guardians are women of color—“but given the challenges we face as a country, we’re not going to write off the experiences of 10 percent of our force.”
Said echoed those comments, saying that while the smaller groups made determining statistical significance from year to year more difficult, “when that disparity—when you look back 10 years, and it’s consistently there—that’s very meaningful.”
Air Education and Training Command has validated a new platform to keep track of disparate augmented and virtual reality training programs across the command with the goal of speeding up the training pipeline and creating a digital training record that will follow Airmen throughout their careers.
The new technology, developed by Dynepic and dubbed the Member Operations Training Analytics and Reports (MOTAR) platform, will soon be distributed to AETC wings—and the rest of the Air Force is taking notice.
“Basically, what we are is the glue that pulls all these augmented reality, virtual reality mobile applications” into a “central portal,” said Krissa Watry, co-founder and CEO of Dynepic Inc. MOTAR enables applications from various companies to be “distributed into courses,” creating a “seamless user experience for the student and instructor.”
It also collects user data into a single interface, creating digital training records for Airmen, and includes live learning dashboards so instructors can monitor students’ progress.
The company won the AFWERX Mixed Reality Challenge in 2019 followed by a series of Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 and 2 contracts then a multiyear Phase 3 contract supporting AETC’s Maintenance Training Next program, which has since evolved into Technical Training Next.
During the pilot program, MOTAR powered a revamped Crew Chief Fundamentals Course at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, with a single login and consolidated dashboard for various AR/VR applications, according to a company release. The web-based, device-agnostic platform also hosted 360-degree videos, documents, and assessments so participants in the crew chief course could learn whichever way suited them best.
Dynepic also won AFWERX’s 2020 Recruiting, Reimagined Challenge, adding recruiting elements to the MOTAR platform for both the Air and Space Forces, and it was one of seven companies to win AFWERX’s Accelerating Pilots to Combat Ready Aviators Challenge, adding another 15 products to the MOTAR platform in support of aircrew training.
Andrea Hagen, a program analyst with Air Combat Command’s Capability Development Engine Room, told Air Force Magazine that although the command is much earlier in the process than AETC, the platform could one day play into ACC’s Reforge fighter pilot training plan. Reforge looks to cut in half the time needed to transform a recently graduated student pilot into a fighter flight lead by pairing the new T-7 Red Hawk’s in-jet simulation capability with ground-based virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
“One of the things we are missing is a [Learning Management Sytem] we can use across different FTU school houses,” Hagen said. “We have multiple around ACC. They’re kind of all doing their own thing, but we’re looking for one common platform, and MOTAR kind of fits that bill.”
The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center Simulators Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, also selected MOTAR for its new Lightweight Simulators Ecosystem (LSE) during its Simulators Pitch Day, according to a company release.
Margaret Merkle, AFLCMC’S chief innovation officer for simulators, told Air Force Magazine the service is striving to bring together various digital training assets and capabilities into one platform so Airmen can access them from anywhere anytime they need it.
“Today, things are stovepiped in certain areas where they are developed, and that’s very hard to … reach back into those records from different disparate systems,” she said. “This gives us a platform to make that connectivity of all that performance data for those Airmen across the commands,” and though training remains with the individual major commands, Merkle said, “We see this as a tool to enable that to be done easier and delivered more quickly.”
Merkle and Hagen were among the 300 people from various commands, including AETC, ACC, Air Force Special Operations Command, and AFLCM, to attend the MOTAR Expo at Joint Base San Antonio’s Kelly Field on Nov. 4.
The expo offered Air Force units a chance to share how they are using the platform and showed those considering adopting AR/VR tech in the future ways it might be useful for them. Air Force representatives had a chance to interact with 28 different MOTAR vendors and learn how they are advancing immersive technologies and using the MOTAR platform to rapidly distribute it.
“What we’re looking to do here is to get cross communication between all of the different parties … and learn lessons from each other, share progress with each other,” Merkle said. “What MOTAR brings to bear on this is the fact that we can share digital assets underneath these various projects to allow each project to build faster towards their end point and not repeat steps early in the development cycle.”
She offered the example of taking an aircraft offline to make digital scans of it. Those scans can then be shared with different entities looking to build training programs centered around that aircraft. One group may be looking to build a training program to teach the proper way to load weapons on that aircraft, while another will teach how to maintain it, and yet another could use the simulation for pilot training.
“We could take that one digital model and share it with all three of those projects,” Merkle said. “And each one of them will progress a little faster because they don’t have to do the same things over and over again.”
GE Aviation, which primarily makes military and commercial engines, will become the main focus of the GE conglomerate after it spins off its health care and energy businesses, the Boston, Mass.-based company announced Nov. 9.
Three new companies will result from the action: GE Aviation, focused on military and commercial engines; GE Healthcare, focusing on advanced diagnostic gear and patient data; and GE Renewable Energy and Power. The moves will take effect by early 2024.
According to a company press release, “Following these transactions, GE will be an aviation-focused company shaping the future of flight.” The company doesn’t expect any regulatory or labor issues attending the split, and GE said there was no investor pressure behind the move.
In a statement, CEO H. Lawrence Culp Jr. said that “by creating three industry-leading, global public companies, each can benefit from greater focus, tailored capital allocation, and strategic flexibility to drive long-term growth and value.” The move was spurred by a desire to focus and simplify its businesses, reduce debt, and improve share price.
Culp will initially head the GE health care company as “non-executive chairman … upon its spin-off. He will continue to serve as chairman and CEO of GE until the second spin-off, at which point he will lead the GE Aviation-focused company going forward.”
The company said GE Aviation’s focus will be “helping customers achieve greater efficiency and sustainability, and [to] invent the future of flight.” It aims to offer “global leadership in propulsion and systems with the most competitive and innovative engine value.” GE has the “youngest and largest commercial fleet and most diversified services portfolio” and “powers 2/3 of commercial flights.”
Stock analysts value GE Aviation at anywhere from a low of $30 billion to a high of $100 billion. Culp has praised the company as the bright spot of the GE conglomerate, and leading analysts have said the bulk of GE’s value is in its aviation business.
GE’s major military business centers around the F110 engine in Air Force and export F-15s and F-16s; F404 and F414 engines in the Air Force T-7, Saab Gripen fighter, Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and Navy EA-18G Growler; and the T408 engine in the Marine Corps CH-53K. It recently won a $1.6 billion Air Force contract to supply F110 engines for the Air Force’s F-15EX, although it’s unclear if competitor Pratt & Whitney will challenge the award.
For commercial applications, the company makes the GE90, GE9X, GP7-200, CF-6 and GEnx, the latter of which may power the next Presidential Transport. GE was not selected in the recent Air Force competition to power the re-engined B-52 bomber.
The company said it fields 37,700 commercial aircraft engines and 26,500 military aircraft engines.
GE is also working with South Korea and India on the KF-X and Tejas fighters, respectively.
Another potential avenue of future GE business is the Adaptive Engine Transition Program, which has created two versions of a future fighter engine for the U.S. Air Force and potentially the Navy. GE’s version is the XA-100, while Pratt & Whitney’s in the XA-101. The Air Force has not said whether its acquisition strategy for the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter will call for a single engine supplier or two, on a competitive basis, but GE is also hoping to capture some of the work for future propulsion of the F-35 fighter, on which Pratt & Whitney has been the sole supplier.
While GE said it will take a one-time charge of $2 billion related to separation costs, it also said it would reduce its debt “by more than $75 billion by the end of 2021, compared with 2018.” The aviation company would carry the largest share of debt but is also the most profitable of the three.
Just 20 months ago, Pratt & Whitney became part of Raytheon when that company merged with United Technologies/Collins Aerospace. Analysts said it’s unlikely that another major defense prime would seek to merge with or buy the new standalone GE aviation before mid-decade.
GE’s stock price initially gained seven percent on the announcement, but by midday, that bump had declined to 2.18 percent, trading at $110.92 per share.
The Air Force Research Laboratory is using Google Workspace to collaborate with its “worldwide network of research partners” in a pilot program that has already “dramatically enhanced engagement,” while reportedly saving researchers an average of three hours a week, according to AFRL.
Google Workspace links together Google Cloud’s apps—Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet, and the like. The company said when launching Google Workspace in October 2020 that it knewmany workplaces were “implementing a mix of remote and in-person work environments” and the apps had “become more integrated, so much so that the lines between our apps have started to disappear.”
“Our mantra is ‘collaborate to innovate,’” AFRL Commander Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle said in the release. “We want our alpha nerds to be very connected, and we really want to up their proficiency as a digital workforce.”
AFRL said the pilot is taking place “among a segment of its workforce of scientists and engineers.” The lab pointed out that it is a “global research enterprise” doing research ranging from “laser-guided optics enabling telescopes to see deeper into the universe than ever before, to fundamental science that has spawned innovation in quantum computing and artificial intelligence.”
It said collaborating with outside scientists, businesses, and other government agencies is essential to its strategy.
“AFRL teams are using integrated Google Workspace and cloud-based tools like Google Smart Canvas to simultaneously share, discuss, and chat about critical information—eliminating the toil of email chains and hours-long data file exchanges,” according to the release.
Several aspects of the pilot were unclear in a news release published Nov. 5 by AFRL, such as how much scientific work had taken place over Google Workspace since the pilot. AFRL did not provide comments on possible implications in connection with the Department of the Air Force’s Cloud One Program; whether any classified work is being done over Google Workspace; the extent of the initial deployment, such as total numbers of internal and external users; whether the lab was aware of other military organizations that had used the platform; or other options it may have tried or considered.
In addressing security, the lab cited safeguards including Google Workspace’s client-side encryption, which the company says has “made it easier to keep your files safe from prying eyes by using encryption keys that only you and the file collaborator would have access to.” AFRL said the security measures are “invisible to end users” and implied that the measures abide by Defense Information Systems Agency standards.
COVID-19 “significantly limited the physical presence of researchers,” said research physicist Joshua Kennedy in AFRL’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate in the news release. “Google Workspace eliminated what would have otherwise been almost a total work stoppage. In fact, new insights into 2D nanomaterials, critical to future Department of the Air Force capabilities, were discovered using Workspace that would have otherwise been impossible.” The release did not elaborate on the discovery.
The release did mention that 240 researchers involved in the “preliminary deployment” of Google Workspace “revealed an average time savings of three hours per week” in a survey. “For AFRL’s highly trained workforce of PhDs, this means more time to dedicate to the mission,” it said.
The Gremlins drone swarming technology program needs to prove a C-130 can reel in four flying drones in 30 minutes before moving on to testing potential uses for the system.
Engineering, avionics, and program leaders for prime contractor Dynetics briefed reporters on the progress of the Gremlins program Nov. 8. Dynetics program manager for Gremlins, Tim Keeter, called the most recent test “a major milestone not just for the program but for unmanned aviation in general.”
For the past year, Dynetics and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have tested aspects of the flight of the Gremlins vehicles, or GAVs, and the mechanical arm and tether that capture the drones and stow them onboard the C-130. Earlier tests verified safety systems and attempted docking, after which engineers addressed how to better mitigate aerodynamic interference. In a captive carry test, an X-61 was reeled out from the C-130 and back in.
Dynetics’ chief engineer for Gremlins Brandon Hiller said “making that mechanical connection, shutting down the Gremlins Air Vehicle, and reeling it in to the C-130” in the final test demonstrated “a very good process” that “matched our simulation predictions extremely well and demonstrated that it is, in fact, safe to conduct that sort of airborne recovery operation.” However, Hiller added, “We do still have some work remaining to improve the robustness of the system to get to the DARPA objective for recovery in the space of 30 minutes, so we’re not there yet, but … we know what needs to change in the system, both from a hardware and a software perspective, to get us to that point.”
The Gremlins avionics lead at Dynetics, Morgaine Kim, said the drones are designed to fly in assigned spots behind the C-130 until someone pushes a button, indicating the X-61s are ready to be picked up. At that point, each of the GAVs will get in line to be recovered.
Keeter indicated it’s possible that all three remaining GAVs will take part in the next test, in which case they would have to launch from two different C-130s.
He estimated that if the program proves it can haul in four GAVs within the 30-minute window by early 2022 and “that it is feasible, reliable, [and] repeatable for multiple vehicles and at an operationally relevant rate,” he said, “then you could expect a very short delay to get the next phase underway.” With just three Gremlins vehicles left in the inventory, however, success will be measured according to the rate of recovery of those that do take part.
Keeter said that in the next phase, Dynetics and DARPA hope to demonstrate the ability to put everything together “with payloads [and] single operators controlling multiple vehicles in a live constructed environment, performing different aspects of missions for the stakeholders to be able to say and showcase what this capability can really do and how it can help transform the military.”
In terms of how a system such as Gremlins might be used in the field, Keeter mentioned situations ranging from a small number of vehicles going into a denied area with “some sensors … to allow some standoff capability” to one in which “you need many more of these to really provide the decision to limit and then overwhelm an adversary with numbers.”
“A lot of that is going to be directed by the initial stakeholders and who that ends up being in terms of what mission they want to fly, and number, and host vehicle,” Keeter said. “It doesn’t have to be a C-130A,” he added. “We can adapt our recovery system to lots of different types of vehicles—as well as our launches.”