AI Algorithms Deployed in Kill Chain Target Recognition

Sept. 21, 2021 | By Amanda Miller

Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall alluded to an event in which artificial intelligence helped to identify a target or targets in “a live operational kill chain” in his remarks at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., on Sept. 20.

Kendall offered the description as an example of his “No. 1 priority,“ which he said is investing in “meaningful military capabilities that project power and hold targets at risk anywhere in the world.”

Kendall said that in 2021, the Air Force’s chief architect’s office “deployed AI algorithms for the first time to a live operational kill chain” involving the Air Force’s multi-site Distributed Common Ground System and an air operations center “for automated target recognition.”

He said the event represented “moving from experimentation to real military capability in the hands of operational warfighters.”

Kendall did not provide details of the mission but said the broad intent of the new capability is to “significantly reduce the manpower-intensive tasks of manually identifying targets—shortening the kill chain and accelerating the speed of decision-making.”

Air Force spokesperson Jacob N. Bailey told Air Force Magazine in an email, “These AI algorithms were employed in operational intelligence toolchains, meaning integrated into the real-time operational intel production pipeline to assist intelligence professionals in the mission to provide more timely intelligence. The algorithms are available at any [DCGS site] and via the [DCGS] to any [air operations center] whenever needed, so they’re not confined to a particular location.”

The Defense Department has acknowledged further need to gather intelligence from afar as well—in addition to holding targets at risk—in pursuing its “over-the-horizon” strategy of monitoring Afghanistan for terrorist activities. Kendall said the evacuation from Kabul included “continuous surveillance from space and the air.”

In July, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said DOD had “significantly” stepped up its number of AI efforts over the prior year. The department preceded that acceleration by adopting five “ethical principles” for AI development and use.

Longer Ranges, More on an Airframe: Imagining a New Era of Weapons Needs

Sept. 21, 2021 | By Amanda Miller

Munitions needed in a near-peer competition, especially with China, may call for longer ranges, and aircraft may need to be able to carry more of them. Defense industry executives made these projections among others in a panel session Sept. 20 at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md.

Range and Scale

Squaring off with a technologically advanced and well resourced military, “You no longer have that sanctuary that maybe you [would] have on some third-world battlefield,” said John Martins, director of international programs for missile systems maker MBDA. “Specifically, you introduce the air threat as well as a potential threat that can protect themselves.” Martins could foresee “a degree of standoff”—sufficient range to thwart a response—“becoming a requirement.”

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Jon A. Norman, vice president of customer requirements and capabilities at Raytheon Missiles & Defense, mentioned range to match the long distances over bodies of water such as in the Indo-Pacific region but cautioned that “not every war fight requires a two-and-a-half-million-dollar exquisite solution,” he said. “What is that right weapons mix of both direct attack and standoff that we need? Not every weapon needs to be hypersonic, thousand-mile—but we do need that within our arsenal.”

Mark Altobelli, director of Boeing’s Phantom Works, expects the scale of munitions to go up in terms of both numbers needed and how many can fit on one airplane.

“When you walk out the door and your bomber has four, maybe eight hits, that’s nice. And I think it’s great, and we need that,” Altobelli said. “But what does it mean when he walks out the door with 20 or 30. And what does it mean when a fighter walks out the door—an F-15E or and F-25[E]X—carrying five or seven standoff weapons?”

Virtual Testing

The industry executives expect more testing to take place in virtual environments, partly in the interest of efficiency also in that of secrecy.

As an example, “A lot of us are working on long-range hypersonics,” said Raytheon’s Norman. “It costs a lot of money to test one of those, and there are very limited locations [where] you can test those, and the availability is incredibly limited.”

Then when such a test does take place, he said, “If I’m an adversary, I’m looking forward to the notifications to mariners and aircraft of when you’re doing that test so I can park [advanced geospatial intelligence] … right there to watch you test that.

“So let’s do that the fewest times as possible. Let’s do it in a virtual environment. … I think there are ways to get after this, but it’s time to stop sitting back, and it’s time to probably throw the rock and make some decisions on what those next-generation, those revolutionary capabilities we need are.”

Setting Requirements Soon

Norman suggested that locking in capability requirements and cost estimates sooner rather than later “will also help the services selling it over to the Hill,” he said. “And it certainly helps us, within industry, [in] designing toward that specification point.”

New approaches such as digital engineering and model-based systems engineering are an area “where we’re going to see great savings,” Norman said. “So let’s pick that capability that we want, get it out to the industry, come back with your best ideas, and move forward on in it.”

Space Force Uniform Prototype Has Diagonal Buttons, PT Uniforms Are Black and Gray

Sept. 21, 2021 | By Amanda Miller

The Space Force’s very first member unveiled the service’s first prototype service dress uniform Sept. 21. Its dark blue coat—almost black—with upturned collar, closes with a diagonal row of six buttons.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond brought two Guardians onstage to model the prototype during his speech at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

But first, Raymond announced that the USSF’s PT uniform is being wear-tested. Previewed in a video by an Air Force Academy grad who competed in track, the uniform includes black shorts with a version of the service’s delta logo in white; and a gray T-shirt bearing the stylized words “Space Force” in white on the back.

The six silver buttons on the coat prototype represent the service’s establishment as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. A video showing some details included the buttons bearing the Space Force’s delta logo, mirror-finish U.S. pins worn on the collar, and silver braid near the cuffs.

Raymond said the service will accept “comments and tweaks” in the coming months before the uniforms go into wear testing.

For their combat uniform, Guardians will continue to wear the Operation Camouflage Pattern uniform, or OCP.

https://twitter.com/SpaceForceDoD/status/1440058302113533964

Chief Master Sgt. of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman announced enlisted rank insignia, featuring deltas and elongated hexagons—another nod to the USSF’s sixth-service status—Sept. 20.

The Space Force stood up Dec. 20, 2019, followed incrementally by its three field commands—organizational equivalents of the Air Force’s major commands—with the most recent, Space Training and Readiness Command, activating in August. Raymond called Space Force a “flat organization built for speed,” without additional command layers the likes of Numbered Air Forces.

“All the big, innovative companies said, if you’re big, you’re slow—and you’re not going to be innovative,” Raymond said.

Raymond said the Space Force now has 6,490 Active-duty Guardians, with more than 500 enlisting directly into the Space Force. This year it became the 18th member of the Intelligence Community.

Space Force uniform prototype. Staff photo by Mike Tsukamoto.

Air Force Turns to Startup for Help Implementing Zero Trust Tech

Sept. 21, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

The Air Force is trying out a new tool to help implement its zero trust information technology architecture through an AFWERX research contract with Silicon Valley startup Illumio.

The Small Business Innovation Research Phase 2 contract follows a Phase 1 award in March. No figures were released in the Sept. 20 announcement.

The award will be used for pilot projects throughout the Air Force and Space Force, Mark Sincevich, Illumio’s federal director and SBIR lead, told Air Force Magazine by email. “The SBIR Phase II award is meant for research and development projects that will help the Department of the Air Force refine and bolster their deployment [of Illumio’s tools] and ultimately their Zero Trust architecture at large,” he said.

The company is working with the Department of the Air Force Zero Trust Task Force to identify key pilot projects, Sincevich said, adding that “any Air Force or Space Force base” would be able to access the tools.

Zero trust networks make it harder for hackers to move inside a network once they’ve penetrated its walls. By interrogating traffic at every juncture as it tries to move inside the network, zero trust systems raise barriers against intruders and create more opportunities to challenge and expel them. Zero trust architectures typically have three characteristics:

Each part of a system, whether a location or application, is walled off from the others;
Users must authenticate themselves continuously; and
Additional layers of security are added to protect the most valuable data in the system.

Speaking at AFA’s Air, Space, & Cyber Conference on Sept. 20, Lt. Gen Timothy D. Haugh, commander of the 16th Air Force, which is responsible for the cybersecurity of the service’s networks, called zero trust “a foundational technology” that, when implemented, would enable mission-critical data from sensors and weapons platforms to be moved around securely and ensure that security threats and vulnerabilities on any network could be mitigated in a timely manner.

“It’s critical for us to be able to do that [implement zero trust], so that we are able to operate in contested environments and trust our data,” Haugh told a media roundtable, noting that the weapons systems currently in use by the Air Force “weren’t built with the [cyber] threat in mind” and are, therefore, vulnerable to hackers.

“If we have a zero trust-based network, those threats as they’re discovered look different to us, because [zero trust] gives us freedom of maneuver within those networks into how we mitigate that threat,” he said.

“We’re pleased with the progress, but it’s got to go faster,” Haugh concluded.

The zero trust approach was made mandatory for federal civilian agencies in President Biden’s May 12 executive order, and the following day, the Defense Information Systems Agency [DISA] published a DOD reference architecture for zero trust, laying out how networks can be built in accordance with zero trust principles.

“The intent and focus of zero trust frameworks is to design architectures and systems to assume breach, thus limiting the blast radius and exposure of malicious activity,” Brandon Iske, DISA’s chief engineer for its Security Enablers Portfolio, said in a release announcing the DISA publication.

Then Illumio tool being deployed under the SBIR award is called Illumio Core. It provides both micro-segmentation—a way of slicing and dicing the IT network so that attackers cannot move freely around, even after they have penetrated the outer defenses—and a risk-based application “heatmap” that shows how the applications on a network are communicating with each other and highlights potential vulnerabilities.

“Zero trust is a strategy and not something that can be ‘achieved’ by one technology alone,” said Sincevich. “With that said, micro-segmentation is a crucial pillar of any zero trust strategy because it stops [cyberattackers] … from moving around to reach high-value assets. When attacks can’t spread, their impact is dramatically reduced.”

‘Unsatisfied’ with Hypersonics Progress, Kendall Questions USAF’s Strategy

Sept. 21, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said he’s “unsatisfied” with the pace of progress in Air Force hypersonics programs and even “the degree to which we’ve figured out what we need from hypersonics.”

Speaking to reporters at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, he said he’s “pretty clear” on how China and Russia plan to use their hypersonic missiles, which experts say are ahead of U.S. programs.

“They’re moving very quickly,” Kendall said of Chinese and Russian hypersonics efforts. “They clearly see the value.” Describing hypersonics as among a number of “asymmetric approaches” to force structure that China and Russia are taking, he said the Air Force must first define which “target set we want to address” with hypersonic missiles, then make the case for why hypersonics are “the most cost effective way” to attack those targets. There’s still “a question mark” about that, he said, though he admitted he hasn’t seen “all the analysis that has been done to justify the current program.”

He acknowledged progress but concluded, “I would like to see it be better,” he said.

The Air Force has yet to hold a successful all-up test of the AGM-183 Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), a boost-glide system that is accelerated to hypersonic speed by a rocket then releases a hypersonic glide body. While captive-carry tests have been conducted on a B-52 launch aircraft, the missile has failed to fly on its own at least twice.

The Air Force is also pursuing the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, a smaller, air-breathing weapon that could be small enough to be launched from fighter aircraft.

Mark Lewis, the head of defense research and engineering during the Trump administration and an expert on hypersonics, has said the Air Force will have to address thousands of targets in a hypothetical Pacific war but has only funded about a dozen ARRWs. That means it would have to be very selective about what targets it uses the missile for. Lewis set a DOD-wide goal of building hypersonic missiles “at scale.”

Kendall said he believes the industrial base needed to build hypersonic missiles in quantity “will follow” as the program matures.

“I think if the [funding is] there … the industrial base will respond,” he said. Although there’s been “mixed results with boost glide vehicles,” Kendall said, “I think we will get there.” The Air Force can do things to accelerate the program, he said, “but we have to solve the problem first of where we’re trying to go, and then get there as quickly as possible.”

16th Air Force Boss Says No to Direct-Commission Civilians. Airmen Are a Different Story

Sept. 21, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

With 36,000 cybersecurity job vacancies across government, the cybersecurity human capital crisis has been called a national security threat. But Lt. Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, commander of 16th Air Force, a key cyber command, says he has all the people he needs.

“We have the Airmen we need in our force,” he told a media roundtable at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. “We have the right talents. We have the right skills. … We have the right Airmen, and being able to apply them to the right problems is a key area of work.”

In fact, Haugh said, he hasn’t needed to use new direct commissioning authorities approved by Congress.

“The National Defense Strategy told us first and foremost: Do better with what you have,” Haugh said. “So we’ve really taken that to heart.” The Air Force prioritized cutting-edge cyber and information operations capabilities and matched that with investments in recruiting and training.

“We’ve created some of the capacity to do operations in the information environment [through] decisions we made to stop doing other things and invest in [cyber and information operations capabilities],” Haugh said. While the leaders of civilian cyber agencies use social media on a near-daily basis to implore cyber defenders to join them, the main problem Haugh faces in human capital terms is keeping the talent he had trained and developed, he said. “When I say we have the Airmen we need, I’m really saying we have the talent. You’ve got to be able to retain that. And there’s no doubt that is a challenge within the career fields we have in 16th Air Force.”

Trained cyberwarriors could easily double or even triple their salaries by moving to the private sector, Haugh said. But making sure his workforce gets training and hands-on experience with the latest cyber tools helps keep people interested. “We want to ensure that they know we’re investing in them, they know we’re going to give them world-class training,” he said. “And we have to continue to enhance our infrastructure so it’s world-class and is able to adapt with them.”

While Haugh said the Air Force has not yet needed “direct commissioning” authorities to recruit civilian cyber professionals directly into a senior officer role, he is using similar authorities to promote enlisted Airmen into the junior officer ranks.

“What we have really focused on are the direct commission programs from our enlisted … force to officers,” he said. “In many cases we know we’ve got enlisted Airmen with just absolutely amazing talents, skills, and degrees. And so what we’ve done there is to actually use direct commissioning programs that allow us to accelerate successful [enlisted] Airmen to officers, and that’s been our near-term focus.”

Direct commissions like those help strengthen leadership and retention, he said. “What we’re able to do there is take somebody with hands-on experience, put them in a leadership role, and allow them to continue to advance. So we know we have talent. We want to keep that talent within our force and also empower them to continue with whatever their goals are.”

Haugh said he saw no need to directly commission civilian experts. “That’s not an area yet that we’ve been focused on, because we’ve been really successful with the Airmen we have in those roles,” he said.

He added that the training given to his personnel now includes instruction about how to recognize disinformation and how to validate news reports they might see shared on social media. “That’s certainly a skill every American needs,” he noted. “We’re starting with the Airmen in the United States Air Force and the Guardians in the Space Force to provide them the right tools … so they can identify disinformation.”

Military leaders have long acknowledged that the campaign against disinformation—even that coming from foreign adversaries—is a whole-of-nation activity that the military cannot fight alone, and Haugh said he wants his Airmen to tackle disinformation on a personal level.

“We all have to be good watchdogs,” he said. “If somebody in my family puts out bad information on their Facebook page, I am duty bound to tell them: That’s not accurate; here’s where you can go to get relevant [accurate] information. And we can’t police that across the board, but I would like every one of our Airmen to feel like they own their particular span of control.”

Haugh said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had declared that defending the integrity of U.S. elections was “an enduring Department of Defense mission” and said 16th Air Force was ready to play its part. “The more that we stay sustained on the cybersecurity threats and the disinformation threats from all of our adversaries, the better … positioned we are, so that we can support DHS and FBI and the states’ [governments] in a much more coherent way.”

Air Force Wants New Engine for F-35—If It’s Affordable

Sept. 21, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force would prefer to put new engines from its Adaptive Engine Transition Program into the F-35A, but whether that can be done affordably may depend on Navy participation, said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall during AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 20.

“We’d very much like to continue the program that advances engine technology,” Kendall said. “We’ve had some pretty good success there.” But the Navy, a participant in the effort, is still on the fence. “It’s not clear that they will be going forward,” Kendall said, adding that he’s “already having discussions with the Secretary of the Navy about that.”

The head of the F-35 Joint Program Office, Air Force Lt. Gen. Eric T. Fick, told reporters last week that if the service wants the AETP engine, it will have to bear the full cost of its development and integration because the engine won’t fit in the F-35B and may not fit in the Navy’s F-35C carrier-landing model, either. The F-35 partners—the Marine Corps, Navy, allied countries, and foreign military sales customers—have all agreed that “you have to pay to be different” on the program, which aims for high commonality as a cost-saving measure, Fick said.

If the Air Force goes for a new engine, that would sharply increase operating costs, Fick said, because the fleet sustainment enterprise would have to support at least two engines, with different parts and associated equipment.

The House Armed Services Committee, in its National Defense Authorization Act language for fiscal year 2022, mandated that the JPO develop a plan for integrating AETP engines on the F-35 starting in 2027.

The AETP technology has great appeal, Kendall said, because of the “fuel savings and thrust increase we can get” from it. Contractors have said the engines could yield as much as a 30 percent savings in fuel.

GE Aviation is developing the XA100 engine, and Pratt & Whitney is developing the XA101, each of which has a third airstream that allows for greater thrust and better efficiency in cruise, as well as greater cooling capability, and, potentially, better infrared stealth.

“I’m hoping we’ll be able to go forward together,” Kendall said of the Navy’s participation. “If we have to, we’ll look hard at the affordability of going forward” as a single service, “just as we have on the rest of the program. But those advantages are substantial. And I’d like to be able to pursue them if it’s affordable.”

Kendall also said he’s skeptical the F-35’s sustainment costs can get down to “the kinds of numbers we’ve been talking about,” which the Air Force has pegged at $25,000 per flying hour by 2025. He said he plans to do a “deep dive” on the program in the coming months to see what kinds of operating costs are really achievable.

The F-35 JPO awarded Lockheed Martin sustainment contract last week that could set the stage for a performance-based logistics arrangement in the mid-2020s if the company shows significant progress in containing F-35 sustainment costs.

Kendall: China Has Potential to Strike Earth From Space

Sept. 20, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall likes to say he came of age at West Point in midst of the Cold War. Spending half his life involved in that frozen conflict informs his sensibilities about the threat posed by China in the future.

Kendall devoted much of his keynote address at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 20 to China’s emergence as a peer competitor with “the potential for global strikes from space.”

“There is a potential for weapons to be launched into space, then go through this old concept from the Cold War called the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System,” said Kendall, “which is a system that basically goes into orbit and then de-orbits to a target.”

During the Cold War, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union considered putting nuclear weapons in space. The Soviets advanced the concept with FOBS, a system that combined a low-flying missile and nuclear warhead that reached low-Earth orbit.

“If you use that kind of approach, you don’t have to use a traditional ICBM trajectory,” he said. “It’s a way to avoid defense systems and missile warning systems.” Kendall also made a vague reference to other offensive capabilities, saying there is “a potential to actually put weapons in space.”

Kendall said “there’s no question about the technical feasibility or technology to do these types of things,” noting that China already has a satellite with a robotic arm in orbit, which Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond warned in February could be used to hook and disable satellites belonging to others.

Offensive capabilities in space are an increasingly common talking point among Space Force leaders. At the same time, Space Force leaders are working hard to declassify facts that make it hard to tell their story. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits placing nuclear weapons in orbit, but the importance of defending assets in space remains vital, Raymond said.

“If you look at the capabilities that they’re developing, it is clear that they are developing capabilities to deny us our access to space,” Raymond said. “We can’t let that happen. If we let them happen, we lose.”

The nature of the domain means that assets face certain challenges, added Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, head of Space Operations Command.

“Space brings us untold advantages, such as being able to overfly other countries legally. You can’t fly in an airspace above other countries because that’s sovereign territory, but that also means that you are regularly and predictably over other people’s countries in what we call their weapon engagement zone,” Whiting said. “So we have to build an architecture that is resilient to potential attacks. And we have a certain space architecture that we’ve developed over the last several years—we have to be able to to defend that architecture, even as we pivot to new architectures.”

SpOC Commander Seeks More Intelligence Capability in Response to China

Sept. 20, 2021 | By Abraham Mahshie

Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting was at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in September 2007 when China destroyed a dead satellite in an anti-satellite weapon test. The target burst into 3,000 pieces, which still swirl around the globe today.

Fourteen years later, Whiting now heads Space Operations Command at Peterson Space Force Base, Colo., and argues that the Space Force must up its game in intelligence gathering.

“Certainly, we had intelligence professionals then, but not very many, and they were not leading our operations,” he said at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 20.

The Space Force needs more robust intelligence today to confront Chinese aggression in space, he said.

“The pace at which China has developed the threat capabilities we’ve seen has just truly been breathtaking,” he said. From 2007 to today, “they have developed an electronic warfare capability to jam our assets; we’ve seen lasers; we’ve seen on-orbit threats and grappling arms,” he added. “They’re continuing to develop those threats. So, everything we do in Space Operations Command must be intelligence-led.”

Space Delta 7, which stood up July 24, 2020, is the Space Force’s operational intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance element. Two of its three squadrons are located at Peterson-Schriever Garrison; a third is at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

When Space Delta 7 stood up, Whiting said, it absorbed every Air Force intelligence unit related to space. Whiting said changes already completed are delivering intelligence data directly to the SpOC operations floor.

“I’m excited about some of the improvements we’ve made,” he said. Now he’s turning to training. “Space is a domain in which we should be able to train in a high-fidelity manner in a simulated environment,” he said. Operators need holistic space domain awareness to best track and find threats.

Space Delta 7 has detachments in each of the other SpOC Space Deltas to provide mission-specific intelligence. The unit has about 350 people but is slated to grow to more than double by fiscal 2025.

“We do have a vision to grow additional units in Space Delta 7—a targeting unit and analysis unit,” he said. “But just because you have manpower slots to do that doesn’t mean you have the people yet. We have got to grow the people over time.”

Talent doesn’t mature overnight, he added. “You can’t get a 10-year-experienced intel operator without spending 10 years to build that person. So, it’ll take time to build up those new capacities. But that will be a growth area for us.”