Air Force Electronic Warfare Chief Sees Limits to AI

Nov. 14, 2024 | By Shaun Waterman

Artificial intelligence and machine learning may in the future offer important capabilities to the Air Force’s radio frequency warriors, who confront America’s enemies in the electromagnetic spectrum—but that day is still some time off, according to their commanding officer.

“When it comes to cognitive [electronic warfare, or] EW, I just don’t see that we’re there yet,” Col. Larry Fenner Jr., the commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, said at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies inaugural Airpower Futures Forum Nov. 13.

By cognitive EW, Fenner explained, he was referring to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, or AI/ML, to replace time-consuming and labor-intensive manual work involved in the processing of spectrum data collected by aircraft on a mission, to turn it into actionable intelligence, which can then be used to engineer electronic countermeasures or protective measures.

“We don’t have a component on an aircraft that can … do everything that we [currently] have to do [in the] rear echelon on the fly. That’s ideal, but we’re not there,” Fenner acknowledged.

In the current fight, Fenner said, “where we see the potential insertion of AI and machine learning is in that data architecture.” Using AI/ML to automate the processes of isolating an anomalous signal, and then generating a waveform to counter it would be a “game changer,” Fenner said.

Automating anomaly detection “allows me to go quicker. So now my engineers know exactly the target signal to go after to start doing their engineering processes” to produce defensive techniques or countermeasures Fenner added.

It would also allow the rapid scaling up of capabilities, which would be important in a high-end electromagnetic spectrum, or EMS, conflict with a peer adversary.

“Not having hours and hours of manpower, pouring over this particular one signal, but being able to do it at scale with hundreds of signals. That, to me, is the game changer, because now I can adapt quickly to that environment and get that back to the warfighter at the speed of relevance for that fight,” he said.

All that processing, and its planned future automation, would take place in the rear echelon, Fenner said, which could prove a problem in the vast Pacific theater, where China would be seeking to sever the communication lines of U.S. forces

In the Indo-Pacific, “the tyranny of distance issue will be significant, especially for the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing when it comes to data wrangling. How are we going to get that data back from the forward edge to make sure that our folks can do the analysis and the exploitation and re-engineering and push it back out to the warfighters?” he asked.

“That’s going to be a difficult problem, especially when you’re in a dynamic, contested environment. How do you move that data, or get the folks out there that’re going to be able to pick up that data from the aircraft? Or is there a way to have an airborne network that passes that data back to your [rear] echelon? These are going to be difficult problems as we try to update the electromagnetic operating environment,” he said.

He added that there were a number of barriers he had to overcome to succeed: “Funding, resources, infrastructure and personnel are some of the barriers … some of them are man-made, some of them are policy-made,” he said.

One issue was “standardization,” he said. The wing supplied EMS data to more than 75 different platforms. But there is an issue. “Not every pipeline has the same structure,” Fenner said. “So what works for one particular platform does not work for another. … We have seen where we can go fast, but there are areas where policy variables, dissimilar structures, manpower-intensive processes do slow us down, and that’s what we’re highlighting right now, so that we can go faster.”

The activation of the 350th SWW in 2021 was seen by many as an attempt to refocus the Air Force enterprise on EMS operations or EMSO—a term that encompasses intelligence gathering and spectrum management as well as traditional offensive and defensive EW. It’s a focus that is badly needed after two decades of relative neglect during the war on terror, when nation-state adversaries had watched U.S. forces in action, and worked on ways to counter their superiority, Fenner said.

“Our adversaries, they definitely had an opportunity … to build up their [EW] apparatus and their capabilities … to counter what has traditionally been an advantage for us in the spectrum,” he explained.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, he argued, echoing previous remarks by senior Air Force officials, “If we lose in the spectrum, we lose in the air,” he said.

EW for Life: A Fresh Approach to Tech Refresh and Logistics

Nov. 14, 2024 | By Adam Stone

The Air Force may be operating the oldest, smallest air fleet in its history, but it hasn’t stopped keeping those planes modernized and combat-effective against the latest weapons and threats.

Josh Erlien, director of life cycle integration for Tactical Aircraft Electronic Warfare at BAE Systems, says his mission is to provide enhanced product support that goes beyond spares and repairs to ensure USAF maintains technological superiority in its battlespace.

“Life cycle integration is a concept that we’re applying at BAE Systems to embed people like me into product lines and programs in all phases,” he said. From the design phase to production and through a system’s entire life cycle, these embedded experts serve as advocates and thought leaders to ensure warfighters have ready and relevant electronic warfare capabilities when they need them most.

“We need to be focused on ease of upgrade, ease of maintainability, to get them back into the fight,” he said.

Too often, logistics and product-support issues don’t get attention until it’s too late: An aircraft is on the ground and no spare parts are on the shelf. “Those tend to be symptoms, and not the root cause,” Erlien said. Life cycle integration is about left-shifting sustainment thought into the design, and constructing support packages that can withstand the contested environment. Support needs to be “a forethought, not an afterthought.”

Life cycle integration focuses on examining the underlying drivers such as material strategy and contract structure that can potentially impact readiness. “We look at the end-to-end supply chain velocity,” he said. They also look at the warfighting environment, he added, because “How our systems are going to be used should strongly influence our design.”

Erlien brings a warfighter’s perspective to the job. He served as a Deceptive Electronics Countermeasures (DECM) technician in the Marine Corps, and before joining BAE Systems in 2022, he was chief of product support for the Spectrum Warfare Department at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana. “I understand the constraints that our maintainers are faced with,” he said.

To avoid supportability challenges, Erlien said, BAE Systems focuses on the foundational elements of product support, such as good technical documentation, a focus on readiness, and understanding customer constraints, while striving to be innovative.

“Life cycle cost is everything,” he acknowledges. “Our customers demand performance,” he adds. “But they also demand affordability.”

To thread that needle, BAE Systems looks at ways to minimize development time by employing a leverage strategy. Leveraging existing architecture to speed up the delivery of new EW capability and drive down cost. He said: “We’re leveraging modularity to update systems, leveraging investments in infrastructure, adapting building blocks to apply to another customer’s mission.”

A product designed for one mission system could be adapted to fit another customer’s application while also trying to leverage economies of scale in material procurement and Public-Private Partnerships that enable the best mix of public and private resources.

Designing for sustainability, supportability, and upgradeability is also key. “Our customers are demanding resilience be built into our weapons systems,” Erlien said. BAE Systems aims to answer that call.

“Resilience is the ability to reconfigure, to repair at the point of need, to keep our systems ready to go without needing to be evacuated back to a depot.” To respond to new threats, he said, systems must be upgraded as needed to adapt to a changing environment.

“It’s not just having the product on the shelf available for use,” Erlien said. It’s about being ready with a solution as soon as one is needed. “As we are designing products and setting up sustainment strategies, we have upgrade in mind,” he said. This is about “making sure that our customers can do what they need to do with the system to make it the most useful in the battlefield.”

Increasingly, that means updates implemented in software rather than hardware, enabling greater adaptability and rapid updates as threats change. “The ability to upgrade software in the field is critical,” Erlien said. “Software controls the functionality of our systems, and so making that easier for our customer to do in the field, at the point of need, is vital.”

The Air Force keeps its systems in use for decades, but the systems it fights with today are typically vastly improved versions of the ones they began with years ago—and building blocks to the solutions they’ll fight with tomorrow. Integrating enhancements with life cycle support solutions is one way BAE Systems helps the Air Force stay ahead of mission requirements.

Air Force: First CCA Models Pass Critical Design Review as Future Plans Being Debated

Nov. 13, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

The two Collaborative Combat Aircraft designs—one each from Anduril Industries and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems—passed their critical design reviews in early November, clearing the way for detailed production efforts to get underway, the Air Force said Nov. 13. However, the way ahead for future upgrades and increments of CCA remain undecided.

Col. Timothy M. Helfrich, Air Force Materiel Command’s Senior Materiel Leader for the Advanced Aircraft Division, confirmed the milestone following a CCA panel discussion at the inaugural Airpower Futures Forum in Arlington, Va hosted by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“Both Anduril and General Atomics, both industry teammates, are on the path to first flight, on a timeline that allows us to get operational capability by the end of the decade,” Helfrich said in the panel discussion. “We are on track, if not ahead, in some areas.”

“The lessons that we’ve learned so far is that we need to be able to know when enough is good enough,” he added. “If we are to continue to add capability and gold-plate” the CCAs, “we’re going to miss out on our cost and what’s important in our schedule targets.”

The critical design review is the final step in certifying that a design should meet requirements, and it establishes a program’s baseline. It not only checks a program’s maturity at both the overall and component levels but confirms that there’s a realistic plan for entering production and testing the item.

The Air Force is making “some of those tough trades to say, ‘this is good enough.’ … moving forward has been a challenge because we want a lot, but we are making a decision,” he said.

CCAs are the Air Force’s planned uncrewed, autonomous aircraft that will escort fighters and carry extra weapons for them. They are also expected to engage enemy aircraft on their own. Later versions will likely have roles in air defense suppression, electronic attack, and other air combat missions. Operational capability with the initial versions—in number—is expected before the end of the decade.

Helfrich, in the panel discussion, clarified the nomenclature being used on the CCA program and said it hasn’t been decided how long CCAs will be operated or whether there will be upgrades or all-new versions of CCAs at various intervals.

Anduril and General Atomics are building competing versions of CCA Increment 1, which will be dedicated to the air-to-air mission. The Air Force is still in the process of deciding whether Increment 2 will be a more or less sophisticated aircraft, Helfrich said, and it hasn’t been settled whether either will later be upgraded or simply phased out, as technology and the threat change the service’s needs.

“The Air Force has a lot of learning to do over the coming years,” he said in response to an audience question, “but I do expect that there will be a time where we have a mixture of Increment 1s and Increment 2s; [and] maybe Increment 3 out there.”

He said the mix of CCAs “will change, based on what is necessary to meet our force design and our commitments.”

The funding and expectation for Increment 2 have provided “one of the ways that we’ve been able to control our appetite” for capabilities on Increment 1, Helfrich said.

“Our original plan was—and the funding that was laid in—was for two increments. … You don’t have to get everything into this Increment 1. What we need to do is get it out there, with the minimum viable capability, on time or early, and on-budget or under budget. But Increment 2 …. we are close to getting started in earnest on that.”

There is a government analysis underway for Increment 2 “with other parties…and internal government agencies” to determine the needed attributes of the system.

“And then next year—actually this fiscal year—we will kick off concept refinement, where we then bring in industry to help us further define what those attributes are and whittle down those use cases,” Helfrich said. “It’s really the same approach that we did for CCA Increment 1.”

He also said that studies and experiments so far indicate that pilots of crewed fighters will likely be able to control many more CCAs than originally thought.

Senior USAF leaders have speculated that the CCA program could eventually achieve a rhythm of introducing a new design every two to four years, which would be better for staying abreast of both changing technological opportunities and threats.

Helfrich emphasized that Increment 2 is not a derivative or growth version of Increment 1.

Just because it’s called Increment 2 doesn’t mean it “has more capability … we’re still looking to figure out … the right balance and do the analysis” of the needed capability “to maximize low cost,” he said. The Air Force may yet decide to “change the focus” of CCAs “from a missile truck to something else,” perhaps an electronic warfare platform.

“I think it’s a little too early to say whether or not we’re going to do “Increment 1B or 1C. We’ll have to learn as Increment 1 rolls out and as Increment 2 rolls out, but we do expect them to be complementary,” and that there will be “multiple Increments in the force at the same time.”

Helfrich said the life expectancy of a CCA is also not yet determined. Early concepts called for using the craft for a number of sorties, and then divesting them on one-way missions, with the idea of avoiding the creation of a sustainment enterprise to support them.

“A lot has to do with how you use them,” he later told Air & Space Forces Magazine. While a small number of CCAs may be used for training, most of their missions would likely be practiced in simulators, and the aircraft themselves would be stored in a crate until needed for operations.

Asked if CCA life expectancy would be measured by flight hours, engine cycles, missions or some other metric, Helfrich said it would be flight hours.

With regards to life expectancy, he told the symposium, “a lot of that has to do with how you build your airframe, right? And so you do end up with life expectancy … and that comes down to flight hours, is how that’s typically measured.” But the expected service life will also depend on the “structural load and how much you build it to do. And if you shorten the life expectancy … then you can potentially take out some weight, saving costs or allowing you to bring other things into the airplane.”

USAF’s New Force Design, Still a Secret, Will Be ‘Fiscally Informed’

Nov. 13, 2024 | By Amy Hudson

As the Air Force completes a highly anticipated force design—its first real overhaul in a generation—the leaders overseeing the work drew a narrow distinction over how the resulting future force will be funded.

“I would say that it really is fiscally informed, not constrained,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Harris, deputy chief of staff of Air Force Futures, during a keynote address Nov. 13 at the inaugural Airpower Futures Forum, produced by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“I can build you the world’s best Air Force—we as a team can build the world’s best Air Force—but I’m here to tell you, we probably can’t afford it,” Harris said. “What we can do, … is actually develop a logic and rationale … to argue for additional resources about why these systems need to come together.”

Speaking earlier in the day, Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin, said the new force design is focused on ensuring lethality, survivability, mass, and connectivity.

Harris intentionally did not mention China in his keynote, noting that an effective force design must be adaptive and able to evolve as threats and technology change. Similarly, he said he began the work by thinking about force design in relation to the National Defense Strategy, only to be asked to remove such references as the force design should be a “living document” that overarches current strategy as it relates to threats or conflict areas.

Instead, the force design is focused on identifying the best mix of capabilities, systems, technologies, and personnel to achieve all of the Air Force’s five core functions:

Air superiority

Global strike

Rapid global mobility

Command and control

Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance

Asked how the force design could evolve if the Air Force does not acquire the Next Generation Air Dominance platform, once envisioned as the replacement for the F-22 Raptor, Harris said it would not change the overall design, but it would “challenge the way that you would actually execute a mission area.”

The Air Force was supposed to make a selection for the builder of a crewed NGAD combat jet this year but paused the process in the summer rather than commit to a winner. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said he made that decision because the threat picture had changed, technology had advanced, and he wanted to be sure that the design he was looking at was still what the Air Force needed and would need in the future.

Now USAF leaders are in the midst of a major program review, with a panel of experts including former Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Jumper, Gen. Norton Schwartz, Gen. David Goldfein, and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Ralston, reviewing the findings.

Lunch Keynote Address by Lt. Gen. David A. Harris, Deputy Chief of Staff, Air Force Futures.
Mitchell Institute Airpower Futures Forum at Army Navy Country Club on Nov. 13, 2024, in Arlington, Va. Photo by Mike Tsukamoto/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Harris said the NGAD decision would impact force structure and other development. “There’s probably multiple force structures, some of them may not include any of that, but I’ll tell you,” he said. “It’s less about the platform and more about the systems and how they are coming together. How do you actually replicate the effects that system would have in Mission Area One or Mission Area Two? There’s a lot of ways that we can actually achieve air superiority.”

Allvin and Harris both spoke in terms of capabilities for three “Mission Areas,” which refer not tp the area those capabilities would operate in, but rather the locations from which they would launch from:

Mission Area 1: Capabilities that can be based or positioned close to an adversary, and can deliver concentrated effects against adversary forces while operating in those close confines.

Mission Area 2: Long-range capabilities based far from potential adversaries, but able to launch from a distance and penetrate a contested environment to deliver precise strikes or effects.

Mission Area 3: General-purpose capabilities, which can be positioned in a variety of locales, and that can provide mass and flexibility for a variety of uses. These capabilities could also support Mission Area 1 and 2 capabilities under certain circumstances.

Harris did not indicate one way or another whether the force design requires the manned NGAD platform, saying only that the Air Force has “not given up on air superiority” and that the service still needs the capabilities that NGAD represents.

“I think the numbers of it matter,” he said, referring to the estimated cost of a manned next-gen fighter, which Kendall has pegged at between $200 million and $300 million. “If you’re going to overinvest in one area, then I need to see where you are going to be taking hits from, then I think that’s where the mission areas, and what that threat looks like, and the intensity of that threat actually matter.”

But, he added, “There could be a time when I want to invest more in the C5ISR … and maybe less in some of the other three” core capabilities, Harris said. “There’s a framework here that we’re trying to describe.”

This is where the cost comes into the picture, he explained. “It helps us be fiscally informed about what capabilities we want and how many, the quantity, of that,” Harris said.

How to Scale AI: The Key to Crossing from Pathfinder to Success

Nov. 13, 2024 | By Adam Stone

Military leaders see applications for artificial intelligence in everything from autonomous aircraft to logistics and cybersecurity. But scaling up from pilot programs to operational is proving to be a major hurdle.

Scaling AI “is very much about building a scaffold or a framework,” said Jay Meil, chief data scientist at SAIC. Narrowing down to “what problem are we actually going to solve” is the first step, he said. “Once we identify that problem, we need to come up with a defined quantitative outcome, and we also need to identify applicable data.”

Good foundational work will help break the problem down into components, and then approach those smaller challenges with the idea that they can be combined later on.

“You can build a small pilot to solve one of those small problems,” Meil said, and then combined pilots can be constructed with future scalability in mind. “You want to build the framework in such a way that it’s extensible and scalable.”

The architecture should be able to easily accommodate more computing capacity; more storage capacity; increased functionality; and expanded data sets. “You want to have very robust processing pipelines and compute pipelines in order to be able to scale it organically over time,” Meil said. Anticipating the potential for additional data or alternative uses of that data can be crucial to creating a path for growth.

Meil is working on a pilot effort for an Intelligence Community customer with exactly that in mind. “We’re building those frameworks and pipelines out so that when they’re ready, they can slowly add more scope, more data, and more scale to the program,” he said.

The mindset is to focus three steps ahead—to envision possible full-scale applications as they mature. And that means starting out with a question: Is AI really the right solution for a given problem?

Meil said he looks for several key markers in addressing the issue. Will AI make the operator’s work easier? Will AI accelerate the speed of decision? Can AI be leveraged in a repeatable way? Does using AI create a force multiplier? And is the relevant data needed to build an AI model available?

If the answers are yes, Meil said, then AI can indeed be “the answer.”

For organizations new to AI, a partner like SAIC can provide invaluable experience and insight to the challenge. “Our focus is to bring these orchestration tools, these workflows and these scaffolds or frameworks, to make this process easier—in a repeatable manner,” he said.

Sometimes the hardest part is a lack of historical data. “Especially when we’re dealing with mission data, we are going to have sparse data sets,” Meil said. “We’re not going to have a lot of information on particular EW signatures or cyber information or information about adversaries,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean AI can’t help. Synthetically generated data can fill the gaps, and AI can help with that. “With generative AI, you might see a new ship that the model has never seen before, and it can generate an answer based on everything that it has learned in the past about previous ships or previous samples,” he said.

Weaving data together to combine, for example, intelligence data and command and control data, is the next step. With data available in a single place, “machines can make decisions and help the warfighter, recommending courses of action,” Meil said.

Some applications may require data to be isolated, such as in combined operations overseas, when some data sources may be shared by one partner but can’t be shared with others. Understanding that requirement ahead of time is key, Meil said. “All of the data can be physically co-located…and logically separated,” he said. “If you and I are searching for the same things, but we have different access levels, we’re both able to access the information that we need.”

With appropriate tagging, that approach can also apply to applications and users with different levels of access. By building that in from the start, the AI application will be readily scalable, and the focus can be on the mission, where existing doctrine and decision-making guidance is already well established.

Building on established doctrine helps ensure AI is providing viable courses of action, and that the humans in the loop—the ultimate decision makers—are always in charge. “There’s no need to rewrite [the rules] around Artificial intelligence,” Meil said. “We train the models on the doctrine that is already in place, that people are comfortable with, to make decisions in similar ways. And we always keep that human on the loop.”

Could Military Orders Via Tweet Return In Trump’s Second Term?

Nov. 13, 2024 | By David Roza

When Donald Trump begins his second term as president in January, national security law experts predict he may return to his old habit of issuing orders to the military via social media, a practice which could cause confusion in the ranks as the relevant chains of command seek clarity to carry out the commander in chief’s intent.

During his first term, Trump used Twitter, now known as X, to signal policy decisions, often from the hip: a 2018 warning to fire “nice and new and ‘smart’” missiles at Syria surprised his aides and disrupted plans with U.S. allies. In 2017, he tweeted his decision to ban transgender troops from the military and in 2020 he tweeted that all U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by the end of the year.

In 2019, Trump also used Twitter to intervene in the case of Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher—a Navy SEAL who had been convicted of posing for a photograph with the corpse of an Islamic State prisoner—telling the Navy to let Gallagher keep his Trident pin, the symbol of being a SEAL.

Trump’s tweets count as official statements of the president, the Department of Justice said in 2017, but Defense officials did not always jump to carry them out. For example, in the Gallagher case, then-Navy Secretary Richard Spencer told Trump he needed the Trident intervention in writing for it to count as an official order.

Even so, tweets from the commander in chief meet all the criteria for a military order, they’re just not the best way of issuing orders, argued Butch Bracknell, a retired Marine judge advocate and national security expert.

“If the President of the United States issues an order by tweet, and it’s a lawful order, and it’s heard and understood by the person to whom it’s directed, that’s the end of it,” Bracknell told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “It is legal but it is a terrible practice. In my view it puts a burden on the person receiving the order to clarify.”

Bracknell made a similar argument during Trump’s first term in a 2020 opinion piece for Task & Purpose. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, an order from the President counts as an order if it regards a subject within his or her jurisdiction, is lawful, is authentic, and gives comprehensible direction, Bracknell pointed out. Typically, orders are carefully written and distributed to avoid confusion.

“We want a rifle squad leader or a destroyer squadron commander to be clear about what he’s been tasked with doing, and that’s why we have a process,” he said. “There’s a science and an art to orders-writing, and we do it in order to reduce ambiguity so that people know what latitude they have to act.”

Doing so typically requires coordination and negotiation with the relevant parties, explained Scott Anderson, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a former legal advisor at the State Department.

“Usually commands go through a process of clarification, discussion, expansion by different people in the chain of command to clarify what the role is for the people implementing it several layers down,” he said. “So if the president authorizes the military to intervene in Iraq, for example, there’s a big coordinated effort to implement that.”

Careful coordination is particularly important in delicate national security situations, said Tony Johnson, president and CEO of the Truman National Security Project, who once served as an intelligence advisor to the deputy secretary of defense.

“We want to ensure there’s no misinterpretation, no bad signaling to allies and adversaries,” he said.

President Donald Trump speaks with Soldiers of the 1st Theater Sustainment Command Operational Command Post via video conference at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, Dec. 24, 2019. (U.S. Army photo by Master Sgt. Jonathan Wiley)

Effects

But as thorough as the process may be, it is not legally required to transmit a lawful order.

“There’s no defined medium by which a commander in chief is required to give orders,” Anderson said. “There’s no requirement that they be in writing or of a particular type.”

What happens if the typical process is not followed? Social media posts usually lack the specificity for service members to execute without clarification, experts said, which means most troops will ask their chain of command for clarity before acting. The lack of specificity also means posts likely will not hold up in court if troops do not immediately act on them, Anderson said. But they can still cause confusion and make it more difficult for the president to achieve his goals.

“Does that mean there is not some risk of somebody down the chain of command doing something unexpected because they thought that’s what the president wanted? No, and that risk is exactly why this is a bad idea and the president shouldn’t do it,” he said. “The greater impact is simply stress, disarray, and confusion within the ranks, which ultimately makes it harder and less efficient for the people trying to do what the president wants to do.”

There would be even more confusion for orders that could be considered unlawful, such as striking cultural sites or using lethal force within the U.S.

Service members are not required to obey unlawful orders, but the bar for proving an order is unlawful can be very high, Anderson said. For example, a 2022 analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy research group, found that the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy the military domestically in certain situations, “is dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse.”

Last month, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) told reporters the Insurrection Act “could be improved significantly” and that the Posse Comitatus Act, which largely precludes federal military forces from acting as civilian law enforcement, is also in need of reform.

In 2020, Trump threatened via tweet to strike dozens of Iranian cultural sites, an act the Pentagon considered unlawful and refused to follow up on. Trump eventually dropped the matter, but if he were to insist on a similar case in the future, it would put the Defense Department in a difficult state.

“If the president persisted through the chain of command,” Anderson said, “then [service members] would hit the hard pressure: ‘are we confident this is unlawful enough that we don’t have to abide by it? And are we willing to risk our personal liberty on that, because we would be potentially charged in a court-martial.’ That’s a harder question.”

President Donald J. Trump talks with Col. Thomas Sherman, 88th Air Base Wing commander, Lt. Gen. Robert McMurry, Jr., Air Force Life Cycle Management Center commander, and Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr., Air Force Materiel Command commander, before getting into his vehicle after landing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, Aug. 7, 2019. (U.S. Air Force photo by Wesley Farnsworth)

What to Do

It remains to be seen whether Trump will be as active on social media in his second term as president as he was in his first term. One complicating factor is Trump’s change of platforms. The president was banned from Twitter after the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and while billionaire Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account after buying Twitter in 2022, Trump said at the time that he preferred his new platform, Truth Social. Trump began tweeting again in August 2023, though by that point Musk had renamed the platform X.

In the days since his reelection, Trump has issued policy statements from X, which now allows paying subscribers to post up to 25,000 characters – far greater than the old limit of 280. Bracknell expects to see more orders-by-tweet or, more accurately, by X post, in the near future, because Trump has fewer constraints than he did in his first term.

“He doesn’t have to worry about electoral politics because he’s in his second term,” Bracknell said. “Second term presidents always have a lot more latitude because the political consequences are attenuated.”

But the risk of those posts sparking a conflict may be lower now because the U.S. has a smaller military footprint worldwide today than it did during Trump’s first term, Anderson said.

“Instead of targeting Iran or that kind of thing, it may be more about standards for [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] or other policies within DoD,” he said.

If service members do find themselves wondering whether they should act on a social media order from the president, the experts all offered similar advice: ask your chain of command.

“You have superior officers who are supposed to help you understand how to best do your job,” Anderson said. “If there’s any confusion, ambiguity, or anything seems unusual, check with your commanding officers to get clarification.”

Katherine Kuzminski, Deputy Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, offered that service members swear an oath to protect and defend the constitution, no matter who’s in office.

“That is part of the stability of what our professional all-volunteer force provides to the nation,” she said. “They don’t belong to a partisan community.”

USAF Will Withdraw A-10s from Final Overseas Base in Korea in 2025

Nov. 13, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

The U.S. Air Force will start withdrawing its A-10 aircraft from Osan Air Base, South Korea, the Thunderbolt II’s last overseas location, starting in January.

In a Nov. 12 release, the 7th Air Force said all 24 A-10s will depart Osan by the end of fiscal 2025—Sept. 30, 2024.

Meanwhile, the USAF F-16s on the peninsula will continue to receive avionics upgrades as part of the Post Block Integration Team (PoBIT) program.

The moves continue the Air Force’s push to tweak its force structure in Korea and the broader Pacific. In July, the 7th Air Force shifted F-16s from Kunsan Air Base to Osan to create a “super squadron” for a yearlong test on how to maximize combat effectiveness.

That month, the Pentagon also said the Air Force would bring in F-35 fighters to Misawa Air Base, Japan, and F-15EX fighters to Kadena Air Base, Japan. It will be the first time either fighter type will be based overseas in the Pacific.

“By introducing advanced fourth and fifth-generation aircraft like our upgraded F-16s along with F-35s and F-15EXs in the Pacific region, we are significantly enhancing our overall air combat capabilities in the Korean theater,” 7th Air Force commander Lt. Gen. David R. Iverson said in a statement.

Iverson did not say if the USAF would bring in new fighters to Korea to match the A-10s being phased out.

The U.S. has been flying A-10s in Korea since 1982, and the current iteration of the 25th Fighter Squadron stood up in 1993. In recent years, however, the Air Force has moved to retire its fleet of Warthogs, saying the legendary close air support aircraft is not suited for a potential high-end fight against adversaries like China or Russia.

Leaders have suggested every A-10 could be divested before the end of the decade, and the service has started identifying new missions for units and bases that host the A-10—the Maryland Air National Guard’s 175th Wing will transition to cyberspace operations, Moody Air Force Base in Georgia will get F-35s, and the Idaho Air National Guard’s 124th Fighter Wing will move to F-16s. One of the service’s main A-10 hubs, Davis Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., is gaining the 492nd Special Operations Wing.

The retirements at Osan will end the A-10’s permanent presence in the Indo-Pacific region, and it marks the second Pacific USAF base to move on from older fighter/attack aircraft—Kadena is also phasing out its older C and D models of the F-15.

‘The United States Needs More Air Force’: Allvin Makes the Case for More Funding

Nov. 13, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

The Air Force’s top officer made a blunt case Nov. 13 for the service to get more funding so the nation can employ more effective airpower—and offered a preview of a coming force design to go with that funding.

“I think the United States of America needs more Air Force. I think we need more Air Force,” Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin said at the inaugural Airpower Futures Forum hosted by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “I think we can see why. We can see what we can do with more Air Force, and I think we can provide some capabilities for the nation that we’re unable to now just because of how we are stressed. The force is stressed. And we’re still doing our very damn best.”

Allvin and other top officials outlined the service’s future force design, which the chief said is built around four attributes: lethality, survivability, mass, and connectivity.

The current Air Force is the smallest in history by aircraft inventory, and nuclear modernization is putting budgetary pressure on some of the service’s future programs, such as the crewed fighter of the Next-Generation Air Dominance program, which is in limbo and may be curtailed to keep costs down.

Allvin said the goal of the Air Force’s force design, which will outline capabilities needed for a 2030s timeframe, is to enable the service to continue “thinking about the change in the environment that we are experiencing, and how we need to ensure that our United States Air Force remains the most dominant force on the face of the planet.”

“It’s not going to happen as a birthright,” Allvin added. “We just can’t let it evolve on its own. We have to put work behind this. We have to put thought behind this.”

“It’s my job as Chief of Staff to advise our leadership on what I think that we should do with the Air Force we have, but also to be very clear about the things I think we need if we could have more Air Force,” Allvin said. “I think that’s something that this force design is going to suss out as us out as well, to be able to more clearly articulate: this is the value proposition that airpower has to our nation, and I think we’re fulfilling as much as we can within the resources that the American people give us.”

Allvin’s pitch for more funding comes amid speculation about how President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will approach the defense budget. Trump has said his foreign policy will be based on “peace through strength,” though incoming officials have not provided any details.

The Department of Defense is currently operating under the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which imposes a one percent annual growth cap for the defense budget in fiscal 2025 and could further limit overall government spending through 2029.

“My point is that if the American people gave us more resources for the United States Air Force, we could do more mission. And I am committed to making sure with whatever dollar that we get, this force design ensures that we put the most lethality, the most combat effectiveness, and the best air force we can put forward for the nation,” Allvin said. “That’s my job, while at the same time advising for areas that if we were working with more resources.”

Hegseth Tapped for Defense Secretary as Trump National Security Team Takes Shape

Nov. 12, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

President-elect Donald Trump has named Pete Hegseth, a Fox News television commentator for the past eight years, as his choice for Secretary of Defense, rounding out a new cabinet-level national security team announced on Nov. 12.

Hegseth, 44, is an Army National Guard veteran who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. He is the author of several politically-themed books, including “The War on Warriors” which contends that the U.S. military has been weakened by diversity and inclusion initiatives.

“The book reveals the leftwing betrayal of our Warriors, and our great Veterans,” Trump said in announcing the choice, saying Hegseth would be “a courageous and patriotic champion of our ‘Peace Through Strength’ policy.”

Other members of the Trump national security team, now announced, include Republican Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida as National Security Advisor; Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as Ambassador to the United Nations; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security and John Ratcliffe, a former Representative from Texas, as head of the CIA. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is expected to be nominated as Trump’s Secretary of State.

Hegseth graduated from Princeton University in 2003. He worked for Bear Stearns as an equity markets analyst but also took a commission in the Army National Guard. He was called up for service at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2004, as a member of the Minnesota National Guard. He later volunteered for service in Iraq, where he was a platoon leader and a civil-military affairs officer. He received a Bronze Star and Combat Infantry Badge during his service in Iraq.

Capt. Peter Hegseth, Assistant Civil Affairs Officer, 3/187th Infantry Regiment, meets with Manmood Kalaf Ahmed, Mayor of Samarra, March 5, 2006. U.S. Army photo

He deployed again in 2012 to Afghanistan, again with the Minnesota Guard, teaching counterinsurgency techniques at a counterinsurgency school in Kabul. He received another Bronze Star during his Afghanistan service.

Hegseth worked for a number of conservative groups, including Vets for Freedom and the conservative-backed Concerned Veterans for America, which pushed for privatization of many Department of Veterans Affairs functions. During his first term, Trump considered Hegseth for the leadership of the VA.

On-air with Fox in 2020, in the wake of Iran’s firing of ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq, Hegseth urged Trump to bomb Iranian economic targets, as well as cultural sites if they were harboring weapons. He said U.S. and international laws against war crimes are “rigged” against American military success. The U.S. should “rewrite the rules” of war to gain an advantage, he said.

“With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice – Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down,” Trump said in the announcement.

Waltz and Rubio have voiced strong support for countering and confronting Chinese aggression in the western Pacific, suggesting that the Biden Administration’s National Defense Strategy calling China America’s “pacing” military threat will not be fundamentally changed. However, Rubio has said that the war in Ukraine cannot be won by Ukraine, and that a negotiated settlement with Russia is necessary.