NATO Looks to Counter Russian Threats, Growing Chinese Influence

June 15, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

NATO nations are increasing defense spending following “persistent, consistent” messaging from the United States as the alliance also faces an assertive Russia and looks to deter China’s expanding influence.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, speaking June 15 with a group of Washington, D.C.-based reporters, said 10 member nations now meet the 2 percent-of-gross-domestic-product defense spending goal, with more expected to meet the mark soon. Stoltenberg met this week with President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders, and the message to increase spending continued, albeit slightly differently after years of former President Donald J. Trump criticizing the alliance.

“This style may differ, but the content of the message is the same, and that is that allies need to invest more in defense. We need fair burden sharing,” Stoltenberg said.

Just three allies met the 2 percent goal when it originated during the 2014 NATO summit.

“I’m not saying that’s perfect, or enough, but I’m saying that 10 is much more than three,” he said. “Actually, more than three times as many. And even those who are not yet at 2 percent, the majority have plans in place to be at the 2 percent by 2024.”

Across the alliance, nations have added $260 billion more for defense. “The good news is that we’re on the right track,” Stoltenberg said.

Following this week’s summit in Brussels, NATO released a communique that highlighted Russia’s aggressive actions, as well as China’s “growing influence” and its policies, as challenges NATO needs to address.

Beijing has been investing heavily in new military capabilities, and “one of the main messages from this summit is that all allies recognize that the rise of China matters for our security.”

Stoltenberg said NATO must also find new ways to conduct arms control. While the alliance welcomes the extension of the New START treaty on nuclear weapons, more agreements should focus on additional weapons.

“We need arms control that covers more weapons systems, especially now since we don’t have the [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty that covered intermediate-range systems. We now only have the New START, covering long-range or the strategic warheads,” Stoltenberg said. “But we have non-strategic or tactical intermediate range, many other systems. Then we need … to start to look into how can we conduct arms control when it comes to new disruptive technologies—hypersonic weapons, or artificial intelligence, or autonomous systems. It opens up a totally new chapter and a new dimension in everything we do on arms control.”

Thunderbirds Flying New Routine and Full Airshow Season Following Reset

June 15, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

The Air Force Thunderbirds’ 2021 airshow season will include the first overhauled performance in about 38 years. It also marks the beginning of a culture change for a team that in recent years has seen some of its lowest points.

Col. John Caldwell, Thunderbirds commander and No. 1 pilot, said during a June 15 Air Force Association Air and Space Warfighters in Action event, that his team is one of the highest visibility squadrons in the Air Force, performing about 240 days a year before millions of people.

The team’s performance is designed to demonstrate the strength of the Air Force and its aircraft as well as skills of combat employment. Maneuvers highlight the element of surprise and the power of the F-16, and they show the crowd that “these are the good guys. You know, that feeling is derived from: We want people to appreciate what your men and women are doing out in the field, out in combat every single day,” Caldwell said.

The mission is important for the service, and the team has to be at its best to spread that message to the crowds.

“When they see the Thunderbirds perform, we’re able to take combat capability and reduce it down into something that’s consumable by your average civilian to where they can truly appreciate the technology that’s represented in these aircraft, and the skill of the pilots, and the skill of the ground crew, and the maintainers through the ground show, and that generates confidence and support,” he said.

When Caldwell took command in 2018, the Thunderbirds were coming out of a couple of tumultuous years that included a fatal crash, along with multiple other serious mishaps and the firing of a commander. With a new commander and new team, Caldwell led the team through a 2019 season looking to “stabilize the system.” The team wasn’t going to push the envelope and instead focused on flying safely and getting through the season by executing the basics.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of appetite at the time to really dig into the history of the team, to dig into some of the structural things that we got into later, to changing the demo,” he said. “We just wanted to get through the season. We wanted to perform well with what we [knew] worked in the past.”

By the end of 2019, Caldwell said there were parts of the squadron that needed work and improvement, so he called in 15 former Thunderbirds for their brutal and honest input on the team.

“Everything was on the table, which requires you to assume a little bit of humility there when you’re inviting 15 folks who previously have done your job to come here and critique you on how you’re doing,” Caldwell said. “But we didn’t have a forum like that in the past—we didn’t have the ability, in a productive way, where these folks could provide critiques.”

The former commanders came to the team’s home at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., to watch the “combat acceptance show” when the head of Air Combat Command watches the team’s performance and approves them to start the show season.

The 15 commanders watched Caldwell fly, sat in the pre-flight briefing and debrief, and ultimately gave some strong feedback.

“It was pretty eye-opening, some of the critiques we received and some of the information that we got from that group,” he said. “It was enough to where we realized there was some serious work that we needed to execute, to get this team back to where we wanted it to be in precision formation flying and precision air show demonstration.”

Following this, the Thunderbirds “committed ourselves to that idea that we were going to work on trying to recapture some of … these versions of the team we had in the past” and push to get better.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

The national lockdowns and spreading impact of the pandemic canceled the Thunderbirds’ show season just as they were gearing up to start. As the weeks passed, the Thunderbirds eventually reached out to the Navy’s Blue Angels, and the two teams developed the “America Strong” flyovers as a way to salute first responders and medical workers across the country during the pandemic.

The two teams flew over cities across the country and worked more closely together than they had before. This collaboration gave the Thunderbirds more insight to the Blue Angels’ operations, and that became a catalyst for the Air Force team to look at how they are flying and for ways to change.

The team spent the last half of 2020 flying “basic air shows,” and when the season ended, they decided to take a deep look at their performance and overall operations to find ways to reinvent and improve.

The result was 59 separate initiatives for the team to address, ranging from individual maneuvers in the sky, to the equipment they use, to cameras and tracking devices to “police” their flying and find ways to improve.

Caldwell said the team’s performance over the years had become a “hodgepodge” of individual tweaks, none of which came together to give it an overall theme.

“We wanted to turn this from a series of athletic maneuvers like the Harlem Globetrotters to more of a performance like the Cirque du Soleil, where it has themes. It has coherency. It has themes that make sense and that we can tie music and narration into,” he said.

The team wanted to focus on the “customer experience.” They reached out to the board of former commanders, as well as entertainment professionals with experience at places such as Disney and Universal Studios, to provide feedback on music and narration.

This year’s show includes eight types of new maneuvers, a changed sequence, new music and narration, changes to the ground show, and the shutdown. The team rewrote its operations manual and installed things like GoPros in the cockpits, GPS trackers to show the exact lines pilots flew, and a new digital video recorder system. These changes “eliminated all the subjectiveness from it. It is cold, hard data that we can look at. And it’s very unemotional: You either did it right or did it wrong, and we have the data here to prove it. And that’s what really made the team, I think, more effective and better.”

Within the F-16s, the pilots got new lap belts because the stock belt on the aircraft wasn’t sufficient for the amount of inverted flying the team does, and its pilots were getting injured.

The F-16s themselves received the newest tech suite, the Operational Flight Program M7.2+ upgrade, which provided new capabilities but also a challenge. The suite includes the Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System, which takes over controls if it senses the F-16 is about to crash. But, the system doesn’t work well with aerobatic displays.

When Caldwell flew with the system for the first time, it tried to recover the jet during his first maneuver, so it had to be changed.

Because of the mishaps in recent years, the team was down by three aircraft. The Thunderbirds usually have a fleet of 13 and travel with eight, but was only able to take seven jets. To remedy that, the team was able to get F-16s from the nearby U.S. Air Force Weapons School and one from the South Carolina Air National Guard. For the first time, in-house maintainers converted these aircraft for the team, including the famous red-white-and-blue paint. By doing this in-house, the team was able to shorten the timeline of receiving an operational jet “on the order of months,” Caldwell said.

The team now is almost back to full strength, with one jet still in a hangar undergoing conversion, though it will be ready “in the next couple of months,” he said.

This year’s season includes at least 28 shows, with more to be added to the schedule.

“I have the opportunity to show people what our true combat capability is, in a different format. But at the end of the day, that is what we’re showing, is true combat capability,” he said.

New GBSD Will Fly in 2023; No Margin Left for Minuteman

June 14, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

The first example of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missile will fly by the end of calendar year 2023 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., program officials revealed, while emphasizing that there’s no further margin to extend the Minuteman III system without risking the credibility of the intercontinental ballistic missile force.

“We’re … already in critical design review for the subsystems, and we’re months away from first flight,” Air Force GBSD program manager Col. Jason Bartolomei said in an AFA Doolittle Leadership Center virtual forum June 14. The GBSD is being developed by Northrop Grumman.

By the end of calendar 2023, Bartolomei said, “we’ll be at Vandenberg, and we’ll be flying the first test flights of the new weapon system.” The missile is already flying in a “modeling and simulation environment,” he said.

The GBSD is expected to achieve initial operational capability in 2029 and full operational capability with 400 missiles seven years later in 2036, Bartolomei said. GBSDs will be deployed to missile silos an average of once a week for nine years, officials said.

While the deployment schedule is challenging, Bartolomei said, he is confident it will happen because of the exhaustive modeling and simulation done on the system to find precisely the right combination of cost, capability, and performance.

During the technology maturation and risk reduction phase, which lasted from 2016 to 2020, contractors created “six billion different configurations” of the missile, showing the “cost versus capability of their design for every requirement;” a “staggering” statistic, Bartolomei said. “You can’t do that unless you’re operating in” a digital environment, he said.

The first review of the all-up system was a six-hour session “in the model,” he added. “Both of our technical teams … were able to follow Northrop Grumman’s design architecture,” he said.

Zero Margin Left

Global Strike Command chief Gen. Timothy M. Ray asserted that time is up to press on with ICBM modernization.

“There’s no margin left,” he said. “We’re just going to run out of time” addressing risks to the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad from disappearing sources for parts, “the complexity of threats,” and the overall “decay” of the 60-year-old Minuteman III, which was originally intended to serve for 10 years.

“All those things add up,” he said.

Analyses of alternatives showed conclusively seven years ago that the cost to extend the life of the Minuteman III far outweighed the cost and benefits in effectiveness, maintainability, and capability from going forward with a new system, he said. That 2015 decision is still borne out by the data, and “now we need to keep our foot on the gas,” Ray said.

The GBSD will most likely be a “70-year system,” said Maj. Gen. Anthony W. Genatempo, director of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center and program executive officer for strategic systems.

“Minuteman III was a 10-year weapon system that was asked to last 60 years,” he said. “We are building GBSD to be a 70-year weapon system that we can maintain and increase its capability to stay relevant over 70 years.” The difference is that Minuteman’s several updates—the last of which was in 2010—were all retroactive and required significant reverse engineering, he said. The GBSD, rather, has been designed to be easily and quickly updateable to respond to new technology and threat changes, he said.

Genatempo said the things that keep him up at night regarding the health of the Minuteman are things such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems and other 60-year-old infrastructure that go with Minuteman that have never been replaced—and the failure of which is largely unpredictable and would take a missile offline for an unknown amount of time as it is fixed.

“That’s why the decision was made” to go ahead with GBSD, he said. It was a decision to “stop trying to keep solving that [kind of] problem and replace this with a system that we can work on that is more reliable, that is safer, and is easier to maintain.” The GBSD system and the Long-Range Stand-Off missile, which will replace the Air-Launched Cruise Missile, “are most certainly designed that way from the get-go,” Genatempo said.

He added that the GBSD model—and that for Minuteman, going forward—is to engage predictive maintenance technologies that no longer wait for things to break and then fix them, but instead anticipate when things will break and correct the issues beforehand.

“Right now, I just do not see the data” that life-extending Minuteman “is a cost-effective option for us,” he said. “I think we have the data to back up that story that it is more cost effective to go down the GBSD route, let alone that GBSD will meet the future requirements” of U.S. Strategic Command, while Minuteman will not.

“From strictly a business case, I think the data is there,” he added. “The case has been made.” Moreover, the cost of extending Minuteman “does nothing but go up as we discover more things” breaking “as time goes by.”

Genatempo also said the GBSD is important for the Airmen “who have to be around that incredibly dangerous weapon system.” While he insisted that Minuteman is safe and reliable, “a lot of the maintenance practices incorporated into the GBSD make it a more safe and reliable system” to work on.

The GBSD is an incredibly complex system, according to Northrop Grumman’s vice president and general manager of strategic deterrent systems, Greg Manuel.

“If you slice and dice GBSD,” he said, it’s the equivalent of “a dozen ACAT 1,” or major development programs. Given that the Air force has 50 such programs, GBSD accounts for a significant share of USAF’s acquisition effort, he said. He also noted that GBSD’s timeline makes it “not a once-in-a-generation program, … but a once every other generation” program.

Not a Trivial Task

Col. Erik Quigley, director of the Minuteman III systems directorate, likened bringing on GBSD while keeping Minuteman credible and deployed to “giving your dog a bath while walking him.” It’s “not a trivial task.” He, too, said Minuteman is suffering from grave structural problems stemming from the fact that “the missile itself is 51 years old,” but the launch capsules and other support facilities are “58 years old.”

“When Gen. Genatempo said he’s worried about HVAC, he’s not joking,” Quigley said.

The launch support building, for example, has “brine chiller lines,” which cool the launch facility. They are “severely corroded; [at] all 400-plus sites,” he said. “But guess what? We don’t attack that problem when we go do programmed depot maintenance out in the field. We just wait for them to break. And when they break, a missile site goes off alert, which is a huge problem.”

In the future, “We’re getting away from ‘hey, let’s hit a site every eight years—let’s go more to condition-based or predictive-based model, using data analytics and digital sustainment to help inform us about what maintenance actions we can take at these sites that will help us get better mission capability.’”

The command has identified the “top drivers of maintenance actions” at the Minuteman sites, and “we really need to double down” on these mitigation efforts “if we’re going to sustain this system for 18 more years,” Quigley said.

Problem areas include “the environmental control system filters, shock isolator air compressors, … the blast doors, the B-plug, the motor generators that are causing MICAPs (mission impaired capability-awaiting parts) in the field, blast valves, things like that. Based on maintenance data that we’re trending, we know how many non-mission capable and partial-mission capable hours that these problems are causing us.”

Quigley said he couldn’t share photos to show “how much corrosion we have … on things like launch and closure doors, and the actual blast doors to the capsules and the B-plug.” The corrosion “prevents us from being able to close the blast doors and lock [them] appropriately. And you can only scrape away the rust and take away layers so many times before you’re putting the crews at risk for potential hardness concerns … [resulting from] an EMP blast and potential radiation.”

Quigley said he’s asked frequently why USAF doesn’t just service-life-extend the Minuteman, rather than build the new GBSD. Given all the changes to make GBSD more capable, easier to update, safer to operate, and longer-lived than Minuteman, he said, “the SLEP program is GBSD. That’s our strategic message.” It will cost $30 billion to extend Minuteman, he noted.

“It’s that big of a bill … Every year we wait, it gets more expensive, … and we are not going down that path.”

Space Force to Reuse Falcon 9 Booster for GPS III Launch

June 14, 2021 | By Amanda Miller

The Space Force plans to try out a used rocket booster—a first under the National Security Space Launch program—when it launches the fifth GPS III satellite on June 17.

Prices for the GPS III launches, because of reusability, and to build the satellites, because of the economy of scale, are going down as more of the new satellites enter the U.S.’s GPS constellation. Representatives with the USSF and the two companies providing the satellites and launch vehicles, Lockheed Martin Corp. and SpaceX, answered reporters’ questions June 14. They expect the newest satellite to be up and running in the hands of USSF personnel within about two weeks of launch—shorter than past timelines. The new satellite likely will amount to a modest improvement in GPS location accuracy but with the better anti-jamming and cybersecurity features of GPS III’s.

The USSF saved $54 million when it adjusted the current GPS III launch contract down from $290 million to make reusability an option. The contract covers three Falcon 9 launches, of which this week’s launch will be the second. The USSF will reuse the SpaceX Falcon 9 first-stage booster it used to launch the last GPS III satellite in November 2020. SpaceX captures first-stage Falcon 9 boosters on the decks of drone ships.

In the balance, reusing a booster for the first time amounted to “a little bit of extra analysis,” said Walter Lauderdale, Falcon Division chief and deputy mission director with the USSF Space and Missile Systems Center’s Launch Enterprise.

“Since we’re using the same booster again, we didn’t have to look at all the build paperwork for a first flight—we just had to look at what they did for refurbishment,” Lauderdale said, referring to SpaceX’s refurbishment and the USSF’s procedures to certify a vehicle for flight. “So the resources that we would’ve otherwise dedicated toward looking at the build paperwork, we were able to use that to apply toward looking at refurbishment processes.”

Three more of the 2,300-kilogram GPS III’s are lined up “ready to be called up for launch” in Lockheed Martin’s high bay at its Colorado factory, said Tonya Ladwig, Lockheed Martin vice president for navigation systems. The more powerful and sophisticated satellites can better evade attempts to jam or spoof—in other words, counterfeit a signal via a cyberattack—than its predecessors, Ladwig said.

Lockheed Martin’s contract to build the first 10 GPS III’s planned for the price to drop from about $500 million per satellite at the beginning of the run to about $200 million toward the end. The officials said the current one is probably somewhere in the middle.

The current satellite constellation consists of 31 operational space vehicles, USSF said, and is a mix of GPS IIR, IIR-M, IIF, and GPS III space vehicles. The fifth GPS III satellite will be integrated into the constellation by replacing one of the aging IIR satellites.

The constellation requires a minimum of 24 satellites to meet worldwide coverage requirements, and this fifth GPS III will become the 24th “Military-code-capable” satellite in orbit, providing global coverage for the military’s new, more-secure M-code GPS signal. However, use of that signal won’t be fully operational until 2023, an official said, pending completion of delayed control system software.

In addition to delivering payloads to space, the Department of the Air Force recently announced it would research the feasibility of flying cargo on rockets to destinations on Earth.

The Space Force owns and operates the GPS constellation. Partly because of satellite transfers to the new service, the USSF’s proposed $17.4 billion fiscal 2022 budget amounts to more than 10 percent of the Department of the Air Force’s “blue” budget.

The launch is scheduled for 12:09 p.m. Eastern time on June 17. The launch window is 15 minutes. A second launch window opens at 12:05 p.m. June 18. Lightning from afternoon thunderstorms brought the probability of unfavorable conditions to 40 percent for June 17 and 30 percent June 18, as of the June 14 briefing.

Weapons School Holds First In-Person Graduation in 18 Months

June 14, 2021 | By Tobias Naegele

Air Force Weapons School Class 21A celebrated almost six months of intense training at a June 12 graduation dinner attended by more than 1,000 graduates, faculty, staff, and family members. Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a Weapons School graduate himself 40 years ago, gave the keynote address.

Deptula recalled his AFWS experience as among the hardest things he did in 35 years in the Air Force. “Relative to all that’s been added to the course since, what you all have accomplished is certainly much more than what I experienced,” he said, adding that he relished the chance to address an audience that is surely the future leadership of the force.

“The Department of the Air Force has become the Department of Defense’s only indispensable military arm,” he said. “There is absolutely no joint force operation that can be conducted without some element of the Department of the Air Force being involved. … That cannot be said of the Army or the Department of the Navy.”

Graduates should ponder, he said, what that means as they carry newfound knowledge back to their squadrons and progress in rank and responsibility as leaders in the Air Force and Space Force.

“My bottom line up front is for you to remember, plan for, and preach the critical importance of integration of the multitude of force elements resident in our air and space forces that’s absolutely required for operational success,” Deptula said. “While we now have a separate service dedicated to organize, train, and equip for operations in space, when it comes to force application, success can only be achieved through the indivisible application of aerospace power.”

Times do change, he continued. “When I went through what is now the Air Force Weapons School, it was known as the Fighter Weapons School because only fighters were involved in the program,” Deptula said. “Today the Air Force Weapons School now comprises 21 squadrons, 31 Weapon Instructor Courses, nine Advanced Instructor Courses, and represents Air Combat Command, Global Strike Command, Air Mobility Command, Air Force Special Ops Command, PACAF, USAFE, AFCENT, and the Space Force. I’m here to tell you: No one in class 81DIN was exposed to orbital warfare.”

Deptula said expansion of the Weapons School has been critical to advance understanding of integrated operations since then. “Think about your participation in the integration phase of the course,” he told graduates. “Do you now have a greater appreciation of what’s involved in planning, executing, and flexing for the inevitable changes that occur in a campaign-level aerospace operation than you did before you came here? I think the answer is yes. During Desert Storm, the vast majority of the captains out there didn’t have that kind of perspective. I’d also tell you that neither did a lot of colonels or generals.

“The point is that your particular weapon system or specialty is just one part of what is a much larger enterprise,” Deptula explained. “And for that enterprise to succeed, it takes optimization of all the parts. Learning that as a captain yields enormous benefits when faced with the real-world cudgel of combat. And when you advance in rank and responsibility, you’ll have the insights required to succeed at the operational and strategic levels of command.”

One of the most significant changes in the evolution of modern warfare is the result of the combination of three technological changes:

Persistent intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance
Precision weapons
Improved survivability thanks to stealth

This combination reverses the traditional paradigm for how air and surface forces can be used to defeat adversaries. Traditionally, surface forces led the fight supported by air forces; but now, air forces can be supported by surface forces and be more responsive, effective, efficient, and less costly in lives and dollars.

Deptula quoted a Marine platoon leader writing about Operation Iraqi Freedom: “For the next hundred miles, all the way to the gates of Baghdad, every palm grove hid Iraqi armor, every field an artillery battery, and every alley an antiaircraft gun or surface-to-air missile launcher. But we never fired a shot. We saw the full effect of air power. Every one of those fearsome weapons was a blackened hulk.”

That’s important, Deptula said, because military “capabilities change over time and those fundamental changes should be exploited, … particularly in an era of great power competition.”

To defeat future peer adversaries, U.S. forces must fully exploit modern ISR, precision strike, stealth, and maneuver, Deptula said. It must increase integration of service components, increase seamless information sharing across systems in every domain, and leverage advances in computing and network capabilities to turn information into a dominant factor in warfare.

“The outcome [of future conflicts] will increasingly be determined by which side is better equipped and organized to collect, process, disseminate, understand, and control information,” Deptula concluded. “Joint all-domain command and control, the Advanced Battle Management System, and Agile Combat Employment … will remain just concepts without the integration” that Weapons School graduates will bring to the fight.

“We need the suppression of enemy air defense expert, the command and control guru, the air dominance subject matter expert, ISR specialists, and dynamite strike leads to turn these concepts into tactics, techniques, and procedures, to experiment and fail as much as succeed, and to lead the way in making the hard decisions … required to make these information age concepts reality,” Deptula continued. “Modern sensor-shooter-effector air and spacecraft are the key elements and will become the nucleus of the combat cloud because of their rapid reach and global perspective.”

Then he quoted President George W. Bush as saying the best way to keep the peace is to redefine war on America’s terms. “You just mastered how to do that,” he told the graduates. “As you return to your units, teach your brothers and sisters in arms to do the same.”

Air Force Adds New ‘Maintenance Duty Uniform,’ Approves Tactical Camo Caps

June 14, 2021 | By Greg Hadley

A new uniform set is coming to the Air Force, giving Airmen in aircraft maintenance, industrial, and other labor intensive units the option to wear coveralls, provided their unit commander authorizes it.

The new set will officially be designated the maintenance duty uniform (MDU) and will be included in the updated Air Force Instruction 36-2903—which governs dress and appearance for USAF and Space Force troops. The new uniform is expected to be released in August, according to a June 14 Air Force release.

The sage coveralls will be worn with the coyote brown T-shirt, Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP) patrol or tactical cap, coyote brown or green socks, and coyote brown boots. It will have a basic configuration of a nametape, service tapes, and rank along with the higher headquarters patch on the left sleeve and a subdued U.S. flag and organizational patch on the right sleeve.

“The MDU idea was presented to the 101st uniform board in November 2020 as a way to help increase readiness and timeliness from the work center to the flight line,” Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass said in a statement. “We are hoping this change will instill a sense of culture and inclusivity for our maintainers who work to keep the mission going 24/7.”

The only career fields eligible to wear the new uniform are 2A, 2F, 2G, 2M, 2P, 2S, 2T, 2W, 3E, 3D, and 1P. The uniform is not authorized for office work.

The Air Force also announced June 14 that it will immediately authorize the wear of certain tactical OCP caps while it works to complete the acquisition process for the new uniform item. The caps must be made entirely of OCP material or OCP material with a coyote brown mesh back.

The new caps differ from the OCP patrol cap in that they are lighter and fit more closely to the head. Women will be able to pull their bun or ponytail through the back of the hats, but Airmen will still have to have the Velcro or sew-on spice brown name tape centered on the back of the caps. The only thing authorized for wear on the front of the cap are officer ranks.

The new uniform adjustments are the second group of such changes instituted by the Air Force in the past few months. In March, the service announced it was authorizing shorts for maintainers, as well as Duty Identifier Patches, certain sock and eyeglass frame colors, and messenger and lunch bags. The department has also recently adjusted its rules regarding the hairstyles allowed for women to better address differences in hair texture and density.

Pentagon Restores $2.2 Billion for MILCON From Border Wall Fund

June 11, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

The Pentagon announced June 11 it is restoring $2.2 billion of military construction funds that had been reprogrammed to pay for the construction of a wall on the southern border.

The funding covers 66 projects in 11 states, three territories, and 16 countries. Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said in a briefing that the funding was unobligated and comes out of a total of $3.6 billion that had been reprogrammed for the wall in fiscal 2021.

The Trump Administration, beginning in 2019, moved military construction and operations and maintenance money to pay for the construction of the barrier. President Joe Biden, on the day he was inaugurated, issued a proclamation reversing the plan and repurposing the funding. The Pentagon, in April, canceled all border barrier construction projects.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks, in a June 10 memo, said the move to restore funding completes the full Pentagon plan as a result of Biden’s directive.

The memo lists the following total force USAF projects that will receive funding:

LOCATION	FUNDING (in millions)	PROJECT
Florida	$25.8	Fire/crash rescue station
Indiana	$9.4	Small arms range
Texas	$22	Camp Bullis dining facility
Utah	$24	Composite Aircraft Antenna Calibration facility
Wisconsin	$10.5	Small arms range
Guam	$28.6	APR-Munitions Storage Igloos Ph. 2
Guam	$13.8	APR-SATCOM C4I Facility
Guam	$2.5	PRTC Roads
Germany	$15.4	37th Airlift Squadron Operations/Aircraft Maintenance Unit
Germany	$1.8	Upgrade hardened aircraft shelters for F-22
Germany	$79.1	Spangdahlem Elementary School Replacement
Hungary	$13.7	Increase POL Storage Capacity
Jordan	$18.9	Air Traffic Control Tower
Jordan	$34.3	Munitions storage area
Luxembourg	$97.1	Deployable Airbase System storage
Slovakia	$59.9	Regional munitions storage area
Slovakia	$20.4	Airfield upgrades
Slovakia	$19.1	Increase POL Storage
United Kingdom	$26.97	Munitions holding area
United Kingdom	$16.5	Main gate complex
Worldwide	$120.9	Tactical Mobile Over the Horizon Radar

Data from Department of Defense Memo

KC-46 Boom Operators Work Around Software Flaw

June 11, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

A feature in the advanced refueling system of the KC-46, designed to improve safety and ease the burden on boom operators, is not working as designed due to a software flaw, so the Air Force implemented a workaround as the service and Boeing wait for more pressing issues to be solved first.

The issue is with the aircraft’s Aerial Refueling Software, which has preset limits for different types of receivers—aircraft needing fuel—to control the boom’s independent disconnect system. Simply put, the system automatically selects the left/right and up/down limits for the boom to stay connected to a given receiver, and if the movement exceeds the envelope for that aircraft, the boom automatically breaks away to avoid damage.

However, the presets in the system are not accurate for each receiver, so boom operators, before each connection, have to override the automatic preset limits and input correct ones. The problem was a Category II deficiency on the KC-46 before the workaround was implemented.

“The Air Force is aware of the KC-46 receiver preset issue,” Air Mobility Command said in a statement to Air Force Magazine. “[AMC] implemented a workaround for boom operators to manually adjust the KC-46 Receiver Presets and closed the CAT II DR for Enhancement. The issue does not impact operational use of the boom, nor will it keep the aircraft from eventually being fully operational. AMC will address a long-term fix for this issue during follow-on upgrades once solutions are met for higher priority deficiencies.”

The issue is in addition to the broader problems with the aircraft’s Remote Vision System, which the Air Force and Boeing are working to replace after agreeing on a broad fix last year. Boeing, in a statement, said it is working “on a plan to address the issue in a future software revision. In the meantime, operators have a workaround to continue refueling operations.”

Air Force Magazine witnessed the workaround firsthand during a recent flight aboard a KC-46 during Air Mobility Command’s Mobility Guardian 2021 exercise, the first time an independent journalist has flown aboard the Pegasus.

The KC-46’s mission during the flight was to refuel four F-16s. As the first F-16 lined up to receive fuel, the boom operator prepared the refueling system, and the instructor on the flight inputted F-16 into the software. The controls are in a mostly black touchscreen on the lowest panel of the Aerial Refueling Operator Station.

The selection adjusts the green/yellow/red lines on the main monitor that shows the boom and the receiver aircraft trailing behind. The instructor then changes the individual settings to the correct ones, referencing a list of receivers. This changes the length of the color line on the RVS to the correct threshold for the receiver. The system then must be reset between each receiver, as the boom operator also changes the settings for how much fuel will be passed.

In the mission Air Force Magazine observed, after the first Viper, callsign Buzz 21, broke away, the instructor pilot repeated the process of selecting F-16 as the receiver and then again overrode the preset limits.

Boom operators said the workaround is not a big deal when there’s just one receiver, such as another tanker or airlifter. However, when there’s a flight of multiple aircraft, such as these four F-16s, the process takes a small amount of time between refuelings. Additionally, if there is just one boom operator on the flight, it takes attention away from this process, an issue that was alleviated in this recent mission by having the instructor handle the resets while the boom operator focused on refueling.

“KC-46 aircrew continue to familiarize and increase skills aboard the aircraft,” AMC said. “Their experiences and feedback are critical to identifying improvements in order to provide the best possible weapons system to the Joint warfighter.”

While the KC-46’s automatic disconnect system uses the software settings, the independent disconnect system in the KC-10 is selected manually at the operator station in the rear of the plane.

The Air Force and Boeing did not provide a timeline for a possible software fix, other than saying more pressing issues will be addressed first. One of the top priorities, the RVS 2.0 replacement, is expected to begin to be fielded in late 2023. This system is undergoing its preliminary design review, and AMC boss Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost said “our boom operators have seen that work, and they are pretty happy with what they see. So, I’m cautiously optimistic.”

There are still four remaining Category 1 deficiencies on the KC-46, the most serious that could impact the safety of flight. Three of these are with the Remote Vision System that Boeing is addressing with the 2.0 version. The fourth is a “stiff boom” problem, which the Air Force will resolve by installing a redesigned actuator beginning in 2024.

In February, the service announced fixes to two other Category 1 deficiencies with the aircraft’s auxiliary power unit, with one downgraded to a Category 2 and the other solved. As of that time, there were 608 remaining Category 2 deficiency reports, down from 730 in June 2020. These are defined as “conditions that could negatively impact operations, but have acceptable workarounds. They can be characterized as test and evaluation, product quality, and/or specific to an aircraft’s acceptance process,” the Air Force said in a statement.

Air Force Changes Hair Standards for Women to be Even More Inclusive

June 11, 2021 | By Amy Hudson

The Air Force is once again changing hair standards for women to better address differences in hair texture and density.

Beginning June 25, women’s hair may extend six inches to the left of the point where hair is gathered behind their head and six inches to the right, as long as they can still properly wear headgear. The updated guidance follows the January announcement that women in the Air Force and Space Force can now wear a single ponytail, or single or double braids, as long as the hairdo reaches no farther than their upper back and doesn’t exceed the width of their head. The January guidance also allowed eyebrow-length bangs.

“Change doesn’t happen overnight, and sometimes it takes another iteration to arrive at the best solution,” Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. said in a June 11 release. “This updated guidance represents meaningful progress. The feedback we received from our Airmen highlighted the need to reevaluate the policy and ultimately make it more inclusive.”

Women in the service had complained for years that wearing their hair up daily in tight buns was giving them headaches and even causing hair loss. Although the initial update was an attempt to acknowledge different hair types and textures among women of various ethnic backgrounds, women said they still struggled to find a hairstyle that didn’t extend beyond their head.

“In developing policy, we try to address all angles and perspectives, but sometimes we have a blind spot,” said Lt. Gen. Brian T. Kelly, Air Force deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel, and services, in the release. “The feedback we received highlighted the need to reevaluate the policy to make it even more inclusive.”

The new policy applies to both Airmen and Guardians for the time being, but the Space Force is working on developing its own grooming standards.

The Air Force noted that safety standards must still be met and encouraged all women to reach out to their unit’s safety office for assistance in determining potential hazards, especially when dealing with machinery, power transmission apparatus, moving parts, or other equipment.

“Whether we’re talking about hair, uniforms, or forums for sharing ideas, an approach that embraces diversity and fosters an inclusive environment is critical to ensuring our talented, dedicated Airmen stay with us on this journey,” said Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass in the release.