Space Force Looks to Boost Cyber Defenses of Satellites with Acquisition Reorganization

May 10, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

The ongoing restructuring of Space Force acquisition authorities is designed in part to ensure proper cybersecurity testing and monitoring of new programs as they are developed and deployed, a senior Space Force procurement official said May 10.

The stand-up of Space Systems Command, and its absorption of the Space and Missile Systems Center, details of which were unveiled last month, was advertised as an effort to increase the speed and agility of Space Force acquisitions.

But in a lunchtime keynote at the CyberSatDigital event on May 10, Cordell A. DeLaPena Jr., program executive officer for Space Production at the Space and Missile Systems Center, stressed that it was also intended to improve the resilience of Space Force overhead architecture against new kinetic and cyber threats.

“The reason why we’ve stood up … a separate Space Systems Command for acquisition, and launch, and architecting is to make that shift from today’s peacetime architecture, … an architecture which was never envisioned to conduct offensive or defensive operations,” he said. In its place, Space Force plans a new architecture that could survive kinetic and cyberattacks by near-peer adversaries. “To make that pivot,” DeLaPena added, “We integrate all of those responses to those threats to our satellites into an integrated architecture, which will achieve space superiority.”

The new architecture, DeLaPena said, would rely on digital twinning technology, more properly called model-based systems engineering, in which a detailed virtual model of a satellite or other complex system is built so that it can be attacked and its cyber defenses tested.

DeLaPena said that cyber threats to U.S. satellite systems would be addressed in detail in a classified session later in the week, but outlined a series of “potential threats” in the cyber domain, which he said the newly reorganized acquisition elements in the Space Force would be “testing against” before turning new products over to operational commanders.

“The types of threats we are looking for [are] things like insertion of rogue components—that’s more on the supply side—malicious software, electronic warfare attack—that’s jamming, spoofing—and then denying our sensor access. And those threats, the results of those threats, could result in our satellites being degraded, or an outage, or spillage [of sensitive data], or a temporary loss of command control of our satellites. So these are the things that we are worried about.”

As part of the Space Force’s commitment to becoming an entirely digital military service, DeLaPena said, this testing would be conducted virtually, using digital twinning. Under a program called SPEED—for “satellite penetration test, environment, evaluation, and demonstration,” DeLaPena said, Space Force acquisition officials were creating “digital environments” that could test, at first, prototype satellites being developed by Space Force itself, and later “a space vehicle simulation testbed, which we will use for testing all of our satellites, from commercial and other sources.”

Finally, DeLaPena said, the service would build “within our operations and sustainment infrastructure, [a] prototype solution, which will allow us to constantly monitor and look for any kind of abnormal behavior” or internal traffic on satellites in orbit. But that kind of testing and monitoring would likely not be carried out by Space Systems Command, he suggested.

Once the command is launched in the summer, DeLaPena said, its commander “will have the prioritization responsibility in terms of the command’s risk assessments and the funding we will put across all of those risks, to include the cyber engineering efforts to ensure that every system being delivered to Space Systems Command is resilient.”

But once those systems are deployed and operational, “it’s going to be up to Space Delta Six to do the monitoring and the defending of those systems, both our space systems and our cyberspace systems,” he said.

DLA Monitoring Impacts of Cyberattack on Fuel Pipelines

May 10, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

The Defense Logistics Agency is monitoring the military’s fuel inventory levels as a major cyberattack has halted operations of a large-scale fuel pipeline on the nation’s East Coast.

Colonial Pipeline, which delivers about 45 percent of gasoline and jet fuel on the East Coast, stopped operations because of a ransomware attack targeting its systems. The company said it is restarting part of its network, with service expected to be restored by the end of the week, The Associated Press reported.

Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby told reporters May 10 that DLA is watching how much fuel is in the system. “We’re awaiting updates from Colonial Pipeline. There’s sufficient inventory on hand for downstream customers, so there’s no immediate mission impact,” Kirby said.

“DLA has the ability to leverage alternate supply means to mitigate long-term impacts if delays continue,” the agency said in a statement.

The Defense Department is “coordinating with our interagency partners” as the situation develops, Kirby added.

The ransomware attack was reportedly conducted by a criminal group called “DarkSide,” according to the AP. The company said in a statement that it “proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems.”

Colonial Pipeline carries fuel in a system spanning more than 5,500 miles from Houston to New Jersey, touching 13 total states, according to the company’s website. The system delivers fuel to several major airports, including locations with a military aircraft presence, though the Pentagon did not specifically state which bases could be affected.

One Year From First Flight, Ray Tours B-21 Factory, Bomber Test Enterprise

May 10, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

As the first flight of the B-21 Raider bomber draws closer, Gen. Timothy M. Ray, head of Air Force Global Strike Command, toured Northrop Grumman’s production facility and the test enterprise that will put the jet through its paces beginning next year.

Ray saw “significant progress made on the build of the first flight test aircraft that will one day make its way to Edwards Air Force Base, [California], for testing,” said the Rapid Capabilities Office, which manages the B-21 program, in a press release.

The RCO said flight testing of the new bomber will begin as soon as aircraft No. 1 is complete, and this will be driven by “key maturity events” and not “arbitrary dates.”

Randall G. Walden, head of the RCO, told Air Force Magazine that he expects the B-21 to emerge from the factory in early 2022 and make its first flight about a year from now. First flight will be preceded by outside engine runs and taxi tests of increasing speed.

Ray started his tour of the bomber test enterprise on May 5 with a visit to the 419th Flight Test Squadron, Global Power Combined Test Force. The unit performs tests on the B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers. It is also already performing tests on the AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon, a hypersonic missile that will equip the B-52 and eventually the B-1 and F-15. Ray has said as many as a dozen B-52s and B-1s could be involved in testing new weapons for the bomber fleet.

Continued B-2 testing “enables expanded strike capabilities while ensuring the aircraft can keep pace with evolving threat levels,” the RCO said.

Ray also visited the B-21 Combined Test Force comprising the 420th Flight Test Squadron and Detachment Five of the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center (AFOTEC), plus B-21 prime contractor Northrop Grumman. He was briefed on “readiness to support the B-21 program when it transitions into flight test.”

On May 6, Ray toured the Northrop Grumman facility at Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, where the B-21 undergoes final assembly. Ray was briefed on construction of the first two test aircraft and “the value of building those test articles using the same production line, tooling, and procedures that will manufacture the final production aircraft.”

The RCO echoed what Walden told Air Force Magazine: that the production managers are applying lessons learned from building the first two aircraft “to implement process improvements well before building the actual operational aircraft, decreasing cost and build schedule.” Stable requirements and a risk-reducing strategy “have played a large part in keeping the program schedule on track to deliver operational B-21 Raiders to the first main operating base in the Mid-2020s.” Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, is to be the Raider’s first beddown and operating location.

House Armed Services Committee chair Adam Smith (D-Washington) recently made an uncharacteristically positive assessment of the B-21’s progress, calling an April briefing he received on it “one of the most positive, encouraging things I’ve had happen to me in the last couple of weeks.” He said the B-21 is “on time, on budget, and they’re making it work in an intelligent way.” The B-21 and other programs are “starting to see the lessons learned” over two decades of frustrating weapons development, and the “necessary changes” in the acquisition system are starting to bear fruit, Smith said.

Due to secrecy, and to prove out a more streamlined approach, the B-21 program is being run by the RCO rather than Air Force Materiel Command, which would normally run a major program for the service.

Collaboration between the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center, AFGSC, Air Force Materiel Command, and the RCO “has paved a smooth path for transition into the critical flight test phase” of the B-21, said Maj. Gen. Christopher P. Azzano, commander of the Air Force Test Center at Edwards. He called it “an extraordinary team effort.”

The RCO quoted B-21 system program director Col. Jason Voorheis as saying the Air Force is “pleased” with the B-21’s progress and that the service and Northrop Grumman are “working closely together to make smart choices on this program to support warfighter requirements and timelines.”

Lockheed Martin Personnel Leaving Iraqi F-16 Base Because of Militia Threats

May 10, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

Lockheed Martin is withdrawing personnel who support Iraq’s F-16 fleet from Balad Air Base because of threats from militias in the region, a step that will likely limit the fleet’s operations.

The move comes after some contractors had temporarily left the major operating base in recent months because of the threat from Iranian-backed militias, according to a Defense Department Inspector General report.

“In coordination with the U.S. government and with employee safety as our top priority, Lockheed Martin is relocating our Iraq-based F-16 team,” the company said in a statement. “We value our partnership with the Iraqi Air Force and will continue to work with the Iraq and U.S. governments to ensure mission success going forward.”

The New York Times reported May 10 that the company had 70 employees at Balad, with 50 expected to return to the U.S. and 20 headed to Erbil in the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan in Iraq.

A senior ministry official told the Times it had asked the company to delay the decision, and the company responded that the personnel would return in a matter of months when protection would be provided.

The Defense Department’s Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve, in a report released May 4, said the contractors had left the base as militias conducted harassment-style attacks at Balad and other locations across Iraq.

This comes after contractors could not directly support F-16s at Balad in 2020 because of a combination of regional threats and COVID-19, according to the IG. When the contractors left in 2020, they created a remote system to help Iraqi maintainers while not co-located at Balad, and the personnel will use this system again, according to a source familiar to the situation.

Leaders Provide Insight Into the Newly Re-Established US Space Command

May 8, 2021 | By Amanda Miller

Special-ops aviators, a physicist from the intelligence community, and an enlisted Marine with decades of deployments: U.S. Space Command’s military and civilian leaders who spoke May 7 were as likely to come from strictly space backgrounds as not.

Several of the newest combatant command’s top officials appeared during a Space Foundation virtual Symposium365 talk. They indicated that their diverse backgrounds are by design and that few Space Force personnel are yet a part.

Some of the day’s insights from inside the command, which was re-established 19 months ago and whose geographic area of responsibility starts 100 kilometers above the surface of the Earth:

More Partners, More Deterrence

Army Gen. James H. Dickinson leads U.S. Space Command from its provisional headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. He said more allied and partner organizations will be “physically coming to work” at Peterson over the next 12 to 18 months and he sees “that energy expanding.”

“When I look at deterrence, one of our strongest deterrence capabilities, or measures, within the command is that strong allied and partner integration that we have,” said Dickinson, whose background is in missile defense. “We are starting to see a lot more allies that want to be … part of the space enterprise, want to work with U.S. Space Command,” he said. “So our ability to be able to capture that energy and start bringing those folks into the command itself is very powerful.”

The Department of the Air Force selected Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, as U.S. Space Command’s permanent home pending an environmental review, though the selection is under review.

One way U.S. Space Command tries to expand the pool of international partners is by inviting countries to take part in the Global Sentinel exercise in space situational awareness started by U.S. Strategic Command, said Space Force Col. Devin R. Pepper, deputy director of U.S. Space Command’s Strategy, Plans, and Policy Directorate and garrison commander of “soon-to-be Buckley Space Force Base” in Colorado. Pepper was nominated to be a brigadier general in January.

Ten partners including the U.S. took part in the last Global Sentinel in 2019. Pepper mentioned Chile and Poland as prospects. He said the invitations serve “as a lead-in to signing space situational awareness agreements with these partner nations.”

Warfighting Dynamic

Air Force Maj. Gen. William G. Holt II said he “didn’t have much experience with the space domain” before becoming U.S. Space Command’s director of operations, training, and force development.

A career special operations pilot, he characterized the command’s makeup as “actually very joint” and “kind of an even mix of Air Force background, Army background, Navy background—we have a handful of Marines, including our director of our cyber operations is a Marine one-star—and then, actually, not a whole lot of Space Force officers at this point in time,” Holt said.

Holt credited Space Force Chief of Space of Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond with the level of jointness intended “to change the dynamic and really bring in a warfighting … viewpoint from across the force.

“I’m not saying that the old Air Force Space Command wasn’t warfighters, because they absolutely did that every day—they supported us; they deployed downrange—but having the different backgrounds as far as the different services, I think, was really critical to [Raymond] bringing me in.”

Farther Reach

As space becomes more accessible, the command is looking ahead to when the military will want to operate beyond Earth orbit.

“More and more nations are operating in space,” said U.S. Space Command’s senior enlisted leader, Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sgt. Scott H. Stalker. He cited the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars Mission, a satellite that arrived in orbit around the red planet in February, “the first planetary science mission led by an Arab Islamic country.”

Stalker previously served as the senior enlisted leader for the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and U.S. Cyber Command, along with numerous deployments around the world and acknowledged that, “We are no longer the undisputed leaders in space.”

To be in position to gather intelligence in deep space soon enough, U.S. Space Command’s Deputy Director of Intelligence physicist Sean M. Kirkpatrick said the U.S. needs to take advantage of space technology the commercial sector is already working on.

“We’ve got a huge moon competition going on. We’ve got a Mars competition going on—multiple countries heading out,” Kirkpatrick said. “We are going to have to extend our mission space to the cislunar, lunar, and Martian orbits and regimes at some point in the not-too-distant future.”

The customary five- to 10-year timeframe for a defense acquisition program would take too long, he said:

“We’re going to be far behind … So we need to look forward now on, ‘What do I have to put in cislunar orbit, or [what] do I need to put in lunar orbit, just to be able to monitor activities that are going on and report that back.?’”

Then and Now

Having flown helicopters by map while stationed in Germany prior to the advent of GPS, then later, during Operation Desert Storm when GPS was brand new and unreliable, Army Brig. Gen. Thomas L. James said the experience of having space as a resource, then having it disrupted “at a time that you didn’t really anticipate,” have made the mission at U.S. Space Command “so visceral and passionate” to him personally.

“As we deployed to Desert Storm, we were handed a small number of sets of GPS systems, and we just learned how to integrate those on the fly as we went into combat operations,” James said.

“The way they operated then—because it was only a partial constellation—is some of the time, you knew where you were with great precision. Some of the time, you knew that you didn’t know where you were at all based off of the GPS. And some of the time, you thought you might know where you are.”

He learned “what it meant to lose our access to space—to have that day without space.”

F-35 Is Now the Air Force’s Second-Largest Fighter Fleet

May 7, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

The F-35A fleet is now the second-largest in the Air Force’s inventory, behind the F-16, surpassing F-15s and A-10s.

There are now 283 Joint Strike Fighters in the Air Force’s arsenal, compared to 281 A-10s, 234 F-15C/Ds, and 218 F-15Es. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. told the House Appropriations defense subcommittee on May 7 the F-35 reached the milestone within the last week.

The Air Force plans to buy 1,763 of the aircraft, and the numbers of jets have been growing at bases inside the continental United States and Alaska. Jets are expected to start arriving at the first USAF overseas base—RAF Lakenheath, United Kingdom—later this year.

Brown told lawmakers the service is still undertaking a study of tactical aviation requirements to determine the right mix of fifth-generation and legacy fighters.

“The intent here is to take a look at the fighter portfolio we do have today with the seven different fighter fleets and what is the best mission capability as we go to the future,” Brown said. “We need to have a range of fighters to do both the high end and low end.”

The F-35 is the service’s “highest-end” fighter, and since the service doesn’t have its full complement of the aircraft, it needs to balance how it is used.

“The intent here [is to] study a range of options of what the right mix should be as we look at the threat for the future. [That] is part of what that study is going to provide,” Brown said. “So it won’t be there to give us an answer—it will give us a range of answers to take a look at the threat to make sure we have done the analysis to inform ourselves but also to inform our key stakeholders.”

The F-35 has come under intense scrutiny from lawmakers recently. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington) called the Joint Strike Fighter a “rathole” during a March virtual event with the Brookings Institution, suggestion DOD leaders should consider cutting the overall buy. For years Congress has bought more F-35s than the Defense Department requested in its budgets, causing HASC readiness subcommittee chair Rep. John Garamendi (D-California) to cite “enormous concern” about the F-35 fighter’s sustainment, saying Congress may cut back on purchases of the jet to let the sustainment enterprise catch up.

USAF Officials Urge Congress to Allow for More Fleet Cuts, Reinvestment in New Systems

May 7, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

Top Department of the Air Force leaders told lawmakers May 7 they need to divest aging aircraft to make room for more advanced systems, setting up a now familiar budget fight on Capitol Hill.

“America cannot wait to modernize the Air Force any longer, not one year, one month, or one week,” Acting Air Force Secretary John P. Roth and Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. wrote in testimony to the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. “To deter and defeat today’s competitors and tomorrow’s adversaries, we must re-capitalize our Air Force, and we must do it now … The call to accelerate change or lose is not hyperbole—it is a requirement.”

USAF officials face an uphill battle, as Congress in recent years has largely blocked efforts to retire aircraft such as A-10s, legacy refueling tankers, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft. Lawmakers also have been critical of new efforts such as the Advanced Battle Management System to replace the E-8C Joint STARS. But with budgets expected to fall in coming years, USAF officials are pressing the urgency.

“We’re going to have to probably make some hard choices and some difficult decisions concerning trying to invest in the future versus continuing to support some of our legacy systems,” Roth told lawmakers during the hearing. “And so we’ve actually been talking about that for two or three years in terms of focusing on the future and taking some additional risks with some of our current systems and some of our legacy capability. My sense is the budget you’ll see is a balanced budget that can support the National Security Strategy with some reasonable risk.”

Because the Biden administration’s 2022 budget request has not been released, USAF officials did not discuss many specifics, so it’s not clear what aircraft would be cut or what future investment plans will be requested.

In prepared testimony, USAF officials once again pressed to allow them to retire old refueling aircraft. Last year, Congress mostly blocked the Air Force from cutting KC-135s, but Air Force officials said getting rid of the aircraft is necessary as the KC-46 comes online.

“The inability to phase the divesture of the legacy tanker fleet shackles funding and manpower resources and hampers the fielding of the more capable KC-46 at the rate required to support combatant commanders,” the testimony states. “This negatively impacts air refueling capacity and tanker advancement. Offsets from legacy tanker divestment in both funding and manpower are critical to the success of the KC-46 and air refueling as a whole.”

USAF leaders also indicated that they have their sights on the RQ-4 Global Hawk fleet for cuts, citing the need for more survivable ISR aircraft. The service wants to cut the RQ-4 Block 30 aircraft, a move that Congress also has blocked before, to repurpose that money for a “penetrating ISR capability.” Future ISR needs to be done by a “family of systems,” including nontraditional assets, sensors, commercial platforms, and a “hybrid force” of fifth- and sixth-generation capabilities, officials said.

“Current ISR platforms have been able to accomplish this task with relative ease because they operated in uncontested and low-threat environments where the United States enjoys superiority across all domains of warfare,” Roth and Brown said in testimony. “Such freedom of action will not be the case in the future. Future threats will challenge the ability of legacy ISR platforms to successfully execute their missions.”

In what is shaping up to be one of the biggest fights of the budget process, Brown and Roth urged lawmakers to continue to support the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program to replace the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile as some in Congress are looking to cut back on the nuclear triad.

Delayed nuclear modernization means there needs to be a “comprehensive weapon replacement,” the leaders said in testimony. Brown told lawmakers during the hearing that the Minuteman III’s overall infrastructure is aging and that there are not vendors available to rebuild parts needed.

“With the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, what you will get, then, is something that’s more safe, more secure, more reliable, and then also paces the threat we’re up against to provide that deterrence value,” he said. “The reason why we actually have the ICBM in the first place is provide that nuclear and strategic deterrence.”

In a sign of the upcoming challenge, multiple lawmakers warned the leaders about the dangers of cutting aging aircraft. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) highlighted an effort by the Air Force in 2014 to cut E-3 AWACS and a Reserve unit at Tinker Air Force Base in his district.

“I know you sometimes got to make changes to reinvest, but please don’t give up capabilities that you might need in the immediate future,” Cole said. “It’s a very dangerous world, as you know better than me, and sometimes you’re going to need those legacy systems.”

Multiple representatives with Guard C-130 units in their districts also warned the Air Force about cutting Hercules aircraft, as the service looks to modernize the fleet and cut old C-130Hs. Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Illinois) said she is “deeply concerned” with plans to cut “our mobility flexibility and responsiveness, to decrease the number of our tactical airlift workhorses in the inventory.” She said the upcoming, yet-to-be-released Mobility Capabilities Requirements Study would support an Air Force request to lower the number of C-130s needed to 255, down from the 2018 study’s recommendation of 300.

Brown said it is the Air Force’s intent to work closely with the National Guard “to ensure we are doing a good analysis.” National Guard Bureau chief Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson told the same committee earlier in the week that he also would not want to see the number of C-130s in the Guard drop.

“We do have to make some tough decisions, and what I want to be able to do is commit that we’re going to work very closely with the Guard as we start to make decisions going forward with our C-130s,” Brown said.

Richard Says Nuclear Deterrence Connected to All Other DOD Capabilities

May 7, 2021 | By Amy Hudson

If strategic deterrence fails, nothing else will work as intended, U.S. Strategic Command boss Adm. Charles “Chas” A. Richard said during a virtual Brookings Institution event May 7.

“Every operational plan in the Department of Defense, and every other capability we have in DOD, rests on the assumption that strategic deterrence, and in particular nuclear deterrence, … is holding right,” Richard said. “And, if that assumption is not met, particularly with nuclear deterrence, nothing else in the Department of Defense is going to work the way it was designed.”

The United States can no longer separate nuclear and conventional policies, assuming they address separate threats. “You can’t think about it in pieces,” he said. “Nuclear is not separate from conventional; it is not separate from space; [it] is not separate from cyber. They are all linked.”

Last year, Richard said his command was rethinking how it approaches strategic deterrence in light of today’s threats, and Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said the Air Force was working on a new nuclear and conventional integration policy. China is rapidly building up its nuclear arsenal and has an “ambiguous no-first-use policy,” and Russia is bolstering its so-called tactical nuclear weapons, Clark said.

“The multipolar world is presenting different challenges for us,” Clark said at an Aug. 19 Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event. “The lines are a bit more blurred between conventional and nuclear, so that’s driven us to start thinking in ways that may be different than we thought about in the last 20 years or so.”

Richard reiterated comments he made on Capitol Hill in April, saying the nation does not have a triad on a day-to-day basis because nuclear-capable bombers were taken off alert after the Cold War. However, he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that could change if the decision was made to shift to a dyad approach to deterrence.

He emphasized the rapidly expanding threats, noting that for the first time in history, the United States must deter two peer, nuclear-capable adversaries simultaneously.

“That is a very different stack of dynamics, particularly the fact they have to be deterred differently. We’re working very hard on that here, but I think this is a much broader question that invites serious effort to go think through,” Richard said.

However, the United States has repeatedly delayed nuclear modernization and is now facing a multibillion-dollar bill for new bombers, a replacement for the 70-year-old Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system, updated nuclear command and control capability, new ballistic missile submarines, and more. The Biden administration has said it wants to take a fresh look at the country’s nuclear capabilities and plans a new Nuclear Posture Review, while some on Capitol Hill are pushing to either eliminate the ICBM leg of the triad altogether or push off modernization yet again.

Richard says this is a mistake and cautioned that the U.S. has only one chance to get this right.

“We have delayed the recapitalization of the triad to the point that in certain infrastructure areas and in certain talent areas—human capital—that if we’re wrong, and choose not to do something, we lose [those capabilities], and we’re not getting them back for five or 10 years,” Richard said. “We don’t normally face those decisions, but I am very confident that we’re trying hard to identify them. I’m confident our leaders, both inside the department and inside the nation, will make wise decisions, but we don’t normally have that consequence to our decisions.”

B-52 Demos Hypersonic Missile Kill Chain at Northern Edge Exercise

May 6, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

A B-52H bomber demonstrated the steps necessary to fire a hypersonic AGM-183 missile at a target 600 nautical miles away during the ongoing Northern Edge exercise in Alaska, the Air Force reported.

The bomber, on a 13-hour flight from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, received targeting data from the All-Domain Operations Capability experiment being run as part of the exercise, which in turn was being supplied with targeting data by sensors the USAF did not identify. The B-52 crew then simulated feeding the targeting data to an AGM-183 Air-launched Rapid Response missile. The service said the bomber was not actually carrying an AGM-183. It did not characterize the type of target being attacked.

“We were really exercising the data links that we needed in order to complete that kill chain loop,” 53rd Test Management Group Deputy Commander Lt. Col. Joe Little said. Feedback was then provided “to the players in the airspace that the simulated hypersonic missile was fired and effective,” he said. The event was a demonstration of beyond-line-of-sight kill chain employment, the Air Force said, and it succeeded in the “highly contested and realistic threat environment that Northern Edge provides.”

The ADOC experiment is meant to demonstrate synchronizing joint functions in forward locations “when traditional [command and control] … is degraded or denied,” the service explained. ADOC personnel help facilitate joint long-range fires through an “Advanced Battle Management System approach.” The experiments are designed to accelerate the employment of tactics, techniques, and procedures as well as technologies that can support a major combat operation.

Northern Edge is a high-end wargame taking place in and around Alaska training ranges. It’s experimenting and exercising with multi-domain operations while providing tactical training for individual land, sea, air, and space units. The exercise is trying out “adaptive basing” joint tactics, training, and procedures with live, virtual, and constructive means in support of Indo-Pacific Command.

The exercise also marks the operational debut of the F-15EX, the two brand-new examples of which flew to Alaska from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, for the wargame last week. They and other F-15s in the wargame are trying out the Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System (EPAWSS) electronic warfare suite.

The Air Force has not yet succeeded in launching an ARRW. The missile was not released in a flight test planned for last month. The service said further attempts will be made soon.