Hill F-35s Deploy to France for ‘Atlantic Trident’

May 11, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

F-35s and Airmen from Hill Air Force Base, Utah, deployed to Europe this week to take part in multiple exercises, including a major France-led air exercise focused on integrating fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft.

The F-35s from the 4th Fighter Squadron touched down at Mont-de-Marsan Air Base, France, on May 10. The squadron is made up of Active-duty Airmen from the 388th Fighter Wing and Reservists from the 419th Fighter Wing. The base is hosting Atlantic Trident 21, which runs May 17-28, with participants from the U.S., France, and the United Kingdom.

This is the third iteration of the exercise, which will include “complex air operations in a contested multinational joint force environment,” according to a U.S. Air Forces in Europe release.

The last Atlantic Trident exercise took place in May 2017 and was hosted at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia. That event included U.S. F-22s and F-35s along with Eurofighter Typhoons from the United Kingdom and French Rafales. The first exercise took place in 2015, also at Langley.

This is the 388th Fighter Wing’s third deployment to Europe. The 34th Fighter Squadron deployed to RAF Lakenheath, England, in April 2017, and the 421st Fighter Squadron deployed to Aviano Air Base, Italy, in May 2019, according to USAFE.

Eglin Testers Load Five JASSMs onto an F-15E

May 11, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

The 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, loaded five AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles onto an F-15E, more than doubling the Strike Eagle’s normal JASSM load.

The May 11 test, part of the Project Strike Rodeo at the base, originated from a discussion during a January 2021 conference working group, which focused on a scenario where the standoff missiles would be employed by a bomber escorted by fighters into a contested environment, according to a 53rd Wing release.

Participants in the group “hypothesized that a formation of fighters” could be used to fire the JASSM salvo, reducing the risk to bombers, according to the release. This would require increasing the capability of fighters to carry the large missiles, since the current maximum payload is two JASSMs.

“No one told us to do this,” said Lt. Col. Mike Benitez, the 53rd Wing director of staff, in the release. “We saw the need and the opportunity, so we executed. This infectious attitude drove every unit or office we coordinated with. Everyone wanted to see if we could do it, and no one ever pushed back and asked for a requirement or a formal higher headquarters tasking.”

The test required workarounds to the loading process. JASSMs are designed to be loaded from the base of shipping containers, which cannot fit under the F-15E. The 53rd Wing, the 96th Test Wing, and the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center used Squadron Innovation Funds to develop a specialized tool to load the missiles and wrote new procedures for the process.

“This is a squadron innovation effort with operational and strategic implications,” Benitez said in the release. “Project Strike Rodeo is all about creating options for combatant commanders, which ultimately can be used to create multiple dilemmas for the adversary.”

With a successful load test, follow-on flight testing would come next to make the increased capacity a reality for the F-15E fleet.

The test comes about two months after the wing also demonstrated another increase to the F-15E’s payload. In early March, the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron flew an F-15E with six Joint Direct Attack Munitions on a single side, increasing the number of bombs the Strike Eagle can carry to 15.

Airlift Continues Out of Afghanistan as Violence Remains

May 11, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

U.S. C-17s have now flown 104 loads of materiel out of Afghanistan as the retrograde continues, and U.S. Central Command plans to destroy more than 1,800 pieces of equipment.

Between six and 12 percent of the entire retrograde process has been completed since President Joe Biden announced the full withdrawal from Afghanistan last month, CENTCOM said in a May 11 statement.

One base has been handed over to the Afghan National Army, according to CENTCOM. The command will provide updates on the progress every week. Biden has ordered the withdrawal to be complete by Sept. 11, 2021.

Violence, however, remains high. A car bombing that targeted a girls’ school in Kabul on May 9 killed at least 85 people and injured 147, CNN reported.

Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said May 10 that there have not been attacks affecting U.S. forces in the area and that nothing has happened that would impede the progress on drawing down.

The U.S. military has deployed six B-52s to the region, along with an aircraft carrier, to conduct strikes in defense of U.S., coalition, and Afghan forces if needed. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III told reporters last week the military has “adequate resources and capabilities to protect themselves.”

The Defense Department is still determining ways to support Afghan forces following the withdrawal, including possible remote ways to help Afghan Air Force maintainers work on aircraft and new basing agreements with nearby nations to host counter-terrorism forces.

CMSAF: No More PT Delays

May 11, 2021 | By Amy Hudson

The Air Force is bringing back physical fitness testing on July 1 after multiple delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass said during a virtual coffee talk May 11.

“Read my lips: We are not changing the PT start date,” Bass said. “We have to have a fit culture, and we will resume PT testing on 1 July. So, again, leadership, make sure your folks are ready. Make sure you’re leading by example. That’s just part of our culture. If you are a fit Airman, you’re a more resilient Airman, and you’re a more ready Airman.”

It’s been more than a year since the Air Force last required PT testing, having delayed it at least four times. Bass said she recognizes that some Airman may have longer-term health effects from contracting the COVID-19 virus, and she called on leaders to work through that on a case-by-case basis.

“If you’ve had COVID and you’ve got some health issues that would prohibit you from being able to be your very best, guess what, as a leader, I’m going to take care of that. I’m not going to throw you out there and say, ‘Hey, it’s your turn.’ You know, that’s not leadership, but it’s not going to be codified in an AFI,” she said.

When the test does resume this summer, it’s going to look different. The service announced in December 2020 it would no longer score the controversial waist measurement, though Airmen will still have to get tape tested each year. Airmen will now be graded with a new scoring system based on a 1.5-mile run and one minute each of pushups and sit-ups. They also will be scored in five-year age groups, instead of 10-year cohorts like the previous test. Bass said the new increment charts will be released June 1.

“We’re going to start there,” Bass said. “From there, the exciting pieces you’ve heard me say before, we are at a point where we should be able to have options to be able to determine what somebody’s cardio fitness is or what their strength is, and we will announce what those will be.”

Bass said the new cardio assessment options are likely to start in January, but the service wants to give Airmen enough time to prepare.

USAF Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Dorothy A. Hogg said during a previous coffee talk that the service was looking at alternatives to scoring cardiovascular fitness. Some of the options being explored by the Air Force Fitness Working Group include a 20-meter shuttle run, row ergometry, planks, and burpees.

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.”