More B-52s to CENTCOM, Ground Troops Reportedly Deploying to Afghanistan

April 26, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

The Pentagon will reportedly send hundreds of troops and dedicated close air support aircraft to Afghanistan to protect U.S. forces during the withdrawal, as two more B-52s arrived in the region.

The two B-52s from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., touched down at Al-Udeid Air Base, Qatar, on April 26, joining two more that arrived late last week. CNN reported that about 650 forces, largely from the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan to help with the withdrawal. Close air support such as AC-130s also will deploy for protection.

Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said he could not confirm the details in the report, saying “we want to be careful about some elements of our ability to provide force protection,” but the “addition of posture in Afghanistan to assist with this drawdown” is expected.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has asked U.S. Central Command boss Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. to provide an updated drawdown plan by the end of the week, which will include more force protection recommendations, Kirby said.

During an April 25 interview in Kabul, Gen. Austin Scott Miller, commander of Resolute Support and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, said, “We have the military means to respond forcefully to any type of attacks against the coalition and the military means to support the Afghan security forces. If the Taliban attack U.S. or any coalition forces, we will have a forceful response if our forces are attacked.”

In the coming months, American troops will turn over bases to the Ministry of Defense and other Afghan forces, Miller said. After the withdrawal, Kirby said U.S. support will be limited mostly to financial aid, though the U.S, also is looking for ways to help with aircraft maintenance from outside the country. U.S. airstrikes in support of Afghan operations are not a part of the plan, Kirby said.

F-35 Sustainment Strategy Coming This Summer

April 26, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

The F-35 Joint Program Office will deliver a sustainment strategy for the Joint Strike Fighter this summer, with a sequenced plan that moves toward achieving—but probably doesn’t reach—a cost per flying hour of $25,000 by 2025, Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Eric T. Fick told Congress on April 22.

“We are … executing the business case assessment to determine what our long-term sustainment strategy needs to be for the enterprise,” Fick told the House Armed Services Committee. This strategy will be “released this summer” and it will determine whether the F-35 will be supported by a contractor Performance-Based Logistics deal, “more organic” support, or “something different,” he said

Lockheed Martin has reported that it expects a request for proposals on a Performance-Based Logistics contract this summer, and the JPO has whittled it down from its initial scope. Ken Merchant, Lockheed’s vice president of F-35 sustainment, in February called the likely deal a “skinny” PBL.

The JPO didn’t endorse the PBL concept as proposed because, “We didn’t want to get trapped into a mandate to sign a PBL contract that’s a bad deal before we’re ready,” Fick explained to the HASC panels. He said the JPO has been studying the PBL since Lockheed “dropped” the white paper proposing it “on Ellen Lord’s desk” 19 months ago. Ellen Lord was the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment czar in the Trump administration; her replacement has not yet been named.

He explained that “we simultaneously started to negotiate what we’re calling the fiscal years ’21-’23 annual sustainment contracts.” Until now, sustainment of the F-35 has been on an annual basis, which Lockheed has said is inefficient. It pitched the PBL so it and its vendors could make larger orders of parts and materials. The new deals, which Fick said will be three one-year agreements negotiated all at once, could pave the way for the PBL, which Lockheed has proposed as a five-year contract with five-year options.

The idea for a “supply-support and demand-reduction performance-based logistics contract … we decided was probably a good idea,” from the perspective of driving down the cost of parts, Fick said. The three-year negotiation will “inform how we move forward” with a PBL, he said.

The “entry point” for negotiations on the PBL will be the “handshake” on the FY ’21-’23 contract, which Fick said he’d hoped to have made by the hearing, but remains in negotiation.

“We’re using the ‘carrot,’ if you will, of the PBL, to make sure that we get a reasonable proposal to secure the tech data that the department needs to execute its intended strategy at the conclusion of the PBL and moving forward,” Fick said. Intellectual property and tech data rights remain a sticking point in discussions because ownership was not an issue early in the 20-year program. Now it is.

The three one-year sustainment deals have cost targets “intended to drive us toward $25K by ’25,” Fick said. “Will it get us there by itself? No. But the … cost per flight hour on ’21-’23 [will] move us down that path.”

The $25,000 figure is in 2012 dollars. The current-dollar cost per flying hour of the F-35A is $41,300. Lockheed is responsible for 39 percent of the sustainment cost; the rest is borne by engine maker Pratt & Whitney, the services, and some other vendors.

Lockheed aeronautics Executive Vice President Gregory M. Ulmer told the panel the company has reduced its share of the cost per flying hour by 40 percent so far, and will lower it another 40 percent over the next “three to four years.”

“Demand reduction” translates to higher-quality parts that break less often, but Air Force F-35 Integration Office Director Brig. Gen. David W. Abba told the committee the “break rate” of aircraft is only four percent per sortie. Newer aircraft are far more reliable and have much better mission capable rates than early-manufacture aircraft.

Fick also noted that the JPO is working with the services to determine if another layer of sustainment between the flight line and the depot is needed, noting the Navy having achieved success in accelerating parts repair using this “intermediate” support level. As a cost-saving measure, intermediate level maintenance was dropped early in the program.

Ulmer also reported that his understanding is that the Air Force only plans to retrofit aircraft from Lot 11 and beyond to the Block 4 configuration, which will require modifications and an update to the Tech Refresh 3 standard, which includes new processors, electronic warfare, and a large cockpit display.

B-52s Return to the Middle East as Afghanistan Withdrawal Begins

April 23, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

Two B-52s arrived in the Middle East on April 23, boosting available airpower to protect U.S. and coalition troops as they prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III approved deploying the bombers and extending the aircraft carrier Eisenhower and its battle group, which will remain on station in range to conduct airstrikes in Afghanistan if needed. The bombers are from the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and the first two touched down at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, the evening of April 23.

“We want to make this a safe, orderly, and deliberate drawdown,” Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said in a briefing. “We’ve made it clear that force protection is going to be a priority as we begin to move all our military personnel out of Afghanistan, and that means giving the commander on the ground … options to make sure that our forces and those of our allies are protected as they move out of the country. And things like bombers provide you options.”

President Joe Biden on April 14 announced the full withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, to be completed by Sept. 11, 2021. Pentagon officials have said there would likely be an increase in forces sent to the region to allow for a safe removal of troops, and to oversee the logistics of getting personnel and materiel out of the country.

“Options are important in a mission like this,” Kirby said. “It’s entirely possible that there will be a temporary increase of some ground forces and enablers, not just for force protection but also logistical and engineering support that will have to go into Afghanistan to help us make sure this drawdown gets done on the timeline and in a safe, orderly way.”

The deployment marks the first time bombers will be operate from Al Udeid Air Base since B-52s from the 20th Bomb Squadron deployed to the region in January 2020. They soon moved to Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia instead of Al Udeid because of the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. The bombers were still assigned to Al Udeid’s 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, but flew from Diego Garcia to Afghanistan and other locations in the region for about two months, completing more than 90 sorties and totaling 1,300 combat hours.

Bombers have not touched down in the region since then, but multiple “bomber task force” flights, long-duriation flights of B-52s, have flown through CENTCOM airspace.

Rolls Teams with Purdue, Carnegie Mellon on Embedded Security

April 23, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

Engine-maker Rolls-Royce is teaming up with Purdue and Carnegie Mellon universities to develop cyber tools and protection for its sophisticated aircraft engines, the company announced April 22.

Initial projects include an effort to use artificial intelligence to detect cyber intrusions in the embedded computers that control jet engines.

Rolls-Royce will fund two or three projects a year through its new Cybersecurity Technology Research Network, choosing proposals submitted from academics at the two partner institutions, said S. Michael Gahn, the chief of technology for Rolls-Royce’s Product Cyber, which is run out of the company’s LibertyWorks technology incubator based in Indianapolis, 65 miles from the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Ind.

Gahn declined to say exactly how much Rolls-Royce is investing, but noted that its commitment to fund two to three research projects per year “gives a good indication of the level of funding that we will be providing to these institutions.”

Success will be defined by the company’s ability to build the results of new research into the company’s engines. “The goal,” he said, is “to help better secure our products in the future.” That includes military and civilian aircraft engines and the systems it builds for power generation.

As embedded systems are added to control such systems, the software and networks used to manage and operate them are potentially vulnerable to hackers, said John Kusnierek, senior vice president in charge of LibertyWorks.

The Defense Department’s Joint All Domain Command and Control concept seeks to leverage such embedded systems, along with sensors and other systems, into what some have called “the internet of military things.” Networked together with high-speed communications and the power of cloud computing and storage, JADC2 seeks to accelerate information sharing to give the U.S. military an edge against adversaries.

“These complex connections, they have advantages in terms of performance, in terms of the environment and other factors,” Kusnierek said. But networking and data sharing have a downside. “They do open up a variety of risks for any system. And that’s where cybersecurity vigilance and capability really comes into play.”

Two of the three initial projects at Purdue involve efforts to develop AI-powered cyber defense tools, such as an intrusion detection system that can run on embedded systems, according to Dongyan Xu, a Purdue computer science professor and director of CERIAS, the university’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security.

Xu cited two “technical challenges that we need to address: Both the accuracy of detection as well as the resource efficiency, how much resource will be consumed.”

AI typically requires massive computing power, more than is typically available in a streamlined embedded system. Detection accuracy is crucial because embedded systems are typically built to be deterministic—to operate with utter reliability and dependability. Cybersecurity systems, by contrast, often generate false positives.

The third project would examine “cyber challenges in cyber human interaction in the specific context of interviewing job candidates,” Xu said. The objective is a gamified platform that would “test and kind of challenge a job candidate … to better identify [their] talents and attributes.”

Carnegie Mellon University officials did not identify the projects they hope to pursue. “We’re still going through finalizing the details of them,” said Lorrie Cranor, director of CMU’s Cylab Security and Privacy Institute. Cranor stressed that the Rolls-Royce initiative focuses on “an issue that is near and dear to CMU, which is cybersecurity at the intersection with mechanical systems.”

The two universities are both rated among the top five engineering schools in the country, and CMU placed number one for cybersecurity studies—alongside the Georgia Institute of Technology and ahead of MIT and UC Berkeley—in the 2021 US News and World Report undergraduate rankings.

Rolls-Royce’s Gahn said planned future projects already include sharing open source software. “We’ve created this research network framework to allow for research results to be shared not only across the industry, but globally,” he said. “Some research will obviously be more sensitive and maybe something that we’d like to implement before sharing it. But there are provisions to allow research projects to be open source at the start.”

Rolls-Royce hopes to expand its network to add more partners, both in the United States and abroad, Gahn said.

“We’re actively looking at an international research university to join the network,” he said. “We’ll discuss that at a later time.”

Quick Turnaround: How a Kadena Maintenance Group Radically Increased Sortie Production

April 23, 2021 | By Jennifer Hlad

When Col. William F. Ray became commander of 18th Maintenance Group in July 2019, the unit was struggling to produce just a light day of sorties for an F-15C/D fighter squadron. It was so bad that the operators had officially requested that some pilots be moved back to the United States from Kadena Air Base in Japan, “to an organization that could fly them better.”

Just 16 months later, the unit pulled off a “super surge,” putting up 436 sorties in three and a half days. That’s the equivalent of more than a month’s worth of flying condensed into less than a week, said Capt. David Barton, operations officer for 18th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron.

“It was considered an unsolvable problem,” Ray explained in a phone interview with Air Force Magazine. Now, with the same aging fleet, modifications, and other issues, “we’re putting up the most [F-15C/D] sorties in the Air Force.”

The key to their success: The theory of constraints.

The theory, introduced in a 1984 book by Eliyahu Goldratt, is a really a mindset shift, said Master Sgt. Derrick Brooke, continuous process improvement program manager for 18th MXG.

“What theory of constraints does is, it gives your managers or supervisors and even your Airmen … a way to look at their processes, the things they’re doing on a daily basis” and identify what is making that work harder, Brooke said. Then, instead of eliminating the constraints, they use them to determine how many jobs to do at once, “so that we don’t spread our resources thin, and so that we don’t crush the quality of life for our Airmen.”

The Air Force had begun implementing the theory across the service by sending consultants to bases to train Airmen on the concept, identify constraints, and work to create solutions. But the maintainers in Okinawa didn’t want to wait for the consultants—who just this month arrived at Kadena, the first overseas base to host them. Instead, Maj. Alex Pagano, now the commander of the 353rd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron but previously with 18th AMXS, and others put together a three-day course to teach the theory, and then implemented it.

Brooke came from Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash., which was the first maintenance group in the Air Force to test the theory of constraints, he said. The consultants came out to Washington and the unit “had a lot of success, but that took six months. … So when I [moved] out here in October, I was extremely impressed to see the equal or greater amount of success” the 18th Maintenance Group was having, based on just a three-day course, Brooke said.

Besides significantly reducing the amount of time it took to turn aircraft around on the ground—Pagano said it used to take about 90 minutes to get 24 aircraft from landing to take off again, and now it takes closer to 50 minutes—implementing the theory has also allowed the group to create “whitespace on the calendar” for Airmen, Ray said.

Previously, it was understood that if an Airman was on the weekend duty schedule, she or he would definitely be working weekend duty. Now, Ray said, “We’re going weeks and months without working weekend duty.” Additionally, 12-hour shifts used to be the norm, and that has been reduced down to nine-hour days, he said.

They’ve also implemented a program where Airmen can occasionally take time on a Friday to do self-care or take classes like yoga, dorm room cooking, or investment, Ray said. “That’s unprecedented in maintenance, for us to be thinking about … a program that takes care of Airmen. We typically are taking care of planes and that’s it. We have our hands full with that, and so we’re using theory of constraints to build better processes, so that we can build better Airmen.”

A day in the life of a typical maintainer a few years ago, Barton said, was “trying to produce as many sorties as you can, and most of those aircraft coming back really broken … just throwing people and resources, essentially shot-gunning people and parts at the flightline to fix that.”

And whereas their previous approach to talent management could be described as “jerking [maintainers] around from aircraft to aircraft as priorities shifted,” theory of constraints has allowed them “to set deliberate priorities, prioritize those, and resource people and equipment to that aircraft, and what that translates into from a quality of life perspective is stability for the Airmen,” Barton explained.

One of the “cornerstones” of theory of constraints is “focus and finish,” Ray said. “So we put you on a job, we want you to focus on that job, we’re not gonna pull you off that job until you’re finished … that simple little shift right there creates stability and peace of mind for that Airman.”

Senior Master Sgt. Felipe Mendoza, 18th Component Maintenance Squadron flight chief for the propulsion flight, said it translates to slowing down the workflow in order to speed up the workflow. “When I got down here, we were working a lot of engines, we were working eight to nine engines just to really produce one engine,” he explained. Now, they’ve cut down on the number of engines they work on at once, which has resulted in an increase in engine production.

The “white space” Ray mentioned has also allowed the 44th Aircraft Maintenance Unit, part of the 18th AMXS, to work on creating multi-capable Airmen, explained 1st Lt. Emily Taylor, 44th AMU’s officer in charge. The unit began building a 15-person cell in January, with the goal of getting them qualified “on everything that an Airman can do to generate an aircraft.” So far, all 15 are qualified on generating and launching aircraft, Taylor said, and “we’re also working on getting our weapons crews capable of actually loading these aircraft and getting them ready for a wartime scenario.”

That type of scenario is a major focus in the Indo-Pacific, but the unit is also sharing what they’ve learned with others across the service. They created an education program to help other units implement the theory, and traveled to Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, to assist. The Goldratt consultants have been to Fairchild; Shaw Air Force Base, S.C.; and Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D.

“One leadership philosophy we had from the beginning was, define what ‘done’ looks like,” Pagano said. They determined that “done” would not be when the unit was finished implementing theory of constraints, but when “every organization in the Air Force” has implemented it.

“We live in a volatile, uncertain, chaotic world. And so, instead of having an organization that just reacts to that, we wanted to have an organization that takes it, and is able to absorb it and respond to it immediately, And so, by implementing theory of constraints and then creating this team, helps us to operate effectively in that volatile, uncertain, and chaotic operating environment that we live in every day,” he added.

AFGSC Stands Down B-1 Fleet to Inspect Fuel System Problems

April 23, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

Air Force Global Strike Command on April 20 ordered a safety stand-down of its B-1B Lancer fleet to inspect fuel system problems following an April 8 ground emergency.

After the emergency at Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., inspectors found a “discrepancy” with the B-1’s Augmenter Fuel Pump Filter Housing. As a “precautionary measure,” AFGSC boss Gen. Timothy M. Ray directed inspections on all B-1s to resolve the issue, AFGSC said in an April 23 statement.

“After further analysis, the commander stood down the fleet because it was determined a more invasive inspection was needed to ensure the safety of aircrews,” the command said.

Individual aircraft will return to flight following the in-depth inspection when they are deemed safe to fly.

“The Air Force takes all incidents seriously and works diligently to identify and correct potential causes,” the command said.

The stand down comes about two years after the B-1 fleet was grounded, that time because of problems with drogue chutes in the aircraft’s ejection seats. The fleet was also grounded in 2018 for separate ejection seat problems.

The B-1 fleet in recent years has faced readiness issues because of prolonged use in combat operations in the Middle East—at one point, the aircraft’s mission capable rate was about 10 percent. AFGSC has said the fleet’s readiness has turned around thanks to increased maintenance, and this recent fuel issue does not appear related to the structural issues that had been plaguing the fleet. The stand down was first reported by The War Zone.

HASC’s Smith: U.S. Should Abandon Quest for Military Preeminence

April 22, 2021 | By Shaun Waterman

The U.S. military needs to wake up to the fact that global dominance is no longer a viable strategy for national defense, because pursuing that unrealizable goal is making the country less safe, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said April 22.

Emerging defense technologies like swarms of cheap, attritable drones have ended the era of unipolarity and U.S. military preeminence, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash) told the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t just be so big and bad that no one’s going to take you on, because they can take you on with a tiny little drone,” he said. Earlier this year, U.S. Central Command boss Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. called the proliferation of small, cheap commercial drones, “the most concerning tactical development” since the rise of the improvised explosive device in Iraq 15 years ago. He said concerns were amplified by the lack of dependable, affordable countermeasures.

“Swarms of these drones … [costing] next to nothing, can deliver more firepower than an F-35, which can’t get into the zone because of the surface-to-air missiles that are guarding it,” said Smith, painting a bleak picture of “a situation where maybe we’ve got $100 billion worth of airplanes that can’t get in after our adversaries, but they can kick the crap out of us with $75,000 worth of drones.”

Smith highlighted Russia’s ability to achieve similar asymmetric strategic capabilities “on the cheap” through hacking and disinformation campaigns as an example of the eroding barriers to entry into global geopolitical competition.

“In the world we live in today, no one [nation] is going to dominate because the barriers to entry are so low. So you’ve got to be a lot more nimble, a lot smarter, and a lot more diversified in how you achieve your national security objectives,” he said.

Discussing the National Defense Strategy, Smith noted that, though it purported to recognize the end of U.S. global military preeminence, it didn’t actually deal with the consequences of that transformed situation. “It was an admission [that the era of unipolar dominance is over], but it wasn’t a transition into an actual policy that recognizes the true implications of that admission,” he said.

As a consequence, the NDS was “overly ambitious, and therefore makes it very difficult for us to actually accomplish anything. Because it just envisions a world that is impossible. So we’re constantly chasing our tail, and unable to do what [the NDS] says we’re supposed to be able to do. That needs to get more realistic.”

He said that, rather than seeking to dominate all its adversaries, the U.S. military should look for ways to change their calculus, to make it clear that conflict was not in their interests. “Deterrence, not dominance, is what I’m really kind of looking at us being able to do here,” he said.

In his remarks, Smith also expressed frustration with a lack of urgency from the White House when it came to President Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget proposal. “Now I know from the White House perspective, we don’t need to pass the budget till Oct. 1, so what’s the rush?”

But if the budget doesn’t arrive in Congress before May 10, he explained, there wouldn’t be enough legislative days on the calendar to draft and properly markup the annual defense appropriations and policy bills before the fiscal year starts Oct. 1. That would make the now annual ritual of a continuing resolution, at least for the first month or so of the new fiscal year, inevitable, he said. “There is not time to get through the legislative process if we don’t get this thing before May 10.”

Smith added that he expected Congress to “waste enormous amounts of time fighting over whether or not we’ve got to add a few more dollars or cut a few more dollars.” Arguing over the top line budget number misses the point, he noted.

Smith, who last month called the F-35 a “rathole” and suggested the Defense Department stop buying the fifth-generation fighter, said there needed to be less attention paid to the overall budget number and more focus on getting value for money for every dollar spent.

“The culture at the Pentagon needs a lot of work,” he said. “They don’t encourage individual decisions, they encourage process. And process takes time … If you’ve got to go up 10 levels of command before you can make that decision, by the time you get up there, software has changed and you need something else.”

“I want the Pentagon to feel some measure of physical pain every time they spend a dollar. And I want them to just make sure that they do it in the most cost effective, intelligent way because they just want to get the most out of it, not because they know Congress will always come along and just throw them a bunch more money and paper over the problem.”

But he ended his remarks on a note of optimism, saying “I have never in my 24 years [in Congress] been in a situation where there seemed like more hope, more urgency to make those changes.”

He said a recent briefing on the B-21 bomber had been unexpectedly encouraging. Smith said he had been joking with colleague Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) as they went in. “They’re going to tell me that it’s on time, it’s under budget, and it’s performing better than they expected … And I of course, was being a wise ass. But it turned out to be the case.”

He said the B-21 program team had “learned the lessons of the F-35 … They’re making it work in a very intelligent way.”

By spending more upfront to buy out the vendor’s technology “to own that [intellectual property], … you can avoid vendor lock-in long term” and save money down the road, he said.

Strike Options Should Compete on Cost Effectiveness, Study Says

April 22, 2021 | By Tobias Naegele

The proliferation of long-range strike options under development across all the U.S. armed forces should prompt a comprehensive review by civilian leaders, a new report by two influential think tanks concludes.

The civilian review should ensure theater commanders have the most cost-effective mix of options available should they be needed in a peer fight, while eliminating duplicative capabilities, said Mark Gunzinger, director of future concepts and capability assessments at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies; Lukas Autenried, a Mitchell analyst; and Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute.

Titled “Understanding the Long-Range Strike Debate,” the report argues that while a mix of options is always advantageous, the true cost of those options must be well understood and the opportunity cost of pursuing more options could deprive commanders of better options over time. It was unveiled at a virtual Aerospace Nation event April 22.

“Our report coming out today is not about the parochial interests of any particular service,” Gunzinger said. The problem is not a lack of new weapons options, but rather too many. “All of the services are pursuing new capabilities to meet [today’s] shortfall. We recommend [the Defense Department] take a balanced approach to filling its long-range strike shortfall, which, quite frankly, was created by its failure to acquire next-generation strike weapons and platforms over the past few decades.”

Clark said having a range of land-based, sea-based, and air-launched strike options can be valuable, citing recent comments by both Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John E. Hyten and the newly confirmed commander of Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. John C. Aquilino.

“Having ground-based fires does support some advantages,” Clark said. “They’re more persistent. They don’t necessarily require as much overhead … so they can provide this ability to deter or impact the adversaries’ thinking in advance of conflict—in a way that air-delivered fires or surface-delivered fires [from ships] don’t necessarily do.” However, he added, those advantages evaporate in a contested environment.

Naval strike capabilities are significantly more expensive, carrying the costs of shipbuilding and a large crew, while potentially getting closer to an adversary, he said. But in a conflict with China, with its own large naval force and long-range anti-access/area denial weaponry, Clark said, U.S. ships may be preoccupied defending themselves and unable to focus on long-range missions.

Another aspect of what Clark calls “overhead” is the command and control needed to manage long-range strike. “One of the overhead items that you have to think about for strike is, how do you get the targeting information to the shooter? And how do you get the commander in there to be able to make a decision on whether to shoot or not, and what to target?” Clark said.

The Air Force, Navy, and Space Force are already there, while the Army would have to develop something new. He questioned the Army’s plan to develop its own tactical space network as “pretty redundant to what has already been pursued by the Space Development Agency, the Space Force, and DARPA, and also in the commercial world.”

The cost of individual weapons is also a factor. While an aircraft costs more to build and operate than a land-based launcher, the cost comparison of the munitions is the opposite. Like a cheap ink-jet printer, where the up-front cost is less but the cartridges are expensive, it’s only cost-effective if used sparingly. “Costs stack up really fast,” said Autenried. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t targets that are so high value and so important that it’s worth actually spending that money to go strike them, but those are going to be few and far between.”

This is why a cost-effectiveness analysis is so important, Gunzinger said. “When most people talk about cost, they tend to think about the unit cost to buy a weapon, or a jet, or ship, or whatever,” he said. “But what matters more is the cost to complete a specific task, like destroying a target or achieving a mission kill that renders a target incapable of continuing operations. That’s what a cost effectiveness analysis would get.”

Such an analysis must take into account “the cost of weapons expended to achieve those effects, the cost of the launch platform, the logistics needed to sustain them, and then the costs to defend them and their operating locations against enemy attacks,” Gunzinger said.

Clark agreed. “If we think we’re going to be faced with a situation where a few weapons might be needed to be launched, well, an Army missile battery may be the cheapest way to do that,” he said. “It doesn’t require a ton of defenses, doesn’t have the infrastructure or the fuel farms or anything else to protect, so … it gives you some escalation options at a lower level instead of having to flow bombers in to attack Mainland China. …. But once things become contested, they’re very hard to defend.” Airpower would then be more cost-effective. “Bombers could be coming from a more distant base that doesn’t require as much defense.”

CENTCOM Looks to Help Afghans Maintain Aircraft After Withdrawal

April 22, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

U.S. Central Command is searching for “innovative” ways to help the Afghan Air Force turn wrenches on their planes after U.S. and coalition forces withdraw from the country, though the command’s boss acknowledges it’s not going to be easy.

“The U.S. contractors will come out as we come out. That is part of the plan [to] withdraw that we have in place right now,” CENTCOM boss Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. said during an April 22 Pentagon briefing. “We’re examining alternatives to assist the Afghans in their maintenance effort from a distance. I don’t want to minimize that problem or make it appear to be easier than it’s going to be.”

There are about 17,000 contractors in Afghanistan today, and the Afghan Air Force relies heavily on U.S. contractors from companies such as Sierra Nevada Corp. to keep their aircraft flying. The contract presence is so critical that in March, John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said that without contract support, “no Afghan airframe could be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months.”

McKenzie said the Afghan Air Force has proven to be a “very, very important force multiplier for the Afghan military. They fly effectively, they deliver ordnance, and they’re actually a deal changer in many ways in the fight against the Taliban.”

He is concerned because the airplanes require continuous maintenance from trained maintainers, and “if we leave, we’re gonna have to find a way to replace them.”

“Aircraft maintenance, … you have to do it every day,” he said. “It requires engagement every day in order to do that.”

Remote video conferencing with U.S. contractors living outside the country is one option being considered to help Afghan maintainers work on the aircraft, while in-depth maintenance can be done at a centralized location.

“We’re going to try all kinds of innovative ways,” McKenzie said. “The one thing I can tell you is we’re not going to be there on the ground with them. We want them to be successful, that remains a very high priority.”