Frank Kendall III Nominated as 26th Secretary of the Air Force

April 27, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

Frank Kendall III is the Biden administration’s nominee to be Secretary of the Air Force, succeeding Barbara M. Barrett in the role if confirmed, administration officials said. Gina Ortiz Jones, a former Air Force officer who recently held a position in the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, was nominated as undersecretary.

Kendall, 71, a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, served as the No. 3 official in the Pentagon for four years in the Obama administration, responsible for all matters pertaining to research and engineering, sustainment, testing, contract administration, and logistics. Immediately following his tenure as undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, the expansive job was legislatively split into two parts: acquisition and sustainment, and research and technology. He was an advisor to the Biden campaign on national security and defense issues.

Kendall’s signature effort at AT&L was the “Better Buying Power” initiative, intended to streamline the Pentagon’s acquisition system, which led to significant improvements in defense programs’ cost and schedule. Noteworthy among these efforts was greater flexibility for program managers to use contracting vehicles that make the most sense for the program or services being acquired, rather than to follow a cookie-cutter approach to management. He conducted a major re-write of the acquisition system’s “5,000-series” rules, which were further simplified and reduced under his successor, Ellen M. Lord.

Previously, Kendall served as the principal deputy to the AT&L position and acting undersecretary. An attorney, Kendall was vice president of engineering for the then-Raytheon Co., where he managed engineering functions and internal research and development. Before joining the Pentagon leadership, he was a managing partner at Renaissance Strategic Advisors, an aerospace and defense consulting firm.

In other Pentagon jobs, Kendall was director of tactical warfare programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and was assistant deputy undersecretary for Strategic Defense Systems. He served 10 years on Active duty with the Army, during which he taught engineering at West Point.

Kendall holds a master’s in aerospace engineering from CalTech and an MBA from C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, as well as a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. He has done extensive pro-bono work on human rights law.

Former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said Kendall is an “excellent choice” for the job because he has a mastery of “all things technical, in manufacturing and R&D.” In addition, “For those of us who know him well, even though he’s not known for people issues, I think he’ll be great in this regard as well because he’s very committed to diversity and inclusion, families, and developing people.”

F. Whitten Peters, former Secretary of the Air Force under the Clinton administration and former Air Force Association Chairman of the Board, called Kendall “a very accomplished executive, both in DOD and industry, and I think he’ll be a real help to the Air Force, particularly as it aims to move procurement forward, faster, and in the rapid assimilation of new technology. He’s … very familiar with the Air Force’s issues, as he got the F-35 up and running” after program setbacks forced a restructure of the program. Kendall has “the right experience” for the job, Peters said.

If confirmed, Kendall “would be facing a familiar challenge of declining defense budgets at a critical time for the Department of the Air Force and its fledgling U.S. Space Force,” said former service Undersecretary Matthew P. Donovan, who is now director of AFA’s Mitchell Institute Spacepower Advantage Research Center.

“He would need to strongly support all Airmen and Guardians, staunchly advocate for the crucial importance of air and space power in support of the joint warfighter and great power competition, and set clear visions for the future” of both the Air Force and Space Force, Donovan said.

AFA president retired Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright said, “Frank is very experienced and understands the important role of our Airmen and Guardians in the defense of our nation.” He will be a strong advocate in helping the Department of the Air Force “deter, and be ready to defeat, rapidly growing peer threats.”

Kendall is “a very logical choice” for the Air Force Secretary job, according to Mark J. Lewis, who last served in government as the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering under the Trump administration, and is now the head of the National Defense Industrial Association’s nonpartisan Emerging Technologies Institute. The Air Force “has fully embraced the need for modernization, including the adoption of critical emerging technologies in a timely manner,” Lewis said, and Kendall’s background, “not only as a technologist but also as an acquisition expert, is ideally matched to the service’s most pressing needs.”

Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners, in an April 27 bulletin to investors, said Kendall may not support the pending acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne by Lockheed Martin, as he has previously warned against excessive consolidation in the defense industry. As an expert on tactical aviation, Kendall will also shape the ongoing joint-service “TacAir” review and will likely get involved with the interservice fracas regarding the Army’s attempt to claim some of the deep strike mission from the Air Force, via hypersonic missiles, Callan said. While Kendall will likely support continuation of the strategic triad, Callan wrote, he may “weigh in on another Minuteman III upgrade” that would defer funding of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program.

Jones, 40, was the 2018 Democratic candidate for Texas’s 23rd district House seat, which she narrowly lost to incumbent William Hurd. In a second run for the seat in 2019, she did not win the Democratic primary.

In keeping with the Biden administration’s effort to appoint leaders who “look like America,” Jones would be the first openly gay person of color to hold the undersecretary position. She is of Filipino descent.

A native of San Antonio, Texas, Jones received an Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship to attend Boston University, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies and a master’s in mathematics. She served in the Air Force three years as an intelligence officer, deploying to Iraq and reaching the rank of captain. Jones received a master’s from the Army Command and General Staff College. As a student and on Active duty, she was required to conceal her sexual identity under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

She later worked as a civilian for U.S. Africa Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency, where she specialized in Latin American affairs.

In late 2016, Jones joined the office of the U.S. Trade Representative and stayed on into the Trump administration. She left in 2017 to seek the seat in Congress.

Donovan to Lead New Spacepower Research Center

April 26, 2021 | By Amy Hudson

Former Undersecretary of the Air Force Matthew P. Donovan will lead a new research center focused on the advancement of spacepower and the needs of the U.S. Space Force. Called MI-SPARC, the new Mitchell Institute Spacepower Advantage Research Center will have its own research staff.

Donovan was Air Force under secretary, Acting Secretary of the Air Force, and undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness during the Trump administration. During that time he helped pave the way for the Space Force to become an independent service under the Department of the Air Force.

“The United States really did consider space a benign domain and didn’t want to weaponize it,” Donovan said in a press call April 26. “That wasn’t our choice. Our adversaries did that for us. [Now], we want to make sure when we’re talking about the defense budget, that space stays at the forefront of the minds of the people who are making those decisions on funding and policy.”

While at the Air Force Department, Donovan sought to shed the so-called pass-through budget—about $40 billion in largely classified spending also known as the “non-blue budget. “That is a problem,” Donovan said in an interview. “That’ll be another major platform position MI-SPARC will be going after, because it not only affects the United States Air Force, but now also the United States Space Force, as both are within the top line of the Department of the Air Force. There’s nearly $40 billion that are passed through the Air Force but executed by other agencies within the Department of Defense. I had no support within the Department of Defense for that, because showing the true top line authority of the Department of the Air Force is not really in anyone else’s best interest … if you think about it.”

Donovan said during his time as Acting Air Force Secretary, then-Acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper was unaware of the pass-through, and he noted that senators asked incoming Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III about it during his confirmation hearing. The fact that this $40 billion bill is hidden in plain sight in the Air Force budget is “amazing, really,” he said.

This portion of the Air Force budget has artificially inflated the service’s top line for decades, Air Force Magazine previously reported.

Donovan said it’s an “issue that’s near and dear to my heart,” noting that budget transparency “becomes even more critical now when you consider that at the Department of Air Force budget includes funding for two separate military services.”

In addition, the research center plans to take a deep dive into the roles and responsibilities of military space, space authorities, assuring communications and the implications associated with that, as well as cutting-edge space technologies, such as nuclear-powered propulsion systems for spacecraft.

“MI-SPARC will contribute to the education of the American public, the Congress, and the burgeoning space industry on the criticality of space for America’s national security, and indeed for our economy, our way of life, and our global leadership,” said retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute.

MI-SPARC will serve as an arm of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and Donovan said the two organizations will work hand-in-hand. In addition to Donovan, Christopher Stone, a space professional and professor of space strategy, and Lukas Autenried, Mitchell’s lead senior analyst, will join the MI-SPARC team.

“MI-SPARC could not come at a more opportune time as our association expands to support and advocate for two great military services, rather than one. The Guardians of the United States Space Force need the same kind of independent advocacy that AFA and the Mitchell Institute has long provided our Air Force,” AFA President retired Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright said. “Former Secretary Donovan’s years of leadership experience in the Department of Defense and on Capitol Hill make him the ideal leader for this role.”

USAFE Begins New Tanker Operation to Increase Refueling Capacity

April 26, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

U.S. Air Forces in Europe recently began a new operation to bring additional aerial refueling capacity to its area of operations, while alleviating stress on its only permanent tanker unit.

Operation Copper Arrow 2021 started earlier this month when a rotation of Airmen and a KC-135 from the Kansas Air National Guard’s 190th Air Refueling Wing flew out of Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and refueled a NATO E-3A Sentry. The operation will bring in Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command tankers to USAFE, to fly out of Ramstein and provide more refueling capacity.

“Tankers are a highly tasked mission,” said Maj. Shay Dickey, 116th Air Refueling Squadron chief of current operations and scheduling and Copper Arrow detachment commander, in a release. “A lot of people need the training. They need the air refueling to either extend the mission or for pilot and crew proficiency.”

The 100th Air Refueling Wing at RAF Mildenhall, England, is USAFE’s only tanker unit, and is highly tasked within the AOR. Operation Copper Arrow uses funds from USAFE-AFAFRICA’s Request for Forces and the European Deterrence Initiative to bring in volunteer ANG and AFRC crews, the release states. The operation combines Operation Atlantic Resolve missions from NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen, Germany, and RAF Mildenhall into one that is overseen by USAFE’s Tanker Operations, according to the command.

“From a Guard perspective, it’s an opportunity for crews to operate in the European theater for an extended period of time,” Dickey said in the release. “The operating area here is pretty busy, so our younger crews can get some of that experience working in a new region, and it really broadens our horizons for future work in the European theater.”

While the first rotation includes KC-135s from Kansas, USAFE is expected to host more Stratotankers, along with KC-10s and KC-46s for the first time. The 101st Air Refueling Wing of the Maine Air National Guard also will participate in the operation.

“I appreciate all the crews; the 190th, the 101st (Air Refueling Wing, Maine ANG) that are coming out, and the Guard and Reserve crews that help get this mission going,” said Lt. Col. William Silence, the 130th Operations Support Squadron and 603rd Air Operations Center A34 Copper Arrow project officer, in the release. “It’s a fun mission, but it’s still time away from their family, time away from home, and they are providing that increased capacity.”

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.