Guard to Send 10,000 Troops to D.C. Ahead of Inauguration

Jan. 11, 2021 | By Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory

The National Guard Bureau plans to send 10,000 troops to the National Capital Region in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential inauguration, with permission to tap another 5,000 if the need arises, NGB Chief Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson told reporters Jan. 11.

The U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Capitol Police, and U.S. Park Police have all requested NGB support, he said during a joint press briefing with Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Jonathan Rath Hoffman.

“To date, our troops have been requested to support security, logistics, liaison, and communication missions,” Hokanson said, noting that the Guard presence may grow closer to 15,000 depending on what kind of help these groups ask for and that NGB is working with them “on a case-by-case basis.”

All of these Guard troops are being activated under Title 32 status, and may carry out law-enforcement duties if an agency asks them to, he added.

More than 6,000 National Guard troops from the District of Columbia National Guard and six additional states are currently on the ground as backup to civil authorities within the National Capital Region in the wake of a Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building that left both rioters and members of law enforcement—including U.S. Capitol Police Officer and Air National Guard veteran Brian D. Sicknick—dead, Hokanson said.

The Defense Department on Jan. 8 released a timeline of Guard-related planning and involvement surrounding the Capitol breach two days prior.

The remaining personnel set to comprise the 10,000-troop total are slated to arrive in the area by Jan. 16, Hokanson said.

Hokanson said NGB is in constant contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and law enforcement to ensure that Guard personnel have the equipment and preparation they need for any potential threats that may arise during their time in D.C.

“Anytime our National Guardsmen go somewhere, we make sure that they bring all of the equipment that they may or may not need, so that we don’t have to, you know, fly back to New York to go get something that we forgot,” he explained. “So when we ask them to travel, we ask them to bring all their equipment, their safety equipment, we actually make sure that they do bring their weapons as well, just so they’re here locally. Ideally, we’ll never need them. But if we do, we wanna know that they’re close by and they’re readily accessible, if necessary, based on the mission.”

He added that while NGB wants to ensure that troops deployed in the district “have the right to self-defense,” that the question of whether they need to be armed during their time serving in the NCR “will be an ongoing conversation” between NGB, the federal agencies its troops support, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and law enforcement.

“If the senior leadership determines that that’s the right posture to be in, then that’s something we will do,” he said.

USAF Finds Key To Raising SERE Graduation Rates

Jan. 11, 2021 | By Amy Hudson

After years of struggling with high failure rates at the Air Force’s rigorous Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape Specialist Apprentice Course, officials think they’ve finally cracked the code.

Twenty-six of 28 new SERE specialists graduated on Jan. 7, the highest-ever graduation rate. Of the two who didn’t make it, one dropped because of an injury and will retake the course. In the past, only about half the candidates completed the apprentice course, the longest of three parts in the six-month SERE trainer pipeline, said Col. Nicholas Dipoma, 336th Training Group commander.

The Air Force is the only U.S. military service that specifically trains personnel to teach aircrew or others how to survive in enemy territory, whether in an urban environments, mountainous terrain, or the freezing, barren Arctic. Yet at a time when potential conflict with Russia and China make such skills increasingly important, the SERE career field is only about 80 percent manned.

The field is “healthy enough to function,” Dipoma said, but historically high attrition rates are “unsustainable.”

“Over the next four years, if we don’t turn attrition and the pipeline around—while also maintaining the same high standards—the career field would be in a bad place,” Dipoma said. “Before this class, that trend line was going in the wrong direction.”

The 66th Training Squadron’s Detachment 3 at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas, has tracked performance data for several years to pinpoint characteristics that make candidates successful. But with only two classes per year, it took time to gather enough data to paint an accurate picture, said the SERE Apprentice Course Commandant Senior Master Sgt. John Conant.

This much is now clear: Critical thinking and adaptability are key to success throughout the course, but each candidate will struggle in different areas, he said. To help candidates succeed, mentoring is now part of the curriculum.

“We have adopted a coaching and mentoring approach, instead of gatekeeping,” said Chief Master Sgt. Alexander Guerrero, 336th TRG command chief. That worked “20 or 30 years ago,” he added, but “Personalities have changed. Generations have changed. How you get across to individuals has changed.”

While one person may find the physical training too grueling to continue, another may find it difficult to prioritize the many tasks asked of students. Coaching can help candidates work their way through challenges.

“Almost every cadre member … has talked someone out of quitting training,” said Dipoma. That’s mentoring at work.

Conant said the cadre aims to be consistent in its messaging and to revisit markers for success throughout the training.

“It’s just a matter of time before a student has a bad day,” Conant said. “He’s gonna stumble, and [he’s] gonna fall. He’s gonna fail, and much like we give them a pat on the back when they succeed, you know when it’s the opposite, they need to look up and see a hand reaching down ready to pick them up and ready to remind them that this is not impossible.”

DOD’s New Counter-Drone Strategy Pushes for Collaboration

Jan. 8, 2021 | By Rachel S. Cohen

The Defense Department is moving out with its first strategy to coordinate and plan for future threats posed by small drones at home and abroad. The Jan. 7 strategy comes after the military has contended with years-long proliferation of quadcopters and other cheap, widely available aircraft that can easily ferry a weapon or spy on Americans.

It looks to fill the gaps in splintered service-focused efforts to protect bases and troops from a low-tech problem, and offer a more holistic solution centered on joint training and doctrine rather than procurement. The Pentagon classifies small unmanned aircraft, or those in UAS Groups 1 and 2, as those that weigh up to 55 pounds.

Three new lines of effort will prepare the military to understand and address UASes, defend those military assets, and work with other U.S. entities and those abroad on protection protocols.

DOD will start looking at the threat posed by small drones on a regional basis around the globe and at home, rather than pursuing a one-size-fits-all solution, an indication of the problem’s growing scale over the past decade.

“The defense intelligence enterprise will cooperate with the larger Intelligence Community to provide timely and informative threat assessments for a range of stakeholders across the Department,” the strategy said. “These assessments will be both descriptive and predictive and cover the range of threats from violent extremist organizations and criminal elements to near-peer adversaries targeting U.S. personnel, assets, and facilities at home and abroad.”

A major issue raised by the strategy is the need to connect counter-drone systems to other assets across the military, rather than having tools that only one part of one force can use. Each service can pursue technology that best meets their own needs, but those products must be able to talk to each other.

“You essentially ended up with a situation where you had every service working on a problem set, several redundant [counter-drone] systems out there,” said Army Maj. Gen. Sean A. Gainey, director of the Defense Department’s Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems Office, during a Jan. 8 Center for Strategic and International Studies event. “Not all of it worked as advertised to the commander.”

The office has pursued 10 interim technologies across the armed forces that identify, track, disable, or destroy drones, and pushed the services that own each system to further develop them. Gainey said the Air Force is working on a “low-collateral effector” alongside the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office in addition to the multiple laser and microwave options USAF is testing.

“They will go to our test range with RCCTO in April, issue an announcement to industry, and say, ‘Hey, in April we’re going to look at all the low-collateral interceptors, bring that capability to our common test range in Yuma, and we will downselect to that,” he said. “Then we will open up a contract for all the services to then buy them. … Next capability, whether it’s high-energy laser or whatever, same type of concept moves forward.”

Officials hope that approach should boost collaboration and may cut costs compared to what DOD spends when each service buys its own tailor-made tech. Gainey said counter-UAS systems across the military should be able to plug into the command-and-control system used by the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense anti-ballistic missile battery, seen as the best C2 technology in the department. The Air Force’s C2 option, known as Medusa, was made interoperable with the THAAD software.

Each of the service branches has a liaison to the joint office, and the Space Force is joining as well. The joint office offers money back to the services for research and development of promising products, and then helps decide when the armed forces should begin production for those systems once they are mature.

The Defense Department will keep digging into the science and technology efforts of each branch to decide where to invest more and where to pull back, said Nicole M. Thomas, the Joint C-UAS Office’s strategy and policy division chief.

The same week, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it would further new regulations to add small unmanned aircraft to the National Airspace System to more easily identify hobbyists and other drone operators. Registration with that ID system will help the military distinguish between which aircraft might be nefarious and which are harmless, Thomas said.

“Although the most common use of sUAS in the homeland is for legitimate purposes such as entertainment, protection of commercial facilities, law enforcement, or firefighting, these systems may inadvertently place DOD personnel, facilities, and assets at risk through careless behavior within an already congested airspace,” the strategy said. “Even at the lower end of the conflict spectrum, malicious actors can adapt this technology to create more robust capability.”

As Guard Presence Grows in D.C., Leaders Hesitant to Discuss Use of Force

Jan. 8, 2021 | By Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory

As the National Guard’s presence in Washington grows in response to the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol building by rioters, state-level Guard leaders are reluctant to discuss how their Airmen and Soldiers will be armed and the kind of force they’ll be authorized to wield while deployed to the city through Inauguration Day.

“There’s no hiding the fact that, you know, Soldiers and Airmen do have lethal force with them,” said Army Brig. Gen. Dave Wood, director of the joint staff for the Pennsylvania National Guard, during a Jan. 8 Zoom call with Guard leaders and reporters.

PANG doesn’t “advertise” its regulations pertaining to the use of force because divulging that information could endanger its troops, but the way those rules are engaged depends on “the scenario and situation,” he said.

“We’re not going to put away the equipment that we have,” Wood told reporters. “We’re going to bring it with us, and the way we deploy it will be based on the situation and based on the commander’s intent.”

He noted that PANG troops—about 1,000 of whom have been tapped to support the District of Columbia National Guard in the nation’s capital—will attempt to deescalate as much as possible, and have a behind-the-scenes, supportive tasking, with matters such as arrests and detentions being handled by law enforcement in D.C. Approximately 50 of these troops are communications Airmen from the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, he said.

“You know, these are Soldiers and Airmen,” he said. “They’re trained and, you know, you don’t send firemen into a fire without all their equipment, so having that equipment available is part of what we do, and how we use it is part of our business.”

Wood also noted that since PANG planned on sending about 1,000 troops to D.C. for Inauguration Day, the current activation just moved up their schedule.

“I would probably say across the board for all the states that were planning to come—and that includes Maryland, Delaware, [and] all of the states here in FEMA Region 3 and Region 2—I don’t think the operational tempo really changed that much,” he said.

While Maryland Adjutant General Army Maj. Gen. Timothy E. Gowen didn’t elaborate on his troops’ rules for use of force or specify the kind of equipment they’d carry with them into the district, he expressed confidence that the approximately 500 Maryland Army National Guard troops mobilized to D.C. are well-trained, sufficiently equipped, in good hands under DCNG leadership, and well-versed in their current tasking.

“My guys are pretty well experienced, unfortunately, in this mission set,” he explained, citing the Guard’s response to civil unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and noting that the MDNG’s current deployment is its second to D.C. in about six months.

“I’m always concerned about the safety of my Soldiers … I’ll be happier when they’re home, but I think we’ve done everything we can do to make sure that they’re in the best posture possible,” he added.

During the same call, New Jersey National Guard Interim Adjutant General Army Col. Lisa J. Hou declined to provide details on whether her state’s Guard personnel would be allowed to carry lethal weapons and the rules governing their use of force.

The 500 N.J. Guard personnel deploying to D.C. include 100 N.J. Air National Guard security forces Airmen, collectively pulled from the 108th Wing at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst and the 177th Fighter Wing at Atlantic City Air National Guard Base, she said.

A security forces squadron from the Virginia Air National Guard also is in D.C. providing support, NGB Director of Operations Air Force Maj. Gen. Steven S. Nordhaus noted.

F-35 Readiness for Full-Rate Production Lies With Independent Academic Team

Jan. 8, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

An independent academic team will assess how ready the F-35 is for full-rate production, and its findings will be integrated into a new program timeline, the Joint Program Office reported. Jan. 7.

The academic team is comprised of subject matter experts from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, and Georgia Tech Research Institute, a JPO spokeswoman told Air Force Magazine.

The group is “assessing current … readiness” of the program’s integration into the Pentagon’s Joint Simulation Environment; a digital platform that evaluates the value of adding more or fewer of various systems, such as submarines, surface ships, vehicles, aircraft, etc., to the joint force. Pending its assessment, the JPO will create a new schedule for the program.

The assessment will not be ready until after the Biden administration comes into office, leaving it to the incoming defense leadership to judge whether and how the F-35 program will proceed.

Pentagon acquisition and sustainment chief Ellen M. Lord, in a December memo, decided to extend the F-35 Operational Test and Evaluation phase past her most recent deadline of March 2021, giving the Joint Program Office until Feb. 28 to come up with a “new acquisition program baseline,” or timetable. That timetable is to be determined in part by an “independent review” entity, or the academic team, the JPO said.

Lord said delays integrating the F-35 in the JSE had to do with the challenges of getting software coders together in secure facilities under pandemic conditions.

The completion of Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E), which will permit declaration of readiness for full-rate production—called Milestone C—has been postponed or extended several times since Lord set it for December 2019. While the jet itself has largely cleared all the flight testing necessary to pass Milestone C, the system has not yet been fully integrated into the JSE, which dictates how many F-35s are needed and how rapidly they must be added to the joint force.

The Air Force and other services have been buying the F-35 at a relatively slow rate, pending completion of IOT&E, and hoped-for lower operating and support costs for the F-35. The fifth-generation jet’s acquisition unit cost has come steadily down over the last decade, now less expensive than fourth-generation jets, but its support costs remain higher.

Lockheed Martin has offered the Pentagon a performance-based logistics contract that would get the cost-per-flying-hour of the F-35 down to $25,000 by 2025. The Pentagon has not yet decided whether to accept the proposal, which will also fall to the Biden administration to decide, but Lockheed has said it doubts the F-35’s operating costs can hit that target without the PBL contract, which would involve Lockheed investing more than a billion dollars in parts and sustainment upgrades. The company would be reimbursed out of later savings.

Minnesota Guard F-16s, Damaged in Severe 2018 Storm While Deployed, All Return to Service

Jan. 8, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

The last of five F-16s damaged in a severe 2018 storm while deployed to Kuwait returned to service on Jan. 6 after years of work at the boneyard.

Twelve F-16 Block 50CMs and 333 personnel from the 148th Fighter Wing of the Minnesota Air National Guard were deployed to Ahmad al-Jaber Air Base, Kuwait, for Operation Inherent Resolve when a massive wind storm hit the base in May 2018. Gusts of up to 91 miles per hour collapsed sunshades onto seven F-16s on the base’s flightline, with five of the aircraft sustaining catastrophic damage, according to a wing release.

“The fabric ripping off the structures sounded like thunder,” said Maj. Will Carr, the 148th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron commander, who was driving outside when the storm hit, according to the release.

A fuel tank blew by their vehicle as the structures started to collapse. While most of the personnel were evacuated, explosive ordinance disposal Airmen came in to inspect aircraft munitions and declare the area safe.

The incident, which was not reported until January 2021, is allegedly the worst battle damage an Air Force or Air National Guard unit received since 1991, according to the release.

“It looked like a bomb went off,” Chief Master Sgt. Ryan Gigliotti, equipment maintenance flight chief, said in the release. He added, “There were centerline tanks and equipment strewn across the ramp from the winds.”

The day after, civil engineers with the 407th Air Expeditionary Group assessed the damage and began to plan the next steps. A crash recovery team came together to remove the sunshades from the aircraft, which took about a week, the release states.

Civil engineers and aircraft maintenance personnel untangle and remove sunshades after they collapsed on F-16 Fighting Falcons during a storm that caused 91-mile per hour winds at the 407th Air Expeditionary Group in 2018. Photo: Master Sgt Tom Krob/ANG

Maintainers worked on aircraft that were not severely damaged, which quickly returned to service. All told, this included 3,473 man hours, with work including a wing change and two tail swaps.

“We quickly prioritized our efforts to get our fully mission capable jets ready, fix the least damaged jets first, then disassemble and ship the non-repairable jets,” Gigliotti said in the release.

Lt. Col. R. Matt Russell, the chief of F-16 Flight Test and pilot for the F-16 System Program Office, deployed to the base to test the aircraft before they returned to operations.

“It’s pretty remarkable to get two jets flying that could have been shipped home in a box,” Russell said in the release. “As a result, they were able to add sorties to their air tasking order in combat.”

These damaged F-16s returned to service, flying 18 more sorties before the deployment ended. During the deployment, the squadron flew 682 combat sorties, including 61 intercepts of Russian, Iranian, and Syrian aircraft along with a maritime escort of a carrier group. In total, the unit flew 3,899 hours, the release states.

The three most heavily damaged F-16s were listed as destroyed, and palletized to be taken to the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, also known as the “boneyard,” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., the release states. There, workers conducted sheet metal repairs and replacements, along with other extensive work. The first aircraft returned to the wing in October 2019, the second in January 2020, and the third, tail number 91-339, on Jan. 6, 2021.

“It feels good to have closure with 339 on the ramp,” 148th Maintenance Group Commander Col. Robert Troy said in the release. “I think it’s even more meaningful for the men and women who put the work into taking the aircraft apart, putting it into a crate to ship home. Many, I doubt, expected to see it fly again. After 960 days, I feel like our fleet is whole again.”

AGM-183 Hypersonic Weapon Still Awaiting First Flight

Jan. 8, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force’s AGM-183 hypersonic missile didn’t fly by the end of December, as predicted by service acquisition executive Will Roper last month. Instead, an instrumented round was again captive-carried on a B-52 and the procedures for launching it were “practiced,” USAF said, without disclosing why the missile wasn’t launched.

In a Dec. 19 test, an “Instrumented Measurement Vehicle” version of the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW, “was successfully captive-carried” on a B-52 over the Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., test complex, the Air Force reported in response to a query. Instead of flying as expected, the test merely confirmed integration with the B-52 and “transmission of telemetry and GPS data” from the missile, designated “IMV-2,” to ground stations.

The program will “now move ahead towards its first “Booster Test Flight …later this year,” the Air Force said. The service could not immediately be more specific as to whether that means the first flight is expected to happen closer to next month or the end of 2021.

At the inaugural event of AFA’s Doolittle Leadership Center on Dec. 14, Roper forecast that ARRW would fly before the end of 2020.

“We’re hoping that our flight demonstrator for a hypersonic weapon will be successful this month, and that we’ll get into production next year,” Roper said.

Before December, the Lockheed Martin-built missile had already made two captive-carry tests; in June 2019 and August 2020.

The ARRW program office thanked the 419th Flight Test Squadron and Global Power Bomber Combined Test Force, which operates bombers at Edwards, as well as “other supporting organizations, for all their hard work” on the test, according to USAF.

The Air Force plans to test ARRW on both the B-52 and the B-1, and longstanding plans call for an initial operational capability before the end of 2022. Both bombers will carry the missile externally; the B-1 will carry ARRW on six external hardpoints that have not been used for munitions since the START treaty was signed and the B-1 was withdrawn from the nuclear role. Roper has previously said the ARRW could be employed by the F-15, as well.

Lockheed is developing the ARRW under contracts valued at more than $1.3 billion, which will cover the program through critical design review, test, and production readiness circa December 2022.

A complementary program, the air-breathing Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, being developed by USAF and DARPA, also failed to fly in December, as planned.

Police Officer Killed in Capitol Attack Served in New Jersey Air Guard

Jan. 8, 2021 | By Brian W. Everstine

The U.S. Capitol Police officer who died from injuries sustained during the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol building is an Air National Guard veteran who served two tours in the Middle East during about six years of service.

Officer Brian D. Sicknick died around 9:30 p.m. Jan. 7 due to injuries sustained during the riot, when supporters of President Donald. J. Trump stormed the Capitol. Sicknick, who was injured “while physically engaging with protestors,” returned to his division office and collapsed, USCP said in a statement. He was taken to a local hospital, where he died of the injuries. The death is under investigation by the Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide branch, the USCP, and federal agencies.

Sicknick enlisted in the New Jersey Air National Guard in 1997 as a traditional drilling member. He served as a Fire Team Member and Leader of the 108th Security Forces Squadron, 108th Wing, at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., according to a statement from the New Jersey National Guard. He deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1999 for Operation Southern Watch and Kyrgyzstan in 2003 for Operation Enduring Freedom, and he was honorably discharged in 2003 as a staff sergeant.

“Staff Sgt. Sicknick’s commitment to service and [to] protect his community, state, and nation will never be forgotten,” NJ Guard spokeswoman Lt. Col. Barbara Brown said in a statement. “Our condolences and thoughts are with his family, friends, and those who worked with him during his law enforcement career.”

He joined the USCP in July 2008, and most recently was part of the department’s First Responder’s Unit, USCP said.

“The entire USCP Department expresses its deepest sympathies to Officer Sicknick’s family and friends on their loss, and mourns the loss of a friend and colleague,” USCP said.

New Program to Deploy Generals as USAF, Space Force Ambassadors

Jan. 8, 2021 | By Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory

A new Air Force Recruiting Service program will deploy USAF and Space Force generals as ambassadors for their services to help underrepresented youth envision a future for themselves in the Total Force.

The “GO Inspire” program, which launched Jan. 1, will match general officers “with teams of top Airmen and Guardians,” AFRS wrote in a Jan. 5 release.

Together, they’ll reach out to young people “from underrepresented groups, or URGs, across the nation,” with the ultimate goal of encouraging more diverse applicant pools for both services, but especially for space and flying career fields.

“The program is as much about the young, sharp Airmen and Guardians our senior leaders take with them to school and community visits than it is about having a general show up and talk about service in the Air or Space Force,” AFRS Commander Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas Jr. said in the release.

AFRS is inviting generals from the Air Force’s Active-duty and reserve components and Space Force to take part, according to the release.

The Department of the Air Force hopes that every USAF and USSF general officer will take part in one to two outreach events each year, AFRS Detachment 1 Commander Lt. Col. Annie Driscoll noted.

“We’ll work with senior leaders to track metrics, but the fruits of this labor won’t be measured for years to come,” she said in the release. “That is the nature of youth engagement. We may still be a decade away from seeing any of these young men or women in uniform. In the meantime, we want every young kid who looks up in the sky and sees an airplane or rocket launch to know that it could be them one day. We also want to help clarify the pathway to that seat in our services for both kids and their influencers.”

The joint memo from Air Force Secretary Barbara M. Barrett, USAF Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., and Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond that directed the program’s creation called general officer leadership “critical” to enhancing diversity and recruitment within the Department of the Air Force, the release noted.