‘Whatever it Takes’: Saltzman Says ‘Space Superiority’ Is USSF’s Mission

March 3, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

AURORA, Colo.—The Space Force “will do whatever it takes” to control the space domain, including destroying adversaries’ satellites when and if necessary, vowed Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman in a keynote address kicking off the AFA Warfare Symposium.

“Space superiority is our prime imperative,” Saltzman declared, “and we do not yet have the service we need.”

In perhaps the most direct message yet from a senior leader on offensive capability in space, Saltzman said March 3 that the Pentagon is pressing forward with offensive space operations and capabilities, a sea change after years of reluctance to discuss the topic publicly.

Saltzman used the term “space superiority” more than a dozen times in his 26-minute talk, hammering home the role of the Space Force as a warfighting service while warning that more change and resources are needed to fulfill that role.

Citing his six “core truths” about space and warfighting, Saltzman defined space superiority as being able to defend U.S. and allied assets in orbit and at the same time protect U.S. forces in all other domains from space-enabled attack—and the Space Force must be ready and able to do so with force if necessary.

“Space superiority is the fundamental difference between a civil space agency and a warfighting space service,” he said. “It is the distinction between a company’s employees operating commercial satellites and Guardians conducting combat operations to achieve joint objectives.”

Saltzman reiterated his oft-expressed view that the Space Force must not be seen as merely an enabler of the other services, but that it must be a warfighting service that controls its domain through a range of capabilities.

“Space control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain, employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities by disruptions and degradation—even destruction if necessary,” he said. “It includes things like orbital warfare, electromagnetic warfare. Its counter-space operations can be employed for both offensive and defensive purposes, at the direction of the combatant commands.”

Analysts and academics have noted the need for offensive space weapons and senior Space Force leaders have been more willing to comment on the topic in the recent past. Saltzman has referred to “responsible counter-space campaigning,” for example, while U.S. Space Command boss Gen. Stephen N. Whiting has said “space fires” is among his top priorities.

But hesitations about openly discussing offensive space persist among Space Force personnel who grew up believing long-lasting, destructive actions in space—which produce clouds of orbiting debris—are the actions of reckless rogue states rather than responsible nations.

Saltzman acknowledged those concerns in a media roundtable after his speech. The destruction left behind after land, air, or sea battles doesn’t continue to move at 17,000 miles per hour as it will in space, he said. Yet there can be times when destruction in space could be warranted, he said.

“I am far more enamored by systems that deny, disrupt, degrade. I think there’s a lot of room to leverage systems focused on those ‘D’ words, if you will,” he said. “The destroy word comes at a cost in terms of debris, if you think about space, and so we may get pushed into the corner where we need to execute some of those options. But I’m really focused on weapons that deny, disrupt, degrade. Those can have tremendous mission impacts with far less degradation than a way that could affect blue systems.” (Blue systems refer to friendly forces in military exercises, while red systems refer to adversaries.)

In the past, Saltzman has classified counter-space capabilities is either on orbit or terrestrial represented by these categories:

Kinetic, destructive weapons

Directed energy weapons

Radio frequency energy and jamming systems

China is pursuing all of these, while the U.S. is not, he told reporters, but he did not specify which capabilities the Space Force doesn’t have.

Asked if he would like to have all six kinds of weapons at his disposal for space control and superiority, Saltzman said his “personal preference about it doesn’t matter,” but hinted that it could be beneficial.

“The mix of weapons based on the targets is always a military consideration, and when I look at the space-enabled targeting architecture that [China] has built, it’s pretty impressive,” he said. “It’s in all orbital regimes. It’s in the hundreds of satellites. And to give the president options requires a mix of systems to be able to go across the full spectrum of operations to all orbital regimes. There are some things that are purpose-built for low-Earth orbit effects, others in GEO. And so the more weapons in the mix we have, the more options we can offer.”

Many of those weapons, if they exist, remain classified, and Saltzman admitted to being “cagey” when asked what the Space Force does and doesn’t have. He was not cagey, however, about the need for space superiority—and for the Space Force to be able to achieve it.

“We need to conduct day-to-day operations while we prepare for the high-end fight,” he said from the podium. “Everything we’re doing, every new initiative, every project, every task, is designed to get us what we need, where we need to go while threading that needle.”

Among those initiatives, Saltzman highlighted the service’s new Mission Deltas, Officer Training Course, Operational Test and Training Infrastructure, component commands, and Space Futures Command. It’s a sizable list, he acknowledged, and one that is putting a “heavy strain” on Guardians. But the efforts are critical.

“Other senior leaders will say, ‘Hey, the Space Force has so many things going on. We need to catch our breath. Why can’t we just slow down, wait a while, consolidate some of our gains?’” Saltzman said. “And I really do wish it was that easy. … But the answer is, the Space Force we have is still not the Space Force we need.”

America’s First Unmanned Fighters Are Here: YFQ-42 and YFQ-44

March 3, 2025 | By Chris Gordon

AURORA, Colo.—The Air Force’s first two Collaborative Combat Aircraft are fighters, the first uncrewed aircraft to carry such a designation, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin announced in a keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 3.

General Atomics’ CCA will be called the YFQ–42A and Anduril Industries’ CCA will be dubbed the YFQ–44A.

Under Air Force naming conventions, Y designates prototype, F means fighter, and Q means unmanned. Once a prototype moves into production, the Air Force would drop the Y from the prefix.

The chief said the unveiling represented far more than a name.

“We have two prototypes of Collaborative Combat Aircraft that were on paper less than a couple of years ago,” Allvin said. “For the first time in our history, we have a fighter designation in the YFQ-42 Alpha and the YFQ-44 Alpha—maybe just symbolic, but it’s telling the world that we are leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare.”

CCA drones are designed to be “loyal wingmen” that can fly alongside new and existing crewed fighter jets, including the F-35 Lightning II. The Air Force believes a single manned fighter can control a larger number of drones than originally envisioned and can do so using less-sophisticated autonomous technology.

“It’s a recognition that we’re moving into a new era of manned human-machine teaming, as we build out our force design,” Allvin said in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Anduril released a statement hailing the milestone.

“Together, in close partnership with the Air Force, we are pioneering a new generation of semi-autonomous fighter aircraft that is fundamentally transforming air dominance by delivering highly capable, mass-producible, more affordable, and more autonomous aircraft by the end of the decade,” said Anduril senior vice president of engineering Jason Levin. “It reinforces what we already knew: our CCA is a high performance aircraft designed specifically for the air superiority mission, acting as a force multiplier for crewed aircraft within the real constraints of cost and time.”

General Atomics sounded a similar refrain.

“YFQ-42A will be critical in securing air dominance for the Joint Force in future conflicts, leveraging autonomous capabilities and crewed-uncrewed teaming to defeat enemy threats in contested environments,” GA said in a statement. “It is designed to integrate seamlessly with current and next-generation crewed aircraft, expanding mission capabilities and ensuring continued air dominance. In short, YFQ-42A provides fighter capacity—affordable mass—at a lower cost and on a threat-relevant timeline.”

The service has become increasingly bullish on the CCA program, which is part of the Next-Generation Air Dominance portfolio, which may also include a penetrating crewed fighter. A decision of the future of the crewed NGAD fighter will be up to the next Secretary of the Air Force and the Trump administration.

“If we’re in this dangerous and dynamic time, I want to give the president as many options as we possibly can,” Allvin said in his keynote. “So that means yes, keep on the modernization. Yes, NGAD. Yes, CCA. … That’s what it is going to take.”

WATCH: Lockheed Martin’s Progress with the F-35 Program and TR-3

March 3, 2025

Chauncey McIntosh joins Air & Space Forces Magazine from Lockheed Martin’s F-35 facility in Fort Worth, Texas, to discuss Lockheed’s near- and long-term visions for the F-35 program, expectations for Tech Refresh 3 (TR-3), the effectiveness and value of a fifth-gen platform and more.

McIntosh is the vice president and general manager of the F-35 Lightning II program at Lockheed Martin.

America Must Resource Its Spacepower Advantage

March 2, 2025 | By Douglas A. Birkey

The Department of Defense’s directive to reapportion 8 percent of its spending to Trump administration priorities presents distinct opportunities and challenges. The nation faces a historic array of national security threats, with China at the top of the list. Ensuring available funds are best directed to decisively address these dangers is extremely prudent. However, in seeking to realign funding, leaders must be careful not to cut to the bone of core capabilities and capacity. Nowhere is this more germane than in the U.S. Space Force.

President Donald Trump created the nation’s newest service in 2019 to protect and defend America’s interests in space. Adversary actions in contesting this domain, combined with a burgeoning demand for space-based capabilities on earth, required a robust response to consolidate and align national security space activities, while also developing new strategies, operational concepts, tactics, and technologies. This includes offensive and defensive measures. This was a major shift given that for decades, U.S. policy prevented members of the military from even using the words “warfighting” and “space” in the same sentence.

Today, Space Force leadership is aggressively transforming the service into a warfighting enterprise. Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman and his team created the key operating concept, the Space Force’s Theory of Competitive Endurance, and they outlined the defining six core truths about space warfighting. They also implemented the Space Force Generation model to generate, present, and sustain combat-ready forces for combatant command missions. It has reorganized its units of action around mission areas to focus on readiness and it is rapidly establishing service components in all the Combatant Commands to ensure effective joint integration. These vectors provide the foundational vision and tenets to deter, and if necessary, fight and win a conflict in space. This is crucial as the service develops new tactics, techniques, procedures, and training to decisively address adversary threats on orbit. This includes new levels of situational awareness and the ability to gain a maneuver advantage with our assets in space.

This is an incredibly complex, demanding set of challenges, and Guardians are making rapid progress—delivering results in months and years that would normally take decades. The scale and scope of the threat demands nothing less.

Teamwork is also important given that space does not exist as an isolated domain. Spacepower is something every service branch must embrace. No activity, whether on land, in the air, or at sea, can execute successfully without the Space Force. Further, joint exercises are crucial to ensure all warfighters are empowered to defend and harness a space advantage.

To execute all these functions, the Space Force is having to literally reinvent most of its operations—everything from how it manages space launch to satellite constellation architectures and the networks that connect them. Failure is not an option, for as Gen. Saltzman declared: “We have a responsibility to secure the space domain to defend U.S. service members in harm’s way. We must contest to control the space domain, or else those service members will be at unacceptable risk of attack.” Spacepower is a key component of combat lethality anytime, anywhere.

However, despite the Space Force’s crucial role in U.S. national security, it is the smallest of all the military services. It consumes just 3 percent of the total Department of Defense budget. The entire service is comprised of just 9,900 uniformed personnel and 8,000 essential civilian experts. This represents the greatest bargain in DOD. Other service branches have individual bases with larger populations. Never-the-less, the Biden Administration issued a 2 percent funding cut in their fiscal 2025 defense budget request. This came on top of decreased buying power due to inflation. Resourcing will become more constrained if Congress fails to pass an 2025 budget given automatic cuts mandated by the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

Given this context, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s 8 percent budget realignment can smartly redistribute critically needed resources to the Space Force. As a new service, its success continues to be premised on growth to meet surging mission demand and advanced U.S. warfighting concepts. President Trump set a very clear vector when he created the service five years ago. Guardians have been working hard toward realizing these objectives. Hegseth must also consider that the Golden Dome air and missile defense initiative will be largely space-based and represents additive mission growth.

Any government institution can absorb cuts. Whether that is prudent for such a small, vital service with burgeoning demand is another question. The reality is that the Space Force will likely need more funds to achieve the effects expected of it across all military domains.

Space Force missions are foundational to America’s defense. No other service can effectively operate without the capabilities Guardians bring to the fight. Gen. Saltzman and his team get this and are pushing hard to transform the service. The Department of Defense must ensure they are sufficiently resourced to execute the missions asked of them. There comes a point where more cannot be done with less. The nation is asking a great deal of the Space Force, and the realities of the modern threat environment are demanding even more. War-winning lethality must always be America’s national security vector—it is the bedrock of “peace through strength.” Robust spacepower is the quintessential element of that bedrock.

Will TJAG Firings Diminish the Import of Military Legal Advice?

March 1, 2025 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

When President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth relieved Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Vice Chief of Staff for the Air Force, they also removed the top Judge Advocates General from each military department—a perplexing move that left many wondering why.

The removals of Lt. Gen. Charles L. Plummer, who had been the Air Force’s top military lawyer since 2022, and Army Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III came just weeks after the Navy’s top JAG, Vice Adm. Christopher French, had retired. Now all three top JAG positions are vacant. Hegseth has said he intends to “open up” the process to find replacements.

“Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything—anything that happens in their spots,” Hegseth told Fox News on Feb. 23. A day later, he told pool reporters at the Pentagon, “it’s not about roadblocks to an agenda, it’s roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander-in-chief.”

Lawyers have always had a role in advising air commanders about what they can and cannot do in the battlespace since at least World War II. But that role has increased as decision-making has become more centralized over time. The implication of Hegseth’s decision is that lawyers had become too powerful in determining when and how targets could be engaged.

Ultimately, Hegseth said, “I want the best possible lawyers in each service to provide the best possible recommendations, no matter what, to lawful orders that are given. And we didn’t think those particular positions were well suited, and so we’re looking for the best.”

Retired Lt. Gen. Richard C. Harding, who served as TJAG of the Air Force from 2010 to 2014, told Air & Space Forces Magazine that with the removal of all three services’ TJAGs at once without any reasonable explanation, “one is led to believe that those JAGs were in the way of what Secretary Hegseth and others want to accomplish.”

Retired Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., who proceeded Harding’s tenure and was deputy TJAG of the Air Force from 2006 to 2010, wrote on his Lawfire blog that the Trump administration “has the right to develop and implement policies it prefers, and to have leaders who will carry them out … so long, of course, as the policies are legal.”

Likewise, retired Maj. Gen. Thomas E. Ayres—former General Counsel of the Air Force and deputy TJAG of the Army—wrote on social media that Hegseth “can certainly ask for new nominations and seek the new nominations’ confirmation by the Senate.”

But the moves continue to fuel debate. Ayers said the firings “show the importance of the position,” while retired Maj. Gen. Steven J. Lepper—Harding’s former deputy—said Hegseth’s comments about “roadblocks” infers “that legal oversight is expendable.”

What JAGs Do

The Air Force employs about 1,300 Active-Duty judge advocates, whose responsibilities include advising commanders on their legal responsibilities as leaders and warfighters. The service’s top legal officer provides independent legal counsel to senior military leaders.

Several former JAGs interviewed for this article referred to their numbers as “force multipliers,” not impediments. “JAGs hold a respected position on the battlefield because they enhance the military’s ability to conduct warfare within legal bounds,” Lepper said. Harding said JAGs help minimize civilian harm, limit collateral damage, and treat prisoners humanely.

A point of contention is the role JAGs play in targeting decisions and the rules of engagement. Researcher Craig Jones wrote in 2021 for West Point’s Lieber Institute that JAGs have become increasingly important. “Once bit-players in the background of military operations, legal advisers today speak of their ‘intimate’ and ‘extensive’ involvement in targeting operations; one recently told me that he provided legal input on well over 1,000 targeting operations in Afghanistan alone.”

That deep involvement is sometimes controversial. Former Army Maj. David French, himself a JAG, has argued JAGs’ recommendations sometimes become too restrictive.

“While JAG officers’ concern with the terrible consequences of poor decision-making under pressure is well meaning and understandable, the current rules have effectively taken combat decision-making away from experienced warriors and put it in the hands of far less experienced lawyers,” he wrote in 2015.

Former Army TJAG Lt. Gen. Charles Pede also warned in 2021 that “today’s senior commander and lawyer have been raised on a constant diet of constraining [counterterrorism] rules of engagement for nearly 20 years,” creating a gap between the law of war and more restrictive policy.

Already, the Trump administration has granted military commanders more leeway to conduct airstrikes without getting sign-off from the White House and Pentagon. Those commanders, however, will still likely consult with their JAGs, and former JAGs said their job is to provide advice based on the law, not impose their own rules.

“To be crystal clear, JAGs advise on [rules of engagement], but it is the product of civilian and military leaders’ decisions,” Dunlap wrote. “It is the SecDef and ultimately the President who bear the responsibility for [rules of engagement].”

Ultimately, if the law restricts certain actions, then the lawyer has to speak up. “It’s not a roadblock—it’s legal compliance,” Harding said.

JAGs also advise on international law, such as the deportation flights the Air Force began flying in February to countries like Ecuador and Guatemala using its C-17s. JAGs ensure commands are operating appropriately within legal bounds.

Retired Col. Don Christensen, former chief prosecutor for the Air Force, told Air & Space Forces Magazine that a JAG’s role is to find legal ways to support commanders’ objectives without violating the law.

French, a decade after critiquing restrictive rules of engagement, also noted in a recent column that “dismissing JAG officers doesn’t change the rules, but it can degrade the quality of the legal advice that commanders receive.”

Advising commanders is “already difficult,” Lipper said, especially in combat where pressure is immense. He worries that commanders might choose not to heed legal advice out of concern that they could repercussions for doing so. “What’s happening now is creating a disincentive for commanders to continue listening to JAGs,” Lepper asserted.

Two Stars

While speaking about the TJAG firings on Fox News, Hegseth also stated that moving forward, the positions would be downgraded from three-star positions to two-star billets. He explained the move as an effort to curb to “the inflation of military generals,” a nod to the increasing proportion of general and flag officers compared to the total force.

Harding objected, suggesting the downgrade could “marginalize the value of TJAGs and their advice.”

The TJAG position, long a two-star billet, was elevated to the three-star level in 2006 following a series of scandals over how detainees were treated during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a former Air Force JAG, drove the change. JAGs had warned against practices that were later deemed torture and in violation of both U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions, and Graham and others argued for elevating the positions because TJAGs legal advice wasn’t reaching the highest levels of government.

Congress amended the statute in 2016, making the third star optional, but until now, each service has continued to fill the roles with three-star officers.

Reducing TJAGs in rank is more than symbolic, Harding said: “By moving them back to two stars, they will be excluded from key meetings where their input is crucial.”

Theoretically, Harding said, the current statute would allow leaders to appoint a TJAG who is neither a three-star nor a two-star general, though that seems unlikely.

Dunlap said, in an email response to questions, that downgrading the TJAGs’ ranks “sends a disastrous message that the importance of adherence to the law is being similarly downgraded.”

To date, the administration has not followed up with details on either its selection process or plans for the positions, which are currently filled by “Acting” TJAGs. Maj. Gen. Rebecca R. Vernon is the current Air Force Acting TJAG. Once a new nominee is named, the Senate must confirm the nomination, typically with a public hearing, a committee vote, and ultimately a vote by the full Senate.

By saying he intends to “open up” the selections, Hegseth suggested the JAG community is essentially closed, and that TJAGs in the past were “chosen by each other.” But Harding disputed the point.

“TJAGs are selected by a promotion board, and like every other general officer, the majority—more than 90 percent—of the board members are not JAGs,” said Harding. “In fact, it’s typical to have only one judge advocate on the board, with the rest being officers who have command experience, three stars or higher. They review annual performance reports, and there are extremely strict rules around reviewing the candidate’s records.”

Indeed, noted Christensen, there are very few JAGs on the promotion board “to hedge against exactly what Hegseth says is happening.”

USAF’s Software Startup, Kessel Run, Pivots ‘Back to the Future,’ as Some Cry Foul

March 1, 2025 | By Shaun Waterman

The Air Force’s Kessel Run software factory, which brought speed and rapid change through modern agile development practices and “DevSecOps” to USAF programs, is changing the way it does business.

Gone will be the small teams of Active-Duty Airmen and Air Force civilian coders working side-by-side with contract engineers paid by the hour. Instead, government engineers will manage software development work by vendors—more like conventional development.

Col. Richard Lopez, the materiel leader of Kessel Run, told Air & Space Forces Magazine that Kessel Run will now be “government-led, vendor-managed.”

Kessel Run has iconic status. Founded by warriors and technologists frustrated with the glacial pace of military software acquisition, it was intended to bring the speed and iterative approach of Silicon Valley startups to Air Force software development. Lauded as a rare success story, this detachment of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Command at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., became a blueprint for other rapid development “software factories” throughout the Air Force and Space Force, many of which used similar naming conventions drawing from Star Wars and the attitude that comes with it—the plucky band of rebels.

The name comes from a brief quote in the original Star Wars movie in which Harrison Ford, as Han Solo, brags that his Millennium Falcon spacecraft is “the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.” Kessel Run is a smuggler’s corridor, another reference to working around the rules.

In the military software world, Kessel Run was all aobut a single digital-age challenge: How to adapt a procurement system crafted for hardware things made of steel and concrete to buy something living and continuously changing, like software.

Lopez said his changes will preserve the “real secret sauce” of Kessel Run, which was about introducing modern software development practices like DevSecOps and agile, to the U.S. military. DevSecOps puts development, security, and operational deployment into a single team, rather than closed cells; agile is a software development philosophy that breaks coding objectives down into manageable chunks, and then rolls out interative changes in sprints, which can be as short as hours but typically one-to-four weeks in length.

“It’s still DevSecOps. It’s still agile,” Lopez said. “So the hand-in-hand work with the vendors isn’t changing. It’s just the individuals that are coding are now going to be the vendors, rather than mixed government-vendor teams.”

Lopez won a two-year extension on his appointment as materiel leader, through 2026, in order to be sure he can see the transformation through to a successful conclusion.

But critics say Lopez’s plan is really an effort to pull an organization that grew out of a failure of the Air Force’s traditional software acquisition process, back to a more conventional government model.

“It’s back to the future,” said one senior software engineer, a service veteran who has worked at Kessel Run since 2019. What Lopez is describing, the engineer said, “is the way that software development was done forever within the DOD, which generally has gotten us monstrosities and software that really isn’t fit for purpose.” 

The engineer spoke without attribution because of their concern about potential repercussions for publicly criticizing leadership. At least one other former Kessel Run employee Air & Space Forces Magazine contacted shared those concerns.

Needed Changes?

Lopez disputes the idea that the changes he is introducing represent a return to so-called “traditional” software acquisition. “It’s not throwing a requirement over the fence and then waiting years and having something come back that wasn’t what you expected,” he said. “This is every single day, working hand-in-hand, integrated in many respects, with the vendor.”

As part of the changes, Lopez added, Kessel Run will move to a single vendor model, where each product portfolio is run by a single vendor paid to deliver a capability or an application, rather than operating in multi-vendor hybrid teams paid by the hour.

Lopez said industry wants the shift to single-vendor teams and that doing so will improve accountability and performance. “There’s a greater sense of, I don’t want to say ownership, because we own the code. It’s ours. But now [the vendors] deliver an end-to-end solution, which is something that industry has been asking us to do, and I think it’s a great opportunity now to work better with industry,” he said.

Bryon Kroger, one of the founders of the software factory back in 2017 and now CEO of Rise8, a military software developer, said some kind of change at Kessel Run was needed. Kroger left Kessel Run in 2019, and said that by 2022, when Lopez was appointed to lead Kessel Run, the software factory was “failing” and “not doing its mission.”

He attributed that failure in part to decisions he and others made in the early days of the organization.

“There were good reasons why we did everything we did, but also not all of it was right,” Kroger said. “In fact, some of the things that people think made Kessel Run unique and special, if I could go back and do them over again, I’d do them differently.”

But it wasn’t just leadership decisions, he said. “It’s the Air Force that failed Kessel Run and the movement towards better software development.”

Kessel Run Culture

From its beginnings, there were no uniforms at Kessel Run, said Ken Kato, one of the founding hires at Kessel Run who went on to create and lead the Navy’s software factory, Black Pearl.

The ban on uniforms was in part for security, Kato said, noting Kessel Run started in a shared, unsecured office space in downtown Boston. But it also helped to erase differences and break down hierarchies.

“It removes the gap between military personnel and civilians. It removes the gap of rank versus ideas,” he said.

Kato summed up that early Kessel Run culture as “strong opinions, loosely held.” That encouraged everyone, regardless of status, to advocate passionately for their opinion but also be ready to change their mind if new information emerged.

“Each team member, as persons, as developers, as individuals, can come up with ideas independently, and present them, the same way you would in any tech startup: Here’s an idea. What do you think?” he said, without having to worry about being seen as disrespectful to a senior officer.

But the culture also emphasized something lawmakers, Air Force leaders, and acquisition reformers all value, said Kato: speed.

“Typically it takes defense organizations as long as three years” to procure and deploy software, he said. Kessel Run was able to do it in three months.

Changing course

Kroger said Lopez is trying to do the right thing, but may have misdiagnosed the problem. “I think his view is, it’s failing because the permanent [staffers] and the culture are all wrong, and they just need to get back to doing what they’re supposed to do, which is award contracts, and let the contractors build the software. … The empire struck back.”

Part of the issue was that some senior officers objected to the Kessel Run culture, Kroger said. They saw “‘ideas over rank’ as a license for insubordination,” he said.

Pairing Air Force developers with more experienced contractors as mentors in mixed teams grew out of a vision to build an organic software development capability for the Air Force: “a squadron of coders,” Kroger said. But the concept quickly ran up against practical issues.

“How long does it take to create a 10-year programmer? Well, it takes 10 years,” Kroger said. “You can accelerate that timeline with the pairing and apprenticeship model we were using, but it’s still years.” Kessel Run was getting Air Force coders assigned on temporary duty, normally for just six months, said Kroger: “We were turning over 50 percent of our staff every six months. So obviously that has problems.” 

Even when the Air Force assigned personnel on permanent duty for three-year postings, “they would go somewhere else and not do software ever again,” Kroger said. “There was no career path for these people.”

Turnover was also been a problem at the leadership level, he said, where the materiel commander and his or her top staff rotate in and out on two-year assignments. “What software company in the world today turns over their entire C suite every two years? Literally the entire C suite. And that’s what’s happening at Kessel Run.”  

Over time, he said the lack of a career path for Air Force and government civilian personnel combined with budgetary pressures pushing down compensation for contractors, combined to reduce the effectiveness of the hybrid model. “People are right to criticize some aspects of it and change them,” he said.

Kroger agrees that a “vendor-executed” strategy like the one Lopez is proposing is the right way forward. “It takes time” to build an organic software development capability, he said. “We don’t have time.” For critical capabilities, the Air Force has to buy in highly skilled engineers. 

But such a strategy requires government acquisition managers to be highly skilled in software development, so they can write contracts that take advantage of agile software development practices. Conventional government procurement starts with a list of requirements, but that can lead to software that is outdated as soon as or even before it’s compiled.  

“You can’t put a contract in front of a contractor as a list of requirements and call it agile because they complete the requirements in sprints,” Kroger said.

The Secret Sauce

Retired Col. Brian Beachkofski, who led Kessel Run from 2020-2022, says the key to understanding the impact Kessel Run achieved comes down to two letters: PM.

In software development, PM means product manager, the person responsible for ensuring developers on the team deliver the capabilities that users need. In government acquisition parlance, PM means program manager, which is an oversight role. “They are just looking at product execution. Is spending this quarter in line with the plan? Are we making progress like we thought?” said Beachkofski, now chief technology officer of Rithmm, a sports data company.

Part of Kessel run’s secret sauce, he explained, was that they had government product managers “responsible for making sure that our user has the capabilities that they need from the software. So who they’re responsible to is actually the user, as opposed to it being more of a check on cost, schedule, performance, on contract execution,” as with a program manager.

The hybrid team model with government product managers, Beachkofski said, meant that government employees and contractors were sitting “on the same side of the table,” alleviating potential tension in the relationship.  

“In a traditional acquisition office, you would have the contractor, who’s delivering on the requirements and going to hand over a software package at the end of the contract. By having a time and materials contract [where the vendors are paid by the hour] where the government and the contractors work together. There was more of, ‘We’re on the same side of the table to solve the user requirement,’” he said.

Beachkofski acknowledged that, by the time he left in 2022, Kessel Run was “drifting” away from its adherence to DevSecOps, mainly because the training budget was cut. 

“I had to make changes I wished I didn’t have to because of the financial situation, but I’m proud of our ability to support the user and deliver when it counted most,” he said. 

He pointed to the organization’s success in rapidly scaling Slapshot, a mission planning app, to ensure the safe evacuation of  more than 123,000 people from Afghanistan, amid the chaos of the Taliban takeover. 

Ultimately, Kroger said, part of the role of Kessel Run ought to be to create more “educated buyers” of software development services in the Air Force. 

A six-month rotation on a hybrid team might not make an Airman a seasoned software engineer, but if they move into acquisition and become a program manager later, that exposure to coding should make them better contract writers, he said.

“I would still like to have some military folks come in and pair [with contract developer mentors]  … with the goal of, once they’re done with their six months building an app, they move into the program office, and now they’re much more informed buyers,” he said. “They can provide a better counterbalance to the contractors in engineering, architecture and design, and I think the results are better contracts and better outcomes from those contracts.”

The anonymous Kessel Run engineer, however, says that’s easier said than done.

“There are very few people that even know what the [contract] language should look like,” the engineer said. “How do you translate what Kessel Run does in agile software development into a contract using standard government language? They haven’t even figured that out.”

Navy Secretary Nominee Touts Service’s NGAD, with Improved Range and Capacity

Feb. 28, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

The Navy’s secretive sixth-generation fighter—which will likely share attributes with the Air Force’s own Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter—will have substantially greater range and payload than its predecessors, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of the Navy said—indicating enthusiasm for the program amid uncertainty about both services’ path forward for advanced fighters.

The Navy and Air Force are also working together to evaluate their plans for joint air battle management in a new review, John Phelan wrote in prepared testimony for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

While Phelan did not go in-depth on Naval aviation during the hearing, he did address it when asked in his his advanced policy questions shared with the committee. Specifically, he said the F/A-XX—the Navy’s designation for its Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter—will offer “significant advancements in operational reach and capacity within contested environments.” The aircraft is “intended to enable Carrier Strike Groups to outpace adversaries while maintaining naval air dominance,” he wrote.

The Navy is also “collaborating closely” with the Air Force and Marine Corps on advanced aircraft “to ensure interoperability through shared enabling technologies like autonomy, mission systems, and communication architectures,” Phelan added.

Air Force and Navy officials have said before they are coordinating their sixth-gen efforts, with the two fighters likely to share technologies such as propulsion, sensors and communication systems. They will not, however, be variants of the same airframe like the F-35.

Phelan’s comments come amid uncertainty about both service’s NGAD efforts. The Air Force put its version on hold amid concerns about the requirements and cost, and previous Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall deferred a final decision on the program’s future to the incoming secretary and the Trump administration.

The Navy, meanwhile, withdrew about $1 billion from its NGAD effort in its 2025 budget request and said it would delay the program, without providing much detail. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti later said the service was still committed to pressing forward with the program, but she has since been dismissed by Trump.

Stephen Feinberg, the nominee for deputy secretary of defense, said at his confirmation hearing this week that a decision about the way forward for NGAD would probably be made by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or President Trump. Trump advisor Elon Musk has publicly dismissed crewed aircraft as obsolete, saying the mission should be taken over by autonomous air vehicles.

CCA

Phelan also noted the existing partnership between the Air Force and Navy on Collaborative Combat Aircraft; autonomous drones that will fly alongside crewed fighters, carrying more munitions for them and potentially serving as sensor, reconnaissance, and relay platforms.

“This collaborative approach, encompassing both manned and unmanned platforms, including Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) will maximize operational effectiveness and flexibility across the services,” Phelan wrote.

“In my view,” he continued, “aligning technology development and operational requirements will ensure the services are poised to full leverage next-generation unmanned systems, ultimately enhancing capabilities and long-range mission effectiveness.”

Battle Management

Elsewhere in his written testimony, Phelan said that “in conjunction with the Air Force, Joint Staff, and the Combatant Commanders,” the Navy is undertaking a study “to define the requirements for joint air battle management in a high-end fight.” This study, directed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation shop, “will inform me, if confirmed, and the rest of the Navy leadership, as to any potential investments needed in airborne command and control capabilities.”

The Navy’s platform for airborne battle management for nearly 40 years has been the Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye, a turboprop-powered, carrier-launched and recovered, airborne warning and control aircraft with a large dorsal radome.

Numerous think tanks and Pentagon leaders have noted that China has developed very long-range air-to-air missiles apparently intended to take out single-point-of-failure assets like the Hawkeye; its Air Force counterpart, the E-3 AWACS; and aerial tankers. The Air Force is planning to replace the E-3 with the Boeing E-7 Wedgetail, but the E-2’s eventual replacement has not been publicly mapped out.

The Air Force has described its planned purchase of 26 E-7s as a bridge capability until it can migrate the air and ground moving target indication mission to satellites.

Boeing Congratulates 2024 Polaris Awardees

Feb. 28, 2025

Steve Parker, the interim President and CEO at Boeing Defense, Space & Security, sends his congratulations to the Guardians being honored by the U.S. Space Force’s Polaris Awards at the 2025 AFA Warfare Symposium.

Defense Industry: Want Surge Capacity? Pay For It.

Feb. 28, 2025 | By John A. Tirpak

If the Pentagon wants the U.S. defense industrial base to be able to surge production of munitions and more, those details should be included in requirements and contracts and paid for, industry leaders told lawmakers this week.

They also urged the Defense Department to take some “thoughtful risk” in contracting in order to get equipment to the field faster and pressed Congress to avoid continuing resolutions and other funding delays that hurt new and small businesses.

Surge capacity is important but “we also don’t ask for it in our contracting,” National Defense Industrial Association president and CEO David L. Norquist told the Housed Armed Services Committee in a Feb. 26 hearing about the defense industrial base.

“Typically, if you have two bidders, and one builds excess capacity, they will bid a higher price and lose,” he pointed out. Surge has to be “part of the requirement,” he said.

In the years since the Cold War, Pentagon contracting has focused almost exclusively on efficiency rather than capacity, Norquist and other witnesses said.

“So if you want somebody to have a capacity to surge, then they need to have it priced into the contract or treated as an allowable cost,” Norquist said. If surge capacity is penalized “because it has a higher price than the one without, you’re going to get what you asked for in the contract. So you have to say, ‘I value surge capacity,’” Norquist said.

He added that the Pentagon needs to lose its efficiency-at-all-costs mindset in order to have surge capability.

“All of these [defense production] facilities are drawing from long supply chains,” he said. “You … want to move away from ‘just in time’ inventory. You want to pay people to be able to store large parts.”

This has the advantage of accelerating the production line because there are enough parts to accommodate lengthened work shifts, he said. And if there is a conflict, there is a back inventory to keep production lines moving while supply chains adjust.

“So from a national security point of view, asking for a move away from ‘just in time’ inventory is a national strategic interest of the U.S. government,” Norquist said.

He cautioned, though, that this approach should be focused.

“You want to be careful when you do that,” he said. “You only want to do that in the things you’re trying to allow, because it is an extra cost for the system. … You can’t have everything. You need to figure out which are the systems, which are the items that, when the war starts, or before the war starts, you will need to surge,” and create contract rules tailored for those items.

Eric Fanning, head of the Aerospace Industries Association, said the Pentagon should accept more risk if it wants to accelerate production, either in peacetime or wartime.

“I think we’re at a time where we need to add some thoughtful risk back into the system in order to get speed, and there are ways to do that,” he said. “It requires careful oversight to make sure that the risk was well placed. But I think that’s a larger cultural issue of taking risk to move faster. And I don’t think that’s what we reward in the system.”

He said Congress provides plenty of authorities to go faster in contracting, But these contract vehicles aren’t widely used by the government workforce, “because we don’t incentivize the federal workforce to use that. We incentivize them to find the problems, not necessarily get us past the problems.’

Different training could incentivize more thoughtful risk-taking, Fanning said.

Fanning also urged Congress to avoid continuing resolutions, as the delays in new starts and especially in funding new entrants or small businesses discourages companies from doing business with the Pentagon.

“Certainly we’ve lived with CRs for many years, although we’re much further into the fiscal year now than we typically are with a CR, and it’s happening at a time when I think the supply chain, at least for our companies and our supply chain members, [is] stretched thin and as fragile as we’ve seen in a very long time,” he said.

Many of the supply chain issues are related to inflation, Fanning added, and he warned that in aerospace, the effects are still ongoing.

“There’s a lag for inflation in the industrial base,” he said, “And I would argue that the Pentagon still hasn’t seen the full impacts of inflation.” Companies in the supply chain are “really stretched [with] cash flow problems. … And when there’s a CR and payments are cut off or are delayed, it creates that extra stress and burden for the companies inside the supply chain that may have already lined up their workforce, their materials, their parts, and are under obligation to those contracts, but aren’t seeing work start on something new or continue on something they’re working on,” he said.

Norquist concurred, adding, “I just want people to understand, if you’re a small business in these supply chains, it becomes very unappealing to stay in this world and work and for the Defense Department. And you decide instead just to go to the commercial work area. So this is something that we’re creating with these CRs, and we’ve got to stop it.”

Witnesses repeated their pleas from a similar hearing last year that the Pentagon and Congress clarify “the demand signal,” so that contractors can make informed decisions about how much material and labor to lay in ahead of a contract, so that there is a common understanding of whether surge capacity is wanted and will be compensated. If that demand is not clear, companies have little incentive to hold on to workforce on the hope that the work will eventually return.

The Pentagon, Fanning said, is often the “single customer” for some businesses, “so when that customer’s demand signal ebbs and flows and the workforce goes away, they go away, and it’s very hard to get them back” for a surge.