As Sweden Enters NATO, Its Gripens Link Up with B-1Bs

As Sweden Enters NATO, Its Gripens Link Up with B-1Bs

Two B-1 Lancers from Ellsworth Air Force Base joined up with Swedish JAS 39 Gripen fighters Feb. 26 and in the Arctic and Baltic Sea regions, training for surface attack, air interdiction, and close air support scenarios, the Air Force said.

Exercise Vanguard Adler took place as Hungary lifted the last roadblock to Sweden’s entry into the NATO alliance the same day. U.S. bombers operated with Swedish fighters and joint terminal attack controllers, according to an Air Force release.

“This timely opportunity for our crews to exercise our collective defense capabilities … in the Arctic region is incredible,” said Lt. Col. Benjamin Jamison, 37th Bomb Squadron director of operations and leader of Bomber Task Force 24-2, in the release. “It demonstrates our ironclad commitment to our partners and allies, demonstrates our expansive reach, and sends a strong deterrent message to potential adversaries.” 

The B-1 Lancers flew from Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., to Luleå-Kallax Air Base, arriving on Feb. 23. It was just the second time a U.S. bomber has touched down in Sweden, following another B-1 task force out of Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, last year. This is also the first multi-day deployment of U.S. bomber aircraft to Sweden, aimed at “building partnerships and increasing readiness,” as part of the Air Force’s BTF mission.

U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancers from the 28th Bomb Wing, Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., arrived at Luleå-Kallax Air Base, Sweden, Feb. 23, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jake Jacobsen)

The bilateral training coincidentally took place on the same day as Hungary’s parliament voted to approve Sweden’s NATO membership.

Sweden and its nordic neighbor, Finland, applied to join NATO in May 2022 in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three months earlier. Finland joined the alliance in April 2023, but Sweden’s application got hung up as NATO members Turkey and Hungary raised objections. Negotiations with Turkey were completed late last year, leaving Hungary as the final hold out.

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan welcomed that decision. “Like Finland, which recently joined our Alliance, Sweden is a strong democracy with a highly capable military that shares our values and vision for the world,” Sullivan said in a statement.

Russia threatened retaliation if Sweden and Finland joined NATO after they applied, but the two formerly neutral countries deemed entry into the alliance as their best bulwark against expanded Russian aggression after the invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not comment publicly on Hungary’s decision, but the Kremlin’s Foreign Ministry has previously threatened “military-technical” and other measures should Sweden become the 32nd member of the alliance. That same “military-technical” term was used in advance of its invasion of Ukraine to characterize its actions there.

“On our part, we will closely monitor what Sweden will be doing in the aggressive military bloc, how it will implement its membership in actuality,” said Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, according to the Kremlin’s state-owned media on Feb. 28. “We will formulate our response policy course and response steps of a military-technical and other nature in order to curb threats to Russia’s national security which emerge as a result.”

Both Sweden and Finland are strategically located in Northern Europe. Joining NATO is a momentous step for Sweden, which has steadfastly avoided alignment over 200 years. But Sweden is not exactly a stranger to its new NATO allies, having regularly engaged in military exercises with NATO members and allies in recent years. Events such as the Arctic Challenge, a large-scale multinational training focused on air operations in the Arctic region, have previously seen U.S. aircraft, including bombers, training and operating with Swedish aircraft.

New Air Force T-7 Trainer Jet Chills Out at McKinley Climate Test Lab

New Air Force T-7 Trainer Jet Chills Out at McKinley Climate Test Lab

The Air Force’s new trainer jet, the T-7A Red Hawk, reached another milestone in its test process when it completed a month-long extreme weather trial at the McKinley Climatic Lab at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. on Feb. 23.

The world’s largest environmental test complex, the McKinley lab gauges how stealth bombers, trucks, and other equipment fare under extreme weather conditions. The lab can heat up to 165 degrees Fahrenheit or cool down to -80 degrees. It can create high humidity, high-altitude air pressure, solar radiation, salt spray, ice, wind, rain, freezing rain, and clouds of sand or dust.

The T-7’s trial ranged from 110 degrees to minus 25 degrees to heavy humidity conditions, according to a Feb. 27 press release. Boeing and Air Force crews performed system operations and engine runs to gauge its performance and how well its instrumentation and electronics held up under extreme weather.

“We need to know the T-7A can operate in the environmental conditions it will encounter at pilot training bases around the country,” Dr. Troy Hoeger, the T-7 Chief Development Tester with the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center, said in the release. 

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A T-7A Red Hawk sits in a frozen McKinley Climatic Lab chamber Jan. 29, 2024 at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. U.S. Air Force photo by Samuel King Jr.

It takes a lot of work to raise the temperature of the 55,000-square-foot test chamber up to desert heat and then down to Arctic cold. The lab has its own staff of welders, machinists, electricians, instrumentation experts, test assembly personnel, and refrigeration operators to keep it running “like clockwork,” according to the lab’s flight chief, Melissa Tate.

The McKinley tests come nearly four months after the first T-7A Red Hawk landed at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., marking the start of the developmental flight test campaign for the two-seat jet, which is meant to replace the sexagenerian T-38 as a trainer for fighter and bomber pilots. The goal of developmental flight testing is to evaluate changes made earlier in the development process and determine how and whether to refine the aircraft further. 

The jet at Edwards is designated APT 2, while the one at Eglin is designated APT 3. Boeing and Air Force officials told reporters in September that APT 3 will be used as a mission systems testing platform after weather testing is finished. Defense News reported on Feb. 5 that supply chain issues have delayed the start of low-rate initial production to mid-2024, months later than originally planned. 

The T-7 program has been marred by a series of delays involving ejection seat issues, flight controls, and other problems, as well as pandemic-related labor and supply issues. The jet’s initial operational capability is not expected until 2027, three years later than the original target of 2024. The Air Force plans to buy 351 T-7As.

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A T-7A Red Hawk sits in a frozen McKinley Climatic Lab chamber Jan. 29, 2024 at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. (U.S. Air Force photo by Samuel King Jr.)

Though the T-7 may still have a long road ahead, the climate tests mark the latest success for the McKinley Lab, which was originally built in the 1940s and has tested a series of aircraft stretching back to the B-29 bomber and P-51 fighter. In more recent days, the lab served as an arctic weather training facility for Airmen from nearby Hurlburt Field, Fla. 

“Equipment and personnel tend to operate differently in cold climates,” one participant told Air & Space Forces Magazine in November. “This exercise allows us to adapt our equipment and learn how to navigate this environment effectively.”

Officials: US Seeking to Expand Military Strike Coalition Against Houthis

Officials: US Seeking to Expand Military Strike Coalition Against Houthis

The top State Department official for Yemen suggested the U.S. would like to expand the nations willing to participate in airstrikes or maritime patrols against the Houthis in response to the group’s attacks on shipping.

“This is a multifaceted responsibility. It should not be all on the U.S. and the U.K.,” Tim Lenderking, the State Department’s special envoy for Yemen, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Feb. 27. “We need to see our Gulf partners in the game much more, and I think we all feel that that is the case.”

The Houthis are still receiving supplies from Iran and retain the capability to threaten shipping, Biden administration officials told Congress.

“We know that they still have capability,” Dan Shapiro, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy, said. “We sort of have a good sense of … what we have been able to eliminate and what they’ve used.”

On Feb. 27, Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said efforts led by the U.S. have “destroyed or degraded at this stage more than 150 missiles and launchers, including anti-ship land attack and surface-to-air missiles, plus numerous communication capabilities, UAVs, unmanned surface vessels, coastal radars, air surveillance capabilities, rotary wing aircraft, underground facilities, to include weapons storage areas and command and control buildings.”

However, how much of that makes up the Houthis’ overall arsenal is less clear.

“We don’t fully know the denominator,” Shapiro said. “That’s obviously information we’re working to develop.”

After U.S. and U.K. militaries attacked 18 targets at eight locations in Yemen on Feb. 23, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said that the airstrikes “further disrupt and degrade the capabilities” of the Houthis to attack U.S. and international vessels in the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and the Gulf of Aden.

Lenderking said the U.S. would like to see a greater international effort through the U.S.-led maritime Operation Prosperity Guardian or direct attacks on military targets.

“There’s certainly engagement at my level … the Secretary of State as well, to, if anything, expand this coalition, either OPG or the strike coalition,” he said.

Iran has equipped the Houthis, and U.S. Central Command has interdicted arms flows from Iran to Yemen in prior years. It has done so twice this year, including one incident in which two Navy SEALs died attempting to board a vessel on Jan. 11 and another on Jan. 28.

“The smuggling continues—we know that it continues,” Shapiro said. “This is a work in progress. But because we know it continues, we are upping our efforts to interdict those shipments.”

The U.S. Coast Guard Sentinel-class fast-response cutter USCGC Clarence Sutphin Jr (WPC 1147) seized advanced conventional weapons and other lethal aid originating in Iran and bound to Houthi-controlled Yemen from a vessel in the Arabian Sea, Jan. 28, 2024. Courtesy photo/U.S. Central Command

Shapiro said the U.S. is working with other countries whose navies could conduct interdictions and working to try to strengthen inspections of tankers coming into Yemen’s ports for weapons. But whether the U.S. can eliminate the Houthis’ ability to disrupt international commerce is another question, and Shapiro declined to reveal the volume and the routes of the shipments in an unclassified setting. However, the successful interdictions pointed to advanced capabilities that could still be making their way to the Houthis.

“In these interdictions, U.S. forces discovered over 200 packages that contain components of unmanned of underwater and surface vehicles; propulsion, guidance, and warheads for Houthi medium-range ballistic missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles; air defense associated components; military-grade communication network equipment; anti-tank guided missile launcher assemblies; explosives and other military components—the very same weapons that have been employed by the Houthis to threaten and attack U.S. Navy vessels, but also innocent mariners on commercial ships,” Shapiro said.

The Pentagon said that it is prepared to continue the strikes if the Houthis don’t cease their attacks

“We’ll continue to make clear to the Houthis that they will bear the consequences if they do not stop their illegal attacks, which harm Middle Eastern economies, cause environmental damage, and disrupt the delivery of humanitarian aid to Yemen and other countries,” Ryder said Feb. 26.

Space Force Leaders Sound Alarm on Budget

Space Force Leaders Sound Alarm on Budget

RESTON, Va.—For all of its brief existence, the Space Force has enjoyed sizable budget boosts every year as the service grew, expanded, and took on new missions. 

But with Congress struggling to pass a 2024 budget five months into the fiscal year, the threat of sequestration cuts kicking in after April 30, and spending caps set for fiscal 2025 under the Fiscal Responsibility Act, Space Force leaders warned at the National Security Space Association conference that hard decisions lay ahead. 

“It’s just horrible, quite honestly,” said Frank Calvelli, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said of the budget uncertainty.

Lawmakers have until March 8 to avert a full government shutdown, and after the top Republicans and Democrats from the House and Senate met with President Joe Biden at the White House on Feb. 27, all indications are that they will need to pass yet another continuing resolution to keep the government open.

Some legislators have even pressed the idea of committing to a full-year CR, which would keep funding levels frozen at the 2023 level and generally prevent new programs from starting. 

For a new service like the Space Force, the effects would be “crippling,” “frustrating,” and “devastating,” its leaders said. 

Under the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed last summer, if any part of the government is still funded by a CR come April 30, the entire government will face a one percent budget reduction. For the Department of the Air Force, going from its requested 2024 budget to 2023 spending levels minus one percent would represent a “buying power reduction of $13 billion,” acting undersecretary of the Air Force Kristyn E. Jones said. 

Even if Congress undid the sequestration provision, a year-long CR “would cancel $2.8 billion in Space Force R&D growth, about 10 percent of the entire Space Force budget,” Jones added. “It would undo effects for critical space architecture, including space data transport, missile warning/missile tracking, and [precision navigation and timing]. We would lose ground on the development of survivable, long-range persistent sensors and kill chain automation tools.” 

For the Space Development Agency, which is built on the idea of going from contract award to launch in three years or less, the ongoing use of CRs is already having an impact, said director Derek M. Tournear. 

“We have two acquisitions that are currently on hold pending appropriations,” Tournear said. “The FOO Fighter solicitation, which are new demonstration satellites for advanced fire control, those are eight satellites—we’re in source selection, we’re almost done source selection, but we certainly can’t write those contracts until we have a 2024 budget.”  

Also stymied are the agency’s Tranche 2 Transport Layer gamma satellites, 20 in total. “We will not go out with that solicitation until we have an FY24 budget,” Tournear said. “So these are actual acquisition timelines that are being impacted today.” 

If the use of CRs drags into April, it could start to threaten other efforts in SDA’s constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites, he added. 

“At that point, we will have to work with our vendors because we won’t be able to continue paying them, and we’ll have to figure out what that means at that point,” Tournear said. 

Calvelli added that a year-long CR would effectively stop work on Tranche 2 of the constellation. 

On top of that, Calvelli noted that he would also be limited to buying three National Security Space Launch flights—a sharp reduction from the 10 planned in the budget. It would also frustrate efforts by the Space Force to work with the National Reconnaissance Office on their plans to develop and buy targeting satellites, he said. 

As the uncertainty persists, the likelihood grows that the White House and the Pentagon will have to roll out their 2025 budget request on March 11 before the 2024 budget is in place—an awkward state of affairs that could force the Air Force and other military departments to reconsider their approach to the progress.

“Given the fact that we still don’t have ’24 and many of our investments in ’25 were based on having received those funds in ’24 and building on that momentum, we may ultimately, depending on how long this takes, have to revisit some of our strategies,” Jones said. 

That’s on top of the fact that the Fiscal Responsibility Act has already set spending limits for 2025—just one percent growth over the limits set for 2024. The Space Force’s previous budget requests all had double-digit increases. 

“Given the FRA caps, it is challenging this year and in particular for space,” said Jones. “We were given direction across the department that we needed to focus on our near-term readiness and the capabilities that would be fielded soonest. And that required us to take some risks in some of the things that we really need to do for the future, but we weren’t able to do.” 

Jones warned of “significant impacts” for the service’s long-term plans, and the Space Force’s chief operations officer, Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt, offered a hint of the impacts when asked for her message to industry. 

“We need you to deliver the amazing capabilities over the years that you’ve delivered,” Burt said. “They can’t come as slow and they can’t be late or so over budget, based on the fiscal realities we’re dealing with.” 

SDA Director: Launching a Nuclear Weapon in Space Would Be ‘Attack on the World’

SDA Director: Launching a Nuclear Weapon in Space Would Be ‘Attack on the World’

RESTON, Va.—Space Development Agency director Derek M. Tournear, the driving force behind the Space Force’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, said the agency won’t change its strategy in the face of reports that Russia is developing a space-based nuclear weapon.

“We are not planning on making sure that all of our satellites are extremely resilient to such an attack,” Tournear said. “By the nature of our orbit at 1,000 kilometers … we are more hardened than most.” 

Tournear acknowledged that such a weapon could be devastating to satellites in low-Earth orbit, creating both debris and long-lasting radiation. The Space Force’s goal of putting hundreds of new missile warning, missile tracking, and data transport satellites into orbit represents a massive expansion in the number and resilience of space-based assets in case of attack. But he acknowledged that a nuclear attack is more threatening than a direct ascent anti-satellite weapon launched from Earth, because it could damage the entire region of space, leaving debris and lasting radiation in the band.

With so many nodes in space, the PWSA was designed to be “essentially self-healing,” Tournear said Feb. 27 at the National Security Space Association conference. If one satellite fails or is attacked, others provide redundancy and resiliency and the data is rerouted, keeping capabilities uninterrupted. 

Dr. Derek Tournear, Space Development Agency director, visited the SDA Test and Checkout Center at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, in August 2023. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Raisa Christie

“From day one, I’ve always said that proliferation gets us out of any point-to-point attack,” Tournear said Feb. 27. “I’m not worried about any point-to-point attack—direct ascent ASAT, directed energy—I’m just not. Proliferation flips that on its head.” 

But a nuclear explosion could flip that strategy, as well. Just two weeks ago, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed media reports that the Russians are developing an anti-satellite weapon which, if deployed, would violate an international treaty banning nuclear weapons in space. The Russians have not deployed the weapon so far, but the threat of such a weapon is vast.  

Since then, lawmakers, media, and the public have been electrified with concern about this newest new wrinkle to the calculus for attacking and defending satellites.  

“A nuclear detonation in space would add significant radiation to orbits used by a number of U.S. military satellites, causing them to degrade in the weeks and months following the detonation unless they are specifically hardened against radiation,” wrote Clementine G. Starling and Mark J. Massa, both of the Atlantic Council. That’s in addition to the electromagnetic pulse that would fry the electronics of any satellites in the blast radius. 

Asked if SDA was reconsidering how much nuclear hardening is necessary for the microelectronics it deploys in space, Tournear noted that a nuclear attack in space would be similar to the kinds of attacks he’s most worried about: “common mode failures”—problems or threats that could affect the entire constellation. 

“The threats I think are still the most important and the most prescient to the ones that we’re working to mitigate are the common mode failures of cyber and supply chain interdiction,” Tournear said. “So that’s still, I think, the most likely and the most impactful. … Now a high-altitude nuclear detonation is not quite a common mode failure, but it’s closer.” 

But Tournear noted that such an attack would be “indiscriminate,” destroying not only U.S. and allied satellites, but also the satellites of everyone else.  

“At that point, it’s one of those ‘Black Swan’ events that we’re not going to completely change our architecture to try to address,” Tournear said. “We know obviously that would have a major impact on our architecture and our capabilities, if something like that went off in space. But it would have a major impact worldwide. It wouldn’t be attack on SDA, it wouldn’t be attack on the Space Force. It wouldn’t be attack on U.S., it would be an attack on the world. So we just would have to address it accordingly.” 

Maj. Gen. Michael Traut, head of German Space Command, who said at the recent Munich Security Conference that “if somebody dares to explode a nuclear weapon in high atmosphere or even space, this would be more or less the end of the usability of that global commons.”  

Watch, Read: CSO on the State of the Space Force and the Future

Watch, Read: CSO on the State of the Space Force and the Future

Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations, spoke about the State of the Space Force, including success stories like the Space Development Agency and the Victus Nox mission and future efforts like Space Futures Command at the AFA Warfare Symposium on Feb. 12, 2024. Watch the video or read the transcript below, made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Well, good morning Guardians and Airmen. Roughly a year ago, we kicked off our warfare symposium here in the Colorado Rockies for the very first time. We also welcomed here on this very stage, our first keynote speaker of the morning, General Chance Saltzman. General Saltzman took on the reign as chief of Space operations and laid out his theory of success outlining competitive endurance. To face the pacing threat, he has implemented a new system of space deltas and led the charge as Guardians birthed a new mission statement “to secure our nation’s interest in, from, and to space.” As the Space Force reached another milestone by celebrating their fourth birthday, we are eager to see how our CSO will continue to lead Guardians in the fight to space superiority. Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great honor that I present to you your Chief of Space Operations General “Salty” Saltzman, please.

Gen. Chance Saltzman:

Wow. Thank you, Doug. It’s a kind introduction. Remember, it’s Fat Tuesday, Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. That’s as big a threat today as China, China, China maybe, but… Sorry, Mr. Secretary. All right, thank you, Doug, for that introduction. Thanks to AFA for continuing to support the department with events like these. And Secretary Kendall, thank you for your continued leadership and vision in this time of accelerated change. Your unwavering commitment to the Space Force’s future has allowed us to stand up new missions and build new partnerships to secure our nation’s interests in, from, and to space. General Allvin, I could not have asked for a better partner in the department, as you understand the importance of the critical relationship between the Space Force and the Air Force. And you continue to be a strong advocate for Guardians and Airmen. Thank you. And finally, to all the Guardians and Airmen that are in attendance today, you all are the foundation for the success of the department as we reoptimize our organizations to meet the challenges of great power competition.

And for the space power enthusiasts and history buffs in attendance, I will point out that it was this week in 1957 that major General Bernard Schriever gave his famous space superiority speech at the first ever Astronautics Symposium. Schriever, who was head of the Western Development Division, now Space Systems Command, was charged with developing a workable ICBM. And unsurprisingly, his speech dealt primarily with missiles. But he didn’t stop there. Despite the fact that some leaders in the new Air Force didn’t want to distract from their primary air superiority mission, Schriever was a big believer in speaking truth to power, and he firmly committed to lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding what he saw as a very real struggle for space. “The compelling motive, he said, “for the development of space technology is the requirement for national defense. In the long haul, our safety as a nation may depend upon our achieving space superiority.”

“Several decades from now,” he said “the important battles may not be sea battles or air battles, but space battles, and we should be spending a certain fraction of our national resources to ensure that we do not lag in obtaining space supremacy.” Time Magazine summed up General Schriever’s sensational remarks this way, The conquest of outer space appears right around the corner, and that corner must be soon turned if the U.S. is to maintain its air supremacy.” Now, the speech was very well received, in fact, a little too well received in the view of some. Immediately after his speech, Schriever was told by the Secretary of Defense to never use the word space again. That gag order lasted about eight months when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 4th, 1957 and the space race officially began. Today, the space race that started in the 1950s has evolved into the immensely more complex great power competition and space that we are engaged in now, and the United States Space Force was established to meet these challenges.

When the Space Force stood up, we worked hard to meet several charges given to us by Congress. First, we were tasked to create a lean organization focused on operations. Second, we were charged with increasing the acquisition speed needed to put the most cutting edge space capabilities into the hands of the war fighter. Third, we were tasked to better integrate commercial and allied space efforts. And fourth, but perhaps most importantly, we were expected to address the threats in the domain and build a cadre of military space professionals that are best in class, laser focused on war fighting and space. Now, there are many other assertions, but these were the big ticket asks that kept coming up. The Space Force, from day one, accepted these challenges, and it is on a path to meeting them. And in at least one effort, I think we’ve already succeeded.

And I’m here today to tell you the Space Force Guardians are the best in class. The Guardian spirit is shining through. Everywhere I go, I see a sense of urgency. I see seriousness about the threat. I see dedication to improvement and addressing shortfalls. It’s the spirit, it’s this spirit that gives me confidence that we’re on the right path. And we’re doing all of this while remaining lean, agile, operationally focused. In fact, our Guardians represent less than 1% of the total DOD active personnel. To put that in perspective, the entire Space Force could go to work down the road at Force Carson and we would still have room for 10,000 more people. To go one step further, the Space Force is about 3% of the Total Department of Defense budget. Despite those numbers, the entire military satellite communication enterprise, all aspects of both strategic and theater missile warning and the position navigation and timing constellations, missions that are vital to the success of the joint force fall to the Guardians to operate, sustain, and protect.

This has got to be the greatest bargain in the Department of Defense, not just in critical capabilities and indispensable services that we provide to the joint force, and in the case of GPS, really to the citizens of the world, but also in the force multiplying value our Guardians bring to the fight wherever they’re called on to support. The Space Force has brought a level of clarity and focus to operations in, from, and to space that the Department of Defense did not have before its establishment. And this lean operations focus service dedicated to space deliberately stood up only five career fields, intelligence, cyberspace, space operations, developmental engineering, and program management. That’s it. This allows our Guardians to focus exclusively on delivering capability, understanding the threat, conducting operations, and protecting the joint force from space enabled attack. And I contend that this focus has started producing benefits.

A significant challenge given to the Space Force was to increase the speed of acquisition, to ensure our processes were sufficiently agile, to keep pace with potential threats, but be nimble enough to take advantage of the latest commercial developments. And since that time, the Space Force has developed, delivered, and deployed capabilities at a speed, I’ll say is uncommon in the Department of Defense, particularly related to space capabilities. For example, this past year the Space Development Agency delivered 23 satellites into low earth orbit to support our missile warning, missile tracking and space data transport layer. This is increasing the resilience of these no-fail missions. By shifting missile warning and communication capabilities from a few exquisite yet vulnerable systems to a much larger number of harder to attack systems in low earth orbit, we will create the resiliency needed in these critical mission areas.

But the fact that this first tranche went from order to orbit in under two years proves just how fast we can acquire and deliver capabilities when properly motivated and resourced. Another example of Guardian’s increasing acquisition speed comes from our VICTUS NOX Tactically Responsive Space Program. And I know some of you may have heard me talk about this effort before, but I think it’s a truly remarkable feat. The VICTUS NOX satellite was built and tested in less than 12 months. After being put in storage until it was needed, it was flown to Vandenberg Space Force Base, made it to a firefly rocket, and ready for launch in under 60 hours. It was then placed into orbit 27 hours later, and ready for operations 37 hours after that. That’s five days from the warehouse to operating on orbit. Now, while that’s still a singularly discreet event in terms of on orbit capability, the event streamlined processes that can be used over and over again to speed on orbit delivery.

The success of VICTUS NOX marks a major milestone in our nation’s ability to respond to adversary action with the operational speed necessary to control escalation, attribute malign behaviors, and deter irresponsible behavior in space. We’re looking at building upon its success with the launch of VICTUS HAZE next year, a similar approach focused on end-to-end execution using commercial capabilities. Now around the same time the Space Force stood up, the joint staff established initial requirements for moving target indication program from space. The ultimate goal of this program is to replace legacy air breathing platforms with more survivable space assets that can perform targeting activities needed to close long range kill chains on a global scale. The Space Force was able to build on the efforts of the Air Force, analyze options, and select a way ahead in less than a year. Now for the professionals in the room, you know getting a program started is sometimes the slowest part of delivery. And as a next step, Guardians are collaborating with mission partners, developing innovative operational concepts to ensure movement. Target indication meets all operational requirements set forth by the joint force.

The Space Force also took FY’23 appropriations and built a cyber test environment focused on missile warning ground networks. We did this in less than a year, and it has already hosted seven major training exercises. These are just a few of the examples of the Space Force delivering capabilities with a sense of urgency. Now, there is still work to do, but we are moving in the right direction. The third area we were asked to address is to better integrate commercial space efforts across the Department of Defense by acting as the focal point for the integration of these new and critical capabilities. We have taken this charge seriously because of how essential the commercial sector is to our resiliency and capacity. The Space Force goal here is to increase our competitive advantage by integrating commercial space goods, services, and activities to support joint and combined operations.

To that end, let me describe some of the exceptional work that Space Systems Command accomplished in establishing the tactical surveillance reconnaissance and tracking pilot program this last year. This initiative will leverage the global data marketplace to deliver commercially sourced sensing and data fusion analytics to meet the unclassified space awareness needs of our downrange joint and partner war fighters. I’m excited to announce that the Tac SRT pilot is now officially kicked off and has already directly supported four combatant commands. For example, the team rapidly responded to earthquakes in Morocco, Japan, floods in Libya, and the most recent outbreak of wildfires in South America by providing near realtime information and support. These are great examples of how the Space Force is integrating commercial space capabilities at the speed of relevance with scalable programs to support any combatant command. And we’re not just focused on better integration with our commercial partners. We’re working to improve our integration with our allies.

One of the biggest barriers to integration has been outdated classification policies. Now to mitigate that barrier, just last month, the Department of Defense released an updated classification policy, one that enables us to fundamentally rethink the way we approach classification of space systems and the effects they generate. This policy advances national defense strategy priorities by expanding access to information within the U.S. government and reducing barriers to space integration with allies, partners, and commercial space actors. I believe this is the most significant change in space classification policy in 20 years, and it will allow us to share more information more quickly with more stakeholders to better address the challenges in today’s competitive space environment.

And speaking of improved coordination with our allies, back in September, the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding with Australia and the United Kingdom on the deep space advanced radar capability. This effort will provide 24/7 all weather capabilities that increase our ability to detect, track, identify, and characterize objects in deep space. It will expand our ability to monitor and detect potentially hostile actions in space, and if necessary, take defensive action. Additionally, in less than 30 days after the memo was formalized, construction began at site one in Australia. The Space Force was primed to act responsibly and rapidly to deliver this capability. Along the same lines, the Space Force has also partnered with Japan to deliver two space domain awareness payloads to provide comprehensive warning of impending collisions in the Geo Belt. These payloads will expand our on orbit approach to understanding the domain, identifying threats, and sharing data between United States and Japan. Recently joining the NOW 10 Nation combined Space Operations Initiative, Japan is proving itself as a tremendous space partner.

These are just a few of our cooperative initiatives and programs aimed at protecting and defending activities that undermine the safety and security of space. And I can assure you, we will continue to aggressively leverage opportunities to improve cooperation, increase coordination, and promote interoperability with our allies and commercial partners. So don’t be shy. Don’t wait for us to ask the perfect question or to deliver you the perfectly worded set of requirements. We want to hear your ideas. Now, perhaps the most critical and complex ask of the Space Force was to address the threat and build space experts who understand it. As the space domain continues to become more and more contested and congested, the Space Force has been working hard to ensure our Guardians have the training and skills to navigate these unique threats. Let me give you a good example. Intelligence Guardians have actively run a two year campaign of learning where threat knowledge is tested, debriefed, and embedded in our thinking, all so that it can be fully integrated into every aspect of our mission.

The standards are high. We know we need to be the experts in the space domain, but we also need to teach the joint force and external stakeholders so they better understand the threat. And to that end, the National Space Intelligence Center recently published their first ever competing in space unclassified threat primer. Additionally, they have also published a classified version, which we delivered to Congress and other senior stakeholders. We’ve gone beyond just knowing the threat. We are now ensuring there is a widespread detailed understanding of this threat. And in the final aspect of this charge, the Space Force was asked to build a cadre of space experts who understand how to put all this together, a cadre taught from the first day in the service how to win in the domain, shaping the future leadership and expertise within our service. And we needed to create an environment that allowed a distinct Space Force culture to emerge, and it started with the creation of a new basic military education program.

And for other services, recruits coming to basic training are on average of about 18 years old. For the Space Force, our recruits average about 22 year olds, and many have college experience. But mostly, they’re just fired up about military space, and that created an opportunity for us to explore different basic training focus. So we created a tailored program for preparing new trainees for military service to provide new Guardians a space specific curriculum, everything from space history to space vocabulary. In its short history, it has graduated 1,153 Guardians, steeped in our core values of character, commitment, connection, and courage, Guardians who are ready to serve a wide variety of missions and in units around the globe. Now, we will work hard to inspire them next to pursue a career long effort in the Space Force.

One step in that direction occurred at the end of last year when Congress approved the Space Force Personnel Management Act. This is a revolutionary new way to manage our talent. We now have the ability to rethink workforce roles, contributions, and career paths. We will have the ability to have full and part-time positions inside the Space Force. Now, this is not a separate Space Force Reserve component. It is fundamentally different, an active force of full and part-time positions and the ability to shift between them without leaving the Active Space Force. This new talent management model will be phased in over the next few years because we’ve learned a lot from the intersection, I’m sorry, the inner service transfer process over the past four years. And we’re committed to ensuring stability in our workforce. We don’t want to inadvertently cause harm to people in their careers as we implement.

We are committed to getting this right, so we’ll be deliberate as we manage billet structures, personnel moves and transfers, and all of the administrative details needed to execute these authorities. So we’re working on getting this right, but we want to get it right quickly. So all this is to say I’m extremely proud of the Space Force and all the good that it has accomplished. But as good as we are, as much as we’ve done, as far as we’ve come, it’s not enough. We are not yet optimized for great power competition. To some degree, all of our efforts to move in the right direction have highlighted some key deficiencies that we need to correct, and that’s why we spent so much time in recent months examining all aspects of how the Space Force organize, trains, and equips, how we equip this service to support the combatant commands in this era of great power competition.

And that’s why we are implementing new initiatives such as Standing Up a Futures Command, redesigning our initial officer training course to optimize for potential conflict in the future. But these are just a few of our efforts. Back in September, I outlined how the Space Force is creating the structure and the processes we need for a future, what some have affectionately referred to as the Saltzman puzzle chart. Now, it’s called that not because it takes a long time to put together. In the end, you realize there’s a piece missing. No, that’s not why they call it that. Rather, it’s because all of these activities must fit together. They’re required. They’re all required. They must work together to form a coherent outcome. And at the core of this discussion was how the service is driving towards a purpose built Space Force for great power competition. And at the time, we had focused on these initiatives under four separate bins, force design, force development, force generation, and force employment.

But what we realized through our optimization discussions was that the four bins that we identified in September matched up with the great power competition, pillars of capabilities, development, people, readiness, and power projection. And the initiatives I introduced yesterday, the Space Futures Command, officer training course, units of action all fit perfectly into this model, and they fit because at the core. The purpose of all the Space Force’s optimizations initiatives is to increase our war fighting capabilities. And so I thought it was important to take time today to talk a little more about some of the other efforts that the Space Force is going to undertake above and beyond the ones we mentioned yesterday. Now, our first pillar is capabilities development, centered on a forward looking planning process that ensures competitiveness over time. Initiatives under this effort are aimed at optimizing the service for the transition of operationally relevant technology at a pace and scale that exceeds that of rival powers.

While Space Futures Command is a major part of this capabilities development effort, it is not the only one. The Space Force will also reprioritize and streamline science and technology pipelines to better meet war fighter needs at the point of delivery. We are prioritizing these science and technology needs based on the future operational concepts so that the research labs can map their efforts more directly to our highest priority activities. Our goal is to maximize operational return to the nation on our investments. And streamlining this process will ensure that the relevance of science and technology investments and their integration into our force design occurs over a long term. Our second pillar is people, and it is a goal to create joint minded war fighters who understand the battlefield context of the space domain and who are well equipped to act within it. The Space Force inherited a variety of operational cultures, disparate organizational structures, and different training requirements when we stood up four years ago.

And these conditions had evolved over the past couple of decades, driven by a pursuit to have optimal efficiency, to the point that we lost focus on effectiveness, effectiveness across our organizational structures, workforce roles, training requirements, among other things. And this has to be corrected. So in support of our optimization efforts, we have been working to establish clear delineation of roles, responsibilities, and the duties of our officer enlisted and civilian Guardians to better align and optimize our force. And I’m excited to announce that this work is now complete, and we have a clear set of narratives and principles for each category of our Guardian workforce. And we will use that information to realign our unit structures and our developmental initiatives to optimize our Guardians for great power competition. Let me just take a minute to describe these roles in a little more detail.

First, for the officer Guardians, they are our services principal leaders and planners. They’re accountable for military decision making at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. They’re tasked with leading commanding, planning, and directing resources within the Space force and the joint organizations. Second, our enlisted Guardians. These are the services technical specialists. They are our primary war fighters, trained as frontline operators and technical experts responsible for unit readiness. They’re tasked with executing operational orders while serving as leaders themselves, weapon system experts, and advisors to their officer and civilian counterparts. And finally, for our civilian Guardians, they possess high levels of unique technical and specialized experience supporting all the space power disciplines. They provide the operational stability, unit continuity, and depth of expertise critical to mission success over time. And in these terms of reference provide us with clear roles and functions for officers enlisted in civilians, all with the goal of streamlining daily operations and facilitating future career development.

And along with the creation of the officer training course and Space Force Personnel Management Act, these initiatives under this pillar are aimed at expanding the training, education, and the development opportunities to Guardians to meet the services high tech operational demands. And that brings us to our third pillar, readiness. In the past, our readiness standards have reflected our ability to procedurally operate our systems in a benign environment. And while this is still necessary, it will no longer be sufficient to fight for space superiority against our pacing threat. We have provided space effects with impunity for decades, and these days are over. Our service must define our readiness by our ability to deter and defeat rival powers rather than our capacity to provide services to others. And it begins with providing all our Guardians with the realistic threat based training they require through a robust operational test and training infrastructure, what we call OTTI.

OTTI is an umbrella term describing the collection of distributed enterprise-wide test and training systems, processes effectively integrated and synchronized to establish and sustain combat readiness Across the spectrum of conflict. We are already building live ranges to conduct events in the actual environment, ensuring ground truth is captured for systems and tactics evaluations. We are also creating an intelligence informed inventory of adversary capabilities with opposing forces whose tactics reflect actual counterspace threats to the space, ground, and link segments. And finally, we are investing in a high fidelity mission specific simulators that replicate each unique mission area, weapons system, and their associated crew positions. And these simulators will encompass the full spectrum of training from initial qualifications to advanced employment. And looking forward, we know these are substantial organizational training and equipping challenges that could impact the Space Force’s ability to ensure its systems and operators are ready for full spectrum combat operations in the space domain. Therefore, we must develop and maintain capable, sustainable, adaptive and collaborative architectures to conduct realistic test and evaluation, full spectrum training, tactics validation to ensure maximum war fighting readiness.

Improved readiness will help us better orient space forces towards the high end fight and ensure our Guardians can win that contested space domain. And our final pillar is power projection. As a service focused on space superiority, we know we must fully integrate into the joint force, properly trained, equipped, and ready to accept mission command for assigned objectives. And yesterday, we introduced combat squadrons as the unit of action for the Space Force. In the implementation of our space generation model, we talked about how they will both enable the accomplishment of advanced readiness activities in the force generation. And as I said yesterday, integration sometimes starts with our service components around the world. Our service components are central to space power projection because they are essential to the proper integration into joint plans. The expertise these components provide will allow effective and realistic inclusion of space effects. They drive realistic joint training, they ensure effective security cooperation activities with our allies and partners, and they enable seamless global collaboration between all elements of the space enterprise.

We have already seen the positive effects, for example, our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, our ongoing efforts to protect U.S. and allied forces, particularly with regards to the Houthis situation in Yemen and the ongoing conflict in Israel. And our efforts to strengthen space related defenses. At a time when the near-peer adversarial threat is growing from China, and to an extent, North Korea and Russia. All of these efforts were enhanced by the work of our service components. Now, by normalizing force generation and presentation, we provide the combatant commands with better forces prepared to meet their space war fighting requirements and project power, just like our sister services have for decades. As I finish up, I’m in awe of how far we’ve come in four short years. I’m excited for where we’re going in the future. Our Space Force is just under 14,000 officer, enlisted, and civilian Guardians. Small when compared to our sister services, but do not mistake our size for our value or our impact.

But just because we’ve come a long way does not mean we have arrived. And let me be clear on this point, it is also true that no team is more capable of getting us ready for war than the Guardians of the Space Force. And let me close with another comment by General Schriever. He said he and his group accepted that they were taking risks because they knew if they did not develop the long range ICBM capability and a reliable satellite reconnaissance system, it would strain the strategic balance between the U.S. and Soviet Union. “We never lost confidence,” he said, “even when we had failures, which we had plenty of in the early days. Of course, there were concerns, but we met them every time.”

Today, the risk of moving too slow is far greater than any risk associated with rapid change. We must evolve. We must take risks. We must solve problems. And we will, because I know our Guardians, and they have proven they have the confidence and skills to deliver. Now is the time to prepare so that we will be ready to meet any threat anytime, anywhere, to secure our nation’s interests in, from, and to space. Thank you. Semper Supra.

Watch, Read: CSAF on the State of the Air Force, Airpower

Watch, Read: CSAF on the State of the Air Force, Airpower

Gen. David W. Allvin, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, spoke about the State of the Air Force and a fundamental shift in airpower at the AFA Warfare Symposium on Feb. 12, 2024. Watch the video or read the transcript below, made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Our next keynote speaker is a proven leader who embodies the integrity of the Air Force. General Dave Allvin’s experience as a test pilot in over 30 aircraft and leadership roles on the air and joint staffs in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pentagon undoubtedly position him as the right leader to lead our Airmen across the globe.

General Allvin stepped into the seat of chief of staff of the Air Force with a very clear vision. Now is the time that we follow through and turn initiatives into results. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome to the stage your 23rd Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force General, Dave Allvin.

Gen. David W. Allvin:

Well, good morning. We’re back again today, and it is a great day. Thanks again to the entire AFA team for making this possible. This is a fantastic symposium. Everyone seems to get better. I’d like to echo thanks to our secretary, Secretary Kendall, who has truly made One Team One Fight a reality, and to my battle buddy Chance Saltzman. Salty knows his business, right?

That guy knows his business, and I couldn’t have a better partner to be able to make the two services one department work for our nation. So you see that on the slide there it says, “The State of the Air Force,” and that’s what the block is. I feel like we talked about that a little bit yesterday on what we’re going to do.

What I’d like to spend a few moments today, if you’ll indulge me, is to really take stock of where we are in history and give you a few thoughts about where I believe we are and why we have that sense of urgency and a sense of commitment to follow through. Since the dawn of air power, our proud heritage in history has been intertwined with key events in combat that have shaped a battle, eventually a nation, in some cases, the world.

Those are seminal events, and those seminal events get the headlines in history. They are studied. They are celebrated. They are learned from. But to me, what’s almost, and in some cases more important, are the times that preceded them. These are times of consequence in my mind. These are times when Airmen and air pioneers, they embodied what is running through our DNA, which is the spirit of innovation, vision, and courage.

And the action of those Airmen in that time of consequence shaped those seminal events. April 18th, 1942. Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle stands on the deck of the USS Hornet with 16 B-25s crouched and a brave cadre of crew ready to undertake one of the most audacious missions in history 132 days after Pearl Harbor was attacked and Imperial Japan felt as though they could conduct this war at a distance and have the United States in a defensive crouch.

The idea here was to flip the script and to show that we could project power and a war that perhaps thought could be fought at a distance could be brought right to their doorstep. This was a seminal event in history, but to me, as interesting was the time of consequence that preceded it. Air pioneers like Eugene Ely in 1911 who took his Curtiss push-plane and landed it [inaudible 00:04:14] of the USS Pennsylvania.

It wasn’t quite combat relevant at the time, but the very fact that it was demonstrated you could put an aircraft on a ship sparked the imagination of those who followed, the vision of what could be. In the 1920s and the 1930s, members of the Air Corps Tactical School sought to draw lessons from air power theorists like Mitchell and Douhet and apply concepts to them to build out what would be the next invention of air power and its integration into warfare.

Central to this was long-range strategic bombing. And the long-range bomber that was a central part of that needed a demand signal, and that demand signal was sent to industry through these innovative Airmen with the ideas to take a concept and put it into action. Industry responded and built the long-range bombers of World War II, including those that were sitting on the deck of the USS Hornet in April of 1942.

It was air power visionaries like Charles Green who was a part of the Doolittle Raid. And as they were preparing for it, realized that the bombsight, the center bombsight, was not going to be suitable to the task. Sorry, I keep… He had an engineering background. He developed the Mark Twain bombsight, one that was accurate below 1,500 feet and suitable to the task.

Airmen like these, visionaries like these ahead of time took what would’ve been seen as maybe a foolhardy plan and made it something that seemed worth trying. And because it was worth trying, they did it and it succeeded. And I’m not saying that was decisive in the war, but had that not happened, had that not been planned and executed, perhaps Admiral Yamamoto might have not been pressed into action earlier than he wanted to to have the Battle of Midway in which he was defeated and the tide of the war was changed.

And perhaps the ultimate outcome of the war in the Pacific would not have been changed, but perhaps it wouldn’t have been able to end like this. He said trying to… Victory could have been achieved, but it might have taken thousands more lives, much more blood and treasure. So that seminal event was made possible by the time of consequence that preceded it.

Six years after the Doolittle Raid, after the surrender of Japan and fascism and Nazism had been defeated on the battlefields of Europe, the Allies had won a victory, but another ideological struggle was on the horizon with deteriorating relationship between the Soviet Union and the US. And that took shape and had a flashpoint in the city of Berlin in which the deteriorating conditions of East Berlin were in stark contrast to a reinvigorating burgeoning West Berlin.

Counter to the narrative that the Soviet Union decided this could not stand and they decided to blockade all access through land and water to the city of Berlin in an attempt to squeeze the city and force the Allies to abandon it, the small isolated city in the middle of a Soviet East Germany. Our response was Operation Vittles, the Berlin Airlift, another audacious plan.

The idea that you could resupply a city, keep a city alive from the air was unthinkable to many, yet we did it. 324 days, 198,000 sorties, 3.2 million tons of food, fuel, supplies, and hope. And the Soviet Union abandoned their plan and the blockade was broken. We did it for three more months just for good measure to show we could continue it and to reinforce the city of Berlin in case the Soviet Union changed their mind.

This was a seminal event. This was a bold, audacious plan, but it was the time of consequence that preceded it that mattered. Experimentation in the ’20s with carrying mail. And yes, when FDR after the mail scandal pressed the Army Air Corps into action in 1934 to carry the mail, and frankly, they failed, Airmen didn’t walk away. They doubled down. They learned from it. Introspection. They developed better equipment.

They developed better training procedures to fly in instruments in weather, and they learned from that. That was a time of consequence. People like Major General Hugh Knerr, who saw that air mobility was a developing part of air power, but he also saw that we were being held back, trapped in the paradigms of the past when he saw that the resupply of the Army Air Corps was limited to the trains and the rail and the trucks.

And he said, “An Air Force that is tied to railheads and it was dependent upon the services of motorized vehicle has the mobility of the truck and the train.” And he realized we were being held back for the potential of air power, that the potential that could bring supplies from the point of origin to the point of need directly.

And he called for air transportation groups and press the War Department and advance air mobility to a greater place in the panoply of air power. But for visionaries like him, might’ve been different. We also continue to learn lessons when we’re flying the Hump, some of the most demanding and dangerous flying that happened, and it was over the China-Burma-India Theater.

From there we learned lessons about our aircraft, about our air crew trying to generate velocity in a difficult environment. And those lessons were learned and adapted to in a gentleman by the name of General Tunner, William Tunner, who took over the Berlin Airlift after LeMay and Smith initiated it, but he took those lessons he learned from flying the Hump and developed those innovations that would make that Berlin Airlift possible.

Understanding about air crew limitations with hypoxia and cumulative fatigue and managing the crew rest and the time cycles within which you could fly before you needed to take a long-term rest from the cumulative fatigue. Understanding the new ways of doing maintenance, innovations like the production line maintenance where you just didn’t fly the aircraft until it broke.

You flew it, and after a period of time you did a tip-to-tail review to make sure the airplane was ready to go. You could keep the entire fleet healthier that way. Understanding that to have velocity, you needed to keep those planes and the crews in the air as much as possible. So ideas like food trucks, the roach coaches that we now affectionately call them. Why?

You wanted to keep those planes in the air, so you didn’t want to have the pilot to go find something to eat or the crew to go somewhere else. You bring the food to them because you need a velocity. What does that result in? That results in every 90 seconds an aircraft taking off. These are the innovations in the time of consequence that actually made this seminal event possible.

I’m going to give you one last example, it’s because I got to experience part of this seminal event in history. It’s late 1980s, 1989 to be exact, and I’m a single lieutenant on flight pay in Europe. Life’s good. All I’m thinking about is flying my mission and not much else. Well, it was a Thursday night and I lived in the loft of the house of a lovely German couple. And of course, there wasn’t a lot of streaming entertainment then, and I had about all the Armed Forces Network that I could handle.

So I was reading a book. And as I was reading, I heard something outside. And so I go to the attic window. I open it up and I look in the street of a tiny town called Hauptstuhl where I lived. And I saw there was a gathering there. It seemed like a celebration. I thought, is this a birthday? Is this a birthday? Is this a family celebration? I didn’t exactly know what it was, until I turned on the TV and this is what I saw.

This is the Brandenburg Gate. This is the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was just a young lieutenant, but I knew right then the world was changing. And in the days that followed, I saw this emergence of hope and just sheer joy and optimism for the future. Cars along the Autobahn going east to west littered with cheap old cars from East Germany because those people were getting out.

They didn’t know if it was going to last and they wanted get out while they could. This thirst for freedom that they finally saw. It was an amazing time in history. It was an amazing time in history, and I will never forget that for as long as I live. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a seminal event. But what made that possible? Did air power contribute to it? You’re damn right it did. This is how we did it.

This was relentless readiness, a demonstration that yes, in the backdrop of the Cold War, the strategic deterrents that underpinned it, our Airmen were ready to meet the challenge. Yes, we could get the aircraft airborne and preserve second strike opportunity. The foundation of deterrents day in and day out we proved that. And for whatever the Soviet Union and their other adversaries may wanted see from above ground, they had to know that the same was happening underneath.

That we had Airmen who were trained, constantly ready 24/7 to do the unthinkable if it was asked of them. That commitment, that sheer will, relentless will, that’s what our Airmen did in this time of consequence. Oh, by the way, let’s not forget, they’re doing it today right now in the missile fields and in those silos with all the support. They’re doing that right now.

Our Airmen haven’t stopped. That sent a message. That was a time of consequence. We also had visionary Airmen like Moody Suter, Bill Kirk, Chuck Horner, who saw that the numerical advantage that the Soviet Union had in conventional forces, including air power, would be a challenge and we needed to have the quality and the training to ensure that we could overcome that.

They were compelled by the logic of the analysis that showed through Vietnam that if the pilots could survive and have success in the first 10 missions than their entire combat tour, they’re much more likely to survive and have an effective combat tour. It was those first 10 missions that were the high risk. So they set about developing an environment in which you could most closely simulate that stress.

They developed the pilots that they trained in enemy tactics who were good at it as well, that who could simulate that environment, that stress, who had the painstaking brief and fly an often painful debrief that helped sharpen them so they could learn those lessons in the flight room and not after a post-shoot-down pickup, or even worse, at the funeral of a wingman.

And from that, the Aggressors were born. From that, Red Flag was born. And to this day, 49 years later, Red Flag is the gold standard for readiness and proficiency to dominate in aerial combat. These were the times of consequence in which Airmen stepped up with the vision, with the innovation, and with the courage to make those seminal events happen. Times of consequence are important, hence the name.

So what’s our next seminal event? I don’t know, but I do know that right now we are also in a time of consequence. What we do now matters. So what are our Airmen doing now? Our Airmen today are doing everything the nation is asking it to. Our Airmen are out there supporting our partner in Europe who is fighting an existential battle against naked aggression. Our Airmen are out there supporting our ally in the Middle East who is fighting terrorism within their own borders.

Our Airmen are out there in harm’s way to help tamp down violence in the Middle East in general. They’re helping support the continued free movement of goods across the waterways. They’re on the peninsula of Korea defending forward. They are deterring. They are building alliances in the Pacific. They are doing everything we’re asking of them, to include what I mentioned before, in the silos, in the missile field showing that we’ll do everything the nation asked us to do.

And frankly, the Air Force is busy. The nation is asking us to do a lot. Because when it comes to our Air Force, in the words of the indomitable David Lee Roth from Van Halen, everybody wants some. And I realized as I said that, there’s a crowd that gets that, but that song was probably… That album was probably cut about 45 years ago in which most of our Airmen weren’t even born, much less of the listening age. But look it up. It’s a classic. Everybody wants some.

We’re spread thin, and that’s a fact. And it’s starting to show. It’s starting to show a little bit in the readiness of our aircraft. It’s starting to show a little bit in the state of our infrastructure. It’s starting to show, and we have work to do there. But let me tell you, you wouldn’t know it by the performance of our Airmen. You wouldn’t know it. They are performing admirably because they know they’re part of a winning team with the right cause.

We should never take that for granted. That is amazing. That is what makes us the Air Force that we are, and we owe it to them to continue to improve on those areas to make their jobs a little bit easier. It’s a tough job. Nobody does it better. But here’s what else they’re doing. Our Airmen are doing something that will make us proud in the future, that they are carrying on the legacy of innovative spirit, of vision, of courage.

Our Airmen are sorting out Agile Combat Employment from the bottom up. They are out there from Alaska, in the Indo-Pacific, in the Middle East, wherever they are, understanding the tenets of Agile Combat Employment, how it might apply in their theater. They’re doing it from the bottom up. They’re figuring out how to lighten our footprint, how to increase our velocity of sortie generation.

Those things that we know are going to be required as a change in character of war is coming upon us and the theater of war is going to require us to fight differently. They’re doing that. They’re also embracing what is the future of our Air Force, which is the integration human-machine teaming. This will be the part of the reinvention of our Air Force and air power into the future. Our Airmen are gripping it.

And I will tell you, it’s not only gripping it in the manner of how we employ them, how we use them to the best effect in combat, but with the standup of our experimental operations unit, our Airmen are understanding not only how to employ it, we’re experimenting how to deploy it, how to maintain it, how to train with it, how to integrate it into our Air Force.

Almost as though they’re listening to the echoes of Major General Knerr who said, “Do not get trapped in the paradigms of the past.” Don’t find the easy answer and say, “Oh, it looks like ah, so let’s just treat it like ah.” Whatever it is, we need to understand this is a unique capability, unique opportunity for us to understand how to best employ, deploy, and integrate this into the next invention of the Air Force.

They also understand that the future is about ones and zeros as well. It is about an Air Force that it is based on systems surrounded by platforms, rather than platforms upon which we hang systems, because those systems as the core of our Air Force going into the future can be adapted more readily, can be updated, upgraded, and be able to be fit for the environment that we find ourselves, an environment that changes rapidly.

Our Airmen understand this. It’s about the symbiotic relationship between the data and the decision maker, between the ones and zeros and the warrior. This is the future. This is the reinvention of our Air Force and our Airmen are gripping it. We’re also not ignoring what’s happening underneath our noses right now. Some of the changes are being played out in combat.

Our Airmen are looking at that, and you can see it in pockets across our Air Force, whether it be in Spark Cells or within our components. They’re looking at what’s happening, the crackling of life that’s happening in the electromagnetic spectrum that have been largely taken for granted, the asymmetric advantages that can happen with low-cost solutions. That may not be enduring, but they’re enough to get you an advantage today.

How do we integrate that and agilely adapt and update for those very things that do not always have to be the next high-cost exquisite solution? These Airmen are doing all of this, and this is why we should be so proud that they’re upholding the legacy of air power. And we’re ensuring that we will continue to reinvent ourselves into the future to be the most dominant Air Force in the world.

That’s what our Airmen are doing. In closing, I just want to say this is a picture that when I go into my office every day, it’s in the back of my office, it’s the first thing I see. And it’s not just because it’s a C-46 flying the Hump, but there’s a metaphor here. I don’t know what the next seminal event will be, but I know there’s going to be one. They’re unpredictable, but they’re inevitable.

And I know that what we do now in our time of consequence, which is now, will impact that. We need to own that. This is our time of consequence. What we do, the decisions we make, the actions we take, the Airmen we lead, and the way we do it will define that next seminal event. As the picture shows, it’s unclear. There’s danger ahead. There are obstacles to navigate, but we will not turn away.

We will lean into them. In this time of consequence, we have to have the courage to make the hard decisions, the conviction to follow through with those decisions. That’s an obligation to our Airmen and it’s an obligation to our nation. The stakes are high and the time is now. Thank you very much.

B-52 Makes Emergency Landing After Engine Fire, No Crew Injured

B-52 Makes Emergency Landing After Engine Fire, No Crew Injured

A B-52H bomber at Minot Air Force Base, N.D. executed an emergency landing due to an engine fire early Feb. 23.

All crew members are unharmed, a base spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Asked if the base’s runway remains open, the spokesperson declined to comment but said bomber operations at the base are continuing as usual as of Feb. 27.

A single engine fire lead the pilot to land the bomber at approximately 12:52 a.m, and the base fire department arrived on the scene and extinguished the aircraft fire, according to the base’s host unit, the 5th Bomb Wing. The bomber is powered by eight engines and is designed to fly and land safely in the event of up to two engine failures.

“First and foremost, the 5th Bomb Wing is incredibly thankful to all our Airmen who made it home safely,” 5th Bomb Wing Commander Col. Daniel Hoadley said in the statement. “I would like to recognize our outstanding base fire fighters for their expeditious response.”

The popular unofficial Facebook page “amn/nco/snco” first reported the incident, with an anonymous, unconfirmed post that “a CSD (Constant speed drive that runs the generator) caught fire on landing and burned through that engine and part of the wing.” The page later posted a purported image of the engine, showing extensive damage.

It is currently unknown what caused the fire, and the incident is under investigation, following standard protocol for accidents involving military operations.

The last major public B-52 mishap was in 2017, when an engine fell off the aircraft during a training flight at Minot. The pilot successfully landed the bomber without incident and all Airmen on board were unharmed, but one of its Pratt & Whitney TF33-P-3/103 turbofan engines crashed in an unpopulated area.

In May 2016, during a routine training mission at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, a mishap destroyed a B-52 bomber. The pilot, from the 69th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron sensed issues during takeoff and initiated abort procedures. However, the drag chute failed, causing the aircraft to exceed brake energy limits, overshoot the runway, and catch fire. All seven aircrew members escaped, with one receiving treatment for minor injuries. The total loss of the aircraft was valued at $112 million.

First B-52s take off from Guam in support of Bomber Task Force deployment
A U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress assigned to the 23rd Bomb Squadron at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, prepares to take off in support of a Bomber Task Force deployment at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, June 15, 2023. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Zade Vadnais

The Air Force anticipates upgrading B-52 engines in the late 2020s or early 2030s with Rolls Royce’s F130 engine intended to be a one-to-one replacement of its current TF33 engines. The F130 is a militarized version of the company’s commercial BR725, which the Air Force already operates on its C-37 VIP transport and E-11 BACN (Battlefield Airborne Communications Node). Rolls Royce will supply the engines, while Boeing, the original manufacturer of the Stratofortress, will integrate them onto the aircraft.

Four B-52s from Minot Air Force Base were deployed to Guam in late January to support Pacific Air Force’s mission. The bombers have recently participated in several public missions, including the three-week multilateral Cope North exercise and a one-day exercise with Philippine fighters over South China Sea this month. Additionally, two of the bombers conducted flyovers at the Singapore Airshow last week.

Air Force Identifies Airman Who Died in Self-Immolation at Israeli Embassy

Air Force Identifies Airman Who Died in Self-Immolation at Israeli Embassy

The Air Force identified the Airman who died after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy on Feb. 25 as Senior Airman Aaron James Bushnell, a cyber defense operations specialist assigned to the 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing.

Originally from Whitman, Mass., the 25-year-old Bushnell first joined the Air Force on May 5, 2020. His duty station was the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas. His duty title was innovation services technician, and his decorations included the Meritorious Unit Award, National Defense Service Medal, Air Force Good Conduct Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and Air Force Training Ribbon.

“When a tragedy like this occurs, every member of the Air Force feels it,” Col. Celina Noyes, commander of the 70th ISR Wing, said in a statement. “We extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of Senior Airman Bushnell. Our thoughts and prayers are with them, and we ask that you respect their privacy during this difficult time.”

The incident is still under investigation. An online video showed Bushnell wearing a military uniform and shouting ‘free Palestine,’ as he burned, multiple outlets reported. The incident took place at around 1 p.m. on Feb. 25, according to Washington D.C. police, who are investigating the incident along with the U.S. Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The Airman was taken to a hospital but died from his injuries overnight.

Bushnell was raised in a strict religious compound in Massachusetts, The Washington Post reported, with friends saying he expressed disapproval of U.S. military support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. His final act caught his friends by surprise, the Post reported. New Hampshire TV station WMUR News reported that Bushnell was an engineering student at Southern New Hampshire University and had pre-registered for the upcoming term that starts next week. 

About 1,200 people were killed when the militant group Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7. Israeli troops invaded Gaza later that month, and about 30,000 people have been killed since then. The U.S. has supplied Israel with weapons and military equipment. The conflict has threatened to escalate as Iran-backed militia groups across the Middle East began lashing out at commercial shipping off the coast of Yemen and at U.S. troops stationed in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, where three American soldiers were killed in a drone attack in January.

The U.S. and U.K. have responded with airstrikes, including several on Feb. 24 that were meant to weaken the Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group that has attacked commercial shipping off the coast of Yemen since November.

Editor’s note: The story has been updated with more recent information on Bushnell’s decorations.