Brown: JADC2 Means DOD Must Rethink How it Targets, Oversees Combat Operations

Oct. 27, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

The military needs to rethink the way it develops and approves strikes in combat and possibly restructure component commands as the Air Force-led joint all-domain command and control effort to connect sensors and shooters in real time takes root, Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr said.

The Advanced Battle Management System demonstrations this year, in which dozens of aircraft and sensors feed into a cloud-based picture of a battlefield, shows that the established way of selecting targets and fires is too slow and cumbersome to be effective in the future.

Under current doctrine, a Joint Targeting Coordination Board composed of several officials, including military leaders, representatives from external agencies, multinational partners, and subject matter experts from areas such as intelligence and operations, develops targeting priorities. But if the military can bring together its sensor and shooter information instantaneously, “We’re not going to be able to have boards with humans in the loop that actually sit down and kind of validate targets,” Brown said during a virtual National Defense Industry Association conference on JADC2.

Instead, as the military develops JADC2, it needs to write its algorithms to take into account the risk associated with targets and the best weapon system to use to strike.

“It requires some thought process for us to build the algorithms, so we can put them into the system and it goes through and says in real time, ‘If you find that target and it meets all of that criteria, then you’re able to engage it,’” Brown said.

There needs to be human involvement, just not at the scale of a targeting board of several officials, Brown added. A human presence “on the loop” watching the target development can confirm it “using some human judgment. But that’s the way you can move faster, so you’re really doing almost a Joint Targeting Coordination Board in real time, using the tools to actually provide options,” he said.

If the JADC2 vision comes to fruition and is used in deployed areas, there needs to be a discussion on “how we organize ourselves,” Brown said. For example, will there still be a need for separate air, land, and sea component commanders if the goal is to fuse all sensors and shooters from each domain?

“Because each of those component commanders need to understand all of those domains,” Brown said. “They may have expertise in their domain, but they’ve got to understand them all in order to be effective.”

The Air Force within the past year has led the charge to joint all-domain command and control, largely with three ABMS “on-ramp” experiments. The second event in August, for example, brought together dozens of sensors and different shooters such as USAF aircraft, Army artillery, and Navy ships, to down a cruise missile threat.

The on-ramps have shown that the defense industry has a large role to play in this evolution, especially since “non-traditional” companies can provide different capabilities in the realms of cloud-based software and communications, for example. The Air Force wants to show it can move beyond the typical acquisition process to move faster and bring in new companies that can translate successful systems already in use in the commercial world for the military.

Brown said companies now need to take into account this broad outreach, and develop weapons systems that can talk with others in a joint language instead of operating in a proprietary way. The Air Force “doesn’t want to spend money on a system that doesn’t connect,” he said.

New systems need to be updated regularly, like mobile software that can be updated on the fly. “What we don’t want to do is build a one-off. We actually should build something that can be upgraded fairly quickly, can be adaptive, it can stay with the times,” Brown said. These systems should use 5G because, “We don’t want to actually still be on 3G and 4G and everybody else is on 5G, and we wonder why things are taking so long, and we’ll get that blue spinning circle on our computers.”

The Space Force’s Need for Speed

Oct. 27, 2020 | By Amy Hudson

If the U.S. Space Force is going to be successful in a domain that makes the Indo-Pacific area of operations look small, speed is key. That’s why Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond said his service will play a leading role in the Defense Department’s digital transformation.

“If you look at the operations that happen in that domain—whether it’s military operations, commercial operations, civil operations, intelligence operations—those operations happen at a speed that is way faster than anything that happens on the sea, or on the land, or in the air,” Raymond said Oct. 27 during a National Defense University webinar. “We’re talking about objects in space traveling 17,500 miles an hour just to stay in orbit.”

When China blew up its own satellite in 2007, it took just minutes for that missile to go from the ground to low Earth orbit. “And so, you can’t operate in that domain—in a contested space domain—without the tools and capabilities,” such as robotics and artificial intelligence, needed to make decisions in such a high-speed environment.

Speed is also at play in deploying systems. Raymond said autonomy and reusability will give the Space Force a “significant advantage.”

A Pentagon policy paper released earlier this month said the Pentagon must transform into a “digitally savvy military” that is “fueled by groundbreaking technology” to “exploit information.

A Pentagon policy paper released earlier this month said the Pentagon must transform into a “digitally savvy military” that is “fueled by groundbreaking technology” to “exploit information.” Raymond said the Space Force will be “on the front line” of those efforts. It is building a digital headquarters staffed by personnel who are “fluent in digital,” he said, and where digital engineering will be the standard for all acquisitions.

It’s unacceptable to take five or six years to build a “clone” of an existing capability already on orbit, Raymond said. The Space Force must leverage growing commercial space technology and insist on digital engineering from the beginning.

Doctrine must also evolve. Ever since space capabilities were first integrated into the fight during Desert Storm, space has been a way to “make the other domains better,” he said. Now, he says, it must be more.

“If you look at how we’ve integrated, there’s nothing we do as a joint and coalition force today that isn’t enabled by that integration,” Raymond said. “The challenge is that our adversaries have had a front-row seat, and they are developing threats to deny us that advantage. So it’s no longer good enough to just think about space as a benign domain … you have to treat it as a warfighting domain.”

In other words, he said, the Space Force must “look at what else [it] can do besides just making the other domains more effective.”

New AMC Boss Outlines Strategy, Changes to Accelerate

Oct. 27, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

Air Mobility Command must accelerate change by developing a force prepared for a high-end fight, advancing new capabilities beyond the traditional role of the heavy aircraft, embracing the role in ferrying the joint force forward, and ensuring the nation’s nuclear mission can be fueled and ready, the new leader of the command said.

AMC boss Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost, who took over the command in August, used a keynote address at the virtual Airlift/Tanker Association conference on Oct. 27 to announce AMC’s new strategy, which follows in the footsteps of new Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s “Accelerate Change, or Lose” directive.

“Now we need to focus and accelerate the command into the future,” Van Ovost said. “Required in this change is greater integration across the services and increased collaboration with all stakeholders to deny our adversaries any seams to exploit.”

The AMC strategy focuses on four key areas, with the first being developing leaders who will be effective in this new era.

“You will be the ones coming up with new operational concepts, you will be the ones rapidly integrating current and emerging technologies, and you will be the ones executing, leading, and making tough decisions in dynamic, ambiguous, and uncertain environments,” Van Ovost said. “You are the strength of this command. We are going to build, train, develop, and sharpen the force for the future high-end fight.”

AMC will focus on resiliency of Airmen to recover and adapt from difficult situations, and develop leaders of “strong character” who will be courageous and focused on the fight.

“Developing the people, concepts, and capabilities that will win against aggressive competitors across the competition continuum must remain at the forefront of our minds and be the lens through which we view everything we do,” she said.

As the broader Air Force continues its push for Agile Combat Employment, AMC will focus on developing Airmen who are multicapable in jobs beyond their main Air Force Specialty Code—a key tenet of the ACE concept. These Airmen will be effective both at a large home base and at small, open-air austere locations. The command will also look to develop Airmen who are digitally adept, with a “foundational knowledge” of emerging technology.

“We can’t capitalize on game-changing capabilities if we don’t even know they exist,” she said. “We must build awareness of the digital environment and bring those capabilities into our problem-solving processes.”

Secondly, the command needs to advance its own “warfighting capabilities” by first being realistic about how the world has changed. “We have to be clear-eyed about the fact that rapid advances in technology have allowed our adversaries to degrade our military competitive advantages,” she said, adding that AMC “can’t assume sanctuary at our bases, especially in multiple domains and command and control.”

“What we do is a physics problem—delivering, refueling, recovering, and enabling,” she said. “We have to advance our ability to beat the physics. Strive toward achieving information and decision dominance by leveraging sensors, information clouds, advanced digital infrastructures, and data analytics.”

Third, AMC as U.S. Transportation Command’s air component serves a key role in delivering joint forces, such as rapidly flying an Army division to the Middle East to respond to an imminent threat like the 82nd Airborne Division’s activation early this year. To effectively serve this mission, the command needs to ensure it can operate in contested environments, through effective exercises and high-end training, so other services can rely on AMC’s capability to deliver them.

Additionally, AMC needs to develop new ways to contribute to a fight. Specifically, Van Ovost highlighted new capabilities on AMC aircraft, such as meshed communication networks on tankers and the ability to deploy munitions or attritable aircraft aboard airlifters, as ways the command can contribute more to a fight.

Lastly, AMC needs to focus on its “no-fail” mission of strategic deterrence.

“With the re-emergence of great power competition, focused efforts and aggressive actions by other nations to modernize, expand, and develop nuclear capabilities, and the increased salience of nuclear forces in their strategies and plans, our nation now faces a more diverse and advanced nuclear threat environment than ever before.”

The command’s role focuses on assured air refueling and airlift support to nuclear forces while also enabling global diplomacy by carrying the country’s senior leaders. Going forward, making credible capacity in its tanker fleet is a top priority. This includes upgrading legacy tankers such as the KC-135 and bringing on the KC-46, which is both late and facing capability issues. Additionally, the command will “aggressively pursue” upgrades to command posts, aircraft, and its 618th Air Operations Center to ensure it will stay connected.

“These are no-fail missions for us and we will prioritize our ability to continue to execute regardless of the environment because we use deterrence daily to ensure America’s freedoms and way of life are protected,” Van Ovost said.

Roper: Air Force Shopping for ‘Skyshots’

Oct. 26, 2020 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force is looking for “Skyshot” ideas—those short of a massive “Moon Shot” technology push, but much more than “baby steps” toward disruptive new technologies—that will spur industry while building relationships between the service and innovative startups, said department acquisition chief Will Roper.

In a streaming “Ask Me Anything” program, Roper said the new project will be akin to the already-underway “Agility Prime” effort, in which the Air Force is looking to develop a “flying car” technology potentially applicable to future, unmanned logistics or rescue of downed Airmen behind enemy lines. The Oct. 26 program solicited ideas for the next initiative, which will be announced at an AFWERX program in December.

Addressing small businesses, he said USAF is looking to “get you off the ground and help you take flight.” The projects the Air Force is looking for are not necessarily quick-turnaround ideas but “deep tech” that will have long-lasting, game-changing effects. The service will have the “patience” for sustained investment where the commercial capital market may not, he said, noting the Air Force can be a “de-risker” in the process.

Responding to chat messages, Roper said USAF would be interested in navigational alternatives to GPS; perhaps something that uses GoogleEarth-like data to recognize position from surrounding terrain. It’s also interested in all manner of hypersonics and has put some money toward a small company pursuing a hypersonic executive transport. The Air Force can be an incubator of such technologies, he said, noting that a hypersonic surveillance platform could work out the bugs in a future passenger-carrying system.

Other ideas Roper showed interest in were energy systems, including small nuclear powerplants; networks of new kinds of sensors, and “next-generation stealth,” which may be achieved by fooling the enemy’s artificial intelligence algorithms hooked up to its sensors, rather than reducing an aircraft’s signature.

The Air Force has no designs on owning the intellectual property derived from such investments, he said, but would perhaps want a time window where it can use the technology first, before it is commercially available.

Quantum-enabled technologies have “great potential” for Skyshots, he said, with application in computing and encryption, but also with sensing. He’s particularly interested in sensors that can “look around corners” or detect something “with a single photon” or “gravimeters” that can detect very heavy objects.

Operational artificial intelligence is another fertile area, he said, noting that USAF recently uploaded new AI software to a U-2 spy plane while it was flying an operational mission.

“We need AI hardened against adversary threats,” and “algorithmic” warfare capabilities for both defense and offense, he said. It’s a sure bet that if USAF deploys AI, an enemy “will try to break it.” This represents a “great opportunity” for small businesses.

The Air Force needs 3D printing capabilities that can yield flight-critical hardware, also, Roper said, and he’s looking for companies that can predictably certify that 3D methods using a variety of methods, machines, and materials in the same printed part will meet specifications.

“If you can solve that problem, … that has a huge return on investment,” Roper observed.

Digital engineering and digital manufacturing also represent a way to bring jobs back to the U.S. that are not affected by the availability of “cheap labor” overseas, Roper said. And “it’s not one-to-one coming back … it’s smarter, it’s more adaptable, and tailorable.”

The Air Force also isn’t interested only in traditional aerospace-related technologies such as exotic materials, for which it’s “always a customer,” Roper said, but in biological technology as well.

The U.S. “wasn’t ready for a crisis like COVID-19, and we need to be ready … for one that’s maliciously created,” Roper asserted, because the reaction to COVID-19 has shown a pandemic is a great distraction if an adversary wants to do something “that normally wouldn’t be allowed on the world stage.”

The Pentagon “is not ready” for another pandemic, and “this is an area where I need companies and investors to bring us big ideas and opportunities,” Roper said. While the Army usually handles such activities, that doesn’t “obviate” the Air Force from thinking about them, he said.

“What I’ve learned about … synthetic biology and gene editing” in responding to COVID, “makes me think the next strategic attack on the U.S. is not likely to be from conventional or nuclear weapons, but from ones we’ve never seen … before, except in great pandemics, but might have characteristics that pandemics of the past never had,” Roper said. “And if we’re not ready for that kind of crisis, then this current one has taught us nothing.”

Roper also said USAF is going to shift its process of answering operational needs away from traditional processes and towards speedier ones where new technologies are pushed toward operators.

“Right now, we’re driven from a requirement to a solution,” Roper said, where the operating parameters are stated by the user, and are “based on the warfighter understanding what they need.” But, “with technology changing so rapidly, it doesn’t make sense anymore.” The process “should shift from being requirements-based to being opportunity-based.”

If systems are “open,” meaning they can easily be reconfigured or reprogrammed, “then I don’t have to have a requirement from warfighters to bring them opportunities; things they didn’t even know they needed.”

During his time in the “classified acquisition system,” running the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, “I think I created 53 or so capabilities; not a single one was requirements-driven,” Roper noted. “They were all opportunities that were either produced by industry or some strategist and then we found industry that could make them. We took it to a warfighter and they said, ‘absolutely.’ So that’s how this process will work.”

He said USAF is open to all such pitches—“bring them to us”—and said AFWERX “open topic solicitations … is the standard way to get us ideas.” He’s especially looking for commercial technology with potential dual-use applications that are not obvious.

Bug-Spraying C-130s Deploy to Louisiana

Oct. 26, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

The Air Force activated the military’s only large, fixed-wing pest control aircraft to help areas recovering from hurricanes and heavy rains.

The C-130s from the 910th Airlift Wing at Youngstown Air Reserve Station, Ohio, deployed to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Oct. 20 for several days to support Environmental Protection Agency-registered aerial spray to control mosquitos that thrive in post-storm conditions across the state. The C-130s are the military’s only aircraft equipped with the Modular Aerial Spray System.

“Our military men and women are privileged to be able to assist the interagency team and people of Louisiana as they recover from the recent hurricanes Delta and Laura,” said Lt. Gen. Kirk S. Pierce, commander of First Air Force (Air Forces Northern), in a release.

The unit is expected to spray in Acadia, Calcasieu, Cameron, Iberia, Jeff Davis, Lafayette, and Vermillion parishes in Louisiana, according to the release. The aircrew use night vision equipment to fly their missions during dusk and nighttime hours when the insects are active, and “the 910th’s men and women are longtime pros at the mission,” Pierce said.

This mission is the first time the unit has been activated for storm response since they treated 1.4 million acres impacted by Hurricane Harvey in 2014, according to the release.

Similar to the Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System flown by other Guard and Reserve C-130 units, the MASS is a roll-on system that releases the spray from the rear of the C-130. In addition to targeting the insects, the aircraft can also assist with clearing vegetation and in the dispersal of oil spills.

The 910th Airlift Wing flies four-propeller C-130Hs for the mission, though Air Force Reserve Command indicated early this year it intends to replace the aircraft with newer C-130J models.

Enlisted Leaders Defend Abrupt Tuition Assistance Cuts

Oct. 26, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

Top enlisted leaders defended the Air Force’s decision to reduce tuition assistance by $750, saying it was the best option available as the manpower directorate scrambled to find money over the summer or risk canceling classes.

In late September, the Air Force announced it was only going to pay $3,750 of college tuition for Airmen and space professionals each fiscal year, a reduction from the previous limit of $4,500. Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass and Chief Master Sgt. Roosevelt Jones, the senior enlisted leader for the deputy chief of manpower, personnel, and services, speaking during an Oct. 26 town hall, said the service in 2020 had about $163 million allocated for tuition assistance. That funding ran out in July, and the service had to look elsewhere inside the A1 to make up that shortfall so it could eventually pay out about $180 million for tuition assistance.

“We had to go back and … try to find $17 million or $20 million dollars that wasn’t already allocated to it, otherwise we would have stopped classes come summertime,” Bass said. “The previous leadership team that was there was like, we have to find the money, but what [that] meant is … something else didn’t get funded.”

Money came out of other parts of the human resources domain, and going forward the service realized it couldn’t “count on that at the end of the year, … so we had to put some measures in place,” Jones said.

Officials discussed multiple options before reaching their decision, such as reducing the number of semester hours that could be used, or only allowing a certain amount per quarter that would likely be used quickly, meaning Airmen applying later would not be able to receive any funding. The service also considered reducing the total available to $3,000, before raising the amount.

Data showed that most Airmen used $3,750 or less, except for about 20 percent of Airmen who spend up to $4,000 or more.

“We wanted to make sure that we covered the majority of Airmen in the United States Air Force to be able to fund how much they normally utilize each year,” Jones said.

The Airmen who fall in the 20 percent who spend more can apply for an exception to policy to receive additional funding, Jones said.

“We had to put some measures in place to ensure that we had mil TA [military tuition assistance] for everyone, not just the few, not just [those] who got it quickly,” Jones said.

Overall, the Air Force pays more tuition assistance than the other services, Bass said, noting that going forward the service will continue to look at the issue to see if additional funding is appropriate.

From a leadership perspective, the negative feedback to the reduction has been “concerning,” Bass said. The military faces tough financial decisions, as budgets are likely to flatline or even shrink in fiscal 2022 and beyond, “and we can’t get shook at something like that. … When we look at our aging infrastructure, all of our airframes are antiques practically, and we’re looking at how do we maintain our readiness and how do we get after the Air Force We Need. We can’t get shook over $750.”

Hill F-35s, Airmen Return from Middle East Deployment

Oct. 26, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

F-35As and Airmen from the 421st Fighter Squadron returned home to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, within the past week after a six-month deployment for combat operations in the Middle East.

The 421st was the third Hill squadron in a row to deploy to U.S. Central Command, where they flew close air support, offensive and defensive counter air operations, and in multiple exercises with partners in the region, according to a base release. The squadron is a combination of the Active duty 388th and Reserve 419th Fighter Wings at Hill, the service’s only operational F-35 base in the continental United States.

“We’re all proud of the job that the 421st FS has done and we’re excited to have them back home,” said Col. Steven Behmer, commander of the 388th Fighter Wing, in the release. “They picked up right where our previously deployed squadrons left off. We’ll continue to train here and remain focused on providing F-35A combat capability.”

Hill F-35s have flown combat missions in CENTCOM non-stop since April 2019, meaning the redeployment marks the first time in 16 months that all F-35 units are at the Utah base at the same time. It is not clear if the squadron returning home leaves the region without a fifth-generation USAF fighter presence. Prior to the first F-35 deployments, Air Force F-22s had been steadily deployed to the theater.

The aircraft and Airmen returned to Hill on a rolling basis over the past several days, and are now in quarantine for 14 days to limit the spread of COVID-19.

“We’re extremely happy to welcome everyone home in time for the holiday season and look forward to seeing our folks reunited with their loved ones,” 419th Fighter Wing Commander Col. Matthew Fritz said in the release. “Deployments are always a challenge and each of our return deployers and their families deserve a pat on the back for a job well done.”

Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Hub is Helping NORAD Monitor US Airspace

Oct. 23, 2020 | By Rachel S. Cohen

The Air Force is moving forward with a new, algorithm-driven system to help North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command better detect airborne threats.

NORTHCOM and NORAD, which are tasked with protecting the homeland from attack, depend on a slew of radars and other data systems to monitor U.S. airspace. But those systems largely cannot communicate with other software, creating roadblocks in a process that should be fluid and collaborative.

So, the organizations launched their “Pathfinder” initiative to build a data ecosystem that lives in widely accessible digital cloud storage, and that pulls together many different streams of information into one operating picture.

“Today, Pathfinder is processing more sensor data than the current command-and-control system used for air defense of North America,” former NORAD-NORTHCOM boss Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy and Brig. Gen. Peter M. Fesler, NORAD’s deputy director of operations, wrote in a September paper.

“Because of the quantum leap in processing power that has been achieved since the fielding of the current system, and the approach used in [the Strategic Homeland Integrated Ecosystem for Layered Defense modernization strategy], Pathfinder is identifying information buried in the data, giving new life to old sensors.”

Pathfinder is also known as the “Air Threat Response” effort, run through the Defense Innovation Unit in California. DIU was created in 2015 to forge closer ties with Silicon Valley giants and tech startups and speed commercial products to the military. It revealed the Air Threat Response effort in its 2019 annual report released earlier this year.

The initiative applies “machine learning to classify objects and predict threats more quickly, allowing the operator to shift focus to decision-making rather than data and signal analysis,” according to the annual report.

DIU issued prototyping agreements to tech firms Kinetica and Raven Black in September 2019 to develop a product that NORTHCOM could test in exercises like the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System demonstrations. The prototype cost about $3.5 million between the two companies.

Kinetica focuses on high-speed data analytics and visualizations, while Raven Black handles cloud infrastructure. About 50 other companies bid to work on the program.

The Air Force moved the prototype into production with an $8 million order in late September. That contract is worth up to $100 million over five years. Kinetica co-founder Amit Vij hopes to give the military a product for daily use by the third quarter of 2021; Pathfinder initiative director Col. Ross Morrell wants to start using a basic product in the next 90 days, once their government cloud storage is approved.

NORAD and NORTHCOM aim to fully hand off Pathfinder to the Air Force in the next few years so the service can manage it in the long run.

The prototype ingests live radar feeds, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast air traffic control data, and flight plan data from the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Dan Nidess, a program manager and systems engineering and technical assistance contractor for the Air Threat Response effort.

A single data feed can produce around 400 to 500 million records every day, Vij said. While the company hadn’t worked on air defense before, it offers data tables that can store billions of records to decide what airborne activity is normal and what is not.

NORTHCOM personnel already have access to that information, but have to manually wade through data files and analyze it themselves to make use of it. Pathfinder streamlines the process so that piles of data aren’t ignored.

“For NORAD, weather and clouds are noise. There’s so much sensory information that can be thought of [as] one thing but may be another,” Vij said. “Bringing to the table machine-learning algorithms that can easily filter these kinds of noises out, it really makes the operators more proficient in keeping the homeland safe.”

The team also tested how well the system fared at noticing entities and activities in North American airspace, compared to NORAD’s existing technology.

Pathfinder platform lead Lt. Col. Joshua Close said NORAD’s assets and its tactics haven’t always been enough to catch potential problems nearby: “There was mission failure, or there were issues that they weren’t able to successfully complete.”

When presented with those scenarios, the Pathfinder prototype alerted personnel to issues where the legacy systems did not.

Pathfinder also helps the command share information with other parts of the military to make them more aware and to respond faster. It “takes all those different data feeds and correlates them into tracks … to say, of all the sensor feeds that are getting ingested, which ones correlate together into some kind of object in the air?” Nidess said.

Service members vetted that during the second ABMS demonstration in early September.

“What we found is that our sensors can actually pick up a lot more than we expected,” Morrell said. “The sensors can actually pick up things like [unmanned aerial systems] that are flying around.”

Its success means that the military can spend less time and money replacing older technology and instead focus on reaping what it already offers and presenting it in better ways.

Morrell said NORTHCOM is figuring out how to condense the information from several different air defense systems onto one or two screens with two- or three-dimensional graphics, instead of spreading that data across eight screens.

Streamlining that process and relying on computers to crunch the information instead of human brains frees up people, time, and money, Morrell said. While the technology proved it can identify and track oddities in U.S. airspace, he said he couldn’t offer any metrics to show whether Pathfinder sped up that work.

Kinetica will continue adding other data, like land, sea, and space surveillance, and classified sources, into the software. It will also work with NORAD and NORTHCOM to connect it to the rest of their enterprise. The FAA is pursuing its own version of the product as well.

“There’s a lot of things to do with regard to entity classification and entity resolution, so providing more precision and accuracy and saying, ‘This is such and such a plane,’ or ‘This is looking like so and so kind of signature,’” Vij said.

USAF Pushes Safer F-16 Training After Contractor’s Death

Oct. 23, 2020 | By Amy Hudson

The Air Force revamped its F-16 Basic Course following a 2017 incident where an inexperienced student pilot strafed the wrong target and killed a military contractor.

Now, students must fly their first nighttime close air support sortie with an instructor pilot in the rear seat of a two-person F-16D. If a two-seat aircraft is not available, the student will practice their first solo strafe attack without ordnance “while observed from close proximity by the instructor,” Air Education and Training Command spokeswoman Capt. Lauren M. Woods told Air Force Magazine.

On Jan. 31, 2017, Charles Holbrook, a retired master sergeant and former tactical air control party Airman, was struck in the head with a 20mm round from an F-16’s Vulcan cannon when a student mistook him and cars for a target during a nighttime training mission at the Red Rio range outside of Holloman Air Force Base, N.M. He died at a hospital later that night.

An accident investigation board found that pilot error caused the mishap, but also said the instructor pilot failed to properly supervise the mission. The teacher’s vague, yet “overaggressive” direction significantly contributed to Holbrook’s death.

The Air Force’s new policy highlights “the requirement for very diligent pre-planning and execution of tactical scenarios with both students and ground parties in the range space,” Woods said. “This is a special-interest item briefed before every student sortie during the CAS phase.”

Holbrook’s widow sued the Air Force for $24.6 million, alleging the service was negligent in hiring, training, and supervising student and instructor pilots and joint terminal attack controllers. The Air Force recently settled with the family for an undisclosed sum.

“We also met with A-10 schoolhouse personnel from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., to review A-10 targeting pod courseware to improve F-16 ground training. This allowed us to capitalize on existing video, content, and instructional techniques for courseware to improve training for students on CAS,” Woods wrote.