USAF Asks Airmen for Input on Women’s Hair Regulations

USAF Asks Airmen for Input on Women’s Hair Regulations

Oct. 22, 2020 | By Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory

The Air Force Women’s Initiative Team has launched a survey to get female Airmen’s feedback on whether and how USAF should change its rules for how women can wear their hair while in uniform.

“The Women’s Initiative Team (WIT), in coordination with the Warrior Braids volunteer group, is proposing changes to the current United States Air Force hair policy for female Airmen,” the survey page states. “Please help this team gain a deeper understanding into what members of the Air Force would prefer to see through this informal survey.”

The survey asks Airmen if they think any change to the policy is necessary, whether the service’s current hair-related rules have ever been an obstacle for them (or made them have second thoughts about reenlisting), and if they ever felt like their hair length might hinder their career trajectory. 

It also asks if they’d like to see more style options than buns or short hair cuts, whether they’d think ponytails and/or certain types of braids might be professional-looking options, and whether either of those potential options might create a safety hazard within their Air Force Specialty Code.

Further, it queries Airmen about the climate surrounding “hair standard corrections”—namely, about whether they feel that female Airmen get corrected for such infractions more often than their male colleagues, and whether they feel comfortable approaching women Airmen (of both higher and lower ranks) when they spot something that breaks USAF’s rules.

The Women’s Initiative Team will use the data “to educate Air Force General Officers on what female Airmen desire for hair standards” during the service’s next uniform board, which is slated for Nov. 2-5, the page states.

Only female Active duty, Guard, and Reserve Airmen serving within the Air Force may take part, and the team will use respondents’ USAF email addresses to check their statuses, the page noted, adding that responses will be kept anonymous.

The page instructed Airmen to email team lead Maj. Alea Nadeem, Capt. Sarah Berheide, 1st Lt. Montana Pellegrini, or Master Sgt, Johnathon Lind with any questions or concerns.

Russia, China Push STRATCOM to Reconsider Strategic Deterrence

Russia, China Push STRATCOM to Reconsider Strategic Deterrence

Oct. 21, 2020 | By Amy Hudson

U.S. Strategic Command is conducting an “exhaustive assessment” of current global threats, as adversaries like Russia and China force the U.S. to rethink the way it approaches strategic deterrence.

“I’ve challenged my command to revise our 21st-century strategic deterrence theory that considers our adversaries’ decision calculus and behaviors, and identifies threat indicators or conditions that could indicate potential actions,” U.S. Strategic Command boss Adm. Charles “Chas” A. Richard said in a pre-recorded speech for the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ two-day, virtual nuclear security conference, which began Oct. 21.

The analysis will include a look at emerging capabilities, changing norms, and potentially unintended consequences of conflict, as Pentagon officials argue other world powers have “blurred the lines” when it comes to conventional and nuclear conflict. That could be a challenge for the U.S. military, which tends to organize, train, and equip its forces based on whether their mission is nuclear-related or not.

That shift in thinking is driven by a push toward so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons, which Russia and the U.S. are both deploying as tools in a regional conflict that would complicate an adversary’s decisions without escalating into all-out nuclear war. Opponents say that view is misguided.

In August, then-Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark said the service has started to shape policy around the concept of “conventional and nuclear integration,” viewing them as two points on a spectrum instead of as separate concepts.

“We have to be able to reconstitute our capability. We have to be able to plan and execute integrated operations, multidomain, whether conventional or nuclear, and most importantly, we have to be able to fight in, around, and through that environment to achieve our objectives,” Clark said.

Richard argues the ultimate goal—ensuring that the benefit of restraint outweighs the benefit of possible action—has not changed. However, “we have to account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions that could seemingly very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least-bad option,” he said.

By the end of the decade, the U.S. will for the first time face two nuclear-capable competitors, each of whom must be deterred differently.

He estimated Russia is “close to 75 percent complete” with its aggressive nuclear modernization efforts, as well as conventional advancements, ensuring it is still very much a “pacing threat.”

“Russia has expanded the number of circumstances under which they would consider the employment of a nuclear weapon, or at least they’re now willing to say it publicly,” Richard said. “Although this circumstance is distressing, it should not come as a surprise.”

China also is a growing threat, Richard said, cautioning the audience not to undermine its capabilities or nuclear ambition. He believes they will match America’s nuclear strength by 2030.

“They always go faster than we think they will, and we must pay attention to what they do and not necessarily what they say,” he said.

China’s investment in “sophisticated” command and control capabilities and ongoing efforts to build up its own nuclear triad seem to contradict its claim that deterrence should require as small of an arsenal as possible, Richard said.

The United States is pointing to those countries and others like North Korea and Iran to argue for the continued modernization of America’s nuclear missiles, bombers, and submarines, slated to cost more than $1 trillion.

“I recognize that great power competition doesn’t equal conflict, or that we’re on a path to war, but as the commander in charge of employing strategic deterrence capabilities for the nation, and our allies, I simply don’t have the luxury of assuming a crisis, conflict, or war won’t happen,” Richard said.

Space Force Launches New Operations Branch

Space Force Launches New Operations Branch

Oct. 21, 2020 | By Rachel S. Cohen

The Space Force on Oct. 21 formally stood up its Space Operations Command, the main organization running satellites, radars, and other combat assets for regional military commanders around the world.

Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting will run SpOC at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo. He has held similar positions in the Space Force and its predecessor, Air Force Space Command, for the last three years.

During a ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colo., Whiting laid out his three top priorities:

  • Preparing combat-ready, cybersecure space forces driven by intelligence data, and building a diverse and healthy workforce culture
  • Partnering with other parts of the Space Force, U.S. Space Command, the U.S. government, and private companies
  • Providing tech-savvy military power in, from, and to space.

SpOC, one of three field commands created by the Space Force, complements the two other field groups built for acquisition and training. It can be thought of as parallel to the Air Force’s Air Combat Command. 



Video: DVIDS

Whiting told reporters the organization will oversee the launch ranges at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and Patrick Air Force Base, Fla., until those move to Space Systems Command, the Space Force acquisition branch.

The service will continue to assess how many people SpOC needs as Army and Navy personnel transfer into the Space Force, and as combat requirements grow.

The plethora of space operations entities can get confusing. The Space Force’s Space Operations Command manages the personnel, hardware, and software that U.S. Space Command, the warfighting organization run by Army Gen. James H. Dickinson, wields through units at home and overseas. 

Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., also hosts a Space Operations Command, a subordinate group that carries out daily missions and will be renamed as “SpOC West.” The Space Force is not planning any other regional SpOCs, Whiting said.

SpOC West functions as SPACECOM’s Combined Force Space Component Command at Vandenberg as well. In that role, it is in charge of supporting other combatant commanders and the joint force through the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg, which works with other countries and commercial companies on missions like tracking missile launches and resolving interference with communications satellite signals.

Whiting replaces Maj. Gen. John E. Shaw, who was recently nominated to become U.S. Space Command’s three-star deputy commander. The Senate has not yet confirmed Shaw to that post.

Russia Intercepts USAF B-1 Bombers Over Bering Sea

Russia Intercepts USAF B-1 Bombers Over Bering Sea

Oct. 21, 2020 | By Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory

Russian aircraft intercepted two B-1 bombers over the Bering Sea on Oct. 20, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Twitter.

“MiG-31 interceptors and Su-35 fighters from the Air Defense Forces on duty in the Eastern Military District escorted two U.S. Air Force B-1B strategic bombers over the Bering Sea,” the ministry wrote in a Russian-language caption that accompanied footage of the intercept on YouTube.

Once the American bombers were detected, the Russian tails took flight to meet them, the caption explained. The aircraft headed back to their “home airfield” after the B-1s turned away from the Russian border.

The USAF aircraft never entered Russia’s sovereign airspace, and the Russian planes followed “international airspace rules,” the ministry added.

Pacific Air Forces on Oct. 21 confirmed that two of its B-1s were tasked in the area at the time of the alleged interaction.

“Four B-1 Lancers are currently deployed to Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, for a rotational Bomber Task Force to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command,” PACAF public affairs wrote in an Oct. 21 email to Air Force Magazine. “We can confirm that the intercept … was deemed as safe and professional.”

The Russian intercept came a day after F-22s assigned to the North American Aerospace Defense Command intercepted a Russian air package consisting of two Tu-95 Bear bombers, a pair of Su-35 flankers, and an A-50 Mainstay AWACS aircraft off the coast of Alaska.

The Oct. 20 intercept is at least the second time this year that Russia intercepted U.S. military aircraft within a day of their own tails crossing into the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 12:56 a.m. Oct. 22, 2020, to include new information from PACAF.

Contentious Corona Debates Push Budget Decisions

Contentious Corona Debates Push Budget Decisions

Oct. 21, 2020 | By John A. Tirpak

A meeting among the Air Force’s top leaders earlier this month, billed as the venue where tough decisions for the fiscal 2022 budget would be made, saw intense debate requiring further discussion, Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. said Oct. 21.

In an AFA Mitchell Institute virtual event, Brown said he expected to be asked, “What did you decide?” after the Corona meeting. But, “this is a process,” and he is now following up with “more engagement” with combatant commanders and major command chiefs, as well as the Air Staff. Circumstances change “every day,” he said, and the Corona meeting wound up being “the first steps on this journey, as we keep knocking … down” action items.

Video: Mitchell Institute on YouTube

The current draft of the service’s 2022 budget request doesn’t allow for each MAJCOM to get its “No. 1” request, Brown said. “We’ve got to look at the entire Air Force.” Some MAJCOMS have already been told, “You’re going to get less, or your No. 1 is not going to get as much as you’d like.” He did not specify any of the systems or capabilities the service may have to give up to afford new investments.

Air Force leaders at AFA’s virtual Air, Space & Cyber conference in September deferred discussions on the service’s budget priorities, saying the major decisions would be hashed out at Corona. Broadly, Brown said, the budget discussions were of a “design implementation” character.  

Brown wants his commanders to take more of an enterprise approach to budget requests and expectations, and to “see the future a bit better.” Although he acknowledged that, “No one likes to lose anything. The first response will be ‘no;’ that’s why they teach ‘sharing’ in kindergarten,” he said. But COCOMs need to understand they have to balance the demands of now with the future.

It remains to be decided which “silos of excellence” are most important, and “where we take risk.” Commanders have to “talk to each other, at least in front of me,” so they aren’t working toward conflicting unfunded mandates where they are fighting “among themselves because ‘the Chief said.’ I want to get them all in one room, as much as I can, to have these deeper discussions, so we can make choices” together, Brown said.

Brown’s frustrated with the Air Force culture of decision-making “from the bottom up,” saying, “It’s amazing, at this level, how many things come to you, and it’s already been decided … I’m not even sure why I’m signing off on the piece of paper, because they’ve already come up with the answer. But is it the right answer?”

This “culture of consensus” slows the service down, he said, because “you can’t get everybody to agree, so you don’t agree, and you keep working it until you beat down your dissenters,” at which point it’s put before a boss “to approve it.”

Brown said he insists there has to be a dialog and high-level debate.

“Sometimes I want to hear what the other side has to say,” he said, repeating his frequent observation of Air Force staffs having a “meeting after the meeting,” in which dissenters hold their objections until they’re “out in the hallway,” after decisions are made. Brown said he wants dissenters to speak up, because “the train is leaving the station,” and decisions may be made without all the necessary inputs.

“What I’m trying to do is drive these conversations, deeper dives, earlier in the process, where I’m included in the conversations, so … I don’t get it at the very end [where] I have very little wiggle room.”  

He cautioned, though, that he doesn’t want dissent for its own sake. While some objections to plans may be based on “judgement, … and I get that,” there also has to be “some data to back it up.”

Brown likes “read ahead” reports, but he doesn’t want PowerPoint briefings, because “I’ve already read that. Let’s have a conversation. And that’s helpful, because I can actually get more information from them. We get a better product because of the dialog.” At least, he said, “We’ll learn where the friction points are.”

One of the main topics of discussion at the Corona meeting was how the Air Force will “look in the mirror” and change its bureaucracy to move more swiftly, Brown reported. He wants to know what USAF is doing “that slow[s] down our decision making,” and whether cross-domain engagements are happening early enough in the process to enable meaningful conversations about future decisions.

Brown also wants to engage external stakeholders—Congress, other services, industry, etc.—earlier in the decision-making process. “To say, … this is where we’re going as an Air Force, so we’re not fighting among ourselves or competing among ourselves for dollars and capability all the way to the endgame.”

More discussion and engagement will “cut down on the friction,” Brown asserted, and USAF will be able to “move a little bit faster.”

Top Lawmakers Look to Start Talks on 2021 Defense Policy Bill

Top Lawmakers Look to Start Talks on 2021 Defense Policy Bill

Oct. 21, 2020 | By Rachel S. Cohen

Leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are tentatively scheduling a “Big Four” meeting for Oct. 26 to begin hashing out an agreement on the 2021 defense policy bill, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told reporters.

The Big Four refers to the top Democrats and Republicans on the two armed services panels: SASC Chairman Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Ranking Member Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and HASC boss Smith and Ranking Member Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas). 

Lawmakers expect negotiations to be relatively smooth this year, despite some high-profile items, from language on U.S. troop levels in Germany and Afghanistan to a provision that would rename Army bases that currently honor Confederate figures. Both chambers passed their respective versions of the annual defense policy legislation in July.

Smith attributed the slow progress so far in part to Inhofe’s reelection campaign for a likely fifth Senate term. Reelection would start the chairman’s first full term in the top SASC post, after he took over following Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s death in 2018.

“We are in discussion, certainly, on the staff level. We haven’t moved forward as aggressively as I would have liked, in terms of having more ‘Big Four’ conversations,” Smith said on an Oct. 21 press call. “Sen. Inhofe has a campaign, he’s focused on that.”

Smith noted that leaving the bulk of those talks until after the Nov. 3 election is risky, possibly because certain provisions may fall prey to partisan politics based on the results. He did not answer written questions by press time about how the election might affect negotiations.

“We’re moving forward and the plan still is to get the bill done by the early part of December,” he said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office, which appoints lawmakers to the conference committee, has not announced who will be party to those talks.

A congressional aide told Air Force Magazine in September that committee employees would focus on completing staff-level discussions by the end of the month. “We cannot discuss specific topics subject to the conference negotiations; staff is working on options for members to reconcile the differences in the House and Senate bills,” the aide said.

The final slate of funding authorizations still needs to match up with a compromise spending bill, which has stalled in the Senate, to take effect.

Smith remains optimistic that lawmakers will pass the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act by the end of December, three months after the new fiscal year began. He indicated that it’s plausible, but unlikely, that negotiations could stretch into January or later.

On that timeline, conference talks will wrap up shortly before President Donald J. Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden is inaugurated as President on Jan. 20, 2021.

Defense News recently reported that Smith and Reed, who would likely become the head of SASC if Democrats earn a majority in the Senate, have started discussing what the defense priorities of a unified Democratic government could be if Biden wins the White House.

“From what Vice President Biden has said, I think we are closely aligned on how much to spend on defense and the fact the nuclear enterprise is something we can probably spend less on, and still meet our needs, and thus free up money to do other things. I think there’ll be good synergy there,” Smith told Defense News.

While progressives push for as much as a 20 percent cut to the defense budget, Smith argues any spending overhaul must be justified by a revamped national security policy. He believes total defense spending could hover around $720 billion to $740 billion in the coming years—either flat funding or a slight cut. 

The Trump Administration requested $740.5 billion for national security, including $705.4 billion for the Defense Department, in fiscal 2021.

“You will not hear me say that we need to cut the defense budget because the U.S. military is a malign actor in the world and must be constrained. I do not agree with that position,” Smith told reporters. “I do agree with the idea that we can have a national security policy that has a lower defense budget than we currently have. You’ve got to get there in a rational, responsible way.”

Air Force Searching for Savvier Sustainment

Air Force Searching for Savvier Sustainment

Oct. 20, 2020 | By Rachel S. Cohen

The Department of the Air Force’s Advanced Manufacturing Olympics showcase kicked off this week with a look at where military sustainment has come so far and what more it has to accomplish.

Air Force acquisition boss Will Roper is pushing the service to adopt three-dimensional printing and other forms of advanced and additive manufacturing that are more prevalent in commercial industry to cut down on sustainment costs, which make up 70 percent of the USAF budget.

“We want to make parts that we currently can’t supply easily,” Roper said. “We want to reverse-engineer parts that we may not have the designs for anymore. We want to look at repeatability of parts so that we’re not critically coupled to an individual printing machine. And we want to look at the entire process of what it takes to get a novelty manufactured part onto a critical mission airplane or satellite.”

The Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office’s Advanced Manufacturing Olympics began over the summer, with multiple challenges where 64 teams can win up to $100,000 in prize money.

Air Force Magazine previously reported that teams in one event are trying to replicate as many parts as possible from a box of components using reverse engineering and modeling. Another set of teams was tasked with fabricating flight-ready F-16 fighter jet parts and getting them certified for flight. A third challenge looks to prove that teams can produce new building materials that work as well as traditional metals and polymers. The fourth focuses on supply chain challenges, and the fifth aims to accurately build a 3D-printed part from existing design data.

Air Force Secretary Barbara M. Barrett added that participants will “directly influence” a new roadmap that is in the works this year to spread those techniques across the Air Force and Space Force.

To make meaningful progress in sustainment, the military needs to get spare parts in a matter of hours or days instead of weeks or months. It also needs to improve the accuracy of modern manufacturing techniques, and to ensure that components will be ready to fly no matter how or on which 3D printer they are made.

The Air Force has printed nearly 10,000 total parts (not just as part of the Olympics), many of which are installed on aircraft, Roper said. Barrett pointed to 118 phenolic wedges—“a small but critical piece between the center wing box and the inner wing splice”—on each C-5M Super Galaxy airlift that needed to be replaced due to moisture and age. 

The service turned to 3D printing to build more than 6,000 of those wedges 88 percent faster, 35 percent lighter, and nearly $1 million cheaper than sourcing them from a defense contractor, Barrett said.

Officials in the Air Force’s maintenance depots are looking to grow their projects in the new fiscal year, including getting a head start on manufacturing components for the B-21 bomber that is still in development by Northrop Grumman. 

Jason McCurry, the Reverse Engineer and Critical Tooling engineering branch chief at the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex, Okla., said his group is analyzing the design of dozens of B-1 bomber parts to build new blueprints and create those components from scratch.

“That started off with just eight different part numbers,” he said. “It’s now up to 76 different panels that we’ve reverse-engineered for the entire interior for the B-1s.”

That effort started about two years ago, and REACT is getting ready to start producing 3D-printed interior panels over the next five years. The team is reaching out to the B-2 and B-21 bomber programs to see how they can assist on those as well.

Damon Brown, who runs the Reverse Engineering, Avionics Redesign, and Manufacturing team at the Warner Robins Air Logistic Complex, Ga., noted his group is working on a munitions loader that hasn’t been updated since it was fielded in the early 1980s.

“We redesigned a circuit card … that should increase the reliability by about 75 percent,” he said. “One of our other systems is a weapons control unit for a platform. We completely redesigned it. The circuit cards built into it were out of stock. … Now we’re manufacturing those spares and so now we’ll be able to keep that platform flying for many more years.”

He did not say which aircraft that second project focuses on.

Brown argues the Pentagon needs to possess more of the technical data for parts up front so maintainers can know more about the components that make up combat assets. That would make the sustainment process more efficient and lessen the Air Force’s reliance on contractors when it needs a new order or an upgrade.

He believes the Air Force’s “digital campaign” can overhaul how it does acquisition for the better. Right now, the service has to turn 3D, computer-assisted drawings into two-dimensional blueprints to store in a system that can’t handle something more advanced. That flat design is what gets emailed around while the hardware is built, which limits how much testing and tweaking can be done on computers in the meantime.

“The design, the contracting, the communication all about these systems would all be digital. … [Under a more tech-savvy model,] it’s not cost-prohibitive to acquire that extra data because it was designed digitally in the first place,” Brown said. “I hate to say that it would put my shop out of business, but it would make for a more sustainable Air Force.”

GPAW Will be Next Mass-Produced, Fifth-Gen Ground Attack Munition

GPAW Will be Next Mass-Produced, Fifth-Gen Ground Attack Munition

Oct. 20, 2020 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force is launching a program to acquire a new, highly flexible ground-attack munition to equip its combat aircraft. The service wants a Global Precision Attack Weapon, or GPAW, that would meet an ambitious set of characteristics: small, lightweight, and affordable in numbers, yet capable against hard and deeply buried targets, and with advanced sensors and autonomy.

The GPAW plan, unveiled in a Broad Agency Announcement on Oct. 19, calls for a weapon that would be carried internally on the fifth-generation F-35 fighter and B-21 bomber, but would still be compatible with legacy aircraft.

The weapon is to have “high loadout”—meaning many can be carried on a single platform, suggesting a small size—and digitally engineered, with open-systems architecture. It should enable “maximum flexibility to integrate a suite of technologies,” including position, navigation, and timing and guidance, navigation, control; as well as “cockpit-selectable warhead effect,” fuzing, sensors, propulsion, “signature optimization” or stealthiness, “martime apps, multimode seeker, affordable mass, and autonomy/sensing.”

GPAW will have to operate “within the joint, all-domain functional environment against near-peer competitors.” It was suggested the weapon should be able to collaborate autonomously. The announcement modified a previous announcement published by the Air Force and Special Operations Command in the spring.

The Air Force didn’t specify when it wants to have the weapon ready for use, but the announcement invites white paper responses from industry within a year. Contracts resulting from the solicitation are expected to be worth between $200,000 and $2 million.

The GPAW development program will be in three phases, and the Air Force will select and work with a System Design Agent to get the project started.

  • Phase 1: The government will characterize the “trade space” for the weapon, including what it can get within the cost and physical size limits it has in mind for GPAW. It will then set the open architecture standards, and develop a work breakdown structure and rough order of magnitude cost.
  • Phase II: A “best of breed” design will be developed along with various technical packages and a plan for rapid prototyping.
  • Phase III: The weapon will be competed for production, based on the technical data packages. The BAA suggested more than one manufacturer would be selected, with subsequent competition for lot buys.

The SDA and its partners “will not be excluded” from Phase II or III. “All businesses (small, medium, and large) are encouraged to submit white papers,” the service said.

F-22s Intercept Bears, Flankers, and Russian AWACS Off Alaska

F-22s Intercept Bears, Flankers, and Russian AWACS Off Alaska

Oct. 20, 2020 | By John A. Tirpak

North American Aerospace Defense Command F-22s intercepted a Russian air package comprised of two Tu-95 Bear bombers and two Su-35 Flankers, supported by an A-50 Mainstay Airborne Warning and Control aircraft, on Oct. 19, U.S. Northern Command said.

The Russian aircraft “loitered” inside the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, for about 90 minutes and came “within 30 nautical miles of Alaskan shores,” NORTHCOM reported on Oct. 20. None of the Russian aircraft “entered United States or Canadian sovereign airspace.”

The F-22s, from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, were supported by an E-3 AWACS and KC-135 refueling aircraft. A NORTHCOM spokesman said there were no dangerous or unprofessional maneuvers by the Russian aircraft.

Russia has increased the tempo of its long-range bomber flights over the last year and has added more elements, like fighter escorts and now the Mainstay AWACS to such missions. A Mainstay was part of a package intercepted in the same region in June.

The intercept was conducted as part of the ongoing Noble Eagle homeland defense mission. “The response to potential aerospace threats does not distinguish between [Canada and the U.S.] and draw on forces from both countries,” NORAD said.  

Russian state-run news described the flight as a pre-planned 11-hour mission “over the neutral waters of the Chukchi, Bering, and Okhotsk Seas, as well as the Northern part of the Pacific Ocean.” It described the Tu-95s as “strategic missile carriers,” and said the aircraft were escorted by F-22s “at certain stages of the route.”

In addition to the Su-35s, Russian state media said the bombers were also escorted by MiG-31 Foxhound interceptors “of the Pacific Fleet.” The Russian news release said the flights are “carried out in strict accordance with the International Airspace Rules.”

Russia released video of the intercept, which did not show any aircraft other than the Tu-95s and F-22s.