Air Force Recruiting Service Institutes Diversity Targets for USAF

Sept. 14, 2020 | By Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory

The Air Force Recruiting Service is implementing diversity targets for USAF recruiting efforts and will gauge its progress once a month beginning in fiscal 2021, AFRS Commander Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas Jr. announced Sept. 14. The Space Force will also adopt these targets, he added.

“The targets are based on the qualified pool of potential recruits in the country,” he explained.

The diversity targets will be applied across the entirety of Total Force recruiting—not just for rated recruitment efforts, though increasing the diversity of USAF’s rated corps remains a top priority, AFRS spokesperson Chrissy A. Cuttita confirmed to Air Force Magazine.

“We’re basically employing one of the old management axioms that what gets measured gets done,” Thomas explained during a media roundtable held during AFA’s virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference. “This isn’t a quota—it is a target—but we’ve got to be able to measure this, look at it, and be able to adjust and tweak to ensure we can move the needle.”

Thomas said that targets exist for “major demographics” for enlisted Airmen and officers in the categories of sex (male vs. female) and race (Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, African American, and an “other” category that includes Native Americans and additional groups). AFRS has the ability to dive into these numbers more deeply, he noted, but examines recruiting data for these “basic groups” on a monthly basis.

By monitoring how it measures up against these targets, USAF will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of its marketing efforts and tweak them as needed to maximize their reach, he said.

“Quotas are illegal—there’s clear legal cases—that’s not what we’re doing,” Thomas said. “It’s not reverse discrimination. It’s simply making sure everybody understands the opportunities available in our Air Force and our Space Force.”

Though the endeavor officially kicks off on Oct. 1, Thomas said AFRS has already started working on these efforts.

Ultimately, he said, AFRS hopes these targets will help the service achieve “the desired force mix based on demographics.”

And though USAF’s enlisted corps is “meeting or exceeding” its targets for most of its demographics, it’s struggling with Asian American recruitment, he added.

Although Asian Americans comprise 9.1 percent of the total number of Americans between the ages of 17 and 21 who are eligible to serve in the Air Force, they account for a mere 4.3 percent of USAF’s recruits this year, Thomas noted.

“We’ve got work to do,” he said.

AMC to Evaluate ‘Interim’ KC-46 Fix While Pressing for Permanent New Remote Vision System

Sept. 14, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

The Air Force in the coming weeks will evaluate an interim fix to the KC-46’s troubled remote vision system to see if there would be any value gained, while still holding Boeing to its requirement to provide a broad, permanent fix to the system by 2023.

In April, Boeing and the Air Force announced an agreement on fixing the remote vision system—a collection of cameras and sensors linking the boom operator in the front of the aircraft to the boom system to refuel aircraft. The system has long been troubled by unclear and skewed images, in turn causing the boom to strike outside of a receiving aircraft’s receptacle. The Air Force has said this is the biggest problem on the aircraft, and without a fix the Pegasus cannot be operational.

Air Mobility Command boss Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost recently visited Boeing, and saw progress on the RVS replacement, called RVS 2.0. The replacement includes an overhaul of the plane’s technology, including 4k color cameras, larger high-definition screens for the boom operator, augmented reality, and a laser ranger for refueling aircraft distance measurement. The company has made progress on down selecting the systems that would be installed, and aims to have 12 aircraft kits delivered in 2023, with installations beginning on the production line in 2024. All changes to the system will be at Boeing’s expense.

“I’m very encouraged with the open collaboration between Boeing and the Air Force on that,” Van Ovost told reporters Sept. 14 as part of AFA’s virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference. “Boeing has stated that they would be able to provide us up to 12 ship sets by 2024, and we’re going to hold them to that and we will do everything we can to accelerate.”

Boeing’s shorter-term fix, originally called RVS 1.5 but now referred to as the “interim Enhanced RVS,” uses incremental software and hardware updates to enhance the quality of the video feed, and Boeing has said it could be fielded in the second half of 2021.

Van Ovost said she saw a demonstration of this unfinished capability, and it did show some sharper images.

“But the proof is in the pudding when it comes to whether or not it actually would provide operational additional capability, or additional safety to the boom operator and to our receiver aircraft,” she said.

Air Mobility Command in a matter of weeks will receive a “package” with all the data on the effectiveness of this interim fix. AMC and the Air Force Research Laboratory will then analyze it to see if the Air Force should adopt it. The quality needs to be to the level where the Air Force can “open the envelope” on the aircraft types it can refuel. Currently, the KC-46 is operational with its boom and drogue system, but most USAF receiving aircraft, which rely on the boom, are limited in how it can refuel from the Pegasus.

“If I can’t increase operational capability … then there may not be a whole lot of reason to put it on the airplane and retrofit airplanes, because if I have to take airplanes out of cycle to do that, then I have less access to those aircraft,” she said. “So, it’ll be what our boom operators, our testers have to say about the final configuration.”

Additionally, Van Ovost said the interim fix will be a no-go if it would cause the permanent RVS 2.0 fix to be delayed.

“There’s nothing that we would do that would slow down getting to 2.0 and getting it on our airplane,” she said. “That’s the most important thing, to get to the full requirements that we agreed to onto the airplane. RVS 2.0 at no cost to the government.”

The “package” of data will spell out these impacts, and “if it slips RVS 2.0 installation at all, I would not be in favor of slipping because that’s the end game, that’s the requirement that we set out and that Boeing agreed to deliver.”

The Air Force and Boeing are also working toward addressing another “category one” deficiency on the aircraft, a fuel leak in the aircraft’s air refueling receptacle. Boeing has a fix “en route” for this, with a new seal to be installed. There is a “speed line” set up at a company facility in Texas to install the fix, and a plan to install it on the production line, Van Ovost said. About 14 aircraft are affected.

There are now 38 KC-46s in the Air Force’s fleet, with two delivered to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C., last week. The service is still withholding some funds from Boeing based on the foreign object debris issue announced last summer. The Air Force and Boeing have agreed to five “gates” that the company has to meet to remedy the issue and free up all funding, such as reporting no tools lost or no FOD found in critical areas. One of these is still “open,” Van Ovost said, without providing specifics, and “we both agree, Boeing and the Air Force, to keep that one open until we show a consistent delivery of airplanes with the level of FOD that we’re comfortable with, which in many cases is zero.”

USAFE: Move of Airmen, F-16s From Germany Still in Planning Stages

Sept. 14, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

About two months after the Pentagon announced the plan to pull thousands of troops from Germany, including the F-16 presence at Spangdahlem Air Base, the head of U.S. Air Forces in Europe said the move is still in the planning stages, with the goal to avoid mitigating current operations.

The Pentagon and U.S. European Command on July 29 announced the military would move 11,900 personnel out of Germany, including moving the 52nd Fighter Wing F-16s to Aviano Air Base, Italy, and would cancel the planned move of KC-135s and a special operations wing from RAF Mildenhall, U.K., to Spangdahlem. USAFE boss Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian said his command “has a fair amount of work in front of us” to understand the details of the move to Aviano, and to ensure the infrastructure is ready to take in the jets.

Aviano already has two F-16 squadrons, along with two rescue squadrons, and USAFE needs to determine how to work the new squadron in to the operational plans there and how they can operate in a new region that doesn’t have the same amount of space or range access that Spangdahlem has.

“From a fighter perspective, there’s some synergies to be gained from that,” Harrigian said. “I think we’re going to have to balance that with location and how we would operate. But that’s all part of the analysis that we’re working through right now. I think importantly, as we work through this though, we want to make sure that we’ve got the appropriate facts understood, we want to make sure that we remain closely aligned with our host nation partners, keep them informed, remain transparent about all this and acknowledge the fact that this is gonna take some time.”

Additionally, USAFE and local leaders want to make the move in a way that minimizes the impacts to the Airmen and their families who will have to move.

“Most importantly to us as we work through all this is to make sure that as we refine and develop the plan today, that we take our Airmen and their families into consideration and lay this out in a manner that we’re very transparent about it, they know what their future looks like, we manage impacts to their families, their kids, such that while we continue to deliver the mission, we also do this in a way that takes care of … our Airmen and their families.”

The 100th Refueling Wing and the 352nd Special Operations Wing had long been tapped to move from Mildenhall to Spangdahlem, but Harrigian said that analysis and input from other “stakeholders” showed that it “made sense” to keep the wings at their current home, “particularly given the great support that we get there, and the infrastructure that we already have and invested in, and the fact that we know as we work through the dynamics of an [area of operations] that’s consistently changing that we needed to retain some of the flexibility with a diversity of bases across Europe.”

Keesler at HURCON 3 as Hurricane Sally Moves on Gulf Coast

Sept. 14, 2020 | By John A. Tirpak

Keesler Air Force Base, Miss., stepped up its hurricane preparedness level to HURCON 3, warning base personnel to expect potentially destructive winds within 48 hours, as Hurricane Sally veered north on Sept. 14. Sally is a slow-moving but rapidly strengthening Category 1 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico with winds up to 90 mph, and which may become a Category 2 storm before making landfall in Mississippi on the morning of Sept. 16.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration posted hurricane warnings for the entirety of the Mississippi and Alabama coasts and the southeastern coastal areas of Louisiana on September 14, and tropical storm warnings for the western Florida panhandle. The hurricane warnings affect Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans and Keesler, while the tropical storm warnings affect Florida facilities at Hurlburt Field, Eglin Air Force Base, and Tyndall Air Force Base.

An Air Force Reserve WC-130J “hurricane hunter” aircraft from Keesler has flown into the storm to characterize it.

NOAA said Sally could bring between eight and 16 inches of rain to the Gulf Coast, with as much as 24 inches closest to the storm center. The hurricane could produce an 11-foot storm surge in some areas, and the National Hurricane Center said severe flash floods across the region are likely.

The local National Weather Service office in Mobile, Ala. posted warnings of dangerous surf and severe rip currents off the Mississippi coast, urging residents to stay out of the water and off the beaches.

HURCON 3 alerts Airmen and their families that they should secure loose objects outside their homes, take protective measures, stay tuned for status alerts, and make preparations for possible evacuation or moving to a shelter.

The Air and Space Forces Want to Break the Mold. Here’s How They’re Starting.

Sept. 14, 2020 | By Rachel S. Cohen

The Department of the Air Force’s top officers are beginning to lay the groundwork for changes to how they manage and provide air and space forces to commanders around the world.

In his first month as Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. has warned that the service needs to overhaul its inventory and quicken the pace of warfare, or risk falling behind other global powers.

To get after that goal, the service’s operations policy team is thinking of new ways to bring in, train, and employ Airmen for global operations, Brown said. Their findings may affect the fiscal 2022 budget request, which is due early next year, and could soon shape deployments overseas.

“Under the leadership of [Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Lt. Gen. Joseph T. Guastella Jr.], we’re going to conclude that sprint, sit down with Gus on Friday, and say, when are we going to get this thing done so we can go ahead and deliver?” Brown said Sept. 14 during AFA’s virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference. “My goal is to get this done by the end of the year. We want to make our force generation and force presentation model easy for us to understand and to articulate inside our Air Force, [and] easy to understand in our joint force.”

The plan could debut around the same time as the Joint Staff’s fresh take on joint warfighting, due out in December. Some new ideas will roll out at this fall’s Corona meeting of the service’s top generals, Brown added.

The Air Force is also considering a shakeup of its Air Staff to update how it handles policy areas from manpower to nuclear operations. Those changes could mirror how Air Combat Command has streamlined its intelligence and cyber forces as well as its various fighter, attack, search-and-rescue, and other aircraft.

Proponents say combining pieces of the Air Force make Airmen consider how various fields connect and how they could affect or bolster each other in combat. Brown has foreshadowed hard decisions ahead to cut certain aircraft and other parts of the force. He wants to focus on what’s most valuable for fights against digitally savvy, advanced militaries like Russia and China, like smarter sustainment, technology-driven training, and evolutions in unmanned aircraft, artificial intelligence, and networking.

“It’s better to have a force of quality than a force of quantity that is missing parts like manpower, sensors, command and control, weapon systems, and sustainment,” he said.

Brown stressed that internal Air Force reorganizations should complement work underway on the Joint Staff and in the other services to best reflect the roles and missions of each.

“We do have some overlap. Some of that’s good, but some of it may be redundant. We need to eliminate some of those redundancies,” he said. “It may drive some levels of reorganization, and if we do reorg, form must follow function. Any efficiency we gain, we need to turn into an opportunity to repurpose manpower, so we can put that manpower against emerging missions or underresourced missions.”

At the same time, the Air Staff can also learn from how the Space Force is standing up its own policy shop for the first time. Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s operations boss, told Air Force Magazine on Sept. 11 that he is avoiding the traditionally separate offices used for operations, cyber, and nuclear policy.

Instead, he wants to split staffers into three areas: those who track current operations and geopolitical conditions, those who analyze that data to see how it affects the force, and those who plan for the future.

It’s a more holistic approach to combat planning than the military usually employs, and Saltzman hopes it will make the Space Force faster and smarter.

“The ‘what’ bin, they’re the ones that are collecting all the information. What’s going on in the world? What are the conditions that are affecting us? What’s the environment look like? What missions are going on? What are the people doing? What’s the adversary doing? … So we have situational awareness about all of the activities that affect the Space Force and its mission,” Saltzman said.

“The ‘so what’ is making meaning out of that. What are the impacts? If the Russians are conducting this exercise, what does it mean for the Space Force? What does it mean for the joint force? If there’s an environmental condition, whether it’s a hurricane or whether it’s space weather that’s affecting us, how is it affecting us?” he continued.

The “what next” team comes up with courses of action and force management ideas to improve the service’s training, resources, and organization.

“I’m not looking at the badges they’re wearing or what job they had before they came to the staff,” Saltzman said. “I’m taking all of that expertise and dividing them along those three lines.”

He added that Space Force deployments won’t change much in the short term. Most space missions, from satellite operations to rocket launches, are handled from control centers on domestic soil.

Airmen with the 16th Expeditionary Space Control Flight and the 609th Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, became the first deployed service members to join the Space Force on Sept. 1. Those Airmen handle work such as finding and analyzing electromagnetic interference with U.S. satellites that affects operations in the Middle East.

“Right now, with our current capabilities, it’s just one of our mission sets, or just a small handful of our missions that we actually need to go overseas to perform. The vast majority of the capabilities, we can do from our garrison locations,” Saltzman said. “Because the numbers are so small, we don’t have to go through a radical shift in how we deploy. We still leverage the Department of the Air Force capabilities for assigning and determining what are the requirements, and then we deploy people as necessary, if they have to go to a forward location to accomplish their mission.”

That could change as the Space Force matures and gains new abilities over time, he added.

Keeping Innovators, After Attracting Them, Means Crossing the “Valley of Death”

Sept. 14, 2020 | By John A. Tirpak

Making investment money available to small companies and startups will attract them to defense work, but the results have to be transitioned to real programs to keep them in the game, acquisition panelists said at AFA’s virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

Lt. Gen. Duke Richardson, USAF’s top uniformed acquisition official, said the service is seeing success in expanding “partnerships with companies and research institutions that don’t normally work with government.” Targeting USAF money and steering investment capital to new entrants is paying off, he said, because “we’re definitely hitting a lot small businesses that have never received” an Air Force contract before.

However, it must be kept squarely in mind that the goal is to “actually transition things to the warfighter,” and projects must have “a very strong pull” from a major command or combatant commander. The results of prototyping have to “cross the Valley of Death,” he said, referring to the frequent problem of prototypes or experiments that succeed but don’t become a program of record because no one from a combat command actually asked for them.

However, “We have to prove to ourselves that what we’re doing makes sense,” Richardson said. “We have to show that we can make timely awards, and we have to deliver to the field.” If an investment doesn’t bear fruit in a couple of years, “we have to ask tough questions, like…why?”

Trae Stephens, executive chairman of Anduril, said the approach is the right one. “We are a nation of inventors,” he said; “a nation of entrepeneurs.” Being able to “tap into” the commercial market “is incredibly important to our future success.”

Venture capital works differently than other investments, and illustrates what the Air Force is aiming for, he said. “If we invest in 100 companies, we’re very happy if we have one or two that end up succeeding, and we fully expect that 90-plus percent will probably go to zero.” That’s OK, he said, because “if you get a multi-billion dollar return from your one winner, it doesn’t really matter that you lost five or $10 million over and over in finding that company.”

For this to work—“finding that one company”—the Air Force needs to take a “‘Field of Dreams’ approach: If you build the ecosystem…the infrastructure, to bring new entrants into the space, they will come.”

However, he added that if USAF fails to transition what it comes up with to real systems, those new entrants “will disappear.” That, he said, marks a “tremendous risk.”

The Air Force is telling the world “we are open for business,” but capital has to be available and growth has to be encouraged. And, there has to be a demonstrated payoff that investors can clearly see.

There’s also a risk “of falling into a ‘Howard Hughes’ model … of entrepreneurship,” Stephens said, where “the winners get to be winners and the losers are just guaranteed to be … losers from the beginning.” Some of the more significant “new entrants,” he said, “were founded by billionaires,” such as SpaceX, Anduril, and Palantir.

It’s “incredibly important” to be clear about how the “winners” will be selected, he said.

“There’s a long history” of the Defense Department insisting it doesn’t want to pick winners and losers, Stephens observed, but “the only way venture capital is going to stay involved as an asset class is … if we’re intentional …about picking winners, and making sure those winners scale to a place where there is equity value to be gained from their success.”

He also noted that whereas U.S. military dominance has previously been built on things like ships, spacecraft, or kinetic weapons, the “skill sets” for future victory are to be found in those specializing in artificial intelligence and autonomy, and those people “are sitting inside of the large tech companies, optimizing ads.” Those experts have to be attracted back “into working on issues of national strategic importance,” and “the jury’s still out” on whether or not that can be accomplished.

Lt. Gen. John F. Thompson, head of the Space and Missile Systems Center, said the number of “small to medium” companies doing prototyping, experimentation and demonstration for the Air Force and Space Force is growing rapidly. The Air Force has increased its bankroll for this effort from just $100 million last December to $500 million early in 2019, and USAF acquisition chief Will Roper, convinced even that was “not going to be enough,” has since raised it to $1.4 billion.

As a result, “at SMC today, with that $1.4 billion ceiling, we have 411 members of the space enterprise consortium; 330 of them are non-traditional to the defense industrial base. We’ve awarded 75 different prototyping contracts worth over $830 million, and we’ve been able to do it in a timeframe that’s 36 percent less that what would be normally anticipated.”

Thompson also said that SMC has put strong effort at making clear how it can be approached with new ideas and proposals. “It used to be,” he said, that an ally or company without an existing relationship with SMC “didn’t know where to go,” but now “we did definitely identify specific entry points for anybody who wanted to partner with us.

He also touted the creation of an “innovation office” and outreach for international partnerships.

Now, if someone wants to pitch an idea, “we can put you in touch…with the entire SMC enterprise, not just one program office.”

Stephens warned that while the word is getting out that the Air Force and the Defense Department writ large are “open for business,” it’s important to understand that “when rational capital is not returned to rational financial investors, there will be a rational decision to stop playing ball.” He said “we should all remind ourselves, as we engage with this, to make sure that we do transition capabilities” into programs of record that pay dividends in production.

Richardson said USAF acquisition is restructuring itself to change the culture. Part of that is “how we promote acquisition people … so that they’re not just … focused on the big primes.” However, “we’re also looking at how we can make sure there’s a business case for the traditional folks” like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, “but make sure there’s access for those that aren’t in that category.” It’s going to take “persistent effort along all those fronts to get the returns” the Air Force and investment capital need.

Donovan: DOD Must Revamp Talent Management to Recruit, Retain ‘Digital Natives’

Sept. 14, 2020 | By Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory

If the Defense Department wants to recruit and retain younger Americans who speak technology and innovation as a first language, it must significantly change its approach to talent management, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Matthew P. Donovan said during a Sept. 14 session of the Air Force Association’s virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“This generation is the exact kind of talent we need to attract in our military and civilian workforce, but it’s also the exact kind of talent our corporate competitors are trying to attract,” Donovan said. “The department is in a growing war for talent, so we must improve our talent management for the information age if we hope to have a joint force that will successfully deter and win future conflicts.”

First, he said, DOD must take keep this younger demographic’s unique expectations in mind and figure out how to differentiate its offerings from those of the corporate world when marketing itself.

“I’m reminded of the value proposition of the Air Force that the Air Force extends to its members—the opportunity to work with amazing people, have access to cutting-edge technology, and make a difference for our nation,” Donovan said. “So while we may never match the salary of a Google, Apple, or some other modern industry, the calling to a noble profession is what enables our people to become self actualized and find real meaning in their careers.”

Next, Donovan said, the department must take a hard look at giving its personnel more flexibility to move between different military components “or even the civilian sector.” This means a few things, he said:

People should be able to shift from Active-duty to Reserve status and back again.
“Sabbatical should be the norm instead of the exception.”
DOD must permit Active-duty troops to take temporary service breaks to raise children, care for elderly parents, further their education, and/or accumulate more professional experience and return “when their situation permits, without penalty.”

Third, Donovan said, DOD must embrace “digital modernization across the entire department.”

While this is necessary to guarantee that members of this younger demographic—whom he characterized as “Digital Natives”—get “access to cutting-edge technology,” it’s also crucial for keeping the U.S. technologically competitive, he said.

“Because [of] some of our foundational analog practices, we’re at risk of falling behind our competitors as they readily adapt to the speed of technology,” he said.

The U.S. military might be the world’s most capable, but its enemies are aware of its weaknesses, Donovan said. As a result, he explained, they’re on an aggressive hunt for “ways to find gaps and seams to exploit vulnerabilities in ways not necessarily kinetic, but just as damaging.”

“We cannot rule out [that] in some cases, our adversaries may already be at a level of technological overmatch,” Donovan said.

DOD can take the first steps towards modernizing “for the digital future” by increasing the digital awareness of its existing digital workforce and recruiting “digital-savvy” talent. In the long run, though, the Pentagon must create a “digitally centric” and “database- and results-driven” culture.

“For DOD and the Department of the Air Force, we have a great opportunity in front of us,” he said. “There is a lot of work to be done, but it is our imperative to lay the foundation so future generations can operate as a technologically advanced force, empowered to be strategically ready, globally relevant, and flexibly sustainable.”

Air Force Introduces e-Planes for the Digital Era

Sept. 14, 2020 | By Rachel S. Cohen

For nearly 80 years, experimental X-planes have been the marker of cutting-edge aerospace technology. Now, the digital age is ushering in a new kind of aircraft: the eSeries.

The Air Force and Space Force will begin adding “e” to the names of aircraft, weapons, and satellites that are designed and tested using digital engineering, Air Force Secretary Barbara M. Barrett said Sept. 14 at the Air Force Association’s virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“For 73 years, the entire history of the Air Force, X-planes have represented technological innovation,” Barrett said. “Today, the e-plane and e-sat will join them in making history and ensuring Airmen and space professionals have modern tools to protect our nation.”

Digital engineering uses advanced computer modeling and simulation, and technology like virtual and augmented reality, to quickly draw up hardware blueprints and vet how various configurations would work in the real world without building a physical prototype. Modern digital engineering is more accurate and reliable than the computer-assisted development of the past, and proponents say it cuts costs as well.

The military is betting that classifying assets in a new way to reflect changes in development and manufacturing will inspire the defense industry to adopt those techniques.

“The service acquisition executive will determine whether an acquisition program meets the digital acquisition threshold,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said. If a system qualifies for the ‘e’ in development, it will drop the designation when it begins production.

Aircraft like the EA-18G Growler and E-8C Joint STARS use an uppercase E to name planes that are modified with electronic devices for electronic warfare, airborne early warning radar, and airborne command and control missions, as well as tactical data communications links for manned flight.

Boeing’s Red Hawk trainer jet is the first plane to earn an “e” designation, as the eT-7A.

“Can something fly thousands of hours before it takes off, be laid out and assembled hundreds of times before any metal is even cut?” the Air Force said in a video about the Red Hawk. “Can something be designed, built, and tested, not by thousands of people, but by fewer than 200, using leading-edge design tools across a digital landscape, connected virtually across the globe? It can. It was.”

Named for the red-tailed aircraft flown by the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II as well as the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter plane, the $9.2 billion eT-7A jet will serve as the training platform for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and other advanced aircraft.

The first of at least 351 Red Hawks is slated for delivery in 2023, five years after Boeing won a $9.2 billion contract to build the program’s planes, simulators, and other equipment. The company argues digital engineering has made the development process more effective and efficient.

“New 3D modeling software meant the company could create a digital twin, test performance in virtual wind tunnels, and make adjustments rapidly, without having to bend metal,” Air Force Magazine reported in June 2019.

Air Force acquisition boss Will Roper has pushed the service to embrace digital engineering as a way of adapting to emerging threats and adding in promising upgrades. Roper’s “Digital Century Series” idea—a plan to come up with new aircraft designs every few years and build them in small batches—relies on speedy engineering techniques.

Digital engineering “brings a high level of fidelity, and not just in the design of the aircraft,” he told Air Force Magazine last year.

“It’s the assembly line, where people are doing work; what work is being done; the machines that do the work; the tooling. All digitally modeled, so you can optimize it,” he said. “You can get expensive tooling out if you can find a better substitute. You can change a process from requiring an artisan with years of training to one requiring a lower skill level.”

Other ongoing programs like the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, which the service often touts as a model for future research and development, could see the “e” designation as well.

In her first speech at AFA’s major annual conference since becoming secretary last November, Barrett also touted the Air Force’s top four priorities for the coming year: maturing the Space Force, strengthening ties with allied and partner countries, supporting military personnel and their families, and modernizing the inventory.

“Our air and space professionals, and the families who stand by them, are our greatest asset and our future,” she said. “We are committed to cultivating a culture of trust, respect, and inclusivity, and developing leaders to overcome the demands of the future.”

Bomber Task Force Sends B-1s to the Arctic, Near Africa

Sept. 11, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

Three B-1Bs flew a long-range bomber task force mission on Sept. 10, starting from Texas and transiting through the East Siberian Sea near the Arctic before touching down at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, to prepare for more missions, U.S. European Command announced.

The three Lancers, from the Reserve 345th Bomb Squadron at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, flew the 14-hour, 4,300-nautical-mile mission into the easternmost section of EUCOM’s area of responsibility, the command said in a release. The task force mission comes as B-52s are already deployed to EUCOM as part of another bomber task force.

It is the first time a Reserve unit has flown a European bomber task force mission, according to the command.

“The mission, which complemented the deployment of six B-52s to RAF Fairford in England, showcased how U.S.-based assets can be employed to achieve an operational objective on USEUCOM’s eastern and western flanks,” the command said.

Two days before the B-1 mission, two of the B-52s deployed to Fairford, then flew south and trained alongside Tunisian Air Force F-5s over the Mediterranean Sea.

“Our ability to conduct these missions with our African partners enhances our interoperability and collective responsiveness to ensure security and stability prevails within the African continent,” U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Bradford J. Gering, U.S. Africa Command deputy director of operations, said in a release.