New Report: Electrical Issue, Poor Weather Led to Fiery F-16 Crash in S. Korea Last Year

May 16, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

An electrical power disruption wreaked havoc on an F-16’s flight and navigation instruments, and poor weather meant the pilot had no other way of gaining his bearings, resulting in a fiery crash in South Korea last year that destroyed the $29 million aircraft, according to a new U.S. Air Force report.

South Korean broadcasters released dramatic CCTV footage of the May 2023 mishap, which showed the pilot ejecting safely before the crash, but the cause of the incident was unclear at the time.

In a report released May 16, an Air Force Accident Investigation Board “did not find the [pilot] to be causal” to the crash.

The pilot and F-16 were from the 8th Fighter Wing at Kunsan Air Base, but they took off from Osan Air Base at around 9:30 a.m. local time on May 6, 2023, as part of a four-ship formation participating in a local exercise. The weather was rainy and too cloudy for the pilot to see his flight lead ahead of him and he had to use his radar to lock on.

Using data from the aircraft’s “black box,” investigators determined that just 11 seconds after takeoff, the F-16 experienced a partial electrical power issue. The exact cause of the problem will never be known, investigators said.

“Given the lack of available evidence, and the many potential causes of the partial electrical failure, to include any piece of electrical equipment or any stretch of wiring, it is not possible to determine the actual cause of the electrical power loss,” they wrote.

Regardless, in rapid succession—less than 30 seconds—essential systems started to fail, including:

the Inertial Navigation System, “which displays flight data such as aircraft heading and relation to the horizon,” the report states

the Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System (Auto-GCAS), which allows the aircraft to take over from the pilot if it senses it is about to crash

the Data Entry Display, which shows data inputted by the pilot

the horizon or attitude indication lines, or “pitch ladders” on the Heads Up Display

Communication with anyone outside the aircraft

All this prevented the pilot “from being able to accurately tell where the horizon (i.e. wings level attitude) is with his primary horizon display … from changing his navigation equipment settings and … from initiating an automatic aircraft recovery.”

While the systems did not display warning messages, the pilot recognized that the data from his primary horizon display, particularly airspeed and attitude, were inaccurate. A brief break in the clouds allowed him to fly using visual cues, but upon re-entering the bad weather, he tried to use the backup horizon display, only to find that that system was also displaying inaccurate data.

“Multiple attempts to try and determine where the horizon was by cross-checking between the primary and standby [Attitude Directional Indicator] were unsuccessful,” the report states. The investigators indicated the pilot was largely helpless at that point, and compared the situation to “when you push on the gas in a car and expect the speed to go up, but the speed goes down.”

By the time the aircraft dipped below the cloud cover, the pilot determined he was flying too low and at too steep of an angle to recover and ejected at 710 feet above ground level, less than three minutes after takeoff. The aircraft crashed close to where he landed, in an agricultural field. Debris flew some 300 yards, and “there was a significant localized post-impact fire at the impact crater,” the report states, but there were no casualties.

The accident investigation board cited two main causes for the crash, with no contributing factors: the power disruption’s effects on the F-16’s instruments and the poor weather conditions preventing the pilot from being able to fly visually.

“The mismatch in data provided by the primary and standby attitude indicators, due to the power disruption, caused the [pilot] to become spatially disoriented and unable to maintain aircraft control in the weather and at a low altitude,” the report concluded. “The absence of either factor may have prevented this mishap.”

The aircraft was completely destroyed, with the damages estimated at $29.39 million. The incident was the first of three USAF F-16 mishaps in South Korea in nine months, leading to a brief pause in flight operations. Officials have said they do not believe the incidents are related. This is the first incident for which an accident investigation board report has been publicly released.

Services Eye One Terminal for All SATCOM, But Lawmakers Fear Lack of Coordination

May 16, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

The Space Force is working on a “hybrid” satellite communications terminal that can use multiple frequencies to connect warfighters with military and commercial constellations alike across orbits. However, key lawmakers are concerned the effort is too focused on the Department of the Air Force and want a plan to integrate the other services.

In a draft version of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act released by the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee this week, the Space Force received its full budget request of $228 million for research and development of a hybrid SATCOM architecture, including $168 million for prototyping and testing of terminals. On top of that, the committee added $2 million for the creation of a pilot program to demonstrate how the hybrid structure would work.

According to budget documents, the Space Force plans to test its prototype terminals “at three ground installations and on nine different aircraft types.” Prototyping and integration assessments for some of the aircraft types began this fiscal year, and the first integration work is scheduled to begin in fiscal 2025.

However, the House subpanel wrote that it “remains concerned that there is not a broader Department of Defense effort to deploy hybrid SATCOM terminals on platforms outside of the Department of the Air Force.”

As a result, the committee wants the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment to provide a briefing by February 2025 “on any efforts being made to coordinate the development of hybrid SATCOM terminals for platforms across the Department of Defense.”

As part of that briefing, lawmakers are asking for “integration roadmaps” for how each military department will deploy hybrid SATCOM terminals.

While it will likely be months before the 2025 NDAA becomes law and the final contours of the bill are still hazy, Pentagon officials typically respond to directive reporting language regardless.

As a general matter, the Department of Defense wants to operate with a common operating picture in the future, allowing easy and quick communication between assets regardless of service through its Combined All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort.

The Space Force is eagerly pushing forward on new forms of satellite communications. The Space Development Agency is building out its “transport” layer in low-Earth orbit. In its new Commercial Space Strategy, the service highlighted SATCOM as one of the top areas of emphasis for working with private industry. Companies like SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb are all building out massive constellations of their own that can provide connectivity. Pentagon officials enthusiastically support connecting troops with crucial data and comms from anywhere on the globe.

To make that happen, service members will need terminals to connect with the satellites flying overhead, but procuring them is no small task.

“If you have 100,000 user terminals or more out there that are being used by the services and our allies, if we required each one of them to buy new kit to be able to communicate with the satellites, it just would never work,” SDA director Derek M. Tournear said in April at the Space Symposium. “There’s no way you could keep up this rapid pace.”

To get around that problem, SDA has focused in the short term on connecting its satellites with Link 16, the standard waveform used by U.S. and allied forces to transmit data for years.

But relying on one waveform and one satellite network may not work for every mission or in times of conflict, and getting different terminals for every constellation would be costly and impractical—hence the push for “hybrid” terminals that can adjust as needed.

The Air Force Research Laboratory has been working on the problem since 2018 through its Global Lightning program. It was able to produce terminals that could connect with one commercial provider at a time, tested with “partners from across the Air Force, Navy, Army, Coast Guard, and Marines to achieve communications to several hundred ground users, ships, military vehicles, and multiple aircraft types,” according to AFRL’s website.

The Navy has its own hybrid terminal program, Satellite Terminal (transportable) Non-Geostationary, or STtNG—though, as the name suggests, that terminal is not meant to connect with geostationary satellites.

The Army, meanwhile, is working on what it calls the Next Generation Tactical Terminal to connect with multiple commercial constellations. Defense One reported the service hopes to award a contract for the program by the end of 2025.

“The Space Force is developing this hybrid SATCOM terminal, working with the other services,” Tournear said in April. But left unsaid was whether each service would design and procure its own terminals.

LaPlante: ‘Nunn-McCurdy Or Not,’ US Must Have ICBM Leg of Triad

May 15, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

Regardless of what the Defense Department concludes in its Nunn-McCurdy cost breach review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program, the U.S. must still have a land-based leg of the nuclear triad, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William A. LaPlante told lawmakers May 15.

The fate of the Sentinel, the successor to the Minuteman III, has been up in the air since January, when the Air Force announced the program had suffered “critical” cost and schedule overruns as defined by the Nunn-McCurdy Act. By law, the Secretary of Defense must certify that the program is essential and that no alternatives exist, or it must be terminated.

Regardless, LaPlante said at a hearing of Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, an ICBM will be required to meet the National Defense Strategy.

“The modernization of our triad is the top priority of the Defense Department,” LaPlante said. The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review “reaffirmed the need for a triad, so Nunn-McCurdy or not, we have a policy of our country having and sustaining a triad.” The other two legs of the triad are bombers and the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, which has also experienced delays.

Some members of Congress—notably Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.)—have offered legislation or proposals to skip the Sentinel program and rely on a dyad of bombers and subs for strategic deterrence, though several members voiced concern in the hearing with delays to the Columbia too.

LaPlante said he is “committed to working with the Air Force and across the DOD team to go through the letter of the law and make sure that if we do recertify [Sentinel]—and it’s not a guarantee—that we certify a program that is executable and will meet replacing that leg of the triad.”

According to law, the Pentagon has 120 days from the submission of its fiscal 2025 defense budget request to decided whether it will certify the program. LaPlante said the review process has “about a month and a half” left. He previously told another Senate panel the work would be concluded by “July 10 or so.”

The Pentagon must work with an independent review team to find the reasons for the 37 percent cost overrun and two-year delay in Sentinel. In a previous hearing, LaPlante declined to discuss any preliminary findings of the review but said he thought the program suffered from a lack of competition for the contract, poor communication between Northrop and its subcontractors, and a lack of appreciation for the infrastructure cost.

Kendall, who is recused from taking any programmatic action on Sentinel or B-21 because of a previous financial relationship with Northrop, has also noted that the Air Force hasn’t undertaken a project of this magnitude in nearly 50 years and lost much of its expertise in cost estimating for it.

Estimated costs have ballooned from $93.5 billion to $118 billion, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has warned that the final bill “may be worse than that.”

But LaPlante was adamant that the ICBM requirement can’t simply be dismissed.

“Apart from the Nunn-McCurdy, we need a triad,” he said.

Senior Air Force officials—including Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and acquisition executive Andrew Hunter—have said program estimators did not appreciate the scope of work needed on the civil engineering portion of the Sentinel program, which requires massive overhaul of the control capsules, silos, trunking, and other infrastructure associated with the new ICBM. Large amounts of material that were expected to be re-used from the Minuteman III infrastructure—such as concrete structures and cabling—are too worn out or decayed to be repurposed for Sentinel, they said. Most of those infrastructure elements date back to before the Minuteman III was deployed in the 1970s.

However, USAF leaders said, the LGM-35A missile itself is on schedule and meeting requirements. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the Sentinel enterprise.

Responding to questions from Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) about keeping the Sentinel on track, LaPlante said “a lot of the focus, assuming we go forward, is going to be really on the localities,” and ensuring that there is sufficient workforce and infrastructure across the three bases and five states where the U.S.’s ICBM silos are located.

Hunter, also testifying, told the committee there is tight coordination between operators and ICBM modernization director Brig. Gen. Colin J. Connor in ensuring the resulting system meets operator needs.

“I work very closely with Gen. Connor, who leads that task force,” Hunter said. “[I] meet with him on a very regular basis, as we go through the Nunn-McCurdy process. But of course we continue to execute that program while we’re going through the Nunn-McCurdy process. So that’s a key partnership.”

Hunter said the B-21, also built by Northrop Grumman, is “the best model for integrating our operators and our requirers, and that is the model we are looking to execute with Sentinel.” He said the Air Force has not yet “reached quite that B-21-level of integration yet, but we are well on our way. We have staffed up in the program office with operators from Global Strike (Command), both operators and maintainers and we are starting to see the benefits of that, especially as we go through some of the design choices that we have to make, to get to where we want to be with the Nunn-McCurdy process.”

Deployments of the Future: Here Are the First 6 Air Task Force Locations

May 15, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

As part of an overhaul of its force deployment, the Air Force announced six initial locations on May 15 that will test a new model.

Command teams leading new “Air Task Forces” will begin to come together this summer, complementing existing forces there, at the following bases:

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz.

Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

Joint Base San Antonio, Texas

Dyess Air Force Base, Texas

Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash.

Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base, N.C.

A senior Air Force official told reporters that the locations were picked for their ability to host the new forces without any additional military construction, to minimize cost, for their existing personnel, and for their proximity to training areas.

“These preferred locations meet the criteria for both space, certain skill sets, and distance to training ranges,” the senior official said. “The ATF locations will have a certain amount of sustainment forces, either there or close by, and the mission forces may come from somewhere else, or they may be co-located.”

An Air Task Force will consist of a command element with an attached expeditionary air staff and special staff that work directly for the commander and a Combat Air Base Squadron that does base support. Mission Generation Force Elements come in to project airpower, for example. Mission Sustainment Teams support those forces.

The six locations comprise two different rotations—two for the Middle East and one for the Pacific. The first three task forces will deploy in October 2025. The other three task forces will rotate in to replace the first batch of forces in April 2026.

The command element is roughly 50 Airmen at each location, whose units perform a wide variety of Air Force missions. The Air Task Forces will led by colonels, personally picked by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin, an Air Force spokesperson said.

Air Task Forces will range in size from hundreds to thousands of Airmen. The design of Air Task Forces is “modular,” Air Force officials say, so the size will depend on how large its mission generation element is—for example, an ATF could have one fighter squadron or several.

“What we want is the command layer and the sustainment layer to be capable of accepting forces really of any type,” the senior official said.

Air Force officials say ATFs are “experimental” and “a pilot program” for the future.

Air Task Forces will lay the groundwork for Combat Wings—in which units could deploy overseas from a single base—seen as the Air Force’s future deployment model. The overhaul is designed to present forces to the Department of Defense’s 11 combatant commands in a more cohesive and easier-to-understand way instead of pulling together Airmen into piecemeal units to meet the requirements of U.S. military operations. Underpinning the changes is the Air Force’s new AFFORGEN deployment model of six-month cycles during which Airmen prepare, train, deploy, and reset.

The change is based on a need to deploy forces that can operate well together more quickly, driven by the threat posed by China. It informed Air Force’s efforts to “re-optimize” for so-called Great Power Competition, though the planning for Air Task Forces predates the re-optimization efforts.

“This is kind of walking us back towards this model that we had during the Cold War, where we know each other, we trained together, we’re building the team in peacetime and in preparation for deployment,” the senior official said. “These teams are able to train together for much longer.”

However, Air Task Forces are just part of that evolution. The Air Force has already deployed Expeditionary Air Bases of units drawn from fewer units. The first XABs were deployed to CENTCOM in October, followed by a rotation six months later in April.

But while there were positives, Expeditionary Air Bases “isn’t exactly where we want to be either,” the senior official said. The Air Force still had to draw from around 60 units for those deployments.

Air Task Forces take the consolidation a step further.

“The ATF, the Air Task Force, is really three layers that will be constant, and that we’re trying to get from as few places as possible,” the official said. “This is one of those steps in the evolution.”

F-16 Demo Team Rolls Out 50th Anniversary Paint Scheme

May 15, 2024 | By David Roza

The Air Force F-16 Viper Demonstration team rolled out a new paint job on May 15 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first flight of the YF-16, the prototype that took off by accident from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. on Jan. 20, 1974. The demo jet features the same iconic red, white, and blue livery as the YF-16, but with a few changes such as “Viper Demo” and “20th Fighter Wing,” the team’s home unit at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., written on the tail.

Usually a paint job like this would take about three months, but the demo team and the Edwards-based 412th Test Wing managed to do it in less than eight weeks, according to a press release.

“When I was hired to be the commander and pilot in the summer of last year, I had made it known that I hoped to find a way to get our airplane painted in the prototype scheme to take America back to the beginning of the story that started 50 years ago,” Capt. Taylor Hiester, the demo team leader, said in the release.

f-16 paint — U.S. Air Force Capt. Taylor “FEMA” Hiester, F-16 Viper Demonstration Team commander and pilot, taxis at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., May 13, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Meghan Hutton)

The new paint job comes about four months after Edwards painted the tail of one of its F-16s in the same colors, also in celebration of the jet’s first flight.

“These custom flashes represent the 50-year legacy of both the F-16 and the 416th Flight Test Squadron team who ensure the Viper remains a dominant presence for decades to come,” the California base wrote in a Jan. 22 Facebook post.

Tony Accurso, a logistics manager for the 416th Flight Test Squadron who directed the F-16 50th Anniversary event at Edwards, served as a historical advisor for the demo team’s paint project. The 412th Test Wing’s corrosion shop used archival imagery to re-create each detail of the original paint scheme.

“Everyone at Edwards has a big sense of pride for not only supporting the Viper Demo Team but also celebrating the 50th anniversary of the F-16 which began right here at Edwards in 1974,” he said in the release.

f-16 paint 2 — U.S. Air Force Capt. Taylor “FEMA” Hiester, F-16 Viper Demonstration Team commander and pilot, flies over Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., May 13, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Meghan Hutton)

Photos released by the base show Hiester taking the newly-painted jet for a spin over Rogers Dry Lake. Half a century earlier, that same lake saw General Dynamics test pilot Phil Oestricher take the YF-16 down the runway for a high-speed taxi test. The aircraft reached a speed at which it became unstable, with its wingtips hitting the runway and throwing off sparks. Oestricher decided the safest thing to do was to take the jet into the air, where he flew a six-minute circuit before landing.

After a tune-up, the jet made its first formal flight on Feb. 2, 1974, but an investigation commended Oestricher for saving the prototype, according to Edwards.

In a 2012 interview with Lockheed Martin, the pilot said he had always intended “to put a little bit of daylight under the wheels, maybe a foot or two, fly it about a thousand feet down the runway, and land it, and in the meantime checking out the lateral or the roll response sensitivity.”

U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Elias Sanchez, F-16 Viper Demonstration Team dedicated crew chief, performs a show launch at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., May 13, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Meghan Hutton)

In the years since, the F-16 has proven itself an adept platform in air-to-air combat, close air support, suppression of enemy air defenses, and aerial acrobatics, as proven by the Air Force Thunderbirds and the Viper Demonstration Team. The team has a history of eye-catching paint jobs: in 2020, they unveiled ‘Venom,’ featuring a snakeskin pattern across the wings and fuselage and yellow snake eyes near the cockpit.

Like Venom, the new YF-16 paint job will no doubt turn heads at the 25 shows the team will perform across four countries this year.

“The only way that we were able to get started was with the support of the leadership at the 20th Fighter Wing, the home of the F-16 Viper Demonstration Team, who believed in the importance of this project and supported the vision that we had in mind,” Hiester said.

Make The Right Decision: Consolidate Space Units into a Single Component

May 15, 2024 | By Charles Galbreath

One of the expectations of the new Space Force is that it will be an engine for innovation and “do things differently.” Achieving that aim means overcoming institutional resistance. This is the central challenge as the Department of the Air Force tries to manage space missions that have for years belonged to the Air National Guard.

The Space Force rightly wants to consolidate the Department’s entire space portfolio. Resistance has been strong. But a measure now in Congress would formalize the Space Force vision to unify the space missions now fulfilled by the Air Guard into the Space Force. Congress should approve the measure to ensure military effectiveness, minimize bureaucracy, and restrain costs—all critical factors as fiscal realities collide with burgeoning mission demand.

The debate over whether these military members are best off in the Air National Guard, a separate Space Guard, or in the Space Force has reached a boiling point. But the facts show this is more a tempest in a teacup than the “existential threat ” claimed by some in the National Guard.

This is really a debate over 578 space positions that would merge into the Space Force under the revolutionary and innovative Space Force Personnel Management Act (SFPMA). All told, they represent about 0.5 percent of the 106,700 total personnel in the Air National Guard. Yet because of the small size of the Space Force, they represent about 6 percent of the Space Force, which now numbers under 10,000 uniformed members.

While many are debating whether the affected individuals should be absorbed into the Space Force or form into a separate Space National Guard, what is crystal clear is that leaving them in the Air National Guard makes no sense. Continuing to manage space units within the Air Guard is leading to disjointed efforts for the sustainment and employment of these forces. No one would put the Air Force in charge of units from the Navy—the organizational construct and supporting infrastructure simply does not align. The same holds true here.

The role of a military service is to organize, train, and equip forces. This is best accomplished by the service responsible for its specific mission domain—air, sea, land, or space. Because the Air Force divested its space missions to the Space Force, the Air National Guard no longer reflects the active component it supports. The continuing Air Guard-Space Force divide risks stifling developmental pathways for personnel whose mission is space. Considerations also exist to effectively allocate operations and maintenance funds to ensure the equipment and personnel are ready for employment. Splitting this responsibility between the Air Guard and the Space Force unnecessarily complicates the process, reducing combat effectiveness.

Congress intentionally established the Space Force as a lean service, consolidating mission essential elements while retaining support elements largely in the Air Force. It did so to unify previously dispersed space organizations to meet the growing threats to our nation’s indispensable space architecture. Folding the Air Guard’s nine space units, located in six states, into the Space Force is a logical continuation of that process.

Attempting to create a separate Space Guard for such a small number of units and personnel is simply inefficient. Increased overhead costs, delays in decisions, and duplicative roles would waste taxpayer dollars. Both the Navy and Marine Corps have proven they can accomplish their missions without the need for a separate Guard Component. The Space Force can do likewise.

The SFPMA empowered the Space Force to employ both full-time and part-time military personnel, a unique solution that bypasses the need for separate Reserve or Guard structures. Thus, the Space Force can fully leverage its ability to hire Citizen Guardians, preserving unique expertise and posturing for surge capacity when needed. In addition, this structure uniquely allows Guardians to transition seamlessly between full-time and part-time status over the course of a career, erasing the division between the active duty and reserve members seen in all the other military services. For Air Guard personnel, this is essential. It enables their voluntary transfer into the Space Force, ensures them the part-time flexibility they seek, and preserves their assignments in their home states. Concern about these two factors can therefore be laid to rest.

Service leaders arrived at this desired end state after extensive study. The in-depth analysis completed by the Department of the Air Force objectively examined three courses of action—retain the units in the Air Guard, create a Space Guard, or consolidate within the Space Force—against eight planning factors. It is the most comprehensive, fact-based coverage on this topic to date.

A few discerning factors from this report stand out—readiness, unity of command, unity of effort, and cost. Understanding the operational readiness and employment ramifications of each option and the ability to achieve unity of effort and command favor consolidation into the Space Force. Secondly, short-term transition costs and long-term sustainment costs must factor heavily in this decision. While there will be some transition cost for both the Space Guard and Space Force consolidations options, the long-term sustainment of a single component will likely be less expensive than maintaining dual tracks. Consolidation is the clearest path forward.

Nothing in this decision threatens the National Guard system. The Air and Army National Guard forces remain key contributors to the Total Force and our nation’s defense. Our nation does not need to stand up a stand-alone Space Guard just to manage these 578 individuals. That defies logic and good sense. Careful and thoughtful analysis has proven that. So now, nearly five years after the establishment of the Space Force, it is time to resolve this debate once and for all. We must not allow the “way we’ve always done it” to dictate the way we do things in the future. These space units and their personnel belong in the Space Force. Let’s put them there and move on.

Retired Space Force Col. Charles S. Galbreath is a senior resident fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Air Force Weapons School Celebrates 75 Years of Adapting to New Challenges

May 15, 2024 | By David Roza

In 1949, the Air Force’s new Aircraft Gunnery School opened at then-Las Vegas Air Force Base, Nev., with a group of World War II fighter pilots passing on their hard-won combat lessons to new crews.

Three-quarters of a century later, what is now the Air Force Weapons School has grown into one of the service’s premier institutions, a place where Airmen and Guardians alike can become experts in their weapons systems.

Celebrating its 75th anniversary this week, the Weapons School produces new classes of about 150 personnel every six months from Nellis Air Force Base. Initially focused on fighters, the school now teaches about bombers, helicopter search and rescue, cyber warfare, space operations, and much more, with geographically-separated squadrons hosting platform-specific classes across the country.

But despite the change, one thing has remained constant, current Commandant Col. Charles Fallon told Air & Space Forces Magazine: a commitment to keep being better.

“When you look at where we began, with very few platforms post-WWII, to where we are now, it looks like wild change,” he said. “But the one thing that hasn’t changed, from its inception until now and into the future, is that we are always going to adapt and improve. That is at the heart of what we do.”

Now, as the Air Force and Space Force prepare to fight a near-peer adversary such as China or Russia, the Weapons School is adapting too, with a greater emphasis on synthetic training environments, multidomain integration, and human performance, so that weapons officers can keep pace with the fast-moving world of military threats and technology.

“Not only are we looking to make really fantastic weapons officers, we think part of that is just making better humans,” Fallon said. “If you can make a better human, then that better human will be a better weapons officer, a better tactician. They’ll be able to answer their nation’s call to lead Airmen.”

U.S. Air Force tactical air control party, or TAC-P, Airmen participating in exercise VIRTUAL FLAG: Battle Management in a synthetic, joint combat environment, ensuring joint operational and tactical warfighter readiness in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, and eight distributed locations, Aug. 15-19, 2022. U.S. Air Force photo by Deb Henley

Synthesized Success

For most of its history, the Weapons School emphasized live flight training as the way to prepare students for real-world operations. Indeed, weapons officers helped stand up the first Aggressor Squadrons: dedicated pilots who imitate hostile “Red Air” tactics to better prepare U.S. and coalition crews for combat. But in recent years, synthetic training has allowed Weapons School courses to simulate large-scale, high-tech battles that may not be possible on a real-world training range.

“When I first went through the school, it was ‘pound on your chest, we’re going to fly, we’ve got to do it live,’” said Fallon, a career F-16 pilot who now flies the F-35. “Now there has been such great advances in the synthetic environment that you can create an ultra-realistic and, in some cases, more realistic threat representation in-scenario than you could in the actual real-world environment.”

Traditional simulators taught crew members how to safely operate an aircraft, but manufacturers did not always incorporate realistic threat simulation into their design, Fallon explained. By contrast, synthetic environments often allow multiple simulators from different platforms to link together and represent threats realistically.

Fallon likened it to video games, which often fall into one of two categories: arcade or simulator. In an arcade racing game, for example, players hold a button to make the racecar go forward, while in a simulator racing game, players must shift gears and adjust for weather conditions, tire traction, and a range of other realistic factors.

“All of our simulators up until now have kind of been that arcade mode,” Fallon said. “Now we’re getting into the real simulation mode where the synthetic environment is almost imperceptible from the real world.”

While not a replacement for live training, synthetic environments help emulate threats or stand-off weapons that may be too long-range for the restricted airspace above a training range, or assets that may be too expensive to bring in more than once a year. But it also helps with the day-to-day skills Airmen and Guardians need to stay proficient.

“I can go in the sim for eight hours and those individuals can receive hundreds of reps and sets that would have taken an entire year of training live,” Fallon said.

Maj. Andrew Hong, 32nd Weapons Squadron (WPS) phase manager and instructor, Capt. Stephen Baker, 32nd WPS Cyber Warfare Operations (CWO) Weapons Instructor Course (WIC) student, and Maj. Michelle Bostic, 32nd WPS CWO WIC student, look at computer monitors at the 32nd WPS on Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., June 10, 2019. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Bryan Guthrie

Multidomain Masters

The push for synthetic environments occurs as warfare becomes more multidomain: the first-ever Bamboo Eagle exercise held earlier this year featured air, sea, cyber, and space operators working together in an eight day simulation of an Indo-Pacific conflict. That melding between domains is also happening at the Weapons School, where Fallon sees students from different platforms working together earlier in the six-month curriculum.

“That integration continues to push left in the timeline, and you honestly can’t start that early enough,” he said.

That was not always the case at the Weapons School, which for its first 43 years focused exclusively on fighters. That changed in 1992, with the activation of B-52 and B-1 bomber divisions; followed by HH-60 rescue helicopters, EC-130 electronic warfare planes, and RC-135 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance jets in 1995; and a space division in 1996.

Today, the Weapons School features 21 Weapons Squadrons, focused on platforms ranging from intercontinental ballistic missiles to CV-22 tiltrotor transports. The F-35 embodies that fusion: a multirole fighter jet with cutting-edge sensors and electromagnetic warfare systems. Almost 70 percent of the F-35 Weapons School syllabus involves some sort of integration with another platform, Fallon said.

“That’s a wild change from other platforms in the past, and we would assume every platform that onboards from here on out is going to be very typical of that,” the colonel said.

The mind-melding culminates in the three-week Weapons School Integration (WSINT), the capstone element where students work together to plan and execute “every aspect of air, space, and cyber combat operations,” according to the Air Force.

The growing emphasis on integration also reflects that the Weapons School, never known for being easy, may become even more demanding of students, who are already expected to be Ph.D.-level experts in their own platforms upon graduating.

“It was a real shock for someone who’d aced everything to date to consider failing a formal course,” wrote retired Lt. Col. Dan Hampton about his experience at Weapons School in his 2012 memoir “Viper Pilot.” Besides a heavy flying schedule, he and his fellow students also had to juggle hundreds of hours of academics covering aircraft weapons, systems, and tactics, write a graduate-level paper, and then present it to their instructors.

“I used to fall asleep standing up in the shower at the end of the day,” Hampton wrote. “It sucked. I loved it.”

Still, part of the expectation at the Weapons School is to raise the standards, “so that every single class is more difficult than the class prior to it,” Fallon said.

“As our understanding of the pacing challenge continues to evolve, we continue to add on,” he said. “All the things that we have asked our graduates to do for the past 75 years, that’s just the norm. And then anything new is a growth on top of that. The old stuff doesn’t go away, there’s nothing that comes off the plate.”

The Weapons School plate has more on it now than ever before, but new advances in human performance could help students consume more and digest it faster to keep pace.

Human Performance

The Weapons School is often “the nexus of the latest and greatest technology and what things you can do with that technology,” Fallon said. “But for right now, it’s people that operate all of our technology, and so that’s where we really need to lean in and invest.”

Recent efforts include taking lessons from science and academia on how people cognitively behave and receive information. For the past year and a half or so, the school hired a contractor to perform cognitive brain mapping on students and instructors, examining their brain waves, stress levels, and their abilities to learn and adapt. The data so far hints that future syllabi could benefit from having time off or “very targeted recovery, rather than just ‘Hey, you’re gonna fly every single day for five days,’” Fallon said. “And then at the end of the week, we wonder why someone’s not getting better.”

Several hundred students and instructors are also tracking their sleep and daily routines through wearable technology, which helps them better understand how to perform at their best.

“We can’t continue to burn people out into the red and then wonder why they’re not getting it,” Fallon said. “We need to allow them to get into what we call a flow state, so that they can actually perform at their peak. Then we need to proactively work that into the syllabus, which is something that’s never been attempted here before.”

Maj. Justin Hargrove, 509th Weapons Squadron KC-135 pilot, Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash., wears the coveted United States Weapons School Graduate Patch during Deliberate Strike Night at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, June 16, 2016. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Kevin Tanenbaum

Beyond making sure students perform at their best in Weapons School, Fallon also wants graduates to keep improving long after they put on the school’s iconic patch.

“The real problem is once you put that patch on your shoulder, training in the Air Force literally stops,” Fallon said. “There are no more upgrades that I can put you in, there is no formal course I can send you to to get you more training in your platform.”

The default assumption, he explained, is that the patch-wearer is at the top of their game and the best of the best.

“My question is just, can you make them better?” the colonel asked.

Synthetic training could play a role by remembering an individual’s weak areas from past experiences, then targeting those whenever they hop in a simulator. The technology is not there yet, the colonel said, but once it is, it could ensure weapons officers retain their edge.

Inflection Point

The Air Force Weapons School has a 75-year tradition of excellence, one that Fallon is reminded of every time he walks through the front door and is greeted by a statue of Brig. Gen. James “Robbie” Risner, the Korean War ace who was shot down during the Vietnam War and helped keep up the spirits of his fellow prisoners of war at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

“That is definitely a visceral thing that physically hits you in the face every single morning when you walk in, and it really means something,” Fallon said.

Though Risner was not a weapons officer, every year a graduate receives the Risner Award for embodying the Weapons School’s values: humble, approachable, and credible, and for doing something “of great credit for the community and represents the patch the best,” Fallon explained.

Capt. “Zoom” Tucker, B-1B pilot assigned to the 77th Weapons Squadron, at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, prepares to board her aircraft for a night mission during a U.S. Air Force Weapons School (USAFWS) Integration exercise at Nellis AFB, Nevada, June 3, 2021. U.S. Air Force photo by William R. Lewis

The Weapons School’s heritage will be on display May 17 during a celebration of the school’s anniversary. In a separate event, the base will also rename the headquarters complex for the 57th Wing and 99th Air Base Wing the Gen. John P. Jumper Headquarters Complex after the 17th Air Force Chief of Staff who served as the Weapons School flight commander from 1974 to 1977.

Jumper will attend the events, as will Air Combat Command head Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach and U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, himself a former Weapons School commandant.

That celebration of the school’s heritage is well-timed, Fallon said, as the Air Force prepares for possible conflict against China or Russia on a tight budget and short timelines. Weapons officers from years gone by also had to adapt to challenges with limited resources, and “we can do that too,” the colonel said. “We can be those people.”

“This is a great inflection point for our institution and it is probably happening at the exact right time,” he said.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with information from Nellis Air Force Base clarifying which building will be dedicated to Gen. John Jumper.

Top Lawmakers Want to Slash F-35 Production, Put Funds Toward Test Capacity

May 14, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

Exasperated with the delays to the F-35’s Tech Refresh 3 update—which has held up deliveries of completed fighters since last fall—the House Armed Services Committee wants to slash the military services’ fiscal 2025 F-35 purchase by at least 10 aircraft and as much as 20.

The “chairman’s mark” of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, signed by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), yanks $1 billion from F-35 procurement, shifting about $850 million to cover the cost of adding another Cooperative Avionics Test Bed aircraft, making a “digital twin” of the F-35, and setting up another Mission Software Integration Laboratory. It also directs Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to implement a series of “corrective actions” on the program.

A staffer for a HASC airland subcommittee member told Air & Space Forces Magazine that “we are trying to get the attention” of the Pentagon and F-35 maker Lockheed Martin, “that we are tired of talking about [F-35 delays] and hearing excuses. … Once and for all, let’s get this thing straightened out.” He said the committee backs the F-35, but as the TR-3 is the basis “for everything to come, we need to get this on a solid basis now.”

The Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy requested 68 F-35s in the fiscal 2025 budget, asking for 42, 13, and 13 of the fighters, respectively. The draft NDAA will slice at least 10 aircraft from that collective buy, to 58 total aircraft—36 F-35As, 11 F-35Bs, and 11 F-35Cs among the services, respectively.

If the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Program Office make a series of corrective actions in the program that satisfy the committee, they can avoid cuts of yet another 10 aircraft. If not, there will be a further reduction to just 48 F-35s in total, leaving the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy with 30, 9, and 9 F-35s, respectively.

F-35 Procurement for 2025

Aircraft	2025 Budget Request	House NDAA with Corrective Actions	Without Corrective Actions
F-35A	42	36	30
F-35B	13	11	9
F-35C	13	11	9
TOTAL	68	58	48

The Program Executive Officer for the F-35, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael J. Schmidt, has testified in recent weeks that the pace of TR-3 testing has been slowed by insufficient test assets and numbers of programmers. Because testing is incomplete, aircraft manufactured with the TR-3 hardware/software package can’t be delivered and have been parked immediately after coming off the production line. An estimated 75 aircraft are completed and in storage at an undisclosed facility, awaiting delivery.

Schmidt has also said the Block 4 upgrade—for which the TR-3 is the basis—is being “reimagined,” with a new timeline that would defer many Block 4 capabilities to the 2030s.

Completion of TR-3 testing is now a year late, and Schmidt has testified that even a “truncated” version of the software—something less than the full TR-3—won’t be available until the third quarter of this year. Schmidt told Congress the F-35’s international partners have agreed to the truncated version of the package in order to get deliveries moving again, but government sources said a decision to do so has still not been made. One said the JPO is waiting “until the software is stable.”

Lockheed Martin chairman Jim Taiclet told financial reporters in April that the truncated version would allow pilots to practice using systems that won’t be fully operational until the all-up TR-3 comes long. He called it a “combat-capable training” version of the software. He also said only 75-110 F-35s out of a planned 156 will be delivered in 2024, although annual deliveries typically vary from the production figure.

Schmidt has said the fully completed TR-3 won’t arrive before 2025.

The delays have meant that U.S. and foreign F-35 customers have not been able to make a timely transition from previous fighters to the new ones.

A spokesperson for the F-35 Joint Program Office said “we are reviewing the chairman’s mark and look forward to working with Congress to keep the F-35 program ready to address national defense requirements.”

A spokesperson for Lockheed Martin said “we look forward to working with the Administration and Congress as the President’s fiscal year 2025 budget receives full consideration in the months ahead.”

The draft NDAA directs Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to create and submit a new acquisition strategy for the F-35, “with appropriate actions and milestones,” as well as a “digital twin” of the aircraft and its mission systems. A digital twin is a full digital model of the aircraft with all elements, down to the fasteners. These models are typically used to refine designs and facilitate upgrades.

The Cooperative Avionics Test Bed (CATB, or “CATBird”) tests F-35 radar, avionics and other RF systems. Congress wants a second one added to the F-35 test enterprise.

Austin is also to present an acquisition strategy to procure “at least one new Cooperative Avionics Test Bed aircraft for the F-35 enterprise.” There is one such 737-based “CATbird” now, which is government owned/contractor-operated, used to test radars, avionics, and other equipment for the F-35.

The Defense Secretary is furthermore to present a strategy to set up a new F-35 mission software integration laboratory (SIL) “to enable concurrent testing of TR–2 and TR–3 mission system hardware, software, and any existing or new F–35 capabilities.”

Neither a new CATbird nor a new SIL can be procured and built quickly. The CATbird is an extensively modified, bespoke aircraft, bearing an F-35 nosecone and wing elements and extensive evaluation gear. The original aircraft took over a year to modify. A new SIL will require a building and software engineers to fill it, at a time when the defense industry generally has complained about being able to hire programmers.

The HASC earmarked $200 million for the new CATbird, $350 million to create the digital twins, and $300 million for the SIL.

The committee also directed Austin to “implement a plan of corrective actions and milestones to resolve all deficiencies and recommendations” contained in the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation annual report to Congress. Among these were an insufficient number of test aircraft, cyber testing, integrating the F-35 with the Joint Simulation Environment, and logistics systems.

The committee additionally wants a corrective action plan from Austin that will “minimize F-35 new aircraft production interruptions and resolve all programmatic deficiencies” with its APG-85 radar hardware and software. Austin is to put into effect corrective actions recommended by the F-35 software Independent Review Team commissioned by Schmidt and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

Allvin: What Ukraine and the Middle East Have Shown USAF About Airpower

May 14, 2024 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

Air superiority still matters, but not necessarily in the case of Russia and Ukraine, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin said May 13, as he delved into the lessons learned from the ongoing conflicts in the region and the Middle East.

“Air superiority still matters, and we need to understand we’re probably not going to be able to do it the way we used to, nor is it necessary,” said Allvin at a Council on Foreign Relations event.

Allvin’s comments build on remarks both he and Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife have made in recent months, arguing that the service must change how it defines and pursues air superiority, an essential tenet of its doctrine.

The Air Force defines air superiority as essential, but its significance varies depending on mission objectives, requiring adaptable capabilities for commanders. Allvin argued that air superiority’s traditional significance has altered due to the evolving nature of warfare—a point he first made during the AFA Warfare Symposium in February.

Allvin said air superiority demands consistent capacity and coordination with other domains to fully exploit the battlefield, an area where both Russia and Ukraine have been lacking.

“Neither side has been able to have much of a continued momentum,” the general said. “Largely, because they haven’t been able to control from the air and be able to support a combined arms operation.”

And while the USAF is not involved in the conflict, the results carry implications for the U.S.

“The traditional idea of how American airpower is, we have used our airpower to roll back the enemy air defenses, and then freedom to and freedom from attack, and the airspace is ours for a long period of time,” said Allvin. “But it’s also not necessary, because if you have the ability to gain air superiority and synchronize it with the reason why you have it to enable a combined arms fight, then it’s still effective. But right now, neither side is able to do that, because they aren’t able to leverage that. And even if they could, the electromagnetic spectrum and electronic warfare is alive and well in that country.”

Modern aircraft rely on electronic warfare support to penetrate heavily defended air space. Experts suggest achieving air superiority over areas controlled by capable adversaries may require pairing low observable combat aircraft like the F-35 with electronic warfare capabilities.

Last month, the Air Force’s Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife, also explored the shifting dynamics of air superiority, citing the explosion of small, one-way attack drones on the frontlines of Ukraine and against U.S. outposts in the Middle East. Slife cited the defense of Israel against Iranian drone attacks in April as an example of an effective layered air defense, where the U.S. and its partners intercepted missiles and drones launched from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Allvin also cited the significance of the episode.

“There’s a lot that went into what turned out to be a quite successful response to the salvo that Iran tried, because, had that succeeded, that might have definitely blown the top off, but it didn’t,” said Allvin.

U.S. Air Force F-15E and F-16 fighters shot down more than 70 drones during the attack, which involved over 100 ballistic missiles, 30 land-attack cruise missiles, and 150 drones. U.S. and Israeli officials claimed to intercept “99 percent” of the drones and missiles, with Israel taking out the majority of the threats.

“There’s so much that went on behind the scenes, the actual the orchestration of the actual event was remarkable,” said Allvin. “It was mostly due to the work, the coordination that was done ahead of time.”

Allvin said broader U.S. efforts in the region helped “keep the Middle East from boiling over,” serving as a testament to the effective treatment of allies and partners in the region.

Air Force leaders have been consistently hammering home the importance of integrated air and missile defenses (IAMD) as of late. The U.S. and NATO allies have expanded the role of IAMD in exercises, citing the two ongoing conflicts that underscore the need to swiftly counter aerial threats and foster early collaboration.