Can Biocement Help the Air Force Build New Runways in the Pacific?

Feb. 29, 2024 | By David Roza

Hidden among the high-tech sensors, weapons, and other gadgets on display at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo., earlier this month were a handful of bricks that could someday play a key role in how the military projects airpower in a future conflict.

The bricks were not made in a cement mixer. Instead, they were made with a biomanufacturing process where naturally-occurring bacteria converts road salt and an organic compound called urea into biocement, a hardened surface that may be able to take the weight of a landing or taxiing aircraft or a heavy ground vehicle. Using biocement to build a runway or road in a remote location could shave months of prep time and tons of equipment off the traditional methods.

“We’re trying to reduce or completely eliminate the need to bring in the heavy machinery, the concrete mixers, the literal boatloads of things that go into traditional construction, and being able to build it in a relatively quick timeframe,” Mitch Meade, an analytical chemist and deputy branch and program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory, told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Biocement is a promising technology at a time when the Air Force is pursuing the concept of Agile Combat Employment, where small teams launch and recover from remote or austere locations and can move quickly to new airfields. Part of the challenge of operating from smaller airfields is that there is not much space to land or park an aircraft.

“Some of them are pretty bare,” then-head of Pacific Air Forces Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach said in 2020. “And so what you might expect is, it’s a runway with a ramp. And that’s it.”

Wilsbach later said in 2023 that PACAF wants to clear jungles from overgrown World War II-era airfields to get at the concrete and asphalt buried beneath.

“We’re not making super bases anywhere,” he said. “We’re looking for a place to get some fuel and some weapons, maybe get a bite to eat and take a nap and then get airborne again.”

Biocement bricks made with different kinds of sand and gravel on display at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo., Feb. 12, 2024. (Air & Space Forces Magazine photo by David Roza)

If the Air Force needs to expand runways, ramps, or roads, the usual process of making a paved surface may not be fast or lightweight enough to work in a Pacific conflict, where military airlift and sealift will likely be overburdened moving the rest of the force across the ocean.

“You almost have to build a cement factory and then all the infrastructure to lay down however much asphalt or concrete on top of that,” Meade explained. The process can take months.

Private companies have explored biocement for decades as a way to cut down on the carbon dioxide emitted by traditional cement production. It starts with S. pasteurii, a naturally-occurring bacteria that can be flown in or grown on site and is then sprayed onto the soil. Once it seeps into the ground, crews add calcium chloride and the organic compound urea. The S. pasteurii converts those ingredients into calcium carbonate, which binds the soil particles together into a hardened surface. The entire process takes less than 96 hours, though it can happen faster or slower depending on the soil and how often the bacteria is “fed.”

“Time is definitely the key factor,” Meade said. “We’re trying to build something as quickly as possible.”

The Air Force has been researching biocement since at least 2019. In the years since, landing pads made of biocement held up under CV-22s and a Navy MH-60S helicopter.

“Basically, you need an agricultural sprayer and some water tanks, so there is very little in materials you need to bring to the site,” Maj. MacKenzie Birchenough, a developmental engineer, said in 2019 about building a 2,500 square-foot prototype site with biocement.

Aircrew assigned to HSC-25 land a MH-60S on a prototype biocement landing pad constructed by Seabees assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (NMCB) 11 Det. Guam, Aug. 3, 2021. (U.S. Navy photo by Construction Mechanic 2nd Class Kevin D. Neal)

Tests with larger aircraft are still to come as AFRL works to “turn this from a biochemistry experiment into something an Airman could use,” Meade said. Researchers need to find out what kinds of soils, climate, and applications where biocement works best. Future tests will likely involve load carts, which can simulate the weight of an aircraft.

“This might be a great solution for one environment, but would something else work better in another environment?” the chemist asked. “Understanding where these things work best is a big part of the research we’re doing now.”

The goal is to answer those questions sooner rather than later, since military leaders are keenly interested in the technology.

“Any time you talk to a senior leader, their first question is ‘when are we going to see this in the field?’” Meade said. “Everyone we talk to, their imagination goes wild.”

Biocement is not meant to support a permanent airfield, but another advantage is that it does not require much clean-up. While calcium chloride does not dissolve, tillers can be used to turn the biocement back into native soil, which eliminates the need to dig up old concrete and ship it out. But could introducing a biocement-making bacteria have wide-reaching consequences?

“One question I get asked a lot is, when you put this stuff on the ground, will it turn the whole island into cement? Will it take over the world?” Meade said. “No, it will not take over the world.”

Space Force’s New Futures Command Could Reach IOC this Year

Feb. 29, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

RESTON, Va.—Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, the Space Force’s chief planning officer, will lead the project to stand up Space Futures Command, USSF’s fourth and newest Field Command, with the goal to reach initial operational capability before the year is out.

A “task force” of roughly 10 to 15 people will form this summer to help Bratton, who previously established and stood up Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM) beginning in August 2021.

That experience “nearly killed me,” Bratton joked, but it also armored him for the task ahead he said at the National Security Space Association conference on Feb. 27. Space Futures Command, introduced conceptually Feb. 12 by Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman at the AFA Warfare Symposium, will be responsible for understanding the future space operating environment and the technologies and capabilities necessary to ensure the U.S. maintains its operational advantage in the domain.

“I’m already pulling the team in place,” Bratton said. “This really is the benefit of the STARCOM experience. … The way we really did the whole Space Force, there was a task force, Task Force Tango we called it, that did all the thinking, and we followed that model for STARCOM: get about 10 or 15 people in the room, and have them figure it all out.

“So I think I’ve got the 10 to 15 people that will be in place here by the beginning of summer,” he added. “Some have to finish commands and jobs that they’re in. And I’ve got them a place to work, and then they’ll be up and running.”

Compared to STARCOM, Space Futures Command will involve more “pulling it together” than “building from scratch,” Bratton said.

Achieving rapid capability is his goal: “I think we’ll have the task force in place by the summer. I think there’ll be probably an early IOC this year,” Bratton said. “Gen. Saltzman and obviously the Secretary are worried about … who’s going to be in charge, but I think we’ll have sort of some sort of IOC organization certainly in place this year.”

By contrast, it “took nine months from the day I showed up to the ceremony” to stand up STARCOM. “This is easier than that.”

As Saltzman detailed at the AFA Warfare Symposium, Space Futures Command will be built around three centers:

The existing Space Warfighting Analysis Center: “We’re not touching SWAC, and that really is the biggest piece of it,” Bratton said.

A new Wargaming Center: “We have a lot of pockets of wargaming within the community,” Bratton said, including e long-running Schriever Wargame and Space Delta 10 inside STARCOM. Bratton’s team will focus on combining those pieces into a single organization.

A new Concepts and Technologies Center: This organization will be entirely new, Bratton said.

In addition to establishing the new centers and the command itself, Bratton’s team must also define how Futures Command fits into and connects with the rest of the Space Force structure.

“We have to draw some boundaries between the acquisition community’s responsibilities in this area and what does futures do, how do they influence investment in technology through priorities,” Bratton said.

Looking five to 15 years beyond the horizon, Space Futures Command will be chartered to ensure the Space Force is investing in and developing the right technologies and capabilities necessary not only to counter emerging threats, but to impose greater complexity and challenges for potential adversaries. That includes things like artificial intelligence, cislunar space, and in-orbit refueling, all of which would necessarily alter the calculus for rivals.

“Those are concepts right now that maybe haven’t been proven all the way through to military utility,” Bratton said. “We should be experimenting and doing demonstrations, and we are. Then, what process do we run that through to make a definitive or at least a sort of analytical assessment of military utility? I need to produce some analytics that show, through wargaming, through thousands of iterations of a war game, [what] difference that capability makes in the fight.”

An artist rendering of a Blue Ring spacecraft, a Blue Origin space vehicle being developed to provide in-orbit logistics and support. Blue Origin says the spacecraft could serve commercial and government customers in medium-Earth orbit and deep into the cislunar region. **Blue Origin**

New Vice Chief: Air Force Failing to Exploit ‘Decisive Advantage’ Offered by Data

Feb. 29, 2024 | By Shaun Waterman

The U.S. Air Force is struggling, and in important ways failing, to deal with the deluge of data that new digital flight systems are producing, missing out on the “decisive advantage” it could supply if properly utilized, the service’s vice chief told industry leaders Feb. 29.

In his first public comments since being sworn in Dec. 29, Gen. James Slife offered a negative assessment of the service’s tools, processes, and skills to take advantage of its own data—at the expense of potential benefits to training, operations, maintenance and logistical systems.

“We’re not at all organized, educated [or] trained, … we don’t have the right policies, we are wholly out of position to be able to take advantage of this,” Slife said at a lunch event hosted by the D.C. chapter of the defense vendors’ trade association AFCEA.

As a result, he said vast quantities of uncategorized, unindexed data were being dumped into the service’s cloud-based data lakes. “These data lakes have more unusable data than that which is actually usable,” Slife said, adding that, as a result, they’ve “become data swamps … with more uncategorized, uncatalogued information than any machine or human could use.”

Slife gave three specific examples of these failures, saying the Air Force could not:

Transmit, index, catalog, and use most of the huge data troves generated and recorded from the F-35.

Record the data that flows between the flight controls, navigation systems and communications equipment on C-17 cargo planes and other Air Force aircraft.

Centrally compile maintenance data that would provide warning about anticipated failures of low break-rate parts, which have to be manufactured in advance.

The F-35 in particular has been described as “a computer that happens to fly.” The aircraft’s flight systems, like its on-board radar, electronic warfare tools, and electro-optical targeting system, “provide a detailed, cohesive image of everything that [the plane] sees and senses,” explained Slife. All that data, many terabytes from each mission, are recorded in real time on a hard drive stored on the aircraft.

”There’s lessons learned built into that,” said Slife, “There’s mistakes than can be learned from in there, there’s the bad radio call, there’s the signal we’ve never seen before.” That data could be used “to feed our algorithms, to power accurate AI models.”

The problem, Slife said, is that “there is a high probability that every bit of that valuable data will never ever see the light of day. It will all be deleted and we’ll record over it the very next day.”

One reason is the sheer volume of that data is too much to transmit across the Air Force network.

“These files are too big for data piping between bases. That means we have to task our Airmen to hand carry hard drives [from base to base],” Slife said. Once the data arrives, it has to be indexed and categorized: “That’s a human job, manpower intensive,” which involves trimming “hours of transit time, unbroken horizon video footage where you’re just droning from point A to point B,” he said. It can take weeks.

There is also a problem with over-classification. As an example, Slife described a mission on which there is a single radio message about a B-21 taking off. “Now that whole mission [recording] … is classified at a top secret level” and can’t be used for training, he said.

“Frankly, our own culture of over-classification and protecting data past the point at which we lose the ability for it to become operationally relevant is part of the problem,” he said.

F-35 missions aren’t the only missed opportunities for the service, Slife added. Even on pre-digital age aircraft like the C-17 cargo plane, the flight systems are a rich source of data. All that data flows across the serial bus, a military standard part in every NATO aircraft known as the 1553 data bus that acts as a sort of telephone exchange for the plane’s various systems—flight, navigation and weapons—to communicate with each other.

“Every microscopic adjustment [of the flight systems] can be captured and stored, allowing for better mission reconstruction and more accurate aircraft data,” Slife said. “Failing parts can be identified earlier, cyber attacks can be detected,” but only if “we capture and use the data and if it is at our very fingertips. Right now if we’re not getting a single bit of it.”

Finally, Slife lamented the absence of a centralized mechanism for collecting and analyzing maintenance data. This would be especially valuable for so-called low break-rate parts—pieces of the aircraft that very rarely need replacing.

Older aircraft like the F-15 are just starting to have such parts fail, “and in many cases, we have no modern stockpile of those parts,” Slife said. It takes months or even years to recreate production lines for parts that haven’t been manufactured for so long, so the advance warning provided by maintenance records was vital.

“Right now, we don’t have any idea how many of those things we need and how often they will break,” Slife said.

The service does have maintenance data for those aircraft, “but it’s spread across multiple databases in multiple different organizations that don’t talk to each other. All the data is bifurcated and sent to different agencies around the Air Force and it’s too split up and disaggregated to allow us to make any predictions about the future,” he said.

To address these problems, Slife declared that he would become the “chief enforcer” for the service’s chief data officer: “I’m going to spend the next X number of years kind of being the designated hammer inside the Air Force on this topic,” he said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

air force force-sizing slife — Gen. James C. Slife, **Photo by Mike Tsukamoto/Air & Space Forces Magazine**

Air Force Must Rethink How to Achieve Air Superiority, Chief Says

Feb. 29, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

The Air Force must rethink how it views the concept of air superiority in the future, Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin said Feb. 28.

“It’s cost prohibitive to be able to say that we’re going to build enough Air Force to do it the way we did before and have air superiority for days and weeks on end,” Allvin said at a Brookings Institution event in Washington, D.C. “That’s probably not affordable. It’s also not necessary.”

Instead, a more pragmatic approach is needed, he said, with the Air Force working with other services to determine when the U.S. must control the skies.

There is a “cost imposition on us to do that all the time,” Allvin said.

The conflict in Ukraine, with a mutually denied air environment due to extensive air defenses, has led to limited fixed-wing aircraft operations. The Ukrainian Air Force has been stymied by advanced Russian air defenses, often inside the Russian Federation, which Ukraine has been prohibited from hitting with Western weapons. The war in Ukraine has also seen the proliferation of small drones and electronic warfare. That has led to much debate about the future of airpower.

But Allvin’s takeaways on air superiority are not just informed by the conflict in Ukraine. He said he is also considering the Air Force’s concepts for operating in the Pacific in the future, in which it will have to function in a dispersed way, at least on the ground.

“If we’re going to operate in that contested environment, we need to be able to move in a theater to be able to disaggregate for survival but aggregate for the greatest combat effect,” Allvin said. “That’s a different way of war fight.”

In the past, the U.S. military has operated with air superiority as a given. Military campaigns such as Operation Desert Storm were predicated on eliminating enemy air defenses before troops got into combat. In the counterinsurgency fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force operated in the skies uncontested.

“We would build our forces and then be able to roll back air defenses of the adversary, establish and sustain air superiority in order to maintain an unfair fight for a combined arms fight in all domains,” Allvin said. “Wars are unwinding faster and faster. This requires a different mindset for Airmen.”

“It’s a shift from saying, first we establish and maintain air superiority so we don’t have to worry about that, and we can do the rest of our operations within that, whenever and forever,” Allvin added.

The Army is also rethinking some fundamental concepts, ditching a new manned helicopter in the works in favor of drones and most recently unveiling a new force structure that places more emphasis on air defense, long-range weapons, and “multi-domain effects.”

All the services are attempting to align better under a Joint Warfighting Concept affirmed last summer.

“You don’t have air superiority just to have air superiority,” Allvin said. “It’s to enable other joint warfighting objectives.”

Allvin’s comments were not the first time he has suggested the Air Force may take a different approach to some of its fundamental concepts. During his State of the Air Force address at the AFA Warfare Symposium on Feb. 13, he said there would need to be “reinvention” of airpower.

Still, Allvin said Feb. 28 that he was not suggesting the service should resign itself to a future defined by mutually denied airspace, as in Ukraine.

“To me, it shows that airpower is still just as important as ever,” Allvin said. “If we intend to do operations from an area in which they are intending to deny us, then the way to defeat that denial is to be able to have a more effective … operation to where we can apply mass and apply superiority in a way that can overcome whatever they have in that given space in that given time, for that certain effect. It doesn’t have to sustain beyond that.”

Allvin Promises Quick Start to Some Re-Optimization Changes But Warns Others Will Take Years

Feb. 28, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

A number of the significant organizational changes the Air Force laid out in mid-February will happen “fairly quickly,” Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin said at a Brookings Institution event Feb. 28, adding the reshaping will be the central focus of his tenure. However, some of the changes may take beyond his term to implement.

Allvin said the service’s re-optimization aimed at competing with China that was rolled out at the AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo “will come in stages.” He also said not all the changes needed have yet been fully developed, that they are likely to evolve as they are made, and that it will cost some money to make them. Nevertheless, the changes to come are essential to keeping the service combat credible, he argued.

The re-optimization is focused on four basic pillars: developing people, developing capabilities, readiness, and projecting power, Allvin explained.

“I believe there will be parts of this, particularly the ‘developing people’ part … we will get rolling fairly quickly,” Allvin said, singling out the evolution of Air Education and Training Command to Airman Development Command as something that will occur “not too far down the path.” Changing the authorities to make that organizational shift is “easier to do than … building new enterprises.”

He also said the leadership is anxious to stand up the new Integrated Capabilities Command “as soon as possible, because the sooner we start that, the sooner we can start changing the way that we build our [program objective memoranda] and our budgets and developing the future force.”

Allvin didn’t offer a specific timeline for implementing the other elements of the restructuring—or what elements he thought would take the longest—but he did say the Air Force will gear up for major new readiness exercises in the near term.

“They’re going to come in pieces,” Allvin said of the revisions, which include creating some new organizations and merging others while shifting the responsibilities and focus of some commands.

“I’m only going to be able to do this for four years—as long as I keep my job—but it’s all I’m going to be doing. It’s the thing I’m going to do from start to finish,” Allvin said.

“I don’t know that it will be fully done, by the time I complete” a four-year tenure as the Chief of Staff, he said. But after four or five years Allvin hopes to see a “drastically changed Air Force.”

Allvin said there was “imagination gone wild” in the media and the service about the re-optimization before it was announced, but the changes announced are really about “enterprise solutions” needed to avoid capabilities and organizations that can’t work together or that don’t further the fighting ability of the service.

The last comparable reorganization of the Air Force came in the early 1990s, Allvin said, when then-Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak had to “solve for efficiency,” in downsizing the USAF by about 40 percent after the end of the Cold War. This new reorganization is driven by the need to “solve for agility,” Allvin said, by making the Air Force’s processes and decision-making more nimble and fielding new capabilities swiftly.

“We’re rolling this out without having the actual, signed official document of what the end state looks like,” Allvin noted, saying the Air Force “will learn along the way.”

“If you know you’re heading in the right direction, you can learn along the way [as] you get to a better destination,” he said.

For example, Allvin said he could not say how many Airmen would be in Integrated Capabilities Command, “but we also can’t wait for that.”

The service also will “engage stakeholders” such as lawmakers on Capitol Hill “who can help you get to the right solution.” Allvin acknowledged that the plans so far are “unsatisfying to some” because end-states have not yet been determined.

It would be “fairly naïve” to say the changes will come without cost, because “if you want to change the name on a sign, it costs money,” Allvin said. However, he said re-optimization would not be a “large fiscal burden” on the Air Force, particularly at a time when its resources are already constrained, and limiting the budgetary impact “is going to be key to this.”

Socializing the changes within the service is already underway, but Allvin said the youngest cohort will adapt quickly. He said they already understand what the Air Force calls “Great Power Competition”—the challenge of China and Russia—and fully expect the service to align with it.

It will be a tougher sell with mid-career people, Allvin said.

They “understood the Air Force that got them to where they are, and they understood the path. And now if that path looks like it’s going to be altered, there’s some unease there. So our job is to communicate with those Airmen to say, ‘There’s still a fantastic path for the future for you. It might be altered from what you thought, but it’s just as robust and it’s just as important.’”

He added, “they call it the ‘frozen middle’ for a reason. There’s this natural skepticism.” Service leaders “have some work to do,” to communicate the reasons for the changes, Allvin said.

Tornado Damages Wright-Patterson AFB and U.S. Air Force Museum

Feb. 28, 2024 | By David Roza

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with additional details from the 88th Air Base Wing.

Engineers are assessing damage at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force after an early-morning tornado struck the base on Feb. 28. Jaima Fogg, a spokesperson for the 88th Air Base Wing, confirmed on Feb. 29 that there were no injuries, but “it will take some time for a full report” of the damages. Photos showed extensive damage to historic buildings and aircraft.

The base commander, Col. Travis Pond, said in an initial assessment that the damage was isolated to the southern side of Area B.

“Our initial focus right now is on safety and damage assessment,” he said in a statement. “I can’t speak highly enough about our security forces, Fire Department, and civil engineer Airmen for their quick response and hard work to assess damage and determine a path forward for restoring operations as quickly as possible.”

wright-patterson — A photo shows a damaged T-33 jet trainer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, Feb. 28, 2024. U.S. Air Force photo

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Building 620, the Area B Fire station, and the privatized military housing community known as The Prairies was also damaged, and there a temporary power outage and closure around Gate 22B, but the base was otherwise operating under normal conditions.

“The 88th Air Base Wing does not have a flying mission so there was no impact to that,” Fogg added. “The 445th Airlift Wing operates from Wright-Patt but there was no damage to their aircraft or facilities.”

The public area of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force was not damaged and the museum operated as normal on Feb. 28, Fogg explained. The damaged hangar is used to restore aircraft for display at the museum.

Photos uploaded to the base’s Flickr page showed considerable damage to two Cold War-era jets, an F-104 fighter, and a T-33 trainer, and to the hangars behind them. The photos also showed significant damage to the entrance of an Air Force Research Laboratory building. The base did not immediately respond to questions about whether other aircraft or artifacts were damaged. Other photos showed workmen clearing roads of fallen trees.

The Dayton Daily News reported some injuries, power outages, and damage in the nearby town of Riverside, with one account of furniture flying out of a store window.

Wright-Patterson also hosts the headquarters of Air Force Materiel Command, which oversees the research, development, procurement, testing, and sustainment of Air Force weapon systems. The base also features The National Air and Space Intelligence Center, an airlift wing, an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance wing, and a range of other units and offices. The 100-year-old National Museum of the U.S. Air Force is the world’s largest military aviation museum and features hundreds of aircraft and spacecraft spread over 20 indoor acres and outdoor parks, according to its website.

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

Feb. 28, 2024 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feb. 28, 2024 | By David Roza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Officials: US Seeking to Expand Military Strike Coalition Against Houthis

Feb. 27, 2024 | By Chris Gordon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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