Maria Demaree, Vice President of National Security Space for Lockheed Martin Space, joined Air & Space Forces Magazine to discuss acceleration of tech readiness in space, such as new ways of powering satellites and Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).
The Space Force’s Polaris Awards annually recognize Guardians who best represent the Guardian Spirit. There are four individual award categories based on each of the core Guardian values—Character, Connection, Commitment and Courage—and a Team Excellence category that combines all four values. Air & Space Forces Magazine is highlighting each of this year’s winners before they receive their awards on stage at the 2024 AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo.
The U.S. Space Force selected the 22nd Space Operations Squadron (22 SOPS), Detachment 1 at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., as the winner of the Polaris Award for Team Excellence for embodying all four core Guardian Values—Character, Connection, Commitment, and Courage—in 2023.
A small team with fewer than 20 Guardians, 22 SOPS, Det 1, installs, operates, and secures the secure global network (SGN) in support of the U.S. Space Force and mission partners across the national security enterprise. Despite being 70 percent manned, the group executed more than 1.1 million patches and 16,000 tickets for more than 6,000 customers in 2023.
As the only Space Force unit in Montana, Detachment 1 has made its presence known in the state’s local civilian communities.
“In Gen. Saltzman’s C-Notes, he talks a lot about telling our story and about the importance of the relationship between the military and the civilian populace,” said Maj. Jared Myers, the detachment’s commander. “So [when] we received this strategic intent from our CSO, we felt like it was everybody’s job to be an ambassador for the Space Force.”
Throughout 2023, the detachment volunteered at 13 separate DOD STARBASE and Stem2Space events where they highlighted the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to more than 400 elementary school students.
Outside the classroom, the detachment helped install the Space Force seal at the Montana Veterans Memorial and presided over a Veterans of Foreign War ceremony where they helped raise the Space Force flag. Volunteers from the team also helped organize and participated in local state park and highway cleanups.
“I think the word got out in the community that our unit was kind of ‘hush hush’ and secret, but that doesn’t mean our presence needs to be hidden,” Myers said. “We really did make our name this past year and showed that, yeah, the Space Force is real. It’s important. Our country needs it. And being good partners with our community is a big piece of that.”
The unit’s amplification of the Guardian spirit was just as palpable on base as it was off. At Malmstrom, members of Detachment 1 voluntarily served as mentors for Airman Leadership School students, dedicating more than 50 hours to help train the local Security Forces in close-quarter battle, tactical communications techniques, and marksmanship.
The detachment also served in key positions in Space Force working groups, including one focused on career field education and training plans, and another for the Enterprise Talent Management Office. They also contributed to Space Operation Command’s One Guardian Tiger Team, providing support to help streamline inter-service transfers as new members cross over to the Space Force.
In pursuit of personal improvement within the detachment itself, the team implemented its own professional development program. During monthly and weekly team meetings, the detachment spent more than 128 hours discussing the structure of the Space Force and Joint Force, the geopolitical terrain, and space operations’ role in keeping up with the nation’s pacing threats.
“Being at such a low echelon of a detachment, a lot of my folks weren’t sure how the service fits together, even things like, ‘What’s the difference between a combatant command and a service?’” Myers said. “So it really brought up some great questions, and was a great opportunity to impart some fundamental knowledge, especially to my NCOs.”
Myers said his team looked for every opportunity to expand its knowledge and expertise. The detachment sent members to Space Flag, a tactical-focused exercise for space warfighters, and to Space 100, a professional military education course, where the detachment earned an 80 percent unit completion.
“I am very proud of the team for everything that they did, especially being alone and unafraid at a geographically separated unit,” Myers said. “Each held their own and did the right thing. So [the Polaris Award for Team Excellence] is super exciting. It’s a very deserving team.”
Meet the other 2023 Polaris Award winners below:
The Department of Defense has a “web of networks” problem: Reliance on the Joint Force’s current warfighting network, SIPRnet, has driven the combatant commands to create more than 80 distinct information-sharing systems. Because these systems are not integrated or interoperable, rapid digital communication at the speed of mission need between the Joint Force, commands and the nation’s allies is not guaranteed—a clear and present danger to multinational mission capabilities, rapid integration of assigned forces, and combat effectiveness at the tactical edge.
HII Mission Technologies, a global, all-domain defense provider, is developing a materiel solution to consolidate the complex web of networks into a single, DOD enterprise framework known as the Mission Partner Environment (MPE) Future State. This will modernize mission partner information sharing, providing data exchanges at machine-to-machine speeds to support human-to-human collaboration and decision-making. The Secretary of the Air Force’s Mission Partner Capabilities Office is leading the effort to deliver DOD MPE capability.
“MPE is really a capability framework,” said Lee Davis, a senior program manager for Mission Technologies’ Cyber, Electronic Warfare and Space business group. “It’s a software-defined digital environment that allows and enables secure, global information-sharing capability between the Department of Defense and its mission partners, to include our foreign allies and partners, to enable coalition operations.”
HII is approaching the MPE as a solution to a system-of-systems challenge that will improve “decision superiority,” allowing commanders across the joint force—at all echelons—to achieve their decision cycles much faster, share digital intelligence products in real time with foreign mission partners, and replace today’s manually-intensive processes, such as developing air tasking orders (ATOs).
That starts by taking the fight off a U.S.-only network, Davis said, because “tomorrow’s fight is a coalition fight.”
“Enter Mission Partner Environment as a sensor-to-shooter enabler,” he said. “In the [MPE], that coalition battle staff will be digitally connected … on the same network, enabling them to generate products at digital speeds as opposed to manually sharing products, and thereby [they can] achieve decision superiority. In other words, getting that [air tasking order] out in mere minutes, certainly not hundreds or thousands of hours.”
Davis said the MPE will break the traditional mold of sharing capabilities between the U.S. and its partners. Instead of “bolt-on fixes” for allies, the MPE will provide two game-changing advantages for coalition warfare.
The first is what Davis calls “common technical requirements,” a set of interoperability standards that will be “baked into” the MPE acquisition strategy from the outset and agreed upon between participating partner nations.
The second key advantage is scalability. Davis said the MPE is designed with “plug-and-play interoperability” from the expeditionary level to the enterprise level. The MPE will eliminate today’s industrial age net-centric roadblocks by providing a data-centric architecture, a more modern and cyber secure approach to delivering information at the speed of mission need.
“Whether I’m a warfighter in CONUS in a training environment, or deployed on a U.S. naval ship in an area of responsibility, or even offshore at a forward operating base, I can get access to that network and its data to meet my mission need,” Davis said. “The architecture is going to be built to accommodate information age levels of data volume we see now … across the entire architecture backbone, all the way from a CONUS location … to the tactical edge.”
HII recently took full responsibility for operating and maintaining the DOD’s Pegasus network, a secure information-sharing network between the nations in the Five Eyes Alliance. This is an important U.S. coalition capability that will eventually transition to an MPE-compliant Enterprise Management Framework.
The Air Force and DOD stakeholders are still defining the MPE future state. Beyond simply building the program’s architecture, the migration and integration process must be mapped out to avoid interrupting current operational capabilities at combatant commands. While the timeline is being determined, Davis said HII is busy gearing up for the revolutionary transition and proposal response to the anticipated government MPE solicitation.
“We’re building out our industry partner ecosystem [and] capitalizing on the engineering and architecture work that we’re currently doing,” he said, “so we can remove those [information data silos and the web of networks issue] from that future architecture design.”
An F-16 fighter pilot was recognized on Feb. 7 for saving his aircraft from a near-disastrous mishap two years ago. While taking off from Aviano Air Base, Italy on March 2, 2022, Maj. Brady Augustin felt his F-16 settle to the left on the runway. Too fast to abort, Augustin took off and rose to 10,000 feet so he could better assess the situation.
After contacting ground support, Augustin believed he had a blown tire, and he prepared to land using the runway’s arresting system. The arresting system is a cable that an aircraft can catch with its tailhook in an emergency, similar to the way Navy and Marine Corps aircraft land on aircraft carriers.
But as the pilot prepared for landing, an airfield management team made a startling discovery: a left main landing wheel still on the runway. Augustin was told to fly a low pass so the control tower could check out his landing gear. Turns out, he didn’t just have a flat—he was actually missing the tire entirely.
Without much gas left in the tank, Augustin had two options: eject or land the Viper on its belly. Belly-landings are a risky procedure, but Augustin is no stranger to stressful situations. In 2020, he received the prestigious Lt. Gen. Claire Lee Chennault Award for his work spinning up Aviano F-16s and Airmen for a no-notice deployment to the Middle East in just nine days, a process that normally takes months.
Now Augustin had to nail a life-or-death task and do his best to preserve an expensive aircraft. Murphy’s Law, the principle that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, had already struck a few times that day, but Augustin managed to put the jet down safely and with remarkable style.
A video of the landing appeared on the popular, unofficial Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco, where the videographer and several commenters praised Augustin’s smooth touchdown. Even more impressive, the pilot managed the landing with a combat load, including a bulky electronic countermeasures pod and other equipment hanging from the jet’s wings and belly.
“I’ve seen plenty of video of gear-up landings and this one was executed very well,” Gregg Montijo, a former A-10 Warthog pilot, told Task & Purpose at the time.
Nearly two years later, Augustin was given the Koren Kolligian Jr. Trophy by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin in a ceremony at the Pentagon on Feb. 7. The namesake of the award was an Air Force first lieutenant who went missing off the coast of California on Sept. 14, 1955, along with the T-33 training jet he was flying at the time. The annual trophy is the only individual flight safety award personally presented by the Air Force chief of staff.
“Maj. Augustin showed incredible skill and ingenuity in a difficult and dangerous situation,” Allvin said at the ceremony, according to a press release. “He was calm, cool, and collected—exactly what we have come to expect from our aviators and all the Airmen who have earned the prestigious Kolligian Trophy.”
Kyle Anderson, a member of the Kolligan family, echoed Allvin’s opinion.
“What may have seemed like any other day in your [Augustin’s] life, we view as an act of heroism resulting from the Air Force’s commitment to education, training and safety—and your skill, composure, and resilience under pressure,” he said.
For his part, Augustin seemed just as grateful for the training.
“It was an incredibly unusual circumstance that had a lot of different ways that it could have gone poorly quickly,” he said. “But due to the exceptional actions by the team at Aviano Air Base in Italy, we were able to salvage [it into] a somewhat normal crash landing and save an airplane, and we all made it home that night.”
The first four Ukrainian pilots training to fly the F-16 at Morris Air National Guard Base, Ariz., are “on track,” the head of the National Guard Bureau said Feb. 8, and the first batch of pilots are funded to complete their schooling. But Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson told the Pentagon press that Congress must authorize more funding to add additional pilots to the training queue.
Ukrainian pilots arrived in the U.S. to train to fly F-16s in September, first at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, for a crash course in English, and then beginning in October at Morris Air National Guard Base, Ariz., home of the 162nd Wing, where the day-to-day mission is focused on training foreign pilots to fly F-16s.
The U.S. and its allies expect the Ukrainian Air Force to achieve initial operating capability with its F-16s by the end of 2024, according to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander, who said pilot training was on track.
Hokanson echoed Wallander’s assessment, but added the caveat that without additional funding, things could change in the coming months.
“Everything we see right now, they’re on track,” Hokanson said. “Obviously as we get further on to higher levels, they may be more advanced or less. But we look at each pilot individually, because what we want to do is prepare them, as much as possible before they go back to Ukraine, to be successful.”
Pilots at Morris complete the six-month “B Course”—or Basic Course—to become proficient in the fundamentals necessary to transition to the F-16. That is the course the four Ukrainian pilots are now undergoing, a defense official previously told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Hokanson’s senior enlisted advisor, Air Force CMSgt. Tony L. Whitehead added that maintainers currently being trained on the F-16 will get resources to help them over the long term.
“Our standard operating procedures and [operating instructions] are translated for those maintainers, so they can make sure that the continuity of training can continue when they go back to Ukraine,” he said.
Such resources will likely be crucial, as officials and observers alike have noted that maintaining F-16s inside of Ukraine will represent a major effort in and of itself.
Building out a corps of F-16 pilots and maintainers takes time, though, and while Ukrainian personnel are also training in Denmark, the possibility of expanding training in the U.S. appears unclear.
“We do have the resources to continue the training that has already started … and hopefully get all of those folks completed later on this year,” Hokanson said. “Then if we decide to increase that, then obviously we’ll need the resources to train additional pilots and ground support personnel.”
Hokanson did not specify where such resources would come from, but lawmakers in Congress are currently locked in a heated debate on Ukraine funding. On Feb. 8, the Senate took a procedural step to advance a massive foreign security aid package that includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and more. However, that bill’s fate remains uncertain in the House. Lawmakers must also pass a budget for the federal government by early March or risk a shutdown.
Previously approved funding for Ukraine ran out in late January.
Kay Sears, Boeing’s Vice President of Space, Intelligence & Weapon Systems, sat down with Air & Space Forces Magazine for a discussion on how Boeing approaches space as a warfighting domain, and how it supports the U.S. Space Force’s mission to protect and defend our nation’s interests in space.
The Space Force’s Polaris Awards annually recognize Guardians who best represent the Guardian Spirit. There are four individual award categories based on each of the core Guardian values—Character, Connection, Commitment and Courage—and a Team Excellence category that combines all four values. Air & Space Forces Magazine is highlighting each of this year’s winners before they receive their awards on stage at the 2024 AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo.
The U.S. Space Force selected Capt. Samantha J. Pereira of the 3rd Space Operations Squadron (3 SOPS) at Schriever Space Force Base, Colo., as the winner of the Polaris Award for Courage for “championing new ideas, accepting smart risks, and pursuing opportunities for innovation and mission success” in 2023.
The 3rd Space Operations squadron was only three years old when Pereira arrived in January 2023 to lead its engineering flight. At the time, the flight consisted of just her and two other Guardians.
“I remember gathering into a conference room being like, what the heck are we even supposed to be doing? What is our job?” Pereira said. “We spent numerous hours just outlining what the flight was supposed to look like.”
Pereira went to task mapping out a manning strategy to grow the flight into a mission-ready team of 16 engineers. She said the key to her plan was having an organized strategy to build the team her squadron needed—a strategy that required courage to present to her leadership.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever gone into a squadron manning meeting before, but going in and asking for 15 people, you’re probably going to get laughed out of the room,” she said. “But I had a three-month manning plan, a six-month manning plan, a year plan, a five-year plan. … I think because we were so organized [is why] going to my leadership and asking for a total of 15 people ultimately worked out.”
Pereira said that in the three years since 3 SOPS was stood up, the engineering flight hadn’t been a priority for the squadron. Her presence and dedication changed that. By addressing the way the 3 SOPS was structured, Pereira created eight engineering roles and appointed three tactical-level teams, the equivalent of a 75 percent manning increase.
The restructure led to a significant improvement around the squadron. Her teams identified nearly 491 critical systems issues, developed 81 unique workarounds, and resolved 152 errors under her leadership.
In the chapter on Courage, the Guardian Handbook calls on Guardians to “highlight areas that can be improved and encourage their teammates to do the same. Innovation requires a creative environment that challenges the established norms.” Pereira has taken these words—especially “innovation”—to heart in order to drive change.
“A lot of the processes that other squadrons have, 3 SOPS didn’t at that point. So everything that we were doing was innovation,” Pereira said. “And they had pre-established processes that were hard to break. So we were saying, ‘Hey, let’s take a risk. Let’s stop what we’re doing to make this better.’”
Pereira’s courage and leadership led the team to win four individual awards, Delta 9’s Team of the Quarter, and the Delta’s nomination for the Lance P. Sijan Leadership Award. Under her leadership, the squadron developed an accountability and configuration control process, which led to the unit’s first security inspection pass rating.
“When people think of courage, they think of running into a burning building and rescuing people. That is definitely an act of courage, but there are small acts of courage that we can do every day that amount to something bigger, that serve as force multipliers in themselves,” Pereira said. “Sometimes you have to be bold to get to see the change that needs to happen or just to correct what’s wrong.”
Now that the Space Force is recognizing her on a national level with the 2023 Polaris Award for Courage, Pereira wants to encourage fellow Guardians—and all her fellow service members—to be bold, break barriers, and champion new ideas that advance the mission.
“If you’ve got an idea that you think could change things, change problems, whether on a Space Force level or just in your section, pursue it,” she said. “Get organized. Drive change. No matter what your rank is, or what your specialty code is, or the number of years of experience you have, everybody has the ability to solve problems and drive change. You just gotta get organized.”
Meet the other 2023 Polaris Award winners below:
The U.S. fleet of F-35 fighters continued to be vexed by reliability, maintainability, and availability (RMA) problems last fiscal year, available for operations only 51 percent of the time—compared to a goal of 65 percent—according to the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation’s annual report.
“The operational suitability of the F-35 fleet remains below service expectations and requirements,” according to the report, published in late January.
Aircraft availability among all U.S. F-35s hit its high water mark in January 2021 but has declined since, the report authors noted.
“In [fiscal year 2023], aircraft availability was slightly below that in FY’22, after declining for most of FY’21,” the report assessed. “Available” means an F-35 can do at least one of its many assigned missions.
The RMA performance of the F-35 has been the subject of numerous congressional hearings and Government Accountability Office reports over the years, and the Pentagon has launched many initiatives meant to get mission capability rates up.
Newer aircraft—with more proven components—have tended to perform better than older ones across the 20-year-old program, and the Pentagon has argued that the complexity of the stealthy and computer-intensive jet means its availability shouldn’t be judged against less-complex earlier types of aircraft.
Even though the F-35 still has not met the developmental exit criteria to enter “full rate production,” the flying hours accumulated by the fleet mean it should be viewed as a largely mature system.
A total of 628 F-35s had been delivered to the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy by the end of September 2023, but that figure doesn’t include aircraft in developmental test or any of the F-35s completed but now in storage, awaiting completion of Tech Refresh-3 update testing. The report did not assess F-35 performance with foreign operators.
Aircraft that were combat-coded—which typically receive priority for spare parts and maintenance—achieved the best performance for availability, the report stated, noting that 61 percent were available on an average monthly basis. But that was still below the goal of 65 percent, and in only one month of fiscal 2023 did the F-35 fleet surpass the goal. Across all F-35s, the average was 51 percent.
Viewed in terms of full mission capability—which means an F-35 is “capable of executing all assigned missions”—combat-coded aircraft again did better than the overall fleet but fell well short of the goal. Across 2023, the combat-coded fleet achieved a monthly full mission capable rate average of 48 percent, versus 30 percent for the whole fleet. The full mission capable rate for the operational test fleet was only nine percent. Non-combat-coded aircraft include those down for maintenance, in depot, or being used as daily trainers.
Slightly more than half the fleet—51 percent, as of the end of September 2023—is now combat-coded, the report noted.
Aircraft dubbed “not available” are designated as such when they are in depot or unable to fly due to maintenance or supply issues. Rates of aircraft down due to supply was 27 percent; “relatively flat” but “slightly worse” than the fiscal 2023 rate, the report noted. It’s been on a worsening trend since July 2021.
Aircraft down because they were awaiting maintenance in 2023 was 15 percent.
“To improve aircraft availability, the program should continue to pursue maintenance system improvements, especially for common processes distributed among many different [Non-Mission Capable for Maintenance] drivers, such as low-observable repairs, adhesive cure times for attaching hardware such as nutplates,” and stocking enough of the “most critical” in-demand spares, the DOT&E report stated.
“The program should also focus reliability improvements on the components most often not immediately available in supply,” the report added.
Particularly for the Air Force F-35A version, “the significant shortage of fully-functional F135 engines contributed” to lower aircraft availability.
This was offset in part by “aggressive program efforts to lay in additional depot resources, improve depot efficiencies, and ruggedize key engine components,” and increasing “the number of spare modules ready for issue,” the report noted.
However, “other degraders such as canopy and egress system issues have contributed to stagnant, or slightly declining, availability.”
As a fleet, the F-35 still isn’t meeting the reliability and maintainability standards set in the Operational Requirements Document, the report noted.
“The F-35A meets two and the F-35B meets one of the three reliability requirements. No variant is meeting [all] the maintainability requirements,” it said.
The F-35A fleet was supposed to achieve a rate of 20 Mean Flight Hours Between Critical Failures after 75,000 fleet hours. But in 2023, it only achieved a rate of 10.5, despite having racked up more than 288,000 total flight hours since entering service. The F-35B variant, operated by the Marines, and the F-35C, flown by the Navy, both missed their goals as well.
The main drivers of critical failures were “troubleshooting (including software stability), attaching hardware (including nutplates), wires/tubes/ducts/ fiber optics, throttle grip, aircraft memory device, [low observability] repair, standby flight display, refueling door, position light,” the report noted.
The fix times for “critical failures” was double the operational requirement for the Air Force, nearly three times for the Marine Corps, and more than double for the Navy.
In the category of Mean Flight Hours Between Removal, all the variants did better, achieving 108 percent for the A model and 78 percent each for the B and C.
All the variants came close to or beat the requirement for “Mean Flight Hours Between Maintenance Events (Unscheduled),” with the Air Force and Navy F-35s besting the requirement by 110 percent and 120 percent, respectively, while the Marine Corps hit 80 percent of the goal.
DOT&E’s recommendations regarding RMA mirrored those of the fiscal 2022 report. It urged continued maintenance system improvements and more investment in spares, “especially for F135 engines, to reduce down-time for aircraft waiting [for] spare parts by developing alternate sources of repair, including organic repair.”
The Department of the Air Force is planning a billion-dollar investment in its dormitories in the coming years, installations boss Ravi Chaudhary told lawmakers Feb. 7, as part of its response to a report on poor living conditions.
Chaudhary, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for energy, installations, and environment, outlined the service’s initiative for the House Armed Services Committee.
“Pending passage of an appropriation, the department is planning its largest dorm investment program in over a decade, estimated $1.1 billion through FY22 through FY26,” Chaudhary said. “… If appropriated, the DAF intends to invest in three new dormitories from FY24 to FY28, to address capacity shortfalls and recapitalized facilities.”
The planned investment involves plans for renovations and restoration at approximately 60 installations— 23 of those 60 are planned to be completed in fiscal 2024, according to Chaudhary.
Chaudhary’s remarks come several months after the the Government Accountability Office released a report that revealed poor living conditions in military housing with issues such as mold growth, water quality problems, bugs, and overcrowded dorm rooms, impacting service members’ mental and physical health.
The GAO report didn’t specify which problems were observed at particular services’ dorms, but it identified shortcomings in how each service manages barracks, where junior enlisted unmarried service members are often required to live. Noting that the report authors visited two DAF installations, Chaudhary said the Air Force is working on issues across all of its installations.
“This year, the Air Force held project owners accountable for $58 million in cost to address mold problems in 560 units and more are on the way,” Chaudhary said. “In 2023, project owners were held accountable for approximately 600 payments to address health and safety issues totaling $60 million in cost, but there is more work to be done, and we recognize that.”
Chaudhary said he personally visited 25 Air Force bases and held 40 round tables with personnel for feedback, including bases hit by recent typhoons and hurricanes that are currently recovering in Guam, Japan and Florida. He claimed the department is “pulling out all the stops” to address the GAO report, with his visits shaping the Air Force’s investment plans.
“We’re accelerating efforts in privatized housing,” Chaudhary said. “We’ve also hired 218 civilians to add direct oversight, including resident advocates on base to represent our service members alongside the chain of command.”
Chaudhary highlighted the significance of infrastructure resilience against a range of threats, from extreme weather to great power competition. He pointed to Kadena Air Force Base in Japan as an example, which successfully weathered a typhoon without experiencing any power outages.
“These critical investments could prove to be the margin of victory in great power competition,” Chaudhary said.
Many of the GAO’s recommendations for the services and the Department of Defense involved overhauling how they conduct condition assessments. For instance, GAO analysis revealed that nearly 50 percent of Air Force dormitories classified as ‘at risk of significant degradation’ still had condition scores of 80 or above. The Defense Department needs to reevaluate those assessments and offer guidance based on its findings, the authors wrote.
“The DOD has, in too many instances, failed to live up to our role in making sure the housing we provide honors the commitment of the service members and their families and enables them to bring their best versions of themselves to their critical missions,” said Brendan Owens, the assistant secretary of Defense for installations, energy and environment. He highlighted that the GAO report shaped priorities, with the Pentagon now focusing on new standards, accessibility, maintenance plans, and quality of life of the service members.
“We anticipate implementing 28 of the 31 GAO recommendations this year,” Owens added.