April 21, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — Since Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein took over as the service's top general in 2016, the Air Force has made figuring out how to connect its weapons with those of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps its biggest priority.
The Air Force is set to have spent $300 million on the Advanced Battle Management System through fiscal year 2021. However, the service is still struggling to define what ABMS needs to do and how much it will cost, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released April 16.
"The Air Force has not established a plan or business case for ABMS that identifies its requirements, a plan to attain mature technologies when needed, a cost estimate, and an affordability analysis. ... To date, the Air Force has not identified a development schedule for ABMS, and it has not formally documented requirements,” it read.
That could have significant consequences for the program down the road, GAO continued:
“GAO's previous work has shown that weapon systems without a sound business case are at greater risk for schedule delays, cost growth, and integration issues.”
The GAO made four recommendations: create a cost estimate and a plan laying out how to afford the program, formalize the decision-making authorities of those involved in ABMS, and develop a list of technologies that are expected to fit into the initial system.
In a response to the report, Kevin Fahey, the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, concurred with all four recommendations — a sign that, going forward, the Air Force may be required to solidify more of its ABMS plans.
The Air Force has maintained that the program's unconventional structure and methodology is a feature, not a bug.
It wants to use a series of experiments to help discover and mature new technologies that can be weaved in alongside legacy platforms. For instance, the first ABMS experiment connected SpaceX's Starlink constellation with an AC-130 gunship, and the next demo will employ a Kratos Valkyrie drone carrying communications gear that enables the F-22 and F-35 to securely share data while allowing them to maintain stealth.
Air Force officials have said technologies that are proven to be successful and mature during the experiments could become programs of record inside the ABMS family of systems.
However, the Air Force does not seem to have a firm plan for what technologies it needs and when to bring them online, the GAO said. The service has identified 28 development areas that includes a new cloud network, a new common radio, and apps that provide different ways of presenting and fusing data. However, none of those areas are linked to specific technical requirements, and the Air Force hasn't explained what organizations are responsible for the development of those products.
In one damning section, GAO compared ABMS with several cancelled programs with similar aims, such as the Army's Future Combat Systems program that sought to field a family of manned and unmanned technologies and the Joint Tactical Radio System, which was intended to create a government-owned software defined radio. These programs publicly flamed out after millions of dollars were spent in development, in part because certain technologies were not mature enough and caused the schedule to unravel.
The scope of ABMS will be far larger than those previous programs, the Pentagon's Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation told the GAO. But because the Air Force has not provided a detailed acquisition strategy, CAPE does not have confidence that the Air Force will be able succeed where those programs have failed.
“Given the criticality of the battle management command and control mission and the planned retirement of legacy programs, the lack of an ABMS business case introduces uncertainty regarding whether the needed capabilities will be developed within required time frames,” the GAO said.
Figuring out who has responsibility and decision-making authority for ABMS is also a messy proposition, the GAO said.
The ABMS effort is led by a chief architect, Preston Dunlap, who is responsible for managing tradeoffs among the portfolio of technologies and guide experimentation efforts. However, existing programs that will be part of the ABMS family will retain their separate program office with their own independent management, and the Air Force has yet to clarify whether Dunlap will be able to redirect those program's funding to fall in line with ABMS objectives.
For example, the Air Force's program office for space is currently working on a data integration project that could correspond with ABMS efforts to field a cloud network.
But “although some ABMS funds have been obligated for this project, there is no documentation to support that the Chief Architect will be able to direct the PEO to change the project objectives or timeline to align with ABMS requirements once they are defined,” the GAO said.
The role of the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability or AFWIC, which was established in 2017 to help define how the service will fight wars in the future, is also unclear. An AFWIC senior official told the GAO that the organization began leading the service's multidomain command and control initiatives in 2019, but it is uncertain whether AFWIC also has the power to change the direction of the ABMS program.
June 17, 2021 | International, Aerospace
No sooner had it arrived, one of the five unmanned aircraft headed to California to be equipped with the so-called GMTI-over-Sea capability, giving it the ability to track moving maritime targets as well as moving land targets.
April 2, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Author: Mike Rees The U.S. Air Force has announced that its Office of Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation at the Air Force Research Laboratory is working on fielding a prototype Autonomous Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle as an Early Operational Capability as early as 2023. The program, known as Skyborg, and the SDPE office have issued a request for information to industry to conduct market research and concept of operations analysis to learn what is commercially available now as high technology readiness level capabilities which can meet the requirements and timeline of the Skyborg program. Skyborg officially stood up as a fiscal year 2019 funded pathfinder program through SDPE in October 2018, according to Ben Tran, Skyborg program manager. “There was a lot of analysis that determined what was put into the CRFI,” Tran said. “We've been given the overall objective to have an early operational capability prototype fielded by the end of calendar year 2023, so this is our first step in determining what the current state of the art is from a technology perspective and from a systems engineering perspective to provide that EOC capability in 2023.” Low cost, attritable, unmanned air vehicles are one way to bring mass to the fight when it comes to addressing potential near-peer engagements in the future, according to Tran. “We also know there is heavy investment by our near-peer adversaries in artificial intelligence and autonomy in general. We know that when you couple autonomy and AI with systems like low-cost attritables, that can increase capability significantly and be a force multiplier for our Air Force and so the 2023 goal line is our attempt at bringing something to bear in a relatively quick time frame to show that we can bring that kind of capability to the fight.” Matt Duquette, an AFRL Aerospace Systems Directorate engineer, brings a background in UAV control, autonomy, and modeling and simulation of UAVs, especially teams of UAVs to the effort while assisting the Skyborg program with formulating its approach to the autonomy system and some of the behaviors that the UAVs will have. “Skyborg is a vessel for AI technologies that could range from rather simple algorithms to fly the aircraft and control them in airspace to the introduction of more complicated levels of AI to accomplish certain tasks or subtasks of the mission,” Duquette said. This builds on much of the AFRL foundational work with AI shown with programs such as Have Raider and the Auto Ground and Air Collision Avoidance systems, which prove that levels of autonomy in high performance aircraft are not only possible, but also practical. “Part of our autonomy development is building assurance into the system. You can either build assurance by using formal methods or approaches where at design time, as you develop these autonomous capabilities, you guarantee certain behaviors, or a more practical approach is to assess the capabilities of these behaviors at run time, meaning while they're running on the aircraft. So, those are the capabilities that we're interested in looking at from the experimentation level to see what type of assurance you need in the system so you can mix high and low criticality.” “We're looking at a range of vehicle performance parameters – mission analysis will help us determine what the final outcome is and the responses from the CRFI will help us understand what the performance is of currently available systems and whether those will meet the needs or not. Everything from keeping up with combat platforms to slower platforms for sensing. There will be a range of possibilities there,” said Patrick Berry, from AFRL's Sensors Directorate, who is supporting the Skyborg program by conducting modeling, simulation and analysis. Although Skyborg is not scheduled for any particular type of aircraft platform at this time, Tran said the CRFI emphasizes the importance of an open systems architecture, having modularity in the system, not only from a sensing capabilities standpoint, but overall mission systems, as well as the autonomy associated with the mission capability for the platform. “We've partnered with the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and specifically an organization called the Emerging Technologies Combined Test Force and we're working with them beginning with small, fast-moving UAVs to test the current state of the art in AI and autonomy in those airplanes and the ability for them to autonomously team and collaborate in flight,” Tran said. Machine learning has progressed greatly over the last few years and we're very inspired by those results and excited by things that are going on in the gaming industry for instance,” said Maj. Ryan Carr, from AFRL's Aerospace Systems Directorate. “We expect that technology will continue to mature fairly rapidly. What we really need to understand is, ‘How do you take that and do something like bring it to the real world and fly with it for example?' The thing we're trying to get at early on is how to do that safely. We're talking about run-time assurance, working hand-in-hand with the flight test community who have a very long record of safe flight testing. That's really what we want to focus our attention on in this early period,” Carr said. “We want to do this in a way that builds trust in the system as you go along so that when you get to that EOC, you will have established a baseline of trust so that operational youth will believe what the system will do or believe it's safe. It's not just that end-state capability, it's the trust as you go along,” he added. Before operational AI innovation can occur, the Air Force must field an autonomous system that meets an immediate operational need and can serve as an iterative platform to facilitate complex AI development, prototyping, experimentation and fielding, and that system is Skyborg, the CRFI says. https://www.unmannedsystemstechnology.com/2019/03/u-s-air-force-to-develop-ai-powered-combat-uav/
January 29, 2021 | International, Aerospace
Concerns that U.S. industry could muscle in on NATO plans for a medium-lift helicopter for the 2030s and beyond has sparked Airbus to call for a European solution. Airbus Helicopters says it has backing from the French, German and Spanish governments to bid for grants from the European Defense Fund... https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/missile-defense-weapons/airbus-calls-european-cooperation-future-military-rotorcraft