February 11, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

Pentagon budget request increases R&D funding, cuts legacy planes

By: Aaron Mehta

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump's defense budget request for fiscal 2021 includes major investments in research and development portfolios as well as “crucial” technologies as part of what the Pentagon is branding an “irreversible implementation” of the National Defense Strategy.

However, the budget also features overall cuts to the Army and Navy top lines, as well as the divestment of legacy platforms from the Air Force.

The president is requesting $705 billion for the Defense Department, including $69 billion in overseas contingency operations, or OCO, wartime funds. Total national security spending, including for the National Nuclear Security Administration and other outside agencies, is $740 billion, as set by a congressional budget agreement last year.

Although not included in the budget documents, total top-line projections over the Future Years Defense Program, or FYDP, are $722 billion in FY22, $737 billion in FY23, $753 billion in FY24 and $768 billion in FY25, according to a senior defense official.

Service budget top lines are $178 billion for the Army, a drop by $462 million from FY20 enacted levels; $207 billion for the Navy, down $1.9 billion from FY20; and $207 billion for the Air Force, up $1.7 billion from FY20. The budget also requests $113 billion for defensewide efforts, which includes the so-called fourth estate agencies, down $6.5 billion from FY20. Overall procurement funding sits at $136.9 billion.

The OCO request of $69 billion is down dramatically from last year's $164 billion, and it comes in three flavors:

$20.5 billion in “direct war requirements,” or funding for combat operations that will end at some point in locations like Iraq and Syria.
$32.5 billion in “enduring requirements,” which covers funding for the sustainment of bases, as well as pots of money like the European Deterrence Initiative.
$16 billion in “OCO for base,” a funding mechanism for money that could be in the base budget but is classified as OCO for the purpose of skirting budget caps imposed by Congress.

Projection for OCO funding falls $20 billion in FY22 and FY23, and then to $10 billion for FY24 and FY25, as “certain OCO costs” are absorbed by the base budget, according to the White House's summary tables. There's no nondefense discretionary OCO proposed for FY21 or the out years.

“This is a budget that makes difficult choices but they are actually choices that support the National Defense Strategy,” a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity ahead the budget rollout.

“We can't have the best of everything in all areas,” the official added. “The low-hanging fruit is gone.”

Among the tough choices: retiring 17 B-1 bombers, 44 A-10 planes, 24 Global Hawk drones, as well as 16 KC-10 and 13 KC-135 tankers from the Air Force.

“When you look at these aircraft, they disproportionately take too much of the readiness account. That's where we've got to go,” the official said. “Those are really the tough choices we had to make. Because we can now take the additional manpower, the [spare parts], all those things we need to make those other aircraft more operationally available and have more flight hours available in the mission we need them to do.”

Congress usually revises presidential budget submissions substantially before passing them into law. A prime target for lawmakers this year will be the Trump administration's favoritism for defense spending over nondefense, which contradicts the rough parity between two that's characterized bipartisan budget deals in recent years.

Congress will also likely upend the administration's FY21 proposal to cut the nondefense base budget by 5.1 percent while adding 0.08 percent to the base defense budget. There are slim odds for Trump's proposal extending budget caps — set to expire next year — through 2025, wherein defense would increase by roughly 2 percent each year as nondefense discretionary decreases 2 percent each year.

‘Irreversible'

Budget documents were branded with the phrase “irreversible implementation of the National Defense Strategy,” a notable signal in an election year that, should Trump not be reelected, could result in major changes to the national budget and American strategy come January.

The branding in support of the NDS can be found throughout the document, even at lower levels. For instance, the Pentagon's security cooperation account has been rebranded the “NDS Implementation (NDS-I) account.”

Missing from the budget request are funds for Trump's border wall with Mexico. However, CNN reported this weekend that “billions” of defense dollars will be going toward the wall effort, with an announcement expected later this week.

Key defense spending accounts break down like this:

Mission-support activities: $66.8 billion
Aircraft and related systems: $56.9 billion
Shipbuilding and maritime systems: $32.2 billion
Missiles and munitions: $21.3 billion
Space-based systems: $15.5 billion
Ground systems: $13 billion
C4I systems: $11.9 billion
Missile defeat and defense programs: $11.6 billion

The department is requesting $106.6 billion to fund research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) efforts, an increase of $2 billion over the FY20 enacted figures — something another senior defense official called the “largest [RDT&E] request in over 70 years.” Funding for that came from savings from the defensewide review, which found $5.7 billion in money to reprogram in FY21, as well as the retirement of older platforms.

Four “crucial” technologies are now bunched together under a new acronym — ACE, which stands for advanced capability enablers: hypersonics at $3.2 billion, microelectronics/5G at $1.5 billion, autonomy at $1.7 billion, and artificial intelligence at $800 million.

However, for the second straight year, science and technology funding for early technology development (the Pentagon's 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3 accounts) is requested at $14.1 billion; that includes $3.5 billion for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Congress plussed that funding to $16.1 billion in FY20 enacted levels, meaning the request here is $2 billion less than what the Pentagon received this current year.

Cyber activates total $9.8 billion, including $5.4 billion for cybersecurity-focused projects. The rest of the funding goes toward supporting defensive cyber operations.

https://www.defensenews.com/smr/federal-budget/2020/02/10/pentagon-budget-request-increases-rd-funding-cuts-legacy-planes/

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May 28, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security

Joint AI Center Turns To Air Force cloudONE As JEDI Stalls
The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center needs three things: new acquisition authorities, more staff, and the cloud. With JEDI delayed ‘potentially many more months,' director Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan said, he's turning to an Air Force alternative. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on May 27, 2020 at 2:25 PM WASHINGTON: The legal battle over the JEDI cloud-computing contract has slowed down the Pentagon's AI program, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center acknowledges. In the meantime, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan told an AFCEA webcast last week, JAIC will turn to a new Air Force program our longtime readers are already familiar with: cloudONE. Cloud computing matters for AI because machine-learning algorithms need lots of data and lots of processing power. A shared cloud can offer both with far greater efficiencies of scale than any single organization's in-house network. JEDI was meant to provide a single “general purpose” cloud to all users across the Defense Department, including Shanahan's Joint AI Center. But it has been mired for months in legal battles over which company should have won the contract, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. “It slowed us down, no question about it,” Shanahan told the AFCEA audience. “Azure, AWS, I will never get into a company discussion. I'm agnostic,” he said. “[But] if we want to make worldwide updates to all these algorithms in the space of minutes, not in the space of months running around gold disks, we've got to have an enterprise cloud solution.” JEDI can't be that solution today, Shanahan acknowledged, but “we now have a good plan to account for the fact that it will be delayed potentially many more months.” For instance, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, the Joint AI Center urgently stood up what they call Project Salus – named for the Roman goddess of health and safety – to pull data from 70 different sources, find patterns, and predict trends for US Northern Command and the National Guard. Salus went from a sketch on a “bar napkin” to a functional bare-bones system (what's called a Minimum Viable Product) in 29 days, Shanahan said. With JEDI unavailable, he turned to an existing Air Force cloud run out of Hanscom Air Force Base, which he'd previously used as head of Project Maven. But the Hanscom-based cloud is “an interim solution that will end ... here later in the fall,” Shanahan said. “Because of that, we are pivoting to the cloudONE environment.” CloudONE & Beyond So what's cloudONE? Like JEDI, it's a new cloud-computing capability that the Air Force hopes will be available to a wide range of users from across the Department of Defense. Unlike JEDI, it's not a joint program run by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but a service program, run by the Air Force. In fact, cloudOne is part of a whole package of computing initiatives – deviceONE, dataONE, et al – that the Air Force acquisition chief, Will Roper, began pushing (and branding) aggressively last year. Further, while JEDI is meant as the Defense Department's “general purpose” cloud, Roper's many ONEs are all intended to serve a single purpose, albeit a broad one: military command and control. Together, Roper's projects will make up what the Air Force is calling its Advanced Battle Management System. ABMS, in turn, will be an Air Force component of the future Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) meta-network to share battle data between all the armed services across all five “domains” of warfare: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Artificial intelligence is essential for JADC2, since human analysts can't pull together that much data from that many sources fast enough to make a difference in combat. The JAIC is far too small to build the whole JADC2 network – that's up to the far better-resourced services – but it can help. “We're not here to build JADC2,” he said. “We're here to find AI-enabled solutions that stitch seams together from all the services, who're [each] developing some version of JADC2.” The objective is to automate and accelerate the often-laborious process of bringing American firepower to bear. That “kill chain” includes everything from spotting a potential target with some kind of sensor, confirming what it is with other sensors, deciding to strike it, picking an aircraft, warship, or artillery battery to execute the strike, and then giving that shooter precise targeting data. Currently most of that requires human beings relaying coordinates and orders over the radio, typing them into terminals by hand, or even scrawling them on sticky notes because one network can't transfer data to another. “Accelerated sensor-to-shooter timelines are so important – to me, this is what the next couple of years will be about, and each of the services has a really strong programs in sensor-to-shooter,” Shanahan said. “What we're trying to bring is the AI/ML solutions.” To do that job, however, the JAIC needs more people and more legal authorities to conduct acquisitions on its own – although it will never be the size of the services' acquisition bureaucracies. For example, while Shanahan initially focused on lower-risk, non-combat applications of AI like maintenance, on May 18 the JAIC awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a landmark contract worth up to $800 million for AI “to support warfighting operations [and] decision-making and analysis at all tiers of DoD operations.” But JAIC did so in partnership with the civilian General Services Administration (using GSA's Alliant 2 contract vehicle), just as it's done past contracts through the Defense Information Systems Agency and other established organizations, because it doesn't have the necessary authorities and personnel in-house – yet. “I couldn't ask for better support,” Shanahan said, “but it's not going to be fast enough as we start putting more and more money into this capability development. We need our own acquisition authority.” In particular, he sees JAIC as a potential early adopter of the new streamlined process for software development and acquisition recently rolled out by the Pentagon's acquisition chief, Ellen Lord. The JAIC also needs to get bigger. Founded in summer 2018 with just four staff, JAIC has now grown to 175 personnel (counting contractors) and must keep growing, Shanahan said. But that larger staff won't include Shanahan: JAIC's founding director retires from the Air Force next month. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/joint-ai-center-turns-to-air-force-cloudone-as-jedi-stalls/
June 5, 2020 | International, Aerospace

U.S. Air Force 'Arsenal Plane' Revival Sparks Intense Debate
Steve Trimble June 02, 2020 An "Arsenal Plane" has rapidly emerged as a short-term priority for the U.S. Air Force, but an internal debate continues over the type of aircraft to use, potentially affecting the service's existing command structure and the Northrop Grumman B-21 program. A proposal to modify Lockheed C-130s and Boeing C-17s to air-drop existing and new long-range munitions is now favored as a short-term solution by the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC) office, which is charged with developing new operational concepts by the Air Staff. Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC), which has responsibility for the bomber fleet and inventory of intercontinental ballistic missiles, prefers developing a new aircraft optimized for the mission, rather than seeking to borrow strike capacity from an already overburdened air mobility fleet. Neither proposal is endorsed by the Mitchell Institute, the think tank arm of the Air Force Association (AFA). In a prepublication report obtained by Aviation Week, Col. (ret.) Mark Gunzinger, the institute's director of Future Aerospace Concepts and Capability Assessments, argues that the most cost-effective solution is to buy more B-21 bombers rather than invest in more long-range munitions to support the Arsenal Plane concept. All the parties involved agree that the airborne component of the Air Force's long-range strike capability is inadequate, even after Northrop Grumman delivers at least 100 B-21s, which are expected to replace a fleet of 20 Northrop B-2s and 62 Rockwell B-1Bs and operate alongside about 75 Boeing B-52s. “What we see is that no matter how big our bomber force is, the capacity that the Joint Force needs is always more and more,” says Maj. Gen. Clinton Hinote, deputy director of the AFWIC, which develops new operational concepts on the Air Staff. The Air Force's latest estimate of the requirement calls for a fleet of at least 220 bombers, Gen. Timothy Ray, the head of AFGSC, told reporters in early April. According to a fleet forecast in the Mitchell Institute report, the Air Force inventory could decline to about 120 bombers by 2032 as the B-2 and B-1B fleets are retired. Gunzinger, a former bomber pilot, forecasts the Air Force will order about 120 B-21s by 2040. Combined with 75 B-52s, however, the fleet would still be about 30 aircraft short of the minimum deemed required by the Air Force today. Closing that gap—either by loading long-range munitions on existing airlifters, developing a new aircraft for that purpose or buying more B-21s—is driving the internal debate. At its core, the debate is over cost-effectiveness and capacity. A stealthy bomber, such as the B-21A, is more expensive than an Arsenal Plane but needs less expensive, unpowered munitions because they can be released closer to the target. On the other hand, the B-21A remains early in the development phase, so Northrop may need more than a decade to deliver a significant number of aircraft. Various forms of the Arsenal Plane concept have been discussed since the 1970s. As former President Jimmy Carter's administration considered options to the Rockwell B-1A, the Defense Department briefly proposed the Cruise Missile Carrier Aircraft—a Boeing 747 modified to launch cruise missiles. The idea reemerged nearly 30 years later as the program that led to the B-21A began taking shape. In 2006, the Congressional Budget Office considered an Arsenal Aircraft based on a Boeing C-17 loaded with a supersonic cruise missile and concluded that it would be less effective than a penetrating bomber and require an extra $3.5 billion to order more C-17s. As the Pentagon locked in requirements for the B-21A program four years later, an Air Force-funded study by Rand compared the costs of a penetrating bomber versus an Arsenal Plane concept. If the U.S. military engages in at least 20 days of airstrikes over a 30-year period, the 2010 study concluded a penetrating bomber would be more affordable than the required investment in the Arsenal Plane. Even though the Air Force awarded Northrop a contract to develop the B-21A in October 2015, however, the debate has continued. Will Roper, then director of the Strategic Capabilities Office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, unveiled an Arsenal Plane concept in February 2016, showing a Lockheed C-130-like aircraft dispensing palletized munitions. A year later, Roper became assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, and the Arsenal Plane moved to the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). In January, the AFRL completed the first test of a new palletized munition dropped by an MC-130J. A picture of the new weapon—the Cargo Launch Expendable Air Vehicles with Extended Range (Cleaver)—showed six munitions on each pallet. A follow-up test involving an airdrop from C-17s was scheduled in April. The Cleaver testing satisfied AFRL that C-130s and C-17s could adapt one of the core capabilities for both aircraft: airdrop. The C-17 also has demonstrated the capability of releasing air-launched rockets from the cargo bay. In 2006, a C-17 was used to air-drop a launcher for a hypersonic boost-glide missile. The aircraft also is used by the Missile Defense Agency to test interceptors by dropping surrogates of medium-range ballistic missiles. The AFRL completed the tests weeks before the Defense Department completed plans for the fiscal 2022 budget proposal. “We are in discussions right now about how we proceed to prototyping and fielding,” Hinote says. For AFWIC, arming C-130s and C-17s with long-range weapons is attractive because it can increase munition capacity significantly in the near term. “It's all about capacity and that you've got to create enough capacity so that long-range punch is really a punch,” Hinote says. “This is why we think that there's a real possibility here for using cargo platforms to be able to increase the capacity of fires.” Not everyone agrees with that approach. As the commander of the Air Force's bomber fleet, Ray told reporters in early April that he does not want a commander to have to choose between using a C-17 for either weapons or airlift capacity. “When you think about using a cargo plane, you're in competition for other airlift requirements,” Ray said. “I think the Arsenal Plane concept is probably better defined as more of a clean-sheet approach to a platform that can affordably and rapidly fill the gap.” While Hinote and Ray debate whether an existing or clean-sheet design is better for an Arsenal Plane, some airpower experts still reject the idea that anything less than a stealthy bomber is adequate. Instead of lobbing long-range missiles, the B-21 is designed to get close enough to a target to use short-range, direct-attack weapons. Such munitions do not need to carry fuel and propulsion systems and so they can be smaller in proportion to the size of their warhead. “Size matters, since the number of weapons that can be delivered per aircraft sortie decreases as weapon size increases,” Gunzinger wrItes in the Mitchell Institute report. In addition to capacity, Gunzinger also questions the cost of an Arsenal Plane's required inventory of long-range munitions versus a bomber's more affordable, precision-guided bombs. A conflict with China or Russia could generate a massive list of targets. “Using tens of thousands of very long-range standoff weapons that cost a million dollars or more each is simply not affordable,” Gunzinger writes. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/us-air-force-arsenal-plane-revival-sparks-intense-debate
December 3, 2020 | International, Aerospace

Fifth missile warning satellite ready for launch, Lockheed Martin announces
By Ed Adamczyk Dec. 2 (UPI) -- The fifth missile warning satellite of the U.S. Space Force has been constructed and is ready for launch, manufacturer Lockheed Martin announced on Wednesday. The Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Earth Orbit, or SBIRS GEO-5, is scheduled to be launched in 2021 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. ULA is a Boeing and Lockheed Martin consortium. The first satellite in the series was launched in 2011, but the newest version features the LM 2100 military combat bus. The bus, the space vehicle that carries the satellite's sensors and electronics, is designed to "provide greater resiliency and cyber-hardening," Lockheed said in a statement. The new satellite also includes "enhanced spacecraft power, propulsion and electronics; common components and procedures to streamline manufacturing, and a flexible design that reduces the cost to incorporate future, modernized sensor suites," according to the company. The next satellite in the series, GEO-6, and future Next Gen OPIR [Overhead Persistent Infrared missile warning] satellites, will also include the upgrade. GEO-6 is expected to launch by 2022, with the OPIR satellites expected to launch beginning in 2025. The constellation of U.S. Space Force missile warning satellites are equipped with powerful scanning and staring infrared surveillance sensors. The sensors collect data useable in discovering missile launches It also supports ballistic missile defense, expands technical intelligence gathering and improves battlefield situational awareness. "SBIRS' role as an ever-present, on-orbit guardian against global ballistic missile threats has never been more critical," Tom McCormick, Lockheed Martin's vice in a statement on Wednesday. "In 2019 alone, SBIRS detected nearly 1,000 missile launches, which is about a two-fold increase in two years." https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2020/12/02/Fifth-missile-warning-satellite-ready-for-launch-Lockheed-Martin-announces/8311606933697

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