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  November 26, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Stop the budgetary bleeding to get the Air Force we need

  By: Douglas Birkey In 2018, then-Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson sounded the alarm regarding the size of her service: “The Air Force is too small for what the nation expects of us.” Her response was direct: The service needed to grow from 312 to 386 operational squadrons. Given the concurrent demands presented by China and Russia at the high end of the threat spectrum, Iran and North Korea in the middle, and the continued danger posed by nonstate actors at the lower threat tier, this imperative for growth was grounded in clear requirements. However, instead of marking a positive turning point for the service, subsequent years saw the Air Force grow smaller, older and more fragile. The burgeoning security environment demands that this downward spiral end now. This is exactly why the Senate's version of the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act includes specific aircraft inventory floors for the Air Force. With positive intentions having fallen short year after year, it is time for legislation to stop the bleeding. No form of power projection is possible without the capabilities afforded by the Air Force. Ships at sea, forces on land and rear echelon operating locations will not survive long if not defended from aerial attack. Long-range strike affords the unique ability to hit critical targets deep behind enemy lines. Air mobility empowers joint force operations. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance was the most in-demand mission area over the past two decades, and remains so today. Added to this, the Air Force also provides two-thirds of the nuclear triad. Despite the value provided by these missions, the Air Force has struggled to earn its fair share of the defense budget. It absorbed the largest fiscal cuts out of all the services in the years after the Cold War. Between 1989 and 2001, the Air Force saw procurement funding drop by over 52 percent — nearly 20 percent more than the other services. FY13 saw aircraft procurement funding hit the lowest levels in Air Force history. To add insult to injury, the Air Force also sees nearly 20 percent of its top-line budget diverted to the intelligence community — enough money to buy over 400 F-35 fighter jets a year. No other service gets hit like this. With budget pressures a perennial problem, the Air Force has continually sought to divest aircraft to free up cash. The problem is that the demand for Air Force missions never went away. Quite the opposite, it increased. In 1990, the Air Force had 2,893 fighters; today it has around 1,800. This same period saw bombers drop from 327 to 157. Combat operations have been unending since 1991, which means a smaller number of aircraft and crews simply get spun harder to meet demand. This is an unsustainable pattern, with the B-1B bomber standing as a cautionary tale. It has been flying combat missions on a nonstop basis since the 9/11 attacks. The Air Force retired a third of the B-1B inventory in the 2000s to save money that could be reinvested in the remaining aircraft. Budget pressures in subsequent years saw these savings evaporate, maintenance dollars run too thin and the aircraft pressed to the limit. They hit the breaking point last year, with less than 10 percent of the Air Force's B-1Bs mission-capable. With nearly every mission area in the Air Force inventory labeled as “high demand, low density,” expect to see similar challenges proliferate. These stresses are also a major driver behind the pilot crisis. Shrinking the Air Force in the hopes that expected savings could fund modernization has served as a continual mirage for Air Force planners. Indeed, the Air Force's answer to funding the Advanced Battle Management System and other priorities in the FY21 budget submission was to retire more aircraft. Better networks are of little use without the ability to complete the kill chain, and that takes aircraft. Presumed areas of growth hang precariously years into the future. There's little chance that cash will remain protected given COVID-19 budget pressures. The problem is that even when divestiture plans appear plausible on internal spreadsheets, service officials are not the ultimate arbiters of their resources. The broader Department of Defense, Office of Management and Budget, and Congress each have a vote on how funds are managed. This pattern clearly has not worked for the Air Force for the past 30 years. Playing this losing hand again will break the force at fundamental levels. That is why the Senate's proposed aircraft floor is not just a good idea — it is a necessity. A prudent negotiator does not enter a meeting with a high-risk position as the starting point, but that is exactly what the Air Force has done for far too long. The time has come to openly articulate what is required to meet national security requirements. That is what the 386 operational squadron goal is all about. It comes down to acknowledging what airmen will need to fly into harm's way, get the job done and come home safe. This takes both capability and capacity. It is time to rebuild the Air Force we need. Douglas Birkey is the executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, where he researches issues relating to the future of aerospace and national security. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/11/25/stop-the-budgetary-bleeding-to-get-the-air-force-we-need/

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  August 14, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  What could a military do with this flying saucer?

  By: Kelsey D. Atherton This may be a flying saucer, but don't call it a UFO. Carefully named, the All DIrections Flying Object, or ADIFO, is instead a saucer-like contraption, a flying prototype built at exploring the aerodynamic potential of an alien craft. It is, at its core, an omnidirectional flying wing built around a quadcopter with jets attached. Its designers see a future for the airframe as an unmanned combat aerial vehicle. In a video posted July 1, a narrator discusses the design process and aerodynamics of the craft. Like many VTOL tools built on a quadcopter frame, ducted fans provide initial lift and mobility at low altitudes and low speeds. The addition of vectored jets on the rear of the craft, combined with four vertical vents and four side-facing vents, promising greater maneuverability at high speeds. The ADIFO is the invention of Romanian engineer Razan Sabie in conjunction with Iosif Taposu, a scientist with a long career in aerospace research for the Romanian government. “The aerodynamics behind this aircraft is the result of more than two decades of work and is very well reasoned in hundreds of pages and confirmed by computer simulations and wind tunnel tests,” Sabie told Vice, in the pair's first American interview. That story explores both the specific nature of the ADIFO, and the long and mostly failed history of flying saucer design. Like many other ideas for the first decades of aviation, the possibility of operating the craft without a human on board opens up greater potential in what an airframe can actually do. Human pilots are subject to the limitations of a body and perception, and a flying disk changing directions suddenly at high speed is not the ideal place for a human to be. Uncrewed craft can take on novel forms, and execute turns and twists beyond those human limits. While maneuverability is likely the primary selling point for a future role as combat aircraft, the smooth and fin-free form could easily have stealth characteristics built in, and could be further adapted by a dedicated team to fully realizing that stealth flight. What might a military planner or designer do with such a machine? The proof-of-concept offers little in the way of information about storage space or sensors. With wide enough lenses, a handful of cameras could match the circular symmetry of the vehicle and provide and omnidirectional surveillance presence. The high speeds and potentially low radar profile suggest a role akin to earlier, Cold War spy planes, taking specific pictures in contested space and returning before anti-air systems can act. And as with any aircraft, the potential is likely there for it to release an explosive payload, taking the flying saucer from an extraterrestrial fear to a terrestrial threat. ADIFO might not be the future of anything. The project's home page says the team is still attracting partners, and aviation history is littered with proofs-of-concept that failed to materialize in a meaningful way. Yet there is something to the idea of a flying saucer working the moment it no longer has to transport a human. It is an old aviation frontier that likely warrants further exploration. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2019/08/12/what-might-a-military-want-with-a-romanian-flying-saucer/

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  February 9, 2021 | International, C4ISR

  French military orders first sigint suite to work across all services

  PARIS — France is to acquire its first joint tactical signals intelligence system from Thales and Airbus, the DGA procurement agency announced Feb. 8. The €160 million (U.S. $193 million) contract was signed with the two companies Dec. 31, 2020, according to a DGA statement. Early capabilities of the new system will be delivered in 2023 and full capabilities by 2025. The system will consist of a series of combinable sensors adapted to the needs of a given theater of operation and whatever environment — land, naval or air — in which it is to be operated. Signals intelligence involves using an adversary's signals — either communication (such as radio) or electronic (such as radar) — to gather data. “This information is necessary to safeguard the forces engaged, to determine the enemy's intention and to be able to independently assess the situation. It contributes to the freedom of action of forces in a theater of operations,” the DGA said in a statement. The French armed forces' current tactical sigint capabilities were developed to meet the specific needs of each service. The purpose of the joint system is to provide the three services with a homogeneous system, using as many common bricks as possible to guarantee operational continuity and joint use of the information collected. The new system will modernize and complete the current tactical sigint capabilities, taking into consideration new communications technologies used by adversaries — whether these are detecting emissions, characterizing and localizing transmitters, or intercepting communications on different frequency ranges — according to the procurement agency. In the Army, the new capability will be used by the 54th Signal Regiment on Scorpion vehicles. It will also equip the Navy's capital ships and the Atlantic 2 maritime patrol aircraft, replacing and complementing the current systems. Members of the Air and Space Force will use the system as deployable ground equipment to protect air bases. https://www.c4isrnet.com/global/europe/2021/02/08/french-military-orders-first-sigint-suite-to-work-across-all-services/