December 7, 2023 | International, Aerospace
Defense bill would let Air Force retire A-10s, F-15s — but not F-22s
Lawmakers want to see more detailed plans for collaborative combat aircraft and the Next Generation Air Dominance platform.
October 30, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Unmanned aircraft could provide low-cost boost for Air Force’s future aircraft inventory, new study says
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — As the U.S. Air Force looks to increase the size and capability of its aircraft inventory, the service should assess the possibility of using drones as a low-cost and highly available alternative to manned airplanes, posits a new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The CSIS report, which was obtained by Defense News and other news outlets ahead of its Oct. 29 release, compares three recent congressionally mandated studies on the Air Force's future force structure by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank, the federally funded research organization MITRE Corp. and the service itself.
All three studies were broadly supportive of retaining existing unmanned aircraft, or as the Air Force terms them, Remotely Piloted Aircraft or RPAs. However, the CSIS report makes the case that the low cost and high mission capable rate of RPAs like the MQ-9 Reaper or RQ-4 Global Hawk merits more attention when making future force planning.
“I think we need a roadmap for RPAs in terms of what are the new missions that we can begin to transition over to RPAs and some new operational concepts for how we use them,” CSIS senior analyst Todd Harrison told reporters at a Oct. 28 briefing.
“I say this more from a cost perspective and a readiness perspective because our RPA fleet stands out from the rest of the Air Force in that it costs a lot less to operate [them] and we utilize them much more,” he said. “We need to leverage that. That's a strength that we need to double down on.”
Harrison pointed to two data points supporting a wider use case for RPAs.
Despite clocking in the highest number of flight hours per airframe, drones boast some of the highest mission capable rates in the Air Force's inventory, averaging near 90 percent for the MQ-9 and its predecessor, the MQ-1, and around 75 percent for the RQ-4 Global Hawk.
Those aircraft are also cheap to operate, with some of the lowest costs per flying hour or total ownership costs in the inventory, Harrison said.
The Air Force, MITRE and CSBA studies provide solid support for keeping the Air Force's current RPA force.
The Air Force's study, which proposes a growth to 386 total operational squadrons, would add two squadrons of unmanned strike aircraft, although it does not say what kind of aircraft should be acquired. It also recommends an increase of 22 squadrons of aircraft devoted to command and control or the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission sets, but does not provide a breakdown of what specific capability gaps need to be addressed or whether they could be filled by unmanned aircraft.
The MITRE and CSBA study, by contrast, advocate retaining the current inventory of MQ-9 Reapers and RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drones. CSBA also recommends the procurement of a new, stealthy MQ-X drone that could be used for strike, electronic attack and other missions in a contested environment.
Despite the broad support, the three studies do not necessarily portend a wider acceptance or demand for unmanned aircraft in the next budget, Harrison said.
“I wouldn't count on it happening that soon. I think this is a wider term change that's going to be needed. Part of it is a cultural change within the Air Force and part of it requires some real strategic thinking about what are the types of missions where unmanned is going to make sense and how do we best leverage those,” he said.
“The RPAs that we have today, they didn't come about overnight. They evolved. A lot of the time they faced a lot of institutional resistance, but they proved themselves. They proved themselves valuable in the kind of fights that we've been in in the past 20 years.”
One mission area that could be flown by unmanned aircraft in the future is aerial refueling, Harrison said. The Navy in 2018 awarded Boeing a contract to produce an unmanned carrier-based tanker drone known as the MQ-25. That aircraft, like all Navy planes, will use the simpler probe and drogue for refueling.
Refueling via a rigid boom, as utilized by Air Force tankers, makes for a more challenging development, but the remote vision system on Boeing's KC-46 tanker — which allows the boom operator to steer the boom using a series of cameras as his or her only visual cue — is a step in the right direction, he said.
Another potential area for expanded RPA use could be the development of low-cost drones that can be flown in swarms or as “loyal wingmen” to manned aircraft, the CSIS report stated. These “attritable” aircraft can be expended during a conflict without making an adverse impact on the mission or putting human pilots at risk.
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March 20, 2020 | International, Naval, C4ISR
The Navy will test pushing new software to ships at sea
By: Mike Gruss The Navy plans to test next year whether it can push new software — not just patches but new algorithms and battle-management aids — to its fleet without the assistance of in-person installation teams. Navy officials plan to send the first upgrades to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln's C4I systems for a test in early 2021, officials said during a March 3 media roundtable at the West 2020 trade show in San Diego. Today, Navy teams frequently deliver security patches to ships, but that process does not allow for new capabilities. The reason is because service officials fear that one change to the ship's software could have unintended consequences, creating a cascading effect and inadvertently breaking other parts of the system. But in recent years, Navy officials have embraced the idea of digital twins, which are cloud-based replicas of the software running on a ship's systems. This setup allows Navy engineers to experiment with how new code will react with the existing system. It also helps software developers work on the same baseline and avoid redundancies. Ultimately, the setup offers Navy officials a higher degree of confidence that the software they're uploading will work without any surprises. The Navy completed its first digital twin, the Lincoln, in fall 2019 and has started building a digital twin of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. Eventually Navy leaders expect to complete a digital twin of all the service's ships. However, only those in the fleet that have already been upgraded to a certain version of the Navy's tactical afloat network, known as the Consolidate Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services program, or CANES, would be eligible for the over-the-air updates. “In the Information Warfare community, software is a weapon,” Rear Adm. Kathleen M. Creighton, the Navy's cybersecurity division director in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, told C4ISRNET in a March 17 statement. “If we were to ask a warfighter if it would be valuable to conceptualize, order and receive additional kinetic capability at sea, of course the answer would be yes. The same is true of software. “In an ever-dynamic warfighting environment, the ability to improve, add to, or build new capabilities quickly has extraordinary value. We believe our sailors on the front line are the best positioned to tell us what they need to win. That is what we are trying to accomplish. Put the warfighter's perspective at the center of the software we deliver and do it iteratively at speed.” In this case, think of a capability update for a ship much like downloading a new app on a smartphone. Today, some ships in the fleet can receive security updates for applications they've already downloaded, but they cannot download new applications. Navy officials expect that to change. The new capability would arrive as an automatic, over-the-air update or come pierside, but would not require an installation team as is the case today. “Anytime there's a new capability or a new change, we're just going to do it the same way that you get that done on your smartphone,” said Delores Washburn, chief engineer at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, which is leading the change. “What we will be able to [do] now is do a rapid update to the ships.” Navy engineers hope to be able to push the updates as quickly as war fighters need them. “We're going to try to go slowly here because, again, we're having to tackle simultaneously cultural, technical and operational problems,” said Robert Parker, the deputy program executive officer for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence. The Navy plans to test this new arrangement by installing a set of software, performing an update and then fairly quickly pushing that update to the ship. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/03/19/the-navy-will-test-pushing-new-software-to-ships-at-sea/
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July 8, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Other Defence
USAF: New Raytheon Bomb Ready for Real-World Vetting
RACHEL S. COHEN The Air Force's top weapons development official says Raytheon's Small Diameter Bomb II, or “StormBreaker,” is ready for primetime despite needing to work out some lingering issues. “Getting them out into the field, right now I think that's the best way for us to wring this out,” Air Force Weapons Program Executive Officer Brig. Gen. Anthony Genatempo said at a recent Air Force Life Cycle Management Center conference. “Get it into the hands of the people using it, figure out what they can do with it that we did not think of, figure out what things are happening in the operational environment that we were not able to replicate and test, and then feed that back into successive upgrades.” The Pentagon plans to buy 17,000 SDB IIs, split between 12,000 for the Air Force and 5,000 for the Navy, and will fly them on all current Air Force fighter and bomber aircraft as well as the A-10, AC-130J, and MQ-9. StormBreaker was designed as a precision munition that can communicate with nearby aircraft to attack moving and stationary targets in bad weather and notch “multiple kills per pass,” according to the Air Force. “The StormBreaker tri-mode seeker uses imaging infrared and millimeter wave radar in its normal mode to give pilots the ability to destroy moving targets, even in adverse weather, from standoff ranges,” Raytheon said in a press release. “Additionally, the weapon can use its semi-active laser guidance to hit targets.” As of October 2018, the service planned to spend $1.9 billion on development and $2.6 billion on procurement, the Government Accountability Office reported in May. StormBreaker's ability to communicate with its host aircraft needs more vetting, Genatempo said, and other fixes are already being added into the current production batch, Lot 4. Its radio may not be fixed until Lot 6 or 7, and the service plans to address parts that will be outdated in Lot 8. “Whether or not that is an issue that will prevent fielding, I don't think I can say that. I don't even think Air Combat Command can say that right now,” Genatempo said. “They very well may choose to take an initial delivery of these weapons at the capability they're at, knowing that one caveat. ... It certainly doesn't affect the entire envelope of operation of the weapon. It's a miniature part of one or two different scenarios.” The weapon is moving closer to being declared ready for initial operations afterfinishing operational tests in June and an overall test program that uncovered a range of performance issues that Raytheon and government officials say are routine in the course of vetting. When airmen are ready to receive the new bomb is ultimately up to Air Combat Command. “It's a very good conversation and dialogue with Air Combat Command about what they would like, when they would like it, what they're willing to take and employ,” Genatempo said. “I very much think that this weapon is ready to go out [to] operational use.” The Air Force now expects to reach its “required assets available” milestone, which has changed multiple times, from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019 through the end of 2020. It was most recently slated for January 2019. To meet RAA, the service must arm 12 Boeing F-15Es with 144 weapons and own spare parts, support equipment, and more. The milestone was originally scheduled for July 2017. Genatempo said RAA was pushed back again to avoid punishing the program for having to wait its turn for testing ranges, as range availability is scarce thanks to several weapons programs simultaneously in testing. Delaying the milestone to later this year was “predominantly a paperwork exercise to make sure we didn't breach our [acquisition program baseline],” he said. http://airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/July%202019/USAF-New-Raytheon-Bomb-Ready-for-Real-World-Vetting.aspx