US Navy Wants a Next-Gen Supply Network — and Fast

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  August 7, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  UK facilities for American F-35 jets are delayed and over budget

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force is on track to begin permanently basing its F-35 jets abroad next year, with RAF Lakenheath in England set to become the service's first international F-35 base. But construction on new hangars and facilities necessary for supporting the high-tech stealth jet have gone over budget and over schedule, and many buildings won't be ready when the first planes arrive in November 2021. On average, construction projects associated with the F-35 beddown at Lakenheath are about 25 percent over the initial $480 million budget estimated in 2015, said Lt. Col. Clinton Warner, who leads the 48th Fighter Wing's F-35 program integration office. “The overall trend has been projects are late and also over budget,” he told Defense News during a July interview. “A lot of the assumptions that were made back in 2015 weren't necessarily valid. There's been cost growth that was outside of the planning assumptions that were made back in 2015.” The cost increase is not the only problem. As RAF Lakenheath's first F-35 squadron stands up, neither the hangars planned to house the jets nor the headquarters building used for planning operations and maintenance will be ready, Warner said. A training simulator building will also be late. Despite the delays, the Air Force still plans to move forward with the beddown of the jet. Warner said the service is exploring options to keep operations on track, such having the new F-35 squadron share space with existing units — which include three American F-15 squadrons — or potentially leasing additional facilities on base from the United Kingdom. “In terms of getting here and flying the aircraft, we will still do that. [There is] really no difference in terms of the capability is going to be delivered, but it'll just look different in how we do it,” Warner said. “It will be some strain on the units here at the base, as there's more crowding and with waiting for those facilities to come online.” The arrival of U.S. Air Force F-35s in Europe has been a long-awaited milestone for the service, which announced in 2015 that RAF Lakenheath would become the first international location to get the jets. Since then, F-35s temporarily deployed to the base in 2017. “Having a fighter with the capability of the F-35s one hop closer to a part of the world that's seemingly less stable certainly will have a deterrent effect,” said Frank Gorenc, a retired four-star general who commanded U.S. Air Forces in Europe from 2013 to 2016. “Being able to daily train with the partners that have F-35s will have a deterrent effect,” Gorenc told Defense News. “It will cause interoperability to soar both on the maintenance side and on the operations side. I think the benefits of having that equipment — the demonstration of having a fifth-generation [fighter jet] in theater combined with F-15Es and F-16s — I think is the right signal.” Under the current plans, F-35 pilots and maintainers will begin to arrive at RAF Lakenheath in June 2021, with the first aircraft to follow in November. The base will eventually be home to two F-35 squadrons, each with a total of 24 jets. That beddown will follow more than five years of planning and development on the part of the Air Force, which stood up a team in 2015 to get the base ready for the incoming jets. In 2018, the U.S. Air Force chose Kier-Volker Fitzpatrick, a joint venture of U.K.-based design and construction firms Kier Group and VolkerFitzpatrick, to build and renovate all installations associated with the F-35 presence at RAF Lakenheath. Construction began in July 2019, with seven of 14 new facilities — which will include new hangars, a building for flight simulation, a maintenance unit and storage facilities — currently either being built or already complete. As unforeseen costs have mounted, the base's program integration office has had to request $90 million in additional funding from Congress, as well as permission from the Pentagon to revise the scope of the projects, Warner said. But there's no overarching answer for why costs have ballooned. “Each individual project had a different set of assumptions, a different set of risk profiles, and some were correct and some are not correct,” Warner said. With only a few years between the decision to base F-35s at Lakenheath in 2015 and the original planned start of operations in 2020, the U.S. government wanted to put a construction firm under contract sooner rather than later, said Stephen King of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, a U.K. government agency charged with overseeing the building and maintenance of military facilities. But workforce costs grew as the project was discovered to be more complex than originally anticipated. “When the workers are tendered, the prices that are coming back in are found to be different from those originally estimated, and it seems to be the price of doing business on a military establishment. There seems to be an ‘add-on' to the outside market,” King said. Because the F-35 is a stealth jet that processes large amounts of classified information, many of the installations linked with its operations must meet certain security specifications. Building those structures to both U.S. and U.K. standards while using a foreign workforce of U.K. citizens posed challenges that the U.S. Air Force did not foresee during the design process, Warner said. “Luckily most of these problems are behind us, but they did cause delays in terms of when we were programming out in the schedule and looking at what we thought it would look like,” he said. “Some of the challenges associated with building those secure facilities were not fully understood.” Air Force officials have said keeping the projects on track was always going to be a challenge. In 2016, Col. Robert Novotny, who was then the commander of the base's 48th Fighter Wing, predicted construction projects could face troubles getting funding or finding a skilled workforce to build the new facilities, and that F-35s likely wouldn't begin to arrive on base until at least 2021 or 2022. “For me, the concern I have when I look at Lakenheath is not the F-35,” he told Defense News in July 2016. “For me, the concern I have is: Are we going to be able to build enough stuff fast enough?” https://www.defensenews.com/smr/nato-air-power/2020/08/06/uk-facilities-for-american-f-35-jets-are-delayed-and-over-budget/

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  April 22, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  COVID-19: Army Futures Command Takes Wargames Online

  While the pandemic's halted field exercises, tabletop wargames can continue long-distance. The catch? Getting classified bandwidth so you can discuss specific military capabilities. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on April 21, 2020 at 7:31 AM WASHINGTON: With Pentagon travel restrictions now extended through June 30th, the Army's in-house futurists can't hold their usual face-to-face brainstorming sessions. So rather than delay their work for months, they're moving seminars and wargames online – but there's a tradeoff. The long-distance collaboration tools available so far aren't secure enough for classified data, which means some scenarios are off-limits. The COVID-19 coronavirus has halted some – but far from all – military training and experimentation. Army Futures Command in particular has had to cancel some high-priority field exercises to try out new tactics and technologies, but a lot of its work is thinking about the future, which you can do long-distance, one of its deputy commanders said in a video town hall last week. “We did have to cancel the Joint Warfighting Assessment [JWA] in Europe,” Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley said, “[but] a lot of the work we do in terms of developing concepts...is moving ahead without significant impact.” Wesley runs one of Army Futures Command's three major subunits, the internal thinktank now known as the Futures & Concepts Center (formerly ARCIC), which brainstorms, wargames, and writes about how conflict will change. Tabletop exercises (TTXs, in Army jargon) can move online. That will include the Futures & Concept Center's annual “capstone exercise” on the Army's concept for future warfare, Multi-Domain Operations, he said. It also included another MDO exercise that had been set to take place in May at the Army War College. Four-Star Orders The May wargame was particularly important because it was the kick-off for a study ordered by the four-star chief of Army Futures Command himself, Gen. John “Mike” Murray, one of Wesley's staff officers told me when I followed up. “We wanted to be able to return to Gen. Murray sooner versus later with initial findings,” Col. Chris Rogers told me, “then continue to experiment throughout the summer and the [fall].” The topic that Murray was so intent on? “It was focused specifically on addressing concerns that Gen. Murray had with calibrated force posture,” Rogers said. In layman's terms, that means what soldiers need to be where, with what equipment, at what time, to handle specific threats. In practice, “calibrated force posture” is a 3-D chess game with a few hundred thousand pieces. You have to figure out what kind of forces need to be forward-deployed on allied territory before a crisis starts, what they should do to deter potential adversaries, what warning you might have of an impending attack, what reinforcements you can send in time, how the adversary can stop those reinforcements, how you can stop the adversary from stopping you, and so on ad infinitum. To start tackling these questions, the plan had been to bring officers and civil servants together from all the Army's “schoolhouses” – the armor and infantry center at Fort Benning, the artillery center at Fort Still, the aviation center at Fort Rucker, and so on – for two weeks at the War College. The scenarios to be examined, focused on a particularly challenging region for military deployments: the vast expanses of the Pacific. Now, this wasn't going to be a wargame in the classic sense, with somber men pushing wooden blocks on big maps or icons battling each other on a big screen. No one can write the rules for a detailed simulation yet because the Army's still brainstorming solutions. Instead, such events are more like highly structured seminars, with teams splitting off to analyze particular aspects of the scenario and reporting back on possible plans, at which point they may get challenged with “well, what if the enemy does this?” But precisely because this wasn't a detailed simulation, the Army didn't need specialized software to run it long-distance – just standard online collaboration tools. (In this case, those tools were provided by DTIC, the Defense Technical Information Center). Rogers described the process as a “guided, threaded discussion.” As he explained it, it sounded a lot like an online discussion board, with moderators posting topics and participants posting replies and replies to replies back and forth. That's actually one of the longest-established applications of the Internet, dating back to the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) that predate the World Wide Web. Modern equivalents are much more sophisticated: You can post graphics like maps and operational diagrams, for instance, which are definitely useful for a military planner. But the systems available to Rogers & co. in May still had definite limits. Limiting Factor The biggest issue? “It's an unclassified network, so there are certain things that we lose,” Rogers told me, like the ranges of specific current and future weapons. The compromise the wargamers made is they'll restrict this first exercise to what's called the “competition phase.” That means everything that happens before – or hopefully instead of — the outbreak of a shooting war — the “conflict phase.” Not simulating actual battles might sound like a major handicap for military planners. But the Army has slowly and painfully come to realize that, while it's really, really good at planning combat operations (what it calls “kinetics”), it really needs to practice the strategic, political and propaganda maneuvering that goes on outside of combat (“non-kinetics”), because you can win every battle and still lose the war. Indeed, from Russia seizing Crimea without a shot to China quietly annexing large portions of the South China Sea, America's adversaries have proven highly capable of accomplishing military objectives without firing a shot. Now, military power still matters in the competition phase: Over all the shadow-boxing there looms the threat of force. But because the competition phase is about deterring war, not waging it, what matters is not the actual capabilities of your weapons, but what the enemy thinks your weapons can do. That, in turn, means you can brainstorm the competition phase in an unclassified discussion, using publicly available information, without ever getting into the classified details of what your weapons could really do when and if the shooting starts. “That's why we felt very comfortable with [changing] from a classified event to an unclassified event, [for] the first iteration,” Rogers told me. Likewise, instead of using classified scenarios depicting potential future crises, he said, they used real crises from recent history, where there's plenty of unclassified information, and then discussed different ways the US could have approached them. At some point, of course, the discussion will have to move on from the competition phase to conflict – from how you calibrate the posture of your forces to how those forces, once postured in the right place, would actually fight. Rogers & co. help to get into those classified details in the next major wargame, scheduled for August. August is after the Pentagon's travel ban expires – at least, in its current form. But given how unpredictable the pandemic has been so far, another extension is entirely possible, Rogers acknowledges, so he and his team are studying alternatives to a face-to-face event. As Lt. Gen. Wesley put it in his town hall: “The real issue is, how long does this last?” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/covid-19-army-futures-command-takes-wargames-online/

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  March 18, 2022 | International, Naval

  As US Navy rethinks its fleet, Ingalls Shipbuilding faces uncertain future

  Over the past three years, the U.S. Navy has tightened its budget and changed its requirements, making the future look far less rosy for a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries.