Robotic fighter jets could soon join military pilots on combat missions. Here's why.

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  31 décembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Four big questions for the Air Force in 2019

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — As the Air Force leaves 2018 behind and flies into into a new year, the service may face some big changes to its organization and aircraft inventory. Expect to see a lot of these questions answered with the release of the fiscal year 2020 budget, which officials have said will be released in early February. Neither outgoing Defense Secretary Jim Mattis nor its acting head Patrick Shanahan has confirmed a topline budget for the department — the latest reports peg it at $750 billion, up from the $733 billion the Pentagon originally planned for and the $700 billion that President Donald Trump mandated afterward. However, much of this could be dependent on whether the Air Force sees a funding bump this year. What's going on with that F-15X buy? Rumors have swirled for more than a year about whether the Air Force could buy additional F-15s, but it appears that the service will begin purchasing more of Boeing's air superiority jet. On Dec. 21, Bloomberg reported that the Air Force will request 12 F-15Xs for about $1.2 billion as part of the FY20 budget request. The F-15X will be a new variant of the F-15 that includes a new electronic warfare suite, radar, cockpit and the ability to carry more missiles. Bloomberg reports that the decision to buy the new aircraft stems from top Pentagon leaders who want new F-15s to replace the aging models used by the Air National Guard — and pointedly not the Air Force, which has been resistant to buying new, fourth-generation planes. In September, when asked whether the service was considering the purchase of the F-15X, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the service needed to use its purchasing power to buy more fifth-generation fighter jets like the F-35. "We are currently 80 percent fourth-gen aircraft and 20 percent fifth-generation aircraft,” she said. "In any of the fights that we have been asked to plan for, more fifth-gen aircraft make a huge difference, and we think that getting to 50-50 means not buying new fourth-gen aircraft, it means continuing to increase the fifth generation.” One thing to keep an eye on is how Wilson and her uniformed counterpart, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein, justify the purchase of new F-15s, and how they characterize their own levels of support for the initiative. A lack of enthusiasm could be seen as damning on Capitol Hill. The other big questions: Will the number for FY20 hold if there is more budget fluctuation following Mattis' departure? And what does the Air Force's five-year plan look like? That could provide a hint on just how big this investment ultimately may get. Does the Air Force buy light attack aircraft? The Air Force was supposed to put out a final request for proposals this year for new light attack aircraft. That has officially been pushed back until 2019, leaving two competitors in a state of purgatory. If the service moves forward with a competition, it will come down to Textron's AT-6 and the A-29 Super Tucano made by Embraer and Sierra Nevada Corp. But industry sources are still unsure whether the Air Force will commit to a formal program of record. Another major question is just how big the program will be. If fewer than 100 planes are purchased, those will likely be deployed exclusively by Air Force Special Operations Command for low-intensity combat, Maj. Gen. Scott Pleus, Air Combat Command's director of plans, programs, and requirements, told Air Force Magazine. A larger buy of hundreds of aircraft would allow the Air Force to spread its light attack planes more widely, through the United States, Europe and the Asia-Pacific. How do Air Force space operations change with the addition of a Space Force? The Pentagon's latest draft proposal would funnel the new military branch for space operations under the Department of the Air Force, a decision that would give the Air Force a continued voice on national security space pursuits. The service would be led by a Space Force chief of staff and an undersecretary of the Air Force for the Space Force, who would report to the Air Force secretary. This seemingly gives the service's top civilian a considerable amount of authority over the Space Force. Still yet to be seen is whether that solution will satisfy Congress. Rep. Adam Smith, the incoming head of the House Armed Services Committee, remains skeptical about the need for a separate military branch for space, but other lawmakers may be more bullish about the Space Force's need to remain separate from the Air Force. Another big question is what this means for the military's current space organization. Does Air Force Space Command and the Space and Missile Systems Center transfer over to the Space Force? Do the Navy and Army keep their own portions of the military space enterprise? And who is going to get named as the undersecretary of the Air Force for the Space Force, anyway? Will there be some restructuring of Air Force headquarters at the Pentagon? Earlier this month, Heidi Grant, the outgoing deputy secretary of the Air Force for international affairs, confirmed that the service is considering transferring some of her office's strategy development functions to the Air Staff's office for plans and requirements, also known as the A5. This, she said, was part of a larger reorganization currently being considered by service leadership. These internal decisions reportedly aren't tied to the budget, and Grant said the Air Force could come out with a decision as early as January. However, leaders have said little about what sort of changes have been proposed. Is this just the transfer of some responsibilities from one office to another, or might we see some consolidation or the creation of new offices as a result of the deliberations? https://www.defensenews.com/air/2018/12/27/four-big-questions-for-the-air-force-in-2019/

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  10 juillet 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Autre défense

  Here’s the No. 1 rule for US Air Force’s new advanced battle management system

  By: Valerie Insinna LE BOURGET, France, and WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force has started work on a data architecture for its Advanced Battle Management System, the family of platforms that will eventually replace the E-8C JSTARS surveillance planes. But the “biblical” rule for the program, according to the service's acquisition executive Will Roper, is that “we don't start talking platforms until the end,” he told Defense News at the Paris Air Show in June. “It is so easy to start talking about satellites and airplanes and forget what ABMS is going to have to uniquely champion, which is the data architecture that will connect them,” Roper explained. “I'm actually glad we don't have big money this year because we can't go build a drone or a satellite, so we've got to focus on the part that's less sexy, which is that data architecture,” he said. “We're going to have to do software development at multiple levels of classification and do it securely. All of those are things that are hard to get people energized about, but they're going to be the make-or-break [undertakings] for this program.” Some initial work has begun on identifying the requirements for ABMS data architecture. The service in March named Preston Dunlap, a national security analysis executive at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, as the program's “chief architect.” Dunlap will be responsible for developing the requirements for ABMS and ensuring they are met throughout the menu of systems that will comprise it. The Air Force Warfighter Integration Center, or AFWIC — the service's planning cell for future technologies and concepts of operation — provided feedback to Dunlap about how ABMS should work, Roper said. The Air Force is still deliberating what ABMS will look like in its final form, although officials have said it will include a mix of traditional manned aircraft, drones, space-based technologies and data links. The effort was devised as an alternative to a replacement for the E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System. While the service first considered a traditional recapitalization program where it would buy new JSTARS aircraft equipped with more sophisticated radars, leaders ultimately backed the more ambitious ABMS proposal, believing it to be a more survivable capability. But defense companies are hungry for more information about the platforms that will comprise ABMS, seeing the opportunity to develop new systems or upgrade legacy ones as a major potential moneymaker. Once the service has defined an ABMS data architecture — which Roper believes will occur before the fiscal 2021 budget is released — it will need to form requirements for the data that will run through and populate it as well as the artificial intelligence that automatically sorts important information and passes it to users. “Maybe one sensor needs to be able to fill a gap that others are creating,” he said. “We're going to have to look at requirements at a systems level and tell satellites that you need to be able to provide this level of data at this refresh rate. UAVs, you need to be able to do this rate and so on and so forth. Once we do that, then we'll be in the traditional part of the acquisition, which will be building those satellites, building those UAVs.” The Air Force intends to conduct yearly demonstrations throughout this process, the first of which will involve “ad hoc mesh networking,” which will allow platforms to automatically begin working together and sharing information without human interference. By FY21, full-scale prototyping could start, he said. In the commercial sector, where devices can be seamlessly linked and monitored over the internet, this concept is known as the internet of things. But that construct — where companies build technologies from the get-go with open software — is difficult to replicate in the defense world, where firms must meet strict security standards and are protective of sharing intellectual property that could give competitors an edge. “Openness in the internet of things makes sense because you can monetize the data,” Roper said. “That's not going to exist for us, so we're going to have to have a contracting incentive that replicates it. The best theory we have right now is some kind of royalty scheme that the more open you are and the more adaptation we do on top of your system, the more you benefit from it.” The service wants to hold a series of industry days to see whether such a construct would be appealing to defense companies, and how to structure it so that it will be fair and profitable. One unanswered is how to incentivize and compensate defense firms that build in new software capability. “If you create the system that allows us to put 100 apps on top of it, you benefit differently than if we can only put one. But the details are going to be difficult because maybe that one app is super important,” Roper said. “But if we can't replicate profit and cash flow on which their quarterlies depend, then they're going to have to go back to the old model of saying they are for open [architecture] but secretly giving you closed.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/paris-air-show/2019/07/09/rule-no1-for-air-forces-new-advanced-battle-management-system-we-dont-start-talking-platforms-until-the-end/

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  17 janvier 2023 | International, Naval

  Push for naval ‘interchangeability’ will require help from industry

  The U.S. Navy and its closest allies and partners continue their quest to become interchangeable, but they can’t do it without international supply chains.