Boeing originally expected to start delivering its latest batch of F-15EX Eagle II fighters to the Air Force in December 2022, the federal watchdog wrote in its annual assessment of weapon systems, released Thursday.

Several production problems delayed the delivery of those six fighters in lot 1B, GAO said. Those delays were mainly caused by what office referred to as “supplier quality problems related to a critical component in the forward fuselage assembly that ensures safety of flight.” The report did not provide further details on that component, but said quality problems were fixed by the time Boeing built the seventh and eighth F-15EXs.

Boeing also mis-drilled windscreen installation holes on four F-15EXs in this lot because the company used tooling with a design error, GAO said. Program officials told auditors the problem was caught before more planes were mis-drilled, and that Boeing will redrill the holes on affected aircraft before starting production on the second lot of fighters.

Boeing declined to comment to Defense News on the quality issues highlighted in GAO’s report, and referred questions to the Air Force. Defense News has reached out to the service for comment.

Boeing spokeswoman Deborah VanNierop confirmed Friday that the only F-15EXs so far delivered to the Air Force are the two test aircraft that were delivered in spring 2021, which were considered lot 1A.

More than two years later, the service is still waiting for the next batch of fighters.

The F-15EX is an upgraded version of the fourth-generation Eagle fighter, with advanced avionics such as fly-by-wire controls and improved electronic warfare capabilities.

But those problems are having ripple effects on the F-15EX program, GAO said. Each lot 2 fighter is now delayed by two months as a result of the earlier lot’s problems, the report read, and delivery schedules are in danger of slipping further.

The report noted that program officials thought Boeing could deliver the six F-15EXs in that lot between May and July, with two delivered per month. But Boeing and the federal Defense Contract Management Agency warned that more delays could occur, GAO said.

Boeing’s analysis predicted it would be unable to deliver the first fighter in this batch until July, and the second in August.

The Defense Contract Management Agency concluded the last deliveries in the lot would probably not happen until September because of the problems that cropped up so far.

GAO said that if delivery of these planes is delayed beyond July, it will be tough to meet planned deadlines in 2023, including the declaration of initial operational capability in July and full-rate production in October.

Boeing referred Defense News’ questions on the fighters’ schedule to the Air Force.

GAO also warned that cybersecurity vulnerabilities remain the F-15EX’s primary vulnerability. The fighter’s design was derived from versions of the F-15 that were sold to foreign militaries, GAO said, and weren’t designed to meet the Air Force’s own cybersecurity requirements.

Program officials told GAO that it is working through the Defense Department’s six-phase process for assessing cybersecurity vulnerabilities on the F-15EX, with the first four either already done or expected to be finished in early 2023. The program expected to finish the final two phases on the aircraft delivered in lot 1B.

The Air Force is now planning to buy 104 F-15EXs, and requested money to buy 24 of the fighters in the proposed fiscal 2024 budget.

The Air Force last year moved to scale back its F-15EX procurement in the FY23 budget, from the original 144 to 80. This was intended to free up funds for higher priority programs, GAO said.

The watchdog warned that a lack of enough procurement funding for the F-15EX could cause the program to be curtailed slightly below that already reduced 80. A June 2022 cost estimate showed the Air Force wouldn’t have enough money for 80 fighters, and only be able to buy 78, GAO noted.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in a March budget briefing that the service had decided to partially reverse its decision to cut the F-15EX procurement to 80, bringing it back up to 104.

Five members of the joint chiefs of staff — including Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman — are required statutorily to leave their posts within the coming months, starting in July. Meanwhile, most of the vice chiefs — many of whom are the nominees or favorites to replace the chiefs — are preparing to assume leadership of the services amid the Senate impasse.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., is doubling down on his blockade of military confirmations. He told Defense News that the looming vacancies will not prompt him to back down from his ongoing hold on hundreds of military promotions, including the joint chiefs.

“If they’re worried about readiness, they need to go back to their old policy and we’ll get it done,” Tuberville said on Wednesday. “But they’re more worried about social programs than they are about military readiness.”

The senator imposed his blockade in February to protest the Pentagon’s new policy that provides leave time for troops to travel to receive abortion services if they’re stationed in states where it’s now illegal.

The first service chief vacancy will occur when Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger steps down on July 10, commencing a steady stream of exits from the joint chiefs through October. Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville must step down next on August 8, followed by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday shortly after on August 21.

President Joe Biden nominated Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown as the next joint chiefs chairman, replacing Milley, who must depart by early October, and creating another opening at the top of the Air Force.

“There’s no playbook for this,” Arnold Punaro, a former staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview with Defense News. “This is really a time for regular order, and not the chaos and uncertainty that we see in the system right now.”

The tumult sends a terrible message about the seriousness with which the United States takes its military promotion process, he said.

“It sends a sign of weakness to the rest of the world, that we can’t get our work done on time, and that we’re involved in political chaos,” Punaro said. “This has nothing to do with the individuals involved. We want the young officers, and up-and-coming commanders to see that the military promotion system is based on merit and [who is] best qualified.”

The Senate typically confirms noncontroversial military nominees, including the joint chiefs, using expedited floor procedures via unanimous consent. But any individual senator can block a unanimous consent request, allowing Tuberville to force the Senate to move through numerous procedural votes on each individual nominee.

“All they’ve got to do is put it on the floor and vote for it,” Tuberville told Defense News. “I’ll vote for it.”

Tuberville’s hold would require several weeks of limited Senate floor time to confirm the five joint chiefs nominees alone. Tuberville’s blockade is also holding up more than 220 flag and general officer promotions, which would take an additional several months of scarce floor time if the Senate did nothing but confirm military nominees. The Senate expects to receive hundreds more military nominees in the coming months.

Democratic leaders appear reluctant to use valuable floor time to confirm otherwise noncontroversial nominees and worry that doing so will encourage other senators to block military promotions in order to extract policy concessions.

“The Senate cannot encourage this behavior by handing out rewards for holding up hundreds of nominees,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who chairs the military personnel panel, told Defense News.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., repeatedly declined to commit to scheduling floor votes for the joint chiefs nominees when pressed by reporters at a Wednesday press conference.

“What Sen. Tuberville has done is just awful,” Schumer told Defense News. “We believe that Republican senators, if they care about national security, should be putting pressure on him to release the holds.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said last month that he disagrees with Tuberville’s military holds.

And Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Defense News he hoped the issue could be resolved with a vote on the Pentagon’s abortion policy in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act– a suggestion that Tuberville shot down.

“I don’t want to put it in the NDAA and then hold it up because you’re going to have people that will be against it,” Tuberville told Defense News. “I’d rather have the Defense Department draw something up, send it over here and let’s vote on it, stand-alone.”

What happens next?

The fact that the same nominees tapped to lead the services will fill in for the vacancies in their capacity as the number two officer provides the Senate with little immediate incentive to resolve the impasse.

Punaro said vice chiefs would step in and perform those duties to keep the services running on a day-to-day basis. Similarly, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady would temporarily perform the duties of chairman if Brown is not confirmed by the beginning of October.

Delaying the start of new chiefs’ tenures hinders their ability to start making their desired changes to their services, he said.

Gen. Eric Smith, the Marines’ No. 2 officer and Biden’s nominee for commandant, is scheduled for a confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Given Smith’s current role as assistant commandant, the Marines are preparing for Smith to perform the commandant’s duties when Berger leaves on July 10 even if the Senate has not confirmed him by then.

The confirmation hearings for the other joint chiefs nominees, including Brown, are slated for July.

That includes Army vice chief Gen. Randy George to replace McConville. Biden has yet to nominate a new Chief of Naval Operations, but Navy vice chief Admiral Lisa Franchetti is widely considered the favorite for the position.

And of course, Biden will have to nominate a new Air Force chief of staff to replace Brown, with current Air Force vice chief Gen. David Allvin considered the frontrunner.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., told Defense News “It would be absolutely irresponsible” not to have a congressionally confirmed service chief.

Senators have held up votes on noncontroversial nominees more frequently in recent years. For instance, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., imposed a blanket hold on all Defense Department civilian nominations for more than a year.

They target military nominees less frequently. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., was the last senator to do so in 2020. Her hold lasted less than two weeks before she lifted it. By contrast, Tuberville’s hold has lasted more than three months with no end in sight.

“What goes around comes around,” Reed told Defense News. “If basically this succeeds, then the next two years from now someone who wants an assault weapons ban will say ‘gee, I’ll just hold up all the generals.”

Jen Judson contributed to this report.

It’s been 19 years since the Air Force last convened the biennial air-to-air weapons meet, which began in the early days of the Cold War in 1954.

The competition is named for the legend of William Tell, a 14th-century Swiss farmer who — as the tale goes — had to fire an arrow so accurately that it would knock an apple from his son’s head, lest they both be killed for insulting the Austrian Habsburg empire.

For decades, the shootout provided a stage for ambitious fighter pilots to show off their skills for bragging rights, a trophy and the title of “Top Gun.”

The Air Force has held just one William Tell competition in the 27 years since it paused the regular meets in 1996. The event reconvened for its 50th anniversary in 2004, before the War on Terror spurred a 19-year hiatus.

Now with U.S. forces out of Afghanistan and a substantially smaller footprint in Iraq and Syria, the Air Force is turning its attention to a faster-paced, more complex kind of air war.

This year’s William Tell, slated for Sept. 11-15 at Savannah Air National Guard Base in Georgia, will reflect military competition in the Indo-Pacific — namely, the U.S.-China rivalry — posed by savvier enemy pilots, high-tech jets and advanced anti-aircraft artillery.

F-35 Lightning II, F-22 Raptor and F-15 Eagle units will go head-to-head in a gauntlet of simulated air combat scenarios, weapons loading, maintenance and weapons director competitions.

Fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft will act as the adversarial “red team,” Air Combat Command spokesperson Mike Reeves told Air Force Times. It’s unclear whether William Tell will bring in the Air Force’s red air contractors like Top Aces and Textron subsidiary ATAC, which fly the F-16 Fighting Falcon and Mirage F1 jets, or turn to drone targets like the remote-controlled QF-16s.

Pilots will be tested on their offensive and defensive prowess against simulated enemy air forces, and on how well they maneuver when an adversary aircraft is in sight.

“There will be a heritage event with live air-to-air gun employment against a towed banner,” Reeves said. “There will also be … weapons loading, command and control, and intelligence competitions.”

Wings across Air Combat Command and Pacific Air Forces are allowed to send teams of 10 to 14 airmen, depending on the type of aircraft. Each team needs one captain, an aircrew of up to eight people, two intelligence airmen and three weapons loaders. Command-and-control wings can also send three members apiece to participate.

Participants will compete for individual and team awards. The group that best thinks outside the box in collaborating with other jets will be crowned the top “fighter integration team,” to show that the aircraft are “most lethal when used as a cohesive fighting force,” Reeves said.

Planners hope the resurgence of William Tell will help prepare airmen for real-life combat operations in the Indo-Pacific, where they could face off against Chinese jets like the J-16 fighter that buzzed an American RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance plane on May 26.

The U.S. considers China its top strategic threat and has pledged to protect Taiwan, the autonomous island nation that Beijing claims as its own territory, if China were to invade.

“Our unwavering commitment to air dominance remains steadfast,” Air Combat Command boss Gen. Mark Kelly said in a release. “We reiterate our steadfast dedication to maintaining control of the skies in support of our joint force and multinational partners.”

Two ways the Pentagon can provide that steadier business include multiyear procurements for weapons and greater use of predictive maintenance, Brown said during a discussion with the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Brown said the military has focused too little keeping a steady flow of munitions production and procurement. “In some cases, because you don’t have a threat on your doorstep, munitions aren’t maybe high on our priority list,” he said.

But with the threat now posed by China and Russia, “that’s different now,” he added.

“This is an area that we’ve got to continue to pay attention to, to ensure that we bring [munitions] along as well,” said Brown, who President Joe Biden last month nominated to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He cited the Korea readiness review, which the military conducted during his tenure as Pacific Air Forces commander, examining what would be necessary to counter a threat from North Korea as an example of the kind of advance munitions planning that must take place. Part of that review, Brown said, was to “look really hard at munitions.”

Brown reiterated the Air Force’s call in its proposed fiscal 2024 budget for multiyear procurements for three key weapons: the Raytheon Technologies-made AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile, and the Lockheed Martin-made Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range as well as the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile.

Air Force officials said in March during the budget’s unveiling that the service wanted to use about $1 billion so industry could procure long-lead items for those weapons, as well as other steps that would send a longer-term demand signal to industry. The FY23 National Defense Authorization Act granted the Air Force the authority to make those multiyear purchases.

The Air Force’s proposed FY24 budget would roughly double its overall spending on missiles, from $2.3 billion in FY23 to $4.7 billion.

The Pentagon is also seeking lawmakers’ approval to conduct multiyear buys of Raytheon’s Patriot surface-to-air guided missile system and Lockheed’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, fired from the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. The U.S. government has provided those weapons to Ukraine as it fights off a Russian invasion.

And if the military wants industry to be able to surge munitions production capacity in an emergency, Brown said, it must make such multiyear buys a regular part of how it does business. That way, industry will have a more reliable demand signal and can keep its production lines flowing.

“I believe that’s just a start,” Brown said, referring to the multiyear buys in the FY24 budget request. “We’ve got to look at multiyear procurements so that it helps give a predictable demand signal to industry. And it’s not just the prime [contractors], it’s all the subs below them so they actually have supply chains laid in, they’re [set up with the proper facilities], they have the workforce, and it’s not a little bit up and down and unpredictability.”

Brown also said it will be important to ensure allies and partners have access to these munitions — and that industry can build enough to keep both them and the United States armed.

“It’s great for them to have the airplanes, but they’ve also got to have the munitions that are capable,” Brown said. “How do we make sure that we have enough munitions on the shelf to support us and our allies and partners? This is something that we need to focus on.”

Brown said the digital engineering of munitions will make it easier to take a more modular approach to building some weapons, similar to the way new aircraft, such as the B-21 Raider, use a modular architecture.

Brown also said the Air Force’s desire to conduct more predictive, conditions-based maintenance on aircraft — where maintainers track how long parts have been on an airplane and try to replace them before they wear out and break — could also help provide a steadier demand signal for industry.

“With data, you know based on the service life of this part how long before it’s going to break,” Brown said. “You don’t wait until it breaks. You’re able to replace it a little bit sooner, which also can help create the demand signal for the supply chain.”

Brown said the Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office has been looking closely at ways to use maintenance data to not just decide when maintainers should replace parts, but also to help industry predict how it needs to manage its supply chains.

The Air Defender 23 exercise starting next week will see 10,000 participants and 250 aircraft from 25 nations respond to a simulated attack on a NATO member country. The United States alone is sending 2,000 U.S. Air National Guard personnel and about 100 aircraft to take part in the June 12-23 training maneuvers.

“This is an exercise that would be absolutely impressive to anybody who’s watching, and we don’t make anybody watch it,” U.S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann said.

“It will demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt the agility and the swiftness of our allied force in NATO as a first responder,” she told reporters in Berlin.

“I would be pretty surprised if any world leader was not taking note of what this shows in terms of the spirit of this alliance, which means the strength of this alliance,” Gutmann said.

“And that includes Mr. Putin,” she added, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While the drill was planned for several years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 ear has jolted NATO into preparing in earnest for the possibility of an attack on its territory. Sweden, which is hoping to join the alliance, and Japan are also taking part in the exercise.

“We are showing that NATO territory is our red line, that we are prepared to defend every centimeter of this territory,” said Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz of the German air force, which is coordinating the exercise. “But we won’t, for example, conduct any flights toward Kalinigrad. So this is intended to be defensive.”

Kalinigrad is a Russian exclave located on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh, director of the U.S. Air National Guard, said the exercise goes beyond deterrence.

“It’s about the readiness of our force. It’s about coordination, not just within NATO, but with our other allies and partners outside of NATO,” he said.

Loh said the exercise would be an opportunity for younger U.S. airmen, many of whom have mainly gotten experience serving in the Middle East, to build relationships with allies in Europe and prepare for a different military scenario.

“So this is about now establishing what it means to go against a great power, in a great power competition,” he said.

Authorities have said the drill will cause some disruption to civilian flights in Europe during the period.

The U.S. government created the A-10 in the 1970s to provide close-air support to American ground troops. At the time it was an effective counterweight to the threat of Soviet tanks, and in the decades since it has served the military faithfully.

The A-10 proved especially useful in the Gulf War, when it flew 8,100 sorties and destroyed thousands of Soviet-era combat vehicles and equipment. Later, it helped the U.S. destroy hardened enemy positions in the war on terrorism.

But major military operations in the Middle East have ceased. Today, our greatest adversary is communist China, whose tanks and emplacements are much more advanced than those used by the Soviets or Islamic terrorists.

To prepare to counter Beijing in a future conflict, we must make the best possible use of our limited hangar space and procurement dollars. To do that, we must retire the A-10, as senior military leaders have called for. This will make room for aircraft like the F-35 Lightning II, and free funds for the development and construction of next-generation missiles and missile defense systems, which will be invaluable in any future Indo-Pacific conflict, whether that’s in Taiwan, the South China Sea or the Korean Peninsula.

However, the A-10 can still do a lot of good if transferred to allies and partners in need of it. The most obvious example is Ukraine, which is preparing to mount a counteroffensive against Soviet-era tanks and entrenched Russian positions.

At the recent G7 summit, President Joe Biden stated he supports training Ukrainian forces to operate F-16 Fighting Falcons, a first step to allies providing the planes to Ukraine. But even if we accept the president’s position, there is good reason to wonder if an air-to-air fighter makes the most sense. Ukraine’s defense intelligence chief, for one, believes Ukraine would fare better with A-10s. Moreover, F-16s require 6,000 feet of tarmac — increasingly rare in bombed-out Ukraine — to take off and land, while A-10s only require 4,000 feet of dirt runway.

Beyond Ukraine, potential beneficiaries of an A-10 transfer program include African countries in the Sahel fighting ISIS and Boko Haram, or even Latin American nations combating paramilitary rebels and drug cartels in the jungle.

Such a program would be neither unprecedented nor unusual. The U.S. manufactures and sells vehicles and platforms the U.S. military no longer uses on a semi-regular basis. For instance, production of the A-29 Super Tucano employs hundreds of Floridians in Jacksonville and supports counterterrorism operations in Africa and Colombia.

Simply put, phasing out the A-10 by transferring it to allies and partners is the smart thing to do. Not only would it help America adapt to the challenges of the 21st century, it would also help our friends confront their own challenges without deep U.S. intervention. That’s killing two birds with one stone — the best kind of public policy.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, and services on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Lockheed picked GE’s CF6-80E1 engine for its planned LMXT strategic tanker, which would be a variation of Airbus’s A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport.

Over the next decade, the Air Force plans to buy about 75 tankers to tide it over between the Boeing-made KC-46 Pegasus — of which the service plans to buy 179 units — and a next-generation design that could be fielded in the latter half of the 2030s.

Lockheed hopes its proposed LMXT can fill that interim role, which in the past has been referred to as a “bridge” tanker.

But the Air Force has downgraded its procurement plans for the interim tanker, announcing in March that it had decided to cut in half the original plans to buy 150 of them and speed up the procurement of the next-generation tanker. And Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has suggested the service could forgo a competition for the interim tanker, and instead buy another series of modified KC-46s from Boeing.

The Air Force’s surprise announcement upended the state of play on its future tanker vision, and made Lockheed’s path to success on LMXT tougher.

In a briefing with reporters Tuesday, Larry Gallogly, head of Lockheed’s campaign, said the company wants its engine decision to show the Air Force that its LMXT tanker could be a viable choice for the service if it decides to launch a competition.

“We want the Air Force to be very confident that we are the low-risk solution,” he said. “We do want to convince the Air Force that we are ready to go ahead, but we also need to show the Air Force exactly what they would be getting if they entered this competition — what is the real alternative?”

Gallogly said Lockheed hopes the positive 50-year track record of GE’s CF6 series of engines on other planes such as the C-5M Super Galaxy and the current Air Force One presidential planes will make it easier for the Air Force to opt for a competition.

“This aircraft has the space, it has the electrical power requirements,” he said. This engine would provide “a lot of electrical power on the aircraft to grow with the mission. … When we look at the Pacific theater in particular … there will be this insatiable need for gas. And if the Air Force chooses to sole-source this interim block of tankers, we set ourselves up for a single point of failure for bulk delivery of fuel in-theater.”

Abdoulaye Ndiaye, the general manager for GE Aerospace’s mobility engines program, said the Royal Australian Air Force now flies MRTT aircraft with GE’s CF6-80E1 engines, and the Spanish Air Force plans to use those engines on its future MRTT fleet.

Lockheed chose this version of GE’s CF6 engine over other unspecified engines because it would deliver greater thrust — almost 70,000 pounds — and better fuel efficiency than previous models, Gallogly said.

If the Air Force goes with LMXT, Lockheed Martin plans to build it in Mobile, Alabama, and Marietta, Georgia.

Lawmakers such as Rep. Jerry Carl, R-Alabama, have criticized the Air Force for considering skipping a competition. In May 2022, Carl made an unsuccessful attempt to add an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have forced a tanker competition, saying lawmakers could not allow the Air Force to “run away with our checkbook and do what they want to do.”

The Air Force has not yet released its requirements for the next tanker purchase, but Gallogly said the process of setting requirements will likely be finished in late June or early July.

Lockheed expects the Air Force to release a request for information after the requirements are done, he said, and by the end of the year, it will be clearer if the service plans to hold a competition.

“When we see those final requirements, that will give us a much better idea of how well the LMXT is aligned with the priorities of the Air Force,” Gallogly said. “We think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what those requirements are going to be, but we’re looking forward to actually seeing those requirements in writing.”

The current plan is to begin training experienced Ukrainian pilots while European nations begin to send aircraft from their existing inventories. Many of these aircraft were purchased in the 1980s. Most have received some upgrades, such as modern networking equipment, allowing aircraft to share targeting data with one another (known as Link 16). However, these aircraft do not have the latest sensors and electronic protections.

Many NATO members fly the F-16 and are ordering new aircraft — mainly the F-35 — to replace their aging fleets. F-35s are slow to arrive, however, meaning that only a handful nations are prepared now to provide aircraft.

The F-16 is designed to fly up to 8,000 hours. They typically fly between 200 and 350 hours a year in peace time. Likely aircraft going to Ukraine could have up to 7,000 hours of flight time. Thus, while F-16s might offer improved capabilities compared to Ukraine’s Soviet-era fleet, they will need to be replaced in perhaps four to six years.

One option might be to provide Ukraine with new F-16 Block 70s. This option would keep Ukraine in the F-16 ecosystem — streamlining both training and sustainment — and offer the latest software, radar and electronic protection technologies. It would also allow Ukraine to continue using the weapons it has been given. But this option would be expensive and take years, and the U.S. would surely bear the cost rather than sharing it with allies.

Challenges with new F-16s

Recent F-16 Foreign Military Sales cases to Bulgaria and Slovakia illustrate the cost of modern fighters — nearly $200 million per aircraft. F-16 flight packages include initial stockpiles of parts, munitions and training. Ukraine says it intends to procure between 40 and 100 aircraft. Low-end estimates would amount to $8 billion. With funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative running out soon, new aircraft, as the Department of Defense has said, might break the bank.

F-16s also cost a substantial amount to operate. According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, operating one F-16 costs $4.6 million a year, or $184 million for a fleet of 40 aircraft. Ukraine’s Air Force budget in 2020 was nearly $1.1 billion, which included support for about 70 older, former Soviet fighters.

Time delays are another major consideration. Lockheed Martin moved the F-16 production line from Fort Worth, Texas, to Greenville, South Carolina. This required both training a new cohort of workers to produce the aircraft and the installation of machine tooling.

Slovakia, for example, placed orders for F-16s in 2018, but its first delivery will occur only in 2024, or five to six years from contract award to aircraft delivery.

Are there other options?

European allies may receive F-35s over a period of some years. This means they could continue for some time to transfer used F-16s, allowing Ukraine access to a flow of these aircraft for a decade or more. This option would allow for continued allied burden-sharing.

This also makes sense in a strategic context since Russia’s war on Ukraine may be viewed as an existential challenge to European security.

There might be other options for combat fighters, such as the Saab Gripen, the Dassault Rafale and the Eurofighter Typhoon.

The Gripen is expensive to buy but cheaper to operate than the F-16. In recent years, Rafale aircraft have outsold F-16s on the international market, implying improved capabilities. The Eurofighter might offer the most advanced capabilities compared to the other options.

These aircraft could be available sooner than new F-16s and might offer some improved capabilities compared to older F-16s. Introducing multiple Western combat aircraft into Ukraine’s Air Force might offer some improved capabilities, but at the cost of sustainment and training challenges.

Europeans may be unlikely to finance the provision of new aircraft for Ukraine, but might be willing to provide used aircraft. Ukraine could end up with a used fleet of multiple aircraft with different maintenance, repair and overhaul requirements.

It is encouraging that Ukraine might receive F-16s to improve its combat capabilities. Over the longer term, Ukraine may seek a continuing flow of used F-16s and possibly of one or more European combat fighters. Western policymakers might begin thinking now about what the Ukrainian Air Force may require in the future, especially if the Russian threat remains acute.

John Hoehn is an associate policy researcher at the Rand think tank and a former military analyst with the Congressional Research Service. William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow at Rand and former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia.

This move comes as part of the Corps’ ongoing Force Design 2030 modernization effort to prepare the service to deter or win a fight against China and other potential adversaries.

The Marine Corps on Monday released an annual status update on Force Design efforts, which included a nod to the service’s Long-Range Attack Munition effort supported by the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, “to rapidly develop and field a low-cost, air launched family of loitering, swarming munitions.”

In a June 2 call with reporters, Brig. Gen. Stephen Lightfoot, director of the Capabilities Development Directorate, noted that as an AH-1 pilot, he has firsthand experience with the Hellfire missile. Depending on the helicopter’s altitude, a pilot might get 8 kilometers (5 miles) of range from the weapon.

“That’s great in [Operation Iraqi Freedom], [Operation Enduring Freedom] and areas we’ve been fighting in for years. But when you move over to the Indo-Pacific and some of the distances we’re talking about, 8 kilometers doesn’t really do as much as you’d want,” Lightfoot said.

Noting that the last H-1 attack helicopters were delivered last year and that the Corps will operate them for several more decades, he said the service must now pursue both evolutionary and revolutionary ideas to keeping these aircraft relevant to the fight.

The service is already experimenting with these long-range, loitering, swarming munitions and expects to field them “within the next few years,” Lightfoot noted.

“That is a capability that brings hundreds of kilometers, and that allows us to be able to use a current platform to be able to do things that we never thought we’d be able to do,” Lightfoot said, calling this development effort “critical.”

These munitions would also be operable from ground launchers, he added.

While the helicopters’ own range and maneuverability would enhance the munitions’ capability, Lightfoot said, aircraft aren’t always in the air. To ensure Marines operating forward have round-the-clock access to long-range offensive weapons, he said the service would pursue a launcher for use by ground troops.

In a separate interview on the Force Design update, Scott Lacy, the deputy director of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, said the organization is working on this effort with the aviation community. The work includes studying munitions already on the market as well as other experimental capabilities.

The Force Design annual update noted “other projects include developing a common launcher for the family of ground launched loitering munitions and testing a low-cost, hypersonic booster in a form factor the Marine Corps can logistically support in a contested environment.”

Lacy did not elaborate much on the hypersonic booster, other than to say experimentation is ongoing at the lab.

In the same interview, Col. Daniel Wittnam, the director of the Marine Corps Integration Division, described another long-range offensive fires effort in which the service is involved, in conjunction with the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The office provided money for the Corps to experiment using the Maritime Strike Tomahawk — a derivative of the legacy Tomahawk land-attack missile that the office directed in fiscal 2017 — as a land-based weapon.

Marines will use the Naval Strike Missile as their first ground-based, anti-ship missile but have previously said they intend to pursue other longer-range weapons for the future.

Wittnam said the 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, California, was standing up a battery to work with the Maritime Strike Tomahawk.

The question the Marines have as they consider this and other emerging capabilities is whether the technology is naval and expeditionary, given their focus on littoral operations in the Pacific, the colonel said.

He noted the current form factor is not, but he said the experimentation would continue. (The proof-of-concept system would mount the missile launcher on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle chassis, a setup that already had a tip-over incident due to the center of gravity being off.)

Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told reporters during the June 2 roundtable that not all the ongoing experiments would be successesful, but the Corps would learn from all of them as it rapidly modernizes.

“I don’t have the luxury of, (A) test something, (B) get the feedback, (C) let’s make changes. You know, that takes years and years. We have to iterate and, if necessary, fail quickly and learn faster, and then iterate again,” he said.

In doing so, Heckl added, “we have made the fleet more capable. Period. Full stop.”

Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said in a June 2 statement no such testing took place, adding that the service member’s comments were likely “taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.”

“The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology,” Stefanek said. “This was a hypothetical thought experiment, not a simulation.”

The killer-drone-gone-rogue episode was initially attributed to Col. Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, the chief of AI testing and operations, in a recap from the Royal Aeronautical Society’s FCAS23 Summit in May. The summary was later updated to include additional comments from Hamilton, who said he misspoke at the conference.

How autonomous wingmen will help fighter pilots in the next war

“We’ve never run that experiment, nor would we need to in order to realize that this is a plausible outcome,” Hamilton was quoted as saying in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s update. “Despite this being a hypothetical example, this illustrates the real-world challenges posed by AI-powered capability and is why the Air Force is committed to the ethical development of AI.”

Hamilton’s assessment of the plausibility of rogue-drone scenarios, however theoretical, coincides with stark warnings in recent days by leading tech executives and engineers, who wrote in an open letter that the technology has the potential to wipe out humanity if left unchecked.

Hamilton is also commander of the 96th Operations Group at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, which falls under the purview of the 96th Test Wing. Defense News on Thursday reached out to the test wing to speak to Hamilton, but was told he was unavailable for comment.

In the original post, the Royal Aeronautical Society said Hamilton described a simulation in which a drone fueled by AI was given a mission to find and destroy enemy air defenses. A human was supposed to give the drone its final authorization to strike or not, Hamilton reportedly said.

But the drone algorithms were told that destroying the surface-to-air missile site was its preferred option. So the AI decided that the human controller’s instructions not to strike were getting in the way of its mission, and then attacked the operator and the infrastructure used to relay instructions.

“It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” Hamilton was quoted as saying. “We trained the system, ‘Hey don’t kill the operator, that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that.’ So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

The Defense Department has for years embraced AI as a breakthrough technology advantage for the U.S. military, investing billions of dollars and creating the the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office in late 2021, now led by Craig Martell.

More than 685 AI-related projects are underway at the department, including several tied to major weapon systems, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal auditor of agencies and programs. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2024 budget blueprint includes $1.8 billion for artificial intelligence.

The Air and Space forces are responsible for at least 80 AI endeavors, according to the GAO. Air Force Chief Information Officer Lauren Knausenberger has advocated for greater automation in order to remain dominant in a world where militaries make speedy decisions and increasingly employ advanced computing.

The service is ramping up efforts to field autonomous or semiautonomous drones, which it refers to as collaborative combat aircraft, to fly alongside F-35 jets and a future fighter it calls Next Generation Air Dominance.

The service envisions a fleet of those drone wingmen that would accompany crewed aircraft into combat and carry out a variety of missions. Some collaborative combat aircraft would conduct reconnaissance missions and gather intelligence, others could strike targets with their own missiles, and others could jam enemy signals or serve as decoys to lure enemy fire away from the fighters with human pilots inside.

The Air Force’s proposed budget for FY24 includes new spending to help it prepare for a future with drone wingmen, including a program called Project Venom to help the service experiment with its autonomous flying software in F-16 fighters.

Under Project Venom, which stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, the Air Force will load autonomous code into six F-16s. Human pilots will take off in those F-16s and fly them to the testing area, at which point the software will take over and conduct the flying experiments.

US Army may ask defense industry to disclose AI algorithms

The Royal Aeronautical Society’s post on the summit said Hamilton “is now involved in cutting-edge flight test of autonomous systems, including robot F-16s that are able to dogfight.”

The Air Force plans to spend roughly $120 million on Project Venom over the next five years, including a nearly $50 million budget request for FY24 to kick off the program. The Air Force told Defense News in March it hadn’t decided which base and organization will host Project Venom, but the budget request asked for 118 staff positions to support the program at Eglin Air Force Base.

In early 2022, as public discussions about the Air Force’s plans for autonomous drone wingmen gathered steam, former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told Defense News that the service must be cautious and consider ethical questions as it moves toward conducting warfare with autonomous systems.

James said that while the AI systems in such drones would be designed to learn and act on their own, such as taking evasive maneuvers if it were in danger, she doubted the Air Force would allow an autonomous system to shift from one target to another on its own if that would result in human deaths.

WASHINGTON — The F-35 program only knows how much cooling the Joint Strike Fighter’s engine will need through 2035, government auditors said in a new report.

But that’s a few years after the F-35 program needs to finish upgrading its thermal management system to be able to support rapidly arriving new capabilities, the Government Accountability Office said in a Tuesday report.

And GAO said it’s hard to predict how long the planned upgrades to the F-35′s power and thermal management system, or PTMS, and engines will be effective, though the fifth-generation fighter is expected to fly for another 50 years. PTMS uses the “bleed air” from the engines to cool systems throughout the fighter including weapons and radars.

The finding spotlights the uncertainty the program faces as it prepares for a major upgrade to the Pratt & Whitney-made F135 engines, dubbed the Engine Core Upgrade. Just a few years after completing the effort, the F-35 program “will face a period of unknown requirements” for its future capabilities — and may be in danger of future cost overruns and other mistakes, according to the new report.

“Without defined PTMS and engine modernization requirements, the F-35 program is at greater risk of repeating prior missteps,” GAO said. “By proceeding with planning and development of future capabilities without considering the demands on the PTMS and engine, the program endorsed capabilities that neither could support. The program risks repeating a similar mismatch between PTMS and engine capability and future modernization needs if the military services select an option without first defining future requirements.”

GAO said the F-35 program can’t fully predict how much power and cooling the fighter will need until the military services flying the aircraft define their own requirements.

But already, new capabilities being added to the F-35 are stretching its cooling capabilities beyond their original design, causing the engines to wear out faster. An upgrade program known as Block 4 — a $16.5 billion project to add new sensors, more advanced weapons, and more powerful data fusion and advanced electronic warfare — will further tax the engines’ cooling capabilities.

Without an engine upgrade, GAO said, the added heat could drive up the cost of maintaining the existing engines by $38 billion.

In a statement to Defense News, the F-35 Joint Program Office said it is confident the ECU engine upgrades can “minimize” the $38 billion in costs GAO highlighted.

“The ECU will restore engine life, and the [power thermal management system improvements] will ensure that the air vehicle can support future capability growth,” JPO spokesman Russ Goemaere said in an email.

GAO recommended the Pentagon order the JPO, before moving forward with the engine modernization effort, to re-evaluate its analysis of how to upgrade the F-35′s engines after the services spell out what power and cooling capabilities they will need.

The Pentagon disagreed with that recommendation, saying the F-35 program will re-evaluate its analysis when necessary as the services’ requirements are updated.

In a Friday statement after this story’s initial publication, the JPO said, “We have a firm handle on engine and power thermal management system options that are needed for future cooling needs, based on the service’s requirements.” The JPO also said the services will provide the cooling requirements they need to support the capabilities they want for their F-35s.

Goemaere said in his original email the JPO is in the early design stages as it weighs several options for improving the fighters’ thermal management systems, which will take place alongside the F135′s core upgrades.

The upgrades to the engines’ core and thermal management system are expected to be fielded in the early 2030s, he said, though the exact schedule will depend on what design is ultimately approved.

However, that means the engine upgrades necessary to handle the added heat may come a few years later than the F-35 will receive its Block 4 upgrades, now projected to be finished in 2029.

More engine cooling — but will it be enough?

In a briefing with reporters Wednesday, Jen Latka, Pratt & Whitney’s vice president of F135 programs, said the current engines would be able to handle the Block 4 upgrades, albeit at an increased maintenance cost. An upgrade to the engine’s core alone would let the F135 more fully enable Block 4, she said. And an upgrade to the power thermal management systems would allow the F-35 to handle future upgrades beyond Block 4, Latka said.

She said the engine core and thermal system upgrades together “provides a tremendous amount of cooling margin” — more than enough to comfortably allow future F-35 capability upgrades beyond 2035, without further improvements to the engine.

“If we’re back here talking about a potential engine upgrade in another 15 years, my guess is it’s for a different reason,” Latka said. “The amount of cooling that will be feasible with the ECU and the upgraded [thermal] system … there’s a tremendous amount of design margin there.”

The Defense Department considered two main options for upgrading the F-35′s engines — Pratt & Whitney’s upgrade to the current engines, and a General Electric Aerospace-made engine it dubbed the XA100 that uses an adaptive design. The so-called adaptive engine uses three streams of air, instead of two, to cool the engine and the aircraft, and can adjust to the configuration that would give the plane the most thrust and efficiency in the moment.

But during the 2024 budget rollout in March, the Pentagon said it decided to upgrade Pratt’s engines instead of going with a new design under the Adaptive Engine Transition Program, or AETP.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said at the time that while GE’s adaptive engine would provide more thrust and cooling capability, it was only certain to fit in his service’s F-35A variants. This meant the other services were not interested in an AETP engine, and the cost was too high for the Air Force to bear on its own, Kendall said.

GAO said in the report the Navy’s carrier-based F-35Cs would also be able to use an AETP engine.

But GAO said AETP engines would not fit in the Marine Corps’ F-35B, which has a unique vertical take-off capability, without a major redesign that would drive up costs and sacrifice commonality across all three variants.

In the roundtable with reporters, Latka said the GAO report supported the company’s position that an F135 upgrade was the best option for upgrading all three fighter variants’ propulsion systems at the best cost.

But in an email, GE spokesman Adam Kostecki said the report shows how important it is for the Pentagon to anticipate what the F-35 will need in the future and start investing in technology to meet those requirements. The XA100 would be able to provide considerably greater range, acceleration and cooling capacity, he said, and GE urged Congress to support its engine — effectively overruling the Pentagon’s decision — as lawmakers continue to craft the 2024 budget.

Collins will replace Vice Adm. Jon Hill, who has served as director since 2019.

The Air Force general is currently the MDA’s program executive officer for Ground-Based Weapons Systems at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. Within that $3.4 billion portfolio, Collins manages the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System, consisting of interceptors in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, designed to intercept potential intercontinental ballistic missiles from North Korea and Iran.

Also under his purview is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, four Joint U.S. and Israeli programs and other classified programs.

Collins previously was the Air Force’s program executive officer for weapons and director of the armament directorate, where he worked on the Air Force’s $92 billion non-nuclear weapons, munitions and ammunition portfolio.

The general began his military career in 1993 as a missile analyst in the 83rd Fighter Weapons Squadron at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida.

As the services are moving to develop offensive hypersonic capability, Collins recently oversaw the ups and downs of the Air Force’s AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon development, or ARRW, which experienced a successful test last year. Amid a slew of failed test events before and after its successful one, the Air Force decided to drop the Lockheed Martin-developed program earlier this year.

Now, Collins will oversee an MDA program in its nascent phase of development — an interceptor capable of taking out hypersonic weapons in the glide phase of flight, a difficult technical challenge.

MDA has also spent the last four years working to upgrade the GMD system, which resides in Collins’ current portfolio. Two teams are competing to build a next-generation interceptor for the system as the current system undergoes a service life extension program.

Collins will also manage the MDA portion of a major new venture in Guam to develop a highly capable air and missile defense architecture to defend the island territory from continuously evolving and growing threats in the region. Some elements of that architecture include systems already in his purview.

The MDA’s $10.9 billion fiscal 2024 budget request continues to prioritize regional and homeland missile defense with a major focus on building the defensive architecture in Guam.

Auditors said that because the government doesn’t have its own system tracking those parts, officials may not truly know how many spare parts are actually in the global spares pool, where they are, or their total value.

As a result, “the full quantity and value of these [lost] spare parts may be significantly higher” than the 1 million tally determined by the main contractor, Lockheed Martin, the document reads.

And disagreements between Defense Department offices and the main F-35 contractor, Lockheed Martin, over how to categorize missing parts are holding up the government’s effort to create its own reliable system to keep track of the parts, the GAO report states.

In short, the F-35 program can’t know whether contractors are properly managing spares, according to auditors, who have tracked losses going to back to 2018.

In a statement to Defense News, Lockheed Martin said the tally of spare parts listed as lost in the report cover the last two decades of the program.

Lockheed Martin said it is working with the F-35 Joint Program Office and the Defense Contract Management Agency to make sure they have the documentation needed to support disposing of components that staff judged to be “excess, obsolete or unserviceable.”

“Lockheed Martin manages F-35 spare part inventory in compliance with contract requirements,” the company told Defense News. “We continue to partner with the Joint Program Office to increase insight into spare part availability and support fleet readiness.”

The F-35′s program office said in an email to Defense News that it also agreed with GAO’s recommendations on ways to improve tracking of spare parts — but said “we know where the vast majority of F-35 spare parts are in the global supply chain.”

The Defense Department office pointed to the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement rules that said programs should strive to have their recorded inventories accurate about 95% of the time, and said the F-35 program exceeds that goal.

“At this time, our error rate is around 1%,” the program office said. “While this is considered much better than the government goal of 5%, we will continue to work with the services and our industry partners to improve spare parts accountability and drive readiness for our warfighters.”

The JPO also said that F-35 spare parts are now being tracked through a non-government system, but that it is working with industry to move the data to a government system.

The international F-35 program, which includes the United States and other nations such as the United Kingdom, Norway, Italy, Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea, has what GAO called a “unique” system for managing its spare parts. All participants in the program worldwide have access to a global pool of spare parts — everything from engines, tires, landing gear and support equipment down to bolts and screws — that the Defense Department owns until a part is installed on a fighter.

But while DoD owns the spare parts that all nations flying F-35s rely upon, Lockheed Martin, which builds and repairs most of the F-35′s air frame, and Pratt & Whitney, which handles the F-35′s engines, manage the global pool. Those parts are stored in more than 50 domestic and international facilities run by contractors other than Lockheed and Pratt.

Part of the problem with parts tracking lies in the Pentagon’s decision a decade ago to shift course on who owns them, GAO said. Originally, the U.S. military didn’t intend to own those parts, GAO said, but in 2012 the F-35 program issued a memo that said they belong to the U.S. government until they’re installed on a fighter.

But the Pentagon didn’t draw up a plan to maintain accountability over those F-35 parts and equipment, GAO said, as Lockheed and Pratt continued to be responsible for them and provide data on them.

Auditors also said the vast majority of lost F-35 parts don’t get adjudicated to review the circumstances behind their loss, figure out whether the government or a contractor was responsible and identify the root causes of what caused a part to go missing.

Of those 1 million lost spare parts over the last five years, Lockheed Martin submitted about 60,000 parts worth about $19 million to the JPO to be adjudicated, GAO said. The JPO finished adjudicating fewer than 20,000 missing spare parts.

Lost parts that were not reported to the JPO include 35 actuator doors worth more than $3.2 million, and 14 batteries worth more than $2.1 million, which were lost in the last three months of 2019, the report said.

A debate that has been going on since 2015 between several Pentagon offices and the two main contractors over how these parts should be categorized is also hampering efforts to better track parts. The JPO, Pratt, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, and the Defense Contract Management Agency’s aircraft propulsion office believe these spare parts should be considered government-furnished property, GAO said.

But Lockheed and DCMA’s office in Fort Worth, Texas, disagree, GAO said.

The JPO wants Lockheed Martin to report lost parts in a system called the GFP Module, which tracks government-furnished property, GAO said. The JPO said it is working with the Pentagon and Lockheed to figure out how to make that happen, considering Lockheed doesn’t consider these parts to be government-furnished property — but those talks “are in the early stages,” GAO said.

The F-35 program also has more than 19,000 parts in the global spares pool that are unusable because they are either extra, obsolete, or unserviceable, GAO said. Those parts have been sitting anywhere from a few months to five years while the site personnel have awaited instructions on how to dispose of them.

Some of these parts can be reused elsewhere within DoD, donated to other organizations such as state governments, sold as scrap, or destroyed, GAO said. But because Lockheed is not using the GFP Module to ask the JPO for instructions on what to do with these parts, it is instead informing the JPO about unusable parts on an “ad hoc” basis, the report said.

GAO auditors recommend in their report that William LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, take steps to make sure all spare F-35 parts worldwide are categorized in the right way and are accountable under a contract, and update policies to make it clearer when parts are considered government-furnished property.

Auditors also said LaPlante should work with the F-35 program executive officer, Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, to issue a process for contractors to report lost spare parts, and to make sure instructions are issued on how to get rid of excess or otherwise unusable spare parts, until those parts are entered into the GFP Module to be adjudicated or track their disposal.

“Gen. Brown is a warrior, descended from a proud line of warriors,” Biden said, referencing Brown’s Vietnam veteran father as well as his grandfather, who led a segregated unit in World War II.

Brown’s command roles in the Indo-Pacific region, the Middle East and Europe give him “an unmatched firsthand knowledge of our operational theaters, and a strategic vision to understand how they all work together to ensure security for the American people,” Biden said, flanked by Brown, Vice President Kamala Harris and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

“While Gen. Brown is a proud, butt-kickin’ American airman, first and always, he’s also been an operational leader in the joint force,” Biden said. “He gained respect across every service from those who have seen him in action, and have come to depend on his judgment. More than that, he gained the respect of our allies and partners around the world, who regard Gen. Brown as a trusted partner and a top-notch strategist.”

If confirmed by the Senate, Brown — who has served as the Air Force’s chief of staff for nearly three years — will succeed Army Gen. Mark Milley as the military’s top uniformed officer.

Milley sat in the front row of the audience at the ceremony, next to Brown’s wife Sharene. Biden, wearing his signature aviator shades, thanked Milley and his family for their years of service.

“As chairman, you’ve led our military through the most complex security environment our world has faced in a long, long time,” Biden said. “We’ve strengthened our alliances from NATO to the Indo-Pacific, and built new partnerships like AUKUS [the trilateral defense agreement between the United States, U.K., and Australia]. ... You’ve helped set our country and our military on a course that will put us in the strongest possible position to succeed in the years ahead.”

And Biden saluted Sharene Brown for her work to improve the quality of life for military families as part of her “Five and Thrive” initiative.

As chairman, Brown would advise the president on military matters, including the potential defense of Taiwan if China invades and NATO’s effort to support Ukraine in its fight to repel Russia’s invasion. He would also regularly consult with top military leaders across all services to gather their thoughts on strategy, operations and budgets, so he could present a range of options to Biden.

The Senate voted unanimously to confirm Brown’s nomination to become Air Force chief of staff in June 2020, which made him the first Black person to head a branch of the U.S. military, and he is expected to be easily confirmed as the nation’s top military officer. However, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has placed a hold on Defense Department nominations over the department’s decision to provide leave and travel services so troops can obtain abortion services, which could create a stumbling block for Brown’s confirmation.

What Gen. CQ Brown would bring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs

During his three years as Air Force chief of staff, Brown has focused on overhauling the service, a plan he dubbed “Accelerate Change or Lose,” which has also become something of a mantra for him. This effort involves reshaping the service’s structure, changing how the service prepares for potential conflicts with major adversaries like China and Russia, and divesting old and outdated air frames like the A-10 Warthog, E-3 Sentry and older F-15C fighters, which he and other Air Force leaders say would be unsuited for future high-end wars.

Biden singled out Brown’s Accelerate Change or Lose strategy as exactly what the military needs.

“General, you’re right on,” Biden said. “To keep the American people safe, prosperous and secure, we have to move fast and adapt quickly. We have to maintain a combat-credible force capable of deterring and defeating any potential threat.”

A retired general officer familiar with the discussions told Air Force Times Biden strongly considered both Brown and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger for the job, but ultimately chose Brown.

Brown would be the second Black person to serve as Joint Chiefs chairman, with the first being Army Gen. Colin Powell under President George H.W. Bush. It would be the first time in the nation’s history that both the top civilian and uniformed leaders in the Defense Department are Black, as Austin is the first Black secretary of defense.

An ‘unflinching’ video

In June 2020, shortly after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and days before the Senate voted to confirm him as chief of staff, Brown made an emotional video in which he spoke about Floyd’s death and his own experiences as a Black person in the military. The video went viral, and observers say Brown’s frank talk helped spark conversations about racism and injustice in the military community.

Biden said that “unflinching” testimonial shows Brown is “unafraid to speak his mind [and] will deliver an honest message that needs to be heard, and will always do the right thing when it’s hard.”

Biden said the video also showed “his deep love of our country, to which he’s dedicated his entire adult life.”

Republicans praised Brown’s nomination and called on him to remain out of politics should the Senate nominate him for the post.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised Brown as an “exceptionally qualified officer” and said he should maintain a “laser focus on readiness, deterrence and warfighting instead of politics.”

“I have also known him to be a thoughtful advocate of accelerating innovation so that our armed services can be ready to defend our country and deter potential threats, especially those from the Chinese Communist Party,” said Wicker.

House defense appropriations Chairman Ken Calvert, R-Calif., said Brown “must be focused on maintaining our edge in the air, land, sea and space and not be distracted by other issues that don’t ultimately result in the enhanced lethality of U.S. forces.”

Calvert praised Brown’s tenure as Air Force chief, noting he understood “we must innovate and equip our warfighters with the next generation of resources to secure our nation” in order to “surpass the technological advancements of China and other adversaries.”

Ties around the world

In a Wednesday interview with Defense News, retired Gen. Dave Goldfein — Brown’s predecessor as Air Force chief of staff — said Brown’s skills, honed throughout his nearly four decades in uniform, and the bonds he’s created with counterparts across the world will be vital as the United States faces multiple challenges.

“When it comes to … Ukraine or China or Korea or Iran, or you name the challenges that he will face, he has built enough relationships and enough credibility that he can walk into the room and, in his very thoughtful way, provide his military advice and assessment of the risks involved, allowing the president and the senior civilian leadership to make the most informed decisions,” Goldfein said.

Since he first met Brown in the mid-1990s — when Brown was aide-de-camp to then-chief of staff Gen. Ron Fogleman and Goldfein was aide to the commander of Allied Air Forces Southern Europe in Naples, Italy — Brown has always been a deep thinker and a quiet consensus builder, Goldfein said. Those traits will serve him well as he advises Biden on the nation’s most pressing military matters.

“He really thinks things through,” Goldfein said. “He’s not usually the most vocal at the table, and he’s certainly not the loudest, but he always has the most to say. … When he spoke in a meeting, everybody was leaning forward, listening, taking notes.”

Goldfein pointed to the 2019 Pacific Air Chiefs Symposium at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii as an example of Brown’s skill in bringing together people from different backgrounds and with different interests to build common ground.

During that conference, attended by air chiefs from about 18 nations, then-PACAF Commander Brown set up a series of small panel discussions that brought every attending nation’s air chief to the table. During those talks, Goldfein said, the “chemistry” between Brown and the other Pacific nations’ air chiefs was evident.

“What struck me was the relationships that he’d invested in across the region, which were on display during the entire conference,” Goldfein said. “It was relationships built on trust, it was relationships built on confidence in each other, it was relationships built on how he valued each of them and their participation and their input. Because he’s such an incredible listener, they knew that he was paying attention to everything they had to say.”

Brown’s breadth of experience in some of the world’s most vital military theaters is unparalleled among general officers today, Goldfein said — particularly his time commanding the nation’s air forces in the Pacific and the Middle East, and serving as a senior leader in Europe.

“I don’t know that we’re going to find an officer who has had more time in joint operations, in every theater, than CQ Brown,” Goldfein said.

The kind of relationship-building Brown excelled at during the 2019 Pacific conference will be vital in his new role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Goldfein said. Brown has already built up a considerable contact list of top leaders around the world, such as ambassadors, top defense ministers and heads of state, during his last three years commanding the Air Force, Goldfein said. He predicted that as chairman, Brown will be able to quickly form ties with international leaders he doesn’t yet know.

“When there’s a crisis and you need to talk to one of your counterparts, that’s the worst time to start building a relationship,” Goldfein said. “You want to build on relationships that you’ve already invested in. … He’s going to bring relationships — across the highest levels of government — with some of the most important countries we ever have to deal with.”

Rachel S. Cohen contributed to this report.

The largest of the contracts was a deal for 18 Korean Aerospace Industries FA-50 light combat jets. The Royal Malaysian Air Force will use these jets for the fighter lead-in training and light combat roles.

In February, it was announced that Malaysia had selected the FA-50 as its light combat aircraft, with KAI stating at the time the value of the order was $920 million. Malaysia has an eventual requirement for up to 36 jets.

Speaking to Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama, KAI chief executive officer Kang Goo-young confirmed the RMAF will begin receiving the FA-50 Block 20 “Fighting Eagle” aircraft in 2026, with the first four jets built in South Korea while the remaining 14 will be assembled locally.

He added that the jets will come with active electronically scanned array, or AESA, radars, although he did not identify the radar model.

South Korea’s LIG Nex1 is developing the ESR-500A AESA radar for the FA-50, while Raytheon Technologies announced earlier this month its PhantomStrike radar will be equipping the FA-50.

Among the other contracts signed at the LIMA ceremony was a deal for two maritime patrol aircraft from Italy’s Leonardo for $150.78 million.

Malaysian defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein in October announced the selection of the ATR-72MP, which is based on the ATR-72 twin-turboprop regional airliner, for its longstanding requirement.

Leonardo says the ATR-72 is equipped with its Airborne Tactical Observation and Surveillance mission system, which integrates the aircraft’s sensor suite that includes a Seaspray 7300E V2 and enables it to perform a variety of missions, including maritime patrol, anti-submarine, airborne surveillance and intelligence gathering.

A deal with Turkish Aerospace Industries for its Anka medium-altitude long-endurance drones will see Malaysia buy three of the unmanned aircraft, which can be armed with guided bombs and missiles.

Malaysia’s acquisition of the drones is valued at $92 million and will be the first armed drones to enter service with the RMAF.

It was also announced at LIMA that Malaysia will lease four Sikorsky UH-60A+ Blackhawk transport helicopters from local company Aerotree Defence and Services. The helicopters are secondhand aircraft and will be flown by the Malaysian Army’s air wing for training and operational duties.

Austin spoke as defense leaders from around the world assembled for a virtual meeting to discuss the ongoing military support for Ukraine. They were expected talk about which countries will provide F-16s, and how and where the pilot training will be done.

The officials will also get an update on the war effort from Ukrainian leaders, including preparation for that anticipated counteroffensive and how the allies, who have faced their own stockpile pressures, can continue to support Kyiv’s fight against Russia.

“We’re going to have to dig deeper, and we’re going to have to continue to look for creative ways to boost our industrial capability,” Austin said before the military leaders began their closed session. “The stakes are high. But the cause is just and our will is strong.”

European countries have said they are talking about which countries may have some of the F-16s available. The United States had long balked at providing the advanced aircraft to Ukraine, and only last weekend did President Joe Biden agree to allow other nations to send their own U.S.-made jets to Kyiv.

“We hope this training will begin in the coming weeks,” Austin said. “This will further strengthen and improve the capabilities of the Ukrainian Air Force in the long term. And it will complement our short-term and medium-term security agreements. This new joint effort sends a powerful message about our unity and our long-term commitment to Ukraine’s self-defense.”

The leaders will also likely discuss Ukraine’s other continuing military needs, including air defense systems and munitions, artillery and other ammunition.

It was not immediately clear whether they will make any firm decisions on the F-16 issue, but initial steps have begun.

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said Tuesday that training for Ukrainian pilots had begun in Poland and some other countries, though Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said training was still in the planning phase. The Netherlands and Denmark, among others, are also making plans for training.

“We can continue and also finalize the plans that we’re making with Denmark and other allies to start these these trainings. And of course, that is the first step that you have to take,” Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said, adding that initial discussions about who may have F-16s available to send is underway.

Ukraine has long sought the sophisticated fighter to give it a combat edge as it battles Russia’s invasion, now in its second year.

The Biden administration’s decision was a sharp reversal after refusing to approve any transfer of the aircraft or conduct training for more than a year because of worries that doing so could escalate tensions with Russia. U.S. officials also had argued against the F-16 by saying that learning to fly and logistically support such an advanced aircraft would be difficult and take months.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said this week that the U.S. decision on the F-16 was part of a broader long-term commitment to meet Ukraine’s future military needs. He said the jets would not be relevant in any counteroffensive expected to begin shortly.

Boeing’s relationship with the Air Force has also been strained by the T-7′s issues, GAO said in the May 18 report, with service officials describing their ties as “tenuous.”

As the program proceeds and Boeing losses, which already exceed $1 billion, mount, GAO said, program officials expect more disagreements between the Air Force and the contractor. While the Air Force waits for the T-7 to be delivered, its own costs related to maintaining older jets could grow, the report warned.

Boeing said in a statement to Defense News it plans to keep working with the service to fix the problems highlighted in the report, but did not address specific issues asked about by Defense News.

“Boeing and the U.S. Air Force are partnered on a path forward regarding these issues,” the company said. “Additionally, we continue to evaluate findings and discovery during testing activities, which is standard practice when developing a new aircraft.”

Boeing in 2018 won an indefinite delivery contract, estimated to be worth up to $9.2 billion, to build the Air Force’s new jet trainer, set to replace the more than half-century-old T-38 Talon.

Student pilots will be able to use this advanced trainer to learn to fly jets akin to advanced fighters such as the F-35, which has capabilities that didn’t exist when the T-38 was first built. New capabilities the T-7 will bring include fly-by-wire controls and high-altitude maneuverability. Additionally, this trainer will allow students to learn advanced air-to-air maneuvers and be able to accommodate pilots of varying sizes, including men and women.

A shaky schedule

The T-7 has seen several schedule delays. Most recently, problems with a potentially dangerous escape system and ejection seat caused the Air Force to postpone to February 2025 a milestone C production decision on the T-7. The Air Force originally expected that decision to come in late 2023.

This means Boeing is now expected to start delivering the T-7 in December 2025, and the Air Force is preparing for it to reach initial operational capability in spring 2027 at the earliest. That would be nearly a decade after the Air Force originally hoped to have student pilots flying in its advanced trainer.

But program officials told GAO that even the new schedule Boeing laid out in January 2023 is “likely optimistic” because it “depends on favorable assumptions.”

Boeing’s revised T-7 schedule assumes the program will have a high success rate through the rest of its development and testing, Air Force officials told GAO. This leaves “little to no margin” for error, including test failures, unexpected software revisions, a possible need to redesign the escape system, or other surprises, GAO said.

If something goes wrong, the report added, the T-7 program could fall even further behind — perhaps significantly so, potentially jeopardizing even the revised production decision date and further pushing back production and delivery.

The Air Force is now planning to have the T-7′s development, testing and production phases considerably overlap, GAO said, which will add a great deal more risk to the schedule.

This approach, known as concurrency, can lead to rising costs or further schedule delays because if testing finds hidden problems, the contractor could have to go back into aircraft that have already been built to fix those issues.

Program officials told GAO they doubted overlapping development and testing would lead to major changes to the T-7, and said concurrency had not driven up program costs.

But such problems have happened before, GAO said, citing a previous 2018 report that found it would cost an additional $1.4 billion to fix problems in F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that had been built before testing was complete.

Boeing also plans to start building the first production T-7s before the Air Force officially places its order, GAO said, which could carry further risks. Boeing started building some parts for the T-7 in early 2022 on its own dime, GAO said, and plans to start assembling the first aircraft by early 2024, the report said.

GAO said this means construction would start about a year before the Air Force plans to place its first order for the aircraft, which will happen no sooner than February 2025 after development and a great deal of testing has been finished. And by the time the Air Force places its order, the report said, government officials believe Boeing could have finished building seven to 10 T-7s it could present to the service.

GAO said Boeing told the Air Force in March 2022 it had already started building some parts that would go into the T-7 — even though the Air Force warned Boeing two months earlier it was under no obligation to buy trainer jets built with those parts until it placed an order. The Air Force also told Boeing any work it does has to meet all requirements for future orders.

Boeing told GAO it began initial construction on planes that could eventually be delivered to the Air Force because it faced pressure to keep its suppliers busy and manufacturing costs down, particularly with schedule delays and financial losses mounting.

But this presents “significant risks” to the Air Force, GAO said. Because no contract is in place for building those aircraft, GAO said, the Air Force and the Defense Contract Management Agency can’t conduct all the production oversight needed to make sure the planes will meet contract requirements. Even conducting oversight, DCMA warned the Air Force, could have the unintended effect of committing the Air Force to accept some of Boeing’s work on the T-7, even without a contract, the report said.

The T-7 could also change significantly between the test phase and the award of a low-rate production contract, which would then have to be retrofitted on already-built planes, GAO said. DCMA has already spotted more than 8,000 differences between the five test T-7s Boeing has already built, and the Air Force’s own contract specifications, the report added.

Older trainers, rising costs

While these delays likely won’t drive up the T-7′s price for the Air Force, GAO said they could lead to other rising costs. With the T-7 still years away from becoming operational, the service will need to keep training student pilots in its existing fleet of 504 T-38s and — to handle the more advanced aspects of pilot training — the F-22, which costs more than eight times as much to fly per hour than the T-38 and T-7. In all, GAO estimated trainer delays could cost the Air Force almost $1 billion.

The Air Force is also at risk of higher costs if it can’t order all 351 T-7s it plans to buy before the ordering period expires, GAO said. The Air Force now expects Boeing to start building the first four production T-7s in 2025 and gradually ramp up production until Boeing builds 48 Red Hawks each year between 2030 and 2033. The final 18 T-7s are expected to be built in 2034.

In an issue that echoes a lingering headache with the F-35 program, the Air Force told GAO it doesn’t have all the data from Boeing that it needs to maintain the T-7.

By January 2023, Boeing had provided the Air Force one-third of the list of parts and quantities used to build and maintain the T-7, known as a bill of materials. That is more than three years later than the contract specified, GAO said, and some of the information the Air Force needs to conduct its own maintenance was redacted.

Boeing told GAO some suppliers were not under contract at first and said its periodically updating the program office.

The Air Force wants to do as much “organic,” or in-house, maintenance on the T-7 as possible. But without that data, GAO said, it may be forced to rely upon Boeing for maintenance and repairs.

The Air Force also needs the list of parts so it can manage its supply chain, and find replacements for parts as they become obsolete, GAO said. Without that bill of materials, the Air Force told GAO it won’t know what equipment it will need to maintain the test aircraft the service plans to begin flight-testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California this September.

Ejection seat delaying tests

Problems with the T-7′s escape system have already delayed the plane’s testing, GAO said, and the system will likely need several more revisions to its design and test before it is safe enough to use.

The Air Force only allowed men to fly when older planes such as the T-38 were originally built, so their cockpits were not designed to accommodate some women or people with smaller frames. The T-7 is intended to be safe and comfortable for pilots with a wide range of body sizes and shapes.

But GAO said tests of the T-7′s escape system show considerable risks for many pilots — even larger people — including potential concussions, spinal injuries, or eye and neck injuries. Tests conducted with the largest manikins barely pass the Air Force’s safety standards, the report said, and smaller and average-sized manikins were at greater risk.

After 2021 tests raised alarm bells about the T-7′s escape system, Boeing worked to improve it. The Air Force said minor adjustments to the seat improved safety and reduced the risk to pilots.

A subsequent sled test in February 2023 showed enough progress that the service plans to proceed with a limited military flight release, allowing its pilots to begin test-flying the T-7 while the final problems with the escape system are fixed. In a sled test designed to simulate an ejection sequence, the Air Force accelerates a rail-mounted cockpit with a manikin inside to speeds similar to a T-7 in flight before launching the manikin.

But even that testing plan means the Air Force is likely almost two years away from showing the escape system meets all the safety requirements.

The Air Force and Boeing also disagree over how close the T-7′s flight control software is to being finished, GAO said. Boeing expects the software will be done by the middle of this year, the report said, but the Air Force’s own software experts said five or six more revisions to the software will be needed to fix problems with the trainer’s flight control, particularly as the T-7 takes on more challenging flights such as conducting maneuvers when climbing or diving at high angles of attack.

Each iteration could take six more months, Air Force experts told GAO, which could delay the completion of the software by more than two years and — if the changes are significant — could disrupt flight testing.

In a sign of the tensions over the program, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on Monday said the concept of digital engineering — which Boeing has touted as a revolutionary advancement in how new aircraft can be built — has in some ways been “overhyped.”

Engineers have been using digital tools to design aircraft for decades, Kendall said at a breakfast roundtable with reporters hosted by the Defense Writers Group, after being asked about the T-7′s delays and the fanfare that accompanied its digital design. Modern computing and data storage advancements have given engineers the ability to process vast amounts of information and swiftly communicate with one another, he said, allowing digital design processes to be fully integrated, he said.

This has led to notable cost and schedule savings, Kendall said. But digital advancements won’t replace real-world testing, he said — particularly when engineers are trying to “push the envelope” on entirely new designs and don’t have models upon which they can fully rely.

“It is a significant improvement, but it has been overhyped,” Kendall said. “More integrated digital designs, better modeling all help, but they’re not revolutionary. They’re a significant improvement, [but] they don’t replace testing entirely. When you’re doing something that’s going to be radically different than prior programs, you’ve got to get it into testing.”

Under the contract, the company will continue the development of its 200,000-pound thrust Arroway engine for space launch, which Ursa Major unveiled in June 2022. Arroway will help replace the Russian-made RD-series engines, according to a company press release. It is a reusable liquid oxygen and methane staged combustion engine for medium and heavy launch vehicles, and the company expects to conduct a hot fire test in 2025.

The contract will also cover the construction and testing of a prototype of the Draper engine for hypersonic launches, which would be a new addition to Ursa Major’s current lineup of three engine models. The company already has a 5,000-pound thrust Hadley engine for hypersonic launches that is currently undergoing certifications for Defense Department use under an August 2022 Air Force contract. Draper would continue this work but use a different liquid propellant that’s more storable — hydrogen peroxide instead of a liquid oxygen and kerosene mix — allowing the reusable engine to be operated safely from more locations.

A Ursa Major statement about the award notes the contract would allow the company to build a dedicated test stand for Draper and hot fire test the engine within 12 months.

The company and the Air Force did not disclose the value of the contract. An Ursa Major spokesman characterized it as an “eight-figure contract.”

“Ursa Major continues to be an important partner to AFRL as we build hypersonics capabilities and remove America’s dependence on foreign propulsion systems for launch,” Shawn Phillips, chief of AFRL’s Rocket Propulsion Division, was quoted as saying in the company news release.

Joe Laurienti, the founder and CEO of Ursa Major, told Defense News in an interview this spring that the military services are pursuing hypersonic missiles and counter-hypersonic defenses, but they still haven’t fully reckoned with the entire infrastructure needed to support those objectives. They’ll need aerial targets for tracking and intercept exercises, they’ll need hypersonic testbeds as they develop various sensors and support equipment for the hypersonic weapons, and they’ll need training missiles as they grow a cadre of hypersonic missile operators, according to Laurienti.

That’s where he thinks Ursa Major and its products — which focus on liquid propellants rather than solid rocket motors — can play the biggest role.

Laurienti said liquid engines have better performance than solid rocket motors but are more difficult to handle and store. The development of the Draper engine gets closer to the ideal balance of the two technologies: as a liquid engine, it will support high speeds, long distances and maneuverable flights, while also being safe enough to fly on the wing of a plane or be stored on a ship.

This combination will be critical as the U.S. builds aerial targets that can simulate threats ranging from Russian hypersonic missiles to Chinese cruise missiles to North Korean and Iranian ballistic missiles.

He also noted the liquid engines can be refilled and reused — but Ursa Major also uses additive manufacturing to keep costs down, meaning the engines will be inexpensive enough to be shot down and destroyed during live-fire tests if needed.

Ursa Major is under contract with hypersonic testing company Stratolaunch to conduct what Laurienti called the the first-ever private hypersonic flight in the U.S. later this year. In this pairing, Stratolaunch has created a reusable cruise missile-like testbed that its customers can use to test their electronics. Ursa Major is providing the engine to propel the testbed to hypersonic speeds.

Laurienti said the company is eyeing other industry pairings like this, hoping Ursa Major can address what he called the “pain point” — propulsion ­— for private industry interested in hypersonic flights.

But Ursa Major is also eyeing a potential business opportunity with the military. Laurienti said the Air Force and Navy bought and used more than 5,000 AQM-37 air-launched supersonic targets over the course of decades. The services are now looking to replenish their stockpiles and upgrade them from supersonic to hypersonic speed, he explained, an effort that could land the company a seat at the table following the latest engine award.

That includes ensuring the Air Force has access to all the sustainment data it needs from the contractor building the Next Generation Air Dominance platform, Kendall told reporters at a breakfast roundtable hosted by the Defense Writers Group.

“We’re not going to repeat the, what I think frankly was a serious mistake that was made in the F-35 program” of not obtaining rights to all the fighter’s sustainment data from contractor Lockheed Martin, Kendall said.

When the F-35 program was launched more than two decades ago, Kendall said an acquisition philosophy known as Total System Performance was in favor. Under this approach, he said, a contractor that won a program would own it for its entire lifecycle.

“What that basically does is create a perpetual monopoly,” Kendall said. “I spent years struggling to overcome acquisition malpractice [on the F-35], and we’re still struggling with that to some degree. So we’re not going to do that with NGAD.”

Kendall also singled out excessive concurrency — which occurs when an aircraft moving through development and into procurement at the same time, which can make it harder to fix problems discovered in testing — as a major problem that hindered the F-35 program.

There will be some concurrency on NGAD, as well as the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, Kendall said. But he said the Air Force plans to do that “in a rational way, that doesn’t take excessive risk.”

Kendall said he wants the government to have much more control over NGAD than it does with the F-35. In addition to ensuring the government has access to the intellectual property it needs, Kendall said the Air Force will make sure NGAD’s manufacturer and subcontractors use modular open system design. That will allow the Air Force to bring in new and different suppliers as it seeks to upgrade parts of the system, he said.

The Air Force’s program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, who is now Brig. Gen. Dale White, will be in charge of the new program, Kendall said.

With NGAD expected to be a very expensive proposition — Kendall told lawmakers in April 2022 he expected each aircraft to cost multiple hundreds of millions of dollars apiece — the Air Force won’t be able to afford working with multiple contractors on the program, Kendall said. The service plans to choose a single contractor to build NGAD sometime in 2024, with Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman expected to compete for the program.

Kendall also said the acquisition strategy for collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) is moving forward in parallel with NGAD, and the Air Force is working with several potential suppliers to create autonomous drone wingmen associated with that concept. He said it’s too soon to say how many vendors the Air Force plans to work with, but that he wants “as many as possible.”

He declined to describe how CCA capabilities might compare to crewed fighters, saying that information is classified.

Kendall said NGAD’s origins date back to the Obama administration, when he in his previous role as the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics asked the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to study what the Air Force would need to ensure it could dominate the skies in a future war.

DARPA’s response, Kendall said, was that the service didn’t just need a lone fighter — it needed a “family of systems,” also encompassing weapons, connections to assets in space, and possibly autonomous drone wingmen.

Kendall then launched a program called the Aerospace Innovation Initiative to start to develop technologies that would form the core of a sixth-generation fighter. That effort led to the creation of experimental prototype aircraft, which Kendall called X-planes, to flesh out those technologies and prove they can work.

Advancements in model-based systems engineering and digitalization also made it possible for both government and contractor design teams to work together much more efficiently, he said.

That’s what’s happening now with the offices developing NGAD, according to Kendall, with government designers and bidding companies essentially working side-by-side at Wright-Patterson. Government designers have direct access to the databases companies are using to design their pitches for NGAD, he explained.

“Everybody lives basically in the same design laboratory, if you will, so we have intimate knowledge of what the competitors are doing in their design,” Kendall said. “We’re very involved with them. … We’re going to have as integrated and as fully integrated a design process and contracting process as possible.”

This is a more efficient approach than how acquisitions were run in the past, where the contractor would deliver “piles and piles of documents” to the government to sort through. “Now you don’t wait for documents, you can see the design firsthand,” Kendall said.

F-16s “will give the Ukrainians an increment of capability that they don’t have right now,” Kendall said in a breakfast roundtable with reporters hosted by the Defense Writers Group. “But it’s not going to be a dramatic game-changer, as far as I’m concerned, for their total military capabilities.”

Kendall said that while F-16s will help Ukraine, they won’t fundamentally alter the balance of power in the war. Effective ground-based air defenses on both sides have meant airpower has not played a decisive role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kendall said, and fighters have been used in fairly limited ways as a result.

For more than a year, Ukraine has repeatedly asked the United States and European nations to provide fourth-generation F-16s or other fighters. Those requests were always rebuffed.

The situation changed last week, when President Joe Biden announced the United States would support training Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s, paving the way for Ukraine to receive those fighters.

At Monday’s breakfast, Kendall said Ukraine has been “very understandably unrestrained” in their requests for weapons and hardware such as F-16s from the United States and other nations.

But other weapons packages to Ukraine have been “incredibly useful” in thwarting Russia’s initial drive to seize Kyiv and much of the country, he said, and then pushing Russian forces out of much of the territory it claimed in the early months of the war. Ukraine has used Western weapons such as High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, precision rockets and Javelin anti-tank weapons to devastating effect against Russia.

Kendall said the West prioritized sending Ukraine those weapons that would be most effective on the battlefield, before shifting focus to laying the groundwork for a future Ukrainian air force.

He said providing fighters such as F-16s “is seen by some as an escalatory act on our part.”

Speed was also a factor in deciding which weapons to concentrate on first providing to Ukraine, Kendall said. Getting significant quantities of fighters into Ukrainian hands would take months at best, he said, so instead the West looked for armaments that could be more quickly shipped.

Kendall reiterated comments he and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown made in July 2022 that eventually, Ukraine will have to move away from its current force of Russian-made Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker and MiG-29 Fulcrum fighters and toward Western-made jets.

“Ukraine is going to remain an independent nation,” Kendall said. “It’s going to need a full suite of military capabilities. And so it’s time to start thinking longer-term about what that military might look like, and what it might include.”

Kendall said the U.S. and other partner nations will work with Ukraine to “figure out a path” toward getting the jets — but it won’t happen soon. He said it will likely take at least several months for Ukraine to receive them.

Many details also have yet to be sorted out, Kendall added , such as where the F-16s will come from, and where their pilots will train.

“We’re just starting our conversations about how we’re going to move forward after the president’s announcement,” he said. “A lot of open possibilities [for training], including our partners.”

NBC News reported in March two Ukrainian pilots were at a military base in Tucson, Arizona, to help sort out how quickly the nation’s fighter pilots could learn to fly advanced fighters such as F-16s. The Air National Guard’s 162nd Wing in Tucson trains pilots from international partner nations to fly the F-16.

But Kendall was optimistic about Ukrainian pilots’ abilities to learn to fly the F-16, saying it would take “months, not years.”

“They’re very motivated,” Kendall said. “Everything we’ve done with the Ukrainians, they’ve shown a capacity to learn. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more motivated individuals, in terms of wanting to get into the fight and make a difference.”

The service’s 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron in April completed initial ground and flight testing of an MQ-9A Reaper outfitted with the Angry Kitten ALQ-167 Electronic Countermeasures Pod, a cluster of components contained in a vaguely cat-shaped tube.

The successful trials at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, focused on providing electronic attack from the Reaper, a General Atomics Aeronautical Systems product typically used to collect intelligence or conduct reconnaissance. The pod is derived from technology developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute, which in 2013 described the project as using commercial electronics, custom hardware and novel machine-learning for flexibility.

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” Maj. Aaron Aguilar, the 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, said in a statement May 13. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present.”

Electronic warfare, or EW, is an invisible fight for control of the electromagnetic spectrum, used to communicate with friendly forces, to identify and suppress opponents, and to guide weapons. Dominance of the spectrum will be critical in a fight with China or Russia, the two most significant national security threats, according to U.S. defense officials.

The Air Force is trying to reinvigorate its EW capabilities after years of neglect; the service in September announced a “sprint” to dig up deficiencies, seek needed resources and identify next steps.

Testing of electronic warfare package for Army’s AMPV expected in 2024

Lt. Col. Michael Chmielewski, the 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a statement said electronic attack aboard a Reaper is “compelling.” The Air Force previously used Angry Kitten in training, outfitting aggressor squadrons with the gear to harass trainees and simulate dizzying electronic barrages.

“Fifteen hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence,” Chmielewski said.

Angry Kitten’s name is a brew of inside joke and design goals, according to a 2013 Newsweek report. It is also a departure from the typical terror-inducing military moniker: Hellfire missile, Predator drone, Stryker combat vehicle.

Roger Dickerson, a senior research engineer with the Sensor and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, in 2015 told C4ISRNET that although the pod has “an admittedly slightly silly name,” it represents “very serious technology.”

“We’ve been working hard to improve the capabilities and the readiness of the war fighters in our sponsor organizations: the Army, the Navy and especially the U.S. Air Force air combat community,” Dickerson said at the time.

The service said in a Thursday release that it sent industry a classified solicitation for an engineering and manufacturing development contract for the secretive and highly classified NGAD program.

The release of this solicitation formally begins the process of selecting a contractor to build the Air Force’s next advanced fighter system, which will replace the F-22 Raptor. The solicitation came with requirements the Air Force expects companies to include in their NGAD designs.

However, this solicitation and source-selection process does not include the drone wingmen the Air Force refers to as collaborative combat aircraft, the service said.

“The NGAD platform is a vital element of the air dominance family of systems, which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in the release. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the abilities to survive, persist, interoperate and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments.”

“No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now,” Kendall added.

The Air Force has repeatedly said its concept for an NGAD platform will not exactly mirror a traditional crewed fighter such as the F-22 or F-35, but will instead be a “family of systems” that incorporates a crewed aircraft component as well as collaborative combat aircraft. Increased sensor capabilities as well as advanced abilities to connect with satellites, other aircraft or other assets could also be part of NGAD’s family of systems.

The Air Force on Thursday said its acquisition strategy for NGAD “will invigorate and broaden the industrial base to deliver rapid and innovative warfighting capabilities.”

As the service develops NGAD, the statement said, it will use lessons learned from other recent acquisition programs, and will use open-architecture standards. The service said this will allow it to take advantage of as much competition as possible throughout NGAD’s life cycle, create a larger and more responsive industrial base, and cut down on maintenance and sustainment costs.

The Air Force said other technical and programmatic details on NGAD are classified “to protect operational and technological advantages.”

Kendall and other service officials said last year they hope to start fielding the crewed component of NGAD by the end of the decade, with collaborative combat aircraft possibly arriving first.

In June 2022, Kendall raised eyebrows when he said at a Heritage Foundation event that the service had “now started on the EMD program to do the development aircraft that we’re going to take into production” — a remark that some took to mean NGAD was already in the engineering and manufacturing development stage.

Kendall later walked back those comments, explaining that he was using the term EMD in a colloquial sense. He said NGAD was still being designed and had not yet gone through the Milestone B review process.

Milestone B marks the point where a program’s technology maturation phase finishes and an acquisition program formally starts in which the service takes its preliminary design and focuses on system integration, manufacturing processes and other details ahead of production.

Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said in an email to Defense News that when the source-selection process finishes, NGAD will go to the service’s top acquisition official — who is now Andrew Hunter — for the Milestone B decision to award the EMD contract to the winning company.

Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have expressed interest in pursuing the Air Force’s NGAD contract.

It’s unclear how much the contact would be worth, but Kendall told lawmakers in an April 2022 hearing that each aircraft could cost “multiple” hundreds of millions of dollars, though he did not get specific about the potential price tag.

Last year, the New Zealand Defence Force received about NZ$4.9 billion. Inflation to December 2022 was just over 7%, according to Statistics NZ.

New Zealand’s Army has the largest share of funding among the armed services, receiving NZ$1.1 billion. The Army received about NZ$1.1 billion last year.

The government is allocating about NZ$1 billion — compared to NZ$941 million last year — to the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

The Royal New Zealand Navy is set to get about NZ$714 million — an increase from last year’s NZ$667 million.

An additional NZ$574 million will go toward protecting New Zealand’s territorial sovereignty and contribute to regional and global security efforts. And more than NZ$30 million is meant to assist with “the employment of New Zealand’s Armed Forces overseas, and to enable the provision of military capabilities overseas.”

The Government Communications Security Bureau, which specializes in gathering intelligence from electronic communications, is to receive almost NZ$402 million — a 25% increase from last year.

The Defence Ministry is set to get about NZ$1.3 billion for the “procurement of major military capabilities.” This includes NZ$605 million for five new C-130J-30 Hercules airlifters to replace the existing C-130H fleet, which has been in service with the Air Force since 1965, and almost NZ$14 million for P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. The third P-8A of four ordered is to arrive in New Zealand on May 19.

The budget also includes more pay for military personnel, with increases ranging from NZ$4,000 to NZ$15,000, beginning July 1 and costing NZ$419 million over four years. Defence Minister Andrew Little said the increase has led to the withdrawal of some resignation letters.

The budget for resource and border protection operations increases from NZ$610 million to NZ$634 million.

A domestic effort that partly supports public awareness of the proficiency and practice of the military will receive a modest increase from NZ$62.1 to NZ$64.2.

Budget documents noted that the funding increase this year follows obsolescence-driven serviceability issues that caused the unavailability of SH-2G(I) Seasprite helicopters, thus reducing naval aviation readiness, and the inability to service Boeing 757 engines, leading to a reduction in strategic air mobility readiness.

Allvin, a career mobility pilot and strategist who has served as Air Force vice chief of staff since November 2020, is the service’s internal pick for chief, according to one current military officer, two retired officers and another expert outside of the Pentagon, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss the issue.

He is the preferred candidate of Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the Air Force’s current top officer who is expected to earn President Joe Biden’s nomination for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The competition has been “very personality-dependent,” based on who Brown wants as his successor, one source said.

What Gen. CQ Brown would bring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for operations and a leader in the special operations community, is in line to become Allvin’s right-hand man as Air Force vice chief of staff, two sources added.

If nominated by Biden and confirmed by the Senate, Allvin and Slife would take over the third-largest branch of the armed forces, a nearly $180 billion portfolio spanning around 689,000 uniformed airmen and civilians. They would inherit a sweeping effort to modernize the service’s inventory of decades-old aircraft, adapt the force to the digital era and encourage young Americans to enlist.

The pair still requires Biden’s approval for the top jobs, sources cautioned.

Their nominations aren’t a “done deal,” said one former military officer with knowledge of the discussions. Another source believes the process is around 80% complete and that the race has been stable for a few months.

U.S. Transportation Command boss Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost could still be in the running as well if Biden seeks to interview her, according to current and former officers. Sources in and out of the federal government have viewed Van Ovost, who previously oversaw the Air Force’s airlift and tanker fleets, as a top contender for the job. She is one of three female four-star officers in the Defense Department.

Another potential pick, Pacific Air Forces boss Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, was recently nominated to lead Air Combat Command.

It’s unclear when candidates would interview with Biden or when he would sign off on the nomination.

An Air Force spokesperson said it’s premature to comment on whether Allvin is in line for chief of staff. The National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.

“Presidents don’t always accept or follow the ‘recommendations’ of the DoD as to who for a particular position, especially a service chief,” said Arnold Punaro, a defense consultant and retired Marine Corps two-star general who served as the staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

For example, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin could reject the service’s suggestion and put forward his own favorite, as could the president himself, Punaro said.

A retired four-star who spoke on condition of anonymity said Allvin and Austin have worked together but the vice chief spends more time in meetings with Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.

Once senior military nominees are approved by the Pentagon, they head to the White House Military Office and the National Security Council for further scrutiny.

“While the basic process is well-known and well-used and has lots of paperwork, even for the military, each administration and each president has their own approach for the most senior military nominations,” Punaro added. “Once the president makes a decision, then there is a host of SASC and Senate paperwork that has to be completed.”

In short: “There is no such thing as a routine four-star nomination,” he said.

The ‘consummate insider’

A 1986 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Allvin began his career as a cargo pilot in the C-12F Huron and C-141 Starlifter while stationed in Washington state and Germany.

He changed tack to become a test pilot in 1994, flying the C-17 Globemaster III and C-130J Super Hercules airlifters as the Air Force built its first squadrons of those airframes in the mid-1990s.

Allvin hoped to parlay his test pilot experience into a job as an astronaut, but decided it wasn’t the right time to join NASA and turned to academics instead, a former general told Air Force Times.

He spent two years as a student at the Air Command and Staff College and School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and joined Air Mobility Command headquarters as part of the commander’s action group in 1999.

Over the next decade, he would bounce between command positions at pilot training wings nationwide and policy jobs in the Pentagon. All told, Allvin amassed more than 4,600 flight hours in nearly a dozen airframes.

He pinned on his first star in September 2010 and took command of NATO’s aviation training command in Afghanistan, then returned to Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois a year later.

There, he led the 618th Air and Space Operations Center — AMC’s hub for tasking tanker and airlift missions around the world — from April 2012 to June 2013. He also served as its vice commander for eight months.

As a general officer, Allvin has risen through multiple strategy and planning roles at the Pentagon, Air Force headquarters, U.S. European Command and the United Nations over the past decade. That experience has positioned him as the “consummate insider,” a stronger advocate for Air Force interests and deft navigator of the federal bureaucracy, sources said.

After Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014, Allvin — who became EUCOM’s strategy and policy director in 2015 — drew up a new war plan for the command, the retired four-star said. That landed him a job on the Joint Staff in 2018 as the vice director, then director, of strategy, plans and policy.

“When he was a J-5, he was thinking in a way that’s bigger and different,” said Clint Hinote, who recently retired as the Air Force’s lieutenant general in charge of long-term force planning. “That’s been a hallmark, and I think that is going to be something we need.”

‘The one in the trenches’

Allvin took over as Air Force vice chief of staff in November 2020, where he plays a central role in shaping the service’s budget and managing its acquisition programs.

Sources described him as a well-read, professorial leader with the self-discipline and Washington know-how to make an impact.

He seeks out insight across and outside of the federal government when crafting an opinion on a subject, and is secure enough in his own perspective to respectfully debate others, multiple retired officers said.

“I have had sparring matches with him that I think a lot of senior leaders would have been very off-put by having a three-star challenge them,” Hinote said. “We’ve actually grown closer in our working relationship because of it.”

One of Allvin’s most significant accomplishments as vice chief has come as the leader of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and other strategic planning groups within the Pentagon, Hinote said. His leadership ensured more Air Force priorities were included in the Defense Department’s recent budget requests than may have been otherwise.

“We got a tremendous amount of victories and plus-ups in the budget,” Hinote said. “There’s so much that is different than what we had before, and I think he really deserves a lot of credit for that because he’s the one in the trenches every meeting, trying to make the case for the Air Force.”

While Allvin has a wealth of Pentagon experience, he has less operational command experience than predecessors like Brown and Gen. David Goldfein. That may concern some observers, but Hinote thinks there are ways to solve the issue.

“I actually think you can use social media a little bit differently, and you could have a lot of town halls and listening sessions” to bring in the perspectives of rank-and-file airmen, Hinote said.

Allvin has sought out those perspectives.

He has spearheaded a new group to rethink recruiting policies and professional development initiatives to help airmen pursue nontraditional careers in the service, and mentors generals and other staffers that are earlier on in their careers.

His version of the annual “Vice Chief’s Challenge” invites airmen to submit their ideas on agile combat employment, the Air Force’s term for deploying quickly and without a large logistics footprint to respond to threats more easily.

He has cultivated a close relationship with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and works well with Slife, a similarly strategic thinker who looks to improve airpower overall rather than push parochial interests, sources said.

Slife, a former helicopter and drone pilot, arrived at the Pentagon in December after leading Air Force Special Operations Command for more than three years and serving as the vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.

“He’s not very patient. He’s not willing to look at things and shrug his shoulders,” one retired general said of Slife. “I think they’ll probably be, kind of, [Allvin] as the idea guy … and then Slife as the executor.”

It’s the first time in more than a decade that neither the Air Force chief of staff or its vice chief hail from a fighter background.

Gen. Norton Schwartz, a mobility pilot, and vice chief Gen. William Fraser, a bomber pilot, served as the Air Force’s top two leaders for about a year together in 2008-2009. Schwartz overlapped with Gen. Larry Spencer, a finance officer, for less than a month in 2012 as well.

“Some will say it with a sense of, ‘This could be really good for the Air Force because you’re not having the groupthink problem.’ And then there’ll be some people that say, ‘Oh, my God, the Air Force is going to pot. They’re not even letting combat pilots lead it anymore,’” Hinote said.

He believes the Air Force’s plan to divest airframes like the older F-15 Eagle models and the A-10 attack plane, and to buy fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighters than initially planned, while investing in more advanced drones and communications technology would happen regardless of what top brass previously flew.

Another source pointed out that Lt. Gen. Scott Pleus, a career fighter pilot currently serving as deputy commander of U.S. Forces in Korea, is nominated to move to the Pentagon as the Air Staff director to ensure that perspective isn’t lost.

As the new face of the Air Force, Allvin will need “sharp elbows” to fight for the service’s interests in upcoming budget and strategy debates within the Pentagon and with Congress, and convince the public of its value, one retired officer said.

The Air Force is pushing Congress to grant its $185 billion budget request for fiscal 2024 and green-light a sweeping plan to retire hundreds of older aircraft that leaders say will be ineffective in future wars.

If Allvin is selected, he will inherit “a lot of the same problems” that Brown has faced, the retired four-star said, “which are primarily how to convince the system that, after 30 years of underfunding the Air Force, it’s going to take some fairly drastic measures to let them catch up with the efforts China has made.”

The new chief will also play a key role in reversing the Air Force’s struggle to recruit and retain airmen — particularly pilots, maintainers and cyber operators.

After nearly 40 years in the military, Allvin believes he has more to give to solve those problems.

“He really wants the job,” the retired four-star said. “He thinks he can do a good job at it and he thinks there are things that need to be done.

“He thinks he’s prepared, and his family is prepared, to go through this,” he added. “And that’s important.”