As US Air Force leaders gather this week outside of Washington, they bring a warning: Potential adversaries are spending big on technology, and the US can’t afford to fall behind.
Much of the focus of the Air Force Association conference will be on a series of recapitalization programs that will get underway in the next few years. But even as the Air Force tries to inject new systems into its fleet, it has its eyes on the horizon and what could be the next wave of recapitalization programs.
The most notable is the program known as “F-X”, “next-generation air dominance” or, much to the chagrin of the service, “sixth-generation fighter.” This would be the replacement for the F-22 and provide air dominance for the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s.
“It’s not a big money driver at the moment, but it’s really important for the future of the Air Force and I personally am going to spend a lot of my energy on it,” said William LaPlante, Air Force undersecretary for acquisition. The program is also a priority for Gen. Mark Welsh, Air Force chief of staff, and Pentagon acquisition head Frank Kendall, he added.
Air Force critics are quick to point out that the F-35 joint strike fighter, a fifth-generation jet, is still in the early stages of production — and still struggling with development and testing challenges. Why, then, should the Air Force be spending funds to develop a new fighter?
Col. Tom Coglitore, Air Superiority Core Function Team chief at Air Combat Command, said the timetable actually lines up with the development of other air dominance fighters, such as the F-15 and F-22.
“We’re at that point that we need to be thinking about replacement for capabilities we have today, because 15-20 years from now the F-22 will be 30 years old,” he said. And unlike their bomber cousins, which have notoriously long lifespans, “these platforms are sometimes pulling 8 or 9 Gs a couple times a day. We stress the heck out of them.”
The Air Force wants to complete its analysis of alternatives and begin Milestone A, the first real step in an acquisition program, in the early fiscal 2018 time frame, Coglitore said.
That’s an “aggressive” schedule, warned Mark Gunzinger, a retired Air Force colonel and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“I think that is pretty optimistic,” he said, considering that significant questions remain about what the next-generation system might look like — and whether it would be a “fighter” at all.
“There needs to be a great deal of work to assess how a family of capabilities could create an air dominance environment that will enable ISR/strike platforms to penetrate and operate effectively in contested areas,” Gunzinger said.
The Air Force is at least open to the idea of not following the traditional fighter mold.
“We’re not presupposing that this is a 9 G aircraft and manned with two tails, two engines and a gun,” Coglitore added. “It could be an unmanned platform that only flies around at 2 to 3 Gs, perhaps. It’s whatever will take us to achieve the capability to fill that gap we see out in the future.”
LaPlante said he is “very interested” in incorporating autonomy into the program, but emphasized the service needs to think hard about distance.
“We have to remember the world is the world and we can’t predict where we may have to put these things, particularly because of basing. We’re going to have to think about how to have air dominance globally,” he said.
“So what technologies do people bring up? It’s hypersonic, it’s variants of new engine technologies like the adaptive engines we’ve got, new directed energy type weapons, those are the classic ones folks talk about.”
The timetable for directed energy weapons is still “the great unknown,” Coglitore said.
“There are a lot of things to solve, but if you look around the world, lasers have made significant progress over the last decade or two,” he added. “Whether it’s mature or effective enough is something that we will need to determine.”
Directed energy weapons have been identified as a service technological research priority, but if it is going to reach its potential, it needs to have a steady funding stream, Gunzinger said.
“There are things that can be done to operationalize directed energy weapons in the near term — it’s no longer a pipe dream,” Gunzinger said. “The directed energy timetable for some weapons may now be driven more by the lack of resources rather than technological maturity.”
Coglitore’s team is also exploring incorporating open architectures, which he called “the wave of the future.” Coglitore brought up a hypothetical of a system similar to an iPhone that can be upgraded through downloadable apps without the need for hardware replacement.
Another major program on the horizon is the KC-Y, a potential follow-on to the KC-X tanker replacement program, which was awarded to Boeing and its KC-46 design.
“I would put the KC-Y as certainly key for the future of the Air Force, because we need to continue to have more tankers as we eventually start retiring” current fleets, LaPlante said.
The service always planned to do a three-step renewal of its tanker fleet, but observers said the KC-Y is highly unlikely to be a new system. Instead, expect a slightly modified KC-46.
“The idea of derailing the KC-46 process and replacing it with something all new is a risk they just can’t take,” Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group said.
He notes that the KC-Z, the last part of the three-step program, could look like a new plane, particularly if the Air Force goes ahead with plans to retire the KC-10 earlier than expected responding to sequestration cuts.
And there are other systems on the horizon that will need recapitalization programs to at least begin in the mid- to late- 2020s.
LaPlante highlighted the need to recap the National Airborne Operations Center aircraft that would be used by the president and other government leaders in case of national emergency, many of which are getting up in age, as a “wildcard” for future budgets. Aboulafia added a potential replacement for the C-27 cargo transport as another option.
One that may see movement sooner rather than later is upgrading ground terminals for many systems.
“I don’t know we’ll have to replace them but we will have to make them more cyber resilient and more common,” LaPlante said.
“So for example, we have more GPS going up, but we also have a corresponding ground control station that has to modernize the previous GPS ground control station and make it more assured in terms of resiliency.”
Realistic Options?
The overarching question, however, is how realistic these programs are in an era of budget drawdowns.
That’s particularly acute now, as the Air Force has a series of major recapitalization programs that are already fighting for funding.
The “Big Three” — the F-35 fighter, KC-46A tanker and new long-range strike bomber — are already well underway. In addition, a second tier comprising the new combat rescue helicopter, T-X trainer replacement and joint surveillance target attack radar system command-and-control aircraft are in various stages of development.
Keeping those six on track while also developing the next-generation fighter and tanker follow-ons is a challenge, LaPlante acknowledged, but said the service’s emphasis on a new 20-year budget strategy will help prevent it from being overwhelmed.
“What that does is it forces planners and all of us in the leadership of the Air Force to make sure that the sequencing makes sense, to make sure, for example, that in the mid-2020s we don’t have everything falling all on top of each other and it goes outside the boundaries of what we can afford,” he said.
“Believe it or not, with the basic planning scenarios it does hang together.”
There “are the uncertainties we have to deal with,” LaPlante said. “But we’re not starting those programs with an unaffordable 20-year plan. We’re just not.”
While acknowledging the service’s attempts at a longer budget view, Gunzinger warned that keeping all these programs on track will tax other areas the service may want to upgrade or modernize.
“There are going to have to be a lot of tradeoffs. Hopefully they are strategic tradeoffs informed by strategy, not just budget cuts,” he said.
One tradeoff for recapitalization? The Air Force has put newer designs ahead of legacy fleets in a move analysts and service officials said stresses the current flying force.
The first major decision of the recapitalization vs. modernization came in the service’s fiscal 2015 budget request, when it cut funding for the F-16 Combat Avionics Programmed Extension Suite (CAPES) upgrade.
That program would have added an advanced radar and other upgrades to the aging F-16 fleet.
Instead, that funding went to a service-life extension program (SLEP) to extend the service life of the F-16 fleet by 2,000-4,000 hours of flight time. Gen. Michael Hostage, the outgoing head of Air Combat Command, has characterized choosing the SLEP over CAPES as a tradeoff the service made in order to keep the jets flying.
The SLEP, which involves changes to the wings and bulkhead, was slated to receive $16.2 million in the service’s fiscal 2015 budget request with full-rate production beginning in fiscal 2019. The Air Force said 65 F-16s will undergo the SLEP through 2019.
And recent events show a SLEP may be needed, with the service’s fleet of F-16D models, as well as international F-16B designs, needing to undergo repairs following the discovery of systemic cracks near the cockpit of the jets.
Keeping new programs on track is vital, “but we also have to remember we are using our legacy aircraft right now in operations and these aircraft are quite old,” LaPlante acknowledged.
“We’re using these things today and we have to make sure we’re making them the most available, safe and effective for the war fighter,” he added. “The juggling is making sure we do that while we protect the next generation of it.”
At the end of the day, getting all of its mission areas covered with the current budget may not be a real option, Gunzinger warned.
“I think it’s inevitable that we’re not going to be able to do everything we want to, in the way of buying as many new aircraft as the Air Force needs to over the next 10 years, unless there is a change to how resources are allocated across services,” he said.