THREATS
State of the Air Force and Space Force 2023
Training airmen to act more autonomously—and gearing up for more autonomous systems.
Jennifer Hlad
BY JENNIFER HLAD
NEWS EDITOR, DEFENSE ONE
MARCH 2, 2023
AIR FORCE
SPACE FORCE
PERSONNEL
The U.S. Air Force’s year brought an unexpected first: an air-to-air kill by an F-22 Raptor. But the shootdown wasn’t of an enemy fighter jet; instead, the Raptor brought down a suspected Chinese spy balloon.
The incident—and the subsequent downings of three more unidentified flying objects—drew attention to the security of United States airspace, the role the Air Force plays in national security, and above all, the potential threat from China.
It’s a threat that’s been top of mind for the Air Force for years, and while Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown says he doesn’t see conflict with China as “imminent or inevitable,” he does want the service to be ready, just in case.
“My goal is to be ready today, tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade. And set ourselves as an Air Force to have capability and capacity to be able to provide options for the President,” Brown said during a recent event at the Brookings Institution.
That looming threat—as well as competition with Russia, which is flying wingtip-to-wingtip with U.S. jets in the Middle East—will continue to drive Air Force programs and policies in 2023 and beyond.
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China is “trying to reshape the [international] order into their own image or their own liking,” Brown said, adding that he pays attention to what they are doing “from a capability standpoint because I want to make sure we stay ahead of the threat. I can’t predict what the [People’s Republic of China] might do, or how they might execute. But I just want to make sure that we have all the capabilities, as much as possible, to provide options.”
One way the Air Force aims to stay ahead is Brown’s “accelerate change or lose” initiative. Introducing it in 2020, he noted that while the Air Force was fighting battles in the Middle East, “China and Russia have done things to accelerate and or move to impact our advantage. And so, our advantage is eroding, so that’s why I say ‘accelerate change or lose’.”
Those changes include two linked concepts Brown calls “agile combat employment” and the “multi-capable airman.” The idea is to create a “lighter, leaner, more agile” force with dispersed bases that can also operate from remote locations—like remote Pacific islands.
“We’ve gotten used to going to the Middle East where we have big bases that are already established, and you just show up,” Brown said at the Brookings event. “We’re going to go places potentially in the future where you’re starting from scratch, and you can’t bring everything. But how do you operate in that environment and be able to make decisions without having to call back to, all the way back up to the headquarters? That’s what I want to instill in our airmen, that they have the confidence to do the things that their nation’s asked them to do without having a lot of oversight.”
In a future conflict, Brown wants airmen “to be confident that they can make decisions and do things at the lower level without having to come back and ask for permission. Because I don’t have time to sign permission slips for everything we do. I want to provide intent and let them go execute. And they will probably do more than I ever imagined.”
To that end, the service recently dropped the four-day BEAST exercise from its basic training and replaced it with a two-day exercise meant to simulate a deployment and test “multi-capable airman” skills. The Air Force is also overhauling its force generation and deployment cycle. The new 24-month cycle, with four six-month phases—including “available to commit,” when a unit is either deployed or ready to go at a moment’s notice—is due to reach initial operating capability this year.
The Air Force’s 2023 budget request of $169 billion—up $13.2 billion from from the 2022 enacted budget—was about transformational change. And Congress approved some of that change: after years of back-and-forth, lawmakers finally signed off on retiring A-10 Warthogs, though they blocked retiring F-22s, and prevented or changed the retirement of other aircraft including the B-1, F-15, and E-3 AWACS.
The FY23 budget also included funding for low-rate initial production of the new B-21 bomber, as well as more KC-46 tankers, F-35As, and EC-37B Compass Calls. It also funds production of prototype E-7 aircraft.
“I think we made progress” on the budget, Brown said. “And it’s because the environment has changed,” with Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the increasing threat from China.
As for the 2024 budget, expect another significant funding bump as the service plans to launch several new programs. Service officials would not elaborate on those “new starts,” but Brown noted that a continuing resolution—“particularly a year-long continuing resolution”—would scuttle them and “give our adversaries a year to move forward,” while keeping the U.S. in place. “You can’t buy back time,” he said.
That budget request is also likely to include unmanned aircraft with greater capability, and the manning to go with it.
“We’re going down the path of collaborative combat aircraft,” Brown said. “To be able to fly with, not just the [Next-Generation Air Dominance], but also looking to see how we could bring that with the F-35.”
Looking at “future budgets” for “uncrewed aircraft,” Brown said, there is “the platform itself, there is the autonomy that goes with it. And there's how we organize, train, and equip to build the organizations to go, and we're trying to do all those in parallel.…As you look at collaborative combat aircraft, it can be a sensor, it could be a shooter, it could be a jammer. But how does it team with a crewed aircraft, and could you operate it from the back of a KC-46? We'll have E-7s eventually. Could you operate it from the back of the E-7? Could you operate it from a fighter cockpit? And we're thinking to those aspects.”
Also expected this year: At least some details on the Air Force’s “Next-Generation Air-Refueling System,” a stealth tanker to “address the changing strategic environment.” The service published a request for information in late January that projects an analysis of alternatives in October of this year, with IOC slated for 2040.
On the Pentagon’s network-everything Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort, Brown said that while many people early in the process talked about “connecting every sensor to every shooter,” he has always felt “it was more directing the right sensor to the right shooter at the right time.”
Now, he said, the challenge is “each of the services that have invested in their various command-and-control systems, and how do you then align those? And the goal is not that I have to connect every airplane to every tank, for example, but how do I get my data off my airplanes” to a place where a ground commander or maritime commander can feed information into it and pull out of it, Brown said.
“If we have some level of commonality in how we move data, that is probably the key point, and I will tell you we are making a lot more progress” than when he took over as chief, he said.
A key part of it is going to be handling all the data, Brown said, “which is why the Space Force is so important. They’ll lay out that architecture.”
It’s not the only thing on the Space Force’s plate. The smallest service branch has stopped growing exponentially, adding just 200 guardians this year, but is now focused on the nuts and bolts of creating resilience and building a “combat credible” force.
Guardians must be able to “operate in, from, and through a contested domain,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters in a media roundtable in January.
“Just because we have the right systems in orbit, or the systems on the ground, doesn’t necessarily make it a ready force. The personnel have to be trained. We have to have operational concepts. We have to have tactics that are validated. The operators have to practice those tactics. We need intelligence to underpin how we're going to intend to use those systems,” Saltzman said. “We don’t deliver technology to the joint force, we deliver forces. Forces require all of those components: equipment, weapons systems, trained personnel, operational concepts, tactics, intelligence.”
For 2023, the Space Force requested $24.5 billion, almost 30 percent more than the previous year. It will ask for another increase this year, to help build an operational test and training infrastructure—which includes simulators, ranges, testing equipment, digital engineering, and more, the CSO said.
And rather than tailoring training to a specific threat, Saltzman said he wants to take a broader approach.
“For a given system, we know what the general threats are, whether they’re anti-satellite kinetic attacks against our systems, whether they’re [radio frequency] energy and jamming, all of the array of threats that are out there,” he said. “And so rather than focusing in very narrowly on a particular threat, [and saying] ‘this is this is the threat scenario I want you to train against,’ I want to have a lot of flexible options against all the threats, regardless of what the outcomes might be, or what's asked of us.”
Saltzman doesn’t want to prescribe, for example, sending an Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite to handle a satellite-communications jammer.
“Too specific. I want to say, ‘Hey, the 4th Space Operations Squadron is ready to address any threat to its mission’,” he said.
Still, Saltzman said, identifying China as a pacing threat provides a useful “landscape of threats” the U.S. might encounter, and there are space-related lessons to be learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well.
“Right out of the gate, we saw both sides attacking satellite operations to degrade command and control. We see a lot of GPS interference to degrade those kinds of capabilities. So clearly, if right out of the gate you’re trying to degrade those capabilities, you recognize that they are central to operations, that they are important to how a force fights in the modern environment,” he said, noting that the conflict has also shown that “space and cyber are inextricably linked.”
“Satellites in space are not useful if the linkages to them and the ground network that moves the information around that you get from satellites is not assured, is not capable, is not accessible,” Saltzman said. “I think it’s a reminder that…if we’re not thinking about cyber protection of our ground networks, that we may have a backdoor, if you will, to negate satellite operations without counter-satellite operations.…There’s other ways to attack these systems.”
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U.S. Marines with III Marine Expeditionary Force Support Battalion, III Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, board a C-130J Super Hercules on Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa, Japan, Jan. 20, 2023.
U.S. Marines with III Marine Expeditionary Force Support Battalion, III Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, board a C-130J Super Hercules on Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa, Japan, Jan. 20, 2023. U.S. MARINE CORPS / CPL. CESAR ALARCON
THREATS
State of the Marine Corps 2023
Efforts to fulfill the vision of Force Design 2030 are hitting a groove. But who will replace its architect?
Caitlin M. Kenney
BY CAITLIN M. KENNEY
STAFF REPORTER, DEFENSE ONE
MARCH 2, 2023
MARINE CORPS
NAVY
PERSONNEL
The year-old land war in Europe has not distracted the Marine Corps from readying its forces for operations in the world's other hemisphere.
“On any given day, 20,000 Marines are west of the dateline. Our job is to organize, train, equip, prepare them to handle the crises that may come. But we are focused on the Pacific. But those forces are not simply designed for the Pacific. They're most useful in the Pacific, but highly useful across the globe,” Gen. Eric Smith, the assistant commandant, said Feb. 14 at the WEST 2023 conference in San Diego.
In January, the Marine Corps reactivated Camp Blaz in Guam after a delay due to the coronavirus pandemic. The base, part of a long-planned agreement with Japan to move thousands of Marines from Okinawa, provides the Marine Corps and the U.S. military “a strategic hub” for training and operations in the western Pacific.
The Marines also announced in January that they would turn the 12th Marine Regiment in Japan into the second of three planned Marine Littoral Regiments.
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The Force Design groove
With six years to go, the Marine Corps’ efforts to fulfill the vision of Force Design 2030 are getting into a regular groove.
“We are done divesting. We went quickly as the Secretary of Defense guided all of us to do in the planning guidance and National Defense Strategy,” Gen. David Berger, Marine Corps commandant, told Defense One. “So now we’re stable. And now as fast as we can go, modernize the force and get the capabilities into the field, now. Not in five years or seven years—now. Which we’re doing.”
Berger said he’s not dissuaded by the criticism of Force Design by some retired Marine officers. But he is listening.
“Some of them absolutely have influenced Force Design,” he said.“The discussion over how many aircraft in a squadron. The discussion about how many Marines are in an infantry battalion. All these were also discussions that were happening in the process, but they raised them also. So, it absolutely affects how we refine concepts and go back and test assumptions.”
Berger said he has also listened to suggestions that he needed to “more clearly communicate things that are not going to change,” such as training or “the basic ethos culture.”
For “evidence” that Force Design is going in the right direction, Berger pointed to January’s U.S.-Japan announcement that the Marines would establish their next MLR in Japan.
“This is between two big nations and their No. 1 item is what the Marine Corps needs to do,” he said. “Two national leaders are validating this is absolutely the direction we got to go, and we got to go faster.”
The 3rd MLR, expected to reach initial operating capability this year, is experimenting “under a stress test in a pretty realistic environment” in California and Arizona that will allow it to learn and make adjustments, Berger said. Its work will shape how the 12th MLR is initially organized in Japan, he said.
The Marines have just released a new report under the Force Design effort, “Installations and Logistics 2030,” which includes the need to work on “the essentials” such as barracks, dining facilities, and workplaces after decades of prioritizing “readiness and lethality,” Berger said. An update to Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 4, Logistics, is also coming out soon, Col. Rob Weiler, the military secretary to the commandant, told Defense One.
People
The most important part of the Marine Corps and its Force Design effort remains its people, Berger said.
“Not any of the gear, not any of the other elements, because it won't work if we can't bring in the right people, train them the right way,” he said. “If you can't get the people part right, nothing else matters. And that is the foundation of the Marine Corps.”
The recruiting crisis is putting pressure on all the services, but the Marine Corps is faring better than others—in part because it has since 2021 worked harder to retain the troops it already has.
“This year alone, we're basically closed out, or will close out, our retention goals about three months earlier than we traditionally do. That's a positive,” Sgt. Maj. of the Marine Corps Troy Black told Defense One.
“In fact, we have a process now where instead of having a ceiling on how many we are going to retain…we are making it a floor,” Black said. “So, we're going to keep more first-term Marines. More importantly, we're going to keep and are keeping, more of our subsequent-term [Marines]—that means people who have reenlisted two or more times.”
The Talent Management Annual Report is expected in early March.
The month-old Training and Education 2030 document has a to-do list to get the service prepared for the “future operating environment.” This includes a new program called Project Tripoli which will provide a “live, virtual, and constructive training environment” for all Marines unit levels, said Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, the commanding general of the Marines’ Training and Education Command.
Budget
Much of the arms and equipment sent to Ukraine, such as howitzers, came from the Marine Corps and Army, and Berger said the two services—as part of a “group” DOD effort—are expected to ask for funding in the 2024 defense budget request to replenish their stocks. That effort will take time as companies work to increase their production, he said.
Berger pledged again that the Marine Corps will be fiscally disciplined, following the course it has laid with Force Design efforts, and living within its means as decided by the Navy and Defense Department.
“I think, rightfully so, the secretary of the Navy should expect from me: if there was more money, what would you do with it? And my answer is: go faster. And some of that, of course, would be the installation logistics part.”
Amphibs
The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act required the Marine Corps to have at least 31 amphibious warships and that the commandant must be consulted on decisions related to the amphibious fleet. The size and composition of the future amphibious fleet was analyzed in the Amphibious Force Requirements Study, whose findings remain classified.
Berger declined to say how many amphibs the study calls for, but said he is “very comfortable with the rigor, the analysis in it. Comfortable with the assumptions that were built into it, and the outcome of it.”
He said that the readiness of the ships matters more than their number.
“The higher your readiness is, probably you can do with less inventory. 31 is the bare minimum at our high readiness rate. Anything lower than that, you're going to need more,” Berger said. “Second is the composition of it. 31, it has to be broken down into both the large—the big decks and the medium and smaller size, so there's a breakdown of each.”
Berger and Smith have both said there are potential risks to combatant commanders if the fleet drops below 31 ships.
The Marine Corps is also pursuing a shore-to-shore connector ship to fill a gap in capability between the big-deck amphibs and the dock landing ships. These Landing Ship Mediums, or LSMs, will be used by Marine Littoral Regiments. The Marines will need at least 35: nine per MLR and eight that will be in some maintenance period, Berger said. The Navy is expected to start buying these newer amphibious ships in 2025, so in the meantime the Marine Corps is leasing three commercial stern landing vessels and modifying them to test out how they could be used by the regiments. The first SLV is expected to arrive in San Diego in April-May, and begin experimentation this summer, Col. Weiler said.
Berger is excited not just about the potential and functionality of the vessels, but what feedback they will receive from the Marines.
“Once you give them something like that, like two weeks later they come back and go, ‘Oh yeah, we figured something else out.’ Because they have it in their hands, they can experiment with it. And they're going to tell us it does these things, and it also does this. We're going to learn,” he said.
Future
Who will lead the Marine Corps when Gen. Berger steps out of the role this summer remains unclear. Berger said he was not aware that anyone has been chosen yet. The decision could determine how closely the Corps stays on the Force Design 2030 path paved by Berger—or where it may diverge.
And Berger’s next chapter? Reporting suggests he's among a few generals being considered for the role of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Berger deflected, saying Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden “make those decisions and run that process.”
“Whatever they’re willing to provide you or not, I’m not going to get in front of them. It’s their—they own it…it’s the right way to do it,” he said.
Spokesmen for both the President and Sec. Austin declined to comment on the chairman nomination process.
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