Air Force photo

Gen. Stephen Wilson

WASHINGTON: The vice chief of the Air Force is “cautiously optimistic” about maintaining fleet mission capable rates through 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Yes, we are concerned about it, but we are monitoring it very closely and think we’ve got a very good plan,”  Gen. Stephen Wilson told me during an online briefing this morning sponsored by the Mitchell Institute.

“Contrary to most opinions, mission capable rates are actually increasing,” he added, “but it’s one of the things we’re keeping an eye on.”

(An Air Force spokesperson told Breaking D today that the service could not elaborate on that statement, as it only releases mission capable rates at the end of each year. “They go up and down by weapons system throughout the year so we snap a chalk line in September for the year,” the spokesperson noted.)

One factor in the improvement, Wilson said, is that the service has been flying fewer domestic sorties over the past few months — allowing maintenance personnel to “get the planes healthier.”

Mission capable rates tell commanders how much of each type of aircraft in the Air Force’s overall fleet are ready to rumble. According to a report yesterday by colleague Brian Everstine, the service’s mission capable rates during 2019 for the service’s fifth-generation fighters and the bomber fleets were pretty miserable — although the service had an overall score of 70.27 percent.

The Air Force spokesperson confirmed to Breaking D that the rates for 2019 cited in the story are accurate.

For example, the F-22 Raptor had an abysmal rate of 50.57 percent the Air Force Magazine story says. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has suffered as prime contractor Lockheed Martin struggles with shortages of key parts, came in at a lackluster 61.60 percent. Bombers faired pretty badly: the B-1B’s had a mission capable rate of 46.42 percent; the B-2 a rate of 60.47 percent. Ironically, the oldest aircraft fleet, the B-52, had the best rate of 65.73 percent.

Indeed, the F-35’s chronic parts shortage has been exacerbated by Turkey’s expulsion from the program last July. Just yesterday, Lockheed Martin announced that it may miss its production goals for this year by up to 24 aircraft because of supplier delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and an agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to create a staggered schedule for keeping the lines open.

Further, the overall fleet mission capable rate for fighters all fall below the 80 percent level called for by former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis in 2018. Since Mattis’s departure, the Air Force and DoD have simply abandoned that goal.

“The Office of the Secretary of Defense determined the FY19 80-percent Mission Capable (MC) Rate initiative is not an FY20 requirement,” Gen. Charles Brown, the nominee to replace Gen. David Goldfein as Air Force Chief of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in answers to policy questions submitted prior to his May 7 confirmation hearing.

“As a result, the Air Force returned to allowing Lead Commands to determine the required MC rates to meet readiness objectives. We continue to balance near term readiness recovery with investment long-term combat capability.”

Wilson also stressed that while mission capable rates are important, they are not the only factor in determining overall readiness and how healthy the fleets are. The state and pace of work at Air Force depots, and the status of overall supply networks including second and third suppliers are also important, he explained.

“We’ve seen a supply network that’s working very well, and we’re actually seeing an increase in supplies,” he said.

Wilson touched on a number of different topics in his wide-ranging discussion, including the Air Force’s ongoing partnership with MIT on accelerating the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems into a number of missions.

Among what he called the “flagship projects” underway at MIT is an effort called “Air Force Alexa” designed to develop natural language processing to allow computers to understand military jargon. (Note the F-35 has a voice activated system, though we haven’t heard much about it over the years.) Another effort involves using AI to help the Air Force discover and mitigate global supply chain problems created by the COVID-19 pandemic; and a third is applying AI to personnel scheduling to relieve airmen of that tedious and never-ending manual work.

Speaking about future All-Domain Operations and the Air Force’s place within that effort, Wilson acknowledged that OSD is at some point going to have to address the issue of overlap between services on weapon systems designed to take out targets at very long ranges, known in military lingo as “long range fires.”

“I think that as budgets get tighter, certainly we’re gonna have to minimize the overlap and redundancies on those. And then, we’re going to have to able to show the strengths of each of the different services and where they contribute,” he said.

Wilson cited the Air Force bomber fleets, the ongoing effort to improve command and control — via the Advanced Battle Management System — and plans to develop new long-range weapons including hypersonics as evidence of service commitment to the long-range strike mission.

“We think we have a pretty strong story to tell about the capabilities that we’ve built as a force,” he said.