Scrap Old Planes Or ‘Risk Losing High-End Fight:’ CSAF Brown

WASHINGTON: New Air Force Chief of Staff CQ Brown, in his call to ditch legacy aircraft to fund new network-centric tech so the US can best Russia and China, faces the same daunting obstacles as did his predecessor: Congress’s fierce embrace of the status quo and DoD’s bureaucratic inertia.

The hurdles to Brown’s strategic vision may be even higher now because of the looming budgetary crunch in the post-COVID-19 environment and the magnitude of the overarching DoD acquisition trough. Add a possible change in administration — which almost always results in at least four to six months of budget uncertainty as a new president nails down priorities — and you’ve got some impressive obstacles to overcome.

“2022 is going to be a blood bath … the Air Force has, and DoD has, lots of bills to pay,” one Air Force insider told me today. The question will be whether Brown can understand and manage “how all the money flows, because that’s the power.”

Brown articulated his strategic vision in an eight-page missive, “Accelerate Change or Lose,” released late yesterday. While following the path laid down by his retired predecessor, Gen. David Goldfein (who had long ago begun grooming Brown as his successor), Brown has upped the ante with his forthright assessment of the strategic crossroads facing the service.

“If we don’t change – if we fail to adapt – we risk losing the certainty with which we have defended our national interests for decades. We risk losing a high-end fight,” he wrote.

“CQ is rightly focused on the high-end fight and that dominance in air and space cannot be assured,” former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told me in an email today. “His greatest challenge will be to build the coalition in Washington, and particularly on Capitol Hill, that will support new ways of rapidly developing capabilities.”

“I would say that, as expected with a new chief, Gen. Brown is trying to clearly define his flight plan. He’s consistent with his predecessor and seems realistic about the challenges his vision is going to face. Only time will tell how this all plays out,” summed up one industry executive.

Brown’s focus appears to be: “(1) force an end to bureaucratic inertia within USAF; (2) make final 2022-2026 POM trade-offs; and (3) negotiate as many 2021 aircraft retirements as possible,” one defense industry consultant told me today.

The Air Force insider noted that his biggest challenge in making those budget trade-offs will be “balancing out mission priorities,” going “faster” on buying new weapons, and paying for an expensive upgrade to the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad with a diminishing budget.

DoD is currently in the final throws of sorting out its annual Program Objective Memorandum (POM) for the 2022 budget cycle that lays out its five-year budgetary plan, which must be approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget before it goes to Congress as a funding request in February or so.

And up to now, as Breaking D readers know, Congress has not been willing to cut legacy aircraft — and the guaranteed jobs in their districts — to fund desired Air Force capabilities for All-Domain Operations that are software-centric rather than platform specific. Instead, lawmakers on both sides of Capitol Hill have put limits and prohibitions on cuts to elderly aircraft (for example, refusing to countenance the retirement of any A-10 Warthog close air support planes).

Brown’s missive focused squarely on the new capabilities required for the Air Force to support DoD’s vision of a new way of war.

“We must contribute to the Joint Warfighting Concept, enabled by Joint All-Domain Command and Control, and place capability in warfighters’ hands faster—through innovation, experimentation and rapid prototyping, and a collaborative approach with our service and industry teammates,” he wrote

As Breaking D readers are well aware, the Joint Warfighting Concept to define how the services and Combatant Commands will work together to fight an integrated battle across the air, land, sea, space and cyberspace domains is being fleshed out by service chiefs and the Joint Staff for delivery to Defense Secretary Mark Esper at the end of the year.

And the Air Force has the lead in developing an approach, and the technologies, to enable Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) linking all sensors to all shooters in near-real time. This week, in fact, the service is undertaking the second of its “on-ramp” experiments testing new technologies aimed at building the JADC2 backbone via the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System. The experiment will run through Sept. 5, and is centered on a Northern Command and Space Command wargame scenario that includes a cruise missile attack on the homeland and attacks on US satellites.

“There’s not much new here. The services always want the latitude to make weapons investment and sustainment decisions purely on the basis of capability and strategy, rather than jobs,” veteran aircraft analyst Richard Aboulafia of Teal Group told me in an email today. “However, Congress is in charge of paying the bills, so while service chiefs may lament their lack of control, the reality is that they’ll never get the control they want. Still, General Brown is certainly correct in highlighting the risks of this approach in terms of not getting the Air Force new technologies and capabilities.”

Mark Gunzinger, Mitchell Institute director of future aerospace concepts and capabilities analysis, agreed that Brown is looking squarely at the risks and welcomed his blunt words.

“More outspoken is a virtue in this environment, and the Chief is absolutely right. Our military, not just the Air Force, must “speed up change” or risk losing a future conflict with China or even Russia. Not just changes to technologies our military brings to the battlespace, but changes in operational concepts—how our forces fight together and with our allies—changes to force management policies and structures, and changes to how our forces train and exercise together,” he tells me in an email today.

“It will also require changes to how resources are allocated across DoD….unfortunately, I don’t see this happening.”

Brown hinted in his vision document that he would like to see changes not just in how DoD allocates resources but actually defines service roles and missions — as he also did in testimony to the Senate during his confirmation hearing.

“We must also use this opportunity, given the stand-up of the U.S. Space Force, to evaluate and adjust internal U.S. Air Force structures and decision processes to include a renewed look at service-assigned roles and missions internal to the Department of the Air Force and even within the Joint Force,” he wrote.

“He’s saying that they need to revisit the allocation of roles and missions among the services, which is both controversial and true,” said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “There are some missions (and force structure) the Air Force needs to transfer to the other services for better efficiency and mission effectiveness, and there are some things in the other services that need to be consolidated in the Air Force and Space Force for the same reasons. The costs of personnel and acquisitions are so high now that we can’t afford the same level of redundancies across the services that we once enjoyed.”

Harrison elaborated in an email today that one “great example is ICBMs and their associated helicopter units and security forces. This logically belongs in the Army because the Army already operates the only other silo-based missiles in the military (GMD), it already has a fleet of helicopters and a training pipeline of pilots, and it has a large component of ground security forces and vehicles.”

“On the flip side,” he added, “there are missions and forces in the other services that may be a better fit in the Air Force, like land-based maritime surveillance aircraft in the Navy (P-8, MQ-4, etc.) because their capabilities overlap so much with other Air Force systems (RQ-4, JSTARS, etc.)

While the consensus is that Brown faces a steep climb to get over the top of both the budgetary and roles and missions mountains, analysts also widely agree that normally a new chief is granted a honeymoon period. And if ever an Air Force leader needed a honeymoon, they say, it is Brown as he heads into the tumultuous next couple of years.