The “E-4 Mafia” is about to get a few new members. Senior Airmen are set to make up the Air Force’s single largest enlisted group—growing from 19 percent to 25 percent of all enlisted billets—by 2025 in the service’s short-term plan to curb midlevel promotions.
Established by the Department of Defense on Sept. 18, 1947, the Air Force has played a critical role in our national defense and has also become integral to American air superiority with its fighter jets, bombers, and advanced technologies that will shape the battlefields to come. In honor of the Air Force’s anniversary, this WatchBlog post looks at how the Air Force maintains that air superiority, including incorporating leading technologies, and our work on the challenges it could face in these efforts.
More than two years into the Air Force’s switch to a new officer promotion system, officials are settling into wait-and-see mode while its longer-term impacts take shape. Unlike on the enlisted side, the Air Force said it is comfortable with how its officer jobs are spread across the ranks. An officer’s chances of promotion will remain essentially the same as usual in fiscal 2023.
In Episode 94 of the Aerospace Advantage podcast, “The Future of Autonomy and Combat Airpower: Building the Tech,” host John Baum talks with Heather Penney of the Mitchell Institute, Mike Benitez of Shield AI, Brett Darcey of Heron Systems, and John Dowdy, who works on aerospace issues at McKinsey, in the second of our three-part series regarding combat air power and autonomy. In this episode, we define key aspects and nuances surrounding this technology while also working to add clarity between realistic expectations and what will likely remain aspirational for the long term.
An exhaustive study four years in the making has found nearly a 40 percent higher rate of veteran suicides than that reported by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The study’s interim report, based on service records from the Defense Department and death records from eight states, examined suicides and “self-injury mortality—or deaths classified as accidental or undetermined—in people ages 18 to 64 from 2014 to 2018.
Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency, and the Missile Defense Agency have formed a new program office to coordinate disparate procurements of satellites to detect ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The combined program office “establishes a formal partnership among missile warning, missile tracking, and missile defense acquisition organizations for greater delivery of integrated and resilient sensor-to-shooter capabilities,” said Col. Brian Denaro, Space Systems Command’s space sensing program executive officer, who will lead the new office.
The Space Force is in “early” discussions with the Army to potentially take over the Army’s Joint Tactical Ground Station missile warning system and assimilate it into a Space Force delta, according to a senior Space Force official. “We’re on the very beginning stages of that,” Maj. Gen. Doug Schiess, vice commander of Space Operations Command, told attendees at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference.
A Russian diplomat said civilian satellites could be legitimate military targets in a statement that seems to refer to Starlink providing broadband access in Ukraine. Civilian satellites "may become a legitimate target for retaliation," the Russian official said in a statement to the United Nations' open-ended working group on reducing space threats.
A select panel exploring how to revamp Pentagon budgeting is making “significant progress” with meetings and research efforts after some “organizational problems,” according to its chairman. The congressionally mandated Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform has been quietly convening for more than five months, interviewing witnesses and hiring staff, according to its chairman, former Pentagon comptroller Bob Hale. The panel―made up of former officials from Congress, the Pentagon, and industry―has also hired two federally funded research and development centers to assist its work.
The Department of the Air Force’s innovation hub AFWERX will formally begin industry-facing research as it prepares to launch a new “Prime” program to collaboratively develop autonomy technologies with industry members to accelerate military adoption. The program will follow the philosophy of Agility Prime: collaborative risk reduction across the industry to accelerate the development and implementation of emerging technologies critical to national security.
The Air Force will provide the defense industry with a test model to help speed development of the service’s Advanced Battle Management System, a critical contribution to the Pentagon’s vision of a seamlessly connected military. The model will “allow us to perform repeatable experimentations against proposed solutions, defining measures of effectiveness and measures of performance, that would allow objective evaluation,” said Deputy Chief Information Officer Winston Beauchamp.
Many parts of the American military go back to the earliest days and conflicts of the United States. The Air Force, however, is a 20th-century creation, many times over. With the advent of flight, the military got into the aerial world quickly, and what’s now the U.S. Air Force has evolved as aircraft did.