what's next for military aviation

WHAT'S NEXT FOR MILITARY AVIATION

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D ecades in the making, the future is finally here for the U.S. military’s fifth-generation fighter jets. The F-22 Raptor is has logged some 300 combat missions over Iraq and

Syria, while two of the three services that fly the F-35 Lightning II have declared at least a few of their Joint Strike Fighters mini-mally ready for war. Now comes the interesting part: developing concepts of operations for the new aircraft.

Defense One’s Global Business Editor Marcus Weisgerber delves into one of the first detailed public looks at the military’s plan for future air war in “Air Force Officers Give New Details for F-35 in War With China.” Officers at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies laid out their predictions for a made-up conflict in the Pacific region in 2026. By that time, they write, cheaper and better air defenses will have turned once-permissive enemy airspace prohibitively lethal to non-stealthy aircraft, while longer-ranged missiles will wreak havoc on airbases that were once safe behind the front lines.

This will force the U.S. military to keep non-stealthy aircraft out of the fight, and to disperse aircraft from the current megabases to an array of airfields and even airstrips around the contested region. Deployments will have to be lighter, with automation replacing human air traffic controllers and maintainers.

But it’s not all smooth sailing yet for the F-35. There’s not enough money in the budget to buy all the aircraft the military wants, and that could set up a funding fight between the strike fighter and the Air Force’s planned B-21 bomber. In “The Coming Dogfight Between the F-35 and the New Bomber,” Weisgerber takes you inside the quiet battle being waged in boardrooms and lobbying shops.

Meanwhile, the Navy is still trying to figure out how to get its F-35Cs to the fight while keeping its aircraft carriers far away from shore defenses. The service appears to have scrapped, at least for now, the idea of developing an unmanned strike craft that would be both stealthier and more expendable than an F-35. Indeed, it put into early mothballs the two X-47 drones it built to evaluate the concept. That’s a bit crazy, argues retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix in “Put the X-47B Back to Work—As a Tanker.” Hendrix, now with the Center for a New American Security, says that if the Navy won’t build unmanned bombers, it should at least turn the X-47s into unmanned aerial refuelers, which could help solve the problem of getting the F-35s from far out at sea to targets on land.

Get all that, and more, in this ebook—and thanks for reading.

Bradley PenistonDeputy Editor Defense One

What’s Here, What’s Next

Bradley Peniston

(Cover) Air Force Photo

What's Next For Military Aviation

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U.S. Air Force officials for the first time said public-ly how they’re planning to use the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in a war with China.

The bottom line: a lot needs to change in the way the Air Force uses its warplanes in battle.

“If you put a fourth-[generation F-15 or F-16 fighter] in there, they’re gonna die,” said Maj. Gen. Jeff Harrigian, who is finishing up a tour at the Pentagon where he has been building the plans for integrating the F-35 through-out the Air Force. He and Col. Max Marosko, the deputy director for air and cyberspace operations at Pacific Air Forces in Hawaii, detail how the F-35 would be unleashed in a new report published Thursday by the Mitchell Insti-tute for Aerospace Studies.

“In our minds, what this comes down to is the ability to kill and survive,” Harrigian said.

Air Force officials frequently talk about how the advanced technology on the F-35 and other jets will give it an edge on the battlefield, but this report offers an un-precedented detail from a senior officer of how the plane could be used in war.

In the fictitious war of 2026 they present, the ene-my tries to jam radar and radio signals, allowing only stealthy planes like F-22 and F-35 fighters and B-2 and B-21 bombers to fly safely and strike targets, which are guarded by mobile surface-to-air missiles.

The Pentagon would spread its fighter jets around the Pacific in small numbers to military and civilian airfields, some as far as 1,000 miles from the battlefield, to prevent enemy ballistic and cruise missiles from delivering a dev-astating knock-out blow to a base. Today, the Pentagon

tends to concentrate the majority of its planes at regional super bases.

“During the initial days of the conflict, F-35s occasional-ly return to their bases - only to discover several are heav-ily damaged from enemy missile attacks,” Harrigian and Marosko write, in their warplay. Those F-35s must divert to civilian airfields. By this time, the F-22 and F-35 won’t

US Air Force Officers Give New Details for F-35 in War With ChinaFor the first time, key officers lay out how they’d deploy the stealth F-35 and F-22 in an all-out war with China. By Marcus Weisgerber

An Air Force F-22 Raptor flies with an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter over Florida. / USAF PHOTO BY MASTER SGT. JEREMY T. LOCK


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need air traffic controllers as their high-tech computers will guide them to runways, even in bad weather.

Older fighter jets, like F-15 and F-16 fighters, which are more easily spotted by enemy radars, must fly at greater distances from the battlefield, out of the range of deadly, long-range surface-to-air missiles. The report does not name China as the enemy, instead saying the fictitious war takes place in “a key region abroad,” where

in one detailed scenario an F-35 must divert to a base in Australia. Only China and Russia have fifth-genera-tion fighters and advanced defenses the F-35 would be deployed to face, and Russia is out of range. Australia is expected to fly its own F-35s in the future — and could fix any U.S. Air Force F-35s damaged in combat. However, the same concepts could be applied to a war with Russia.

In order to win this future war, much needs to change in the way the Pentagon employs its aircraft, Harrigian and Marosko said. F-22s and F-35 must fly missions more frequently than current military aircraft. Unlike most missions today, they will receive targeting information from command centers through high-tech computers and communications equipment as they fly to the battlefield. Connectivity improvements between old

planes and new ones is also a must.The Air Force needs to deploy its F-22s and F-35s

more quickly from bases in the United States since the enemy could move assets around the battlefield, Maros-ko said. And when they deploy, they must do it with less equipment and fewer people.

The newer fifth-generation planes also would need to collect and upload data to command centers and other aircraft more quickly. Harrigian said the data also needs to get pushed into the cloud quickly.

“There’s going to be a huge reliance on all that data … getting back to the mother ship,” Marisko said.

The goal of their paper is to spur a discussion about the ways to use the nation’s most advanced fighter jets on the battlefield in conjunction with older American and allied warplanes and forces. “There’s more work that needs to be done with this,” Harrigian said.

Fifth-generation refers to aircraft that possess a combination of stealth, high-tech computers, and sensors baked into a warplane, allowing it to act as the quar-terback over the battlefield, collecting data and sharing intelligence and targeting information with other aircraft.

“Everybody gets better” when a fifth-generation aircraft like the F-22 or F-35 flies over the battlefield, Harrigian said.

The timing of the report is notable as the Air Force is expected between August and December to declare its first squadron of F-35s ready for war. That means a regional military commander could request those planes for combat. The Marines declared its F-35s ready for war last year, but they have not been used in the air campaign against ISIS, Afghanistan and in Africa, all areas where the military has bombed enemy strongholds in recent years.

Harrigian, an F-22 pilot, soon will take over as the commanding general in charge of the air campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

The Air Force’s F-22s were deemed battle ready in 2005 but were not deployed until 2014, when American warplanes began bombing ISIS strongholds in Syria, which had sophisticated air defenses.

In our minds, what this comes down to is the ability to kill and survive.MAJ. GEN. JEFF HARRIGIAN


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The two aircraft at the center of the Pentagon’s fu-ture-of-war plans are headed for a fierce battle, even though one has never faced off against a foreign rival

and the other has never flown.It’s a fight without bombs, missiles, or the

chest-thumping roar of 43,000 pounds of jet thrust screaming across the sky. Instead, this clash is unfolding in the shadowy conference rooms of the Pentagon and boardrooms of the world’s largest defense companies. The stakes are high: tens of billions of dollars every year for a decade or more.

That money will fund two of the most sophisticated and expensive planes ever built, the F-35 Joint Strike Fight-er and the new Long Range Strike-Bomber, or LRS-B. The bomber needs cash to get off the ground and the skittish F-35 camp already is worried the new kids will steal from the huge but finite pot.

“The F-35A and [the bomber] are almost certainly on a collision course,” said Todd Harrison, a budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The fight will intensify this week when President Barack Obama sends his 2017 budget request to Congress. The F-35’s price tag looms at $400 billion for thousands of jets to be bought over the next two decades. The 100 planned bombers are expected to cost between $80 billion and $111 billion. The last time the Air Force had such an am-bitious plane-building plan, Ronald Reagan was president. But unlike then, defense spending is capped through 2021.

“The problem now is it does not look like we have a buildup of that [Reagan-era] magnitude on the horizon in the defense budget,” Harrison said. “We’re not going to see the budget increase by 30 percent in the near future here.”

Pentagon leaders have expressed unwavering support for both projects.

“[J]ust because it can’t out-turn an F-16, or just because it can’t go as fast, we are absolutely confident that [the] F-35 will be a war-winner,” Deputy Defense Secretary Rob-ert Work said in November at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, responding to critics of the new jet’s performance. “That is because it is using the machine to make the human make better decisions.”

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Ash Carter has called the new bomber “a strategic investment in the next 50 years.”

“It demonstrates our commitment to our allies, and our determination to potential adversaries, making it crystal clear that the United States will continue to retain the ability to project power throughout the globe long into

The Coming Dogfight Between the F-35 and the New Bomber A battle is brewing between the two multibillion-dollar aircraft programs — and the defense companies, lobbyists, and Pentagon offices that back them. By Marcus Weisgerber


A U.S. Air Force F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with the weapons it will carry. /LOCKHEED MARTIN PHOTO

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the future,” he said in October when the Air Force chose Northrop Grumman to build the plane.

But despite support at the top, a rivalry has emerged within the Air Force ranks, according to Pentagon officials. “The bomber versus [F-35] fight is one that is taking place inside the building right now,” said the American Enterprise Institute’s Mackenzie Eaglen, referring to the Pentagon. Ultimately, political leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense will have to arbitrate, she said.

The F-35 has been largely insulated from recent years’ spending caps. The Air Force plans to buy the lion’s share of

them — 1,763 of the planned 2,443 aircraft — with the Marine Corps and Navy getting the rest.

The Air Force needs to buy new planes, lots of them, in the coming years and not just F-35s and new bombers.

Pentagon leaders have been floating the idea of signing a contract with Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, for more than 450 new F-35s over a three year-period beginning in 2018. Most of those planes would be for the Air Force. Between 2016 and 2020, the Air Force plans to spend more than $25 billion on at least 200

F-35s, according to Pentagon budget documents.For the bomber, Air Force officials will not disclose the

actual yearly budget of the plane, saying that would harm national security. But they have released an estimate that it will cost at least $23.5 billion to develop and at least $56 billion to buy 100 planes.

Meanwhile, work is on hold because the decision to give the job to Northrop Grumman is under protest by Boeing-Lockheed team, the losing bidder. A ruling is ex-pected this month.

A new air refueling tanker, built by Boeing, will also play a tangential role in the fight. But the KC-46 tanker is likely to prompt less infighting because most of the Air Force’s cur-rent refueling planes date back to the Eisenhower administra-tion. Plus tankers are needed to gas up different planes in all branches of the U.S. military and allies as well.

“The tanker is in a different category in the debate be-cause the F-35 is useless without the tanker and the LRS-B

… still needs tanking,” Harrison said. The tanker program, valued at more than $40 billion, also is more stable because Boeing, not the taxpayer, must pay for any cost increases. The Air Force is eyeing 60 new tankers costing about $15 billion between 2017 and 2020. “That programs has got a lot more security,” Harrison said.

In 2015, the Air Force spent a total of $12 billion on new planes across the board. It is expected to need $22 billion in 2023 for the F-35, bomber, tanker and new planes for intelli-gence and other types of special missions, Harrison said.

“The problem now is we’ve got three massive pro-grams that are overlapping almost perfectly in time,” Harrison said. “This is really the perfect storm for air-craft modernization.”

And the main driver of what Harrison calls a “bow wave” is the F-35, bomber and tanker.

With three of the world’s largest defense companies in the ring, that fight will soon spill outside of the Pentagon’s walls and into lobbying campaigns.

“I think that we’re going to see a prolonged battle among these programs and these companies,” Harrison said. “It’s gonna get nasty.”

Lockheed, Northrop and Boeing would not disclose spe-cifically how they plan to market their respective projects in the coming months and years ahead.

But Lockheed said that as cash gets tight, it plans to stay focused on the F-35’s performance.

“Our central objective is to always deliver the very best and most cost effective weapon systems and products to ensure our services have the resources they need for our warfighters,” Lockheed spokesman Joseph LaMarca said in an email. “Lockheed Martin’s relationship with the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Department at large remains strong and we continue to work with them on a daily basis to sup-port their strategic priorities.”

A new round begins on Tuesday when the Pentagon’s budget proposal heads to Capitol Hill, but many more rounds are sure to follow.

“This is going to be a fight that drags out over many years,” Harrison said. “Unless someone loses and a pro-gram is canceled. And I don’t think that’s likely.”

It’s gonna get nasty.TODD HARRISON


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Top U.S. Air Force generals are floating the idea of buying a new warplane to support ground troops better and more cheaply than the venerable A-10

Warthog.In addition to its utility against militants and other

light-to-medium forces, Air Force leaders hope this new close air support, or CAS, plane will help them win the fight to retire the A-10. And they are even beginning to envision an aircraft beyond that, in concepts variously known as the “arsenal plane” or “flying Coke machine.”

“I’d love to build a new CAS airplane right now while we still have the A-10 [and then] transition the A-10 community into the new CAS airplane,” Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, said Wednesday at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. “We just don’t have the money to do it and we don’t have the people to keep flying the A-10 and build a new airplane and bed it down.”

Welsh, who is retiring at the end of the month, said that the Air Force might seek a new aircraft design or adopt an existing one, depending how much money it wants to spend and how quickly it wants to move.

“We don’t think this would take that long to do and we don’t think it’s that complicated of a design problem,” he said.

The plane would not be meant for high-end combat, but a “low-to-medium-threat environment,” where it could fly low over the battlefield, bombing or strafing enemy forces without too much worry about advanced air defenses, Welsh said.

Compared to the A-10, Welsh envisions a new plane

“that brings more firepower, that is more responsive” and is cheaper to fly. “We need something to keep doing, at much lower cost, the types of things we’re doing in the counterinsurgency fight today,” he said.

The A-10 costs between $19,000 and $20,000 per hour to fly. Welsh said he would like to see an aircraft that cost between $4,000 to $5,000 per hour.

Earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Mike Holmes, the deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements, said officials are building requirements for this type of plane and trying to figure out if that could fit in the Air Force’s budget. “The question is exactly where is the sweet spot…between what’s available now and what the optimum CAS replacement would be,” Holes said at an Air Force Association event. “We are working along that continuum to see exactly what the requirement is that we can afford and the numbers that we need to be able to do the mission.”

As the Pentagon fought a ground-focused, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade-plus, a small number of Air Force officers argued that the service should buy turboprop aircraft instead of jet fighters. These smaller, slower planes can can carry the same types of weapons as high-end fighters but linger far longer over a combat zone. The Air Force even launched a project to buy such planes, but those plans went away as the Pentagon set its sights on the Pacific and began gearing up for a high-end war with China.

If the idea of a fresh CAS design is rejected, potential candidates now on the market include the Embraer A-29

Air Force Wants New Plane to Replace A-10, Fight ISISGenerals float idea of new CAS aircraft — and beyond that, an “arsenal plane” or “flying Coke machine.” By Marcus Weisgerber


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Super Tucano, Beechcraft AT-6, and Textron-Airland Scorpion. The Super Tucano and AT-6 are turboprops, the Scorpion a light jet.

Welsh’s enthusiasm for a new CAS plane notwithstanding, he acknowledged that it’s not currently high on the Air Force’s priority list. Air Force leaders have said they need to retire the A-10 to save money to buy higher priority aircraft, namely the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, KC-46 refueling tanker and B-21 stealth bomber. Mothballing the fleet of 300-plus A-10s would save $4 billion, Air Force officials say.

But Congress repeatedly denied the service’s effort, citing the A-10’s unduplicated ability to help ground troops. And today, as troops return to Iraq, keep fighting in Afghanistan, and continue an air campaign against Islamic State militants that is approaching its third year, the Air Force has sent the Warthog back to war.

“Keeping the A-10 has been a wonderful thing for us,” Welsh said. “But the question really is: what does the Air Force of the future look like?”

Beyond the A-10 ReplacementWelsh is looking beyond even the A-10’s replacement.

“Eventually, I think the right close air support replacement is something that’s overhead the ground force all the time and is firepower on demand,” he said. “It’s flying artillery.”

Welsh mentioned the “flying Coke machine,” a concept championed by former Air Force Secretary James Roche. As described by a June 2005 Popular Science article, it would be a drone “that would orbit high above the battlefield with a variety of bombs and release them on command from ground observers.”

“In the perfect world, that’s close air support of the future,” Welsh said. “But there needs to be the ability to mass firepower quickly, and that probably going to involve sending more close air support capability. We have that in lots of forms today.”

Defense Secretary Ash Carter raised the idea of an arsenal plane earlier this year, but details of the project are classified.

An A-10 Thunderbolt II flies over the Baltic Sea /U.S. AIR FORCE / TECH. SGT. JASON ROBERTSO


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FARNBOROUGH, England — Pentagon leaders have long lamented insurgents’ ability to produce new weapons and tactics faster than the U.S. military could react.

Now defense firms are responding with aircraft designed to evolve as quickly as the modern battlefield.

The trend, on full display at this week’s Farnborough Air Show, mirrors Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s push to develop new and surprising capabilities for existing U.S. weapons.

Take the the SPYDR, built by L-3 Communications. Based on the Beechcraft King Air, it resembles the C-12 intelligence plane, with ridged antennas and bulbous domes protruding from its body and wings. But while the Army and Air Force C-12s are generally built to collect specific types of intelligence and cannot be easily reconfigured, the SPYDR is designed to easily accept different types of cameras, antennas and radars — whatever the day’s mis-sion requires. In theory, it could fly a signals intelligence mission to intercept enemy communications, land, have a radar bolted onto its belly, and then head off on a search-and-track mission.

“We can modify it based on what the customer wants,” said Craig Koziol, L-3’s vice president of ISR Systems. “It’s like buying a car with different options.”

The SPYDR is also designed to be part of a network; intelligence analysts on the ground (or in the plane) can remotely control its onboard sensors. And while the plane doesn’t carry any weapons yet, that’s in the works, L-3 employees said.

Meanwhile, weapons are the main focus of a new

upgrade for the Black Hawk helicopter. At Farnborough, Sikorsky showed off a black-painted aircraft with rockets, guns, and Hellfire missiles mounted on side pylons and an intelligence camera on the tip of its nose. It takes about an hour and a half to install or take off the pylons, a Lockheed spokesman said.

Militaries use the Black Hawk to move troops and supplies around the battlefield and medevac soldiers injured in combat. The upgrades will allow the helicopter to also fly close air support for ground troops and assault missions, said Lorraine Martin, deputy executive vice president of Lockheed’s mission systems and training business. While some countries already fly armed Black Hawks, this marks the first time it’s being offered as a factory option, built at a 1,500-worker Sikorsky plant in Poland. Lockheed Martin, Sikorsky’s parent company, is looking to market the armed chopper to cash-strapped countries that might not be able to afford different fleets of helicopters.

“There are a lot of nations around the world that would love to be able to use the tried-and-true Blackhawk, which has so much history and maturity behind it, but they can’t afford to have three or four different kind of helicopter types,” Martin said. “They want to be able to do multimis-sion in a single helicopter and this armed Blackhawk gives them the opportunity to do that.”

These are hardly the only aircraft being built for flex-ibility. The Air Force has said its secret new B-21 stealth bomber, to be built by Northrop Grumman, will be built with an open-architecture computer system that will be de-signed to accept upgrades easily and far more quickly than

Flexible Flyers: Companies Race to Equip Warplanes for Quick ModificationWith innovation a new strategic imperative, aircraft builders are making it easier for planes to accept hardware and software improvements. By Marcus Weisgerber


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possible with today’s bombers, which can require years to add new weapons or sensors.

In an interview, Leanne Caret, president and chief ex-ecutive of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, spoke broadly about how you build an aircraft to evolve.

“Because what you want to do is provision an aircraft in such a way that, as technology evolves, you can change it out, and as mission sets change, you can change it out,” Caret said in an interview.

Secretary Carter has declared quick innovation to be a strategic imperative for the Pentagon — indeed, the only way the U.S. can retain its military superiority over enemies. Earlier this year, he shocked many with-in the defense community when he revealed the Navy’s Standard Missile-6 could sink ships. Built by Raytheon to shoot down planes and ballistic rockets, the missile

became able to take on a whole new mission through a secret modification conceived by engineers in the Penta-gon’s Strategic Capabilities Office.

The office’s goal is to modify existing weapons, giving them new capabilities, and reveal just enough to keep the enemy guessing — a delicate dance that SCO director Will Roper calls a “multi-variant calculus.”

Now the Navy has a missile that can handle offensive and defensive tasks — and that means packing more capa-bility into a warship’s limited number of launch tubes, said Mitch Stevison, Raytheon’s vice president of air and missile defense systems

The missile gives “the Navy that kind of flexibility in a much more rapid timeframe than would normally have happened through the normal evolution of our acquisition system, which can at times be very slow,” Stevison said.

At the 2016 Farnborough Air Show, Sikorsky showed off a new upgrade to its popular Black Hawk helicopter with side weapons pylons and a chin sensor turret. / MARCUS WEISGERBER


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Facing a shortage of pilots, dollars, and training time, the Pentagon wants private pilots and fighter jets to play the bad guys during dogfighting and other drills

with military pilots.While contractors have long been used in various

kinds of military training, top Defense Department offi-cials believe this new role could free up uniformed pilots to fly in combat squadrons.

“That is something that is actively under consideration,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said Tuesday at a Defense One leadership briefing. “We have to see how the dollars and cents work out.”

The military uses “aggressor squadrons,” like the one commanded by “Viper” and “Jester” in the 1980s film “Top Gun,” to simulate enemy tactics. Sometimes they even fly enemy aircraft. During the Cold War, the Air Force actually got its hands on Soviet MiG-17, MiG-21 and MiG-23 fighters, secretly flying them from a remote air force base in the Nevada desert.

For adversary training today, the Air Force uses T-38 Talons, jets that date back to the 1960s. It also operates aggressor squadrons of F-16s at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. Those jets, painted in blue, brown or black camouflage, fly against American combat pilots in high-end war games. In 2006, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, added F-15 Eagles to the aggressor wing at Nellis, but that unit was deactivated in 2014.

But fying and maintaining high-end aggressors, like the F-15 and F-16, is expensive and removes pilots from combat squadrons, according to defense executives.

Now the military is considering companies to fill that void. “It is a training approach that could well work,” James said. The list of companies with private fleets of high-performance, military aircraft, and pilots who can simulate foreign tactics is fairly small. Among them is

The strain on the military's pilots and budget is fueling a booming market for companies of private pilots and fleets of fighters jets to play the bad guys in wargames. By Marcus Weisgerber

US Military Turning to Private ‘Bad Guys’ to Dogfight Fighter Pilots

An F-16 from the 64th Aggressor Squadron. / USAF/STAFF SGT. TIMOTHY BOYER


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Florida-based Draken International, which flies adversary missions for the U.S. and foreign militaries. Draken is working with Montreal-based CAE to compete for a Cana-dian aggressor contract, a deal that if won could broaden the cooperation between the two firms. There’s also Dis-covery Air, headquartered outside of Toronto (it’s defense business is based in Montreal), the current provider of aggressor training for the Canadian Forces and German air force.

The market is also attracting new entrants. Earlier this month, Rhode Island-based Textron created Textron Airborne Solutions to compete for this type of business globally. It recently acquired the Airborne Tactical Advan-tage Company, whose jet aircraft already do this type of work for the U.S. military.

Cadres of former military pilots at these companies largely fly decades-old fighter and training jets, like the K-21 Kfir, A-4 Skyhawk, Mk-58 Hawk Hunter and L-39 Albatros.

“What we see out here is a growing interest and a grow-ing need for outsourcing certain traditional military training tasks that [the Pentagon] used to always handle,” said Russ Bartlett, CEO and president of Textron Airborne Solutions.

The Airborne Tactical Advantage Company trains Navy Super Hornet pilots who are learning to fly the jet for the first time or studying advanced tactics at Top Gun, the Navy Fighter Weapons School, said Jeff Parker, CEO of the Airborne Tactical Advantage Company. Carrier Strike Groups made up of ships and aircraft train against the firm’s aggressor jets before deployments. The compa-ny also trains ground controllers who call in airstrikes.

“The industry that we began is literally exploding,” Parker said. The company flies about 6,000 training hours per year. Now, the Air Force and Navy are looking to outsource thousands more hours, Parker said.

Bartlett said that would double the existing market by 2018. “And that’s just scratching the surface of what’s out there,” he said.

Bartlett said he sees his new unit of Textron acquir-ing and growing the unit as the demand exists. There are also global opportunities.

“This [market] is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, these days,” he said. “It could easily be a multi-billion-dollar market in five years.”

What we see out here is a growing interest and a growing need for outsourcing certain traditional military training tasks that [the Pentagon] used to always handle. RUSS BARTLETT, CEO AND PRESIDENT OF TEXTRON AIRBORNE SOLUTIONS


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Salty Dog 501 and 502 sit silent in their hangars, their expected contributions to naval aviation unfulfilled. Before the Navy spends time and money ginning up

another expensive new UAV, it should put its X-47Bs back to work.

Authorized for construction in 2007, the X-47B pro-totypes represent a billion-dollar investment by naval aviation to investigate how unmanned aircraft can be integrated into aircraft carrier operations. Their glory days included the first autonomous landing on an aircraft car-rier and the first mid-air refueling by an unmanned aerial vehicle, and with just 20 percent of their designed flying lives expended, the two airframes were slated for yet more pioneering tests. Instead, naval aviation leaders have consigned the X-47B to museums, even as they struggle to define the next step in unmanned carrier aviation.

The Salty Dogs were built as prototypes for an un-

manned attack aircraft, with a low-observable design, 4,000-pound internal payload, and range beyond 1,500 miles. But once they arrived, naval aviation leaders had a surprising change of heart. Instead of long-range strike, they said, the capability most needed on the carrier was long-range surveillance. Yet the Navy had just finished buying 68 unmanned MQ-4C Triton broad area maritime surveillance vehicles, enough to serve the fleet’s carrier strike groups, according to the program’s requirements documents. Moreover, the decision seemed to ignore the rising threat of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) weap-ons, such as China’s DF-21D carrier-killing ballistic mis-sile, which are designed to force carriers back beyond the range of its airwing, which presently has an average unrefueled range of around 500 miles. Objective analysis suggests that the airwing requires a long-range, strike asset similar to the X-47B’s design.

Before the US Navy spends another billion dollars on prototype UAVs, it should wring more lessons from its existing fleet. By Jerry Hendrix

Put the X-47B Back to Work — As a Tanker

An X-47B UAV made a historic launch from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush on May 14, 2013. / U.S. NAVY / ERIK HILDEBRANDT


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It is important to note that the original test plan of the Salty Dog aircraft is far from complete. As approved by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, the plan also includes:

��Refueling from the Air Force’s boom/receptacle system (as opposed to the Navy’s hose-and-drogue).

��Navy night launch and recovery, plus moving the air-craft around the flight deck under low light.

��Flight operations amid bad weather and crosswinds.

��Integration with other aircraft, including manned air-craft under the full range of recovery conditions (what aviators call Case I, II, and III landings).

��Allowing the carrier air traffic control center to bring a Salty Dog in for a landing using its installed radios.

��A total of more than 100 carrier takeoffs and landings; to date, they have made fewer than 20.

One billion dollars and 80 percent of a test program designed to determine how unmanned aircraft will inte-grate and operate around aircraft carriers ironically sit idle in hangars while the Navy struggles to determine just what role unmanned aircraft should serve in and around the aircraft carrier.

Not surprisingly, other voices inside the Pentagon have become involved in the conversation. In fact, they have ordered the Navy to stop planning to acquire an un-manned surveillance vehicle and to look instead at devel-oping an unmanned aircraft that can serve as a mission tanker with an eye towards extending the range of current manned aircraft to overcome the A2/AD pushback. Such a decision makes sense if the design represents a tanker that can subsequently evolve into a strike aircraft, the ultimate capability required, but would make no sense if the design represented a basic surveillance aircraft that also serves as a tanker. Such a design would not match the normal mission profile (altitude and airspeed) of strike aircraft, nor would it be optimized to carry heavier loads and hence adequate fuel “give” to other aircraft to effec-tively extend their range.

So here is a suggestion: Do something crazy and complete the original X-47B/Salty Dog test plan, check-ing off each of the evolutions originally called for when the aircraft were purchased, but also adding an addition-al test. Take one of the Salty Dog aircraft and install a 4,000-pound fuel bladder into its bomb bay and then a hose-and-drogue buddy store on a hard point to allow the Salty Dog to serve as the test platform for the concept of an unmanned tanker. The X-47B’s mission profile, 40,000-plus feet in service altitude and its high subsonic airspeed, will allow it to naturally integrate with the current array of manned carrier aircraft. What’s more, it can begin testing now.

Times are fiscally tight, the enemy is moving out, and we have two airframes sitting in hangars that can help the Navy figure out its future. It is time to use them — right here, right now.

The Salty Dogs were built as prototypes for an unmanned attack aircraft, with a low-observable design, 4,000-pound internal payload, and range beyond 1,500 miles. Jerry Hendrix

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MARCUS WEISGERBERMarcus Weisgerber is the global business editor for Defense One, where he writes about the intersection of business and national security. He has been covering defense and national security issues for more than a decade, previously as Pentagon correspondent for Defense News and chief editor of Inside the Air Force. He has reported from Afghanistan, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, and often travels with the defense secretary and other senior military officials.

About the Authors

BRADLEY PENISTONBradley Peniston is deputy editor of Defense One. A national-security journalist for almost 20 years, he helped launch Military.com, served as managing editor of Defense News, and was editor of Armed Forces Journal. He has written two books about the U.S. Navy, including No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf, now part of the Chief of Naval Operations’ Professional Reading Program.

JERRY HENDRIXJerry Hendrix is the director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security. A retired U.S. Navy captain, he is a former director of the Naval History and Heritage Command.


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