The planned U.S. Air Force reorganization–referred to as –will profit the belief of the service’s priority research and development/acquisition efforts, resembling Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin suggested this week on the Air and Space Forces Association’s warfare symposium in Aurora, Colo.
Among the many 24 initiatives under the reorganization are a Integrated Capabilities Office to spur coordinated modernization across the department; a Program Assessment and Evaluation Office to enhance resourcing decisions; an Integrated Capabilities Command to develop “competitive operational concepts” and requirements that integrate systems; and a “refocus” of Air Force Materiel Command’s Air Force Life Cycle Management Center because the Air Dominance Systems Center “to synchronize aircraft and weapons competitive development and product support.”
The CCA effort is a successor to the Multi-Mission Long- Range uninhabited aircraft (MMLR) within the Air Force’s 2015 Future Operating Concept, Allvin said. That document accommodates 10 references to MMLR, all in anecdotal form from a hypothetical 2035 scenario wherein a future “F-35D” variant plays a task.
“Dangerous 1 and a couple of chosen full afterburner to speed up their F-35Ds to Mach 1.5, propelling Captain Miller and her wingman out ahead of their accompanying formation of multi-mission, long-range (MMLR) uninhabited aircraft,” in accordance with the lead MMLR reference within the document. “The F-35Ds needed to catch up with to the enemy to be able to provide high-fidelity cueing to the long range shooters. Capt Miller’s situation display, fusing data from multiple airborne and surface sensors, space assets, and real-time intelligence inputs, showed her a gorilla-sized wave of enemy fighters, cruise missile shooters, and decoy aircraft, all protected by a blanket of electromagnetic jamming. At the very least the friendly jammers would give similar protection to her formation. Dangerous Flight needed to take out the enemy bombers before they launched their hypersonic cruise missiles—otherwise the carrier strike group can be overwhelmed.”
Allvin told reporters on the AFA symposium this week that while “you can’t reorganize your way out of an issue, there are occasions when your organizational structure inhibits your ability to get to the function that you simply need.”
“I used to be lucky enough to be on the Air Staff in 2013/14 once we wrote the then Air Force Future Operating Concept,” he said. “You will note things in that document that appear like Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Multi-Domain Command and Control became JADC2. We had the thought of proliferated LEO [low Earth orbit] back then. We thought it may be CubeSats shot from an F-35. Human machine teaming–all of those things were in that document. Why has it taken a decade for us to take a few of those ideas and put them into development and production? I believe a part of it is due to our disaggregated structure, and we were constructing our force pieces at a time, and people concepts never rose to the highest level of any of those functional parts of our Air Force so that they remained somewhat dormant or concepts within the background. We would like to integrate to where we have now one force design, and we are able to drive faster into that future.”