Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on Tuesday added scant detail about two new space-related development initiatives that have been approved to begin execution before Congress has authorized and appropriated funding.
One of the Quick Start initiatives is for a “more resilient national GPS position navigation and timing capability” and the other is command, control, and communications “battle management for moving target indication,” Kendall told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a hearing to review the fiscal year 2025 budget requests for the Air and Space Forces.
The Air Force released a statement saying the rapid capability developments include research and engineering activities that will lead to programs of record expected to be part of the FY ’26 budget request.
Kendall last week disclosed that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had given him the go-ahead for the two efforts, which he described then as one being a space capability and the second as allowing the “Air Force to utilize space capabilities more effectively” (Defense Daily, April 10.).
Congress in the FY ’24 National Defense Authorization Act granted the Defense Department authorities to kick-start new development programs before receiving appropriations to help the department keep pace with threats from China. Otherwise, Kendall has maintained, it could be a year or longer before a program begins if DoD waits on the annual budget cycles to complete.
“We selected these projects because we recognized their potential to benefit the Joint Forces and the nation and we’re appreciative that the Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense expedited their review and approval—resulting in less than four months between enactment the authority to execution of first projects,” Kendall said in a statement released by the Air Force.
In other matters during the hearing:
- Kendall said that production of one E-7 Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft is being delayed a year due to prime contractor Boeing’s [BA] price being higher than expected, “and we’ve been involved in negotiations to try to get it down.” Progress is being made but talks are ongoing and at the risk of being “optimistic,” he said there is hope for an agreement “very shortly. “We’re still committed to the program but we’ve got to have an affordable aircraft,” he said.
- Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said the F-35 Joint Program Office efforts to bring sustainment costs down on the aircraft is “expected to see some results from that in the very near future.” He said the Air Force is still interested in transitioning away from a contractor logistics supply arrangement to performance-based logistics. The Government Accountability Office on Monday reported that DoD’s estimated lifetime sustainment costs for the program have increased 44 percent from $1.1 trillion in FY ’18 to $1.58 trillion in FY ’23, in large part because the services have lengthened their expectations to use the Lockheed Martin [LMT]-built aircraft by 10 years through 2088.
- Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) expressed concerns about the Space Force’s FY ’25 budget request being $600 million less than the FY ’24 appropriations and related delays in counter-space systems. She asked if the Space Force would be able to execute on the funds if Congress boosted the budget. U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman replied “We have a series of programs that are still in R&D, but there is a good solid program that with additional resources, we would be able to accelerate and deliver capability in this FYDP.” Kendall later said that his biggest concern in the budget is the pace at which we’re moving forward in space, particularly counter-space.” Saltzman said that China “has built a very robust space-enabled targeting system and they continue to do so at a very rapid pace,” so the Space Force needs to develop counter-space capabilities at scale because “we’re falling behind on the timeline. We’re just not moving as quickly as I think we should.”
- Gary Peters (D-Mich.) mentioned a meeting he had with Allvin last week when they discussed the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and a potential pilot program to study drone operations in medium and high-intensity airspace” given the difficulty unmanned aircraft systems face in contested environments. He said a pilot effort would allow DoD to experiment with unmanned systems like the General Atomics-built MQ-9 Reaper to prepare for the use of CCAs. Allvin agreed that the time is “ripe” for such a pilot program to examine options for survivability, risk, and the ability to penetrate adversaries’ defenses.