The project is linked to the $9.6 billion jet procurement contract reached between Finland’s MOD and the American company Lockheed Martin in February 2022. The deal covers the delivery of 64 F-35s to the Finnish Air Force.

The building of the aircraft assembly facility forms part of the contract’s so-called stage one industrial component. The umbrella project required the signing of a lease for a suitable assembly plant development site. This was found near the town of Nokia. The site lease was signed in January between the Finnish Defence Forces and Defence Properties Finland, the state organization tasked with managing properties and assets owned by Finland’s defense administration.

Construction work on the engine assembly building is slated to commence during the second half of 2024. Under the terms of the industrial deal struck between Finland and Lockheed Martin, engine maintenance at the facility in Nokia will continue throughout the entire life cycle of the Air Force’s F-35 fleet.

“Industrial cooperation tied to the F-35 agreement will generate critical maintenance and repair expertise for Finland’s indigenous defense industry. This includes performance areas like reliability of maintenance. The agreement will also create significant know-how in Finland for F-35 engine assembly and testing,” Defence Minister Antti Häkkänen said.

The assembly plant will operate in close collaboration with the regional aircraft hub in Tampere run by Patria’s aviation division. An estimated 100 personnel will work in various assembly roles at the facility.

The government owns 50.1% of Patria, and the Norwegian company Kongsberg controls the remainder. Patria itself owns half of the Norwegian defense contractor Nammo.

The F-35s are set to replace the Air Force’s ageing McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet jets. These planes are scheduled to retire by 2030. The first batch of the F-35s on order are due for delivery and then deployment to Arctic air bases in Finland’s Lapland region by 2026.

The industrial cooperation component of the F-35 acquisition deal is expected to be scaled up in stages by 2030. The broadening of the industrial agreement may include the production or assembly in Finland of certain parts and systems used in the aircraft.

The Air Force has already tested the F-35′s suitability and adaptability to operate in extreme weather conditions, especially in Arctic areas of Finland during the country’s long winters that feature limited daylight.

In recent exercises, the service routinely used stretches of “closed highway” in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions as temporary airstrips. The Air Force is currently running such maneuvers as part of the weeklong Hanki drills in the north of the country, which are to continue until March 2.

The 74-page whitepaper, which the service unveiled during its annual symposium this week and which builds on a similar document published four years ago, details planned procurements out to 2037.

“The Air Force is aware of [the importance of] long-term development planning and spending of the national budget to achieve maximum value,” said the service’s commander, Air Chief Marshal Panpakdee Pattanakul.

Indeed, part of the whitepaper’s raison d’être is to stake claims for long-term funding as its aircraft inventories age. For instance, the 2020 version stated the fighter fleet had an average age of 26 years, a figure that continues to increase.

But the government’s procurement process is disjointed, according to Greg Raymond, an expert in Asia-Pacific affairs at the Australian National University. He cited factors like political instability, inadequate strategic planning, annual rather than multiyear budgeting measures, and weak civil oversight that allows each armed service to makes its own decisions.

In the latest whitepaper, the Air Force gives priority to a medium-range air defense system possessing a minimum 30-nautical-mile range from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2028. Afterward, from FY33 to FY37, the service plans to carry out a second phase for a medium- or long-range air defense system.

From FY28 to FY32, the force plans to buy a short-range air defense system boasting gun-, missile and laser-based weapons. Credence is given to counter-drone systems, too, and a nine-year project to procure these is to commence in 2025.

The service is also eyeing 12-14 new fighters to replace the F-16 jets of 102 Squadron based at Korat. The procurement is scheduled to take place from FY25 to FY34, two years later than originally planned. The squadron’s F-16s from the late 1980s are to retire by 2028.

Two contenders have emerged for the aircraft requirement: Lockheed Martin’s F-16 Block 70/72 and Saab’s Gripen.

“We’re confident the F-16 Block 70/72 will complement the RTAF’s existing F-16 fleet and deliver the advanced 21st century security capabilities and performance needed to address Thailand’s most pressing defense requirements,” a Lockheed spokesperson told Defense News.

Thailand ordered its first Gripen C/D fighters in 2008. Following a January 2021 contract, the aircraft were upgraded to what the manufacturer calls the MS20 configuration.

Robert Björklund, who markets the Gripen to Thailand for Saab, told Defense News the existing fleet is integrated into the Saab-supplied Link T data system and that the aircraft provides its user with “a very wide range of weapon options, including its highly effective RBS15 anti-ship missile.”

A second fighter replacement project for 12-14 aircraft is slated for FY31 to FY35 to replace F-5E/F jets of 211 Squadron at Ubon that are to retire around the end of the decade. An identical number of fighters are needed to replace F-16A/Bs of 403 Squadron at Takhli from FY37 to FY46.

Thailand tries to maintain relations with several competing nations, including the United States, China, Russia and India, the whitepaper noted. Thailand previously purchase materiel from China, such as armored vehicles, air defense systems and a submarine.

Asked whether the Royal Thai Air Force would consider buying a Chinese fighter like the J-10CE, Raymond said the service values its relationship with the U.S. and likeminded allies too much to do so. He noted that Thai-U.S. relations have “largely stabilized,” despite the latter denying the former’s request to buy F-35A jets last year.

“They wouldn’t want to see themselves placed on the outer [circle] in terms of not getting invitations to things like [exercise] Pitch Black in Australia. I tend to think they’d be perhaps more careful about getting Chinese aircraft than the Thai Navy was about getting a submarine,” he said.

The whitepaper also detailed an effort starting this year to refurbish C-130H Hercules transport aircraft. The 2020 version recommended the service buy 12 replacements, but that idea was dropped.

As for pilot training, last year’s delivery of 12 T-6TH trainers allowed the Air Force to retire its Pilatus PC-9 fleet last month. New Zealand-built CT-4E trainers are to retire in 2031, so basic trainers will be needed from FY33. New lead-in fighter trainers are also sought from FY25, with Thailand already operating the South Korean T-50TH in this role.

The new whitepaper also emphasized unmanned technologies. One effort underway is the Thai-developed M Solar X solar-powered drone. Loitering munitions are also schedule for purchase by 2026, as are medium combat drones from FY26 to FY29 and high-altitude pseudo-satellites from FY24 to FY35.

The Air Force also mentioned procurement programs for micro- and nano-drone swarms from FY26, and a research and development effort for weaponized tactical drones from FY29.

And two Saab 340B Erieye airborne early warning aircraft are to receive enhanced command-and-control capabilities, with their dorsal-mounted radars to be replaced. This would take place from FY26 to FY29.

The government’s FY24 defense budget bill calls for a 198 billion baht (U.S. $5.5 billion) fund, of which $1 billion is for the Air Force. The service has already applied for an allocation of approximately $530 million for a first batch of four fighters.

A full-year continuing resolution that would keep fiscal 2023 spending levels through the rest of 2024 means the U.S. Army, for instance, would run out of operations and maintenance funding in the European theater as it trains Ukrainian soldiers to defend against Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country, which has entered its third year.

The financial strain is compounded by the lack of certainty over whether Congress will pass a supplemental funding package that would reimburse the Army for expenses incurred so far in bankrolling support to Ukraine.

The Army already spent $500 million in the European theater in operations and maintenance, and “we were counting on a supplemental to be able to sort of replenish us for that,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at a Feb. 27 Defense Writers Group event. “What that means is probably by late spring, summer, we would have to make some difficult choices about other [NATO] exercises, for example, that our forces participate in.”

Additionally, the Army has been funding support to Israel to include deployments of units to the Middle East in the event they are needed, she added.

Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo told reporters Feb. 28 at the Pentagon that the service spent $100 million in U.S. Central Command’s area of operations as well as another $500 million to support the U.S. Southwest border security mission.

“I do worry. Our budget has been flat for the last couple years. We don’t have a lot of cash under the sofa cushions, and if we don’t get a budget and we don’t get a supplemental, we’re going to probably have to cancel some things,” Wormuth said.

The Army is prioritizing current operations, Camarillo said, which means it is “going to have to look to other areas of O&M spending where they “can potentially take some risk,” including “exercises and the degree to which we participate in some around the globe. We might have to scale some of that back in the absence of an appropriation this year.”

For the Air Force, Kristyn Jones, who is performing the duties of the service’s undersecretary, told reporters alongside Camarillo that in order to pay its personnel, training exercises would take the hit.

“Anything that’s already on a [Foreign Military Sales] case won’t have a dramatic impact, but all of the replenishment that we’re expecting in the supplemental is currently impacted. And even things like F-35 [fighter jet] training that we’re planning … with our allies and partners, that’s impacted by not having this appropriation as well.”

The Air Force is focused on trying to ensure flight hours are maintained, but it’s also important, Jones noted, that pilots receive training.

Despite the military’s experience in warfare, “we’re in a different strategic environment and we need to do the exercises, often joint and allied, to prepare for that environment. And the lack of our ability to do that doesn’t allow us to, again, to test the new techniques, the new military tactics that we’d like to have primarily for an Indo-Pacific fight,” Jones said. “That’s really where we need to stretch our muscles a little bit more.”

Learning from sequestration

With a possible extended or full-year continuing resolution, the service undersecretaries said the last time the military felt such a painful budget crunch was during the 2013 sequestration, where the services were required by law to make percentage cuts evenly across spending lines.

One of the fallouts of the 2013 sequestration was a rise in aviation mishaps because vital training flight hours were cut. Military Times and Defense News took a deep dive into aviation mishaps from FY11 through FY18 and uncovered the trend.

“Safety is always going to come first,” said Navy Under Secretary Erik Raven, “but we did look at the lessons of 2013 and sequestration, where we spread risk around the enterprise, and I think the concerns about maintaining ready and trained forces are part of the lessons that we’re using to inform if we get into this worst-case scenario where we don’t have our ’24 budget enacted and we are under a CR.”

“We’re not going to repeat that same peanut butter spread,” he added.

But trade-offs will be inevitable, he acknowledged, and “we’ll have to look across the board to see how to maintain the focus on current operations.”

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — The Indian government is closer to buying a multibillion-dollar package of cruise missiles, air defense weapons, surveillance radars and fighter jet engines following approval from the country’s highest decision-making body on security affairs.

At a Feb. 21 meeting, the Cabinet Committee on Security approved the four procurement projects cumulatively worth about 350 billion rupees (U.S. $4 billion).

According to local media reports quoting government sources, the approved items were BrahMos cruise missiles for the Navy, air defense guns for the Army, ground-based air surveillance radars and new engines for the Air Force’s MiG-29 fighters.

Approval by the committee, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi chairs, is a necessary step along the Defence Ministry’s contractual pathway.

Local media reported the BrahMos missile deal would be signed in March. The consolidated contract would include some 220 weapons to arm Indian frigates and destroyers — the largest-ever individual BrahMos order for India.

The contract will reportedly involve a mix of standard 290-kilometer-range (180-mile-range) and extended 450-kilometer-range (280-mile-range) BrahMos missiles, of which 75% is locally made.

“The BrahMos is expected to considerably enhance the potential for surface-to-surface attacks by Indian Navy ships, especially with extended-range missiles,” Rahul Bhonsle, a director of the New Delhi-based consultancy Security Risks Asia, told Defense News.

India is also exporting BrahMos missiles to the Philippines under a deal worth about $375 million signed in January 2022. Atul Rane, who leads the missile manufacturer BrahMos Aerospace, said last year the company has set a goal of exporting $5 billion worth of BrahMos weapons by 2025.

The committee also approved the purchase of Sudarshan air defense systems from private firm Larsen & Toubro — an acquisition worth approximately $844 million. The Army would use the systems, which feature radars and 40mm guns, to protect its installations and the country’s border areas.

The Sudarshan approval followed an October 2022 request for procurement seeking 141,576 ammunition rounds to accompany 220 guns, including pre-fragmented, programmable proximity fuses and smart rounds.

The Sudarshan is also competing in an Air Force competition for 244 close-in weapon systems.

“Air defense guns have assumed importance because of the overall weak air and missile defense profile with dated equipment, with the Indian Army in particular, and the add-on threat from drones,” Bhonsle explained.

The Indian Army relies on antiquated Bofors L/70 and ZU-23-2B towed guns, and their replacement has become urgent given the emerging threat of drones and loitering munitions.

Larsen & Toubro is also set to provide the air surveillance radars, worth about $723 million. India is prioritizing better radar coverage of its northern and western borders to guard against Chinese and Pakistani aircraft, respectively. Augmenting the existing radar network in phases, the Air Force will operate the new indigenous sensors.

And Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. is to manufacture new RD-33MK engines for MiG-29 fighters in collaboration with Russia, with the project worth about $639 million.

These projects underscore India’s attempts to maximize indigenous input. The Make in India economic policy seems to be gaining groud, Bhonsle said.

“However, it should be noted there is also considerable foreign collaboration involved in many of the projects, as up to 50% or more is permissible under existing rules for acquisition,” Bhonsle added.

In an interview with Defense News, Northrop Grumman executive Doug Shaffer said the company is on track to deliver those aircraft, newly modified into Range Hawks, to the Defense Department’s Test Resource Management Center by early 2025.

These two Range Hawks are the first to be modified from a batch of 24 Global Hawk drones the Air Force has retired in recent years and passed on to TRMC for a second life as flexible and airborne test data collectors.

In the past, the government has used sensors mounted on ships to collect test launch data for hypersonic systems. But moving those ships into the proper positions can be a lengthy and laborious process that requires a substantial number of people.

So in recent years, the Air Force, NASA and TRMC have been working on a concept called SkyRange to mount sensors onto Global Hawks that could more easily collect this data. The program’s first three adapted RQ-4s — which were older Block 10 models — in recent years have been supporting tests for programs such as NASA’s Artemis Moon exploration program and hypersonic vehicles. They are stationed at the Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

In an interview with sister publication C4ISRNet, TRMC director George Rumford said having those early Range Hawks allowed the Pentagon to conduct virtually back-to-back hypersonic flight tests in early 2023, 10 days apart over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Northrop Grumman said the first three Range Hawks performed so well that TRMC is moving to expand the SkyRange program. The two dozen Block 20 and 30 RQ-4s that are slated to be modified into the next several batches of Range Hawks are more capable than the older model.

Technology has advanced enough in recent years to be able to shrink the sensing equipment down enough to be mounted on a drone, said Shaffer, vice president of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting programs for Northrop Grumman’s aeronautics systems sector.

Shaffer said Northrop Grumman has started breaking down these first two RQ-4s at the Grand Sky facility near Grand Forks, North Dakota, and will start installing the new suite of sensors as parts come in. Once mounted on the Range Hawks, the sensors will be able to gather telemetry data on hypersonic launches such as speed and trajectory, he said.

These Range Hawks have now passed their critical design review, and the design process is now finished, Shaffer said. Northrop Grumman used digital design techniques, he said, which has sped up the process.

Northrop Grumman plans to modify the remaining RQ-4s in batches of four, Shaffer added, starting with the Block 30s. And with each RQ-4′s modification taking roughly eight months to complete, he said, updating the entire fleet could take several years. He cautioned that schedule will depend on whether the program continues to get enough funding.

Shaffer declined to say how much each updated Range Hawk will cost, but said later modifications will grow cheaper as work on the program progresses.

The Air Force now has nine RQ-4s left in its inventory and plans to eventually retire them. But in the latest National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers moved to prevent the Air Force from mothballing the remainder of its fleet until after fiscal 2028.

The F-35A purchase would be on top of earlier orders for 12 F-35Bs from the American defense company Lockheed Martin.

Addressing Parliament during Wednesday’s budget deliberations, Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen said his ministry wants to take advantage of the competitive price of the F-35As, which are now “comparable” to Boeing’s F-15 jets.

“We have to de-prioritize other projects for this opportunity, but we’ve done our calculations and we think this is the best time to put orders for F-35As,” he said, adding that accelerating the F-35 acquisition plan will put the Republic of Singapore Air Force in the “premier league.”

F-35As are built for conventional takeoff and landing, have dependable endurance, can carry higher capacity payloads, and provide more operational flexibility, Ng explained.

Both the “A” and “B” variants are suitable for Singapore’s limited land spaces, the ministry has noted.

Singapore ordered four F-35Bs in a 2020 deal worth an estimated $2.75 billion, then added eight more F-35B units in 2023. The aircraft are on track to arrive during the 2026-2028 time frame.

If Parliament approves the current F-35A acquisition, Ng said the additional fighter jets would arrive by 2030, the same year Singapore’s military plans to retire its F-16 fleet. By the end of the decade, the Air Force would operate a combined fleet of F-15SG, F-35A and F-35B fighter jets.

The ministry has also proposed a SG$20.2 billion (U.S. $15 billion) defense budget — an increase from last year’s SG$17.98 billion (U.S. $13.36 billion) allocation.

For several years Singapore has steadily allocated around 3% of its gross domestic product for defense spending, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute think tank. This consistency has allowed the country to upgrade its aircraft fleet as well as modernize existing platforms.

The military had undertaken a massive modernization push set to materialize in 2040.

“Today we are reaping dividends of the sum we put up steadily over the past 20 years [on defense spending],” Ng said.

Singaporean leaders during the budget deliberations expressed concerns over Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, and economic disagreements between the U.S. and China.

“We are all concerned that the U.S. and China can clash over Taiwan, and if that happens it will be a very bleak Asia for a very long time,” Ng acknowledged. “I want to make clear that if ever something similar happens to us here in Singapore, [the Ministry of Defence and the Singaporea Armed Forces] do not plan to depend on another country to come to our rescue.”

But budget uncertainties and a possible 1% cut to funding levels could jeopardize the Air Force’s ability to set up a new Integrated Capabilities Command and other changes in time to have the right impact, Gen. Dave Allvin said at a Brookings Institution event.

“It’s not a matter to me of: this is an optional thing that we think is a good idea to do,” Allvin said. “The strategic environment compels us to do this. Otherwise, we find ourselves in a situation next year, then the year after and the year after that, where we fall further behind.”

Allvin, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, and other top officials unveiled the revamp — the service’s largest since the post-Cold War period in the 1990s — earlier this month at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium. The shift is part of the service’s effort to better position to counter major adversaries, particularly China, and win a high-tech, modern war, all while dealing with budgetary limitations.

The creation of a new Integrated Capabilities Command is one of the biggest changes in the works for the Air Force.

Today, the Air Force often develops the future capabilities it will need partially within its major commands and piecemeal.

But the single, centralized Integrated Capabilities Command in the works will take charge of developing the Air Force’s future requirements into new systems or other capabilities and allow a more unified approach.

This new command “understands the impacts of modernizing one part of our Air Force with the other part of our Air Force, and it helps us develop a more cohesive and coherent force design into the future,” Allvin said. “We have to make quality decisions faster. And sometimes, when you diffuse the power structures and the decision-making authority across the functions, it’s very hard to get an enterprise solution on time.”

These changes might not be noticed outside of the Air Force, Allvin said, but he predicted they would have a significant effect internally.

The service is working on setting up the Integrated Capabilities Command as soon as possible, he said, so it can start changing the way it conducts long-term planning for the future force. But he acknowledged the full reorganization could be done in pieces and take years — and may not be completely finished when his tenure as chief of staff ends in four years.

“It’s all I’m going to be doing … from start to finish,” Allvin said. “If I do my job, and get the support and I’m able to build a team and build the advocacy, you’re going to see a drastically changed Air Force.”

He said it is too early to tell how much the reorganization might cost, though he doesn’t expect it to be “a large fiscal burden.” He believes the Air Force already has most of the resources and abilities it needs, and must start moving on these changes immediately.

“This Integrated Capabilities Command, I can’t tell you, to the airman, how many are going to be there,” Allvin said. “But we also can’t wait for that in order to get started. We need to know that we’re going to move forward and adapt on the fly.”

But with the fiscal 2024 budget languishing in Congress, the Air Force — like the rest of the government — is still operating on a continuing resolution funding it at 2023 levels. If lawmakers don’t pass this year’s budget by April 30, a further 1% cut will kick in.

That would not only jeopardize the Air Force’s ability to make these changes, Allvin said, it would also create “a more existential issue.”

“The one thing that we really lose is time, and our ability to be able to spend the precious resources on the things that we had planned on in order to keep pace,” Allvin said.

The U.K. expects to award a contract in 2025 to build the new helicopters, the ministry said. According to a March 2022 government document about major defense projects, the deal could be worth nearly £1.2 billion (U.S. $1.5 billion).

“The New Medium Helicopter will provide essential support to our military operations, and we’re pleased to have reached this next important stage of the program,” Defence Procurement Minister James Cartlidge said in the news release. “The program’s competition includes essential criteria that are key to securing vital rotary wing operational independence, allowing us to respond swiftly to emerging threats in a highly contested world.”

This program is expected to deliver up to 44 medium-lift support helicopters that can operate in all environments and perform up to five different jobs that were previously covered by different types of aircraft, the ministry said, including carrying out both combat and humanitarian missions. This is expected to streamline the U.K.’s vertical lift capabilities, providing more efficiency and operational flexibility, the ministry added.

The U.K. branches of Airbus Helicopters, Leonardo Helicopters and Lockheed Martin are expected to submit bids now that the British military has released its invitation to negotiate.

The potential to export these helicopters to other countries will be an important element the U.K. will consider as it evaluates bids, the ministry said. Other issues to undergo consideration include the helicopters’ design, production and manufacturing process.

“The New Medium Helicopter contract will secure the vital operational independence we require, as well as investing in U.K. skills for the long term, and demonstrates the U.K. government’s commitment to the Defence and Security Industrial Strategy,” the ministry said in its release.

The winner of this contract will replace the Army’s Puma helicopters, as well as the country’s aging Bell 412, Bell 212 and Airbus Dauphin helicopters.

Lockheed and its subsidiary Sikorsky plan to submit the Black Hawk helicopter for the New Medium Helicopter program. Sikorsky president Paul Lemmo said at the Paris Air Show in June 2023 that it was considering setting up a Black Hawk final assembly line in the U.K. to strengthen its bid for the program. A final assembly line on the European continent — likely Poland — is also an option, Lemmo added.

Airbus has teamed up with Boeing to pitch the H175M for the program, which it would build in Wales. The H175M would be a militarized version of Airbus’ commercial H175 helicopter.

Italian firm Leonardo is eyeing its AW149 helicopter for its own bid, saying the construction style allows for the aircraft to better survive small-arms fire.

South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration selected the C-390 in December under a $544 million Large Transport Tactical Aircraft II program. While the cargo plane had been raking in business from European and Middle Eastern countries in 2023, the order was the company’s first in Asia.

“The Korean decision was very important,” Embraer Chief Commercial Officer for International Business Federico Lemos told reporters during a security and defense briefing at the Singapore Airshow this week. “We are receiving a lot of interest and this is part of a greater opportunity.”

Embraer did not disclose target markets, but officials indicated that new customers may be revealed in the first quarter.

Officials said they plan to take the C-390 plane on display at the Singapore Airshow to other countries in the region before returning to Brazil.

Despite lacking a publicized order in Southeast Asia, the company signed a maintenance, repair and overhaul agreement with ST Engineering this week dedicated solely to the C-390.

Executives also said Embraer intends to leverage an existing partnership with Swedish firm Saab to explore new markets. The companies signed a production line deal for Saab’s Gripen fighters in Embraer’s Gaviao Pexioto plant in Brazil last May and ihave agreed to pitch the C-390 together to the Swedish Air Force.

Apart from the partnership with Saab, Embraer has engaged with domestic firms to offer the C-390.

Earlier this month, the company partnered with India’s Mahindra Defence Systems to offer the C-390 to the Indian Air Force. The IAF sought to replace aging AN32 planes and was reportedly planning to order 40 to 80 medium transport aircraft.

In December, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with state-owned Saudi Arabian Military Industries to pitch the C-390 to the Ministry of Defense and to establish a regional MRO hub and assembly line in the country.

North Korea has conducted six rounds of missile tests so far this year, most of them reportedly involving cruise missiles that typically fly at a low altitude to overcome opponents’ missile defenses. Analysts say that in the event of a conflict, North Korea aims to use cruise missiles to strike U.S. aircraft carriers as well as U.S. military bases in Japan.

South Korea’s air force said in a statement the drill on Friday involved fifth-generation stealth F-35A fighter jets from both countries and other fighter jets from South Korea. It said the U.S. F-35As were deployed in South Korea on Wednesday from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.

North Korea has ramped up its weapons tests since 2022 in what experts call an attempt to increase its leverage in future diplomacy. South Korea and the U.S. have responded by expanding their military exercises and trilateral training with Japan.

On the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Rio De Janeiro on Thursday, the top diplomats from South Korea, the U.S. and Japan agreed to strengthen their joint response capability against North Korea’s evolving nuclear threats and coordinate to block the North’s financing of its nuclear program, according to South Korea’s Foreign Ministry.

This year, North Korea is expected to step up its testing activities and belligerent rhetoric as both the U.S and South Korea head into elections. North Korea is likely seeking international recognition as a nuclear state, a status that experts say the North thinks would help it receive relief from U.S.-led economic sanctions.

North Korea’s advancing nuclear arsenal has likely emboldened its stance, and there are concerns that the North may launch a limited military provocation against the South. Observers say a full-scale attack is unlikely as the North is outgunned by more superior U.S. and South Korean forces.

U.S. and South Korean officials have repeatedly warned that any nuclear attack by North Korea against them would spell the end of the North’s government, led by Kim Jong Un.

Indeed, both countries have experienced heavy losses in life and materiel during the war, which began when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. There’s now a growing sense this conflict has reached a stalemate, and that it will likely continue through the year, according to a report released this month by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The London-based think tank also recently updated its Military Balance+ database, which assesses the defense capabilities of militaries around the world. The following compares select system types and data points between Russia and Ukraine, based on data from IISS, with footnotes at the bottom of this article. The data is current as of November, meaning it accounts for nearly two years of war.

• Data as of November 2023.
• Armored Fighting Vehicles are armored combat vehicles with a combat weight of at least 6 metric tons.
• Artillery includes guns, howitzers, rocket launchers and mortars with a caliber greater than 100mm for artillery pieces and 80mm and above for mortars, capable of engaging ground targets with indirect fire.
• Surface-to-Surface Missile Launchers are launch vehicles for transporting and firing surface-to-surface ballistic and cruise missiles.
• Air Defense includes guns, directed-energy weapons and surface-to-air missile launchers designed to engage fixed-wing, rotary-wing and unmanned aircraft.

The two governments are now ironing out the final terms of defense cooperation based on a memorandum of understanding signed in June and ratified in September, the Philippines’ Defense Department explained in a Feb. 16 news release.

The arrangement is key to Sweden’s participation in the Philippines’ multirole fighter jet program, the department said, and the governments are to ink a deal at a meeting next month.

Negotiations had stalled while the Philippine military finalized its new defense acquisition program, dubbed Horizon 3 — the last phase of the government’s massive push to modernize its armed forces. In January, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. approved a 2 trillion peso (U.S. $35 billion) budget for the decade-long plan.

The Defense Department has not shared a specific list of assets and platforms it wants under the program, but Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro told reporters last month the budget will focus on building assets and capabilities to address threats to Philippine resources and vessels. Capabilities will focus on raising domain awareness; connectivity; maritime and aerial deterrence; command and control; communications; computer technology; and intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance.

The military previously told Defense News most of its assets and platforms are deployed to the country’s western and northern borders.

Following the approval of Horizon 3, the department said it had changed its requirements for the fighter jet and had not disclosed the total number it planned to acquire, nor the price tag.

The Philippines retired its fleet of Northrop F-5 fighters in 2005, and in 2013 it spent 18.9 billion pesos for 12 FA-50 light attack aircraft from Korea Aerospace Industries as fighter jet negotiations continued.

While the government has not identified the final choice for the fighter jet, the Swedish firm Saab’s JAS 39 Gripen was reportedly among the top choice.

The country had its eyes set on Lockheed Martin’s F-16 Fighting Falcon in the 1990s, but economic troubles and a lack of prioritization stalled negotiations.

In 2021, the U.S. approved the sale of 10 F-16C Block 70/72 and two F-16D Block 70/72 aircraft in a $2.43 billion package. However, the Philippines has only earmarked $1.1 billion for the acquisition.

Sweden instead proposed the JAS 39 Gripen in 2022.

Saab has not participated in negotiations thus far, according to Andrew Wilkinson, the company’s Gripen campaign director. Speaking to Defense News during the Singapore Airshow this week, Wilkinson said Saab will join the discussions once the bilateral agreement is signed and after the Philippines reaches a decision on its preferred fighter jet.

“We are at the very first phase, but right now there is no official decision, no requests,” he added.

Previous negotiations were over the aircraft, but Saab officials said there is an array of systems to provide a “holistic defense solution,” like the GlobalEye airborne early warning and control plane that can provide long-range air, sea, and land surveillance in real time.

“We have ground radars, airborne radars, other types of sensors, and you can fuse all this information to provide one aviation awareness picture that you can distribute to the navy, to the army, even to the coast guard,” Anders Dahl, who leads Saab’s branch in the Philippines, told Defense News.

The company has a history in the region. In 2008, Saab signed a $309 million deal to supply aircraft and surveillance systems to the Royal Thai Armed Forces.

After the Defense Acquisition Program Administration issued a request for proposals in November, companies had until Feb. 22 to submit their bids.

South Korea is taking on more self-defense responsibilities from the U.S., and the new quartet of AEW&C aircraft will supplement four Boeing E-737 planes delivered around the 2011-2012 time frame. The Defense Acquisition Program Administration said the new platforms would enhance the South’s “ability to monitor North Korean missiles and defend its airspace.”

Boeing is competing with a 737-based platform again, its E-7 having the advantage of aerial refueling to give on-station times stretching to 20 hours.

“Regarding the capability, the unmatched E-7 multirole electronically scanned array radar sensing and tracking provides the most powerful multidomain surveillance, communications and networked battle-management capabilities of any aircraft,” a Boeing spokesperson told Defense News.

The American company, which is the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world, said the E-7 “is production-ready and offers lower operating and sustainment costs, higher mission readiness rates, and unmatched interoperability.”

Boeing executives at South Korea’s Seoul ADEX defense expo last year claimed a 96% availability rate for the E-7. They also highlighted commonality with existing Korean E-737s. “In addition to crew training efficiencies, the E-7 offers life-cycle cost savings inherent with fleet continuity and a global, common logistics model.”

Saab’s GlobalEye is also competing, with the Swedish company proposing a Bombardier Global 6500 airframe.

Saab believes its design, which mounts an Erieye extended-range radar atop the fuselage, is ideal for South Korea’s Air Force. As well as a hot production line, Saab touted its willingness to transfer technology to enhance Korea’s strategic independence. It also highlighted rapid delivery and affordability.

Saab is the 33rd biggest defense contractor worldwide.

The other contender is American firm L3Harris Technologies in tandem with Korean Air and Israel Aerospace Industries. Its Phoenix solution also uses a Global 6500 and integrates Elta Systems-made conformal radars and artificial intelligence algorithms. L3Harris claimed its design will have low sustainment costs and at least a 95% operational availability rate.

L3Harris is the ninth-largest defense company in the world, while IAI lands at 29. The former noted that an initial two aircraft would undergo modifications in Texas before receiving radar integration in Israel. Korean Air would lead work on the two remaining aircraft in-country, as well as perform sustainment.

“Through L3Harris’ agreements with Korean Air, LIG Nex1 and Ace Antenna, and ongoing discussions with additional Korean partners, the team intends that the aircraft and mission system equipment will be fully supported in Korea,” a spokesperson for the group told Defense News. “This … paves the way for independent domestic research and development, and fostering excellence in aircraft system integration, upgrades and modifications, which will contribute significantly to the advancement of South Korea’s research and development program.”

The Defense Acquisition Program Administration declined to provide Defense News with further details. The agency is now proceeding with evaluations.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — India is moving closer to buying 15 maritime patrol variants of the Airbus C295 aircraft, following permission from the country’s Defence Acquisition Council.

This initial approval from Feb. 16, called acceptance of necessity in Defence Ministry parlance, will see the Navy receive nine C295 medium-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft and the Coast Guard get six C295 multimission maritime aircraft.

Once a contract is signed, a joint venture between the French firm Airbus and the Indian business Tata Advanced Systems Ltd. would manufacture the aircraft in India.

The Air Force previously placed a contract for 56 C295 transport aircraft, of which the first 16 are under production in Spain and the remainder in Tata’s final assembly line in the Indian city of Vadodara.

Although Airbus offers a maritime patrol version of the C295 — Spain ordered 16 in December — the Indian Navy and Coast Guard platforms will receive locally made sensors such as an active electronically scanned array radars, identification friend or foe systems, data links, and electro-optic/infrared technology. The Centre for Airborne Systems, a branch of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, is developing this equipment as part of the government’s efforts toward greater self-sufficiency in defense production.

Medium-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft would help India monitor nearby waters as well as gather electronic and communications intelligence. The aircraft would supplement 12 P-8I aircraft used for anti-submarine warfare.

With around 11 hours of endurance, the variant would also provide longer-range capability than existing Dornier 228 aircraft. The Navy is also set to receive 15 MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones to boost maritime surveillance.

The Indian government has expressed concern about the Chinese military’s activities in the Indian Ocean, and the Indian Navy has carried out anti-piracy operations in the nearby Gulf of Aden since 2008.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard’s C295 variants would conduct maritime surveillance, anti-piracy missions, pollution monitoring, search and rescue, disaster response, and fisheries protection.

The acceptance of necessity brings India’s formal requirement for C295 aircraft to 71.

M. Matheswaran, a retired Indian Air Force air marshal and head of the India-based think tank The Peninsula Foundation, told Defense News that there’s a potential for export opportunities.

“Joining hands with established majors like Airbus is not only [advantageous for] the domestic market, but [also helps it] become part of the global supply chain. Exports are extremely vital for that,” Matheswaran said, predicting Tata could produce 300-400 C295 aircraft.

The CEO of manufacturer Turkish Aerospace Industries, Temel Kotil, tweeted that the first flight took 13 minutes. The aircraft registered a speed of 230 knots and reached an altitude of 8,000 feet, he added.

Turkey initiated the combat aircraft development program in December 2010. A conceptual design contract was signed between the government and the company in August 2011. A development contract followed in August 2016.

The program aims to field a fifth-generation combat aircraft to meet Turkish Air Force requirements beyond 2030s, replacing the country’s F-16 fleet. Turkey aims to become one of the few countries possessing the entire value chain for making advanced combat aircraft, covering everything from technology, infrastructure, human resources and manufacturing capabilities.

With a wingspan of about 46 feet and length of 69 feet, the Kaan is equipped with two engines. The prototype is powered by two General Electric-made F110-GE-129 turbofan engines, which are to be used in early production batches. Turkey is now working on the development of an indigenous turbofan engine for the Kaan by local company TRMotor.

The fighter program is expected to incorporate most of the characteristics of a standard fifth-generation aircraft, such as low observability, internal weapons bays, sensor fusion, advanced data links and communications systems. The aircraft are to be in service until the 2070s.

The current contract covers the initial four years of the program, which will be concluded with the completion of the preliminary design phase. Until then, further testing and technology maturation activities are on the schedule.

In December 2022, the head of TAI said the initial delivery of Kaan was scheduled for 2028. After 2029, the aim is to produce two jets per month, totally 24 jets per year.

The jet that flew Wednesday was a ground test unit. Now, the manufacturer will make five more prototypes, for which the government bought 10 F110 engines.

In a TV interview last week, the Ukrainian ambassador to Turkey, Vasyl Bodnar, expressed interest in the aircraft.

And the service plans to make a Milestone B decision on the Commercial Engine Replacement Program by the end of the summer, which would allow it to move into its engineering and manufacturing development phase, officials said in an interview with Defense News.

These developments will mark critical milestones in the Air Force’s effort to upgrade its fleet of 76 Cold War-era B-52s with new engines, radar, avionics, and other improvements to keep it flying until perhaps 2060, about a century after the B-52H was first introduced. The planes’ 1960s-era TF33 engines are at the end of their working lives, and are to be replaced by Rolls-Royce’s F130 engine.

Col. Scott Foreman, B-52 system program manager who oversees the bomber’s sustainment and modernization efforts at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, and CERP program manager Lt. Col. Tim Cleaver said in the interview that the base is also taking several steps to prepare for the significant modernization work.

This includes plans to build a massive hangar at Tinker starting in 2026, which could house up to four B-52s and increase the amount of work that can be done on the bomber at any given time.

The Air Force wants to “get these H models converted to [B-52]J models as quickly as possible, because … the clock’s ticking on those TF33″ engines, Cleaver said.

The Air Force knows the F130 engine works, Cleaver said, since a version of it has powered the Gulfstream G650 business jet for years. But the F130s will be mounted differently on the B-52, and the Air Force needs to make sure there aren’t any surprises with the bomber’s twin-pod, under-wing configuration.

Rolls-Royce last year completed much of the initial twin-pod testing of the F130 engines at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, Cleaver said, and the last six-week test cycle there is expected to start in early March. Those tests will involve exposing the engine pods to cross-wind blowers, and seeing what happens if one engine in the pod has to operate at reduced power or is even inoperative.

More tests will follow, Foreman said. In April, the F130 will start sea-level performance testing on a stand at a Rolls-Royce facility in Indianapolis. Another engine will undergo durability testing through 2025, Cleaver said. And this fall, F130 testing will move to the Arnold Engineering Development Complex in Tennessee, where it will be subjected to simulated altitudes to produce more data on how it might behave in flight.

Once that round is done, they said, the F130 will have finished its qualification testing that ensures it would be safe to fly, and pave the way for test modifications to begin.

The first two test B-52s will be modified at Boeing’s San Antonio, Texas facility beginning in 2026. It will take a few years to upgrade these bombers for the first time, Cleaver said, and ground and flight tests will go from late 2028 to 2031.

After this year’s testing, Boeing will set up four systems integration laboratories to ensure adding the new engines onto the B-52 will go smoothly, Cleaver said. Three will be in Oklahoma City, near Tinker Air Force Base, and the fourth — focusing on the engines’ electrical systems — will be at a Boeing facility near Seattle.

“We have a mix of simulated functions and hardware … functions to make sure that our systems are working with each other, and that we’re not using the test aircraft as our place to find problems,” Cleaver said. The labs “will really prove out the design before we even cut into a jet.”

The Air Force is still awaiting cost estimate updates from Boeing — which originally built the Stratofortress and is the prime integrator on the upgrade program — before it can finalize its own cost expectations and make a Milestone B decision, Cleaver said. Boeing is expected to provide those updates around late spring or June.

In a statement, Boeing confirmed the Air Force’s statements about the need for updated cost estimates.

The engine contract with Rolls-Royce is worth $2.6 billion; when the development, integration, test and production of other major subsystems is factored in, the cost estimate is roughly $12.4 billion.

Tinker, where all production B-52Hs will be upgraded into B-52Js, is also preparing for its role in the massive modernization effort.

“It is a large scope of work, when you include things like the radar modernization program, the [engine upgrades], integration of advanced extremely high frequency communications, [and] other programs,” Foreman said.

Tinker’s workforce will install the engines, radar upgrades, and other modernizations on B-52s as they cycle through their regular depot maintenance that occurs every four years, Foreman said.

The Air Force sends about 17 B-52s through Tinker for major maintenance each year, and wants to conduct as many upgrades to the bomber as possible as it moves through the depot. But he cautioned some modernization programs are moving at different timelines and all may not be ready when some bombers go through.

“We have a master plan that goes tail by tail, that shows over the next 10 years where [a bomber] is going to get modifications along the way,” Foreman said. “So as we get into the late [20]30s, we have a fleet of 76 aircraft with new engines, new radar, new [weapons], communications, etc. … The plan is ever-evolving as we gain more and more information and individual [modernization] programs move left or right.”

But the upgrades will mean a lot more work, and require a lot more capacity at Tinker, Foreman said. So in 2026, Tinker will start building a massive structure known as the bomber agile common hangar that could house four B-52s and allow for more upgrading work to be done. That hangar will be ready at the end of 2030, in time for the upgrades of production jets to begin in early 2031.

“If you have aircraft that are using depot docks for a longer period of time, you need more docks, and that’s what the agile common hangar brings to us,” Cleaver said.

Foreman said it typically takes a B-52 between 220 and 260 days to go through depot maintenance, depending on parts availability and whether a bomber has any age-related stress fractures or corrosion that need to be repaired. The Air Force is still trying to figure out how much more time the upgrades might add to that schedule, he said.

Cracking and other structural issues are common on the six-decade-old B-52, Foreman said, and sometimes require components to be replaced. But the Air Force is used to catching and fixing those problems, he said, and the aircraft should be able last well into the 2050s — perhaps to 2060 — without more in-depth structural upgrades.

“We’re very disciplined about [structural integrity] inspections every time [the B-52] comes in” to the depot, Cleaver said. “That’s what’s allowed this aircraft to make it here into the 2020s. But he still has life to take her into 2050 and beyond.”

The move to concentrate air warfare capabilities at the remote American installation, located at the rim of the Philippine Sea, is part of a modernization plan proposed by the U.S. air service.

Over the past few years, North Korea has threatened a number of times to attack the small island, as was the case in 2017 when U.S. bombers took off from there to patrol the skies of ally South Korea.

“Andersen AFB is a strategic location used to project airpower and expand combat capability from the forward edge of the Indo-Pacific – our intent is to further resource this location,” a spokesperson for U.S. Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) told Defense News in an email.

“The purpose of the proposed action is to provide critical infrastructure that enhances U.S. posture west of the International Date Line,” the statement said.

The Singapore-related upgrades entail the bed-down and mission support of up to 12 Singaporean F-15SG aircraft, a variant of Boeing’s F-15 Strike Eagle, with plans to provide training facilities for pilots.

The changes, as detailed in a December U.S. Air Force statement, will also increase airfield and munitions infrastructure to address capability gaps and enhance how ground operations are carried out. The construction is expected to affect 209 acres and take place over a period of three to seven years.

There is currently no fixed date for when the work could begin. The Guam installation, one of ten bases under the authority of PACAF, is the only one in the western Pacific that can continuously overhaul American heavy bombers.

It is likely to have been selected by the U.S. Air Force for this project, as Guam is known to have a relatively unconfined airspace and has been deemed vital by analysts in the event of military action by North Korea.

Additionally, it is near the Farallon de Medinilla, a 1.75 mile-long (2.8 km) unoccupied island, used as a training bombing range from Andersen.

The U.S. air service “reviewed requirements for strategic capabilities within the Indo-Pacific region and identified Andersen AFB for enhanced capabilities, dismissing five other potential alternative locations within the Pacific Air Forces area of responsibility from consideration,” the PACAF statement said.

Singapore signed an initial $1.6 billion deal with Boeing in 2005 for the procurement of 12 F-15SG fighter aircraft, after which it ordered an additional 12 aircraft, resulting in a fleet of at least 24 fighters.

“The F-15SGs remain an important part of our fighter fleet – they have been serving us well since 2009 and they are expected to continue to meet our operational needs,” Maj. Gen. Kelvin Khong, chief of the Republic of Singapore Air Force, or RSAF, said in a statement ahead of the Singapore Airshow organized here from Feb. 20-25.

The RSAF has also been operating F-16s for several years, which began undergoing mid-life upgrades in 2016, as the city state plans to retire them from mid-2030 onwards and will soon receive its first F-35Bs from Lockheed Martin.

“The RSAF next-generation fleet will consist of F-35s and F-15SGs, and we expect to take delivery of the first four F-35Bs by 2026 and remaining eight in the following years,” Khong said.

The official added that the country plans to commence the training of its first F-35 pilots in the United States in order to enhance cooperation between the two nations’ fleets.

“We’re having a hard time with [the E-7 program], getting price agreement with Boeing,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters in a roundtable at the Air and Space Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here. “We’re still in negotiations with them, and that’s not been finalized yet.”

The Air Force plans to buy 26 E-7s from Boeing by 2032 to replace its aging E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft fleet. The service awarded Boeing a $1.2 billion contract in February 2023 to start working on the aircraft.

The service plans to first buy two rapid prototype E-7s, with the first expected to be fielded in 2027, and in 2025 make a production decision on the rest of the fleet.

Australia already flies the E-7, which it refers to as the Wedgetail, and Boeing is also making the aircraft for other nations such as the United Kingdom. The Air Force’s version of the E-7 will have a modified design to meet U.S. satellite communication, military GPS and cybersecurity and program protection requirements.

“We’re partnering with the US Air Force to deliver this critical capability and are working diligently to reach an agreement,” Boeing said in a statement to Defense News.

Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in another roundtable the sticky negotiations center on the E-7′s first two rapid prototype aircraft.

The level of engineering work needed to adapt the E-7 to the Air Force’s specifications was “above and beyond what we anticipated,” Hunter said.

“The big surprise there was an unexpected amount and degree of non-recurring engineering required to meet the requirement that the Air Force specified, which we thought was very close to what the U.K. is currently procuring from Boeing,” Hunter said. “Those discussions have been challenging.”

Hunter said the Air Force is trying to better understand Boeing’s proposal and determine what elements are essential, and what are unnecessary or could be deferred. The service has narrowed those nagging issues down to a smaller list, Hunter said, but he declined to detail them.

Hunter said he would prefer the process to be going faster. But he acknowledged it’s not surprising that Boeing is being particularly cautious as it negotiates on this program, and that the Air Force and Boeing are working through these challenges together.

“They’ve gotten into some contracts in the past that it’s apparent that as they were bidding those, there was key information they were lacking,” Hunter said. “At some level, it’s not that surprising that they’re trying hard to do their homework and not bid things and not understand the full scope of the work they can be expected to perform when they prepare their proposal.”

“We have this wonderful vision, lots of great programs that we have teed up,” Andrew Hunter told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here. “[We] still need that FY24 budget to make it real.”

The Pentagon is now operating under its third continuing resolution of fiscal 2024 as Congress continues to draft defense spending legislation. The latest stopgap deal, passed in January, funds the government through March 8.

Like a traditional CR, the measure pauses funding at the prior year’s levels — fiscal 2023, in this case — and prevents the Pentagon from starting new programs and increasing procurement quantities for existing efforts. While the department is accustomed to operating under a continuing resolution for at least a portion of each fiscal year, the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act adds a twist.

The law stipulates that all federal agencies would face a 1% cut from fiscal 2023 funding levels if the government was still operating under a CR on Jan. 1, 2024 — which it was. However, the language includes a four-month grace period, so while that initial deadline has passed, Congress has until April 30 to approve FY24 appropriations and avoid slashing the executive branch’s spending.

While lawmakers tend to reach an annual appropriations agreement by March or April each year, Air Force officials signaled a growing concern that Congress could miss the late April deadline.

During this week’s conference, the Department of the Air Force distributed a fact sheet outlining the impact a 1% cut would have on its two services, the Air Force and Space Force. The measure would reduce the service’s buying power by nearly $13 billion and put $2.8 billion in space modernization projects on hold. It would also limit production increases for key programs like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Small Diameter Bomb and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, and delay seven Space Force launches, according to the department.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in keynote speech Monday that the congressional funding standoff has caused significant delays to his vision for modernizing the service. When he took on the role in 2021, he revealed seven “operational imperatives” meant to inform Air Force and Space Force budget priorities.

Initiatives driven by those priorities, 19 of which were included in service’s FY24 budget request, have yet to be fully funded.

“It would be very disappointing to me to have been in office for an entire administration and have never received any of the needed resources to be competitive — resources that we identified in the first six months I was in office,” he said.

Key among those efforts, Kendall said, is the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which will field fleets of drones powered by autonomous software and designed to fly alongside crewed fighters.

The service hopes to narrow its pool of potential CCA providers from five companies to two or three in fiscal 2024, but that timeline depends on when funding is available.

“We’re moving ahead with a sense of urgency on CCAs,” Kendall told reporters Tuesday. “As a preamble, everything depends upon FY24 being appropriated.”

For the Space Force, which requested $30 billion in FY24, the automatic cuts have an outsized impact. The $2.8 billion in stalled modernization projects represents nearly 10% of the service’s total budget.

The Space Force’s budget has nearly doubled since it was created in 2019, and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters Feb. 13 that funding delays are having “an acute effect” on the service as it continues to grow.

“Our ability to do all the missions that are required is being severely impacted by not being able to get the resources that we’ve asked for,” he said.

Air Force investigators are continuing to probe the Nov. 29 crash in parallel with a comprehensive review of whether the service’s Osprey force is properly trained and equipped to fly safely, Air Force Special Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here Tuesday.

Air Force ends effort to recover final member of downed Osprey’s crew

While Bauernfeind offered no additional clues into what may have caused the accident, the Pentagon’s Joint Safety Council said earlier this month it was working with the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy to return their Ospreys to service.

Bauernfeind said he is in weekly conversations with leaders from the sister services to determine the path forward to flight, adding that flights will only resume after he has full confidence in training, crews and the platform, as well as measures in place to mitigate future issues.

“What is the information we need to now put the appropriate risk mitigations in place to move forward?” he said. “Just because we’re having those conversations does not mean that we have the information we need yet.”

The U.S. military grounded its fleet of around 400 Ospreys — about 50 of which belong to the Air Force — on Dec. 6 as the mishap investigation got underway. Japan also stopped flying its own 14 Ospreys after the accident.

The tiltrotor aircraft is known for its towering nacelles that allow it to launch and land like a helicopter, and speed forward like a fixed-wing plane. Air Force special operations units use the CV-22 to navigate into and out of areas where fixed-wing planes may not be able to land with troops and supplies. Each Osprey can carry about three dozen troops or 10,000 pounds of cargo.

While it remains unclear what downed the American CV-22 in November, the Air Force has said that an aircraft malfunction — not a mistake by the crew — likely caused the crash. The Associated Press reported earlier this month that the Pentagon believes it has identified the cause but has declined to divulge the information as further analysis is underway.

Four fatal Osprey crashes, including the latest mishap, have claimed the lives of 20 American troops since March 2022. It also marked the first fatal incident involving an Air Force-owned CV-22 since 2010, and the service’s deadliest accident since 2018, when nine Puerto Rico Air National Guard troops died in a WC-130 weather reconnaissance plane crash.

The Air Force grounded its Osprey fleet for two weeks in 2022 following back-to-back “hard clutch” incidents, after the aircraft’s clutch temporarily slipped and then re-engaged. The move unevenly distributes power to the aircraft’s massive rotors and can cause it to lurch. One of those hard clutch problems caused a June 2022 crash that killed five Marines.

Federal watchdog to investigate Osprey’s safety record after crash

Bauernfeind said commanders around the globe have “leveraged other joint force capabilities” to meet their daily operational needs, but did not say how.

“There is a strong desire to return to fly because it is a capability we want to have,” he said. “But we want to be able to return to fly with as much knowledge as we possibly can, so that we can ensure that we’re safely taking care of our crews.”

Navy Rear Adm. Chris Engdahl, chairman of the Joint Safety Council and head of Naval Safety Command, told the Associated Press that commanders across the services may need to gather input on how long troops would need to spend in simulators to get ready to fly again, and what maintenance each Osprey needs before resuming operations.

“The Air Force and Marine Corps have been running the Osprey’s engines; the Marines have been conducting ground movements to keep the aircraft working,” the AP reported.

The Air Force announced Jan. 11 it had called off the weekslong, multinational search effort that recovered all but one of the Osprey’s downed crew members.

The service held a memorial for the fallen airmen earlier this month at Kadena Air Base, Japan, where two of the Osprey’s crew members were assigned. A larger memorial is planned for Thursday at Japan’s Yokota Air Base, where the downed crew was assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Wing.

And the Air Force plans to award contracts for the next round of CCAs — drones loaded with autonomous software that would fly themselves into battle alongside crewed fighters — in fiscal 2025, Frank Kendall said during a roundtable at the Air and Space Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here.

This next round of CCA development could also involve participation by the United States’ closest and “most strategic” international partners, he said.

On the first increment of CCAs, the Air Force has contracts with five companies: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril. Kendall said the Air Force would like to cut that to three, but acknowledged budgetary limitations will make choosing just two companies more likely.

The Air Force plans to field several different types of CCAs, with different capabilities and levels of survivability, to carry out a wide range of missions including strikes, surveillance, jamming, and serving as decoys to draw enemy fire.

Kendall said the Air Force is working on its first two “increments” of CCAs as part of its five-year plan, and moving with a “sense of urgency” on the program. As with the first increment of CCAs, he said, the contracts for the second increment will cover concept definition and preliminary design work.

The Air Force will next focus on moving CCAs into production, Kendall said, and in the next few years will further downselect the companies working on the first increment of CCAs. Kendall said it remains uncertain how many companies will move into production, adding that there could be at least two firms working on the initial batch of CCAs.

Andrew Hunter, the service’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the Air Force’s CCA program has been closely consulting with Air Combat Command to see what kind of capabilities these aircraft would need in combat.

And the Air Force received a great deal of feedback from industry about how they could meet the service’s loose goal of fielding about 1,000 CCAs, Hunter said.

Companies who didn’t make the cut for the first increment will get a second shot in the next increment, Hunter said.

At least one defense contractor is hoping to do just that. In an interview with Defense News Tuesday, Steve Fendley, president of the unmanned systems division at Kratos Defense and Security Solutions, said that while the company didn’t make the cut for the first round of CCAs, it remains very interested in the program and plans to compete for the next version.

“We’re in the mix,” Fendley said. “Part of what’s important to the Air Force, and to us, is being able to see the range of capability systems and the range of cost systems to satisfy all of the different scenarios and mission challenges” for which the Air Force wants CCAs.

Most of the attention paid to CCAs has so far focused on the companies building the physical drone portion, Hunter said, but “another slew of contractors” is working alongside them on software and other elements of the program.

That work will continue apart from the individual increments to develop the CCA air vehicles, he said. And developing that kind of “foundational architecture” for CCAs is one potential area on which the Air Force can work with international partners, Hunter added.

He said creating a software core that allows a CCA to operate autonomously is the hardest part of this program. The Air Force can get it done in the first batch of CCAs, he noted — but there will be room to improve.

“We have a high degree of confidence that we can deliver useful autonomy in increment one,” Hunter said. “But it will be more limited than I think what you’ll see down the road.”

The Air Force and Space Force’s top civilian and uniformed leaders unveiled the sweeping slate of plans at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here following a monthslong, department-wide review that began in the fall. Its results comprise one of the most significant reorganizations since the end of the Cold War.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the goal is to prove the Department of the Air Force’s competitive resolve to U.S. adversaries — particularly Russia and China — and to execute those plans with urgency.

“We can no longer regard conflict as a distant possibility or a future problem that we might have to confront,” Kendall said. “The risk of conflict is here now, and that risk will increase with time.”

Among the biggest shakeups is the launch of a new Integrated Capabilities Command. The organization will become a central planning hub as the service crafts its requirements for the decades ahead — removing that responsibility from the service’s other commands and allowing the Air Force to think more holistically about its needs.

The new command, to be led by a three-star general, is “just what the name infers,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Allvin said.

“This is where the operators will test operational concepts against our force design,” he said. “They will also ensure that when we have modernization initiatives, those are rationalized to ensure … we do not unintentionally put modernization on platforms that really don’t have a long-term play in the future force design. It wastes money.”

The move also frees up the Air Force’s major commands, which organize, train and equip troops for missions around the globe, to focus on daily operations rather than future force planning.

The Space Force will create a similar organization, Space Futures Command, to lay the groundwork for expanding the service’s missions through experiments and wargames.

While much of the proposed updates aim to revamp the Air Force and Space Force’s acquisition enterprise — including several more offices that will lend greater focus to the department’s highest-priority projects, like nuclear modernization and information warfare — the services also hope to improve how airmen and guardians are trained throughout their careers.

To that end, Allvin said, the service will replace its Air Education and Training Command with a new Airman Development Command. While few details accompanied the announcement, Allvin said the renamed command aims to streamline the educational pipeline, so that when troops move “from one part of our Air Force to another part of our Air Force, they don’t need to relearn the systems and tools and they can develop faster.”

“We believe we’re going to have a more coherent force … that can move rapidly through the future,” Allvin said. “We’re all also reinforcing mission-ready training.”

Many details of this week’s announcements, on which the service had raced to build consensus by Monday’s keynote, are still being finalized. It’s unclear where the headquarters of new organizations will be located, or how quickly the department can launch them.

Senior leaders had discussed the possibility of consolidating the Air Force’s nine major commands into a more streamlined system, according to two sources outside the military who are familiar with the internal discussions.

But rather than combine or eliminate commands, Allvin said, the service can do more to highlight the various roles within them — particularly, how they provide forces to the larger joint combatant commands like U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Transportation Command.

That includes a plan to move Air Forces Cyber from under Air Combat Command and elevate it to a service component command. AFCYBER would report to U.S. Cyber Command for daily offensive and defensive operations on military networks and systems. Doing so may allow CYBERCOM to more seamlessly direct Air Force cyber units and give the organization a larger role in managing its own training and resources.

The shift marks Air Forces Cyber’s third major move since 2018, when the organization moved from Air Force Space Command to Air Combat Command. It later combined with Air Force intelligence units to create 16th Air Force at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

As it seeks to become more nimble and responsive to the joint combatant commands that direct daily operations around the world, the service will also turn its operational wings into “units of action,” categorized as deployable combat wings, in-place combat wings and combat generation wings, the Air Force said.

The idea is to create standardized packages of combat assets, like aircraft, maintainers and other support staff, that can deploy alongside the same squadrons with which they train, without shortchanging bases of the airmen needed to run daily operations and protect their perimeters.

The plan is expected to contribute to more predictable deployment schedules, a top focus for the service after leaving Afghanistan in 2021.

Allvin also said the Air Force will aim to mount a new service-wide training exercise in the Indo-Pacific in fiscal year 2025 that tests how pieces of the force work together, rather than limiting those lessons to individual commands.

Hints of other planned personnel changes have already trickled out, including news that the service will bring back warrant officers to bolster the Air Force’s technical expertise in cyber operations and information technology. The Air Force’s last active duty warrant officer retired nearly 50 years ago after the service deemed them too inflexible to meet its personnel needs, according to the Warrant Officer Historical Association.

The Department of the Air Force isn’t requesting specific funding for the changes in the fiscal year 2024 or 2025 budgets, but will ask Congress to move money around mid-year if necessary, Kendall said. New funding will be built into the fiscal 2026 budget request that is starting to take shape, he added, but officials will largely try to use existing appropriations in new ways.

One challenge the Air Force faces will be defining the separate responsibilities of each organization, one retired general officer told Air Force Times. Defense organizations tend to multiply over time because it’s typically easier to stand up a new unit to address a problem than to repurpose existing ones, he said, so leaders must have a clear implementation plan and ensure airmen understand the long game.

Another retired general officer questioned whether the Air Force and Space Force have enough time to put the plans into action before Kendall, a political appointee, may leave his post at the end of President Joe Biden’s current term.

The department must see its vision through to the end to ensure piecemeal changes don’t cause more confusion than good, he said.

“The question is, will it be done right?” he said.

But the U.S. Air Force’s B-52 bomber fleet is showing its age, and the Red Gremlin II is no exception.

On a crisp, clear morning in January, its five-person aircrew from the 11th Bomb Squadron ran through preflight checks for a training mission, tallying up what was broken and how serious the problems were.

Instructor pilot Lt. Col. Michael DeVita’s digital display — a relatively recent system known as the Combat Network Communications Technology, or CONECT — wasn’t working. The radar altimeter was down. And the targeting pod display, needed for a key element of the planned simulated bombing, was on the fritz. At one point, DeVita, the squadron commander, leaned over and gave a stubborn dial three solid taps to unstick it.

For the last six decades, the Red Gremlin II and the other 75 B-52s still in use have been the backbone of the Air Force’s bomber fleet.

They have conducted around-the-clock nuclear alert missions at the edge of Soviet airspace as well as massive bombing campaigns during the Vietnam War. They helped carry out strikes on Iraq that paved the way for the rapid ground assault of Operation Desert Storm. And in recent years, these aircraft conducted precision-guided strikes against the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

Now the Stratofortress needs to last another 36 years.

The Air Force is preparing to bring on its newest stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, and retire the aging B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit. Sometime in the 2030s, the service plans to have a fleet of two bombers — at least 100 B-21s and the current fleet of 76 B-52s, modernized top to bottom with a slate of upgrades.

It is the most sweeping revamp of the U.S. bomber fleet in more than a generation.

This $48.6 billion overhaul is intended to keep the (eventually redubbed) B-52J operational until about 2060 — meaning the Air Force could be flying nearly century-old bombers. When the last B-52 was delivered in 1962, it was expected to last 20 years, the Defense Department’s inspector general said in a November 2023 report.

‘Weapons hot’: Lessons and mistakes on a B-52 bomber training flight

The service is preparing for the overhaul, rethinking day-to-day maintenance and reevaluating its strategy for how a fleet made up of two bomber types would operate against an advanced enemy.

“The B-21 with the B-52J [will be] a very powerful, integrated force,” Maj. Gen. Jason Armagost, commander of 8th Air Force, said in a January interview here, sporting a B-21 patch on his uniform sleeve. The combined fleet would be capable of conducting a wide range of operations and striking an array of enemy targets, possibly armed with the latest hypersonic weapons.

The centerpiece of the B-52J modernization will be the replacement of the bomber’s original ’60s-era Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines with new Rolls-Royce-made F130 engines; that $2.6 billion effort is known as the Commercial Engine Replacement Program. The Air Force expects the first test B-52J will start ground and flight tests in late 2028, and for more B-52s to receive new engines throughout the 2030s.

But that’s not all: The B-52J will also receive a new modern radar, improved avionics, the Long Range Standoff weapon to carry out nuclear strikes from a distance, communication upgrades, new digital displays replacing dozens of old analog dials, new wheels and brakes, and other improvements.

The Air Force is counting on all these advances to work. If they don’t, the service could find itself with perhaps as much as 40% of its planned bomber fleet unable to keep up with wartime requirements.

The Air Force must make the B-52 modernization succeed, said Heather Penney, a retired F-16 pilot and senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “Long-range strike is absolutely nonnegotiable. Bombers are it.”

Air Force historian Brian Laslie said the fact the B-52 is still in the air, and could continue flying until around its centenary, is remarkable.

“If there was an airplane that was flying today that was 100 years old, we have to go back to 1924,” Laslie said. “We’re talking about the [Boeing P-26] Peashooters, the [Curtiss] JN-3 and JN-4 Jennys [a series of World War I-era biplanes]. We’re talking about canvas and wire and wooden airplanes. A hundred years ago, we don’t even have enclosed cockpits [or] retractable landing gear.”

Experts like Penney argue the United States has underinvested in its bomber fleet since the 1990s, including truncating its B-2 purchase by more than 100 planes, letting the B-1 fleet decay, and waiting too long to start working on the B-21. As a result, she said, the Air Force is asking the B-52 to shoulder a burden no bomber has before.

“We’re asking geriatric B-52s to be that backbone while we’re waiting for B-21 to be able to come on board,” Penney said.

Looking for ‘showstoppers’

Before a B-52 takes off, DeVita said, it’s common for its crew to find at least one thing is broken during the preflight check process. Usually maintainers can fix the problem on the flight line and the crew takes off with a fully operational jet. But sometimes, he added, a broken system can’t be fixed in time, and the crew must decide whether its loss would be bad enough to scrub the mission.

‘More with less’: Lacking parts, airmen scramble to keep B-52s flying

Of the 744 Stratofortresses the Air Force built between 1954 and 1962, 10% remain — and the years have taken a toll. The aircraft’s mission-capable rate has steadily declined over the last decade, from a modern high of 78% in 2012 to 59% in 2022 — the most recent year for which statistics are available.

The bomber’s 185-foot wingspan means it must often remain outdoors, exposed to the elements, including frigid winters at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, searing Middle Eastern heat and sand, and corrosive salt air from the Pacific Ocean. Key parts have become increasingly unavailable, as the companies that made them have moved onto other business or simply closed.

The B-52 may be old, but it’s a hardy plane, said Capt. Jonathan Newark, the instructor weapon systems officer for the training flight. And even though some of its systems may look “antiquated,” he said, they get the job done. He gestured to a panel with thick, black keys he uses to punch in targeting data.

“You look at this keyboard, it looks like something out of the Cold War. Dr. Strangelove, right?” Newark said, referring to the 1964 film about nuclear war that prominently features the B-52. “But we could do every single mission set using this keyboard ... all the way up to our most advanced weapons.”

Back on the runway, the Red Gremlin II idled more than a half hour longer than expected, with the engines emitting a low and steady whine, while maintainers tried to get the targeting pod screen to function. But a fix would have taken too long, so the crew decided to get the flight going.

“We’re balancing what training we can get done,” Newark said. “I don’t have any showstoppers [on this flight]. The students that are here can still get all the training they need. [The targeting pod practice would be] nice to have, not necessarily something we needed today. There’s a lot of things like that — the radar altimeter doesn’t work.”

“We’re able to make an aircrew decision to fly without it,” he added. “We do that a lot with airplanes that are a little bit older.”

Issues with the engines, hydraulics or flight surfaces would be deal-breakers in any situation, Newark said. But in combat, a B-52 crew will be more willing to fly with minor problems on their plane because the mission must get done.

So the crew of the bomber, call sign Scout 93, strapped on their parachutes, buckled into their seats and roared into the sky to meet up with a KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling tanker near Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Top-to-bottom upgrades

The scope of this modernization project is unprecedented in the B-52′s history, said Col. David Miller, director of logistics and engineering at Air Force Global Strike Command.

And Armagost noted the service expects the B-52′s engine upgrades will provide improved efficiency and range. But the new Rolls-Royce engines are also expected to be quieter and more reliable than the current engines, plus they wouldn’t have to depend on an outdated supply chain for spare parts.

“If we’re on a [bomber task force] mission in Indonesia, we’ll probably have parts available for those [new] engines that are pretty close, rather than having to schedule a C-17 [cargo aircraft] to fly an engine from” the United States, Armagost said.

Gallery: Take a flight in the US Air Force’s B-52 bomber

The B-52J will receive a modern active electronically scanned array radar to improve its navigation, self-defense and targeting capabilities. The B-52′s current, outdated mechanically scanned radar is at the end of its life and is increasingly difficult to support, Armagost said.

But making the B-52 new again is only one step in the process. The Air Force is also trying to map out how best to use it in a war against advanced forces that could deny airspace to the U.S. and allies.

Such a conflict would represent a dramatic shift away from the relatively open airspaces in which B-52s have operated for the last two decades. And the modernization on the way is vital to keeping the B-52 able to engage the enemy, Armagost said. That will mean figuring out the best way for the B-52J to work alongside the B-21 now in development.

The B-21 Raider, with its next-generation stealth capabilities, was designed to conduct penetrating strike missions against an adversary with advanced air defenses, such as China, while the B-52J — about as stealth-less as can be — would carry out standoff strikes, launching missiles at enemy targets from outside contested airspace.

But Armagost doesn’t expect a “siloed” approach to how the service will use its fleet of two bomber types, with one or the other individually designated to carry out certain types of missions. What’s more likely, he said, is the B-52J and B-21 working in concert, along with other U.S. forces or partners, in integrated multidomain operations that could include working with cyber and maritime assets.

“Their capabilities are inherently different,” Armagost explained. “But a penetrating strike force, [including the B-21], might open up opportunities for a standoff strike force, [like the B-52], that then has follow-on opportunities for reacquiring denied or contested airspace.”

He envisions the B-52J conducting the kind of integrated operations that paved the way for Desert Storm or the opening salvoes of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

During the Gulf War, for example, B-52s flew 1,741 missions and dropped 27,000 tons of munitions, including Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles and conventional bombs. They targeted airfields, aircraft, command-and-control sites, power facilities, and Republican Guard positions, while allowing allied ground forces to sweep through and swiftly win the war.

And in a single night mission in the opening phase of the Iraq War, B-52s launched 100 cruise missiles at targets before going on to fly at least 100 additional missions in the conflict’s first few weeks.

Such a campaign would allow “a 100-hour ground war because of what’s been conducted through an air operation,” Armagost said. “Then the resulting joint environment becomes completely different than what it was prior to that.”

The Air Force is drawing up “robust” concepts of operations for how the B-21 will carry out missions, he added, including alongside the B-52, which is also helping Air Force Global Strike Command identify potential future capability gaps and how to address them.

The weapons arming the B-52J will likely run the gamut, Armagost said — everything from gravity bombs that provide “affordable mass,” to cruise missiles for carrying out strikes beyond the range of enemy air defenses, to precision-guided munitions and highly specialized, “exquisite” weapons like hypersonics.

“If it can fly or be dropped off an aircraft, the B-52 has probably done it,” he said.

The Air Force has used B-52s to test prototype hypersonic weapons in recent years, and Armagost “absolutely” sees them as a regular part of the Stratofortress’ future arsenal.

Although hypersonic weapons have the potential to provide tremendous capabilities — including flying faster than Mach 5 and maneuvering in such a way as to avoid countermeasures — they carry price tags so steep that the B-52J would need cheaper and more traditional bombs, too, he added.

“Everything is a choice, particularly when it comes to aviation,” Armagost said. “If it flies fast or is maneuverable, everything’s a trade-off. That’s why gravity weapons probably will always be a thing.”

Broken tech ‘makes combat a lot more difficult’

After a nearly six-hour flight that included flying alongside another B-52, aerial refueling with a KC-135 Stratotanker out of Illinois’ Scott Air Force Base, and simulated bombing practice, the crew of the Red Gremlin II turned back to Barksdale. Its student pilot, 1st Lt. Clay Hultgren, practiced touch-and-go landings over and over, and then brought the bomber to a safe stop.

During the post-flight debrief, instructors took stock of how the flight went — and considered the toll the broken equipment took on their lessons. The radar altimeter started working after the bomber took off, but even if it stayed broken it wouldn’t have been a big deal.

The crew was able to successfully complete most of the planned bombing simulations, except an assignment to find and target mobile equipment.

“We weren’t able to do that because we didn’t have a targeting pod,” DeVita said. “So [we have an] alibi for that.”

And losing the bomber’s CONECT screen — a system rolled out in the mid-2010s that provides detailed, moving color maps and helps with digital targeting — was a major “limiting factor,” DeVita added. The crew of the Red Gremlin II instead had to use the legacy navigation system DeVita learned to fly on years ago.

Losing the CONECT screen also meant the weapon systems officer and electronic warfare stations didn’t have the maps that would have made their jobs easier, DeVita said.

“That’s an issue,” he explained. “It makes combat a lot more difficult to be precise and to do a lot of the things that we walked out the door to do today. So that was unfortunate.”

While the B-52′s massive modernization is vital, Penney fears what the Air Force might find when it takes a closer look under its hood. Six decades of flying may have left it with metal fatigue, corrosion, stress fractures and other hidden structural issues, the retired F-16 pilot said.

She compared the potential dangers facing the B-52 to the unwelcome surprises the service found when it re-engined massive C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft in the 2010s.

“They ended up having to cut the planned number of [C-5] upgrades nearly in half because when they opened up the aircraft, they found a lot of stuff that they didn’t expect,” she said. “They ended up having to do a lot of unplanned [service life extension work], essentially, and that ended up eating into the available money they had for the program.”

Air Force Global Strike Command said in a response to Defense News’ inquiry that the service assessed the B-52s before deciding to modernize them, and found their underlying structures were strong enough to last through the plane’s extended life span.

Penney said she also worries about the risks that come from concurrency as the Air Force attempts multiple major upgrades on a plane in short succession, if not simultaneously. Any one of those upgrades — re-engining, installing a new radar, updating avionics and so on — would be a major effort on its own, she added.

“These are programs that are long overdue and are utterly necessary if the B-52 is going to be able to execute what we need it to do in today’s — and last into the future’s — strategic environment,” she said.

If the B-52 modernization ends up significantly more complicated than expected, and thus delayed, Penney explained, the Air Force may be forced to extend the life of some B-1s or B-2s beyond their planned early retirements in the 2030s just to keep enough operational bombers.

And if the Air Force opens up the B-52 and finds structural problems severe enough to jeopardize the re-engining?

“We can’t even go there,” Penney said. “It is such a must-do. We cannot fail.”

BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE, La. — As the B-52H Stratofortress tops more than six decades in service, it’s grown increasingly temperamental — and for the U.S. Air Force, a challenge to keep in the air.

Its original 1960s-era engines keep finding “new and creative” ways to break, as an Air Force Global Strike Command leader put it. Stocks of spare parts are limited, and the industrial base needed to repair broken components or make new ones is drying up.

The Air Force is scrambling to keep the B-52 bomber operational and is resorting to an array of options to do so — up to and including a process called cannibalization. To date, three out of every five B-52s are able to carry out their missions at any given time.

Airmen across the spectrum at Barksdale Air Force Base — from the flight line and supply shop to leadership — describe a situation where maintainers must regularly “cannibalize” parts, meaning take them off one B-52 to be installed on another so the second aircraft can fly.

It’s a lengthy process that can create further problems, and it’s meant to be a last resort. But the B-52 community is increasingly turning to that method. Tech. Sgt. Bonny Carter, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the B-52′s decentralized maintenance support section at Barksdale, said the rate of cannibalization has gone up 200% since 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic snarled supply chains worldwide.

Global Strike Command disputed that figure, though it acknowledged cannibalization rose over the last five years mainly due to obsolete parts. The command did not provide statistics on cannibalization rates, as requested by Defense News.

The Air Force is using other fallback options first, such as pulling parts out of the “Boneyard,” the Air Force’s airplane cemetery in Arizona where many retired B-52s rest. The service also combs the industrial base for new sources of fresh parts, and taps its own back shops and sustainment center to repair parts or make new ones. Back shops are rooms where specialized repair and maintenance is done on smaller components.

A wide-ranging series of modernizations for the B-52 — everything from new Rolls-Royce engines to new wheels and brakes — is on the way, and the Air Force hopes these upgrades will result in a more reliable airplane, with a fresh supply of spare parts that relieves some pressure on maintainers.

But until that happens, Global Strike Command will need to keep the B-52H flying, even if it’s increasingly daunting, said Col. David Miller, the organization’s director of logistics and engineering.

Vendors, pool of parts dwindling

The biggest maintenance challenge facing the B-52 is the “slow atrophy” of the defense-industrial base that supplies it, according to Miller.

“The vendor base is just drying up,” he said. “Trying to entice vendors to continue to make very old, very difficult parts in small numbers is a challenge,” particularly when it comes to specialized parts with little, if any, value to commercial aviation.

The reduction of the B-52 fleet over the years — from a high of 744 to 76 today — also shrunk the market for spare parts, further limiting companies’ opportunities to make money in this business. Some companies, particularly small mom-and-pop shops, have either decided to stop making parts the B-52 relies upon, or gone out of business entirely.

The new B-52: How the Air Force is prepping to fly century-old bombers

It can take months or even years to get some crucial parts for a B-52. One part, a valve, has a 900-day lead time, Miller’s office said, and his directorate is working to replace that rare piece with a more readily available valve.

Global Strike Command said it sometimes takes those valves off B-52s entering depot maintenance in order to install them on bombers preparing to fly.

The parts supply problem is particularly acute for the B-52′s TF33 engines, which Pratt & Whitney made in the 1960s, Miller said. Parts from those engines — or whole engines entirely — are the component most often cannibalized for B-52s, he said.

Miller noted the bomber depot at the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex used to regularly remove engines from B-52s as they entered their lengthy heavy maintenance process, then reinstall those components on other B-52s that were nearly finished with their overhauls. But with more spare parts on the depot shelves, the service no longer does that.

The Rolls-Royce F130 engines are to come with new parts that last longer before they break or require maintenance, as well as a fresh supply chain making readily available replacements when parts do break, he explained.

“What we’re buying into is an aircraft that’s not going to have to go through core maintenance very often, if at all,” Miller said. “As opposed to the TF33 — that goes through a lot of maintenance right now.”

‘Weapons hot’: Lessons and mistakes on a B-52 bomber training flight

The Pentagon in November moved to shore up the B-52′s engines, awarding Pratt & Whitney a contract worth up to $870 million to sustain nearly 1,000 TF33s. Those engines also power the E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control aircraft, and the sustainment contract could run through spring 2034.

In an interview with Defense News at the time of the contract’s award, Pratt & Whitney executive Caroline Cooper said the sustainment contract would help address the spare parts shortages exacerbated by the decline of companies making niche, low-volume parts for the B-52. Cooper said this deal provides funding for the firm to either make those parts itself or find other companies to take on the work.

“We’re looking at … the operational tempo of the aircraft, and then looking at the inherent risks in the supply chain, and wanted to build that upper limit so that we can move quickly and expeditiously to get the men and women in the Air Force what they need,” Cooper said in November.

Master Sgt. Dylan Drake, a production superintendent at Barksdale’s 2nd Maintenance Squadron, said maintainers are “excited” for the new engines to come online. If they’re as reliable as promised, he said, maintainers will be able to turn their attention to other parts of the B-52.

“If we don’t have to worry about the engines, that’ll let us focus on other systems,” Drake said.

Gallery: Take a flight in the US Air Force’s B-52 bomber

When maintainers remove faulty parts from the B-52, Miller said, sometimes they can be overhauled or repaired — but they sometimes must be replaced entirely. And that is growing harder and harder.

Carter, of the 2nd Logistics Readiness Squadron, said when a maintainer needs a spare part, the first step is to look in her supply shop’s own stocks, then reach out to other supply shops elsewhere if it’s not on the shelf. The decentralized maintenance support section Carter oversees stores and organizes spare parts for maintainers to fix Barksdale’s B-52s.

If they’re still striking out, the Air Force has workarounds, Miller and Carter said in separate interviews. That could include turning to an Air Force back shop to make a new part or the Air Force Sustainment Center at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.

Miller said the components undergoing production or overhaul at the sustainment center range from wire harnesses to larger, modular components known as line replaceable units.

The advantage of keeping the Air Force’s own industrial base for B-52 parts humming, Miller noted, is that the service knows it will be available if a war breaks out.

“You never know when we’re going to be called upon, perhaps in a wartime environment, to be able to provide that [maintenance in] real time,” he said. “That’s not the time to go out and find we’ve got to cold start [the production line], and [with] an 18-month delay, having a new vendor produce something for us.”

But the work is also stretching the service further. Carter said back shop airmen are working longer hours to fix broken parts — even those that previously weren’t their responsibility to repair.

It could mean pulling a part out of a retired B-52 in the Boneyard, officially known as the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group. But there are a finite number of B-52s there the service can scavenge, Carter said, so that solution will only work for so long.

It could mean hunting down a commercial company that does similar kinds of work and hiring them to make a part.

And if all else fails, airmen pull parts from one aircraft for installation on another. But that solution can make more problems.

“When we do the cannibalization, it downs another aircraft so we can make this aircraft flyable to conduct its mission, to get training hours,” Carter said. “And then we have to swap again. We are constantly swapping parts.”

“But we’re learning to work with what we got,” she added. “You know, more with less.”

The plane’s weapon systems officer, Capt. Jonathan “Loaner” Newark of the 11th Bomb Squadron at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, furiously taps targeting coordinates into a computer, his face bathed in green light.

Numbers on the screen tick down to zero as the bomber looms over its destination. The bomb bay doors open with a whir and a thump.

”Weapons hot,” Newark says over a crackling intercom. He reaches to his right and flips open a small panel covering a button designed to let loose a 2,000-pound bomb. “Bay three, releasing.”

In one of several passes, and without warning, the bomber jerks sharply upward as its student pilot, 1st Lt. Clay Hultgren, disengages the autopilot at the wrong time. Within seconds, the plane climbs past its assigned altitude limit of 20,000 feet — where it could run afoul of other aircraft.

Instructor pilot Lt. Col. Michael “Fredo” DeVita quickly grabs the yoke and wrestles the 185,000-pound bomber back down to a proper altitude, banking hard to the left. The plane steadies and resumes course as quickly as it veered off track.

No bombs — real or fake — were aboard the B-52 during its Jan. 4 training run. But the five-person aircrew on the flight dubbed “Scout 93″ practiced each step in the process as if they were headed for a airstrike at war.

Stratofortress pilots control six-decade-old hardware with a 185-foot wingspan — and the lives of the four or five airmen onboard. But the moment the Vietnam War-era bomber’s wheels leave the ground, anything can happen — and some of the most important lessons cover more than routine flight procedures.

During training flights, instructors impress upon younger lieutenants the seriousness of life and death when controlling one of the most formidable weapons of war ever built. Its crew must make calculations, down to the smallest decimal point, that ultimately determine whether the bomber strikes its intended target or innocent civilians.

“It’s tough to really glue everybody together,” Newark said. “At the end of the day, we’re all crew and we’re all in charge of those weapons. We all own them.”

Cold War plane, 21st-century training

Hultgren aims to join a long line of pilots that stretches back to the B-52′s debut in 1954. If his training goes as planned, he’ll be among those in the cockpit as the fleet remains in service for decades to come. The Air Force is now working on a series of upgrades, such as new engines, that aim to keep the B-52 flying until about 2060.

As the Stratofortress barrels toward a century in operation, its missions and training for the aircrew aboard must adapt to the digital age, too.

The new B-52: How the Air Force is prepping to fly century-old bombers

Five crew members were aboard the bomber that day, including three instructors: DeVita, 40, a pilot who commands the 11th Bomb Squadron; electronic warfare officer Capt. David “Rumble” Bumgarner, 35; and Newark, 34, the weapon systems officer. Rounding out the crew were pilot trainee Hultgren, 27, and WSO student 1st Lt. Jeremiah Tackett, 27, both too early in their careers to have earned their own call signs.

The mission marked Hultgren’s sixth training flight on the B-52, and Tackett’s 10th.

Their unit, the 11th Bomb Squadron, is the active duty component of the Air Force’s B-52 formal training unit. It takes airmen about nine months to finish the academics and flight training syllabi to learn to operate B-52s and their weaponry. About three dozen students graduated last year, the service said.

For Hultgren occupying the co-pilot’s seat is an exciting opportunity. He dreamed of flying when he joined the Air Force and would have been happy in any aircraft, he said. But being chosen to operate the B-52 — with its deep history and strong community with others who fly the Stratofortress — was thrilling.

“I like that I’m doing something that people have been doing for a while,” Hultgren said.

‘You scared him’

On the morning of the training flight, the crew strapped into their parachutes, donned their oxygen masks and buckled up for takeoff.

Their aircraft — completed in 1960 and dubbed the “Red Gremlin II” — eased onto the runway, following another outbound B-52 that spewed a plume of jet fuel exhaust as it departed.

Hultgren’s left hand rested on the bomber’s eight throttle levers, which allow the pilots to individually adjust the power to any engine that shows signs of trouble. DeVita reached over and guided him as they pushed forward in tandem.

A whine rose from the plane’s engines as it accelerated through the acrid cloud of exhaust. DeVita stuck his hand into Hultgren’s peripheral vision, flashing a thumbs-up. The student let go of the throttle and gently pulled back on the yoke with both hands. The Red Gremlin II was airborne.

A typical B-52 training mission almost always follows the same script: takeoff, a few passes with an aerial refueling tanker, simulated bomb runs, and a few touch-and-go landings. Each sortie lasts five or six hours.

During the nearly 6-hour, counterclockwise loop over Arkansas, Oklahoma and back to Louisiana, the B-52 flew alongside the first bomber, met up with a KC-135 Stratotanker for aerial refueling practice and logged bombing runs at Fort Johnson, Louisiana.

Aerial refueling is one of the hardest things for a pilot to master — especially when flying something as massive as the 159-foot-long B-52, mere feet away from a tanker that is almost as large, tens of thousands of feet in the air at hundreds of miles per hour. It requires a steady hand, Newark said, and is “where pilots make their money.”

“Two big airplanes, with a lot of aerodynamic forces, and you’re trying to make really small corrections,” DeVita said. “We’re talking corrections of … a couple feet left or right, on airplanes that are really close together. That’s the hardest part.”

There’s a lot of aerodynamics to consider. As Hultgren pulled the B-52 closer to the KC-135 for yet another round of refueling, the bomber entered the tanker’s downwash. The B-52 began drafting off the KC-135, causing the bomber to speed up as its air resistance waned.

A buzzer blared and red light flashed. The KC-135 pulled away. DeVita pushed Hultgren’s hand off the throttle and eased the plane back.

“You scared him a bit,” DeVita said. “That’s why I took over.”

‘More with less’: Lacking parts, airmen scramble to keep B-52s flying

But after spooking the tanker, Hultgren showed he could learn from his mistakes. DeVita gave him back the throttle and offered pointers on making incremental changes to the bomber’s power to find the “sweet spot” behind the KC-135.

“Whenever you’re ready,” DeVita said. “If you need a little bit more of a break, that’s fine.”

“Think we can do one more?” Hultgren asked. He slowly maneuvered the B-52 forward for its sixth refueling connection.

“Crank the power just a hair,” DeVita said. “Good.”

“F---ing awesome,” Hultgren murmured, as the refueling boom loomed larger and larger above the cockpit.

“That’s really good, dude,” DeVita said as the boom settled into place with a thunk. “Contact. Perfect.”

Hultgren kept practicing to get aerial refueling right, over and over, before the bomber parted ways with the KC-135 and flew back to Louisiana for bombing practice.

Like most training missions, this run was designed to pit the B-52 against a generic, unnamed adversary, Newark said. The crew of the Red Gremlin II practiced entering a simulated battlespace with enemy fighters and friendly forces — in this scenario, F-22 Raptor and F-16 Fighting Falcon fighters and an E-3 Sentry airborne target-tracking jet — before striking imaginary ground targets.

But instructors can throw students some curveballs. The bombing simulation began by striking soft targets such as aluminum aircraft hangars, before the instructors directed the crew to hit hardened two-story buildings in other locations. The deviation pushed Tackett, the student WSO, to decide what combination of munitions could best destroy the sturdier buildings, and to work with Newark to update the targets.

“It gives them [experience with] live problem-solving,” Newark said. “That’s what drove all those good discussions about, how would we destroy a troop staging area? How would we destroy a hardened building? Because we didn’t tell them ahead of time what it would be.”

For years, Stratofortress flights required five airmen — two pilots, two WSOs and an electronic warfare officer. But advancements in technology are allowing the Air Force to fold the EW officer’s duties into the WSO job, blending the bomber’s offensive and defensive roles and shrinking the crew to four.

Now WSOs can handle electronic warfare and airstrikes from computers that show data for both jobs, rather than making airmen sit at a designated station that can perform only one role.

Combining those tasks isn’t daunting for Tackett, the WSO-in-training. When asked how he juggles the sometimes-conflicting duties of a WSO, whose job is to take a plane close enough to a combat zone to strike targets, and an EW officer, who is responsible for keeping a plane out of danger, Tackett said: “A lot of it comes down to commander’s intent, and our mission for the day, making judgment calls, and assessing the situation from there.”

“Knowing both sides of it, I’m able to provide better recommendations to pilots” about where to go and what to hit, Tackett said.

A cramped ride

Flying on the B-52 can be exhausting, and even more so on operational missions that can last up to 36 hours. Despite being one of the biggest bombers ever built, the Stratofortress doesn’t leave much space or comfort for the crew.

It’s cramped and noisy. The constant roar of its six-decade-old engines creates such a din that airmen wear earplugs under their noise-canceling headsets and flight helmets. Without the communications system, it’s impossible to hear what someone else is saying, even when shouted from inches away.

Airmen must stoop when making their way from the cockpit to the electronic warfare station at the back of the jet’s upper level, and then down a ladder to the WSO station. Their posture in the seats isn’t much better.

“This is why our backs are all so screwed up,” DeVita said. “We’re sitting hunched over like this, with this heavy parachute on.”

Gallery: Take a flight in the US Air Force’s B-52 bomber

Amenities are few. A single bunk behind the pilot’s seat allows airmen to grab some shut-eye on long-haul flights; a small, well-used oven that can heat meals up to 400 degrees sits in the back. Typically, the crew brings light sandwiches or other snacks to ward off hunger, and — since it’s easy to get dehydrated while spending hours at high altitude — large bottles of water.

The B-52 crews find ways to entertain themselves in transit on ultra-long flights. Sometimes that means bringing a book; other times, 11th Bomb Squadron members plug a music player into the intercom, courtesy of a jury-rigged cable one airman soldered together.

In 2022, Air Force Global Strike Command launched a program at Barksdale called “Comprehensive Readiness for Aircrew Flying Training,” or CRAFT, to give airmen the physical, nutritional and mental tools to better weather the grueling missions.

But there’s one thing the Air Force can’t give crews: a real bathroom.

Behind this bomber’s WSO station, next to the bomb bay hatch, sits a single urinal without a curtain for privacy. Passengers are often reminded of the “Big Ugly Fat Fellow’s” cardinal rule: Do not go No. 2 on the B-52. An emergency garbage bag is on hand for those who really must go, but the crew is clear: Using it won’t win you any friends.

Debriefing the mission

After a series of repeated touch-and-go landings, the bomber came to a safe halt at Barksdale. The crew made their way back to Thirsty’s, a heritage room decorated with the insignia of the 93rd Bomb Squadron and other aviation memorabilia, a pair of arcade machines and a bar.

The crew popped jalapeño popcorn and cracked open small beers — only one per person — before the instructors started the debrief to run through the results of the day’s training.

They successfully refueled the bomber, and they hit their targets, which was good, DeVita said.

But then, DeVita said, the mission “started to go downhill.” The crew missed check-ins and roll calls they were supposed to make with other aircraft, and started to fall behind schedule.

“In real life … they might cancel the whole ball, because we didn’t speak up or show up,” DeVita told Hultgren and Tackett. The students listened with neutral expressions.

Then there was the matter of the lurch. After a simulated bomb drop at about 19,000 feet, DeVita said, Hultgren had turned off the autopilot while attempting a ‘break turn,’ in which an aircraft turns away hard from a potential threat. Hultgren didn’t account for the bomber’s nose pitching up, causing the sudden and unexpected climb, DeVita said.

“I’ll take the slap on the wrist for that,” Hultgren said. Some of the crew chuckled — but not DeVita.

“Did anybody tell you to kick off the autopilot and make that aggressive of a turn?” DeVita asked him. “Someone taught you that? Or did you teach yourself that?”

“My first-ever break turn, they said don’t use autopilot,” Hultgren said.

“Who?” DeVita said.

Hultgren demurred: “I don’t want to out him.”

DeVita told Hultgren that, at his current skill level, he should stick with the autopilot in those scenarios. And he warned Hultgren that kind of flying endangers the bomber and its crew.

“[At] the roll rate that you did today, I wasn’t comfortable that you were not going to break the airplane — not to mention the fact that we didn’t have control of the airplane, because we climbed 300 feet out of the airspace,” DeVita said.

But DeVita owned up to making his own mistake, when he relayed the wrong data to the crew during bombing practice.

“It can happen so easily, even to experienced people,” Newark said. “It has to be exact.”

The instructors stressed to the students that — even when they’re the new airman in their squadron, and even if it’s a more experienced commander who made a mistake — they need to speak up if they see even a single decimal point out of place on a bomb’s coordinates. Newark said he’ll sometimes give students the wrong coordinates during training to ensure they double-check the numbers.

“I wasn’t paying attention” won’t hold up as an alibi in court, Newark said.

“Don’t just be a passenger in that situation,” Newark said. “If we drop the bomb on the wrong target …”

“We all go to jail,” DeVita answered.

Though the training on “Scout 93″ didn’t go perfectly, that’s why the Air Force spends so much time training B-52 students, DeVita said. Instructors give their unvarnished feedback; students learn and grow from their mistakes.

Hultgren acknowledged his mistakes and said his aerial refueling skills have greatly improved, thanks to DeVita’s frank feedback. He and Tackett are on track to graduate in March.

“If we fly a sortie, and we don’t debrief anything [that went wrong], then we shouldn’t have wasted the taxpayer’s money by taking the airplane airborne,” DeVita said. “It’s not personal.”