By Michael Sirak
Fielding game-changing weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and systems based on laser and microwave beams, demands a new cadre of scientists and engineers as well as steady funding, according to a senior Air Force munitions developer.
“There has to be funding to bring them along, to mature them, to transition them to systems,” Judy Stokley, deputy program executive officer for Weapons, told Defense Daily during an interview last month at the 33rd Air Armament Symposium in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla. “But as a companion to that, we have to be growing a workforce with the high- tech skills and the experience in these different fields to work those programs.”
Stokley serves concurrently as executive director of the Air Armament Center (AAC) at Eglin AFB, Fla.
The AAC has identified three thrust areas in the near term: defeating hardened and deeply buried targets; weaponizing directed-energy laser and high-powered-microwave concepts; and neutralizing time-critical targets via capability like hypersonic missiles and mini munitions fired from unmanned aerial vehicles (Defense Daily, Oct. 11 and Nov. 15).
The center is laying in the planning and programming to move out in these realms. However, like all aspects of Air Force acquisition, there exist challenges in securing the funding available to advance the new concepts.
“We are using everything a lot in the war, and yet we are faced with these budget constraints,” said Stokley. “And we also have a wealth of technology and capability needs and would like to get more advanced capabilities.
“So it is finding the right balance between spending for the war today, investing for the future and taking care of our inventory,” she continued. “And so, that whole picture of modernization and recapitalization, just like the rest of the Air Force, is what we see as our biggest challenge.”
The current munitions inventory is aging, in some cases already surpassing its design life, Stokley said. For example, 57 percent of the Air Force’s inventory of AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles are already older than their design life, she said.
This does not mean that the missiles are no good since they “last longer than they are designed for” and the AAC closely monitors them to ensure that they remain as robust as possible, she said.
To address the workforce issue, AAC has been working closely with local universities and executing mentoring-scholarship programs, she said. The center has also stood up an Air Armament Academy that brings in specialists from across the Air Force enterprise, including the Air Force Research Laboratory, to instruct the weapons engineers and update their proficiencies.
Finally, Stokley said, AAC funds internship programs in career fields relevant to weapons development, and then works to secure full-time positions for these interns when an older weapons designer retires.
These activities are so AAC remains “a vibrant center that can bring these game-changing technologies forward,” she said.