The Department of the Air Force scrimped on fiscal 2025 plans to advance U.S. counterspace technology to deter China because of constraints in the Budget Control Act, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on April 30.
”Our greatest regret, if you will, in the constraints we had this year was we couldn’t move forward more quickly on counterspace capability, in particular,” Kendall told a Department of the Air Force fiscal 2025 budget hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense (HAC-D) panel. “Our pacing challenge is fielding a number of systems that threaten the joint force and are targeting assets like aircraft carriers. We need to have the capability to do something about those assets so they can’t provide an attack targeting surface to the Chinese military. That would be the highest thing on our list that we aren’t able to move forward as quickly as we’d like to.”
Last summer, a paper by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said that current systems, such as those in the Space Surveillance Network and the Satellite Control Network, are ill-suited to the “warfighting domain of space.” (Defense Daily, June 26, 2023).
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), the chairman of HAC-D, asked Kendall why the Air Force had chosen to reduce requested funding for programs under the service’s AFWERX innovation arm, including AFWERX Prime, and the “Agility and Autonomy Prime efforts,” which “dropped from $70 million in fiscal 2024 to $6 million in fiscal 2025.”
“I’m concerned that the Air Force has decided to slash resources in a well-known innovation hub,” Calvert said. “Mr. Secretary, what message are you sending to innovators, if AFWERX’s budget request has been gutted in fiscal year 2025?”
Kendall replied that he is committed to innovation and that the Air Force has budgeted $6 billion for modernization under his “operational imperatives,” but that innovation has to focus on affordable technology that has a good chance of reaching the field.
“The guidance I’ve given to our acquisition people is to structure programs to get meaningful capability in the hands of our operators as quickly as possible so that’s what we’re trying to do with our programs, but there’s also an observation that goes back some time that we’ve been starting more things than we can finish by a significant margin, ” Kendall said. “We have to be more careful about the things we start and be certain that they’re gonna be cost effective and fit into our budgets in the future and lead to real fielded capability. We’ve been trying to pare back some of the things which have little, if any, chance of transitioning across the ‘Valley of Death’ to focus on the things that will.”
One of the programs that stands a good chance of crossing that valley is the service’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), which may deploy from F-35 fighters and the manned Next Generation Air Dominance fighter to serve in roles, such as air-to-air, jamming, and reconnaissance.
Kendall said that his goal is to field “more than 100” CCAs in the next five years and that “$25 million to $30 million” is the “upper bound” of what CCA unit cost should be.
Last week, privately-held Anduril and General Atomics beat out publicly traded defense industry heavyweights, Boeing [BA], Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] for the service’s first round of CCA picks (Defense Daily, April 24).