U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown suggested on June 7 that the Air Force’s fiscal 2024 request for multi-year procurements (MYPs) for the Lockheed Martin [LMT] AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) and Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) and the Raytheon Technologies‘ [RTX] AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) will lead to future MYPs for other munitions.
The Air Force fiscal 2024 request for JASSM, LRASM, and AMRAAM MYPs “is just a start,” Brown told a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ virtual forum. “We’ve got to look at multi-year procurements. It helps give a predictable demand signal to industry, and it’s not just the primes. It’s all the subs below them so they actually have supply chains laid in…It helps us be able to surge when we need to.”
Munitions “is an area that we tend not to spend as much focus on, and I think we need to,” he said. “In some cases, because you don’t have a threat right on your door step, munitions aren’t maybe high on our priority list. Well, that’s different now. You think about what the National Security Strategy laid out with our pacing challenge of the People’s Republic of China and the increasing threat of Russia, and you see what’s happening in Europe.”
Following the August, 2020 release of Brown’s strategic approach for the Air Force, Accelerate Change or Lose, he signed four action orders in December 2020, including Action Order C on “competition” to promote analysis of Chinese and Russian aims and ways for the U.S. to deter/defeat aggression by those nations.
Revised in February last year, Action Order C charges the service deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements–now Lt. Gen. Clinton Hinote–with leading an effort to “develop concepts to effectively compete with adversaries across the competition continuum, from below the threshold of conflict (to deter aggressive and violent behavior counter to our national security interests) to using military force to deny adversaries their objectives in the event of conflict.”
“These concepts will use existing capabilities in novel ways and capabilities under development to attack the adversaries’ strategies and enable progress that solve prioritized operational problems contributing to the DAF OIs [Department of the Air Force operational imperatives], and ultimately defeat the adversaries’ ways of war,” per the order.
Using systems in new ways could include the General Atomics‘ MQ-9 for persistent signals intelligence, in addition to full motion video, and a collaborative Small Diameter Bomb by Boeing [BA], Brown said during the June 7 Mitchell Institute forum.
Last month, President Biden nominated Brown to succeed Army Gen. Mark Milley as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Defense Daily, May 25).
On June 7, Brown said that the Northrop Grumman [NOC] B-21 Raider stealth bomber and the LGM-35A Sentinel look to be on track for planned flight testing this year.
In response to a question on when the Air Force plans to accomplish in the coming years a downsizing of F-15E Strike Eagles from 217 to 99 and how the service will synchronize those retirements with a production ramp for 104 Boeing F-15EXs, Brown replied, “That’s an area that we will continue to look at, as we lay out across the FYDP looking at the F-15Es and when they’re programmed to retire and when we actually retire them.”
“We need to balance that, as we bring on additional capability and capacity,” Brown said. “That’s part of the dialogue of why I want to make sure we’ve taken a hard look across our capacity, not only for the Air Force, but for the Joint Force. I’ve had this same conversation with the other service chiefs on fighter capability and capacity.”
Combat aircraft receiving the biggest requested flying hour increases in fiscal 2024 are the Strike Eagle–13,106 hours, the Lockheed Martin F-35A–13,064 hours, the F-15EX–4,200 hours, and the A-10–2,507 hours. The Air Force requests 17,353 fewer hours in fiscal 2024 for the F-15C/D fleet, which the service wants to retire.
In fiscal 2024, the Air Force requests more than $8 billion for 1.1 million flying hours (Defense Daily, Apr. 6).
Brown said on June 7 that the Air Force needs to improve the management of its flying hour program to ensure pilots are getting the training they need and that requested flying hour increases are not going nearly exclusively to satisfy contingency demands.