U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that the Department of the Air Force is finalizing its recommendation for the first “quick start” modernization program allowed under the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, P.L. 118-31.
Section 229 of the law “gives us the ability to start what would be a major new program without waiting for this whole [congressional appropriations] process,” Kendall said on Feb. 8 at a RAND forum on the PPBE Reform Commission. “That’s a breakthrough to me…We’re working right now to identify the first program. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but I hope to be able to talk about it very shortly. We have to go through the approval process with the Secretary [of Defense Lloyd Austin], and then we’ll tell the Congress what we’re gonna do.”
Under continuing resolutions (CR), funding for new programs is prohibited. The current CR extends until early March.
Kendall told the Senate Armed Services Committee last May that an OMB legislative proposal to permit the military departments to spend up to $300 million for the early development phases of new programs would not reduce congressional oversight (Defense Daily, May 3, 2023).
P.L. 118-31 reduces that $300 million to $100 million. “We’re gonna use this [authority] and show that it does work, that it can be effective,” Kendall said. “We’ll give the Congress plenty of opportunity to decide whether we should continue or not, but it helps us to start and knocks an awful lot of that [final congressional appropriations delay] time off.”
While press articles have referred to some of the fiscal 2024 new starts as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and the Next Generation Air-refueling System (NGAS), the Air Force’s fiscal 2024 justification budget books do not refer to CCA and NGAS as such.
Some of the “new start” references in the service’s fiscal 2024 procurement and research and development budget request are $122 million for low-rate initial production of RTX [RTX] Force Element Terminals (FETs) under the Air Force’s Family of Advanced Beyond Line-of-Sight Terminals (FAB-T) program; $50 million for Project VENOM (Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model)–experimentation with autonomous software on multiple F-16 fighters to develop algorithms to tie drone sensors with those on Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35s; $40 million for the System Integration Lab to upgrade communications and availability of the five Boeing [BA] E-4B National Airborne Operations Center planes; and $29 million for Next Generation Airlift (NGAL), including $26 million for the Replace Multi-functional Controls and Display program for the Lockheed Martin C-5M airlifter and $3 million for NGAL capability studies;
The FETs are radiation-hardened satellite communications (SATCOM) terminals that are to permit the B-52 bomber to transition from the use of Ultra High Frequency signals from the five Lockheed Martin Military Strategic Tactical Relay (Milstar) satellites to signals from the six Lockheed Martin advanced extremely high frequency (AEHF) satellites (Defense Daily, Feb. 15, 2022).
The last Milstar–each of which has a design life of 10 years–launched in 2003.