The planned U.S. Air Force reorganization–known as Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition–will benefit the realization of the service’s priority research and development/acquisition efforts, such as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin suggested this week at the Air and Space Forces Association’s warfare symposium in Aurora, Colo.
Among the 24 initiatives under the reorganization are a Integrated Capabilities Office to spur coordinated modernization across the department; a Program Assessment and Evaluation Office to improve resourcing decisions; an Integrated Capabilities Command to develop “competitive operational concepts” and requirements that integrate systems; and a “refocus” of Air Force Materiel Command’s Air Force Life Cycle Management Center as the Air Dominance Systems Center “to synchronize aircraft and weapons competitive development and product support.”
The CCA effort is a successor to the Multi-Mission Long- Range uninhabited aircraft (MMLR) in the Air Force’s 2015 Future Operating Concept, Allvin said. That document contains 10 references to MMLR, all in anecdotal form from a hypothetical 2035 scenario in which a future “F-35D” variant plays a role.
“Risky 1 and 2 selected full afterburner to accelerate their F-35Ds to Mach 1.5, propelling Captain Miller and her wingman out ahead of their accompanying formation of multi-mission, long-range (MMLR) uninhabited aircraft,” according to the lead MMLR reference in the document. “The F-35Ds needed to get closer to the enemy in order to provide high-fidelity cueing to the long range shooters. Capt Miller’s situation display, fusing data from multiple airborne and surface sensors, space assets, and real-time intelligence inputs, showed her a gorilla-sized wave of enemy fighters, cruise missile shooters, and decoy aircraft, all protected by a blanket of electromagnetic jamming. At least the friendly jammers would give similar protection to her formation. Risky Flight had to take out the enemy bombers before they launched their hypersonic cruise missiles—otherwise the carrier strike group would be overwhelmed.”
Allvin told reporters at the AFA symposium this week that while “you cannot reorganize your way out of a problem, there are times when your organizational structure inhibits your ability to get to the function that you need.”
“I was lucky enough to be on the Air Staff in 2013/14 when we wrote the then Air Force Future Operating Concept,” he said. “You will see things in that document that look like Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Multi-Domain Command and Control became JADC2. We had the idea of proliferated LEO [low Earth orbit] back then. We thought it might be CubeSats shot from an F-35. Human machine teaming–all of those things were in that document. Why has it taken a decade for us to take some of those ideas and put them into development and production? I think part of it is because of our disaggregated structure, and we were building our force pieces at a time, and those concepts never rose to the top level of any of those functional parts of our Air Force so they remained somewhat dormant or concepts in the background. We want to integrate to where we have one force design, and we can drive faster into that future.”