But one option the Biden administration has definitively taken off the table: imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Experts told Defense News a no-fly zone would present multiple challenges — up to and including worries it could ignite a larger conflict between Russia and NATO.

“As much as we would love to say no-fly zones are super easy and it’s a clean way of doing business, this is simply not the case,” Heather Penney, a former F-16 pilot and senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said in an interview.

As Russian forces advanced on key Ukrainian cities, calls to impose a no-fly zone have increased. In a tweet Tuesday morning, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had “emphasized the need to close the sky over” Ukraine in a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

That’s not happening, the press secretaries for the White House and Pentagon said Monday.

In a press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said “that’s not a good idea,” adding that President Joe Biden does not want to risk putting the United States military in conflict with Russia.

“What that’d require is implementation by the U.S. military,” Psaki said. “It would essentially mean the U.S. military would be shooting down planes, Russian planes. That is definitely escalatory.”

For a no-fly zone to be credible, Penney said, the U.S. or NATO would have to shoot down any Russian aircraft or air defenses violating it — or the Russians would have to believe the U.S. would open fire so it would steer clear of Ukrainian airspace. If the U.S. or NATO declares a no-fly zone and doesn’t enforce it, it becomes a paper tiger.

“Do we want our credibility tested that way?” said Rachel Rizzo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

Penney said the U.S. opening fire on Russian forces would upend the delicate network of international support for Ukraine the administration and Europe have created.

“To be credible, we would have to be willing to take that first shot,” Penney said. “Starting that kinetic war with Russia is something that the administration has been very careful to avoid. Every element of escalation has been initiated from Russia, and that has been key to a lot of the international support for Ukraine.”

John Venable, a defense policy expert from the Heritage Foundation and former F-16 pilot, agreed. “A no-fly zone would be a declaration of war in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s mind,” he said.

Penney said the debate over a no-fly zone is what happens when neither side in a conflict achieves air superiority in a conflict, or displays “credible combat airpower” — though she said she fears Russia will do just that in the coming days.

Ukraine did not have the fighters and air defenses it needed to drive Russian aircraft out of its airspace, she said. And Russia, for whatever reason, did not commit the air forces it would need to definitively seize air superiority in the first days of the conflict.

“What we expected is not how things have gone down,” Penney said.

That is likely to change as Russia shifts course and commits more forces to the invasion, Penney said.

“The Ukrainian air force has put up a valiant effort to defend their airspace and their territory,” she said. “But they’ve been unsuccessful because they did not have the capabilities or the capacity, both from a fighter perspective and from an air defense perspective [such as surface-to-air missiles].

Ukraine has used its Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 combat drones very well, Penney said.

And Ukraine has lauded and mythologized its fighter pilots as heroes and emblems of national resistance, rallying around morale-boosting aerial victories over Russian aircraft.

But if Ukraine had definitively kept control of its skies, Penney said, its air force could do a lot more to destroy massed Russian forces. One potential target could have been the 40 mile-long Russian military convoy spotted outside of Kyiv in satellite images, she said, similar to the so-called “Highway of Death” attack on hundreds of Iraqi army vehicles retreating on six-lane Highway 80 from Kuwait to Basra in 1991.

Highways can allow militaries to rapidly and efficiently move large numbers of their vehicles and heavy equipment without risking them getting bogged down in mud or other unforgiving terrain. But they also can constrain forces and make them an easy target, Penney said — if their enemy has control of the skies.

A ‘night and day difference’

After the Gulf War, the U.S. and allies created no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq dubbed operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch.

Operating from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey for the north, and bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain for the south, U.S. aircraft, alongside British and French allies, conducted aerial reconnaissance, airborne command and control using E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, aircraft, and strikes against Iraqi air defenses.

Iraqi aircraft infrequently challenged the no-fly zone, but came under fire when they did. U.S. forces shot down two Iraqi MiG fighters that violated the no-fly zone in 1992 and 1993, as well as two Su-22 fighters in March 1991.

But maintaining those no-fly zones until the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003 was a considerable effort.

And a no-fly zone over Ukraine would be a “night and day difference” from Iraq, Venable said.

Dave Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who commanded Operation Northern Watch in 1998 and 1999, said each Iraqi no-fly zone typically had about 50 U.S. and allied aircraft on hand, to fly patrols a couple hours each day. Flying around the clock would have taken much more, he said.

Flying around-the-clock air patrols over Ukraine — a nation that covers more than twice the area of the Iraqi no-fly zones — would easily take hundreds of fighters, said Deptula, now dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“This is not just something you flip a switch and, OK, we’re gonna put a no-fly zone up,” Deptula said. “It requires extensive preparation and definition [of the mission and objectives] to be effective.”

It would also mean thousands of airmen across multiple bases to fuel, arm and maintain these fighters — not to mention a significant aerial refueling infrastructure to keep them in the air, and ISR aircraft such as the AWACS.

The Iraqi no-fly zone came after that nation’s air force, defenses and command and control were all but wiped out — a situation that doesn’t exist in Ukraine. A no-fly zone there would require a significant suppression of enemy air defense, or SEAD, effort to take out Russian defenses such as the highly capable S-400 surface-to-air missile system, likely with F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning IIs.

But the U.S. or NATO would very likely lose aircraft in such a mission, Venable said — and trying to rescue downed pilots in such a volatile region would test the limits of the military’s combat search-and-rescue capability.

Penney said the U.S. needs to look closely at Russia’s difficulties in the skies over Ukraine and draw lessons for how to establish, and the importance of, air superiority. For the last two decades, the U.S. has maintained “de facto air dominance” anywhere it has operated, she said.

That won’t be the case in the future, if war breaks out with China — or Russia.

“We’ve really taken [air superiority] for granted,” Penney said. “Our Air Force is the oldest and smallest that it’s ever been, and we could find ourselves in similar situations [as Russia], because we too may lack the capability and capacity.”

Rachel Cohen and Geoff Ziezulewicz contributed to this report.

Wilson sat down with Defense News and Air Force Times on Aug. 31 to discuss budget challenges and progress on several key procurement programs.

Can you go into any more detail on how you’re preparing for a possible continuing resolution and what it would mean for airmen?

If it were a short period of time it will have not much impact, and of course, we have shared what kinds of exceptions or issues that we would have to address with the Office of the Secretary of Defense and they will, of course, let the congressional leadership know.

If it goes on for a long period of time, or there’s no release from the limits on the Budget Control Act it will become a very serious problem for the Air Force. We are a service that is too small for what’s being asked of us, so we have surged to the fight. We have readiness issues at home already and if we were to have to continue next year, either on a continuing resolution that was flat from last year or even worse, under sequester limits — and if you go back to 2013 and see what happened in the service at that time, it would be very similar, though probably in terms of budget it would be a deeper cut and probably the equivalent of four months of flying time for the entire Air Force.

What that would mean is, if you were in combat or spinning up to go to combat, you’d get to fly. Just about everything else would be grounded, and we have a problem now with retention of pilots. If we have to ground the air force when the airlines are hiring, it would be devastating and it would be years to recover from it.

Based on your experience in Congress, do you think we’re going to have a short-term CR or do you think they’re going to actually get a budget deal through?

That’s one of those things where you have to be really close into the decision makers at the time to understand it. And the thing that I worry about now is, there’s so much going on in the world and we’ve got a thousand airmen who are deployed in support a huge national disaster, epic scale natural disaster in Texas. There are people focused on all kinds of policy issues, we’ve got tensions rising in the Far East. I worry that people — there’s a lot of demand on every member of congress that don’t relate to the security of the country and it only matters when things go wrong and then it’s too late.

Senator McCain and representative Thornberry have called for the service to give them the list of the programs that would be affected if a CR hits. Do you have a better sense now of what programs would be vulnerable?

Unless exempted, we would expect that all of the new starts would be delayed.

Does that include T-X?

It would include everything … unless it’s exempted.

Could you select a winner on T-X without giving them the actual contract award?

Well, what’s the point?

Fair enough.

We don’t have the money to be able to so it. You end up delaying a lot of new starts, probably would have a hard freeze if not a chill on hiring. We’re trying to hire people in cyber. In training, we’re trying to increase the number of pilots we’re putting through pilot training. Well, if you can’t hire the civilian pilots to be able to train them, we’re not going to be getting better there either. This becomes, very quickly, an extremely difficult problem.

Could I ask about the light attack aircraft demo that happened this month? Have you guys made a decision on whether to conduct that combat exercise?

We finished the experiment yesterday. We expect the final report to be done by the end of December. I would expect this fall or certainly by December, January, that we will make a decision on whether to do a follow-on experiment that would be a combat experiment and which aircraft might participate in that.

When you say combat experiment, what exactly do you mean?

We would probably bring it to the theater. I’m not sure exactly what missions they would run, but one of the things we can do is see how it connects up with command and control systems and other kinds of things. They did that with an OV-10 aircraft that they pulled out of the bone yard and brought it forward into the Middle East probably three or four years ago, something like that.

Given the talk of the need for more airpower in Afghanistan, does that intensify the need for a light attack aircraft?

I think we’ll see what we learn from the experiment and take a look at that and see what it tells us. One of the things that was striking to me on my recent trip to Iraq and Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, was the extent to which we were dependent on tankers. We were doing about 65 tanker sorties a day, fighter aircraft that’s taken a bite to ISIS, probably refuels four or five times in each mission. It is very tanker dependent and some of the light aircraft that we’ve seen do have refueling capabilities, some don’t. I think that’ll be one of the factors to consider.

General Carlton Everhart from Air Mobility Command has talked pretty extensively about the high demand for that asset. Do you think that might mean that there’s a need to increase the program of record for KC-46, maybe?

I don’t see the increase in the program of record. The thing that concerns us most about the tanker force is the demand on the people. We’re now operating at one-to-one, so in other words, if somebody is deployed forward for six months then they’re home for six months, but they’re not really home.

Could I ask about the Air Force One program? A couple weeks ago, the Air Force awarded a contract to Boeing for two aircraft that had been previously built for a Russian airline but had always remained in the possession of Boeing. Could you talk a little bit about how that deal came about? The optics could have looked pretty bad, So, did the Air Force have to do a lot of work with Congress to get them onboard?

On any procurement, we always try to inform the Congress on what we’re doing. We have a pretty standard engagement process to let people know when we’ve made a decision on something, so it’s pretty straight-forward and standard in that way.

It’s our desire to get the best value we can for the tax payer, and in this case, there was a company that ordered aircraft that they never accepted and the company went bankrupt so Boeing was left holding some airplanes that had never left Boeing’s possession and we were able to get a good deal on them.

When did the Air Force become aware that those aircraft were available? Was that something that the Air Force discovered on its own?

I actually don’t know the details on that. It was handled in Air Force acquisition.

Do you know how much the cost-savings overall for the program are at this point? President Trump has said that he wanted to shave a billion off the cost of the program. Are you guys going to meet that?

We will at some point release a total cost number. We do have an agreement for competition reasons not to release the cost of the air frames, but we got a good price.

But I think at this point, the requirements have been evaluated and then firmed up again, so were there any changes that the Air Force believes will allow for a high amount of savings?

I am aware that they did go back with the White House military office and look very carefully at all of the requirements and revalidate those requirements to see if there were opportunities to reduce cost, and then there will be a fair amount of negotiation to make sure that we’re getting good value for money.

But, we have that obligation no matter what the program is and every dollar that we spend was earned by somebody and we need to make sure that we get good value for money on everything that we buy.

Along those lines, Boeing is supposed to deliver 18 KC-46 tankers by October 2018, and Boeing’s encountered a lot of issues along the way. I know people in the Air Force have expressed skepticism that’s going to be met. How to you feel about the chances of Boeing being able to meet that requirement and have you begun discussions with them about what happens if they don’t meet it?

Let me see if I can remember the details of this. Boeing has a fixed—this is a fixed price contract and it does have a provision in there for delivery by a certain date without there being some penalties and so-forth. If they aren’t able to meet the contractual requirements, we will engage with them about what kind of compensation there might be.

They went through this once before — they added in some additional training and some other things because they failed to meet one of the dates, but we have kept the requirements absolutely firm and are holding them to the contract, so I think they’re highly motivated to do everything they can to meet the dates.

We should know fairly soon as the real long pole in the tent had to do with FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] testing and certification for airworthiness and I know that that was ongoing over the summer and into the fall here. The Air Force believes that that was a risk. At the same time, Boeing has worked more with the FAA than we have. We just thought it was a pretty aggressive schedule to get FAA approval.

We should know and Boeing probably should know pretty soon whether they’re on track or not.

As a Republican congresswoman who represented New Mexico from 1998 to 2009, Wilson served on the House Armed Services Committee and Energy and Commerce Committee. Immediately afterward, she was employed by Sandia Corp., a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin that runs the government-owned Sandia National Laboratories, which develops components used in nuclear weapons.

Although Wilson has said she didn’t personally engage in lobbying — which would have been illegal for one year after she left Congress — emails show that she played a critical role in helping Lockheed craft a strategy that allowed Sandia to retain its contract without having to rebid in a competitive environment, the Center for Public Integrity reportedearlier this year. Lockheed paid $4.7 million in 2015 to settle allegations that it had used federal funds to illegally lobby on its behalf.

Wilson made almost half a million dollars working with government nuclear labs from 2009 to 2013, but an investigation by the Energy Department’s inspector general found no evidence that she had provided work. The private firms in charge of the labs reimbursed the government for most of that sum.

It’s unlikely that questions about Wilson’s employment history will derail her probable confirmation by the Senate, and nor should it, Dennett said. Still, SASC should press Wilson about her time with Sandia Corp. and what services she provided the government labs, Dennett added.

“[Wilson] hasn’t proven to be the best steward of money, in addition to generally showing a lack of interest of complying to oversight practices,” she said.

If confirmed, Wilson will serve in the Air Force’s top civilian position as the Pentagon invests about $400 billion a year into nuclear modernization, according to the Congressional Budget Office, potentially to companies for whom Wilson has worked.

The Air Force owns two legs of the nuclear triad, intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable bombers, and plans to begin procuring new versions in the early 2020s. Two major nuclear programs are currently in source selection: the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, which will replace the Minuteman III ICBMs, and the long range standoff cruise missile. Lockheed Martin has expressed interest in bidding on both contracts.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein signed a memo on March 8 formally authorizing the flight demonstration, service spokeswoman Ann Stefanek confirmed in an email to Defense News. The memo explains that the Air Force plans to conduct a variety of experiments meant to help the service make future force structure and modernization decisions, with the light attack aircraft demo as the first campaign.

A formal invite to industry is expected within weeks or perhaps even days. The Air Force’s strategic development planning and experimentation office, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, will lead the effort.

The service has not reached consensus on potential OA-X requirements, only that entries must be low-cost and ready for production. Therefore, Textron is proposing multiple options with different layers of capability.

If the service opts for an inexpensive turboprop type of aircraft, Beechcraft’s AT-6 could be a good fit, said Grant. The aircraft is based on the T-6A used by the Air Force for basic pilot training and modified for the light attack mission. The AT-6 features seven hard points for general-purpose, laser-guided and inertially aided weapons. It also boasts low operating costs and can be flown for less than $1,000 per hour.

“When it comes to a turboprop, we believe that it is a very viable candidate,” Grant said.

In that category, the AT-6 could come up against Embraer’s A-29 Super Tucano, which the U.S. government has purchased for the Afghan air force. But while commonality with allies could be a selling point for the A-29, the idea of buying a Brazilian plane could rankle the “America First” Trump administration.

If the service is willing to pay more for added capability, the Scorpion jet offers greater performance and more flexibility than a turboprop plane, said Bill Harris, Textron AirLand’s vice president of Scorpion sales.

Textron designed the Scorpion with modularity in mind, allowing it to quickly adapt different sensors and weapons in its internal payload bay or the six hard points located on the wings, which can collectively carry 6,200 pounds of ordnance.

The jet’s ability to fire precision-guided munitions while maintaining low levels of noise could make it a better choice for urban close-air support than loud, less advanced turboprop planes, Harris said.

“These confusing, urban-type battlefield engagements where the target has very short dwell time and it’s hard to dig out where the target might be [located], so you’re working with ground forces as well as other aircraft,” he said. “I think the Scorpion has some capabilities with the sensors that it can carry to tackle that kind of a mission that may be a little more difficult for an AT-6.”

The Scorpion hasn’t found a launch customer, and Textron AirLand is currently in the throes of manufacturing the third production-conforming jet. Depending on the size of the order and the modifications, Harris estimated unit prices could clock in at $20 million to $30 million a copy, with an operating cost of about $3,000 per flight hour.

But once SLATE is integrated into the fleet, that F-15E will be able to see the F-16 as a MiG-29, or any other adversary aircraft, on all of its sensors and displays. The idea is to more accurately replicate the conditions of battle, including simulating various environments, adversary weapons and other systems not in the US inventory.

“When we take off, go around the area and point at each other, I have the radar cross section signature of a MiG-29, I have all of the radar emissions of a MiG-29, so when I lock him up, he doesn’t see on his radar warning receiver a symbol for an F-16. He sees a MiG-29,” Noah said.

“The first time that he knows that I’m not a MIG-29 is finally, at let’s say 2.1 miles, gets a visual on me,” he said. “Up until then, he doesn’t know.”

Once SLATE is integrated, an F-15E in the training simulation will see the F-16 as a MiG-29, shown here, or other adversary aircraft, on all of its sensors and displays.

Photo Credit: powerline1/Getty Images

AFRL is overseeing the development of three key technologies for the program: a radio waveform that can manage the unprecedented throughput of data between the different LVC assets, high-level data encryption that keeps sensitive information like radar signatures from proliferating, and a multi-level security system that allows different data to be passed to US and international assets depending on the level of classification.

The waveform, called the Fifth Generation Advanced Training Waveform (5GATW) has been fully developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory and performed final flight tests in September, Noah said. During the tests, Lincoln Labs stressed the waveform by passing as much data as possible between ground stations and two aircraft, an L-29 and Dassault Falcon 20 owned by the labs.

Cubic is responsible for the rest of the system, including creating the encryption and security architecture as well as manufacturing a software-defined radio about the size of a smartphone capable of managing and processing the 5GATW, said Mike Knowles, vice president of air ranges. It’s also making the ground support system that will provide connectivity between the LVC elements.

Over the upcoming months, the company will integrate those technologies — along with an antenna, power amplifier and a processor — together into a pod that will be attached to fourth-generation aircraft.

“Inside our labs as systems integrator in San Diego, we’re already putting together the software-defined radio, the waveform we integrated, the multi-level secure architecture and the ground station,” he said. “So in our lab now, we’re at the point where we can do simulated connectivity of the system, so we can test out and verify the communications. The encryption system is already under the NSA [National Security Administration] process for certification.”

During I/ITSEC, the company showcased some of the systems that will be encapsulated into the pod, which will be about the size of an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. For fifth-gen jets like the F-35 and F-22, more engineering will be required to internally install the capability, preserving its low observability. That’s not a part of SLATE’s technology demonstration phase and will be done later on when the service starts an acquisition program, but Cubic has proposed some ideas to AFRL on how the core systems could be integrated into the joint strike fighter (JSF).

“For JSF, it’s not going to be that hard. [For] a lot of the SLATE components, the hardware is designed to be able to be able to port into JSF in the future,” said Tim Cockerham, a senior principal systems engineer for Cubic. For instance, some of the technologies used for SLATE could replace older processors or other subsystems that are larger in size.

The Air Force has committed $49 million for the technology development phase, and the Navy plans to add about $20 million of its own funds.

AFRL and Cubic are going to continue testing and developing SLATE over the next year. Three two-week demonstrations at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, which will include Navy participation, are planned in 2018, Noah said.

The first demo, planned for March, involves a couple F-15Es and F/A-18s interfacing with some virtual and constructive players

the ground control stations, passing data back and forth

​.

“We’re just making sure we have connectivity out on the range at Nellis,” he said.

Another demonstration in May increases the number of actors and the influx of data being exchanged. The capstone event in October will take it up yet another notch: up to 16 live aircraft acting as blue forces, additional live aggressor forces, and then “a classified number” of virtual and constructive forces.

“But it’s going to be a lot because we want to show how much the system can handle,” he said.

Future Acquisition

Once technology development ends, it will be up to the service to spin SLATE into a competitive program of record. That’s not exactly an easy thing to do in this fiscal environment for a capability that will cost billions, and possibly tens of billions, Noah said. However, the service’s Life Cycle Management Center, the acquisition arm of Air Force Materiel Command, has designated employees to help ensure a smooth transition.

“They come to work in our building just to be joined at the hip with what AFRL is doing with SLATE,” he said.

AFRL is already engaged in regular meetings with Air Combat Command — which has been designated the lead command for LVC platforms — and with Lynda Rutledge, the program executive officer for the agile combat support directorate, who is in charge of acquiring simulators.

The acquisition strategy has not been finalized, but “this is going to be multiple programs of record because LVC is so huge,” he said.