People lined up well before the start of the service at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest to file past the open coffin and say their goodbyes to Fortson, who was shot six times by a deputy responding to a May 3 call about a possible domestic violence situation at Fortson’s apartment complex in the Florida Panhandle. He was 23.

Fortson’s face and upper body were visible in his Air Force uniform, with an American flag draped over the lower half of the coffin. After viewing the body, many mourners paused to hug one another.

“As you can see from the sea of Air Force blue, I am not alone in my admiration of Senior Airman Fortson,” Col. Patrick Dierig told mourners, referring to the rows of airmen who took up nearly an entire section of the sprawling church.

“We would like to take credit for making him great, but the truth is that he was great before he came to us,” said Dierig, who commands the 1st Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Air Force Base in Florida, where Fortson was stationed.

The Rev. Jamal Bryant opened his eulogy with a story about how civil rights icon Medgar Evers joined the Army during World War II even though he and other Black American service members were fighting for freedoms abroad that they didn’t enjoy at home.

The 1963 killing of Evers, a Mississippi NAACP leader who was gunned down by a white supremacist, “showed all of America that you can wear a uniform and the uniform won’t protect you, that regrettably sometimes the skin you wear is more of a magnet to opposition than the uniform that you bear,” Bryant said. “Because in America, before people see you as a veteran, as an airman in the United States Air Force, they’ll see you as a Black man.”

Bryant also called for justice in Fortson’s killing.

“We’ve got to call it what it is: It was murder,” Bryant said. “He died of stone cold murder. And somebody has got to be held accountable. Roger was better to America than America was to Roger.”

The Fortson family’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, delivered a rousing address, telling the gathering: “We will remember him for the American patriot he was.”

“He was the best from East Atlanta. … He was the best from the state of Georgia. He was the best from America. He was one of the best this world had to offer,” Crump said.

In a recorded video played at the service, the Rev. Al Sharpton also highlighted Fortson’s military service and called for his death to not go unpunished.

“He as a young Black man stood up, signed up to fight for this country. The question now is will the country stand up and fight for him? … That is the question and that is what we intend to get an answer to,” Sharpton said.

After the service, airmen saluted and Fortson’s mother embraced mourners outside the church as his casket was carried to a horse-drawn carriage and led away.

On Thursday, Fortson’s mother vowed to get justice for her son, who had served in overseas combat zones. At a news conference held by the family and Crump, Meka Fortson spoke glowingly about how her son had always stayed on a positive path and had never been in trouble or shown signs of violence.

She also had a message for Okaloosa County Sheriff Eric Aden: “You’re going to give me justice whether you want to, Sheriff Aden, or not,” she said.

On the day he was killed, Fortson opened the door while holding a handgun pointed toward the floor, according to the deputy’s body camera footage. The deputy shouted, “Step back!” and then shot Fortson six times. Only afterward did he shout, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun!” The deputy then called paramedics on his radio.

Fortson’s family and Crump argue that the shooting was completely unjustified and that the deputy had gone to the wrong apartment while responding to a call about a possible domestic disturbance in progress at the apartment complex. Fortson was home alone and talking to his girlfriend on FaceTime when he grabbed his gun because he heard someone outside his unit, Crump has said.

The deputy, whose name has not been released, shot Fortson within moments of the airman responding to the deputy’s knocking and opening his door. Sheriff’s officials say the deputy acted in self-defense.

Two weeks after the shooting, the sheriff has yet to release an incident report, any 911 records or the officer’s identity, despite requests for the information under Florida’s open records act.

The case is among many around the country in which Black people have been shot in their homes by law enforcement personnel.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating and the deputy has been placed on administrative leave.

The B-52’s nuclear option of choice is the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, commonly referred to as the ALCM. Fully loaded, the B-52 can carry 20 of the weapons. But like the plane that launches them, the weapons are on the older side, having been produced in the early to mid-1980s.

“A lot of this stuff predates the airmen I have working on ’em,” said Senior Master Sgt. Daniel Abrams-Trust, the cruise missile flight chief for the 2nd Munitions Squadron at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Interviews at Barksdale were conducted by journalist and Defense News contributor Jeff Bolton.

“So while it was extremely sophisticated at the time, it’s fallen out of favor. Some of that technology’s requiring service-life extensions where we identify maybe some high-failure areas, things that we need to replace,” Abrams-Trust said.

Click here for videos and more coverage of the B-52 and the B-2.

The ALCM “had an initial service life of 10 years,” Abrams-Trust added. “It was really only meant to go to early to mid-’90s, be replaced by the advanced cruise missile. And while we fielded that, advanced cruise missile had some challenges logistically, maintenance was difficult. So we’ve pushed through the ALCM even further.”

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are currently on contract for $900 million as part of a four-and-a-half-year technology-maturation and risk-reduction phase to design the new weapon (the full cost of the heavily classified program is unknown). In fiscal 2022, the Air Force plans to choose between the designs. The service intends to integrate the weapon with its nuclear-capable bombers — the B-52, B-2 and B-21 — with initial fielding slated for the late 2020s.

Along with the newly designed ALCM is a newly designed warhead, known as the W80-4, currently in the early design stages with the National Nuclear Security Administration. Because the warhead is being designed at the same time as the delivery system — the first time in 30 years the two projects have been done in parallel — the program faces “unique” risks, according to NNSA’s most recent annual report to Congress.

The first production unit of the W80-4 is expected to be delivered in FY25, with completion of the production run by FY31. Costs are expected to range between $6.7 billion and $10.3 billion between FY18 and FY32; however, the warhead program experienced “a loss of $120 million in productivity due to delays associated with Continuing Resolutions since the beginning of FY 2016,” according to the NNSA report.

For a few years, it looked like the LRSO program might be in for a rough ride from congressional Democrats. But the introduction of even newer nuclear weapon systems through the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review appears to have taken the heat off the new cruise missile. And for advocates of the air-based leg of the nuclear triad, keeping the B-52 as up to date as possible is a good thing.

“When we say nuclear modernization, we are merely replacing the current triad. We are not expanding our capabilities, we’re not violating a treaty, we’re not developing a new capability. It’s a very reasonable response to the threat,” Robert Soofer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, said during the 2019 Defense News Conference.

With Russia and China modernizing their nuclear arsenals, and the U.S. engaged in what the Pentagon has termed as a renewal of “great power competition,” Soofer described the overall nuclear modernization efforts as “sensible,” “reasonable” and “affordable.”

But keeping the nuclear deterrent viable doesn’t just involve technology, noted Lt. Col. James Daily, deputy commander of the 2nd Operations Group at Barksdale.

“The bomber is that flexible, visible and recallable arm of the triad, and one of the things that we’re looking at is how do we do [operations] better everyday based on the environment,” Daily said.

“Back in the day, it was a two-player game during the Cold War. Now you’ve got multiple players, different environments and different considerations to include. We talk about extended deterrents for allies and things like that, so how do we better posture the force, is what we’re look at everyday.”

“What is the right mix of fixed wing, rotary wing, manned and unmanned that can do the business of light attack?” Goldfein said in an exclusive Jan. 26 interview. “What is the right mix and how do we bring allies and partners in right now with us — not just periodically parachute in — but how do we expand this experiment to bring them into the tent with us?”

While the Air Force is still finalizing its strategy on light attack, Goldfein’s comments hint that a lack of interest by partner nations may have shaped the decision not to press ahead with a program of record late last year.

The Air Force was set to issue a request for proposals in December for a light-attack platform. The competition would been open to only the Embraer-Sierra Nevada Corp. A-29 Super Tucano and the Textron AT-6 Wolverine, two fixed-wing turboprops that the service said were best suited to meet the needs of the program.

But now, other aircraft could be joining them.

Goldfein said the Air Force chose not to release that RFP for two reasons: ongoing budget uncertainty and the desire to expand the parameters of what the service is seeking.

“For us to issue an RFP when we didn’t [know] what the budget was … and setting an expectation that we’re ready to go into source selection when we’re still working our way through the strategy, in my mind, would have been irresponsible,” Goldfein said. “I’ve talked to both of the CEOs involved, and we want to make sure we strengthen the partnership and build it as we go forward.”

Goldfein added that light attack was not something that was central to what the Air Force needed, saying that it would only be funded if the money is available in upcoming budgets.

Increasing interoperability has been a longtime goal of the light-attack experiments, but it appears to have taken on new importance as the experiment potentially moves forward.

Goldfein and other Air Force officials have spoken at length about the potential benefit of a common, off-the-shelf attack aircraft that could be purchased by countries that can’t afford the F-16, but still want to deepen ties with the U.S Air Force. Over the course of the effort, foreign delegations have been invited to observe flight demonstrations of the A-29, AT-6 and other previous contenders at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.

However, not all nations could want a turboprop aircraft like the A-29 or AT-6.

“Some countries, it actually would be better to have an unmanned option. Some countries, [it] would be better to have a rotary-wing option,” Goldfein said. “Some countries would do fixed wing, but [only with a] turbojet [engine]” instead of a turboprop.

And regardless of whether the service does buy the new jets this year, Goldfein said the new aircraft won’t be taking money from the Lockheed Martin F-35.

“I’m not backing an inch off of the F-35” Goldfein said. “The F-35 buy that we’re on continues to remain on track. And I’m not interested in taking a nickel out of it when it comes to buying anything else in the fighter portfolio.”

The FY2020 defense budget has been the focus of speculation for months, and the Pentagon has still not released a final topline figure.

Original planning had called for a $733 billion topline, which dwindled down to $700 billion after calls from President Donald Trump to slash federal spending and then ballooned up to $750 billion after the intervention of then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

In December 2018, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told Defense News that “all options are on the table,” and on Saturday Goldfein acknowledged that the service had built multiple budgets as different figures were proposed.

“We built the [$]730[billion] budget, and we went in and did a drill said what if we only get [$]700[billion] and what do we subtract, and what if there was a [$]750[billion] budget?” he said.

Goldfein would not directly confirm that the Air Force has the money in the budget for the new planes. But he hinted strongly that the service would pull the trigger on acquiring them.

The F-15X is an improved model from Boeing, teaming a new airframe with an improved radar, cockpit, electronic warfare suite and the ability to carry more missiles, bringing in upgrades that have been developed for the F-15s sold to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Late last year, Bloomberg reported that the Air Force was planning to request $1.2 billion for 12 of the fourth-generation jets in the 2020 budget request. The report said the aircraft would go to the Air National Guard to replace the olders F-15Cs, which date to the 1980s.

And that age is why the Air Force is looking at a new variant. The service currently has about 230 F-15C and D model aircraft in service. However, Goldfein acknowledged those aircraft don’t have the lifespan to make it to 2030 like other current fourth-generation aircraft, such as the F-15E, the F-16 and A-10.

“It [has] performed brilliantly, but the cost growth runs to a point to where you’re spending too much money,” Goldfein said.

The Air Force’s decision to buy new F-15s came as a surprise late last year, as Air Force leadership had previously pushed back on the Boeing sales pitch. As recently as September 2018, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said that the Air Force needed to prioritize buying fifth-generation aircraft.

“We are currently 80 percent fourth-gen aircraft and 20 percent fifth-generation aircraft,” she said at the time. “In any of the fights that we have been asked to plan for, more fifth-gen aircraft make a huge difference, and we think that getting to 50-50 means not buying new fourth-gen aircraft, it means continuing to increase the fifth generation.”

But, Goldfein said Saturday that the decision to possibly refresh the F-15 fleet comes down to the need for more fighters in service, regardless of generation.

“They complement each other,” he said. “They each make each other better.”

When asked if that meant compromising for quantity over quality, he said that would not be the case.

“We’ve got to refresh the F-15C fleet because I can’t afford to not have that capacity to do the job and the missions.” Goldfein explained. “That’s what this is all about. If we’re refreshing the F-15C fleet, as we’re building up the F-35 fleet, this is not about any kind of a trade.”

He added that Air Force needs to buy 72 fighters a year to get to the amount they need in the future — and to drive average aircraft age down from 28 years to 15 years. And while Goldfein might want all 72 to be fifth generation F-35s, budgetary concerns likely won’t let that happen.

“If we had the money, those would be 72 F-35s. But we’ve gotta look at this from a cost/business case.” he explained. “An F-15 will never be an F-35. Never. But I need capacity.”

EVERETT, Wash., and MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. — On the chilly morning of Jan. 25, just as the sun was beginning to rise, two KC-46 refueling tankers took off from Boeing’s Everett, Washington, delivery center and began flying toward McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas. Later that day, it touched down, to cheers from airmen assigned to the base’s 22nd Air Refueling Wing.

It took only minutes for the aircraft to taxi and take to the skies — a welcome lack of drama for a program that has seen prolonged challenges: a virulent competition between two companies, two years of schedule delays and more than $3 billion in cost overruns that manufacturer Boeing had to pay out of pocket.

The delivery of the first two KC-46 Pegasus planes was almost two decades in the making. As such, the event was treated as a momentous celebration by Boeing officials, who held a ceremony Thursday marking the occasion with its Air Force customer.

On Friday, Air Force leadership, congressional representatives and Boeing executives witnessed the aircraft’s arrival at McConnell for yet another event.

“To me, its personal to bring on this capability,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said after arriving on base. “This is a big day for us.”

“I think we all know the journey over the last several years,” Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said Thursday. “It hasn’t been easy. In fact, it’s been hard. But this team stuck to it. This team worked together.”

At the Everett ceremony, Boeing brought in a band to play classic rock songs by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin before the ceremony, dispersed cookies and chocolate lollipops featuring the KC-46, and had a tanker-themed “selfie station” where visitors could take photos of themselves with the Pegasus on display.

Over the KC-46 flight test program, the aircraft clocked 3,800 hours in the sky and pumped more than 4 billion pounds of fuel, Muilenburg said.

Leanne Caret, who heads Boeing’s defense business, said the delivery solidifies the firm’s legacy as “the tanker company for the U.S. and the world.”

“We’re looking at delivering not only great capability that works today, but we’re looking at staying on that leading edge of technology going forward, and we will continue to lean in throughout this process,” she told reporters after the event.

But numerous obstacles remain. Boeing needs to correct the KC-46’s deficient remote vision system — the series of cameras and sensors that are the sole source of situational awareness for boom operators trying to move fuel from the tanker to a receiver aircraft. The company is redesigning that system at its own expense, and Caret declined to comment on the projected costs of the upgrades.

In order to hit a contractually obligated milestone, it also needs to move forward with getting wing aerial-refueling pods certified by the Federal Aviation Administration, an event that Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson confirmed will not happen until 2020.

Despite those problems, Air Force officials sounded an optimistic note about the current status of the program.

Wilson, who previously criticized Boeing for seemingly not paying enough attention to the tanker’s problems, touted the new capabilities the KC-46 will bring to the tanker force, such as infrared countermeasures, protection against electromagnetic pulses and armor that will make it more survivable in the field.

“This aircraft is able to defend itself in ways that the KC-135 can’t. It also has some other capabilities that allow us to refuel completely in the dark,” she said. “So there are things about this aircraft that we’re really keen to get into the hands of our airmen.”

Goldfein didn’t appear to be worried about the ongoing deficiencies, telling Defense News on Friday that “this is why we do operational test[ing]” and that the Air Force and Boeing had been through “significant” negotiations to get to this point.

“We ended up, I believe, in a good place, and so now its time to get this aircraft in the hands of the war fighter and the operators to let them flesh out all of the operating concerns,” he said. “That is part of the normal business of operational testing.”

That operational testing will be led by the 344th Air Refueling Squadron, part of the 22nd Air Refueling Wing at McConnell. The wing will receive two tankers during the ceremony and two later this month. Altus AFB in Oklahoma, set to be the formal KC-46 training base, and it will receive its first aircraft next month.

The service agreed to accept three aircraft a month, but Goldfein said increasing that rate is a possibility later this year, depending on the ability of the Air Force to receive the aircraft.

“Not only do they have to have the capacity to push aircraft, we have to have the capacity to receive aircraft,” Goldfein said.

Fixing the Remote Vision System

Boeing’s biggest hurdle is fixing the Rockwell Collins-made Remote Vision System, a novel tanker technology that has posed some challenges and could take three to four years to fix.

With legacy tankers like the KC-135 and KC-10, boom operators looked out a window at the rear of the plane and used visual cues to guide the boom into a receiver, but the KC-46 moves the boom operators toward the cockpit in more comfortable work stations.

The advantage of the RVS is that it incorporates a panoramic display of visual and infrared cameras that can provide high fidelity imagery in bad weather conditions or even at night time, and without needing to create ambient light that may make the tanker less survivable.

The problem is that during sunny conditions, at certain angles, the sun creates a glare that increases the risk of the boom scraping the receiver aircraft.

Wilson compared the problems with the RVS to what one might find with a backup camera in a vehicle—in certain lighting conditions, the imagery isn’t always perfectly clear.

In other cases, “there’s a bit of a stretch effect, like if you had a piece of rubber and you pulled it at the edges. There’s a little bit of distortion,” she said.

Wilson said the system is safe to use the way it is, but that operators may have to take some mitigating steps in certain conditions. For instance, the KC-46 will not be able to refuel as it moves directly away from the sun, so the tanker will just have to change the direction it is facing during that refueling.

Under the terms of the contract, the Air Force pays Boeing upon each delivery of a new KC-46, but the service is withholding $28 million per plane due to ongoing complications with the RVS. However, Wilson said the service has identified “nine parameters” that it wants the company to meet as it upgrades the RVS, and that as it meets those, it will begin reducing the amount withheld when aircraft delivery.

With improved software developed over the past year, boom operators can now optimize RVS imagery by toggling between different lighting modes that provide various levels of contrast, said Mike Gibbons, Boeing’s KC-46 program manager. But the Air Force wants that process to be automated, so boomers have less work to do.

To get the RVS to that stage, it will need a “rather significant” upgrade of new hardware and software, and Boeing may potentially recompete elements of the system if needed, Gibbons said.

“We would prefer not to have to do that because frankly, it’s always better in an enhancement to be able to stick with the architecture and the hardware that we already have. It will be lower risk,” he said.

Fixing the KC-46 boom

Meanwhile, the Air Force has the lead on making changes to the KC-46 boom, which it is funding with taxpayer money.

Wilson explained that the service agreed to fund and develop this fix independently because Boeing met the requirement to provide a boom that met international standards. However, it doesn’t properly disconnect from the A-10 Warthog due to the aircraft’s light weight.

“It’s a fairly simple fix,” she said. “It’s an actuator fix just to make that boom a little bit more sensitive for some of our lighter aircraft. That’s at the Air Force’s expense because Boeing met the requirement. So we will do the design of that.”

Defense News is on the ground at McConnell Air Force Base, traveling with Gen. Goldfein, and at Boeing’s plant in Everett. Stay tuned as this story develops.

“We’ve certainly got a lot to learn with you,” Branson told the audience during a Q&A session with Gen. Maryanne Miller, the commander of Air Mobility Command.

Branson, the world-renowned entrepreneur and private space pioneer, was in attendance to discuss ways to increase innovation within the air mobility force.

“We’re speaking with your company and I think there’s lot of opportunity, so we’ll keep the dialog open,” Miller said. “There’s very fertile ground there.”

Earlier in the symposium, Miller had confirmed the Air Force was in talks with Virgin Orbit and other space companies, like Blue Origin and SpaceX, but that no resources were being committed as of yet.

“We’re continuing, our [planning] community is going to continue to have discussions with the space companies, and we have agreed to just sit with them and just stay up to date with where they’re going with their future plans, to just be at the table with them” she said in a Friday roundtable with reporters. “We won’t commit any resources, but we’ve committed to work with them to see how quickly they progress through that.”

The idea of space cargo operations isn’t necessarily new to AMC, as the organization’s former commander, Gen. Carlton Everhart, floated the idea in August during a Defense Writers Group breakfast.

“Think about this. Thirty minutes, 150 metric tons [and] less than the cost of a C-5,” he speculated at the time.

But there are concrete signs the military is considering the idea. On Oct. 19, the U.S. Transportation Command asked commercial space companies to join collaborative studies on “Responsive Spacelift Supporting Department of Defense Mobility Operations.”

The solicitation asked for companies to provide several pieces of information, including projections of future capabilities, affordability estimates, types of operations that could use spacelift and how long it would take to move cargo around the globe in real-world scenarios.

It also asks for possible launch facility locations, business plans and how to protect cargo against various threats, like cyber or electromagnetic countermeasures.

While nothing resembling a commitment came of Branson’s remarks, he did leave airmen with one particular message.

“Screw it, just do it,” he proclaimed to laughter and applause.