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.

“I think the other launch providers, or most of the other launch providers — certainly the ones are flying now — think that it’s not worth it. That for their particular technology, it doesn’t work for them,” she said. “I think you’ll see that position changing, but it worked for us.”

She also discussed SpaceX’s next big goal: launching and recovering a rocket, turning it around, and then doing it all over again a day later.

“Reusability, we don’t believe it really, really counts unless you can turn it around as rapidly or almost as rapidly as you turn around an aircraft,” she said. “Basically, you land the system, you land the stage, you do some brief but important critical checks and inspections, you refuel, and you re-go. So our challenge right now is to refly a rocket in 24 hours. That’s when we’ll really feel like we got the reusability piece right.”

In addition, SpaceX wants to begin recovering the rocket fairings to further shave cost. It was able to recover one fairing after last week’s launch, but would like to bring them all back, she said.

While SpaceX has is all-in on reusability, other launch providers are more skeptical.

United Launch Alliance, the Lockheed Martin and Boeing joint venture that was the sole Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle provider for years, wants to eventually be able to recapture the Vulcan’s engines, but that won’t happen until the 2020s.

That’s a different economic model that would allow ULA to recoup about two-thirds the cost of the booster compared to SpaceX being able to bring back the entire first stage, but it may result in more overall cost savings, its CEO Tory Bruno told Defense News in an interview.

“When you’re getting a booster back, you get the whole booster, but you can only do it when you didn’t have a very heavy spacecraft, because you have to save fuel to fly home with and if the spacecraft is really heavy, you’re going to burn up all your fuel when you dump it in the ocean,” he said. “Which will be more economically beneficial? We’re going to find out.”

The final version of Vulcan — called Vulcan ACES — could provide an even more exciting opportunity to repurpose previously-launched rockets. The vehicle will have a reusable, refuelable upper stage that can stay in space and conduct other missions for years at a time, Bruno added.

“So it opens up this cislunar economy because you start creating a transportation system in space,” he said. “There are these space pickup trucks all of a sudden.”

Orbital ATK will not pursue reusability in any form for their Next Generation Launch System, preferring instead to lower costs by using common parts and materials with its current rocket line. Mike Laidley, the company’s vice president of space launch programs, contended while SpaceX’s reused Falcon 9 launch makes for great photos, it may not make for the best-value launcher.

“We understand reusability, and reusability is not free. It comes with a cost to recover the asset, to reprocess, to inspect,” he said. “Launch vehicles are unique in the sense that they are really highly tuned. People compare them to aircraft, but aircraft have factors of safety and margin that allow them to fly for a decade or more. Getting out into space and escaping gravity is really hard, and so the margins on those systems are not the same as the margins on aircraft.”

While yesterday’s launch will likely stoke Defense Department interest in reusability, near term impact will likely be limited, said Bill Ostrove, an Aerospace Systems Analyst for Forecast International.

“The Defense Department is very conservative in the way they manage their launch services right now,” he told Defense News on March 31.

“Because launches have traditionally been so expensive, they’ve kind of gotten into a cycle where they pack as many capabilities into each satellite as possible to maximize what is going up with each launch. What that’s created is a situation is a situation where they really have to focus on launch reliability, and that reinforces the high expense of the launches.”

The Pentagon will likely remain in an observation mode while the SpaceX continues testing reusable launch vehicles, waiting for the company to prove that its technology is reliable, said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation.

Even if the military is years away from adopting reusable launch systems themselves, the department may still be able to financially benefit from the commercial sector’s use. SpaceX founder Elon Musk believes he can substantially lower the cost of a Falcon 9 launch — currently valued at about $62 million — “by as much as a factor of a hundred” if the rocket can be flown many times like a commercial airplane.

“Right now we don’t know exactly what SpaceX’s pricing plans are going to be,” Ostrove said. “It would be sort of be a logical move to, if they are going to use a launch vehicle 10 or 15 times, to spread the cost over those 10 or 15 times, rather than the first customer pay full price and then lower prices for everyone else.”

In that model, the Defense Department theoretically could purchase the first launch, with commercial companies purchasing subsequent ones.

But Weeden pointed out that SpaceX launches for the military cost considerably more than for commercial customers because of Pentagon requirements, which demand greater financial oversight as well as additional checks of the launch system itself.

“SpaceX is going to continue to be able to bid on Air Force contracts like the GPS. In theory those might get cheaper over time,” he said. “But even if there are savings there, I don’t think it will have a huge impact. Those savings might be offset by all the additional requirements that DoD already has for those particular launches.”

Additionally, the Falcon 9 launch vehicle doesn’t meet the requirements to carry many military payloads, which tend to be larger and heavier, he said.

“It won’t be until Falcon Heavy comes along until SpaceX itself will be able to say they can launch a lot of the biggest and heaviest national security payloads. And that’s of course still a ways off. And reusability is even further away,” Weeden said.

If the Air Force begins fielding smaller, more disaggregated satellites — an idea officials have championed because of the benefits to survivability — it might also be willing to experiment with reusable rockets because there would be less financial risk involved if a launch failed, Ostrove said.

But it’s unclear what the path forward would look like, he added. The Falcon 9 is already certified for national security missions, but the Pentagon has no precedent for validating reusable launch systems.

“It’s hard to say at this point how extensive of a process they would want do use, if they would want to start from scratch [and certify it] as if it was a new launch vehicle, or treat it like a new variant, which would be a much more abbreviated process,” he said.

SpaceX isn’t the only company pursuing reusability, but it is the furthest along. Blue Origin is developing an orbital launch vehicle called New Glenn, which would have a reusable first stage like the Falcon 9. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, plans to make the first stage engines of the Vulcan reusable. However, that functionality will not be available for years after its first flight, scheduled for 2019.

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.

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.