Hensley, who pinned on his third star prior to the ceremony, was previously the organization’s deputy commander.

The ceremony was presided over by Gen. Ken Wilsbach, commander of Air Combat Command — which 16th Air Force currently sits under — and Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the inaugural commander of 16th Air Force, with several retired military cyber officials from all the services in attendance.

Hensley takes over from Lt. Gen. Kevin B. Kennedy, who came into the job in summer 2022 and is retiring after over 34 years in uniform.

16th Air Force is the service’s integrated information warfare entity, which encompasses cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, electromagnetic spectrum operations and weather, among others. It serves as the service component to U.S. Cyber Command and the cryptologic component to the National Security Agency conducting signals intelligence.

The organization was created in 2019 to integrate the disparate functions of information warfare across the Air Force, one of the first in a series of reorganizations across the U.S. military to address the growing field of IW and combat similar integrated and reorganized factions of adversary militaries such as China and Russia.

The unit has some unique missions, Wilsbach said. “In fact, there’s some of them that are happening as we speak inside of cyberspace, in the air, with reconnaissance aircraft. And certainly we have analysts, intel analysts, that are looking at collections that we’ve been making over the last few days. They’re doing that right now and they do that seven days a week, 24/7.”

Wilsbach noted that under Kennedy’s leadership, the command established an information warfare operations center to synchronize all the activities associated with information warfare for the air component and combatant commanders and launched something called Project Phoenix that gathers subject matter experts across numerous organizations to improve the way intelligence, cyber and reconnaissance products are delivered.

It has played a critical part in recent operations as the main entity responsible for conducting and planning cyber ops across U.S. European Command, helping harden networks against Russian cyber threats in the midst of the war in Ukraine.

Kennedy “led the longest Cyber Command tenured mission packaging campaign cyber response for Ukraine. They’re doing some amazing work. I can’t tell you about any of it — but amazing work and that’s happening 24/7,” Wilsbach said.

Haugh noted that 16th Air Force supports four separate combatant commands and has played a major role in aiding their efforts:

• European Command: defending networks and supporting Eucom in its efforts to aid Ukraine against “the unlawful invasion by Russia.”
• Strategic Command: defending the highest priority networks within the Department of Defense that relate to nuclear systems.
• Space Command: integrating with the newest combatant command as it grew its headquarters
• Cyber Command: aiding in election security efforts over the last few years to prevent foreign interference.

“Each of those roles take synchronization, it takes time and what it also takes is a really great leadership team,” Haugh said.

One of the issues Hensley will navigate is the elevation of AFCYBER, part of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s sweeping changes to the service as part of a reoptimization plan to better organize the department to fight China, which was first announced in February.

As part of that plan, the Air Force intends to elevate AFCYBER, and while details on that effort have been sparse, it is believed it will be taken out from under Air Combat Command.

“We have some changes that are going to happen with AFCYBER and 16th Air Force that are going to occur in the near future,” Wilsbach said. “If you could pick anybody we would pick [Hensley] to lead us through that transition because he has the expertise and he has the experience too. A lot of joint time, a lot of time overseas, a lot of different missions. So right guy, right time.”

Gen. David Allvin, chief of Staff of the Air Force, told reporters in June that the service is being very meticulous in getting this elevation right.

“We want to make sure we measure twice and cut once because there’s different elements of that with respect to where the manpower belongs and … comes from different sources,” he said.   

The post New commander takes charge of Air Force’s information warfare unit appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Last year, the Air Force announced its intent to pick a contractor for NGAD’s engineering and manufacturing development phase sometime in 2024. However, comments made by senior service leaders in recent weeks have suggested that funding constraints and advancements in emerging technologies have prompted the Air Force to reevaluate the program — putting the fate of the NGAD platform in limbo.

But when asked whether or not the Air Force still planned to award a downselect for the NGAD fighter in 2024, ACC Commander Gen. Kenneth Wilsback told the Mitchell Institute on Wednesday that he does “expect it to be this year.”

Both Lockheed Martin and Boeing are considered to be the top contenders bidding for the contract. Although NGAD is a highly classified program, the sixth-generation aircraft is expected to be a long-range fighter jet equipped with advanced sensors, weapons payloads and enhanced stealth technology.

At press time, the Air Force has not responded to DefenseScoop’s requests to confirm the date of the NGAD award.

Although the NGAD platform has widely been considered a replacement for the fifth-generation F-22 Raptor fighter jet, Wilsbach seemed to suggest otherwise.

“There is no official replacement to the F-22 right now,” he said. “Obviously, it will be in complement with the [F-35 Lightning II], which we’re continuing to build. And hopefully soon we’ll start to take delivery of more of those as we get through the [Technology Refresh 3] slowdown at Lockheed Martin.”

Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) is a suite of hardware and software meant to allow the F-35 to receive new upgrades as part of Block 4. However, prime contractor Lockheed Martin has struggled to validate the TR-3 software, forcing the Pentagon to pause deliveries of new F-35s to the services.

Wilsbach also emphasized that NGAD is more than a single aircraft, but part of a larger family of systems that also includes loyal wingman drones known as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) and advanced command-and-control capabilities.

“I want everybody to be clear that it’s a family of systems, and there’s a lot of things that are not in the public sphere that we’ve been working on for a while and we’ll continue to expand that,” he said. “Part of it is the CCA, that is in the public sphere. But I’ll just say it’s a family of systems, not one thing.”

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin previously told the Mitchell Institute in June that the service’s CCA effort has played a role in its considerations for NGAD, emphasizing the importance of not putting “a lot of eggs in one basket” and instead pursuing new technologies that are adaptable to changing operational environments to mitigate risks. 

“Built to last’ is a tremendous 20th century bumper sticker. But the assumption was, whatever you had was irrelevant as long as it lasted. I’m not sure that’s relevant anymore,” Allvin said. “Ten years after this, I’m hoping the technology will make it so that CCA won’t be as relevant, but it might be adaptable. And that’s where we’re building in modularity and adaptability.”

The service awarded contracts to Anduril and General Atomics in April to create detailed designs, manufacture and conduct flight tests for the first batch of CCAs, known as increment one. A competitive production decision for increment one is slated for fiscal 2026, and the Air Force plans to field the systems before 2030.

Wilsbach noted that when fielded, CCAs are expected to provide value as a force multiplier for the Air Force’s current fighter fleet, as the drones are expected to fly alongside manned F-35s and F-22s.

“The service has talked about potentially having as many as 1,000 of these CCAs to use in a contingency, and I think that’s a noble goal and one that would create a lot of dilemmas as people think about getting into a fight with us and having to content with that many plus all of our manned platforms,” he said.

The post Air Force still expects to award NGAD contract in 2024 despite uncertainties — ACC commander appeared first on DefenseScoop.

PACAF chief Gen. Ken Wilsbach discussed this plan as a key element of the command’s new official strategy to guide operations through 2030. Notably, he emphasized how his team is prioritizing security in their pursuit of these new information-sharing arrangements and efforts.  

“The discussions are pretty easy. The papers are pretty easy. It’s the protection of the information that we want to be safeguarded — that, we have to ensure. And so that’s why things go fairly slowly, but we are kind of trying to come up with additional computer networks where we can work on [those] computer networks together,” Wilsbach told DefenseScoop during a media roundtable at AFA’s annual Air, Space and Cyber conference this week. 

PACAF is charged with helping supply continuous air, space and cyberspace capabilities in the Indo-Pacific, where the U.S. military and its allies view China as the top threat.

“We know that [China’s military is] working on attacking our logistics. We know that they’re working on attacking our communications — because if you can take out those two things, you make agile combat deployments difficult,” Wilsbach explained. 

“The Chinese would love to have a fight that would be the China versus U.S. fight because that makes their math pretty easy. [But] when you make it China versus the U.S. — plus the other countries that will likely be with us — their math gets pretty hard to do,” he said.

In the new PACAF Strategy 2030, which Wilsbach unveiled during the roundtable, officials state that the world is moving into a “pivotal era” and any actions made in the critical region will influence the social, economic and security conditions there “for the foreseeable future.”

Competitors including “the Chinese Communist Party, the Russian Federation and the Democratic People’s of Republic of Korea,” namely, are seeking to undermine international rules and order, while violent extremist organizations are posing new risks to peace in that area, according to the document.

That’s all part of the reason why, as the strategy notes, PACAF is moving to sign new intelligence-sharing agreements with international partners and allies to strengthen defense capabilities and detection tools against air and maritime threats.  

When asked by DefenseScoop what nations the command was eyeing to deepen all-domain awareness integration, he responded: “A lot of it is classified, and so I probably don’t want to reveal too much.”

Still, he shed some light on what his command is really envisioning. 

Currently, PACAF “probably has the best and most robust sharing” capacity with Australia, and then the United Kingdom, Wilsbach said. But more recently, certain European nations — like France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy — are showing increased interest in furthering information-sharing with the U.S. 

“The reason why those European countries have been interested in the Indo-Pacific is because they see some of the poor behavior that China has exhibited in our region. And those European countries have Indo-Pacific interests and they want to demonstrate that they’re willing to defend those interests, if they have to. So, I’m really thankful for our European partners that have shown interest in the Pacific,” Wilsbach noted.

His team is striving to “increase the amount of sharing” that exists within existing alliances there, which include Australia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines. 

“With the Philippines in the recent dust-up around some of their islands with the Chinese Coast Guard — we want to be able to share more,” Wilsbach said, alluding to recent attempts by China to harass members of the Philippines’ military as they were embarking on resupply missions to their outpost at Second Thomas Shoal.

The PACAF chief also pointed to heightened tensions and military clashes in the last few years on the border between India and China. 

“We’ve shared quite a bit of intel with [India] that they’ve been appreciative of. But we want to expand it beyond just that intelligence about China vis-a-vis India, but much more broadly than just the border region,” Wilsbach said. 

In response to DefenseScoop’s questions, he also repeatedly emphasized how his team is working fervently on the front end of establishing this deeper collaboration with other nations to ensure any information and intelligence exchanged is done so with extensive security. 

“One of the conundrums on sharing is we have to make sure that that information that we share doesn’t get propagated out,” Wilsbach said. 

In that light, his command is looking to set up “additional computer networks” to connect safely with partners and allies in the region. 

“We had a chance to work with Australia and Japan this year, of course. We already have a network that’s very robust with the Republic of Korea. And we’re trying to bring more and more of those together so they can be multi-country versus bilateral countries. And so all of these things are things that we desire and are working toward. It’s slow going, but we’re making improvements,” Wilsbach told DefenseScoop.

The post PACAF establishing new intel-sharing mechanisms to enhance all-domain awareness with allies appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The Air Force is planning to field drones known as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) that will act as force multipliers by flying alongside manned fighter jets — like the F-35 and the forthcoming Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) system, and potentially other platforms.

While the Air Force’s CCA program is still in its early stages, PACAF Commander Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach said the service is looking at how the Royal Australian Air Force deploys its own robotic wingman — the MQ-28 Ghost Bat — to help learn how to operate manned and unmanned aircraft in tandem.

“We really look forward to what they’re doing with the MQ-28 Ghost Bat,” Wilsbach said during an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “They’re doing some great work figuring out exactly how to use this aircraft, and we look forward to seeing what they learn and then, perhaps, applying that to our CCA program ourselves.”

The Boeing-made Ghost Bat made its first flight with the Australians in 2021 and is slated to enter service by 2025. The drone is meant to fly with the Royal Australian Air Force’s fleet of aircraft to conduct a range of missions, including intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and tactical early warning.

The U.S. Air Force wants 1,000 CCA platforms in its own fleet that not only augment manned platforms with multi-role capabilities, but also create dilemmas for adversaries, Wilsbach said.

“Imagine if they had to deal with 1,000 additional combat aircraft that can do multiple things. They can be sensors, they can be weapons platforms, they can be decoys, they can be jammers, they can be a lot of different things,” he said. “And so the ability to create dilemmas and mass up those dilemmas on your adversary causes them to make mistakes, it causes them to use weapons, and it eventually will cause them to lose their assets versus us.”

Wilsbach also emphasized that CCA can fly dangerous missions in place of manned aircraft, reducing the risk of pilots being harmed.

The U.S. Air Force is requesting more than $500 million in research, development, test and evaluation funding for CCA and related efforts in fiscal 2024, and plans to spend more than $6 billion on these activities over the next five years. The money would go towards platform development, autonomy development and creating a specialized unit to explore operational concepts.

The post US Air Force hopes to learn from Australia’s robotic wingmen efforts as it pursues collaborative combat aircraft appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Still, they recognize how this “eye-opener” is informing their teams and the public about related and “irresponsible” activities they say China has been steadily conducting globally via a secretive fleet of similar airships.

“The balloons — I think they’ve been a wake up call for the American people, in particular, who did not think of China as a very near, clear and present danger. So, I think that’s been useful in a way,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told DefenseScoop during a roundtable at the annual AFA Warfare Symposium last week.

In separate discussions throughout that summit, Kendall and other senior Defense Department and military officials shed light on how the U.S. government is processing that incident and the emerging risks associated with it.

‘What we know’

The Pentagon first publicly confirmed the existence of a high-altitude object hovering over Western states in the U.S. on Feb. 2. At first, military brass advised President Biden not to immediately shoot it down, partially to avoid harming any people or property with debris.  

Under the president’s direction on Feb. 4, multiple aircraft were mobilized and the balloon was ultimately taken down by an F-22 fighter jet‘s AIM-9X missile — over water six nautical miles off the coast of South Carolina. Notably, the shootdown of the system came after it likely captured data from tens of thousands of feet above sensitive U.S. government sites.

On the heels of that occurrence, U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command — both led by Gen. Glen VanHerck — recalibrated military radar and fine-tuned detection assets to sharpen the scrutiny of potential threats in the harder-to-monitor altitudes of the initial balloons course. At least three mysterious platforms that U.S. government officials have described as “objects” — as opposed to balloons — were subsequently hit by missiles from American fighter jets on Feb. 9, 10 and 11 off the coast of Alaska and over Canada and Lake Huron, Michigan, respectively.

Despite requests, VanHerck did not brief reporters at the AFA Summit this year. But during a panel at the event, he provided some new perspective on this overarching balloon saga.

“What we know is that China’s had a program for years that they’re utilizing to gain collection [of information on] places they haven’t been before. For me, it was an eye opener. I didn’t find out about balloons flying over the homeland until Jan. 27 of this year. I was aware of balloons around the globe in August as they presented that to us — and at that time I told my team, I said ‘It’s just a matter of time before one of these approaches the homeland or flies over the homeland. Let’s go figure out, from a legal standpoint, where we are and what our options are.’ And so low and behold, there we were on Jan. 27 — we got notified of the potential high-altitude balloon flying over our country,” VanHerck explained. 

In his view, the Defense Department “did PhD-level work” to detect and mitigate the multiple high-altitude threats.

“Shooting something down 65,000 feet that’s only going to 20 or 30 knots — everybody thinks that’s easy. I get asked questions like, ‘Well, couldn’t you just go out there and lasso it?’ And I’m not kidding you, I get questions like that,” VanHerck said. 

Early into the crisis, the commander “called up the weapons folks over at Tyndall” Air Force Base, Florida, to obtain information on success rates for assets the military had that could be useful “for shooting this thing down.”

He was told that the service did “not have any of that info.”

“Okay, so we’re guessing essentially. I told the president that, ‘Hey it’s 50/50 that we take this thing out.’ But going forward, we know a lot more now. In an unclassified environment, we can’t really talk about that. But, I will tell you that we learned a lot about our domain awareness,” VanHerck said.

At a media roundtable during the AFA Summit, Pacific Air Forces Commander Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, who also serves as U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s air component commander, confirmed that his team “had seen that type of [high-altitude, balloon-like] vehicle, probably for about a year-and-a-half to two years before what you saw happened” with the object that traversed Alaska, Canada and the continental U.S., in early February.

“We’ve been watching them — and so, we’re fairly certain that it has incurred upon multiple countries’ sovereign airspace several times before it actually went across North America. So, we had been monitoring it,” Wilsbach told DefenseScoop.

Throughout multi-team efforts to recover the remnants of the high-altitude objects, the Pentagon has been tight-lipped about their attributes, elements, and alleged “surveillance” technologies onboard. In clarifying how he perceives the massive aerial system, Wilsbach hinted at some of its components. 

“We say balloon because it looks like a balloon — but in actuality, that vehicle was an airship. So it had a vessel that looked much like a balloon. But underneath it was a, I call it a ‘gondola,’ but it was a structure that hung from the balloon that had some sensors on it, but also had some props, and so that’s how it maneuvered,” Wilsbach said. 

Mixed reactions

At the AFA summit, DefenseScoop asked military leaders whether the high-altitude object-centered events are shifting how their teams are currently operating.

“I would tell you that I don’t think we’ve really changed our homeland defense procedures,” Wilsbach said, noting that “certainly we are very attuned to vehicles that aren’t flying at airline type speeds.”

While it was all eye opening for the American public, Kendall said as far as he can tell at this point, these balloons do not “represent a serious threat to” U.S. national security. 

“They are surveillance balloons. We have [detected] thousands of other objects now that we’ve changed the sensitivity of our radars and so on. So, we need to be aware of them and we need to be cognizant of them. I think we sent a very strong message to China about: ‘Don’t send these over our sovereign territory in our airspace.’ But, I don’t consider them to be one of the threats that’s really compelling as a motivator right now for me,” he told DefenseScoop.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman did not get into specifics regarding whether the Space Force considered any post-balloon event posture changes in response to DefenseScoop’s question. However, he said the pace of China’s “shift to a very operational aggressive counterspace capability” in this century is at this point “the thing that concerns him the most.”

When the Chinese conducted their anti-satellite missile test back in 2007, U.S. military officials immediately realized “things are going to be different,” Saltzman noted. And over the last 17 years, China has sent what he views as “some remarkable capabilities to orbit, and on the ground, to really affect the advantages that we have in space.” 

“That’s a pretty remarkable shift if you think about how fast they’ve put all that together. And so I would say it’s the mix of weapons that they’ve chosen to invest in and the speed with which they’ve been able to demonstrate operational utility of those weapons — from lasers, from on orbit plane-matching capabilities, kinetic kill capabilities, the hypersonic reentry vehicle that glided and maneuvered, and the grappling arm that pulled a satellite out of its mission orbit — I mean, these are dramatic offensive capabilities. And so the pace with which they’ve been able to do that is probably the biggest technical concern,” Saltzman told DefenseScoop.

Northcom and NORAD officials have for years been trying to alert lawmakers and government leaders about “the lack of domain awareness and the challenges” their organizations have been confronting, according to VanHerck.

“In the history of Northern Command, [congressional] appropriators have never given us the opportunity to testify. Magically, the House and Senate each want to talk to me this year — and so that’s a great opportunity to tell our story,” he said.

“The fact that these things have flown over before and we didn’t see, that ought to concern all of us, folks. I’m convinced now that we will see them, but we need to see them further out. And I think that this experience — not only for me, but for the commands I get the privilege of commanding, and for our nation — will make us better going forward,” he added.

The post Post-balloon saga, US defense leaders ‘know a lot more’ about China’s alleged global surveillance operations appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The Air Force plans to field robotic wingmen, or “collaborative combat aircraft,” to serve as force multipliers and keep pilots out of harm’s way.

At the annual Air, Space and Cyber conference, DefenseScoop asked Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach if PACAF had started thinking through operating concepts for those types of systems in the Indo-Pacific where Pentagon leaders view China as the top threat.

“Yes. And I would say it’s in the very beginning stages because, you know, in all candor we’re just starting to see the initial actual technology start to reach the field,” he replied during a media roundtable.

A number of questions need to be answered as the U.S. military and its allies consider how the systems could be employed, he noted.

“The first one is what do we want it to do? … Do we want it to be a sensor? Do we want it to be a shooter? Do we want it to be a relay platform? Do we want it to be a decoy? … I guess I want it to do all of that,” Wilsbach said.

Another issue to be sorted out is how much autonomy the platforms should have.

“Will it be completely autonomous? In other words, will there be artificial intelligence such that you program the CCA to go do a mission and it knows how to do that, much like if there was a human in the cockpit — we’ve trained them to be able to do the mission, and even if there’s … no connection into the network, the human can accomplish the mission because they have a brain? So, will that be how we employ these? Or will they be remotely piloted? And if remotely piloted, will they be flown from another aircraft?” he said.

For example, if the drones are to be remotely operated rather than being fully autonomous, the Air Force needs to figure out whether the drones would be flown from an aircraft like the E-7 Wedgetail airborne early warning and control system, another fighter jet, or some other platform.

“There’s quite a bit of work that we need to do. But I am a big fan of this CCA technology because I believe it will allow us to bring mass against our adversaries. That will be pretty difficult to contend with,” Wilsbach said.

In that scenario, enemies could be overwhelmed by potential targets and have trouble determining which U.S. aircraft they should try to shoot down first.

“It’s a pretty hard environment to operate in. And so if we can present that to our adversaries, it’ll give us an advantage,” Wilsbach said.

He noted that U.S. allies in the region are also working on robotic wingmen technology and thinking through operating concepts, mentioning Australia and its Ghost Bat platform as an example.

DefenseScoop asked Wilsbach if he envisions future scenarios in which the U.S. Air Force’s robotic wingmen could accompany allies’ manned aircraft into combat, or vice versa. U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown highlighted the possibility of such Friday during an international air chiefs conference in Washington on Friday.

“I don’t want to get in front of anybody, but … of course. I mean, we do that with our manned platforms. Why wouldn’t we do it with our, you know, with our uncrewed aircraft?” he said.

The post Pacific Air Forces working through operating concepts for robotic wingmen appeared first on DefenseScoop.