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14 Aug 24. Army stands up Arctic aviation command. The Army’s activation of a new aviation command in Alaska marks the return of local air control over two battalions in the Arctic region after a five-year hiatus, as the service works to cement its footprint in the High North.
It comes as the United States military in general works to counter Russian presence and Chinese interest in the region.
The 11th Airborne Division, also known as the “Arctic Angels,” stood up its Arctic Aviation Command at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, on Thursday, the Army announced.
The move puts two active-duty aviation battalions under direct control of the command and the 11th Airborne.
Previously, the command’s Alaska-based battalions, 1st Battalion, 52nd Aviation Regiment, and 1st Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment, reported to units based in Washington state and Hawaii.
Now, the two battalions will exclusively report to the new local command while continuing to support rotary wing operations across the region, Col. Russell Vanderlugt, recently appointed head of the aviation command, told Army Times on Monday.
“The Arctic is obviously a strategically important region in for the United States,” Vanderlugt said. “What’s unique is this is our home, we are not a transient unit, we are stakeholders in the region.”
By living in the region and running aviation operations on site, the colonel said battalion soldiers and crews can work in the extremes of an environment that challenges ground and air assets on a near-daily basis.
“We realize forces can’t just show up in the Arctic and expect to operate here,” Vanderlugt said. “The timing of this thing is critical, there’s a sense of urgency as we continue to transform aviation across the Pacific.” (Source: Defense News Early Bird/Military.com)
14 Aug 24. The Army Is Set to Expand Basic Training, Fueled by New Recruiting Momentum. The Army is set to expand how many new recruits it can send to basic training starting in October, as officials are confident the service is digging out of a recruiting slump it has struggled with for nearly a decade.
Fort Sill in Oklahoma and Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri will get two additional basic training units each — able to train an additional 4,000 new recruits each year combined, according to the service.
Army officials are increasingly confident they will hit their goal of 55,000 new recruits this year. One service official with direct knowledge told Military.com that projections show the Army may actually exceed that goal.
That annual goal matches what the service brought in last year, despite a recruiting target of 65,000 in 2023. The Navy and Air Force also missed their recruiting goals, with the Marine Corps and Space Force — both significantly smaller branches — hitting their much more modest goals.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, in an interview with The Associated Press, said the service is eyeing future expansions to basic training next year if it can maintain its current recruiting groove.
Much of the service’s recruiting woes can be tied to a decreasing number of young Americans qualified to serve amid an obesity epidemic and falling academic performance, which has led to poor performance on the service’s entrance exam. The Pentagon has estimated only about 23% of 17- to 24-year-olds are qualified for service.
Aggravating the issue is the Army’s struggle with marketing to America’s youth, as the service is barred from advertising on the Chinese-owned TikTok social media platform. A recent $11m deal with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and his troubled football minor league didn’t yield a single new recruit, internal Army analysis shows.
The driving force behind the Army digging itself out of its recruiting slump has been the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses established in 2022 and mostly held at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
Those programs allow troops who are outside of the service’s body fat or academic standards to be tutored or lose weight to qualify for and move on to basic training. The Army can graduate some 20,000 recruits out of those pre-basic training courses it otherwise would not have been able to recruit — effectively making up the service’s deficit.
A Military.com investigation found that much of the recruiting struggles were gendered — with a shortfall of male applicants making up much of the problem. Since 2013, the number of women enlisting each year has remained relatively flat, with about 10,000 joining annually.
Meanwhile, male recruiting dropped from 58,000 enlisting in 2013 to 37,700 last year, data from the service shows.
That drop in males enlisting can be attributed to a slew of complex factors, including young men being more likely than younger women to be obese and boys falling behind in grade school compared to girls. Both of those issues are being addressed by the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses as Army planners have had to address societal trends.
(Source: Military.com)
14 Aug 24. Integrated Deterrence Is Key to Meeting Challenge of Future Conflicts, Brown Says.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., today explained how incorporating the concept of integrated deterrence — the Defense Department’s planning, coordinating and operating with all government agencies, as well as allies and partners — is key to meeting the challenges of an increasingly complex strategic environment.
Brown discussed the concept while delivering a keynote speech at the 2024 U.S. Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, Nebraska.
“We are in the midst of a mindset shift when it comes to how we think about deterrence,” Brown told the crowd, noting that the geopolitical landscape of today is more complex than that of the Cold War era.
“Instead of a bipolar world, we’re facing multiple adversaries and malignant actors that create an increasingly complex strategic environment challenging our deterrence framework,” Brown continued. ” means our strategies need to be networked, dynamic, adaptable and integrated.”
Brown labeled integrated deterrence as a cornerstone of the National Defense Strategy.
“Integrated deterrence means leveraging all powers of our nation; aligning our policies, investments and activities; and adapting our efforts to specific competitors as a holistic deterrence strategy,” Brown said.
“We need to act with urgency now before we find ourselves needing to innovate in the midst of a major conflict,” he continued.
“We need to act like we’re in a crisis, before the crisis.”
To achieve such deterrence, Brown said DOD needs to focus on three key areas: our adversaries’ cognition and culture; the ever-evolving information environment; and the impacts of advancing technology.
On the topic of cognition and culture, Brown said that deterrence is based on the perceptions of our adversaries and how such perceptions can influence risk and reward-based decisions to create conflict in the pursuit of their national interests.
“But in determining these perceptions lies the challenge,” Brown said. “To accomplish this, we must understand the culture of our adversaries — their view of history, their collective values and the semantics of their language.”
Stating that cognition and culture determine how our adversaries perceive information, Brown then discussed how the recent revolution in communication technology has significantly changed the information environment.
“We live in an era where the U.S. deterrence messaging can potentially be undermined through cyberoperations and information warfare, complicating the task of maintaining credible deterrence — and the global information ecosystem’s fragmentation has made it increasingly more difficult to project a unified stance,” Brown cautioned.
“These dynamics require an unprecedented level of coordination to ensure that United States’ messages — in coordination with our allies and partners — are not only heard but are also accurately interpreted to achieve the desired deterrent effect,” he said.
On the third topic of advancing technology, Brown pointed out how the character of war has been changed by the proliferation of new capabilities among state and non-state actors.
“New technologies have the potential to shorten viable response times in the event of an attack, changing the calculus and challenging the equilibrium on which global security relies,” Brown said.
“We need to collectively deepen our understanding of the emerging technologies — both the opportunities and the vulnerabilities — so we can shape the international norms of behavior,” he added.
Brown’s speech culminated in a call for integrated deterrence to be achieved through a joint, seamless alignment of all elements of national strength — what he said has been called a “symphony of power” by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
“Integrated deterrence is not just about possessing advanced technology and superior firepower — that is just one part of the orchestra,” Brown said, adding that truly integrated deterrence requires harnessing the full power of government by drawing on all interagency capabilities and aligning all our national strengths.
“And by taking these steps along with our allies and partners, we forge an integrated deterrence,” Brown said, closing out his remarks.
“And through that symphony of power, we ensure a future where deterrence prevails — safeguarding peace and security for all.”
Now in its 15th year, the Aug. 13-14 Stratcom Deterrence Symposium sought to draw from “academic, government, military and international experts, to explore a broad range of deterrence issues and thinking,” according to the command’s webpage. (Source: U.S. DoD)
12 Aug 24. The US tried to fix its foreign military sales system. Did it work? Military personnel stand next to U.S. missiles prepared for weapon-loading drills in front of a U.S. F-16V fighter jet at the Hualien Airbase in Taiwan’s southeastern Hualien county in 2022.
Last summer when the Pentagon released its plan to fix its sprawling foreign military sales system, it also issued a warning.
Sasha Baker, then a top policy official and one of the co-chairs of the “tiger team” leading the effort, mentioned, pointedly, that they had tried this before. The U.S., she said, has tinkered with its foreign military system “roughly every 18 months for the last 20 years,” like a car in and out of the shop.
The goal this time, Baker said, was to make repairs that would last.
Little more than a year after their recommendations came out, though, it’s not clear whether the U.S. has succeeded.
All prompted by the war in Ukraine, the Pentagon, State Department and Congress launched their own efforts to reform their share of foreign military sales, or FMS. Having finished, they’re reporting different levels of progress.
The Pentagon is still trying to implement many of its recommendations, and a bill to start doing so in Congress hasn’t passed. State was more bullish about its own work but acknowledged a larger issue: Regardless of how fast the U.S. government moves, defense firms are still struggling to deliver orders.
Meanwhile, demand for American weapons has spiked. Total U.S. foreign military sales are already above $80bn this fiscal year, said Cara Abercrombie, acting deputy for Pentagon policy. That’s higher than the FMS total in FY23 and more than $30bn over that of FY22. Abercrombie predicted it would continue to rise.
As demand grows, the question now is whether the U.S. government and the defense industry can keep up.
“We’re really now trying to harness [the] bureaucracy,” Abercrombie said.
The wall
That bureaucracy is vast. The FMS system is spread across swathes of the U.S. national security system, including the State Department, Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency once mapped it out inside a government building in northern Virginia — and the chart took up an entire wall.
As Baker noted last year, reforming this system has been a priority for decades. American defense firms are considered the best in the world, but selling to other countries is often so difficult that supply hasn’t fully met demand.
Fixing FMS became more urgent the more America’s partners found themselves in need. The Trump administration opened the spigot of arms sales to Taiwan, facing a more powerful, more aggressive China. Taipei now has some $20bn in orders that haven’t yet been delivered.
But everyone interviewed for this story agreed that the latest and most powerful spur for reform was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In the months afterward, the U.S. rushed weapons to Kyiv at a volume and pace rarely, if ever, seen.
Doing so involved using new tools and senior leaders in the government giving the process an unusual amount of attention, a senior State official, speaking anonymously per the department’s policy, told Defense News.
Countries suddenly anxious about their own security after Russia’s invasion started asking the U.S. why the system couldn’t move this fast for them as well.
“Many senior officials heard from our security cooperation partners that they were not satisfied with the timelines” at the start of the administration, the official said.
Thus came three efforts to speed those up: one each from the Pentagon, State Department and Congress, led by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
They had similar findings. The FMS system is so diffuse and so technical that it’s hard to monitor cases from start to finish. It doesn’t always speed up the sales that are most important for America’s own security goals, such as those to Taiwan and Ukraine. And America has extremely strict rules on what technology it can share with other countries, even when it’s in U.S. interests to do so.
“There’s been a lot of effort paid to identifying the problem,” said a Democratic congressional aide, who said the different parts of the government agreed, broadly, on the issues. “FMS is a strategic tool of policy that is too slow and too clunky to be as effective as we want it to be.”
‘Faster than that’
The aide was less confident about the solutions offered so far.
“The reform efforts have been granular and bottom-up, rather than big-picture [and] strategic,” the staffer said.
Officials leading those efforts largely agreed, but said that tweaks to the process are still important.
The State official, whose department administers foreign military sales, listed several areas of improvement, many of which were in a set of recommendations released last May.
The department is updating the curriculum for officers that handle security cooperation, so that they can better manage expectations and delays. It’s revised its own policies to make it easier to transfer aerial drones. And the State Department has tried to set requirements that apply to whole regions, rather than separate countries — like an oil filter that fits on a whole class of cars rather than only one make and model.
When pressed, the official couldn’t share statistics to show how much faster cases were now moving, but did say that the speed of aerial drones had increased. Overall, the official argued that the department wasn’t a major delay in the FMS process.
“It takes 98% of the cases 48 hours to go through the State Department,” the official said. “It’s very hard to move faster than that.”
‘Overburdened’
Where cases take much longer is the Defense Department, which has spent the last year implementing its own reforms.
Abercrombie, the policy official, described the progress so far in three main areas.
One is a group of Pentagon leaders that now meets once every quarter — though more often at lower levels — to make sure they’re paying attention to the issue and measuring their progress, almost like a monthly calendar reminder on a phone.
A Defense Department spokesperson said that the secretary and deputy secretary of defense receive quarterly updates on the reform efforts — and that the Pentagon is still studying how to best retool its process.
Another is a new set of meetings between the combatant commands, which work the closest with American allies around the world, and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which actually oversees cases.
The goal here, Abercrombie said, is to watch for any new issues — say, with a country or individual case — that may need higher-level attention.
Lastly, the Pentagon is setting up a new cadre of officials, embedded in embassies around the world, like defense attaches, to shepherd countries through the process. This core is meant to help each partner through the highly technical prep work required, making it faster and more accurate.
And it may require more people. The Defense Department is already “overburdened” with the jump in foreign military sales over the last two years, Abercrombie said. It’s deciding whether to hire civilians to supplement the uniformed personnel handling these cases.
Abercrombie didn’t offer specific cases that had sped up in the last year as a result of the changes. Instead, as an example, she mentioned that the Pentagon had recently issued a new “toolkit” meant to help Pentagon officials handle contracting, one of the hardest parts of the FMS process.
If a partner wants munitions that the U.S. buys in bulk, for instance, they need to know when the Pentagon’s deadline is to submit its own orders. Meeting that in time would let the other country add their number to the total and lower the price overall, like shopping at a wholesaler rather than a grocery store.
The toolkit is meant to help with those schedules, though when asked how one didn’t exist before, Abercrombie pointed to how vast FMS is — and how a process can act inefficiently when it’s so far spread out.
“It seems like common sense, but systemically it might not be,” she said.
What’s left
Each of the people interviewed for this story also mentioned the need for help from Congress: specifically raising the dollar number required to alert lawmakers about a sale, for a separate and sometimes lengthy review.
That threshold hasn’t been updated in decades, meaning it hasn’t met the rate of inflation.
Earlier this year, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill that, among other provisions, would raise the limit, though it’s since stalled. An aide to Mike Waltz, R-Fla., who sponsored the bill, said that they still expected it to proceed.
“I think it’s a speed bump,” the aide said, particularly amid the war in Gaza when arms sales to Israel are under more scrutiny.
The pause means that any changes from Congress in the near term will be, in the words of the first aide, “granular.”
Regardless of their efforts, a much longer part of the process is actually delivering on orders. Multiple sources told Defense News that firming up the defense industry needs to be an equal, if not higher, priority.
“For the actual process to get something on contract, the worst of those are a year or two years, whereas we’re regularly seeing eight-to-10 year total time frames for delivery,” said the first aide.
As an example, the State official mentioned six long-term contracts that Congress approved this year for munitions labeled critical by the Pentagon. Those contracts will help defense firms move faster, but none of the munitions are, by law, exportable — one instance of higher supply that won’t help address higher demand.
“None of this matters if our industry does not have the production capacity to fulfill the orders in a timely manner,” the State official said. (Source: Defense News)
09 Aug 24. DOD Integrates Its Industrial Base With Allies, Partners. The strength of the Defense Department and international security lies with defense industrial base cooperation with allies, partners, industry and academia, said Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Christopher W. Grady.
Speaking today at a National Defense Industrial Association event on emerging technologies, Grady said there’s just one defense industrial base, and that’s the international defense industrial base.
The admiral provided an example of how that works.
After Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, some 50 allies and partners have been meeting regularly to supply defensive arms to Kyiv, he said. Each partner nation has something to bring to the table.
For example, Grady said Latvia is good at manufacturing drones.
Also, a combined joint requirements oversight council has been established with international partner nations to better utilize each of their industrial strengths, he said.
Regarding DOD’s industrial base, the admiral said speed matters when it comes to critical technology development and rollout. The Defense Innovation Unit and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency really shine in compressing timelines, he said, adding that timeline compression should be a priority elsewhere in the department, as well.
Transparency regarding the requirements would also be helpful, particularly for small businesses and startups because they don’t have a lot of experience navigating the bureaucracy, he said.
Grady also discussed talent management, saying there should be an easier way to recruit cyber talent. He said one way might be to make the workplace more relaxed for talented young people, while another would be to create a pathway for talented industry professionals to work for the department for a time and then return to industry to cross-pollinate their knowledge and experience.
The admiral said the U.S. is a superpower, not just on the strength of its weapons and talented workforce; it’s also dominant because of things that have less public visibility, like outstanding testing facilities and methods, infrastructure, training, ranges, recruiting, management and other items. (Source: U.S. DoD)
09 Aug 24. DOD Official Lauds New Program to Streamline Acquisition Process. William A. LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, on Wednesday praised a new Defense Department pilot program designed to streamline DOD’s process for procuring new military technology by making what has been a sequential process for onboarding new military capabilities more simultaneous.
During a panel discussion at an industry conference on emerging defense technologies in downtown Washington and in a recent opinion piece he authored on the topic, LaPlante explained how the Competitive Advantage Pathfinders program seeks to identify technology potentially useful to multiple military services that may be stuck somewhere in the acquisition process.
LaPlante labeled the three traditional, bureaucratic processes — determining requirements, determining funding and acquiring new technology — “the three-legged stool” or “iron triangle,” and explained to conference attendees that CAP-derived solutions are arrived at by facilitating collaboration, removing barriers to the process and then validating and disseminating lessons learned throughout DOD.
“CAPs work by getting representatives — and buy in — from the resources, requirements and acquisition communities together to address whatever might be the cause of the delay, be it funding, contract rules or interservice concurrence,” he wrote in the op-ed.
“In all, CAPs can accelerate a specific technology or align requirements, budgeting and acquisition processes to deliver needed capability faster (speed) and, as importantly, into production at a high rate (scale),” LaPlante wrote.
During the panel, LaPlante also spoke about other priorities of his office, including protecting and sustaining the joint force and fostering a resilient, robust industrial base to meet the demands of protracted conflicts.
“At some point, you’re having one industrial base fighting another industrial base the warfighters,” LaPlante said. “And I think we have to remember that an industrial base includes the sustainment piece, and that’s a different way of thinking than we thinking probably up until a few years ago.”
LaPlante also used a portion of his remarks to praise those who dedicate their careers to defense acquisition.
“Acquisition, of course, is a profession and an expertise,” he said. “And there are 187,000 acquisition professionals doing incredible work.” (Source: U.S. DoD)
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