Loren Thompson
The Air Force has embarked on a revolutionary approach to aircraft, satellite and software development that it hopes will greatly compress the time required to bring major advances into the active force. Dubbed the “Digital Century Series” after a burst of early Cold War innovation, the new approach could reduce the time required to develop new combat aircraft to five years, with additional years of time saved in developing military spacecraft and major software advances.
At least, that’s what the service’s charismatic chief weapons buyer, Dr. Will Roper, proposed at the Air Force Association’s annual air, space and cyber exposition last week. In an eloquent call for faster progress in fielding weapons, Roper talked about high-leverage development tools such as agile software generation, open architectures and digital engineering with the confidence that you would expect from an intellectual who earned his doctorate in mathematics at Oxford.
Roper said that the Air Force needs to think of itself more like a technology company, investing in game-changing innovations that disrupt the military marketplace and disorient potential adversaries. Rather than taking decades to field new planes or spacecraft by tapping a handful of big system integrators, Roper wants to award more contracts to a wider range of innovators, relying on competitive prototyping to turn out combat systems on timelines not seen since the early 1950s.
His model is the 1950s-era Century Series of fighters, aircraft so-called because they had designations like F-100, F-101, F-104 and F-105. The planes were developed fast by half a dozen companies focused on a few core parameters like speed, and they were only intended to have service lives of a decade or so. Roper says that’s what the Air Force needs today if it is to stay ahead of advances being made in countries like China: a larger number of integrators producing a diverse assortment of tactical systems in record time, typically in small numbers. He suggests that as few as 72 aircraft of a given type might be sufficient to field game-changing features like tactical lasers.
An F-100 Super Sabre, first of the Century Series of fighters. The plane was developed very quickly, and it showed. In one year, 1958, 116 Super Sabres were lost and 47 pilots killed. WIKIPEDIA
Dr. Roper deserves an “A” for imagination, and he certainly understands the innovation process better than your typical political appointee. The military acquisition system needs to move much faster, and the Air Force has traditionally led the joint force into new technological realms such as precision-guided munitions and unmanned aircraft. However, there are reasons to suspect that the Digital Century Series won’t yield the gains Roper foresees, and will quickly crash and burn in the prevailing political culture. Here are five concerns worth contemplating.
PROMOTED
The original Century Series was not a smashing success. In fact, by today’s standards it was a disaster. Under pressure generated by competition with the Soviet Union, the military took spectacular risks and paid the price. The first Century Series fighter, North American Aviation’s F-100 Super Sabre, saw nearly 40% of its total production run—889 out of 2,294 fighters—lost in accidents, killing 324 pilots. The plane was never credited with a single aerial victory. The F-105 that replaced it performed so poorly it was withdrawn from combat in Vietnam, ultimately losing 46% of the entire production run to accidents and hostile fire. Other Century Series fighters were similarly disappointing, with several never even reaching the operational force. This sure doesn’t sound like a model for military innovation.
The Air Force isn’t a hedge fund. Nor is it a science fair. The Air Force is about deterring and/or defeating aggression, a process that can place millions of lives at risk. The only way to justify the costs and dangers inherent in the military enterprise is to demonstrate its alignment with potential threats to the nation. The Digital Century Series is the latest in a succession of military initiatives like the Army’s ill-fated Future Combat Systems program of the last decade that substitute technological enthusiasm for sound operational analysis. The Air Force is a killing machine, not a technology startup, and building effective weapons is very different from developing the latest iPhone (a favorite Roper analogy). The Digital Century Series seems like the triumph of process over product, form over function.
The air fleet would become an incoherent patchwork. Dr. Roper told Valerie Insinna of Defense News that 72 aircraft would be a sufficient number for combat operations. That is an absurd statement. To sustain air operations over time, there must be enough aircraft of any given type to perform missions, conduct training, undergo periodic maintenance, provide a combat reserve, and meet various other requirements. Usually you need at least three times the number of actual deployed aircraft—with one third getting ready to deploy and another third recovering from deployment. A fleet of highly specialized aircraft acquired in small numbers could not execute a coherent air campaign due to chronic shortfalls of particular types, and would lack interoperability with other coalition forces.
Funding will tighten in the years ahead. The Trump Administration’s current funding plan for the military envisions no significant increases beyond those required to cover inflation through 2024. As the service encounters unforeseen bills, it will have to pull back from fanciful experiments that interfere with securing combat power. For instance, the service will have to pay much more for production of the next-generation B-21 bomber than it currently is expecting, and those extra dollars will have to come from somewhere. The Digital Century Series is a product of one of those rare moments when money is plentiful and threats aren’t all that pressing. As these circumstance change, so will the availability of money for neat ideas.
Politics will intervene. The ultimate customer for all U.S. military hardware is a political system, which evaluates weapons not only in terms of their operational efficacy but also in terms of their electoral impact. The system rewards weapons with hard-wired constituencies spread over many districts and many years. Weapons bought in small numbers from scattered sources with modest political footprints are vulnerable. When money gets tight they turn into bill-payers, and if they are part of a system that encourages failures borne of risk-taking, it will be easy to find excuses for cutting their funding. Because the Digital Century Series does not connect with the prevailing political culture—it has a risk profile only a technologist could love—the effort will prove unsustainable in the annual legislative tug of war over who gets what.
The conclusion is obvious: the Air Force has to find a way of speeding the introduction of new technology into the force that is compatible with operational needs, fiscal realities and political patterns. What Will Roper proposes is technologically feasible, but few of the key players will see it as desirable when hard choices need to be made.