‘Kudos’ to Air Force on Kill Webs, but Problems Persist

AURORA, Colo.—The Air Force has made progress integrating its own kill webs and figuring out how to break the enemy’s, but its partnership with industry on the issue has been hampered by programmatic silos and classification issues, executives from three of the biggest U.S. defense contractors said this month. 

During a panel discussion at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 4, executives also noted that the resiliency of American “blue” kill webs, and the U.S.’s ability to disrupt enemy kill webs rely on domination of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS), but the Air Force also faces challenges integrating cutting edge communications and electromagnetic warfare technologies into its platforms.

Silos

Silos across programs can force contractors to produce a series of bespoke solutions to requirements that are 95 percent identical; while high classification levels complicate training, testing, and operational analysis, the executives said.

“We still have lots of silos that keep us from having a full and open dialog,” said Dave Harrold, vice president and general manager of countermeasure and electromagnetic attack solutions for BAE Systems. As an electronics supplier, he said, “what we see coming down is every different platform wants something almost similar, but bespoke. And so that that costs money, that takes time, that that often has engineering implications.”

The solution, he suggested, is better communication and coordination so that acquisition officials can integrate their architectures and requirements.

“Sometimes if we could just have that conversation where [we say], ’this other program office is asking for, like, 95 percent of the same thing you’re asking for, but this one little thing makes it a little bit harder,’” said Harrold. 

“There’s always going to be something that’s a little bit different for a particular platform, and we understand that,” he added, “But the more leverage we can gain, the faster we can create solutions.” 

Harrold said the Air Force has made progress breaking down some of those silos, but high classification levels for electronic warfare threats are another kind of silo. Many U.S. war games can’t use real threat data—a problem for contractors because they rely on the war games to do operational analysis on the effectiveness of their system.

“Sometimes we do the war games at a classification level that doesn’t include all the Gucci stuff, right?” Harrold said. “And that changes the entire narrative of what’s in the art of the possible there, from an operational analysis perspective, which is critically important.”

The defense industrial base is “investing heavily in operational analysis,” Harrold added, “So, the more real threat data that we can have, the more accurate of an answer that we can give,” about how the system will work under fire. 

“If all we have to go on is some fuzz ball that doesn’t actually represent a real threat, you’re not going to get the sort of fidelity in the answer that we would like to give to you,” he concluded. 

“That was really good feedback. I’m taking notes here,” said panel moderator Maj. Gen. William Betts, director of plans, programs, and requirements for Air Combat Command. 

Chain vs. Web 

A classic kill chain—like a forward observer calling in an air strike—is linear and singular. The observer connects to the Air Operations Center, the AOC to the pilot.  

The F-35 “is its own kill chain,” said Ed Zoiss, president of space and airborne systems for L3Harris. “All by itself, it can find and locate the target, it can decipher if it’s friendly or foe, and it can launch a weapon on it.” 

By contrast, kill webs are dynamic and overlapping: The observer should be able to call on a variety of fires through different command chains and use a variety of sensors to provide feedback on the accuracy of the strikes.  

The Air Force had made great progress on kill webs but there was still a long way to go, said Zoiss, a panelist who spoke later with Air & Space Forces Magazine.  

“Imagine the F-35 being able to launch a weapon from a ship offshore,” he suggested. That would require “connecting the Navy’s command and control, and fire control architecture, in with the Air Force.” 

The theoretical poster child for kill webs, Zoiss said, is President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome initiative to create a missile defense system that would use satellites and space sensors for target acquisition and tracking and fire control to cue, at least initially, land- and sea-based interceptors.

The key to making it all happen, though, is resilient communications, said retired Gen. Jeffrey “Cobra” Harrigian, now vice president of strategic campaigns for aeronautics, strategy, and business development at Lockheed Martin. 

Even as a four-star general, Harrigian said he found it difficult to get Pentagon leadership’s attention on critical communications resiliency problems.  

“I’m gonna throw stones a little bit,” announced Harrigian, who retired as commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa in 2022. “There were problems in the field relative to this exact issue that we were challenged to get into the building. I’ll put it that way, and to get the building to react to what the warfighter needed,” he said.

Harrigian recalled his work in the early years of the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) program, the Air Force component of joint all-domain command and control (JADC2) initiative.

“We struggled trying to figure out what we wanted to do,” he said, “It took a while.” 

The solution was “a conversation that occurred between those in the field [and], those working at the headquarters level” that “broke down the stovepipes to get the right people in the room.” 

He encouraged current Air Force leadership to “get industry out front at PACAF [and] USAFE, understanding the problems.” Only by being involved hands on could contractors ensure that when making big investments in future capabilities they were “actually getting after the right problem and fixing those things at the edge for today’s fight, which we can then spiral into the future fight.” 

Next Steps

The Air Force’s response to the need for coordinated solutions across the service and the joint force was to establish an Integrated Capabilities Command—an effort that is currently paused as the department awaits new leadership.

Harrigian said he saw the value in the new organization, but he pointed out the command would take five years to establish.  

Zoiss said that, in the meantime, the service was making great progress on communications resilience.  

“I’m not going to go through a lot of the programmatic details, but I will tell you that many of the platforms right now that are currently in service are being outfitted with additional ways to communicate, methods that were outside the original scope of the platform when it was conceived, allowing for a much more resilient architecture, allowing for it to pass communications and targeting data up to a much broader set of platforms,” he said. 

“Kudos to the Air Force,” Zoiss continued, “We still see the kill chains and kill webs becoming much harder and much more resilient.” 

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