Little is being said publicly, but Air Force institutional expertise was a key part of America’s first sustained use of cyber weapons with the joint U.S.-Israeli deployment of the Stuxnet worm that dates to 2010 or earlier, and was intended to infect the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in Iran. This unorthodox attack required sneaking a memory stick into the plant to introduce the virus to its private and secure off-line network. But despite Natanz’s isolation, Stuxnet broke loose and eventually infected hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide. Observers wonder if a newer malware development called Flame or Skywiper marks a continuation of the attack or comes from some other source.
The Air Force may or may not be able to regain the dominant role as it once sought, but airmen will be crucial to cyber defensive and offensive operations in the future. Air Force officers now say that while establishing the joint-service Cyber Command is a good step, more needs to be done to develop government wide plans and strategies. That will surely happen by 2030. No one wants an all-out cyber arms race because the United States is more dependent on networked computer systems than any other country.
Hypersonics – And Space
For decades, the United States has built vehicles that reached orbital speed of 18,000 miles per hour or more. This category of spacecraft is not limited to the NASA shuttle orbiter fleet that has now been retired, but includes, among others, the Air Force’s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicles (OTV), which have carried out two spectacular, and highly secret, prolonged missions. Closer to the ground, the situation with speed is quite different.
From the time of the Vietnam War onward, new military aircraft were no longer flying faster than their predecessors. Despite enormous advances in thrust, reductions in weight, and improved fuel economy of modern turbofan engines, today’s warplanes don’t fly a realistic combat mission any faster than the turbojet-powered RF-101C Voodoo of 1970, right around the edge of Mach 2.0, or twice the speed of sound. Development of ultra high-speed power plants has been limited thus far to demonstrator aircraft like the Boeing X-51 WaveRider, an unmanned scramjet aircraft capable of Mach 6.0, or about 4,000 miles per hour at altitude. Carried aloft and dropped in flight by a B-52 Stratofortress mother ship, the X-51 is initially propelled by an MGM-140 solid rocket booster to approximately Mach 4.5 before the booster is jettisoned. Then the vehicle’s Pratt & Whitney-Rocketdyne SJY61 scramjet takes over and accelerates it to a top speed near Mach 6.0.
Designed to be launched like a satellite and land like an airplane, the second X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, built by Boeing for the U.S. Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office, is an affordable, reusable space vehicle. Boeing photo
A different demonstrator vehicle, the Pentagon’s arrowhead-shaped Falcon HTV-2 space glider, which the Air Force says can fly from New York to Los Angeles in under 12 minutes, may have reached Mach 20.0 before tearing itself apart on re-entry. Rumors of a manned runway-to-orbit hypersonic vehicle being tested at the supersecret airfield at Groom Lake, Nev., are fanciful and fictional.
In mid-2012, the Senate Armed Services Committee directed the Air Force to create a master plan outlining future requirements and proposed investment in hypersonics test infrastructure out to 2025 as part of the Senate’s draft version of the fiscal 2013 defense authorization bill. The committee said it is concerned because of the “dated” and limited nature of existing test facilities at a time when hypersonic weapon systems could play a significant role in overcoming the tyranny of distance in the Asia-Pacific region and in countering anti-access, area-denial challenges from potential adversaries. “The state of the nation’s hypersonics ground test and evaluation facilities and workforce have not received adequate attention over the years” and they are “facing both threats of divesture as well as gradual decay,” states the committee’s report.
What is clearly coming, and will surely happen, according to experts, are advances in technology that will wipe away the imaginary borderline between air and space. “The Air Force should dominate the portion of the commons we’re responsible for: air, space, and cyber,” said Wood. “My sense – just look at exoatmospheric sightseeing trips by commercial firms – is that there is not a defining border between air and space.” Deptula added: “Right now, we have a fragile system of space-based architecture. In the future, we’ll probably also put up a constellation of small satellites instead of big-architecture [satellites]. They won’t replace the big ones entirely, but sometimes small ones are good enough.”
Directed-Energy Weapons
The notion of a death ray wiping out everything in its path was once the stuff of science fiction. Producing real and practical directed-energy weapons isn’t an easy undertaking and won’t succeed fully without missteps along the way. The Air Force has retired its airborne laser test bed, the YAL-1A or Boeing 747-400, partly as an economy move but partly because a very large chemical laser carried aboard a very large and slow aircraft was a step in the wrong direction. The YAL-1A was predicated on the idea that a big, slow aircraft could fly within a couple of hundred miles of an enemy’s ballistic-missile launch sites and would be able to zap the missiles while in the boost phase – but the scenario requires an enemy capable enough to have missiles while incapable of mounting air defenses.