As the Air Force’s top civilian, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson is in charge of making sure the service can meet current demands for air power — which may be increasing as the U.S. military beefs up its presence in Afghanistan — as well as making investments in future technologies it will need further into the future. That’s not always easy to do in today’s fiscal environment, where budget caps threaten to derail the service’s growth and modernization.

Wilson sat down with Defense News and Air Force Times on Aug. 31 to discuss budget challenges and progress on several key procurement programs.

Can you go into any more detail on how you’re preparing for a possible continuing resolution and what it would mean for airmen?

If it were a short period of time it will have not much impact, and of course, we have shared what kinds of exceptions or issues that we would have to address with the Office of the Secretary of Defense and they will, of course, let the congressional leadership know.

If it goes on for a long period of time, or there’s no release from the limits on the Budget Control Act it will become a very serious problem for the Air Force. We are a service that is too small for what’s being asked of us, so we have surged to the fight. We have readiness issues at home already and if we were to have to continue next year, either on a continuing resolution that was flat from last year or even worse, under sequester limits — and if you go back to 2013 and see what happened in the service at that time, it would be very similar, though probably in terms of budget it would be a deeper cut and probably the equivalent of four months of flying time for the entire Air Force.

What that would mean is, if you were in combat or spinning up to go to combat, you’d get to fly. Just about everything else would be grounded, and we have a problem now with retention of pilots. If we have to ground the air force when the airlines are hiring, it would be devastating and it would be years to recover from it.

Based on your experience in Congress, do you think we’re going to have a short-term CR or do you think they’re going to actually get a budget deal through?

That’s one of those things where you have to be really close into the decision makers at the time to understand it. And the thing that I worry about now is, there’s so much going on in the world and we’ve got a thousand airmen who are deployed in support a huge national disaster, epic scale natural disaster in Texas. There are people focused on all kinds of policy issues, we’ve got tensions rising in the Far East. I worry that people — there’s a lot of demand on every member of congress that don’t relate to the security of the country and it only matters when things go wrong and then it’s too late.

Senator McCain and representative Thornberry have called for the service to give them the list of the programs that would be affected if a CR hits. Do you have a better sense now of what programs would be vulnerable?

Unless exempted, we would expect that all of the new starts would be delayed.

Does that include T-X?

It would include everything … unless it’s exempted.

Could you select a winner on T-X without giving them the actual contract award?

Well, what’s the point?

Fair enough.

We don’t have the money to be able to so it. You end up delaying a lot of new starts, probably would have a hard freeze if not a chill on hiring. We’re trying to hire people in cyber. In training, we’re trying to increase the number of pilots we’re putting through pilot training. Well, if you can’t hire the civilian pilots to be able to train them, we’re not going to be getting better there either. This becomes, very quickly, an extremely difficult problem.

Could I ask about the light attack aircraft demo that happened this month? Have you guys made a decision on whether to conduct that combat exercise?

We finished the experiment yesterday. We expect the final report to be done by the end of December. I would expect this fall or certainly by December, January, that we will make a decision on whether to do a follow-on experiment that would be a combat experiment and which aircraft might participate in that.

When you say combat experiment, what exactly do you mean?

We would probably bring it to the theater. I’m not sure exactly what missions they would run, but one of the things we can do is see how it connects up with command and control systems and other kinds of things. They did that with an OV-10 aircraft that they pulled out of the bone yard and brought it forward into the Middle East probably three or four years ago, something like that.

Given the talk of the need for more airpower in Afghanistan, does that intensify the need for a light attack aircraft?

I think we’ll see what we learn from the experiment and take a look at that and see what it tells us. One of the things that was striking to me on my recent trip to Iraq and Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, was the extent to which we were dependent on tankers. We were doing about 65 tanker sorties a day, fighter aircraft that’s taken a bite to ISIS, probably refuels four or five times in each mission. It is very tanker dependent and some of the light aircraft that we’ve seen do have refueling capabilities, some don’t. I think that’ll be one of the factors to consider.

General Carlton Everhart from Air Mobility Command has talked pretty extensively about the high demand for that asset. Do you think that might mean that there’s a need to increase the program of record for KC-46, maybe?

I don’t see the increase in the program of record. The thing that concerns us most about the tanker force is the demand on the people. We’re now operating at one-to-one, so in other words, if somebody is deployed forward for six months then they’re home for six months, but they’re not really home.

Could I ask about the Air Force One program? A couple weeks ago, the Air Force awarded a contract to Boeing for two aircraft that had been previously built for a Russian airline but had always remained in the possession of Boeing. Could you talk a little bit about how that deal came about? The optics could have looked pretty bad, So, did the Air Force have to do a lot of work with Congress to get them onboard?

On any procurement, we always try to inform the Congress on what we’re doing. We have a pretty standard engagement process to let people know when we’ve made a decision on something, so it’s pretty straight-forward and standard in that way.

It’s our desire to get the best value we can for the tax payer, and in this case, there was a company that ordered aircraft that they never accepted and the company went bankrupt so Boeing was left holding some airplanes that had never left Boeing’s possession and we were able to get a good deal on them.

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When did the Air Force become aware that those aircraft were available? Was that something that the Air Force discovered on its own?

I actually don’t know the details on that. It was handled in Air Force acquisition.

Do you know how much the cost-savings overall for the program are at this point? President Trump has said that he wanted to shave a billion off the cost of the program. Are you guys going to meet that?

We will at some point release a total cost number. We do have an agreement for competition reasons not to release the cost of the air frames, but we got a good price.

But I think at this point, the requirements have been evaluated and then firmed up again, so were there any changes that the Air Force believes will allow for a high amount of savings?

I am aware that they did go back with the White House military office and look very carefully at all of the requirements and revalidate those requirements to see if there were opportunities to reduce cost, and then there will be a fair amount of negotiation to make sure that we’re getting good value for money.

But, we have that obligation no matter what the program is and every dollar that we spend was earned by somebody and we need to make sure that we get good value for money on everything that we buy.

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Along those lines, Boeing is supposed to deliver 18 KC-46 tankers by October 2018, and Boeing’s encountered a lot of issues along the way. I know people in the Air Force have expressed skepticism that’s going to be met. How to you feel about the chances of Boeing being able to meet that requirement and have you begun discussions with them about what happens if they don’t meet it?

Let me see if I can remember the details of this. Boeing has a fixed—this is a fixed price contract and it does have a provision in there for delivery by a certain date without there being some penalties and so-forth. If they aren’t able to meet the contractual requirements, we will engage with them about what kind of compensation there might be.

They went through this once before — they added in some additional training and some other things because they failed to meet one of the dates, but we have kept the requirements absolutely firm and are holding them to the contract, so I think they’re highly motivated to do everything they can to meet the dates.

We should know fairly soon as the real long pole in the tent had to do with FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] testing and certification for airworthiness and I know that that was ongoing over the summer and into the fall here. The Air Force believes that that was a risk. At the same time, Boeing has worked more with the FAA than we have. We just thought it was a pretty aggressive schedule to get FAA approval.

We should know and Boeing probably should know pretty soon whether they’re on track or not.


About Valerie Insinna

Valerie Insinna is Defense News' air warfare reporter. She previously worked the Navy/congressional beats for Defense Daily, which followed almost three years as a staff writer for National Defense Magazine. Prior to that, she worked as an editorial assistant for the Tokyo Shimbun’s Washington bureau.

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