What's Brewin: Cyberspace and the future of the Air Force

The week after Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley to resign in June, Moseley had planned a top-level strategy conference with key Air Force uniformed civilian leaders to redefine the service.

A reader kindly sent my way a pile of PowerPoint briefs prepared for that conference. The slides had one resounding theme: Air Force dominance of cyberspace operations intertwined with the service's air and space missions.

The new Air Force chief, Gen. Norton Schwartz, plans to reevaluate the projects his predecessor kicked off, including the Air Force Cyber Command's planned Oct. 1 standup, which Schwartz sidelined this month.

But Air Force sources tell me that Cyber Command may see a new life. Based on the presentations prepared for the strategy conference, Schwartz has many reasons to continue the cyber push, including the fact that it will be hard to decouple cyber from air and space operations.

The Cross-Domain Dominance Thing

Lt. Col. Brad Lyons and Lt. Col. Tim Rapp from the Air Force Strategic Studies Group, which Moseley established in June 2007, said in their conference brief that cyberspace was another domain the Air Force needs to dominate and it fits in with the service's traditional air and space missions.

"Our cyber and space capabilities have developed to the point that they must be considered as more than just enablers of air operation," they said. "We now consider airpower to be the productof air, space, and cyber superiority. ... We have found that integrating capabilities across these domains provides synergistic advances in total capability that is greater than the sum of its parts."

Following this logic, cyberspace must become a core Air Force mission, Lyons and Rapp said, even though they gave lip service to joint operations in cyberspace. But, they added, "The Air Force provides the preponderance of the nation's strategic and operational military power in the air and space domains, and we have heavily leveraged the cyber domain to enhance those capabilities."

Well, at least they didn't decide to stake a claim to the ground mission performed by the Army and Marines or the Navy's sea mission.

That Pesky Title 10

Title 10 of the U.S. Code outlines the roles and missions of the armed forces and does not yet have a section governing cyberspace. I'm told by well-informed sources the Air Force has draft language on the Hill to fix that problem, singling out the service as the boss of all things cyber.

Defense Department Directive 5100.1 defines the overall functions of Defense and the individual services, and it, too, lacks language outlining who is in charge of cyberspace. Lt. Gen. Raymond E. Johns Jr., Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and programs, said in remarks prepared for the strategy conference that the service has developed language for Directive 5100.1, clarifying its role in cyberspace and expects a change this November.

Johns also came up with a zippy new mission statement for the Air Force, which emphasizes its plans to dominate air, space and cyberspace operations: "To deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests — to fly and fight in air, space and cyberspace."

With a Little Help From Their Friends

The Air Force has hyped Cyber Command in a TV commercial and in speeches during the past year in an effort to position itself as the logical lead service for all things cyber.

At the same time, I'm told, Air Force cyberwarriors have not been shy about tapping into the expertise of organizations that have been in the cyber game longer, such as the Naval Network Warfare Command, whose motto sounds like it came from a Cyber Command briefing: "Information superiority for the warfighter."

Netwarcom sources tell me that Air Force cyber folks have been picking the group's collective brain for the past three years, with their latest visit to the Navy cyber operation on the Little Creek Amphibious Base in Norfolk, Va., in July.

Maybe the Air Force wants to take over the Netwarcom property, which sure has better sea views than the provisional Cyber Command HQ located at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

Army's Future Combat Systems Bill Up to $300 Billion?

That's what the Congressional Research Service said in an Aug. 1 report on the 2009 Defense authorization bill. The CRS report said it obtained the $300 billion figure from the Defense Cost Analysis Improvement Group, a rather obscure organization of bean counters who provide independent cost estimates of major acquisition programs.

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Martin Downie told me I should discount the $300 billion figure because it includes "added personnel and life-cycle costs to procurement costs," he said. "The Army will incur personnel and life-cycle costs with or without FCS on whatever vehicles and systems it employs."

Downie added, "FCS is designed to reduce personnel and life-cycle costs, and, in fact, will do so through a significantly reduced logistical tail and less intensive maintenance and support requirements. However, these cost savings are not included in the CAIG report."

Downie stuck to the Army's total cost estimate of $160 billion for FCS and pointed out that in its April quarterly series of Selected Acquisition Reports, Defense said the cost of FCS had dropped to a mere $159.3 billion due to "a correction of previously reported costs that were overstated due to the use of incorrect escalation indices."

Don't you just hate those incorrect escalation indices?