WASHINGTON – The head of Air Force Global Strike Command wants to modernize his fleets at a rapid pace, and he believes Air Force Special Operations Command may be the model to follow.
“Continuous modernization, and smart modernization, will be absolutely essential for the future,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Wilson said during a speech at the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute. “Twelve years to acquire a weapon system is way too long.”
AFSOC has managed to quickly come up with the idea for a new system and get it up and flying quickly, something Wilson highlighted in his speech.
“I’m a big fan of AFSOC and always have been,” Wilson said. “I want to be like them. I want to be able to figure out how I can work with [various partners] to be able to bring capability quickly to existing airplanes.”
He told the audience about a trip he took a year ago to visit AFSOC, and saw a targeting pod equipped on a C-130 that had gone from concept to flying in just five months, a turnaround nearly unheard of in the Pentagon.
Rather than just be envious, Wilson sent a team out to AFSOC to figure out how they did it — and to see if they could take the same pod and put it onto a B-52 bomber following the same model, which Wilson said had glowing results.
“So we did a demo just last year with the B-52. We took the same radar targeting pod and we actually beat AFSOC — from idea to test was four months,” he said. “[That’s] smart modernization, how can we take existing platforms with other capabilities and adapt it to what we currently have.”
Wilson expanded on his interest in AFSOC when talking to reporters after the speech.
“I’m going to listen to how they do things, how they take ideas to concept to reality really quickly, and how my team could do the same thing with the B-52,” Wilson said. “We have a pretty flat organization. We want to be agile enough to partner with the right people to knock down the barriers to see how we can do things just like the way AFSOC does.”
While that model works well for existing sensors which can be equipped onto platforms, Wilson acknowledged some of the modernization priorities require a larger investment of time and money.
Those include the B-2’s defense modernization suite program and the B-52 CONECT system, as well as the new long-range strike bomber which will eventually form the backbone of America’s global strike capability.
“I’m a passionate believer that our nation needs a new long range strike bomber,” Wilson said.■
Email: amehta@defensenews.com.
