US Air Force, Army eye industry access on test ranges

Earlier this year, the Army announced it was opening five of its military test ranges – four domestic and one overseas – to approved companies in a move designed to speed innovation and get weapons and tech to the warfighter faster.Now, the Air Force says it’s considering a similar move. In a forum hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies on Tuesday, the commander of the Air Force Test Center, Brig. Gen. Mark Massaro, said service leaders were “actively working with the Army” to understand how they could apply the concept. “We’re … looking at how the Army has opened up some of their ranges to commercial access and understanding what it is that we can do, on the Air Force side, to maybe move forward in that direction,” Massaro said.The Air Force, he said, has had discussions with leaders from Army Test and Evaluation Command to “understand where they have gone with their access to ranges … to open up opportunities for contractors,” he said. He added that in a previous posting as commander of the 96th Test Wing at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., he had worked with Air Force officials and contractors to arrange smaller-scale test range access for specific tests. That experience, he said, had yielded “a lot of lessons” for how the arrangement could work.He acknowledged the threat from adversaries gathering imagery from above – an existing and growing risk with the rise of drone incursions that such a move might exacerbate.“We do understand that we have critical capabilities that we’re testing and we need to protect them,” Massaro said. “We do understand that there is a threat from an information security standpoint that we do pay attention to when we execute our tests, and we do work to design our processes and our ways of testing to account for that.”But the advantages, he said, are also evident.“Industry really is leading the way in a lot of ways on exploration and development, using their own internal research and development,” Massaro said. “And allowing them the ability to gain access to capabilities like the ranges helps … them to accelerate that learning to a point when it may become a useful, relevant technology for our military to consider using … So to to help them along that process in ways that we can through range or other assets, enable some of that work to help move the needle forward.” Former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll made the opening of service test ranges to industry one of the centerpieces of his work to eliminate barriers to industry and drive efficiency in innovation. In a January interview with CBS, he described conditions that private companies couldn’t easily replicate on their own, such as a range set up to imitate a Ukrainian battlefield and space to test anti-jamming and hypersonic weapons technology. He also said that opening Army ranges would cut down the traditional range test process from up to 18 months to as little as 30 days.“A company with a good idea shouldn’t need a team of lawyers and a program of record just to prove their equipment works,” Driscoll said in an August statement announcing the range openings. “So we fixed that. One front door … a real person to walk you in, and on the other side, everything the modern battlefield demands: contested airspace, degraded signals and the space to test at real scale.” The ranges the Army made available to industry via an online application portal include Dugway Proving Ground, Utah; West Cibola Range, part of Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz.; Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, Miss.; Camp Grayling Joint Maneuver Training Center, Mich.; and the Multidomain Training Area range complex within the Morocco-based Africa Multidomain Training and Experimentation Center.