Gen. Duke Z. Richardson leads Air Force Materiel Command, and recently released a new strategic plan for AFMC. He spoke with Air & Space Forces Magazine’s News Editor, Greg Hadley, about his vision for the command. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: The first line of effort in your strategic plan is to “pursue enterprise solutions.” What does that mean?
A: Within the command sometimes even within certain centers, you might have business done slightly differently, in different ways in different offices. And I think a lot of that is just fine. We wouldn’t want to over-prescribe.
But what we’re trying to do is where it makes sense to have the best way of doing it that we then propagate that either across a single center, or if it’s AFMC-wide, across all six centers. There’s value in that, just as we move our folks around, they’re not learning new processes every time they move jobs. And it also extends into just being able to pick the best of breed and making sure that propagates.
One of the first enterprise solutions that we’re going to come out with is this idea called digital materiel management. … We’ve got a number of programs that are doing programs digitally, but let’s see if we can figure out a standard way of doing it—not just a standard way, but standard tools, trying to figure out a common tool set that we could use, and then making sure that the workforce is training.
Another one is we have a tool called Air Force Product Life Cycle Management. And it’s basically an IT tool that we’re going to use to house a lot of our data in a very standardized way across all six centers. And I think that might be the only tool we mandate because we also have to realize that we’re going to be working very closely with the defense industrial base, so I’m trying to be very cautious and not mandate too many tools. But that one is a tool that we will mandate in terms of how to house all the data.
We’re going to build enterprise solutions that the whole Air Force can use, and we’re going to use enterprise tools to build those enterprise solutions.
Q: Another idea in the Strategic Plan is surge requirements. That issue has been highlighted by the war in Ukraine. How do you envision that working for AFMC?
A: Like every other MAJCOM needs the capability to surge, AFMC does the same exact thing. So we will actually do a lot of exercising. We will come up with exercise scenarios in the materiel domain like, ‘Hey … here’s a problem statement. Here’s a requirement from, pick a combatant commander, how do you go about getting X munitions to this COCOM within nine months or something like that?
And so we’ll pull together a team from across Air Force Materiel Command to put together a very, very quick strategy on how to do that. … We haven’t exercised that muscle as much as we should have. The purpose of that objective is to dust off that plan and start exercising that muscle a lot more than we have in the past.
We have certain organizations that do exercise that muscle, but we’re going to try to get more folks involved in it.
Q: So how exactly do you exercise those muscles?
A: So you basically write out a scenario: ‘Hey, what if you had to put this special radio on a KC-135, how would you go about doing that?’ So we’ll have a team that’s not from the program office, from the Staff, they’ll write up a scenario and hand that over and then three days later, the team has got to come in and brief the strategy for it.
What’s really neat is they take them seriously and a lot of times the solutions they come up with are pretty good—like, wow, we should just go ahead and do that. And so they’re very, very realistic. Just like when you play a board game at home, people get into it.
Q: As you advance the strategic plan, what comes next?
A: What you’re not seeing in the strategic plan is the initiatives—so you’re seeing the [lines of effort] and you’re seeing the objectives. What you’re not seeing are the initiatives.
We are right now drafting initiatives to fall under each of the objectives. Those are in the very early stages. One of them is digital materiel management, we’re going to come up with a training program. We have pockets of it going on going on, but we want to really expand it. So we’ve got teams that know how to do it, and so we’re going to actually try to formalize the training behind all that and also the tools. There’s an example of an initiative that’s going fall under there.
If you look under LOE 1.2, “Deliver the Future Force,” that’s very closely tied to Secretary Kendall’s operational imperatives. And so my job is to organize, train, and equip. So I’m not selecting the programs that follow the OIs. I’m also not selecting the strategies for executing the programs. What I have to do is make sure that I’ve got people ready to execute those programs. And so one of the initiatives is to take those programs that Secretary Kendall is about to approve and then start figuring out how to execute them from a staffing perspective, from a facilities perspective to make sure that we have the right classified facility space, and then from the tools perspective.
Q: When will those initiatives be released?
A: I don’t intend to publish them, per se. The idea would be that you’d hear about them. The initiatives will come and go.
Another one is common support equipment. You hear the Chief and the Secretary talk about Agile Combat Employment, about distributing our forces more. So if we’re going to distribute our forces, that requires more support equipment, and so if you’re going to have support equipment distributed, it really makes a lot of sense to make sure that if you have multiple weapon systems at the same location, that they can share the same equipment, so that you’re not buying a lot of very specialized equipment. So an enterprise solution for me is common support equipment.
And you’ll see something in the strategic plan about unique solutions only when necessary … we will enforce that. It’s not going to be 100 percent, but you’re going to have to have a really good reason before you feel the need to build a piece of support equipment that only works on your airplane.
Q: Much has been made of the potential of the digital design process. What areas are most ripe for digital transformation?
A: All of them. I mean, seriously all of them.
Digital design is in manufacturing. So once you’ve designed it, you can imagine when you manufacture something, if you have digital design tools, it allows you to push a lot of the subassembly man.ufacturing off station, to the point where when the parts come together, they just fit. And so it takes a lot of the large tooling that you’d see it a normal … aircraft factory [where] you’ll see a lot of fixtures to hold the aircraft parts align just right so that you can then drill holes. We don’t need to do that anymore.
What’s really cool about these digital tools is because they’re all cloud-based, you can distribute them. So your suppliers can actually build the parts as they come in. That tool that I talked about, the product life cycle management tool, it’s going to house a lot of our data. And so it’s also going to allow us to make sure that the intellectual property that the government owns is actually being enforced, but at the same time, the intellectual property that the vendor owns is also being enforced.
Part of this is having models that very accurately match the system.
We will never not fly to verify performance. But if we have models that correlate, we won’t have to fly as much. We’ll be able to fly at the corners of the envelope and do a lot more interpolation between the points. So yeah, it’s very pervasive. It is not digitizing paper. It is not at all about that. It’s enabled by three things—the cloud, number one. Number two, the computing power that we have today is just enormous. And the third thing is the companies have actually made all these digital design tools.
Q: Are there guidelines you need to put on digital design and digital testing? The T-7A was the vanguard of all of that, and the timeline put on that was extremely ambitious, but it has experienced delays. Clearly there are still things that need to be ironed out.
A: I think that is actually a very powerful use of digital design tools, which allowed Boeing to basically design, build, and fly an airplane in about three years—pretty remarkable.
I think the lesson that I take away from that is that it goes back to the models: When we do future solicitations, we have to make sure there’s an ability to share the model. If we can’t share the model and understand the model, both the government and industry, we won’t be able to speed up the test part. That is one area that I do worry a little bit about. I think the test area is really ripe for digital materiel management, but that’s only going to work out if we have certified models.
The joint simulation environment, that’s being used pretty heavily right now on the F-35 program. We want to propagate it and start using it as a way of testing out more systems than just F-35.
But that really is going to require a certified model in it. So that’d be my one area that I’m watching closely is just making sure that the modeling part of it is really reflective and it’s truly a digital twin of the physical world. If it’s not a digital twin of the physical world, it will limit the usefulness of it. It will still be useful for things like product support and manufacturing, but it will be less useful for design verification.
Q: In the Strategic Plan, I was struck particularly by the idea of wanting to amplify the warfighter culture. Why do you think that’s important for AFMC?
A: Air Force Materiel Command is 70 percent civilian. It is easy to get disconnected from what all this equipment does that we’re developing.
You can imagine yourself being a configuration manager—you may not see the linkage between that and actual aircraft dropping a weapon.
It really involves a lot of things. [First] is making sure they see how their job connects, because it definitely does connect. [Second] is getting them access to some of the intelligence products that they may not see, which you don’t see.
These things come in many flavors, many different classification levels, but allowing more of the workforce that has the proper clearances to see why it is they’re building and designing and supporting the systems that they’re doing.
We’re also going to try to do better about giving them opportunities to actually walk on their equipment and touch it. There’ll be an effort where we’re working very closely with the other major commands that actually operate the systems to allow more access to their systems, which they’re very open to doing. What the workforce here does is very important. I can say that, but until they really feel it, they just think that I’m saying it.
Q: A lot of contractors have been stung by losses in fixed-price contracts. What are your thoughts on what this means for the Air Force and your relationship with those contractors?
A: If you look across time, we go through these phases of … about 15 years where different contract types are in vogue—cost plus, fixed price and then we have bad experiences with fixed price and the push goes back to cost plus.
Maybe I’m a simple acquirer on this. But what I do is I really have a very simple process—what is the requirement that we’re trying to procure or acquire? What’s the risk? What are the technical risks inherent in that requirement, in fulfilling it? And then that then drives the strategy. When I say strategy, part of that strategy is a contract type. And so, if all that stuff’s aligning, I think there are cases where fixed price development is appropriate.
Secretary Kendall, in his book, he kind of offers a five-step recipe in there. …
One is setting firm requirements, which means that you’ve already done the cost versus performance trade-offs. So those are all complete and you know the requirements are firm.
The second one is low technical risk. Now once you set those requirements, the technical risk is low. And basically you’re integrating mature technologies. So you’re not trying to invent something.
And the third one is having a qualified supplier base. So if you know that you’ve got qualified vendors that can actually bid, that would be a requirement.
The fourth one was financial capacity to absorb overruns. So, if for some reason, you did get into trouble, the company wouldn’t go under. And the fifth one is motivation to continue. I think the fifth one is important, because there’s got to be a business case, right?
I think if we get the first three right, we don’t ever have to worry about four and five. Firm requirements, we’re not trying to invent something, and we have qualified suppliers—if those three things are met, we don’t have to worry about number four and five.
Fixed price is definitely an option. We just have to be careful that we don’t try to apply it when it doesn’t match.