‘Vendor Pools:’ One Strategy to Accelerate Acquisition and Increase Competiton

March 7, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

AURORA, Colo.—What if the Air and Space Forces could create their own dream teams of contractors for major programs instead of leaving it to prime contractors to assemble teams on their own? The Air Force is looking at ways to achieve that effect and generate more competition, said Air Force acquisition executive Andrew Hunter.

Speaking March 7 at the AFA Warfare Symposium, Hunter said the department has used “vendor pools” with classified programs sees it as a valuable tool for stimulating competition in the defense industrial base throughout the life of a program.

“So you don’t get into this sort of high stakes [decade-long] competition, where all the mission systems are defined early on, they’re aligned with a prime and then they’re sort of locked to that team, and everyone else is locked on another team,” Hunter said. Once teams are formed, he added, ““And then those locks, “We can’t unlock them as we go on, and we can’t come back later and say, ‘Well, OK, it turns out that the key mission system is something that I was doing a little work on, but I didn’t necessarily have it prioritized exactly right when we did the first chalk line.’”

Creating “relatively broad vendor pools” gives the Air Force flexibility to seek alternative solutions from industry with relative ease. As an unclassified example of the approach, Hunter cited the Next Generation Air refueling System (NGAS), the service’s new tanker program.

“Having a vendor pool, a wide variety of providers, working with them as we go through an analysis of alternatives for NGAS, so that we understand what’s really out there,” Hunter said. “How do these things—mission systems, airframes—in a family of systems approach, actually come together and work together to create an integrated capability that’s going to meet the needs of the joint force?”

By separating those pieces, the Air Force could, in effect, assemble its own dream team. Hunter took the sporting analogy further: “And it’s continuous, right? No one is ever out of the game,” he said. :They always have an opportunity of that next shot, to be in the game.”

Air Force acquisition programs applied similar approaches in broad awards for JADC2 and the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion program. But Hunter said there are limits to its appeal.

“Obviously, we’re still talking about contracts here,” he said. “So there is a process of when it comes to formulating a vendor pool: You have to go out ,and people have to provide offerings and explain why they have something they bring to the table that’s worth having, that’s relevant to the game. And then you source select,” Hunter said.

“But it’s not one and done, right? You can select additional providers from the vendor pool over time, so you’re never closing the opportunity to findsomeone who has something you need that wasn’t on the team before.”

The Space Force’s approach to satellite acquisition has similarly spread risk by awarding tranches of satellites to different vendors for the Space Development Agency’s proliferated constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites, said Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney, the military deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration.

“We’re seeing awards for satellites being given to multiple contractors in each tranche and each epoch,” Whitney said. “We want to be very clear with industry that … we don’t want to take anybody out…. We want to make sure that we’re really clear here where we’re going.”

Kendall Warns Congressional Gridlock Over Budget Would Be a ‘Gift to China’

March 7, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

AURORA, Colo.—Department of the Air Force leaders have sweeping plans for the year ahead, promising initial work on several futuristic headline programs. And details on the Air Force’s priorities are soon to be revealed in detail in the fiscal 2024 budget request.

But whether Congress will come up with the money is an open question.

“It will soon fall to the new Congress to enact both an authorization and appropriations bill on time,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in a keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 7. “The DAF leadership team is ready and eager to work with Congress.”

But lawmakers are currently locked in a bitter fight over raising the debt limit, which caps how much money the government can borrow. The debate is likely to become more heated when the Biden administration releases its 2024 budget request in the coming days. After the 2022 midterm elections, Congress is split with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats in charge of the Senate. Brinkmanship could lead to a government shutdown if the debt limit is not raised.

It is still several months until the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1. But uncertainty regarding the budget has become an ongoing concern. In 13 of the last 14 years, Congress has started fiscal year under a continuing resolution, which keeps funding at current levels as a stopgap measure. Congress only approved a fiscal 2023 budget in late December after burning through multiple CRs.

Even the National Defense Authorization Act, generally considered must-pass legislation, has been delayed past the new fiscal year multiple times recently.

Kendall hopes he can explain why that would be harmful to the Department of the Air Force.

In his speech, Kendall talked about rapidly fielding the B-21 Raider stealth strategic bomber, 1,000 Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and 200 Next Generation Air Dominance platforms to replace current platforms—just some highlights of where the Air Force wants to go.

“The many new efforts I have described and that we have spent over a year analyzing and planning cannot begin without Congressional approval. My greatest fear today is a delay or even worse a failure to provide the Department of the Air Force and Department of Defense with timely authorization and appropriations. That would be a gift to China. It’s a gift that we cannot afford,” Kendall warned.

In the House, members have set up a select committee on threats from the Chinese Communist Party. But whether Congress will heed Kendall’s warning is unclear.

Speaking to reporters later in the day, Kendall expanded on his concerns. He said he believes he has a good dialogue with leading members of relevant committees who are familiar with defense issues. While those members may fight over specific programs and the topline figure, they understand that the DOD needs a budget and NDAA to function properly.

“It’s never always 100 percent or perfect, but by and large we get very good support,” Kendall explained. “People take national security seriously.”

Kendall is particularly hopeful Congress will be receptive to the Air Force’s messaging. He said during the previous Congress, his office spent time briefing members on threats. Now, as the Air Force looks for money to disperse and expand its airbases under Agile Combat Employment and the Space Force aims to launch more proliferated satellite constellations, Congress is aware of the growing threat from China that has prompted those moves—something Kendall has relentlessly hammered home.

“We’re going to have a good story to tell,” Kendall told reporters. “I think we’re going to have a receptive audience in our committees of jurisdiction. I feel pretty good about that part of Congress. What I’m worried about is political gridlock.”

As has become common practice in Washington, if the budget can’t be passed, a CR can be passed to avert a government shutdown. But CRs halt “new starts”—projects or activities that were not previously funded or authorized in the prior year’s budget.

“The CCA is one of them, for example,” Kendall said. “That’s a major new start.”

Funding questions go beyond advanced, new programs. Speaking to reporters, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. said increasing the Air Force’s precision munitions supply, which wargames have shown would quickly be exhausted if the U.S. were to get into a war with China, requires a “predictable budget.”

Ultimately, the Air Force and Space Force may be subject to the whims of some lawmakers, no matter how important their missions.

“I can foresee some difficulties as we move forward,” Kendall said. “Because you can’t go faster until you can start and we can’t start until we have the authorizations and appropriations.”

ACC Boss: Fighters Should Start with One CCA, Then ‘See Where It Takes Us’

March 7, 2023 | By John A. Tirpak

AURORA, Colo.—Before adding multiple autonomous wingmen to Air Combat Command’s fighter force, the Air Force will first add just one per fighter and “see where it takes us,” said ACC commander Gen. Mark D. Kelly said at the AFA Warfare Symposium.

Hours after Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall announced notional plans for 1,000 Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) to accompany some 200 Next Generation Air Dominance jets and 300 F-35s, Kelly said “a lot of discovery” still needs to bring true manned/unmanned collaboration to fruition.

“As far as numbers [for] testing and development, I think we’re obviously going to start with one [CCA per crewed fighter] and see how that goes,” Kelly told reporters at a press conference during the AFA event.

“I can easily see one platform controlling one CCA doing one mission, whether it be sensing or jamming or something like that,” he said. Then, after proving that can be done, he continued, adding a second aircraft “with a different mission.”

Making CCAs work will depend on the “processing power and bandwidth of the platform—and the processing power and bandwidth of the aviator,” he said. It’s important that pilots must not be overburdened with managing other aircraft.

Kelly said he can see two CCAs per fighter as the right number at some point, or even eventually three, but testing should start with one.

Asked what enabling mission is most urgent for CCAs to perform, Kelly suggested electronic warfare.

Sensing, jamming, and signals intelligence would be Kelly’s top mission for a CCA, he said. Size, weight, power and cooling requirments would impact those decisions, “I think we’ll iterate from there,” Kelly said.

Enabling CCAs to employ weapons could be five to 20 years away, Kelly said. “Well before you get to weapons employment, you’ve got to get to the ability for it to do auto-target recognition.” And before that, Kelly said, CCAs need to work within the broader airspace, and today’s uncrewed aircraft don’t yet have unlimited permission to operate in civil airspace.

“My biggest focus, for our team, is just to make sure they don’t outstrip” the authorities they have to operate, he said. “If we let automation and CCAs … skip on authorities to execute … it will be a bit of a lopsided capability.”

Kelly also said it would be foolish to just involve fighter pilots in developing the concepts of operation for CCAs, because the cadre would not include operators with useful knowledge, such a MQ-9 Reaper pilots “who know how to handle lost links,” Kelly said, adding “we better have their expertise in the room.”

Similarly, he thinks RC-135 Rivet Joint surveillance operators should be included “because they know how to do really high-end jamming and SIGINT.”

Minihan: Mobility Guardian 23 Will Test Airmen in New Ways

March 7, 2023 | By David Roza

AURORA, Colo.—The head of Air Mobility Command is eager to find out how his Airmen handle the combined challenges of long distances, open ocean, and integration with other services at a major exercise scheduled this summer over the Pacific Ocean.

“Operation Mobility Guardian … normally just happens over the [continental United States] and we moved that into the theater that matters,” Gen. Mike Minihan said March 7 at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “We are going to understand intimately what the tyranny of distance is and what the tyranny of water is.”

Mobility Guardian is the largest full-spectrum readiness exercise Air Mobility Command conducts. Past iterations of the exercise have seen a wide range of refueling and transport aircraft work with thousands of service members and international partners to practice airlift, air refueling, aeromedical evacuation, and other mobility exercises under “degraded and operationally-limited environments,” according to a press release about the 2019 edition.

Mobility Guardian 2023 will likely be even bigger. A five-day planning conference for the event that took place in February involved about 180 representatives from seven countries, the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the U.S. Department of State. The exercise, which will span an area of more than 3,000 miles, is part of a series of training programs scheduled to take place under U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s authority this summer.

“Mobility Guardian is the cohesive glue that enables Indo-Pacific Command’s Large Scale Global Exercise this summer,” Lt. Col. Jacob Parker, the director of Mobility Guardian 23, said in an Air Force press release. “We’re providing the meaningful maneuver for the combined Joint and Coalition forces exercising together in theater.”

For Minihan, the exercise is a chance to find out whether the changes he has pushed since he took the command in October 2021 have borne fruit. At the AFA Air Space & Cyber conference last September, the general laid out four gaps that his troops need to address to be ready to fight China—command and control, navigation, tempo, and “maneuver under fire,” Minihan’s term for the maintenance, logistics, fueling and other ground-based work that makes flying military aircraft possible.

These gaps need to be closed quickly, Minihan said, or Air Mobility Command might not be ready to move troops and supplies across the vast reaches of the Pacific fast enough to defeat China in a potential conflict.

“Can we operate at the tempo required to win? Can we operate at the tempo greater than our potential adversaries?” Minihan asked March 7. “These gaps require integration. … You cannot have integrated operations if you do not have integrated planning in advance.”

The general said his troops have been working with the other services to make that integration happen, which helps give him “an enormous amount of confidence” that they can deliver when called upon. But Mobility Guardian 2023 will show how well that integration works in reality.

“We are going to understand that, as the joint force maneuver, we have to service everybody,” Minihan said. “We are going to have a chance to do that in the theater: We are going to have a chance to work with all these entities and we’re going to test the planning integration to see if that really turns into operational integration in the theater.”

Minihan does not expect it to go perfectly.

“We’ll learn something,” he said. “Some things won’t go perfect and we’ll go back and we’ll work harder to get it and we’ll close gaps as quick as we can.”

Lessons from Vietnam: ‘Stay Connected, Don’t Be Alone’

March 7, 2023 | By Patrick Reardon

The AFA Warfare Symposium kicked off March 6 with three storied heroes of the Vietnam War. This is the second in a three-part series on their talks. Read the first talk by Lt. Col. Gene Smith.

AURORA, Colo.—1st Lt. Lee Ellis’ F-4C Phantom was shot down on his 53rd bombing mission over North Vietnam. Captured immediately on Nov. 7, 1967, he was taken to the notorious Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, where he stayed for the next five and a half years.

“That cell in the Hanoi Hilton … was six and a half by seven feet,” Ellis told a packed room of Airmen and Guardians at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “That’s like a bathroom in a gas station. I was in there with three other guys for the first eight months.”

Despite the cramped conditions, Ellis and his fellow American POWs endured, helping each other maintain their collective spirit by offering encouragement and moral support. And when they were isolated from one another in attempts to break their wills, they did what they could to remain connected.

1st Lt. Lee Ellis and his F-4C in November 1967, shortly before his capture in North Vietnam. Courtesy photo.

“We tapped on the walls,” Ellis said. “These walls were about 16 inches thick. We tried to communicate … because you’ve got to stay connected. The key to resilience is ‘Don’t be alone.’ We had to collaborate. We had to come up with ways to defeat the enemy and offset them. We had to support each other. You can’t let somebody who’s alone be alone.”

Connecting was every prisoner’s job.

“We would risk our lives to get to somebody in solitary confinement and say, ‘Man, we’re proud of you. We’re not going home without hanging in there. One more day.’”

Among the 590 prisoners who eventually made it home in 1973, leaders emerged, setting an example of positivity for the rest of them. He cited three in particular: Air Force Lt. Col. James Risner, Navy Cmdr. Jeremiah Denton, and Navy Cmdr. James Stockdale.

“They got there two years before … I got there and they had been through hell,” Ellis said. “They spent more than four years in solitary confinement, and they bounced back and bounced back.”

To help all endure, Ellis said, Risner reshaped the Code of Conduct to fit the conditions:

Be a good American.

Resist up to the point of permanent physical or mental damage, and then no more. Give as little as possible, and then…

…bounce back to resist again.

Stay united through communications.

Pray every day.

Go home proud. Return with honor.

Risner’s direction gave the men a codified culture to live by, and by reinforcing that every day, the POWs could believe it when they told each other, “One more day.”

Wives and families at home ultimately were as decisive to their survival, Ellis said, as their own resilience. They wouldn’t give up, and they took their quest public.

“The military didn’t know what to do with [the wives of MIAs],” Ellis said. “They were told to keep quiet, and they did for a couple of years. And then they said, ‘No more. You’ve got to do something for our men, because [North Vietnam is] not following the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of POWs.’”

1st Lt. Lee Ellis returning home in 1973 after five and a half years as a POW in North Vietnam. Courtesy photo.

Sybil Stockdale, Phyllis Galanti, and the National League of POW/MIA Families campaigned to bring attention to North Vietnam’s treatment of POWs, Lee said. Their relentless campaigning—and refusal to remain silent—built international pressure on North Vietnam to change their policy.

In 1969, their efforts succeeded and the torture at Hanoi mostly ceased.

“That’s why we were able to come home so healthy,” Ellis said. “The women changed our lives. It’s amazing what they did.”

Inspired by the impact the wives had on foreign policy and a hopeless situation, Ellis ultimately felt compelled to tell these stories of love in a new book. Collaborating with relationship expert and author Greg Godek, his newest book “Captured by Love” tells the love stories of 20 Vietnam War POWs. It is scheduled for release in May.

Watch, Read: ‘Operationally Focused ABMS’

March 7, 2023

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey, the Air Force’s program executive officer for command, control, communications, and battle management, oversaw a panel discussion on ‘Operationally Focused ABMS,’ looking at how the military and industry are defining and refining the connected battlespace at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 7, 2023. Panelists included Elaine Bitonti, vice president and general manager of connected battlespace and emerging capabilities mission systems for Collins Aerospace; Dan Markham, director for Joint All Domain Operations / Advanced Battle Management System in Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division; and retired Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, vice president and general manager for Air Force and Space Force programs at L3Harris. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

Well, welcome to the session on an Operationally Focused ABMS. My name’s Brig. General Luke Cropsey, and for the next 40 minutes you’re going to be exposed to an absolutely amazing set of questions and answers. So strap in for the ride. I will also say that it’s somewhat ironic that they put the acquisition guy in front of the Operationally Focused ABMS discussion, but I assure you I’ve got plenty of accountability here in the audience. So as we move this conversation forward, recognize that I am now building off of a whole series of conversations that we’ve had over the last six hours in regards to what C2 looks like inside of the evolving operational context that we’re going to be discussing now.

And then it’s my privilege to introduce our panel members. So I’ll just run through the ranks here real quickly and then hand it over to you to give brief opening comments. So Elaine Bitonti is joining us from Collins Aerospace and she does business development for their mission systems. Welcome. Next to her we’ve got Ron Fehlen. He is coming from the L3Harris side of the business and owns the Air Force portfolio over there. And then rounding out the back end of this conversation is Dan Markham and he’s the director for Lockheed Martin joint all domain operations and advanced battle management system efforts. So without further ado, Elaine, let me turn it over to you for opening comments and we’ll just kind of go down the road here.

Elaine Bitonti:

Great, thank you very much. So I just took a new role. BD was my old role and with all good organizations we have changed. So I’m now responsible for our connected battle space and emerging capabilities at Collins Aerospace, which encompasses how we’re going to address JADC2. So we’re excited to be on the panel today. Collins Aerospace is part of Raytheon Technologies. Raytheon Technologies is one of the performers on the ABMS Digital Infrastructure Consortium. We’re also one of the performers on the Common Tactical Edge Node Consortium, which is looking at how we’re going to bring together the networks required for ABMS. So we have a really good deal of expertise. We’re excited to participate on the panel today. We also have a large amount of commercial expertise inside of Collins Aerospace. And so, one of the things we’ll talk about are business models that can be leveraged from the commercial sector to solving problems like ABMS. So thanks for having me on the panel today.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

Absolutely. Ron.

Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, USAF (Ret.):

Ron Fehlen, I’m the vice president and general manager for the Air Force and Space Force programs at L3Harris under broadband communications systems out in Salt Lake City. Long title, all that really means is I get the privilege of ensuring connectivity for our war fighters. We look at the networks, whether it be the tactical side and how do we get information forward to folks that need it at the right time, or how do we get information back to the operational centers or even to the strategic level. How do we do that in a manner that ensures a security of the data as it goes back and forth, resiliency of the network as a whole through various forms of connectivity and assurance, assurance that it’s actually going to get there.

Basically, the things that any of us would want if we’re in the middle of a fight and we don’t want to think about whether we’re connected to the network, we want to make sure it’s there. So that’s primarily what we do out of our business, as far as L3Harris, of course, we supply not only that level of connectivity all the way down to the tactical in the hand radios, and then as well on the sensor side and platform side and ensuring that we can apply those mission effects, as well as being the right place with the right sensors to pull the data back to make decisions on. So thank you for the opportunity to be on the panel, I’m looking forward to the discussion.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

Dan.

Dan Markham:

I’m Dan Markham. I’m out of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics out of the Skunk Works ADP organization. As Luke mentioned, I run the JADO and ABMS portfolio for the company. That’s a broad set of initiatives across space, the rotary mission systems, aero and our missiles and fire control group and trying to corral all of those efforts. We have a number of different activities going on relating to the legacy, I’ll call it, of the ABMS program and what is built up to what General Cropsey is running now, in a number of different efforts on how to both bring the legacy platforms, which obviously Lockheed has a strong delivery history and interest in enabling into those systems, as well as enabling the data access, data processing and the software associated with those as part of the ABMS program. So thanks for letting me participate as well.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

Okay, great. So just a little bit more context here for the audience. So I’ve already forewarned Elaine that she’s literally the only person that’s got a business background here. The rest of us are all card carrying members of the nerd herd. So three engineering degrees on my side with a mechanical engineering degree and two double E guys sitting over here on the other end. So you’re just going to have to take all of these comments with a grain of salt as we go through it, but Elaine’s going to ground us here as we get into this. The other thing that you should know is that we’re going to use a little bit of Thunderdome rules here, so I might ask one of you a question, but it’s like open season on how you want to jump in on it.

All right. So let me set a little bit of perspective for everybody when we start talking about what it means to be operationally focused. Within the broader construct of what we’re doing for C3BM, there’s kind of a ditch on both sides of the road that we’re trying to avoid. On the one side of the road, we have this thing that I’ll call status quo, and I think the room in general understands that doing what we’ve always done is not going to get us where we need to go when it comes to the future fight. The problem is that when over correct, when you hit the ditch on the other side, you end up in the ditch on the other side of that road. And the other side of that road looks like trying to boil the ocean. It looks like trying to connect everything everywhere all the time. And that isn’t going to work either.

In fact, if you talk to the secretary, he’s got a long litany programs that went with what I call the big bang acquisition theory in this problem space and it ended poorly. So the question is, how do you stay focused and aligned down the middle of this road? And what I’m going to offer to you in terms of the way that we’re focused between the PEO side of this conversation and the ABMS/CFT side of this conversation and the cross-functional team is headed up by Brig. General [inaudible 00:07:00] and Major General Olson with regards to the air and the space operations side of this business. So the way that we stay down the middle of the road, is by making sure that we are laser focused. I mean ruthlessly focused around the operational problems that need to be solved in order for us to win the next fight.

And when we talk about an operationally focused ABMS, what we’re talking about is a program that starts with the operational problem that needs to be solved and then works from that point back through the system. So as we talk about the conversation today, it’s grounded inside of this fundamental belief that if we can identify, clearly articulate the operational problem that we’re trying to get after and do that in a way that allows us to all share the same vision of what that problem looks like, then we can figure out how we back our way through the rest of that kill chain and the rest of the mission threads that are going to be required in order for us to solve this.

But from my perspective and set in the context here for the panel, when we say operationally focused, we mean operationally focused. Because, the alternative is what? Not operationally focused. I mean it’s like doesn’t even make any sense. So we’re all about solving operational problems and the things that we’re going to talk about, and I’m telling you that now, because you might hear words like system of systems and architecture and some things like that in the conversation, but you have to know that they’re all grounded back inside of that operational picture.

So with that, I’ll lob one over to Dan at the other end of this. And Dan, there’s a lot of conversation around how you design and engineer system of systems as opposed to what we’ll call the classic platform centric view of the world has been historically and what the implications are with regards to being able to solve these very hard operational problems at a system of systems level. Can you just give us some perspective from your corner of the world on what system of systems engineering looks like and how that plays into what we’re talking about today?

Dan Markham:

Oh, absolutely, and thanks for the question. Lockheed in particular, it’s interesting to start with that question, because we are traditionally very platform centric and we like to look at problems from a platform point of view. And as this has evolved, as ABMS has evolved and as the integration of those platforms work into the solution set, the ability to think about a number of different things, those platforms need requirements that participate, as that starts to boil up into the smaller systems of systems, how they participate with other platforms and then how they contribute into the larger C2 network or data processing network and data access network and how all those things start to play together and they start to, as I mentioned before, those platforms are both enhanced by the access to that data and contribute to that solution is all part of the way to look at that problem.

As we’ve started, in particular one of the contracts, you all are working the digital battle management network. How do we connect those things and start down the road, to your point, without boiling the ocean, think through individual mission threads. How do I task this system through this interface with access to this software and touching this particular piece of hardware? And all of those things can be from different companies, which is also a unique experience from a lot of our perspective that, that collaboration is critical and making sure that we are enabling that and partnering with both industry and the government is a unique experience that we’re all working through.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

… Go ahead.

Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, USAF (Ret.):

So I was going to say it is interesting too, as you described it sort of I’ll say bottoms up platform by platform sewing together the Legos so to speak. And it is actually very heartening to see the CFTs work. As they walk through that work the other day because it truly is at the top level asking what’s the task and the processes associated with being a battle manager. And the fact that you can describe it at that level then goes to your earlier point on, okay, but what problem am I trying to solve operationally? The functional decomposition, you can do that construct on the operational side because the beauty of it to tie into exactly what you just said, is as the CFT produces a model produces things like, again, as you pointed out, we’re going to be a little nerdy at some points here, but interface exchange requirements, IER, something that’s been sort of in the system but hasn’t been pulled forward for a long time.

Now suddenly it’s identification of, well I need this platform with this sensor to provide this information at this time. Okay, that’s now a at retractable problem from a system engineering perspective that as Dan said, we can take, well is it this platform or this platform that’s going to provide that? Who’s going to be in the operational environment at that time and whether it’s a highly contested environment or not, how do they operate within there and how are we going to be able to pull that information out? So having that upfront work from the CFT to describe what it is they need from an information and where within their processes is a key part of that. And now the next piece is really how do we get that information either as Dan said, either forward to the operator or back from the systems and sensors out there. And it really boils down to how do I connect those things. So at least we have some operational construct on the functional side to derive what’s important first.

Elaine Bitonti:

I think the other thing to add there is as you understand the operational construct and you think about actually how do you decompose that into a product that you would offer, really thinking about operational analysis on the industry side and how do we do that operational analysis, very left word in that process, not just at the platform level, but also at all the subsystem levels that have to interoperate the com system, the C2 system. Because, in doing those operational analysis and doing that type of modeling and sim, in a digital engineering environment up front, we can actually find a lot of things before we even progress to experiments and then further would progress to an acquisition. So I think that chain of events is also important to how you field system of system capabilities.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

So let me follow up with that a little bit from the perspective and going back a little bit to Dan’s point that we typically think about designing fielding sustaining weapon system platforms at the platform level. And historically companies have made money over the fact that they’ve kind of owned the data around doing that sustainment work over time. And as we heard in the last session in this room, a lot of times those data lakes turn into data landfills. And in regards to how the data becomes ubiquitous across the system. Can you provide a little bit of perspective from where you’re sitting in the ecosystem as it relates to business models and how you’re going to monetize the capability you bring to bear when you’re no longer paying for the data, because data’s ubiquitous. So what does that look like as we move in the future?

Elaine Bitonti:

I think there’s some very interesting models from the commercial side. So in our commercial business, we run the largest global C2 network for commercial airlines. And as we looked at how that was done, the airlines actually came together and created the infrastructure, I’ll say they didn’t really charge for that because they knew they had to have the infrastructure to run all of the data. But then once the infrastructure was created, there’s many different ways that you can actually monetize the data. So on the commercial side, you can monetize the data by charging for the criticality of the data you pass.

There can be different tiers based on that. You can also look at a service based model based on how much data are you facilitating being transmitted. The third way that we look at it is sometimes the access to data, while it is ubiquitous and that can threaten certain revenue streams actually as an industry member, if you now have access to all of that data, you can reduce it down, you can use it to inform your future product roadmaps. There’s value in that. So I think there’s multiple different ways that industry can look at creating business cases. And there’s a lot of lessons learned we can take from the commercial side where that’s already being done successfully.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

Yeah. Ron, Dan, interested in your thoughts from your perspectives.

Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, USAF (Ret.):

So I would agree the bandwidth, quality of service type metrics, being able to incentivize that particularly, nobody wants to be out of the edge, not have any connectivity at all. You should have been able to design into that ahead of time. It’s not unusual for networks and systems to have, how many nines do you want from an availability standpoint. And of course air traffic control is one where we want a lot of nines. And certainly from an operational perspective we want that as well. I think as well, it opens up additional opportunities. It really is about suddenly as industry members, we may have access to data that we didn’t have before. So there is a little bit of that. I only had this much, but now I can see it all. How can I add value on top in exploiting that data for the benefit of the customer, again, from an operational perspective and within that framework, there’s a lot of value there and it can drive investment on our part.

Dan Markham:

From Lockheed’s perspective, the fact that a large portion of our business model is focused on the platforms and the integration of subsystems, with additional providers and through those partnerships. The access to the data, if I broke it down into the logistics components, we certainly value from maintaining a fleet, but from an operational execution perspective, which don’t get me wrong, logistics is absolutely part of operations. So y’all know I can’t really see all you.

So the angry faces of all the logistics folks coming at me, we can’t see. But from the operational data and the delivery of the sensor data, data as a service, and we look at that absolutely as how can we facilitate the connections through commercial providers, through commercial space providers, how does that mesh with the space systems that we are building that have different security levels and how do those things come together? All of that work still has, I think, value to the government and expertise that we can bring that helps us. We’re a business, we want to generate more business and we think we can provide that in a great way for y’all.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

So as we think through, and this is a little bit of a sidelight, so I’m off script now, Thunderdome rules. We were talking about the data flow inside of this construct. And in order to do the kind of scaled problem that we’re talking about from a system of systems perspective, we’re not going to be able to do that with flat file paper. We’re going to have to be in a digital engineering environment. We’re going to have to flow those interface requirements, those data requirements, the logic, the multi-faceted, multi-layered set of things that have to all come together for an end-to-end system of systems to work, in to some kind of a digital space that allows us to segregate, modularized, partition the workup in a way that we can get at individually and know that when we bring it back to the table, it’s all going to work together.

Can you comment on any concerns that you might have from your individual perspectives about either the ability to get that operational environment into that space? So Ron, you commented on the CFTs work for that functional decomposition and where that may help or hurt as it relates to being able to pull that now into the engineering side of that and then use that as a way of scaling from a systems’ perspective, what you need to do with regards to that operational objective and how you tie that back to that problem that has to be figured out here at the end of the day. So Ron [inaudible 00:19:18].

Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, USAF (Ret.):

So it’s a great question and I think one of the things I liked most about some of the briefings with the CFT, is taking those IERs and some of the chicklets essentially, and assigning those to systems that are platforms. I mean, we’re going to have platforms forever, because those are the end defects and so forth. So now it really is a, but what do you want from it? Because, the question really we’re trying to answer is not from a sensor and an effector perspective, what do I want from that system, that platform, from a data perspective, it’s no different frankly than the cell phones that we carry around every day. I suspect nobody in here has a flip phone anymore. There might be one or two out there, but I’m sure you’d rather have the latest and greatest from a cell phone perspective.

It’s because we demanded more data and more processing out of the platforms that we had. So by taking those IERs, by identifying them against specific platforms, it is the first step in developing what do I need from that platform? What does that platform need from me? And if now you take that to the next level of engineering and say, well, I only need a track file passed back and forth, so this is nineties AOL dial up type of speeds, versus, oh no, I want full motion video and I want to stream it to all the teenagers. So all of a sudden I’m thinking about Netflix and the house kind of thing and the streaming that we do there. I want that type of full motion video coming off the platform. Well, that’s a different bandwidth requirement, there’s a different security wrapped around that. And it may be now you’re in a different environment operationally, so you’re able to use high bandwidth, whatever the case may be, and there’s solutions there.

So it really boils down to as you go through that process of being able to identify that we can take it to the next level, match against it, and now say, okay, you want X out of this platform, this is how we can help you get it out of that platform. And now you can get to the point where going back to a little bit of what you were saying in the beginning is, okay, now we’re swimming in all this data. We’ve figured out what we need, when we need it and where it needs to go either whatever direction, and now what do we do with the data when we get there. And applying the CFTs work on top of that, now you’re down to the software applications piece of whether it be fusion, artificial intelligence, some sort of learning algorithms, whatever the case may be, that will drive you to be able to exploit that data to the benefit of the war fighter.

Dan Markham:

Ron’s done a great job of describing a little bit of the theory, I’ll go after, at least from industry’s point of view. And one of the challenges that I think acquisition, the acquisition community is going to have is the smaller you make that granular, either the government or becomes responsible for some of that interaction. And that’s a challenge. And there’s been various different perspectives on that and approaches to that. It also starts to drive, you mentioned kind of the business models and how we think about that problem on the industry side. The more those are exposed, the more challenging it is to build things internally. The smaller the projects the harder they are to monetize over time and get value from on the backend, the harder it is for us to justify further innovation.

So there’s a sweet spot in there that allows us to build things, sell things, innovate things, and deliver things that fit into this architecture when the boundaries are defined and there’s an understanding and an agreement, if you will, on how those things are going to be protected and competed, we welcome that opportunity. I’ve never met an industry partner that says, “I want to just protect it. My thing’s not as good, but I’m going to protect it and prevent competition.” And we all want to make sure the best is out there for the war fighter. So defining those interfaces is critical. Understanding the granularity is very important and as we go forward and build this and as the CFTs work and the models come forward, I think we’ll find that sweet spot over time.

Elaine Bitonti:

I think it’s also important also maybe even left of that process, is how is the open architecture defined and what are the standards that eventually define those interfaces? I think in our experience at Collins, whether it be communications system, avionic systems, we’ve integrated systems across multiple different platforms made by different OEMs. And many times the challenges happen where the government believes that they have specified the architecture to an appropriate level, but they left I’ll say a lot of interpretation.

And so, that can really lead to things where you get into these different data models and the interfaces don’t work and you run into significant challenges in integration. So I think a key part of that is how are we doing the consortiums that eventually set up the architecture, how are those interfaces decided and do you have a robust sampling of industry? There are people that do build platforms, people that build subsystems, because I think in that type of collaboration is how you’ll eventually get the outcome that you’re after. So I think that’s one of the biggest challenges we’ve seen from our experience.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

So let me pull on that a little bit more. So obviously getting the, I’ll say the packet size, how you decide to do your modularity inside of some of these conversations becomes a primary driver with regards to how the rest of this conversation flows. From your perspective, and maybe going a little bit deeper on the defining interfaces and standards conversation, but in the broader context, what do you need from guys like me to be able to do that effectively? And in terms of the context where those get set a little bit to your point, is there a better way to get after those kinds of things with regards to how we set those up?

Dan Markham:

I’ll jump in first, because then it’s easier than you guys can try and figure out the hard problems. Call it communities of practice where those standards are propagated. I think by and large, the Air Force has done a very good job of that in establishing what they want to do from an architecture and a messaging perspective, making sure those are set and I’ll say demanded from industry to keep things consistent, security support. Anytime we’re crossing these boundaries between whether they are SAP, all the way down to [inaudible 00:25:27], frankly, all of those things require government approval and active participation in the development of how those things are going to traverse.

And then the last thing, and this is almost a throwaway line, it happens a lot. The interfaces between the Air Force and the Navy and the Marine Corps and the Army, we work those on the industry side all the time, but ensuring that there’s active partnerships and communication with those other services ensure that those things are participating in what we are trying to deliver to the war fighter early, such that we don’t show up and try to connect to something with the army and then have to do translators. It’s not effective, it’s not efficient. So those are the three things that immediately come to my mind, the easy ones. Good luck.

Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, USAF (Ret.):

And I think it’s fair, vision wise would love to organically no matter what service you’re in, be able to step into a joint force and turn on and now all of a sudden you’re connected. Great vision. To your point, there’s two ditches there and you got to stay in it. So how fast do you want to go and what are the first four steps that have operational value from that perspective. On the interface side and the modularity piece, I guess one, I was an acquisition officer for 18 years, so active duty. And one of the things that we always struggled with or talked about and wrestled with was how small of a box do we define? How big of a box do we give industry to define? And in the end, is it enough of a black box?

And I’ve defined the interface as well enough that I will have a sufficient level of competition within there over the time horizon that I want to, but it’ll enable me to go fast. And I think some things that I’ve seen in the past, and I think some of us have experienced is a little bit of the over specificity. There’s some things that we’re doing on our side, whether it be in cooperation with other services or other partners that might be unique and innovative, but if you make the box too small, then now suddenly it rules it out simply by how you define the box. So finding the right side of the box from a modularity perspective allows us to compete and gives incentivization for innovation within that black box.

Elaine Bitonti:

I think the other thing to build on what Dan said is, as you step back and think about it from a business case perspective, when you’re an industry and you’re trying to build a business case, let’s say you’re trying to sell a communication system. If the open communication system standard for the Air force is different than the Army, than the Navy, that impacts how you build your business case. And sometimes there’s good reasons that there may need to be differences for operational reasons, but other times I think one of the things we would request from you is it is more so lack of communication, lack of coming together on what is the actual need?

Because, I think many times we see as industry where things could be more common, it just wasn’t set up that way. But if they’re more common, you can draw more industry partners. Industry can build a bigger business case over more instantiations, whether it’s a platform or a network or whatever. So I think that that piece is, many times I think when we speak to customers they say, “Oh, we didn’t actually know the other service was doing it this way.” We’re the ones telling them as we try to go make the business case.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

So we’ll kind of wrap up with this one. It’s a humdinger, so feel free to take it wherever you want to, but where do you see the biggest barriers to us getting to the kind of capability that we’re all talking about being able to deliver, whether it’s from your interactions with us on the government side or broader industry related kinds of things. And then any observations about thoughts on how to fix it? So major barriers and then any thoughts on where to go from there?

Elaine Bitonti:

I think two major things from our perspective. One, is I think industry is going very fast. We can go very fast, we can develop capability, but there’s a lot of supporting or enabling entities. You have to have IATTs, you have to have crypto certs. So your organization is trying to move fast, but there’s all these other supporting entities that have to have things happen in order for the entire process to change. And I think one of the barriers we see, is we see increased speed in certain parts, but those enabling supporting partners maybe still are not moving at the pace that’s needed for what the war fighter requires. And so, I think looking at how do you accelerate that entire chain is maybe something that hasn’t been focused on that would be helpful.

The other barrier we see is are glad to see things like your organization and the authorities that are in it. I think from an industry perspective, what we’re waiting to see is what are those first platforms where the platform PEOs, because those are the ones that still exist, actually take what you specify and how do we see that manifest in acquisitions for platforms, because that’s the way that things are done today. And so, I think from our side’s, it’s not as much a technology barrier, as it is barriers within the current system and how it operates.

Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, USAF (Ret.):

And I’ll offer a slight variation, is that there is the model of you hand out requirements. Sounds like an easy job by the way. Probably somebody’s going to want you to pin a check to that requirement as well as it goes over to PEO to actually implement. And then there’s other models where it’s more centralized. You want to be a part of moving the data, this is the system you need to have on your platform and whatever level. Again, what size box do you want to put that in? And then you are delivering from a GFE perspective. So part of the challenge is just understanding where that’s going to land, whether or not that’s more, again, specific by platform specific. Again, the platform centric type model, that’s the organization as it is or more of a centralized that distributes out. We’re very interested to see where that piece lands.

And then I’ll say, a little along the same lines is a unity of purpose. We all know, if we want to go fast, the number one thing you have to do is have the objective. Number two, is unity of purpose and it is some of those support organizations. And so, you’re in that enviable position of having some piece of influence over it, but maybe not direct control, no different than what I saw as well. But if you can get the unity of purpose, whatever functional, from contracting, to security, to finance, etc, sort of all on the same team, focused in the same direction. It’s not that things are a wave to go fast, it truly is. Everybody understands what we’re trying to get to. They play their role on the team as they should and you’re able to just move quicker.

Dan Markham:

I’ll build on. Security is always an issue, but I think we’ve hit on it a couple of times. I really love that Ron, that the unity of purpose problem and a lot of folks out here in uniform, what we have seen and observed as we put hardware and software and systems in the user’s hands everywhere from the specific line users, the enlisted troops executing on the edge, to the test community, DT and OT, to the acquisition community, to the leadership. It almost strikes me as someone at some level the messaging campaign, which it’s almost hard to do. You don’t want to feel like you’re going out there advertising your solution and that’s not really what I’m suggesting. It’s back to what Ron’s offering, making sure that everyone understands we’re giving you this piece of equipment so you can provide us feedback, because the users say, “I don’t want this piece of equipment, this isn’t what I wanted.”

No, this is part of the process. And the more they push back on that, the less value perhaps we get. And that is absolutely one of the barriers we see that we’re constantly working through. So that partnership to establish that clarity across all the spectrum, which is, I don’t have an answer for you other than just get it in their hands and take their feedback when it comes and have thick skin, which that’s something we all have to deal with, is really where I think one of the big barriers in addition to what we’ve already talked about.

Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey:

Great. Well the good news is I know a guy who happens to have quite a bit of interest in figuring out how to get to the unity of effort piece that you talked to. And I think to the point that you’re making Elaine, there’s an open question. I’m as interested as anybody with regards to kind of how this plays out. To Ron’s point, is it more of a centralized and decentralized execution kind of a model or is it back to more of a platform basis? We’re working our way through that right now and should have better answers for you here in the near term.

But I think all of those things get after this underlying fundamental belief that we’ve got to figure out how to do the integration problem at the next level up from the platform. And we live in a system that was designed to do platform integration. So culture eats process for breakfast and it’s like brunch time right now. So we’re going to keep after it. I appreciate the perspectives that y’all bring into this and we’re going to absolutely stay tightly linked with all of you on the industry side as we go down this path together. So around of applause for the panel. Thank you.

Brown’s Future Operating Concept: ‘Airpower is the Answer’

March 7, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

AURORA, Colo.—If the question facing the United States today is how to deter or defeat rising threats from China, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. says the answer has proven the test of time: Airpower.

In a forceful, sometimes playful, keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium March 7, Brown repeated his call to move faster and embrace change, even if it’s “uncomfortable.” Airpower is not like poker, he said, where a good hand is helpful, but a bad hand can still win with a good bluff.

“We can’t afford to bluff,” Brown said. “For more than 75 years, when our nation has called, airpower was the answer,” Brown said. “When addressing the pacing, acute, unforeseen challenges of today, or tomorrow, airpower is the answer.”

Brown hinted at a future force design but also drilled down to clarify a debate he said led in the past to “inconsistencies in some of our strategic documents,” whether the Air Force is organized around missions or functions. The answer is functions.

Brown unveiled the Air Force Future Operating Concept (AFFOC) and defined its five core functions:

Air superiority

Global strike

Rapid global mobility

Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance

Command and control

The new operating concept will be the service’s North Star going forward, he said, informing the future force design.

“It’s the aspect of bringing many different parts together,” Brown explained to Air & Space Forces Magazine, “the operational concept, how we might organize, the capabilities we require, and the Airmen we may also require.”

Few U.S. military operations can succeed or even begin without the Air Force, Brown said. Since World War II, no matter what the conflict, America has relied on airpower, from the Doolittle Raiders in the months after Pearl Harbor to Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and even defeating ISIS in Syria. And airpower will remain vital to U.S. operations in the future, Brown told his Airmen.

“It’s what we must do today and what we must prepare to do tomorrow,” Brown said.

Brown’s core functions are part of a broad “security promise” the service provides the U.S. military, he said.

“The Air Force, our Airmen, through these core functions, underwrite the entirety of the joint force,” Brown said.

To underline that point, Brown took a selfie with those in attendance, calling on all the Airmen present to do the same, and send it to all they know as a sign of the importance of their service.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. takes a selfie during his keynote address at AFA’s Warfare Symposium.

But the Air Force can’t just claim it is the linchpin in the U.S. military. Those outside the service will need to buy in, including Congress, Brown said. Funding, particularly funding in a timely way, is essential.

“We cannot do this by ourselves,” Brown said. “Success takes help. Failure—you can do alone.”

But Brown’s new concepts mainly serve as an internal guide. He presented the key functions the Air Force provides in the form of answers to questions, as might be done on his favorite TV gameshow, Jeopardy, where the host reads answers and contestants must provide answers.

To achieve air superiority, the Air Force is modernizing its fighter fleet with new F-35s, F-15EXs, and, soon, Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) and a rapidly advancing Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform.

For its global strike efforts, the Air Force is bringing online the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, the new Sentinel international ballistic missile, and the developing hypersonic weapons.

Global mobility means modernizing the Air Force’s tanker fleet by purchasing the KC-46 Pegasus to replace KC-135s in service since the 1950s. The Air Force also recently unveiled the Next Generation Air Refueling System (NGAS) program to ensure the Air Force and the joint force has the range it needs to fight by providing aircraft with a survivable airborne gas station that can aid the U.S. and allies in the vast distance of the Pacific.

The Air Force’s ISR efforts provide the entire joint force with air and space-based capabilities to deliver timely and accurate intelligence, with a focus on being able to deliver data even in contested environments.

In Brown’s vision of command and control, the service will not just provide information to allow decision-making, but push forward with its contribution to the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) efforts. Brown noted that without reliable communications, global operations become difficult. But more than just ensuring the service can operate in the future, Brown wants the Air Force to provide speed and precision to disrupt America’s adversaries before they have a chance to fully enter the fight.

The new Air Force Future Operating Concept was developed by Brown and Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, his deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements. Hinote’s office is more commonly known as Air Force Futures. But what Hinote and Brown are outlining is not what the Air Force hopes to do with some newfangled technology, but rather what the Air Force must do to prepare itself for the future fight.

“We must adapt,” Brown said. “We are uniquely suited to provide airpower as the cornerstone of the nation’s defense.”

Brown shared a clip of a Jeopardy question from a few years ago asking to which job Charles Q. Brown Jr. had been appointed. The contestant, he said, got the answer wrong.

“We as an Air Force can’t get this wrong,” Brown said. “We have a responsibility to get the answer right.”

Watch, Read: ‘Threats, Targets, and Intelligence Advantage’

March 7, 2023

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and cyber effects operations; Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, director’s advisor for military affairs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; and Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon, deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, talked about cooperation across the intelligence community and the intelligence threats posed by China during a panel on ‘Threats, Targets, and Intelligence Advantage’ at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 7, 2023. Retired Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, director of intelligence analyses division for IDA, moderated the discussion. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

Everybody who made the trek get some extra fitness points here to Colorado C. So thanks for everyone doing that and chief, especially you. So Airmen, Guardians, and guests, good morning and welcome to this AFA Warfare Symposium Panel on Threats, Targets and Intelligence Advantage. I’m Jim Marrs and it’s my honor to serve as moderator for this esteemed group of panel members who are extraordinarily well qualified to speak to the wide ranging and mission critical topics that are the focus of today’s panel. Many of you in this symposium have heard speakers already underscore the crucial role of intelligence as integral to the future of our space and air forces. We’re going to dig deep in that area today. But first I’d like to start with some brief introductions. To my far right, I’m pleased to introduce Lieutenant General Jeffrey A. Kruse. Lieutenant General Kruse is the director’s advisor for military affairs at the office of the director of National Intelligence.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

In this role, Lieutenant General Kruse serves as a DNI’s advisor on Department of Defense Activities and Issues, synchronizes DNI efforts supporting DOD, and drives intelligence community DOD enterprise integration in partnership with executive leaders across the IC and DOD. Prior to his current assignment, Lieutenant General Kruse served as the director for Defense Intelligence war fighters support in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. To General Kruse’s left, I’m pleased to introduce Lieutenant General Leah G. Lauderback. Lieutenant General Lauderback is the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance and Cyber Effects Operations, headquarters, US Air Force. Lieutenant General Lauderback is responsible to the secretary and chief of staff of the Air Force for policy formulation, planning, evaluation, oversight and leadership of the Air Force’s ISR operations, cyber effects and war fighter communications operations and electromagnetic spectrum superiority operations.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

As the Air Force’s Senior Intelligence Officer, she’s directly responsible to the director of National Intelligence and the Under Secretary of defense for intelligence and security. Prior to her current assignment, Lieutenant General Lauderback took a lead role in standing up the US Space Command as well as the US Space Force. In both organizations she served as the first senior intelligence officer. To General Lauderback’s left, I’m pleased to introduce our third distinguished panel member, Major General Gregory J. Gagnon. Major General Gagnon is the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Intelligence, US Space Force. In this capacity, Major General Gagnon serves as a senior intelligence officer to the chief of Space Operations and is responsible to the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Space Operations for Intelligence policy oversight and guidance. He exercises overall responsibility for the Space Force Intelligence community element, which is the 18th and newest member of the intelligence community. Additionally, he serves as the chief service cryptologic component with delegated authorities from the director of the National Security Agency. Prior to this assignment, Major General Gagnon served as the director of Intelligence, United States Space Command.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

The AFA Warfighting Symposium colleagues and guests, please join me in a warm welcome for our panel members. Now I think as all of you are well aware, we have limited time to cover a great deal of territory. So we’re going to jump right into questions. I’d like to start with the first word in our panel’s title, threats and ask Lieutenant General Kruse to lead off, followed by Lieutenant General Lauderback and Major General Gagnon with your thoughts on threats as they apply broadly to this symposium’s focus on dominant air and space forces.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

All right, Jim. I’m assuming this is working. Good. All right. First let me start by saying thanks to you and to Air Space Forces Association. I’m working now?

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

I don’t think you’re on. I think I’m on. Can you make him on?

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

And some things are possible.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

I’ll just borrow Leah’s. Better now? Still not yet? All right.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

Leah, why don’t you take his spot.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Okay, I will. All right. We’re good friends. It’s fine. Hey, that is actually one thing that I wanted to tell everybody in the room here. The three of us know each other and have known each other and worked with each other a number of times in our careers. General Kruse might be representing from the Director of National Intelligence Office, and I think that this is fantastic, this panel that we’ve put together because it shows the partnership that we have with the intelligence community and then the services. And I just want to make sure that everybody knows that and sees that within the room here and online, we are dedicated to one another. This guy over here has followed me a couple of times. This gentleman over here actually promoted me to the rank that I am now. As well I took a job from him previously too. So it’s a great family, whether that’s in the intelligence community or within our ISR enterprises within the services. So thanks and Jim, thanks so much for moderating today and getting us all together.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

All right, so characterizing the threat. I want to say that the reason, well, not the reason, but in one of my jobs I was the J2 at JTFOYR. This was the defeat ISIS mission a few years ago. I got there, I was in Kuwait, I think, middle of 2017. I opened up my drawer and there’s a coin there that says, for excellence presented by General Jeff Kruse. And it’s about providing decision advantage to the commander. All right. Intelligence is one of the seven war fighting functions. And it is because the commander cannot have decision advantage. He or she can not make good decisions without actually understanding the battlefield, understanding what is happening in the battle space, being able to characterize the threats, being able to understand their capabilities as well as their intentions.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

That is what we do as intelligence professionals. That is our number one job. And so as the senior intelligence officer for the Air Force, I take great pride in be able to provide intelligence. If that’s to Chief Brown here in the front row, if it’s to the ACC commander, I see General Kelly as well, or to the secretary of the Air Force, we have to be able to provide that. And what we need to do now is to be able to provide that in a speed and with precision and at scale for the high-end fight that we need to be prepared for. I think that we need to understand what foreign leaders are telling us in the open press and then you can read some of the intelligence if you want to, but they’re telling you what it is that they want to tell their populations and what they’re messaging to us.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

And so China, I will take as an example in 2049 has told us the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and a world-class military. They want to be second to none. I heard General Brown actually speak about, if you’re not first, you’re last, this morning. Right? And I think that’s china’s feeling as well in a 2049 timeframe. We need to be able to be prepared for that. It goes without repeating, I mean, I do have to repeat it though, right? Is that they will double their nuclear stockpile in the next 10 years. Their A2/AD investment is very much narrowing our advantage. You truly don’t want to be within about 300 nautical miles of the Chinese coast, and that is continuing to increase and will continue over the coming years. Their IADs is just continuing to grow and become more significant and lethal.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Therefore, from an intelligence perspective, we are going to write in our writing right now, I should say, the Air Force strategic vision for 2033, the intelligence strategic vision. All right. I need to ensure that we as intelligent professionals are ready for that high-end fight to be able to provide the decision makers with decision advantage. And so I’ll speak a little bit more on our strategic vision, but that’s where we’re going in the future because again, as Intel is a war fighting function, we have to take that function very seriously and I think that we all do.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

General Gagnon.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

So I was excited to hear both the SEC half, the CSO and the chief of staff discuss China, China, China. And what they did is they highlighted sort of the pace of change and the rate of change. But to give you all just a little perspective on what they’ve done in four budget cycles, 20 years, because they’ve run five year plans as well, they’ve decreased about 300,000 troops out of their army element and they’ve used that savings to fortify the Air Force, fortify the Navy and established a Strategic Support Force. The Strategic Support Force was established 31 December, 2015. They are seven years old. When we cut cake to say that our space force is three years old, they’re seven years old. In fact, they were the first major restructuring of a military to start the new domain of warfare. Many countries have followed suit.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

But since 2015 their on orbit assets have expanded dramatically. I was trying to do some math before the lights blinded me, but I think we might have about 700 folks in this room. So if you would, turn around and just look at how full this room is, because in January the Chinese and the PLA went above 700 satellites in outer space. And if it was 2011 and you might remember where you were in 2011, their number of satellites would only equate to the first five rows. So I ask that you look around and wonder about that change. Of the over 700 satellites in outer space, about half of them are used for remote sensing and ISR. All of us in uniform have been afforded the luxury of us having space superiority over our adversaries for the last 25 years. Space superiority will have to be gained in a conflict in the Pacific against the PLA.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

Their on orbit armada of satellites can track us, can sense us, can see us, can connect that data to their PNT and their fires network and can now hold US Forces at risk in a way we have never understood or had to face to date. And that is what has been the fundamental change in force design for great power militaries in the last 10 years. You’re seeing the adaptations and the changes we’re trying to achieve to deal with that fact. You’re seeing agile combat employment. You’re seeing concepts like logistics under fire. But I ask you, the biggest changes that have taken place in the last 10 years have happened because space superiority must now be earned.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

And General Kruse, I know you talk with your hands, so this is a real test.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Am I up and running?

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

You are.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Okay, fair enough. I think this is intentional, because you know I talk with my hands and so this is to at least keep one of them out of the game. And this might be fratricide, they may have had to cut your mic off for us to share. All right. First of all, Jim, to you and the Air Space Force Association, thank you very much for letting me be part of the panel. As you mentioned, I am currently not only outside of the Air Force a little bit into a joint world, I’m outside of DOD into the inter-agency world. And quite frankly, we are working tactically, operationally, strategically, air and space issues every day. But it is fantastic to be invited to come home and to sync with just the incredibly innovative Airmen and Guardians and I would say private industry partners that we have. So thanks very much for letting me be a part of this.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Since they have already covered the air and space threats, I think I’m going to skip to the thing that I actually think from a threat perspective is perhaps a thing that has changed the most over my career, that it has accelerated dramatically over the last couple of years. And third, if we don’t address it may be more detrimental to everything else that we are doing if it goes unmitigated. And we on the back end want to prevail in either strategic competition or if it comes to that future warfare, and that is counterintelligence. Call it whatever you’d like to call it. Call it a foreign espionage threat, call it cybersecurity, call it an insider threat program. Whatever it happens to be, we are at a place now where everything that you see on the exhibition hall, everything that the chief talked about earlier today, everything that’s going to go into the budgets mission when it goes over to The Hill, that is at risk if we all don’t do our job, think back to what it used to look like.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

So the guys that are my age and older, we used to think of sort of that counterintelligence perspective as a classic Soviet spy versus spy. The Soviets at the time would work out of embassies, under diplomatic cover, trying to recruit people, steel secrets and steal research. Quite frankly, that game didn’t change much even through 20 years of CT. The counterintelligence business changed at the tactical level and shout out to all the OSI agencies do that for the Air Force in world class way. What changed in the 2010s in the rise of the current leadership of the CCP and the goals that have already been talked about and that you guys are absolutely familiar with. If you’re familiar with the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, they put out a counterintelligence assessment every three years, goes to the president, it’s top secret, and I’m going to tell you what it says. Some of what it says, right?

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

It says that compared to where we were before, there are more actors, more vectors going after, more threats. And let me break that down for you. More actors. We still have to be concerned about the human recruiting and the human element of this game. However, they’re no longer just working out of embassies under diplomatic cover. They are under the cover as students, business leaders, academics, research. And what are they out there doing? They’re out there recruiting US and western students, business leaders, academics and researchers to get after the data that they can’t get after any other particular way. The number of threat actors that are out there have doubled down and we have not necessarily put in place all the programs we need to do to be able to disrupt that in the way we used to do.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Some more vectors. What I would tell you is that in addition to the human recruiting piece that I get to see from the national level, cyber intrusions, using technology, acquisitions and mergers, joint ventures, talent management, hiring the experts that have trained and come from US military and industry going to our adversaries. It is remarkable the flow of data that I will say China, but China and others expect to come their way.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

And then the last one is the sort of going after more things. And what that means is targets. So let me just cut to the chase and be very clear. The target is you. It is we. It is the joint force, it is industry. Everything that we are doing together is at risk if we don’t have a world class insider threat program, world class cybersecurity wrapped around all the things that you’ve done. The innovation that people are doing today is absolutely remarkable. We need to make sure that it will take our potential future adversaries by surprise or it can be revealed by leadership at a time and place of our choosing, not because by the time we feel that it’s already been compromised. So I think from my seat having been, as you talked about in a couple of positions together, been out at OYR, been the only non Navy J2 out at Indopacom, I’m actually more concerned about our ability to secure what we’re doing than almost anything else.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks for that great first round of answers and I’d like to shift the focus now to our intelligence ecosystem and ask our panel to share your views on critical architectures, standards and systems needed for information advantage to support targeting and operations. And General Lauderback, if you don’t mind leading off and we’ll go with General Gagnon and General Kruse again. Thanks.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Hello, hello, hello. All right, thank you. Thanks, Jim. I think, yeah, so I briefed just a little bit about it a few minutes ago as our ISR strategic vision. So what I wanted to say about this. This, actually, General Brown, introduced the Air Force future operating concept and apparently just sent that yesterday. So we are in lockstep with the future operating concept. We understand that we have to have, there are going to be tons of sensors out there, whether they’re intelligence community sensors or Department of Defense sensors. Everything needs to be a sensor. We need to make sense of all of that data, that information, that intelligence or turn that into intelligence to be able to make sense of that and to be able to provide that to the decision makers or to the inflight target updates directly to the weapons, wherever it might be.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

I consider this to be called the sensing grid. And a few years ago, I want to say it was 2018, is actually when we signed out the Air Force Next Generation ISR Flight Plan by actually the chief of staff and the secretary of the Air Force at that time. So the sensing grid is not new. We introduced the sensing grid at that time and I would say that we’re operating with a sensing grid today, but I want to say that the sensing grid is one of those real old timey bicycles, like the big wheel and the small wheel, and so we’re talking whatever, 18th century or something. We need a triathlon bike. You know anything about triathlon bikes, Jeff?

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Do I look like I know?

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Sorry, that was unfair. Greg and I have done a few, and so I wanted to use the analogy of a triathlon bike. We need something that is… A triathlon bike today is lightweight. That means that the human that is driving that bicycle doesn’t have to work as hard. So we don’t want to work as hard. We need some machines. We need automation to go sift through all of that data that we are going to be collecting, that we do collect today. We need that to happen in a much faster way. A triathlon bike today also is extremely precise. Oh, there we go. You got a new one.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

So the handlebars, right, the brake system, the shifting, I mean it is shifting the gears with ease. There is no problem doing this. It’s very precise. It’s engineered by, I don’t know, electro, some kind of an engineer in Germany elsewhere. Italy, I should say. They do a fabulous job. We need our sensing grid to be precise. We need our sensing grid then also to be at scale. So if you haven’t been to a triathlon these days, I mean, there’s like thousands of people that are in them because it’s one of the fastest growing sports besides pickleball, I think. That’s a true statement. Anyhow, the triathlon bike, at speed, at scale and with precision, that’s what we need our sensing grid to be. And so there are four components that we’ll come out with in the ISR strategic vision, but those four components of the sensing grid, so that you can kind of put your mind to it.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

One, it’s about making sense, right? Sense making is the very first step of it. Number two, is integration. So integrating these sensors together. Three is about orchestration. And I like say collection management, but orchestration is increasing or enhancing our collection management processes of the past, orchestration between if it’s the IC or if it’s the DOD and it’s in any domain, that’s what we need to get to in order to ensure that all of those sensors are coming together. And then the fourth is the sensors themselves, to be able to ensure that we’ve got the right sensors with the right persistence if you will, around the world. Because we’ve got, we’re, not just looking at China, that’s not the only threat or concern that we have. We’re very concerned with the acute threat of Russia. And then of course within our NDS, we’re still concerned with Iran, North Korea, and a violent extremist organization. So this is a sensing grid that’s not just built for one type of conflict.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Try that one.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

One, no, hello, yes. It’s not a sensing grid that’s built for just one type of conflict, but it should be a sensing grid that lasts us and is a global capability. And again, I’ll just shout out to General Brown this morning and he talked about our five functions and ISR being one of those functions, it’s a global ISR capability that we need to be able to provide from the Air Force. And so I think I’ll end it there because I feel like I’ve been talking for a few minutes. So over to you.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

General Gagnon.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

So I’ll pivot a little bit and just talk about two ways to approach the problem. There’s obviously data standards and interoperability, but a great way to think about it, if you’re an investment banker and on the staff, I kind of consider myself an investment banker like when I was at ACC, you want to get a high rate of return on what you’re spending. The services spent last year in the military intelligence program, which is sort of DOD, Intel money if you will, about 26 billion last year. And that’s a public figure from OSD public affairs. $26 billion. Also a public figure from the DNI is how much the national intel budget was last year, which was about $56 billion.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

So if you think about it as an investment banker, you want to spend your $1, if you’re in a uniform on an area they’re not covering down or if you have deliberate overlap, you want to make sure that that overlap is highly interoperable and mutually supportive, so that you’re $1 that you’re spending on something, let’s just say it’s a collection from outer space. If it works with the other agencies, you’re going to gain two free dollars from Department of Defense. So that’s generally an investment strategy you can think about. We’re a Department of Defense that’s like an 800 billion machine and the national Intel budget is another 56 billion you want to bring to bear to work with you. So from an investment banker standpoint, I always look how to make the other two compliment.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

The second part of this is about people. We always talk about interoperable systems and interoperable data standards. You got to have folks that can flow back and forth. You want to flow people into the National Security Agency for a tour or two, and then you want them to come back and do Service Cryptologic operations. Whether they’re exploiting collection from a U2 or a UAV or from a ship, because that’s what makes them more proficient and more well-rounded as they grow up as a cryptologist. You would want the same thing for imagery interpreters. The United States Air Force has a large group of imagery interpreters that work in DCGS, but we also let them go to the Jayoxs to learn to do all the skillsets that they would need because at nighttime, radar imagery’s delicious, it tells you what’s going on, you can see through the clouds and you can count tanks, you can count ships. And over the last 20 years, maybe those skills got a little rusty on our side, but current events and current crisises we’re spinning right back up.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

General Kruse.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Okay, assuming that the mic works, I’m burning through mics quicker than burning through water here. Let me actually pick up a little bit where Greg left off, but actually talk about the reverse of that, which is also true. So for me, almost anything we do, any of the core functions that chief talked about earlier, anything across all the services, but pick any of the functions or pick a targeting cycle, which I know a lot of folks here are focused on. Any good targeting strategy is actually a data strategy. If you can’t take data from either a collection or sensing grid or whatever it happens to be or a repository where you’ve kept it and move it through a couple of things, data fabrics, APIs and C2 nodes and an exploitation piece that is either human or tech and AI enabled, there’s going to be a human touchpoint either designed into it or not.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

If you can’t do that and map out in advance where your data’s going to come from, what it has to do and where it’s going to go, so you can close the kill chain at the end, we’re all going to fail, all the things that we’ve been trusted to build over time. And so the data strategy, to me, when you ask about architectures, it really comes down to do we have a common interoperable data strategy? We are certainly working on that, but to really say that the flip side of what Greg was talking about in leveraging some of the intel dollars, I would tell you the ICS data strategy has actually included the Air Force for a very, very long time. When you look at the original launch in the 1950s of the Corona satellites, what was our data strategy? It was ejecting a canister of film, it re-entered the atmosphere, deployed a shoot, it started floating down and the United States Air Force airplane came and snatched that out of mid-air, delivered it someplace and it was developed. And in weeks to a month, we had fantastic data someplace.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Fast forward into SR-71 U-2 kind of program, same kind of thing, but we were collecting, we could directly land, we would send it and maybe we were down to days as we were moving some of this developed film. Fast forward then into maybe the Gulf War, the initial Gulf War. By that point we had figured out direct down links and we were doing all of that. But anybody my age or greater will understand that we were still at that point delivering ATOs, maps and compartmented intelligence via aircraft to all the distributed places all throughout the Middle East. The data strategy, I use that as exemplar because it actually is the hardware, the software, the interoperability, the standards. What do we want to agree on going forward?

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

So I think history is a guide. I’m a student of history and like the chief, I don’t like to lose. I don’t like to come in second. So for me, that future data strategy is really about a couple of things. But the primary one is we need to figure out how do we have an interoperable architecture that we can all trust and know that it is there. The only thing I would add to that is the IC is committed to supporting DOD in doing this. So when I first got to DNI in the fall of 2020, we convened a JVC2 conference. It was at that timeframe when if you ask 10 people what JVC2 meant, you got 20 answers because nobody still knew themselves. They would give you two different answers. We have now done a couple of things, while there’s a strategy, there’s also a new NSS, a new NDS, there’s a new set of joint war fighting concepts. There’s new offices out there, CDOs, CDAs, all of them make data strategy much more complicated.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

So we held another conference this last fall. We pulled all the stakeholders in across OSD, the joint staff, all the IC members and the services, and we developed what was signed in February, which is the first IC DOD implementation plan. Now, it is nothing. It’s not designed to be new stuff. It is designed to be how do we leverage and learn across the board from each other. There’s four LOEs. The first one is exactly this. What are interoperability and standards that we’ve all agreed to and how do we enforce that? Middle two LOEs for that are along the lines of harvesting mission sprints and the mission threads that are coming out of the joint staff to take all the work that you’re doing and cross-cut it and make sure the IC is ready to support.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

And then the last one actually may be the most important, which is how do we measure our success? Are we actually making progress in any of this? How do you measure the demos? How do you grade a tool before you insert it into an architecture? Is it ready to be part of that architecture? So both joint staff and OSD have developed tools to assess those things. The IC decided we’re not going to develop yet a third test. We’re just going to adopt those. And I really do look forward to seeing how that comes together. I am optimistic for the first time we might have an interoperable data strategy ahead of us that can underpin all of the war fighting functions that we’re going to have to do going forward that are just getting harder and harder to do.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks General Kruse and thank you all for a great demonstration of microphone resilience and we are going to build on your last answers.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Can I just say one thing?

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

You may.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Yeah. I mean, I’m also optimistic about our way forward here, and this is what I was just alluding to in the very beginning, is that there were great partners. I think though, and not that you have to answer General Kruse or General Gagnon, but we’ve got to break down some policies in order to get to the things that we all want to get to. And those often are the stickiest and more difficult things to do. But I think a way that we can work through that is one, teaming, determining what our message is and then just being persistent at that. So yeah, thanks for all of that. I also am optimistic and glad you are too.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

So I’d like to build off the last round of answers and ask you all to comment on how do we enable strategic advantage in competition. And General Gagnon, if you can take first shot at that. General Kruse and General Lauderback. Thanks.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

We’re talking about playing poker earlier. I think it was Chief Brown talking about playing poker. We need to realize we have more chips than anybody else on the table. We don’t pay attention to that enough. We have the largest economy in the world. We have one of the best innovative bases in the world and we need to recognize that because, and I’m the intel guy, so I’m supposed to do a lot of fear and stuff like that, but sometimes you have to recognize you’re holding a dominant position and that position, yes, is being challenged and eroded. But our position at chips get even bigger, because we have friends who think us, want the same outcomes we want. They might be The Five Eyes, they might be NATO, they might be the Japanese, they might be the South Koreans.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

And when you think about all those people who are playing at the table, that becomes a much more powerful position for competing on a strategic environment. I will tell you though, because I am the intel guy, we should be very concerned about how fast one player at the table keeps adding money and adding chips to his chip count. Because today, and this is a huge change from 10 to 15 years ago, the PLA have more surface combatants than we do. The PLA have more SAMs than we do. The PLA show us how they behave when they have positional advantage. When they have positional advantage, they surround a free and independent place. They do it in the maritime domain, they do it in the air domain. They did that in August. They may use their positional advantage thinking about the long game, on how to move their position strongly over time without becoming too insightful.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

Think about ships bringing in sand and bringing in rocks and building an island and then putting an airfield on an island, then putting defensive weaponry on the island. That would sound like some crazy movie we were watching. No, that’s happened. That’s the South China Sea. So we have to recognize that as we sit at the table with some fantastic chips, not everyone’s playing the same fair game and we have to watch that. And that goes back to general Kruse’s comment. They want to steal your intellectual property if you’re in that exhibition room. And in fact they’ve been successful at doing that on a number of you, right? Because they don’t play by the same set of rules. They’ll steal it as a government and then they’ll give it to CASS and KASIK, which is their Lockheed Martin and their Northrop Grumman, and then they’ll put out weapon systems that look a lot like ours and their development cycle will shrink, their cost will shrink and they’ll continue to grow strong. So not where you are looking ahead, I don’t think.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

That’s good.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

But just realize their chip count’s getting added. Our strength is our partners at the table, but we need to be concerned about the chip count. And I think last week they announced that their defense budget for next year will be 7.2% higher. So they’re putting the investment in.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

General Kruse.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Okay. You ask about sort of strategic advantage, decision advantage. I think that comes down to one thing and then one thing that enables it. So that one thing is partnerships, partnerships, partnerships. Those come in all flavors. It is our foreign partners. We’ve seen several of them here today and it’s great to see you all. It could be industry partners, it could be academics, it could be advanced researchers. We have got to figure out how do we use those partnerships to our greatest advantage. The chief announced the future operation concepts. I don’t want to get ahead of him, but if you read through even the front piece of that, he talks a little bit about hard power deterring.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

I think when it comes down to it, partnerships do one thing for hard power and that is they increase our capacity, our capability, our geography, and our sustainability over time, which is exactly what we’re looking for. So what do you need to have good partners and to enable good partners? And then I think the piece is probably most appropriate for me to talk about, which is the awkward conversation, which is intel sharing. I think that is the underpinning of really what we’re seeing as a seed change in an approach. I would offer that when you think about intel sharing, fundamentally that is the process by which you need to downgrade, declassify or publicly release certain data so you can share it with some partners who aren’t originally aligned to receive that data.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

There are a lot of things culturally that we’ve got to work through, some of those awkward conversations, but actually the precedent sent in Russia, Ukraine conflict I think is a precedent. And now we may not do it exactly the same way. We’ve got to think through what that looks like. We actually started this some time ago. You probably saw election security. There were some releases. We’ve gone through this in COVID origins. We’ve gone through it in anomalous health incidents, but really the Russia, Ukraine crisis leading up to it in particular, and then now all the activity that is ongoing. So what does that look like? I know from a DNI perspective and the guidance that is out there, that is changing dramatically. If you want to look for proof, you can look at the odni.gov website and you can start to see National Intelligence Council assessments at the unclassified levels is now being published there.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

My boss, the director of National Intelligence has her posture hearing. It’s actually the annual threat assessment coming up this week. The classified version of her report is already over at The Hill, but the 35 to 40 pages, the unclassified version will be her statement for the record. We are now designing how do we publish at an unclassified level in order to do some of the things that we want to do on intel diplomacy and enable the partnerships. Long way to go. The only caveat that I would say that we’re still working through that then drives some of the designs for how do I use automation and other things to help that out, is when you look at the original processes and the original philosophy behind how do you downgrade and declassify. As you recall, there’s original classification authorities. Those are the people that say, this data is at this classification level and that either comes out of senior leaders or it comes out of security classification guys that we’ve written.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

The original design for the authorities to do downgrading and declassification was actually at a higher authorization level than the senior levels because the philosophy was we were substituting our judgment for the senior leaders who already said it’s classified at this level. We’ve got to flip the script. I think we’ve brought that conversation now down to the data owners and they’re much more likely to work through this at speed and scale to do intel sharing. And we’ve got to work through what is an entirely new concept look like so you can leverage technology in order to do intel sharing. The last piece that I would probably say with that is in addition to that, we’ve got a new approach to what we call one time reading. So it’s not just data going out. It is where industry partners are coming in and we’re doing one time reading so they can get access to classified information and understand the threat to their particular industry.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Again, if you go back to some of the NCSC, the National Counterintelligence Security Center, activities in ’21, they’ve launched a campaign with industry. In ’22, they did a Safeguarding Science Campaign to provide tools for industry. If you want to go out and develop your own counterintelligence or insider threat program. And then this year they’re doing a top 30, where if you’re one of the top 30 companies in your industry, they will partner with you in a stronger way. I would encourage for everybody who’s in industry to not only become a part of that, but to become a part of what NSA and Cybercom are doing, which again is really getting after some of this data. We need to have partnerships in a way that enables classified conversations. So we all know the fight that we’re potentially preparing for and we protect that data going forward.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks, sir. And General Lauderback, any brief comments?

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Yeah. Okay. So let me just say briefly. I wanted to take it down from that strategic advantage in competition to conflict. So before this crowd goes, and I think we only have a minute or so, there are a number of efforts that we are working on across the globe and in a number of different nafs and wings. To make our ISRT Airmen better at what it is that we need to do, about that as a intel as a war fighting function. But also many of you in this room know that we also own part of the…

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Hello? Okay, there we go. All right. One of those efforts, I just visited our Korea team about three weeks ago, they have an incredible effort that they’re working right now. This is about live fly training of ISR Airmen to actually find, fix and then F2T2EA, or at least the F2T port of that. We also have a tri wing effort. This is between our three 63rd targeting wing, the 70th ISR wing and the four 80th ISR wing. This is about [inaudible 00:41:05] Oh man, I don’t know if that’s just me or the mic. Okay. Anyhow, the bottom line is that the effort is about trying to get better at kill chain automation, right? Finding the targets faster, getting that information to the commanders or to those shooters, whomever it might be in order to prosecute the targets. That’s what we’re about at a strategic conflict or a tactical conflict I should say. But I think those folks on the Korean peninsula show us that they’re deterring every single day while they’re also preparing for a conflict if necessary.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

General Lauderback, thanks. And being mindful of time, I think we have enough time left just for some brief wrap up comments. So we’ll go ahead and start, General Kruse with you and just work our way down the line. I’d say about a minute each.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Okay. Since I’ve overachieved, I’ll go under that. If you look at the program that you have about two pages in, there’s something at the bottom that says something to the effective every Airman and Guardian in the fight. I would offer that could say every Airman, Guardian and industry partner in the fight. We need everybody sort of synchronized. The second thing is, because this is the Warfare Symposium, I am with Leah, that it is extraordinarily impressive what folks are doing in the innovation realm. It is extraordinarily impressive what we’re going to task people to do in a future conflict. I think you should be demanding in what you expect, demanding in what you need, funnel those up and let us work those issues. We need to fundamentally rethink a few things and what are the policies associated with that in order to have the capabilities we need going forward. And we trust you to be awesome. We trust you to be demanding of all of us as well.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Thanks, Jeff. Okay, so I was at the KAC in 2003, and I tell this quite frequently. How many people, can I see hands? Who was in the KAC in 2003? Who was in OIF in 2003? I mean, there’s barely anybody in the room here that I can see, that I can see, right? All the old people up on stage were here. The KAC in the very beginning of Iraqi freedom was chaos, and it took us probably about five or six days to actually get into a regular battle rhythm where we could prosecute targets. We didn’t have to drop weapons on a target three times because we didn’t have the battle damage to be able to tell the folks that you don’t need to do a restrike.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

I mean, there was a lot of personnel that we put at risk in those first number of days of OIF because we didn’t have our reps and sets in, if you will. We’re not going to have that opportunity. If there’s a future conflict with China, the timing is too dramatic. It is too fast. We don’t have five days to get our stuff together in the KAC or however we’re going to see to it. So just be thinking about that. Think about the sense of urgency, where we need to get to in order to prosecute a fight if it comes to that.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

So following up on the sense of urgency from General Lauderback, it’s clear to me that the PLA has reorganized, which has started in 2015. It has retooled, which it has done over four fide eps. Executing a deliberate budget plan with consistent funding, which grew every year. And they’ve also been practicing and rehearsing new operational concepts, which they call systems destruction warfare. And for all the geeks in the room who did their PME, that’s called a revolution in military affairs. They’ve done those three things. The PLA today is a joint integrated team that can power project, whereas at 2003, they were an inward looking territorial force. The world is different. We need to be combat ready and we need to be combat ready today.

Maj. Gen. Jim Marrs, USAF (Ret.):

All right. Well, I regret that while we’re not out of questions, we are out of time and so thanks to our wonderful panel members and one more round of applause for them for a great show.

Watch, Read: ‘The New Air Operations Center’

March 7, 2023

Retired Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, former mobilization assistant to the Chief of Space Operations and Acting USSF Chief Technology and Innovation Office, oversaw a panel on ‘The New Air Operations Center’ with Bill Torson, warfighting architect for Kessel Run; Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer, chief of command and control/intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations for Air Combat Command; and Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman, commander of the 505th Command and Control Wing, at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 7, 2023. The panel talked about how new technologies and challenges are driving the Air Force to reconsider how it approaches command and control. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

We got you. Thank you so much for being here. Wow. I’m glad you guys all found us. This is a great group. I think we’ve almost got a full house here. Talking about the new Air Operations Center. I’m so excited that we’ve got such an eager audience to be part of our conversation today, and I’m really thrilled to be the moderator of this particular panel. Let me just briefly introduce myself, and I’ll introduce our panel members, and then we’ll jump into this interesting discussion. So I’m Kim Crider, retired major general. I retired in 2021. I would say that command and control has been kind of a core theme throughout my entire career. I started my career out in acquisition, and I was actually working at Hanscomb Air Force Base when we first created the AOC Weapon System, way back in the day.

Throughout my career I’ve been involved in not only the systems engineering design and acquisition of command and control systems for air operations across and around the globe, in Europe, in the Pacific. I’ve been involved in requirements and capability planning for command and control. I’ve been involved in air mobility command and control, as well as in cyberspace operations and space operations. So I think I had a pretty full rounded career, and really got to see how the Air Operations Center has evolved, how air operations has evolved, and how it’s integrated with other joint operations and with the integration of space and cyberspace. So it’s been a phenomenal evolution to watch, and it’s continuing to grow and evolve. And that’s what we’re going to talk here about today.

Let me introduce my panel members. Colonel Trey Coleman, on my left, is an Air Battle manager that currently serves as the commander of the 505th command and control wing at Hurlburt Field. The 505th is responsible for testing, training, and developing tactics, techniques, and procedures for C2 systems from JTAC to JFACC. Trey has also commanded the 609th Air Operations Center at Al Udeid, and the 961st AWAC Squadron at Kadena. He’s published several articles on C2 throughout the Marshall Institute and Air University, and is one of the most senior C2 subject matters in the Air Force. Thanks for joining us, Trey.

Seated next to Trey is Colonel “Doc” Docauer. Doc is the Chief of C2 and ISR Operations at Air Combat Command Headquarters. He’s a career air battle manager with combat experience in the E-3 AWACS, E-8 Joint STARS, and control and reporting centers. He is one of the architects of Comax BMC2 Roadmap, which is transitioning the legacy USAF Theater Air Control System to an ABMS JADC2 enabled C2 system for our air component commanders. Further, he’s one of the tri chairs of Comax Air Operation Center evolution effort seeking to design and field the AOC of the future, and the goal of ensuring the effectiveness and resiliency of the Air Force operational C2 in the face of challenges posed by adversaries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Doc, thanks for being here.

And last but not least, Bill Torson. Mr. Bill Torson is a pilot with a non-kinetic operations background, currently serving in the Air Force acquisitions community as the war fighting architect at AFLCMC/HBB Kessel Run. Kessel Run is the system program office for the AOC weapon system and six other wing level targeting and operational C2 programs. As the war fighting architect, Mr. Torson engages with industry, the war fighting community, and government technologists to develop a model-based system architecture for Kessel Run’s programs of record that reflects the future of warfare. Bill, thanks for being here.

All right, so with this great panel, let me just give us a little bit of a backdrop. Command and control, as we all know, is a core Air Force mission and joint function. It underpins every operation in our ability to deliver decisive effects at the operational level of war. The United States Air Force has been effectively executing operational C2 via the Air Operation Center for some 30 years. As an operational C2 weapon system, the AOC has served us well. It’s the centerpiece of prosecuting theater war. And while the AOC has certainly evolved over the years, we find ourselves at the next inflection point. Changes in technology and changes in the operational environment are driving doctrinal changes in the conduct of modern warfare, particularly with respect to command and control, which in turn is driving the next evolution of the AOC, to keep pace with future operational demands in an increasing complex and challenging environment.

Today’s panel will explore the changes affecting the AOC, the types of innovation that are driving the AOC evolution, and the operational C2 challenges yet to be faced by the AOC of the future. So Trey, I’m going to to turn my first question to you. With that as a backdrop, and with everything that you’ve done, you’ve had such a great career and influence in thought leadership relative to command and control, operational command and control, and the future of the AOC. Can you give us some thoughts in thinking about the doctrinal changes that we see going on, and specifically how does Mission Command doctrine change the role of the AOC?

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Thanks, ma’am, for the question, and thanks for the audience. Thanks for being here. It’s amazing that the house is so packed, and that’s just a reflection of how important the AOC is and how much we think about it and how important it is to the way we fight. I’ve got this theory, and the theory goes something like this. And if you’re a major going off to IDE next year maybe, and you’re looking for a research paper, I’m looking for somebody to write this out in a professional way. But here’s the theory. It’s that there’s an inverse relationship between the size of our force and the need for C2. Particularly the type of C2 that is resource management that happens at the Air Operation Center. There’s all sorts of different types of command and control at all the different levels, but I’m talking about kind of operational level command and control that figures out what assets are going to what place at what time, what they’re doing, who’s getting the assets. That’s essentially resource management.

And that is what the AOC does on behalf of the air component commander, on behalf of the combatant commander, under the authorities of the Secretary of Defense. And so today, with a force as small as we have today, we need that function more than ever. If you think about World War II, we had about 300,000 airplanes in the inventory in World War II. 300,000 airplanes. And think about the C2 structure and the C2 capabilities back then. Certainly there was somebody making decisions and doing some resource allocation, but technologically there just didn’t… Once those airplanes took off, there wasn’t much there. Very nascent radar, very, very nascent radio capability. And so they didn’t have much C2. But they had a ton of airplanes. And if a mission took off and came back with half the bombers, that was not desired, but you could accept that, you could tolerate that and you can keep fighting. We cannot do that today.

When you think about Vietnam, Vietnam had 17,000 airplanes in the Air Force inventory, about seven or 8,000 fighters alone. And we had what I would call a first generation C2 enterprise. You had the EC121, you had some ground control stations, and we had some basic command and control capability, a first generation C2 capability. And then came the 80s and 90s when we delivered the AWACs and the JSTARS. And the AOC was kind of the culmination of our C2 delivery in the 90s that folks like yourself helped build. And it was really revolutionary. Think about, without that Air Operations Center, without that function, who was deciding what airplanes were going where at what time, when they were meeting up, what their mission was, who wasn’t getting the resources, what’s the strategy, who’s doing the targeting? How did those functions exist? And so the AOC was pretty revolutionary. And I would call that our second generation C2 force.

And then we stopped. We stopped. And so we have a second generation C2 force that culminated in the 1990s, and we have a fifth or sixth generation fight. And so we got to catch up. This panel is about the AOC, but we’re doing it across the board, and DOC and ACC are doing a great job with the BMC2 roadmap. It’s really helping usher us to the next generation. But we got to skip a few generations. We can’t go to the third generation, we need to go right to the fifth or the sixth. And so it’s challenging. But this panel focused on the AOC, I’m going to focus my comments on what we’re doing to bring across, to bring about the new AOC.

And we do it, you asked about Mission Command, doctrine is driving a lot of these changes. Mission Command is not new, but it is new to doctrine. It is a new focus for us, how do you execute Mission Command? I’ll give you an example of how we did it when I was at the 609th. At the 609th, in 2019 we issued mission type orders to AFA in Afghanistan, and we said, “Hey dude, you guys have all the resources you need. You got two fighter squadrons, a tanker squadron, some MQ9s, C130s. We’re really focused on these things over here in Iraq and Syria and Saudi Arabia. And so you guys do your thing, and just let us know what you’re doing, we’ll put it on the ATO, and you guys go execute.”

If you flew out there, you knew it’s a four hour drive time anyway, to get from central Afghanistan to anywhere in the Gulf where you’re usable. And so we gave them the MTOs, they executed, they did their thing, and it worked pretty well. But they didn’t have enemy IADs to worry about. They didn’t have to have a big EW requirement. It was pretty simplistic targeting on behalf of US4A. And they had the ability to have that relationship right there.

And then we started pulling tankers away from them, because we needed them in Iraq and Syria. And the whole MTO thing just kind of unraveled, and it unraveled very quickly. And then when we pulled one of the fighter squadrons out, it just, we had to stop and we rescinded the orders. What we learned from that experiment was that the way we were trying to use mission type orders in that case was to replace the functions of the air component. And unless you have an entire Air Force, a composite wing the way that they did at the time, you need the functions of the air component to give you the resources. And the more they needed the resources, the less MTOs work to replace those air component functions.

So our big takeaway was, that’s not really the best use of MTOs. MTOs are great at the tactical level. Mission Command is what we need at the tactical level. That’s how you do decentralized execution. Give the AW the authorities to park his jets wherever he wants under an ACE construct. As a matter of fact, I don’t think the ATO should even say where you take off from. I don’t care, as long as the airplane gets to the right place at the right time. So that’s what Mission Command should do, give the AWs all the authorities they need to defend their bases and move their assets around. But they don’t replace, Mission Command does not replace those resource management functions that happen in the Air Operation Center today. So that’s kind of my opening salvo. I’m excited to be here, and looking forward to this conversation.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Very helpful. Doc, do you want to jump on that?

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

Yeah, sure. I completely agree that if you think macro, decentralized execution as our joint doctrine and our service doctrine is overarching approach that really gets back to the American way of war, where Americans execute a mission, and the Airmen on the battlefield and our soldiers, they recognize opportunities and they act on those opportunities. That’s why we have the flexibility and the ability to take advantage of those in comparison to some of our adversaries.

You remember back in the Cold War, that was always the comparison between the Americans and the Russians. The Russians, they don’t have any authority, they can’t do anything but what they’re supposed to do. Americans, we can think and we can act. And I really think that tie to commander’s intent is really important. And at the decentral execution level, the way we’ve done that in the past is, hey, you read the AOD, you read the spins, you understand as much as you can about the commander’s guidance and intent and do your best to stay aligned. And I just think that Mission Command and mission type orders really help to understand the commander’s intent at a deeper level in the transition from the operational to the tactical level.

And that’s why I think it’s so absolutely critical. Because we have to get back to thinking, and acting, and taking an initiative, and taking advantage of opportunities on the battlefield. Because it may be the difference between winning and losing, as it was in the past. And we need to evolve past the 5,000 mile screwdriver, which we’ve gotten very, very good at over the last 20, 25 years of war. And maybe that our Airmen today don’t completely remember how to exercise initiative like they did in the past, because those Airmen have retired and moved on. And we’ve got to go and train every day and our exercises, our daily training, our OREs, our ORIs, to think and act like that. So from that perspective, what General Brown said earlier about mission type orders need to be executed at every level at every training event, that’s what he’s talking about. We need to go relearn not only the nuts and bolts of Mission Command and how to develop and execute a mission type order, but we need to go relearn how to take initiative on the battlefield. Okay.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks very much. So pulling back to the operational C2 level then, right? Let’s talk about another important concept and function of the AOC, which is to produce, process, and execute the ATO, the air tasking order. So as we think about the AOC of the future, what changes do you envision, Doc, to how the ATO cycle may work? Do we see anything happening there?

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

So that’s an interesting question. And I think that it’s almost… And there’s some AOC commanders, AOC leadership out there, almost everybody asks that, right? But let’s just be clear, in the past we’ve made adjustments to the ATO cycle based on the needs of the mission. Great examples of that manifested around the summer surge in Iraq in 2007, 2008 timeframe, when the land component commander just wasn’t being serviced by the length of our ATO cycle, and our ability to effectively stay in tune with the JTAR process. So we compress the ATO cycle. So I don’t think that the joint air tasking cycle or the ATO cycle is static. I think it’s very much mission dependent, and episodic based on the needs of the combatant commander, the component commander, the war fighters, and your supported units out there in the field.

That said, people talk about ATO execution, they think about ATO execution and combat ops. But it actually takes time, resources to develop strategy to turn strategy into a plan, allocate resources that plan, enable all the planning across the force, pulling tankers’ fuel together, resources, logistics, generating fighters, generating tankers, building bombs, all that kind of good stuff. That stuff takes a little bit of time too, okay? So you can’t just assume that we’re going to execute a 12 hour ATO cycle. Because all that other planning, directing, controlling, assessing air power, all that other stuff besides just executing is important too.

But do you think that the place where there’s room for a lot of thought, and there’s been some thought in this arena, and we need more, is things like multi-day ATOs, and standing guidance out there in the field to enable the initiative at the tactical edge to execute when the ATO didn’t drop on time. Because we still need to generate air power, we still need to stay in the fight. And good, bottom up, your fighters launched, they have to go somewhere, they have to talk to somebody, and pull together some kind of plan, generate a mission package. So good processes, procedures, training, and doctrine all the way through that we can exercise in our major force exercises to be able to do those things on those times or those days when the CDO environment gets ahead of our ability to generate an ATO.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Great. So as we’re trying to generate the ATO with a certain amount of flexibility, and move in fact towards maybe multi-day ATOs, Bill, help us think through a little bit, and Doc, maybe you can jump on this too, from an AOC weapon system perspective, the a C2 system itself… I mean, the ATO is dependent on data. And all of the systems across the AOC are dependent on data, and the need to be very collaborative across all of those different functions. So how is the C2 weapon system evolving in the AOC of the future to be more collaborative and data centric?

Bill Torson:

Great question. I love that question, and thanks for having me. This is what we live at Kessel Run at the SPO. And as we think about how we do this better and we talk about the potential for a multi-day ATO, or an ATO process that changes, or potential delegated authorities that move further down the chain in a contested environment, our job in that is to create opportunity for the process to change with technology. And a lot of the way that we’re doing that, first of all, I think speaking to what the chief talked about earlier today, and what the secretary talked about, one of the things that we’re doing very closely with our partners at C3BM is making sure that we are building to a model-based systems engineering standard that supports the greater ABMS construct.

Because when we talk about data centric, that’s all fine and good, and it tends to be hand wavy. I think we all know that. Where, “Oh, it’s about the data. It’s about the data.” Well, I agree with that. But fundamentally, what are the human workflows that we are enabling, and how do we enable those successfully using data? So it’s not about data in general, it’s about specific things we can know.

One of the things that we’ve learned in studying the AOC that goes into what it takes to shorten an ATO cycle or make it more adaptable, is that a lot of the time that goes into the development of the ATO is coordination and collaboration time. It is emails, it is hundreds of phone calls between an LNO and a supporting wing command post. “How many planes are available now? How many planes are available now?”

As we dig back into that and we start treating our wings, our joint partners, our coalition partners, our friends and partners who operate at different classification levels that don’t always make it directly into an ATO but need to be coordinated with, especially when we start talking about non-kinetic operations, when we start talking about EW and space and cyber and how those integrate into the overall picture, we’re really developing a view of data that allows those teams to be, I’m going to use a term from the 80s that probably died, but a prosumer. A producer consumer sort of hybrid where it’s their job to ask for things, and to provide resources that support the overall development. They do their own work, but they also support a larger system. So looking at all of those teams equally as producer consumers, or prosumers, helps us think about what data needs to be exchanged to make them successful.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Sounds great. I love that. Prosumer, right? That’s our new word for the day.

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

Let me write that down. Just pulling up just a little bit, I think, so how do we get to a collaborative environment across our C2 system from JFAC to JTAC? And I think that is a key to really executing things like sensor to shooter in a meaningful realistic way, all the way through the targeting process, and the decision cycle, and actually getting a decision, coordinating out there in the field, but automating some of that. But it is really about the quality of the data. But it’s not just the data, but feeding in as much data as you can from as many sources as you can, including our allies and partners. Not just giving our allies and partners data, but getting data from our allies and partners is a baseline. But then you got to have the application layer, where the workflows that are going to execute that data kind of manifest.

And then, how do you make sure that what’s happening in AOC is collaborative with what’s happening in a CRC, and on an E7, and with a JTAC at the tactical edge? So these tools and processes that we’re building, we have to share code, share software, share processes, and make sure things, open architectures, and data standards, and things like that are consistent across the board, so that we’re able to stay synchronized. And make sure what our operators, whether at the wing using CHIMERA, at the AOC using Kratos, or in a BCC using CBC2, they’re all able to see the same data. Maybe specifically used by the operators a little differently, but the data is leveled, so it’s a democratization of that data.

And then pulling up another level, so to facilitate that you have to go to the cloud. So moving everything into the cloud is really kind of… So feed in as much data as you can, and collaborative application layer, shared data, shared code, shared applications, and then a cloud to pull it all together. There’s some risk management there with edge computing and things like that. But at the end of the day, you really have to have those three things. And at the very tippy top you better have a resilient communication layer to be able to move all that data from where it needs to be, from where it is, and be able to protect it at the same time. So there’s a lot to dig into there, but that’s really kind of the four things we really need to get after to get after that collaborative environment. Trey?

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Yes, that’s great. And Trey, let me pull this back to where we started a little bit with you. And Bill mentioned it, so an important aspect of the collaboration, of course, is collaborating with the wings, at the wing level. And to your earlier point, I mean, MTOs, Mission Command, push that down to the tactical level. But AOC still wants to coordinate and collaborate with those wing level units. So how do you see the C2 system of the future facilitating that collaboration to support distributed or decentralized control?

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

That’s a great question. The distributed word there is one of the most fundamental changes to doctrine that we’ve seen in a long time. We went from centralized, controlled, decentralized execution, and then we separated command and control, and now we’ve transitioned, under General Brown’s… during his time as a chief of staff, to we’ve transitioned to centralized command. Because a commander, a single commander needs to have those command authorities to distributed control and decentralized execution. This distributed control thing is what we’re talking about.

As a historical reference, I’ve used this before, so if you’ve heard it before, humor me. In 1929, the French started building the Maginot Line based off of the lessons learned in World War I. And it was a beautiful structure, spans 200 something miles, tons of command bunkers in there, and tunnels, and hallways. It was fantastic, and it would’ve worked really, really well in World War I. They spent $9 billion on it in today’s equivalent funds, by the way, and took 10 years to do it. And the Germans walked around it in eight days.

And I’d argue that our AOCs are built on the Maginot Line business model. Now, the difference is they’ve worked really well for 30 years. They have really been successful for us. They’ve revolution revolutionized the way that we C2 air power. But they’re not going to work in the next fight. And so we’ve got to get away from the Maginot Line business model, and get ourselves into the Uber business model. And that’s what distribution is all about. That’s what we’re trying to do here. It’s not necessarily a new idea. I mean, COVID showed us how it can be done. Essentially it’s remote work, that’s what we’re talking about. It is revolutionary. It’s a new idea for the air component.

And it’s really uncomfortable, because we all like having all our people in the same room. And by the way, we’re built, our C2 systems today, both at the operational and tactical level, are very much built to be centralized. Not only are the people in this big gigantic, hundreds of billion dollars or hundreds of million dollar building, but the data’s there too. So we all have these beautiful data centers in the basements of our air operation centers, and the data can’t get out. And if the data can’t get out, it makes it really, really hard to distribute. And so while we talk a lot about the cloud, we all know we need to go to the cloud, I think that one of the things we’re going to have to do from our enterprise level is incentivize getting our air components to transfer their data to the cloud. That’ll be an important step for us.

But once you’re in the cloud, how do you do it? There’s some really good examples out there of folks who are doing it already. AFSN’s probably leading the way with distribution. There’s other examples. I’ll give you a couple of examples that are a couple years old, and one that is as of a couple weeks old. When I was at the 609th, we were transitioning a lot of our forces to our alternate location, to the AFSN headquarters at Shaw. And so we had the ability there, we were pushing the ATO from our facilities there. And then as tensions kind of escalated with Iran, we put some of our combat operations capabilities there too. And so, we were in any given day performing a senior defense position, air defense duties from Shaw, and offensive operations or chief of combat ops from LUD, or vice versa. You could conduct the entirety of the entirety of the strategy mission from Shaw. So there’s some distribution there.

I was talking to General Grynkewich the other day, and he said now that they’ve transitioned fully to Kratos, they’re not using TBMCS and FTK. Because the way we were doing it back then was just a VPN tunnel. So you had the VPN into the system at LUD, and there’s latency, and it’s not very good. And so, but it was okay. It was better than what we were doing before. But now that we’re using Kratos, which is entirely cloud-based, I guess they pushed the ATO from an apartment complex as a… They decided to just not go to work that day, and they pushed the ATO from an apartment complex in Sumter, South Carolina.

That’s distribution. This stuff isn’t science fiction. It’s real, and we’re doing it. But Kratos is just the first step. It’s one really important system that’s a part of the Air Operation Center, and there’s a whole lot of other systems that we’ve got to get to the cloud, and a lot of other data that we’ve got to get to the cloud, so you can do this with any of the systems and any of the functions that you need to perform inside of the AOC.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you so much. That’s really helpful.

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

Mind if I jump on that real quick?

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Of course, go ahead, Doc.

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

Yeah, I know you’re trying to move on. I think one thing that is misunderstood about distributed operations, distributed control, is the bean counters here that, and they think efficiencies. They think, “Hey, if we’re going to distribute our operations, it must be more efficient, therefore I’m just going to take my cuts, and then you guys can figure out how to account for the cuts down the line.” And we see that manifest in things like the AOC consolidation discussion, which is out of sync with the manpower deficiencies we have in the system. But really, distributed ops is about resiliency.

Now, it’s up to a component commander working with their combatant commander to find with their requirements for resiliency are. That could mean distribute forward, distribute rear, distribute to your TFI units, whatever, or some kind of combination. But the point is it’s really to enable that resiliency. As an additional step to the protected COM, you also have to be able to protect and assure your operation. So distributed ops is about being more effective, it’s not about being more efficient. And I think if you get a chance to communicate that to everybody who wants to take a cut, that would be helpful to our cause.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Great, great point. Thanks for adding that. So the C2 system of the future, the future AOC, very focused on providing an infrastructure that facilitates collaboration and distribution, which adds to resiliency. Bill, I want to circle back on one of the other points that you made, which is coalition partners. So in this new environment that we have to operate in, we know how critical our coalition partners are to our war fighting operations. So how are the coalition partners going to play into this, and access this C2 system of the future?

Bill Torson:

Yeah, this is the tough one today, right? No. So, I think first of all I want to acknowledge upfront that it could not be more clear from our AOC commanders, all the way up through the Chief and the Secretary, all the way up through our most senior leadership, that we go to war with our partners no matter what. And we do that right. So whether it is a policy thing or a technology thing, we’re going to war with our partners. So what it takes to get there is a combination of technology and policy. So in the midterm, there are ways that we are changing the way we build the AOC weapon system from a technology perspective that support coalition partner access.

One of those things is, as opposed to having multiple regionally located AOC, and Trey and I talked about this, the tech stack is in the basement of the AOC, transitioning to a single instance of the cloud-based AOC, which is multi-tenant, meaning all of the AOCs live in one large instance of the AOC, and data is shared specifically based on role and attribute based access. That is important for us, as a US force, to be able to distribute information accurately. I think mobility right away, as folks that are constantly transitioning between AORs, and their data needs to transition with them effectively, we are treating our coalition partners and our joint partners exactly the same way. So their access to different parts of the system is 100 percent based on the reliability of the information, and their roles and attributes based on what they are doing as they operate the AOC weapon system. So that’s kind of the big picture.

In the interim though, we are looking for, and we are getting, a lot of support to policy that supports that kind of work. What we’re talking about from a technology perspective is not something that has been done many times before. So it goes, for the technology people in the room, it’s a zero trust model, which is something the Air Force just put a policy out about on how we’re moving that direction in general. The way we implement that successfully in the AOC weapon system is something that we are lead turning, and not waiting for the Air Force to figure out as a big picture.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, thank you so much. And you kind of mentioned somewhat of the technology, and the way that technology is really helping to facilitate… Technology’s come a long way to facilitate a lot of these advances and opportunities that we have. We talked about cloud, we talked about better management of the data, being able to tag the data, being able to assign attributes much better, more effective role-based and attribute-based control, and supporting zero trust models. Bill, just to continue that thought a little bit, talk to us a little bit more about Kessel Run, and how you’re using best industry practices and industry innovation to sort of help this evolution of the AOC.

Bill Torson:

Sure. So there’s two things there. One is the industry practices piece, and then the other part is how are we using industry itself? So from an industry best practices perspective, Kessel Run, for those who don’t know, was born out of this idea that industry, especially software, agile best practices are a more successful way to deliver content fast. So the basic principles here being continuous delivery, continuous test, so that we are always delivering new content. So for example, when the 609th transitioned fully to TBMCS, or off of TBMCS, excuse me, into Kratos, you would assume based on an original model for delivery that, “Okay, that’s the baseline. We’re going to let it settle and then kind of wait and see what happens next.” No, in the next two or three weeks there were more than 100 changes to the live production weapon system.

So, this sounds like risk, but it’s not. It is managed risk. And from what we learned from industry, and what we’ve really learned in iterating on this process in government, because it is a very different thing to do in government, is that you actually reduce risk by continuously deploying to your production environment. To the actual weapon system, as opposed to sitting, and waiting, and validating. Now, this has been a journey with our test community, who have been awesome partners in figuring out how to do this well, because continuous test is not something that is generally done. They usually wait until, “Here’s the… You’ve completed the entire requirements document, I’m going to go back, I’m going to give you a zero to 100 score on what you’ve completed.” Well, the idea now is that it might show us a very small percentage, but that very small percentage is very, very narrowly and well done, and we’re going to move to the next percentage after that.

So those practices have been iterative, and we have changed a lot. I think from our original model that was strictly out there, user-centered design, everything is focused very intentionally on the 609th user, we’ve learned some lessons along the way. One of those lessons was kind of the genesis for my position, which is the idea that user-centered design is a beautiful thing if you’re building the Nike Run app for a watch, right? Because your metric for success has everything to do with user adoption. And, “I changed the button to green, and looks like a few more people showed up.” Well, what we find is that user-centered adoption is a beautiful thing when you’re trying to really optimize an individual position, but it really requires a bigger understanding of how the system itself fits together, and how human workflows flow between each other to be successful.

And for that reason, we have come to the conclusion that there is a larger ecosystem, there is more to the solve, and that’s where we really look to our industry partners and our other government technology partners to help us succeed. Now, what we have learned is that building it yourself in all cases is not going to solve all the problems. It’s too big, and it’s too complicated. What we really have to do is understand the model for how it needs to work, and then we need to go out to industry. So we are always looking for industry partners, and we approach that from a very humble position, where we know we need industry’s help, and we want to operate as an internal integrator to a greater ecosystem.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

That’s great. Thank you so much. Did you want to jump on that, Doc?

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

If you don’t mind.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Please. I don’t mind.

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

Yeah, so I think the amount of time it’s taken to progress from AOC 10.2 and the failure of that program to where we are now is, I think everybody would agree it’s been too long. And certainly our C MAJCOM commanders and their AOCs would agree, because they’re doing a lot of things on their own to try to get capability in their AOCs. So how do you leverage industry, industry capabilities to kind of form the chocolate and the strawberry and the cream and the icing on the Sunday, if you will, to kind of build on, and be a force multiplier for Kessel Run and Kratos as we work through the very difficult and very challenging issues that are working for the next set of capabilities? And really use that as an accelerant if you will, an enhancement to Kratos when we get it out to the wide audience here over the next couple of years? And I think that’s an important question. There’s a lot of lot to that in terms of how you evaluate those industry capabilities. Maybe Trey’s got some stuff on that.

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

So part of the 505th command control wing is the 605th test squadron. It’s the Air force’s only C2 operational test squadron. And so everything from JTAC to JFAC, those guys test. And it used to be back in the day you get delivered a programmer record, and it’s gone through DT, and then it goes to OT, and we develop TTPs for, and you deliver it. And if you want to make a change to that, you can put in your form 1592, and we’ll get the change to you in about two or three years, and we’ll develop TTPs for it. That just does not work with software. The greatest thing about… the reason Kessel Run worked so well at the 609th is because the coders were sitting right there next to you, and you go, “I want to change this, I need to change this,” and they did it in 20 minutes or an hour, or whatever. And software has to be like that.

But we’ve got to figure out how to test it too. One of our other squadrons is the ABMS Battle Lab ShOC-N at Nellis. The mission there at ShOC-N is experimentation for ABMS, but this is a new endeavor for us, and so we’ve got to figure out how to take systems that aren’t programs or record, that aren’t really funded, put them there, experiment with them, do DT, do OT, write TTPs for them, and then some air components have them and some don’t. And every time you go to an air component, you go, “Hey, look at this new tool we’re testing out at Nellis.”

And that’s the place to do it, by the way, because that’s the home of the fighter pilot, and that’s where the greatest exercises happen in the world. And so you got to bring your systems to the Battle Lab, test them at Nellis, build the TTPs for them. Then you bring it to the air component and they go, “That’s cool, but I got this system.” And you’re like, “Oh, let’s bring that one to the ShOC.” And it takes six months to get it in there. But it really is an endeavor of influence and relationships, and it’s not the standard business model that we’ve always grown accustomed to, and we’re figuring out how to do that.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, USAF (Ret.):

Outstanding. Well, thank you so much. I think we’re just about up on time. We’ve got so many more questions that we could ask, and I think it would just really be a great opportunity to get more and more of your insights here. You guys truly are the architects of the future of the AOC on so many different levels. But let me just wrap us up. So as the complexities and challenges in the joint operating environment continue to increase, and joint all domain, C2 continues to become a key source of strategic advantage, we know the AOC must evolve. Today we’ve discussed the impact of changing doctrine, technology, coalition engagement, and industry practices on the AOC, and the opportunities and challenges that must be addressed to ensure the AOC is ready for the fight tonight and the future fight. Thank you, gentlemen, for your insights today, and the focus you bring every day to AOC’s evolution, and contribution to war winning joint operations. Thank you so much for being here.

Bill Torson:

Thanks.

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Good job.