Watch, Read: ‘The New Air Operations Center’

Watch, Read: ‘The New Air Operations Center’

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.

Watch, Read: ‘Ready to Fight: Flying Hours, Flight Safety, and Training the Next Generation of Pilots’

Watch, Read: ‘Ready to Fight: Flying Hours, Flight Safety, and Training the Next Generation of Pilots’

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, deputy chief of staff for operations; Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson, commander of Air Education and Training Command; and Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, chief of safety for the Department of the Air Force, came together to discuss the challenges faced and advances made as the Air Force works to develop and maintain the skills and safety of its world-class pilots during a March 7, 2023, panel at the AFA Warfare Symposium. Retired Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, executive vice president of AFA, moderated. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Well, good afternoon to the last panel of the day. My name is Doug Raaberg. I’m the Executive Vice President of your Air & Space Forces Association. Sincerely, thank you for joining us to discuss what I consider a very serious topic of national security importance, about being, quote, “Ready to Fight: Flying Hours, Flying Safety, and Training the Next Generation of Pilots.” Let me introduce our guests this afternoon and then let’s give them a warm welcome. To my left, Lieutenant General Jim Slife, Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for operations. To his left, Lieutenant General Brian “Smokey” Robinson, Commander, Air Education and Training Command. And to the far left and really our blue three on this formation, Major General Jeannie “Tally” Leavitt, Air Force’s Chief of Staff. Let’s give them a warm welcome, please.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Chief of Safety.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

What did I just say?

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Chief of Staff. But that’s okay.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

She’s now the Chief of Safety.

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

For a moment.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

And she’s now Blue four. Let’s go right into this because I think this is important. I was like to have General Slife set the tone. Sir, you’ve recently spoke with the Mitchell Institute Dean, Lieutenant General Dave Deptula on his Aerospace Nation podcast. And it was really about the need for a well-articulated force presentation construct that really balances mission, resources and risk. You indicated, quote, “The Air Force we have employed the last 20 to 30 years is not the Air Force we need to succeed in the environment we face today. Safe, effective, and timely pilot production and absorption continues to be the greatest challenge if the Air Force must remain dominant to deter, fight and win.” So, General, set the scene for us. How would you describe the current air crew production and absorption model, no small answer, compared to a desired throughput pipeline that safely balances high-end training with the complex missions and sensors? Sir, over to you.

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Well, thanks Doug. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you on the panel. I’d like to congratulate General Leavitt on her eight or 10 seconds of being the chief of staff. It’s been great serving with you, ma’am.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Any things you’d like to command before he goes and takes over?

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Hey, you asked how I would describe it, and so in two words I would describe it as in transition. And so we have a well-established construct for how we produce and absorb new pilots into our squadron. And of course absorption, for those that don’t live in this world every single day, absorption simply deals with the rate at which new pilots can be absorbed into a squadron. And so you can’t have a C-17 squadron full of co-pilots with no aircraft commanders. And so there’s a limit to how many new co-pilots that can come in. And our ability to absorb is generally governed by a couple of things. It’s governed by the flying time that we’re able to put on new crews. And so if I’m flying 50 hours a month, I’m going to absorb very quickly because I’m going to experience pilots very quickly.

If I’m flying five hours a month, it’s going to take me a long time to be able to absorb. And so the other thing is our definition of experience. If I’m comfortable creating a F-22 four ship flight lead after they have 10 hours in the F-22, I’ll be able to absorb very quickly. It’ll just be at a very, very high level of risk. And so how we define experience and how much flight time we can put on crews is really the governing factor. And if General Stewart and the AETC 19th Air Force production pipeline could produce more pilots, we would have a hard time absorbing them in the operational squadrons.

And so really it’s a system that’s in balance, but we’re living at an interesting time because of the advent of technologies that are really going to change our historic models for absorption and production. The advent of things like augmented reality, synthetic training environments particularly for some of our high-end platforms are not just nice to have, but they’re got to have training modalities that will increase our rate of absorption. And so we’re standing at a precipice where there’s a lot of new technologies that are going to both increase our production and our absorption. And so I would say we’re in transition.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Being the advanced wing commander, I remember steam jet capability and now you’re having to mix that into the operational imperatives capability with the sensors and really get rated management accelerator. So, General Robinson, you’re ultimately responsible for replenishing the combat forces, especially with pilots for rotary to fixed wing platforms, really from manned to remotely piloted to now semi-autonomous systems. That gets complicated from there. What are your instructors learning from training students in a complex mix of live, virtual and synthetic training environments? And then the next question is really some early results from the incorporation of cognitive learning and artificial intelligence. Sir?

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Thanks, General Raaberg. I appreciate it. And likewise, I’m honored and privileged to be on stage here with Jim Slife and with General Leavitt as well. I’ll just stick with his joke for that. So, we’ve learned a lot in that regard. So, the beautiful part about being a part of AETC, the first command, is we touch every skillset and training. So, we touch more than just pilot training. It’s all the AFCs across the Air Force, a little more than a couple hundred. And what’s interesting is we’ve learned a lot in the last four years of pilot training transformation in terms of the technologies that we’ve applied to it and how we’ve designed the learning and action. Being unfair by saying we. It’s actually the 19th Air Force that’s done a lot of that work, most of that work, and we’re pivoting off that now toward tech training transformation.

But to answer your question directly, we’ve learned that the more often you stimulate the cognitive experience for anybody, either in flying skills or no matter how heavy or light the touch labor aspect is, the more comfortable the students are in training when they actually get into the platform of choice, be it an aircraft or a K loader or a Humvee, whatever that might be. Or air traffic control, radar scope, whatever that might be. Because they’ve seen it before. Their expectations are shaped. They’ve heard it before. They’ve been able to make decisions on the scenarios that we’ve able to present through immersive training, technological solutions or AR/VR.

So, that’s actually done a lot of service there and it’s actually helped us manage risk in a lot of ways too. Because those more modern systems can actually capture data for the student’s performance and we can instruct them earlier. And one of the things I’ll never forget, at least in the flying training side, is I was at Laughlin Air Force base in the flight room early on in my time with the command and we’re getting out of one of the immersive training devices and I heard one of the students who just went out to the OR, to the MOA rather, for a contact phase ride. And he’s explaining that as he’s upside down in the Cuban 8, he looks through the top of the canopy and the ground references are just like he saw them in the immersive training device. So, not as worried about where he’s maintaining position in the MOA.

He’s focused on flying the aircraft and putting it through the right parameters and flying it safely from that perspective. So, that’s very, very important in that space. And so we’ve learned that we can do that sooner. In the cases of how that’s transferred over to maintenance training and even air traffic control training, we know for a fact we can train skill level upgrades in maintenance probably about 33% faster is what the science has shown so far, the studies have shown so far. In the case of air traffic controller training, I have personal testimony of one individual who linked in with the network that the immersive training devices that the pilots are using in the flight rooms and they could upgrade to the five level on their skills in about five months faster than the traditional cathode ray radar scope with a white carded inject from a civilian instructor or a live instructor, a human being. So, we’re not done learning what we can in that space, but that’s what it’s shown so far. A lot of great promise.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

So, General Leavitt, in many ways you and your teams have the tougher job, frankly, to ensure safety enables the mission. It’s a key point you always make from a session to combat readiness. You also emphasize that safety culture cannot be an afterthought. How do you identify potential hazards and proactively mitigate the risks from your perch?

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

Well, thank you. Very happy to be here with my outranking Generals. Thank you both for letting me join. You’re absolutely right. We’re really trying to get after the idea of ingraining safety in everything we do. Because we know we’re often an afterthought and we want to stop doing that. One of the things we did at the Safety Center was to shift our mission and vision. And so we safeguard Airmen and Guardians and protect resources, but the why part, and it’s to enable mission success. We’re not here to slow the mission down. We’re here to speed it up. Because you want to slow things down, you have a mishap, everything comes to a screeching halt. And so we really want it ingrained in everything we do, and we want to get that proactive safety mindset to people to identify risks ahead of time.

We’ve seen some great examples in the field of when a unit will have a really close call, that near miss, where they didn’t have a mishap but they were about a split second away from having one. But rather than just go, “Whew,” and go to the bar and have a drink and go, “Wow, that was close,” we’ve had some organizations go, “Let’s treat it like an investigation. Let’s go find that root cause and let’s make changes.” There’s nothing stopping us from making changes. And so we have seen some great behavior along those lines and really trying to share that so that we do that more. We want people to share their flying stories. We want them to share their experiences so we can learn from each other’s experiences. I had the great fortune last assignment when I was in AETC to check back out in the T-38, and I was blown away by the debrief abilities that come with that.

It wasn’t the T-38A I left. The T-38C was considerably different, but the incredible amount of debrief capability that we can’t always take advantage of because of the ops tempo, because of the [inaudible 00:11:29] of the time. And so I think this is one of the places as we go forward, in addition to immersive training devices, that we could potentially have that AI instructor. Because they could watch every single approach I did and know my exact threshold crossing height and my attitude and my speed and all of those things. And so when we’re able to get our arms around some of this big data, we can identify trends and be able to really take advantage of all that information.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Yeah, I think that’s pretty powerful. And so we need to build that time in for the debrief and like you mentioned there. Because the students can take that and then go jump in the immersive training device and practice on the very specific particular maneuvers or tasks that they’ve been debriefed that they need to work on without having to re-fly in the aircraft. So, I think that’s pretty powerful.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. General Slife, you’ve been a MAJCOM commander. You’ve been the end user of the product through the pipeline, but I’d like to get both perspectives, both as the A3, but also as an end user MAJCOM commander. That is, there’s a dimension of volume and velocity. You can only go so fast with the product to get it out there and then get it to the end user, especially the MAJCOMs that’d have to bring it to a combat status. So, what have you seen both as the A3 in terms of that absorption model and then give a perspective looking back as the [inaudible 00:12:54] commander?

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Well, I’ll tell you, as General Robinson’s predecessor General Webb used to say, “The clue is in the patch.” There is a MAJCOM that has the words education and training in their patch. And these are the professionals at education and training. And so my experience as a MAJCOM commander and certainly as translated as the A3 is that as the operating force tells AETC, “This is what we need you to produce.” Whatever standard that is, whatever special qualifications we need them to have, whatever it is, when we tell them what we need them to produce, this is what AETC does for a living. And they can come back and tell us exactly, “Well, this is what it’s going to cost. This is how long it’s going to take,” and so on and so forth.

And that allows the operating force to be able to make trade-offs for, “Okay, how much of an exquisite product do I want the pipeline to produce versus what can I accept in the squadron when it shows up?” And I think every MAJCOM goes through that a little bit. But I will just tell you my own experience was that I wanted to push as much of the formal training enterprise in the AETC as possible because these are the professionals that do this for a living. So, I think as long as the operating forces are clear with AETC what’s required, they can deliver the product.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

The real question is, you’re dealing with the new dynamics. Obviously force modernization. We’re talking NGAD. We’re talking new bombers, lots of new weapon systems, and again, the continuation of the complexity of training. Sir, go ahead.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

No, it’s a great point. We are. So I think we’re on the crest of the wave with that with the work we’ve done already in pilot training transformation. So, we understand now that there are certain standards in the learning management systems that we have to assure that, as the lead MAJCOMs go out and acquire these new weapon systems, that will allow us to capture that data to understand the student’s performance from their actual employment of achieving the criteria and the standards for operating the aircraft, but also not only that, but their human performance. Are they adequately rested? Are they ready to perform in the aircraft?

And we can see if the stress level’s too high to safely perform. We can see if they’re rested or not with wearable technology, things of that nature. And we’ve got a lot of work going on that space as we designed the fighter bomber fundamentals syllabus going further forward beyond where we were with the air mobility fundamentals. So, a lot of that work is going into place, understanding what’s coming down the pike for those systems. We are working to stay and gain the right level of integration into those weapon systems and what the training approaches are going to be as they come forward. Of late in the last couple months, as Secretary Kendall mentioned this morning, when he came to visit us in November, he said, “Hey, what are you thinking about for collaborative combat aircraft training?” And he caught us a little bit flatfooted. We’re like, “Uh, we’ll get back to you on that.”

But we’re getting up on step pretty quickly on trying to understand where that’s at and how we use that technology and the data that we’ll have to transpire there in how a four ship flight lead with X number or any pilot with X number of CCAs attached to him or her and how they’re going to be tasked or what they’re capable of. So, that’s actually been really, really, really exciting, to be honest with you. And so the tech is there. There’s no lack of industry willingness and ideas on how to do that. And so we’re really embracing that through our detachment 24 that works directly for 19th Air Force to really wrestle those things to the ground.

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Can I-

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

I’m sorry.

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Go ahead, Jeannie, and then I want to come back with some-

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

Go ahead, sir.

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Okay. So, a great example of the different thinking that AETC is putting into this is when Hurricane Michael struck and really wiped out much of Tyndall, we found ourselves in a very different position with our F-22 FTU, which was located at Tyndall. And of course the airplanes end up over at Eglin, but all the simulators are still down in Tyndall. And so typically the way our training methodology would work is you would mix in the simulators interspersed with flights in the actual airplane. And the way we would typically use our simulators was, you would set the simulator up at the critical phase of flight. And so in other words, you wouldn’t fly a whole flight in the simulator. You’d fly whatever the training objective for that day was in the fight.

And so you’d go back and reset at the merge or whatever and then do it again from the merge. And because we found ourselves, because of this natural disaster, we found ourselves with the airplanes at Eglin and the simulators at Tyndall, we didn’t want students having to drive back and forth to Tyndall for a simulator today and then back to Eglin for a flight tomorrow and so on and so forth. And so AETC really innovatively put all the simulator training up front and completely switched the syllabus around where the students were flying full, climbing the jet, do your pre-flight, your start taxi takeoff, your flight out to the training area, whatever training iterations you had to do, all the way back to recovery, all the way to engine shutdown. And every simulator flight was that way. And they did all of that front to back.

And then they came over to Eglin to hop in the live airplane. And what we actually found was that by the time the students get into the airplane, they don’t actually require a whole lot in the airplane because of the quality of training they got in the simulators. And there’s specific things they need to do in the airplane, but a lot of the mission stuff they’ve already handled in the simulator. And so I think that’s, just by happenstance of this natural disaster, we’ve stumbled on to something that really may point the way ahead in the way we think about the training.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Tally.

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

Yes, sir. So, one of the things I was going to say is that with AETC, we’re trying to insert ourselves into processes and things that we may not have traditionally been in, but there’s a lot of value to it. So, for example, new aircraft acquisition. We’re staying very closely tied with all the entities on that because sometimes there’s systems that we’ve figured out in other platforms that we may want to integrate in. And in the bubble with the initial requirements that were written and things like that might not be part of it. So, example, Auto GCAS, the Auto Ground Collision Avoidance System.

It is now credited with 12 saves and 13 lives that we have saved. And so it is a system that’s on the F-16. When a pilot has a G loss of consciousness heading towards the ground, the airplane gives you one chance. Hey, you’re going to recover. And if it doesn’t, the airplane recovers. And so there’s all kinds of different features. And so we’re really trying to embed ourselves in, whether it’s acquisitions, whether it’s in the air crew task force, just different areas where we’d like to be part of the conversation to bring that perspective.

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

General Leavitt, the other thing that I would, not to put you on the spot, but one of the things that I have been most impressed with is our MFOQA program and how… This is where we take data recorders that are already on the aircraft. And when you think about flight data recorders and voice recorders, it’s typically in the aftermath of a crash. You go find the box. You pull it out and figure out what happened and why the airplane crashed. Well, what we found is we can actually collect data off these things off of each sortie and look for training trends.

And you can say, “Okay, how many unstable approaches do we have inside the final approach fix? How many times do we see a bank angle that exceeds whatever it is?” And so whatever the criteria are you set, you start to get that data back. And it’s washed so that it’s not, “Hey, Raaberg was out flying again last night. Let’s take a look at his data.” It’s trends in a fleet over time. And I’ll tell you, that really gives you some great insights into the training programs you have in the squadrons.

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

Yes, sir. And FOQA, we borrowed it from FOQA which the civil aviation uses, but the MFOQA we’re working on getting it on more of our platforms. We’ve got it on a lot more of the mobility platforms. Starting to get it on a few of the other ones. It just got into the F-15E, but it does exactly what you said. So, now we can identify trends like, “Why are there so many slow approaches in this variant of the C-10?” Well, we go back. And again, it’s aggregated data, washed data. You don’t identify who it is, but it’s trends. And so we found that in that case it was a negative transfer from a different model. And so now you can identify an issue and be proactive. And I always say one of the most important metric we want is the one we can never have, which is how many mishaps do we prevent? Well, we don’t know. But everything we can do to do a proactive action that could prevent that future mishap is absolutely key. And so MFOQA is a big part of that.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

I agreed. And I think the data point that General Leavitt was talking about was Officer Robinson, a little slow on the air speed negative transfer. But-

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

It was aggregated.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Yeah. Actually-

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

What does the chief have to say about that?

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Yeah. But I think we also, in AETC, we haven’t forgotten the fundamentals. So, again, as enhanced as we can by data, but we’re actually going back and taking a refocused look on operations resource risk management rather, both in the flying realm and on the ground realm, and your team’s being incredibly helpful with our safety office on that, to standardize where we can, not take away enough, allow wing commanders in their mission sets enough maneuver space and decision space, but also to simplify and make that more effective. But that’s still, as the Airmen are going out the door, thinking about the environment they’re going into. “Am I ready? What environment am I going into?” All the things we evaluate in that space, we’re just doubling down on that. And so your team’s been very, very helpful in that.

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

Yes, sir. And that ties into one of the things that we’re standing up a new division within the Safety Center called Human Performance. Because if there’s one common thread with mishaps, there’s often a human in some way, shape or form involved. And in the past we’ve always focused on human factors, which usually says, “Who did what wrong? Did you have channelized attention? Did you have test saturation?” Whereas human factors are just a part of it. We want to look at it more holistically as human performance. What can we do proactively to optimize human performance to negate some potential human factors from happening?

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Smokey, you caught my ear when we did our panel prep. You talked about a C-17 incident where the data after the fact proved that we could have caught it a lot earlier.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Yeah, that’s true. And so this goes way back several years now, but the only C-17 we’ve actually totally lost to a Class A, by virtue of the use we really came to appreciate MFOQA, as General Leavitt talked about. Because unfortunately we weren’t looking at it as aggressively as we do now, but it turns out the particular aircraft commander that had the Class A, we went back and looked at a pattern for stall warnings is what we were looking for. And as you looked at the trend in the data and the fleet, there was one data point that stood out quite a bit on the graph. And you can drill down into it when you need to, tail number orders and crew member. And unfortunately, what we missed was that aircraft commander was involved in the eight previous events where those star warnings had happened. So, had we had this culture and understanding what the data can tell us proactively, we might have been able to intercede and not had that crew in that aircraft lose their lives and lose that aircraft.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, absolutely. Tally, go ahead.

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

I was just going to say, another MFOQA good news story was with a C-17 and they were doing low altitude threat reactions and they had briefed it, the non-flying pilot would call the threat reaction. Well, they had just done a crew swap and the IP was up front and poor timing type of thing on a threat reaction. And so it came very near a stall. The IP took it and ended up overspeeding something and so recovered it. Got home, it was a Friday, and the IP had the chance to think about it and it was like, “Holy cow, that was so close to being really bad. And if that could happen to me, that could happen to anyone.” So, he went back and they pulled the MFOQA data and they recreated it so he could share that with the squadron so that others can learn. And that’s the exact kind of culture we’re trying to encourage. Not cover up like, “Oh my gosh, we almost crashed that airplane.” No. “Oh my gosh, this happened to me. It could happen to any of us,” and sharing that information so others can learn.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. Let me start with you, Jim, because I think this is important. We’ve been talking about culture, structural changes to adapt to the new 21st century training environment. Let’s talk about the business model. It takes cash to fly. So, can you talk about the Flying Hour program, the funding for the program? And I’d like all three of you to address it from your perspectives.

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Well, so there are a couple of funding issues really that go into our ability to fly more hours, absorb more pilots, all those things that we started talking about. And really at the top level, I’d say the three variables, the three funding variables that affect that are number one, you mentioned it, the Flying Hour program. And so our Flying Hour program pays for things like fuel and consumables. It’s the washer that when it comes off, you throw it away and you put a new washer on when you do maintenance on the airplane. All those consumable items that go into generating a sortie. And so that’s our Flying Hour program. And I think that’s important. The longer term funding issue is what we call our Weapon System Sustainment Funding. And so this is money that funds a lot of our depot and backend repairables capability. And so if you don’t fund your WSS program, you’ll have airplanes stacking up at the depot because you don’t have the throughput at the depot that you need to put the airplanes back out on the flight line. Then you’ll have a shortage of flight hours.

And then the third thing that is directly impacted by funding is frankly, in my view, the most important thing, and it is where we really have some work to do. And frankly that’s in our maintenance manpower. We have assumed a lot of risk in our flight line maintenance manpower. We have taken manpower cuts over the years for reasons that all made sense at the time, but it has left us in a position where we have a shortage of qualified flight line mechanics. And as it turns out, it takes about seven years to create a crew chief with seven years worth of experience. And so this is not a problem that you can apply money to and fix it today.

It’s a long term problem. And so those three things are really the variables that we have to work with. I would say that we are trending upwards in that. And because of things like this maintenance issue that I said, there are limits to what you’re going to be able to produce, even given more fly. I mean if you gave more Flying Hour program funding, we wouldn’t be able to generate the sorties because we don’t have the flight line maintainers to generate them. And so these things are all interconnected. But at the end of the day, I think we’re trending upward across the board on this, and I’m optimistic about the future. We just can’t really get there fast enough for my comfort.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Yeah, And General Slife, one of the things I take away from your comment there is that’s a great way to state the system of systems approach to what you’re talking about. So, where data can help us again is as we’re entertaining a decision or anyone in senior leadership in the Air Force has to go, “I think this is the right answer,” how useful would it be to say, “If we do this, the likely outcomes will be the following effects”?

So, we can make that decision with our eyes wide open and go, “Is that really what we want to do? Because we know sometime down the road this is what’s going to happen or likely to happen,” and then make that fully informed as opposed to where we tend to find ourselves today is we make the call for valid reasons with what we know, and then we go years on, to your point, and then we find ourselves in a position and the staff unfortunately has to waste time going back looking at, how did we get here? So, I think there’s a lot of activities going on right now that are helping us get back in that more proactive space.

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Yeah. We’ve got a fairly involved project going on right now for the chief and the secretary. We just showed a first demonstration of this to the secretary a couple of weeks ago. But all of these variables are knowable things. I mean, it’s not a mystery. This is how it works. It gets complicated in the details. And what we need is we need to take advantage of all the data that we have collected over the years about how these variables interact and affect what’s the end result. And to me, as the A3, the end result is air crew flying hours per month. So, right now, if I’m not satisfied with the number of hours that our air crew are flying every month, what I need to be able to tell the secretary of the Air Force is, “Mr. Secretary, we need to get that number from here to there, and here’s where you need to lay the money in that’s going to get us from here to there.”

If you add a Flying Hour dollar today, you’ll get an immediate reaction to that, assuming you’ve got the maintenance to generate. If you add a WSS dollar, you’ll see that impact for several years in a row. If you add a dollar into maintenance, you’re probably not going to see it this year or next year, but three years from now you’ll see an increase. And so this very complicated model for how these variables ultimately affect our air crew flying hours per month is really what we’re after, so that we can answer questions for the secretary like, “If I had one more dollar to spend on readiness, where would I put it?”

Well, it may not be in the readily apparent thing. Or maybe the question is, “If I have to take one more dollar out, where should I take it in order to have the least impact on our air crew flying hours per month?” Those are the kind of questions that we need to answer for our secretary. We have the data to do it. We just haven’t built the algorithms that allow us to sort that out, and that’s the work that we’re doing right now.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, I’m glad we’re tackling that. So, General Leavitt, really, let’s zoom to 50 here. Looking down, it’s a dynamic ecosystem to be able to do the pipeline, especially all the variables we talked about. So, what are your biggest concerns now from your vantage point?

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

What I would say is when it comes to flight hours, everyone would like to see a direct correlation because that makes it really easy. You just, “Okay, more flying hours, less mishaps.” It’s not that easy. So, there’s a couple variables I would highlight, and one of them is the fact that there are all these immersive training devices. Back when I went to pilot training, I did have the little poster on my wall and I had the traffic pattern taped to the floor in my crew room to practice making the calls. It’s obviously dramatically different where they can have the VR headset and they can look down and see the VFR entry point. They can practice making those calls. And so it is different. And so by the time they get in the airplane, they’ve had a lot more reps at that in a more realistic type of training.

And so part of it is the fact that it’s not a direct correlation. The other problem is, and I’m working with General Slife’s team on this, is all of my data tends to be mishap. So, I don’t have data for the folks who don’t have mishaps. So, I can tell you 30, 60, 90 day look back on anyone who’s had a mishap. And then an added complication is the thresholds. Okay, so Class A threshold, it’s now 2.5 million dollars. It was 2 million dollars. Back when I started flying, if it was a Class A mishap, it was a crashed airplane. Now we can have an engine or two and have a Class A mishap just because of those price thresholds. So, again, trying to make sure we are able to pull the appropriate information out when we’re looking at statistics. We have a lot of data and we are trying to get more analysts.

We’re cleaning up our data and standardizing a lot of things. And so that will be helpful because the more we can do the analysis, the more we can identify trends and try to identify areas of concern. But I think one of the challenges will be articulating how many hours do you need? Because yes, you can do immersive training devices and yes, we can do simulators, but at the end of the day, we also need to get up in the air. And where is that balance? I don’t think any of us know, but that is definitely one of the areas that I think that we all need to take a look at.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Let me tap a different one for you, General Robinson, and I’d love all three of you to answer this question, but let’s talk about one other variable that’s added into the pipeline and that’s our international partners. We’re all of a sudden seeing the news lines about the Ukrainians looking at F-16, some basic training. Less about that, but more about all the international folks that come into the pipeline, your perspectives on working that. What have you seen from your vantage point?

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

The bottom line there, what we’ve seen is it’s actually incredibly important. It goes right to the National Defense strategy, integrated by design, as General Brown refers to it quite often. And so particularly for us at the Euro-NATO Jet Pilot Training Program at Wichita Falls, Texas is where we have the greatest concentration of international pilot training. The experiences that they get, for any of those countries that is their sole source of fighter pilot training is through ENJJPT. So, the throughput capacity there is incredibly important to they can get their crew members back to their home nations to serve in their combat units. But we also train international allies and partners across all of our EPT bases. So, we don’t just limit it to that.

And so the challenges that come with that are sometimes language barriers and understanding cultural barriers, but ultimately to train them to their best ability to go back and train. But if we step into a conflict or even in competition by with and through our allies and partners, the fact that they’ve had the experience of training together with US Airmen is a huge advantage, a significant advantage. And that’s incredibly important, and we take that very, very seriously. And by the way, again, that’s not just limited to pilot training. We have the same with all of our ground forces, many of our ground forces in the different specialties that we train Airmen for.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

General Slife?

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Yeah, I think it says something about the enterprise that General Robinson leads for us that we are where the international community wants to come to train. I think that more than anything else says that we have by definition a world-class training enterprise. We can always be better. We’re always seeking to improve it around the margins. I think we ought to leverage some of our partners and allies. I mean, we’re not the sole repository of good ideas here in the United States. I think we can rely on our partners and allies for that. But the fact that they entrust their national defense to the United States to teach their aviators how to fly says something pretty powerful about the enterprise General Robinson leads.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

That’s great. General Leavitt?

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

I concur 100%. And we have a program at the Safety Center called the International Flight Safety Officer Course. Super popular with our allies and partners. And we are able to host them because they very much look to us for setting up their safety programs, both the proactive side as well as the investigative side. Because the investigative side is very important, that root cause analysis, what went wrong, what changes can we make to prevent future mishaps? And so those engagements are very, very valuable.

And we have folks come through all the time. I know PACAF’s going to bring a team through in May. We’ve hosted people from many different countries coming through on that safety side of things. And we are the Safety Center for the Air Force and the Space Force. And we are standing up a space mishap investigation course, SMIC, coming soon, next month. And the funny thing is we already have international partners going, “Hey, we want to come.” And I’m like, “Okay, let’s us first do our initial class and we’ll see.” Because again, the power of that message that our partners and allies look to us for things that are critically important to them.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Believe it or not, we actually only have about two minutes remaining. So, I’m going to start off with the chief of staff and get your perspective on really, what is your message to industry?

Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt:

We really need to partner with industry every step of the way as we’re going through things. I mean, we’ve learned this on the acquisition side, not part of my area of expertise, but I realize the importance of us staying embedded with them to make sure we’re clearly understanding requirements and what the war fighter needs as we go through the acquisition process.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

General Robinson?

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

I echo what General Leavitt said, but I think we need to partner with industry as well in the AETC lens of, how do we transition? Help us transition to a digital age learning environment that is student-centered. It’s no longer lowest common denominator or the center of the bell curve. So, people can learn on command, on demand in the way they’re going to learn and they move through the pathway or the pipeline and get out to their combat mission. We don’t need to be holding them up in the training pipeline for an inordinate amount of time in that way. And it comes down to helping us design our learning spaces.

We went out to visit Apple Incorporated some time ago, and the work they do and a lot of work in the education space, believe it or not. And one of the things they did for learning space design, the number one quality attribute they look for in effective learning space is how the sound carries. They’ve demonstrated through science and studies that if it’s clean, crisp, clear sound, the learning is at its maximum value. If it’s awkward reverberations or other things, it just starts to degrade where you are in the room. So, we need assistance in those ways and all the ways that we train Airmen across the board.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

General Slife?

Lt. Gen. Jim Slife:

Yeah. I think a couple of things I would say to industry. One is I think, as we think about the future of augmented reality and how it can transform much of our air crew training, I think there is a shotgun blast of use cases out there. Well, you could use it in General Robinson’s T-38s in order to provide a flight lead so that your student can practice being a wing man on a flight lead that’s an augmented reality platform. And so you only need to generate one jet instead of flying two jets to get a formation out of that. In our combat air forces, you might be able to replicate threats that there is no way that a aggressor flying an F-16, for example, is going to replicate a threat that is a high end from one of our pacing adversaries.

So, I mean, we see all these use cases for what we can use augmented reality for, but I feel like we’re a little bit stuck in neutral on this. We’re overwhelmed by the cornucopia of opportunity in front of us and we need to find someplace where we can get a early success, demonstrate value, and then scale out from there. And so helping us figure out what is not in the 10-year time horizon. What can we do today to get a success and build out from it? So, I think that’s probably the key thing that I’d be looking for from industry.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Well, thank you. So, here’s my ME debrief. First of all, I owe each and every one of you a beer. Thank you for covering me down on this formation. General Leavitt, General Robinson, General Slife, I know our audience really appreciates the insights. And for everyone, let’s go meet at the bar at the Rock the Rockies, and let’s have a wonderful Air Force Fly Safe Day. Thank you.

Watch, Read: ‘Optimizing C2 to Assure Kill Web Dominance’

Watch, Read: ‘Optimizing C2 to Assure Kill Web Dominance’

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia, DAF Advance Battle Management System Cross Functional Team lead; Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman, commander of the 505th Command and Control Wing; retired Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies; and Heather Penney, senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies sat down to discuss ways to accelerate the Pentagon and the Air Force’s transition to a better command-and-control architecture in a panel on ‘Optimizing C2 to Assure Kill Web Dominance,’ on March 7, 2023 at the AFA Warfare Symposium. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Heather Penney:

Good afternoon everyone. I’m Heather Penney, Senior Resident Fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and welcome to our panel on optimizing C2 and kill web dominance. As you know, China has been studying how we as a nation conduct combat operations and as a consequence, they’ve developed a war fighting strategy of systems destruction, which seeks to dismantle how we go to war by blinding and destroying our ISR capabilities, isolating our command and control and taking our data links. This is clearly problematic in a highly contested environment where we will have to close thousands of kill chains against dynamic and fleeting targets with limited resources. Command and control, battle management will be key to achieving kill web dominance. So we’re pleased to host Brigadier General Jeffrey “Spaniard” Valenzia, Colonel Trey Coleman and Lieutenant General David Deptula to discuss this important topic.

General Valenzia is a secretary’s operational lead for operationally focused ABMS. His team guides threatened formed and concept driven command and control modernization, linking war fighting capabilities to decision to advantage in competition, crisis and conflict. Colonel Trey Coleman is an air battle manager that currently serves as a commander of the 505th command and control wing at Hurlburt Field. The 505th is responsible for testing, training, and developing the tactics, techniques and procedures for C2 systems that range from JTACS to JWACS. Trey’s also commanded the 609th Air Operations Center in Al Udeid and the 961st AACS squadron at Kadena. And finally we have our very own Dean of the Mitchell Institute, Lieutenant General David Deptula, who’s participated in actual command and control of joint forces in multiple real world joint operations like Desert Storm, Northern Watch, Enduring Freedom and Unified Assistance, and is a foremost expert on the topic.

Again gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. I’d like to kick things off today by giving each of you a few minutes to share some of your thoughts and General Deptula we’ll start with you.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

Well, thanks very much Heather. What I’d like to do to kick this off is to highlight kind of what’s going on in this subject area at this strategic level to emphasize just how important the job is of General Valenzia, Colonel Coleman and all the others who are working to get us to the next level of command and control and why that’s so vitally important. The US and our allies were at a critical point in history, at the center of an information in war revolution, if you will. And what I’m talking about is this revolution sort of where the speed of information and the advance of technology as well as organizational design are merging to change the way that we execute military operations. In the third decade of the 21st century, what it demands is a new, more agile and integrated operational framework for the employment of allied military power and to shift away from the structure of segregated air, sea, land and space employment. That basically has been our history.

So while the competencies of how to operate in each of those separate domains is still going to be required, we can achieve dramatic synergy of those operating forces if we can command and control them as an integrated whole. That’s an imperative if we’re going to win the next major regional conflict. And it’s an imperative because we’ll be relying on our information advantage to compensate for our capacity disadvantages. Remember, we’re currently the oldest and the smallest Air Force we’ve ever been in our entire history and we’re on a path to only get smaller and older by 2027, which is the same year, some anticipate China will be able to take Taiwan by force. So we’ve got to move toward the advantage that all domain synergy can achieve, embracing complimentary vice merely additive employment of individual domain capabilities. Desired military effects increasingly will be generated by the interaction of systems that share information and empower one another.

And what’s important to realize is this phenomena isn’t restricted to an individual technology nor is it isolated to a specific service, domain or task. That’s what I’d tell you or suggest is the vision of joint all domain command and control. Working in an environment that’s an operating paradigm where information, data management, connectivity and command and control are core mission priorities. It envisions every platform as a sensor as well as an effector and requires the JADC2 enable linking, automatically seamless data transfer, all the while being reliable, secure and jam proof. Now that doesn’t mean that every system needs to be connected all the time, but to where and what is required when it’s required. To a degree the JADC2 concept inverts the paradigm of combined arms warfare making information the focal point, not necessarily the weapon systems themselves. So with that, over to you Spaniard.

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

Thanks sir. My name’s Jeff Valenzia, introduced part of the ABMS cross-functional team. I’m actually really only one of four who are carrying in this mantle on behalf of OI2 and what we heard the secretary talk about earlier today. So I represent the air operational community as we look at command and control. My counterparts, Major General John Olson who looks at the space. And then a really important partnership we have is with C3BM, PEO, the Brigadier General Luke Cropsey, and Dr. Brian Tipton. It’s important to understand that when we talk about command and control, we’re really talking about the totality from the operational side to the derived technical side to how we’re going to deliver. A lot of what General Deptula just laid out for you.

I’m just going to lay down two things just to understand where we sit from an operational community. Number one, what is and is not command and control. Command and control is planning. It’s what our commanders do, how they make the decisions that they make, how they allocate resources, delegate authorities, establish priorities, and then it’s the controlling apparatus that executes in a very dynamic and challenging operational environment that’s constantly changing in order to keep that fixed commander’s intent as the outcome for that day’s activities. It’s not connectivity. We depend a lot on connectivity and it’s an important derived technical requirement that General Cropsey and Brian Tipton work very hard to deliver for us. It’s not data access, but we do care a lot about the data we have. But frankly, the data managers that we have today, they’ll operate off of a radio call. They’ll operate off of the most arbitrary source of data in order to derive the best tactical outcome. We know we can get them more, we care deeply about it, but our battle managers are going to succeed with whatever data we give them.

It’s not about intelligence and how we do the exploitation of targets to identify the priorities for the day or to help us with developing the targeting solution. It’s not about sensing, but we care deeply about our sensors and the information that they have out there. Ultimately when you start looking at what command and control is and is not, it establishes some really cool boundaries that help us to focus our effort in specified ways.

The second that I’ll leave you with is our C2 system that we have today is simply inadequate against the adversary that we’ve been told is our pacing threat. And we need a new C2 system today, not five years from now, not 10 years from now. So to do that, we got to focus on the tools in the TTPs while we allow the technologist to look at advancing technologies that can help us to improve better. But if we start waiting for the technology before we get after the tools and TTPs, we’re already too late. Thanks.

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Okay, thanks for having me. I’m Trey Coleman and I’m an air battle manager. And there’s never been a better time to be in this business, to be in the C2 business at large. So I’m really excited about this. It’s amazing that nearly the entire focus of this event is on C2 and never before have we had conferences focused so exclusively on this core function that General Brown laid out for us as he laid it out this morning. I’ve got this theory about C2 and it goes something like this. There’s an inverse relationship between the size of your force and your need for C2. And if you draw back, if you think back to World War II when we had about 300,000 airplanes in the inventory, what did our C2 apparatus look like? There wasn’t much there, right? We had some really nascent radio, some really nascent radar capability, but there wasn’t much C2. And then we’d send a bomber force out and maybe half would come back sometimes and that’s how we did business. But you had 300,000 airplanes.

Fast-forward to Vietnam when you had 17,000 airplanes, 7,000 of which were fighters. And we had what I would call our first generation C2 force, some basic ground control capability. You had the EC-121 figuring out how to do this C2 thing. And then in the 80s and 90s we started delivering the AWACS and the J Stars and the AOC and that was our second generation C2 force and that’s what we still have today. And so we have this second generation C2 force and we’re facing a sixth generation fight. And so it is time now to not just… The name of this panel is optimizing C2. I think we got to revolutionize it. We got to jump about four generations if we want to keep up with the pacing challenges General Valenzia just mentioned. So I’m looking forward to this panel and to continue to work with the likes of General Valenzia and General Cropsey and the enterprise here to make this right.

Heather Penney:

Thank you so much. And if you haven’t had a chance, Colonel Coleman has written a series on command and control that you can find in the Mitchell Institute website and they’re excellent. They’re quick reads but they’re very rich reads. So to begin off with the questions, I’d like to kind of go back in time. General Deptula, you started talking about building a combat cloud a decade or so ago and that term is morphed into the acronym now, JADC2. Could you please give us an assessment of why it’s taking so long to actualize and what are the key actions that need to occur to get this accomplished?

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

Well thanks Heather. And since this panel was put together in the planning stages, there’s some good news with respect to how I might answer that question. And that’s basically the Secretary of Defense mentioned this topic in his letter to the force this past Thursday that I’m sure many of you have seen. And what he said was he’s really interested in it. And I quote, “Accelerating joint all domain command and control is a priority.” So that was the first thing I was going to tell you is JADC2 has got to have a champion and the best champion it could have is the Secretary of Defense. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be getting the necessary attention by all of his services to accelerate it. Because even with the great work that the JADC2 cross-functional teams are doing, pushing up the initial operational capability for it won’t happen without the Secretary of Defense making it one of his priorities. And now he has.

Okay, that said, the goal of actualizing JADC2 still faces a lot of challenges. One of those, as Spaniard mentioned, it isn’t JADC2, but what’s important is assuring connectivity. And that’s also been recognized as the JADC2 cross-functional teams have recently set up the transport and war fighter communications working group. So while there’s a heck of a lot to be done, the bottom line is I think that the Department of Defense has got the… He has the message now that it’s got to move out faster in making JADC2 a reality. And we all heard the secretary of the Air Force mention it today. So I think there’s plenty of awareness, there’s a lot of activity moving it forward.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. General Valenzia, I really appreciated your comments at the beginning of the panel regarding what JADC2 is and is not. And so to follow up on that, it seems that there’s a lot that we can do from a tactical, operational, doctrinal and even organizational perspective to get at these problems. And we’ve all talked about how we can do things differently with what we have right now that would make a significant difference. So I’d like to start with you, what one change do you think would make one of the biggest differences in being able to accelerate command and control in ABMS?

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

Can I give you two?

Heather Penney:

Absolutely.

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

I got the mic, right?

Heather Penney:

Absolutely. You got the mic.

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

Okay, so I’m going to go back to my opening comments. What I was trying to characterize is what is and is not C2. JADC2 is a lot of things. So my first thing is I would get a Men in Black pen and I’d put in front of all you and I’d click it so you guys get over your hangover of what you think it is or should be and actually look at where we’re going with it today. The second thing that I would do is for the operators out here in the community, you got to get together. You guys are screaming at our acquisition community and the technical integrators with too many voices. And when I look at Luke Cropsey and Brian Tipton, what they’re trying to do to ratify and make some really tough technical choices, what they’re finding behind them is so many shouting voices from the operational community that they’re having a very difficult time making those decisions.

And so what I would do is let’s get over what we think it could have been, should have been, and then start looking at what it is. I bounded it one way for you. That is one way of bounding it. And that would just offer that if we get together as an operational community of which… That’s part of what the CFT represents, then I think we can get to the acceleration, which was the core of your question to General Deptula is why is it taking so damn long? And I think if we did those two things, we probably could see some really impressive progress in a much shorter period of time.

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Can I have three? I just want to do more than him if that’s okay. So the first two are pretty quick. And the first one is we got to incentivize folks to move to the cloud. Everybody’s got their own data centers and their data storage capabilities and we got to get folks in the cloud because you’re can’t be agile until you’re in the cloud. The second is, this is a self-promotion for the 505th command control wing is we have a great battle lab at Nellis Air Force base called the Shock. We need your systems. If you got a cool system, whether you’re industry or you’re an air component or you’re a wing, bring us your systems, plug it in at our facility. We have a great facility with our own ATO, three year ATO.

We can say yes in days and plug it in and see how it works in the Nellis range and then we can integrate them. We still have lots of great systems out there. As a matter of fact, I think we have all the systems we need, but we’re not integrating them in the battle of Nellis is the place to do it. So the second is, bring me your systems. The third is bigger and I think this is how you actually have lasting change is if C2 is a core function, it’s one of the five things we do. Global mobility, global strike or superiority, ISR, C2, those are the five things. When you look at global mobility, they’ve got air mobility command championing them. When you look at global strike, they got global strike command championing them. Well who’s the champion for C2? How do we organize C2?

We don’t. We don’t have a NAF, we don’t have a four star headquarters because everybody does C2 and it’s kind of part and parcel to all of our missions. But I’d argue that’s how we got ourselves into the position where we have a second generation C2 force and a sixth generation fight is because we don’t organize that. We don’t organize for it, we don’t have a champion for it. And so if I could make a wish and grant it, it would be that we had some kind of NAF structure with a three or four star general for C2 that organized and trained, equipped C2 forces the way that we do for the mobility core function or for the global strike core function.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

You want…

Heather Penney:

Go ahead.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

You want one or two or three or how many?

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

You got to do four, sir.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

I was going to go back to one. And quite frankly it’s the last one that you talked about and it’s sort of combined to what I was trying to say with respect to having a champion. Organizationally, we are still unfortunately as a military organized in a pre-industrial Napoleonic construct with an AJG 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, which doesn’t really work very well in terms of finding someone who’s the champion for command and control. That’s why I was saying, look, you want to get attention, you want to get this thing moving. You get the Secretary of Defense who asks at every frapping meeting, how are we doing service chiefs? When’s IOC going to occur? Now it also helped to have a well-defined and common architecture that everyone understands. So that’s another part of the puzzle.

Heather Penney:

Well, I think it’s interesting that in many ways as we talk about this, the connectivity piece, which is not command and control, it’s not battle management. The assured elements of that, again, we’re devolving back to… And there are important pieces of the technical aspects that enable us, but we need to get back to the operational focus. General Valenzia, would you like to speak a little bit to that of how you, as you’re approaching ABMS, you’re looking at the operational elements of it and not necessarily just the technical pieces and how you’re beginning to integrate some fidelity in measuring what matters?

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

It begins with you need to contextualize the fight we’re trying to fight the same way. It’s getting away from just producing OV-1’s or imaginations on where you think we could go within a fight. And let’s look at where we really are within the fight. For us, we’re paced off of INDOPACOM. We’re not pacing ourselves off of a future plan. We’re looking at the current plan. We’re breaking it down to joint mission threads that we can then decompose into how each of the components contribute to the overall outcome. And from that, using a very disciplined approach, we can start to identify operational focus areas. This is how we’re going to start to galvanize number one, bringing the operational voice into coherency for the acquisition and technical communities. This is how we’re going to bring industry to become a partner in the development rather than just in a sidecar hoping to keep up with us.

This is where we’re going to drive the clarity so that we can show return on investment when we walk into the boardroom within the Air Force and we say, this is where we want you to invest your money. We can show the ROI, we can show how it’s inclusive of our partners, we can show how it’s scalability to a larger conflict. If we don’t do those things right, and this is the operational community’s imperative. If we don’t do those things right, I don’t think we can expect that we’re going to get some magic technology that’s going to turn this over for us.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. And I don’t mean to belittle how important that kind of connectivity and connecting all the different pieces in the battle space are, but I do think it’s important that we make… There’s a differentiation between how we employ them, how we operationalize them, and how we control them. Which leads me to my next question, Colonel Coleman, as I mentioned, you’ve done a number, series of papers on command and control and one of them was on distributed control. Can you speak to that because I think that that’s a really important piece of how we begin to continue to operationalize battle management in a highly contested environment where we may not necessarily have connectivity all the way back to the mothership?

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Thanks Penney. That’s a great question. So we have this second generation C2 force that we’re fighting with today is built to be centralized. Our air operation centers, our air components are built to be centralized. And even at the tactical level, if you look at what we did with Kingpin out in Absent, where you had multiple CRCs that we created one large CRC called Kingpin that takes care of the whole theater. We’ve centralized our C2 and that’s a very efficient thing to do, but it will not work in a fight against China because they can shut it off kinetically or not kinetically and shut it down. That one facility, it’s a single point of failure, game over. And so we got to figure out how to get through that.

There’s two ways to do it. One is mission command where you empower the tactical level. And I think there’s a lot of goodness in that, particularly through those [inaudible 00:21:00] four channels with the AW commanders, move your jets where you need to move them, launch the jets for when you need to launch them to defend your airspace. But there is still a need for that operational C2 layer. In fact, going back to my opening comments, there’s more of a need now with our smaller force than there’s ever been to get the right aircraft or the right asset in the right place at the right time. We don’t have enough to lose. We don’t have enough to… We can’t afford to have half the force come back. So we got to get it in the right place in the right time. And that’s what the AOC does and that’s what the air component does. But if it’s not survivable in its single vulnerable position, the solution is distribution.

So when we changed doctrine, when the Air Force changed doctrine, it used to be, remember, centralized control, decentralized execution. When we differentiated command from control, which was a much needed change and really is a revolutionary way of thinking about it. Now you have to have a centralized commander, right? Centralized command, one person is making that decision, but your control can be distributed. And so instead of having a single facility, you have four or five, six facilities or you disperse it to maybe some [inaudible 00:22:00] agencies or the walks or other folks are crowdsourcing those operational C2 functions that you still need.

You still need a strategy. You still need to prioritize targets. You still need to match assets to targets. You still have to have whatever you call it. I think ATO called it a sync matrix, call it a flight schedule. Somebody’s got to figure out when the airplanes are going to be in the right position at the right time so they can be packaged appropriately and go downtown. Somebody’s got to do that job. And if you can’t have it in the same facility and you can’t push it down to a lower appropriate level, then the solution is distribution. To do that effectively, you have to have cloud capabilities, you have to have secure transport, you have to have a degree of automation. And those tools and those systems exist today. We just need to harness them and get comfortable with them.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. And thank you for making the connection between how we actually operate and the technologies that we’ll need to facilitate to make all of that happen. But I’d like to get back to the people part. And Colonel Coleman, so this gets back to the air battle managers. I mean, as an Air Force, our people are tied to platforms. So as we begin to divest J Stars, as we begin divest our E3 AWACS, that’s going to have significant impact on the air battle managers that have been tied to those platforms. So how do we retain the intellectual capital? How do we continue to keep that core expertise as we transition towards the future advanced battle managers?

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

That’s a great question. And it’s a really exciting one because I think the air battle management career field is really only 20 years old or so. As a matter of fact, when I came in as a lieutenant, we weren’t rated and then we became rated. And I remember being a lieutenant and your greatest hopes were maybe you can make lieutenant colonel. And we had our first squadron commander like in 2001, and it’s taken off since then. But times are changing. And in the day we focused exclusively on tactical C2 ,on making threat calls. Threat six are making picture calls, two groups ESMA 10. And I think those days are getting behind us. I don’t think the F-35 and the F-22 and the NGAD need that kind of tactical control the way that they did, the way that we grew up with F-16s and F-15s and in making those kinds of calls.

But I think that the need for no kidding battle management at the upper tactical and the lower operational where you’re doing dynamic force packaging, where you’re calling alert cells, where you’re doing cap management, those needs still exist and they’re probably greater than ever before. And I’d argue that this career field is the only career field in the Air Force that starts from day one with C2. I mean everybody does C2, a wing commander does see two, a flight commander, the security forces squadron does C2 when he says… Tells the gate, close this gate, open that open gate, CFAXs do C2, everybody does C2, but ABMS are the only one that do it from day from one. They enter the service and they spend a year in undergraduate training learning about how to do C2 and they do it for their entire career field.

And so what I’d like to see, what I would personally like to see the ABM career field morph into as we transition out of AWACS into E-7, as we transition away from J Stars into the talk family of systems, I’d like us to also incorporate more of that operational C2 function. I think that you should see your air battle managers more as C2 experts from both the tactical and the operational level. So they start in a tactical platform and they get into the air components and they’re working in the AOCs and they’re C2 experts their entire career, instead of just focusing on exclusively on the tactical C2. That’s where I would like to see us go.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. So the title of this panel is command and control and optimizing kill chain dominance. So let’s kind of walk backwards a little bit and define terms of reference. Gentlemen, how would you define kill chain dominance? Gen. Deptula, we haven’t heard from you for a bit.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

Yeah, I see my partner’s over here looking at each other. So I’ll give you a break. I’m going to give you a chance to think about it while… I define the kill web as a collection of sensors netted with command and control, that are able to pass critical information to the right weapon systems to achieve the right effects or desired effects. And to be dominant means that these means of connection have to be multi-path. They got to be multi-directional and they’ve got to be resilient. We have to be careful here too, because Trey mentioned something earlier in one of his answers, or maybe it was Spaniard, forgive me if I attribute wrong, but we also have to be careful that we don’t get to the point where we rely on connectivity because oftentimes we talk about assured connectivity, but guess what? The enemy gets a vote.

And we’re not always going to be assured connectivity. So we also have to build a capability into our personnel to be able to operate with an understanding, which goes back to the mission command piece to operate autonomously. But dominant means building a network such that even if an adversary does attack it, it doesn’t completely go down. Sure, it’s going to be degraded. We have to plan for the time it goes away. I think if we do this right, we can maintain a semblance of capability and at least if we train our folks right and battle managers, if connectivity does go out, we still continue to operate and we get it regained. Well, obviously we can get better at it, but sorry, it’s a little bit long, but the fact of the matter is web dominance means being able to operate even when you might not be able to communicate with one another.

Heather Penney:

General Valenzia, I know that you and I have a lot of conversations about this. You’ve got a somewhat contrarian view, so would you mind kind of sharing that with us?

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

Aren’t we close to the end of our time?

Heather Penney:

Don’t worry, we’re getting into the lightning round next.

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

I don’t know what a kill web is. I just don’t. Trying to operate off a very precise language so that we can do the hard work to deliver war fighting, war winning capability. I’ve lost the granularity on what a kill web is. I’ve actually lost the granularity on what a kill chain is because it’s become an imprecise term we’ve somewhat walked away from it. And because I don’t know how to measure it, I don’t know how to evaluate it, I can’t see consistency across the many conversations I have. We’ve just walked away from it. So to me, it’s a term of convenience, but it’s not more of a term of art than a term of science that we’re going to measure improvements to war fighting.

Heather Penney:

And I think that’s fine. Having terms of convenience that can become sort of a common shorthand for most of us can be useful. But I think that what you’re really getting at is the distinction between how we use it colloquially and then actually what you are doing within your ABMS studies in terms of really getting into the functional decomposition so that you can measure what’s actually going on within the broader system of systems. So from an engineering standpoint, it doesn’t provide you, as you mentioned, the granularity, the fidelity that you need for what you’re actually studying to determine where you get advantage and where you don’t. But I don’t know from my perspective, that kill chain or kill web loses value from the broader perspective of how we look at it. Although from an engineering standpoint, I can understand why that’s not quite as useful. Gentlemen, do you have anything else to add before we move into the lightning round?

Okay. All right. Well, General Deptula, we’ll leave you with the last word. So in order of rank then, Colonel Coleman lightning round with you, then General Valenzia and then to General Deptula.

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Well, I won’t take a lot of time here, so I’m excited about where we’re going. There’s never been a better time to be in this business. Thanks for your passion for it and bring me your systems to the Shock. Thanks.

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

Yeah, I’ll just say thanks to AFA for creating these venues, driving these conversations. As Trey hit earlier, and just thanks to my fellow panelists and of course, Lucky for moderating this.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

I’d like everyone to take away the understanding that design, development and actualization of JADC2 is an absolute imperative if we’re going to win in the next major regional conflict.

Heather Penney:

Amen. So with that, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve come to the end of our discussion. This was a very short panel today. We only had 30 minutes vice the normal 40. I’d once again to thank all of our panelists for their time and their insights, and from all of us at the Air Force Association and the Mitchell Institute, have a great aerospace power kind of day. Thank you.

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Yeah, I love that ending.

Watch, Read: ‘Defining Resilient and Effective Space Order of Battle and Architectures’

Watch, Read: ‘Defining Resilient and Effective Space Order of Battle and Architectures’

Leading industry experts in Jason Brown, professional services manager for Google Public Sector; Joel Nelson, senior director for strategy and business development for Space Systems at L3Harris; and Kay Sears, vice president and general manager for space, intelligence and weapon systems for Boeing Defense, Space & Security discussed why the Space Force must pivot to a more resilient architecture and what the service should consider when doing so during the ‘Defining Resilient and Effective Space Order of Battle and Architectures’ panel on March 7, 2023, at the AFA Warfare Symposium. Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt, deputy chief of space operations for operations, cyber, and nuclear, moderated. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

Well, good afternoon. Thank you ladies and gentlemen for joining us today. I am honored to be on this panel, Lieutenant General DeAnna Burt. I am the Chief Operations Officer at the United States Space Force in the Pentagon, and I am honored to be here with our three distinguished panels members from industry. So before we start, I’d like to go through each of them and let them give a brief introduction of themselves and their background. So Kay, I’ll start with you.

Kay Sears:

Thank you General Burt, and welcome everyone. Thanks for being here this afternoon. Also, thanks to the AFA, really appreciate that space is now included in this and I think there’s an important dialogue. I’m Kay Sears. I am the VP GM at Boeing for Space, Intel and Weapons Systems. And just a little background, I’ve spent time in commercial as well as the military side. I worked for a bunch of commercial satellite operators providing services, bandwidth mostly to the military during Desert Storm, OEF, OIF. Then moved into the manufacturing side, the OEM side of the business with Lockheed Martin and worked the military space portfolio and then came over to Boeing to really expand the missions. So pretty good perspective in terms of commercial and the military side of what we can do for our war fighters today. Thank you.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

Joel.

Joel Nelson:

Pleasure to be here. Joel Nelson, Senior Director of Space BMC3 Systems, overseeing the front end of our business, strategy, business development. I started out in space control back in the day and acquisitions in the Air Force, did some space operations. Been in industry for about 15 years, so bringing a perspective of the acquirer, the operator and industry. So I look forward to the panel.

Kay Sears:

Jason.

Jason Brown:

Hi everybody, I’m Jason Brown. I’m the Head of Professional Services for Defense at Google. I’m a retired intelligence officer, was a former I-CER Wing Commander and AFCENT A2.

Jason Brown, Professional Services Manager, Google Public Sector. Photo by Aaron Chen/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

Well, as you can see, we have an awesome panel. And so with that, we’ll get started. You guys have heard a lot today about the Secretary’s Seven Operational Imperatives. And so today’s panel is really to talk about OI-1 which is an Effective and Resilient Space Order of Battle and Architecture. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about.

We’ve talked about today, China, China, China, and why we need that resilient architecture in order to continue to fight through that. We focus on our US and allies and broad services to make sure that we are resilient and continue to provide that capability through all stages and continuums of conflict. You heard from General Saltzman today talking about how we have to move to removing that first mover advantage and resiliency in our architectures and the way we do that moving forward. And these three partners are critical in how we do that.

So Kay, I’ll start with you. What is your perspective on the support that industry provides to the US government through commercial space-based technologies and how we use them, their availability during times of competition or conflict, and how can industry support sustained operations during a wartime surge?

Kay Sears:

Thanks, appreciate that question. I really believe there’s a major shift here, mainly because we have to be threat-driven and the threat has changed so dramatically since OEF and OIF, when we actually really discovered that the space layer provides us huge advantage. Obviously the Chinese noticed that too and they have come after us big time. So the way that we use commercial during that last surge is very different than how we can use commercial going forward, I think. We had space, we owned space. We owned the space domain at that time, and commercial operators were putting up huge amounts of bandwidth, which was helping us bring back ISR across the Southeast Asia region and very good working relationships. There was a way to lease bandwidth quickly, and I think commercial operators at that time were making a big difference, along with some of our ISR partners that were also launching systems that could take photos.

And so they were doing a lot of the foundational collection and distribution of key data and it was complimenting what our defense systems were doing at the time. But if we’re threat-based, then what has changed? Pretty much everything about that space domain. So now when I look at what commercial can bring, I still believe there is a huge role there, but we have to be very realistic about what’s going to be effective. And so when we think about resilient systems and what commercial can bring to resilient systems, we can play the numbers game, we can play the different orbits game and commercial can be a part of that.

The question though is when we actually go to war, what happens to those systems and how do we think about our commercial partners? If they lose a system, what is the liability? Is the Space Force willing to cover that liability and that would include future revenue of what that system might have provided for a commercial operator? Are they willing to take that risk?

So it just raises, in my opinion, a lot of new questions about how we leverage commercial. It’s not an if. It really is a how, and I think it comes down to being realistic about that conversation. Because when you’re on the commercial side and you’re not in the threat discussion, you’re really thinking about the capability of your system. And in many cases, commercial systems have a lot of capability. They have high bandwidth, you’ve got the numbers in proliferated LEO, but in a threat environment it’s not just about capability. It’s about resiliency and how we protect those systems.

So there’s a dialogue there. It’s different than what it was during the last surge. We need to be realistic about the threats and what they can do to commercial systems. And the commercial providers need to be aware of those threats as well. I do think there’s things we can really invest in now that allow them to be part of the architecture and contribute to resiliency. Things like compatibility, hosted payloads. On the networking side, common ground, common protocols and waveforms. Those are some of the investments I think we could do now to bring those systems into the fold. And then we need to have the very real discussion about liability and protection.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

No, agree. So we’ve heard from the CSO as well about his lines of effort, and the first being that we need to develop combat-ready forces that are resilient and are ready for the fight. A key part of that is ensuring our architectures are threat-informed and capabilities are delivered at an operationally relevant pace and speed.

Joel, what is your perspective on how industry can accelerate acquisitions in the procurement of space systems and related technologies that generate affordable mass in terms of that resiliency we’re looking for?

Joel Nelson:

One of the things I wanted to focus on was talent development, and it gets into the US government side as well. I’ve had a conversation with Dave Hamilton at the DAF RCO over the years as well as Kelly Hammet now at Space RCO. And one of the things we’ve been talking about are the qualities that make a really good program manager. Whether you’re in the government or you’re in industry, it’s almost like people are moving through so quick and we don’t have the depth in program managers that I’ve seen at the NRO or some of these old space programs. And if you want to get to the speed of the acquisition, I really think it’s that relationship between the government and the industry PM, government PMs that have been through the Education With Industry Program.

On the industry side, we’ve got to understand the risk posture. How you set your mission assurance requirements and the risk posture will allow us to go quicker. Sometimes we forget what the risk posture was of a program when it launches and doesn’t work, but that’s really that partnership and I think if we develop the talent on both sides of the fence, we can manage the budgets, manage the risk, and get to capability much quicker than we have been.

Joel Nelson, Senior Director, Strategy and Business Development, Space Systems. Photo by Aaron Chen/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

Well, thanks Joel. And to that point, Jason, Joel’s talking a lot about talent management and how we work to increase speed based on the folks that we have on either side of the government versus the commercial side. I would ask you, as we seek to reduce procurement timelines and advance operational capability, what are some of the key enablers and foundational technologies that could support that effort, not just the human capital element of it?

Jason Brown:

Yeah, that’s a big question and I’m going to come back to talent because that’s, that’s really needs to be foot stomped, but software and data are the capabilities that matter most in 2023. I was saying that a few years ago in the Pentagon, I’m not sure many people believed me, this is before the pandemic. I think there’s a lot more believing that now. And so the short answer, what capability matters? The short answer is commercial cloud. Every enterprise that’s competing is in the commercial cloud. We should ask ourselves, should war fighting be any different?

Now, I’ll probably talk later about some of the things about maintaining the proper level of classification in the commercial cloud, but commercial cloud, it extends to space. We should view space architectures as an extension of the cloud. So a lot of lessons over the last year around space, around commercial space and some good… There’s some things around cybersecurity, there’s some things around what are commercial companies willing to do.

Despite all that, I think there’s nothing that I’ve seen where we should not be leaning heavily into commercial. All that said, it’s not a panacea, as Kay mentioned, it’s how we should approach it. We have to give the Chinese a multi-dimensional problem to solve. And so it’s not just about one approach or the other. It’s about how do we find that right mix and then develop the right strategy which is about de-risking the future. And it’s not just about buying a thing, it’s about making choices around investments. It’s around changing the rules. There’s lots and lots of rules that have to change. And then finally, it’s about cultivating talent.

In a very practical program, Education With Industry, I would love to see the department of the Air Force double down on that program. And there’s an actual program that does the opposite, where it takes industry and puts them in the DOD for a period of time. I think we need to double down. That’s where we get that program management trade craft and other capability that enables us to get more capability to the force much more quickly.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

Oh, thanks Jason. A resilient architecture is defined as one that can withstand fight through and recover from attacks. However, I’m interested in your thoughts on how do cost, schedule and performance parameters factor into industry’s ability to support the realization of a resilient and effective architecture?

Kay Sears:

So I think we’ve defined what we want to get out of a resilient architecture. What we haven’t really defined yet is how we’re going to measure that resiliency, and I think it can be measured. We know with every orbit, every new asset, we have more resiliency. So we need a way to measure that. We need that to be across industry and Space Force and then of course, requirements drive cost and schedule. The complexity of those requirements, how much new development is included in those requirements. Of course today, our supply chain drives cost and schedule as well. But if you just look at requirements and the level of development, so if we can find a way how to measure resiliency, we can set those requirements at what that next thing that you’re buying has to add to the architecture versus very complex requirements where we’re not thinking about what is the piece of resiliency that this one asset or this constellation or this capability is going to bring.

So I think we have to look at a way to break that down. If we have a resilient architecture, then we’re buying a piece of that every time and we’re not overstating the complexity of those requirements, which is going to help us with affordability and it’s going to help us to deliver faster. The architecture is what has to fight through, not every single asset. In fact, we would be designing things that might be taken on day one or day three or day seven, but it’s according to our plan and our definition of resiliency. Right now, I think there’s a great effort to add mission capability to existing programs of record and we’re doing that through evolution.

If you think about the WGS system as an example, we’re adding resilient capability with each new spacecraft that we build. That is one good path. We’re also through Space RCO adding brand new capabilities, whether that’s offensive or defensive capabilities. So each one of those adds a component to the architecture. So let’s figure out how to measure it and then let’s ensure that we’re setting those requirements correctly and we don’t get overly complex because that’s really what’s going to drive us into five year timelines and something that’s not affordable.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

Well, thank you. So we heard this morning, General Saltzman is our Chief Space Operations talk about competitive endurance, and we talked about responsible counter space. If you were here for the panel before lunch, we talked about how do we up our counter intelligence game to keep our adversaries from stealing our intellectual property and our technical capabilities and moving faster than we are.

So Joel, this question is for you. As we look at what it takes to protect our capabilities, what can be done now to protect our space systems and how can industry ensure the appropriate security of sensitive material in the development of new technologies and architectures?

Joel Nelson:

Thanks for the question. Two thoughts, one’s more an operations-focused, in the terms of speed of defending against the threat. In my operations background, we worked a lot with a GOCO model, government owned, contractor operated, and I know with a lot of the new systems coming on board as Delta has figured out how to staff and operate these systems, maybe the color of money’s off and you didn’t get the money you needed to operate things quick enough. I’ve seen it, if the contractor’s embedded with you, the operator, in a bigger way, the speed of which you can react, come up with a new TTP or procedure, you can really shorten that loop and protect a system quickly. So I think there is an operations aspect you need to think through in that GOCO model that it isn’t as prevalent on the Space Force side of things.

As far as security, I would encourage the government to think about moving to an SCI model where you have an umbrella that you can get people read into. A lot of times in this world, I’ve seen physics get classified. Certainly in the air realm, anything you do to protect a platform in the air, you can probably do similar things in space. CONOPS, TTPs, war fighting isn’t new. Yeah, it’s might be new to the domain, but the over-classification and the inability to collaborate and talk about how these systems fit together and work together has been prohibitive. So those are my thoughts.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

No, don’t disagree. And we’ve had those conversations in other forums today and we’ll continue about the over-classification and how we get after that data sharing.

Jason, you’ve served in the military as you mentioned in your intro, and you’ve worked now in industry supporting the Department of Defense. What are some specific areas of readily available technology that are mature innovation products or services in industry today that you see that we are not tapping into or utilizing as the Space Force that could have an high impact and low cost in improving our space resiliency?

Jason Brown:

There’s not an easy button, that’s for sure, but I would say, and it’s not easy. So many of the problems that the department has are not technically difficult. I would even say that JADC2 is not technically challenging. It comes down to policy. So it’s really focusing on the networking layer, which is at the base of any enterprise architecture, and that’s the layer in of itself. If we think we’re going to fight on SuperNet as is or some of our other classified networks as is, the latency is just… It’s horrible to be able to do the kinds of things that we say we’re going to have to do in a fight, in a high end fight. So the short answer to what can we do, software-based encryption. So literally running SuperNet on the commercial cloud is very possible to do it very secure, to make it very resilient, to move away from hardware-based encryption to really capture that capability that the cloud offers.

I’ll just give an example from the private sector, day traders, or not day traders, I should say those power traders. They’re the ones working at the big financial firms, doing a lot of trading. Four milliseconds or a five millisecond delay will cost them $4 million. If they have a five millisecond delay in their ability to sell or buy, it could cost them large amounts of money. So we say, “Well, we’re not in that business.” Well, we are in the business of defending against hypersonic missiles and so now we’re talking about milliseconds that matter. So we really need to focus on the networking layer and remove the policies around software-based encryption and really, really lean in on that.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

Thank you. Jason.

As a follow up, Joel, I think one of the things we all are interested in is from an industry’s perspective, what do you think that’s out there that’s not at a lower TRL level today that, but would mature in the next three years to a TRL level that the military would or Space Force would be willing to bring on as a relevant operational capability for the war fight in 2028?

Joel Nelson:

A few thoughts, some of these are more mature technology wise, but multi-mission payloads and reprogramability of payloads, the threat’s not static. The enemy’s evolving, learning, the ability to have on-orbit payloads that are reprogrammable to shift with a threat is important. Similarly, autonomous threat detection and what to do about things. You’re not going to be in touch with some of these birds all the time either. So detecting a threat, reacting to a threat, as AI comes into play more, you’re not always going to have that operator in the loop. And I think we’re in this paradigm where the operator has to be in the loop. There needs to be a little bit of a shift to some autonomous operations, especially at the speed of protecting and defending occurs. And I’m not seeing that in the requirements. I think the technology’s there. So it’s a shift in what can be done and how can we do it in CONOPS, in operations as well.

Kay Sears:

That’s another example where the airborne layer and the space layer could move in tandem, right? Because we’re doing a lot of that autonomy, autonomous systems and AI in that to really create a force multiplier. We should think about what’s the equivalent of that in the space domain? What’s that force multiplier that relates to the software piece as well?

Kay Sears, Vice President and General Manager, Space, Intelligence & Weapon Systems for Boeing Defense, Space & Security. Photo by Aaron Chen/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

I’m going to throw a question because you guys have answered the next question we talked about, because you’re all going towards the technologies. I think all of us in the Space Force are very much recognizing we are born in the information age as a service. We are not born in the industrial age. Much of the industrial base, the people we work with every day, how people have their value propositions in making money in a particular company, have typically been very hardware focused. I just heard all of you sort of talk about software, reprogrammable software, payloads, artificial intelligence.

How do we change the value proposition for companies in a way that would make them want to shift, particularly the bigs who’ve been very much involved in hardware, getting them more software focused rather than hardware focused? Do you guys have any thoughts on how we incentivize that? It’s a free-for-all because that was a question I did not… I threw that on the table, so I apologize, but I’m trying to make it interesting based on what you guys gave us.

Jason Brown:

We talked about modeling in SIM, so the space domain has gotten incredible. This is an understatement, incredibly complex. Who knows what it’s going to be a year from now, two years from now? We have to model that. Right now, there’s not the incentive for companies to truly share models. There’s not really even an environment to really do that. So focusing on building that environment, by the way, this gets back into the cloud and some other conversations to really make this viable. Being able to model all of that will require a community. So a couple different examples, so NOOA has the Unified Forecasting System, which is a community-based modeling approach. They have various different vendors producing various different models and then contributing to it as a community.

The driverless car industry, community-based models, people are offering up new models based off of whatever research they’re doing, whatever product that… It’s a number of different players in that space. So being able to have a marketplace where people are offering models, that all starts with the requirements, by the way. We have to have a requirement to do all of these things and it’s not currently there. They’re just people are offering a model, they’re saying it’s open. It’s not really open, it’s open maybe to the vendor who produced it, but it’s not open to the community. And I think the problem we have to solve,

Kay Sears:

I don’t know, I disagree a little bit in terms of the open systems approach coupled with the digital engineering thread that we’re trying to create. I think the big defense contractors realize that the value they can bring with open systems is what our customers want. And so being able to exchange those digital models, having early conversations about what kinds of digital tools are you using and when can we exchange? Where could we meet? Maybe in the cloud to collaborate digitally. I think we’re going to try to put our arms around this and carve everything out for ourselves. I think that those days are over. We see the value of open systems, of bringing payloads, apps, on top of that and capabilities and building that system. That is what our customers are really asking for. So I see that happening now. I see it happening more in the airborne layer than it is in the space layer right now. I always think about NextGen, but I think there’s no reason it can’t happen in the space domain as well.

Joel Nelson:

I think, you bring up hardware and software. I’ve run both types of programs. Software is involved with a lot. I think sometimes we try to fit a hardware acquisition model to a software system. I think the government struggles with how do we buy software? We could go into examples of that, but we’ve also… I bring it back to the PMs. I feel like we’ve lost a generation of program managers that went to Silicon Valley. They haven’t been in aerospace, maybe in the late 90s, early 2000s. So again, part of it’s training our PMs to understand how to convert commercial development models to the government. And likewise, how does a government really go about buying software? I think there’s more we could do there to figure that out.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

No, I absolutely agree. I’ll throw one more before we go to our closing question. My question to you is, what are we doing today as a government or the Space Force that you would say is obsolete and we have absolutely got to stop doing in your opinion, based on how industry is going, in the way we do business today?

I didn’t mean to stump them, but I didn’t.

Jason Brown:

It might be a long list.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

I know it’s probably a list.

What are we doing today?

Jason Brown:

Stop doing?

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

What should we stop doing that’s absolutely obsolete and it’s hurting us to continue to do because we’re not moving forward with where industry is going.

Jason Brown:

I’ll go back to talent. Managing talent very differently than the way that the traditional military model has managed. By the way, I’m very aware that the Space Force is focused on that and trying to do that. And I would just really like whatever barrier the Space Force is facing to be the force that they want from that talent management perspective.

I just encourage you all to keep driving because quite honestly, I think it has the potential to change a lot of things across the services. There’s a lot of different aspects of talent management that everyone in this room who’s certainly wearing a uniform or wore a uniform knows exactly what I’m talking about. Some of it, quite honestly, is just fundamentally getting some of the IT fixed in the A1 world. 118 systems and databases, many of which written in COBOL, that’s what I saw just a few years ago. I doubt it’s changed that much. So there’s a lot to be focused on around talent and figuring out how to do that, how to retain the expertise, how to bring in new expertise. So that’s where I would focus.

Joel Nelson:

I guess two thoughts. One, acquisition wise, again, I’ve used firm-fixed price when I was in the government, I’ve been on the recipient side. I think we, in industry, we get into trouble when there’s NRE on fixed price. It’s hard to quantify that cost and risk. And I think we need to think long and hard of, “Hey, let’s get through CDR, define what we’re doing, be a little quicker before we go to fixed price.”

And then the second is I think the government should think long and hard about being a system integrator and what that means. It’s hard. That’s what you know used to pay us to do. Sometimes you take it on, but it can be challenging as we’ve seen on a number of things.

Kay Sears:

You took mine, so I’ll add one. I think your incentive structure, your incentive structure for your PCOs doesn’t match what you want them to do. So we’re all set. We’re all being told go faster, think out of the box. We got to bring the contracting office along with that.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

No, all good puts. And I appreciate you flexing with me asking something different, but because the way we’ve been going, you’re crushing all my questions. So I’ll close with this, our conversation with this last discussion.

This morning, you heard General Saltzman outline his theory of success and for building a space superiority mission set that is effective. He stated the first tenant is to ensure that we avoid operational surprise. In your thoughts, what could we do better to avoid operational surprises? Is there something on the horizon that you don’t think we’re addressing enough that we need to, moving forward, or we’re going to fail?

Kay Sears:

I would say we underestimate the agility of our competitor and our threat, and we’re looking for sanctuary again. OMIO, that’s going to be sanctuary, it’s not. P-LEO, that’s going to be our sanctuary, it’s not. So it is this agility that I think we’re underestimating that has to drive us in the architecture to be sure that we are covering every one of those bases. I think the operational surprise, it is space domain awareness, but it’s comprised of so many sub-elements of that that we have to be really, really good at identifying and tracking space objects.

Obviously the UDA loop that we talk about, the networked sensors and capabilities, that foundational network. So we can not just collect data, we can process it with decision systems at the speed of how we have to make those decisions. So there’s this consistent evolution that we have to have as a part of our nature of what we’re doing in space. And that has to translate into everything, has to translate into how we’re buying, how we’re evolving, the requirements, on top of that space domain core capability, and know that it has to be incredibly agile because the threat is incredibly agile. And I think if we can get there and we don’t underestimate that agility of our competitor, we won’t be surprised.

Joel Nelson:

I key in on the speed of decision making and the speed of the fight. It’s going to happen quickly, I think. As I look at the architecture, we talk capabilities, effects, but when you get into what does the transport layer need to look like to talk to all these things and what does the battle management command and control? We’re still a little stove pipe and it gets hard when you’re acquiring pieces through different acquisition agencies. How does that all come together?

We’ve touched on AIML and the data, but again, it’s getting you the information to make the decisions you need to make quickly and then what level of capability am I comfortable to put on board and let a system make its own decisions to protect and defend. Those are things I see in pockets, but as a community, I think we still need to wrestle through.

As I said before, I think the technologies are there to enable those things now, but it tends to be CONOPS and TTPs for you, the operator and the government to think about what are we willing to do. We have first lieutenants, captains flying around in F-22s, making fire control decisions and in doing things, space is moving to that. So how can we use technology to enable that decision making?

Jason Brown:

I’m thinking about Chinese spy balloons right now, and it isn’t really about the balloon. It’s about China’s ability to offer a multi-dimensional problem to us. And we have to respect that. We have to acknowledge it. There’s other things I’m confident are happening that we may or may not know about, that will generate a surprise. And so we have to acknowledge that. I think we talked about the UTA loop comes from John Boyd. John Boyd focused on people, ideas and technology in that order. I think we’ve got some great ideas, some great concepts. I think they’re sound, the technology to actually achieve them is there. It’s just a matter of the policy as we’ve talked about.

So then we can get to the really hard problems, technologically speaking, which is putting in machine learning agents into a model and SIM environment that can give me what-if scenarios. If something gets taken out, and we could do that from a programmatic, what do we buy? What do we build? Or we can do that from an operational, I need to shift some things around right now, but to reach that panacea, there’s some foundational things that need to take place. And then I’ll just end on people, ideas and technology in that order. It comes back to really doubling down on your people, doubling down on the talent that exists and how we attract more.

Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt:

Thank you all. I appreciate you. I hope the audience, we’ve talked about what it means to be a Space Force and General Saltzman went through the history today of the Air Force and how the Air Force evolved and then how we’ve seen the Space Force evolve. We don’t do that without our industry partners. And it has been amazing to see the growth in industry and what we’ve seen from all of you, particularly in about the last 10 years. We’ve just seen it just come like gangbusters. And that’s been huge to us because as a Department of Defense, we cannot execute without an industrial base that is supporting us and providing those capabilities that we would then use to defend the nation.

So thank you, all three of you, for being here today. We talk about the theme of this conference is about… We can see that this panel is an example of what I think the conference and I heard in the in the Intelligence Threat Brief earlier that the monikers should be on all of our programs and that every Airman, Guardian and industry is in the fight. So thank you very much for your time today, and thank you for being here after lunch and staying awake.

Jason Brown:

Thank you.

Watch, Read: ‘Agile Combat Employment: Are We Ready?’

Watch, Read: ‘Agile Combat Employment: Are We Ready?’

Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command; Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, commander of Air Forces Central Command; Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh, director of the Air National Guard; and Maj. Gen. Derek C. France, commander of the Third Air Force discussed both current and historical examples of the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept and laid out how they plan to implement it during a panel moderated by Col. David Pappalardo, French Air and Space Attaché, on March 7, 2023, at the AFA Warfare Symposium. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Col. David Pappalardo:

Good afternoon everyone. I’m Colonel David Pappalardo, the French Air and Space attaché in Washington, and this is my tremendous honor to moderate this panel on Agile Combat Employment today. So to dig into this issue, I’m lucky enough to sit in the middle of a fantastic alignment of leaders. Among them, we have a Major General France, a commander of the Third Air Force at Ramstein Air Force base in Germany. So, a little bit of echo. So as a US Air Force Europe and US Air Force Africa only numbered Air Force. The Third Air Force you can command, sir, empowers and advocate for 10 wings and more than 32,000 Airmen across two continents, which is an area of responsibilities that stretches from the Arctic to the Cape of Good Hope. And before switching to the other, considering your last name sir, for sure you will have the first and easy question. I saved the wicked one for the others.

I also have the pleasure to host Lieutenant General Bauernfeind, commander of air special operation command in Hurlburt Field, Florida. So AFSOC, the Air Force component for US Special Operation Command and provides Air Force Special forces for worldwide deployment and assignments to unified combatant commanders. If I switch to my left. I also have the pleasure to host Lieutenant General Grynkewich, who with the commander of the Ninth Air Force in AFCENT and also the combined force air component commander for US Central Command. So you are responsible, sir, for developing contingency plans and conducting air operation in a 21 nation area of responsibility covering central and southwest Asia. And last but not the least, Lieutenant General Michael Loh, with the director of the Air National Guard. You are responsible for formulating, developing and coordinating all policies, plan and program affecting more than 108,000 Air National Guard and civilians. You’re all welcome. It’s such a pleasure to have you. Before yielding the floor to you. Let me offer some context here on Agile Combat Employment.

So the panel’s title come with a question mark, Agile Combat Employment: are we ready? I emphasize the we since you may have noticed from my charming French accent that I’m not American, so I should should have said are you ready? But I emphasize the we for at least two reasons. First, I will discuss during the panel the role of allies and partners is critical to the successful implementation of Agile Combat Employment for the US. And second I say we because we might argue that ACE concept may not be new but for sure concern all the air force as a epitomized by the initial lessons learned from the air war in Ukraine. Amidst them, indeed is the relevance of a flexible and resilient basing strategy to mitigate the effects of Russian strikes. So to some extent the Ukrainian have applied [inaudible 00:03:55], the tenets of the American concept of agile combat deployment by randomly selecting, sorry, several air fields of deployment to complicate Russian targetings.

So to go back to the other side of the ponds and talk about the United States, we know that Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall list of seven operational imperatives unveiled in 2022 is also a call for resilient basing and that effort is closely tied to the service’s ACE concept in which small teams of Airmen and aircraft dispersed to remote austere and small locations and can move or operate quickly to create a lot of unknowns for adversary. So maybe start from the Air Force doctrine definition of a Agile Combat Employment, a proactive and reactive operational scheme of maneuver executed within threats timelines to increase your availability while generating combat air power. I think it’s a good start and we may start with you General France. So following on this definition, what is your perspective? What’s your vision? What is Agile Combat Employment, what it is really about and is that something really new or lessons we learn to edge against the return of high intensity warfare?

Maj. Gen. Derek C. France:

Thank you for the question and thanks for the audience for being here. I think to answer your question, is ACE new? It’s a new name for a concept that that’s been around warfare for centuries. I think some more recent historical examples of good and bad. If you think of the Six-Day War of 1967, an example of not good ACE by the enemies of Israel at the time and they lost a good chunk of their air force and it’s called a Six-Day War because oddly enough it lasted about that long. A positive example of ACE that we see from World War II that’s highlighted in the USAFE CONOP if you’ve thumbed through that is the Polish Air Force in World War II when they were attacked and had the foresight to move a lot of their air assets knowing that the airfield would be attacked and then had the ability to operate for several days, ultimately not prevailing in that conflict but exacting a loss on the German adversaries as they did that.

So I don’t think it’s new. I think this is something that has been around since, well before even air power, this concept of maneuvering to keep your enemy on the toes. What has changed, and I can speak to the European theater, is the number of bases that we operate from. So in 1980 we had 18 main operating bases, today we have six, rough math in public, that’s a third. Add to that the extended range of the threat that we face and the complexity and the precision of the threat that we face in the European theater and that really drives us to do something different than we have done and ACE is the answer as far as the situation we have now. In USAFE, we think of ACE really in three terms and while they’re proactive and reactive as you described earlier, we really think of it as ACE to defend, ACE to deter and ACE to win.

And so defending is kind of that reactive type of ACE where there’s a threat, we have indications and warnings, we get off the X, we put small footprints out for a short period of time to survive some sort of attack and be able to operate, but a very light footprint to do that. ACE to deter and I would caveat that by saying ACE to deter and assure our partners in the alliance is something that we would do in a much more methodical method and the footprint’s a little bit larger but still a light footprint and something that we could operate from and then ACE to win is in a full scale type of conflict where we’re actually doing sustained combat operations moving back and forth. I will say the challenges we have right now in USAFE are really, there’s several, the two biggest are how do we command and control theater wide ACE and how do we support it and sustain it, specifically within terms of weapons.

For command and control, we’ve done some experimentation at the theater level with the Air Operation Center, trying to command and control multiple ACE movements that are happening at the same time. And the tendency is if you just do one, the whole AOC looks at that ACE movement and they focus on it and it goes pretty well. When you do multiple ACE movements across the theater, the AOC is forced to get up to its doctrinal level of being operational command and control and we have to push some of those authorities down to the wings in their wing operations centers and the detachments that are often commanded by a field grade officer in a very small footprint and push that decision authority down to a lower level.

And so that is still work in progress and logistics is probably the highest hurdle of all that, so how do we sustain those forward locations either with prepositioned weapons and equipment or being able to move it across and in Europe we have a little bit of an advantage as far as we can use GLOCs, we can use ground lines of communication in shorter distances and things like that that I think is more challenging in different theaters for sure in the Pacific. So that’s a little bit about how we see historically and some of the challenges we see in USAFE right now.

Col. David Pappalardo:

Okay. We will have the occasion to come back on the challenges with other panelists and before turning to Lieutenant General Bauernfeind. So in Europe, so we talk about a little bit about the Ukrainians, but how that the Ukrainian Air Force strategy in the war against Russia shed light on ACE concept is that’s something that would change your perception about ACE?

Maj. Gen. Derek C. France:

I think the examples we’ve seen as far as the ACE concept that we’ve seen in the Russian invasion of Ukraine is twofold and I think you touched on it in your opening comments is we’ve seen ACE to deter from our NATO partners and from US assets where we take small footprints out into eastern flank airfields that we normally don’t operate from, but anywhere from Romania up through Poland, up through the Baltics. And while it’s conceptually a little bit different than how we envision ACE because it was a longer duration, they were out there for several months leading up to the conflict, a lot of the skillsets and a lot of the footprint is very similar to what we see an ACE kind of construct.

And so that deter and assure aspect of ACE is something that we saw play out. And while you could look at it and say, well we didn’t deter Russia from invading Ukraine, I would contend that there was a deterrence and assurance factor as far as NATO cohesion as the invasion happened and a deterrence from expanding the war further to the west. I think on the Ukrainian side we absolutely saw ACE to survive or ACE to defend moving assets off of their location both aircraft as well as some of their surface to air missile systems for that. And they’ve been fairly survivable and able to operate. They’re still taking combat losses in that war right now, but we don’t see mass losses on the airfield because they’ve been savvy enough to keep their aircraft moving around.

Col. David Pappalardo:

Thank you sir. Sir, I’m turning to you to some extent, AFSOC is a pioneer of the ACE concept, having been able to, for a long time now, to rapidly deploy an established forward operating location manned by multi-capable Airmen and commandos. Could you elaborate please on the contribution to the ACE concept to AFSOC, sir?

Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind:

Thank you very much and first of all, thank you so much for MCing this great panel with these teammates and to the AFA for setting this up. And as we look at this, I would provide it from a few perspectives of what we’ve been contributing and I’ll put it into three as first is our mission sustainment teams and the concept I want first off is our multi-functional Airmen and air commandos and then finally mission command. But before I go into that, I want to reinforce the why and the why is if we look at the last three decades, our adversaries has been looking at the American way of war, what do we do? We power project, we established super bases, we establish our force, and once we’ve collected ourselves, then we proceed forward with our offensive operations and our adversaries have taken full note of that and they are going to attack our bases with quite an aggressive manner in that it’s a critical vulnerability that we have to, so we have to have these forces that can power project from locations and be able to shoot and scoot.

And what I mean is land, establish, generate combat power, prosecute missions, and as soon as we get an intel threat, we’re moving on to the next location and we’re constantly moving around theater and it’s important to understand the why and I want to reinforce the history as well as to say that we’ve been in this a while. We can trace this all the way back to World War II with where we kind of take our roots with Air Force Special Operations Command. When we look at what General Arnold did when our British teammates came to us and said, hey, we’re having a challenge getting behind Japanese lines in the China Burma India campaign. They came to General Arnold said we need help. And two colonels, Colonel Cochran and Colonel Allison moved forward with an operation known as Operation Thursday and 400 Army Air Corps Airmen moved forward, maintainers, services, medical personnel, enlisted pilots all moved forward for a glider invasion behind Japanese lines to establish that footprint for the follow on force of P-47s, of B-25s to really take the fight against the Japanese.

And I will not bother you with all the aspects, but nobody landed and said, hey, I’m just a maintainer, I’m only do maintenance. It was all hands on deck as they established that airfield and brought in combat air power and made it happen. And that has really informed us as we’ve moved forward, but we kind of had to reflect on ourselves because the last two decades of counter VEO, we got out of that mindset. We showed up with our operational forces and looked to the left, looked at our right of our teammates and said, okay, who’s going to support us? Who’s going to defend us? We’re going to generate the operational power on that, but we’ve returning to our roots and under General Slife’s great vision, we established what’s called the mission sustainment teams, that first aspect to bring to you that. These are 54 person teams primarily out of the mission support group of engineers, defenders, communicators, contracting specialists, service specialists that are bringing that capability forward to make sure that we can support and defend our operational units as they move out.

And I will tell you, our air commandos are absolutely loving it because they’re training together and they’re coming in and they are doing so much more than what they signed up for. And I will tell you from my perspective as we’re wrestling with the recruiting effort and our retention effort, these new teammates come in to do, they don’t come in to sit, they come in to do. And so that’s a big aspect, we’ve got to break down this mindset of, hey, you can only do one function. Our Airmen are so much more capable than a singular AFSC and we’re seeing it every single day as they move forward.

As an example, as we’ve exercised this into employment, we had a young services air commando that came in, became a part of the team, became so effective at what he was doing, became an air advisor through the process and as the mission sustainment team went forward, also started air advising Latvian teammates. Never in our wildest mind did we see services teammates doing that, but they rose to the challenge and it’s been exceptionally powerful. And then the final aspect that I think we’re getting after is mission command. Mission command is hard because for the last three decades we’ve been so centralized to General France’s great point on what the AOC does and doesn’t do. We’ve really got to get after the mission command aspect of future war fighting and it’s going to be hard on all of us, but we’ve got to embrace it. And I will tell you, we got to embrace it for a couple reasons. The first and foremost in all this is we have to feel comfortable telling our teams what they need to do and the why behind it. And we got to get out of the how.

They’ll figure out the how and they’ll figure out the how in ingenious ways. And so we got to get very comfortable in giving mission type orders, that’s critical to success in the future so that when those lines are severed, and I expect in the future fight as hard as we’re going to try to make sure it doesn’t, we will have teams that are not being communicated with and we’ve got to know that they don’t sit on their hands waiting to be told to do, that they continue to take the fight to the adversary. But the second thing is they’ve got to know that we’re empowering them with this decentralized execution. Not only empowering them but expecting them to do this. And through this they will build that mutual trust. And the final aspect that we’re focusing on with the mission sustainment teams is you can’t generate this on a moment’s notice.

We’ve got to pull these teams together and they’ve got to train themselves as it goes forward. And what we’ve learned through this process is as we pull them out of the units, we’re actually assigning them to a team inside the operations group and they go through an 18-month workup and the mutual trust they benefit from that is exceptionally powerful and we’re seeing great success as it moves forward and we’re going to double down on that, not only in the active force, but we’re getting great support from our total force teammates as they’re leaning forward into the mission sustainment teams as it goes forward and we’re excited to see where it goes. But the final thing I want to push on is also the feedback that we’re seeing in it, the air commandos that are part of these mission sustainment teams are absolutely loving what they’re doing because they’re out, they’re tied to a mission and they’re tied to a team and they’re seeing great rewards from that.

And at times, to be quite honest with you, we’re seeing teammates are going, we want to keep doing this, but we’re having to go, nope, you’ve now completed mission at the 24-month point, we actually need you to go back to the garrison so that you continue to progress in your AFSC as it goes forward. We got to keep both balances going. And that’s the second friction point that we got to highlight in all this is what I call the garrison trap. And what I’m seeing with our teammates and the wing commanders is where is it most important to take risk? Because as we have developed these mission sustainment teams, it’s all under the auspices of we’re getting no additional manpower, so we’re taking this out of hide.

So where are you going to take risk? And are you going to take risk in your war fighting capabilities? Are you going to take risk in your garrison responsibilities? And those are tough conversations to have, but I will tell you the nation’s expecting us to fight those war fighting capabilities. And the final thing I want to double down that General France already did is we’ve got to be serious about exercising logistics. For way too many years, we have simulated away the exercising of our logistics and I think that what we are seeing from the Ukrainian fight with the munitions expenditures, with the logistics shortfalls that they’re seeing, we will see very similar problem sets unless we get serious about exercising those requirements we will need for the logistics as we move forward and looking forward to our industry teammates bringing forward new capabilities to help us with that. But a short snapshot of where we’re going, but exceptionally excited to see where our air commandos are going in this.

Col. David Pappalardo:

Okay, so what I’m taking away is capabilities, of course, multi-capable Airmen, mission command, teamwork and of course exercise and training and training and training. You mentioned a little bit about, I stay with you a little bit, but you mentioned about capabilities, but do you foresee any further need, new needs for capabilities to implement ACE concept or what you just described before is enough?

Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind:

Yeah, a couple things. I think we have to have a conversation of what capacity of this capability do we want in our air force right now inside of AFSOC, I realize that we are a very unique part of the Air Force. We are right now able to generate three active duty MSTs and potentially one to two total force mission sustainment teams as it goes forward. But what will the rest of the Air Force be able to generate and move forward as we go into this regards if the whole of the Air Force goes out. So we have to have a serious conversation of what’s that capacity requirement and then also it’s going to lead into potentially new organizational structures. In AFSOC, we’ve established it inside of hey, these great air commandos that are inside the mission support group when they generate, they become part of the ops group and become an operational deployment as it comes forward, is that the right way to go forward for the rest of the force?

That’s a conversation we need to have. But on the, I would say the what capabilities we need industry to bear on this is at the end of the day we’ve got to be lighter and leaner across the force. We’ve got to have C4I systems that fit in a backpack not on a 463 L pallet and be able to communicate globally with multiple channels as it goes forward with multiple waveforms, multiple encryptions and multiple antennas as it goes forward. We’ve got to really dig into what is contested logistics going to be like. We really haven’t had to wrestle with that in the past two decades. The biggest challenge on logistics is going to be is a hey, is it going to clear customs at Qatar as it comes forward versus the, hey, how are we truly going to get the capabilities we need forward?

So what are we going to do for water generation, fuel generation, energy generation, 3D printing as we go forward? Because we’re not going to have the luxury to MICAP parts all the way at the leading edge where many of our forces are going to be and we’re going to have to enable our Airmen to be successful as it goes forward. And then finally, the capabilities we’re going to have to have is that mobility aspect to be able to move quickly and what we’re calling is runway agnostic operations. While will always benefit from great FOBs that will enable the greater force roll in on, we at AFSOC are looking at capabilities that almost make the runways agnostic. Things like high speed vertical takeoff and landing that have a theater dash capability, but that terminal area flexibility where you can land anywhere. For maritime operations as we’re looking at an amphibious C-130 type capability to make sure that we can move around the battlefield where we need to with the ultimate goal of just giving more and more dilemmas to our adversary.

Col. David Pappalardo:

Thank you sir. I’m turning to you Lieutenant General Grynkewich. So the implementation of ACE is not without challenges. Our two previous panelists mentioned some of them, be it in terms of logistic on training, on war reserve material per se. Could you please give us some examples on how the Ninth Air Force intend to face these challenges in your responsibility?

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich:

Yeah, you bet. So thanks for monitoring this panel and you actually made my job really easy because I’ll just say what they said but what I’ll try to do is give you a couple of specifics and fill-ins on how Ninth Air Force is thinking about this, but I could not agree more of the three main points that have been highlighted here. Training and exercises, you’ve got to practice this stuff over and over again. Logistics/sustainment and command and control. So couple things on training and exercises, in AFCENT today, right now we’re executing a theater wide Agile Combat Employment exercise called Agile Spartan. All of our air expeditionary wings are participating in this and basically we’re dispersing the force to a number of different locations across all of the countries in the region where we operate. This allows us to do a couple of things.

The first is in an austere combat environment where we’re generating combat sorties to go up over Iraq and Syria, we’re able to do things like integrated combat turns, load live weapons, make sure that we’ve got real gas that we can load up and, no kidding, generate combat power and operate and we’re going to be doing this for a few weeks. So it’s not just going cross country for those air crew members. I mean the ops and maintenance teams out there, aircrew and maintainers can go somewhere on austere location and launch a jet. It’s sustaining that over time that really becomes challenging, especially when you’re talking about all the different things that you need. Gas, food, weapons, et cetera. So it’s a great opportunity for us to do that. It then gives us insight into the command and control aspects of this. And I could not agree more with my friend Trapper France that you have to get the Air Operations Center at the right level of warfare.

And the way I think about it, for too long I would say, and AFCENT has been part of this, the definition of command and control and how we thought of it was just with an air operation center and the CAOC at Al Udeid. What we really need to think about as an Air force is command and control at echelon. And one of the quotes that a mentor of mine once said is, “I’m always in command but I’m not always in control.” And I think that’s really important, we’ve got to be willing to recognize that we can’t control everything from Al Udeid or any other AOC anywhere in the world and we need to think about building mission command nodes at echelons at the wing level and all the way down to the squadron level as you disperse these detachments out across cluster bases. So from a C2 perspective at AFCENT, what we’ve done is we have a cluster of bases and each air expeditionary wing commander owns that cluster of bases and they’re responsible for filling the ATO from that base cluster.

And I’m not going to tell them what base to generate from. I’m not going to tell them what base to land an aircraft at. I’m just going to tell them what mission it is that they need to fill and they need to get that line where it needs to go. But if I try to manage their cluster base, I won’t have the situational awareness as to how much gas is at a location, are the right munitions there or not, that’s all going to be managed at echelon, a lower echelon, not a higher echelon or we’ll fall on our faces in my view. And the last thing I’ll say about it is we sometimes talk about this concept of mission command as something that only applies when the comms go down. I would tell you that from my perspective, the concept of mission command is just as important when the comms are up and we will have a tendency to get into each other’s chili, we’ll have a tendency to use a 2000 mile screwdriver and start micromanaging.

But the moment we do that, we’re taking away opportunity space from Airmen on the front lines who are able to see an opportunity, seize that opportunity and gain a decisive advantage when we try to manage it from somewhere else. So we’ve got to be comfortable that we’re not controlling it, we’re just commanding it. The last point I’ll hit on is logistics. So the concept of using ground lines of communication works in Europe, absolutely essential to us in AFCENT having logistics readiness, squadron commanders have to figure out how they’re going to move a ground convoy and shuttle equipment from location to location, still dealing with customs at the border as you go say from Israel to Jordan. I mean huge challenges that you have to work through, again, at the squadron level, they’re able to pull this off. That’s the long-term sustainment, but you’ll still have things that you have to get very quickly to a location, maybe it is MICAP part that you can’t 3D print or something along those lines.

So we have a new concept that we’re working on with Air Mobility Command and our DIRMOBFOR and the air mobility division in the AOC, an agile airlift cell that is working to be in direct support of wing commanders rapidly allocating tactical airlift to get emergency supplies, emergency equipment, a shipment of weapons that wasn’t where it needed to be shuttled between locations as quickly as possible, so those are just some of the things that we’re doing.

The very last one I’ll say is, and you mentioned WRM in your question, all of us have big piles of WRM at main operating locations and it’s very efficient from a money standpoint and a personnel standpoint to manage things that way. What we’re doing in AFCENT is looking at based on indications and mornings and the road to war, to major combat operations, where is the trigger point where you need to start dispersing that WRM and setting yourself up for ACE? That’s going to be an expensive trigger point to execute, it’s going to be a DP that’s going to send a signal for deterrence, but it is something that you got to think through because that WRM will not do you any good if it’s just sitting at Al Udeid. Thanks.

Col. David Pappalardo:

Thank you very much sir. So time flies, so time is now for our last question and it’s very frustrating not to have extra time by the way. But anyway, so I recall Northern Agility 22-1, which demonstrated the US Air Force Agile Command Employment Doctrine and ready to execute missions quickly in unpredictable ways like having some National Guard assets taking off from and performing integrated combats on the close 9,000-foot section of Michigan Highway M-28 was very impressive. More in detail sir, for the very last question, can you explain how the Air National Guard is preparing for ACE? Thank you.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

Yeah, sure. Team, really quick because those in front can’t see ya. We got standing room only in the back. I mean our Airmen are excited about ACE and whether you’re in the active component, the guard or the reserve, we’re all doing the same thing, how do we operationalize the national defense strategy? Part of that for the Air National Guard is recapitalization both in mission and equipment. The second piece is innovation, which ACE fits under and the third piece is engagement, which also ACE fits under. It’s how do we engage our allies and partners in this thing. The one you mentioned was our fourth generation and I call it exercising, every unit is out there exercising, whether you’re in KAF, MAF, AFSOC, they’re all exercising this, they’re all getting evaluated on it for every time we go out and we deploy. I’ll give you just a couple of examples of what we’ve done this past year and I think it’s important.

First off, I’ll start with our legacy systems, the mobility platforms. KC-135 ACE, within 35 days we brought Airmen, soldiers, sailors together. We launched a KC-135 with two razors in the back with a small ground battle management C2 system in those razors, 31 Airmen, two pallets. Unloaded it all, figured out how to set up a FARP, how to actually get gas off of KC-135, a 62 year old airframe with the right configuration and feeding those lessons learned into weapons and tactics, we set up a mobile ground system, a network that both went over the horizon and that to do C2 at the edge. And we actually did real time targeting both for sensors that were airborne and also sensors that were over the horizon using some other national technical means. Very powerful and how do we get after this? With a very small team, but that was a joint team.

It’s also nice when in the Air National Guard, I can go to my Army National Guard brethren, some of our SOF forces like 19th special forces groups and 20th special forces groups and grab their razors and their expertise. So that’s the legacy side and how we’re going to get after it and what is the ground time on a 135 because I can land it, I can get gas off it quickly and now we can get out there, all those are feeding back. The one you mentioned is fortune, it’s we had never hot pit refueled an A-10 on a highway in Michigan and the Airmen didn’t know how to do it actually because they had done it off a truck. We were doing it off of an Army National Guard FARP location. And so we had a Army National Guard specialist teaching our Airmen how to actually take an A-10 and refuel it in a hot pit in there.

And so that’s the experimentation side and how we’re doing that stuff. And then fifth gen and Trapper, I’m going to use the example of USAFE and I’m going to say it this way, because General Hergan at one of our meetings last year went, “Hey, Mike, your F-35s that are operating over there.” He goes, “I know ACE is working because I don’t even know where they are in theater at certain times.” So what was allowed over there when the F-35s deployed over to Europe was an example of fifth gen. Think about all the stuff that goes into fifth gen.

And we sent six F-35s with 35 Airmen, so less than six Airmen per tail. That’s officer and enlisted operated out of a non-US base in Estonia for five days, did over 300 maintenance tasks, set up lightning rods, tracked over 5,000 tools and delivered combat power and very small teams to do exactly what General Hergan at the time needed, which was, hey, what can I do up in the Baltics and how can you help me out? So using our innovation for Agile Combat Employment and multi-capable or multi-functional Airmen as General Bauernfeind so says we can do that with the small teams and the experience of the Air National Guard and also those partnerships that we’ve established throughout the world, like in the state partnership program to get after that access basing and over flight and actually do some of that training and combined training to get after it and I think that’s how we’ll operationalize the NDS and be able to survive.

Col. David Pappalardo:

That’s a good and wonderful way to conclude this panel. Please join me to give a wonderful round of applause to our panelists and thank you very much.

Watch, Read: ‘Every Threat a Target’

Watch, Read: ‘Every Threat a Target’

Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, moderated a panel with Gen. Mark D. Kelly, commander of Air Combat Command; Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, commander of Space Operations Command; and Lt. Gen. Alberto Biavati, Italian Air Force Operational Forces Commander on the need to integrate across services and partners to better target threats on March 7, 2023, at the AFA Warfare Symposium. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. I guess we’re ready to go. I guess this is a pretty popular panel, because of all of our panelists. Sorry for those of you who have to stand on the sides and in the back. I’ll make sure the leadership gets the word to give us a bigger space next year.

I’m Dave Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Power Studies. As you can already tell, we’re really pleased today to host General Mark Kelly, Commander of Air Combat Command, Lieutenant General Steven Whiting, the Commander at Space Operations Command, and Lieutenant General Biavati, the Air Operational Forces Commander for the Italian Air Force. Welcome, you all, to our forum today.

As you can see, there’s a lot of interest in the topic, and what I’d like to do is just give a little bit of a brief introduction. Now, as we move toward realizing this notion of joint all-domain, command and control, we need to start looking at how the war fighting capabilities in different domains can be better integrated to target and defeat the wide array of threats facing us.

Whether that be air, land, sea, cyber, they’ve always worked better, or at least the people in them have worked better, when they’re integrated to overcome our threats, and space is no different. We need to move away from the idea of de-confliction of forces to a construct focused on getting the right capability to the right place at the right time, or better said, integration of available forces to achieve desired effects in the battle space. That includes integrating the capabilities of our allies and partners. You know we’ve got some key players here. I’m really pleased that General Kelly was able to join us today. As the commander of Air Combat Command, he’s got an understanding like none other on how to affect mission results with the combat air forces under his command. We’re really looking forward what you have to say today, General Kelly.

I’m also glad to welcome Lieutenant General Whiting, because as commander of Space Operations Command, he brings an insight into the space capabilities that underpin all our combat operations. It’s great to have you here too, sir. Finally, I’m happy to introduce Lieutenant General Biavati of the Italian Air Force as the Air Operational Forces Commander for the Italian Air Force. He works really closely with US air forces in Europe and our other NATO allies to ensure that we have a credible and combat ready force in Europe. He provides an important voice as an ally and a partner helping us execute our missions in a truly collaborative way. Thank you all for joining us. What we’re going to do to start off is to give you an opportunity to speak to the subject today. With that, I’ll turn it over to General Kelly and then we’ll just go right down the line.

Gen. Mark D. Kelly:

Okay. Well, great. Well, thanks. Appreciate the invite and appreciate the crowd. I really appreciate my teammates up here. It’s a great optic that we don’t do any event that’s truly hard by ourselves. It takes other services, other domains, other allies and partners, especially when you start talking about targeting in any sense. When I got the email that I was assigned to this panel, Every Threat a Target, I thought it was a bold statement. It doesn’t matter if it’s ACC or Space Force or Navy or our allies or partners, our army. It doesn’t matter who it is. If somebody makes the statement every threat’s at targeted, we need to be wide-eyed that you can call every threat at target, but not every target is targetable easily. That’s a key part that our half A26 and the experts in 16th Air Force go through every single day.

In Alberto’s world, every one of the World Cups soccer goals is a target. In our world, every end zone is a target and every NHL goal is a target. If you’re going to actually get there, it takes an incredible amount of strategy, teamwork, coaching, talent, effort and all that, along with some violence, doesn’t guarantee you’re going to get there. We have to be wide-eyed how hard this is and how professional the Airmen we have and Guardians across the enterprise are, that do this type of mission. Before we make a target actually targetable, first we have to find it and then we have to fix it and then we have to track it. I was talking to John Van Herk yesterday if you were able to attend his speech. I chatted with him for five minutes afterwards and I’ll just segue off of a couple of the comments he made to me.

You heard in his thing, every day or at least every few days, he gets an update on the Russian guided missile submarine, the Severodvinsk. That’s a hard target to find. If you find it, it’s tough to fix in terms of depth. If you do find it and fix it, then to continue tracking it when it runs rather quiet is tough business. Even the Russians themselves, when they wake up every day, they would consider one of their threats the US HIMARS. Very difficult to find. If you find it, very difficult to fix and then it moves. That’s what the H and the I and the M stands for, highly mobile. Very difficult to find, fix, and track these targets that are truly the ones we want to locate. If you get to that stage, well then you’ve got to have a legal clearance to engage something.

For example, again, Gen. VanHerck, I’ll just use his day-to-day engagements. When the ACC launched F-22s to shoot down the balloon off the East Coast at 65,000 feet, they did so because we had found it, we had fixed it, we tracked it, and we had engagement authority. If that balloon would’ve been 62 miles instead of 62,000 feet, it would’ve legally been in space. We would not have a legal recourse to execute that engagement. North Koreans put their MIG base in China during the Korean War, because they wanted to make sure we had a legal hurdle to get through to get to that. Again, not so easy. Then you have to have some capability. Our air domain players, when they go on offense, they’ve got to go through a pretty thick nest of sensors and weapons to get to targets that are heavily defended.

When we’re on the defense or we’re trying to defend our bases, obviously some of the weapons coming at them, the number of missiles coming at them, especially if they’re hypersonic, those are very, very tough targets to make targetable. Again, a very tough business. When you get to the very end of it, again John Van Herk’s lane, you can have the find, the fix, the tracking, you can have engagement authority, you can have the capability.

Like for example, he’s charged, as he mentioned yesterday, with missile defense of the US mainly against North Korea, because he’s got unclassified number 44 ground base interceptors to execute that mission. That does not cover what a peer adversary could throw at this nation. Again, thanks for letting me be on this panel, Every Threat a Target. Just keep in mind, not every threat is targetable. It takes an incredible enterprise of professional Airmen and Guardians and it takes some really methodical planning and execution to get to the end game. Thanks, again.

Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting:

General Deptula, thanks for the invite to be here. It’s great to be here with General Kelly and General Biavati. You said it very well to begin with. Space underpins everything we do in the military. This is a very sophisticated audience and I won’t go through trying to convince you of that fact, but there are some implications that flow out of that fact. Number one is the joint force has been sized, assuming it will have access to our space capabilities through all levels of conflict. We don’t have a force structure across any of our services to fight without access to those capabilities. Now there’s a whole host of technologies that have gone into the size of our force structure for the Air Force, to include stealth technology, jet aircraft technology, global mobility and airlift, and tanking, but without space, we can’t unhinge from terrestrial networks and operate around the globe with command and control.

We can’t operate without knowing what’s over the next hill through intelligence, without being highly precise anywhere we are on the planet. For the Space Force, that means it is our moral responsibility to the rest of the joint force that we continue to provide you those effects that make you more lethal and more effective across all levels of threat. That’s one of the reasons we have a Space Force, is to make sure we can now do that across all of these levels of threat. Of course, the environment we find ourselves in today is more congested and contested. On the congested side, just in the last three years, we’ve seen a 90% increase in the number of trackable objects on orbit. That number is up to about 48,000 right now and that’s gone up for a few reasons. One are the mega constellations like Starlink that we’ve seen be so effective here over the last year in the European theater.

It’s also the Russian ASAT test of a little over 15 or 16 months ago. Highly unprofessional, left 1500 pieces of long-lived debris. We’ve had some other breakups unrelated to that and now we have some better sensors that are helping us track smaller and smaller pieces on orbit. There’s a lot more things now in our environment we have to operate around and while that’s concerning, what’s really concerning are these threats from irreversible up to reversible, direct-ascent ASATs, lasers, on orbit, co-orbital ASATs. All of that we now have to deal with.

As we think about why we have to worry about targeting in the US Space Force, now we have to be able to hold those counterspace capabilities from red at risk and then hold red at risk, as well as they think how they want to use space to get after attacking us potentially. I look forward to discussing some of those issues here over the next 30 minutes or so.

Lt. Gen. Alberto Biavati:

Good morning, or actually, good afternoon to everyone. I would like first to thank General Deptula and the Air and Space Forces Association, The Mitchell Institute for this invitation. It’s a honor for the Italian Air Force to be here today, represented by me, and for me personally is a pride and a pleasure to be here with you. Here in just three weeks, we are going to celebrate our centenary. We are one of the oldest Air Forces in the world. On the 28th of March, we will become 100, but we feel terribly young, not like I do. I’m part of the last 40 of this 100 years and therefore, I feel pretty old. The only good thing is that here next to me sits one of the instructors that I found at Sheppard when I went through pilot training. That gives me at least a little bit of relief on my age.

What are we going to do on this centenary is to remind ourselves first and all our fellow citizens what the Italian Air Force has done in this 100 years and how we came to this point. We came to this point with a lot of losses, a lot of comrades that have fallen in war and in peacetime. We have come to a set of capabilities that I suppose is well rated all over NATO. NATO has many times recognized the capabilities that Italy is bringing to the fight. We are also setting up the next 15, 20 years with the new document that our chief of staff issued some months ago, in which we set the pace for the future. Our pace for the future is exactly the will to meet every threat possibly as a target by developing all the capabilities that we have already developed in the last 20 years in which we had a quantum leap, in my opinion, in development and adding all those capabilities that we have not yet in our inventory.

To do that, we need you. We need the United States Air Force and I make a plea here. We have always been in a very good relations except a very significant but brief time in the previous century. We have always been on the same side, defending the same values, and defending the same free world. We still need your help. We need your help in giving us the possibility to continue training our pilots in [inaudible 00:13:46]. We need to spin up our force and without your support in [inaudible 00:13:52], we won’t be able to do it. We need your industrial base to continue support our fleets like the C-130, the transition to the block five and the predator.

We need your support in training together with us. Lately, we trained in Falcon Strike in the southern part of Italy. We set up an operational training infrastructure that is one of a kind, where you came and trained with us. We help you out with all the American bases that are located in Italy. I think probably we’re the country in Europe with the most American bases. We need your help, because we need to continue our improvement that has brought us to this point that makes us very, very proud.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Well, thank you very much, all of you, for those initial insights. I’m thinking as General Biavati was talking … first, congratulations on 100 years, but the first bomb from an airplane, and the historians in the audience would know this, was dropped by an Italian in 1911. That was a long time ago. This is kind of a pertinent to our topic today, but the guidance for that hand grenade that was dropped over the side is a little bit different than what we rely on today with our space-based assets. First question to General Kelly, Air Force targeting doctrine makes a number of key points and specifically it states that targeting is not just about delivering kinetic weapons, but determining the best way to achieve desired effects. Could you walk us through what that means for your approach to targeting threats in a contested environment?

Gen. Mark D. Kelly:

Yeah. No, thanks. I appreciate it. I just got back a week ago from Ramstein, where a whole bunch of ACC airman working in the different squadrons there and their operations center and they’re doing cyber and they’re doing targeting and they’re doing unbelievable work. I wish we could skiff up this place and I could tell you everything they’re doing, because it’s unbelievable work that they’re doing, but it’s mostly in the non-kinetic realm. Frankly, the more contested it gets … and I believe it was in the earlier panel with Joe Latterback and company. The comment was made about how many nautical miles from the particular pier coast, it starts getting dangerous.

Well, that basically is a huge demand signal of you better get your non-kinetics in order before your kinetics even think about going anywhere. Frankly, when Joe Hawk was 16th Air Force commander and now John Kennedy, both the same discussion I had with each one of them as they were in 16th Air Force, and that is 16th Air Force, that information warfare set of experts really needs to be the conscience of the United States Air Force of taking us from a service that has been very, very physical oriented for many, many years and take us a little bit to the cognitive. Not hard to starboard, but we’ve we got to start migrating that way. We’ve been a very physical focused to cognitive, very kinetic focused to non-kinetic, very conflict focused to non-kinetic. Also, we’d like to say we’re digital, but they need to take us there. We’re still very, very analog as much as we’d like to say it.

As far as the non-kinetic and where I sit in ACC, growing up a small airplane guy, one of my biggest efforts, if not my biggest efforts is frankly EC-37 and every electromagnetic spectrum piece of equipment we have. As Joe Montgomery from our British allies said years ago, if we lose the war in the air, we’ll lose the war, and we’ll lose it quickly.

I would say today, if we lose the war in the electromagnetic spectrum, we’re going to lose the war and we’re going to lose it quickly. It’s those non-kinetic experts that take us first and foremost out the door. Many of our 72 hour ATO cycles don’t have non-kinetics as step one. Sometimes they have it as step 10 or step 20. It needs to migrate more to step one. We need to figure out what they can do early on before we start putting people at further risk. Sometimes now they have the best avenue and sometimes our allies have some capabilities and some authorities that outstrip our own. We can’t overstate the capability of our non-kinetic and the talent of our non-kinetic Airmen. Thanks.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Awesome. As a bit of a follow on, when we take a look at joint all-domain command and control as a means, what organized train and equip changes, adjustments, whatever do you see out there to implement or make JADC-2 a reality?

Gen. Mark D. Kelly:

Well, the big thing is I would again reference my partners up here on this stage is it needs to be collaborative in every sense of the word. Collaborative, frankly, means trust to a simple aviator. If we’re going to have trust, first and foremost, you have to trust the architecture and the network you’re operating on and your own system. You can have enterprise IT without doing JADC-2, but you can’t have JADC-2 without your enterprise sorted out. You’ve got to, first and foremost, trust the network you’re on. Then it was actually again in the previous discussion that we had in here. That is you have to trust the fine folks that are on the network. I think as far as an organize, train, equip, I think it’s really more organize, train, equip, and policy.

The policy, frankly, outstrips ACC. I’d call it what they referred to earlier as a data strategy, which again is, how are we going to standardize the data, how are we going to secure it, and how are we going to share it. When one of Alberto’s F-35s pushes something onto a network of a USS F-35, or a US AAC or a US E-37 or whatever the case may be, or a space sensor pushes something on the network, there shouldn’t be any ambiguity or me wondering, I wonder if Alberto’s team converted kilometers to miles and feet, et cetera. We should know. They’re on the net, that means they’re on our data strategy, which means they’re on our data standards, which means they’re on our data security. They’re sharing it, because they’ve met that high level of criteria and there should be no ambiguity. We can’t wait and wonder, we are the rate limit of machine speeds of the humans. We’ve got to make sure the stuff that’s provided to us is ready to go and so these teammates are ready to go. Thanks.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks very much. General Whiting, we all know about the growing threats in the space environment. Could you share with us and the audience some of the things that you all are doing in the Space Force to speed up the completion of the kill chain when we need to do that?

Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting:

Yeah. In Space Operations, Commander Spock, as we call the organization I have the privilege to lead, we’re focused on improving our resilience right now with the capabilities that we have. We say our number one priority is to prepare combat ready ISR-led cyber secure space and combat support forces. Let me unpack that a little bit. Combat readiness is the coin of the realm in Spock. We are the Space Force service component to US Space Command providing probably 95 percent of their capabilities. Certainly, the other service components provide very important capability, but we have the bulk as the service responsible for space. We have the bulk of that capability that’s provided to US space command, and so partnering with Space Training and Readiness Command or STARCOM, they perform our warfare center function. They’re providing us the venues for advanced training, they perform our Alpha-Tech test functions, so they’re providing the venues to go and test our TTPs.

We are trying to wring everything we can out of our current architectures. Now another way to improve that resilience is to truly embrace intelligence. I think this is one of the areas we’ve made the most progress in the last three years, as we’ve started the Space Force. We still have a long way to go, but when we started the Space Force, we went around the department of the Air Force and found all the pockets of intelligence that were supporting the space enterprise. Actually, a majority of that was not in Air Force Space Command. It was in other places in the Air Force, doing important work for space, but not tied directly to our tactical forces. We brought all that home now to Space Delta Seven, and Space Delta Seven now puts detachments of Intel Guardians in each of the other space deltas, ensuring that, as we’re executing each of those missions, we have the intel we need to know about the threats, have indications and warnings, and to operate again in the face of these threats we now face.

Then, we have to be cyber secure. Cyber is the soft underbelly of space networks by definition or global. They wrap around the globe and then they extend out to 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface, out to geosynchronous orbit. At some point in the not too distant future, they will go to the moon to cis-lunar, XGO as we call it. That creates a lot of novel cyber attack surface, and so that’s why we have a cyber Guardian workforce in the United States Space Force, is to defend us there. Now certainly China and Russia can take us on in the space domain, but it’s expensive and it’s more attributable than if they try to take us on and take us out in cyber.

We’ve created mission defense teams composed of these cyber Guardians to defend us in the cyber domain. Now we need enterprise IT as a service, which General Kelly mentioned, to continue to pay off, because that allows us to pivot our cyber Guardians away from provisioning base IT and moving them on to these mission defense teams. We’re making progress not as fast as we want to, but we want to scale that rapidly across all of our mission sets. Also, in the cyber domain, about 13, 14 months ago, we stood up our cyber security service provider CSSP, which is also providing layer defenses in the cyber domain of four of our mission sets and we will scale that over the FYDA across 27 various mission sets that we have. That is a way to build resilience, right now, is to scale those cyber defenses and then we’re looking to the future.

It is vital that the Space Force pivot to the next generation of resilient architectures. Think about how successful Starlink has been in the last year in the European AOR, a proliferated low earth orbit satellite that a determined adversary is trying to take off the air and has been unable to do so. Just think about this for a second. We have always assumed that in a near-peer fight we would lose Satcom, for example. Maybe here in the near term, maybe to the midterm, something like Starlink, a P-Leo constellation, has completely flipped that assumption. Maybe SATCOM can be ubiquitous and we can always be connected. It’s an interesting thought and something we need to continue to work through, but these future resilient architectures are vital to us for the reasons General Saltzman mentioned in his presentation. It raises the bar of how our adversary has to attack that which promotes deterrents.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

That’s awesome. Appreciate the insights. I’ve got a bit of a follow on. Given the importance of space in the process of identifying and targeting threats, how’s the Space Force approaching the deterrence of adversary aggression or should that deterrence fail? How do you engage? How do you defend our assets?

Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting:

The classical elements of deterrents hold in space as they do in any other domain. You want to be able to deny the benefits of your adversary potentially attacking. You want to be able to impose costs on them and you want all of that to be very clearly communicated, so they understand what they’re facing. Let’s think about integrated deterrents. Space is the eyes and ears of integrated deterrents. Of course it takes the whole joint force and our allies, but space is what allows us to look into that other country legally to see what their capabilities are to start to ascertain their intentions. Space also is what makes it instantaneous and global. It’s nice to know what’s going on on the other side of the planet, but if you can’t get that information back for hours, days, weeks or months, it is much less interesting.

If we can get it back immediately, which our space networks allow us to do that’s very promoting of deterrents. I also would point to our partnerships. Space is a team sport, by definition. No single service agency or country can do all that needs to be done in space. We have vital international partnerships. Just inside of Spock, we have a hundred either exchange officers, liaison officers, or positions we’re working to fill with our partners to bring them inside working with us. In fact, if you go over here to Buckley Space Force Base just a few miles away, walk onto our global missile warning ops floor where we detect any missile launched anywhere on the planet, it might be a Canadian, a Brit, or an Australian who’s commanding that crew today. That’s the level of integration that we have to continue to work. That promotes deterrents, too, because it complicates the targeting strategy and the targeting calculus of our adversaries.

We have equal partnerships with other US government agencies, commercial, academic, as well. Then lastly, I would point … because you asked what if deterrents fail. The days of space operating and individual stovepipes where maybe I’m just worried about missile warning or I’m just worried about space domain awareness are over. We now think and are rehearsing TTPs where we operate in force packages, the way we’ve learned from the US Air Force. We have high value assets on orbit that have to be protected. They cannot operate alone. They now have to operate with intel, with cyber, with command and control, with offense, with defense, with joint fires all coming together to protect those capabilities, so that we can defeat the threats and continue to provide those space effects which enhance joint force lethality and effectiveness.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Well, thanks for those insights. General Biavati, identifying and targeting threats and implementing those JADC2 concepts of operation with our allies is going to require both intel sharing as well as target deconfliction. What do you see as some of the key challenges facing these needs?

Lt. Gen. Alberto Biavati:

Well, I think the first problem is mentality. Mentality is a hard thing to change and it has to do a lot with your history, your education, your way of looking at the world. When we have to work together with other countries, that is a big problem. It’s first of all a big problem in Italy, where we have to work with other services and it’s very difficult to connect to them, to train to with them, to work with them, to make general planning with them. I heard this morning talking about the JLOC where finally also you can plan on something that is shared and which is important for everybody and not every single member of the panel works for his own service. First of all, that is the thing to do and we are working hard in Italy on that. We think that we are naturally a leader in the space domain.

We are naturally a leader in the air domain. As an Air Force, we think we could be leading the joint old domain command and control structure. Naturally we have a lot of resistance. If we go on the combined side, then we start talking about limitations due to access to information. I heard one of your Generals in the last panel from working in South Korea talking about problems that you have with Koreans for secret, no foreign. Secret no foreign is a big problem for us, too. If we want to develop connectivity and everything else, because if we want to continue forward on this line, what we are pressing in the last years trying to turn our Air Force by 2040 on a 100 percent fighters from fifth or sixth generation, we need the first of all to connect the fourth and fifth generations together.

The metal on the F-35 does not speak with the Link 16. The Link 16 does not speak with all the possible counties in Europe, plus all the possible services in Italy. It’s a question of mentality. First of all, we need to override this, in my opinion, very old mentality. I’ve always been thinking that we need to work like your chief of the air staff says, if we don’t change, you are dead. Julie, which was before Mitchell, someone that says something good for us, airman and Guardians. I would say he said it this morning that we need to change the mentality. For the infrastructure, I think is only a matter of technological means; we have those. We wouldn’t have built the F-35, we wouldn’t have built all the capabilities that we have in space. Italy is also working a lot on space, in particular the Air Force. We have a center in the northern part of Italy that collaborates strongly with the space command. We work together to track all the possible objects that are around us, in particular the friendly ones, let’s put it this way. We track all the orbiting and coming back into the atmosphere. We give advice to our national civil protection for possible dangers for the population, but mostly we concur mostly with the US in having a situational awareness that we think is necessary.

We want to develop that in our 15 to 20 year strategy that we just lay down. As I said before, we want to look for space success. We want to look for space capabilities of interoperability. We want to connect our fifth and sixth generation fighters with a possibility to work with space, together with space assets. I think connectivity, connectivity, and connectivity are the three important things that we need in order to get to a joint all domain command and control set up.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Well, very good. You mentioned F-35 and it’s a good segue to follow up for you. The fact that Italy is one of multiple nations who has the F-35. Could you comment a bit on how you view that platform in terms of increasing the interoperability with the rest of the forces who have that airplane and accomplishing our common objectives?

Lt. Gen. Alberto Biavati:

Well, first of all, I’m very grateful to my predecessors on, when I was much younger, decided to go on this path. It was difficult in Italy because of political resistance, of big resistance from the other services because F-35 takes a big chunk of our budget. Naturally, the other services weren’t particularly happy about the enterprise, but I think we went the right pace and we see it now. We have been leading in Europe, we have been the first one to declare IOC during an exercise in Spain. We have been the first one to have an operation deployment in Iceland to defend the Northern Atlantic gap. We are working together with all major European Air Forces who fly the F-35 plus with the US. I mentioned the Falcon strike that we flew a couple of times in southern Italy last year and the previous year again, and which was a very big success.

The US, you found an outstanding venue to train our capabilities. Naturally, I go back to the same issue as before. If you have an F-35 and then you land in the UK and then you have to bring around your maintenance team, because you cannot cross maintain the airplane. We were used in another way in the Cold War. Everywhere you landed, you had someone able to check your aircraft out even if it was a different airplane that you didn’t even own. Now we needed to work towards that direction and we need strongly, and I think from the last meetings I had, I speak for all the European partners in the program. We need the US to really move forward in these issues, because it has no sense to create a platform like the F-35, which has been made to give a standard to all the western world and then not let even cross maintain the airplanes if I land somewhere else. Imagine if we are at war and every threat becomes a target, how should we manage it? That’s my question.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Amen. Sharing those mission data files, too, and I need to do it optimally understanding that each nation’s going to have what they need to protect. That’s what machine learning’s all about. Okay. Enough. I could go on for hours on that one. We’re coming up to our end game, but we got about five minutes left. What I wanted to do is ask each of you something that I think everyone in here is interested in hearing, and that’s your take on any lessons that might be applicable to our subject area today with respect to what you’re seeing ongoing in the Russia, Ukraine war. We’ll just go down the …

Gen. Mark D. Kelly:

Okay. Like you said, we only have a few minutes. You could have a whole session on this alone. Real quick, I’d say there’s going to be a thousand lessons and it’s going to take a while to document them all. Folks will learn what they want to learn, I think, but a few of their obvious are if you have an organizational culture where dissenting opinion is not only not welcome, it’s ostracized and could get you terminated, those types of organizations make the worst decisions of any. The other one would be Russian wasn’t as strong as we thought, but they’re not as weak as we need. The alliance is stronger than anyone thought, and except for the folks that live in that alliance every day, there is an immeasurable power to a force that’s defending their farms, their freedom, their families, and their faith that you can’t measure and put on a Excel doc.

Don’t lose the information battle early. That helps when you’re not in good stead, when you pick a war with a professional actor who’s got right on his side and will get both houses of the UK and our Congress to standing ovation. That doesn’t end well. Also, if you think logistics are hard from the Belarusian border to Kyiv, try them across several thousand miles of hostile ocean. From narrowing it down to more of my swim lane of the air component, as we talked in the past AFA in September, it should strain every airman’s eyes to watch a bloody trench warfare and a grinding artillery duel. We want to be an Air Force to establish air superiority, time, and place for our choosing to execute an air defense, take down a time and place of our choosing to avoid a grinding bloody trench warfare with not thousands, hundreds of thousands of casualties.

If we’re going to have that Air Force, our nation needs to make a decision and continue resourcing a first-rate Air Force. If that’s too hard, then a second rate Air Force can handle that just fine. As we advocate to our fellow taxpayers, Congress voters, et cetera, we used to make sure a choose wisely, choose knowing that China’s building a first-rate Air Force and choose knowing that the only thing more expensive than a first-rate Air Force is a second rate Air Force, as we’ve seen play out over the past year.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks very much. General Whiting?

Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting:

Yeah, as General Kelly said, we’re going to be deriving these lessons for a long time, but I’ll just hit a few. One is I think we are watching what happens when a military force does not trust or have a professional, educated, empowered, and motivated enlisted force and junior company great officer force. I come to work every day so thankful for our enlisted Guardians and our junior officers and the Airmen that work alongside us in those ranks, because you give them a mission, they know what to do, they’ll figure it out, and they do it the right way. That’s probably lesson than number one. Lesson number two, Alberto mentioned the challenges with classification. While certainly commercial space is helping to just overcome some of those challenges. Now commercial space from the west and the United States is so innovative right now. We’re able to provide commercial capabilities in support of Ukraine, that are fantastic. They get around all of those security challenges and we’re seeing the power of high quality ISR.

Maybe the last thing I would mention is just, again, partnerships. It is our secret sauce that we have partners like Alberto and the number of nations that compose NATO. Then all the other relationships that we have and the countries that we’ve been watching there with Russia and with the PRC, they don’t have those relationships. We’ve seen the power of how a coalition can support a country and we just have to continue to foster those relationships.

Lt. Gen. Alberto Biavati:

Well, I fully concur with the three points that Steven just mentioned. I would like just to add 30 years of financially driven general planning based on the so-called peace support operations have, thank God, not been followed completely by the Italian Air Force. We have continued developing our capabilities, or at least the capabilities that we thought were necessary for a near-peer confrontation. It has paid off, because now we go back to the old world. I think we are very prepared. Now, what we need to do is to go from capability to capacity. Being financially driven, the budget has always been very scarce. We were in peace, peace dividends, and all these nice stories. Now we have to go back to rebuild. Here you have to help us out also. We have to rebuild our stocks. That is, I think, the most important thing. There’s little else to be added.

We rediscovered the vertical repositioning, the horizontal repositioning, the dispersal of depots, the dispersal of bases, all these nice things that we practice every day in the Cold War. Then again, based on the few of the little money that we got, we had to concentrate everything in few bases and in a few depots. I think we are prepared to follow on what has happened in Ukraine as in Air Force, and we are working now to adjust for the things that we have relearned after 30 years.

Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Well, unfortunately, we’ve come to the end of our timeframe here. On behalf of the Air and Space Forces Association and the Mitchell Institute, I’d like to wish each and every one of you a great aerospace power day, and please join me in thanking our panelists.

Watch, Read: ‘Warfighting from the Homefront: Senior Leaders Perspective’

Watch, Read: ‘Warfighting from the Homefront: Senior Leaders Perspective’

Katharine Kelley, Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital, USSF, moderated a session on “Warfighting from the Homefront: Senior Leaders Perspective” at the AFA Warfare Symposium, March 7, 2023. The session hosted Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations; Gen. David W. Allvin, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force; Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Joanne S. Bass; and Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Voiceover:

Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. Please join me in welcoming the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital for the United States Space Force, Katharine Kelley.

Katharine Kelley:

Hello and good afternoon. Can everybody hear me okay? Excellent. Excellent. Welcome. I’m so excited to have everybody here and for this really excellent panel that we’re going to have a great discussion with senior leaders from both Air and Space Force. So thanks so much for being here today. Very much appreciate it and absolutely honored to be up here on stage with this panel. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Kate Kelley, I’m the Chief Human Capital Officer or the S1 if you will, A1 equivalent for Space Force and it’s absolutely my privilege to be here with this leadership panel here today to talk with all of you. Thanks for being here and thanks for everyone’s attention. We’re going to talk a little bit about senior leader perspective on a couple of really interesting themes and topics this afternoon. And thanks to AFA for pulling all of this together, this opportunity for us to be on stage and hear from our great leaders here this afternoon.

So without any further ado, let me please just open as moderating the war fighting on the home front, senior leadership perspective panel. And so we’ve set this up to get their thoughts and views on certain topics. I’d like to welcome and of course thank General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations, General David Allvin, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Chief Master Sergeant Joanne Bass, and also Chief Master Sergeant Roger Towberman respectively, Air Force and Space Force. Thank you all so much for being here today. It’s an honor for everybody in the audience to hear from you.

So this year’s AFA Symposium theme is dominate Air and Space Forces to deter and fight and win. And with our Airmen and Guardians as well as their families, it’s critical that we have that ability and it’s critical that we have the ability to perform our mission in order to build the strongest teams possible because we really feel strongly about the value of what we bring for Airmen and Guardians to be able to do that. During this panel, I’ll be asking some of our leaders here questions focusing on the challenges that Airmen and Guardians face today, as well as the initiatives for improving things like quality of life, things like resiliency, community relations, and the military experience that all of you are part of and all of us on stage are as well. And so taking care of people and supporting our families will be part of our theme here today.

We want to help ensure that we are fielding a combat ready force that will deter, is ready to fight and will win against our adversaries. And we know that part of doing that is not only opportunities like this, but getting feedback from senior leaders on their perspective on some key issues. So my first question, I’m going to open to General Saltzman first, sir. Sir, in your 30 plus years in the military, you’ve moved several times, many times I suspect, and each move comes with change and uncertainty and challenges for both the military member and of course their families. So what assignments have made the biggest impression on you, on your sense of community and what advice do you have for military members to quickly establish their place in that new environment? Sir?

CSO Gen. B. Chance Saltzman:

Thank you Kate, and thanks to AFA for putting on this symposium. It’s always an honor to talk to Airmen and Guardians and like-minded Americans about some of these important challenges we face. And I think this is a particularly important panel. So thanks Kate for putting this together. I think I may be one of the more fortunate people on the stage. In 30 plus years, it’s always plus when you go above 30, right, Orville? 30 plus years, but only 17 moves. And so that may be fewer than my compatriots here. That’s not very many for that long of a career. But it’s enough that I know all the headaches, I know all the inconveniences, I know the trials and tribulations of moving families from coast to coast and you thought you were going to be somewhere for three years and it turned out to be eight months.

And again, this crowd understands those challenges in great detail. But it’s also fun when you’re the old guy and you think back on all those moves as inconvenient as they were, there’s something kind of nice about them. My family, we talk about how it kind of pulled us tighter together. You know, spend 30 hours in a car moving across a country and you get to know each other really well, all the ins and outs. And so I think there are some strengths to being a mobile force, if you will. But for me, a couple of key assignments give me this sense of community that I’ve reflected on more than once. The first one was my very first duty station at Malmstrom Air Force Base as a missileer. And what I remember thinking about was that we were all there basically at the same timeframe of life. We were all doing the same kinds of things. We had the same challenges, the same struggles, and we were learning from each other continuously.

And I think back to what a great place that was to be a lieutenant and try to figure the Air Force out and how great the people were that were around me that were teaching me what it was like to be in the Air Force and that sense of community. Whether it was the very old majors and lieutenant colonels that were teaching me about how Air Force worked or whether it was my peers, the lieutenants, showing me what they were struggling with and making me feel like I’m not by myself in working through these challenges. But I think also what’s important to know is as you move through your career, your circumstances and life change. And so I also think about my time as a squadron commander at Vandenberg Air Force Base at the time now Space Force Base. And that was different because now I have a family, I had two children at the time. And so it’s a very different kind of base community when you’re going through the struggles of raising a young family.

But when you’re in that base community and the kids are running around playing with kids their own age and how safe we felt letting the kids just roam the streets on base there and the old adage stay out till the streetlights come on or it gets dark and come home. And all of that I think built a sense of community again, where my neighbors were helping raise my kids the same way I was helping raise their kids. We were all in it together. We were all kind of experiencing the same challenges. And I think back on that kind of community and at that time Air Force, now Space Force for me, it was a second family. It was an extended family that helps you get through all the trials and the tribulations that come with military service. And so I think very fondly about those two experiences. But it was just that we were with a group of people that we enjoyed being around, like-minded Americans, like-minded patriots going through the same kinds of things. And we were all in it together and I think very fondly about that time.

Katharine Kelley:

Thank you, sir. Could I ask General Allvin to address the question too?

VCSAF Gen. David Allvin:

Sure. And thank you very much. Well, I tell you what, CSO really brought out a lot of the very important things when you talk about the community that are of like-minds and like-experiences. And so we all understand that we are the same community because we have a same reference point about the transition and the mobility that’s required. I think I’d like to talk about two times where it was most impactful on me in the Air Force community and the community that we moved to. I’d say the first one was at Grand Forks, North Dakota. It was the summer of 2001 and when we got there, we could not hear enough from the community how appreciative they were about how Grand Forks Air Force Base helped save the town with a terrible flood of 1997. This is something that happened four years before, but they were effusive and they were so sincere that this was a group of people that lived on a base just outside of town.

No, not exactly Metropolis, but still they were separated by a little bit of geography, but came together because external events really brought us together and sort of solving the same problem together. So a couple months later, 9/11 hits and the very same thing. We all found ourselves in a new environment trying to figure it out a little bit scared, a little bit nervous. We hadn’t done this before. Now that happened within the gates and that happened within the community. And this idea that there’s so much more that connects us than doesn’t was really very impactful on me. And that was an example where external events really brought the entire community together. And then the next one is absolutely Altus Air Force Base. Now there I was fortunate enough in AETC, and I know it’s all different now, but at the time you felt like that you were not quite mainstream AETC and that was the great part because AETC, they’d call up to you go, “How’s it going up there?”

‘Cause I didn’t know much about what Altus did, “Allvin, how’s it going?” “Oh, it’s good.” “Need a thing?” “No, I’m good.” So it was this fantastic opportunity, but there was something and still remains about that community that was more than just this transaction will take care of the folks on the base. And I know you could be cynical and say, well, you need to do that because you want to be BRAC proof. That wasn’t it. Altus, the community of Altus loved its Airmen, loves its Airmen, loves the entire family. And you could tell that in everything that they did. I have friends for life from Altus, and the one story that I probably hear as many as any other was is one of the most touching to me.

I was brand new wing commander trying to figure out what that meant at Altus. And the first thing that they had was this thing called of a committee of a hundred. And it was a hundred of the businesses around Altus. And again, I’m not being pejorative, but Altus doesn’t have 10,000 businesses. So a lot of that community comes out and they came out more for the youngest Airmen and their family than they did for the senior leadership. And I remember standing up there and I’m trying to introduce myself to this community and about halfway down, one of my three kids, our youngest who was three at the time, was trying to get away and Gina was trying to hold her back so it wouldn’t embarrass dad. And she breaks free and I’m just trying to get my legs underneath me and communicate to this audience.

Very similar here, comes running up on stage and looks at me. And so I give her the mic, she turns around, she says, “Hi, my name is Reagan and I’m three.” And that was it. That was all. I was the most popular guy and just because of her, I could do nothing wrong after that. But it just showed you that this community really is something that you don’t have to necessarily have a shared current experience, but if you have a shared love and a shared common values and interests, then it doesn’t matter if it’s a community inside or outside the base. That’s what makes us strong. And those are two times that really reflect and keep in my mind.

Katharine Kelley:

Thank you. Great feedback and obviously a theme of community and a theme of support in those two initial responses, which is perfect because my next question, I’m going to tee up to Chief Bass and Chief Towberman, whoever wants to take it first, up to you. We wanted to talk about resilience in the force and resilience as individuals and resilience as Airmen and Guardians. So what issues and barriers do you find most impact on resilience and what ideas and recommendations do you have for this audience to think about when we talk about resilience as a community and as Airmen and Guardians?

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

You want me to go?

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman:

Yeah, you go.

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

Does anybody have a three-year-old I can borrow? Okay. Okay, good, good, good. Hey, first of all, good afternoon, AFA. Awesome, very excited to be here. Thanks so much for moderating, I’m very excited to be with my fellow wing men and brothers on this stage. When it comes to resilience, I’ll be honest, there’s not probably a venue that I go to or an all call that I go to where resilience, wellbeing, health comes up and I would offer, I think there’s several barriers when it comes to us being able to be our best self. One of those that I know for certain is the stigma of just going to get help. And so we have worked really hard to try to help get beyond that stigma that it is okay to get health because if you’ve heard the Secretary of the Air Force, in fact say it right, mental health is health.

And so we need to all of us, every leader, every Airman, every wing man, every Guardian, be able to really help get after that stigma on being able to seek help. The other challenge and barrier that we have is the capacity to be able to go get the help when we need it, which is really what informed our rollout of the spectrum of resilience. And hopefully you all saw it, hopefully you didn’t do an auto delete when the email came your way. But that spectrum of resilience really speaks to what is that whole continuum of resilience throughout an Airman’s life, throughout their career, and what are all the different touchpoints that we can have before we do go seek mental health or need that support. Certainly there are things that we can do to be able to help take care of ourselves. I’m a big fan of the comprehensive Airman fitness pillars that we have.

What are the things that we can do to be able to help our own family members, our fellow wing men, the people on our right and left. And so those are some barriers which really, and my teammate Chief Towberman may expand upon this, which really informed the Fortify The Force initiative team that both he and I championed to help get after the barriers that are not helping our Airmen, our Guardians, our family members, our veterans from being able to gain the help that they need to be able to fortify themself. And so that Fortify The Force initiative team has really… It’s hitting its one-year anniversary this month and they have done a lot of grassroots efforts to bring to the senior leaders things that are barriers from our people getting help. And some of those are policy things as well. And we’re knocking those out. Towby, any thoughts?

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman:

Yeah, so I mean, first I think it’s important we got to say one thing because I know we are creatures of habit. We like this regimented life that we live as military members and former military members. So I know this a huge audience and most of you didn’t read the fine print. You assumed that if we were going to be on stage, we would have our spouses with us. And the only reason you’re here was to see Rachel and she’s not here. And so I apologize that I’m by myself and you have to only listen to me and not the enlightened perspective of my beloved wife who’s at home hopefully watching this and yelling at me through the cats right now. But thanks for being here and thanks for putting this on. So we are doing a lot with Fortify The Force. I should say, they’re doing a lot.

And I think that that’s probably to me, the biggest barrier that any of us face. And that is this ridiculous notion that we’re supposed to live our lives and deal with our problems by ourselves, which is the most unnatural, abnormal perspective we could possibly have. Everything we’ve done from the beginning of our species, we’ve done together in groups and for some reason these days we want to deal with our challenges alone. And nothing could make challenges more difficult than trying to tackle them on your own. And so from a Space Force perspective, it’s why Guardians ask for connection as a value. It’s why they are embracing it so well. And so naturally we have to have our teammates, we have to have our families, we have to have help to navigate this very difficult thing that we call life. I don’t think there’s more noticeable a barrier, but also no more easier barrier to conquer than just stop trying to deal with it by yourself.

You’ve got teammates who care about you, who love you, you’ve got family, you’ve got friends. And the Fortify The Force Initiative is bringing together people to help solve their problems together. And that’s the most important part of the whole thing. And so we’re lucky when our barriers are so easy to identify and frankly, so simple conceptually to conquer. We’ve just got to make that decision. Stop living in isolation, stop trying to solve your problems on your own and reach out to your teammates and reach out to your friends and reach out to the people who want to help you and then help others and judge your success and know that what makes you valuable as a human being, as an Airman, as a Guardian, as a leader, what makes you valuable is the lives that you change and the difference that you make in other people’s lives. And invest in their biographies and yours will write itself.

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

Can I add one more thing, one alibi on that?

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman:

Of course. You always add on my stuff.

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

When we talk about the capacity piece, it’s interesting when I talk to most of our mental health professionals, and I don’t know if there are any in here today, but typically I’ll talk with them about the challenges that they have in that business and in that space. And when I talk with most of them, they share with me that out of the 10 people who might come into seek mental health at the mental health clinic, that only about two of the folks that come in actually need clinical mental health support. The other eight simply they need support and they need help. Most of all, they just need to know if somebody cares. And so that is really a profound thing. And we talk about the capacity piece. Our nation is short mental health providers, which means the Department of Defense is, which means your Air force is, but what we’re not short of is leaders.

And what we’re not short of is wing men. And it gets back after what you said, if the person on our right or left would just be there for each other and then help try to figure out within that spectrum of resilience how to get after this, how much better will be. But again, the number one thing I often hear is our people just need to know that somebody cares. Thanks.

Katharine Kelley:

Thank you both. Obviously there’s a theme here on… We heard a little bit in the opening discussion about teams around you and being supportive, both family, communities, but also making sure that you’re taking care of each other. And so on that note, we’ve got a perfect segue into the next thematic question that I wanted to pose. And so I’m going to go to General Allvin first. And sir, we’re talking about quality of life now and obviously a little bit of what’s already come up in our first conversations, but can you give us a little bit of a sense of where you’re seeing things going well with respect to quality of life for Airmen and Guardians, and if you have any thoughts on areas where we need to continue to work?

VCSAF Gen. David Allvin:

Yeah, I do and I appreciate the question. And I think it’s interesting because coming off of the very serious issue that both the Chiefs just talked about, when we talk about quality of life, I think a lot of things… We all almost say it in the same sentence or paragraph in support to the families. And so I just want to bifurcate this, and I know I’m doing this in a dangerous way because the subject matter we just talked about, there is a definite support for someone who is suffering from an ailment or there are also other areas where we have people who have been subjected to terrible things and they’ve been a victim of experience and they need support. And there’s a certain characteristic and attribute of that support. I think that we also need to understand when we’re talking about supporting families, it’s not like they’re victims.

This is a rockstar team. This is a fantastic team that we’re a part of, and these families are a part of that team. And so we’re talking about quality of life. If you have an all-star team, you don’t do things to make that team perform better to support them because you feel sorry for them. You do that because they are going to not only help the team, they’re going to help themselves personally, professionally. And so a lot of these quality of life initiatives are truly that because we have offered to join our team in one way or another, either by raising your right hand or by marriage or by any other… That part of the team has a agreed to be here. And so the sacrifice is something we in some way, shape or form have submitted to doing and it’s a fantastic team.

So that’s where the responsibility comes, I think, in and making sure that that team can help reach the full potential. And so some of the things that we are dealing with, I really harken back a little bit to what the Secretary of Defense did last fall with his supporting people memo. And it talks about some of the things with helping moves. How do you help moves? We all know moves or transitions. Transitions can be tough, especially when you’re trying to find housing. And so this idea of temporary living expenses extending that Department of Defense is doing that. Childcare, which we’ll probably talk about later as well, enhancing childcare because that’s meeting where our rockstar team where they are, lots of those teams have children who are going to grow up to be rockstar team members as well. We need to make sure we care for them.

So while we have work to do on gaining the right facilities and making sure we have the proper capacity, we also need to make sure we’re hiring the right folks and we have rockstar teammates who could be a part of that force. And in order to do that, we need to make sure we’re paying them appropriately and incentivizing them appropriately. And so that’s when the Secretary of Defense put in that supporting the people memo about for the children of those who would might come on board and be CDC employees that make sure you have at least 50% of a discount. Well, the Air Force has gone a little further than that. We said a hundred percent discount for the first one, 25% discount for all those beyond. So reaching further into that, we’re really getting into those things that I think are a little bit enduring issues for quality of life that we should always be working on.

And so that’s where I think we’ve made some progress in those. But at the same time, if I were to say where we could have improvements, it’s on those same things. And that’s why I really appreciate what Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Saltzman along with the Chief and CSO are on this Five And Thrive piece. It’s these five elements. They’re not new to us that we want to make sure we maintain focus on housing, healthcare, childcare, education, spouse employment. These are things that are going to ensure that this rockstar team that we have continues to perform the best for the team and for themselves. And so there’s two things I would say for improvement. One is speed. We live in a time where the pace of change is quickening, but our bureaucratic decision making isn’t. And when I say bureaucratic, that’s so royal. We’re part of United States Air Force, which is part of a Department of Air Force, part of Department of Defense, part of an executive branch, part of US government.

All those wheels have to turn and the world is turning pretty fast. And so when we see some of our Airmen and families having to deal with exigencies of the environment that the bureaucracy hasn’t put in place in a timely enough manner, the solutions for that becomes a bit of a challenge. We can always work on that. And the other part is follow through. When we come up with an idea or an initiative or a project, we work very hard to get that across the finish line. That may not be the finish line, that finish line of getting the project started or initiated or funded is really the start of the next journey. The next journey is following up on execution, follow through. What did we expect that thing to do for us and how long should we let it go before we decide to try something else?

Or maybe the problem is in execution, it wasn’t the problem with the initiative at all. We have some of the greatest solutions that nobody’s ever heard of because we haven’t communicated them properly. And that’s why some of the things that the Five And Thrive initiative is doing is constantly having these monthly updates and having access to those programs so people can at least try them. And then we’ll realize whether we are on the right track and we have poor execution or maybe we need to go back to the drawing board. And so I would say speed and follow through on the initiatives that we know we need to work on or maybe we could have some improvement.

Katharine Kelley:

Thank you, sir. Chief Bass, anything to add?

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

Absolutely, I don’t think a day that goes by that we’re not always thinking about the quality of life, the quality of service and welfare of our service members and their families. It’s always interesting to me when I’m out talking with our Airmen and their families because I always hear, right, I wonder if General Brown knows about this or I wonder if Chief Bass knows about this, I wonder if they know about the COLA reductions over in Japan or Guam or Italy or wherever. I wonder if they know that some of our commissary shelves are empty, right? The answer overwhelmingly is yes, because your senior leaders across your major commands, your NAFs and your wings really do inform us well on those challenges. And it gets back after Vice Chief, what you said, which is how do we respond in this bureaucratic system at the speed of relevancy? And to make it even more challenging is just how fast we’re trying to keep pace with some of the things that challenge your quality of life like inflation and like housing costs and et cetera.

And so we are really working hard and I’m actually really proud of our department of the Air Force for being very proactive with OSD to help get after some of these, taking care of people and their family members thing. And for us being able to have that voice to the Secretary of Defense to say, Hey, here’s what’s really happening boots on the ground and here’s how we have to get after some of those challenges. Improvements, there’s always improvements that we need to make. This is why one of my focus areas really is while we’ve been successful for the past 75 years, we have to be very forward-thinking in how do we take care of today’s service member and their families. And that means we really have to just dig deep into all of our processes and all of our policies. And if it was good enough 10 years ago does not mean that it’s good enough today. So we have got to constantly look at how do we modernize and how do we get more responsive when it comes to quality of life of our service members and their families.

Katharine Kelley:

Great. Thank you so much. Great thoughts there. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Chief. I’m going to turn a little bit now to General Saltzman and Chief Towberman on a slightly more nuanced topic, perhaps more relevant to Space Force, although clearly impacts on some Airmen as well. Space Force is geographically concentrated in certain parts of the country, sir. Many units employed in place, a different construct arguably from many of the services and so what I would like to explore as part of the panel today is what you see as unique challenges in that construct and also what opportunities might that present to Space Force having that particular nuance.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman:

Sure. So I’ll start, I think especially when it comes to recruiting and retention, and I say this a lot, it’s never the stuff as much as it’s does the stuff meet the expectations. And so I think we have to be from day one honest about, Hey, we’re in a few places and if the only reason you’re coming in the military is to get stationed in Crete, then probably Space Force is not your gig, right? Crete’s awesome, by the way, had a lot of good times there. I think we have to be honest about that. But with these few main operating locations, number one, there’s plenty of opportunities. I mean, just in the last couple months alone, we’ve visited Guardians all over the place, in really exciting places. So there is certainly opportunity to still see the world, but at our main operating locations, there’s different types of opportunities.

If you know that you have the opportunity to come back to a community repeatedly, then you make different investments in that community emotionally and perhaps financially you can put down roots in a different kind of way. So I think we’ve got to really talk about our ecosystem honestly and openly and then recruit to a base that is attracted to this unique lifestyle that we live where 75% of the force is employed in place. And that’s hard and it has its own challenges, but it also has some really cool opportunities to have a different kind of lifestyle. So to me, it’s really mostly about correctly framing the expectations and then allowing the choice and control as much as we can with Guardians to be able to capitalize on the opportunities that are there. And then of course there’s the mission piece threat, you probably want to talk about.

CSO Gen. B. Chance Saltzman:

Yeah, but let’s not skip too fast past what Chief Towberman said, join the Space Force, go to Florida, California and the front range of Colorado, right?

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman:

They are horrible places, right? Yeah.

CSO Gen. B. Chance Saltzman:

I wanted to talk for a minute about employed in place because this audience of course knows that that happens and it happens in the Air Force as much as it does quite frankly in numbers as it does in the Space Force. But from a percentage standpoint, the vast majority of our operations are conducted from our home stations. And this creates opportunities and challenges and we have to make sure we’re accounting for all those and the differences. Growing up in the Air Force, there was definitely an emphasis that you had to be ready to be an expeditionary part of the force. And that didn’t always resonate with space people or when I started in the ICBMs, but I recognized that that was what the majority of the Air Force was about. It was about moving out to austere places to provide air power for the nation.

Now that we’re a separate service, we don’t have to think about a deployment model as being the central theme for how we do operations. So it’s important that we understand what the distinction is with employed in place. I thought back to a time when I was a much younger person… Actually General Whiting mentioned this morning to a crowd that a much younger Saltzman and a much younger Whiting were on the ops floor at Vandenberg watching in real time the Chinese destroy one of their own satellites. And we talked about how that was such a game changer. Literally the space domain had almost in an afternoon shifted from the way we grew up in a benign environment to one that we recognized was going to be a war fighting domain. And the reason I bring that story up is because I remember getting in my car and driving home that afternoon and my son asked me if I would teach him how to throw a spiral with the football.

And I literally am trying to process what was going on at work. The entire domain that I’m responsible for has shifted to a war fighting domain and I’m processing this and my 12-year-old son is trying to figure out how to throw a football. And the mental disconnect that I was having in the backyard trying to process that was really nothing when you think about… We were just at Buckley yesterday talking to some of the young Guardians down there who were on the ops floor when the Russians attacked Ukraine and they watched hundreds of missiles go into Ukraine from their screens. And they did an amazing job of reporting one of the largest attacks that we’ve ever seen since we’ve had these sensors on orbit. And then within hours they’re sitting at home watching the news reels of the devastation, the tragedy that was unfolding in Ukraine.

And it suddenly hit a lot of them that, wait a minute, those dots I was just watching on the computer screen that’s turning into combat operations and the warning that we provided is trying to save the people that I’m now watching on the screen. And they struggle with that because that’s different. It’s different to be in an op center in a combat environment and then two hours later you’re sitting on your own couch. For those of us that deployed, and I know that’s the vast majority of this crowd, there is something about a deployed location that gets you mission focused and you by necessity almost have to put the people that are back in the States on the back burner and focus on what you’re doing. And it’s very clarifying and you have to focus on it. And it’s tremendous amount of work.

But I remember spending 27 straight hours in the kayak after a particular attack. Never once did I think, I feel guilty for not calling my wife because she knew that where I was, I was deployed. But when you’re employed in place, that is running through your mind, I got to get home for dinner, what’s going on? And in space, it’s even more problematic because we get home and then we can’t talk about it because most of what we do is at the top secret and higher levels. And so we stare into the distance sometimes and they know something’s wrong. Our spouses are pretty savvy, they’ve learned us and they know something’s wrong and they know we can’t talk about it. And you almost just kind of stare at each other and you hug and you hope that that’s enough. But being employed in place and doing combat operations from Colorado for example, we have to understand that all the stressors of life are playing out while all the stressors of combat operations are playing out.

Now, is it the same as kicking a door in? No. But do you feel the stress? Do you feel the weight that you doing your job is actually protecting people and saving lives down range? Absolutely. And so do we have the chaplain support? Do we have the resiliency teams? Do we have the doctors, the medics that are there to think about resiliency of our forces doing combat operations in Colorado, in California? And I think that that’s a leadership challenge for us to make sure that we don’t forget that dealing with the stressors of life is tough and you have to be resilient just to deal with those. And when you layer onto that combat operations, it can change things dramatically. And so I think I speak for everybody up here that has missions that they know play out like that, that we are committed to understanding those nuances, understanding those challenges, and providing the kinds of resources that our Guardians and Airmen need when they’re conducting those operations employed in place.

Katharine Kelley:

Thank you both. I will tell you, I relatively just joined the Air Force and the Space Force from another service. And I want to go back to a point that Chief Bass made because it actually underpins a lot of the conversation here from the panel today. The voice that the Air Force and the Space Force are presenting to OSD and to Congress in support of quality of life and resiliency and taking care of people is a strong one, maybe the strongest. And so I think you all should be very proud of what is happening in terms of acknowledging what needs to take place, what might need to change, what might need to continue quickly and deliberately, but also know that there is no doubt that this particular department is leading the charge in terms of making it known what is necessary to become part of a resilient team that is Air Force and Space Force.

So I think on behalf of everybody in this audience, thanks for all of your support and your leadership and helping do that. You’ve just illustrated not only the why of that, but also what you all are championing and doing for Airmen and Guardians today that is so powerful and so strong. So thank you all very much for that. I have a few minutes left and I did have a couple of what I call hold teaser questions, but because this is such a strong panel, they’ve addressed some of them already. One was about the challenge of childcare that we acknowledge across all of our portfolios, and we heard a little bit already on some of the initiatives that are happening in that area. And the other one was about pay and compensation.

And so I was just very briefly ask Chief Towberman and Chief Bass if they have any thoughts on this because the quadrennial review of military compensation is by law in place and happening. In fact, we had the first kickoff with OSD last week where there’s a board of directors in air and space are represented on that board of directors. But I know this is near and dear to your hearts based on your testimony last week. And so before we go to our final question, I wanted to just see if either of you had any thoughts you might want to share on the power of that particular review and why it’s so important to the themes we’ve talked about today.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman:

Yeah, thanks, ma’am. So I know that I don’t have to remind this room that the most decisive military advantage in the history of the world is the enlisted force of this nation. And that force has never been more educated, has never been more skilled, has never been more empowered, has never been more important. And the question for the nation is do we value that advantage commensurate with its importance to our freedoms? And so I think we both are looking forward to the QRMC and the hard look across multiple lines of effort that the President has asked the department to look at. And there’s a process, and I think at least from my perspective, I’m not interested in guessing, I’m not interested in just throwing good ideas out.

We’re interested in following the data and truly looking at age-old formulas, some of them that go back to the Vietnam era, they go back to the draft that this is how we figure out housing, this is how we figure out pay, this is how we decide what the value proposition of serving is, and it all needs to be reevaluated for the modernity in which we live and the real world in which we have to recruit and retain the greatest advantage that this world has ever known. There you go.

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

Absolutely, I think, if this is very much the CliffNotes version, we both testified in front of Congress last week, and so we didn’t get fired, so that was good.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman:

We got to testify this week too, so there’s still time.

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

Yeah, yeah. That wasn’t good, but I would say, go back to that… But the one thing that I want to add onto that is this year we are celebrating our 50th anniversary of the all volunteer force. Our goal is to make sure that in five years from now we have an all volunteer force and in 10 years from now we have an all volunteer force. And so the piece that CMSSF talks about on valuing our people is critical. We need a holistic look at today’s military paying compensation writ large for all of our service members, again and for all the reasons that you listed, but we need that and we need it sooner than later to make sure that in five years from now or 10 years from now, we continues to have that competitive advantage and that all volunteer force.

Katharine Kelley:

Thank you both very much. I could not have asked for a better segue into our final question, and so I’m going to just go there and I will open it up to the panel for whoever wants to jump in first. But the segue’s perfect. So all volunteer force, I hope many of you know, and if you don’t, spoiler alert little bit of facts here. We are facing a data set that suggests that there is a significant declination, if you will, declining rates in people’s willingness to serve in our nation, in our military, meaning our younger generations. We see data where we have a declining propensity to serve.

And so knowing that and thinking about where we are right now as an all volunteer force, what I wanted to ask of all of you, because I think it’s so powerful for all of us as ambassadors of our brand to hear from you, your thoughts on what military service has meant to you and specifically your service to the Air Force and the Space Force, and how would you advise this group of people here? How should we be talking to young people about the value proposition of service? And there’s been a theme throughout today’s discussion about community, about supporting each other, about getting after things that we need to fix, about the power of team. But all of that can’t be said any better than what your heartfelt words might be. So my close question is essentially what would you advise this audience to talk about what’s powerful to you with respect to military service and how can we continue to be an all volunteer force?

CSO Gen. B. Chance Saltzman:

So I have no idea what to tell this audience because you have your own stories and your stories are probably enough because you don’t spend a lifetime in public service and military service and not have all those stories. When I sit here, I think instantly that it’s been the honor of my life to serve my country, but I think it was 32 years ago when I was commissioned, Mike, you were there. Listen, the only person more surprised than I’m sitting here is Mike because he was watching me get commissioned. But I think it’s important to recognize that the things that maybe get you into service aren’t the reasons you stay. And we have to think about this as a continuum of service and continue to tell the stories. My entering the Air Force back then was pretty transactional. They pay for college. There’s a job waiting on the other end, and so I’m in. But that’s not why you stay for the second tour because all of a sudden there’s relationships and people you like and respect and it’s a fun group to hang out with.

And so you take the next job and you take the next job and before you realize that you have this sense of purpose because you go home on leave and you watch your friends from high school and the jobs they have are… They’re making good money, but they don’t have this calling, this sense of duty and they respect so much of what I was doing. I just started to feel this sense of purpose. And then before you know it, in the blink of an eye, you’re the old guy on base and now you have this desire to give back to the institution that’s given you so much. And so I think it’s all of those stories along the way. Public service is an amazing journey because the people that are in it, the people that do it for that long, do it for these esoteric, unbelievably patriotic and heartfelt reasons.

It’s not about chasing a job. And again, I know we’re a little bit lecturing to the choir but if you tell your stories, if you tell the best parts of military service, it’s a calling, the profession of arms. If you tell those stories, they’re going to be inspiring and people are going to follow your footsteps.

VCSAF Gen. David Allvin:

Man, I wish I’d a gone first. Said what I was going to say only a little bit better. So I do believe it is about stories, it is about narratives. I think there is a narrative out there and as everything else, the pace of change quickens. So does the ability to get a narrative out there and get it to be crystallized and polarizing. And that’s a problem because the narratives that are out there are sometimes not necessarily totally factual and sometimes without context. And so I’ll use the example of… I’ve served, we all have served with heroes for the last three decades plus who have done America’s work and some of them paid the ultimate sacrifice and some of them are still suffering from the wounds of it. And so thank God we have organizations that are here to take care of them. Sometimes that’s all that America sees though. And so it becomes this picture of a place where people need to be fixed because they were broken.

And while that’s true and we should be so thankful that there are those among us who are willing to do that for those within our formation who need that help, that’s not the only narrative. There’s another narrative out there and it just needs to be told and it needs to reach those who are going to follow on and be able to have that narrative to talk about in the future. This idea that Gen Z-ers and the youth are different, they don’t really care that much, that’s becoming debunked more and more. It’s a human thing to want to be a part of a team. It’s a human thing to want to live with purpose. It’s a human thing to want to matter. And so value proposition, here’s a value proposition for you. You get to participate in history rather than just watch it.

Kid grows up in the backdrop of the Cold War, decide he wants to fly, finds out his first assignment is in Germany, gets to be there when the wall comes down, gets to stand over Wenceslas Square when Vaclav Havel is talking over 300,000 people in a peaceful revolution and changing the face of Europe. Then that kid gets to come back to the states and participate in one of the biggest operations in a long time in the thing called Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and gets to see the most beautiful and terrible sunrises and sunsets and all those things that are happening in that desert war. And then gets to go through the rest of that next decade challenging himself in the most technical way, lucky enough to go to a place called Test Mile School and in the intellectual way to a place called SASS. And then gets to be a part of a team that when the world changes after 9/11 gets to lead that team into trying to transform that into a place where the nation can feel safe again.

And then is allowed to keep moving on and participate in three strategic reviews about how we might want to alter the strategy of the defense department, gets to come back and work on Air Force strategy, gets to go over to Europe and build a war plan for a command that was a relationship command that so Putin started screwing around the first time. And then gets to come back and speak in front of our audience about three plus decades worth of that story. Now, just because that was me I was talking about, you don’t have to be a four star to get to do all those things. Everything I did, each one of those I did as part of a team, being part of a team in a time that matters in a place of consequence who could want more as far as a purpose filled life, there’s your value proposition and that’s what we have and that’s what you’re all living right now. So I agree with CSO, tell those stories. We are the value proposition. We should be living those and telling that rather than letting the story tell us.

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

Oh no, we’re going by age. You first. You first.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman:

Wow. When I was 17 years old, I packed up everything I owned in my 1976 Pontiac Catalina and I pulled away from my mom’s double wide to be a rock star. You can see how that worked out. I messed up my life in every way imaginable. Between 17 and 22, I’ve stolen food to feed myself. It doesn’t matter what I do, I don’t think my debt with the United States Air Force and now Space Force will ever be paid. We’ve got to tell our stories, we’ve got to tell our stories and we’ve got to play offense. We can’t just sit in our echo chambers and tell them, we can’t just come into friendly confines and tell them. There was a time where maybe our brand was so significantly impenetrable that playing defense was good enough, and that as long as no ugly articles made the paper, we were okay. That time isn’t now.

We’ve got to challenge the people who would twist the reality that because we choose to tackle the greatest ills of our society, that somehow that means we have more of those ills than anyone else. We’ve got to challenge that narrative with real stories of teamwork, of love, of second chances, of late bloomers. We’ve got to take this narrative to the streets. We’ve got to mobilize the nation that seems at times to be ripping itself apart. If you wear this uniform, you are what makes this country great. You are what unites us. And every single one of you can tell that story and we’ve got to play offense. It matters so much. Thank you for your service can’t be just some polite thing people are supposed to say. It’s got to be something that more people inherently understand. And so thanks in advance for getting outside of your echo chambers and helping to tell your story. I think the rest of the value proposition sort of works itself out. But you wanted to go last, so there you go. Smarty-pants.

CMSAF Joanne S. Bass:

This one, you can learn a lesson or two from your elders. I should have went first. There is no more nobler cause than to be able to serve one’s nation, but I think it’s important to appreciate that everybody joins for a different reason. And if you look along this stage, and if you heard what everybody said, we all join for different reason, transactional at times. When I look back in almost three decades, three decades this week it’ll be, but I joined to get my GI Bill, figure out life. My dad told me that four years in the military never hurt anybody. I’m still trying to figure out what four years he was talking about. And then I tell people all the time, I only re-enlisted at the four-year mark to pay off my Honda Civic, like real talk. And then it was probably about the eight-year mark where I really joined our Air Force and I understood what it means to wear our nation’s cloth.

And so today we have to appreciate that everybody joins for a different reason. And that’s okay. I actually tell our Airmen all the time, “I don’t actually care if you sign up to do four years, six years, eight years, 28 years, most of us just signed up to do four quick years. What I do expect you to do is to make our department of the Air Force better. That is what we need for you to do.” Especially at a time like this where we’re serving in the most complex times ever. And so that is a value proposition that I might offer. I would also offer that we also have to value the fact that we have five generations that are serving in today’s workforce. And when people talk about Gen Z, Vice Chief, as you talk about that, you know what we’ve learned about Gen Z is Gen Z, by the way, actually wants to serve.

They just want to serve in their own way. And so we’ve got to figure out those different pathways to allow them to be able to serve their nation and really be able to serve in this noble cause. And so with that, thank you all so much for your time. Thank you for your service. And on behalf of all of us, please thank your family members and your loved ones for their support to you so that you can defend this nation. Thank you.

Katharine Kelley:

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. I have failed miserably as the moderator I am over time, but if you got something out of this, if you’ve got a lot out of this, a huge round of applause for our panel. And thank you all so much.

Voiceover:

Thank you so much. Would Kate Kelly and our Esteem Panel, please remain on the stage for the Joan Orr Spouse of the Year presentation. Will Meredith Smith, please come forward and join our panel stage center?

Mrs. Meredith Smith exemplifies outstanding volunteer service through her diverse and ongoing support of military spouses. She established a 5 million dollar pilot fellowship program in a variety of industries and led a team of 85 people as they manage 65 military spouse professional networks. Smith hosted a 101 professional development workshops helping military spouses fine tune their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. She also collaborated with industry and nonprofit partners to hire, train and advocate for military spouses. She advocated for a military spouse employment through a military spouse employment summit that included two congressional speakers and 381 participants from seven countries.

Her advocacy on behalf of military spouses was elevated all the way to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Office of Personnel Management and the White House. She was instrumental in the support for Operation Allies Welcome and assisted with workforce resettlement training for Afghan refugees. The Air and Space Forces Association is pleased to present the 2022 Joan Orr Spouse of the Year Award to Meredith Smith. Thank you and congratulations to Meredith Smith and thanks to our panel. Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in the ballroom. The next panel will begin momentarily.

Watch, Read: ‘Logistics on the Attack: The Build Up and the Delivery’

Watch, Read: ‘Logistics on the Attack: The Build Up and the Delivery’

The AFA Warfare Symposium hosted a session called “Logistics on the Attack: The Build Up and the Delivery” on March 7, 2023. The panel featured Gen. Mike Minihan, Commander, Air Mobility Command and Gen. Duke Richardson, Commander, Air Force Materiel Command. RAF ACDR Jez Attridge was the session’s moderator. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Voiceover:

Please direct your attention to the stage and welcome our moderator, Royal Air Force Air Commodore Jez Attridge.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

Sirs, ma’ams, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am Air Commodore Jez Attridge, the British Air and Space Attache, and I oversee the RAF through all Air Force personnel here in the United States with US Space Force and the US Air Force from Hickam Air Force Base right the way through to Pentagon, flying the T-38 to the F-22. I’ve been very fortunate to be here for the last two years. For those of you at home on the online platform, there is a button you can press which will bring up close caption so you can understand what I’m saying. For those of you here in the Aurora room, I apologize, I’m speaking the King’s English, so I will speak slowly for you.

Now, unfortunately, I go home this summer after three years, but I’ll be hosting a party in Washington D.C. and I’d like to extend an invitation to all of you to come along to that. It’s on a British national holiday. It’s the 3rd of July. We call it Dependence Day, and at midnight we’ll bring the Union Jack down when the Stars and Stripes goes up to the national anthem as we celebrate the glorious withdrawal. So I hope to see you there.

Now, General Omar Bradley famously said, “Professionals talk logistics, amateurs talk tactics.” So it’s good to see all the amateurs have left and I’m left with the professionals because today we’re going to talk about logistics on the attack, the buildup, and delivery. Now, logistics, some used to say that was boring. Who would’ve thought Vladimir Putin would make it so interesting and actually showing sharp relief how much we need a good logistic plan? Because he has shown us really well what it looks like when it goes wrong and the buildup and delivery doesn’t account for plan A or for plan B. It’s probably too early to draw any real lessons from Ukraine, but it has highlighted areas that should be noted when considering how to keep a combat force viable. Under the heading Buildup, how do we get stockpiles of material right against the backdrop of post-Cold War assumptions and an industrial based size for the last war?

Russia has made it look very difficult on a European theater with plenty of roads in a relatively small distance between the border and Kiev. What about if we raise it from high school to varsity level and consider the Pacific, vast distances and fewer areas to use the supply nodes, all potentially during a period of competition? So, it’s fair to say that if the focus is China, China, China, then in order to deliver credible conventional deterrence, you should be going to sleep at night thinking about logistics, logistics, logistics. Secretary Kendall’s Operational Imperative Five is defining optimized resilient basing, sustainment and comms in a contested environment. This underlines the buildup and sustainment of logistics, and it’s my great pleasure to introduce the two MatCom generals pivotal to the successful deliveries of these capabilities, General Duke Richardson, Commander of Air Force Materiel Command and General Mike Minihan, Commander of Air Mobility Commands. Please join me in a round of applause.

General Richardson commands 89,000 personnel and oversees a budget of $72 billion annually. He is responsible for, among several other significant tasks, the sustainment and mission support of virtually every major air force weapon system. And you would’ve heard Chief Brown say this morning, “To provide logistics under attack, we need rapid global mobility.” The man responsible for that small task is General Mike Minihan. A 10-year veteran of the Pacific Theater, serving INDOPACOM, PACAF, the Pacific Forces career, and he’s responsible for transporting the material at the speed of relevance, whether in contested or uncontested airspace. I should also mention the incredible performance of his organization during the challenging drawdown in Afghanistan and the NEO that followed, and of course, the role of both organizations in providing enduring support to Ukraine. Ladies and gentlemen, would you show your support for the brave Ukrainians as they’re fighting now? Slava Ukraini. So, General Richardson, can I start with you, sir, please?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

Yes, absolutely.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

So we’ve gone from countering violent extremists to considering fights against near peers to now peers, rather. Could you talk to us about the most pressing concerns within AFMC, in order to integrate across the logistics enterprise?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

I can. So, I would say … let me start at a broad sense. So, one of the things that we’re charged to do in Air Force Material Command that the secretary and the chief are both charged to do is not just deliver, but deliver integrated capabilities. Normally when you think about integrated capabilities, you’re really thinking about capabilities that are integrated with other capabilities, like a data link being able to pass information between platforms. In this context, it actually means something slightly different and I’d like to talk about that a little bit today.

So, the first charge that I’ve been given is to deliver integrated capabilities. What we’re doing, and Secretary Kendall mentioned this morning, we really have to do two things. We have to sustain the force that we have and we also have to deliver the future force. So, one of the things we’re very much focused on are those two elements of it. If you think about the competitor that we’re talking about right now, China, China, China, this idea of … and General Brown is hammering us on this pretty much every other day about this idea of agile combat employment, multi capable airmen, mission command. All these things go together and I think those things, both the level of the threat that we’re facing, and then the idea of how we’re going to answer it through more of a distributed laydown of forces really drives a need for integration. So, this time I’m using the word integration to talk about logistics. So we’re very much focused on what I’m calling enterprise solutions. You’ll probably get tired of hearing me discuss this idea of enterprise solutions, and it really does play in the logistics area.

A couple quick examples, logistics IT, we have about 500 logistics information technology programs. What we’re trying to do is rationalize those down to a much smaller set, and so we’re moving them to the Cloud, we’re collapsing them. Things that are similar, we’re dropping into one. For example, we actually have five, or excuse me, four different maintenance information systems, so IMDS and GO81 are two that are well known, that are probably used by about 120,000 people in the United States Air Force. We’re working on a system to drop that to a single system. Both commands agree, not just both, but the lead commands, ACC and AMC, are very agreeable on that. So, that’s just one example. We have a lot of work to go in the area of log IT, but that is a very clear example of this idea of enterprise solution so that we have one system regardless of where that airmen might be, especially if they’re a multi capable airmen.

The other thing that I wanted to mention is this idea of OI Five resilient forward basing. So, we’re very much about doing enterprise solutions there as well. So, there’s a very large effort right now to look at what we call war reserve materials. So, in other words, material that we pre-position in certain locations. We’re working very closely with the … most specifically with [inaudible 00:08:24], but really all the MatComs to figure out where that equipment should be and make sure that we have the equipment, the right equipment, and that it’s serviceable. So there’s a large effort there. One aspect of that is this idea called common support equipment. So, remember what I said about enterprise solutions? We want to make sure that we have common support equipment that can be used across multiple weapon systems. So, we’re going to be like a dog with a bone on this idea of common support equipment.

I should say that we have a lot of support within OSD on this construct. We’re not going to be talking about specifics with the PB24, but I can tell you that we’re expecting to see a lift in this area, this idea of support equipment, war reserve material, so that we can get that area bolstered above the current level that it’s at. I think industry has a large play here, very much so, and so as we start filling out those kits, in some cases we’ll be buying new equipment. That’s common across mission design series. In other cases we’ll be buying more of what we already have, but we’re working very hard to make sure that we get the theater all set. That is a very large focus for Air Force Material Command, and in fact, it’s called out directly in our strategic plan.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

Thank you, sir. Excellent. General Minihan, last fall at the Airspace and Cyber Conference, your address was titled the Mobility Manifesto, during which you presented the problem statement that the joint force is not ready to fight and win, specifically in a Pacific conflict. Given that we are merely six months removed from this statement, can you speak to the efforts particularly at Air Mobility Command to address the problem statement?

Gen. Mike Minihan:

Absolutely. First of all, I don’t speak the King’s English, so forgive me. I speak Auburn C130 English, so if anyone’s got a problem with that, they’re going to have to get over it pretty soon. Just real quick, if you are part of the mobility enterprise, just clap your hands a few times. Let’s hear it.

The reality is everybody should have clapped. So, you are a part of the mobility enterprise, whether you wear my patch or not. What is going to be required in any conflict is going to be, whether you’re a passenger, a cargo handler at a base far, far away that’s just generating pallets on a UTC to get out of town, we all participate in the mobility enterprise. Context to the question is the two problems statements I pitched out at the last AFA were, we’re not ready to fight and win inside the first island chain and the joint team is not as ready, integrated, or agile as they think they are. And then there was a dot, dot, dot and a bill that said, but we will be by August of ’23. So, there is enormous urgency, I think as both the secretary and certainly the chief indicated, as to being so ready that that readiness has an enormous deterrent value. Then, should the deterrents fail, that we are able to win decisively.

So, these are all very interconnected. I will pull on the same thread that you all talked about when it comes to integration. So, what the Mobility Manifesto brings together is, it acknowledges, like the chief did, that airmen are the magic, okay? It acknowledges that, no matter what your role in the Air Force, that lethality matters most. It acknowledges that the AMC team and the mobility team is the joint force maneuver. There’s incredible distances. It’s not just the tyranny of distance here, it’s also the tyranny of water when it comes to the Pacific AOR. Then finally, it says we must invest our American tenacity, forgive me, to win now.

So, we’ve had very superb examples of that, which I’ll talk about at the end here, but that integration to get after that Manifesto, which buys down four gaps for me. I’ve got a gap when it comes to command and control. I’ve got a gap when it comes to navigation. I’ve got a gap when I’m calling Maneuver under Fire. That’s the global air mobility support system. That’s everything underneath flying that makes it happen. That’s the maintainers, that’s the logistics, that’s the port dogs. All right, they had a big lunch, don’t … forgive them on that one. That’s the fueling. That’s everything that makes the air happen. Then I’ve got a tempo requirement that I need to address. Can we operate at the tempo required to win? Can we operate at a tempo greater than our potential adversaries? So, these gaps require integration. You cannot have integrated ops if you do not have integrated planning in advance.

So my team has been incredibly committed to partner with all the other MatComs, to partner with all of the combatant commands, and to partner with the services to get this integrated planning down. So we do staff-to-staffs with other MatComs. I’ve been a part of TTX’S forward, especially with PayCom, their components, certainly Cruiser and his team, Global Strike and StratCom, certainly. As we overlay this integration, what we find is that there is actually definition behind the urgency and definition behind the actions that need to happen. This isn’t simply stating we got to be quick, all right? And we got to do things. We have a list of things to do and we have a timeline for which to accomplish them. There is a gentleman in this room, I’m certain, that’s a retired Three Star that used to tell me when I was a wing commander, you’d say, “Mini, I need less INGs out of you and I need more EDs out of you.” End your verbs with ED.

So, when it came to the Mobility Manifesto, to end here, it was a call for the urgency, a call for action, and a call from turning the things that we need to do to provide deterrents that this nation desires, that our adversaries wake up, open up the window, look at us and say, “I don’t want any piece of that,” but if they should decide to take that on, that we can win decisively for this nation. That integration is certainly paying off now and I look forward to moving that forward even faster.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

At the risk of getting two barrels back in the face right now, what would your assessment be of where you are after six months?

Gen. Mike Minihan:

So, six months after the Manifesto, I’m in a really good place. I’m extremely fortunate. I believe Dan Cooley here and Otis Jones is in the room. I just came from Ramstein and met the mobility team there. So not all of them were wearing the AMC patch. So there was the Mighty 86 airlift wing, I had the AMAL 521st in the room and the CRG was there as well and it was us as mobility professionals and I was … these events, like for you all, are fuel for the soul.

Okay, this is the team that did the retrograde in Afghanistan that you mentioned. This is the team that came off of that and went hot into the evac out of Afghanistan, and then not too many months later, went straight into … President Zelenskyy said, “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo,” right into Ukraine opportunities, and then simultaneously being to bring on the earthquake operations that are happening in Turkey right now. So, there are hundreds of people in this auditorium and you’re feeding off of their energy. They understand urgency, they understand the actions required, they understand how their actions fit into the grand scheme, and they understand that their expertise, their mobility culture is absolutely required to have operational victories on the battlefield. So, I take that culture, I take that feedback, and I have an enormous amount of confidence.

Now, I lay that over with what we’re doing in the Pacific Theater that’s essentially very near to start, which is Operation Mobility Guardian, which is a mobility exercise that normally just happens over the conus and we’ve moved that into the theater that matters. We are going to understand intimately what the tyranny of distance is and what the tyranny of water is. We are going to understand that, as the joint force maneuver, that we have to service everybody. We service ACE, we service EABO, we service MDTF, we service the Marine Littoral, the new Littoral concepts. We certainly help with the Navy’s MDO operations. They do their maritime deterrence operations. So, we have to service all these things and we are going to have a chance to do that in the theater. We’re going to have a chance to work with all those entities and we’re going to test the planning integration to see if that really turns into operational integration in the theater. So, the short answer to your question is, I have nothing but high confidence. I’m excited about getting into theater and making it happen.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

Who said logistics was boring? Giddy up. General Richardson, considering the recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies stated that the US industrial base is not adequately prepared for the international security environment that now exists, what is the Air Force doing to bolster the defense industrial base upon which it is dependent, ensuring it has the material it needs should a nation state conflict arise? Short question.

Gen. Duke Richardson:

Yeah, Jez, thank you for that question. So, one of the things that we’re doing in Air Force Material Command … First of all, I need to mention the Honorable Hunter’s here, right up there in the front. He and I work very, very closely, especially when it comes to the defense industrial base. So, simply stated, we can’t do any of this without the defense industrial base. They’re very much teammates and part of the solution. So, I just want to acknowledge the industrial base right up front. One of the things that we’re doing, and we talked about this with our last CEO round table with the industry CEO’s subset of them, is this idea of digital engineering, digital acquisition, what I call digital material management, because it really does span everything from invention at the Air Force Research Laboratory all the way through re-installation, mission support at IMFC.

So, that this construct, and Honorable Hunter did actually touch on this during his panel a little bit earlier, and I’m not going to go through all the details of it, but it’s the idea that we have models that actually discuss where the interfaces are. It actually allows us to put a lot of the technical data inside the Cloud and then also make sure that we actually protect intellectual property, not just of the government, but actually of the defense industrial base. That’s very important to us. The reason this is so crucial is digital material management itself is an enterprise solution. So, we believe that if we can get working with the industry to define what that system’s going to look like, we can come up with a tool.

Right now our tool’s called Team Center, it’s a product life, what’s called a product life cycle management tool. That really is sort of, in my opinion … I’m actually an engineer by the way, but it is the quarterback. Engineers don’t like to hear that, but it really houses all the data for a weapon system, and so we’re going to move to a system where we use the same system that the prime for a specific platform would use it. Also, the suppliers that supply that Prime would use that same system. So if you can imagine this quarterback housing our data and it’s all cloud-based, it’s a very, very powerful tool that we’re moving towards. All of our new programs are moving this way and we’re going to move some of the legacy programs as we’re able. So, DMM is definitely something that’s going to strengthen both the defense industrial base and our own system.

I’ve mentioned PLM. The next thing that I would mention is this idea called supply chain risk management. So, we really want our supply chains to be resilient and healthy and so we have a very large effort underway to do what we call SCRMs, supply chain risk management. So, you know, you could probably give me a supplier that’s out there in the audience. They probably wouldn’t realize it, but I could probably run a pretty darn good report on them. We look at about … everybody’s going, “Ooh” … about 11 different risk factors that we look at, everything from … and it’s not just financial health, it’s even environmental health, where are they located, it’s foreign influence risks, all kinds of things that we look at. So, we can do that for the primes. We can also do that at their major suppliers that supply them, and so we’re paying very close attention to that, especially for a lot of the key supply chain parts.

This is another area where we’re very closely partnered with OSD. Mr. Hunter and I also partner on this. The SCRM team is resident in many of the centers and Lifecycle Management Center. I don’t know if Joe Morris is out there. Also in the sustainment center with General Hawkins, and even in my headquarters, if we see problems in the defense, in supply chain, we also have this tool called the Defense Production Act, Title Three. Air Force Research Lab is the executive agent, not just for the department of the Air Force, but for the entire DOD, and so there’s an appropriation that we get each year where we can go off and address things that we find through tools like SCRM, and so we’ve made a lot of investments in areas like energy storage and batteries, microelectronics, castings and forgings, just all kinds of areas, and that’s an ongoing pro project that we do. So, hopefully that kind of gives you … the DMM is certainly a more longer term strategy to keep us all healthy, and then SCRM and then DPA Title Three are other two good tools that we use, that we’ve used for quite a while to keep everything all shored up. So good question though. Thank you.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

Thank you, sir. General Minihan, if we take the data-driven approach that General Richardson was talking about, can you talk about the criticality of the war reserve materiel to the logistic effort you oversee?

Gen. Mike Minihan:

Thank you. First of all, when I talked about the integration for planning, the other MatCom that we’ve had the most reps with is Duke’s team and they’ve been wonderful. We’ve exchanged hostages two times on each other’s turf, which has been great. So, we absolutely understand that the underpinnings of success in theater are anchored by our ability to keep that GAMSS, that Global Air Mobility Support System, going to keep the maintenance going, to keep the port going, and WRM is an important part of that. Pre-position another part of that, and I also want to highlight our partners and allies are another part of that. You fly C17s, Ozzies fly C17s, Indians fly C17s, and certainly we do.

So, there is collaboration that can happen at the partner and ally level that can help support some of these things, but I want to emphasize that we are a Konas based force. To use a Hawaiian term, we’re a mainland based force, and so the majority of military power is going to come off of the mainland United States and have to be projected somewhere. That is going to boil down to pallet making and UTCs, and this is why everybody’s a part of this mobility enterprise. So, we are going to have to project, very quickly, enormous power to make a statement on deterrence, to make a statement on when decisively, and to give our civilian-elected leaders the most decision space and options that they desire against any adversary. So, there is a mix of WRM, it’s got to be relevant. There is a mix of prepo, there is a mix of what partners and allies can contribute and we can contribute for them, but at the end of the day, the majority of what we do is going to be on the back of a gray tail or a white tail that gets out there early. That’s going to be a comment on us to make sure that we’ve got those right sized for the mission at hand and it’s certainly going to have to be in a position that we can project it quickly. Over.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

Thank you. Excellent. Well, we’ve got just over five minutes left. So, a quickfire round. Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face.” How will the Air Force respond when punched in the face? Specifically, what are you doing now to leverage assets to take an offensive approach with logistics, support, sustainment and delivery efforts? General Richardson.

Gen. Duke Richardson:

I would say, first of all, I want to make it clear that we’re prepared to get punched in the face, but the real plan is to deter first. So, that said, we are prepared to get punched in the face. So, I want to make sure … there’s an area that I want to emphasize towards the end of my question here, but one of the things that we’re doing, and General Minihan mentioned this, is Mobility Guardian 23. So he’s basically come to … he came to [inaudible 00:24:46] and he asked for a whole bunch of things to support him for that exercise and we’re doing that, everything from supply surge to depo surge to ABDR teams. So we’re working very, very closely so that we can practice what that looks like. So I wanted to mention that. I already mentioned Prepo, so I won’t hit that anymore.

A couple other things, rapid airfield repair, we’re doing that. We’re also setting up regional training centers so that we can actually … and Installation Mission support center, which is one of the six centers inside AFMC, to actually practice combat support ops with teams before they actually go out. The one that I really want to highlight is this ABDR, the Aircraft Battle Damage Repair. So, inside of Air Force Material Command, inside the Air Force Sustainment Center, at each of our three air logistics complexes, which is what we call our depos at [inaudible 00:25:36], we have a team of professionals that know how to do depo level repairs that are larger than you would expect from battle damage. So we send these teams out. They can be shipped out in with 72 hours notice. They use these things called war wagons, which is basically their kit, if you will. We’re trying to standardize those over time so that they’re not specific to a specific MBS, and that’s also an enterprise solution. Like I said, you’re going to hear me say that a lot. So that is a huge area for us. I did want to highlight three of our airmen here. If you guys could stand over there, Staff Sergeant Steven Stoy, Tech Sergeant William Kesler, and Master Sergeant Kyle Sommerfeldt.

So, they’re ready to go. So if this ABDR team, and we have a number of these teams, we have a set of these teams at each of the three locations. In most cases, chief, they are multi capable. Well, they are. They’re multi capable airmen already. So, they come from … they’re crew chiefs, they’re fuels experts, they’re sheet metal, they’re E and E, all these different career fields. They get crosscut trained, cross utilization trained. Most of them come in at seven levels. So we’ve got a batch of these ninjas that are ready to go off and do that, and we’ve got, as I mentioned, their war wagons positioned out there and they’re able to do all kinds of neat things. So, if we get punched in the face, we will be ready to turn that team in and move them out smartly.

So, that’s something that I definitely wanted to highlight for you. I think, just in closing, this idea of logistics, I do actually think logistics is interesting. So, wars are fought … won or lost through logistics. What’s fascinating to me, and I think the Air Force Material Command team really resonates with this idea, is this idea of integrated deterrence, where you take all the instruments and national power both inside the DOD, inside the department, the Air Force, inside the government, and you kind of integrate them, and it’s a formidable thing and a near peer competitor might say, “Well, not today.” I think logistics is very much part of that. So, when you think about what I’ve described about making sure that we have the WRM in place, making sure that we can move it quickly with General Minihan if it’s not in place or if it gets damaged, making sure that we have readiness spares kits for our parts, making sure that we have common support equipment, making sure that we have logistics IT systems that are common, Cloud-based, and accessible in more than a single location.

That package of things that I’m describing, making sure that we have ABDR teams ready to go. By the way, I used to be an aircraft maintainer, enlisted. General Brown, as you were talking today, I realized, when you went through pilot training at Williams, I very likely fixed more than one of your airplanes. So, Airman Richardson. So anyway, because of my steep maintenance background actually turning wrenches, they actually tell me that I can wear this patch. So I don’t know if I really can, but at least today I can. So I’m an ABDR repairman today. So, this idea of putting all this stuff together, from a logistics perspective, I think logistics is very much a large element of this idea of integrating deterrents. So, thank you.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

Thank you, sir. General Minihan.

Gen. Mike Minihan:

I’ll end on culture here. The culture of mobility is extremely strong. The mobility airmen from D-Day airdrops on the Cherbourg Peninsula to saving Berlin to Chosin Reservoir, to Kazan, to Desert Storm, to Iraq-Afghanistanm to Afghanistan Retrograde, Afghanistan evac, certainly Ukraine support, and so many more. I’m under servicing the culture here. It’s a culture that takes any operational environment and turns it into success. That is an enormous foundation and one that we should all take pride in. So, shifting that culture from handling any operational environment to building on it and saying we’re going to affect the environment that we’re going to operate in, is exactly where this air mobility command is heading. So, when you are the joint force maneuver, when everybody is counting on you to be successful, when every capability that the joint force enjoys needs to be in position to aggregate to be lethal, to disaggregate to survive, and then aggregate to be lethal again, and to accommodate all those agile schemes is exactly where this command’s focus is each and every day. We’ll do demos in Mobility Guardian, we’ll learn something, 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.

I believe the secretary had it exactly right before he opened up his comments in his presentation this morning where he talked about the Vietnam panel that was sitting on this very stage yesterday. That was a display of affection yesterday. There were three gentlemen on there that displayed their affection for this country, that displayed this affection for this Air Force, displayed their affection for their family, certainly displayed their affection for their mission and each other. That same culture exists today and aligning it so that anybody that looks at us says, “I don’t want any piece of that, and I’m not going to take a shot at your nose, at your face,” and Lord, if they do, that they’ll regret the second they made that decision. Over.

RAF ACDR Jez Attridge:

Hear hear. Hear hear. Well, sadly, we’ve come to the end of our time. General Richardson, General Minihan, thank you very much. It’s been illuminating. Thank you for your time and for your thoughts there. Could you join me please in a round of applause for our generals?

Voiceover:

Ladies and gentlemen, our final panel of the day will begin shortly and it will include a keynote address from Global Strike Commander General Thomas Bussiere, right here in the Aurora Ballroom. Enjoy a short break and be back here in 10 minutes.

Saltzman Unveils ‘Competitive Endurance’ Theory to Guide Space Force

Saltzman Unveils ‘Competitive Endurance’ Theory to Guide Space Force

AURORA, Colo.—Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman offered a new working theory of space operations, calling it “Competitive Endurance,” and defining it as a means of ensuring U.S. access to space and ensuring competition with space powers like China and Russia does not devolve into conflict or crisis. 

Speaking March 7 at the AFA Warfare Symposium, Saltzman said his theory expands on the “Theory of Success” concept he unveiled two weeks ago and the Lines of Effort he outlined in January, which combined make up his fledgling service’s intent to develop doctrine, operational concepts, and tactics. 

“I intend Competitive Endurance to be a starting point for a dialogue I believe is critical—absolutely critical—to the success of our young service,” Saltzman said. “The goal of this theory of success is to maximize our ability to deter a crisis or conflict from extending into space and, if necessary, allow the joint force to achieve space superiority while also maintaining the safety, security, and long-term sustainability of the space domain.” 

Undergirding “Competitive Endurance,” he added, are three core tenets. 

Avoiding Operational Surprise 

The first step to endurance in space is “comprehensive and actionable” awareness of the domain, he said. 

“Space forces must be able to detect and preempt any shifts in the operational environment that could compromise the ability of the joint force to achieve space superiority,” Saltzman said. 

Space domain awareness has been a key mission for U.S. Space Command and the Space Force’s Space Delta 2, but the Pentagon has also been responsible for space traffic management, monitoring tens of thousands of commercial and civil satellites as well as debris. With that mission set to transfer to the Commerce Department in the future, the Space Force will be freed up to focus more on monitoring potential threats in the domain. And Saltzman indicated the service will bolster that capability in the years ahead. 

“We are investing in new sensors, we are investing in advanced data management and decision support tools,” Saltzman said. “We are exploring commercial capabilities to augment this mission area and partnerships with allies to expand our information sharing.” 

Deny First-Mover Advantage 

While the Space Force has to be able to track changes in the operating environment, awareness alone won’t deter an adversary, Saltzman said—in fact, the current reality encourages aggression.  

“The visibility, predictability, and reconstitution timelines associated with current military space architectures favor the actor that goes on the offense first,” Saltzman said. “This is an unstable condition that works against deterring attacks on space assets. We can’t have that.” 

Saltzman’s warning echoes what many leaders focused on space have said in the past few years: The Pentagon’s satellite constellations are not resilient enough, and an adversary would only have to take out a few to have an outsized impact. 

“The Space Force must shift this balance by making an attack on satellites impractical and self-defeating, thus discouraging an adversary from taking such actions in the first place,” Saltzman said. 

That planned shift is at the heart of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s Operational Imperative to build a resilient space order of battle, and Saltzman said the service will do so by designing its future force to be more proliferated, maneuverable, and disaggregated among orbits. 

“All of this creates deterrence,” Saltzman said. “If an adversary has little chance of denying space missions through attack, the incentive to attack at all, much less first, will be reduced.” 

Responsible Counterspace Campaigning 

Deterrence is also boosted by the ability to hold an adversary’s assets at risk—which is at the core of Saltzman’s final tenet of “Competitive Endurance.” 

But compared to other domains, space presents unique challenges to offensive or counterspace activities, Saltzman said. 

“Counterspace activities may be necessary to prevent adversaries from leveraging space-enabled targeting to attack our forces. But we will balance our counterspace efforts with our need to maintain stability and sustainability of the orbits we are required to use,” Saltzman said. “Space forces must preserve U.S. advantages by campaigning through competition without incentivizing rivals to escalate to destructive military activities in space.” 

To that end, the Space Force will work with the Pentagon, other government agencies, and allies to encourage responsible behaviors in space and confront those who do not follow them, Saltzman said. 

Beyond that, though, the service is also “investing in capabilities that protect our joint force from space-enabled targeting while understanding that we cannot have a pyrrhic victory in this domain,” Saltzman said. 

The Space Force’s counterspace offensive capabilities have long been a closely guarded secret—though leaders have pushed to declassify some of those capabilities in order to deter adversaries. And while Saltzman did not detail exactly what the Space Force is investing in, he did indicate that “efforts to control the domain cannot inflict such a devastating toll on the domain itself that our orbits become unusable for follow-on operations.”