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

March 7, 2023

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’

March 7, 2023

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

March 7, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

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.”

AFSOC Teaches Cultural and Air Ops Skills in New Course for Multi-Capable Airmen

March 7, 2023 | By David Roza

AURORA, Colo.—Eight Airmen are testing a new training program at Hurlburt Field, Fla., that combines cultural awareness, cross-cultural negotiation and communication, and the nuts-and-bolts skills of setting up air operations overseas.

The first-of-its-kind, three-week course seeks to enable multi-capable, culturally literate Airmen who the Air Force and the wider military may depend on in a future conflict.

“You typically hear ‘multi-capable Airmen’ as Airmen who can work more than one Air Force Specialty Code,” Walter Ward, a retired Air Force colonel and head of the Air Force Culture and Language Center, said March 6 at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “But in the ACE environment, you’re going to be doing those tasks with your host nation counterparts out there. So language and culture, to be able to get the operational outcomes we want, have to be part of the [multi-capable Airmen] MCA skillset.”

Agile Combat Employment (ACE) is the Air Force’s strategy for deploying small, nimble units of Airmen overseas for launching and recovering aircraft. ACE is meant to complicate an enemy’s targeting process by decentralizing airpower. However, ACE cannot work without collaboration with the host nation, Ward said. That is where the eight Airmen training in Florida come in.

The eight Thai-speaking Airmen are all Language Enabled Airmen Program (LEAP) scholars. LEAP is a program within AFCLC where Airmen and Space Force Guardians who have significant experience in a foreign language can apply to serve as cultural and linguistic experts for their fellow service members. The goal of the LEAP program is to help the Air Force and the broader military overcome linguistic and cultural barriers in order to work more closely with foreign partners. National security experts say America’s allies and partners may mean the difference between victory and defeat in a possible conflict with China.

“If you want to understand how your phone works, you need to understand the operating system of that phone. Culture is the operating system of humans,” Ward said.

LEAP scholars keep their culture and language skills fresh through online mentoring courses or through Language Intensive Training Events—which could take the form of living abroad or of a course like the one at Hurlburt. At the Hurlburt course, a Thai-speaking instructor from the Defense Language Institute taught classes in Thai history, politics, cuisine, religious beliefs, and even the role of Korean and Japanese pop music in Thai culture.

The first week of the course was taught in English as the LEAP Airmen learned techniques in cross-cultural negotiation and communication from instructors at Air Force Special Operation Command’s ‘intercultural skills for engagement’ course. The scholars also learned how to assess and report whether foreign airfields can support military or humanitarian operations. The eight Airmen come from a wide range of career fields, including maintenance, intelligence, and airfield operations.

“You’re typically not using terms like ‘load-bearing capacity’ in a dinner time conversation,” Ward said. “But if you can nail all those things with your Thai partners … look at the velocity we get in a bed-down, the velocity we get in putting combat power into the air.”

The second and third weeks of the course will be taught entirely in Thai as the LEAP scholars brush up on their cultural and linguistic proficiency and practice their cross-cultural negotiation and airfield assessment skills.

The schedule includes role-play sessions where the LEAP scholars conduct pre-deployment site surveys, set up operations centers for humanitarian and disaster relief missions, and even buy fuel for the airfield. Sprinkled in between those sessions are visits to a nearby Thai market, a Buddhist temple, and the Hurlburt chapel kitchen for a Thai cooking session. The goal is to train Airmen who can immediately build bridges with Thai colleagues if the U.S. military ever needs to operate with them in the future.

“There is a speed that a team can work at when it connects and communicates effectively, [and] there’s a speed much less than that for teams that can’t connect and communicate effectively,” Ward said.

AFCLC plans to teach similar courses later this year in Tagalog, Spanish, French, and Russian. Overall, there are about 3,600 service members speaking more than 90 languages who have participated in LEAP.

The Air Force keeps a database of LEAP scholars so they can be called on when needed. For example, if the military needs an airman who can speak Filipino and also help teach Filipino troops how to use unmanned aircraft, then commanders know where to look for that airman. LEAP is highly competitive, with about 1,200 Airmen and Guardians applying every year for a total of 400 slots, Ward said. When AFCLC can join forces with other Air Force organizations like AFSOC through efforts like the Hurlburt course, it is a win-win, he said.

“It really shows a good business relationship within the Air Force where we’re taking best-of-breed capabilities [and]working together to all support our flagship operational concept,” he said. “This particular cohort, it applies to the airfield operating concept. But our imagination is the only limit of where we could potentially spin this.”

Watch, Read: ‘Defending Forward Bases’

March 7, 2023

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, commander of Air Forces Central Command; Lt. Gen. Scott L. Pleus, deputy commander of U.S. Forces Korea; Maj. Gen. Derek France, commander of the Third Air Force; and Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Mastalir, commander of United States Space Forces Indo-Pacific, all participated in a panel discussion moderated by Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.), Director of STEM Education Programs at AFA, on the challenges of defending forward bases, one of the key operational imperatives for the Air Force. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you so much. Although the last U.S. service member to die by an enemy airstrike was in 1953 during the Korean War, China and Russia have made vast strides in missile technology since then. The advent of cruise missiles, the proliferation of unmanned aircraft and improved ballistic missiles make our overseas bases increasingly vulnerable. It is my huge honor to introduce some air and space force leaders working this problem on the front lines every day.

Lieutenant General Scott Pleus, Deputy Commander, United States Forces Korea, Lieutenant General Alexus Grynkewich, Commander U.S. Air Force’s Central Command, Major General Derek France, Commander of Third Air Force, and Brigadier General Tony Mastalir, Commander, U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific.

General Grynkewich, what are some unique sovereignty considerations when defending a military installation in a foreign country? And are there any lessons learned that you have to share on shaping host nation agreements?

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich:

Yeah, sure. That’s a really good question, and I think I’ll answer it in a bit of a roundabout way. So first off, most of the bases that we have in any region of the world, I would argue, but for sure in Air Force’s Central are not just U.S. Air Force bases. We are hosted by the host nation, whether that’s at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, that is a Royal Saudi Air Force base. Same thing with Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar and on and on. All of those locations have both forces from the host nation and our own forces there.

So at the base level, the base defense level, you actually have to do a fair amount of work to integrate the base defenses that are there, particularly with counter-UAS systems, with the proliferation of those technologies that threaten us and, frankly, the great work that our industry and our services, the Army and the Air Force, have done in fielding capabilities that can counter those threats. All of that has to be integrated, not just amongst the U.S. forces that are at a base, but again, with that partner force that is there hosting you.

I’d also say that, at the higher operational level, there’s another layer of integration with partners that has to be executed. And so in the Central Command region of responsibility, we are focusing on people, partners, and innovation. And if you center on that word partners, one of our key requirements that we have going forward that’s been tasked all the way down from the President to the Secretary is to look at how we drive the regional integration of air and missile defense. And so as Area Air Defense Commander, I’m constantly working with other Air Chiefs and Air Defense Chiefs around the region, figuring out what radar data can be shared, what are the tactics, techniques, and procedures that we’re going to use, how are we going to decide what country’s aircraft or what country’s patriot battery or what country’s counter-UAS system that’s on the ground is going to engage a particular target.

There’s a lot to unpack in all of that, but you can’t do it without your partners. None of us, in this day and age, when you’ve got 360 degree threats, complex attacks across all the threats that you just mentioned, none of us have the resources to do that defensive work alone. It’s going to take every service and every partner nation working together.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Awesome, sir. General Pleus, how do you balance the natural tensions between host nations, other components and the air component when it comes to setting your defended asset list?

Lt. Gen. Scott L. Pleus:

The challenge that you run into in a host nation environment like Seventh Air Force in Korea is the natural tension that occurs between the national authority in this state of Korea, Korea’s government, and then interest for the United States and trying to balance the two. I think the easiest way to describe it is the fact that we fall back on joint doctrine. We go through the joint combined theater, air and missile defense process. It’s a process that our Iraq counterparts are very familiar with and it’s one that we use. And it also not only cuts through all of the, if you will, friction that occurs between the services, but it also allows you to have, in this case, a host nation that comes to the table and understands the process.

I think one of the challenges that you run into inside of the process itself is developing the critical asset list and then, from that, now going to the defended asset list. I think everybody can agree across the spectrum on what is a critical asset in a theater, whether that’s a host nation asset. In the case of the Iraq government, it might be their presidential White House, as they call it, or the People’s House. It may be a Korean air base or it could be a U.S. air base. And I don’t think anybody really argues about the critical asset list. Where the real tension comes is when you get to what you’re going to defend.

Korea itself is probably… To give you an example, Seoul is twice as dense as Manhattan is when it comes to the amount of civilians that live inside of that area. And the area itself is not much bigger than Denver. So the friction is caused by the fact that if I defend everywhere, I’m really defending nowhere. And that, I think, is where you have a process in place, in my situation, with a Joint Forces Commander, who has combined forces underneath his authority during war time. He now has that ability to make a true assessment across national authorities and then make the decision on what becomes defended.

Where you get into the each is is, is Osan Air Base more important than Kwang Ju Air Base? Is Daegu Air Base more important than Kunsan Air Base? And that’s where you really start cutting hairs where the difference between it can be a national argument. But we’ve been very lucky with our partners over in Korea that we’ve never ended up in anything more than just a very professional and frank discussion. The caveat to that always is what other other assets can, in this case, the Koreans bring to the fight? What other assets could they bring to provide additional assets to defend the critical asset list?

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Outstanding, sir.

Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Mastalir:

Stu, could I riff off that just for a second? Can you hear me?

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, I can hear you.

Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Mastalir:

So first of all, thank you to AFA for hosting this and congratulations on the name change to the Air and Space Forces Association. I was actually at this panel in Orlando a year ago when we talked about standing up space components for the first time. We didn’t quite get there yet at that point, but glad to be back now that we have. But just off of what General Pleus was talking about, and when you look at what the Guardians are providing in terms of missile warning in a lot of these areas, even if something is not on a defended asset list, having that warning has proved time and time again continues to prove beneficial, saves lives, has done so in Ukraine. We saw that in Al Asad, we’ve seen it in UAE. Having that first, that overhead persistent IR that then we’re able to get that word out immediately at the need of relevancy so that you can take the proper precautions continues to save lives.

So missile defense notwithstanding, the missile warning piece, and again, let’s be honest, we’ve got bad actors. We covered that on what’s happening on Penn and we processed 565 missile events just last year, most of them coming out of neighbors to the north on Penn. So it continues to be a dangerous place, and I think missile warning is an important part of that.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Outstanding, thank you. Gentlemen, I was going to ask. Obviously, that’s a situation in Korea. You see a similar situation with our allies in Europe in Central Command?

Maj. Gen. Derek France:

Certainly, certainly in Europe. I mean the complexity of the number of nations that are close by each other and in close proximity and then overlaid with a NATO construct that, in a lot of ways, works really well as far as getting those nations on the same sheet of music. But there are national caveats to each of those and what they hold is important, is very different. And they’re all within that threat ring, so absolutely.

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich:

Yeah. So I think the dynamic plays out very similar what General Pleus mentioned on Penn. The difference for us, and I presume for Trapper as well, is it’s the multilateral nature of all the different nations that we have to set the priorities with. And so you have a multi-variable problem where if you now prioritize an asset in one country over another country, it might be a three-way national discussion that evolves about the relative prioritization. But we’re actually very fortunate in CENTCOM in that some of our partners are incredibly capable when it comes to defending their bases. UAE, during the attacks that were just about a year ago in January, their version of September 11, if you will, when the Houthis launched ballistic missiles at Al Dhafra, it was the UAE who launched their THAAD missiles first. They had their Patriots engaged. U.S. Patriot’s also engaged, but the UAE was very capable.

The Saudis, likewise, have proven very capable of defending things that are important to them as they look at the threats that have come at them for the last several years of one-way attack UAS’s flowing in. And Israel, of course. Extremely capable partner in the region now as well, now part of U.S. Central Command, a very good integrated air missile defense. So what we find is that if something is important to a particular country, they will often dedicate their national assets to defense of it. And then when we look at a multi-national lay down from a coalition perspective, and we’re talking about defending particular bases, it becomes a little bit more difficult of a conversation.

Maj. Gen. Derek France:

And I apologize, but one more follow on to that that we’ve seen in Europe for sure is it is somewhat scenario dependent. You like to have a static list of each, but certainly in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the one strategy that the theater looked at was, “Hey, do we prioritize things that are on the eastern flank based on proximity to the fighting and the threat that might be real there versus a theater perspective on maybe some more important, generically speaking, that may be further west.” So there was that balance as well to contend with that was scenario-specific to the Ukraine invasion.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you, sir. So General France, with threats ranging from small UASs to theater ballistic missiles, how does the Air Force strike the right balance between target-rich, but more easily defended main bases and less target rich, but more easily or less defendable forward operating bases?

Maj. Gen. Derek France:

This is a great question. Thanks for the invitation to be up here and explain a couple things of how we see that balance in Europe and USAFE. And I’ll talk specifically to USAFE. Although we have a wing in Africa, it’s a different problem set and certainly different threat dynamics there. To start off, the main operating bases have to be there. There are nodes for logistics, there are nodes for C2. They’re what we project power from. So the balance clearly has to tip in their favor.

So if you don’t protect those correctly, then a forward operating base doesn’t make any sense because you’d have nothing to go back to. I will say that in USAFE right now, there’s a couple things we’re working on that focus on those main operating bases, and the first is having an understanding and having a network of sensors that’s fused together centrally so that we have an accurate picture and some accurate air domain awareness.

Right now, the way it exists is we’ve got limited sensors, limited fusing, and with limited indications of warnings, we can hack the clock and it becomes an eighth grade math problem of a cruise missile’s traveling at a certain speed and we think it was launched from this territory and it could be here at a certain time and make decisions based on that. Whereas what we need to get to is a network of sensors that is fused, that every piece, including our coalition partners, airborne, ground base, passive sensors, all fuse a picture that we have a little more fidelity on what’s coming our way.

As we look at our main operating bases, USAFE right now is doing a fair amount of work on air base air defense and specifically looking at the main operating bases. And we think along the lines of those as passive type of defense, which is your classic conception and concealment to dispersal on the MOB to things that recover a base and fight the base like rapid one repair and things along those lines.

Our active defense right now is somewhat limited as far as a kinetic reaction to a threat if we can see it and cue something on it. And then the BMC2, to actually command and control that. And this is really where we’re trying to get after having wings that are able to make decisions along the lines of their air defense of their MOB. And so the team right now is proposing something along the lines of a BDOC, but we call it a ADOC, to where it has sensor feeds in and a wing commander can make a decision about air defense posture levels and what he’s doing or she’s doing on MOB and to the extent of even launching potentially fighters to intercept cruise missiles if we have enough indications and warnings.

Your question asked about the balance between MOB and a forward operating base, and I would say that while the main operating bases have to be primary, there’s some advantages to doing a forward operating base in that you have deterrence capability, confused targeting, and we’re going to talk ACE later on, so we won’t get into the aspects of that.

But to be able to do all of that and the assurance of our allies by putting U.S. assets that are out there as far as a NATO piece on the eastern flank, but all of those things, active, passive and the C2, become much more complicated. For example, if you want to do dispersal on a MOB and you’re at Spangdahlem or one of our main operating bases, it’s easy enough because the wing commander, essentially, can call the shots and make moves on that installation. If you’re at a four operating base, you may have one apron where you have limited ability to disperse on the MOB and defend yourself that way. And the same holds true with active defense. A lot of ROE considerations at a host installation, the command and control that goes up, in some cases, to their national chain, to very high levels, et cetera, all complicates that. So much more complicated on a forward operating base to do that. Thanks.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

And, gentlemen, do y’all have any perspective on that question?

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich:

I’ve just got one thing that I’ll emphasize that Trapper mentioned and that is trying to figure out how you delegate the right authorities down to the air expeditionary wing commander or the wing commander depending on the theater and what you call them, but that is when you hear the Chief talk about mission command, that is mission command. Trying to figure out how to provide precise intent so that your wing commander on the ground can make smart decisions about dispersing forces from a MOB to a forward operating location, make smart decisions about engaging.

And by the way, that Air Defense Center on each base has to be able to integrate with a theater architecture, so if you’ve got DCA fighters or Patriots that are the first layer of defense, as leakers get through, you’ve got to have clear communication from those tactical firing units, if you will, into a BDOC or a BADC, a Base Air Defense Center, that can do the final engagement. So there’s a host of different mission command and the importance for Airmen to understand the tenets of mission command, how you provide clear intent, how you interpret intent when it’s given to you from a higher echelon, and then come up with your own mission-type orders inside your organization is something that I just wanted to highlight. So thanks.

Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Mastalir:

Yeah, so I completely agree with that perspective. One, when I think about the INDOPACOM Theater, one area I’ll deviate a little bit from a space perspective, is instead of forward operating base, looking at, “How do I protect the air component and the maritime component schema maneuver in the first and second island chain?” And when you think about all of the buildup and forces that we’ve seen with China just within the last five to six years and the number of satellites that have been put on orbit and the number of those satellites that are specifically ISR, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, and let’s be honest, that’s all about find, fix, track, target.

It’s the F2T2 against Airmen, against sailors, against soldiers and Marines that are there to fight in that theater. So when I think about protecting that scheme of maneuver and working closely with U.S. Space Command, working closely with the intelligence community, working closely with the ground assets that we have at SPACEFOR-INDOPAC, and then understanding the timing and tempo that’s necessary to achieve the combatant commander’s priorities and objectives, that’s something that we’ve gotten to a point where it’s not just a nice to have, it’s a requirement. We’re at a point now where space, I’d say in the past, we increase precision, lethality, ability to project. Space has done a lot of things over the years.

We’ve now gotten to the point where we don’t want to go into that fight without space protecting that scheme of maneuver because that’s a losing proposition. So as we build out the component and we try to better understand how do we integrate across the other components, how do we integrate to make sure that my fellow component commanders, their missions are successful? That’s a big part of it is protecting that scheme of maneuver because the first and second island chain is a dangerous place to operate these days.

Lt. Gen. Scott L. Pleus:

One of the things that is a little bit different in Korea, but I think it’s worth noting. On the Korean peninsula, we fight from our foxhole. We’re not going anywhere. And every one of our bases is a main operating base. There is no such thing as a forward operating base in Korea. That and the density of the population on the peninsula actually offers an additional problem set and that is if you defend the base, but you have a large population immediately outside the base, you’re now risking civilian casualties that are not a part of that conversation.

Based on missile technology advancing over the years, we tend to think of everything as a precision strike, but there’s still a lot of capabilities that a adversary can throw against us that they’re happy to hit something inside of a football field. They’d be happy to hit something inside of a half a mile. Well, something that’s just outside of the base that maybe has hundreds of thousands of people living in it and a missile comes in, if you’re not defending, at least considering are you going to defend against that, how we traditionally think about it is, “I’ve got a wire around the outside of a base and I need to worry about my ability to defend my base.” I think that’s also something to at least consider as we have the conversation about main and forward operating bases and which one is more important.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Yes, sir. I like that fighting from a foxhole. Not an fun task. General Mastalir, in most cases, the Space Force is attended on other components installations. How do you ensure that your critical capabilities, whose impact on war fighting might not be readily apparent, are protected?

Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Mastalir:

Yeah, so my first reaction to that is, since elevating to a component, there are a lot of things that are readily apparent about what Guardians and what space capabilities bring to the fight. And the reason is is you have space Guardians that are sitting at the table alongside all the other components. So just like they’re going to hold me accountable to provide the combat effects from space that they need to be successful, I look to my fellow component commanders because, let’s be honest, we have forces on Kadena and Osan and Humphreys and Oahu and Maui and Kauai.

So you look across the AOR and those commanders responsible for those bases know what space brings to their fight because we’ve been integrating with them and we’ve been synchronizing OAIs, opportunities and activities and investments, as part of a campaign plan synchronized across all domains. So it is more apparent today within the combatant commands what space brings to the fight than it ever has been.

And that’s really not a function of leaving necessarily the air component because we’re still closely embedded with the air component. It’s a function of having that seat at the table and being able to discuss what the space war fighting contribution is to that particular campaign element. And then it becomes readily apparent where your forces are, where your capabilities are, what needs to be done to protect those. So it’s really not a problem since we’ve activated.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

That’s good to hear, sir. General Grynkewich, what innovations or lessons learned have been made in your command that could enable the Joint Force to better defend forward locations?

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So I’d offer a couple of thoughts. First, as a paid political announcement for AFCENT, if you look at the tactical problem in the Pacific in a very shorthand description of it might be thousands of ballistic missiles that can rain down hate on the first island chain, forcing us to move to different places like the second island chain. And we can’t go and attack those ballistic missiles either for policy reasons or because they’re protected by an advanced IADs. If I take you into the CENTCOM AOR, it’s the exact same tactical problem, different scale perhaps, but the exact same tactical problem that we face in AFCENT. Our first island chain are the main operating bases that we actually have at forward locations along the Arabian Gulf. Many of you have probably served there over the years at Ali Al Salem or Al Dhafra or Al Udeid.

And our second island chain are the bases that we would use as contingency operating locations that are over, say, along the Red Sea or in the Mediterranean or over on the continent of Africa, if Trapper lets us use them. So the point is, if you flip east and west and change the sand into water, you have a very similar tactical problem. So across the board, as we think in AFCENT about how we execute things like agile combat employment, as we explore the tenants of mission command and as we develop our overall theater architecture for air defense, the lessons that we’re learning, the lessons that you all will learn if you come into AFCENT, will be directly exportable to the fight that we will all have to be involved in, should it come, with China. So I think it’s highly exportable across the globe. The biggest challenge for us, again, is the C2 of this entire thing.

So there’s lots of challenges with capability. Do we have enough? Is it mobile enough? Can we set it up quick enough, et cetera. But it’s a command and control of those capabilities and making sure that we know when a fighter’s going to intercept, we know when a Patriot’s going to engage. We know when we’re now going to hand off to a Base Air Defense Center so that they can engage with their capabilities, and how do you make those seamless transitions?

And every time there’s a seam, there’s an opportunity for us to mess it up. And so practicing and practicing and practicing several times a week doing exercises either up with bases in OIR, CJTF for Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria where they come under UAS attack several times a month, or doing that at our main operating bases that AFCENT runs outside of OIR. It’s absolutely critical that we practice this and then export those TTPs and share them across air components around the world.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Gentlemen, any perspectives on this? Any TTPs on defending bases, both material and non-material, or TTP?

Maj. Gen. Derek France:

I think the one thing I would add that we have discovered more recently than not in USAFE is the need to train and to exercise and to practice those TTPs because the reality is that every base, whether it’s a MOB or a FOB, is different in some aspect or another, especially the forward operating bases. So we put assets in an eastern flank base that has U.S. air assets on the ground, NATO partner defense assets on the base, U.S. assets on the base, host nation assets on the base, SA3s, Patriots, et cetera, all trying to figure out how that layered defense looks like and who’s going to be the shooter and what authorities they’re going to operate under.

And to exercise that and really just have a live fly red air come in simulating a cruise missile or a type three, four, or five UAS is eye-opening to do that. And so we’ve gotten to the point where those locations, and you can’t just go one and it’s the same across the theater, that the locations are unique and specific and we’ve, I think, made some pretty good money as far as actually being ready to handle that scenario, at least as best we can, given the resources that are involved.

Lt. Gen. Scott L. Pleus:

Yeah, the only thing I would bring to that is when you’re not in actual engaged, named operation, and in the case of Korea, that is sovereign Korean airspace. So a threat flying towards a base that is my responsibility to defend, until it crosses my fence line, is not my authority to do anything. Until I become the JFAC and the WAMDC, all of the authorities that come with that, I have to do nothing more than say to the, in this case, our Korean partners, “Hey, do you see it?”

And if they don’t see it, then we pass the information to it and then they make decisions. And until it physically flies over my fence line in a vertical 90-degree vertical line, there’s nothing I can do about it because that is their sovereign airspace and it is their host nation responsibility to protect against it. And it happens every day in all of the AORs that we run into.

Korea just happens to be a little bit different where they had the drones that flew in December 26 into Seoul, out of North Korea. The first question was, “Hey, you’re the WAMDC, what are you doing about it?” And I said, “I have no authority to do anything about it.” And we worked very closely in partnership with our ROK counterparts and we provided options available to their National Command authority to make decisions over that. But that’s one of those kind of, when you look at a wiring diagram of what your authorities are, you always have to put a caveat next to it as to what authorities you have based on where you are in conflict, crisis or, in my case, it’s armistice on a day-to-day basis.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you, sir.

Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Mastalir:

So in terms of sharing TTPs and lessons learned across the various AORs, one of the advantages we have, there’s not a lot of advantages to being small, but one of them is that we can share information fairly easily. And, of course, I spent a year working CENTCOM and helping working with General Grynkewich at the time, helping build that component structure. And happy to hand that off to Colonel Chris Putman, who’s the commander there today, and has continued to just do awesome things with it.

And then, like you heard the CSO allude to earlier today, we’re looking at activating that next component. Well, we have the one on Penn, which is under my flag, Lieutenant Colonel Josh McCullion commanding there. And then we’re going to look at standing up another one in the European command, looking at specifically elevating into a Europe Africa type space component.

So the advantages is all these commanders, we all know each other, and we all served together for one to two decades-plus. And so being able to share information in terms of what works in one AOR and what might then translate to another AOR is pretty easy. But more to the point, and we just held the first one at Al Udeid, is these theater space conferences, and we bring in everybody from all the various components.

Like I said, Colonel Putman hosted the last one at Al Udeid. We brought in folks from the CSpOC at Vandenberg, from U.S. Space Command, from the IC, and really focusing on that theater space component and what it needs to bring to the fight, sharing those lessons learned, in terms of what did we set up to protect Reaper lines in this particular AOR. Now that Reapers are going to be flying in another AOR, will those same TTPs work? So being able to transfer that information very easily is one of the advantages that Space Force has, being the small numbers that we are.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Outstanding, sir. So General Pleus, what advancements does the Air Force need to make in its AAD architecture to enable it to defend more effectively against a peer competitor?

Lt. Gen. Scott L. Pleus:

I think the easiest number one topic, I think, would be the ability to share information. There’s not a theater of theater around in the entire world right now where we don’t run into some problems with our ability to share information from a AAMDC standpoint on. And I think that’s probably the first thing. I think opportunities to increase sensor sensitivity, if you will, the ability to find smaller targets, specifically in the UAS realm, is going to be critical as we move forward. I think options for the actual protection of a facility or a base, anything that we can do that can lower the cost curve, specifically so we’re not shooting million dollar missiles at $50 helicopters or quad copters.

Anything we can do to bring that cost curve down. And then I think the last thing that we need to consider is then how you take that architecture, whatever that sharing architecture is, and make sure that you’ve got the right command and control in place that goes across either national lines or host nation lines and the authorities that are imposed inside of them. The vignette that I gave a minute ago is exactly the conversation that you would want to have so that you don’t end up in that seam, which it’s, “I have no authority to do the job, yet they turn to me and say, ‘What are you going to do about it?'”

And if we can play through those, I think those are the opportunities. I think probably I’m talking mostly to industry at this point. The ideas of what are the innovative ideas you have out there on how we can start to help facilitate those types of things, multi-domain, cross-domain solutions. And when I say multi-domain, I’m really talking about truly multi-domain. Non-kinetic, kinetic options as well as how do we do that in a coalition environment? And every coalition is different.

And so if you’re talking about a NATO coalition, that’s going to be different than what you’ve got over in the UAE. It’s a different one that you’ve got between countries from the Space Force standpoint and different than what the ROK allows in Korea. So I think that’s where I would ask industry to put their smartest folks on because the problem set of defending not just a base, but frankly the United States of America and its soldiers, sailors, Airmen, Marine, and Guardians is our responsibility no matter where we are on the planet. And we need to make sure that we are prepared to do that prior to any cessation of hostilities.

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich:

Outstanding, sir. Now just so I’m understanding, I am a product of the Florida public school system, so I got the caveat. We’re talking information sharing. You’re basically talking overclassification perhaps?

Lt. Gen. Scott L. Pleus:

Well, it’s not necessarily over classification. It’s just classification in most cases. And then on the second part of that is I’ve got a system that it’s a U.S.-only system, and they’ve got a Korean system. And their system is no U.S. It’s Korea, no U.S. We always say, “It’s secret. No foreign.” Theirs is secret, no U.S. And those two systems can’t talk to each other today. And that, I think, is really… It doesn’t really matter what the information is. It’s just how do we share it across those domains.

Col. Stuart Pettis, USAF (Ret.):

Gotcha, sir. So, gentlemen, we’re wrapping up here. Thank you so much for your time here today. As, again, the product of the Florida public school system, I’m a little humbled being up here with these great leaders, who some I’ve known for many years. So thank you so much for your time here today, sharing your perspectives with our both industry and all of our Airmen and Guardian that are here today. So thank you so much.

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich:

Thanks.

Kendall Reveals New Details on Air Force Plans: 1,000 CCAs, 200 NGAD Fighters

March 7, 2023 | By John A. Tirpak

AURORA, Colo.—The Air Force will field 200 Next-Generation Air Dominance aircraft and notionally 1,000 Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and will request funds in the fiscal 2024 budget to develop these new systems, Secretary Frank Kendall said in his keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 7.

The next generation of air dominance will include both the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter platform “and the introduction of uncrewed collaborative aircraft to provide affordable mass and dramatically increased cost effectiveness,” Kendall said.

The “notional” 1,000 CCA figure was derived from “an assumed two CCAs for 200 NGAD platforms, and an additional two for each of 300 F-35s,” Kendall said.

He cautioned that “this isn’t an inventory objective, but a planning assumption to use for analysis of things such as basic organizational structures, training and range requirements, and sustainment concepts.”

Exactly how many NGAD platforms the Air Force is planning to buy has been a closely-held secret, and even if it is “notional,” the 200 figure is revealing in that it is greater than the current inventory of F-22s which the NGAD will eventually succeed circa 2030.

Kendall has previously said as many as five CCAs could collaborate with each crewed fighter—performing missions in electronic warfare, suppression of enemy air defenses, air and ground protection, and communications—but he has also said the process of introducing them will be iterative.

Asked in a later press conference why the planning figure mentioned 300 F-35s—when the Air Force inventory objective of 1,763 F-35s has not changed since the program’s inception—Kendall said it is “just a reasonable starting point. It’s somewhat arbitrary.”

While USAF is “starting out” with a notional two CCAs to work with each of 500 fighters, “I don’t know what the ultimate inventory … would be or exactly what the ratio would be,” Kendall said. “It could be more than that. It’s going to be a question of what the technology will support and what works out best for operational forces. But we wanted to give” chief of staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. “a reasonable assumption, … a basis to begin some planning.”

He added that, “This is a new thing. It’s a … way of operating we haven’t actually had a experience with, so we’ve got a lot to learn and that’s going to take some experimentation … some testing and some careful thought. So we put that on the table as a way to structure that planning, around what we think is a reasonable first tranche and a reasonable ratio. And we’ll learn as we go.”

Kendall said the budget that will go to Capitol Hill next week will include requests for CCA stand-ins “that … are not the ultimate CCA, which we can use for a variety of things to develop operational concepts to develop technology, reduce the risk of the program … and also start to think through some things like how we train, what kind of organizational structures we have, etc. So there’s still a lot to be done there.”

Kendall acknowledged his earlier comments about up to five CCAs per crewed aircraft, but said the updated figure of two is about finding a “sweet spot.”

“We don’t want to undershoot, we don’t want to overshoot,” Kendall added. While the Air Force wants to get “as much operational combat capability as we can out of this concept,” he warned that “if we shoot too far, we’re gonna have a problem: program that gets caught in schedule and cost overruns. So we’re assessing the technology.”

The CCAs will be pursued “competitively,” he told reporters. “There are a lot of candidates. … People are out there thinking hard about this already, based on the what we’ve already put out.”

“I want to push the technology without pushing it too far. So that’s that’s something we’re gonna have to figure out as we go along,” Kendall added.

Affordability for force-building is one of the drivers behind the push for CCAs, Kendall said—if the Air Force only buys F-35s and F-15EXs, then “we have an unaffordable Air Force.” The goal for CCAs will be to cost “some fraction” of the cost of an F-35. “We’re going to design around that,” he said.

However, Kendall also hinted that greater buys of F-35s will be coming in the fiscal 2024 budget request that goes to Congress in the next week or so, saying in his speech that the service “will be acquiring aircraft currently in production at higher rates than previously planned,” though, in general, “our previously-initiated programs are continuing as intended.”

In the longer term, the 2024 budget includes “close to 20 new or significantly enhanced efforts.”

Kendall said his “greatest fear” is that Congress will not move out quickly to debate, authorize, and appropriate defense funds, which would stymie new starts and be “a gift to China … that we cannot afford.”

Quoting Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Kendall said “military failure can almost always be summarized in just two words: ‘Too late.’ Time is an asset that can never be recovered or replaced.” And while he expressed gratitude to the White House and Congress for supporting increased USAF spending in fiscal 2023, “especially in allowing nearly all requested divestitures of legacy systems,” he also warned the forthcoming budget request will include more “hard choices.”

Watch, Read: ‘Defining Optimized Resilient Basing’

March 7, 2023

To help the Air Force disperse and harden its forces to make targeting harder for adversaries, industry is considering things like better connectivity and more, panelists said March 7, 2023, at the AFA Warfare Symposium. The panel on ‘Defining Optimized Resilient Basing’ included Ryan Bunge, Vice President & General Manager Resilient Networking and Autonomy Solutions, Collins Aerospace; Thom Kenney, Technical Director, OCTO, Google; nad Brad Reeves, Director for C4I Solutions, Elbit America. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Hey, good afternoon teammates. My name is Paul Birch. I’m the Wing Commander at the 36th Wing Anderson Air Force Base on Guam, and …

Audience:

[Cheering]

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

I did bring a cheering section. Thanks guys. This is the panel on optimizing resilient basing, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to introduce our illustrious panel here and then we’ll open with a few thoughts on what we’ve seen on that topic in Guam and why I’m so encouraged. But I just want to start off with a note of gratitude, how thankful I am to be here, how thankful that you all have joined us when we’re up against the Global Strike Command Keynote and a panel on the future of pilot training, which I know are very interesting topics.

So over here to my left, Ryan Bunge from Collins Aerospace, Brad Reeves from Elbit America, and Thom Kenney from Google OCTO. And I’ll just let these gentlemen introduce themselves a little bit more, say what their role in the company is and then say how JADC2 or ABMS is relevant to the topic of resilient basing. So Ryan, we’ll give you the floor first.

Ryan Bunge:

Yeah. Hey, thank you sir, and thanks for the opportunity to be here. I understand we’re up against a couple panels. We’re also up against beer down in the exhibit hall.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

That’s right.

Ryan Bunge:

So yeah, I’m Ryan Bunge. I’m The Vice President and General Manager of a business at Collins Aerospace that we call Resilient Networking and Autonomy. So really the strategic focus of my business has a lot to do with JADC2 ABMS.

But as I think about the context of this panel, if I think about resilient basing, I think the logistical problems you face today, sir, even in peace time and operating from a main operating base with infrastructure are probably challenging enough. But if I think about that in the threat that we face or in a future conflict, we start moving to agile combat employment operations, I think that challenge is going to grow considerably. So if you think about doing that in a distributed manner, you think about doing that maybe at more austere locations where you don’t have some of that infrastructure that you typically count on and you think about doing that in a CDOL environment in a contested environment or even a denied environment. I think it starts to become a pretty challenging.

And I think that from our vantage point of the world in the connectivity business, I think beyond just the challenges of marshaling the people, the resources, the wartime material, I think we’re seeing a growing importance of the ability to marshal the data, and that’s largely where our focus is. If you think about what might be the first knights of a conflict like that, if anyone was here to listen to the last panel, they touched on some of this, but that ability to get the ATO, that ability to maybe pop up on the network, get that C2 update, get that intel update, or in those first nights you may encounter things or sense things that you haven’t before, it’s not in your library.

You got to be able to get up on the net, get that critical information back into a cloud, back CONUS, get it processed, get your MDFs updated, get back out there and into the fight. So those things become pretty challenging in that CDOL environment. So the way that we’re looking at how we help that problem set is really the resiliency and redundancy of connectivity methods to get after that. And that’s part of your pace plan. Again, when you’re at that main operating base, you’ve likely got your fiber infrastructure, you’ve got your nipper, your sipper, all the ways that you enjoy today. You’ve probably got 5G capabilities coming online that help solve some of that problem. But again, when you move to some of those other contested area, you start moving down that pace plan a little bit to some of those alternate methods of doing that.

So certainly a lot of interest in commercial satcom now. As that maybe becomes less available, you move down or degrade to a military satcom maybe onto a tactical network or tactical mesh network, maybe even all the way down to HF. HF is maybe a capability we don’t talk a whole heck of a lot about, but there’s a lot of advancements going on in HF right now with wider bandwidths and digital mesh networking. I think it provides a really great opportunity for that kind of final step of your pace plan. It’s pretty easy to move, it’s easy to set up and it’s pretty darn hard to contest.

So we’re looking at things like that. And then I think maybe three other things I would point to as we think about or you contemplate building out that pace plan or setting up those capabilities to ensure that connectivity. I think we got to think about the joint and mission partner environment as we build that out. So as you think about maybe falling in on other preexisting locations or cooperative security kind of things, we need that ability to drive the interoperability with our partners that brings in things like cross domain solutions, different enclaves of security that we need to be able to operate and move that data through to be successful with our partners.

I think the second thing that we need to think about as we build that out also is assured P&T. None of these networks happen without time. And in a GPS contested environment, you need that AP&T ability to stand up those networks, provide that good known source of time. And then maybe that third aspect that I would point to is just the people side. So again, as we build out this pace plan, the redundant resilient networks, the ability to automate that, make that intuitive easy to use, bringing in AIML, some of the things that’ll help do that I think will be tremendously valuable. And then the ability to train for those scenarios. So as you think about training for that fight untethered way in that second or third island chain, doing it out for real, I think are important areas for us to focus on going forward.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Great. Thanks Ryan. Brad Reeves.

Brad Reeves:

Yeah, thank you, sir. So I’m at Elbit America. I lead the C4ISR business segment there. And I’ll start with a spoiler alert. All right. And that is that you have a problem, a dilemma when it comes to resilient basing and projecting air power in the INDOPACOM Theater. You have to survive against a formidable missile threat. And one of the ways we’re doing that is by dispersing bases throughout that theater. And so enter part one of the dilemma, which I want you to not only survive but thrive, but in the dilemma, you have to have the numbers to do that and you just don’t have those numbers.

So a fun fact for you is during World War II, the US had 93 air bases abroad that carried us through the Cold War. Today we have 33. So this is a problem, right? And it means that the fixed sites, while absolutely important like Guam in critical are not going to be enough. We’re going to have to rely on expeditionary bases to do this. And so we’re not the only ones that have figured this out. The Marine Corps following your lead, they’re completely redesigning themselves and they have a concept of focus that they call expeditionary advanced base operations or EABO. It’s quite complimentary to our agile combat employment ACE concept inside of the Air Force.

But now inter dilemma part two, and that is that in order for these expeditionary bases, these austere locations to be effective, they have to have command and control and they have to have protection. So I’m full of bad news so far. I’m hopeful to give you some hope here right now to say in industry we’re trying to get after these problems. In America, what we’re doing to help you solve parts of these dilemmas is we have two main focus areas that we’re looking at.

The first is expeditionary survivable command and control, C2. The second is autonomous force protection solutions. And so these are related to the ACE concept. As a matter of fact, they tie into three of the five core elements: command and control, movement and maneuver, and protection. These are inside the ACE concept.

And so here’s what we’re doing to get after those. On the C2 side, what we’re bringing to the fight there is expeditionary survivable command and control. What does that look like? Think a mobile C2 platform that allows you to conduct C2 at the tactical level. So what is this? It could be a BDOC for base defense. It could be a NPC for mission planning for aircrew in between sort generations. It could be an AOC light type of function which allows you to operate and generate mission type orders when you get disconnected from the greater KOC. And it could be a WOC, a wing op center. So if you’re at the wing level to connect into the greater JADC2 network. Using things like resilient networks that my friend Ryan is talking about today, using machine learning and data management that my friend Thom is talking about today.

So this is what we have brought on the C2 side. And then on the protection side, in order for these expeditionary bases to be effective, we’re offering autonomous force protection solutions. And so with these, think a fully autonomous team of unmanned platforms that are able to conduct observation and sensing around the local area for that commander. And so this is not just the perimeter security and counter UAS though it certainly includes that it goes beyond the base, it goes through the island, it goes beyond the island even into the lateral maritime region. So now you’re getting into multi-domain air, land and sea awareness. And so this is the knowledge that the commander has to have in order to launch and recover air power in an effective and safe manner.

And for those that are old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoon commercials, we learned here that knowing is half the battle. So this is what we’re talking about with the protection. So this C2 and protection are things that we in industry owe you and things we’re working on at Elbit America to help you be more effective to not only survive, but to also thrive in this type of environment. And I’ll finish by just offering that first an applause to you to for being here because when the military-industrial complex, when we come together, history has shown that when we partner, we’re able to be a potent force and we’re able to deliver use systems and solutions that enable you to do what you do best, which is to arise, to go forth and to conquer.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Thanks a lot Brad. Thom Kenney.

Thom Kenney:

Thank you General. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today with my colleagues. I’m from Google and I’m part of a group called the Office of the CTO, and that’s what General Birch referred to as OCTO. We call ourselves OCTO. And the role of the office of the CTO is specifically to be the technical leaders inside of Google Cloud that connect with our largest customers and solve some of our most challenging problems. And many of those problems are years away from being realized.

One of the exciting things about being in OCTO is the opportunity to look very, very broadly across a number of different industries and across a number of different agencies. As we stood up Google Public Sector, one of the things that we were looking at doing was bringing all of the best practices from the commercial sector that could apply to US government agencies, and particularly here now the Department of Defense and accelerate where we need to go now.

Now as we’re talking about JADC2 and some of the connections with ABMS, before I came to Google, I was the Chief Data Officer and Head of AI for SOCOM. And I can tell you the connectivity in data sharing problem is so real, especially when we think about strategic competition. Now, Google as an entity has grown up over the last 25 years and some have characterized us as a toddler in a suit, meaning we’re still very young relative to some other companies, but we’ve got some of the prowess to bring some of the expertise to the industry.

One of those things that I think is interesting about where we’re going is looking at data management at a planet scale. Now data management is one of those things that we lament about, we moan about. It’s one of the hardest things to do when you talk about working inside of JADC2 with the DOD. And part of that is contractually based. Part of that is we have a lot of legacy systems and part of it is we’re just not really sure exactly where we need to go. JADC2 is going through a new evolution Now it is no longer with the Joint Staff J6, but it’s now in the Chief Digital and AI Office trying to accelerate our path.

So as we look at it from Google perspective and we look at that planet scale data management, we recognize a couple of things that are related to resilient basing. The first is you don’t need all the data that exists all the time. So as we think about some of the ways that our adversaries have looked at pushing data, they’re pushing every single piece of data they have to every location. This is going to be a challenge for them in strategic competition. If we look at data management from the perspective of what is the most important information and where does it need to get to first, we can start creating the ability to transit data across the globe at speeds we’ve never seen before. If we also look at data management at what is the most information that the commander needs and the most relevant information that the commander needs, we can reduce the cognitive overload that we seem to get with a lot of systems that we have today.

How many of us have deployed overseas and had to deal with two or three or five different systems at a time and there’s information on one system that doesn’t match another system? As a Civil Affairs Officer in the Army Reserve, I can tell you this happened all the time. One deployment has one system, another deployment has another system, and in a third deployment, you’ve got three systems that are all doing the same thing. This idea of data management and ensuring that data is getting to the right people at the right time is absolutely critical.

As we think about the forward motion of what we need to do for strategic competition as it relates to JADC2 and resilient basing, one of the things that we recognize is that the information needs to get closest to the last mile as it possibly can. Thinking about having massive CONUS data centers cannot be the answer for where we need to be with JADC2, but nor do we need to replicate the size and capacity of every data center that we have in CONUS for those that are OCONUS.

As we look at where we need to go from a data center perspective and what needs to happen with machine learning, we work very, very hard to help people understand that you don’t need the same computing power to actually train an algorithm. That’s very computationally intensive. But there are companies out there today, one of which that I got to meet a little while ago that can put a computer vision algorithm onto a device the size of a SIM card that can recognize every commercial aircraft that exists in the world today. Imagine that. Imagine in a resilient basing model where weight and time is so important to deploying force, minimizing the amount of weight that you transmit out to a resilient base and minimizing the amount of data you have to transmit to a resilient base allows you to accelerate your opportunity faster and it gets the people that you need there faster.

Now, as a secondary, we’ve already heard this from the other panelists up here today that there’s more to this than just what we’re going to provide. And one of the things that we’re really excited about with Google when we talk about JADC2, there’s also the sustainment and the comms aspect of this too. And think about the power of bringing the best of breed software cloud and hardware companies together to drive this forward. Thinking about API-centric designs, thinking about what is the last time of value for data, thinking about what data do I need to make a strategic decision at what echelon at what time? And we’ve had a tremendous opportunity going forward. JADC2 is not going to be easy. Integrating it with ABMS, integrating it with all the other systems that exist today. This is a very hard problem to crack, but it’s not insurmountable.

Look at the things that we did in World War II ramping up our capability. Now, the technology was not the same on silicon. It was steel technology we were building, but we were able to do it because we had a very concerted effort, we had great leadership and we’re able to deliver. We can do the same thing with resilient basing. We can get to a point that whatever element size you need that needs to get to a forward operating location has the connectivity back to a global network that gives you the right information at the right time, whether it’s from a piece of hardware, a piece of software, or from boots on the ground.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Great opening. Salvo, gentlemen, I appreciate it. I told you at the outset I wanted to unpack my optimism for we’re growing by leaps and bounds in this space. And I’m going to do that in the context of a recently completed exercise called COPE North, which is something we’ve done for many years in PACAF and Endo Paycom, and it’s a tri-lateral exercise traditionally with the United States, Australia and Japan.

But we just came off the 2023 iteration of that, and I would argue that it was nothing like its predecessors in terms of the scope and complexity of the basing problem we faced and tackled very successfully. So the realm of our operations went all the way up from Ioto, which you may know is Iwo Jima in the north, then down through Saipan, Tinian, Rhoda, Guam, all the way down through the Federated States of Micronesia and down to Palau.

And in that part of the second island chain, we operated no fewer than 10 hubs and spokes. Two of them were on Guam proper out of Anderson Air Force base and Juan Pat the international airport. But then a combination of fighter mobility, air power went to all these different spokes and generated in a way that simulated genuine lethality, genuine mission generation, things that would be useful in an enhanced competitive environment or a more competitive environment.

And what I saw was really night and day from some of the things I’d even heard in the Pentagon in the previous year, I would hear things like, “Well, we don’t know what it takes to buy a unit of ACE” or “I don’t really know what operational imperative five means when it says more resilient basing.” Now we can completely debunk those notions and say, “We know exactly what we need to do. We know exactly what the elements of ACE are and we know exactly what a resilient base looks like.”

And there’s several facets of both of those gems and there’s lots of low hanging fruit in each one. So let me kind of go from small to big in this case and just say what we recognize. They’re the first one. The imperative from PACAF leadership is having landing services and taxi services where we can put aircraft so that we complicate the enemy’s targeting problem and then we generate air power from so that we can be lethal. And I think it’s important to put those two together. We talked a lot about the first part of that, complicating the targeting problem, which is great and which is necessary, but at the end of the day, we don’t want to just be a target. We want to be something that can go do something useful to deter, compete, or win.

The second part of it is having the preposition war reserve material, the fuel, the weapons, the age, the MHE, the things we’ll need to be effective at those locations. Having them in the right scalability in the right amount so that you’re not overdoing it, so you’re not letting it rot out in the tough climates in the tough environments that we face out there. But certainly having it there and being able to flow it at scale just in time when we need to fight with it.

Another part of it is protection, and that takes many forms. You have high-end systems that are coming from the Missile Defense Agency to protect some of the population centers and the central hubs. But then we’ll also use things like concealment, camouflage, deception. We’ll use some other passive means. We’ll use some directed energy, we’ll use a variety of things at our disposal in a way that’s appropriate for the hub or spoke we’re at to protect ourselves from the adversary. But again, it’s all with the idea of not remaining a target, but rather getting the air power off the ground and into a spot where it can be lethal and then tied together with JADC2 concepts so that it knows what to do and we know how to bring the conflict to a rapid end.

In COPE North, we saw a couple things and it kind of reverberated out. And the first place was every wing, every unit in PACAF is coming together to do this. Some other panels have covered this very well. This is not a strange and abnormal thing in PACAF anymore, and it’s the way of the world in the Air Force. Now, General Grynkewich next door just talked about how they’re doing a AFCENT wide ACE exercise where all the wings are picking up, shuffling around, operating out base clusters just in the same way we did in COPE North. And it’s certainly happening at scale and Europe too. So what we’re doing is we’re seeing the entire Air Force imbued with this mindset, with these capabilities and getting the sets and reps to be truly competent.

The next thing to focus on is the fact that the entire world is coming out to these resilient bases to see what we need. And that’s going to drive us into our next question. So I have an idea how I need to protect my base and how do I need to protect my base cluster and what do I need at the various hubs and spokes. But one of the challenges we’ve found is we need to communicate that rapidly to industry, to the decision makers in Washington, DC, the appropriators, the people who ultimately set our budget.

So I’ll start with this next question for the panelists. What do you need to hear from the units in the field, from the operational leaders and from strategic leaders in DC to be more effective at helping US design solutions for resilient basing ACE or JADC2? Thom, I’ll hand it over to you first for this one.

Thom Kenney:

That’s a great question, sir. Thinking about what do we need to know in order to solve that problem?

One of the things from our perspective when we think about the large scale planet, scale work has to do with where are the levels of communication that need to happen? Because some of that communication is going to happen at the IL5 level, some at IL6 and some higher. How do we break that down? And then maybe a secondary question is, what is information that may be in a higher domain classification that actually doesn’t need to be, but just happens to be there as it is already? Those are the types of questions that then we can start saying when you’re thinking about the comms, when you’re thinking about the sustainment, once the base is there to answer the question of what do we need to continue to operate?

Now the question becomes a lot easier to share with a larger industrial base. Now you can open up the door to what suppliers do we need to communicate with? Where are those suppliers located? Who are your preferred suppliers? What are the preferred needs? What is the stack rank of needs for comms and for equipment and tooling that you would need to go forward? And I’ll give you an example of why I think this is so important. As you think about that resilient base and getting set up, you’re going to learn a lot in the first 24 to 48 hours. And all of the modeling that we do ahead of time is going to change in the first 24 to 48 hours. So understanding some of those needs and the hierarchy of needs for resilient basing allows companies like ours when we’re developing machine learning models for prediction on where the threats may come from, where are the needs for a sustainment come from, where we may we see communication failures and the backup needs for those resilient failures.

We can now apply automation and intelligence that allows the war fighter to concentrate on the war fighting rather than on the paperwork or rather on chasing all the vendors that you need to chase in order to make this happen. So that hierarchy of needs I think is really, really important. And sharing that hierarchy of needs at what domain and what classification with the time that you need that information is absolutely essential to driving really great machine learning, really great neural networks that help the predictive nature of what we need to do for war fighting and strategic competition.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

That was a great answer. I’ll give everybody a chance to pile in here, but when you talk about pushing information, where we need it, when we need it in the right level, I have to think about what it looks like in the second island chain when we’re under attack and heavily reliant on comm networks that either come from Hawaii or come from Japan, and rarely do they have redundancies that flow from one to the other. So how do we solve the problem of data management pushing data when we’re cut off from our home port as it were? How do you start to tackle that problem? And Ryan, why don’t we start with you for that?

Ryan Bunge:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So I think it builds on what I talked about from having resilient redundant avenues to go do that. And I think one of the really important technologies here to get to that, how do you cover that last mile that Thom talked about, or maybe in this case it’s the last a hundred miles or more, a thousand as you look at it, is applying that similar kind of AIML concepts to how we sense the electromagnetic spectrum and being able to then utilize the criticality of which packets of data have to get through. To Thom’s point, what are the pieces of information that need to get there? That’s an area that we’re doing a lot of work in actually have done a lot of work with DARPA, looking at how we sense that and then how we route the criticality of packets by the most assured method to ensure that data that has to get there gets there when it needs to.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Okay, great. All right. And then Brad, what do you need to hear more from the user or how do we tackle this problem of getting cut off?

Brad Reeves:

Yeah, sure. Thank you, sir. So first I would say quick public advertisement if I can. For industry, what we really need from you, we don’t even need direct requirements even. We just need to engage. So we just need to be in part of the conversation. That’s what we are thirsty for. A lot of us were in the Air Force, for example. You kind of knew everything. You had a super net on your desk or a JWICS, you go into industry and it’s the black hole right? Now you know nothing, and so having those conversations is key. So just for all my industry partners, if I can just put that public advertisement out.

But as far as what we need in that conversation, we need, we really need to understand the CONOPS and where the TTPs and the way you’re thinking about this and I’ll just give you a kind of an example. So you alluded earlier, sir, there’s what I’ll call the exquisite type of solutions. So these are the things that Anderson could potentially have. When I was in the Pentagon a while back, we were addressing this issue and we had a company that came to us and I don’t remember all the details, but they said, “Hey, you need hardened shelters for all your bases. So seven foot 5,000 PSI reinforced concrete, and this will be the solution for a passive base protection measure.”

And I mean, great idea. I think we’d all love to do that. And at Anderson, we can might be able to do that. Expeditionary bases and all of these spokes, it’s just not practical for us to do that. So that’s the exquisite side. So then the CONOP becomes, “Okay, what do we do for the exquisite solutions where we have all the lake sharks with laser beams and stuff like that to defend the base? And then what do we do at the expeditionary hub?” So what’s the CONOP look like? Is it just General Brown said, “Hey all, I need to be able to launch and recover air power is I need a ramp, I need a runway, I need a weapons trailer, a fuel bladder, and a pallet of MREs and I can go.”

And that type of concept is not far from the truth for what is the realm of the practical. We can offer solutions that will enable you to do that type of launch or recovery of air power at our steer locations, at these expeditionary hubs. And we remember back in the day, we used to train for this. We used to train for landing on highways in South Korea or in Europe and you just had some fuel there. You had a few local things you’d turn, squeeze, and off you went. So we used to do all of this. We’ve kind of forgotten a lot of it. So a lot of this is from the past. If I can say borrow this term from the past in the future, that’s kind of where we’re going back. But it’s really us being a part of that conversation.

As far as how do we now manage the data that question, the way at least we’re addressing that at Elbit America is, we view that in, I’ll call them echelons. So we have the higher level global type of cloud, if you will, the all-knowing Skynet type of data. And that’s all great, but we’re not going to be connected to that. At some point during the fight we’re going to get disconnected. So then you would have a regional version of that if you will. And then most importantly, you then have a tactical level, a tactical cloud.

And so as you decrease in these, what you lose as you get disconnected is you don’t have all of the current information, but you still have last known data and you have enough to continue to fight the fight. And then the final defense is edge computing. And so today’s environment, and one of the things we’re working on is edge compute and putting AI on there. And that allows the war fighter, it allows you to reduce cognitive workload. It allows you to reduce the number of operators. It allows you to continue to fight the fight. It’s a degraded manner. But that’s one of the strengths of the US quite frankly, is our ability to command and control into issue mission type orders in old school.

When we were disconnected from the greater C2 networks, you had a captain, mission commander with his package of aircraft or assets. In this case we’ve got cyber space, all sorts of great assets. You gave him those assets and he or she went out and they went and they conquered the world and they conducted a mission and they did that and they made decisions at their level. And so pushing empowerment down, that’s where the TTPs come. But if we’re in the conversation, then we can help an industry deliver those solutions.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Great. Great answers. Thank you all. Okay, let’s land this plane with one last discussion of resources specifically those we’re short on. So the title of this panel might be a little bit misleading. We’re talking about optimizing and when I think about optimizing, I usually think about reaching an inflection point where your use of resources is at a minimum. But it turns out that to be resilient and to have options and to be able to go to many places and to be able to effectively generate air power from those many places isn’t really efficient. So the thing that we’re optimizing here is maybe that balance and tension between efficiency and efficacy.

And one of the things that I’ve seen personally is it takes more people to run this. And that can be at your command and control echelon where you need now an AEW, an air expeditionary wing staff on top of an air expeditionary task force staff, and then the various staffs that are going to do those functions that keep a force fed and in the fight. And then even at the tactical level, my contingency response capacity, do I have the people that can go out and do those base opening functions to get us out there in the first place so that we can generate and then we can sustain in things?

And so that makes us acutely aware of the shortages we have. And some other panels have covered what we talked about, how many bases we used to have around the world and we don’t have that anymore. Trey Coleman in his AOC panel talked about the relative decline in the number of aircraft we had. And of course commensurate with that is a decline in none of other people.

So since we’ve got a panelist who are experts in this area, the question then becomes artificial intelligence, machine learning, what can those emerging technologies do for us in terms of making it more efficient to operate with the people that we do have? And Ryan, we’ll start with you on that one.

Ryan Bunge:

Yeah, so I think efficiency is really the key. In the concept of ACE, we talk about multi-dimensional Airmen, folks that can fall in and fulfill a number of different roles because as you say, the recruiting challenges, the distribution, the scale at which you’re going to have to get after this problem is going to put a huge strain on the number of people. So I think where AIML can help tremendously there is if you automate a lot of the tasks, the data management, you present more decision aiding, you make it easier for one airman to maybe perform a couple different functions with the support of that automation, it allows you to get a little more bang for the buck with the folks that you do have there.

And then I think just potentially a shift in how you deploy your resources. So if you think about one of the biggest challenges, we kind of joked about the tyranny of distance, the thousand miles, it puts every piece of your logistics chain in contention. So we think about how you automate some of that from a physical flight automation or uncrewed assets to move things around, does that allow you to free up then some resources to apply it to other parts of the problem set?

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Excellent. Brad.

Brad Reeves:

Yeah, so I love this question. So I’ll try to contain myself and not dance too much on stage because I do geek out on some of this technology and there’s a lot out there and there’s a realm that I’ve actually seen operate with my own eyes and now I get it. And so I’m going to try to plant something in your head with plant a picture to help you understand this.

So one of the things we’re doing, like all the folks here, we’re a global company. And so all the folks on the stage here, global company. So we’re pulling some technology from some of our overseas counterparts in Israel that just so happened to be, I am going to say the world leaders in autonomous war fighting. I don’t know if that’s really true or not, but that’s how I would label them. They’re really good at this and they’re doing it today.

And so we’ve brought some of this technology over and so our engineers have been working with theirs and we’ve transferred some of this knowledge. And what we’re able to do now with AI and machine learning autonomous systems is we’re able to do the full OODA loop, if you will, all the way from the planning, execution, debrief, assessment all the way back around in the loop to close that out. And you can do it fully autonomous.

And so what does this look like? So we have systems today, that technology exists where you can have one airman and he can operate an entire unmanned team that can take care of, let’s just say we’re, since we’re talking force protection, you mentioned that earlier force protection for the base. And so now you have some small platforms, you have one airman and you have what used to be, we would have hundreds and hundreds of base defenders, for example. And so you can augment a lot of that because the system will reduce the cognitive workload or in my terms, makes it easier for somebody to do a larger amount of work without thinking too much and it also reduces the number of operators that you need to do that.

And so it’s really game changing. And again, there’s the exquisite side where we’re talking the CCCA stuff where you have unmanned wingmen and all this on the fighter side, all the way down to here on the expeditionary basin side. But it is critical that the footprint is small enough that it’s actually something that can be … it has to be an executable plan. And so that in the expeditionary basing the elephant in the room is the sustainment of the logistics side of this. That’s one of the other elements I didn’t mention in ACE on purpose because it’s a can of worms, right?

How do you actually sustain or setup these bases? Well, I don’t have a great solution for you today, but I’ll just tell you in industry, the way we’re attacking that is we’re trying to come up with light and small systems that you can easily get them there because Thom mentioned the chip, right? Where you have all this type of machine learning and computer vision on a small chip. This is what we have to do. We have to use that autonomous capability, the AI to augment the humans and it becomes a force multiplier for us.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Wonderful. Thanks. Thom.

Thom Kenney:

So you mentioned the word optimization and in computer science, an optimization problem is a classic problem to try to figure out how to do things a little bit better. If you apply optimization across the board, that’s where you can get a lot of really great value from tools like neural networks, machine learning, data optimization across the board. And how that reacts or relates to what we’ve all set up here, especially what Ryan and Brad have said is about how do we create the resilience and resilience spacing? That comes through resilience supply chains. So think about applying a machine learning model that’s using a neural network that can determine ahead of a human when there’s going to be a supply chain disruption.

The last a hundred miles as we’ll use here today or maybe the last thousand miles, knowing where that disruption is going to happen can be lots of different factors. It could be weather, it could be threat, it could be just shortage of something that’s not available. Having automated systems that can identify where the breaks in the chain may be and being proactive or predictive about solving that break in the chain is huge. Exactly what we’re talking about with base defense, what we’re talking about with air command and control, also what we’re talking about with communications.

This is an area where leveraging commercial networks is a huge advantage for the DOD, and that’s because we’ve been leveraging machine learning capabilities, other artificially intelligent agents to figure out how to do that resilience in our networks already. You may be connected to Hawaii, but if we know what the most important information is, if you get into a degraded connectivity environment and you’re leveraging some more of the commercial environments, you may not need to worry about whether or not I’ve only got an exposed box on the edge. You may have a great connection that you can get through Korea or through Australia or through the Philippines, and have it automatically route the communication traffic with the right priorities based on the needs in the phase of the operation that you’re actually in.

And this is what the real promise is. I mean, we talked earlier about we’ve got plenty of data, we’ve got plenty of data to run Skynet today, that may not be the best solution. And when we think about one of the challenges that we’ve got with man in the middle that seems to come up a lot, the difference between machine learning with logistics and machine learning with war warheads on foreheads is that we can make more mistakes in machine learning and logistics right now and learn how to build very resilient models that we can apply across a number of disciplines to support the needs of the war fighters that are at the edge.

Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD.:

Outstanding. It’s exciting stuff.

Well, folks, I appreciate that we have only scratched a few of the facets on a gem that has many of them and is very complicated. But I know myself and the rest of my panelists, we’re willing to stay here for follow-on conversation if we didn’t hit part of the topic that you would’ve liked us to. And we know that the benefit of these conferences is the one-on-one interaction and the networking that happens too. I’d like to thank our host. I’d like to thank AFA for giving us all the opportunity to have this dialogue today. I wish you a safe evening and we’ll see you back here tomorrow. Thanks, and a hand for our panelists.

Watch, Read: ‘Achieving Moving Target Engagement at Scale’

March 7, 2023

Paul Ferraro, president of air power at Raytheon Technologies; Dave Richards, senior director of precision weapon systems and precision targeting solutions at Elbit America; Mike Shortsleeve, vice president of strategic development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems; and Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe, Director of Plans, Programs, and Requirements, Headquarters Air Combat Command discussed ground, air, and space capabilities that will contribute to the Air Force’s current and future moving target engagement during a March 7, 2023 panel at the AFA Warfare Symposium. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our panel of distinguished panel members up here on achieving engagement of moving targets at scale.

I’m Major General Scott Jobe, Air Combat Command, A-5, 8, 9’s plans, programs, and requirements. And sitting to my left, our distinguished members are Mr. Dave Richards, Senior Director of Precision Weapon Systems, Ground Combat and Precision Targeting Solutions, Elbit America. We also have sitting to his left, Mr. Michael Hall, Director of Domain Awareness, Raytheon Technologies. And to his left last, but certainly not least, Mr. Mike Shortsleeve, who is the General Atomics Vice President of Strategic Development.

Welcome to the panel.

So what we hope to have is a robust dialogue this afternoon on Achieving Engagement and Moving Targets at Scale. For the flow, I’m going to basically go to each of the panel members for quickly a two to three minute introduction for opening comments. Give us a view of your world and what you see is happening in this mission space. And then I’m going to go to each of the panel members, present some targeted questions. We’ll go each on our own merits. Other panel members can chime in as they see fit. And then we’ll try to go around the room in our 40-minute session that we have here. We’ll save a few minutes at the end for any questions or comments from the audience. And so we’ll kick off without further ado.

So Mr. Hall, let’s go opening remarks. How about you go first?

Michael Hall:

Yes sir, thanks and thanks for the opportunity to be here and comment. I’m going to bookend it. Again, Mr. Ferraro sends his regrets. If you saw the picture, our hairstyles might be different, but we think about the problem the same. So we need to track and engage moving targets. You have to do it at scale. That means you need to do it repeatedly, the same mission, have mission depth and in a challenging environment. So all weather far away to stay safe and engage the target. So let’s go to the front of the kill chain or the end of the kill chain where you take the weapons, you think weapons first. I think a storm breaker, it’s a smart weapon, could engage moving targets in all weather up to 45 miles away. You get that distance. It’s currently fielded on the F-15E.

We have a lot of those. You start to get your depth. We’re testing it on the F-18 and the F-35. On the F-35, you can carry eight storm breakers. So again, engaging at scale, you have the numbers to do that. It’s a net enabled weapon. So hope I get a chance to talk more about that. It’s really a game-changing kind of capability. So that’s the end. Let’s go upstream. Where do targets come from? Where do we get the targets in this environment? And I want to talk about ground-based radar. There’s a ground-based radar piece of this, specifically a next generation over the horizon radar.

Nobody’s made one of these yet. It’ll have extra sensitivity, but the tech is there, put it all together. And that investment, that means you’re going to be able to track low-flying cruise missiles. Small targets moving fast. So track the weapons along with the platforms. Again, tracking, moving and engaging moving targets at scale. You want to know everything that’s there. So it puts the whole picture together and you get really robust battle space awareness. So that’s the end, maybe part of the beginning.

It’s all about, there’s a lot of stuff in between. Integrating everything to work in one motion, that’s important. And also industry wise, we’re cognizant that we have to lower cost, kill risk, improve the schedule, get these weapons available. How do you do that? Digital transformation, open architectures, mission engineering, so you can keep the capability in mind and have that as a variable. And again, being a collaborative partner to put the whole thing together to make a robust capability. So beginning and end, that’s how we see the problem.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Thanks. Mr. Shortsleeve.

Mike Shortsleeve:

Thank you. So much of my comments today are going to focus a little more big picture on the entire problem set. So what does it actually mean moving target engagement? Well, for the most part, the Air Force has been doing this for quite some time. You can go back several years, even World War II, they were out there trying to track different targets, whether they were in the maritime environment, the land environment, or in the air. The thing that I find really interesting about this particular operational imperative is what’s at the end of that moving target engagement, the at scale, much larger is what the expectation is. So when I look at this problem set, I’m not just solely looking at the specific platform or weapon or any of that, but it all has to come together as a capability.

And in essence, I see four big bucket areas because ultimately I think the goal is you want to be able to outsee, outrange and outshoot the adversary before they can even get a chance to get at you. So the four big areas that I look at is you got to have the ability to actually sense and strike. You got to have the right capabilities that are able to do this. There’s no one monolithic, exquisite type platform that’s going to do this. It has to be done in multiple fashion with a variety of different platforms and capabilities in all domains to include cyber and space. So getting after this problem set is much more than just trying to target one individual aircraft. We’re talking about characterizing a battle space and having to target, which is the second point I would put in is 100s to 1,000s of target sets.

Having had experience being in the AOC at the beginning of OIF, there was a target list that was well approaching that 1,000 mark. And I got to tell you, many of us were like, “Wow, we’ll see if we can actually accomplish this.” And then once things started happening, those fixed targets that we were going to go after just change the dynamic targeting environment. So this at scale isn’t just specifically for certain target sets where they’re at, but is being able to adapt as quickly as you can to the way the battle space is changing. The third area that I would focus on obviously is do you have enough of this to do this? The capacity aspect of this? How do you get at the ability to get after all these targets with the numbers of weapons that are going to be required or the numbers of sensing capability or all of that has to be looked at.

And then finally, what I think is probably the most important part of getting after the target set when you talk about moving target engagement. And that is the one thing that is common across the board for sensors, the BMC two, the weapons, the shooters, all the enabling things for the kill chain. And that’s connectivity. If you aren’t able to connect everybody together to be able to pass that information, you’re not going to be able to see where the targets are at or be able to react in a quick fashion. So those are some of the things that I would highlight and I’ll talk a little more about those later on.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Thanks so much. Mr. Richards.

Dave Richards:

Again, thanks for having us. I think both Mike and Mike said a lot of the things that I think are on our minds as well in terms of target engagement at scale. Up in America comes at this problem from over a decade of building tens of 1,000s of seekers, mostly for primes, our prime partners for the US Air Force, and we know a thing or two about building things at scale and… Excuse me. And being able to do the manufacturing that’s required to do that. I think the mission challenges that really emerge and the things that we’re tracking as part of this problem set is really that proliferation of the target list.

There’s, in the modeling that we’ve done for other theaters but that we’re seeing in real life in Ukraine, the multi-domain aspect, the enhanced SU 4 ISR, the civilian aspect of target at least finding if not fixing, is really going to be driving that volume pretty significantly. And so when we talk about the cost of being able to engage all of those targets, sometimes we talk about bending the cost curve, the reality is it’s going to need to be a break in the cost curve. It’s going to need to be a significant sea change on all the components. And coming from the secret side, we’re really focused on that aspect. So excited to participate in the discussion today and look forward to the questions.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Thanks for the remarks. All right. So Mr. Hall, we’ll start with you. You’d mentioned ground-based over the horizon radars in your opening remarks. So could you touch on how ground-based radars have evolved to tract and detect advanced threats? Specifically maybe things like hypersonics that threaten our forces as are in the field?

Michael Hall:

Yes, sir. So traditional line of sight radars look out, they have the curvature of the earth problem that gives your adversary a sanctuary. Obviously you’d like to take that away. So HF radars are a little bit different. They’re refracting off the ionosphere, come down straight down, don’t give anybody a chance to fly under the radar, but modernization, that technology needed to be modernized. So the investments not just in our company, but different agencies in the government internationally, there’s been a lot of investments to get that sensitivity up so that over the horizon radar can be something that can see those small targets and stuff. You mentioned hyper sonics and there’s phenomena there that make that sensing. There’s advantages we won’t talk about here to making that detection with a HF kind of radar and hyper sonics, but the sensitivity is needed for those subsonic cruise missile threats too.

So that next generation, you’re going to get the sensitivity, you’re going to get the detections, you’re going to take away the sanctuary of flying under the radar. And again, I’m going to comment too on not just HF Radar, but there’s some latent capability and other ground radars that we have in the inventory. We just had the incident with the new targets floating over America, and you heard on the news that they tweaked some radars and they could make that sensing. So we still have latent capability in our existing radars too, to address OI number four, but a new radar that has some advantages with hyper sonics, broad area, long range, and you really start that kill chain out to take care of the moving target situation.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Thanks. Mr. Shortsleeve, you mentioned your opening remarks a little bit about air operation Center’s, command and control obviously tied into that a targeting cycle, which we’re well familiar with how we have done it in the past. Could you talk to our need to disaggregate and distribute capabilities in maybe some new and unique ways, things that are going to really dictate how we engage moving targets at scale and get up to that 1,000 magic number that you quoted at the beginning. It’s a very complex task obviously. Could you give us some thoughts on that?

Mike Shortsleeve:

Yes, certainly. So I don’t think it’s lost on this crowd, and certainly most people agree that potential adversaries in the future have been watching us and have been learning for how we do operations. Having done intelligence for over 30 years, early on in my career, I asked an analyst who had well experienced, actually individual, created the indications and warning system. I said, “What do you look at?” And he goes, “Well, you follow the money. People spend money where is most important for what they’re doing?” And so when you look at our potential adversaries, they’re spending money in areas that are going to negate the advantages that we’ve had in the past. And one of those certainly is the ability to be able to execute command and control from a central location. We can talk about distributed ops, distributed command and control. There’s a wide variety of different terms that exist out there.

But the reality is I think for this moving target engagement at scale, you have to have a spatially distributed architecture. It has to coincide with the way the environment’s going to be. So that may mean that you’re going to have individuals who may be in an air operation center or a multi-domain operation center, whatever you want to call it. They could be on a boat, they could be a soldier on the ground, they could be in a wide variety of different locations, and they have to have the ability to be able to tap into those capabilities that exist there. Now at General Atomics obviously were we work heavily into the unmanned aircraft arena, and one of the things that we’ve looked at specifically to look at this problem set, is how would unmanned aircraft, how could they contribute to this environment in a spatially distributed architecture?

Well, fortunately, technology today has gotten to the point that you can do sort of that airborne early warning or air domain awareness capabilities on single aircraft if you need to. But what we have found is that when you put multiple unmanned aircraft working in conjunction with say, an E7 or an E3, you now have the ability to actually provide even more refined awareness. And I will say getting down to the point where you can see specific targets that perhaps you weren’t able to see. You can correlate between different entities and different platforms to actually give you a more refined look at what it is. But I think what it really creates more than anything when we look at all our concepts and we’ve done modeling and simulation, is that it really creates a dilemma for the adversary because no longer is it about taking out one or two single type platforms to disrupt everything.

This is a matter of taking out multiple platforms. And so if you were to take the airborne layer that I’m talking about with unmanned and let’s say the E3 and E7, and now you were to layer on a maritime level and you were able to layer on a space level and you’re able to layer on a terrain level, now you’ve really caused the dilemma for the adversary because what you have is gradual degradation. You’re still going to get something. And so I think it’s very important that in this, what we anticipate to be a future fight in an environment where we’re going to have to distribute everything, that the architecture itself should start with the fact that: one it’s all domain, two it’s got to be connected, and three you’re going to have to have it spatially dispersed across the entire battle space.

Dave Richards:

Could I add to that real quick?

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Please.

Dave Richards:

I couldn’t agree more, Mike. And I think that the distributed nature of that decision making is going to be absolutely critical. I do also think in addition to that, there is value also to moving some of that decision making and that distribution down to the munition to munition level. There’s always going to be the threat, I think of some form of denial of service at whatever level, depending on the environment and the situation. And being able to abstract some of that decision making down to munition to munition is a real interesting part of the problem. I think it also poses very significant unique challenges when you have to have munitions that are in flight towards the target communicating quickly and then trying to make a decision. So I think that there’s an aspect that shouldn’t get lost on there, but I couldn’t agree with you more. That distribution aspect of it is going to be critically important in the future.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Thanks. So Dave, you’re on the hot mic. Let’s keep you on the hot mic. So we’ve gone through evolutions throughout the Air Force’s history, daylight precision bombing, which was arguably less precise than what we would appreciate today with the northern bomb site. Then you get into Vietnam with the first PAVE Way series of laser-guided bombs, beam riders that were very precise, that enabled us to take out key and critical targets we were unable to take out. And then you bring us forward to today where we have a lot more exquisite advanced capabilities. So could you talk about the proliferation of targets in the future battle? What the changes to the economics and con-ops do to that precision target engagement for moving targets?

Dave Richards:

Yes, sure. So we talked a lot earlier on about the proliferation of the target list, and there’s always going to be some fraction of that target list that is high priority and absolutely demands the best exquisite capability that we’ve got both today and what’s going to be coming out in the future. So there’s no doubt about that, but I think that one of the things that keeps me up at night is, well, what happens to the rest of that list? There’s things that are currently serviced by direct attack types of capabilities, have the potential in the future battle to put Airmen in harm’s way. How do we prosecute those targets on mass and overcome countermeasures and defense systems that are trying to attract those capabilities?

So as we start to look at that, not only does that have an economic implication, but it also has, I’ll say an engagement approach, implication. Our history has been one of pretty much one weapon, one target, a singular engagement. And going back to what you were saying, Mike, I think that that adversaries have looked at that and said, “That’s a mode of operation.” I think in the future state, one of the interesting things to look at is how can multiple weapons working together, leveraging some of these communication networks, how can they start to exchange information at a rapid rate using that distributed approach? And basically generate more complex engagements that make one plus one equal three.

Not only does that have the possibility if we’re able to push the economics of those individual seekers down, our individual weapons down to make the overall engagement less expensive, but it also gives us the opportunity to overcome some of the countermeasures that we’re starting to see emerging from the one weapon, one target type of pairing. So I think a lot of interesting aspects to that going forward and something that I know a lot of the things that AFRL is doing in terms of golden horde and various other activities is really moving in the right direction.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Excellent, thank you. I think we’ll follow on with that. Let’s stay with that theme for just a second. So can you give us some thoughts and maybe the rest of the panel can comment as well on what industry and the acquisition community inside the government can do to transform and assist to get more affordable weapons at the scale that we need?

Dave Richards:

Absolutely. I think it’s a little bit of a different… As we start to say, hey, it’s not one weapon, one target anymore. Now it’s going to be multiple weapons against multiple targets. And how does that work? What I think it really underlines is the need to be able to really do the operational assessment well on how those algorithms are going to work, how those weapons are going to work, how the threats are going to evolve during the engagement. And it really plays back to model-based systems engineering. It plays back to the digital twin. It plays back to being able to have those approaches, those concepts and technologies in the digital space so that we can develop them and war game them without having to actually go direct to hardware and spend that expense. And I think that that is going to be even more crucial, like I said, as we’re going forward and we’re starting to change that or look at the effectivity of changing that paradigm a little bit in the future.

Michael Hall:

I’ll take a crack at that one too, because I did spend some time on the government side and I was stuck in the current paradigms. Right now, new sensors can just develop volumes and volumes of data and we left that alone back in the day because we didn’t have a way to process it to transport it. So now the algorithms are there, now we got to go back upstream, get that data, transport it, and I’d say if we can keep that in mind, the whole kill chain in the moving target indication, that whole kill chain, make sure we’re not forgetting about the data that we’re leaving on the floor to get it to operate on it so it can be available for the good sensors on the weapons that are going to make an end game out of it.

Mike Shortsleeve:

So the way I would address this from the acquisition standpoint, the way the processes are set up today don’t work. I think everybody recognizes that. If you’ve ever actually seen the chart for the acquisition, it’s like the Mayan calendar and it literally is that long. It’s like 2,000 years to get something done, and I get it, that’s the process. But there are mechanisms and things that can be done, other transactional authorities, things like that, make things a little more rapid. I would also offer that perhaps doing operational evaluations or operational experimentation would be very useful to getting capabilities out to the field as quickly as possible. And that would also mean using surrogates, not necessarily using the exact platform that you may have in the future, but you may want to use a surrogate platform that may be as like it or actually, you control it to where it might mimic what you’re going to have in the future.

And that does a few things. One, it will reduce the risk which will bring down some of the cost because you’re actually able to play with the system and see it. And certainly we can do a lot of that in the digital and engineering environment and a lot of modeling, simulation based software engineering can help with that. But the reality is sometimes you need to get it in the hands of the operator to go ahead and play with it because that’s when things get broken and that’s when the things of, hey, this widget doesn’t work because that’s not the way we really do things. So I would definitely push hard on that using surrogates to do that. And guess what not do. Not only do you reduce the risk, but if that capability really is successful, you just fielded it that much faster to the existing platforms that are out there today. So that’s what I would offer.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Excellent. I’m going to stay on this thread for just a moment because I think it’s a very interesting one. As we are now trying to pivot towards innovative, dynamic and rapidly iterating through capabilities. And I’ll just open up to any of the panel members. When General Shriever was developing ICBMs, he failed a lot on the rocket launchpad, a lot of things blew up, a lot of things broke, but we learned forward and we leaned into the problem set. So could you give us some sense of risk, either from the industrial base perspective or from a fielding capability or money perspective or just how we might handle risk of failing and to go fast?

Dave Richards:

I think going back to something Mike was saying about the acquisition process, I think one of the knock on effects of that too is the lead time up to the fielding with new weapon system. It’s so long and it’s so defined that unless there’s this explicit attention paid to putting in an ability to have those types of failures, that there’s tremendous economic pressure. It’s not necessarily economically viable to risk this entire, almost in some cases decade long acquisition chain or your role in it to have a failure. So I think it breeds a little bit of conservatism in how tests are are arranged and it prevents that fail fast mentality because any failure can derail you from this extremely long acquisition commitment, that’s kind of the name of the game today.

Michael Hall:

So I want to make sure the systems engineering process is important, but we probably all agree it doesn’t need to take as long as it takes. So things like digital engineering, so you can speed that up, it’s good things. But I want to defend our government teams that are trying to get everything right so there’s not a big got you, after you spend a lot of money. Sometimes you can go a little slower and you produce the outcome faster. So systems engineering really important. It doesn’t mean that it has to go fast or it has to be slow. The other thing I’d say is we’re okay with not developing and delivering all the capability right away.

There might be cosmic algorithms that we can use later on if we don’t trap data, if we transport the data and we get it into a place, if we develop those algorithms later, that capability can come later and it won’t slow the whole process up, you can get on with Fielding. And I think that’s one way to get the systems engineering right, get it fielded, but make sure there’s that opportunity for capability later too.

Mike Shortsleeve:

So I’ll answer it this way. Having had the opportunity to be a Program Manager, when you say risk and you’re a Program Manager, what that means to you is you’re the one that they point the finger at and you’re the guilty party. Unfortunately, that’s just the way it is. So it’s a cultural thing in some aspects, and certainly there is some legal aspects to how much you could push the risk, but I think in some environments I would encourage the Air Force to look at building these sandboxes. You got a multitude of defense industry out there that spends a lot of their own research and development doing things in house, but you know what? It means a lot more when you’re actually able to put it on an aircraft that’s owned by the US Air Force. So having some of these aircraft available so that you can actually go out and push your things on there and really get the feel for how this would work in that environment would be really useful.

And again, the risk, hey, it is what it is, how much you’re willing to take really determines on how fast you need this capability. If a war were to break out tomorrow, guess what? Risk is out the door for you can fail as much as you want until you get the right thing, but what is that happy medium until we get to that point? And I think some of the ways to get after that is perhaps a teaming effort between industry and the Air Force to build these sandboxes to go out and fly different things.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Thanks. I want to shift gears just slightly. So Michael, could you give us from Raytheon’s perspective, we talked when we’re fielding our long range kill chain, which we’re actively engaged in, requires a lot of new and innovative technologies, but give us a sense of how industries investing in command and control solutions to provide us better decision aids and identify threats in the contestant environment.

Michael Hall:

Yes sir. And to set up decision aids, we have to set up the data that those decision aids are based on. I think we all know that we have Facebook experiences and internet experience where why did they know I’m interested in that product, we know that those algorithms are out there. So those decision aids to not apply them to our kill chains, moving target in kill chains, we need to do that, but they need data. They need data to act on. So from C2 perspective, as we engineer the new ground sensors that start out this kill chain, again, just going back to what Mike said in his opening remarks, you don’t want to trap data. Trapping data, you’re not going to use it, you’re not going to act on it. So it starts with making sure you know, can get it off the sensor, get it to the right spot. So that’s the context, getting the data to the right spot in their C2 construct. Then I know everybody winces when they hear artificial intelligence and machine learning, but it really is a thing.

Again, we experience it in our daily lives. We have that new chatbot that’s AI enabled and stuff and we say wow. So I think as Raytheon and other companies approaches that we’re saying we need to do more of that. Now again, we need to go upstream, to do that right, you need interfaces, you need a place to do that AI, you need an interface to get the data in, get the bot to help you with the decision and get it back out into your C2 system. So that’ll enable the whole kill chain and that’s how we see the problem.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Excellent. Mr. Shortsleeve, could you elaborate a little bit on, you talked about partnering and trying to go a little bit faster. What’s your sense of us being able to get after this 1,000 target set at scale that’s mobile and dynamic in the environment? Just what’s your scale of timeline?

Mike Shortsleeve:

Yes. Well obviously if you follow the Mayan calendar, it’ll be 2000 years before we get there. But all kidding aside, I would say that we’re closer than most people would think. And I say that because the pieces and parts are there, it’s a matter of being able to put them together, play around with it, figure out is this what’s really working for us? And so this teaming that I was talking about with the government and particularly the Air Force in this case, is really to start to put the things through the ringer that are already out there. If you really want to accelerate that timeline. It goes back to what I was saying a little bit earlier of fielding it onto capabilities you have today. If you’re able to connect some of the things today and start to really flush out what I would call the concepts of operations, your TTPs, you’ve just fast tracked when that ultimate capability ends up out there, whatever it is, five years down the road or 10 years.

But the fact of the matter is that we’ve got to look, everybody, defense industry and the Air force in particular, we all have to look at how do we do this differently with what we have today to help get after this problem set? And to be honest with you, when you’re spending billions of dollars, which I’m very familiar with how that works when we were in a eight, you’re playing with a lot of money there that you don’t want to make a mistake in the sense of pouring a bunch of money into something that you’re not going to test or even look at and be able to operate 10 years from now. So try to accelerate that is what I would say by using what you have today.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Excellent. David, we talked earlier about precision engagement and being able to go after both exquisite and non-exquisite target sets. Could you talk a little bit about what’s the impact to platforms that are delivering weapons or Con Ops discussion, both from a crude or accrued perspective? Could you give some comments on that?

Dave Richards:

Yes. I think we’ve kind of touched on it a little bit earlier here too. There’s the level of autonomy and collaboration that can occur down at the actual munition level, but there’s also the reach back, I think Mike was talking about earlier as well, a little bit of that reach back to manned or unmanned airframes that may have a richer dataset that could add to that engagement. I think it’s interesting to think through, there are some engagement modalities, whether they’re at extremely long ranges or are otherwise denied, where that won’t be available. So you might not be able to rely upon it. But there is definitely, I’ll say an engagement Con Ops and a TTP piece that goes along with leveraging those new kinds of approaches.

And I think it goes back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier too, about getting out of the one weapon, one target mindset, how that also is going to drive, I think we just need to be aware that that is also as the potential to drive the employment con ops, the engagement con ops, what authority looks like, how different situations are dealt with, and certainly how it’s trained as well. So I think that there’s a lot of additional aspects to that type of change that are kind of second and third order effects that might not be, I’ll say obvious at the outset, but it’s something that needs to be considered holistically along with the employment of some of these new technologies.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Awesome. Michael, I’m going to pivot back a little bit to sensing and sensing the environment sensing target sets. We know within the department of the Air Force that the United States Space Force is going to provide us a lot of the capabilities we need both from a data transport perspective, but also sensing the environment and developing target sets. Could you give us some sense of as we work to fight in and through and with space from a joint perspective, what does that future look like from a space sensing perspective?

Michael Hall:

Yes sir. And everybody knows there’s a contest in space, right? Space is not free, space is not… Without its perils. There’s a complementarity between what we do in space and what we do on the ground. So as we look at ground sensors, like Mike was talking about earlier, put your enemy on the horns of a dilemma. If you got two different ways to sense, you put them into the decision space, what are they going to do? So that complementarity between terrestrial and space-based assets very important. There’s a cost curve there. The cost curve of space is getting lower and lower. That’s a good thing.

Doesn’t mean that the cost curve and terrestrial sensors can’t be lowered too. So the complementarity number one, then we still got to connect everything like we were talking about earlier, trapping data that isn’t going to help. You’re going to have to figure out how to transport that. There’s a hybridization of space and terrestrial mechanisms we can use to attack it. So I think solving the problem, the moving target indications, is not getting stuck in a mindset that I’m going to do it all one way, combine the strengths of the different modes, put them together, don’t trap data, and that’s the best place to be using that complementarity.

Dave Richards:

And I think an interesting addition to that too, how does that impact the requirements? That now presents I think a requirements challenge to say, hey, this isn’t the sensitivity to this one sensor. When you have these multiple pathways, how does the requirements’ community establish kind of the baseline, the expectation of performance when in a given situation there’s a lot of different ways that this problem could be solved. So I think again, that’s a great area where industry and the government can partner together to define the art of the possible and define things maybe a different way.

Mike Shortsleeve:

One thing I want to add on, we’re talking a lot about autonomy and automation as well as AI. One of the things that I certainly think needs to be looked at closely is the ability to present that information to the human. What we don’t want is the fusion or the analysis having to take so long between the ears. You need the machine to machine type of interaction, but it’s not just the machines talking to each other. It’s what exactly are they passing? I don’t need to pass tons of data, I just need to pass the specific things. I don’t need to tell you about all the characteristics of say a J20 when I’ve identified it, maybe I just need to send you the coordinates of where it’s at and where it’s going.

The algorithm looks at it, maybe perhaps looks at patterns of life of previous type activity and is able to tell you as in the cockpit that hey, this aircraft is translating this location and is going to do this to help us make those decisions. Or some of the things that I think we need to get after as well because this is now getting away from machines or tools and now they’re teammates. And we really need to think of that from that perspective and make sure that we’re refining the data that’s out there. Because ultimately I hear a lot of people talking about these data lakes who’ll be able to go in and get all this data.

They become data landfills is what they really are. And the only individuals that are in there are those that are actually a picker going in and looking for specific things. But if it just sits there and just continues to build up and build up, it’s not helping us. So onboard at the edge processing, going through the information, it’s exactly like you said, we don’t want the information to get trapped. We need to get only what is needed to the person that needs it. So you got to be smart with that. It’s not just about an individual, but it’s about how the systems are designed to be able to do that so you can react. So to me it’s about the presentation of the data that is really important to be able to act on it. Right.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Great. Thanks. So we’ve only got a few minutes left. It’s been a great dialogue up to this point, so I appreciate everyone being actively engaged. So what I would like to do now is really to go down the panel, start with you, Dave, about a minute or so, closing comments or any other thoughts or things you wanted to address that we didn’t get around to yet?

Dave Richards:

No, I think we covered a lot of the things I think that are at least on my mind for what we’re going to be seeing for the future here. Again, I think we talked a lot about a lot of cool features and a lot of new things that are going to be required for the next generation battle space. But at the end of the day, it comes down to you, we got to be able to also do this at cost, at a cost that allows these things to proliferate. And when we talk about costs, it’s not just about money, it’s also about industrial capacity to be able to manufacture these goods, even if it’s cheap, if it takes us a year to build one, that’s not going to get the stores filled at a rate that’s going to be compatible with what we need to do. So I think while we’re doing all of these things, we got to walk and chew gum at the same time. We got to be innovating, but also making sure that we’re doing this in an affordable way.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Awesome. Mr. Hall?

Michael Hall:

Dave brought it up and I never followed it up, but the whole aspect of net enabled weapons, we talked about getting stuck in paradigms. I’m kind of stuck in the paradigm that you fire a weapon and that’s it, but we have this opportunity with net enabled weapons. A storm breaker for example, you fire it, it still talks to the platform, it talks to stuff on the ground. It can make those re-prioritization decisions that Dave talked about, you get mass, you get battle space awareness and you get a lot more value from that fired weapon. So I talked a lot about the beginning of the kill chain. I probably should have talked more about the end that that’s an important part of making an end of a moving target as well.

Mike Shortsleeve:

The last piece I would end with is to reemphasize that point I made at the start, which is when you look at the common thing amongst all these components of the kill chain to get after this, it’s the connectivity. And one thing I would emphasize is that if you’re a student of the mosaic warfare concept, you understand that it’s not looking at these as specific F35 or E3 or anything like that. They’re nodes because every platform ultimately you want to achieve is it’s a producer, a consumer, but it’s also a conduit of information no different than your cell phone as you’re going through a city, right?

You’re going to hit different towers and you don’t even know it should be the same way with the information that we’re trying to pass. I get it’s the panacea and it’s hard to get there because we have a Frankenstein system that we’re built with, but we can’t achieve some of these things I think in localized fashions and just start small and then you build off of that. So I would say that continue to focus on the one piece that’s going to make this all work. If you’re not connected, guess what? You’re never going to know and you’re never going to be able to act.

Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:

Well, gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate your perspectives and a round of applause please for our panel members.

Watch, Read: ‘Joint Warfighting Requirements: The Forces Needed to Fight and Win’

March 7, 2023

The AFA Warfare Symposium hosted a session called “Joint Warfighting Requirements: The Forces Needed to Fight and Win” on March 7, 2023. The panel featured Gen. David W. Allvin, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force; Gen. David D. Thompson, Vice Chief of Space Operations; and Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.), Executive Vice President of AFA, as the session moderator. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Voiceover:

Ladies and gentlemen, Airmen and Guardians, welcome to the next session of the AFA Warfare Symposium. Please direct your attention to the stage and welcome AFA Executive Vice President, Major General Doug Raaberg.

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

Thank you. Thank you for joining us for today’s discussion on Joint Warfighting requirements. The force is needed to fight and win. Now we’re very fortunate, and this is an incredible alignment, to be joined by the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General David Allvin. And to my right is Vice Chief of Space Operations, General David Thompson.

Now to set the scene, both of them sit on the Joint Requirements Oversight Committee. Now on the JROC they are the direct representatives to the joint force on all current and future capabilities the Air and Space Forces provide combatant commanders. In short, they lead an important role to articulate strategic and operational imperatives that drive force structure and force presentation to warfighting commands.

Now, according to a recent intelligence report from Stratfor, it’s entitled Navigating the Risks of a Multi-polar World that says, “The reemergence of a multi-polar world and rising peer competition is changing the global security and business landscape. Defense budgets are climbing. National security considerations are driving geo-economic competition. Global norms and expectations that have held for decades are now in flux. Complex supply chains woven since the end of the Cold War are fraying. Adapting to the shifting global landscapes requires rethinking,” as you’ve heard this morning, “And rethinking longstanding assumptions, but also understanding the geopolitical forces driving change and how to prepare for potential conflict as a result.”

The real question is how do you rethink as a force provider to organize, train, and equip the space and air forces at the strategic level against this backdrop of this ever contested multi-polar world? Well, that’s what we’re going to tackle here on this panel this morning. And so what I’d like to do, gentlemen, is please hand it over to you all. General Thompson, let’s take it out to the Lagrange point, if you don’t mind, and lead us off with perhaps some overarching insights to what is a really emerging concept called the Joint Warfighting Concept. Sir?

Gen. David D. Thompson:

Okay, thanks. Thanks, Doug. Thanks for hosting this panel today and to all of AFA. Thanks for this vitally important symposium and professional development opportunity for our Airmen and Guardians. And so that really is, as General Raaberg described, the responsibilities of the JROC. There are many things that we deal with every single day and many places from which we derive our duties. In addition to those systems and capabilities we deal with today, part of where we get our charter from is creating capabilities to do what in the future. And one of the key elements of that is, as Doug said, a conceptual framework for how in fact we’re going to conduct operations. The Department of Defense has been on a four-year journey to create a new concept that we call the Joint Warfighting Construct. But this is not the first time the Department of Defense has done it. It has done this for decades.

In fact, the first conceptual framework for an operational approach that I remember came out of the early 1980s when the United States Army and the United States Air Force got together and created the concept of the AirLand Battle. And really what that conceptual framework said was, “We should expect, as our pacing challenge, to fight a large, conventional, mechanized army that has equipment on the ground and in the air that’s relatively equivalent as ours, but is likely going to be superior in number.” And that operational concept said, in short, although there was a lot of development and a lot of supporting there with it, it said in short that the ground forces were going to be engaged in active maneuver defense on the front lines while air forces went deep and interdicted the rear echelon so they could not come in and reinforce those frontline forces after which the ground forces would defeat the enemy elements in detail. That was an operational and conceptual framework for how we were going to conduct warfare in the 1980s.

That was subsequently replaced in the early part of this decade by the United States Air Force and the United States Navy in a concept called the AirSea Battle that talked about a capable, but probably not completely equivalent near-peer adversary, trying to deny us air and sea access to an area of conflict and contest. And the Air Force and the Navy got together and created this concept and framework for developing capabilities called the AirSea Battle. Well, in 2019, the Secretary of Defense said, “It’s time for an updated concept for how the joint force expects to approach warfare in the future.” And so over that four-year period, a lot of work has gone on. In order to develop that, also in addition to understanding who and what you are, you need to understand the strategic environment.

And so the pacing challenge associated with this Joint Warfighting Construct really said, “I have a peer adversary, perhaps a near-peer adversary, that is very capable on land, at sea, in the air, in space, and in cyberspace, that I will likely have to contend with. It’s likely that I’m going to be fighting an away game that that adversary will be fighting in its backyard. And that this battle will occur, this conflict will occur on a scope and scale that is unprecedented in the long history of warfare.” Not necessarily in geography and numbers, but we’re talking about thousands of targets over billions of cubic miles on land, at sea, in the air, in space, and in cyberspace that we will have to identify, track, target, and defeat at a size, scope, speed, and scale that has never hereto for been experienced.

And in order to do so, we will have to very, very tightly integrate air, lands, sea, space, cyber, and special operations forces together in a way that we have never done before. And in essence, that’s what the Joint Warfighting Concept does and tells us to do. It says that is how we expect to fight in the future. The next step becomes how do you decompose that concept into supporting concepts into capabilities required and then build programs and training and doctrine to be able to adapt to that concept. And I think at this point I’ll let my wingman, Dave Allvin, talk a little bit about that decomcomposition and what we have to pursue to do achieve that concept.

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

So general Allvin, please take us back inside the JROC because you both sit with the Army, the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and you really grapple these issues. So what are the supporting concepts that belie the Joint Warfighting Concept?

Gen. David W. Allvin:

Well, thank you. And I’ll add my thanks to Doug and team for putting this together. This is fascinating. It’s always great to be in a room with my wingman, DT. We do sit in sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger rooms with the JROC, but the idea that we are still finishing each other’s sentences and understanding, at least to an extent that we can advocate on behalf of, while we’re our own service, we’re part of the one team, one fight. And so we become, I think, a more powerful force in that room with all the other service representatives because we’re of like mind.

I will tell you that DT did a great job about really articulating the contours of this Joint Warfighting Concept. But the devil being in the details. When you go back to the very apt description on AirLand Battle and AirSea Battle, those were what one might call multi-service concepts, but not necessarily one that fully captured the totality of what the joint force was going to need to do. And DT talks about that in what the Joint Warfighting Concept entails.

Now, let’s get to the business of actually executing it. There are things that I think in past concepts that have been set aside because they were assumptions that may be held but no longer do. And when you get the advent of the changes in technology with massive increases in computing power with this idea of cyberspace being woven into everything we do, space going from a benign domain to a warfighting domain and the ubiquity of the things that we depend on for space, the potential enemy learning a lesson about how the American way of war happens, some of those assumptions can no longer obtain. And so one of the things, I think, as we look through our three plus decades of war gaming, the most important part of the war game wasn’t necessarily the logistics or the C2 or those other elements. It was just, “Let’s get to the fight and see what happens.”

But one of the brilliance of this Joint Warfighting Concept in its development and now in its maturation is these four supporting concepts. These battles that we talk about are going to be essential in order to attain success in the overall concept. And these are in the area of fires, integration of fires, information and having that advantage and decision advantage, in logistics, contest logistics, and in command and control. I would posit that if we spend enough time and give those their due attention, then even if the main concept isn’t exactly right or it has to shift or adapt over time, we’re going to be ready to go. So when we start thinking about solving for agility in this concept, if we get these four supporting concepts right, and again with fires, information, and logistics, and C2, if we get those right, then even as the adversary changes capabilities or launches some new approach, we’re still going to be in good stead.

If we ignore them and just focus on the capabilities that we think are going to be required for the main fight, we won’t get to the main fight. And that’s why I think those supporting concepts are so important. And they’re also well aligned with the department of the Air Force’s operational imperatives. One of the reasons why Secretary Kendall put in operational imperative number seven, we need to be able to get out of town. And oh, by the way, as you heard our Chief of Staff of the Air Force talk about in the freshly signed Air Force future operating concept, one of the fights is to get into the theater. We recognize that. We’ve put light on it. We put intellectual energy against it. And we ensure that one of the things that potential adversaries are trying to keep us from, which is just keep us away for long enough until there can be a fait accompli and then maybe we’ll sue for peace, or I find a better alternative because they’ve kept us out. Not permanently, but just long enough.

And if you don’t pay attention to that, that could happen. So this idea of being able to get out of town, get into the theater, that’s part of operational imperative number seven. Being able to have logistics under attack, contested logistics. Logistics is… Everybody assumes it’s there because it always has been. That’s a flawed assumption at this point if we don’t change the manner in which that we execute it. Part of that is right in line with operational imperative number five. Resiliency. Resilient basing. When we talk about being able to hit moving targets at scale, that’s fires. That’s fires integration. Operational ABMS. Operational imperative number two. That’s very much command and control. But all of those things are understanding those long-standing parts of warfare that need to be updated for the current security environment and the changing character of war.

And where I feel confident that as we pursue those four supporting concepts as an Air and Space Force, I think it’s natural. There’s not a great departure from the direction that we’re heading because this changing character of wars we’re seeing, it privileges agility, speed and tempo, lethality, resilience. We grew up with that. Our Air and Space Force is, that’s our stock in trade. And so as we integrate into the Joint Warfighting Concept as an Air and Space Force through these four supporting concepts, I think it’s not much of an adjustment for us. There’s acceleration, which we like now; there’s moving forward, but we have heat and light applied to these four supporting concepts, which I think will make any future foreseeable overall Joint Warfighting Concept that much more successful.

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

So after listening to the Secretary Kendall, Chief Brown, and you’re listening to Chief Saltzman, let’s put it all together now. Would you both kind of expand on the interconnectedness of what you said, General Thompson, to what you said, General Allvin, and talk about that interconnected part? General Thompson?

Gen. David D. Thompson:

Sure. Thanks. As General Allvin described, as you decompose the warfighting construct in it, you decompose it first into those supporting concepts, those battles for advantage, fires, joint all-domain command and control, information advantage and logistics, by law that JROC is required to identify gaps in capabilities that prevent us from being able to effectively implement those specific supporting concepts. And so we ensure we understand the capabilities we have today to support those concepts and we maintain them. We identify the capabilities we may not have, but we have active programs to go obtain those capabilities and we ensure those continue. And then the last piece is to say, okay, what are those gaps and how do we go get them?

But after you’ve done that decomposition and the individual pursuit of those capabilities required, you can’t let them exist in stovepipes. And that’s therefore then when you go to how do these architectures fit together to inter-operate, what does the doctrine say that says how you put them together, General Allvin talked about the need to war game and see how they fit together and exercise. You integrate them back together in the routine activities of both of organized training and equipping in that execute or exercising your forces in order to achieve the integration that you want.

And as an additional note to what General Allvin said that I firmly believe and agree with, if we get these supporting concepts right, it leads to incredible flexibility. And as an argument in that case, I would say that the success that the United States of America and its partners and allies saw in the first Gulf War in 1990 and ’91 was because of the work it did in the 1980s in the AirLand Battle. And thankfully we never had to fight the fight we were preparing for, but it made us very ready and capable for the fight that came upon us there in the first Gulf War.

Gen. David W. Allvin:

Yeah. If I could follow up on that because DT really set the groundwork here for… The point that I want to make is this is going to be challenging for the joint force to do because it is a significant shift. And big organizations don’t cotton to change that easily. And as we try and navigate this terrain of change, the most comfortable thing is to make the new parts, the new things that you’re doing sort of look like the old because you knew how to do that. So incremental change. And it’s easy for each of the services. This is really about, again, our role on the JROC, which is this panel’s really about joint requirements.

Service cultures run deep. Understanding how you envision yourself as a service as part of the Joint Warfight and understanding how you may have to reimagine that. Now, we’ve had a history of some successes and some less than successful endeavors as we’re looking towards trying to develop a more effective joint fight sometimes at the expense of a service. That’s not something that’s very comfortable. But here’s why I’m confident that we can do this. I believe that from the top-down, from the President’s national security strategies through the National Defense Strategy, through the supporting national military strategy, through the Joint Warfighting Concept, through the supporting concepts, through the Air Force future operating concept and the secretary’s operational imperatives, there is alignment like I have never seen in my over three and a half decades.

There’s an alignment about the threats that the pacing challenge offers us, pacing challenge and acute threat as well. There’s this alignment with what the changing character of war is putting in front of us. And so as we are able to evaluate these things, we’d like to evaluate them on facts and not emotion. We like to evaluate them on a common set of assumptions rather than [inaudible 00:18:49] centric assumptions. And sometimes that’s just plain tough. And so I would say early on, not to be pejorative to our predecessors, but just the environment wasn’t conducive to a super effective JROC that was able to put a value proposition against joint requirements versus something that a service wanted to advance that might have some byproducts that could affect a joint warfight, but was really more towards helping their service as a core continue what they did.

And I would say that early on in history’s eyes, it’s been a blink of an eye since Goldwater-Nichols. It’s been all of our career. But in history’s eyes, it’s been a blink of an eye. And so getting the entire JROC to be as it was envisioned has been a long slog. And we can really credit some of the most recent acceleration of that to General John Hyten who was here yesterday. And when he was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he actually, as a parting gift, one of the JROCs that we had, printed a little card for us. And that card was the Title 10 responsibility for the joint requirements [inaudible 00:19:54] and reminding us that this was our responsibility. This was not just, “Hey, the service wanted to do something. If you could squint real hard and you could see a joint application, put the stamp on it and off you go.” That doesn’t cut it anymore. That’s how you get inefficiencies. And inefficiencies and times of constrained budgets and accelerating adversaries just does not work.

And so we’ve been on that journey. And I think I can speak from our partner here in that we’ve noticed a big difference. We’ve taken a little bit differently. The functional capabilities [inaudible 00:20:25] joint capability [inaudible 00:20:27], as well as now these [inaudible 00:20:31] cutting portfolio management reviews. Really important. I think I’m [inaudible 00:20:39]. In upping the game. I could just yell too. Sorry.

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

You have to do that occasionally, right? At JROC?

Gen. David D. Thompson:

Okay.

Gen. David W. Allvin:

That’s true. But in upping our game in being able to look at things and compare them against joint requirements. So now when we look at things, we truly have something to evaluate them against that the Joint Staff and that the Department of Defense has agreed to this Joint Warfighting Concept is the way. So it becomes a guidepost against which we can measure that we all agree to. We may not don’t like it, but we’ve agreed to because it’s been sanctioned through the alignment of all these strategies from the Defense Department down to the Joint Staff and down to each of the services. So I’m optimistic that once we have a common set of assumptions that we can compare capabilities against, we are going to be able to go faster to achieving better joint efficiency rather than service culture perpetuation that maybe has some joint effectiveness to it.

Gen. David D. Thompson:

Yeah. And I would add, and as Dave said, the JROC, in my opinion, had become over the year a little bit tactical and focused on details. And it’s not that some of that tactical and detail work was required and necessary. It absolutely is at times. But that became almost exclusively what we were dealing with. And so when General Hyten came in, and it’s been continued by Admiral Chris Grady, the current vice chairman, making sure we’re looking at the strategic problems, identifying those key gaps, and the next thing and the next place that the vice chairman wants to take us is helping to understand the priority of those gaps. Because I will tell you as we have looked at the Joint Warfighting Construct and its supporting concepts and the gaps that are resultant, frankly there are more gaps than we can afford to pay for. And there are more gaps than we need to pay for.

So the work of what are the most critical, what are the high priorities, what should we focus on first, which gaps do you need to close first before you can meet subsequent gaps, that’s the next step that we have to try and do and achieve is put a JROC stamp on a prioritized set of those gaps. And now the JROC does not have budget authority, programming authority. Right? That resides in the services and the service secretaries. But those same JROC members who do that business then go back to their services as service vice chiefs execute in the service with their service chiefs and the service secretaries their budget process. We sit in the Deputy Secretary of Defense Management Action Group that reviews those investments that identifies places for additional funding.

And so we intertwine those with the work that we do in the JROC and the budget process to ensure that while the services pursue what’s important to them and how they’re going to fulfill the needs of the concept and supporting requirements, we also help to bring to light the potential gaps that are of a critical nature that perhaps we haven’t addressed fully as an armed force and in our services.

Gen. David W. Allvin:

I want to add one thing if I could real quick because DT brings up a great point about identifying the gaps and finding that there are more gaps than we had anticipated. The other thing that happens through this new process of these CPMRs, these capability portfolio management reviews, is it allows you to look across sort of warfighting functions, if you will, and see what sort of capabilities we’re developing to see if we’ve maybe got duplication across services, because we can’t afford to be inefficient as a service or as a joint force either. So as those capability portfolio management reviews come to us on the JROC, we see that there are different gaps that might be being filled by multiple services and maybe not to the best effect. But sometimes they are complementary, but sometimes they’re just duplicative.

And I think that is another role to ensure that we are optimizing for this Joint Warfighting Concept with the right capability and the right capacity. And I think some of those are tougher conversations than others to be had to say that this particular service or agency is developing more of the capability that we need in capacity, and then maybe advising a service that you don’t need to invest that anymore. But again, to DT’s point, we don’t have authority. We can say that that is duplicative, but we’re not the ones within the JROC can say, “Buy less, buy more.” But the transference of this JROC into the DMAGs that also use the Joint Warfighting Concept as a litmus test for the value proposition of capabilities really helps us get more efficient as a Department of Defense.

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

So we talked about, at the beginning, having to rethink warfighting concepts completely. So let’s marry that against speed, tempo, and agility. Sir, you still got the mic. How does that marry up against agile combat employment for all the services?

Gen. David W. Allvin:

Yeah. Maybe I’ll hit briefly on agile combat employment, but DT knows that it in a JROC I become somewhat of a one-trick pony on this talking about the idea of re-imagining. When we say we’re doing things because doctrinally that’s how we’ve done, and then the next sentence says, “Well, and doctrine is done out of the practice of doing things,” and well, that tells you that’s a couple decades before you change doctrine, before you can change, reimagine how you’re doing things. We can’t operate in that serial nature anymore. As we’ve said, it’s about speed, and tempo, agility, lethality, resilience. And some of the ways that we have been imagining how we are going to do our warfighting is not conducive to that environment. And when we talk about things like command and control, that’s one of the things I’ve really been hammering home. And I don’t have all the answers to, but I know we all need to think at it in a more imaginative way.

So we’re developing the capabilities within the operational imperatives to try and scale and hit multiple targets at scale. Yet we still do command and control by domain. We still have a JFAC, a JFMCC, a JFLCC. And so the manner in which we conduct operational C2 by domain is in itself it’s effective in keeping from a fracture side and deconfliction and in some cases synchronization, but maybe not optimization. We have capabilities out there that might enable effectors, if you will, that reside in one domain to be able to be used to attack targets that perhaps were the purview of another domain. So we’re cruising along, we’re looking to hit a target, and it turns out that we’ve already exhausted too many of these types of munitions and our shot doctrine is going to… It’s going to be really costly to go after that, but there might be an attacks over here or a surface vessel that can prosecute that target just as quickly. And we have the opportunity to know that at speed. But our current structure for doing command and control is not optimized to be able to make that decision.

So as we start developing the capabilities to fit into this Joint Warfighting Concept, those are some of the things that we need to reimagine, not only command and control, but how we integrate fires within that command and control, how we leverage the, as General VanHerck talked about, not only the sensor to shooter but sensor to decision maker that can help us get inside the speed and the tempo of the potential adversaries. So those are things that if we don’t bake those in to the way that we intend to support the Joint Warfighting Concept, we’ll just be building a better buggy whip when the Model Ts went out for a long time.

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

Sir, fighting in through from space. So how does that change the rethink calculus?

Gen. David D. Thompson:

Yeah. First let me say that the air vice handicapped himself at 50/50 as whether he was going to go into the Joint C2 rant. I was at 90/10 and I’m glad he did it because he’s right. But when you think about the environment we’re going to be in, especially in the early days of a conflict that we would see against an adversary that’s as sophisticated, advanced, and capable in a near-peer, we are going to struggle greatly to have access to the air, to the sea, to land spaces around that matter. The way we are going to do that at scale and the scope that we will need to do leading up to in crisis and ultimately in conflict, the way we are going to have to do that, and the only way we will do that is if in those early days we succeed through space.

And you saw that in the previous remarks by General Saltzman when he showed you the air picture over Ukraine. The space picture doesn’t look that way. It’s crisscrossed hundreds and thousands of times every single day with all sorts of space sensors. And so space is going to bring you that presence and that ubiquity and the ability to react at speed and scope and scale with agility, but it means that those capabilities have to be resilient and we have to have the ability to pass all that information back quickly, decide how to deal with those targets, those threats, make them targets, and then respond with long-range weapons. As in the early days of the fight, we turn that denied area into an area where we’re going to thrive and win. Without space, we won’t do it.

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

So let’s talk money for a second because the Secretary alluded to the fact that the 2024 budget rollout is expected this week. We know that plenty of analytical rigor has gone into the services budgets for the Department of the Air Force. So the real question is how well postured are we with the DAF budget, the Department of Air Force, in alignment with Joint Warfighting Concept?

Gen. David W. Allvin:

I think we’re aligned very well. I am optimistic. The thing about it is though this is not a one-and-done. We are happy with how we did in ’23. I believe whatever success that we will have with the FY24 budget, first of all, when the President puts a cross and then as Congress deliberates on it, is the alignment that we have with those capabilities we’re developing, we’re pursuing the alignment with the Joint Warfighting Concept with the National Defense Strategy. It’s very, very strong. That’s part one. And I think it goes back to the changing character of war is coming back, is coming to our wheelhouse. And so that’s one of the reasons.

But secondarily, and this is obviously something that Secretary Kendall has held in high regard for because he’s demanded this from the very beginning, it’s about analytics. You have to be able to have the analysis behind what you’re doing. And I think we’ve spent more time in this particular budget year, and maybe in the past one, in having those analytics to be able to support that and not just on a hunch or emotion, but really saying this is how what these capabilities will provide, impacts X, which impacts Y, which impacts Z, which helps win the joint fight. And I think that alignment and the support analytically has been one of the keys to whatever success we’re going to have in FY24.

I also believe that there is a propensity for smooth flowing over time, in which case people might look at it and go, “Well, we got the Air Force and the Space Force healthy and off we go.” This is not a one-and-done. These capabilities that we’re pursuing are… They’re continuously developing. And so those tough choices that the Secretary talked about this morning, those tough choices are going to have to happen year over year over year. But to the extent that we can continue to demonstrate the value of what we’re doing to now an aligned Joint Warfighting Concept and a National Defense Strategy, the more likely we’re going to have success in the future. And if we fail to do that, then we’ll get what we deserve.

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

Absolutely.

Gen. David D. Thompson:

Yeah, obviously can’t get in front of too much budget wise. I think, as you all know, we’re in the last few days of getting ready to deliver that budget to the Hill. And you will hear in the next days and weeks that follow the details at an excruciating level of information. But it clearly, I think the budget that’s coming reflects what is a now multi-year trend of a recognition that there’s more that we have to do in space, there are more capabilities that have to be there, that they are closely tied to and aligned, as General Allvin said, with National Security Strategy and the National Military Strategy and the National Defense Strategy all the way down through the Joint Warfighting Construct. So two things in that regard.

Right now, my largest concern is to make sure that we in the United States Space Force are good stewards of that money and execute effectively the resources the nation will provide us and has provided us to deliver the capabilities that are required. The second thing is, especially in the little insular cabal of the national capital region, we focus so much on the fact that the sky is falling and there’s this problem or that problem or we have to get after the following challenge. We have been looking at recently, by most measures, some of the largest defense budgets in history. And if we all can’t address the nation’s security and the challenges we face with some of the largest budgets in defense history, maybe it’s time for the nation to find some other people to do our business.

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

So General Allvin, you’ve already kind of touched on all the alignment of the seven operational imperatives. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to throw it over to General Thompson. Sir, really, how well do you see the Space Force and the alignment of the seven operational imperatives to the joint [inaudible 00:34:48]?

Gen. David D. Thompson:

Well, I think there’s tremendous alignment. And one of the things that I didn’t talk about initially with these sorts of operational frameworks are they not intended to rigidly align and make sure everybody puts their service culture and their capabilities and the way they look at a problem into that bucket in those four buckets. The key is to ensure, it is to guide and synchronize those activities. And so if you look at the Joint Warfighting Construct, if you look at the four supporting concepts, and then you look for example at the Secretary’s operational imperatives, if you can’t look at those operational imperatives and see where they fit into the four functional or the supporting concepts, come up and I’ll help you with that afterwards. If you can’t have listened to General Brown’s remarks today about the core functions of the Air Force and see how they support that, I said, the little bit extra studying. If you can’t see what General Saltzman presented today and see it there, then you need to go back and study it a little closer.

So if you make people align rigidly in terms of phraseology and the way you talk about it and in an exact nature, what you end up with is homogeneity rather than a composite force and a composite structure. And the engineer and the nerd in me says the composite structure is always by weight and strength and capability, much, much more strong and resilient and capable than the homogeneous force. So it aligns the activities of services and others. It makes sure we’re moving in the same direction. But the intent is never, “We should all look the same, we should all speak exactly the same, and we should suppress our service cultures as we pursue it as a joint force.” That is never the intent or the desire.

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

Going fast. Less than five minutes. Sir, message to your industry partners, what would you say?

Gen. David W. Allvin:

Let’s talk. Let’s continue the dialogue. And again, the Joint Warfighting Concept itself is classified. We’re dealing with the things that we can and can’t say. I would say as a separate piece under Secretary Austin and Deputy Secretary of Defense Hicks, there’s an aggressive move to start working on… to continue working on that, the likes of which I haven’t seen in a long time. But we still need to make sure that we have the right types of dialogues with our industry partners so we can work together as a team because we all are after the same goal at the end, is to make US America stronger and safer. So that specifically as… And also know that sometimes if we aren’t talking to you is because we haven’t fully formed the problem yet.

But I think we’re getting better at that as a department under Secretary Kendall because he understands that in ways that few secretaries have in the way that how we need to develop the maturity of the questions to ask rather than the presumption of, “We have the answers now, go build it.” And I think that’s seeing that in the manifestation of how he’s put Luke Cropsey in charge of with the integration on the ABMS piece and across all the operational imperatives He’s paired up not only the operators with the tech folks, but the acquisition folks. So we can have that right type of dialogue.

And I want to… This is totally a non-sequitur, but I didn’t want to let us off the stage without saying this. And this is to my partner here, DT. I was sitting in a JROC a few weeks ago. And they were talking about the resilient space architecture and the importance of it, excuse me, to one of the other topics that we had that day. And I thought to myself, man, if I was sitting here four years ago and I didn’t have the space vice here, how fast, how well would we be able to do this and get after the Air Force part of the operational imperatives, but be able to also work forward with what space does? And I think so for any people who have any doubts about better or worse, I believe that we would be in a much worse position. We would not be nearly as far along intellectually or advocacy wise if we didn’t have these two well-aligned but separate distinct services. And I think we see that in the JROC every day. And I shudder to think if I had to carry that alone nowadays. So anyway.

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

Gerald Allvin, one team, one fight. General Thompson, so what’s your parting words to our industry team members?

Gen. David D. Thompson:

To industry? Absolutely let’s talk and two things. We need your help critically in two areas… Well, more than two areas, but these two areas. The first is help us… General Allvin talked about the change in the nature of war. Chief Brown put up Douhet’s quote, “Help us leave behind the capabilities that do not adapt and will not service well as the nature of warfare changes. And then ask us to show you the capability gaps and demand of us that we let come forward with innovative ideas and approaches to fill those gaps that we may not have thought of.” That’s what I’d say.

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

Well, generals, this has been very stimulating, especially when you’ve taken us to the strategic and the operational level of warfighting. First of all, on behalf of the Air and Space Forces Association and your entire team out here in the audience, thank you and thank you for a very, very invigorating panel. Let’s please give our guests a big hand.

Voiceover:

That concludes this morning’s session. Lunch is now available in the exhibit hall until 13:00 at which time sessions will resume. While in the exhibit hall, please take the opportunity to visit with over 100 of our industry partners. They are looking forward to your visit and are most interested in what you have to say. Please make your way back to the Aurora Ballroom by 12:55 to be sure you’ll get a seat. Have a nice break and we’ll see you back here soon.