B-21 Will Be ‘Backbone’ of Bomber Fleet, AFGSC Boss Says as New Images Are Released

March 10, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

AURORA, Colo.—The B-21 Raider will be the “future backbone of the bomber fleet,” the head of Air Force Global Strike Command Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere said March 7. The new bomber, which is expected to fly this year, is just one part of a broad effort to modernize U.S. nuclear forces to deter China, Russia, and others, the AFGSC boss added.

“We need credible, modern systems,” Bussiere said in a keynote address at the AFA Warfare Symposium. “Fundamentally, it’s all about combat credibility. We deliver long-range strike, and we provide nuclear and conventional deterrence.”

Bussiere said the Air Force will field a minimum of 100 B-21s as part of a long-term plan for fleet of 220 bombers. B-21, a stealthy flying wing, will come in cheaper than its B-2 predecessor, which cost more than $1 billion per airframe. Bussiere said the program is exceeding expectations, and on track to meet all its cost, schedule, and performance marks.

The Air Force released new images of the B-21 the week of Bussiere’s remarks.

The B-21 Raider was unveiled to the public at a ceremony Dec. 2, 2022 in Palmdale, Calif. U.S. Air Force photo

The service hopes the aircraft will be airborne in short order.

“The B-21 is projected to begin flight tests later this calendar year,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in separate remarks. “Our goal is to get into production as quickly as possible … overlapping some testing production.”

The service is moving from a three-bomber fleet to a two-bomber fleet, as the B-2 Sprit and B-1 Lancer will come offline in favor of the B-21.

Bussiere said the B-21 is “on track to deliver operational aircraft to its first main operating base in the mid-2020s.”

The stalwart B-52 will remain, with a projected service life of around 100 years. The aircraft was introduced in 1955. But that doesn’t make it a legacy platform, according to Bussiere.

“We’re updating everything—new radar, engines, upgraded communications, and datalink capabilities,” Bussiere said. While the B-52 is not a stealth platform, its large payload makes it ideal for a wide variety of munitions, including long-range standoff missiles and hypersonic weapons.

The B-21, while state-of-the-art in the 2020s, is designed to be upgraded throughout its life as well to maintain its relevance.

“The technologies that are integrated and the open architecture system will provide any potential capabilities to advance, modernize, and keep that weapon system on the leading edge of a threat in the future,” Bussiere said.

Nor is the B-21 AFGSC’s only new system. The DOD has pledged to replace all its aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles one-for-one with new Sentinel ICBMs, as part of a multibillion dollar investment to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

Bussiere cautioned that the nation faces increasing atomic threats.

“Just two weeks ago, Russia withdrew from the [New START] treaty,” Bussiere said. “That was the last vestige of arms control treaty that the United States had. We do not have an arms control treaty with China. … China and the CCP are sprinting to parity with their nuclear force—diversifying, expanding, and modernizing at a pace that we haven’t seen since the Cold War. It is the most complicated international order I’ve ever experienced in my military career.”

That requires the Air Force to upgrade its current strategic forces, he said.

“There is no operational margin left,” Bussiere said. “We have no choice but to modernize.”

With Flying Hours Limited, Simulation and Data Analysis Aid Pilot Training

March 10, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

AURORA, Colo.—The Air Force’s pilot training and safety enterprise is in the midst of a pivotal transition, with data analytics and high-tech simulators gaining ground but limited flying hours and related budget pressures a continuing issue, top generals said at the AFA Warfare Symposium.

The Air Force’s continued pilot shortage is among the drivers for change, as leaders seek to accelerate pilot production using new training approaches and qualification procedures. Indeed, even if those changes do yield more new pilots, the Air Force isn’t necessarily ready for all of them, said Lt. Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife, deputy chief of staff for operations.

“We have a well-established construct for how we produce and absorb new pilots into our squadrons,” Slife said during a March 7 panel discussion. “You can’t have a C-17 Squadron full of copilots with no aircraft commanders. And so there’s a limit to how many new copilots that can come in.”

Those limits, he explained, are primarily the number of flying hours a pilot has and the standard of experience the service sets for a pilot to then be considered fully qualified and absorbed.

“And if the [Air Education and Training Command] production pipeline could produce more pilots, we would have a hard time absorbing them in the operational squadrons,” Slife said.

Limited flying hours available to keep pilots proficient remain an issue. Those numbers have been steadily declining for years, with the flying hours program having historically been a bill payer for other sustainment accounts.

There are three factors in play affecting the flying hours shortage, Slife indicated:

The daily cost of fuels and consumables;

The longer-term costs of weapons system sustainment in depots;

A shortage of maintenance manpower.

That final issue might be the most important. “It takes about seven years to create a crew chief,” Slife noted, a point reiterated in a separate event by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.: “As you look at our aircraft, they are breaking a bit more, taking longer to fix, and the experience level of our maintainers is not what it was over the past few decades,” Brown told reporters. “So that’s a combination of things that grind down aircraft availability.”

While giving more money to the flying hours program would provide a short-term boost, Slife warned that investments in sustainment and maintenance personnel are needed to prevent other long-term issues—and officials are working to quantify those risks so that decision-makers can make more-informed budget choices.

“All of these variables are knowable things. I mean, it’s not a mystery,” Slife said. “This is how it works. It gets complicated in the details. And what we need is we need to take advantage of all the data that we have collected over the years about how these variables interact and affect … the end result.”

Once tools are developed to interpret that data, service leaders can decide how to prioritize different accounts. Good data can be leveraged in numerous ways. Explained Brown: “Because of the data, we can now take a look at other things we can do, other levers we can pull to have a better understanding that will help increase the number of fight hours per month.”

Safety

Increasing flying hours is not a cure-all, said Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, the Department of the Air Force’s Chief of Safety. “Everyone would like to see a direct correlation because that makes it really easy—more flying hours [equals] less mishaps,” Leavitt said. “It’s not that easy.”

Instead, Leavitt highlighted other factors in improving safety—and helping the pilot corps improve. Her first example is one that Slife and AETC commander Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson also highlighted: advanced simulators.

“We’ve learned that the more often you stimulate the cognitive experience for anybody, either in flying skills or no matter how heavy or lightly the touch labor aspect is, the more comfortable the students are in training when they actually get into the platform … because they’ve seen it before, and expectations are shaped,” Robinson said. “They’ve heard it before. They’ve been able to make decisions on the scenarios that we’ve been able to present through immersive training technological solutions.”

Similarly, Slife noted that pilots now get into aircraft better able to focus on learning techniques instead of spending time getting acclimated.

The Air Force is counting on advanced simulators, as well as augmented and virtual reality, to play a key role in pilot production as part of its “Undergraduate Pilot Training 2.5” program

Still, Leavitt also emphasized the importance of “balance” in pilot training and safety.

“At the end of the day, we also need to get up there,” she said.

Yet even when pilots are up in the sky, there are ways for advanced technologies to make a difference, all three generals agreed. In particular, they cited a relatively new practice of analyzing aircraft flight data.

“When you think about flight data recorders and voice recorders, it’s typically in the aftermath of the crash, you go find the box, you pull it out, figure out what happened and why the airplane crashed,” Slife said. “But what we’ve found is we can actually collect data off these things, of each sortie, and look for training trends. And you can say, ‘OK, how many unstable approaches do we have inside the final approach phase? How many times can we see a bank angle that exceeds whatever it is? … And I’ll tell you, that really gives you some great insights into the training programs you have.”

Robinson said that in one instance, AETC went back and examined data leading up to a C-17 mishap and realized that, had they analyzed the pilot’s earlier flights, they could have identified a problem that contributed to the accident and made corrections before it ever happened.

With the ability to analyze data, Slife said, new ways of thinking about how to use it are needed. “We’re living in an interesting time because of the advent of technologies that are really going to change our historical models for absorption and production [of new pilots].”

Dispersed But Resilient: Air Force Gets to Work on New Basing Construct Under ACE

March 10, 2023 | By James C. Kitfield

Last month, the Air Force’s evolving Agile Combat Employment (ACE) doctrine received arguably its most rigorous test yet in the annual Cope North exercise, as Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps fighter and bomber aircraft, backed by aerial refuelers and airborne early warning and control aircraft and supported by Japanese fighters and French and Australian transports, fanned out across 1,200 miles of ocean and far-flung Pacific islands. They operated from a hub-and-spoke system of 10 air bases spread from Iwo Jima in the north, through Saipan, Rota, and Guam, and down to Micronesia and the Palau archipelago to the distant south.

“In terms of the scope and complexity of the basing challenge, the 2023 iteration of Cope North was nothing like its predecessors. What I saw during the exercise was night and day from some of the concerns I’ve heard expressed about ACE,” Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, commander of the 36th Wing out of Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, said while moderating a panel on “Defining Optimized Resilient Basing” at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 7. “We can now debunk some of those concerns, because [after Cope North] we now know exactly what the key elements of ACE are, and we know exactly what a resilient base looks like.”

The imperative driving ACE is the need to greatly disperse U.S. and allied air bases across the Indo-Pacific region in a way that complicates targeting for China and its massive arsenal of ballistic missiles. The Cope North exercise revealed both the promise of that doctrine, and the challenge of building resiliency with such a widely dispersed basing footprint.

air force basing — Japan Air Self-Defense Force, Royal Australian Air Force and U.S. Air Force aircraft are parked on the flight line during Cope North 2023 at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, Feb. 8, 2023. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Charles T. Fultz

For one, the exercise revealed that complicating an adversary’s targeting challenge is necessary but not sufficient, Birch said.

“We also have to generate airpower from the bases that is lethal and useful in helping us compete and win,” he noted.

The task of building a more dispersed yet resilient basing footprint is forcing the Air Force to relearn some lessons that atrophied in the permissive post-Cold War era of uncontested major operating bases.

For instance, the service needs to refine its prepositioning of materiel—the weapons, ammunition, fuel, and maintenance equipment needed to generate air sorties from austere bases. Base protection is also increasingly important, running the gamut from passive measures such as hardened aircraft shelters, camouflage, concealment, and deception, to active air defenses such as PATRIOT systems or other surface-to-air missiles. Rapid runway repair capabilities will also be needed to reconstitute damaged airfields.

“To be successful we need to have the right amount of prepositioned materiel, at the right scalability, so that it is available or arrives in time to meet the need, but not overdoing it to the point that it rots in the tough climate and environment that we face in the Indo-Pacific,” said Birch. “Base protection is also imperative, and it can take many forms. At the same time, being a target isn’t our main focus. Rather, the focus is getting our airpower off the ground in a way that is lethal.”

The model of dispersed basing dictated by ACE also puts added strain on command-and-control, logistics, and manpower. In each arena, the challenges of working in an austere environment will be greatly magnified in a time of conflict.

“When you think about having to operate in an austere environment where you don’t have a lot of the infrastructure and support associated with a main operating base, and then consider how that looks in a ‘contested’ or even ‘denied’ scenario, it can become really challenging,” said Ryan Bunge, the general manager for resilient networking and autonomous solutions at Collins Aerospace. “If you think of what the first nights of a conflict might look like, an expeditionary commander’s ability to pop up on the command-and-control network and get an intelligence update or a new air tasking order might be impaired. To help the Air Force meet that challenge, we’re looking at providing more resilient connectivity.”

Such resiliency could be offered by commercial and military satellite communications systems, or even high-frequency radio enabled by digital mesh networking.

Defense industry representatives also believe artificial intelligence and machine learning systems can help the Air Force can meet the logistical challenges raised by more far-flung operations.

“Optimization is key to creating more resilient supply chains, so think of a neural network that can predict before a human when there will be a supply disruption due to weather, a supply shortage, or an adversarial threat,” said Thom Kenney, technical director at Google’s Office of the CTO. “Having automated systems that can accurately predict in advance a break in the supply chain would be a huge advantage.”

With ACE and its focus on dispersed operations demanding more “Multi-Capable Airmen” who can operate out of their normal career fields, industry representatives also said AI and autonomous systems can help the service better deal with manpower strains.

“In order for these expeditionary bases to be protected, we’re already offering autonomous force protection solutions,” said Brad Reeves, director for C4I solutions for Elbit Systems of America. “Think of a single Airman operating a fully autonomous team of unmanned platforms that are able to conduct observation and sensing around not just an expeditionary base, but also beyond the base to the entire island or even beyond that to an entire littoral maritime region. Such multi-domain, air, land, and sea awareness would give a base commander the knowledge necessary in order for him to launch and recover aircraft in a safe manner.”

Defining Optimized Resilient Basing: Ryan Bunge, Vice President & General Manager Resilient Networking and Autonomy Solutions, Collins Aerospace; Thom Kenney, Technical Director, OCTO, Google; Brad Reeves, Director for C4I Solutions, Elbit America; and Brig. Gen. Paul R. Birch, PhD., Commander, 36th Wing, Andersen Air Force Base, Guam Photo by Mike Tsukamoto/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Want to Grow a Beard? Not in My Military, Says Colón-López. Others Aren’t So Sure.

March 10, 2023 | By David Roza

The most senior enlisted service member stamped down on the push to allow Airmen and Guardians to wear beards in uniform without a waiver, saying beards don’t contribute to military preparedness and the push could have a negative effect on discipline.

“If you want to look cute with your skinny jeans and your beard, by all means, do it someplace else,” Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Ramón Colón-López said during a ”Coffee Talk” Facebook chat streamed live from the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 8. “But quit wasting our time on something that doesn’t have anything to do with kicking the enemy’s ass.”

Colón-López was joined by Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass and Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman, who expressed similar views.

“From a fashion perspective, it’s a very silly thing to worry about,” said Towberman. “We’re not here to be fashionable.”

A Hairy History

Beards are again a sensitive topic in the Air Force. Decades after the Air Force imposed a beard ban, the service recently began allowing religious exemptions for some Airmen and medical waivers for others.

Air Force medical research published in 2021 suggested the beard ban was discriminatory toward Black Airmen, who are more likely to suffer from pseudofolliculitis barbae, a skin condition, also known as razor bumps, caused by ingrown hairs that makes shaving painful and even scarring if skin is not given a chance to heal.

Researchers found that Airmen with shaving waivers took longer to earn promotions and often could not land high-profile positions as recruiters, military training instructors, Honor Guard members, or positions on the Thunderbirds flight demonstration team.

“[T]he promotion system is not necessarily inherently racially biased, but instead biased against the presence of facial hair which will likely always affect the promotions of Blacks/African-Americans disproportionately because of the relatively higher need for shaving waivers in this population,” the study said.

Bass said she wants to eliminate discriminatory policies against Airmen with shaving waivers. Her team repealed policies that had barred bearded Airmen and Guardians from serving in some positions and they made it easier to qualify for beard waivers. Bass said she is aware of the stigma against facial hair, and in a December Facebook post wrote about her desire to erase that stigma.

Yet Airmen and Guardians continue to press for a rule change on social media forums like the Air Force subreddit and Facebook’s Air Force amn/nco/snco page, where commenters frequently question the need the beard ban in the first place. Military leaders often claim that facial hair disrupts the seal of a gas mask or oxygen mask, though one Air Force doctor has found no direct scientific evidence to support the claim.

“It’s an unsubstantiated claim,” Lt. Col. Simon Ritchie, the dermatologist who led the 2021 study on beards in the Air Force, told Task & Purpose in May. Beard opponents “may have anecdotal evidence of one to five people who they see fail the fit test,” he said. But “that can’t be extrapolated to hundreds of thousands of Airmen.”

Fellow NATO nations Canada, Germany, and Norway allow beards and show no direct evidence that facial hair disrupts gas mask seals, said Ritchie, who was stationed in Germany at the time. The nearest thing to direct scientific evidence he could find, he said, was a 2018 study showing that 98 percent of study participants who had an eighth-inch of beard achieved acceptable fits on civilian half-face negative-pressure respirators, which Ritchie said are comparable to the M-50 gas masks used in the military today.

Ritchie told Task & Purpose at the time that the Air Force would need only a small study—perhaps 100 to 150 participants—to settle the issue one way or another. But Towberman and Colón-López seemed uninterested in pursuing broad acceptance of beards.

“I really feel pretty comfortable” with the policy as it stands, Towberman said. “It feels like we’re accomplishing what we needed to. I shouldn’t be discriminated against because of a glasses prescription, [and beards are similar]. So the medical requirement or the religious accommodation needed to be addressed and we’ve addressed it.”

‘Is There a Need?’

Colón-López was more blunt. A former pararescueman, he noted there was a “combat need” to grow beards in order to blend in with the local population in Afghanistan, but that need gradually fell away as the U.S. military established a longer-term presence there.

“You had GI-issue body armor, helmet, big American flag and a beard. Really? You blend in? So it became a stupid argument,” Colón-López said.

But in the 2016 book “Hammerhead Six”, Green Beret Capt. Ronald Fry wrote that beards were more than blending in—they were also an important means of gaining the respect of local elders.

“If I had shaved my beard, when I returned to duty in the Pech nobody would have talked to me,” Fry wrote. “The warrior king would have been reduced to juvenile status, and the respect that we were working so hard to gain would evaporate.”

Then-Senior Master Sgt. Ramón Colón-López wore a beard while deployed to Afghanistan in 2004. His beard then helped him blend into the population. Photo via the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

Still, as the operator look—beard, baseball cap, Nine Line t-shirts—caught on, beards became “a badge of pride because of our ass-kicking track record downrange,” said Colón-López. His view: The calls for beards in the Air Force derive either from the desire to fit that style and look or from laziness and the desire to not shave.

“Now the question is: Do we really need to be discussing fashion, when we’re preparing after 20 years of war, to best an opponent that can potentially have the best of us?” he said. “Is there a need for a beard, other than personal comfort to not shave?”

Colón-López said he opposed religious exemptions to the beard rule when he worked for the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

“We call this a uniform,” he said on the Facebook chat, pointing to his chest. “And what does uni mean? One. And that is part of the expectation of people, to put their personality aside for the betterment of the team. … The more we start requesting ‘well, I want,’ we start losing sight of that discipline and that commonality that we have as warfighters.”

Ritchie, the dermatologist, disagreed in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“This has never been about looking cute or about fashion, this has always been about eradicating every possible vestige of racial discrimination in the Air Force and also about allowing those with religious beliefs to express those while in uniform,” Ritchie said.

“We are forcing out talented Airmen (proven with data), we are not promoting our shaving waiver holders (proven with data), and because our waiver holders are predominantly Black this directly translates into racial discrimination,” he said.

Last year, former Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Kaleth Wright said in a panel discussion that he spent nearly his entire 32-year military career opposed to facial hair. “I had opportunities to hire all kinds of folks and I was adamant about not hiring somebody with a shaving waiver, just because I fell into that category of ‘this is Air Force policy, it’s not professional,’” he said. “I was willfully ignorant about the impact it was having on young Black men.”

But as CMSAF, Wright eventually changed his tune. At least one general officer shares Wright’s position. Maj. Gen. Kenneth Bibb, then-commander of the 18th Air Force, said on the same panel that for many years he did not want Airmen with shaving waivers to represent his wing or be in his Honor Guard.

“Man that hurts now that I think about the words that I said and the guidance that I gave,” said Bibb, now the deputy inspector general of the Air Force.

“I’ll be the first Airman to grow a beard” if the Air Force drops the ban, he said. “I think we have to take away the stigmatism that goes with this. Even if you change the rules, if we don’t see leaders that have beards,” the stigma will survive.

Biden’s 2024 Budget Seeks $842B for Defense, ‘21st Century’ Air Force

March 9, 2023 | By Greg Hadley

President Joe Biden’s $842 billion Defense budget request includes a 5.2 percent pay increase—the biggest in 22 years—“builds the Air Forces needed for the 21st century,” and “increases space resilience,” the administration said.

Topline budget figures released by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget offered scant details; the full budget is to be released March 13.

“The Budget funds the procurement of a mix of highly capable crewed aircraft while continuing to modernize fielded fighter, bomber, mobility, and training aircraft,” the OMB release said. “The Budget also accelerates the development and procurement of uncrewed combat aircraft and the relevant autonomy to augment crewed aircraft. Investing in this mix of aircraft provides an opportunity to increase the resiliency and flexibility of the fleet to meet future threats, while reducing operating costs.”

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall indicated earlier this week at the AFA Warfare Symposium that the Air Force will buy more F-35 Lighting II fighters than in fiscal 2023, new F-15EX fighters, and more KC-46 Pegasus tankers; it will also invest significantly in the B-21 bomber and Next-Generation Air Dominance systems.

The development and procurement of uncrewed combat aircraft—referred to by the Air Force as Collaborative Combat Aircraft—has been a well-known priority for the service. Kendall recently revealed notional plans to build 1,000 of the drones, which will fly alongside manned fighters.

Air Force generals and civilian leaders have argued CCAs are necessary to build what they call “affordable mass,” giving the service enough aircraft to match an adversary like China while not costing as much as an entirely manned fleet.

Space Force

The White House budget document highlighted funding to improve “the resilience of U.S. space architectures, such as in-space sensing and communications, to bolster deterrence and increase survivability during hostilities.”

Resilience or endurance of space operations under attack, whether by kinetic strikes or electronic jamming, is a defining aspect of Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman’s vision for the Space Force. He unveiled his theory of “Competitive Endurance” at the AFA Warfare Symposium, describing it as is a dis-incentivize to deter adversaries from striking first.

The Space Development Agency has emerged as the most high-profile contributor to diversifying the national defense space architecture, developing plans to launch hundreds of satellites into low-Earth orbit in the coming years—including “layers” for sensing and tracking missile launches, as well as for communications, and transporting data.

Budget Fights

The $842 billion topline for the Pentagon would be $26 billion more than the $817 billion appropriated for fiscal 2023—a 3.2 percent increase. Yet in an era of high inflation and increased threats, Congress may well up the ante, as it did in each of the past two years.

House and Senate Republicans will lead that charge. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, each released statements criticizing defense investment as insufficient.

“The President’s defense budget is woefully inadequate and disappointing,” Wicker said. “It does not even resource his own National Defense Strategy to protect our country from growing threats around the world.”

Rogers called the threats facing the United States “the most complex and challenging … in decades.” The president’s budget request “fails to take these threats seriously,” he added. “A budget that proposes to increase non-defense spending at more than twice the rate of defense is absurd. The President’s incredibly misplaced priorities send all the wrong messages to our adversaries.”

But Biden will have supporters. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised Biden for crafting a “strong budget,” even as he left open the possibility for change.

“Some will inevitably say the topline is too much, while others will claim it is not enough,” Reed said. “I say America’s defense budget should be guided by our values, needs, and national security strategy. This topline request serves as a useful starting point. I look forward to receiving the detailed budget request so we can get to work crafting a responsible, balanced National Defense Authorization Act.”

Air Force Faces 10 Percent Recruiting Shortfall in 2023—And Long-Term ‘Headwinds’

March 9, 2023 | By David Roza

AURORA, Colo.—The Active-duty Air Force is projected to miss its 2023 recruiting goal by 10 percent, amid a historic low unemployment rate and a growling lack of interest and eligibility to serve among young Americans, top service officials said earlier this week at the AFA Warfare Symposium.

“We are currently projecting about a 10 percent shortfall this year in the Active Air Force and more in the Guard and Reserve,” said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall in his keynote address March 7. “We are swimming upstream against a reduced propensity to serve nationally across the board and a limited percentage of qualified candidates.”

The next day, Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, the commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service, outlined some of the specific “headwinds” that his troops face as they try to sign up more recruits. These include a 3.4 percent unemployment rate, the lowest since 1969 according to the Department of Commerce. Only 23 percent of American youth are eligible to serve in the military, Thomas said, and only 9 percent say they are interested in serving.

The grim projections come in the wake of what was already shaping up to be a tough year for Air Force recruiting. The AFRS barely reached its fiscal 2022 goal for the Active-duty Air Force and missed its goals for the Reserve and Guard by about 1,500 to 2,000 recruits each. Last September, Thomas called the effort “a dead-stick landing” that would leave the service starting 2023 about 5,000 recruits short on the Active-duty side alone.

At the time, Thomas pointed to some of the challenges such as the lack of in-person recruiting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, low unemployment, and misperceptions about military service. Many of those long-term challenges persist.

“One area that I do want to highlight, which we believe is critical, is countering declining familiarity with the U.S. military,” said Thomas in a statement, citing research that 50 percent of American youth cannot name all of the military services, and 65 percent of young Americans said they would not join for fear of death or injury.

Thomas said the Air Force needs to counter misperceptions of military service by “increasing community outreach–getting out into the communities and re-introducing ourselves to America. I don’t just mean getting outside the gates of Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio or Altus, Oklahoma. We must get out and provide meaningful exposure to our men and women in uniform across the nation, in the hard-to-recruit areas, and in all the places where Americans are not likely to know anyone in the military.”

In the meantime, the general said there is no “silver bullet or game-changing strategy” that will reverse the downward recruiting trends. Instead, AFRS has to pursue every small advantage it can, whether that is revising Air Force tattoo policies, updating body composition standards, changing bonus structures or other mechanisms to bring in more recruits.

“What we have concluded is that there are multiple areas where we need to adapt and improve performance by single or double-digit percentage points,” Thomas said. “We will continue to take a hard look at ourselves and leave no reasonable option off the table.”

There are bright spots for the recruiting service. For example, AFRS is on track to meet its Space Force goals and the Air Force in general enjoys strong retention levels.

“Retention numbers look very good,” Kendall said in his keynote speech. “We’re keeping the people that we get, but we need to get more people. People coming into the Air Force are staying with us, so please reach out to your communities and help us counter negative perceptions of our military service and share our positive and accurate messages.”

Ground-Penetrating Radar and AR Guide Airmen to Spark Tank Win

March 9, 2023 | By Patrick Reardon

AURORA, Colo.—No one wants to stand up in front of the entire Department of Air Force leadership team and own up to being personally responsible for cutting vital communications lines in a war zone, but Tech. Sgt. Raymond Zgoda turned that error into an example of a much-needed, winning innovation March 8 in the 2023 Spark Tank Championship.

Zgoda and Master Sgt. Sarah Hubert (the originator of the winning idea), both of Yokota Air Base, Japan, won the competition before an audience of about 2,000 Airmen and Guardians with an idea for using ground-penetrating radar and augmented reality goggles to more precisely map underground pipes, wires, and fiber-optic lines on military bases to prevent accidental breaks caused by construction.

Spark Tank is an annual competition modeled after the “Shark Tank” TV program. Instead of entrepreneurs pitching investors for funding, Spark Tank enables DAF “intrapreneurs”—primarily Airmen and Guardians, but also including department civilians—to pitch innovative ideas and ask leaders to fund their projects. From an initial field of 235 ideas, or “sparks,” six finalists got to pitch their projects on the main stage at the 2023 AFA Warfare Symposium.

This year’s panel of judges included Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall; Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.; Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman; Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass; Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman; National Basketball Association Senior VP and Head of Referee Operations Michelle Johnson, a retired Air Force lieutenant general; and investor Michael Moe, founder of the merchant bank Global Silicon Valley.

Each of the six finalists were allowed a three-minute pitch explaining their ideas, their progress thus far, and the potential return on investment for the services. Panelists then had four minutes to question the presenters.

2023 spark tank — 2023 Spark Tank Winners Master Sgt. Sarah Hubert and Tech. Sgt. Raymond Zgoda present their proposal to the Spark Tank panel. Photo by Mike Tsukamoto/Air & Space Forces Magazine

Hubert and Zgoda won the day with a straight-forward pitch.

“I’m a dirt boy,” Zgoda said. “I dig ditches. I’m good at my job, but without the proper tools and information, I can become a liability and insider threat. Unfortunately, I haven’t been issued X-ray vision. I am relying on inaccurate maps. I have personally seen our maps be off by as much as 75 feet from what is actually under the ground.”

Digging into underground storage tanks, wires, fuel lines, and other buried infrastructure is costly and all too common, they said. But by mapping areas using ground-penetrating radar and then fusing those findings with augmented reality, the solution the team presented can eliminate the risk of digging blindly—saving time, labor, money, and even lives.

For example, Hubert cited a sinkhole at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in 2020 that took two years and $77 million to repair. Ground-penetrating radar could potentially “detect these sinkholes at low costs before they turn into sunk costs.” Avoiding accidental damage to underground infrastructure could save up to $750,000 on wasted labor at every Air Force and Space Force base, the two said.

“Airmen and Guardians can die from hitting natural gas and electric lines,” Hubert said. “We cannot put a price on that loss.”

Their pitch won over Kendall, Saltzman, Bass, and Towberman, good enough to take home the prize. But all the projects earned the judges collective approval.

The “celebrity” judges reveal their votes for the Spark Tank 2023 champion at the AFA Warfare Symposium, March 8. Photo by Mike Tsukamoto.

The crowd favorite, indicated by electronic voting, was also Brown’s selection: “Project Kinetic Cargo Sustainment,” a system for accelerating airlift operations by implementing new digital processes for weighing and measuring pallets, vehicles, and other cargo before loading cargo craft. The idea was conceived by Master Sgt. Brandon Allensworth and Master Sgt. Peter Salinas, both from Kadena Air Base, Japan, who said the system can reduce cargo processing times from around 20 minutes per vehicle to a matter of seconds.

Both guest judges, Johnson and Moe, voted for “Accelerated Development of Multi-Capable Airmen and Guardians,” a Special Warfare training project touted to provide linkages between human systems and operational tasks. The concept was developed by a team of Airmen, including: Maj. Caitlin Harris, Chief Master Sgt Michael Rubio, Capt. Andrew Antonio, Tech. Sgt. Ty Hatcher, and Lt. Col. Peter Dyrud. Although still a prototype, the project is estimated to save an annual $3 million through graduation rates and has already received interest from multiple groups and across the DOD.

The remaining three “sparks” were all well-received by the judges, who praised the innovative solutions and encouraged their further development. They included:

DOD civilian Michael Dolan of Space Base Delta 3 at Los Angeles Air Force Base, for his “Real-time Asset Management System.” RAMS integrates the Air Force’s seven existing asset-management systems for tracking systems, people, and workspaces into a common interface, potentially saving 50,000 hours annually in wasted effort needed to track and map those assets.

Master Sgt. Aaron Cordroch, Hurlburt Field, Fla., for “Advanced Maintenance & Troubleshooting Suite,” a maintenance-troubleshooting dashboard and information database. Cordroch said AMATS can save the Air Force thousands of hours of equipment downtime by using predictive analytics to anticipate parts replacement.

Staff Sgt. Michael Sturtevant, Kadena Air Base, Japan, for Project Oregon Trail, a solution for lifting and moving pallets and equipment in all terrains without need of a forklift. Particularly relevant to agile combat employment scenarios, Sturtevant’s simple solution consists of four tripods for lifting the loads onto small wheeled platforms so they can be more easily moved by small teams. He envisioned equipping all expeditionary cargo craft with this gear in order to minimize the need for forklifts, which themselves make up a full plane load to get them into theater.

For more information on the six finalists in the 2023 Spark Tank, visit the Guardians and Airmen Innovation Network.

New Air Force Force Generation Model Will Stop ‘Crowdsourcing’ Deployments

March 9, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

AURORA, Colo.—Looking to build stability and improve readiness, Air Force leaders said at the AFA Warfare Symposium they are planning a move in 2024 to what they call a more cohesive approach to deployments for Airmen.

That deadline to implement the service’s new force generation model—Air Force Force Generation, or AFFORGEN—is a self-imposed one, reflecting an urgency to shift focus to the Pacific and prepare for a more sophisticated fight, a panel of top generals said March 8.

“We’re changing fast enough now,” Lt. Gen. James C. “Jim” Slife, deputy chief of staff for operations said. “The reason we’re changing our force generation, force presentation models in the Air Force is because the strategic environment has changed.”

That changed environment means Airmen need to arrive at their deployed location prepared to work as a team without the luxury of time to work out the kinks—and AFFORGEN will emphasize that by grouping units together in new ways.

Instead of just bringing over squadrons, the Air Force will create XABs, or expeditionary air bases. That will replace the current model of air expeditionary wings. The goal is to bring more operations from a home base into a deployed location, including, for example, security forces personnel that previously may not have gone along with pilots and maintainers.

“It really goes back to what our National Defense Strategy says—we have to be ready for the high-end fight,” said Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn, deputy commander of Air Forces Central. “The AFFORGEN model is going to move away from the decades-long crowdsourcing—asking hundreds of Airmen to come from dozens of locations to arrive in their expeditionary wing, and then execute ops immediately as a high-performing team.”

Those teams of Airmen will cycle through four six-month phases in AFFORGEN—“available to commit,” “reset,” “prepare,” and “ready.” After twenty years of heavy demand for airpower during America’s fights in the Middle East that strained units and aircraft, AFFORGEN is supposed to provide predictability for Airmen and aircraft—and subsequently improve readiness.

“We’ve been able to get away with that in an operating environment where frankly, we have not been heavily pressured by our adversaries,” Slife said. “We’ve been able to get away with taking three Airmen from this base, five Airmen from this base and two Airmen from that base, deploy them and expecting them to come together on day one, be a team. But we don’t actually think that that’s the way the future operating environment is going to permit us to operate. We’re going to have to build and generate teams of Airmen at home station that train together, deploy together and then come home and reset together and go through that cycle.”

In addition to providing cohesion within the Air Force itself, leaders also expect AFFORGEN to make it easier to articulate what they actually have to combatant commanders and the rest of the joint force—and sometimes make sure they know requesting aircraft constantly will have long-term ramifications.

“It allows us to have what I would call a boundary on it to say ‘No.‘” Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh, director of the Air National Guard, explained to Air & Space Forces Magazine. “You can’t just set up another location and more force elements—whether it be fighters, tankers, airlift—because we don’t have it.”

Loh explained that sometimes saying “No” to a commander’s request will ultimately benefit the rest of the U.S. military—if forces that are supposed to be in the training bin are deploying, then the Air Force may not be able to provide those forces in six months. Equipment may be overused, families will be strained, and retention will suffer, he said.

“When you gotta be all in, there’s a time to be all in, but for normal global force management, the natural tension between the combatant commanders and the service, this is how we’re presenting forces now,” Loh added. “That will build us a stronger Air Force over time.”

Watch, Read: ‘Transitioning to a Wartime Posture Against a Peer Competitor’

March 8, 2023

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, moderated a discussion with Andre McMillian, vice president of sustainment operations for military engines at Pratt & Whitney; Brian Morrison, vice president and general manager of cyber systems at General Dynamics; and David Tweedie, general manager of advanced products at GE Edison Works, on readiness ranging from technology to manufacturing to sustainment, on March 8, 2023 at the AFA Warfare Symposium. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Good morning. How are we doing today on day three of our symposium? Doing well? We have a great topic here today and we have great panelists. I want to say thanks for joining us today on an important topic, it’s transitioning to a wartime posture against a peer competitor. I’m really honored to be here with some of the thought leaders in industry on this critical topic. As we’ve all heard throughout the week, we are at a pivotal moment in history. The DOD is very clear-eyed about our peer adversary, our peer competition, and the multi-domain threats that it poses. Our nation has responded by advancing the concept of integrated deterrents in our national defense strategy, but should deterrence fail, then what?

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

In this hour, or 40 minutes, more closely to the target, we’re going to talk about what it means for the Department of the Air Force to mobilize its forces at scale, to be ready with a wide range of information systems, facilities, and support, to deploy Airmen and Guardians to the fight, and most importantly, to win in air, in space, and in the cyber domains. In a word, this panel’s all about readiness, the seventh and essential operational imperatives. With me today, we have experts from industry up here on this stage. Thank you all for joining me. First up, we have Andre McMillan, who’s the Vice President of Sustainment Operations at Pratt & Whitney. Andre, if you would, please tell us a little more about you and your work.

Andre McMillian:

Thank you, General Pringle, and good morning, AFA. It’s great to be with all of you and certainly, it’s an honor to be on a panel. I lead all of our sustainment activities across all of our portfolio of military engines at Pratt & Whitney, so essentially, what that entails is that we’re responsible for activating all of the bases, the ships, the depots around the world. We’re also responsible for the customer support engineering to support all of our operators and maintainers in the field and in the depot. We also lead a team that’s responsible for the support equipment, for the movement of material around the world, and to industrialize the repair network. I’ll also share, I’ve been with Pratt & Whitney for 16 years, so I’m a 16-year industry partner, but also continue to serve as an Airman, 26 years as a mobilization assistant, and so it’s great to be with you this morning.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Thanks so much, Andre. Next up, to my left, we have Brian Morrison, Vice President/General Manager in Cyber Systems at General Dynamics Mission Systems. Brian, tell us about yourself.

Brian Morrison:

I’m delighted to be here. Thank you for having me, ma’am. I’m grateful to all of you for coming. I come to this from a little bit of a different perspective, I think, than many of you. I come here with a deep and abiding passion for security and how we can use security to render the fight against our adversaries unfair. I’m not interested in any fair fights and I know you all aren’t either. I lead a business focused on cryptography and keys and information security throughout the department, but with a very heavy focus on the Department of the Air Force, and I’m delighted to talk to you today about readiness.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Thanks so much, Brian. Last, and certainly not least, we have David Tweedie, General Manager of Advanced Products at GE Edison Works. David.

David Tweedie:

Thank you, General. I’m just happy to be here to represent GE, who’s been a proud supplier of the US military for over 100 years now. From the first US jet engine in 1942 to the first three-stream adaptive cycle engine in 2022 and everything in the 80 years in between, just really proud with the partnership with the US military and the Air Force. Specifically within my portfolio, I have general manager responsibility for a variety of advanced fighter engine development programs at different phases that’s really focused on bringing state-of-the-art technology into our product portfolio, both today and in the coming years to bring that capability to the war fighter. Again, just excited to be here.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Thanks so much. Appreciate you being here. Thank you all. Brian, I’m going to start with you, and let’s jump in. Talk about the context of readiness and really what it means, what does it mean to you, your company, or your technologies?

Brian Morrison:

I think through decades of the department, we’ve thought of readiness as are our Airmen trained, are our platforms maintained, do we have sufficient ordinance? Do we have sufficient JP-5? It was really a purely logistical question and that resonates, I think, with many of us, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. But I think that in the world in which we live today, we need to think of readiness as maybe there’s a step before all of that. Readiness has to include the security of our information, the security of our plans, the security of our orders, the security of our comm systems, because as we know, our peer competitors are going at that soft underbelly, so that to me is the central principle of readiness.

Brian Morrison:

If I made aircraft engines or a sustained aircraft, I might feel differently about it, but from where I sit, the key issue in readiness is left of launch. It is can we secure our information before conflict arises and then keep the security of that information during conflict? It’s maybe a little bit of a different view of it than the logisticians in the room, than the engine manufacturers, than the maintainers in the room, but I think it is as essential as any other part of readiness I can think of. Does that answer the question, ma’am?

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Absolutely. As we’re facing multi-domain threats, we have to think about readiness in a multi-domain way, so I think that makes perfect sense. It leads into my next question, which really, I’m going to target at Andre. You mentioned that you’re a commissioned officer in the military and you’ve been in for a while, so times have changed, technologies have changed, and so can you tell us how has readiness changed from when you’ve started to maybe today?

Andre McMillian:

I think as you think about what’s changed is the fact that we’ve changed our way of thinking from an industrial age mindset to more of a informational age mindset. What I mean by that is if you were to take a look at and view readiness through the lens of a system, it’s not only the technology readiness levels, it’s the manufacturing readiness levels, but it’s also the digital readiness levels that I think is incredibly important. If you look at, iPhone is a great example. iPhone was launched in 2007, here, as we sit, they’ve launched, in 16 years, 16 versions of an iPhone. There’s been this desire to continue to have iterative technology insertion along the way. If you were to look at propulsion, we have done exactly that same in partnership with the Air Force, who really adopted this idea early on with the Engine Model Derivative Program.

Andre McMillian:

As we look at our history with the F100, that has had several iterations of improvements along the way, we’ve had the F119, likewise, that has done the same. Many people don’t realize that the 119 was nicknamed the maintainers engine, and so it was already looking at logistics under attack, it was already thinking about a contested environment, and it was already thinking about how is an Airman going to be able to utilize and work within a hazmat suit, be able to use six common hand tools, remove and replace a line replaceable unit within 15 minutes and do it in a austere environment?

Andre McMillian:

We’ve taken that type of iterative design and technology and we’ve built that forward even to the 135. From a digital perspective, I’ll share with you that the 135, in one single flight, will actually download usable and useful data than what an entire 119 was able to do in one year, and so as you think about how we accelerate change from that perspective, it’s significant. We continue to do that, we have an engine core upgrade that we’re working through now, and we’re making sure that it’s supportable across the sustainment network across the globe.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Having that digital underpinning and adapting quickly to change is really what is making today’s readiness different than the past, and so that’s particularly important as we’re looking at the scale of a pure competition and transitioning there, so really great words there. Speaking of pure competition, David, if we can, let’s talk about China. They have this concept of military civil fusion, where industry looks and everything that they do, they bring those advantages to the military, including its readiness posture. Here in the United States we have a different model, open society, et cetera. Do you have any thoughts on how we might better benefit from what industry has to offer, even, as Andre just mentioned, those digital technologies that are out there?

David Tweedie:

When we look at what our competitors are doing with their system, I think we need to step back and look at what are the asymmetric advantages of our system? There’s a couple that I’ll bring up, one, the first one is competition. Our free market, private sector system, competition is a driver and it provides innovation, it provides affordability, and it provides responsiveness to the end user/customer. While the DOD is often the obtainer of bespoke capability and therefore has to often fund during the development phase, and so some of that upfront investment to ensure competition throughout the life cycle might be more upfront, downstream, time and time again, both in the commercial world and in the military world, the implementation of a competitive structure over the life cycle can bring those benefits of innovation, affordability, and responsiveness.

David Tweedie:

And then one step beyond that, I think with recent world events, both with COVID and the challenges in Ukraine, have highlighted resiliency in the supply chain. It’s one of those things you never know how valuable it is until you lose it and I think that’s something over the last three years, we’ve all collectively recognized how fragile we were in terms of supply chain resiliency. That’s another intrinsic benefit to competition that’s harder to quantify on a dollars and cents basis, but again, it’s invaluable once you realize you don’t have it. But then the second thing to bring up is our commercial aerospace industry in the United States. We’re blessed it is the best in the world and it’s actually the largest capital goods export market, which sets a very strong for the United States.

David Tweedie:

It sets a strong foundation for our economy, which is intrinsically beneficial to our country, but then that provides some technologies and capabilities that can be leveragable in, it provides an infrastructure, whether that’s unique manufacturing capabilities, as well as industrial capacity. The commercial aerospace market is larger than the military aerospace market, so tapping into that brings that industrial benefit, as well as the workforce. We heard from Secretary Kendall that the Airmen are critical to the success of the department, of the Air Force. Well, our skilled workforce, both our engineers, our salaried and hourly manufacturing workforce, it’s a tremendous asset to this country, so now how do you get more of those products into the Department of Defense space and how do you get more of those commercial players into the defense world? Just a couple thoughts, commercial off-the-shelf procurement is an obvious way to do that.

David Tweedie:

One thing we sometimes see is you start with something that’s almost what you want that’s commercially available. And then as you start applying unique requirements for our unique military needs, each of those individual requirement decisions in a vacuum might make sense, but in aggregate, you might have marched so far away from the original commercial off-the-shelf intent that you’re giving up the cost and the economies of scale and what you’re really after, and you drive more cost, higher qualification costs. Maybe just it doesn’t work in all cases, but adjust the lens a little bit from how do I tailor the commercial off-the-shelf product to my unique military requirements, to maybe flip the script a little bit is can I tailor my military requirements to align with what the commercial world is producing and maybe live with not perfect technical requirements, but good enough technical requirements, but then give you that affordability and scale that you’re looking for to provide readiness?

David Tweedie:

And then finally, IP. I think there’s a great structure for commercial items. There’s a great structure for bespoke items, but some of the players, if you’re a small business with a very narrow, but very valuable IP, and that’s the center of your business, when you put that at risk, you’re risking your whole company. And then if you’re a more large, commercial-oriented business wanting to get into the commercial world, how much of that are you willing to put at risk? In that in-between zone of pure commercial versus pure military, is there an IP structure that can get more players on the field? It’s not a insurmountable barrier, but it’s a speed bump that that might be preventing fully tapping into that asset we have.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

If I were to summarize what you were just helping us understand, intellectual property, the talent, the people that actually make it all happen, and then looking at the requirements in order to do it at scale, are there ways that we can get good enough, min viable product, if you will? I really like all of that discussion. You also mentioned something that’s near and dear to my heart, as a lab commander, we’re constantly focused on what if we don’t know what the threat is that’s out there and we have to adapt to the unknown? COVID was the absolute perfect example. You rely on the talent to converge in a multidisciplinary way and solve that in new and different ways than what you might not have thought, and so that makes readiness a whole different aspect. Andre, I’m going to come back to you and see, have you learned anything? What did your company employ throughout the pandemic and are there lessons learned that we might apply to our readiness posture?

Andre McMillian:

Thank you for the question. I think if you look back over the last couple years, we’ve learned a very valuable lesson because the pandemic, clearly, was the great equalizer that affected every city, every county, every country, every continent, but it was at the same time, the natural force and function, in many respects, that actually brought us together when we needed to be together the most. I’ll look at the lens of our partnership, specifically our public-private partnership, which we have down at Tinker Air Force Base. I’ll share with you that during the last couple years, despite the fact that we had workforce disruption, despite the fact that we had supply chain disruptions and everything else that was going on, that location, across three engine series, the F119 that powers the F22, the F135, obviously, as well as the C-17 engine, in two years, they were able to increase their output year-over-year and it was the highest they actually had ever done and they did it during a pandemic.

Andre McMillian:

And then you would say, “Well, why is that?” I think in many respects, we were able to develop the right level of partnership that was required, we were able to move at the speed of trust, and we actually brought that same focus as we increased our capacity across the international sector. We actually have 36, 26 spaces, 10 ships, that we stood up within a couple years, that’ll be 74. I had a team that actually built three test cells in three continents and still had to deal with quarantining for two weeks at a time in the countries that they were at, so it just shows you that despite the distractions and the disruptions that we have, that there’s still a way to be able to partner together.

Andre McMillian:

I’ll share one more that actually hits closer to home is obviously, General Pringle being the commander of the Air Force Research Lab, this year, we’ll actually sign a data sharing teaming agreement with them, and it’s in an effort to be able to support digital thread for sustainment. We decided to partner with them on how do we look at flight safety critical hardware and how do we actually utilize the data mesh that’s there and accelerate it in a way that we can actually not only be able to come up with advanced repairs, but also maybe potentially look at different types of materials? This is all in an effort to be able to leverage sustainment and then more so leverage the network that we have across the globe to support our products.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Thank you, Andre. As we become more involved and/or dependent or integrated in a digital way, we’re going to have to start to think about, or well, hopefully we’ve thought in advance about securing that and our communication strategy and cybersecurity. Brian, this brings me to you and a question for you about what steps can we take to be better prepared, whether it’s with our cybersecurity or our communication strategy for Airmen and Guardians?

Brian Morrison:

I think as an initial matter, what I worry about, and I think many of you worry about, is that we’re coming off a couple of decades of conflict in which all of our comms were essentially secured, we were not competing with a peer, and I think most of us in the room believe the next conflict will be quite different from that. I worry that maybe we have lost some of the fire in the belly in worrying about how to keep those comms secure. Look, in every circumstance, whether it’s your laptop at home or the iPhone in your pocket or the IFF system in your aircraft, in every circumstance, the first question is always about updates and patches. We have seen over time that most of the penetrations we’ve had have not been unbelievably sophisticated attacks, they’ve been known exploits or exploits of known vulnerabilities that we had the means and the knowledge to remediate.

Brian Morrison:

The first thing I think we all have to think about all the time is are we doing our, what I would call cyber hygiene? It’s a funny turn of phrase, but I think it makes sense. Are we eating our vegetables, from an information security perspective? The second thing I think we need to keep in mind is that the United States Air Force and the United States Space Force has largely solved many of the most thorny problems of warfare for the past five centuries. We now can deliver a weapons system anywhere in the world within minutes with near 100% accuracy and near 100% lethality. That was unthinkable for most of human history and now, it’s thunk, we can do it and we know we can do it.

Brian Morrison:

Unfortunately, our peer adversaries know we can do it, so they will, by necessity, pursue those asymmetric attacks, which have to be attacks on our information systems. What that requires us in turn to do is think like the enemy. I know there are no doubt planners and red teamers, probably in this very room, who make their living thinking like the enemy. We’ve got hundreds of pen testers in my business who think every day, how can we break what we’re doing? We’ve got to think like the enemy and then we’ve got to devote the time, treasure, and attention to stay ahead of the obsolescence curve, particularly in my part of the world at General Dynamics Mission Systems, with codes and crypto.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

That’s not just a military issue, it would also be one in industry, as well. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Brian Morrison:

David said something I loved, he said, “Our asymmetric advantage is our competition.” I think that’s a wonderful response to the sort of unity of effort you can get in a totalitarian country. I totally agree. I think our competition will allow us to respond to that unity of effort. The challenge is that, again, our enemy knows that we are more innovative, that our technologies develop faster, so they’re stealing it left, right, and center, so that’s the industrial base threat is how do we keep them from stealing our mittens, so to speak? You know they’re trying, we know they’re trying, and we see it every day, OSI warns us all the time, our own internal security departments warn us all the time. While I totally agree with David that our innovation can get us out of this box, we’ve also got to protect our innovation.

David Tweedie:

100 percent agree with that.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Jump in, please don’t be shy. It’s a great topic. David, let’s pull the thread a little bit more. How can industry be better prepared, whether it’s in this area or, as we’re talking about, this transitioning to a wartime posture? We are talking at scale and mass and speed, obviously, can’t get there soon enough, so do you have any thoughts on that?

David Tweedie:

A few things we’re working on at General Electric, we’ve been through a, as well as all of industry, a massive supply chain disruption through COVID. As we really try to get back to where we need to be to deliver for our customers, both commercial and military, we’re really trying to attack with lean principles, really trying to drive waste out of the system and focus on SQDC, safety, quality, delivery, cost, in that order, because you’ve got to attack them in that order if you want to get to the ultimate result, and also, driving a culture of continuous improvement, kaizen is the lean term for that. That’s both internally in our own shops, as well as in close partnership with a lot of our tier one suppliers, where we work collaboratively with them to go through week-long kaizen events and try to drive improvements. We’ve seen in our own shops up to a 70% improvement in turnaround time in our HPT blade manufacturing product lines, with some of our suppliers, we’ve seen a 30% improvement in throughput, and that’s just making better use of the assets that you already have.

David Tweedie:

Another approach for us is strong synergies between our commercial technologies and our military technologies. For GE specifically, that’s ceramic-based composites material systems that are lighter weight, more durable, higher performing, and additive manufacturing, 3D printing. We actually did a lot of pioneering technology work with the Air Force Research Laboratory on those technologies, but then our high-volume commercial products have industrialized those, gone through the regulatory hurdles, and are now flying millions of people every day on those technologies that then get fed back into our T901 turboshaft engine for the Army Future Attack Reconnaissance aircraft, as well as the XA100 that we worked in close partnership with the Air Force on, that that can revolutionize and maintain the air dominance function of the Air Force, so that’s as we think of things.

David Tweedie:

And then just one specific example that caught our attention yesterday was Secretary Kendall talking about 1,000 CCA, collaborative combat aircraft, and we need to collectively, industry and the government, think through the problem we’re being asked to solve is the Air Force can’t afford the exquisite capability of the manned platforms and the volume required, so CCA is the solution, but if we do nothing more than just take off the systems that are there to support the pilot, I don’t know that we’re going to break the cost curve enough to get to the volume we’d like,. How do we think through, again, the requirements process through design qualification and even the whole sustainment approach, how do we rethink that collectively, as industry and government, to get to a true low-cost solution, not just a slightly lower cost solution? I don’t have the answers, but that is some of the things we’re trying to think about and want to partner with the Air Force on.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Well, and it even brings up the other question of the dual-use technologies that meet military or civilian needs. Do you have any thoughts on that? Would that be a way to better break the cost curve?

David Tweedie:

Absolutely. It speaks right at the heart of are there commercially available alternatives that are good enough or close to good enough that, again, when you think about the industrial cap… But first of all, products that might already be developed, as well as industrial capacity that might already exist, that can be quickly repurposed as different customers have shifting needs over time.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Go ahead, please, Andre.

Andre McMillian:

I’ll add, and I think there’s some similarities there with a blended business of having commercial and military. Many folks don’t realize that 75% of our business is actually commercial, so we do think heavily about where do we leverage that technology to include the actual product? As you look at CCA, and the other topic that was brought up yesterday was this blended wing concept regarding the future tanker and what’s the staple of commercial off-the-shelf products that we actually have and they’re actually available, so it actually accelerates the time for insertion and then it also provides an opportunity to partner with their framers from an integration standpoint, so I think there’s great benefits there from an affordable readiness perspective.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Any thoughts in the cyber world, is it different?

Brian Morrison:

It is. I’ll disagree with my friends just a tiny bit as it relates to my domain, which is different, admittedly, it’s a different world. In the cybersecurity domain, the notion of just good enough, or almost good enough, to me, is a recipe for mission failure. In the cybersecurity domain specifically, the notion that we can get almost there with commercial crypto is obviously a non-starter for our most critical missions. Of course, there are missions in which you can rely on some commercial crypto because you’ve got short lifetime for the… Data security. Maybe somebody doesn’t like what I’m saying, man.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Well, or they really like it,

Brian Morrison:

Or they want me to get off the stage, I don’t know.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

We have seven minutes.

Brian Morrison:

For our most crucial missions, though, we have to be dealing with gear that only, only the US military and its closest allies have. It’s just our lives depend on it.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Well, great thoughts and apparently, it was enlightening. Dun, dun, dun. As we wind down our discussion, let’s finish with, so let’s we’ve assume we’ve transitioned to this wartime posture, we’ve collected our capabilities at scale, our Airmen and Guardians are prepared and ready, so how do we continue to adapt while we’re in the middle of fielding these challenges, addressing the threat, et cetera? That’ll be the last question, then we’ll go to closing comments. David, we’ll start with you.

David Tweedie:

I think in two work streams, I think in the cold conflict of ongoing, as our capabilities evolve, our understanding of our competitors capabilities evolve. I just think the continued close partnership between industry and the military and understanding where those emerging needs are is the way to address that. And then I think in more of the hot conflict, it’s about having the right products at the right time and that ability to surge capacity with very short notice, which I think we’ve all learned is harder than a lot of people anticipated. I think it’s about being prepared and perhaps thinking different from a just in time approach that a lot of us, in both commercial and the military side, have migrated to, to what does a just in case posture look like and how do you set up yourself for that?

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

I think that’s a really good point, because we don’t want to just only plan for up to day one and then wing it after that, we’ve got to be prepared day 2 to day 200. Any thoughts, Andre?

Andre McMillian:

I go back to yesterday, the Chief shared the quote from Italian Air Marshall Giulio Douhet and it certainly resonated with me, and it’s a quote that I’ve shared with the team in previous times. Basically, it says, “Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the change in the character of war, not upon those who adapt themselves after the change occur.” I think what we bring to the fight is our ability and our approach to be able to solve problems with our customer.

Andre McMillian:

As I think back to Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney history, a lot of people don’t realize that they were integral in providing interchangeable parts during the Civil War, and so that’s where the history’s gone. And then in World War II, with the scale that was required for both the Navy and the Army Air Corps, we were able to provide that. Fast forward to even now, and much more, so we’re able to leverage the power of Raytheon Technologies, which is our parent company, and clearly, there is a portfolio of technologies, but then I would also say there’s 180,000 people that are working shoulder-to-shoulder with our customers. When you think about that and our ability to do things together and partner, I think it’s going to be critical as we go forward to be able to adapt in a pure competitive environment.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Thanks, Andre. Brian?

Brian Morrison:

I love what you said about partnership. I’ll quibble with your premise a little bit, ma’am. The question was premised on the notion that we will one day move from a peacetime footing to a wartime footing. In my part of the world, ma’am, I believe we are there, and if there’s one thing that really keeps me up at night, I believe we are in hot conflict today in the cyber domain, and I know many of you agree with me. If we are in hot conflict today, I assure you that those two or three peer adversaries are working every day to break our codes, to get inside our sensors, to read our communications, to hear what we’re saying to each other.

Brian Morrison:

If in fact we are in that hot conflict, and I’ll ask you to believe me on that, what I worry about is that we are not having the urgency I think we need. Look, you can tell I’m a passionate person, you can tell that I jump out of bed every day to do what I do, but what I would love to see, from industry and government together, is that agility and urgency that we saw. There was a time, actually, when I was in Iraq, and I think you might have been there, too, at that moment, we were dealing with explosively formed projectile threats to the underbelly of the vehicles. Some of my people who would later be my colleagues at General Dynamics, I had never met them at the time, sat down with the two-star and the two-star said, “Look, soldiers are dying, we need an answer today.”

Brian Morrison:

They sketched out a design for a different hull for the vehicles and they went back to the plant and they started working on it. There was no question about how am I going to get paid for this? Are the requirements lying flat? Do we have all the contract terms? It was urgency to mission, and then we’ll let everything else sort out along the way. Everybody’s got lawyers, everybody’s got contracts, we’ve got to worry about them, but I would love for all of us together to get back to that moment of urgency, because I think we are in a hot war.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

There is no transition, is what you’re saying. That’s the whole title of this panel and I’m really glad you challenged that, because I think there’s a lot of what you say, there’s a lot of truth in that, and so the question is do we have our gloves off now or do we wait? Any final thoughts, David, closing remarks? We’ll just come down the line.

David Tweedie:

Just thanks for the opportunity. We at GE, we are not at the pointy end of the spear, but we’re really proud of what we do to support and bring in the most capable products to those men and women who are at the pointy end of the spear, because we don’t want them going into a fair fight, we want it to be an unfair fight in their odds. We just are really proud of the small piece we do to make that possible.

Andre McMillian:

Thank you again for the opportunity. I’ll really focus my comments on the folks that are given in uniform. Having come from the uniform and being in a position that served a customer I once was, I’ll share with you that you probably don’t realize that you need just as many people outside of uniform as you do inside a uniform to help you be successful. I would say I’ve taken that path and as I think about both David and Brian, on behalf of all of our industry partners out there, we truly are committed to one cause and one single mission. I think people need to understand it, they need to recognize it. Using the old African proverb, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together, and this pure competition will require us to go together.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Long way to go. Brian?

Brian Morrison:

Again, thanks for having me. I think sometimes I tend towards scaring people with the vision of the cyber warfare that we’re in today. I guess I’ll leave you with some hopefulness, which is that I know the world is getting more dangerous. I’ve got a four-year-old at home, I worry about the world he’s going to grow up in. At the same time, I am 100% certain that when the chips are down, our soldiers, sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Guardians are invariably the kind of people that rise to the challenge. I want you to know that I get up every day to provide you the tools to meet that challenge and I’m grateful that you are out there meeting that challenge for us, so thank you to all of you. Thank you, ma’am.

Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle:

Thank you all for being here. I’m sure when you walked in and we started talking about transitioning to a wartime posture and you have a lab commander and three industry panelists, you wondered how is this going to be helpful to me? But I think the team has demonstrated that there are a lot of great ideas and that together, we can make it happen, so would you please join me in a round of applause for our great panelists?