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.

Watch, Read: ‘Answering the Warfighters’ Needs’

March 7, 2023

Andrew P. Hunter, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition Technology and Logistics, and Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney, the Military Deputy of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration joined Air & Space Forces Magazine’s Editor in Chief, Tobias Naegele, for a discussion on “Answering the Warfighters’ Needs” at the AFA Warfare Symposium, March 7, 2023. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

View Post

Tobias Naegele:

Hi, good afternoon. So, our session is titled Answering the Warfighters’ Needs. And our panelists, couple of very senior leaders responsible for acquiring platform systems, weapons for Airmen and Guardians, are here to talk about how they do that to maximize the warfighter advantage. Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition Technology and Logistics, and Major General Steve Whitney, Military Deputy of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration.

So, one brief thought and then I’ll hand it over to you. It’s 40-some years since the Packard Commission said acquisition was taking too much time. The average weapons system was taking 10 years to be deployed and we’re going to move a little bit faster. Well, I don’t know that we’re moving a whole lot faster yet. So this session is about speed. Let’s hear how you’re addressing that. Andrew, you want to start?

Andrew P. Hunter:

Well, thanks, and it’s great to be back at AFA. I’m mindful that the last AFA session that at least I attended was with… I did a panel with General Richardson and we talked about our joint priorities. And I want to touch on that just a little bit, but spend more time talking about how we’re going to go after those priorities, which will speak to how we’re addressing warfighter need and how we achieve the speed and the pace that we need to achieve in the acquisition system. So just a recap briefly, the focus priority areas I discussed last time’s delivering operational capability of the warfighter, shaping a vibrant integration base for strategic competition and transforming the acquisition enterprise for the 21st century. And if you had heard a speech like this or a presentation from a lot of my predecessors, I think those priorities are ones that would be pretty consistent over time. So not necessarily anything earth-shattering there.

I think what’s different now is the clarity of vision that is being brought to this work by the operational imperatives work that the secretary and the chief have led. That really clarifies for us a lot of the issues that often keep us tied up in knots early on in the process. What’s the capability that’s really going to make a difference? When do we really need to field it in order to have the impact that we want? What’s the right strategy to get there? And to my mind, the work of the operational imperatives has really clarified a lot of those questions, because we understand what we’re being tasked to go acquire and why it’s so important. We understand the timeline that we have to deliver to, which is meaningful military capable to be fielded as soon as possible.

And so it simplifies the mission. It gives us a very clear set of parameters to work forward. And our job is to get after it, which we are doing in the acquisition system, and I think jointly between AQ and SQ. And then the question of how, OIs also gave us kind of a steer on that, because the operational imperatives were developed with close coordination between the operational requirements communities and the acquisition community, working very closely together. And I think the key to delivering on them both in terms of delivering the right capability and delivering it at pace is going to be to continue that same degree of coordination, of integration between those of us who are carrying out the acquisition programs with those who are going to be fielding these systems, so that we are constantly understanding how to prioritize and make trade-offs in order to deliver on time. Very similar undertaking from what I did in my last go around at the Department of Defense in the rapid acquisition world, where we were meeting command or operational needs.

I also thought, I was intrigued by the chief’s comments early this morning about distinguishing function and mission. Obviously, both incredibly critical in a lot of ways. I think that is what we’re talking about here because Steve and I are essentially functional advocates and run functional organizations, but we’ve got to tie what we’re doing to the mission. And that’s what the operational imperatives is helping us do. And then just lastly, in terms of opening comments, I want to say that I think the speed, the pace that we’re talking about, it comes from that integration. It also comes from our approach to the industrial base and how we leverage their capabilities. And if you think of that longer timescale that we sometimes devolve into, it tends to be the case when you look at those programs that they may be competitive on the front end, but competition at some point stops. And you’re left with a single provider that you’re trying to work with over a long period of time.

You also see that a lot of these programs are high stakes decadal competitions, that it’s one and done and then you’re committed. And that tends to build a lot of pressures in the system that we then have to address through our process, and it slows us down. By contrast, if you look at a lot of our newer programs that we’ve been pursuing in recent years, and I give full credit to many of the people, many of our PEOs who developed these strategies and approaches, and also to my predecessor who put a lot of this approach in place, is continuous competition with incremental delivery of capability where you don’t have this high stakes, winner takes all, once in a decade or once in multiple decades, but it is constantly ongoing, driving innovation and driving pace.

And then the last piece that I’ll just mention is leveraging our digital engineering capability, which helps us acquire the technical data that we need to continue, continuous competition over time and drives the technological maturity in our design process that helps us move faster. So those are kind of the high points and I’m sure we’ll get into the details and I’ll pause there.

Tobias Naegele:

All right, Steve.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

Thank you, sir. First off, sir, thank you very much. I agree with your comments. But let me just start off with it’s an honor to be here today to represent my boss. He’s the Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, Honorable Frank Calvelli. And more importantly, to represent the men and women in the United States Space Force in the Space Acquisition Enterprise. These are truly historic times. You talk about it and we talk a lot. Those of us who wear the blue name tag talk about the standup of the Space Force and the standup of a new service. The FY20 NDAA also did something that’s completely unique in our entire federal government. It created a second service acquisition executive to be focused solely on space. Nowhere else in the federal government are there two acquisition executives within the same department.

Not interior, not agriculture, not commerce, not the Navy. We actually have two confirmed individuals to help us guide our acquisition. I think that’s a unique strength of where we’re at. I think it allows us, as Chief Saltzman said, to have focused individuals on the specific challenges of the domain and the specific challenges that we have as we go about acquiring our space systems. Honorable Calvelli has a number of priorities, we’ll get into those as we go through, and he’s got some thoughts on how best to go after that. But his basic priorities are speed, resiliency and integration. How do we get capability in the hands of the warfighter quickly? How do we get it that we know it’s going to be there when it’s needed? And how does we get it so that it delivers the effect it needs to for the joint war fight?

I think Honorable Hunter went down that route a little bit in the conversation about getting after the fight from China and where we’re trying to see the threat going. And that’s kind of our focus. The other historic time that we’re seeing in space acquisition actually is in the commercial industry. There is historic unprecedented investment by our private industry in terms of where they want to go, whether it be SATCOM or launch or whatever. And that presents us a unique opportunity to try and figure out how they can do that. How do they go off? I, as a former GPS program manager used to talk about I had the largest satellite production line. I did 10 satellites over the course of 15 years. Starlink is pumping out 42 satellites a launch every other day. So that allows for a different mindset is how we go about producing these. And we start talking about what can we capitalize on that and how do we turn that into our capabilities? And I look forward to getting into the conversation as we talk about how we take advantage of those opportunities.

Tobias Naegele:

Okay. So let’s come back and just focus on speed and maybe an example from each of you of where you really are accelerating the process, what you’re doing differently and how you’re getting there first. And Andrew, you want to go first?

Andrew P. Hunter:

Yeah, well, I’m a big believer that the ability to go fast is really building upon a solid foundation. You can’t just roll out of bed one day and decide “I’m going to go acquire a complex multi-billion dollar defense capability and I’m going to do it in five years.” It just simply doesn’t work that way. But when you’ve built a solid foundation, you can move quite rapidly. So I would point to an area that the secretary talked about in his speech this morning, which is the collaborative combat aircraft, CCA. We expect to and we plan to move out very rapidly to field an initial increment of CCA. And of course, the secretary gave us a steer this morning on fielding a pretty large number as a planning factor of that capability. So that’s a fast timeline and it’s not just onesies and twosies, right? It’s a substantial quantity.

I think, though, that we can say that we have the ability to do that because of the foundation that has been laid through the Skyborg program, through AFRL, where many of the critical enablers, the critical technologies acquired to make that a meaningful military capability, that work, a lot of it has been done, substantial risk reduction work has been done in that space. Plus industry has been investing heavily in this area. They’ve got in many cases relevant designs for the kind of capability we’re [inaudible 00:11:15] with, that they have been flying and developing and iterating on over multiple years. So it’s our ability to build on that foundation of experimentation, of investment and of technical work and risk reduction that’s going to allow us to feel the CCA capability on what I think is a pretty favorable and-

Tobias Naegele:

Aggressive schedule.

Andrew P. Hunter:

Aggressive timeline.

Tobias Naegele:

But there’s another piece to that, too, is that because you’ve had that industry competition, you’ve had a lot more potential players-

Andrew P. Hunter:

We do.

Tobias Naegele:

… building those aircraft than conventional fighters. So on the space side you’ve done similarly, you are building on the rapid proliferation of satellites in space.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

We are. And so, I mean as Honorable Hunter said, it’s important to know where you’re headed, otherwise you’re going to end up getting pulled off first base and getting picked off. So you got to be careful to make sure you’ve got the strategy down to where you’re headed to know what’s going on. And I think our ’24 president’s budget will lay out some of those steps for folks. Honorable Calvelli has what he calls a formula, if you will, for helping program managers in Space go after this. And I just want to take a moment and walk you through that. First off is to build smaller systems. Building a satellite system that’s going to last for 15 years requires you to put a certain level of testing and a certain level of requirements into it. Building a large structure requires you to reinforce it and so forth.

If you build a smaller satellite, you’re going faster, you’re doing the upfront engineering to try and get it to fit. And so that helps you go faster, step one. The second thing is to try and reduce, if not eliminate, non-recurring engineering. Too often we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how I can get just 5% or 2% more performance out of a sensor, and we’ll spend 10, 15 years to get that 2%. Whereas if we would’ve just put and flown what we had, then we could’ve iterated a couple of times. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t want to do experiments in NRE, we just don’t want to do them in our baseline programs. We want to work with the lab, with the AFRL, with General Pringle’s team, to be able to work those experiments. We want to work with industry as they do their [inaudible 00:13:25].

The third thing he wants to do in his formula is to try and drive the time from initiation to launch to less than three years. I think what we’re seeing in the commercial world right now, we’re seeing quite often that the teams that are successful can actually go from the start of a design to launch in about 24 months. And so how do we do that? And so to try and get us to into a tempo and try to do it. And then the third thing he wants to try and utilize is fixed-price contracts. And that step is really about budget stability. As a six-time Pentagon veteran, our Pentagon loves to talk about a five-year fight up and a one-year budget. And so if you’re on a fixed-price contract, you kind of put some stability into that.

So those four things are ways that we see this playing out. And the example I give you is our missile-warning missile-track pivot that we’ve been doing. And we’ve got two different groups going after that. We’ve got the Space Development Agency, and we’ve got SSC. Space Development Agency is doing the LEO missile-warning missile-track and trying to get out there and they’re coming up on their first launch here in a few weeks. And then we’ve got the SSC team, which is building after the MEO layer, or the medium earth orbit layer. And so our design has the two of them playing together, but they’re both using these four tenets or four steps in the formula to try and get after it. And at the same time, utilizing what Honorable Hunter was saying with competition, and how do I invigorate companies to want to play? And so all that is the tools we have, and so how do we use them?

The last tool I’d bring out is we’ve changed space acquisition from a place where we had a single PEO, we had a single three-star that made all the decisions, and we’ve pushed that decision making down. And now depending upon how you count, we’ve got five PEOs at Space Systems Command. We’ve got a space rapid capabilities office. The Space Development Agency is a PEO. We’re working with DAF RCO. We’re working with AFRL. And all those entities are producing capabilities for us. We’re pushing that decision making down as the last step, I’d say.

Tobias Naegele:

So software is the thing that makes these nice little devices so effective. And the wonderful thing is you can roll that out and you can change it and iterate. And that’s, in a sense, the secret sauce to adding capability faster. What are we doing to make that more possible and to do it more rapidly with things that are already fielded?

Andrew P. Hunter:

Yeah, I think Steve and I may have very similar answers to this question because I don’t think there’s any fundamental difference to how we do it on our side versus on their side. But a lot of it is building into the software development process. First of all, setting up the process so it doesn’t take years. So you have to design a process that delivers capability in sprints, in days-

Tobias Naegele:

You have to change the requirements process.

Andrew P. Hunter:

… months, not years timeframe. So you’re right, the government has to bring its side of the equation of saying, we can actually provide you with a needs statement that you can work to and then give you another one in six months’ time, or less, actually preferably less, in order to drive that pace. But it’s also building in, if it’s an aircraft system and the software you’re doing addresses some element of flight safety, it’s building in the ability to do an airworthiness process as you write, not as a big bang at the end, or on, again, a multi-year timeframe. And the other certifications that are required for that software to actually be fielded. And I think we’ve come a long way in engineering our processes around that. We still do have a ways to go. There’s still some things that we can do better. And then automating the test, where we can do automated test, and where we can’t do automated test, real-life test. Schedule it and turn around the results rapidly so we can respond to them.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

Right, sir, I’d agree with you. I’ve seen it work well when we do incremental capabilities and they’re on a regularly scheduled tempo. I’ve seen it struggle when we try to do the big bang approach. I’ve got my OCX scars abound. But the things that I would tell you is the short timelines, the small capabilities, the incremental capability builds are important. I think, sir, your point about testing, and testing isn’t just deploy it to the ops arena and test it there. It’s every night that I rewrite code to test it that night against the dev system and then come in the morning and figure out what worked, what didn’t, and get on it.

The last piece that’s really key, and I’m sure we’ll talk more about this, but this is a team sport. This isn’t a acquisition system or acquisition career field problem. This is a team sport. We need operator involvement to tell us what it is you want, to help us set the requirements, to help us with that testing, to help us get that capability delivered and to help us work through when is it good enough to just start going versus the full up, “I’ve got to go through operational acceptance, which is a 15-month process, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Well, maybe the tool that I’m building you is good enough to use now.

Tobias Naegele:

So operational testing, and the combination of the testing and the DevOps approach, DevOps being a software approach, but it’s kind of what you’re doing with the B-21. You’ve got operators out there and they are working every level of that program. Is that happening enough in other places? Are we doing that across the board, or is that a kind of an unusual circumstance and not typical?

Andrew P. Hunter:

It’s a best practice. I’d say we’re doing more and more of it. It’s absolutely my goal that we do significantly more of it. And we were. I think the B-21 program has pioneered some of how this is done really well. And we’ve been fortunate that with a really great relationship with Global Strike that they gave us access to a continuous set of folks from there, from units, real operators to work with us through that. It’s not always possible to do that, I know, and some of our parts of the force are really stressed. But where it is possible, it’s been incredibly helpful, and we are doing it in more programs beyond B-21.

Tobias Naegele:

In Space, too?

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

I agree, sir. I think the biggest challenge is keeping it small and incremental so that as I work and build a relationship with my operator brethren, I have that relationship. When I do the big bang approach and I turn to you and get the requirements, three, four program managers later, there’s going to be three, four different operators and you’re going to have different opinions and so forth. And so going short, going fast, that relationship is key and we’ve got to work that really hard.

Andrew P. Hunter:

And if I could just, sorry, just give one more example that I should have given, which is on E-7, which is a new capability that we’re going to acquire. We have the opportunity because Congress has agreed to let us divest some of the AWACS in this calendar year to actually take a unit. And because there are E-7s already flying and operating in the wild, with our partners in Australia, they have an opportunity to go.

Tobias Naegele:

It’s the Outback, not the wild.

Andrew P. Hunter:

Well, it seemed a little wild to me, I was just there. But yes, I think you’re right. But we have the opportunity to team with our partners and leverage that. And then those same folks will come back and inform our acquisition program.

Tobias Naegele:

So, we got a room full of Airmen and Guardians, and I suspect that everyone has had the experience of why did they design it this way? Whose idea was this and why didn’t they ask me? And we’re kind of getting at this, but I think that probably in the back of everybody’s mind is what is it that I’m supposed to take away from this? What can we tell, what can you tell Airmen and Guardians that will help them understand some of that why did they do this to me and why didn’t they ask?

Andrew P. Hunter:

Yeah. Well, I love the way Steve put it, that acquisition is a team sport. So we’re not going to do good designs if we aren’t closely integrating throughout the acquisition process with the user community, with the customer. So I guess my message is if there is an acquisition effort that is relevant to the work that you do on a daily basis, either you or someone who wears the same uniform and does the same job, we need those folks to be our partners and to engage with us. And like I said, it’s tricky. How do you do that in a way that makes sense, that doesn’t take away from mission, but that allows us to get that feedback into the acquisition process? When I was a young congressional staffer and I had stars in my eyes and I thought, “Well, we just pass a law to fix things,” which apparently is not how it works.

Tobias Naegele:

We can dream.

Andrew P. Hunter:

Yeah, we can dream. Tried to put a provision in the defense authorization bill that said for every major acquisition program, there should be an operational unit that is teamed and paired with that acquisition program to be the representative of the user. Well, we’re doing something not totally unlike that in some of our acquisition programs now.

Tobias Naegele:

That’s cool.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

Agree, sir. As I said, team sport, that’s not to discount, to say that the operator has nothing else to do. The operator has a very important mission to do. I need some time and some cycles from them as well to help me make sure I’m giving them what they need. Part of that too comes in how you set requirements and what you set those requirements at. So I’ll just pick on one set of requirements, requirements need to be bound in something that’s operationally relevant. We have a requirement we’ve been debating for the better part of 12 years with regards to our handheld GPS units. And the requirement that’s up for debate is that to be able to use your handheld GPS unit, 100% power on for 19 consecutive hours on two AA batteries.

And physics doesn’t allow you to do that, but it’s not operationally relevant because nobody’s going to walk around with a light shining on their face as they go through the fight. “Let me highlight my target for you.” And so help us set operationally relevant requirements. Help us take advantage of what commercial is. If that’s good enough to get us started, help us do that. Don’t set up requirements such as we have to go down to military development. Sometimes 30% of requirement is better than 100% of nothing. And so that’s something we need to think about as we work our way through that.

Tobias Naegele:

So, in the fall I was out at SSC and they had all these banners. And I can’t remember exactly what they said, but something along the lines of “Remember the threat,” or “Don’t forget the threat.” “The threat is real,” maybe. And so I asked people, I said, “Well, you don’t put up a sign like that if you don’t think that it’s an issue.” And so I’d like to hear your take on the acquisition workforce and what has to happen to evolve the acquisition workforce to understand the threat as seen by the warfighters.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

Great question, sir. I would say that I think for too long our acquisition workforce got enamored with the system they were building and not the reason why it existed. As a GPS guy, it was real easy to get into the mission and talk about it and get everybody excited about it, but some of the other ones were a little bit more difficult. I think there’s been a lot of work to make sure we’re educating folks, because the other part was, “Hey, well, there’s a threat, but I can’t tell you, it’s classified.” And so it started back in the 2017 timeframe when we started doing unclassified threat briefs for everybody at the center at the time and getting the entire workforce. Honorable Calvelli is using that though as he goes forward in his messages with industry to share with them as well what we’re seeing as the threat, so that they can know where to think about investing their dollars and capabilities for what capabilities they might have on the shelf to help us out.

Andrew P. Hunter:

Yeah, no, I think that piece of being threat informed is absolutely critical. And you have to structure that into a program, either early on or if you have to backwards engineer it, then you do that. Because the threat is moving incredibly fast.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

It is.

Andrew P. Hunter:

And when I talk about operational imperatives, I say, we have a pacing threat and the pace is quick. It’s a daily challenge to keep up, so we have to be mindful of that. And the acquisition system, there’ve been areas in the past, more traditional programs where they say, “Hey, you’re moving the goal post on me. I had a Milestone B, they told me what threat I was trying to address.” Now, that was 15 years ago and it turns out things have happened in the last 15 years. So we have to get away from thinking about that. And I think the approaches that we’re taking with more rapid increments, again, less high stakes, you’re not loading the ability to address every possible future threat onto one design, one iteration of what you’re trying to do.

And be willing to say, “Yeah, no, we’re going to fill that increment and it’s going to do what we said it was going to do, but we’re already posturing for future increments and we’re already working with industry to understand what can they do that we can plug in. And it won’t count, if you will, against our acquisition program baseline for increment one, but we will be in a position to field it rapidly going forward.” And so that, I think, balances operational risk. It’s that balance of operational risk and acquisition risk that I think we’re able to using those kinds of approaches that we can do better.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

And I think, sir, if I could just use a quick example for everybody. Everyone’s got their own cell phone, right? And every six months, or every three, four, six months, you see a new phone come out. It’s not that that program took six months to do. It was that they have multiple programs running with incremental improvements along the way. That’s really what we’re talking about here for our capabilities. How do we build systems for space and for air that take advantage of those incremental capabilities?

Tobias Naegele:

So that every satellite that goes up over a eight-year period isn’t the same?

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

Correct.

Tobias Naegele:

You can incrementally improve-

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

Incrementally improve it, it’s got new capabilities, it’s got a new software. Or maybe if I build a string of 10 and they’re up and ready to go at one launch, it’s the next string type of a deal. And I think we’ve seen that again in our missile-warning missile-track between SDA and SSC.

Tobias Naegele:

So you’ve talked, Andrew, several times you’ve mentioned risk. And I think in the time that I’ve covered stories about acquisition, risk is always at the heart of it. But one of the problems is the risk aversion of the acquisition professionals. Nobody wants to be the guy who might go to jail for breaking the rules or might get in trouble because that was protested or they don’t want to risk a protest. How do you build in, what are you doing to help them understand that risk is okay, as the chiefs have indicated and that failure is okay sometimes? Sometimes.

Andrew P. Hunter:

Right. And true statements, right? Failure is okay at times. We need to structure the way we approach risk so that we don’t have failures that take down decades worth of effort or billions of dollars worth of effort. So we got to be judicious in how we posture ourselves for risk, but we have to take risk. And in some cases, I talked about that balance between acquisition risk and operational risk. And the secretary earlier today commented on, if you look at collaborative combat aircraft, we have to understand the art of the possible on the near term and go for that.

And I think we’ll see substantially increased operational capability with fielding those capabilities in the near term. So we are actually reducing operational risk by the way that we’re going to pursue that program, but we’re not dealing with an excessive acquisition risk. And then as we iterate and as we go into additional increments and generations of capability, we’ll buy down even more operational risk. And it’s keeping that balance going forward and keeping it well-balanced, which is where we in the acquisition side, we can’t figure that out on our own. That’s where that integration with the operational community is so essential.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

I would agree, sir. I’d say failing forward is an interesting concept. We’ve got to get in that mentality that this is a learning experience. When you do smaller increments, you have more opportunities to see it all the way through a life cycle or all the way from the start to the finish. And so our program managers and our engineers get a chance to, for lack of a better word, build scar tissue as they take on challenges and they learn from mistakes, or they learn from things that didn’t go exactly like they thought. And what we’re looking for is how do they work that into the next iteration to not make the same mistake twice? I think that’s the real challenge. And I think, again, going small allows you to get those faster cycles to get through that. And then eventually, you’ll build up the bench of acquisition program managers who have experiences and will be able to move rapidly at scale.

Tobias Naegele:

Let’s talk for a moment then about the industry piece of this. It’s a team sport. You can’t acquire if they’re not willing to play ball with you. And that industrial base is not always as large and as vibrant as you might like. So what are you doing to expand the industrial base, and to ensure that you’ve got the competition in all the different places that you need it?

Andrew P. Hunter:

Well, let me give an example because I’ve been talking about it a lot in the last couple days, which is on our next generation refueling system, the NCAS program that the secretary talked about this morning, and we’ve had several days of dialogue on it. My intention with that program is to leverage an approach that we’ve pioneered on other programs, that it’s harder to talk in detail about because they’re classified, but it-

Tobias Naegele:

We won’t tell anybody.

Andrew P. Hunter:

Just among us. It’s to leverage vendor pools. So relatively broad vendor pools. What I’ve talked about with NCAS is that we would want to have in a vendor pool for NCAS, airframe providers, mission system providers, a wide range and a wide swath of industry. So you don’t get into, again, this sort of high stakes decadal competition, where all the mission systems are defined early on, they’re aligned with a prime with whom they’re sort of locked to that team and everyone else is locked on another team. And then those locks, we can’t unlock them as we go on. And then we can’t come back later and say, “Well, okay, it turns out the key mission system is something that I was doing a little work on, but I didn’t necessarily have prioritized exactly right when we did the first chalk line of what we thought this was going to look like.”

So that approach, having a vendor pool, a wide variety of providers, working with them as we go through an analysis of alternatives for NCAS, so that we understand what’s really out there, how do these things, mission systems, airframes, actually, in a family of systems approach actually come together and work together to create an integrated capability that’s going to meet the needs of the joint force? And it’s continuous. No one is ever out of the game. They always have an opportunity at that next shot to be in the game again.

Tobias Naegele:

So are you building a dream team in that scenario, or are you-

Andrew P. Hunter:

I might have to incorporate that term.

Tobias Naegele:

Are you the assembler of these different pieces?

Andrew P. Hunter:

Yeah, so I mean, obviously we’re still talking about contracts here. So there is a process. So when it comes to formulating a vendor pool, you have to go out and people have to provide offerings and explain why they have something they bring to the table that’s worth having, that’s relevant to the game. And you select, you select folks into the vendor pool. But it’s not one and done. You can select additional providers into the vendor pool over time. So you’re never foreclosing the opportunity of finding someone who has something you need that wasn’t on the team before. You can bring them on to the team later on. But you do have a process that tells you who’s got game and who doesn’t.

Tobias Naegele:

And I’m assuming you got to have open systems, you’ve got to own a lot of the IP or it’s not going to work.

Andrew P. Hunter:

That’s right.

Tobias Naegele:

So, can you do the same thing?

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

We can. And what we’re seeing on the Space side, again, is we build small and we’re seeing, I’ll use missile-warning missile-track as another example again. We’re seeing awards of satellite builds to multiple contractors in a tranche or in an epoch. And then we’re being very clear with industry that the next round will be an open competition again so that you’re not locked out if you didn’t get it. And so we’re being very clear, we don’t want to fake anybody out like Lonnie Smith running to second base in the ’91 World Series. So we want to make sure that we’re really clear in where we’re going so that industry understands. And I think that comes through honest and open conversations at industry days and so forth, as we meet with the industry team and let them share what we’re seeing and what our plans are to the best of our abilities.

Tobias Naegele:

Do you have enough open interaction with industry that’s not at risk of compromising programs? Do you get to have open meetings frequently enough? Do you have enough contact?

Andrew P. Hunter:

I would say by and large, when I talk to our PMs, our material leaders and our PEOs, generally the answer is yes. There may be areas where we could do better and we could bring on a wider swath. And I know from the industry side, the smaller the company or the more non-traditional their approach, the harder it is to get in the door or to get through that barrier. I think that’s something we’re constantly working on and we have to keep constantly working on, because it’s not just the same old usual suspects who always have the right answer. And I think some of these techniques that honestly, as I came into this job, it’s been about a year now, in the Air Force, I wasn’t aware of all the innovative work that had happened in Air Force acquisition to set up these vendor pools and to make it a very broad, open conversation. So I think it’s a real step forward, but for sure we can continue to expand that and to do better.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

I agree, sir. You can always communicate better, you can always have more conversations. But I think we’ve tried to do very open and frank conversations. I know our SSC team has done what they call reverse industry days where they’ll put out a statement of a problem and then they’ll have a conversation for two days with industry, listening to how they would handle that. I know that SDA does industry days all the time, trying to understand the latest in technology and where it’s going. So I think that’s a very valid mechanism. But too often industry days are tied to there’s a contract. We’ve got to get into this conversation where it’s about, “Hey, this is the problem we’re facing and I want to know what you have to help me fight this.”

Andrew P. Hunter:

And this is, if I could just add on to what I said earlier, this is an area where I think if you talk to the community and say, “Who does this well?” people will point to SOCOM. Their special operations community is always out there for the technology areas they’re interested in, going out, talking to people, finding providers. They have the advantage of scale, small scale in this case, and being nimble. But AFWERX has been that engine for the Air Force of being able to constantly be out with small businesses, with non-traditional providers, putting out problem sets for them, or just having open calls for them to submit their good ideas and processing through that and essentially scouting the technology that’s out there.

Tobias Naegele:

So one thing that I think some of us at AFA have recognized is that you do have contact with executives, who are often subject matter experts who graduated from the services. You don’t necessarily have working-level Airmen and Guardians meeting working-level engineers, who might actually be able to solve problems in twice the speed if they didn’t have to go through so many layers of conversation. How do we accelerate that kind of conversation? I mean, this kind of gathering can be that, but what else could be done to accelerate that interaction at that working level?

Andrew P. Hunter:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I thought the awardees this morning that got that General Larry Spencer Award, I mean, what a phenomenal example, and eye-watering what they were able to do and how much money they were able to save us over what I’m sure will be an extended period of time through AFWERX Sparks, which is that effort to get out into the units and to really solicit and to find ideas at that level and then implement them. And I know that’s something the vice chief has been instrumental and really passionate about, and I think it’s a great approach.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

Agree, sir. I think it’s been a fantastic tool.

Tobias Naegele:

Okay, so we got two minutes left, which means that you got each, you’ve got one minute. I have a brief question and then you can say anything else you want in your minute. Each of you has a major flight program coming, so when does B-21 fly and whatever else you want to say? 60 seconds, you’re on.

Andrew P. Hunter:

Well, I said this earlier today and I got a chuckle. I said, “B-21’s going to fly when we’re ready.” And I got a chuckle from our media colleagues.

Tobias Naegele:

I think that was a groan.

Andrew P. Hunter:

That’s a non-answer, but actually there’s something to that, right? Because with a lot of these decisions, the question, then there’s a second order question, which is what is it that we need to be ready? What do we need to know? And I think too often when people think about acquisition, they think, well, there’s a date on a sheet somewhere that says, this milestone will happen at this point in time.

No, it’s going to happen when we’re ready, and we have to understand what we need to know to be ready. And by the way, if we’re ready, and maybe it’s before we had penciled it in on our calendar, that’s okay, we can move forward. Or maybe half of it’s ready and half of it’s not. Well, if we can separate those things and say we’re ready to make this decision, not ready to make this decision, then we’re going to make the one we’re ready for and we’re going to defer the one we’re not. So I think there’s actually, if I could say so, there’s more in that answer than meets the eye. But we are looking to have flight in 2023.

Tobias Naegele:

All right. We’re standing by. You, sir.

Maj. Gen. Steve Whitney:

All right. So the Vulcan, real simple. We have a contract with ULA for a launch sometime this fall. And in our agreements, they are required to produce two certification flights prior to that launch. They are in their efforts to take care of that and I would defer that question to them as far as with the first flight. But we’re going to hold them to that contract of two cert flights, and our team stands ready to review the data when it’s available.

Tobias Naegele:

Well, okay. So we’re out of time. Thank you so much. I found it interesting. I hope everybody else here did.

Chinese Balloon Means NORAD Now Getting Proper Attention, VanHerck Says

March 7, 2023 | By Chris Gordon

AURORA, Colo.—After a Chinese high-altitude spy balloon traversed the United States in late January and early February, much of the public spotlight focused on Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the head of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

And the question at the top of most minds: How did this happen?

VanHerck has had to answer tough questions from Congress and from the media about why NORAD could not better track the object.

But for VanHerck, the incident has now become a call to arms. The man in charge of America’s homeland defense is finally in the spotlight as the Pentagon talks of an increasingly assertive China and a Russia that is lashing out against its foes.

“Actually, that high-altitude balloon was a great opportunity for NORAD and United States Northern Command to get some attention that I think we deserved,” VanHerck said during a panel at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 6.

VanHerck, who has been in his job since 2020, has long clamored for better capabilities to see the threats America faces.

“Domain Awareness: Hey, you can’t deter, you can’t defeat something if you can’t detect it,” VanHerck said, highlighting his top focus for the command.

On top of that, VanHerck said, he also needs “information dominance” in order to provide decision-makers more time to consider their options.

“That’s about getting more time,” VanHerck explained. “The only thing I can’t get the President and the Secretary of Defense enough of is time.”

In the case of the Chinese balloon, it wasn’t displaying “hostile intent,” so VanHerck didn’t have the authority to act right away. Information had to run up the chain of command. President Biden didn’t learn of the balloon’s existence until days after it first entered U.S. airspace on Jan. 28, administration officials have said.

VanHerck himself knew the Chinese balloon program existed since August 2022, he said. The balloons had been detected by the intelligence community in incidents dating back to the Trump administration. The U.S. is now working to exploit the Chinese balloon’s debris for information

“Going forward, we know a lot more now,” VanHerck said.

VanHerck wants to eventually be able to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve his threat detection capabilities, alluding to some of the capabilities the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept promises. But in VanHerck’s case, he doesn’t want an AI-assisted automated balloon-killing device. When the ultimate backstop to protect the U.S. is its nuclear arsenal, what NORAD needs is information.

“I think the services are focused too much on ‘sensor to shooter,'” VanHerck said. “We need more sensor to decision-maker.”

Added VanHerck: “I think we’ve been too focused on deterrence by punishment and that doesn’t give our most senior leaders many options. What we have to do is give options to our senior leaders to create and fill that space. Those options are what I would say are deterrence by denial.”

Ultimately, the balloon incident was a wake-up call to the whole nation, perhaps for the better, VanHerck said.

The Chinese balloon drew intense scrutiny of NORAD’s mission from the top brass at the Pentagon and the West Wing of the White House. When the U.S. adjusted its radar settings so it would no longer filter out slow-moving objects such as balloons, NORTHCOM ended up shooting down three objects that were likely harmless on President Joe Biden’s orders.

But VanHerck has long pointed out that cruise missiles are the most acute threat to the American homeland, along with ballistic missiles, and Russia has already proven it can launch long-range cruise missiles from inside its own airspace and target another country in its attacks on Ukraine. NORAD’s North Warning System radar network is an antiquated relic of the Cold War that was designed for Soviet bombers. VanHerck has previously warned that Russian air-launched cruise missiles could be a possible threat to the homeland. He also sees an increased risk from ballistic missile submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Meanwhile, NORAD is moving to update the North Warning System and has next-generation missile interceptors coming online—eventually.

“We’re pretty much stuck with what we have in the near term, VanHerck said. “I think the future of homeland defense looks vastly different than it does today. It’s autonomous unmanned platforms that can loiter for long times. That can create domain awareness. We can do kinetic and non-kinetic effectors.”

Whatever the future holds for America’s homeland defense, it will likely be better resourced than in the past.

“It’s great to have that opportunity to tell our story about the challenges we face—the domain awareness challenges we have in the homeland,” VanHerck said. “Magically, the appropriators want to talk to me.”

US Policy Is Prolonging the War in Ukraine

March 6, 2023 | By Brian J. Morra

The following commentary is written by Brian J. Morra, a former Air Force Intelligence officer and retired senior aerospace executive. His most recent article for Air & Space Forces Magazine was “The Near Nuclear War of 1983.” His novel about the 1983 incident, titled The Able Archers, was released in March 2022.

The United States is pursuing a ‘gradualist’ policy in Ukraine, ratcheting up the pressure on the Russian invaders by progressively arming the Ukrainian military. Gradualism didn’t work in Vietnam, and it may not work in Ukraine.

In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson feared that the war in Southeast Asia might escalate out of control. He worried Moscow would threaten Berlin and that the People’s Republic of China might enter Vietnam with massive ground formations like it did in Korea.

Johnson tried to calibrate the American use of force in Vietnam to send nuanced “messages” of American resolve to the leaders in Beijing and Moscow. The White House increased pressure on Hanoi through its air campaign, gradually increasing airstrikes and then backing off to see the impact. Johnson viewed airpower as the key component of this messaging exercise. Johnson’s gradualism and failure to use airpower decisively prolonged the war and led to additional years of death and destruction.

It wasn’t until President Richard Nixon discarded that policy and instead decided to use airpower appropriately that Hanoi finally agreed to get serious about the Paris peace talks.

Today, despite repeated pleas from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for combat aircraft, U.S. President Biden insists that Zelenskyy “doesn’t need” F-16s. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has reinforced the president’s position, indicating that the Biden Administration is carefully measuring Ukraine’s tactical needs on a case-by-case basis. In a classic example of gradualism, Sullivan did not rule out providing Ukraine with F-16s at some later date.

Absent a coherent strategic framework for resolving the conflict, it’s tempting for the Biden Administration to focus on Ukraine’s needs on a week-to-week or a month-to-month basis. That tactical, short-term focus is prolonging the war.

Like Johnson in Vietnam, the Biden administration seeks to orchestrate a carefully calibrated policy in Ukraine. The problem is that wars are messy and unpredictable, calibration is not a precise science, and the enemy may interpret gradualism as weakness.

The Biden administration’s concerns about escalation are legitimate. Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials have trotted out threats of nuclear escalation since early in the current conflict—and to great effect. Those threats have limited NATO’s freedom of action and are the root cause of Biden’s incrementalist, gradualist approach. President Biden is managing the risk of escalation by not providing Ukraine what it needs to win decisively.

A long war is not in Ukraine’s interest. Zelenskyy is telling us that time is not on his side and that he needs to achieve a military victory sooner, rather than later. A longer war also increases the potential for Iran and China to arm Russia in earnest. CIA Director William J. Burns has issued public warnings that Beijing may soon expand its role as an arms supplier to Moscow, raising the stakes in the conflict and increasing the risk of escalation.

The Biden administration’s gradualism has taken Washington from providing Ukraine with Javelins and Stingers to sending HIMARS and promising Abrams tanks. Stepping up support over time is not a strategy toward a satisfactory end game, however.

Gradualism in Vietnam led to a disastrous outcome. Let’s not make the same mistake in Ukraine.