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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

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

And some things are possible.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

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

Leah, why don’t you take his spot.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

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

General Gagnon.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Am I up and running?

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

You are.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Do I look like I know?

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

Try that one.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

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

General Gagnon.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

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

General Kruse.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

Can I just say one thing?

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

You may.

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

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

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

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

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

That’s good.

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

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

General Kruse.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Lt. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback:

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

Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

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

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

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

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

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

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Torson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

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

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

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

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

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you so much. That’s really helpful.

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

Mind if I jump on that real quick?

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

Of course, go ahead, Doc.

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

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

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

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

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

Bill Torson:

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Torson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

If you don’t mind.

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

Please. I don’t mind.

Col. Alan “Doc” Docauer:

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Torson:

Thanks.

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Good job.

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

Heather Penney:

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

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

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

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

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

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

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

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

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

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

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

Heather Penney:

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

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

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

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

Heather Penney:

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

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

Can I give you two?

Heather Penney:

Absolutely.

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

I got the mic, right?

Heather Penney:

Absolutely. You got the mic.

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

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

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

You want…

Heather Penney:

Go ahead.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

You want one or two or three or how many?

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

You got to do four, sir.

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

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

Heather Penney:

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

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

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

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

Heather Penney:

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

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

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

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

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

Heather Penney:

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

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

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

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

Heather Penney:

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

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

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

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

Heather Penney:

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

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

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

Heather Penney:

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

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

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

Heather Penney:

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

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

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

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia:

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

Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula (Ret.):

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

Heather Penney:

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

Col. Frederick “Trey” Coleman:

Yeah, I love that ending.

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

Col. David Pappalardo:

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

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

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

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

Maj. Gen. Derek C. France:

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

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

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

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

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

Col. David Pappalardo:

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

Maj. Gen. Derek C. France:

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

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

Col. David Pappalardo:

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

Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Col. David Pappalardo:

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

Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind:

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

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

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

Col. David Pappalardo:

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

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Col. David Pappalardo:

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

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

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

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

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

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

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

Col. David Pappalardo:

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