Watch, Read: ‘Space Innovation to the Tactical Edge’

Oct. 16, 2022

Sean Maday of Google moderated a discussion on “Space Innovation to the Tactical Edge” with Maj. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt, special assistant to the Chief of Space Operations; Marc Bell CEO of Terran Orbital; Steven J. Butow of the Defense Innovation Unit; and Chris Kemp, CEO of Astra, Sept. 21, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Sean Maday:

All right everyone, good afternoon. We’re coming to the tail end of the conference and is the tradition, we’ve saved the best for last. Really excited to moderate this panel today on space innovation to the tactical edge. We tend to talk about the concepts of space, and cyber, and tactical edge as abstract, concepts on an OV one slide, a PowerPoint slide somewhere perhaps. But in the last seven months, we’ve seen space innovation to the tactical edge change the battlefield in Ukraine. The day before the war kicked off in Ukraine, a malware attack, a wiper malware attack originated that specifically targeted the commercial satellite modems that the Ukrainians depended on for their command and control. It’s easy to see how a few Russian planners at a table in Moscow may have thought this would leave their adversary stranded at the tactical edge.

But what incurred was the best of American ingenuity and modern human innovation. We saw very quickly Starlink terminals deployed to Ukraine. Now over 20,000 Starlink terminals on the ground in Ukraine. When the Russians again tried to change the dynamic and began tactically jamming this capability, a small team of software engineers in California wrote a few lines of code that again outmaneuvered their adversary.

So at no time in modern history has space innovation to tech ledge meant as much as it does today. And I’m really excited to carry the conversation with these amazing panelists. General Burt to my left is the special assistant to the Vice Chief of Space Operations. Bucky Butow is the Director of the Space Portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit. Chris Kemp is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Astra and Marc Bell is the CEO of Terran Orbital. So before we dive into the meat of the conversation, I would like to give each of the panels just a couple minutes to introduce themselves beyond just the title I shared with you and to talk to you a little bit about how they’re thinking of this concept, Space Innovation to the Tactical Edge.

So General Burt, please.

Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt:

No, thanks Sean. It’s great to be here today to talk about what our Airmen and Guardians do at the tactical edge and innovation. So I’m really here today, not as a special assistant to talk to you, but in the job I jealously gave up to General Doug Schiess, as the Combined Force Space Component Command Commander and the Vice Commander at headquarters Spock. Our Airmen and Guardians at the tactical edge are doing both material and non-material innovations every day. You’ve heard on the stage all week, it’s about the pacing threat in China. We as war fighters have to fight with the hand. We have been dealt for fight tonight. So how do we innovate with everything that we have? And we’ve been building super coders over the last few years. You heard General Schiess talk about that in his panel yesterday and Headquarters Spock. And what we’ve been doing is having those folks down at the tactical ledge trying to work software, innovations as we see jammers as Sean mentioned in Ukraine or in other places.

How would we respond to that on our own weapons systems? Nonmaterial as well, how do we exercise and do tactics, techniques and procedures as you’ve heard general Bratton discuss with the sky series of exercises that Starcom is doing? How do we improve our tactics, and techniques, and war fighting? And then the material solutions? How are we working to quickly develop software to change our weapon systems and the hardware itself to survive as we move forward for the future? So innovation top to bottom that American ingenuity is what it’s going to take for us to defeat our potential adversaries and we need everybody in this room engaged both commercial, our coalition partners as well as all of our long term military industrial base. So it’s an honor to be here today with this panel and I appreciate it Sean, for the time.

Sean Maday:

Thank you ma’am. Bucky.

Steven J. Butow:

So earlier today Gerald Dickinson talked about the number of objects in earth orbit and it was very staggering number, and something like 47,000 objects. But more importantly is that the greatest growing number of objects is not space debris, it’s commercial systems for remote sensing, for communications for other applications. By the end of this decade, that number will increase significantly more by a factor of at least three. How do we leverage all that capability so that we can fight the fight today with the capabilities that we have access to? The Defense Innovation Unit was started in 2015 by then, Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter with the idea of accelerating the adoption of commercial technology. And we do things a little bit differently. We don’t go to companies with requirements. What we go to companies with is a problem statement. And we say, “Tell us how your commercial solution can solve this problem or other relevant problems.”

And then we contract around that for prototyping. So the goal is to work with companies that are already doing something in the commercial context, they have a nexus to the commercial Marketplace, and then provide them with an opportunity to demonstrate for national security and defense, how their technology can help us solve tough problems and then we can help them out with transitioning through a DOD partner. So we’re not an acquisition agency. But I think this is, the Ukraine conflict is a great example of, as Sean mentioned, of the impact commercial capabilities have at the tactical edge can help us achieve strategic outcomes. And I’ll come back to that in a little bit after the-

Sean Maday:

We’ll dig into that in just a minute. But Chris, please.

Chris Kemp:

Chris Kemp. Probably one of the newest space companies. We were in a garage in San Francisco in 2017. In 2020, we bid through the DARPA launch Challenge to be one of the companies to deploy a launch system and conduct an orbital launch and then do it again in 30 days. We were the only remaining company to bring hardware out of the field. Last year we conducted four orbital launches. We had two successes, delivered 23 satellites into operational orbits that are operating today.

We have a launch system that we deployed out at Cape Canaveral in six days with five people. And we’re now able to operate this system with increasing levels of efficiency. In San Francisco we have a rocket factory that will produce one orbital class rocket per week starting next year. And this will allow us to provide the lowest cost launch to the edge. And what we realize is to serve at the tactical edge, you have to put your infrastructure at the edge, which means above the theater where it’s needed. And with all of these incredible new capabilities being developed by the commercial sector, being able to deploy these sensors and these new communications assets above the theater rapidly, quickly, and responsibly is a really key piece of the equation. So we’re really excited to be here and be the newest space company to be delivering these assets into orbit.

Sean Maday:

Well thanks, Chris. From one of the newest space companies to a space company that spawned an entire small set market. Marc, please tell us a little about your-

Marc Bell:

Thank you for having me. So Terran Orbital, over a decade ago invented something called the Cubesat. And so you could either thank us or blame us for this whole industry that came up here. And we started with cubes, we did it as open source. We now build satellites up to 800 kilograms and we build them predominantly for the DOD in the IC community. A lot of people here today are our customers or their organizations are our customers and we thank you for that. And we solve problems. So you come to us with a problem, we give you a solution that we can solve from space where you build buses, but we’re payload agnostic. So we build everything from synthetic op to radar, to electro optical to infrared, to internet of things, 5G. So we’re payload agnostic, but our job is to help integrate that. We help integrate them into rockets.

We build now about a satellite a week and we’re moving to go to about three satellites a week coming next year and continuing to speed up production as we bring more facilities online. And we are here, we look, we have our own ground stations, we have our own mission operation centers. So we give you a complete solution to when you want it or we just hand the satellites off to the customer and let them do whatever the mission is for that satellite. But it’s really all about protecting the war fighter at the end of the day. It’s helping to provide data that’s tactically relevant in real time to the war fighter on the ground to save lives and protect American soldiers. And with that I want to thank everybody for their service who serves today because without you we wouldn’t be here today. So thank you.

Sean Maday:

Thanks, Marc. So Bucky, we started the conversation with Ukraine and talking about the way commercial internet, COMSAT kind of changed the game in Ukraine. But there’s another side of the story, it’s a side that Marc alluded to, right? Commercial remote sensing, electro optical, infrared, SAR. This has made a difference on the battlefield in Ukraine. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve seen there and give us some perspective?

Steven J. Butow:

Sure. If you think back not too long ago in our history and 2014, when Russia invaded and seized Crimea, the world was really caught off guard by that. And largely because at that time, most of the commercial remote sensing capability was really in its infancy. That’s no longer the case today. And I really think the first strategic shift that we saw was that the amount of remote sensing, unclassified, remote sensing data that was available to the world, the world was watching the buildup to the Ukraine invasion and that really put the Russians in a disadvantage. The other wonderful thing about that is I think that, and every time I have an opportunity, I always throw props at NGA and the NRO, the commercial SPO at the NRO because they were really the enablers here. They’ve been working to get commercial remote sentencing companies on contract and provide the infrastructure so that this information could be immediately releasable to our allies.

And that is if you’re from one of those two organizations in a room, you deserve applause. Now we have to scale it and we have to incorporate advanced analytics because as you said, you named off different phenomenologies, SAR, electro optical IR, but the radio frequency. But the real, what we need to do responsibly is take all that and produce information that tells the war fighter specific things that they want to know. And the only way we’re going to do that, we have to synchronize that all the way through the operational elements and have the commercial sector as contributing in a steady state capacity to meet this need, not just in Europe but globally. So one of the big challenges we have now is to take the communications, the remote sensing, the GNSS interference. That’s probably one of the greatest new innovations that what we’re able to do with unclassified sensors and then scale that so our allies and partners in regions, including the end of Pacific, don’t have to wait until trouble’s knocking at the door to have access to these things.

Sean Maday:

Thanks Bucky. I mean I love that point about synchronization, right? I truly believe that tyranny thrives in the dark and America, tight integration of American commercial technologies, space Force, DOD, to your point, put the Russians at a disadvantage. And I think a big part of that was General Burt, your work, your team running the commercial integration cell within the combined Space Operations Center and providing that connective tissue between DOD and these commercial entities. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that integration has looked like?

Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt:

Yes, I can, Sean. It’s a pretty small organization right now. We’re really excited. I don’t know if General Dickinson, I didn’t get to hear his comments this morning if he talked about their new commercial strategy that US Space Command just signed. Part of that was, as Bucky mentioned, different entities have had relationships with commercial partners in different ways. So for example, in the commercial integration cell that General Schiess now commands, there are 10 companies that are part of that organization and those are built with CRADAs. So we do at the TS SCI level, we’re able to talk to those partners, we’re able to share ideas and experiment on different things. No money exchanges hands there, there’s no contract per se with the government. It’s really about how do we explore doing things in a new way and exploiting them and then how do we then bring that to scale, handing that off to the commercial space office in the front door with Space Systems Command to then look at how we contractualize that in some way.

As we went through Ukraine, each of those companies were obviously providing capabilities to three of our key partners that were involved in Ukraine that we worked with very closely. Maxar when we talk about a commercial imagery perspective, Viasat from a commercial SATCOM perspective as well as Starlink with SpaceX. So all three of those companies were very much engaged on their own business working with Ukraine. But we tried very hard to make sure where we could and where we could talk with them and integrate with them and what they were providing and as US companies, was there anything we could do to help them as they started working through that troubleshooting and trying to identify where they were having issues? That needs to continue. That commercial strategy that US Space Command signed now gives us the joint requirements to then as a service and in the Space Force and the other services and with the NRO and NGA to say, okay, how do we now codify our relationships with commercial to best bring those capabilities to bear in a fight tonight where the US would be engaged in how we would leverage those capabilities?

I think one thing that will be interesting for all of the services and agencies to addresses, we have historically bought bandwidth or a transponder or we’ve wanted to have the whole satellite dedicated to us. I think Bucky has pointed out pretty vividly and as we saw across working with our commercial integration cell partners, we need to think about buying things as a service. I don’t have to, as Marc mentioned, he’s going to give you all those satellites and a C2 system and everything to go with it. Well why don’t I just let him do that and I buy it as a service as the government, versus I now have to put Guardians on console doing that? Because again, we’re small, lean and lethal. An SSC statement you’ll hear, and I’m sure you’ve heard a bunch of times over the last few days, “Buy what we can build what we must.” That’s absolutely true and that buy what we can, I think, we’ve got to think differently. Can it be a service rather than leasing an entire transponder or satellite?

Sean Maday:

Thank you, ma’am. I hesitate to open this door, but I’m going to. We could quickly devolve into a conversation about all the challenges with procurement and acquisition. Anybody who’s heard about the value of death for funding of SBIRs into production, I’m sure you have all had the value of Death Square on your bingo card punched multiple times over the last three days. But I do think it’s worth acknowledging some of these challenges, right? General Burt just talked about how we incorporate these exquisite services, these amazing capabilities, but there are challenges. Chris, what are your thoughts in terms of how this data as a service is evolving and where some of the friction is right now in this changing business model?

Chris Kemp:

Well, I think if you look at some of the new entrance into the space sector, Starlink is a great example. Amazon will be entering with Kuiper in the near future. You’re seeing these companies leverage their ability to raise capital and using their own balance sheets to invest in completely vertically integrated solutions. So they’re not leveraging the industrial base, they’re leveraging… In fact, they’re hiring a lot of the most talented engineers from the industrial base to build these vertically integrated systems, which they will provide as services, in fact do provide as services in the case of Starlink. And so I guess the question is, do we want to see a future where there are standards and interoperability between a diverse group of innovative companies that push the edge and provide unique capabilities to the war fighter in this environment, like the internet if you will? Do we want to see the internet expand into space and then have a zero trust environment where security and capabilities can be deployed securely to the tactical edge across this diverse and vibrant ecosystem of the industrial base?

Do you want to have a few vertically integrated, frankly new entrance into the space, control the entire stack? And so I think Marc and I probably agree, we love the diversity and the innovation and the entrepreneurial technology coming from almost a dozen companies that have gone public this last year to be inserted into an environment that supports innovation and competition. And you get that through open standards and you get that by expanding the internet into space, not necessarily having closed walled gardens that are vertically integrated and potentially competing with the rest of the industrial base emerges as the end state.

Sean Maday:

Marc, I mean your team recently put what, seven satellites in orbit in 10 weeks. I mean I think you guys are at the front edge or the leaning edge of getting assets in orbit. Where does this conversation land with your perspective?

Marc Bell:

We look at all these great new companies starting up and unfortunately in space specifically, Constellations has a very bad track record of bankruptcies. And the reality is then the DOD has to step in, whether it’s Iridium or other systems and bail them out. If the DOD were to, and the IC were to embrace these startups from the beginning and help them grow and provide them capital and provide them funding, they’d be fully vibrant companies. Because as General Burt said, it’s all about data as a service and you’re providing them data on demand. They don’t need to own the satellites, they just want access to the data. And if people in this room, people throughout the community embrace these startups and help them with funding, it’s a de minimis amount of money if you think about it in a total budget. But the value that all these companies can provide in terms of data as a service years from now is invaluable.

And so we’ve got to change how we do procurement. The government’s got to change how they look at these startups. They have to look at the big primes and say, “That’s great. They’re building things that are fabulous and they’re big juicy targets in orbit and that’s wonderful.” But what we’re doing is we’re building things that are resilient, that we can build quickly. We can build them in what used to cost a billion, we can do for 10 million. What used to take 10 years to build. We can build an 18 to 24 months. But as Bucky said, it’s not just about the hardware, it’s about the software on the ground. Having that computational power on the ground to in real time, take that data and then interpret it and deliver it to the war fighter. And here’s where innovation really can take place. And here’s where places like the DIU really help is help by seeding all these companies, but we have to take it a step further. It’s not just seed them capital, but get them real capital to grow, to become fully mature and profitable and stand up on their own.

Sean Maday:

Well let’s take that DIU pivot real quick. We heard a little bit from Bucky about DIU’s mission to bring commercial technology into the DOD. I will lod your team, Bucky, you’ve done amazing things over the last few years. I believe this hybrid space architecture is a project that’s in your portfolio now. Can you talk to us a little about that and specifically what is… Through the lens of that project, what does Space Innovation to the Tactical Edge mean?

Steven J. Butow:

Sure. I want to just tag on to what Chris and Marc just talked about first. It was discussed earlier that we’re already being attacked in the cyber domain as we speak. But there’s one other domain that wasn’t included, and that’s the economic domain. So there are companies, multiple companies under civil military fusion in China that are looking to displace both of these companies to the left of me and others. And so that attack is alive and well, both in terms of going after intellectual property, price gouging, basically setting up to try to displace this. And we work with XM Bank, we work with others across the government ecosystem to make sure we’re competitive. But we have a vested interest in making sure that our economy is not left in the trail. In fact, we were the leading economy going into World War II and on that manufacturing capacity is what actually enabled us to do things responsibly 75, 80 years ago now.

So this is something that we have to keep in the discussion that it really is a national security interest to make sure that we have a vibrant commercial space industrial base. And with pivoting now to hybrid space architecture, that is actually, General Raymond probably for the better part of two and a half, three years, that’s one of the things that he’s been talking about repeatedly and we’re involved, but we’re doing the commercial slice of this. And for those in the room, if you don’t know, This Space Warfare Analysis Center is doing force design for the hybrid space architecture. And their goal is to integrate all kinds of different things, commercial, government, even civil capabilities. So we have diversity, secured, assured, low latency communications to the war fighter. So a lot of people will say, “Hey, that kind of sounds like the back plane for Jatzy 2.” I think it is.

Sean Maday:

Nice.

Steven J. Butow:

And of course what we did is our contribution to this working with the SWAC and AFRL RV and others is that we’re bringing in world class Fortune 100 and other commercial companies that have innovative technology, big and small, and they’re going through this process right now, but it’s really amazing. And the cool thing is, we always have to have a commercial nexus. And our commercial nexus for this is really to constitute internet in space like Chris was talking about. The internet on the ground, terrestrially is what, is it like a 6 trillion dollar year part of our economy and that’s pretty phenomenal. So imagine what the space will be. It’s in Jeff Bezos terminology, it’s going to be digital infrastructure on which future businesses will be built. And so we have a compelling economic reason to do hybrid space architecture, a compelling natural security one. It’s going to include allied systems and so it’ll be ubiquitous. But it’s going to really provide the multipath secured, assured way for us to get the timely information at the speed of relevance.

Sean Maday:

I love that. General Burt, sometimes the challenges here can seem daunting. Obviously there’s policy challenges outside of our control. I mean you are at your core, ma’am, a space operator. Where does this conversation kind of dovetail with your experiences and your observations in the fight?

Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt:

No, I think everyone, every day is trying to find new ways to do business. And anything we can do to fight tonight to do what we do better. I mean, we are taking systems that frankly weren’t built for this fight. And how do we take operators on the system who understand how they work and maybe use them in a different way? And we’ve been doing this in every domain. This isn’t new to space. We’ve done it with, I mean we do close air support with B-52’s for example. I mean that was never what that platform was built for, but that’s what we do.

And so as military members, that’s what we’re doing is innovating every day. I think the Space Force is very much focused on being small, lean and lethal, and how do we do that in a digital age? So the super coders have been our forefront to how do we start learning and we send our super coders out to learn from industry, but then how do they come back to the legacy systems that we have and build side cars or ways within our legacy systems to make the systems work faster, better, smarter, more efficiently for us?

And they’re doing that every day. I think the other piece as all of this discussion really would be what I would talk with general Guetlein is, but I think we’re exercising ways with our Space Enterprise consortium over the next five years. They’re going to give out about 3 billion over to multiple prototypes on the order of about 101 prototypes across the enterprise to try to get after some of these cutting capabilities. But is that enough, as these gentlemen have said, is that seed money? How do we keep those programs alive to bring them to fruition across the enterprise? Space Works is another, just like all the other domains have their own works program. We have our own space works and they awarded 227 million to 160 different companies. Again, building that seed money, but how do we keep them alive? Our coalition partners have been critical. Sharing of data, getting data standards as these gentlemen mentioned, I think is what’s going to take us to the next level to be able to work with our coalition and commercial partners.

If we have a standard of how we do, for example, space domain awareness data where we make it available. Our CTIO office has been working with Ms. Costa has been working very hard on the unified data library. How do you make data available in the data lake to solve the tactical problems that you’re working on? If I could encourage everyone getting to software based capabilities, whether that be the satellite, the ground system, or the receiver, rather than being so hardware focused. We are in the digital age, we need to step to that next level if we’re going to win against our potential adversaries. The discussion here of, for example in SATCOM, if I went from a military capability pick a band, EHF, UHF, SHF, any of them and I were denied in an INDOPACOM scenario, could I quickly transition to a commercial partner and my receiver could transition to that?

Those are the kinds of conversations we’re having with our commercial integration cell partners who are largely SATCOM providers. But how do we get to those kinds of solutions working with industry so that when we’re in a denied environment and have to fight tonight, we can quickly go. Now I make that sound simple. We all know when you try to change out receivers on ground systems or hardware, any aircraft or ship, that’s difficult. But I think that’s why we’ve got to get to software based capabilities so we can quickly evolve as the threat changes rather than I’ve got to change out a whole hardware set in order to win. And so again, why the focus for the Space Force has been all on the digital side.

Sean Maday:

I love it. I Mean we talked up front, right, the age of software defined warfare. A small team of engineers in California pushing a patch to StarlinK terminals in Ukraine to change the game. Chris, you’ve got a long history with software. What, from your current vantage point leading this new emerging space company, where does this conversation take you?

Chris Kemp:

Yeah, we’re in Silicon Valley for a reason. If you look at our executives, they mostly came out of Google and Tesla and Apple. And the way we look at this is there’s almost like an evolution from the mainframe era of space where these billion dollar computers and these billion dollar satellites that would have the critical capability in one asset is now being distributed. So just like Gmail and Google run across millions of servers across data centers around the world, no one server matters anymore. And if you look at capabilities like Planet Maxar, Starlink either distributed across constellations and the service is being provided by the sum of all of those satellites. And increasingly as bandwidth through new KA-band, optical laser, V band technology, the cost of bandwidth just as it has on earth, as the cost of bandwidth comes down in space, what will become critical is the cloud systems that are connected to the constellations.

So whether it’s the Google Cloud, that Microsoft Azure Cloud, Amazon Cloud, because most of the processing will be done on the ground where you have the computational resources and the storage resources. Traditionally space, launch has been very expensive and traditionally bandwidth has been very expensive. Those two things are becoming less and less true. And as launch becomes less expensive, more frequent, you’ll be able to put more assets above the war fighter. You’ll be able to move the sensors and the sensing to the tactical edge and you’ll be able to move the computation to systems that are incredibly powerful yet directly connected like Alexa. I mean the power in your iPhone and the connectivity to the cloud enables you to have an enormous amount of capabilities that is now completely available as long as you can put that capability in space and on the war fighter. So just it’s about taking the best technology which is no longer being developed at very high cost by the DOD but is being developed by Apple, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and leveraging that technology at the edge. That’s where the innovation will come from.

Sean Maday:

Yeah, I mean Marc, you and I talked a little bit earlier about there’s a lot of people pushing for data centers in space and sometimes I tongue in cheek wonder how people who can’t actually run data centers on earth are going to run them in space. But what is this, where is Terran Orbital’s kind of position in this? How are you thinking about the future? I mean, one thing you and I talked about was, you have a vision for 50,000 launches a year in 10 years. Talk to us what that future state looks like.

Marc Bell:

Well it was 50,000 satellites a year that are going to be built over the next 10 years. But we view it as we’re going to continue to drive down the cost of building a satellite and increase the functionality. And what we’re trying to do is work towards a common bus for all of our clients. And you know how that easy that is to get every service and everybody in the intelligence community to agree on one thing. So the goal is to get a common bus that has a set of features like collision avoidance, resilience cyber, all the things because by everyone agreeing on standards, as Chris mentioned earlier, we want to… It’ll lower the cost and provide more opportunities to do more satellites in orbit, faster revisit rates, faster with the SDA’s transport layer, you’re always connected to the ground and we’re building SDAs.

We’re Tranche 0, Tranche 1, we’re building now for the SDA for the transport layer. And that’s really the cornerstone of all these new satellite constellations will connect into the transport layer to transmit the information back to the ground. And so we see a future of you then on the ground, everything you’re talking about data centers and being someone who used to be the second largest owner of data centers of the world back in the nineties, computing power is important and it has to be. Unfortunately there’s not enough power in space yet to do it. The technology’s not there yet, but it’s coming. Everyone’s talking about it. But on the ground, it could be done quickly and suddenly and get it into the war fighter’s hands within milliseconds. And that’s the idea, is time is money and time is lives and saving lives. And that’s the whole purpose of everything what we all do in the room today, is find ways to save lives.

Sean Maday:

Yeah, I love it Marc. Well we’re drawn close on time so we’d just like to give each panelist a couple minutes to just bring us home. And ma’am why don’t you know, to start with you. I mean you shared some great innovations with us, but kind of want to give you the mic here to talk about some of maybe the innovations that you’ve seen or that you’re most proud of since Space Force launched in 2019.

Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt:

No, I think there are a ton of innovations across the board. I really want to close though with kind of a discussion here that I think the team has identified. The space domain started backwards compared to every other domain. Every other domain started with an entrepreneur who built something and then the military saw it and said, “Hey that’s a great thing and let’s do something with that.” Henry Ford builds a car, we put armor on it and becomes a tank. Orville and Wilbur fly an airplane into World War I, we realized, hey we could do ISR with that. We could put guns on it, we could drop bombs from it, we could do different things with this. Space started in the government domain in the space race against the former Soviet Union and has continued that way for a very long time.

With the evolution, as we mentioned earlier, of cheaper launch and the ability to do launch at lower costs, that’s now opened the door to commercial industry. The problem is, we’ve spent decades in the space business with the government leading this. And the way the government would do this is very different than a business model and what entrepreneurs in the level of risk and how they would set this up. I think we as a department of defense have to be bold. As the chief tells us, we have to be innovative and we have to get out of our own way and work with congress and lawmakers to make sure that we are setting ourselves up to leverage all the great capabilities these three gentlemen have talked about.

Because again, the way we did it was great where the world’s greatest space force and we’ve come a long way. But now industry is coming and they’re doing the things we need them to do and we have to figure out how to get out of our own way and enable them and let them now lead the norms and how we would go after this from a risk perspective. And again, it’s great for us because it lowers our price point, it helps us work more with our coalition and allies who now want in this business as well and how we would do that better as a combined team. So I thank you gentlemen for sharing these, but I think ultimately the government’s got to get out of its own way and let commercial take this every other domain to the next level.

Sean Maday:

Thank you ma’am. Bucky.

Steven J. Butow:

I’ve been here most of the week in a flight suit. I’m an air guy, but I do space, is my hobby. But I will say that the future is space enabled and software defined. And we have a vested interest to make sure that it is US led, right? That’s why we created this space force. That’s why we have and we should be embracing and supporting a vibrant commercial space industrial base. And China becomes a much more problem if we bring in our friends and allies. At the tactical edge, everybody in here who’s not a space person would love to see a pile of radios over here in exchange for the software defined man portable capability that is streamlined and multifunctional. Same thing for ground terminals, everything else. So the people who pay the tax, who need the information the fastest are the people at the tactical edge and we can’t burden them with yesteryear technology. We have to be thinking forward and taking advantage of all the diversity that Chris talked about and it’ll lead the way, and we’ll be much better in the future because of it.

Sean Maday:

Yes, sir. Chris.

Chris Kemp:

I think America led the world in space with the Apollo program. America led the world with the internet, America’s leading the world with electrification in the automotive industry. And we have had opportunities to lead the world with drones and autonomous flying technology. We lost it. And I think there’s a moment of truth right now where we had a dozen companies go public this last year based on the promise of everything we’ve been discussing on this panel today. And it’s ours to lose. And you all in this room have the power to drive the changes in procuring solutions, in procuring services, in and just simply buying the data from the companies that are now right before you. And if you do, America will lead the world in space for the next decade.

There are some of the smartest people in America. Elon is in a 400 square foot house working on incredible technology. And it’s not because a government contract was awarded to him, it’s because he believes in the future of a multi planetary species. We believe in space, improving life on earth, providing a more connected, healthier planet. Now’s the time for you all to support this because it’ll take another decade to rebuild it if in the next year when the economy continues to falter, we don’t have that demand signal from you to support these businesses. So I need your help.

Sean Maday:

Great.

Marc Bell:

I think everyone here said a lot of things that in the closing that are very relevant. For example, we’re building, like we talked to software defined, we are building something called software defined synthetic ature radar. So it’s taking synthetic amateur radar to the next level using software and to really be able to focus it on different objects you’re looking for. We are the goal of buying of data as a service, building satellites so you don’t have to buy the satellite, you could buy the service. It is also the way the industry’s changing. And the DOD and the Space Force is changing with it. And they’re very open to listen to these conversations and they’re adopting them and they’re giving out creatives and they’re giving out awards to buy data and then to interpret that, empowering other companies to interpret that data to put into the hands of people.

And this is an evolution and we’re evolving as we go and we will continue to evolve our dominance in space. But they’re newer threats. You have hypersonic missiles. How do we track them? How do we take them out? How do we… You know this is a whole new set of problems that just came up. And things that we could do from space in order to help solve those problems. So as threats continue to evolve, we will continue to evolve with those threats to meet the demands that everybody here has in order to help keep our country safe. And so thank you very much for your time today.

Sean Maday:

Thank you to all the panelists for this conversation and thank you to all of you. Our future together is dependent on your creativity, your ingenuity. That is what is going to give us the edge in great power competition. So thank you and enjoy the rest of the conference.

Watch, Read: ‘Electromagnetic Warfare’

Oct. 16, 2022

Col. Joshua Koslov, commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, moderated a discussion on “Electromagnetic Warfare” with Dave Harrold of BAE, David A. Mueller of AT&T, and Brent T. Toland of Northrop Grumman, Sept. 21, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Col. Joshua Koslov:

Good afternoon, AFA. How we doing today? Yeah. Last panel on the last day. And just like me, you guys must be excited and optimistic about the future of Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations in order to be here today. I’m super stoked to be here with all of you guys and with an amazing panel. Very quickly, first thank you to Brigadier General Clark for being here today, former A26L and also thank you to General Select Marks for being here the current A26L who will turn a lot of the dreams that we talk about today into reality for all of our war fighters in the Air Force.

For those of you in the back, if you can’t see me, I’m standing up. So bring it in if you need to. But seriously, thanks for being here today and I’m stoked to see the optimism for Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations. I know there’s been a lot of new stories during the AFA about sprints and operational imperatives and those kind of things revolving around the Spectrum. We’re not going to touch on that today.

What our focus today is going to be talking about collaboration and speed to need. It’s really tough to talk about the Spectrum in an unclassified environment. So what we want to talk about are some of the competencies we’re going to need as a war fighting element in order to be successful in the future. I am the commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, AKA the Crow. And my goal for this is not only to let these gentlemen instruct all of you, but let you know that there’s an organization in the United States Air Force at the operational level that’s living and breathing and thinking about the Spectrum every single day.

All right, so the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing just reached its IOC capability about three days before I took command of the organization under the great leadership of Colonel William Dollar Young, who most of you know, and in that year the Wing accomplished a series of amazing things and proved that it can deliver a lot of capability in a rapid capable way very quickly.

As we drive towards the fully operational capable of the wing, we’re positioning the Wing to be a functional Wing in support directly of air component commanders and delivering them rapid combat decisive capability when they need it. What are their threats? What are their top five requirements? And we want to be the folks that target them in the spectrum.

We’re also posturing the Wing to be the touchstone for the United States Air Force and get folks to ask the question, what does the 350th think when it comes to the Spectrum? And part of that is a realization that in the future, if we all are optimistic about where the Spectrum is going and the capabilities of our adversaries, we have to be able to develop a force and a capability to achieve commander’s objectives in the Spectrum and with the Spectrum.

It’s not just an enabling capability. The Spectrum has to grow to become a supported capability. So I think initially we’ll continue to be a support team as we grow, but our aspiration and our inspiration should be to achieve commander’s objectives and intent and to take the fight directly to our enemy at all times. There’s a lot of members of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing in the room today. I hope you’ve had an opportunity to talk to them, but we’re here to talk to you and answer your questions and we’ll be up following the event to answer any questions that you have.

The last thing I just want to touch on with the Wing is that we right now today service 20 platforms across the Air Force and 74 different systems in the Air Force from a mission data programming perspective. We do that in a channelized industrial age process, but we are really good at it and we are the best at it. We have to get better. And all of that data for those 20 different platforms and 73 different systems has to reside in one place where we can then take that data and quickly develop that war fighting edge capability that I talked about that air component commanders need today.

That’s our vision, that’s our goal. The Crows are very happy to be here and look forward to continuing to work with our ACC counterparts, our pack half counterparts, our USAF counterparts, and of course the Department of Air Force counterparts as we move forward. The last thing I’ll touch on is in order, the Spectrum is inherently joint and it’s inherently coalition. So within our own service and our own department, we have to work with the Department of Space, the United States Space Force. We have to work with our Marine brothers and our Navy brothers and the Army brothers as they continue to develop their capability, because it’s the only way we’re actually going to be able to do it at the speed that is required.

So there’s some gentlemen here that are going to help us with that today. The first to my left is Mr. Dave Harrold. He’s the vice president and general manager of Countermeasure and Electronic Attack Solutions at BAE. Also joining us today is David Mueller, Spectrum Solutions Architect from AT&T, and also in his military career was a prowler pilot. Also joining us as Brent T Toland, the Vice President and General Manager Navigation Training Survivability Division Northrop Grumman.

So gentlemen, thank you very much for being here today and I look forward to some banter and some arguments and some discussion and take the gloves off. This is the last panel at AFA, and if anything else, our goal is for you guys to leave here with some thought-provoking ideas about the Spectrum, how we should fight in the Spectrum in the future, and then to ask yourselves what do the Crows think?

So the first question I want to jump on is Secretary Kendall has been very loud in his critique of experimentation or demos that are not delivering combat capability, that are kind of intellectually interesting, but they don’t deliver decisive combat effects. So in other words, what I think he’s saying is that we’re being too slow and we’re studying problems for too long before we make decisions and deliver combat capability to our component commanders.

So in short, how is your organization addressing the need to advance EMSO operations to gain competitive advantage against our near peers, specifically China and Russia, Mr. Harrold?

Dave Harrold:

Sure, thanks Josh, and thanks everybody for being here this afternoon. Yeah BA Systems, obviously we’re steeped in the electronic warfare space where we’ve been doing this for 60 years and over those 60 years we’ve really learned a lot about how to get there. Two things that BA Systems has done organizationally to really speed things up. One is we’ve really tried to plug into the innovation ecosystem. So places like the capital factory in Austin, Texas and Mass Challenge in Cambridge where we’re learning how to operate more fluidly and more consistently with small companies.

Small companies do great things, bring a lot of innovation, but often don’t have the scale or the ability to move those great things to an actual mission capability. We do. We know how to do that. The other thing we’ve done is we reorganized our R and D organization in a way that many R and D organizations do a lot of experimentation. Let’s do low TRL kind of stuff just to prove some concepts and then all of that stuff gets left on the shelf unfortunately.

So we’ve reoriented such that our R and D organization sits at the center of all of our businesses and any work that’s really being done in that R and D in the S and T community has a very clear tie to a business like mine and a government partner for that S and T effort. So we’re really trying to help the government writ large find ways to not allow those S and T things to die on the vine or sit on the shelf because that doesn’t help any of us. So we understand the need for speed and so we’re really leaning into that across the board.

David A. Mueller:

Excellent. Thank you [inaudible 00:08:11], and thanks to the AFA for putting this important panel together, and thanks for all of you for staying for the last panel of the day, which I think is one of the most important ones here because we’ve got to win the fight in the Spectrum. We don’t win the fight in the Spectrum, overall the Joint Force is going to lose and lose pretty quickly. So how do we speed up that acquisition?

Your question in a lot of ways is more of a general acquisitions question. I mean I applaud Secretary Kendall for his efforts. I think every OSD level senior executive I’ve heard come in over the last 20 years has said, “I want to go faster and I’m willing to accept risk to do that.” And of course, generally speaking, they’re all one Washington Post headline away from not wanting to take risk and not wanting to go faster.

That being said, I think we got a lot of good initiatives going on. I know at AT&T we’re working a lot with OUSD R&E where they have a lot of initiatives going on trying to move 5G capabilities forward, get them in the hands of war fighters, get ready for that internet of military things that is coming. There are a lot of great capabilities that are going to be riding on Spectrum. We’ve done this for a long time.

But the value of Spectrum, the importance of winning the Spectrum fight is never more important than it is now. And as this technology moves forward, I mean I think you could make an argument that moving forward in wireless communication technology, the enabling things that not just 5G, Next G bring to the war fighter. This may be the most strategically important technology race since the microchip was invented.

So we’ve been working with OUSD R&E. They’ve got a lot of initiatives, but like we’ve seen all along, R&E doesn’t go to scale with things. You need a service on the backside of those experiments. We can do and set up 5G warehouses and what not in Coronado. We can set things up at Air Force bases. We have lot experimentation going on over at Hill. But until you can bring those things to scale, until you can get them in the hands of the war fighter and have services that run those programs, it’s got to be able to make the shift from R&E over into DOD CIO, A&S, and then the services to bring those programs forward. And I think that’s what we’re really looking forward to is to seeing how we’re able to do those things.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Outstanding. Really good comments. Mr. Toland?

Brent T. Toland:

Yeah, first thank you, Colonel, for the opportunity to participate on this panel. Spectrum war finding has changed its dynamic. The threats are going to be sophisticated. They’re going to be changing frequently. They’re going to be distributed and so the war fighter, we’re going to be immersed in Spectra. So that changes a lot of the dynamic. And first of all, for us to succeed, we need to take our collaboration to a whole new level.

But first, for what Northrop Grumman is doing, first is we’re leveraging our mission in system engineering. So in a joint war fighting environment, multi-ship, multi-domain, we need to make sure we understand the mission objectives that we’re interoperable and that we’re not interfering with ourselves. We also need to understand that our adversary is not dormant and they’re not going to be stagnant. They’re going to be doing everything they can to counter us. And so that all needs to be taken into the solutions that we bring forward is the mission perspective.

Second thing we’re doing is we are ever enhancing the fidelity of our digital tools. So digital tools are going to be essential digital models. We’re going to need to use those to model the threats, for example, and that’s another area where we’re leveraging our experts is first working with the Air Force, for example, understanding threats, modeling the threats. But the digital tools help us model the threats and it will help us model the solutions, and we are validating those models, again working with our industrial partners and with the services because validated models are going to be essential as we come up with solutions in a distributed multi-platform, multi-domain environment, we are not going to be able to test solutions thoroughly if at all before we field them. And so we’re all going to have to get comfortable with those sort of solutions.

Third thing is developing modular open systems. I think we’re all aware of the advantages those would bring in terms of speed, if you’re being able to swap things out, whether it be hardware or whether it be software. Another advantage for those systems is that we’re able to leverage multiple funding streams. So across the services, and we were talking about this before, across the services there is a lot of shared concerns, shared threats and shared investments.

We can leverage common investments from the services. There are unique aspects of it, of course, but we’re needing more bandwidth, more processing power, techniques, AI training data, all that stuff could probably be leveraged across the services as well as across industry. So that’s going to be important in these modular open systems.

Fourth thing is partnering with commercial. So Northrop Grumman, we just announced the strategic partnership with AT&T, a 5G network ecosystem that we’re going to establish that will bring the best of both AT&T with their technology and their ability to scale, and with Northrop Grumman’s ability to provide mission solutions and secure systems.

And then finally the last thing is the most important of all, say it the last, is hiring, retaining, attracting the skilled workforce we need. I think across the board, none of this works if we don’t have the diverse, skilled workforce.

Dave Harrold:

Can I jump on that for a second, Josh? So I want to go back to Brent’s comment about the leveraging across other services and things. Because we do see this that any time you try to put a J in front of a program, everybody gets nervous, right, because there’s a lot that comes with that. But it doesn’t have to be that way. When we work with the Army and there’s a specific capability that say the Air Force is looking for, we are in the positions where we say, “Well the Army just dumped a whole bunch of money over there on something very similar and you don’t have to make it a joint program, but can you use that as a starting point?”

And really where the services need to look, in my humble opinion is, where can they leverage other people’s money? Both our company’s internal IRAD, but also where the other services have already made some bets and really try not to … it’s never going to be a one size fits all, but we probably have way too many bespoke solutions across the services these days. I think that’s another way where we could move fast. If you could build upon hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from another service and use that as your starting point, you can move a lot faster.

David A. Mueller:

I think that’s a great point and I think Brent hit a bit on the interoperability piece because that goes to the heart of the interoperability piece, which is important all through acquisitions and all through what all the services do. But it has particular importance in EW and in MCO. There is no such thing as fielding a Joint Force EMSO capability unless the entire Joint Force is interoperable. I think one of the problems is traditionally we have a standard of interoperability where we just worry, “Hey as long as my thing doesn’t break the thing next to me, I’m interoperable.”

But if we’re going to take a real EMSO concept as we build that Joint Force, it’s not just, “I can’t break the thing next to me.” I need to be compatible, I need to be complimentary, and ideally I need to be collaborative with that other thing. And until we can build real collaborative systems that work together, and hopefully we get on this at the end, managed by real solid tactical EMBM type systems, we’re not going to have that degree of collaboration across our systems.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Yeah, I’ll just jump in there just for a second. I don’t want to stop this discussion because collaboration and interoperability are definitely a topic I’d like us to hit. But I think I heard you guys in summary to the first question identify is that for the DOD, what we owe you is people, process, tools and resources that can drive good requirements for you to support what we’re trying to do. So I’m going to be a little facetious because I have the microphone, but leveraging other people’s money sounds like an amazing idea.

I sat through a bunch of Space Force briefings and sounds like they’re doing some amazing things. What is your recommendations from a business perspective on how we can do that as an Air Force, specifically in the Spectrum? So as an example, the Spectrum, like every other capability in the Air Force, touches each of the operational imperatives, a massive role in each of those. None of those are successful without the Spectrum. So how do we build a culture and a capability to leverage other people’s money, and deliver capability faster?

Brent T. Toland:

You already are. So I think first though is just increasing the communication and the awareness. So we have systems where we have been funded by the Army for radar warning receivers and there’s parts of the systems that we are incorporating into the F16 IVEWs. So they’re building blocks and there’s an awareness of across the services of, “Well this piece is already being developed. I, Air Force, don’t need to fund this, and we can take it to another level.” I think it’s really just awareness and continuing the kind of consortium in communication.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

I just want to build on that. So rather than just leveraging your money, leveraging your expertise as well. And so you talked about digital engineering and speeding up the acquisition process by being able to test and model and those kind of things. Those are all really super valuable in the Spectrum. However, our business practices in the Air Force, when it comes to Spectrum capability, still rely on hardware in the loop labs, and in my opinion archaic business practices to develop and field capability. Can the three of you talk a little bit more about digital engineering and some of the ways that your company uses it and it’s effectiveness and where you see it growing to?

Dave Harrold:

Yeah, I mean when you talk digital engineering, model-based systems engineering, I mean these are all emerging things. We’ve got excellence in pockets across the industry, but it is about getting to a level of risk tolerance that says, “I can retire some of that stuff that I’ve always gotten used to doing.” We still want have strong modeling and simulation. We’re still going to have to have some level of test. But where is that threshold of, “I’m going to do more in the digital environment than I am in the physical environment, and I’m going to believe in it, and it’s going to help me make risk-based decisions.”

Let me take an aside on this and make a more general acquisition comment. One of the things that we always ask for is clarity of requirement. Sometimes you don’t have the clarity because we don’t fully understand what needs there are. But one thing is let’s make sure we’re separating between needs and wants. If you ask us to gold plate something, we’ll do it, and then it’ll be unaffordable and we won’t be able to buy enough copies and all that stuff happens.

Just a little sort of anecdote, I was with a customer and we were talking about a future requirement and this customer said to me, “Wait until you see the requirement. It’s going to blow your mind.” Please don’t blow my mind, because that means we haven’t been having conversations about what’s in the art of the possible and what the trade space looks like. So what I advocate for is a really open dialogue to the extent possible because collectively we can really get clarity and get to the right requirements that’ll allow us to move fast and deliver.

David A. Mueller:

And the key to these things are in the requirements, right? When we look at all of our systems, I mean let’s be honest, we’ve got EW communities out there, but the overwhelming majority of the EW the Joint Force brings to the battlefield, especially the EA capabilities, are self-protect systems. They’re dispersed throughout all of the different platforms and they’re run by all the different program offices.

The requirements get set by each of those different programs. But to get a collaborative capability out of that, you’ve got to have a degree of common requirements across. You’ve got to have common standards and you’ve got to demand that out of the requirements and make it in a way so that as budgets start getting tight, survivability isn’t the thing that falls out because it’s viewed as survivability, not as an important EA system that is going to enable the Joint Force Commander to have the effects on the battlefield he’s trying to get.

I think that’s the big key is are we able to set those standards in the requirements process? Can the JROC start doing some of those things? That’s an open question.

Brent T. Toland:

I would agree with all that. I think there’s also an aspect just at the very beginning in terms of modeling the scenarios. So when we’re talking about joint war fighting environment, multi-domain, multi-platforms, that we have models that can model those platforms, the capability of those platforms, model those domains in realistic scenarios. The moving OV1, and many of us participated in those. I can’t really get into details but modeling those first in that we believe that the models represent reality. I think from that will come requirements that will flow into how you … you’ll see in the model how you successfully prosecute a mission and then what capabilities were needed to actually succeed in that mission.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Fantastic. I want to thank you for letting me challenge you a little bit. I did it on purpose because you brought out the points that for the blue, the uniform crowd in the audience. There’s a lot of apathy about we can’t fix it, these things don’t get fixed. We’ve done a bunch of strategies and studies and it’s time to take action. But what you’re really outlining for us is people, process, resources and tools drive requirements, which if we do that well, we can get to where we want to be.

So let’s pull on the people thread a little bit. We talked about some of the organizations that helped develop your requirements. From looking at DOD, how often are we talking out both sides of our mouths, and do you know where to go to get the most solid EMSO requirements for the Force?

Dave Harrold:

Well, I’ll just use the secretary as an example. We’ve had lots of conversations over the course of this week asking senior leaders in the Air Force about what’s going on in the EMSO environment, but we really didn’t have to because the secretary’s pretty clear about what the Air Force’s imperatives are, what the mission focus areas are, and how important EMSO is to support all of that priority.

So I think one good thing that’s happening is there is very clear, in my mind, clarity from the top, and alignment as we spoke to senior leaders this week, very good alignment across the board on what has to happen. I think one of the things that we all should consider is we’ve all seen where it can work, where we can move fast.

And often for me, so first of all we should find some of those shining examples and really say what went well here and how can we more broadly use that? But in my experience, the majority of that comes down to communication and alignment. So when we can get alignment of focus, and again the operational imperatives and the mission focus areas, those are giving us the opportunity to have alignment of purpose.

And then if we can have iterative conversations that allow us to stay aligned, that’s how we move fast. We’ve all seen plenty of examples that we can pick from and say, “Yep, that was a core piece of why we were able to be successful there.”

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Alignment of purpose, 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, advertisement. Thank you, sir. I kid, I kid. Is there anything that you’d like to add onto that, Mr. Mueller or Mr. Toland, before we transition? So I’d like to pull the thread now, we’ve touched on it a couple different times, but collaboration and standards and interoperability. Massive challenge in every single one of our mission portfolios.

But as Mr. Mueller quite astutely said, it’s even more important in the Spectrum because of the Spectrum’s reach. So if you were charting a course, first off do you believe that full interoperability is a real thing or will we always be in a collaborative state? Are standards real for EMSO? Let’s start there and then we’ll have a broader discussion.

David A. Mueller:

So I think absolutely they are. They’re a real thing. We just have a system that is in that is designed to disincentivize the creation of those real standards. Because we have five services now that get to make all their own acquisition decisions and we don’t have a very clear senior leader that owns all of this, although there’s a lot of work done and CIO certainly feels that at the OSD level they own it now because they own the EMS superiority strategy. Are we able to create a system that will permeate those standards in a way that makes them enforceable across the Joint Force?

I know that General Hyten had a very clear understanding that he wanted to see the JROC set those standards, and use the JROC to, in his words, instead of validating other requirements for deliverables, could the JROC be used to create a requirement for things that are not deliverables, ie standards?

I can tell you if you go into Title X, the JROC clearly has that authority, but how would that actually take place? The JROC gets fed by the Joint Staff by the FCBs that permeate requirements up for validation. Can you put enough expertise into the FCBs or can they adopt a process that brings enough expertise? Because I think that that would be a role for DOD and industry collaboration.

The research laboratories would have to be involved in this. If you can get them enough influence into the FCBs so that you can get the right standards set, the JROC has the authority to set them. The question is, are we going to do that and are we going to make them enforceable across the services?

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Mr. Toland, anything to add?

Brent T. Toland:

No, I just would say that standards are going to be essential, back to my opening comments. In an interoperable environment, there has to be standards that we adhere to or we’re just not going to be able to function. So those need to be enforced. Those need to be developed early on in the process. And again, it starts with the mission system engineering.

Dave Harrold:

I think maybe this wades into a different question, but I think complete interoperability, that’s tough, especially when we’ve built some systems intentionally not for other reasons, for security reasons and things like that. But that gets us, in the EMSO environment, it gets us to the EMBM conversation around maybe you can’t have everybody talking directly to everybody, but you can have everybody talking to one place, and that place helping to manage the entire battle space. So I think we can get to interoperability if we’re smart about how and where we do the EMBM part of the mission.

Brent T. Toland:

That’s an excellent point. We have the OI, so it’s really using the use cases and defining what actually needs to be interoperable. Not everything needs to be interoperable, but as we go through the OIs and actually have real world scenarios that we try to have joint solutions to, that will define which assets need to be interoperable and how. And again, I think starting there will help define what the interoperability requirements need to be, and then we would need the services to align to those.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Mr. Mueller, anything to add?

David A. Mueller:

No, I think those are all great points, and I couldn’t agree more. It comes down to how you define those EMBM systems. Are we going to have real tactical, real time EMBM that eventually will be AI-enabled, that can really do EMS maneuver on the battle space? If the Joint Force isn’t capable of EMS maneuver on the battle space in the future war fighting environment, the notion that it can be survivable is probably going to be very problematic.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Right on. So two topics in our remaining time that I’d like to drive into, the EMBM discussion being the first one of those. So not only from an industry perspective but from a DOD perspective, if we’re going to realize a vision of EMBM, what is, in your mind, the starting point for that discussion? Not from a process procedure or office perspective, but what is the starting point for a discussion of what EMBM actually is?

So there’s lots of discussion of EMBM is the management of collection, EMBM is management of electronic attack, EMBM is the integration, the convergence of aerospace and EW perspectives. So it can’t be all things because an EMBM will fall under the weight of its own drum. So let’s have a discussion about your perspectives of the starting point for a realistic EMBM capability for the DOD.

David A. Mueller:

So if I can just weigh in real quick, I think the starting point is clearly articulating the EMS superiority strategy. There are two paragraphs that clearly define EMBM in the near term and in the long term solution about what real tactical, real time EMBM looks like, and eventually in the future becomes AI enabled. And in short, it’s the command and control of your Spectrum-dependent systems that will give you the ability to maneuver in Spectrum, that will be able to sense and avoid problems on the battlefield with agile EMS-dependent systems.

The key to that is one, getting service EMBM systems that are all interoperable with each other, also interoperable with, because DISSA has a program and they’re building an operational level EMBM tool that’ll work in operational headquarters and that’s fantastic. So got to be interoperable with that. And then you’ve got to have the agile EMS-dependent systems that give you something to EMBM. Because if you don’t have agile systems, it doesn’t matter that you can sense and avoid on the battlefield. Nothing’s going to move. So I think we start there. Other thoughts?

Dave Harrold:

Yeah, if I can. So I have loved the conversations that we’ve had this week, not about this platform or this capability, but about the enterprise and about how do we create enterprise solutions. And I think that’s empowered by the fact that this EMSO is feeding into all these imperatives. But I think the conversation that we have to have is around we’re really good at doing the operational analysis on this platform versus this threat.

And I know even at our company where we’ve got EW systems on 80% of the DODs fixed wing aircraft, we still do a lot of 1V1, if you will, or platform versus threat, where we really need to do collectively is get to the place where we are doing that operational analysis at the campaign or enterprise or more operational level and less in the niche environment. So I think for me the conversation starts with good definition of what we think it is. Then what’s the analysis overall that has to be done to allow us to see where the gaps are and point us in the right direction.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

So if I may just kind of peel that onion back a little bit, what I think I heard from Mr. Mueller is a really good description of what EMBM brings to us, and then what you’re bringing to us, sir, to the uniformed audience, is the operationalization of that capability, right? And so DOD investing in the people and the human capital that could sit in those operational commands, it’s very similar to our requirements discussion, but know enough about war fighting and are very capable at integrating the Spectrum into the scheme of maneuver that then can define how EMBM goes forward. Is that kind of what you’re talking about, sir?

Dave Harrold:

Yeah, that’s right. Yep.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Mr. Toland, anything to add on that line of logic?

Brent T. Toland:

No, I think I’ve been clear throughout this is I agree it starts again with modeling the scenarios from the top levels, the mission modeling, and then having the confidence in the models that you are modeling reality, so you can quickly deploy solutions. There’s also an aspect of this where we need to do better is to get threats into the hands of experts within the DOD and within industry. And there’s another opportunity for us to collaborate together and start to learn more about the threat, to learn more about the solutions, and that will help us deploy solutions much faster as well.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Sir, I just want to pull on something that you’ve brought up a couple times, and I’m sorry it’s the second time you brought it up but I didn’t jump on it, but something that’s really astute and really important is the future of modeling and software-based testing allows us to do multiple iterations and go faster and potentially cut costs for you, but for us there’s a lot of use to that as well. So can you drive into what is your framework or a potential framework or some frameworks for risk-based decision making as it comes to models?

Brent T. Toland:

So as we’re developing the models, there are specific tests we can do, boundary cases that we can test as we go along, and for certain situations that will build our confidence in the model. We have built many some systems and we could start comparing how the model predicts they behave with how we’ve actually measured them. If you do that enough, then you’ll start to have confidence that when we need to get something out within a day to the field, that we’re going to go with the model, because the model has not let us down before. We trust the model.

And when we get to AI, we’re certainly going to need that sort of trust. And it isn’t just blind trust. So it’s going to take years of us working together to have confidence in these models, that they are actually modeling how these systems really perform in real world environments. And that is all doable. It just takes time and it takes collaboration.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

And then I’m a bit of neophyte on this particular topic, but when we talk about models and the data it requires to operate those models, would it be fair to say that not only data management but interoperability between data sets becomes potentially something that from a Spectrum perspective that we have to invest in and we have to do some technical debt investment in order to get to where we need to be?

Brent T. Toland:

Yeah. And there’s an aspect of configuration control as well, but we have to, once we validate the model of the system that performs, then we need to be able to control that. But we also need to be able to validate how the threats are. Is the environment itself actually realistic, and then be able to control that as well.

David A. Mueller:

And I think there are bureaucratic barriers there as well. You two gentlemen deal with this a lot more than I do, if you wanted to comment on it. Some of this is getting DOD acceptance that they’re willing to accept the models for fielding on those things and operational test requirements and whatnot not withstanding. Will those stand up and will DOD accept those results?

Dave Harrold:

Yeah, I think that’s right. Confidence comes from volume, repetition and validation. That sometimes takes time. You could have the models that say this is how it’s going to happen, but you don’t get validation of that for a number of years. But we got to keep on doing that because the fear is, we all talk about AI being part of this in the future, but if we don’t get the trust piece first, the technology will be there and we won’t be able to leverage it because we won’t trust the outcome of it.

So I know we’re all working now to figure out how to do that with the tools that we have, the data that we have. Inherently there are some structural challenges as well around this data sits in this compartment or in this network and it’s hard to get access to. So when we can’t get the volume and the right data to do those thousands and thousands of repetitions on a simulation, it’s hard to then build the confidence.

Brent T. Toland:

All the services have their modeling capability. We know this, as do the contractors. And it’s kind of this nascent emerging collaboration that we’re having with various services, one at a time with the Army here, with Air Force there. And we need to get to where it’s … and when we share and work with the services, they will actually provide us models of some of their platforms and we’ll provide them with models of like a radar warning receiver or something.

So we will share those models, but where we need to get to is where there is a common standard model, I think, across the services and industry. And there is also, it’s done at the right levels. The clearances can also be a challenge for us.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

I think when I’m summing up this discussion very quickly, what I think you gentlemen have kind of taught this audience is technologically we’re there. So if we go back to people, process, resources and then tools, the tools are there, the processes and the people aren’t there to make the risk-informed decision on the uniform side. And this is where until we make that leap, this is where we’re going to continue to struggle with the valley of death in terms of acquisition. Is that a fair assessment?

David A. Mueller:

Yeah, and I think that that’s where that type of calculated risk acceptance is probably right in the wheelhouse of Secretary Kendall’s guidance.

Brent T. Toland:

We’ve kind of walked down the aisle over many decades. We are a very risk averse industry and so we need to walk back from that and be able to accept more risk or we’re just not going to be as fast as deploying as commercial. I mean iPhones, we’ve gone iPhone seven to 14 here in 10 years maybe, and some EW systems we’ve gone from one to one and a half. So we need to move a lot faster.

Dave Harrold:

Yeah, I would just quantify or qualify the risk comment because sometimes we say, “Hey DOD, you need to take more risk and you need to be more comfortable with it.” All of you in the audience do very serious things for this nation. And so there are what I would say is appropriate risk, because there’s some places where we just can’t add risk because the potential outcome of that is devastating. So we need to have the conversations around where it’s appropriate to lean in, take more risk and move faster. But where are those keep out zones where we really together have to make sure we’ve got the right risk profile?

Brent T. Toland:

And as I said earlier, a large component of that is building the trust early. It’s working early and developing the trust over years. That’s where we’re going to get to the tolerance for risk.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Outstanding. With just a minute left, we’ll do a quick speed round. A topic that I didn’t talk about but this audience might want to know about or I should have brought up that I’m not thinking about that I need to as a leader in the Spectrum for the United States Air Force.

Dave Harrold:

I can’t think of anything off the bat. I think the operational analysis conversation for me is the big point that we ought to pull more on.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Yes sir.

David A. Mueller:

Yeah, I’ll go back to we need to be focused on that good tactical EMBM and doing the prep work because the internet of military things is coming, and we need to be ready for it to get here. If we start preparing once it’s here, we’re going to be two years behind.

Brent T. Toland:

I guess again, back to the workforce and what we need for the services, the highly skilled is perhaps collaboration, more collaboration on attracting folks into the military, into this defense industry. We are a high tech industry. Sometimes over the last few decades that’s kind of gotten submerged, but we are the high tech industry and we are the ones with the mission and I think the fulfilling purpose. So I think us messaging and doing that and promoting STEM in high schools and elementary schools would be one area.

Col. Joshua Koslov:

Phenomenal points. Thank you. So I’ll end with what we started with. There’s optimism in the air for EMSO. The 350th existing with those personnel and beginning to onboard more personnel is the Air Force’s first starting point towards developing the organizations needed to be successful and go forward in the future.

I just want to say as we wrap up and to the audience, we’ll hang out in the front of the stage if you have any personal questions for any of the panelists. To you and your companies and the people that work at your companies, thank you. Not only thank you for being at the panel letting me challenge you and drive some tough conversation, but thank you for the capability that you do deliver, because to your point, sir, we do do serious business and that capability has proven both to be very effective and lethal over time.

We just got to get a little bit better and faster and a little bit more mojo. But thank you very much to you and your people that developed that capability for us. And to the audience, thank you for being here at the last panel of AFA. Please ask us any questions that you have. If you have any questions about the EMSO in the Air Force, ask the Crows at the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing. Thank you very much for being here.

David A. Mueller:

Thank you.

Dave Harrold:

Thanks a lot.

Brent T. Toland:

Thank you.

Watch, Read: ‘Building Capacity Today, While Innovating Capabilities for Tomorrow’

Oct. 16, 2022

Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, moderated a discussion on “Building Capacity Today, While Innovating Capabilities for Tomorrow” with Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii), Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), and retired Col. Mark Gunzinger of the Mitchell Institute, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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

It’s hard to see you. I want to make sure everyone gets a chance and gets seated, but good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Dave Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and welcome to our panel on building capacity today while innovating capabilities for tomorrow. Now for over 30 years, modernization of the Department of the Air Force has been deferred due to other US Department of Defense priorities.

In fact, the Air Force’s budget has been less than the Navy and the Army’s for the last 30 years in a row when you take into account actual monies allocated to the Air Force. The result of anemic funding for new aircraft and spacecraft combined with higher than expected usage of current aircraft has badly worn Air Force hardware and its personnel. Because of the combination of these realities, the US Air Force today is the smallest, the oldest, and the least ready in its history.

Our Air Force has less than half its fighter force and only one-third of the bombers that it had in 1990, yet its latest proposed budget divests about 1,000 more aircraft than it buys over the next five years, which will create an even smaller, older, and less ready force. Now the reason it’s planning to do this is because current and future Air Force budgets are not at the levels required to meet the needs of our defense strategy.

At the same time, both threats and demands for Air Force capabilities and capacity by the war fighting combatant commanders are growing. The fact of the matter is that the nation requires much more from our Air Force than the resources allocated to it allow. So the Air Force is in a jam. It’s forced to do the only thing within its power it can do, and that’s divest current force structure in an attempt to invest in future requirements.

Unfortunately, this approach generally has not worked as the Air Force has no control of the money it saves through divestments. It all goes back into the US Treasury and it’s not earmarked for future Air Force spending. So decades of this kind of square corner that the Air Force has been put into were the result of inadequate budgets that are exactly what’s forced it to choose between modernization, force size, and readiness.

Unfortunately, the increased demand for Air Force capabilities without adequate investment has resulted in the reduction of all three to precarious levels. So the challenge is what’s the plan to build back our Air Force to the capacity necessary to meet the challenges specified in our defense strategy while also innovating to better prepare us for the threats of tomorrow? Now I’m extremely pleased to introduce to you the panel that we’ve assembled to dive into this challenge.

We have Representative Kai Kahele from Hawaii, Representative August Pfluger from Texas, and retired Colonel Mark Gonzo Gunzinger. Congressman Kahele is in his first term in office and represents Hawaii’s Second Congressional District. He currently serves on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and the House Armed Services Committee. He’s a combat veteran, a C-17 pilot, and commissioned officer in the Hawaii International Guard, where he continues to serve as a lieutenant colonel at Hickam Air Force Base.

Congressman Pfluger is also a freshman in the House and represents Texas’ 11th Congressional District. He’s a colonel in the Air Force Reserve and spent 20 years on active duty flying the F-15C Eagle and the F-22A Raptor. Matter of fact, we actually used to fly F-15 together at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. Mr. Gunzinger is the Director of Future Concepts and Capabilities Assessment at the Mitchell Institute. He’s a retired colonel in the United States Air Force with more than 3,000 hours in the venerable B-52, the youngest of which is over 60 years old.

Gonzo also serves as a director on the National Security Council staff as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for force planning and in other DOD leadership roles. So thank you all for being here, taking the time. They made an effort to get over here because a vote in the House. So I appreciate you being here on time and offering your thoughts on this important critical issue. What I’d like to do is ask Gonzo to come upfront. He’s my co-author on our latest report, Decades of Air Force Underfunding Threaten America’s Ability to Win.

He’ll give us a brief overview and then we’ll dig into discussion with our senior Congressional Representative. So Gonzo, over to you.

Col. Mark Gunzinger (Ret.):

Next slide, please. So let’s start with why we wrote our report. We’ve all heard for years the Air Force has been saying that its aircraft inventory is the oldest and smallest ever. The sad truth is every year, that’s been correct. 30 years of underfunding has created a high risk Air Force that is not sized for peer conflict and other defense strategy requirements. Now that’s a problem for all the services because no joint force operation can be conducted without the capabilities the Air Force and the Space Force can bring to the fight.

So as you see on this slide, this little red triangle, the Iron Triangle, the Air Force has been caught in that deadly triangle for years where it’s had to trade off its readiness to help fund some modernization. And our trade-off is capacity to help maintain this readiness and so forth, so on. The problem is the Air Force cannot break out of that triangle without more resources, plus it’s readiness is already too low, it’s already traded off its capacity, and we cannot further delay its modernization because its aircraft are simply too old.

So we present an evidence-based approach for why DOD should increase funding for the Air Force. Next, so this is a snapshot that represents the Air Force inventory trends starting in 1989. You can see by 1999, both bomber and fighter force had been decreased by about 40%. The third columns are today’s inventory, and the fourth column are primary mission aircraft only assigned to combat squadrons after subtracting task training and other non-combat tails.

Now the last columns, we apply mission capable rates. So you can see any given day we’ve got about 59 mission capable bombers ready to support global operational requirements. As the oldest Air Force aircraft are about 29 years old across the board, its F-15s and F-16s have hit the 30-year mark. And of course you already mentioned, B-52 and KC-135s, over 60 years old. But the real point is fighting China with a force that is this old and does not have enough stealthy aircraft and does not have enough capacity is going to drive attrition rates that we haven’t seen since World War II, and the Air Force doesn’t have the inventory or the trained air crew to replace those losses.

Next, so this illustrates how that force might stack up against a defense strategy which requires the Air Force, the size of its forces for homeland defense, nuclear deterrence, peer conflict, and to deter a lesser aggressor elsewhere. And those are all additive requirements. So we added up that demand in the third columns, and you see the Air Force runs out tails before it runs out of requirements.

And then the fourth column, we added capabilities needed to credibly deter, if necessary, a fight in Russia that takes advantage of us being engaged against China in the Indo-Pacific. And you can see we simply lack enough iron. And just a foot stop, no other service can make up for these shortfalls. No other service can respond from outside the Pacific theater within hours to begin to blunt a Chinese invasion on Taiwan or in the South China Sea, and then halt and then win.

Next, so our report addresses a DOD practice that paints a false picture of the Air Force’s budget. We’re talking about pass through funding, which is appropriated as part of the Air Force’s budget, but the service cannot use the organized training equipment that goes to other non-service organizations. The dark blue line shows the Air Force budgets that DOD has reported to Congress, which includes that pass through. And pass through practice also obscures how resources are allocated to the services.

Next, the light blue line, we took out the pass through, and that’s the Air Force’s real budget and pass through in the last budget was 40.1, about $40 billion. The next budget is about $40.1 billion. That’s a lot of money. $40 billion could buy 400 F-35s, just to provide little context. So next slide, we took the pass through out of the Air Force’s budget and we put it where it belongs, into DOD’s other funding category, which goes to defense agencies and other non-service organizations. And that’s the purple line. From that, you can see at times, well, for over a decade, the Air Force wasn’t even third in the queue behind the Army and Navy. It was fourth behind other DOD organizations.

Next. Y’all heard of Valley of Death? Well, this is real world what Air Force is investing in S&T, RDT&E, and its procurement budget. You can see the gap there. As Secretary Kendall says, “Hey, it’s easy to start an S&T program. When it comes time to actually acquire those technologies, there’s no money left. And that’s what this is showing. We’re not buying new iron, new capabilities.

Next, going down one more level, this shows the Air Force’s new aircraft procurement only has been flat despite the shift towards deterring China and Russia, despite the shift toward great power competition, it’s averaging about 7% of the Air Force’s budget any given year to buy new combat aircraft. 7% the Air Force’s budget to buy new combat aircraft.

Next, and just for context, this compares the Air Force’s new aircraft buys with the Navy’s. And you can see once again, the Air Force has been in trail. Why? Again, budget. Last slide. So to wrap up, we make five recommendations to help break this budget driven spiral toward a hollow force. First, shift pass through to DOD’s non-service budget line, so decision makers can have the right site picture of resources the Air Force actually receives.

DOD and Congress should also prioritize funding for capabilities and forces that are most capable of defeating Chinese aggression. And since that fight, the Indo-Pacific will be predominantly in the air space, cyberspace, and at sea, that’s where that new funding should go. And that’s going to require real Air Force budget growth, which should be used to immediately begin reducing risk by buying next generation systems that are already in production.

And finally, we can talk about this a little more with the Air Force to benefit from a forced sizing construct that explains to Congress, “This is the force we need to execute the defense strategy and this is what we can afford given our budget,” and a delta between is risk.

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

Well, thanks for that rundown, Gonzo. What I’d like to do now is turn this over to our Representatives, Kahele and Pfluger. So whichever one of you would like to go first.

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

I’ll defer to Texas.

Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas):

Finally, some bipartisanship that works. That’s a good thing. First off, to AFA, thank you for hosting this. I mean, it’s a great conference to begin with, but to see so many active duty personnel, reservist Guardsman that are out every day doing the job, I applaud you and your service, your family’s service is very important to those of us on Capitol Hill.

It’s recognized by us, but thank you for that. To the Mitchell Institute, General Deptula, you have an incredible advocate for air and space power right here. And the conversations that General Deptula, Gonzo, and the personnel, the men and women who are advocating for air power, for space power, for what we know is just an insatiable appetite and demand from our country and from our partners and allies, this institution here does a great job of getting down to the details and then being strategic with where we need to go.

And I think we can all admit that we are facing an incredible threat environment right now around the world. Probably more complex than we’ve ever seen, and I used to think that it was more complex since World War II, but I don’t know that that’s true anymore. It might actually be more complex than we’ve ever faced. You look at what happened in Ukraine, you see the major powers that are acting in ways that are aggressive, what’s going on with violent extremism, not just in the Middle East, but throughout the rest of the world.

The cyber domain is as active as it has ever been for malign reasons. And then you look at China and the Chinese threat and the threat of Xi Jinping’s legacy resting upon reunifying China and Taiwan. And these are real impacts. They’re real threats that we face. And when it comes to the ways that the Department of Air Force can not only deter, but if needed defeat, we have to be clear eyed about it. We have to be realistic.

We I don’t believe have recovered from what the negative effects of sequester and the patchwork of continuing resolutions that have gone on across the river from the Pentagon, and those have been a real threat to our own security because it lacks predictability, it lacks planning, and it doesn’t allow what decision makers in the Pentagon need to be doing to address those threats, to take a threat-based approach to force planning, like was just so eloquently mentioned here. Obviously, pass through is an issue.

It’s a threat that faces decision makers because the story needs to be told in a way that mentions that insatiable appetite, that demand for air power. When anything pops up around the world, what is the first phone call that’s made? It’s to air power. It’s to space power, it’s to the Department of Air Force. The political capital needed to send an airplane is not nearly as high as that would be required for boots on the ground or any other method or other department or other domains. So we have to be clear-eyed about the threats that we’re facing, and really the solutions, I think come down to a couple of things.

Number one, our request from the other side of the river is that the Department of Defense, the Department of Air Force move at the speed of relevancy to face these threats. No longer can we afford to have 15, 20-year programs like I was part of in the F-22. We have to move at the speed of relevancy when it comes to acquiring new weapon systems and getting them into an operational level of service.

Number two, on the other side of the aisle, the threat of a CR, which we are facing right now yet again is real. And it prevents that predictability on the budgeting, it prevents the levels… $777 billion was the 2022 NDAA and now we’re over $850 billion. And that doesn’t account for inflation and we need to be addressing those inflationary pressures, but we are committed to making sure that we can avoid those CRs. I can’t speak for my other 433 colleagues, but there are those of us who are working to avoid that situation to allow policy makers inside the Department of Defense and Air Force to do what’s needed to deter.

So I know there’ll be plenty of other questions. I’ll pause there and hand it to my good friend and partner-in-crime, Kai Kahele.

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

You took away everything I was going to say. No, aloha. And it’s great to serve here with Congressman Pfluger, and same thing, how you opened, General Deptula, Gonzo, Mitchell Institute, AFA, another fantastic conference and convention celebrating the 75th anniversary of our Air Force. Can I call you August?

Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas):

I think Photo.

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

Photo? Want to go with Photo? All right, we’ll go Photo, call sign. What Photo and I bring to the Hill is a perspective that does not exist, or it exists in a limited capacity, and it’s being able to represent an experience and a skill set from the perspective of the United States Air Force that does not exist really on Capitol Hill, and in the authorizing and the appropriating committees where it’s really, really important.

So for myself, I serve on the HAS committee on the subcommittee on Tactical Air, Land, and Readiness. I’m the only member of the HAS committee assigned to INDOPACOM that’s currently wearing the uniform. Another thing that’s unique to both Photo and I, we still wear the uniform. I’m in the Guard, he’s in Air Force Reserves. So we continue to bring that perspective to the Hill, and I hope over the next 30 or 40 minutes, we can shed a little bit of light onto what some of our colleagues are thinking when we have these discussions with them, especially on the appropriating and the authorizing committees. What are some of the challenges that we see when the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force come to the committees to present their budgets based on the requirements of the National Defense Strategy? What’s coming out of the White House and out of OMB?

And some of the challenges that we’re currently facing right now, and Gonzo highlighted them, the most important thing that our Department of Defense and the Congress is focused on is protecting the homeland, is being ready to fight tonight against a near peer adversary, to deter other adversaries, and to be able to provide the type of strategic deterrence that is critically important for the security of our nation. So maybe over the course of the questions, we can identify areas that we can be supportive.

And we are here, we are here to support all of you, to be a voice for the Air Force Reserves, for Big Air Force, for the Air National Guard in Washington, DC and on the Hill. So thanks for having us.

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

Well, thank you both for those remarks, and Gonzo again for the overview of the presentation. Let’s dig into some of these issues as you suggest, in a little bit more detail. One of the items that you mentioned was the National Defense Strategy. And we all know in here that relatively recent change if you look over the last 30 years, but the latest National Defense Strategy plans only for a force capable of fighting one conflict at a time.

But we face multiple threats. You all know what they are. I’m not going to waste time by itemizing each one, but the question to you all is does the Department of Defense force planning approach need to change? And if so, how should it change to ensure that our military has both the capacity and capabilities needed to compete and win against multiple threats, not just one?

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

I think just with the new administration, and new national security strategy came a new national defense strategy and that’s the overarching requirements for the Department of Defense to provide the defense for the nation. And what are the requirements that the services need to provide to meet those requirements coming from the administration? There’s no doubt that when that request and that budget is presented to Congress, we look at it, at how does the Department of Defense’s budget impact national security?

How does it increase or decrease risk? What are the types of investments we’re making or not making in terms of equipment, in terms of resources? And that’s what we often weigh when we’re looking at the budget. There’s no doubt that air power and air superiority is going to be number one for any major military conflict and it’s going to require critical investments and important decisions to be made by the Congress when it passes the NDAA, like Photo just talked about.

We’re facing a continuing resolution in 10 days, a partial government shutdown if we don’t get a budget done by the end of this month. And it’s highly likely that nothing’s going to happen before the November 8th general election to see what the political dynamics are going to be in Washington, DC, before the Appropriations Committee passes out their defense bill, both from HAC, from HAC-D, and see what the Senate does.

The Senate hasn’t done anything yet. The House Armed Services Committee, we’ve passed the authorizing bill and we’ve passed it over, but the Senate hasn’t taken action yet. So we’re going to have to see what they do. And it’s probably going to be pushed into sometime in December when we’re able to pass the final NDAA piece.

Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas):

Yeah, totally agree. Just let me go back to my days at Tyndall Air Force Base or training in the F-22 in a mission just six years ago, five years ago in the Middle East. Start with the target, start with the threat. What is the threat, and how do we identify that? The NSS, the National Security Strategy, national defense strategy, these things should identify the threat and it shouldn’t be a reactionary, “Let’s give you the budget and then come up with what your threat is.” No, it’s actually opposite of that. There’s a threat and the force planning structure that we have right now does need some help.

I think it can be sharpened and refined to identify not just the capabilities. I mean, the capabilities are very important right now. First off, the Chinese, they do not have the same bureaucratic nightmare that we have here. And I know that’s a shocker to everybody, but when they say there’s a threat and they go out and try to solve these problems, what they’re doing is allocating the amount of money that’s needed to go face down these threats. Now we don’t have unlimited amounts of money and we’re facing $30 trillion in debt in our country that has to be dealt with, so knowing that, we still have to start with that threat environment. We still have to start with what is required to deter, to defeat.

And then that’s where the capacity issue comes in. And what needs to be communicated loud and clear is we know what the threat is. We understand that there are finite resources, and this is coming from the Pentagon, we’re going to be able to have a capability to meet X, Y, and Z threat. And when you can’t meet that capability, it needs to be clearly communicated so that the risk can be assumed on the other side of the river.

And likewise on the capacity side, just a couple of years ago, the Air Force did a nice job of coming up with a number of squadrons. And since the Gulf War, we have been declining in that capacity to meet and defeat the threats that are around the world. So absolutely, we need to reorganize, to refine, and to do a better job when it comes to force planning and to have that threat then committed… basically communicated to the American public.

And when those things are done, and I think the pass through issues, and I’ve introduced legislation, I know Kai has worked on this, the pass through issue is not communicating the real story, the narrative, and you’ll probably get to this, but it’s not communicating the real story of what the Air Force budget is from year in and year out, because it’s being masked to the tune of $40 plus billion.

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

And why the pass through is so important is it’s two things. One, it creates transparency, it creates transparency for the decision makers on the Hill and for the American public. The second thing it does is it provides parity, it provides the United States Air Force to be able to compete against the other branches. Historically, it’s been one-third, one-third, one-third. But if you look at the Air Force’s budget as presented by the administration, it’s about $230 billion. That is not reflective of what the Air Force has money to spend on, because you take out 40 billion in pass through, you take out about, I don’t know, 20 something billion to fund the Space Force.

And you just look at the two legs of the three-leg nuclear triad that we have to… and the cruise missile defense that we’re responsible for. And there’s a lot of requirements placed on our United States Air Force and we’re just not able to invest in more F-35s, more F-15 EXs, more platforms. We can’t get the B-21 fast enough to replace our B-1s or our B-2 strategic bomber force.

So these are the things that are important and it’s why fixing the pass through issue is important. And we have other champions on the Hill, Representative Bacon from Nebraska, we’ve partnered with him on this pass through issue, but it’s going to require engagement from all of you to engage your members of Congress on the House Appropriations Committee, HAC-D, on HASC to be able to provide that clarity and to be able to provide them that political leverage to be able to address this issue.

Col. Mark Gunzinger (Ret.):

So very quickly, I don’t believe DOD backed off two-war force planning construct, sizing and shaping its forces because of a lack of threat. It did it because of a lack of resources. The point I want to make though is not every service needs a two-war force. DOD as a whole does. The Army should size primarily in Russia and Europe because it’s going to be air, land, cyberspace, and space-centric. In the Indo-Pacific, it’s going to be air, maritime, space, and cyberspace-centric. So the Navy Marine Corps should size for the Indo-Pacific, but remember I said air for both theaters. The Air Force must size its forces, its capabilities, and capacity for both Indo-Pacific and for Europe. And it’s the only force that’s going to be able to deploy and employ its forces again within hours, to begin to blunt an invasion by a peer adversary and then bring it to a halt.

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

Thanks for that. Back to our Congressmen, how does Congress currently view the way forward when it comes to building a force that can combat this array of threats that we’ve talked about that the country now faces? And is there any consensus within Congress on their awareness of these threats and what our future force size and structure should look like?

I’d just add one more on there, is have the consequences of Russia invading Ukraine garnered any attention? It doesn’t on the Hill, to the degree on what we ought to be attuned to, by just giving more money to Ukraine.

Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas):

Great questions. Nothing like a crisis to be able to help shape and refine our own plans. Yes, there is consensus, I believe, on what that threat is and on what we should be focusing on. And that is China, and it’s not just their military threat. It’s an all of the above threat, whether it’s Belt and Road, through their economic policies, whether it’s their cyber activities or obviously, their conventional and non-conventional military force and the structure that they have. So I think that if there’s one bipartisan consensus issue in Congress right now, it is the threat of China.

Now, I think this is where we take a step back and one of the issues, and I serve on Homeland Security and I serve on Foreign Affairs, which is a good compliment to Kai and his Armed Services Committee. Let me speak from a perspective of a member of Foreign Affairs, that it appears to me that the narrative that we get from year in and year out DOD-wide will change.

And I think the point that Gonzo just made, that we may not need every service to have a two-front war capacity/capability. That is the narrative that I think we need to coalesce around on the Hill. That is what we can do something about with a limited resource environment. And I don’t think that that has actually happened, and I think that we would do ourselves a lot of good from a national security strategy on down to the resources that are appropriated by coalescing around that. When it comes to Ukraine, I’ll briefly say a lot of lessons have been learned, and I think one of the key lessons that everybody in this room that is here at AFA should take away from it is the job that you do is so incredibly important.

It is the game changer when it comes to the ways in which we will fight wars and without the air superiority, without the ability to fight in a true joint environment, and we have seen the Russian military all but crumble against the Ukrainian force. I mean, I was in Kyiv 18 days prior to the invasion talking to Zelenskyy, and he had his minister of defense there. He had multiple people in his cabinet and they were confident at that point in time that they were going to put up a good fight.

But I don’t think anybody could’ve predicted just how important air power is, and you see the lack of ability of Russia to project air power, but it’s because they didn’t take the lessons seriously. They had the time to learn it in Syria, they had the time to learn it wherever their other deployments in the Mediterranean and other areas and they didn’t do it. So I hope that Capitol Hill will take those lessons and run with it.

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

I think in the conversations I’ve had on HASC and seeing different members debate, I know that they get upset when we are not able to get the platforms on time, on schedule, what we ordered. I mean, we can talk about F-35, we can talk about the KC-46, but it’s going to take a whole of government effort with the defense industry to be able to produce the platforms that we’ve ordered and produce it on time and on schedule, what the American taxpayer paid for.

At the same time, Congress sets the conditions for that defense industry and when we say we’re going to order 700 F-22s and we buy 184 of them, and they create a production line to mass produce F-35s and F-22s in these platforms, and we don’t buy what we say we’re going to buy and we close down hot production lines prematurely, that affects the defense industry.

So there’s going to have to be a relationship that’s a working relationship with the defense industry in Congress so that we can prioritize what we need. There’s no doubt we need as many fifth generation fighters as possible. We should be at 80% right now. Our combat air force should be at 80% fifth gen, and it is not. We’re still flying F-15Cs and Ds. We’re still flying Vipers that were designed and built in the 60s and 70s. And if you go to the operational level and just look at the sortie generation rates and our Eagles down at Kadina, which is probably the closest to the fight for Taiwan, these airframes are being flown way beyond what their life expectancy would’ve expected to be.

So they’re being restricted. Guys can’t go out there and pull as much Gs and fight how they want to fight because they just can’t do it with the aircraft. So what are we going to replace that with? Well, we’re going to put F-15 EXs at Kadina. Well, we just ordered 24 F-15 EXs in the latest NDAA. Is that enough F-15 EXs that we just ordered?

We want to divest to invest, we want to divest, Block 20 F-22s. Is that a good decision to make? Right now, you see in the House Armed Services Committee, it is not. We would rather take those dozen or two dozen or so Block 20 F-22s because we’re not building any more of them and make them into Block 33s, or whatever they are. So we have another squadron available if we need fifth gen F-22s. So those are the decisions that I hear often and we try and weigh in as best as we can on the committees that we serve on.

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

Well, that’s a great segue into this next question, which has to do with funding capacity growth and future capabilities. And you just talked about how in the past, we’ve cut acquisition of new programs that were intended to modernize some of our oldest forces, and a lot of that was driven by the exigencies at the time. It happened both to the F-22 as you mentioned, as well as the B-2. We were originally supposed to buy 132, we ended up buying 21.

So how would you characterize risk right now to programs that are critical to our future, like the B-21, like the KC-46, T-7, F-15 EX, F-35 and NGAD? Are the resources going to be available to buy enough of these platforms to meet our Air Force global operational requirements?

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

Because the Air Force has a budget it has, they approach Congress with, “We want to divest to invest, we want to retire aircraft so that we can take those resources into new platforms or additional platforms,” and sometimes what you’re seeing is Congress push back, because if we’re not replacing an aircraft real time with another platform, then that’s going to of course increase the amount of risk that we have. So I think that’s one of the challenges that we deal with every single day.

Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas):

I’m going to go back to the threat-based approach here. When do we need these aircraft to come online? When were they planned to come online and why were the weapons systems… And let me just step away from saying aircraft, when were the weapon systems designed and needed to be available? And when you look at the risk that we’re assuming, it really comes down to there’s a lot of political risk that I don’t know is being planned for on the acquisition schedule.

And I’ll specifically talk to China here. When are we going to reach our peak risk with regards to China? Is that next year? Is it 2025? Is it 2027, ’28, ’29? And at that point in time, and it probably is somewhere between ’27 and ’30, 2027 and 2030, at that point in time, what weapon systems do we have to execute the NDS?

And so yes, I think we do have a real problem with risk right now, specifically when it comes to our fifth generation fighters, when it comes to the transition between the B-2 and the B-21, are we going to be able to actually execute what the NDS states that we need to be ready to execute? And this is a real decision that we’re going to have to make on both sides of the river, and we need to come together in both branches of government and have that clear eyed discussion, because I think that the risk right now from my perspective is actually outweighing the need to… Let me put it this way, we’ve got to speed up our acquisition cycle at the speed of relevancy, and get to those public-private partnerships using maybe private companies in some cases that can leverage quickly technology to meet those threats.

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

Very good. We’re coming up to the end of our period. Real quick question to both of you on innovation. With each service pursuing their own solutions for a future fight, obviously we’ve got to be selective in what we choose to invest in. How do you view the current process of picking so-called winners and losers when it comes to innovative technologies?

Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas):

Neither of us want this question. Well, I think it’s slow and archaic and I think it’s not… We’re basically dealing with a flip phone system when we’ve got an iPhone world, and that flip phone system, it’s not good enough to meet the iOS updates. And if you use some other type of phone, I’m sorry. I see a friend of mine here that runs AFWERX, and Nate Diller is somebody who is constantly fighting this battle of bringing technology rapidly to bear, so that the ideas that we have can be in an iPhone world, not 20 years ago.

So quite honestly, I’m not going to grade it here on the stage, but it’s not meeting the standards. And we need to increase that and leverage technology and do it at the speed of relevancy.

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

I’ll jump to another point. We’ve been talking about platforms and all the fancy shiny objects, but we often forget about our Airmen. We forget about our military bases that have suffered from years and years of lack of investment. I just went to Columbus Air Force Base back in March. I hadn’t been there in 20 years, the same base that was there when I was there, same T-38s that were flying when I was there.

So we got to be investing in our bases. Joint basing has not been a good thing. It hasn’t been a good thing for Hickam Air Force Base, I can tell you that. We haven’t put in investments at Hickam for years, and that’s the same way across the entire force. So if we’re not investing in our bases, our infrastructure, our people, how are we going to be investing in additional platforms? And that’s I think something that often goes overlooked, especially on the Hill.

Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas):

We’ve got a lot of commanders, and I know Colonel Reilman, I’m not sure if he’s in the room, but the base that I represent, Goodfellow Air Force Base through Colonel Reilman’s leadership is doing exactly what Kai is saying. And that is bringing to attention the things that are going to… the most foundational Maslow Hierarchy needs, shelter and food and these things that are going to actually have an impact on recruitment and retention.

And we don’t want them to have a negative impact on it. And the Airmen that come from Goodfellow, I’m proud to represent you. I’m proud of what you do.

Col. Mark Gunzinger (Ret.):

Yeah, just a quick word. I’m all for innovation, no question about it. I’ve been a champion of next gen technologies for decades, in and out of the department, but we can’t let 1,000 flowers bloom, which is an approach the DOD seems to be taking. Take the Army for instance, it’s investing in hypersonic weapons. It’s going to buy a $50 million missile to kill a single target. That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

You have to apply cost per effect analysis and invest into things that will have the most impact in the battle space of the future, rather than just allowing each service to invest in whatever it thinks it needs. We need cross-domain, we need cross service trade-offs, and no one is driving those trade-offs.

Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii):

And maybe Gonzo then, and I know the Mitchell Institute has proposed this, is the cost per effect analysis or looking at mission roles and responsibilities for how we execute the national defense strategy is something that should be seriously considered at the Pentagon.

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

I’ll just finish up with a plug for if we’re not going to increase the defense budget, we’re not going to decrease the requirements in our national defense strategy, then we have to make smarter decisions about the resources that we have. And that’s where cost per effect decision making comes into play.

So with that, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve come to the end of our panel. We really appreciate you all being here. And Congressmen, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule for being here and for all of you, please pick up a copy. I think that there’s copies of the report in the back, read it, commit it to memory, and use it to make the case that our Air Force needs more funding. With that, have a great aerospace power kind of day.

Watch, Read: ‘Enabling Manned/Unmanned Teaming’

Oct. 16, 2022

Royal Australian Air Force Air Commodore John Haly moderated a discussion on “Enabling Manned/Unmanned Teaming” with John Clark of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Ben Strasser of General Dynamics Mission Systems, and Mike Atwood of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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RAAF ACDR John Haly:

All right. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Good to see the room filling up and thanks for joining us. If you are not here to talk or listen to a discussion about enabling manned and unmanned teaming, then you are in the wrong place, but you should totally stay because it’s going to be great.

It’s my great pleasure to introduce our three expert panelists that we have today. We have Mr. John Clark, Vice President and General Manager at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Dr. Ben Strasser, Principal Lead, Mosaic Autonomy Research with General Dynamics Missions Systems, and Mr. Mike Atwood, Senior Director, Advanced Programs Group, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Gentlemen, welcome.

As I said, we’re here to discuss how we can go and enable crewed and uncrewed platforms and systems to work together for a common purpose and common missions. And so, the format of today probably won’t surprise you, but we’re going to invite each of our experts to talk and to give some opening comments and then we’ll launch into some questions from there. John, why don’t you take us away?

John Clark:

Thank you. John Clark. I’ve had the fortunate, I guess, career up growth, if you will, of working in unmanned systems for the better part of 20 plus years, almost 25 now, of doing unmanned aircraft. What was interesting and how things have navigated is that there’s always this dimension when you’re talking about these unmanned or uncrewed systems, how the human interacts with them.

And so, as we talk through this crewed/uncrewed teaming or manned/unmanned teaming and how we integrate these adjunct systems to the crewed systems, a lot of things really drive back to that human machine interface, how you interact with them, and it takes me back to very early S&T research that was I working with the Office of Naval Research now 20 years ago. We were putting a lot of autonomy software in place and having users go through and evaluate it.

We had this capability where, right out of the gate, you’d see the users ask, “Why did the system do that? I really wish it would’ve done that and instead.” And I think that as we go forward with a lot of this manned/unmanned teaming and crewed/uncrewed teaming, we need to make sure that we don’t replicate those types of experiences. We have to have the human actually understand why and what those other systems are doing and how it benefits them because they’ve already got a heavily task saturated job operating in a cockpit. And if we’re inundating them with additional tasks and requirements to understand what the system that’s supposed to be helping them is doing then, then we’re failing as an industry.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Yeah, thanks very much there. And just for a note, you came to a 40-minute presentation but the clock hasn’t started. So look out, this is going to go forever. Ben, I’ll turn over to you to build on that and to provide some words as well.

Dr. Ben Strasser:

Excellent. Thank you, John. I want to thank the AFA for giving me the honor to speak today. At General Dynamics, our north star for autonomy is really about taking us from a highly orchestrated, tightly controlled paradigm into an adaptive one, featuring multiple manned and unmanned agents collaborating together on complex, open-ended missions. In particular, we want them to respond well to unanticipated tactical situations and be able to function and make those responses without particular necessary input from humans on the loop.

If we want to have manned/unmanned teaming, we want to envision this, we think there’s four key capabilities that need to be born out. First, intent, commander’s intent. This goes beyond what are my orders for the particular mission and into what is the mission ecosystem? What are the overall objectives? If I see something unexpected, how should I respond? And before we can have unmanned assets responding well, we need to make sure they understand the situation and are empowered to make the same kinds of decisions a human might make in response to unanticipated tactical situations.

Second is your role. In response, once you have that mission ecosystem model, you need to determine at any one moment what is my role and how is that going to be changing over time? How am I supposed to be functioning in this system? The third is really the tactics, then you need to optimally execute your role to complete specific tactics. There’s a lot of really great work in using autonomous systems to execute very specific roles. And so, we need to identify what role to we need to execute.

And finally, and most importantly for this panel, is trust of course, trust and transparency. How do we give enough insight to humans on the loop as to what the autonomy system is doing and why it’s doing it? And how do we build that trust that that system is going to make good decisions? That’s what I hope to get to today. Thank you.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Perfect. Thank you. And Mike?

Mike Atwood:

Yeah, it’s interesting to hear John and Ben speak, being in the middle of that. I, too, like John, started at General Atomics almost 20 years ago and my first task was to support the Hellfire installation on the MQ-1 Predator, and that set my life on a trajectory that I could have never expected. Fast forward through the Afghanistan conflict and the weapons engagement, build forward to the F-35 operational deployment, I was part of the operation where we lased a target to launch the first JDM an F-35.

So for me, the manned/unmanned teaming something, a concept is something that I’ve been living with for quite some time and I feel like we’re at a really interesting point in our technology portfolio right now where we can truly innovate by integrating. We have so much technology from the driving car industry, from the high power compute gaming industry, we’re finally at the point of realizing some level of closed loop artificial intelligence. And I think we’re now taking that and abstracting that to a level that a human can actually interact with that.

Kendall has talked about OI3, air dominance, family of systems. I think we’re on the precipice of something very, very special with the collaborative combat aircraft, and very excited to be a part of that and be in the testing program with things like Skyborg to go through and try to understand what the opportunities are for our war fighters to use that technology.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Mike, could you help me out with … you used the expression closed loop artificial intelligence. Could you explain that?

Mike Atwood:

Yeah. A lot of people in this room have probably operated an MQ-1 or MQ-9 Predator. It’s very open loop. You slew an EOR to it, you look at a target, you laser designate it, you pull a trigger, there’s two pilots and it’s open loop to the human. The human’s constantly closing the loop for the system to engage the target or provide the ISR. What we’ve realized on the Skyborg program is we put the human on the loop. So we’ve closed the autonomy loop.

And what we’re doing now is we’re setting objectives and constraints. We’re saying, “Fly over there, find this thing, don’t fly over here, stay away from that thing.” The robot system, the autonomy engine, is basically solving that problem for us. And so, that closes the decision making loop. That closes some of the [inaudible 00:07:38] with the objectives and constraints changing based on the human outer loop. And so, the human operates on the outer loop, while the machine operates on that inner closed loop.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Okay. And that comes back to the discussion, Ben, that you were talking before about it being empowered to make those decisions. When we were talking about this earlier, you spoke about this in the context of explainability of what’s happening. Could you take us through that?

Dr. Ben Strasser:

Absolutely. I think there’s two components, and one is really about making sure we bring in both the semantic elements of the mission, as well as the physical elements. The semantic description, this is what comes from the written op board. “Here is the role I’m performing, here’s my job, here are the things I’m interacting with.” And then of course this interacts directly with the physics in a complicated way. Both of these talk to each other and both influence each other.

But when you start to bring in the semantic thing and you make that an essential part of the control loop, then you almost have built in explainability because the machine can always say in words what it thinks it’s doing. And so, that’s I think one part of it, bringing the semantics. The second part, there’s best of breed academic research says what we need is simpler heads up displays that can communicate information like purpose, performance, and process. What is the thing doing, how well is it doing, and how was the decision made for it to do that?

And if you start to add in more information about its confidence and its ability to accomplish its mission, it’s uncertainty about what it is it’s supposed to do, that actually further improves metrics of human understanding. And the final thing I’ll say before I ramble too long is that this is somewhere where AI can actually come into play, not necessarily for flying the aircraft, but for helping to curate the data that gets presented to a manned teammate, because if you have one human on the loop and one unmanned aircraft, that’s one thing. You can present a lot of information.

When you start to have five unmanned systems, 10, 50, 100, at some point, there’s cognitive overload. So I think the idea of an AI curator can actually help improve the explainability and reduce the cognitive load.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Yeah, that’s interesting. I get cognitive overload with one platform under my control. So I can understand how multiple would do that. From Lockheed Martin perspective, particularly from a Skunk Works perspective I guess, I’d be interested to hear about the ethical considerations that I know you’ve worked through and your concept of purpose driven work.

John Clark:

As we’ve navigated through that early science and technology related research and then systematically went to go build up systems that do stuff that we’re talking about, that element of explainability and determinism had to be intrinsic in it. One of the things that we built in based on that human interaction such that the user would understand what the system was doing, is that we built what we called a flexible autonomy framework where the user could go in and dial in and say, “All right, for this decision, the system is authorized to make that decision. And for this other activity, for instance, dropping a weapon, dropping a weapon is not authorized and it will require a human in the loop intervention to facilitate the weapon actually being released.”

And so, we systematically have gone through and put this framework in place such that the user can customize the decisions that it’s authorized to make. And in that spirit of, as Mike had highlighted the on the loop construct, that on the loop construct is allowing … At the end of the day, we very much look at Air Force doctrine and understanding there’s an accountability element for every weapon system that we put out there and how can that accountability be traced back to individual users?

And so, in that construct, we’ve put that decision framework in place such that the ethics of how the system is operating is actually driven by the user that configured it to do what it needed to do in that day. And as we’ve continued to advance those capabilities, as we explore adding machine learning and artificial intelligence on top of it, we’ve actually started to evaluate ways in which you can take model based simulation and explore, “All right, we’re going to take these systems into a dense threat environment. You’re going to configure them a certain way, this is the response that comes out.”

And then you run those on a recursive basis so that you can start to see AI is not deterministic in all cases. And so, you can start to understand how you’re going to get a response profile and then that response profile can then be driven by the user of the operator to understand, “All right, I’m okay with this response profile and authorizing the system to make these types of decisions, but I’m not okay with this response profile.” So ultimately, you’re going to have a more overwhelmed user taking on more tasks to then authorize these other adjunct systems to support.

Mike Atwood:

Yeah, I want to jump in there because I think John’s starting to hit on something that maybe not a lot of people talk about when we talk about machine learning, but I think is essential to understanding it. Many years ago, we all had Google Photos, start patterning our face and tell us who we were on our phones. That’s called supervised learning. Then all of a sudden, you had this thing on your computer where you had to show how many cars were in a scene, Captcha, to get through your thing. That’s called unsupervised learning, where they actually look at entity types and start patterning things. That’s analogous to the Maven program with Google and then the Smart Sensor program with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

What John’s talking about now is a modeling framework that allows an emerging technology called reinforced learning. And this is very exciting because what you do in this case is you define a state space, a world that your machine can operate in and then a set of actions and you let the machine run through all those permeations and basically self-learn all the different behaviors it can find within that state space.

And so, I found actually comfort in using the reinforced learning model as we go into flight testing with group five unmanned systems because the state space, the maximum extent of what that machine can do. It’s much like your cruise control in your car. You start by a closed loop control of it throttling back and forth, then we trust a radar to come into the equation and we grow that trust in the system and add that. Then we see a steering wheel that can turn itself and we slowly become a constant of that, but we know it can’t turn the radio dial, it can’t turn the air conditioning on and off. And so, we’re comfortable with it moving laterally and longitudinally in that state space.

And what we’re finding now in the manned/unmanned teaming is the squadrons are ready to start accepting more degrees of freedom to the system. Not just flying in a circle, but maybe queuing mission systems, maybe doing electronic warfare, doing comms functionality. And we’re building upon the framework, that flexible framework, that John talked about to really let the war fighters develop these really exciting TTPs within those reinforced learned state spaces.

Dr. Ben Strasser:

Actually, reinforcement learning is a really interesting idea because … sorry to jump in if I can jump in on top of you here. It’s a really interesting idea because, as Mike was saying, it allows us to really define pretty open-ended problems where you can define pretty broad objectives and say go and hope the machine learns. And I think the real challenge is in incorporating trust into that system and making sure there are enough constraints so the training actually converges, so you actually get there.

And that’s where I think introducing some hierarchies in the reinforcement learning. Are you really letting the AI pilot think about the whole controls to accomplish an end-to-end mission? Are you confident in that or do you want to introduce maybe separate decision layers too. What is my objective that I should be pursuing? How should I go about pursuing it and then let me execute that. And one thing I like about the hierarchical paradigm is it lets you mix AI technologies when you trust them with traditional optimization, when that works better. So I don’t know if you guys want to … Oh, sorry.

John Clark:

One of the things that I’m going to pose out to the audience as you’re navigating through your day to day challenges and think about what our adversary’s doing, the question posed to me was centered around ethics and how we apply ethics in our employment of artificial intelligence. And as it was just highlighted, there’s a lot of advancements here. Those advancements that are not unique to the US. That technology and that capability is available to both the nation state actors as well as those folks that now we just say that they’re the peer adversaries.

And candidly, I’m not so certain that they’re going to be having these types of conversations about ethics and their AI, and what ramifications does that have for us as we’re going in and navigating those types of fights? And as folks that build capabilities for all of you, understanding how do we navigate that space. Having specifically worked with the user community in fielding capability where we explicitly for decisions of Air Force doctrine and safety, we pulled capabilities back and explicitly did not allow them to be available to the end user because of the higher ground that we take.

And I’m not advocating that we don’t take that higher ground. However, we have to think through the implications of what the adversary is going to do. And that’s going to cause us to maybe have to think asymmetrically about how we fight these reinforcement learning capabilities. If a peer adversary is putting a large amount of aircraft out coming after us and they’re having emergent behavior that we’ve not seen and how we combat it, that’s going to be a challenge if we don’t have a system in place that can be as adaptive or more adaptive than what the adversary puts forward.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Ethical considerations aside, where it’s a consideration of trust in terms of our either senior leaders or our political masters trust in the system in order to allow us to go and do things, what policy constraints do you think are surmountable, aside from the ethical things, and how do you think we, as essentially a government industry team, take that part of our population, ultimately our leadership in some cases, on that journey?

Mike Atwood:

Yeah, I’ll start there. I had a chance to sit with General Kelly for a little bit and talk about his belief in how we approach what we want these machines to do. And he’s a huge advocate of these Adversary UX program that in the vein of what John was just talking about, we go out, we give it to the weapons schools and we use it as red. And I think we’ll quickly realize how capable these systems can become in the hands of our adversaries. And I think that will be maybe the Sputnik moment of cultural change where we realize when we saw flyer F-22s and F-35s in the range, how challenging it is to go against that.

And I think that will spark a debate of needing to create an inverse to that, where when we put weaponized product in the battle space that’s unmanned, the adversary treats it just like it has the lethality of the manned aircraft. So I think the answer somewhere lies in an experimentation program like Adversary UX to start exposing these underlying policy ethics ROE issues that you raise up.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Yeah, I agree. Adversary UX is likely to be a really good forum for that sort of development. The other one that springs to mind would be in what we would describe as shaping or phase zero type of activities that are short of conflict. Any thoughts down that line?

John Clark:

Yeah, I’ll take a swing at it. I think that this is one of the things that, especially with our times right now and one of the things that I emphasize with my team, is that any of these types of capabilities that as a collective enterprise, working both contractor as well as the Air Force and the broader DOD, the more that we can show and highlight and publicize, I think the better off we are going to be in the near term, in particular with China. The fact is that they’re very aggressive, but culturally, they will look for that guarantee that they’re going to win and we need to be showing off things that maybe give them pause, give them that little bit of reticence that maybe today’s not the day as it’s been quoted in the past. And so, I think that there’s a lot of opportunity for us collectively.

We’ve even talked internally within our Lockheed Martin team of partnering with other contractors as a mechanism, much like we did in the ’40s when it was World War II and we’re looking at Manhattan Project. Having that type of collaboration where everything operates in a [inaudible 00:20:34] environment and we figure out a way to go get some capabilities out there, no kidding in the next 12 or 18 months, to just change the game with respect to the adversary.

The environment is not quite to that point, but it’s maybe one day or one event away from having that sort of environment. So inside the Skunk Works, we’ve already been thinking about that, about how we would prepare ourselves to navigate in that sort of environment to meet some urgent national need, even though in my opinion, it’s already here.

Mike Atwood:

Yeah, I think there’s a sub narrative that I was picking up a little bit in John and disruptive tactics in how we employ these weapon systems. I’ll just share an experience I had on the Skyborg program out in the Edwards test range. We were doing some manned and unmanned teaming with some F-16s from Lockheed and the MQ-20 platform by General Atomics, and we were using them as loyal wingmen, so blue aircraft. The F-16 would send a links 16 command over to the MQ-20s and we try to prosecute some other F-16s that were acting as adversaries.

And what we found really quickly is the F-16 would run out of gas and our blue wingman manned aircraft and it would go off to Mammoth ski area to go get gas from a KC-135, sit there for a while, while the UADs stayed on station and kept surveilling the target, holding custody, watching it fly through the range so when the F 16 could come back. And the F-16 pilot calls on the radio and goes, “Why do I need to come back? I’ll just stay on the tanker, you guys stay over there and we’ll all look from these multi-static perspectives at these targets out there.”

And we realize that the way in which we think about air tactics, air combat maneuvers, BVR, beyond visual flight range engagements is fundamentally going to change for us. And I think some of the things that we’re going to start experimenting with are these fundamentally different expansive tactics that are possible now through this wide mathematical trade space that Ben and his team work on.

Dr. Ben Strasser:

Well, I’ll take that cue. Thank you very much. Yes, of course, we at GD are very proud of the work we’ve done to build, we call our commanders algorithm toolbox. And I’m sure Lockheed also has a toolbox of really advanced tactical algorithms for unmanned assets. I think your point about collaboration earlier is a really good one because there’s not a monopoly of good ideas out there. And one thing we have to figure out is, as you walk around the trade floor, one floor below, there are a lot of autonomy companies doing really interesting work coming up with very tailor-made advanced tactics to solve very particular problems.

And if you want to go to our north star, being able to accomplish end-to-end missions and having autonomy assets that can do more than one thing, we’re actually going to need to combine tactics from different vendors. And the buzz words about open architecture and infrastructure as code paradigm start to really matter when we need to combine novel capabilities from multiple providers in order to get an autonomous capability that’s more powerful than the sum of its parts. So that’s something that we’re really championing at GD, is how can we lower the barrier of entry, build architectures and development pipelines that are easy to incorporate third parties, easy to incorporate good ideas from smaller vendors to ultimately deliver the best autonomy capabilities to the war fighters as quickly as possible?

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

What do you think is likely to hold that back from being achieved? Will it be the competitive development between different vendors? Will it be the requirements that are set and defined by the services that aren’t conducive to that? What do you think the impediments are likely to be?

Dr. Ben Strasser:

I think the two main obstacles are you’re at the competitive element. Everyone wants to have their own proprietary system that is the best in the world. And I think I had another component. I’m drawing a blink on my second component, I apologize.

John Clark:

Yeah, I’ll jump in. I think that what I look at right now having navigated through this in the past is that there’s definitely a cultural dimension. The technology has come a long way. There’s a lot of capabilities that are out there. We could do a show of hands. Who in here would go hop in a Tesla right now and immediately press the auto drive button and let it take you back to Reagan National with your eyes closed? There’s not going to be very many folks. And so, there’s that element of trust in the system.

And so, that’s going to be no different than our user community that you’ve been trained thoroughly and thoughtfully through how you employ a fighter aircraft. And I’ll share a little anecdotal story that emphasizes this. And so, we have the Alpha Dog Fight program that we participated in with DARPA. And for those of you that recall, our Lockheed Martin team, we placed second. Well, why didn’t we place first? Obvious question that I posed to the team. And we went back through things and we evaluated. We evaluated against the team that won, and what we observed is that we had worked with some of our user community in our reinforcement learning process and we had put some specific behaviors in our algorithms that were driven by the pilots in terms of how they would prosecute a mission.

We went and looked at how the competitor that placed first, how they had executed it, and they were not constrained by those same tactics that were put in there. In fact, they were actually outside of doctrine that was authorized based on how aircraft are used. And so, at that point, that’s the question is that, which one was better? Was it better to follow the doctrine or was it better to win? And so, I think that that’s going to be one of those things that culturally we’re going to have to navigate our way through. There’s that acceptance and moving through, understanding the technology, embracing the technology, and then what risks are we willing to take as a nation?

Many of you I’ve talked with in the past, I think that’s one of the places that collectively we can get a whole lot better. And this is a prime space for us to go explore that, is take more risks. We need to go explore this trade space a whole lot more thoughtfully and we’re not going to do it by analyzing it on paper. We actually have to go experiment. We’re going to have to get some aircraft in the air. We’re going to have to fail a few times and learn from those failures to then move forward with this is the right way to go do it. And so, I think that that’s the number one thing that’s keeping us from being able to really make the leap forward with this technology. I don’t think it’s the technology.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Switching gears slightly but not very much, how do you think envisage that we are likely to mission plan for these types of capabilities? Do you see this as being something that’s done in exquisite vaults well ahead of time, or are these likely to be not mission planned ahead of time, but actually just employed within their capabilities by whomever has custody of them?

Mike Atwood:

I’ll take a lead on that. In my generation of working with the MQ-9 Reaper, we essentially do no mission planning. The plane has such long endurance, it launches into the range and it’s dynamic. You get a task from a JTAC, from an airborne battle manager, and you’re doing some function. And so, GA has had to think really hard about how do we look at this battle space where there’s not that dynamic human, those objectives and constraints that I talked about earlier.

And the best way I can describe it right now is something like Waze on your phone that you’re going to say, Hey, I want to go from here to here or do this objective at this point in time in this place and it’s going to give you all these purple lines. It’s going to say, “This is the fastest drive, this is shortest drive, this is the most beautiful drive to make you smile.” And the people on that outer loop that we talked about earlier are going to have to implement that doctrine in a way that looks at the risk acceptance posture, looks at the ROE and makes the best human subjective decision about the multiple courses of action that can be executed in that trade space.

Once we set that level of risk acceptance and time of arrival and all these things, we’re going to have to trust some level of closed loop automation to solve that problem when it gets there. Data links are constantly being challenged every day. We need more assurance when we’re not connected and we need to live in worlds of sporadic connectivity, we need more edge processing. And I think that mission planning will happen probably not in a vault because it’s in an objective constraint level, but ultimately, be put on the machine to close the actual execution of that within the objectives and constraints.

John Clark:

Just to provide maybe a complimentary, not contrarian view, but I think that what you’re going to find is that given the way in which we can model things, there’s going to be a lot of activity that happens in a vault and that’s going to be basically simulating all these different permutations, going back to this modeling environment that we talked about earlier, where we’re going to explore the different ways in which the mission could unfold with different things that pop out.

Based on that, that’s the type of thing that’s going to be used to facilitate what is traditionally the ATO. I mean we still have to get the airplanes to the right airfield, those airplanes have to have the right amount of gas and understand how that’s all going to be orchestrated. And so, you’re going to have that level of mission planning, but you’re not going to have that same level of mission planning of this is exactly … you’re going to have 79 way points in your mission and you’re going to take an image on this one and you’re going to drop a weapon on this one, more akin to some of the traditional LO mission planning that has happened in the past, where you just follow the line.

I think that once you’ve gone through that model based evaluation in the vault and understand all the capabilities that can be brought to the environment, then you’re going to execute with that initial ATO construct with the airplanes coming in. And then it’s going to be very dynamic, very adaptive. You’re going to do all that processing at the edge. And likely one of those permutations you explored will manifest, but it’s not going to look exactly like it was in the vault.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

What do you think, Ben?

Dr. Ben Strasser:

Just to add onto the conversation, I mentioned earlier commander’s intent is really important and being able to capture the mission ecosystem, which isn’t just the written words on the op board or the exact objectives we want to accomplish, but really the tactical context. Mission planning today, there’s a lot of analysis and a lot of artifacts that we develop and a lot of processes that exist for a reason to help plan missions.

One of the things that we think has to be an important part of this conversation is really a human centered design approach so we can leverage all the work that’s already being done to plan missions for manned assets and capture that in a computer understandable format for the unmanned assets, because at the end of the day, this is not just a panel on autonomy, it’s a panel on manned/unmanned teaming. And so, we have to make sure we have that understanding of the manned mission, even if we’re allowing some level of improvisation or adaptation or even just on the fly planning based on the objectives and constraints.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Yeah, interesting. Do you think it’s a truism or it just can’t be achieved, the concept of this balance between cost versus the lethality/survivability thing? Is there a knee in the curve that we should be all aiming at and exploiting, or is that a falsity?

Mike Atwood:

Yeah, that’s an interesting question and one that I think about a lot as I make material decisions for where General Atomic sets with technology. Being part of this for so long, I’ve seen the X-45, X-47, J-UCAV programs, which were giant flying wings, 40,000 pounds, 8,000 foot runways, and I think we tried to make those loyal wingmen in the 2012 era and we realized they’re a little too monolithic, they’re a little too big. And we realized the adversaries were going to swarm tactics and attrition mass mattered, and we needed some level of attritability.

And so, the pendulum swung over to the target drone community and growing those up into more capable UAVs. That’s the Valkyrie program, XQ-58A. And as that executed, we realized it was hard to man, train and equip that. The operational readiness of radio bottles and parachutes, it was hard to provide a phase zero deterrent capability with that. And I think what you’ve seen emerge with Secretary Kendall is this middle class. And it’s not that different than an RQ-170 or an MQ-9 type platform that have stood the test of time for the last 15 to 20 years because they’ve been adaptable to the changing mission in the Middle East.

And so, I think we’ve consolidated as a war fighting community around this 10 to 20,000 pound class of utilitarian, adaptable CCAs. And I think they embody a fundamentally different philosophy than just a small F-35. And it’s been exciting to see how we compliment the manned aircraft and we bring sensors that are offset and disaggregated, and not just make a small fighter or make a target drone that’s so attritable that it doesn’t have much capability.

John Clark:

I’ll build on what Mike highlighted there. As we went through and evaluated these types of ideas and concepts, they’re not new. We’ve been talking about some of these things for quite some time. As that pendulum swung and it was down in this a triable class and you’re looking at things, we did a lot of operations analysis trying to explore is there something where you can get sufficient capability into a contested environment and have a meaningful impact while understanding what that sustainment and logistics tale was going to look like to support them?

And the candid answer is we couldn’t find anything, just as Mike highlighted. As you continue to look at anything that was really in that lower class vehicle, in the end, they became really exquisite targets and they would just be shot down on day one and you didn’t get them back. So they weren’t attritable, they were truly expendable. And so, at that point, when it’s expendable, everything’s about just getting as much cost out of it as possible. Attritable, you want it back.

And so, you start to have this dilemma that, “All right, I’ve just put this really sophisticated IRST on there. All right, the price just went up. Now, I want that airplane back every time. Well, now that I want it back, every time I’m going to have to put this additional survivability content on there. Maybe I’ve got to put a jammer on it. Now I’ve got to put some [inaudible 00:34:30] materials on it. Now that price point keeps going up and now it just snowballs on itself.”

And so, I genuinely agree that where that middle class has emerged, I think that there is a sweet spot that we can find where you’re going to have a class of vehicle that has the right amount of survivability, the right amount of sensors to actually compliment the fighters. And I’ll close with this little dimension. I’ve shared with a few folks that have come in and looked at our operations analysis. And so, when we play chess, the pawns are the front end. Our unmanned systems, I think we can all argue would be the pawns in it. They’re the ones that are going to stimulate the activity.

You don’t play chess by putting all your pawns behind the systems or the pieces on the board that matter. And so, as you go explore that, you’ve got to have the systems, those pawns, actually be able to get close enough to the adversary to make an impact and do something to stimulate the behavior that you want in this teaming construct. And so, these ideas of having unmanned aircraft that are way behind the fighters, all of our OA says that that’s not a really good value proposition and it’s not actually helping, because at that point, you just bring more F-35s or F-18s to the fight because it’s not actually making an impact for the humans that are putting their lives at risk. We need to put the unmanned aircraft out in front and they have to actually persist long enough to make an impact.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Speaking of the humans, that’s a really great segue. Ben, I’ll throw this one to you initially. What do you think we need different in our people to effectively be teamed with these uncrewed aircraft? Are we producing the right sorts of people already, or is there something that we should either be looking at or cease looking at in order to be able to do this role effectively?

Dr. Ben Strasser:

That’s a really great question, and I think as I mentioned before, we’re looking a lot to the research community and the ideas of psychology to try to really reduce the cognitive load. I think we have some incredible pilots out there. And of course, several panelists have talked in other discussions have talked about the importance of STEM education and making sure we have that level of understanding and literacy so when we want to communicate what our unmanned systems are doing, there’s a level of training and understanding for what these semantic descriptions of those algorithms mean.

Mike Atwood:

Yeah, it’s interesting for me. I’ve watched the training curriculum of the MQ-1 and the MQ-9 and the pilots that have come through and all the training that goes into being a weapons qualified officer in the platform. I’ve had the pleasure to work with the 26 Weapon Squadron up in Nellis Test and Training Range, and I’ve realized the strength of our Air Force is in our people. The ingenuity that I’ve seen these war fighters do with the platform that is now almost 20 years old …

There was just some exercises done out in Valliant Shield where the operators of the MQ-9 did things that I never thought were possible with the systems that I designed in my younger engineering career. And so, yes, I do think the Airmen of today and the Guardians really have the ingenuity, the innovation, the capability to take our war fighting systems and do things as the designer that I never imagined with them. And that really excites me for the future, and especially if we do more aggressive manned/unmanned teaming and we bring more automation and capability to the war fighter. I’m just so excited to see what they can do with it.

John Clark:

Yeah, I’ll share a funny story out of that. We were going through a human factors experiment with a set of users that came into our system where we were putting them through this new technology and this new capability that we were putting through its paces to go to the field, and we actually had some MQ-9 former operators that came in to go look at our system. And what we were doing, we were eliminating the sensor operator as a part of the autonomy where there was no longer a sensor operator. But folks that had been MQ-9 sensor operators came in. And so, we put them through a mission and evaluated how well they performed the mission. And apologies to the pilots in the audience, but the sensor operator kicked all their butts. And so, she specifically did a fantastic job of using the tools and the technology in ways in which the pilots were not accustomed to.

And so, I think that that’s going to be an interesting dimension of how we go through that training equip process, looking at the individuals that we’re going to be training them, putting them in new circumstances and figuring out how to indoctrinate them to using the tools in a new way because that experience, it’s something that stuck with me where, by a large margin, that sensor operator, she completely executed the mission successfully where other pilots were still messing around pushing on buttons and trying to make things do exactly what they wanted, where she trusted the system and it did a lot of stuff. So I think that getting that training in there and helping people understand new dimensions, it’s going to be incredibly important.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Well, I think you’re probably not the first and you won’t be the last person to realize that pilots have limitations. What actually did happen in the time since when we started talking is they did start the clock and we’ve come to the end of our time, unfortunately. But would you join me in thanking Ben, Mike and John representing General Dynamics, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin.

Mike Atwood:

Well, thank you, John. It’s always a pleasure to talk about this. I have a deep passion for not only the planes and the autonomous stuff we build, but the war fighters. Maybe I thank you to the audience and all these … it’s nice for me being a civilian to walk around and everyone in their flight suits and the military. I feel really honored to be an American and be able to give you guys technology that help us fight this war as it ever increases against the peer adversaries. So I really enjoy this and thank you for everything that you do for our nation.

RAAF ACDR John Haly:

Thanks very much.

Watch, Read: ‘Weapons and Munitions’

Oct. 16, 2022

Royal Air Force Air Commodore Blythe Crawford moderated a discussion on “Weapons and Munitions” with retired Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant of Marvin Test Solutions, John Martins of MBDA, and Steve Milano of Raytheon Missiles & Defense, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Air Commander, Blythe Crawford, Commandant of the Royal Air Forces Air and Space Warfare Centre. If any of you have a problem with the accent, I’m sure one of the panel will be able to translate on my behalf. But I’m delighted today to welcome all y’all to this panel on weapons and munitions. And the challenges that we are facing with addressing these in the future.

I’ll introduce our illustrious panel in a moment. But by way of introducing the theme, I’ll say a few words just to contextualize the scenario we are faced with today. So, as we gather here this week, the world is facing one of its most turbulent times in history. Since Putin’s letter back in December ’21 where he detailed his aspirations for a new world order. We have seen our adversaries emboldened to take action beginning with the invasion of Ukraine in February.

This conflict will be marked in history as one where a democratic state fighting for its freedom and supported by the free world was faced with invasion from an increasingly autocratic Russia, seizing strategic opportunity, enhanced by a global pandemic, political shifts in the West, and a withdraw from Afghanistan. The first real conflict where Western weaponry has had to directly approve its metal against contemporary, but also supposedly modern Russian weapons.

It has become a lesson tactics, resilience, logistics, and strategy to say the least. Watching with keen interest, the Chinese then sought to reaffirm their claim over Taiwan, escalating a long-term crisis. And where if conflict occurred, we could see an untested but seemingly very capable Chinese force pitted again against Western weaponry. Each of these crises have also forced us to address our resilience and supply chains.

Tom Mahnken recently recorded that the US needs a new approach to producing weapons, where whilst they have played an increasingly important role in halting Moscow’s initial offensive, it has become increasingly apparent that such weapons are neither cheap nor available in unlimited numbers. The effectiveness of precision weaponry against invading forces has been impressive. But has also highlighted the fact that the current US munitions infrastructure is not robust enough to support a high intensity protracted conflict against a major adversary such as Russia or China.

Similarly, our technical advantage looks increasingly vulnerable as both Russia and China test a new range of weapons, hypersonics being a classic example. Though the effectiveness of these in the battlefield is still unproven. We have similarly seen our adversaries conduct trials in space, although not officially weaponized yet. But where they’re showing considerable progress and interest. And of equal consequence, we have seen off the shelf drones with rudimentary munitions take on the vast field of Russian armor with great effect on the battlefield.

So, what does this mean for our force mix of the future? So, these are all challenging problems which must drive us to think and act faster and more effectively than before. Within General Brian’s slogan of accelerate, change, or lose. So, I’m privileged to be allowed to draw on some of the country’s experts in this field, who I’m sure can help us address some of these questions and others. So, I’d like to start by introducing Major General Steve Sergeant, retired, who has been CEO of Marvin Test Solutions since 2012.

General Sergeant previously served as the Commander of the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center, the 56th and 8th Fighter Wings, and was Commandant of the USAF Weapon School. We’ve also got John Snooze Martins, Director of International Programs at MBDA. Snooze served in the Navy flying F-14s as a TOPGUN instructor, and TPS graduate, and as a Program Manager in the F/A-18, F-35, and the Air-to-Air Missile Program Offices.

And finally, Steve Milano, Director of Air-to-Service Effects at Raytheon Missiles & Defense. Steve leads Air-to-service Requirements and Capabilities Development for Raytheon Missiles & Defense Air Power Mission area. And his portfolio also includes various existing weapon systems as well as emerging capabilities like open system architectures and collaborative autonomy. So again, I’m very pleased to welcome such an illustrious panel to the stage. And maybe General Sergeant, would you like to kick off the discussion?

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

Well, thanks very much. And I really appreciate two things. One, the warm introduction for all of us. And two, you and all your colleagues from the United Kingdom being here during a very solemn time back home. And we appreciate the sacrifice you make being here at the Air and Space Symposium this week. So, thanks very much.

So, I’m going to spend just a very short time introducing a little bit to play off of what you just talked about, especially with Smart weapons and the speed at which the Air Force and Guardians, but in this case, it’ll be mainly talking about Airmen that are working on the flight line, the speed at which they need to prepare aircraft to be able to deliver weapons. And we’ll see if my clicker works here. There we go.

So, over the last decade that I’ve been on this side of the blue line, on the industry side, and by the way, they’re not all slimy contractors. There are actually a lot of people down on that first floor in the atrium in the exhibit hall that are really here to listen to what your requirements are and try to deliver those in the time that you need them. Just a little plug for some of those that aren’t necessarily aware of that or haven’t maybe wandered down into that hall.

There’s a lot of things to learn and a lot of things for you to impart there. But over the past 10 years, I’ve dealt with a lot of Airmen in the armament arena. And quite frankly, when I was on active duty, they took me out to bend wrenches on the jet now and then. But never really with the armament piece, and seeing all the onerous amount of test equipment that they had.

So, I asked them along the way, “What would you really like?” Things like a small footprint by the jet. In other words, fewer boxes, but more capability in the boxes that they do bring out. Rugged and Airmen-proof equipment that didn’t need to leave the flight line every six months to be calibrated and or fixed, and be gone for sometimes up to three or four months. Reduced training requirements. In other words, they were thinking about Multi-Capable Airmen a long time ago.

And that the speed at which ACE needs to be executed. So, that you could go and be trained across multiple different systems using the same equipment as opposed to the traditional model of every MDS has its own separate set of test equipment. So, commonality was something that they were thinking about, for sure. And not just at home drones, but when they were deployed to other locations. And they really wanted test equipment that would actually do functional test of Smart weapons.

Not using, for the most part, test equipment that was fielded with the current legacy fourth generation aircraft back in the late ’70s that has just been bandaid together, or maybe replaced with a similar light commodity test set on a flight line. I said commodity for a reason, because that’s how it’s looked at in the acquisition world. And so, they had a box that did certain things. They got a new box that did certain things that could be sustained.

So, they looked and said, “Well, do we have to keep going down that road?” And we’d sure like to do faster setup, and faster test times, and be able to keep the data that we have, so that we could use that thinking ahead to what you all are looking at today, how to use AI to do predictive maintenance. This is over the last 10 years. This wasn’t in the last 10 months. And then they really wanted to be able to increase mission effectiveness with reliable equipment and things that could meet the sortie generation times.

Things like combat turns are back again. They disappeared for a long time. So, then enters Agile Combat Employment. And with the work that we had done at Marvin Test Solutions over the past decade, we started having people come around and look at our equipment, and said, “Whoa. You’ve got an Agile Combat Employment or ACE enabler here,” where we’ve taken a lot of the capabilities and put them together moving from the desirements of what the maintainers had on the previous slide, leading to actual requirements that could be written, and actually achieved, and attained.

And so, when we looked at that, we said, “Well, let’s break this out a little further.” Common, menu driven, intuitive type test equipment. And with some of the tests that were done over the past couple of years, Airmen who had never been trained, were selected from the flight line to come over and use the equipment. And they were doing tests in sometimes 90% less time than the traditional equipment, having never been trained on it.

I think that leads to a Multi-Capable Airman, when you can pull someone who’s never been trained on that equipment and use it, which kind of goes along the lines of what the chief was talking about yesterday when General Brown said, “We don’t need to have someone that’s certified, certified, certified, not certified, where we make it very hard.” You can break down the barriers if you have the right equipment.

Unprecedented test times. And then lean support in that as you’re moving multiple MDSs together in these tailored force packages, to be able to have single common test equipment that could test all of them. That exists today. That exists today, and can be moved rapidly with the C-130s that the PAC-AF commander talks about having at his disposal, not C-17s in the future. So, the footprint will be extremely, extremely important.

So, this is what the Airmen have been saying. And this is what we’re listening to and tried to feedback to them. So, if you get a chance, stop by our booth, 716, and we’ll show you some of what they were calling ACE enablers. I’ll leave you with this little bit of maybe fire up since it’s after lunch. A little fire up video, if this all works. Here we go. Something happened. Click. There we go. Let’s see if it’ll play. I’ll hit the click play and see if it goes. Maybe we’ll get the folks over on the side to make it happen. It’s not me. Well, if they can’t do it, maybe we’ll let the next speaker go. And then they’ll come back to it. Thank you.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

All right. We’ll have some gratuitous explosions at the end. So, over to Snooze.

John Martins:

Well, sir. I’m also a fan of video. So, what I thought I’d do today is voice over a three minute video of lots of things blowing up. So, hopefully, we’ll pick up the slack a little bit. I’m John Martins, call sign Snooze, from our MBDA D.C.’s office. MBDA is a global weapon manufacturer. We have plants in France, Italy, UK, Germany, Spain, and of course, in the US. Have over 45 weapons in the inventory.

Today, I’m just going to focus on two that are applicable to our toughest theater we’re about ready to look at, and that’s the Indo-Pac Com theater. Of course, the Indo-Pac Com theater is especially stressing because it comes with that anti-access maritime battlefield. So, makes the weapons have to do things like all weather, multiple moving target, against ships that can defend themselves. So, that tends to drive extended ranges. And Smart seekers that can do basically self-contained kill chains.

So, I’m going to use two weapons to highlight that in a three minute video. Ideally, I’ve got to prep the video a little bit because it’ll come at you really quickly. But the only thing I’d love you to walk away with is the message that, and it’s kind of cautiously optimistic, which is the US has a lot of friends throughout the world. So, we don’t fight alone usually. And so, what I’d like to leave you with is the friends are going to show up with some pretty cool stuff, and show up ready to fight.

So, with that, I’d love to jump right into what we call the SPEAR Missile. But it’s in development right now. So, I didn’t have a lot of cool seeker video. But it’s Brimstone is going to give us a good baseline. So, I’m going to show you what I call the world’s most underappreciated direct attack weapon, the Brimstone. For everybody to sync you up, it’s a lot like a Hellfire or a JAGM except it’s been stressed to go on fast-moving fighter aircraft. So, they pull a lot of Gs.

You’ll see there’s a dual seeker on Brimstone. Brimstone has a millimeter wave. So, of course, it can go to Lat Long and take out a piece of metal. It can also take out laser spots. But of course, we’re going to talk about cooler stuff. This is what we do in Huntsville, Alabama. We build the Diamond Back Wing kit for Boeing’s STB-1. Built over 30,000 of them. But what you’re going to see now is Brimstone in the dual mode. Dual mode, this is in the desert against a really fast target. It’s a small target. You see the laser spot is where the crosshair is. Really messy, not on the target.

So, what the Brimstone does is it turns on its millimeter wave radar. It says, “I see what you want me to do.” And it takes over, and end the game. I got another shot against a similar target. Also, a motorcycle clipping along in the desert. And again, notice that the messy laser spot, and it does its thing. Next, I’m going to show you is a column attack mode. A fighter can carry 12 of these a piece. The launcher says, ‘You 12 missiles are going to see the same thing.”

Brimstone one, you go after the first target. Brimstone two, you go after the second. Brimstone three, you go after the third. So, basically a self-contained kill chain. I know you guys are all thinking of Ukraine. This is a great weapon for that type theater. You all have seen the road of trucks. Brimstone also has an area attack mode very similar to the column attack. In this case, it’s an area Brimstone do the same thing. They seek out the targets and kill them.

High res millimeter waves. So, it can tell the difference between track vehicles and wheeled vehicles. Can tell exactly how big the target is it’s going to attack. So, there’s a bunch of different ways you can make sure it doesn’t kill the good guy boat. That was just to prep us for SPEAR. SPEAR, that’s going to be coming up, is we’ve improved Brimstone in almost every way. We put an air-breather turbine instead of the solid rocket motor and wings. So now, on class it goes beyond 90 miles.

Think a tactical cruise missile for those targets that don’t warrant those large expensive cruise missiles, if you will. It’s got a better seeker than Brimstone. So, everything you saw is better on this one. Better warhead as well. And of course, long time of flight, you’re going to need a data link that’s got Link 16. It’s a slow missile. So, there’s also a SPEAR-EW. So, you can stick one of those in an attack package like this to take care of the weapons enroute.

So, we’re going to continue the theme with another air-breather. You need air-breather for a confined stealth space to get a lot of energy in there. In this case, it’s the Meteor Air-to-Air Missile. Of solid rocket motors, have up to 80% volume as oxygen. So, if you can get your oxygen from the outside, you can pack a ton more energy in these things. So, in comparison to a similar sized air-to-air missile, this one will go three times further head-to-head, five times further in a chase down. So, if you have a 50 mile, these are fake dummers by the way, 50 mile head-on shot, would be 150 for Meteor.

So, you can imagine a mixed load. All our coalition partners have the world’s best medium range missile as well, the AMRAAM. So, imagine a mixed load of two Meteors, four AMRAAMs, two AIM-9s to clean up anything that’s still living within 20 miles. So, yeah. You can almost use F-35 and air superiority now in the same sentence. So, with that, I hit you real quick with that. Just hopefully, you guys take away that yeah, the coalition partners have a lot of cool stuff hanging out, and they’re going to show up ready to contribute. Thanks so much for letting me be a part today.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Yep. Thanks, Snooze. And he’s got a brochure as well. Okay. Over to Steve, please.

Steve Milano:

I’ll try and go a little bit quicker I think. Thanks for the overview. I learned a lot actually from this. And I’m really, really humbled to be on the stage with you guys. A lot of experience up here. So, thank you for the invite and thank you for the opportunity here. So, my name’s Steve Milano. I am the Air-to-Ground Effects Lead out of Tucson, Arizona. So, the StormBreaker weapon as well as Joint Strike Missile fall within my portfolio. And I think we have a short video that we’ll play. You may have seen it kind of in the lead up. So, it’ll be a little bit of a recap here. So, if we can roll that video, we’ll be able to get started.

Video:

Air dominance is critical in today’s global threat environment. To stay one step ahead, Raytheon Missiles & Defense is advancing the capabilities of weapons like AMRAAM and StormBreaker. With upgrades to AMRAAM hardware and software to enhance its range, maneuverability, and effectiveness against advanced threats. And the StormBreaker Smart Weapon. Network-enabled to receive target updates in-flight, and readily integrated across a host of platforms. Raytheon Missiles & Defense.

Steve Milano:

See, short videos. It’s not a tip, it’s just a recommendation. So, the StormBreaker Smart Weapon. So, I wanted to lead with that as the stepping off point for a little bit of the conversation that hopefully, we’ll get into here, is that we’ve reached IOC on the F-15E. And we’re in operational testing for the F-35B, A, and C to follow. Obviously, a lot of interest in the capability on those platforms.

But I really wanted to look at what are we focusing on within our air-to-air and air-to-ground effectors? And it’s how do we evolve capability and capacity today? And it’s leveraging our partners from the logistics trains after they’re developed, but also in the design phase. And so, we’ve done a lot of work trying to digitize the life cycle of all of these effectors. And so, looking at the digital twining on the early side is great, and it’s interesting, and it gets us to an ability a lot faster. But that’s just one piece.

And I like to say, “Mind the gap,” right. Because when you go from one stage of the systems engineering V to the next, you’re fraught with peril, right. And so, we’re really trying to focus in on how do we deliver capability without disrupting capacity in the current state? And so, that’s been something that we’ve been focusing on and trying to bring capability, not just to the US war fighter, but partners and allies around the world. And it really is, it’s been an interesting journey because it’s not a single approach.

And as soon as you bring everyone into the fold, you learn a lot more, but you also enable capability across the spectrum. And so, really we’ve been focusing across the air-to-air domain and air-to-ground domain about Raytheon Missiles & Defenses. Really focusing on how do you get to that system integration perspective? And we’ve got a lot of history there. We’ve got a lot of history bringing systems to the forefront. And just bringing those things together, and bringing suppliers, partners into the fray. So, looking forward to the conversation.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Brilliant. Thanks very much Steven. Thanks to all three of yous for some fascinating insights. So, we saw a pretty impressive array of weaponry there, and right across the board. And obviously, with modern weaponry it takes quite a bit of time to produce some of that, and especially at scale. So, if we go back to one of the first points that I brought up concerning our ability to produce and distribute weapons at scale. Is Tom Mahnken right with his assumption? And if that is an issue, how do we get after this, both from a production and a logistics perspective, to be able to produce weapons at the scale they’re going to be used at? And General, would you like to kick off with that one?

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

Well, at the Marvin Group, we don’t make anything that goes boom. But you can’t get the boom to the target without the things that come out of Marvin Engineering. In other words, the bomb racks, launchers, and the pylons. And I’ll just give you an example of how you can scale up and move the speed of production when needed. About three years ago, it was discovered that there was an 18 month gap from the time of F-35s rolling off the flight line until the armament actually showed up.

And when the government came to Lockheed, and Lockheed came to the Marvin Group, and they said, “We need your help,” within 18 months they closed that gap from a cold start, ramping up what they had. So, when things need to be done, you look back in history, like we heard yesterday, we’ve done this before. And I would tell you that Marvin Engineering hadn’t done it before. But American industry had with our partners because there are four countries involved in the production of that armament beyond Marvin Engineering. And they made it happen.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Brilliant. Snooze, is this something you’ve looked at, at MBDA as well, just in terms of production times?

John Martins:

Yeah, production times, as well as I think what disappoints the war fighter as well, not only production delivery, but development as well. I know there’s some lingering requirements holds, especially where we want to go fighting. And one of the things that frustrates I think the customer, the war fighter, is that it takes a rough rule of thumb in our businesses, 10 years and a billion dollars to develop a new weapon. And we need them yesterday. And they’re not available yet. So, if there was a way I think if we could accelerate that developmental time.

If you don’t, you’re stuck with what’s available today, or maybe small modifications, or so. But I will plug again the coalition partner theme is we’re not going at this alone. And of course, there’s production overseas and other options available. So, that’s an immediate low-hanging fruit, as well as I’d love us to fix the acquisition community that I grew up in, right. So, I was a part of the problem. But it’s a tough problem, rest assured. And I think we’re looking at a daunting task of a theater that needs capabilities we don’t necessarily have today. And we need a lot of weapons as well. So, it’s all coming together at once.

Steve Milano:

Yeah, exactly.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Steve?

Steve Milano:

Yeah. That’s a great point. And that’s where my head goes to as well is that the stable and dependable requirements and funding help build that resiliency into your logistics and supply chain. And so, we all feel that pressure, whether it’s on the government side of acquisition, or it’s on the defense industry side of acquisition. It is a pain point. It’s something that we can help work together as long as we continue to have that consistent conversation.

But it’s also looking at your capacity and logistics train as a system of systems, right. And I think that all too often we don’t look at the total complexity of the logistics and capacity, and how that plays in. We’re starting to realize it because of the current situation we are in now globally. You look across where your supply chain’s weakest. Where do they need some resiliency built in, where can you build in some of that dynamism, and actually have a benefit to the expenditure of some funds to create that resiliency in the supply chain?

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

Part of that resiliency that you just mentioned is actually looking ahead and having the stocks that you need, especially as the Air Force looks at this ACE concept. You can’t just move all these munitions around where you need them. So, I think part of what’s happened in the last year in world events has probably driven the planners to step back and go, where do we need to ensure across the coalition partners as well as across the US the stock piles to be replenished or begun, where they were never filled to begin with?

Because you won’t have time. Given all the challenges, the acquisition system’s not going to change overnight. We heard yesterday with some of the panelists with the startups and that sort of thing, things are moving in the right direction. But that’s taken quite a few years to get moving. And the big acquisition process is not totally that rapid and agile yet. And so, stockpiling to enable to be able to conduct the war wherever you are. Moving airplanes is fast. Moving weapons is not.

John Martins:

Yeah. So. General, you brought my mind to the resource section, both of you guys did, which is there’s very few problems you can’t make go away without by not throwing, throw a little money and you can make almost any problem go away. But now what do you do when you have multiple different areas you have to address? Stockpiles, new weapons. And there is a challenge, right, I guess so.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

And we’ve seen quite a few panels today already talking about speeding up the acquisition process. But then also talking about digital design and digitalization across the manufacturing process. If we had to put emphasis on technology or process, which one would you plunk for?

John Martins:

Right, both, if that makes sense. But you did talk about a lot of the things that the acquisition community is going after in a good way, which is why can’t we make these weapons modular? Where if you want to replace the back end, you can do that by simply plugging and playing. And having more of a consistent common architecture that you can mix and match, and play, and maybe mix vendors as well. So, I think the acquisition community is going at it the right way. But it’s a slow process.

Steve Milano:

Yeah, I agree 100%. You have to do both, right. The process can change incrementally, but you can’t wait for the process to change. You have to bring the material solutions to bear and the engineering to bear in the current process. And that’ll help us evolve. And so, those processes can enable us to get the most out of digital engineering, digital acquisition processes, that we’re well entrenched in. But we need to acknowledge where there’s shortfalls. The example that I use is that we’ve got completely digitized factories, right, very low touch points. And we’ve got robots moving equipment around the floor.

And all of our material supply systems are fully integrated. And so, you can see where the material is coming in and out of the factories. And I walk in one day, and I see a whiteboard. And they’re writing in exactly, this is the shift, this is how many were done at this shift. And I was like, “Well, what happened to the digitized board?” It was like, “Well, this is faster.” Okay. Well, that’s where process didn’t really catch up with technology, or they didn’t get it quite read. The technology didn’t get it quite right. And the process needed to amend. And so, we need that flexibility back and forth. And I think the answer again, is both.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Okay. Super. Let’s move on to another thing that I want to address. And I discussed briefly about what China and Russia are doing with regards to new weapons at the moment. Experimentation with hypersonics, which Putin has obviously gone out publicly and said that he has been using. It’s questionable whether they are hyper or not. So, are they really catching up? Or, are they ahead in certain areas? And what are the implications of fielding such weapons on the battlefield? So, Snooze, do you want to kick that one off?

John Martins:

Yeah, sure. So, the hypersonics is obviously an area where we’re expending a lot of resources for good reasons. It’s very hard to defend against something coming in that fast. Of course, there are a lot of challenges I think, which you’re alluding to. When something’s going that fast, not only materialize, but communicating sensors on the weapon, or so. So, it is yet to be seen how effective those weapons are. And maybe equally as important, is countering those weapons and having the technologies to do that.

But rest assured, we in the industry side and the acquisition side, we do tend to occasionally fall asleep at the wheel. And we wake up, and we find, “Huh, how come they have this and we don’t have that?” And the good news is we usually respond pretty quickly. I think we did a couple years ago. And hopefully, and almost always those gaps do close. But to answer your question, it’s unclear how effective those are going to be. But it is a problem that we have to address. And oh, by the way, why don’t we have a better arsenal, is the question that we’re all asking as taxpayers?

Steve Milano:

Yeah. And I’ll say it brings to the forefront the necessity for a layered defense approach, right. We understand the threat that hypersonic weapons present, offensive hypersonic weapons present. And that’s leading to I guess a lean-forward approach from the missile defense industry, from the Air Force, from a resiliency in that space-based sensing layer as well as domestic and indigenous missile defense capabilities against hypersonic threats.

But the ability to sense them, the ability to engage them, is critically important. But it also tips the hand a little bit, right. I mean, all of those tests show what’s in play. And physics are what they are. And so, it’s a good tell to be able to see what’s happening on the world stage, what that development looks like. And so, I don’t necessarily personally, me personally, I don’t see it as incredibly alarming when I see a news article. I see it as a data point. And are we responding appropriately? Are we using that calculus to adjust our approach from an offensive and defensive capability perspective? It’s not a one-off. Do we match capability for capability? It’s a balance.

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

I think the good news that we tend to overlook is that 12 to 20 years ago we had a lot of work going on in hypersonics. And then for a period of time, leading up to just a couple of years ago, that was put on ice. But we learned a lot over that decade-and-a-half, or so ago on hypersonics. Now that there’s emphasis back on it, we’re not starting from a cold start.

And I think it is an unknown as to how capable the China and the Russian hypersonic weapons are. But the fact is they are exploring that arena. And they’re actually using some of those weapons today. And so, I think we’re going to find with the entrepreneurial spirit of the United States across small and large industries, that there’s a lot of work being done. And I think we will catch up and accelerate past wherever anyone else is today, sooner than later. Working across with our partners and coalition partners as well, who are also working in that arena.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Great. Well, that’s reassuring at least. We talked about hypersonics. But what else would you see as being a disruptive capability that’s potentially around the corner and with regards to weapons and munitions? Steve, do you want to kick that off?

Steve Milano:

Yeah. So, I guess in the cyber domain and in the networked autonomy domain where we’re leaning forward, the things that we’re seeing from a mass scale, it’s all about data and how fast can you process that data. And there’s a lot of areas around the world, there’s specifically our adversaries in China, they have an ability to source data at a greater scale. And so, we really have to look internally and think about where are we applying our resources? Because we’ve got brilliant people in this country and in our partner nations that can come up with those algorithms that can be deployed in our systems-to-systems to really make the capability eye watering.

But it’s only as good as the data that we can feed through it. And so, we need to be innovative about where we come up with those data sources. If it’s a munition, we’ve got terabytes, upon terabytes, upon terabytes of data, of flight testing, between our companies that we can bring to bear. Are we using that appropriately? And so, that’s the area that concerns me the most is are we applying all of our resources to this autonomy challenge? And are we keeping pace? Because it’s less clear than a hypersonic weapon. It’s a little bit of a nebulous space.

John Martins:

Carrying that theme further, our processing power is crazy right now, and our ability to crunch data and deal with data as well. An area that I think could be a game changer is making the weapons through the hard work. The missile we showed you, the Brimstone, had a 700 combat shots and a 98% success rate, which means it’s air crew proof, right. And I think we need more of that. Meaning the weapons, the UAVs, the autonomy. It just simply can think faster. The technology exists to think faster and make better decisions, if we program them right.

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

I think it’s fair to say that force-on-force is not what we’re going to face tomorrow. And asymmetric type threats and attacks are certainly there. And so, in the cyber arena, things that were taken for granted that we don’t have to worry about it in the past. Any software that gets there anywhere near a flight line, or a missile site, or satellite production area, all that software needs to be NIST certified. And if it’s not today, it needs to be tomorrow. Because a lot of disruption can happen through software attacks. Whether a traditional cyber attack that we read in the Wall Street Journal, or something that happens with someone on a flight line that she never suspected would happen, like a Twin Tower attack.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

As if by magic, General, you’ve perfectly segued into my next question, which was going to be around that asymmetric aspect. We talked a little bit about Ukraine earlier on, which you’re seeing a very different use and very different approach by both sides in that conflict. So, what lessons would you say we are garnering from that battle so far with regards to precision versus mass, or delivery versus effect, for example?

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

Well, I think they got my video working, and it might be a good introduction.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Let’s watch some stuff blowing up. Just to revitalize everyone.

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

So, one of the biggest lessons learned, did you get the video working?

John Martins:

Can we see it?

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

All right. There we go.

John Martins:

There we go.

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

Let’s go ahead and hit play on that. This is why you don’t want to mass armor on a road. Just wait for it. We’re not done yet. Now we’re done. But this is why you don’t want to mass armor on a road. And what did everyone fear in Ukraine? The mass of armor. It’s all moving to the south. Well, with some of the weapons from the gentleman to my left that were employed and weapons from others, that column became one of the world’s largest targets at the time.

John Martins:

Yeah. So, question asymmetric type piece. And yeah.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Yeah. So, mass versus precision and delivery versus effect. We’re seeing grenades being dropped through the turrets of tanks from a commercial drone that’s [inaudible 00:36:00]-

John Martins:

Right on. Yeah. So, we’re making incredible advances in the areas that we’re talking about. And we’re becoming reliant on it. So, it’d be real easy to, if you can take away some of those tools, we’re starting to rely on the computer power. Computers are self-targeting, that sort of thing. And sometimes, something as simple as a gun can do some neat work. And it’s hard to be full-

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

Or a Javelin.

John Martins:

There you go, a Javelin.

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

Or, a Stinger.

John Martins:

There you go.

Steve Milano:

Yeah. Thanks for the plug there. Javelin and Stinger are doing the job. And it’s a great stepping off point from where my thought process goes on this topic, is that we’ve got existing capability that’s being used in novel ways. And that innovation and that approach is necessary on the battlefield. And so, you’re seeing a lot of the systems that would be quote, unquote, legacy systems being used in new ways. New ways that we didn’t anticipate that they’d be used. But that’s what warriors do. We innovate. When the need is there, we get the job done with the tools that we have.

And so, what that brings me to is when we look at the digital engineering infrastructure, and what that’s doing to accelerate capability to the field, and accelerate development and production timelines, it’s also giving you the flexibility and the modularity to be able to scale up and scale down. Because in one fight you may need that exquisite capability to be able to survive, and get to the threat, and eliminate it. And in another, you may be planking tanks on a 40 mile convoy, and you don’t need that same capability.

So, you want to know what is your cost effective way of doing that. And if you’ve engineered a solution that you can scale up and scale down in the same form factor and you can put that together on the flight line, that’s capability that’s going to endure because it grows with the mission set.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Thank you. And as we enter our last couple of minutes here, just one final question for a quick response to, if I may. We’ve talked about a lot over the last day-and-a-half about integrated by design. And interoperability is a key factor with this. And we’ve seen lots of different western systems being strapped to Ukrainian aircraft at the moment. If we want to get after integrated by design from a weapons system perspective, how do we go about getting after that issue and get some commonality across allies and partners? General.

Maj. Gen. Stephen T. “Steve” Sargeant (Ret.):

There’s probably some lessons from the past that are worth pulling up again. And that was an exercise that was held throughout NATO in the ’80s called Ample Gain where aircraft would move from one base where they were assigned to another base with total different Airmen from another country being able to maintain, gas them up, and load weapons.

Well, in order to do that, you’ve got to get away from multiple different sets of test equipment because this is not affordable in today’s world. So, if you can actually get to common, expandable well into the future test equipment, whatever weapons come up tomorrow, can be tested today and in the future. And that’s one way to do it so that you make Multi-Capable Airmen across the coalition, not just in your own Air Force.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Snooze?

John Martins:

Common platforms as well. F-35, almost everybody’s flying that on the good guy side or so. So, the weapons, even coalition weapons going in Block 4 or so. It’s another way we show up and you just know what the other folks are doing and thinking.

Steve Milano:

Yeah. I have to agree that the common test equipment, common logistics train, it’s very important. Once we field our weapons, if you have a unique logistics footprint that you’re needing to adapt to, that’s a very challenging thing for us as a contractor to be able to plan for and help work with to satisfy your mission space.

But also, commonality across wave forms, commonality across interfaces, UAI compliance is a big thing. So, having F-35 is big. But across multiple platforms is also important as well. And so, if there’s some commonality and discussion points to be able to drive towards common wave forms, common interfaces.

RAF Air Cmdr. Blythe Crawford:

Brilliant. And thank you very, very much gentlemen for a fascinating insight into the future challenges we have with weapons and munitions. It’s encouraging to hear that you’re thinking ahead, and we’re we’re going to be doing something about it to stay at the front end of our game. So ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to join me in thanking the panel for a fascinating conversation.

Watch, Read: ‘Space Warfare’

Oct. 16, 2022

Retired Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider moderated a discussion on “Space Warfare” with Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt of Boeing, Shon J. Manasco of Palantir Technologies, and Jim Reynolds of SAIC, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

If your firewall block YouTube, try this link instead.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Good afternoon. Thank you. It’s not afternoon yet, is it? It’s afternoon somewhere in the world. It’s good to see you all. We have a wonderful audience with us here today. Thank you so much for being here. Hopefully, the conference has been an exciting and engaging opportunity for you. I have just been thrilled with meeting all of the folks that are here this year. This is a record- breaking year for ASC, so it’s been really fun to be out there. I’m Kim Crider, Major John retired, I retired last year, it’s hard to believe it’s been a year. And I think I have a lot of friends in the audience, thank you so much for being here to listen in and hear some of these interesting perspectives that we’re going to bring you today on space warfare. I will tell you, in the time since I’ve retired, I’ve had an opportunity to be out and about in industry, and there is some amazing innovation going on out there today.

We’re seeing a lot of that here at the conference, of course, on our exhibit floor. Our industry partners have come out in full force, large, medium, small companies that are joining us, and really showing us all of the great capability that they’re bringing to bear, to advance our war-fighting capabilities, not the least of which, our war-fighting capabilities in space. So we’re going to talk a little bit about space warfare today, and what’s interesting is that you have a space warfare panel that is made up of industry, industry leaders, which really speaks to the shifts that we’re seeing out there, in terms of how critical … certainly, industry has played a critical role in our war-fighting capabilities since the beginning.

But when it comes to space warfare and the space domain, we’re seeing even an even more critical and vital role that industry is playing as a partner in the process of not only developing and delivering capability, but integrating those capabilities with our military capabilities, as part of our overall integrated architecture. So we’re going to talk a little bit about that as we get into this today. I’m going to give our panelists just a couple of minutes to introduce themselves, and then we’ll kind of roll into it. So let’s go ahead and get started. Stu?

Jim Reynolds:

Thank you, ma’am. So my name is Jim Reynolds, I’m at SAIC, working the defense space account for them. I started about six weeks ago, so pretty new at SAIC, learning the organization and the mission. Before that, I was at Raytheon Intelligence & Space in El Segundo, working missile warning, missile tracking, types of programs. And then before that, I was in the Air Force. I retired in 2019, working primarily space programs, both on the acquisition side and the operation side, across what was then, Air Force Space Command, the National Reconnaissance Office, headquarters, Air Force, working space superiority programs, missile warning programs, primarily.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Thanks, Jim. Shon.

Hon. Shon J. Manasco:

Well, good morning, everyone, Shon Manasco. It’s great to be back at the Air and Space Conference, cyber conference. And I, today, work at Palantir. I’ve been at the company two months, and prior to that, I worked alongside many of you, to include General Crider, at the time. So I would be remissed if I didn’t say thank you publicly for your partnership when we were together in the Pentagon, and really, your thought leadership, and how you looked at data and really drove a strategy for the Space Force and its creation. So Kim and I worked together, I was acting under secretary at the time. And like I said, it’s great to be here, and particularly, it’s fascinating for me to be here on this stage with my two colleagues here, and talk about this very important topic. So I look forward to getting into the discussion.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Thank you, Shon. Stu.

Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt:

Yeah, thanks, General Crider. Thanks to AFA for putting this on and inviting us to come speak. It’s always fun to get back and get close to the uniformed folks again. My current role at Boeing … I’ve been at Boeing since 2015. I manage the internal research and development funds across both our commercial and government sectors, so we’re seeing things in a much broad perspective on what space warfare and the potential of space warfare is doing, both from the government standpoint, but also, on the commercial side, which we’ll get into today. Before Boeing, I had 22 plus years or so in the Air Force, and did a couple assignments through space superiority. So back in the day, I was with Jimmy down there, and we were the Chicken Littles, telling everybody the threats coming, the threats coming, and it finally showed up. And it’s good to be part of the solution still, and outside in the industry, and looking forward to today’s talk.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, so just to kind of open things up a little bit, it’s hard to believe, but it was really just five years ago that then Secretary of the Air Force, Heather Wilson, and three top Air Force leaders, Chief Goldfein, Chief Raymond, and Lieutenant General Sam Greaves, who was leading at the time, Space and Missile Center, told Congress, and really, this was the first time that this was kind of a declaration, space is no longer just an enabler and a force enhancer for our US military operations. It is a war-fighting domain, just like air, land, and sea. And freedom to operate in the domain is no longer guaranteed. We heard this again just this past week with Lieutenant General Saltzman, as he went forward for his confirmation hearing, reinforcing these critical points that were made five years ago, to Congress now.

And also, the countries which pose the greatest threats to the United States’ assets in space are not surprisingly, Russia and China. So in the five years since, our national leaders have responded to the growing threat and the risk it poses, not just to our way of war, but in fact, as we all know, to our way of life. In these last five years, we established United States Space Command, charged with the responsibility to defect, to protect, and defend US and allied national interest in space. We stood up the United States Space Force to organize, train, and equip for space operations. All the while, our adversaries have become more belligerent, as witnessed by China’s aggressive SJ 20 actions in space, and Russia’s [inaudible 00:07:22] and [inaudible 00:07:23] launch, continuous jamming and cyber attacks, not just on US and allied government-owned systems, but commercial systems, as well, as we saw in Russia’s attacks on US commercial Satcom capabilities during the Ukraine crisis.

There can be no doubt that the age of space warfare is upon us. Space is contested, and any entity, nation, state, commercial, civil industry, academia, research, that wishes to operate in, through, and to the domain, does so at risk. So what can we all do about it? What role can industry play in helping to deter conflicts in space, to raise awareness of the threats, to accelerate and enhance the capabilities of our space war fighters around the world, and to promote safe norms of behavior, and increase resiliency in the domain? I’m going to turn now to each of our panelists to share their thoughts on the role industry is playing and should play more of to deter space warfare, and help protect the ultimate global commons of space. So let’s start down at the end of the line with Jim. Jim, from your perspective, what role can or should industry play to help deter conflicts in space, or enables space war fighting?

Jim Reynolds:

Great, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to get to share my thoughts with the audience here today. I think, for me, it really starts with creating that digital environment or ecosystem, or whatever buzzword you want to use. But it has to be one environment that you can coexist industry partners, government, commercial, international, at the right level. And that’s the hard part, is determining how to do that in one environment, instead of many environments. And then, how do you do that, but still be able to protect the information, the classification of certain levels? We have various levels of classifications and access, but it’s also for industry. How can you protect the intellectual capital, the intellectual property that comes along with providing that? But once you have that open, accessible, trusted environment, the abilities to use that environment are endless. Starts with being able to really do that forced design work, and prove out what you need, and then enable the introduction of various capabilities in a more continuous integration, continuous delivery process, so you can stay ahead of the threat, you can be adaptable to changes in the environment, and you can prove that out.

And then lastly, you have to have the data, the information, accessible. We love to talk about the sensors and the systems and the rockets and satellites, but those are the means. I mean, those are the cool means, so it’s nice to be working on those capabilities, and they’re very, very important. But it’s really, how do you take the information that those means provide, and turn it into decision quality and trusted information that we can use to maintain resiliency across our space enterprise? As we introduce more and more systems into this environment, it becomes very complex, and then we can take advantage of the opportunities that the information technology age offers for digital engineering.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Thanks. Let’s pick up on some of those themes that you laid out there, Jim. Shon, I know from your perspective, you’ve thought a lot about data, and you’ve thought a lot about the importance of data in support of war fighting operations in, through, and to space. What are your thoughts in terms of the role industry can play to enable more effectiveness in the domain?

Hon. Shon J. Manasco:

Well, I think I agree with a lot of what was said, previously. Here’s the way I kind of think about it, and Kim, you touched on just how things have changed in space. A few things that I would just note, our adversaries, Russia and China, and we can talk about the things that they’ve done recently, and we can talk about just how irresponsible some of those activities we might find, I will say that, in particular, I really appreciate Secretary Kendall’s focus on China. And I think it’s fair for us to just acknowledge in this room that we are in competition with China, and China is playing a game, and it’s a game of go. And we sometimes like to play chess. So we should be thinking about all that they’re doing on orbit as them playing the game go, and taking the real long view.

And so, I think for us, what that means is, we have to acknowledge the game that we’re playing, especially with that particular adversary. Now, bringing that closer to home, one of the things that I think we have to do as industry to help the war fighter is, we have to partner better together. So at Palantir, really, our focus primarily is on data, and creating a data fabric that we can blend in together, national assets that we might have on orbit, but also, to pull in commercial satellite data, and weave that together, ingest it, and make it in a usable format so that we can then transmit that to users on the ground, and/or war fighters that are sitting at SpaceCom.

And so, for us it is about partnering with one another, but also being able to field a set of capabilities that do allow us to ingest, for us to then fuse together that data, and then turn it into something that is actionable. And that’s where our focus is today, and those are some of the things that we’re doing in support of the space war fighters, especially as it relates to domain awareness.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Outstanding. Thank you so much. Stu, let’s pick up on this idea of partnering and increased collaboration between industry and the government. And from your perspective, what does that look like, and how do we increase the amount of partnering that goes on? There’s a lot that goes on today, but how do we take it further, so that we can really continue to advance our capabilities and our ability to deliver those war fighting capabilities more effectively?

Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt:

Sure, thanks, ma’am. So if you pull on the thread, and you start the thread off with, the ideal position is to provide you the war fighter what you need to get the mission done, and make sure that you come home safe. So if you start with that objective in mind … I’ll be additive on the comments, because I agree with everything that Jim and Shon were saying about working together. A lot of the environments that we are talking about, you can’t actually go test and try out these capabilities on orbit, so you need the digital environment, you need to partner closer. I’d like to say, the real nugget of this is, how do industry partners get in your head space? What are you thinking about as the war fighter? What are you thinking about as the operator, when you’re going to use a system? What are your TTPs? How do you think about the kill chain? How do you think about the threat? How you’re going to use the system, and maybe you use it differently than the way it was built, and its intended purpose becomes even better.

And I think to do that, you have to really kind of focus on, where are the current and future leaders’ minds? And in Boeing, we do a lot of research on papers that you all write at Air War College. I’ll give you an example, General Hyten wrote a paper when he was a lieutenant colonel back in 2001. His wife corrected me last night, he published it in 1998, Sea of Peace, Theater of Conflict, the Inevitability of Conflict in Space. It’s a great paper, it’s a mandatory read for most people at Boeing that are getting into the space environment.

And why? Because to better allow the engineers to innovate and provide the capabilities that you need to go to war, we have to understand where you’re thinking. What are the things that you require? And outside of the partnerships, which, we’d love to do that, right? And outside of the environment to operate in, getting into that mindset, and being able to speak the same language. When you come over, and we’re going to do a mod sim run of a GEO, HEO orbit scenario, already speaking the same language because we’ve been researching, what are the problems that you’re staring into and what you’re thinking about, is crucial to moving forward in that partnership side.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Great. Thank you so much. So increasing the integration through the digital thread, leveraging data across that digital thread more effectively, as we look at space war, fighting, space war fighting needs, and working very closely together through active collaboration, so that industry and military can approach our war fighting challenges from a common perspective, as we’re leveraging data and digital capabilities. These are all critical to enhancing our ability to be effective in this domain. Shon, you talked about China, and you talked about the formidable adversary that they are. And certainly, they’re playing the long game, and presenting capabilities that are significant.

But Russia is an important adversary, too, and we’ve seen play out, of course, all of us have been watching play out in the Ukraine crisis, some of the ways in which space and cyber are vulnerable to attacks. And we have always often said that conflict will begin in space and in cyber, and we’ve seen that occur. From your perspective, of industry’s perspective, as you guys have watched this play out, and we’ve seen that, while the Gulf War was the first space war, Ukraine has really become the first commercial space war. What do you think the Ukraine crisis has taught us, regarding the role of commercial industry in space warfare?

Hon. Shon J. Manasco:

So I’m happy to start and open it up to my colleagues. So to me, as I step back and I look at the conflict that’s happening there, to me, it’s a classic David versus Goliath kind of engagement. And we’ve seen recently, the success that the Ukrainians have had. Now, we all know that we don’t have boots on the ground in the Ukraine. I will say that, from a Palantir perspective, we have deployed forward with our partners within DOD, and we’re working closely with western allies to really help monitor troop movement and combat activity. And so, we’re very proud of our embedded analysts and engineers that are engaged in that work.

The thing that strikes me, though, is, outside of the will of the Ukrainian people, the importance of software and data, and what that’s doing to give them the upper hand. It’s clear that commercial satellite communications and imagery is being used now more than ever. And to me, while we are collectively engaged in this fight, it’s one of the things that I believe we can create environment and a set of dilemmas for China, if we can, in our commercial entities and work with our national assets, to prove that we can work together and integrated. And it will also get at the resiliency that you talked about, that’s so very important, and that Secretary Kendall has talked about, as well.

Jim Reynolds:

Yeah, pick up on the resiliency theme a little bit. So recently, the Space Systems Command hosted what they called a Tactically Responsive Space Industry Days. And I was very impressed with the messages that came forth from Space Force leaders, General Guetlein, General Bythewood, General Sejba, about how tactically responsive space isn’t a separate thing, it’s something that we need to have inherent in all of our capabilities. And so, where that comes into play with resiliency is, you have to fight with what you practice with. So that was a quote from General Guetlein, and I’m sure many higher up senior leaders, but it resonated with me in terms of, if you don’t practice with these commercial and international capabilities, and information that those capabilities can provide, whether it’s to reconstitute capabilities that we have inherent in our architectures, that we may lose through a threatening environment, or the ability to support our allies in their conflicts without, as Shon mentioned, putting boots on the ground.

We have shown our allies the way that they can leverage existing capabilities into their way of defending their nations, as well. And then, finally, just to get back to the original message I had earlier, it’s really about the data and the information, less about the systems, or the means to get that data. And so, making that data accessible when you need it, to make the decision quality and real-time decision making that it takes to execute war fighting in this age, it’s not just space war fighting, this is war fighting that we’re doing.

Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt:

Yeah, I might add on, if I can, this will sound a little strange, but normalizing the conversation around space warfare has had a net benefit for what I would call the nonstandard DOD industry, commercial entities in particular, where they used to, as an example, for Satcom, they would deal with frequency interference. You’re selling your service, and you’ve got interference somewhere, which means you’re dropping bits, and you’re not able to sell that service, and you’re losing revenue. Well, break break, change narrative, and now they’ll just call that a contested environment, and it’s jamming versus an interference. But the fact that we’re talking openly about it, and we’re having conversations about space warfare, has got the commercial industry starting to think about not only how they can apply principles and activities and things that they do as a course of action of normal service providing, but also now, how can I customize, or what can I do differently to this commercial activity that I have, that could benefit the war fighter and be used in a contested environment?

And if they are working down that road, now it’s, how do you get into the space where you’re actually allowed to practice with that system, and actually buy that service and utilize it so you, the war fighter, can figure out, is it meeting the need? And then, provide that feedback loop to the commercial side. And I think the whole discussion and narrative around space warfare has really opened it up. I can tell you, looking across both market spaces, the conversations we’re having today with the commercial services providers that we build satellites for, are drastically different than they were four or five years ago, drastically different, and I think net benefit to the US war fighter in that, we’re able to kind of openly discuss, there are problems on orbit, and there are things happening, and commercial does have a place to play. I think there’s still going to be a need for the purpose built systems, but certainly, any resiliency I inherently drive into my commercial systems, it’s going to be net benefit.

Hon. Shon J. Manasco:

Kim, can I also jump in? Just one other thought. This idea of … I grew up in a different service early on, and then I came to my senses and came to the Air Force. I hope this is not recorded, so my Army brethren don’t see or hear that. But the truth of the matter is, this idea of train as you fight, is a really important concept. And so, as I look out in this audience with a group of war fighters, here’s what I think you should challenge us in industry to do, is truly partner. Because what I would rather do to better deliver you a solution that is useful, is to force the integration of our collective strengths before the need is there.

Because what happens sometimes is, we don’t necessarily always do that, and then when we have a crisis, then we’re trying to scramble to make things talk, and set up the data integration like you want it to, so that then, we can turn it over to you for you to do your jobs and do it effectively. Just imagine, though, if you were to challenge us with partnering on the front end, how much easier it would be, the next time we enter into a live conflict, you’re not going to be scrambling around, we’re not going to be scrambling around, and you’re going to be that much more able to, again, do the job that you’ve been given to do.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Yeah, great point. Jim, let’s pick up on what you said. I loved what you guys were saying here about, normalizing the conversation has been absolutely critical, not just to get the American public and Congress more aware, but also, so that industry can be thinking about what they’re delivering in new and different ways. And Jim, you mentioned tactically responsive. Tactically responsive is a mindset, right? There’s certainly very specific things that we see our US military, US Space Force asking for, from a tactically responsive perspective.

And I think you made the point that tactically responsive is part of this new way of thinking. It’s this new way of making sure we can posture ourselves to be tactically responsive to the threat, and to ensure that the capabilities that we’re planning for are positioned for that, so they are go ready. And of course, we need to be able to integrate those in, and work with those early and throughout the development process, as Shon said, to be able to challenge industry, to be in the fight up front, throughout the planning and development and delivery. What do you see, Jim, perhaps, as some of the obstacles to that collaboration, and to industry really being able to develop that tactically responsive mindset?

Jim Reynolds:

Yeah, I would say, the biggest challenge right now is the connectivity from the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. There’s really no environment available that allows that interconnectivity at those levels. And it’s critical, because in order to be tactically responsive, you have to understand how you fit into the broader strategy. You have to understand how you fit into the broader war fighting strategy, not just space. So that begins with operational exercises, the modeling and simulation of how the data and information that can be provided from assets in space, sensors in space, can enable the joint war fight, the joint all domain command and control interconnectivity, so that, when we do these operational exercises, or bring in our international partners, or introduce non-traditional capability providers, they can understand how that fits into the strategic picture, down to the operational level.

And then, from a tactical level, then you have the specific operators really understanding their relevance to the joint war fight. And instead of just being one piece, or protecting their one piece, they understand how that fits into the broader picture. And that’s important from a training and a testing and a trust perspective, because at the end of the day, this is really about relationships, building trusted relationships, whether that’s from industry to government, or between acquisition testing and operational communities within the Department of Defense, or finally, extending that to our international partners, as well.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Great. Thank you so much. And I want to pick up on this thread, too, with you, Stu, in terms of your thoughts on this, and also, if you would tie in the international piece. We’ve talked a lot, we hear a lot about Allied by Design, so it’s a focus area, it’s really important. How do we bring our international partners into the process early, and throughout the design, development, delivery, operation of capabilities. From an industry perspective, and in order to be most effective and resilient and responsive to this threat, how do you think about Allied by Design?

Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt:

Sure. So I’ve been lucky enough to have been part of the WGS program, which has a multilateral MOU signed by … geez, I think we’re up to 12, maybe even 15 countries now, where they partner with the US on utilizing Satcom off of the WGS system. And you see a lot of activity, I think international space is exploding, a lot of activity with the Australians wanting to be contributors and not just consumers to the fight, and bring their own systems in. But you’re seeing it everywhere, and I would offer up that, when you talk about Allied by Design, that we’re talking about industry leaving the hooks in to ensure that when the coalition comes together, and you’re in the ops floor, the coalition ops floor, that you guys are all operating off of the same systems, and their systems are interoperable with US systems.

And that’s what industry’s worried about, industry’s worried about, how do we ensure that we’ve got the hooks in there, and are we using the right standards? Are we using the right interfaces? Are we designing appropriately? We would also kind of take the position that, I think you would much rather have the systems built in the US, and sold with that interoperability in mind. And so, how do you then start working through release ability of technology to allies? And I think we’ve seen some success and movement on that front with the US government in ensuring that what we are providing to our allied partners is up to the standard and up to par with what we expect as US war fighters.

And so, I think there’s good movement there. I think there’s a little bit more can be done around the clearances and security. I think we always kind of talk about that. There’s mechanisms and ways that have been opened up to be able to have the knowledgeable discussions with our allies about the true threat and nature of what is happening in space, so that they can effectively respond. The more I think you share with your allies, I think the more they’re willing to step up and bring those systems with the hooks to have interoperability to the fight. So that’s what I think about when I think about Allied by Design, is kind of along those three chunks.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Great. All right, let’s talk a little bit about something that we’ve just heard very recently in the news, and certainly has been kind of fall out from the recent conflict activities in Ukraine. And this is the discussion that’s going on in the halls of OSD, in particular, about, well, what if a commercial company is caught up in the conflict? We know we want to integrate commercial capabilities into our hybrid resilient architecture, but what if those commercial capabilities are damaged in the conflict? What kinds of compensation or indemnification needs to be considered? And how do we think about that as we continue to increase the partnerships between our purpose built capabilities and our commercial capabilities, and the providers of those, to enhance our overall war fighting capability? So Shon, let’s start off with you, and get your thoughts on this conversation that’s going on.

Hon. Shon J. Manasco:

Well, I’ll answer very succinctly. I remember being in the Pentagon and going through all of the war games that the teams would run. And one thing always emerged, and that was, if we don’t win in space, we don’t win. And make no mistake, winning matters. And so, from my perspective, if commercial satellites get caught up in some irresponsible behavior, then we have to do what it takes as a nation to win. Now, if that means addressing this policy and being clear about what the federal government will do, I think that is something that is absolutely imperative, if, in fact, we value winning. And I know that, I speak for myself, I certainly value winning.

Bryan “Stu” Eberhardt:

I add onto that, I’m very excited that the conversation is starting, because I think the commercial providers are looking for that kind of conversation. Commercial industry is very different in how it gets incentivized to do business. And if the government’s waffling on the fence about whether or not they’re investing in a service that they want provided, it may not be exactly what you need, but if you can incentivize the commercial side to say, hey, look, we’re going to ensure that, as we utilize your services, if something occurs, that conversation happening gives the commercial industry at least a target out there to think about how they’re developing their next generation systems, and incentivizes them to think more about you as the customer, versus just the standard services that they provide out there, whether it’s cruise ship, airplanes, all the different commercial services that they pride. So I think having this conversation at this point in time is key, crucial, and I think commercial industry is really going to value, if not a decision, at least the fact that we’re acknowledging that this is a potential out there that could happen.

Jim Reynolds:

Yeah, I think Stu and I have been hanging out too much together, because I was going to talk about incentivizing, too. Because that’s the way I thought about it when I heard about it. We need to pull out any incentive possible to encourage this type of behavior. We’re encouraging companies or groups or non-traditional thinkers to take risk, and one way to do that is by providing some assurance that, if your risk goes badly for you, that the government can support you and will support you for taking that risk. So it’s just like any other type of investment, it’s an investment that I think the government is putting up their backing towards. And I think it’s a great way to make sure that we’re all working together, bringing in all the capabilities that we can, all the data sources that we can, to take on this threat.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider:

Really well said, thank you so much, all of you, for your thoughts on that. So we’re going to wrap this up. Space is a war fighting domain, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. And what we’ve certainly seen play out, and what we’ve heard about today, is that it’s an absolute team sport when it comes to space warfare. We’ve got to continue to focus on getting those critical purpose built capabilities out there, but we’ve got to integrate commercial capabilities into the fight to have that truly capable, resilient, hybrid architecture that’s going to ultimately help us win.

Shon, you said it best, if we don’t win in space, we don’t win. And we win with data, we win with integration, we win with digital insights, and we win with the best capabilities that we can bring to bear. Thank you. Thank you for your thoughts. Thank you for your insights. Thank you for being part of the team. It is, in fact, one team, one fight, and we’re going to win together because of the capabilities that you all bring, and the insights and ideas that you help us innovate on, that are going to continue to help us surge forward. Thank you all for being part of our panel today. We look forward to your feedback.

Watch, Read: ‘ACE and Enlisted Leadership’

Oct. 16, 2022

Retired Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Jim Roy moderated a discussion on “ACE and Enlisted Leadership” with the Command Chief Master Sergeants of U.S. Air Forces in Europe Benjamin Hedden; Air Mobility Command Brian Kruzelnick; Air Combat Command John Storm; and Pacific Air Forces David Wolfe; and Space Operations Command senior enlisted leader Chief Master Sgt. Jacob C. Simmons, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Jacob C. Simmons, Senior Enlisted Leader-SpOC CMSgt.

CMSgt. David Wolfe, Command Chief Master Sergeant, PACAF CMSAF Jim Roy, (Ret.)

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

Again, welcome. This forum is the Agile Combat Employment, otherwise known as ACE, and then listed leadership. As you see. The group of folks in front of you there. We’ve got a very distinct group that is here to talk to you about ACE and the employment of our multiple capable Airmen and Guardians. First of all, to my left, I’ll just go right down the line here. My left, Chief Master Sergeant Brian Kruzelnick from Air Mobility Command. All those AMC warriors out there. Absolutely.

CMSgt. Brian Kruzelnick:

There’s like three of them.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

There’s three of them. They’re over on this side. So I’m waiting to see where ACC and PAF and USAF are. Along with that, we’ve got Chief Master Sergeant Ben Hedden from US Air Force’s Europe and AFAFRICA. Chief Master Sergeant John Storms from ACC, Air Combat Command. John. Chief Jake Simmons, Senior Listed Leader Space Operation Command. Give it up for space. Come on now. We just heard The Guardian. We just heard a new song. Wasn’t that special. Thinking your living history. You just met the person that wrote that song. That’s pretty great. And then also we have Dave Wolfe all the way from PACAF, all the way from Hawaii. Again, most importantly, we have you our audience. Without you, this is not possible. And as Chief Murray just mentioned, 16,000 Airmen and Guardians here this week. That is simply amazing. You should give it up for yourself. That’s quite a unique challenge. That’s the largest ever that I can ever remember and I’ve been coming to these for a lot of years. So give it up to yourself as well.

I want to start with BK. Air Mobility Command. As we talk, and normally I’d let the group tell a little bit about yourself. Because our limited time, I thought we’d dive right into the questions because really I know what’s on your mind and what’s on your mind is this idea of ACE and how the enlisted leadership falls into this. So BK from Premier Mobility to command from the MAF perspective, how can illicit leaders best prepare to operate using the ACE concept?

CMSgt. Brian Kruzelnick:

Well Chief, thanks for the question. Appreciate being with you, Chief Master Air Force number 16, Roy. Incredible. And you got to hold down two cops and two maintenance dudes and a space guy. So good luck to that.

Really to AFA, General Roy and Chief Master Air Force number 14, Murray, thank you for hosting this. That’s a ton of people. You got to be very strategic if you want to get a cup of coffee in the morning or else you ain’t getting it with that many people. And lastly, thank you. We had a little bit if we’d have more people on the panel than in the audience and obviously you guys are outnumbered by a little bit so I’ll get back to you on that one. So that’s fantastic.

So back to the question. How do we best suit a MAF warrior for ACE? And I’ll talk to MAF because that’s what I do. I think there’s three parts. We need to have education. I think the other part is really understanding what we’ll call MAF board gen force elements look like and then train to MCA. And then the last piece is just sets and reps and where we’re going to ask you to do the work. So let’s talk to education. We use the same word with a lot of different meanings. So if you haven’t, I would ask you to look at the doctrine note 1-21 which is entitled ACE. Crazy Enough. And give you really good foundation of what we’re talking about. I think there might be confusion because the Vice Chief actually went further and put out a key terminology memo that kind of talks about the presentation and employment approaches to make sure we’re all using the same vernacular and it means the same thing.

If you really talk about ACE, really basic, it’s a proactive and reactive scheme of maneuver that increases survivability while generating combat power. Just that easy. Since it’s a scheme of maneuver, that’s why the AMC dude is here. I’m not pretty and witty as Ben Hedden here, but we run the scheme of maneuver, AMC and MAF is the only or the meaningful maneuver force for the Department of Defense. I say that because it’s more than just Air Force, it’s ACE. It’s Army’s multi-domain task force, part of multi-domain operations. It’s Navy’s distributed maritime operations. It’s the Marine’s expeditionary advanced based operations. It’s all of that. So joint integration is incredibly important because we do have 110,000 total Force members, 1,100 aircraft. But that is not enough to go into silos of excellence for agile combat concepts. We got to come together and I would say allies and partners, but I’m sure Chief Wolfe will talk about the allies and partners piece.

But the joint integration is critical. From a MAF perspective, we need to have our Airmen understand that so much that my boss, General Minihan came up with a team he’s put together called the Fight Club. And this one we talk about. With this Fight Club. It is a cross sectional team of experts that are trying to look at what is the winning scheme of maneuver in the Pacific against the PRC or against China? The joint winning scheme of maneuver. That has enlisted people and that has officers on it that are working through that. As we kind of figure that out, we went to Indo Paycom… Well, we’re about to go twice to have that conversation. We also went to each one of the major commands, almost all of them, and we will hit all of them to also talk that out. And it improves every time that we look at it.

There’s four major gaps in that. One is C2 and we talked about that yesterday. It’s a huge AOR. And with contested logistics, with dispersed operations, that’s a very hard problem to solve. Another is navigation for the same reasons. Another one will be contested maneuver. Think about running an obstacle course while people are shooting at you. It becomes a very difficult problem. Then the last one we’ll call ops tempo and that’s their ability to stay in the fight in the first island chain. Our Airmen are living and breathing, how to solve those hard problems each and every day on top of offering that to industry as we’ve done here and some of our other engagements to also try to solve those problems. We need our enlisted Airman who could be a captain and a master sergeant with a bunch of junior Airmen on a island somewhere trying to get after an objective. They need to understand what we’re asking them to do.

That kind of plays into these force elements that we’re going to compose that make up AFFORGEN, or in our case, MAFFORGEN. And what kind of supplements that is a multi capable Airman. I don’t know if I like the term cause it freaks everybody out. If you have deployed in the last 30 years and you were asked to do something that was outside of your soul specialty, you were a multi capable Airman. We just didn’t call you that, right? So that’s the baseline of it. You’re going to go out to our steer location, there’s going to be gaps in what we’re trying to get done and you need to stand in that gap, whatever that job happens to be. The Air Force’s Expeditionary Center, which just happens to fall underneath AMC, teaches a level one MCA training, so everybody has the same baseline and there’s different levels depending on what you’re asked to do per your mission set.

We have contingency response folks at AMC. Now this is aerial porters, this is defenders, this is ATC, this is a conglomerate of specialties that all can do each other’s job just as well as one another. That’s probably the highest level. Those are the folks that go into an air base, assess it, open it, establish C2, and then hand it off to somebody to operate on. Not everybody’s going to be asked to do that, but you all do need a baseline of what MCA is and we need our enlisted Airmen to understand that. It’s nothing new. We just gave it a name and we’re going to put a little structure behind it. Don’t get scared. We’re going to be able to get through it.

Really another piece on that is understanding mission command. And that’s really just understanding mission type orders, commander’s intent. When you are separated from an air operations center and you’re not sure what the most realtime information is, still get after your objective at that location. And like I said, that could be a Captain or a Senior Master Sergeant and a bunch of NCOs. Still push forward, achieve your objective and then we’ll push out. Because there’s a short period of time to be agile. Proactive, reactive scheme of maneuver. So those are the baselines on that. The last thing is we got to get you sets and reps in the AOR.

If this is a Pacific fight, and that’s what I will talk to because I’m sure the next person will talk to a different fight, we have to be able to understand what that AOR looks like and the way we’re going to have to maneuver there. So Air Mobility Command does things called the Mobility Guardian exercise every two years. It is a gigantic robust joint exercise where we work through these war fighting concepts and we’re going to do this year’s in the Pacific, the closest to the first island chance we can without being provoking. That’s what will happen. If you’re an AMC and you are not in the AOR, you will run parallel exercises that match what we’re doing in the AOR. So this way, everybody’s participating. And this is the way we’re going to try to get the sets and reps we need to win or have that winning scheme of maneuver in that AOR. And I think I talked quite a bit there so I’ll stop. At the end of the day, Chief, education, we need to understand AFFORGEN, the force elements in MCA and then we need sets and reps.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

That’s great, BK. Thank you for doing that. Chief Hedden, maybe a little real world current events, if you will. Maybe what’s going on in Ukraine and how that’s helped the Ukrainians from our ACC concept if you will.

CMSgt. Benjamin Hedden:

People always ask what’s the reason, purpose of ACE, the why? And I always just go right back to what happened in Ukraine. We’re in day 209 of Russia’s 72 hour military operation in Ukraine. Day 209 of their 72 hour operation. That was the second largest air force in the world, Russia invading Ukraine, with the 27th largest air force in the world. And Russia still does not have air superiority. We wouldn’t live like that, right? That’s the first thing you want to do. And that’s what our joint partners want. The Army, the Navy, the Marines, everyone wants us to establish air superiority so they have scheme of maneuver on the ground without threats. They still don’t have it. It’s amazing. And how did they do that? Well they’d ACE’d. They moved their planes from the airfields they were at so when the Russians struck, they struck the spot where the aircraft were sitting yesterday. They weren’t sitting there today when the missiles hit. They were sitting in another air base and they’ve continually moved their aircraft around and moved their surface to air missile batteries and all that stuff around.

And in the last 10 days, open source, read on Reuters, the last 10 days, the Russians have lost four aircraft. Day 209, Russians have lost over 55 fixed wing aircraft. That’s what people are estimating open source. 55 fixed wing aircraft. That’s crazy. Ukraine’s only had like 200 aircraft and they’ve shot down 55 Russian aircraft. So that to me shows importance of ACE because the Ukrainians are still operating 209 days in with a much smaller force and they’re agile and they’ve been able to do it because they’re NCO core. When I talked to their Chief Master on the Air Force, that’s what he told me. Their success is solely on their NCO core. The Russians, they send general officers to the front lines. There’s a Wikipedia page that lists all the general officers from Russia that have died in Ukraine. We don’t do that. We send a master sergeant.

But if there’s a logistics issue or there’s problems, that’s what Russia does. They send general officers to the front line because they do not have an enlisted court that they can empower like we do. The Ukrainians learned that. After the annexation of Crimea, they were like, “Hey, we need to change our structure.” So they worked hard for eight years to change their military structure and empower their NCOs. They understand commander’s intent and you see them all the time, “Give us the weapons, give us the weapons, give us a little bit of training and we’ll take the fight to the enemy.” And they’ve proven that and they’ve done a phenomenal job. And I think that right there to me is the best example of what ACE can bring for us.

So if we’re in any kind of conflict with an adversary, it’s the AXO back in the day, a lot of us old school folks remember that ability to survive and operate, right? And we’re always worried about the chemical weapons. Now it’s our ability to move our stuff before our adversaries can target us. We have to know what our targeting cycle is and we have to operate faster than they can target us. If that means we move everything every 12 hours or 12 minutes, whatever. We have to understand how fast the enemy can target us and then we have to be faster than them and we have to be able to move our stuff, take the fight to the enemy and then recover, reconstitute and launch again.

And when we do this, it’s going to be a lot of times small teams. We talk about sending 20 people out to a forward operating location and the highest ranking person on that team probably going to be a Master Sergeant. Because really we always say, the backbone of the Air force is enlisted core or the NCO core. That’s true. That’s our asymmetric advantage over our adversaries. There’s plenty of articles out there that talk about Russia doesn’t have an NCO core. China wants one and they’re trying to figure out how to emulate what we do. That’s hard. I mean it’s taken us a long time to get to where we’re at and people just can’t decide they want to have a good enlisted core and then two years later have it. We all know that. It’s taken us decades, 75 years. And even then, we were doing it before that when we were the Army Air Corps. That’s all.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

Great. Thank you Ben. So Chief Storms, from an ACC’s perspective, and Ben kind of touched on this pretty eloquently on Master Sergeant and what the leadership is. From an enlisted perspective, where do you see the leadership opportunities in ACE?

CMSgt. John Storms:

Yeah, thanks Chief. So I think that ACE is going to provide our enlisted force. Just incredible unlimited leadership opportunities. Oftentimes we’ll have a young CGO or a senior NCO out there leading the team as Chief Hedden mentioned. We got to be realistic in this. We might be operating in an environment with degraded communication, inaccurate or incomplete information, oftentimes without the specialists or subject matter experts that we’re accustomed to having at our traditional fixed bases. And then on top of that, we may have degraded command and control. We’re going to thrust this kind of less than ideal situation on our junior leaders and ask them to go ahead and execute in accordance with the commander’s intent based on the best decisions that they can make with the information they have available at the time.

So it’s going to be tough, but I think if you are an aspiring leader, this is the golden ticket from Willie Wonka for leadership. It really is a perfect opportunity to express your leadership abilities. I’m excited about what’s happening and as an Air Combat Command, we’ve kind of gone through some exercises and operations. Our enlisted leaders are stepping up to the plate multiple times over and over and over again. It’s really impressive to watch, Chief. Thanks.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

That’s awesome. Chief Simmons, we often talk about the importance of space when we talk about the operation. Currently, in your position, how do you see the perspective of ACE in space operations? How do we employ the ACE fundamentals?

CMSGt. Jacob C. Simmons:

Thank you, Chief. So first and foremost, appreciate everybody being here and taking an interest in how we get after combat employment. You continue to hear that space is congested, contested, competitive, I’ll add that it’s complex. It is extremely complex in space. If you give me a couple of minutes, I’d like to sort level set us all on what the new conditions are in space.

First condition is space is ubiquitous. It is persistently present. It is involved in every mission, it is involved in every capability and it must be intertwined as such. Condition two is space is no longer peaceful, permissive or predictable. That is a new condition we find ourselves in. Condition three, space is a ballistic battlefield. And what I mean by that is things move in space at 17,000 plus miles per hour and with over 50,000 objects in space or nearly 50,000 objects in space, each of those have the potential of colliding at an instant and creating a cascade of long lived shrapnel. That is a battlefield that just doesn’t stop. It doesn’t rest. Space is a technical and a tactical terrain. We have to get after a new set of threats and we have to understand what the new thresholds are.

Condition number five is that space is not one in its own vacuum. Our Guardians and our Airmen have to operate outside of our own vacuums. We have to be integrated. We have to be interoperable. Condition six is that space is moved from being a national interest to a national imperative. We cannot fight tomorrow or let alone today’s wars without space fully baked into the campaign plans and to what the Air Force is doing with ACE.

Now to get to your question, each of the services have concepts for how we get after conflict and dynamic environments. The Army has multi-domain ops, the Navy has distributed maritime ops, stand-in forces for the Marines and then the Air Force, ACE, right? Well, space is dimensionally different. We have to take a look at space from the perspective of our own dynamics and where the Air Force might look at posture and command and control, movement and maneuver, security and posture. Those are those elements of ACE. The Space Force has to take a look at things through our own set of dynamics. I would offer that some of those dynamics might be security. Security of our critical ground links, our ground stations, our networks, our nodes. Mitigation of non-kinetic and kinetic attacks. Speed to be able to disrupt, to deny and to degrade. Resiliency to overmatch and then even to overcome and if nothing else, to outlast. Then that responsiveness to be able to regroup, to be able to recover, to be able to reenter into a fight and stay relevant to the mission that’s at hand.

I would suggest that our ACE from space elements bring together our anticipation, bring together our understanding of what our awareness is and our adaption to the AOR. And we have to look at getting after things, not only in an innovative way, but being able to iterate those things and integrate them into the fight faster and further in than what’s ever been asked from space before.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

And I like the way you said it. ACE from space. I don’t know if anybody else wrote that down, but that’s pretty unique. I’m sitting up here with a big grin on my face because to listen to these chiefs talk about the operations and how involved they are in ACE, it’s tremendous for me to sit back and realize, wow, we’ve really made a lot of progression in our enlisted force development. So hats off to you. And with that, David Wolfe, I’d like to go to you on that particular topic. I’ve spent a little bit of time out in the Pacific. A lot of time on the Pacific. A lot of things that we did in the Pacific were focused on this partner nation building, specifically for my task was the enlisted force. From your vantage point in current ops, where do you see that value of partnering with other nations and specifically to the enlisted force and how that all integrates in with ACE?

CMSgt. David Wolfe:

Thanks for that question, Chief Roy, and thank you for setting the conditions in the foundation during your leadership time in the Pacific for us to be able to operate and do what we’re doing today. It certainly matters and thanks everybody for being here on this panel. My brothers from the other commands have done a great job in illustrating that. So let me talk just a little bit about specifically with our partner nations in the Pacific. We’ve got kind of a sliding scale, if you will, of capability and capacity with our partner nations across the Pacific. It goes something like this. Probably on the less developed end of the scale are things like a country that maybe doesn’t even have an enlisted force to speak of that has much capability at all and they’re more manual laborers and they don’t have any real responsibilities. Something that looks a little bit more like what Chief had talked about with Russia, but maybe a little even less capable than that.

And then all the way up to some of our stronger partners who have a very well developed enlisted force and they partner with us, they have similar weapon systems to us and sometimes even they have kit that we don’t have that we need. There’s a spectrum. And then there’s everybody in between, and everybody’s kind of at a different place. So our objective in the Pacific is to develop a system where each one of those countries, no matter where they’re at on that sliding scale, wherever they’re at, just move them up the next step. Take them to wherever it is that they’re willing to go with us.

These partnerships are so important because as General Wilsbach said yesterday in his panel, you look at the roster that we’ve put together of players that we’ve got on our team and it’s a pretty long list and pretty capable countries that have experience and willingness to play on the same team with us. Then you look at the roster that China’s been able to put together and it’s one and a half maybe, and capability isn’t something that can really be talked about because there isn’t much of it.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of all of us in this room taking on the responsibility of communicating to our youngest people why this stuff is so important. My brothers did a great job of talking about the scheme of maneuver and what ACE is all about, but why do we have to do that? We have to do it because China’s ambitions will take us to a place that we don’t want to be. What might that look like? Right now if you want to take a vacation, you just go on the internet and you book a flight and you book a hotel and you go. What if 25 or 30 or 50 years from now, because you’ve been talking bad about the regime, you’re not able to fly anywhere because you don’t have a social credit score that’s high enough for you to be able to do that? So now if you want to go somewhere, you’ve got to drive to take your family to Disney. You think that sounds a little bit crazy? That’s exactly what we’re up against is a regime.

The Chinese Communist party that would have control over everything on the globe, not just in their region if they reach their ultimate goals. And maybe that’s not in anybody’s lifetime in this room, but certainly it could be in your children’s lifetime or your grandchildren’s lifetime. And it’s our responsibility as freedom loving democracy leaders in this world to make sure that nations like that don’t have the capability to complete their objectives. And it is that enlisted force that is going to be the foundation of whether or not that objective is reached. Every morning when the party wakes up in China, they should be looking out across the landscape and seeing us operating everywhere and then just going back to the drawing board because we’ve done something else that’s complicating their calculus and that’s pushed them back on their timeline with their ambitions. And it’s going to be each and every one of you that’s in this room that’s going to figure out how to change that value of X in their equation that makes them think twice about advancing their goals.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

That’s awesome. I think it was BK that mentioned about the education, teaching this concept. And Chief Storms, if I could just ask you maybe just to drill in a little bit more. When we talk about the education factor of it and the teaching of it, how do you see that Master Sergeant out there to be able to employ their leadership skills in the ACE concept? How would you advise that first senior NCO out there?

CMSgt. John Storms:

Yeah, thanks Chief. I think our senior NCOs are enlisted force period. I don’t think we have to teach them how to lead. Our Airmen do remarkable things every day. They make the incredibly complex seem ordinary every day. If you were lucky enough to sit in the 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year banquet last night and you heard the accomplishments of some of those Airmen, they were all leading and doing it really, really well. So if you’re one of those 12 OAY, congrats. What awesome accomplishments.

But I think as we prepare our enlisted force for ACE ops, we have to develop exercises and training scenarios that are realistic and tough. And we have to allow our enlisted leaders to take prudent risk in training and not be afraid to make mistakes. As we do our debriefs, the feedback has to be timely and accurate and add some value and make sure that we’re learning from the mistakes that we’ve made. As a force, we need to realize that we’ll learn just as much through failure as we will through success. And ultimately, that’s what’s going to prepare us for when it matters most when we’re trying to do this in combat.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

That’s a great idea. Chief Simmons, if I could ask, you mentioned a little bit about jointness and how the Army does this concept, how the Air Force is doing it, how the other services do it. If you can drill down on that just a little bit more, how do you see a Guardian or an Airman being able to express their leadership in those joint environments? Because it’s not just about our education. It’s about also educating our other service leaders as well.

CMSGt. Jacob C. Simmons:

I appreciate that. Certainly it’s all about how we utilize and empower our Guardians and our Airmen. As Chief BK was saying, many of our Airmen have already experienced what it’s like to be a multi capable Airman. From the get go, every single Guardian is cross-functional and every Guardian is deliberately designed to be cross utilized. We have to look at our Guardians and our assigned Airmen and we have to give them the opportunities to be the experts. We know that they are the experts. We have to actually give them the opportunity to be the experts. Our space and our cyber and our intel Guardians that are cross functional, I call them are sci fighters. These Guardians get after it in a couple of different ways, if you’ll permit me.

One is giving them the opportunity to show what they know in the situational awareness and being able to anticipate what’s coming. They see things at ground truth that we don’t always see. And if we think that everything has aggregated up to the senior leaders without talking to the person at the edge, then we are missing a large portion of what the true fight is all about. We need to leverage the interdependencies. That’s in garrison, that’s in theater, that’s in coalition, that’s in industry, that’s within the joint fight. Those interdependencies matter as a Guardian. Because we know, as I said before, that we should not be operating within our own vacuum.

We have to have persistent power projection. Space relies on the base. We are employed largely in place and if we’re deployed out, we are supported typically by a garrison. That base power projection is our lifeblood, it is our runway, it is the oxygen that we need in order to operate. And then the last piece that I would say is that we have to empower at the edges with the authorities to be able to execute at speed. That means we have to be able to trust those leaders at the very front end, the very front edge of the space fight. I think that that is how each of our Guardians have to approach any contest moving into the future.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

That’s great. Chief Hedden, if I could maybe just ask you, I think it was Chief Wolfe that mentioned about his theater of operation, how they’re setting those conditions from an USAFE-AFAFRICA environment. How are you all setting those conditions to utilize ACE concepts?

CMSgt. Benjamin Hedden:

Well, I think part of it goes back to the partners. I think right now we’re doing a lot of scheme maneuver, doing a lot of the ACE. But I think we’re looking more in the future when we go in conflict, we’re not going to go by ourselves. We’re going to go with our partners and allies. And you look at NATO, 30 members right now, about to be 32., my boss said over 600 F35s will be in NATO. That’s amazing if you think about that. The interoperability we’re going to have from that and over 4,500 F16s ever made. There’s a bunch of those out there in Europe too. We start talking about the cross servicing.

So if you have an F35, you should be able to drop into an Italian F35 base and without any US Airmen there and get your jet turned and take right back off. I think that’s where we want to go in the future and this ability to… Instead of us having to move our Airmen forward to service our aircraft or turn our aircraft, “Hey you have F16s and you guys been working on it for 20 years. We have F16s. Why does it have to be a US Airman that hot pits and F16?” It doesn’t need to be. We should be able to do that and then take right back off. I think that’s where we’re trying to go.

As we set the theater, we’re looking at prepositioning, a lot of WRM at certain locations. So that way if you think about the buildup for conflict and how long it takes, lucky for us, we have our squadrons that are signed in Europe, we belong to EUCOM, so we’re able to move already in our theater and go to a lot of these installations. That might be a place in conflict we would go. So we’re doing this real time. Airmen gets to see these airfields. We operate these airfields maybe for a couple weeks at a time or a month at a time. And then we go back and then maybe we leave some stuff there. That way when something happens, we’re ready to drop right in and we’ve done this before. It’ll be very smooth and we don’t have to rely on a bunch of strategic airlift to move WRM and stuff over. We’re ready if the bell rings.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

That’s great. Unfortunately we’re getting close to that time. I wish we had another three hours because I’ve got a lot of questions for the chiefs up here, but unfortunately we’re getting at that point in time. But let wrap it up this way. When we talk about the multiple capable Airmen and Guardians, the idea and the example that these gentlemen up here express and the knowledge that they have in this concept and the leadership that they provide to the Force is an example. For myself, I was the United States Pacific Command Senior Enlisted Leader at one time, and I’ve seen it from that particular view. Obviously, a lot of my questions are really focused in on the joint operations because I think that’s how we do these kind of things. And I think it’s important for us as Airmen and Guardians to not just share this amongst ourselves, but we’ve got to share it with our joint partners because they have to understand the concept.

They have to understand, just like Jake mentioned, he understands how the Army does that operation. I’m not saying he is the only one, but I’m picking him out because he mentioned it. You’ve got to express that to your peer and our other services as well so that they understand what the United States Air Force and the United States Space Force is doing in this environment. I remember when AEF was brand new. That’s a long time. I’m dated, I realize that. And we spend an awful lot of time, how do we market this? How do we sell this? And I say that kind of rippingly because you don’t think of a concept having to market it or sell it, but we don’t operate as sole entities. We operate as a joint team. The leadership team that you have up here knows it, understands it and is able to express that. I turn to you and ask you to do the exact same thing with your peers. So if you would, let’s please give them a hand of appreciation for each of you. Chiefs, thank you. You did a fantastic job. Thank you.

Watch, Read: ‘Secret Weapons: Guard & Reserve’

Oct. 16, 2022

Maj. Gabbe Kearney moderated a discussion on “Secret Weapons: Guard & Reserve” with Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh, Air National Guard; Lt. Gen. John P. Healy, Air Force Reserve; and Maj. Gen. Daryl L. Bohac, Nebraska National Guard, Sept. 19, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

If your firewall blocks YouTube, try this link instead.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

All right. Welcome everybody. This is Secret Weapons for Guard and Reserves, so if you were looking for the unmanned vs. manned, I’m just letting you know you are in the wrong room. But, we’re going to have a great session today. And today we’re talking all things guard and reserve. I’m Gabbe Kearney. I’m with the 142nd out in Portland, Oregon. I’m with the maintenance group there. I do live locally, traditional guardsman, and I’m very excited to be here. This may be my first and only year moderating, as I believe I might have been supposed to bring snacks and afternoon drinks, so I’ve already failed that.

But with us today, we have three wonderful gentlemen, Lt. Gen. John Healy, Chief of the Air Force Reserve, Lt. Gen., Mike Loh, Director of the International Guard and Maj. Gen. Daryl Bohac, President of AGAUS. And we’re going to dive right into our questions. Again, a great session, lot of really meaty, filled questions. And everyone voted, since Gen. Healy is the newest guy in his position, you get to go first. Applause, there you go, yep. And you brought your fan squad out there. As the new commander of the Air Force Reserve Command, how are you settling into your position and what’s going to be your focus for this next 90 day, three months that you’re going into?

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

Well, first of all, I appreciate the opportunity to be here with such an austere panel as well. I am by no means the jokester and the comedian that my predecessor was, so I’ll try my best to be a little bit amusing at times, but mostly factual.

On behalf of the 70,000 plus reserve citizen Airmen, I really am honored to be here as the Chief of the Air Force Reserve, Commander of Air Force Reserve Command. It’s going to be a daunting challenge. I’ve been in the job now for seven weeks, I’ve got 201 to go. My wife told me that. But I’m excited about it. It is going to be a challenge. If you were at the opening comments this morning, there’s going to be some issues going forward and we’re going to have to make some tough decisions going forward. We’ve got a very challenging fiscal environment right now as we try to recover from COVID still. And that cost, in order to bail out the economy, is going to come from somewhere and it’s likely going to hit us hard. We know it is. We’ve got a challenging hiring environment right now. Employment is making it very difficult to meet our end strength and to get the recruits that we truly need in order to be a strong and complete air force reserve.

But also we’ve got a strategic competition that’s going on. It’s no joke, with Russia and their incursions to Ukraine and with China as the pacing threat right now, we’ve got our work cut out for us. And in order to become the Air Force the nation needs the Reserve Command, the Reserve, as the entire ARC are going to have to make some challenging choices going forward to make sure that we fit into that role going forward.

With regard to how I’m going to do what I’m going to do over the 90 days? I’ve got a rather poor track record of lasting 90 days essentially. When I went into EUCOM, my goal again was to last 90 days, take a look at things. Two months, in that case, I lasted before I started making some changes. When I went into 22nd Air Force, I think I lasted two weeks. With the move into the Chief of the Air Force Reserve and the Commander of Air Force Reserve Command, it was 90 minutes, literally.

The change of command, Gen. Brown was down there, promotion change of command, I changed uniforms and we had all the commanders present for a commander’s call. And we issued a task org right out of the bat. First thing we did was ensure that everybody knew from start to finish, it was seven pages, it was great work, it was a team effort in putting together the expectations of what every reserve Airman is expected to do. So left and right boundaries, limits on, from every Airman to every three star, expectations of what I need every single one of them to do every single day. It gets into basic things like basic blocking and tackling of every Airman is responsible to maintain their medical proficiency, maintain mental proficiency, ensure that their family’s ready, physical fitness, and most of all make sure that their AFSC training is where it needs to be, both in garrison and deployable. Every Airman’s got that responsibility.

But then we laid it out a little bit more in terms of different groupings to ensure that everybody had some degree of accountability, whether it’s a unit commander and making sure that their tasks, basically we started laying out, this is the current environment that we’re in. We issued individual tasks to each one in order to be successful in a desired end state. Carried that up to the group wing, NAF commander responsibilities, all the way up to most importantly, in some cases, the headquarters, to ensure that they’re doing the things that are actually helping the units down at the unit level, ensuring that they’re getting everything they need to be adequately resourced and trained. There’s a percentage of the force as well, mobilization assistance, reserve advisors, IMAs. It makes up almost 10% of our force, so we were careful to ensure that they understood their role and their expectations.

Since then, last week was our first requirement placed on everybody, which was 100% acknowledgement throughout the entire command. And we hit that mark, I think we were 99.96% with a couple stragglers in the IMAs out there, which is unfortunately typical for the case. So we hit that mark. The next thing we’re going to be doing is each and every one of those units need to report how they’re going to execute the tasks associated with that task org. We’re going to get on that and we’re going to be moving out constantly trying to measure where we were, where we’re going, where we want to be, and adjusting as necessary to ensure that we’re meeting the requirements in order, like I said, the best tools and practices to ensure that they’re adequately resourced and trained. My priorities were simple, I laid them out first and foremost, which is ready now, and transforming for the future, carrying on the work so that we are ready to be part of the Air Force the nation needs going into the future fight.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

What’s great about events like this is, being so new in your position, is you have reservists in the audience who get to hear directly from you what your priorities are and what your focus is going forward so that they can go and take that message back to their unit and start moving out on that.

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

Well, I tell you what was really interesting, about a week and a half ago, we went out to March Air Reserve Base and I had the opportunity to have an officer’s call. And I don’t think they were used to my style, so to speak, as they asked questions, and I would pose questions right back to them. But what I loved about the visit is that seven page task org, they had in a pocket size, highlighted based on if you were a wing, if you were a group or a squadron commander and individuals and what your responsibilities were. I was blown away by that.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

That’s fantastic. Shifting a little bit to somebody a little bit more seasoned in their role. I put him in the middle. He seems like the jokester, so we’re trying to keep him in line. Gen. Loh, you’ve been in your position for a little over two years now. How have you had to make change and adapt at the strategic level with the influence and setting those priorities for the Guard?

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

Yeah. Hey Gabbe, great question. First off, in the International Guard, when you look across the 50 states, three territories, District of Columbia, 108,000 Guard Airmen organized underneath 90 wings across all mission sets of the United States Air Force.

Let me start with our enduring priorities and then talk about as we shift the new national defense strategy. The enduring priorities for the Guard are ready forces, partnership, people, policy and force structure. Those will be enduring throughout. Two years ago when I took over, we were right in the midst of a COVID pandemic. I had to have mission assurance for our 24/7/365 homeland defense missions. We had the longest and largest mobilization of guard personnel since World War II. And we were sourcing for the overseas fight primarily in CENTCOM, Afghanistan, but also AFRICOM and every other COCOM. So I started with this, ready today. We had to be ready today to do our nation’s work, both at home and abroad. Then I also thought about what we were looking at as everything was going on and we’re in all these legacy missions. We had a National Defense Strategy that talked about one thing, and we heard it, China, China, China. And I said, “We must be stronger tomorrow.” I started out with Ready Today, stronger tomorrow. And that is still carrying through the organization.

But now a new secretary comes in, we’re out of Afghanistan, Russia invade Ukraine, COVID largely over. And so now where do we take the institution of the National Guard and how do we modify it for the future? And so that’s where we’re at right now, about two years in. As you look to the next two years, I said, “How do we operationalize the National Defense Strategy?” And working with our adjutant generals, we’ll hear it from them here in a second, and looking at everything that we do both at home and abroad, I said, “Okay, here are the priorities of National Defense Strategy. Defend the homeland, deter strategic attack against the United States, its allies and partners with the pacing threat of China. We must make that shift. Deter regional aggression. And if all the deterrence fails, we must dominate in conflict. We have to build a strong force. And then we must build a resilient joint force and defense ecosystem.” When you look at that, defend, deter, dominate, and build. Those are the national defense priorities.

And if we’re going to operationalize those, I said, “I need every Air National Guard Airmen to see themselves in those national defense priorities. No matter where you are, no matter if you’re a drill status guardsman, or if you’re a full-time member, when you come to work in the National Guard or when you’re part of that defense ecosystem outside that in your civilian job, you must get out there and do these things.”

The three priorities that we’ve come up with and that we’ll be working through and working together on are one, recapitalization. How do I recapitalize out of old legacy equipment and old missions that our United States Air Force will no longer do, into new? Recapitalization number one. Innovate, innovation at the heart of everything we do. How do I unleash that innovative power across the National Guard, 80% part-time workforce out at the unit level? We need to harness all of that together. Recapitalize, innovate, and then the last thing is engage. We need to engage everybody to make sure they understand what it takes to build a strong resilient joint force, more importantly, for a United States Air Force to build a strong Air Force that can do all the things the nation needs it to do.

Okay, ready today, Stronger tomorrow has turned into realistically think global. Every Air National Guard Airman needs to think global. What’s their relationship into that global enterprise? But we also must act local. So think global and act local is where we’re going to go, and that’s how we’re going to get after the National Defense Strategy and operationalize it to make a stronger, more resilient joint force and an International Guard that can compete and win in the future. Thank you.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Yes sir. And I think every unit can take that back and really start to focus and set their mission priorities to help carry that out. Maj, Gen. Bohac, this is a great tee up for you as an adjutant general, can you discuss how that national level strategy and those priorities are driving those changes at that local level?

Maj. Gen. Daryl L. Bohac:

Sure. Thanks Gabbe. I actually just showed up because I was hoping to find out what those secret weapons were. It’s really good to be here with Gen. Healy, Gen. Loh. And in terms of local, so think locally, act locally and what we have to do with our Airmen, think about this, we’ve come out of 20 plus years of operating environments where we delivered uncontested air superiority. That’s not going to be the case when it comes to China. And so it’s really a mental shift in our Airmen and really our families and our communities that we need to engage with and to get them to see themselves in that light rather than what we’ve been doing for the past 20 years. Rotations for Nebraska, where I’m from, we have tankers in our International Guard unit and so they’ve been rotating throughout EDEED doing other global mission sets, but that’s going to be different. We’re not going to be able to fight the same way.

And so it might be the same kind of exercise activities with a mental mindset of going into contested environments where we’re going to experience attrition, not only of airplanes, but of people. That warrior spirit, that idea is what we have to permeate through our formations to be ready to do the things that our nation would ask us to do in support of the National Defense Strategy.

And then the second part of being local too though, is being longstanding members of the same communities, and being seen as, in some cases, the only representation of our United States Air Force of the total Air Force in those communities. You take the state of Minnesota, the state of Iowa, can name others where there is no active duty base, no presence that’s brought into the communities. It’s up to us as reserve component Airmen to bring that message to our community. Whether it’s a Rotary Club or PTA or whatever it might be, whatever venue we’re asked to come into, we have to be ready to carry the threat of China into those discussions, and obviously in an unclassified way to tell that story. Because that’s what will connect the will of the American people to us who wear the cloth of this nation to carry the fight forward when we have to and to do the things that Gen. Low and Gen. Healy talked about, and in particular for us to defend the homeland.

And that’s not just here in the continental United States. Gen. VanHerck was here from NORTHCOM, he would talk about defending forward, defending the homeland forward and what that means and projecting power and how do we do that. I think locally that’s the shift we’re having to engage our Airmen on and get them to think about and not to be put off by it, but to be prepared for it. To me that’s really the key to our success in being a total Air Force partner is that we are ready, ready to do the nation’s work. And the slogan of the Air National Guard is Always Ready, Always There. But I would add the Air Force saying that Gen. Brown says, Anytime, Anywhere to that phrase. And our ability to project power across the globe and deliver it decisively, it will make the difference. Now, the other thing we have to think about locally I think too, is making sure we’re working as a total force to get the resources we need to be funded appropriately to deliver the effects that this nation requires. Thanks Gabbe.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Yes sir. It’s that continued advocation, yep. Shifting again to the strategic discussion, this is for Gen. Healy in Gen. Loh, given the current NDS, what do you think the role of the ARC is going to be? What secret weapons does the Guard and Reserve possess to tackle the strategic competition?

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

Well, I’ll start with, we provide capacity, capability, we provide accessibility and all of this at speed with experience. That’s how we fit into the grand scheme of things. When it gets to the, and everyone, make sure the doors are shut, the secret weapon up is everybody here? I mean, it as simple as that. We were commenting about a week ago when we were talking about this, we’re like, “Secret weapon of the Air Force? Who came up with this?” But anyway, the programs were already written so we couldn’t change it. The secret weapon of the Air Force is the members of the Air Force Reserve and of the Guard of the people right here sitting in this room and everyone out in every one of the units.

The way we see us providing to that though is through, as I said, capacity. It’s a curse sometimes to have this capacity because unfortunately for the Reserve Command, and this were difficult decisions come in, our capacity lies largely within legacy weapon systems, which is where the challenges of future decisions come from. We have the capacity though, we’re continually showing what we can do with our special mission sets. The capacity to do air evac, 61% of the air evac missions. We’ve got 25% of the KC-46 weapons systems out there right now. Over 50% of the crews are Air Force Reserve. So we’ve got the capacity to offer.

We need to be more driven in capacity in the bomber and the CAF fleet as well though, actively trying to make sure that that occurs. We’ve got accessibility. We constantly, I think between the two of us, constantly are striving to get the message out there of accessibility. And it’s met with skepticism on active component parts sometimes, but the proof is in the pudding, it’s a year old, the data, but it’s unmistakable, 1700 plus participants from the Reserve side of the house, even more so from the Guard in terms of response for OAR or OAW. Within the first 24 hours, we had 30 crews ready. Within the first 72 hours we had 30 tails and 80 crews ready out the door. C-17, C-5, 135s, KC-10s, everything pitching into the fight to ensure we have the proper things done.

In terms of value, we always talk about the value proposition. Again, a point of discussion, I’ll put it politely, in terms of how valued we are. Because the value proposition is as simple as this, I’m not too strong on math, but I can do the math in public of we are 20% of the total force and we are 4% of the cost. It’s as simple as that. Everything else, we’re constantly working and trying to find a cooperative agreement with the active component or what the life cycle cost of a reservist is relative to an active duty member. So we can come to agreement in terms of how to best use that capacity that we provide at value.

And the last thing I like to mention as well, we are steeped in experienced personnel, due to the increase in the operational use of all of our air crew over the last few years. I mean the average pilot in the Air Force Reserve is 3,600 hours, much, much ahead of the active component. All of those things I think is the way we get that capacity and that capability out the door in a timely manner. The key is how we transition that into the capacity and the capabilities we need moving forward.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Thank you, General.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

Hey, hopefully Gabbe, the secret’s out. Okay?

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

It’s out.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

Hopefully it is out there. But when you look at it, okay, the National Guard, unit equipped to fight and win our nation’s wars while simultaneously defending the homeland. That is our charge. But as I thought about this at 75 years, 75 years Air Force, I went back in history and I said, “Where was a time where maybe we were a secret?” And I had to go back to the Korean War. As we came out of World War II and you looked at the Korean War, it was going to be short. Underestimated that one. And you know what? We’re going to do it active duty only. And in the Guard and Reserve we had propeller driven airplanes when everybody else was flying fighters with jet engines and MiGs. And yet we mobilized 80% of the Air National Guard for the Korean War. And we sent these propeller aircraft over there. We hadn’t trained together, we weren’t interoperable. It was a mess. Despite that, the International Guard Airmen, with their experience, overcame a lot of things, flew over 39,000 sorties in Korea and had 39 MiG kills.

Now, fast forward of what our forefathers did in the Air Force to 1991 Desert Storm where we were a fully integrated force, same training standards, same aircraft. We had concurrently recapitalized the National Guard with the active duty. You look at all of the stuff that we’re still flying today, by the way. And now we’re right there on the leading edge and you look at the success that we’ve had since ’91 to today. Over 30 years of continuous mobilizations. In the National Guard, when you talk Army and International Guard combined, over a million mobilized soldiers and Airmen in the National Guard, that is a testament to all of you. So the secret’s no secret, is we have to be fully interoperable, on par with our active duty counterparts and we have to make sure that we get that recapitalization and we are there concurrently with them. That doesn’t always happen and it’s still not happening today. We see it. Okay? And it’s that fight for the dollar.

What do we bring? And I’m going to talk about everything that my buddy here John Healy just did, because it is about the same. Capability at a cost point that’s affordable for America. It’s about capability and cost. The deep experience level that we have compared to our active duty counterparts, we can’t do it without them, nor do we want to. But when we own the weapon systems, when we’re out there in the units, it becomes a family affair and we build a much stronger joint force. We take care of that equipment and we’re deep in the knowledge of it and we’re going to continue to fight for that. And so when you look at that capability, that cost and that deep experience of our officer corps and our enlisted corps, that is really the secret of the Reserve components. And now we need to continue that on from here and into the future. Thanks.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Yes sir. The secret’s out, right? All three of you have mentioned something very consistent in your answers and that is money and resources. What is the Guard and Reserve doing to prepare for those future fiscally constrained environments? Gen. Bohac, we’ll start with you.

Maj. Gen. Daryl L. Bohac:

Well, I think the way we prepare is to tell the story about the value proposition and to create an understanding of what we can do, both in the Guard and Reserve, which is in fiscally constrained times. And if you look at personnel costs alone in the total budget, it’s the greatest consumer of the dollar we’re given by the Congress and the taxpayers of United States. And yes, we need to invest in our people, into our Airmen, into our families to do that. But our ability in the Reserve components in the Guard and Reserve to take on active duty talent and retain it in the service of the total force and to have it available for this nation when it’s needed as a surge component of the total force is something that I think probably consistently gets undervalued, quite frankly and not well understood.

And sometimes the arguments are, “Well, you’re difficult to get to you. We can’t access you.” I could not point to a time in my history in serving in this uniform that we didn’t respond to the mission when we were asked to do it. So I think that argument doesn’t sustain itself very well. I think our ability, it’s a talent management proposition as much as recapitalization of equipment. When you look at things like rebalancing the CAF, for example, across the Reserve components to maybe a 50/50 balance. We’ve done some number crunching, that can save the United States Air Force around $2.5 billion across the fight up. That’s real money even in Congress. And so money that can be used for other things like recapitalization programs, modernization programs that all the components need in order to be an effective force and to be effective globally.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Gen. Healy?

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

I’ll get back to what I started with. First of all, as we’re going through these fiscally conservative times ahead, everybody if you recall back to sequestration, starts protecting their own. They get very parochial in terms of what they’re looking at. And it’s a challenge from a leadership perspective to think from an enterprise solution. What we did in issuing the task org was we identified three foundational activities that we need to improve on how we manage. And they’re all tied to money. Everything’s tied to money.

The first thing we looked at is our human capital management. So how are we going to manage our people going forward? It was interesting when I was at March, one of the first questions I got from the audience was a major from a flying unit who said, “Hey, your task org’s saying that we need to be sharp, we need to be more ready than we were before. We’re doing more with less. We’re maxed out. How are you going to help us with that?” And again, it was different than I think they’d expected when I said, “Well, I’m sorry to say but you’re 106% manned, what do you want me to do?” Then I folLohd it up with, “Unfortunately, you’re only 88% effectively manned.” Which is one of the problems we have to manage with human capital. Basically we’ve got the wrong people in the wrong spaces or not enough of the right people in the right spaces. So we’re truly getting after that to make sure our manning documentation is correct, to make sure our UTCs are properly aligned.

And in that we’re going to be doing a soup to nuts to ensure that every unit is built at the way they should be built. One of the things that came out of March as well as a senior Airman, and this was just music to my ear, a senior Airman who said, I said, “Hey, so you just got qualified as a boom operator in the 135. Are you familiar with the task org?” He said, “Yes, sir.” He says, “My job is to be physically fit, mentally fit, medically fit and AFSC trained. And that is my responsibility in mine alone. And my goal moving forward is to attain higher levels of certification at every opportunity.” And immediately I called to Chief White, “Chief, you got to meet this guy.” that’s what we need to do is to ensure that people are moving out to get the training they need to be in the proper position so the manning works itself out.

Second thing we did is FM. We’ve had the luxury, one can call it, of not having a specified FM execution strategy as we could have in the past because we weren’t in potentially austere times. What we’re having to do now is to ensure that we have all the tools in place to make sure that we are the best stewards of managing that money and execution. And this is where the inner geek in me truly comes out because we’ve really developed some powerful tools using some systems, some business analytics that allows us to see what our dollar amounts are down to the wing level on a daily basis. It used to drive me nuts as an NAF commander where I’d call one of my wings and I’d call headquarters finance and I’d said, “Okay, where are we on obligation and execution”? And we’d get three different numbers. Now it is a tool that manages $1.25 billion portfolio on a day to day basis that provides us the same level of information so we can execute at speed and make decisions and understand the ramifications of those. We need that kind of detail in order to be better stewards of the money.

And then lastly, POM is the third foundational activity. We need the collaborative efforts between the MAJCOMs and our MAJCOMs to ensure that what we’re doing solves an enterprise problem going forward as opposed to protecting what was ours because that’s what we’ve always done. We’re taking a proactive approach to ensuring that we are set up to be part of the Air Force the nation needs as opposed to continuing what we’ve done in the past.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

I think it’s fair to say money is always going to be an issue. It’s being creative and working as a team to solve those problems going forward together.

Gen. Loh, you touched on this a little bit earlier. Your two years in your position, you’ve seen a lot of changes through COVID and the challenges that we have going on today. The total force of the past is not going to be the total force that we need with coming challenges in the future. How do you see that total force evolving to meet those coming challenges?

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

Hey Gabbe, great question. Because we’ve had a lot of discussion on the total force and what the total force means. Okay? Active Guard and Reserve three components come together to deliver air power anytime, anywhere. That’s what our total force does today and it’s what our total force needs to continue in the future.

With that, how do we leverage the best of each of the components? And I think that that is probably the secret sauce of how we make this work. Some of the things are like cross component command. That’s very specific, but it’s things like that, that we can leverage to get out there to make us a much stronger Air Force. So when I look at this, and I’ve heard these two talk about how we’re going to get more money, nice. And then also what we need to do to get after the recapitalization piece in the future, let’s think about both the capability and the capacity of our United States Air Force and how we can leverage the total force to build the largest and strongest total Air Force.

A couple things, okay? In the MAF enterprise, Mobility Air Force’s enterprise, we look at about a 50/50 active component to reserve component mix. Right now there’s huge pressure on the fight or fleet and we’re at a capability and a capacity issue. How do we get after that? Level the fleet. Let’s look at leveling the fleet. Next thing, let’s look at how we can recapitalize. We’ve heard our Air Force, 72 new fighters a year, that’s F-35 and F-15EX. We’re not there yet. And how do we field those faster to the reserve components, both Guard and Reserve. In the International Guard, we are 27% of the fighter force structure, yet the newest equipment, less than 7% of the F-35s, less than 11% of the F-22s. So we’re sitting on A-10s, F-15Cs, pre-LOC F-16s, both of us. We need a strong, healthy recapitalization plan.

What does that mean? Get fighter production up. One out of every two or one out of every three new fighters off the line ought to become to the Guard and Reserve. That gets us on par and gets us fleet leveled and also gets us into that next thing. That will operationalize the NDS and that’ll scare China more than anything else. And now let’s optimize it across a total force in order to get after what really is the heart of the entire problem, how do we defend the homeland? How do we project power overseas? How does tomorrow’s deterrence work so that adversaries don’t start the next conflict? That’s how we can get after that across the total force enterprise. Thank you.

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

I just jumped in too, and it’s what I was talking in the opening comments about there’s fully burdened lifecycle cost. Without that, it was requested by DSD six, eight years ago. It still hasn’t been produced in terms of a fully burdened lifecycle cost. So we know exactly how much every single Airman, whether Guard, Reserve, active duty costs from the day they join until the day they exit, based on permeability, moving in and out within. Until we get a fully burden lifecycle cost, they’ll continue to be non data backed decisions regarding capacity, capability, and force mix. It seems logical to me, it seems logical to Mike, that we’re cheaper. 25% full-time, 75% part-time, we have to be cheaper. The argument is not compelling and it’s not making a difference right now. So that’s where we need to work as well to understand and get the active duty component and the programming to get down that road too

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

As a maintenance officer from one of those F-15C units, that recapitalization really hits home. And I think those were some great points and efforts that we hope to see moving forward. We are out of time for the overarching deep questions and I think your execs would be very proud of you guys for staying on track. I will offer to all three of you to share some closing thoughts or parting words to the audience. We’ll start with you, Gen. Healy.

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

Like I said, I’ll finish like I started, I’m excited for the next four years. I truly am excited at where Gen. Scobee left the Air Force Reserve Command, some remarkable steps forward in reforming the organization. And we’re going to continue those on to make sure that we’re the best stewards providing the tools and resources to get the proper training that every Airman needs. I’m truly looking forward to getting a ready now force and transforming for the future. Thanks.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Yes sir. Gen. Loh.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

Hey Gabbe, thanks for your service, especially in the International Guard. I know that. Commuting all the way across the country to make that happen. Thank you very much. So that’s first. Also, thank for your service here. As far as AFA goes, thanks for your advocacy. All of you are here because you want to see the latest and greatest in our United States Air Force. So thanks. With that advocacy, we will maintain our readiness today, we’ll be stronger tomorrow. And for all of you, how do we think globally, but act locally to make us a stronger United States Air Force? Thank you.

Maj. Gen. Daryl L. Bohac:

Yep, thank you. I would offer this to you, the challenge is to you, it’s the same one we all face as leaders up here, but is to go tell our story. Because sometimes we are the best kept secret in our community. I mean, how many times have you shared a story and someone would say to you, “I didn’t know you did that?” Well, we need to tell our story to those communities out there and the people we serve, the citizens of this nation. And I believe if we do that, we can carry the message about our value proposition. But maybe most importantly, well for me, is to carry the message out there that we’re a force that’s prepared to train your son and daughter, your blood and treasure, to the fullest extent possible to be prepared for that day when this nation might need them. Thanks, Gabbe.

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Yes sir. Thank you again, gentlemen, for your time and you’re very thoughtful and deep answers to these questions. And for everyone, I hope you are taking something back to your unit that you can help carry these priorities and mission sets forward. Enjoy the rest of conference. I believe they’ll hang out for a little bit if you have any other things to discuss up front. But have a great day and safe travels.

Watch, Read: ‘Spouses in the Fight! Advocates for Change’

Oct. 16, 2022

Sharene Brown, spouse of Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., moderated a discussion on military “Spouses in the Fight! Advocates for Change” with Heba Abdelaal, Air Force military spouse of the year; Kat Hedden, military spouse; Eddy Mentzer, Office of the Secretary of Defense; Suzie Schwartz, Military Spouse Programs, Victory Media; and Melissa Gilliam Shaw, Pioneer Utility Resources, Sept. 19, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Voiceover:

Spouses in the Fight, Advocates for Change. Mrs. Susie Schwartz has long been a champion for military spouses and families. She is the spouse of former chief of Staff of the Air Force, Norton. A Schwartz. Mrs. Schwartz works passionately to support spouses and families in achieving their goals by promoting selflessness, teamwork, and a special sense of community. She is active in numerous organizations that support our military and continues to work hard every day toward finding solutions to those challenges that affect our military families.

Mr. Eddie Mentzer is Associate Director of Military Community Support Programs for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He has more than three decades of experience supporting service members and their families. A senior leader within the Department of Defense, the spouse of an active duty Air Force member, and the parent of a military child. Mr. Mentzer brings a unique perspective as a military spouse. He is focused on easing challenges faced by our military families.

Mrs. Kathleen Hedden, is a board certified acute care nurse, practitioner and spouse to the United States Air Forces in Europe, Air Force’s Africa Command Chief. She collaborates with leadership in each wing to find possible solutions to challenges in military spouse employment, childcare availability, and other quality of life initiatives. Mrs. Hedden has a heart to advocate for military spouses and families, especially those living overseas.

Mrs. Heba Abdelaal is the Armed Forces Insurance Air Force spouse of 2022. For nearly a decade, she worked as a congressional staffer and policy aid in the United States Senate. Once she became a military spouse in 2018, Mrs. Abdelaal developed a passion to empower all service members, spouses, and families to use the tools of advocacy and civic engagement. It is this passion to improve military family quality of life that gives her purpose.

Mrs. Melissa Shaw is a communications professional serving clients nationwide in her role as Vice President of Digital Solutions at Pioneer Utility Resources. She leads multiple digital product offerings, manages a large remote team and advocates for fully remote spouse employment opportunities. Mrs. Shaw provides a unique perspective on what life is like as an interservice transfer spouse from the United States Army to the Space Force. Her experience and desire to help others will support spouses for years to come.

Kari Voliva:

Welcome friends. We are so happy that you’re here. I am Kari Voliva, AFA’s Vice President for Member and Field Relations. I’m honored to introduce our moderator for today’s Spouses in the Fight panel, Mrs. Sharene Brown, spouse of Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. Mrs. Brown has accompanied General Brown on 20 assignments around the globe. Raised in a military family, she is an avid supporter of active duty, civilian, Air National Guard, and Air Reserve Airmen and their families.

She understands the valuable contributions of a military spouse to the Department of the Air Force. Mrs. Brown’s mission is to bring awareness to the quality of life challenges that impact military families, particularly in the areas of childcare, education, healthcare, housing, and spouse employment. This led her to create the Five and Thrive Initiative designed to highlight preventative measures, promote best practices, and foster community partnerships. Mrs. Brown, on behalf of the entire AFA family, welcome.

Sharene Brown:

Well, thank you, Kari, for that warm and welcoming introduction, and also for all the work you and your team has done to make this happen today. I’m especially grateful to the Air and Space Forces Association for this opportunity to host our series, One Team, One Fight, to include our spouses, families, and communities, as well as our Space Force Panel, People’s First Session. Addressing the quality of life issues for our Department of the Air Force is not only relevant but significant to our Airmen and Guardians and their families. A special thank you to my Thrive Team for their work on all the things working for Airmen and families.

So it is my honor to be the moderator for this panel. Spouses in the Fight, Advocates for Change. Thank you for being here, especially our spouses, both in person and online. There is no doubt our spouses make a difference and serving alongside their Airmen and Guardians every day, you our spouses are often the agents of change and I’m excited to hear from our panelists today on the ways our spouses are in the fight too. So let’s get started.

So Mrs. Schwartz, this first question is for you. A working spouse on your Air Force journey, a strong advocate for our Air Force community, you bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to our panel. As we come together to celebrate 75 years of our Air Force, we see many examples of our spouses, both past and present, both continuing to add tremendous value to our rich heritage. As I’m sure you’ve witnessed firsthand, it wasn’t always easy. And in many instances, spouses have had to fight to improve childcare, education, healthcare, housing, and spouse employment, since the very beginning.

Your contributions as a military spouse have clearly made a tremendous impact and you’ve played in a critical role in various efforts, including the service wide establishment of the Key Spouse Program and the Center for the Family of the Fallen, located at Dover Air Force Base, just in name a few. What contributions are you most proud of to date?

Susie Schwartz:

Thank you. I think she might have said them all. No, just kidding. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think about what am I’m most proud of and I’m proud that I fought to be able to go to work. I got in trouble for it, but we’ve survived and that’s not an issue anymore. I’m proud that I stood up for families and I tried to have a voice. When we were at Hurlburt, I got a drop in daycare center built, if you can imagine, for families who the mother or the father didn’t work and they could drop in their child. But I think the day that Norton and I drove out of town, they reverted it back. So it only lasted… They were doing the dance of joy as we drove out of town and they got their break room back after we left Hurlburt.

But I’m joking, but not joking because it was very successful. But mostly what I’m proud of, I loved Dover and I love McKee’s Spouse Program, I love EFMP, I love that I got my husband to agreed to have a school liaison officer at every base and he did it in front of a group and surprised his staff. Not sure it was a good surprise, but I’m proud of that. But for the lasting legacy or the part that I think about now is that I’m glad I took the opportunity when I had it to try to make a difference. You only have a short time. And yes, I worked until my husband was a three star. It wasn’t the most successful career because I went back and forth when he had a command and I wasn’t working, when he came up here, I could work and I worked until he had his third star.

And I went down and I said… it wasn’t that I couldn’t work anymore, it’s just that it wasn’t fair to my employer. The last job I had, I was only there for eight months and I just couldn’t do that to them anymore. But I’m proud that when the opportunity presented itself, I knew my mind. I wasn’t afraid to speak up and I made a difference.

I heard from someone at the Warrior Games and she came up to me and she said, “Ma’am, I hear your voice in my head all the time.” And what I had said to her was, “If everyone likes you, if you’re not making some enemies, then maybe you’re not doing your job right.” And as a spouse, that’s even harder to do because you only get things done by convincing others. You can’t tell them to do a darn thing. So I’m proud that I was able to find my voice, take the hits, and believe me, there were many. I’m sure I made many enemies along the way, but I don’t regret any of it. And at the same time, I hope, and I believe, and I know that I inspired others to find their voice and do their best to make a difference. That’s what I’m proud of.

Sharene Brown:

Thank you, Susie. Susie, you have so much to be proud of and we’re so grateful that you’re still in the fight. So one more thing though. Can you tell us what inspires you to continue fighting for our military families, especially our military spouses?

Susie Schwartz:

Sure. Two things. Norton and I chose to stay in the DC area because it makes a difference. Air Force general officers tend to run to Colorado Springs or to San Antonio, both lovely places. But to be supportive, and we swore we would be supportive, we would not be the person that sends nasty grams to the current sitting Chief of Staff of the Air Force. And I think we’ve been successful. I don’t think we’ve sent any snot grams to anybody.

But I chose to be involved because I thought I could still make a difference. There’s a brief moment where you still got the contacts, you can still make some calls, you can still be involved, you can make a difference. And the greatest gift that was given to me, I say it was a gift, and one of the MSOY said, “No, ma’am. This was not a gift. You earned it.” When I was asked to be a part of the Armed Forces Insurance Military Spouse of the Year program, and I think I have some in the audience of my MSOY family, I am proud of them because they make a difference across so many different areas. And I was their mother, maybe now I’m their grandmother, I don’t know, I don’t care. But I love to see what they have accomplished.

I love to watch them when they get an award and maybe five years later, oh my goodness, they’re everywhere. They’re doing EFMP, you have a three digit suicide prevention number thanks to an Air Force spouse, they’re just everywhere. And one of them now… Anyway, I don’t want to say… I don’t want to go down the road to what they’re all doing because they’re doing great things and they make me proud every day and I’m still out there trying to make a difference.

And at the Warrior Games, if you guys have not gone to Warrior Games, you all need to do it. It is so fun. The Air Force has the best team. I just want to say literally and figuratively, we have the best cheerleaders, we got the best outfits, but we win, you guys, we win. And if you’ve never been, you have to do it. It’s a great thing. So you can tell my passion is still there. I still love it. And why not?

Sharene Brown:

That’s awesome, Susie, that’s awesome. You are an inspiration to us military spouses, and thank you for doing for what you do. All right. So this next question is for Heba. So the goal of my initiative Five and Thrive is to highlight and promote best practices that foster community partnerships, so all military families have the opportunity to thrive. Through this initiative, families continue to reach out to me and share their challenges.

As the military spouse of the year for 2022, your platform speaks to spouse advocacy, particularly improving the quality of life for military families. So how has your experience as a congressional staff member influenced your personal advocacy as a military spouse?

Heba Abdelaal:

Oh, thank you for that question, Mrs. Brown. Well, I’ll tell you what it didn’t prepare me for, and that’s to be on a stage, anywhere. But I had the incredibly fortunate opportunity to work for two United States senators that really believed in this aspect of when you take care of people, they’ll take care of the organization. And so when you’re working with constituents and constituents are reaching out to you, and most of the time they’re reaching out to you because everything has gone wrong, everything’s gone sideways, they don’t know where to turn to for help, you’re their last resort. And, “Gosh, why has it taken this long, 8, 9, 10 months to get a reimbursement?”

It’s things like that that really… That’s what families would reach out to us about. And that’s when we’d start digging and say, “Okay, well is this an issue? Is this a larger, widespread problem? Is this something that needs to be solved by technology? Is it another resource problem? Do we need more staff? Do you need more personnel?”

And so you really learned pretty quickly on that all of those issues do have an impact on people. They have an impact on their day-to-day ability to do their work and to go in fully prepared, fully ready to meet whatever mission or whatever job requirements they’re going to have for the day. Something else that really prepared me for, I think, becoming a military spouse. I was a congressional staffer long before I became a military spouse. And so I would see and hear these stories from military families and yes, we knew what we were signing up for, to come into the Air Force.

But at the same time, you learn that there are no easy solutions anywhere and there’s no single solution that’s going to solve or be the 100% solution for any one issue. And so not only did we have to get creative working with other members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, on both sides of the capital, but we had to get really creative working with MSOs and VSOs and community partners to really try to find those 1%, 2%, 3% solutions.

And while they seem small, the impact that they could have on a family and an individual was going to be huge. So I think that is what I learned most from being a congressional staffer, is that absolutely everything that we did touched every single individual’s life in some form or fashion. And for every decision that we made, there was going to be an equal and opposite decision on the other end. And how do we move forward, share best practices, share ideas to make sure that we are serving as many people as we possibly can. That’s really what my congressional staff experience gave to me.

Sharene Brown:

Wow, that’s wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. I especially love the fact that you recognize taking care of the people than results in people taking care of the organization. So to that, let me just ask you, where do you encourage families to go when they have a quality of life issue and they want to be heard and addressed?

Heba Abdelaal:

Thank you again for that question. And I’ll actually say, this was really a product that came from your initiative, Mrs. Brown, Five and Thrive. And thanks so much to the Thrive team. I hadn’t met any of you, but I knew you were working quietly behind the scenes just like a congressional staffer would. So thanks for all of your hard work. Thanks for all of your support. I really cannot tell you how much your encouragement has meant to me. And because of the five big quality of life pillars, Mrs. Brown, that you helped us identify through Five and Thrive being the childcare, education, housing, healthcare and spouse employment, we have started, we have initiated conversations and dialogue about an initiative called the Family Life Action Group.

And the Family Life Action Group, or FLAG, is going to be a tool. It is going to be a tool for everyone, for all of us, for uniformed personnel, for family members, spouses, dependent, survivors, retirees, civilians, all of us that are affiliated with this military life, with the Department of the Air Force to help communicate best practices, opportunities, the solutions that you have found in your communities that work, help us scale those. Let’s talk about it. Let’s pitch them like Shark Tank. I think Mrs. Brown, you and I had this conversation many times. But hey, could that be an opportunity, something that works at Tinker Air Force Base, could we scale that and go send that somewhere else? Does it work at Edwards? Who knows? Let’s have those conversations, let’s have that dialogue, and we’re just really, really excited for this to get off the ground.

Please, please, please, my co-leads would absolutely kill me if I didn’t mention that we have a website where you can go to find more information. We’re hoping to be fully operationally capable by February 2023. But I’m going to ask for your help. I’m going to ask for your help because when it comes to the five big Rs that the Department of Defense cares about, it’s going to take every single one of us. And those Rs are going to be your recruitment, your retention, your readiness, your resilience and retirement. And so it’s a military life cycle and it’s going to take every single one of us in this room to help make it happen.

Sharene Brown:

Thank you, Heba. All right, now we can see why you’re a shining example of our military spouse, and we’re fortunate to have you as our military spouse of the year. All right, so let’s jump over to Eddy now. Eddy, you ready?

Eddy Mentzer:

I’m ready.

Sharene Brown:

Okay. So thank you for being here with us today, first of all, and then having recently PCSd with your family and continuing to work remotely, you are a representative of an uneventful, if it can be said for a military spouse to transition and maintain employment. So in the most recent Blue Star Family Survey, respondent shows 63% of employed military spouses are under employed. Additionally, military spouses face unemployment rates that are four times the national average.

Although we have made great strides in our military spouse employment over the years, these statistics show we still have a ways to go. Eddie, as a military spouse and an associate director of our family policy for DOD, how have you seen employment opportunities for spouses improve and what still needs to be done to allow spouses to find a meaningful and fulfilling employment?

Eddy Mentzer:

Absolutely. Very good questions. And first, Ms. Brown and Ms. Raymond, thank you so much for putting this together, AFA as well. Having military spouses have a voice is critical at every aspect. And when we look how full this room is, and it’s not all military spouses that are here, there’s a lot of uniforms in here as well where their spouses said, “You will go to this forum.” And so that’s critical. The challenges that we talk about, whether it’s spouse employment, whether it’s childcare, these are challenges that are not new challenges. These are challenges that have existed for our military families for a long time.

But as we look at what the Air Force, what the Space Force, what the department is doing, there are so many new opportunities for it, we are in a new age and new opportunities and we know that Covid proved that there are opportunities much more than we ever anticipated for remote work, so that’s one of the areas that we have to continue to focus on. We have to continue to focus on that with our employer partners that have made these commitments to recruit and hire and retain military spouses, but we also have to do it in-house.

We have to look at ourselves as a preferred employer. And when I say ourselves, I’m talking the Department of the Air Force, I’m talking the DOD, who better to work across all of the challenge that we have, than military spouses themselves. When we look at the five colleagues that are on the stage with me, and I say colleagues, because I see each one of us as colleagues, because we are part of this fight, part of educating not just those that are here in the audience, the leaders that we have today, because I’ll tell you, every one of our leaders understands the challenges.

This is not new to our leadership. Everybody gets it and there’s a lot going on. One of the things that I’m very excited about, especially when it comes to that underemployment issue that we talk about. In calendar year 23, we are going to be launching, and we’ll have more information on this coming out in December, we’ll be launching a DOD funded Spouse Fellowship. This is a fellowship where military spouses will be placed into corporations, into companies, and they will be compensated. That means that they will have paid fellowships.

Now, there are organizations out there that are doing this right now and they’ve had amazing success hiring our heroes at the US Chamber are doing great things around this, but the fact that the department with congressional assistance is able to build onto what’s already happening is huge. So if we can place our career ready military spouses into those employment opportunities, but here’s the key, it doesn’t help us if we place them in there for a 12 week period and they get hired at the end and then they PCS a year later and they lose the job, that doesn’t help us.

We have to keep them employed. And that’s really what we are going to focus on is finding employer partners that not only are committed to bringing in a paid fellow into their organization and then hopefully transitioning them into full-time employment, but keeping them employed as we move forward over time, as that family PCSs. And for the department, I can tell you across the board, whether it’s our leadership in the Air Force, whether it’s our leadership within OSD, we have a focus on these challenges. There is so much more to be done. There is no doubt whatsoever.

We also have to understand that we as a community, as colleagues have five amazingly successful women on this stage with me today. There are many other military spouses that are in the crowd right now that are watching us online that are extremely successful. Why? Why are they successful? What do they have? What are they doing differently that others may not? So how do we share that? How do we create forums like this? And this is one forum, we need more than one forum, but how do we share that success that has been able to… For me as a federal civilian for 32 years, how have I been able to carry that for 32 years with a successful military spouse that just graduated Wing Command? So how do we continue to carry that forward?

We have to have opportunities to share and spouses across the board have to continue to advocate and to articulate and it’s more than just identifying the problem, it’s also identifying the solution. And we have a lot of solutions out there.

Sharene Brown:

That’s awesome. Thank you, Eddy. I’d like to say I appreciate your insights as well as your encouragement for all of us to continue working toward this issue. The other thing, I’ve heard a lot of spouses who reach out to me who are overseas and are talking about some of the difficult challenges that they have. So from your perspective, are there efforts to address those unique challenges our military spouses face while living in another country?

Eddy Mentzer:

Absolutely. One of the greatest challenges, you can look at spouse licensure when you cross state lines as a challenge. But when our spouses have to go overseas, we know that there are very limited opportunities. Not just in the communities that they live and thrive in within the installation, but outside as well. I’m sure we’ve got folks here that are from Aviano and Italy, and we know that the challenges that are presented living in Germany, living in Italy, living in Korea when it comes to employment. So the department is very aware of these challenges and looking incrementally at what can be changed, what can be done? I do think that in conjunction with that, it’s very important to understand that that’s not a Department of Defense challenge alone, it’s also a Department of State challenge.

When we look at the rules that are in place in every country, of course every country is different. There’s no standard anywhere, and it does become a challenge. We have to recognize that challenge. We also have to look for the opportunities. I think more and more you’re going to see a greater utilization of non-competitive hiring authorities in overseas locations. We’re already seeing a couple installations that are piloting, trying to use those authorities more. There’s an Airman that I’ve been pen pals with or email pals with for about a year and a half that has really taken this on and the challenge that his spouse faced when they were in the Pacific. And so he’s looking at solutions as part of his work and his efforts.

So there’s a lot of people that are focusing in on this overseas challenge. I think there is some good news on the horizon. One of the things that we’re very aware of and focusing on is what are called Digital Nomad Laws. And Digital Nomad Laws are being picked up across Europe. And really what it comes down to is the realization in Europe that non-residents can work remotely within countries. And we’ve seen some very positive movement in allowing for remote work from the states or from other locations. So I think that’s something that if you’re a military spouse that is overseas or is looking at moving overseas, the first thing you look at is, what is doable?

And the best thing you can do is to contact the Employment Readiness Office at the gaining installation because they are going to be the experts. If you’re looking at your own business or if you’re looking at working remotely for a company that you’re already working for, you also want to check with your JAG. And at the gaining installation, they’re going to be best positioned to tell you what is doable, but keep an eye on those digital nomad laws because I think those are going to have a resounding impact on our remote workers that are looking at moving overseas.

Sharene Brown:

Oh, that’s awesome. It’s great to hear that we have an overall view or a top down view of some of the things we need to look at, especially when you look at overseas assignments, the department of the state and just this digital nomad looks like it would be very much interest to a lot of us. So thank you for sharing that, Eddy.

So this next question is for Melissa Shaw. I’m so excited that she’s here with us today. She’s our representative from Space Force. Thank you for being here today. So our Air Force Family Tree has grown exponentially over the years and we are so happy to have with us today our Space Force representative to celebrate the last 75 years. As you may know, our force began with the US Army Air Service and became the US Army Air Core in 1926. In 1947, it became the US Air Force. Most recently, in 2019, our service tree expanded to even more with the Space Force. So Melissa, as an army spouse newly transitioned to the Space Force, were there any prior spouse experiences or insights that better equipped and prepared you and your family for this transition?

Melissa Gilliam Shaw:

Mrs. Brown, thank you for having me and it’s an honor to represent the Space Force today. We are a very proud Army family. We have taught our kids well. If we say, “Go Army,” in our house, they respond with, “Beat Navy.” The 15 years of active duty that my husband spent in the Army also included two years at the Pentagon helping to stand up the Space Force. He started there in January 2020. He was one of the first 12 officers at the Pentagon helping stand things up. And I would say that the years we spent in the Army, we were not married for all of his time, he did two full deployments before I ever met him. But by the time I met and married him, he was teed up for his third deployment. And so at the end of our first year of marriage, he had been active duty seven years, and he had been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for 36 months of that.

We’ve been married 10 years now. We have three kids, born in two countries. We are on our sixth home. We have been stationed all over the place. We’ve had great experiences in adventures as I like to call them. And I think that some of the things that has taught us, one thing is it has taught us that we are in this together. I am never a victim to this lifestyle. We make every choice that we make as a family together. So every opportunity he gets in the military, we discuss it. Obviously there are times where he doesn’t get a say in what he does, but when we’re presented with choices, we make those choices together. And that makes me feel very empowered. And I would encourage the spouses in the room to do the same. That’s something that I take from those years of constant change in the army.

Another thing that we take away from that, he is currently in command of a fairly high ops tempo deployment, Space Force Squadron. Not a lot of our squadrons deploy as frequently as his does. And so I feel like that our experience having… We were married and three weeks later he was boots on the ground in Afghanistan and the first person died in his unit a week after that. And so I’ve been there, I’ve made the lasagna, I’ve taken it to the other families, and I’ve lived that life and I think that the deployments that we support in his current squadron are not typically as dangerous as the deployments that he was on in Afghanistan.

However, I can relate really well, very firsthand to what it’s like to be a newly wed and have your spouse leave or to try to hold down the fort when they’re not there. I think that the Department of the Army has done a great job helping folks be able to, and I’m probably not going to use the right military language for this, but to be ready to move quickly. And so that’s something that we’re trying to help our families be prepared to do within our sphere of influence in this Space Force as well.

Those are a few of the things that we bring. It has been an absolute honor for us to have a front row seat to the development of this space force. Some of the spouses in the room today have taken me under their wings and helped me learn the way, and I have a lot of hope and excitement about the times that we have in the future as well as my gratefulness for years in the Army before.

Sharene Brown:

Oh, this is awesome. I’m sure that your experience will benefit so many of our folks and the folks who are transitioning from other services will benefit from your experience as well. So let me just ask you, moving forward, what role do you think spouses can play in contributing to the overall culture of the Space Force?

Melissa Gilliam Shaw:

I think that’s a great question. One of the things that… anyone in the room who’s touching the Space Force family at all right now, it’s not a surprise to you that we are shaping the culture every day. Things are happening and changing the last 12 months, how many small changes have been made to uniforms? We’re talking about the Key Spouse program. There are so many things that we are doing that we have an active opportunity to shape a brand new service of the military. That’s a responsibility, and it’s such a fantastic one. Don’t take it for granted. If you have the opportunity to contribute in a positive way, you don’t have to have a mindset of changing something. You can just bring what you bring, bring your unique skillset, bring you, be authentic, bring that to the Space Force community, and we’re going to grow.

We’re going to end up even greater than we already are as a community of family and Guardians. I think that that opportunity exists every single day and we’re having those conversations, for two years now, two and a half years, we’ve been having those conversations at our dinner table, two or three, four nights of the week we’re talking about, “And this has changed and this has changed and this has changed.” It’s a fantastic time. And we all have, all of us who are in the Space Force family or who are even in influential positions within the Department of the Air Force, have an opportunity to have a positive impact.

Sharene Brown:

So thank you for being here today and sharing your perspective. It just seems across all services that the one thing about the military is that change is constant. So thank you so much. And so next on our panel, Kathleen, Kathleen Hedden. As a military spouse living overseas, there’re incredible opportunities to travel, experience new cultures, and build an old [inaudible 00:34:24] community. However, there are also some unique challenges that come with living abroad. So as a working professional in the medical field, healthcare system, a key spouse mentor, a volunteer spouse advocate in your community for many of the Five and Thrive focus areas such as healthcare, childcare, and spouse employment, can you share with us how you find creative ways for military families to support one another through these unique challenges?

Kat Hedden:

Thank you for having me, Sharene and thank you AFA. So I have to say, be careful what you ask for. This is still fresh for me because we’ve never lived OCONUS before. And I always ask my husband, “Get us overseas, babe, please.” I didn’t ask for it in the middle of a pandemic or at the end of OAR. So be careful what you ask for. A lot of unique challenges, to say the least. And I have to say, I’m not one to reinvent the wheel. I really like to use programs that have already been in place. And so a program that I really want to talk about is our sponsorship program. It’s been around for a long time, and I think PCSing is one of those areas and all of us, it’s a rough one. It’s probably one of the most difficult things as military families that we go through is PCSing.

And our sponsorship program has been around for so long, and I think we can just do it better. I think that there’s opportunity to reach out to families early on, share things like, “Hey, you’re going to need a two phone authentication or multi authentication. Once you get OCONUS, you gave up your US number and now you can’t get into your bank account.” I think somebody very close to us, he might have a couple stars on his sleeve, just went through this himself personally. So it reaches everybody at every level.

And I think that sponsorship program, we can just do a better job at reaching out, connecting families with other families that have something in common. If you have children, connect them with another family that has children because they have questions like, “What school am I going to go to?” Or, “I’m a nursing professional.” And so, “Okay, I have questions about licensure, reciprocity, all of these things.”

And I wish that someone would’ve reached out to me and said, “This is the expectation.” And I think expectation management is really big. And if we can just get over that hurdle together a little bit better. Another thing, another program is Heart Link. I absolutely love me some Heart Link, Heba knows this because I invited her to Heart Link with me. And Heart Link it’s very close to my heart because in the beginning it was for spouses who, “Oh, you didn’t know about the military and you just wanted to learn how to be a spouse.” OCONUS it’s so much better, it’s great. It develops you into culture. It tells you about when you get a ticket for your first time. Cheese, German camera, that first flash you get on the freeway, you’re like, “What just happened? What just happened?” I looked over to my husband and he was like, “And we just got our first ticket. I hope I looked good.”

And just those conversations, and again, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I think just sharing your experiences and sharing what you’ve gone through. And I still feel I’m going through it. It’s been 13 months, but I still feel like we just got there. I have to share, a person to reach out was a really good friend. Even closer now, but when I first got there, I was so jet lagged. Our family was so jet lagged. We had one of those amazing experiences with our transition and our flight being canceled twice. Two young children, our four year old, our 10 year old and a dog getting on the plane, off the plane. And then we landed, we got into TLF, I didn’t know what to do first. Go pee, empty the groceries. What do I do first? Everything was very overwhelming.

And we get a phone call and it was, “Hey Kat, you’re going to get in my car because I’m going to take you to the commissary.” I was like, “Huh, go shopping now. Is that what I need to do? I don’t know. I’m so tired, I’ll figure it out.” So she literally, she put me in the car, she took me over to the commissary and I’m going through the motions and I just put things in the cart and she put things in my cart. I didn’t even know if I was going to need them or want them, but we were going through the motions.

And that kindness, that personal touch, it meant everything to me because when I woke up in the morning with at least six hours of sleep, I was so grateful to open my fridge and have things that I wanted, to have things for the kids. So it’s things like you just don’t know what you don’t know moving overseas. And it’s just that personal kindness that I think we lost during Covid and I think we need to get back to a little bit better. And so yeah, kindness is free. Give it out, plentifully.

Sharene Brown:

Well, thank you so much for sharing that invaluable knowledge. Just the opportunity to share some of your realities and the resources that are available to our community is important for all of us to hear. So with that, let me just say I want to thank our panel for being here today. General Brown and I, are so proud of the work our spouses do to support our military families and communities. As a military spouse, I am truly honored to be among you. Such great advice from our wonderful panelists.

As is evident here today, our military spouses have so much to offer Air and Space Forces as well as their local communities. I hope our panel discussion encourages us all, including our military leaders, to continue recognizing the value of our military spouses and the strength they bring to the fight. Living in collaboration with a theme of the United States Air Force’s 75th birthday, We are and we will innovate, accelerate and thrive. Thank you for being here today. We couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.