Roper, Former Joint Chiefs Chair Join Defense Innovation Board for First Meeting in Two Years

Oct. 17, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Former Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, and Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman were among the seven new members of the Defense Innovation Board introduced Oct. 17, as the influential civilian advisory board held its first meeting under new chair Michael R. Bloomberg.

The DIB, composed of academics, technologists, and others experts, consults with the Secretary of Defense and offers recommendations on how the Pentagon can become more innovative and technology-friendly.

The Oct. 17 meeting, held mostly behind closed doors, marks the board’s first gathering in more than two years. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III temporarily halted the work of more than 40 civilian advisory boards and their subcommittees in January 2021, before approving the DIB and several others to resume this past February.

At the same time, Austin announced his pick of Bloomberg, media magnate and former mayor of New York City, as the new chair.

In public remarks after the first meeting, Bloomberg emphasized the need for the board to push the Defense Department to keep rapidly experimenting.

“Innovation isn’t only about science and technology. Innovation starts with people. And it requires building an organizational culture that can develop new ideas, take a few big swings, live with the inevitable misses, and then scale up the ideas that show the most promise,” Bloomberg said. “Fostering that kind of culture is where we can play a helpful role, and we are building from a very strong foundation.”

The seven new members of the board introduced include:

William Roper Jr., distinguished professor at Georgia Tech, senior adviser at McKinsey and Company, and former assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, co-founder of Inflection AI, and partner at Greylock.
Adm. Michael Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Chief of Naval Operations
Gilda Barabino, president at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
Susan Gordon, Board of Directors member at CACI International, Avantus Federal, MITRE, and BlackSky.
Ryan Swann, chief data analytics officer at Vanguard.
William “Mac” Thornberry, former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and member of Board of Directors at CAE.

Roper’s return to the Pentagon comes roughly 20 months after his tenure as the Air Force’s top acquisition official ended. Within the department, he earned a reputation as an innovator eager to push boundaries and pursue cutting-edge technology. Since he left, he had a brief tenure as CEO of drone-maker Volansi and has advised or joined the boards of several other startups.

Having experience inside and out of the Pentagon, Roper said he is hopeful “to try to bring both of those worlds together on the Defense Innovation Board.”

“I certainly know how challenging innovation is inside of the Pentagon and the services, so I plan to treat every recommendation as if I had to implement it myself,” Roper added. “And hopefully we’ll be able to help move the ball forward for those who are serving right now in government.”

In reconvening the board, Austin asked officials to look at two issues in particular, according to Bloomberg—the Pentagon’s relationship with investment capital, and input for the department’s National Defense Science and Technology Strategy.

Roper highlighted that first area as a particularly important issue and a way for the Pentagon to establish new ties with industry.

“I see huge potential for innovation in the private sector,” Roper said. “It’s a way that we can help counterbalance the consolidation that we’ve had in the defense industrial base—not the fault of those companies, it’s the way we’ve done business that’s forced that consolidation. Allowing companies that are a little bit of .com, a little bit of a .gov, be able to work successfully in national security on their path towards commercial success, global success, can be a winning formula for the U.S.”

Such an approach would also be beneficial to the Pentagon, Gordon added, as the two have become increasingly linked.

“Right now we have a much clearer picture that there is a shared value proposition between the department and private sector,” said Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence. “We don’t totally know how to prosecute it yet. But I don’t think it’s ever been clearer that their fates are tied together, that … the national security decision-makers, the department depends on the energy in that sector.

Roper agreed, but also noted that the Pentagon should look to be strategic in its own investments and avoid duplicating efforts in the private sector.

“Not everything needs to be a huge priority, because the private sector is going to move a lot of technology along—and shame on this building if it doesn’t leverage it—but it’s not going to move everything along at the pace that the warfighters will need,” Roper said. “So I think it’ll be different today than it would have been, say, 15 years ago doing this. So there will have to be a proper dissection of what technology will be moved because of private investment for commercial means that can be leveraged, and this building needs to be a fast adopter of it, and then what technologies will not be, and this building needs to be the investor and the accelerator itself. And if it gets that right, it gets the best of both worlds.”

Watch, Read: Gen. Lance Lord (Ret.) on ‘The Spirit of Space Power’

Oct. 16, 2022

Retired Gen. Lance Lord delivered a keynote speech on “The Spirit of Space Power,” 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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Voiceover:

Airman and guardians. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 14th Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force. AFA Chairman of the board, Gerald Murray.

Gerald Murray:

Good Morning. Good morning everyone. Well, we certainly got off to a great start yesterday. What a great day. I certainly hope you felt the same way. And then to be able to see so many of you down in the exhibit area with our industry partners there in the evening. And of course, I hope your evening was great as well for those of us that attended and celebrated the 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year last night. It was really, really a special evening and with just the great Airmen that represent our United States Air Force.

Well, thank you again for being with us today. And as I said yesterday, space is now our middle name. But the Air and Space Forces Association has always been committed to the power of air and space and has always seen them as intimately connected. We begin today with an inspirational message from a giant of Air Force space history. Over 37 years of… Over his 37 year career, he held numerous positions including leadership at the Air University and as commander of the Air Force Space Command. Ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed my honor this morning to introduce to you and bring forward General Lance Lord. General Lord, please.

General Lord:

Good morning.

Audience:

Morning.

General Lord:

Let’s hear a little audience participation here, not precipitation. I’m from Colorado. We need precipitation. Okay, good morning.

Audience:

Morning.

General Lord:

Okay, the clock started here and CSO, I’ve got 10 minutes to do my warmup for you, so hopefully you’ll support that. And Molly and I know the chief and Jim Brown as well as Secretary. Thank you and to all for being here today and thanks to the Air Force and Space Forces Association, I think that’s a tremendous thing. So I want to talk just a couple minutes about the art of space, but in a way that you probably wouldn’t predict, which is kind of like the way I like to do business. It’d be a little unpredictable, but stay on message throughout that. And Mr. Secretary, I’ve read the reports from your statements, etc. over the last couple days. You’ve got a lot of issues that’s on your plate, I know.

And hopefully as we move in the days ahead, we’ll be able to help you solve some of those and even get better as part of the process. But true to my space background in the launch business, I mean, I’m not a rocket scientist, that’s for sure, but I do know a lot about the rocket business. So what we’ve got today is really what we call in the rocket business a hypergolic situation. Take energetic fuel, energetic oxidizer, you mix them together in the combustion chamber and what do you get? You get an explosion. And a real effort is to manage that explosion in a way that it goes out the right side of the rocket, then the rocket escapes gravity. It’s tough to do that, but with enough thrust you can fly anything. You even fly this building with enough thrust, but you know, you might not know where it going without some kind of guidance set, but that’ll be good.

But with that in mind, in a hypergolic situation, the hypergolic situation we find ourselves in right now, and you all do, is you got a retired general officer and an audience. That’s hypergolic. So I’ll do my best to manage that explosion that we can move on from there. But when you talk about the art of space, how could we define that? It’s not the what, because I know what you all are. What I really want to know is who you are, who you are as you’re part of the Air and Space Forces moving forward. So let’s focus on that for a minute.

Now I have, and I’ve tried to instruct my two sons and their brides and our five grandchildren by the way, as we get together on the East Coast to celebrate our oldest son’s 50th birthday, we’ve got the family together and with five grandchildren and all the adults, you got all this variety that it’s created. You got gluten free, you got dairy free, you got all these things. Trying to find a restaurant that will handle all this variation is really difficult. The only thing that, when we sit down for dinner for this big birthday dinner that everybody would agree on was guess what? Who gets to pay? Yeah.

But the variation of the kinds of things that people bring to this business as we talk about the who of the art of space is really important. My oldest granddaughter, Abby Lord. High School senior. Allstate basketball player. I posed the question to Abby. I said, Abby, who are you? She said, Well, Oppa, it depends. And I said, Okay, let me ask the question again. Who are you, Abby? She says, Well, if you’re recruiting me to play basketball, I’m six feet tall, but if you want to date, I’m 5’10. So, that girl’s going to go a long way. But remember the variation of that. So the who of what we are, who are you? We’re all here because in deference to Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha who said, The only way to make money is to learn how to say no, we’re all here because we said yes.

And you want to say yes as you look at the possibilities of what we can do with this organization and what we can do with the Air and Space Forces as we move forward. We’re all here because we said yes, not because we said no, we said yes, whether we’re an Airman or a Guardian, we said we want to be part of this. We took an oath, oath of enlistment or an officer oath, but that separates us from every other business you can be involved in and in the civilians in the community who also provide the industry and the push to help the secretary and the chiefs get things done that we need to. They took an oath too really, to do the best they could to bring forth the products and services that support this business. So the who of this business is you. Every one of us are part of the who.

So who are you? How much do you know about what we need to do? How are you improving yourself to make sure that you can contribute to the art of space? Now how do we, that’s point number one and true to my academic background in the last four minutes and 32 seconds, I better hurry up here. Three main points. We talked about the who. Now we got to talk about the framework for making the who work. And lastly, we got to talk about what are the next steps and how do we launch forward? Well, I would argue, and I know you’ve all heard this from many times, is the technological imperative that kind of drove the Air Force and the who’s of those days were able to take that and exploit it. Well that kind of framework is how we all grew up and that framework is good for us in the future.

Let me run right back to base basketball for a minute. Abby would permit me to say this, but you know the great basketball coaches and the strategists of the time, Tex Winter who used to support Phil Jackson when he was a coach of the Lakers, the guy that sat next to him and when Michael Jordan was playing, his really commitment was to develop what’s called the triangle offense. And I saw him in Los Angeles and I said, Coach Winter, I really wanted to compliment you on your strategy. He says General, it’s a good strategy, but you know what, it only works if you run it.

So remember the framework we’re in. The total force framework that we developed in the Air Force, Guard Reserve, active duty, civilians, the community of industrial professionals as well as the civilian component makes things really work together. And there’s no reason why that can’t continue to move forward in the future as we talk about how we’re going to make the next steps as a Air and Space Force and leading to really taking advantage of the capabilities we have as Air Force and Space Force together.

So don’t abandon that framework, continue to work inside that operation and then move on to what are the next steps. How do we really operationalize that? As I said, having the strategy is only good if you follow it and you have to adapt along the way. There’s no doubt about it. But I know the CSO and also, the Chief of Staff, the Air Force have adapted that kind of framework. And Mr. Secretary, I’d commit to you that that’s going to be the help that you need to solve the joint all domain command and control issue, which you spoke about yesterday. And those are thorny issues for sure. And how you integrate across that, those domains and make sure we take advantage of that. Those are tough problems, but I think we can stand up to that. We need to understand, and I’m sure John Jumper who’s talked yesterday, if he didn’t say it, I would be embarrassed because he drilled it into my head.

You got to have a concept of operations that you follow in this business. So the framework we operate in, the total force, bringing the best technology together is going to pay off for us. So the steps forward are really to take a look at how do we harness all this intellectual capital, the people, the great people that we have, the who’s who make the spirit of space work every day. How do we move forward? Well, I encourage you to read a couple books if you haven’t already, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dr, the Hayden Planetarium. I know General Raymond spent time with him. I really think he’s one of the brightest minds to talk about. How astrophysics fits with what we’re doing in the military. And then understand that there are several books that you should read. One of them is Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

That’s important to understand. The other is Letters from an Astrophysicist because he gets letters all the time from young people especially saying, well, one of them was why did you cut Pluto out of the Lineage of Planets. You know, kids in school learn the planets from in order from the Earth to outwards Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. And now no Pluto. He said, I’ve got rafts of letters from angry third graders. Why’d you take Pluto out of the thing? But the relationship is really, really important to think about. We’ve got one more from Dr. Tyson we’ll talk about, but one I want you to think about too, if you can find a copy of this by Stafford Beer called Platforms and Change. It’s about how organizations adapt and run and are able to operate in uncertain and unpredictable times. This is goes way back, it’s a cybernetic view of an organization input, output process in the middle and the feedback.

Why do organizations react to how they do that? And sir, Mr. Secretary, I know that that’s going to be part of the solution set for what’s going to happen in JADC2 is really how do we work these organizational issues together? I know that that’s something will be important. So do that. Who? You’re the who. We know where we’ve been, now, where we’re going is our ability to kind of harness our understanding, be able to maximize the operation utility of space as General Raymond and I know General Sussmann’s had his hearing and I think that went well. And I know our friend Tammy Cotton is going to be the strategic commander as well. All out of that same mold of people who think about the future in exciting and interesting ways and taking care of the people in the process. The framework we have treats everybody with dignity and respect.

And remember, we can’t do anything as we move forward without that hallmark of the issue. It’s going to be tough, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be things we need to do. And the red light’s on. So I give you four stanzas from my favorite poem, Invictus by William Ernest Henley, British author, and mid 18 hundreds. The last four lines are important: “No matter how straight the gate are charged with punishment to stroll, I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.” You got it. We got it. We got to do it. So I’m proud that you’ll do that and I look forward to hearing from General Raymond. Thank you very much.

Gerald Murray:

General. Wow, General Lord, sir we can’t thank you enough. And I just took the opportunity to be able to thank General Lord by handing the 75th anniversary commemorative coin. But sir, we have a little something else to be able to add to that. And so I want to thank General Raymond for joining me on stage. And gentlemen, if we might and if General Lord, if you’ll take center stage between General Raymond and me.

Voiceover:

AFA Lifetime Achievement Award. General Lance W Lord was commander of Air Force Space Command from 2002 to 2006, at which time he retired. He was responsible for the development, acquisition, and operation of the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems. He oversaw a global network of satellite command and control communications, missile warning and ICBM launch facilities, and ensured the combat readiness of America’s entire intercontinental ballistic missile force. The General held senior positions at the wing and numbered Air Force levels, as well as serving as the commander of Air University. General Lord is the chairman and Chief Executive Officer of L2 Aerospace. Prior to this, Lord served as Chief Executive Officer of Astrotech Space Operations, where he led the execution of expanding core services from spacecraft processing support to a comprehensive line of end to end mission assurance services. He also serves as the Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors for Boneal Aerospace, a role he has held since 2015. The Air and Space Forces Association proudly presents a lifetime achievement award to General Lance W Lord.

General Lord:

Thank you very much. I certainly appreciate this. Real quick story about when I was first commander of Air Force Base Command in 2002, I came to the Air Force Association meeting and they had a big sign says, Check your membership status. So I got in line, I got all the way up to the front and I said, I’m Lance Lord, could you tell me when my membership expires? And they went through the roster, they got to the L’s and they said, Well General Lord, you’re a lifetime member. And I said, I just want to know if you know something I don’t. And now I know you do. So thank you very much.

Watch, Read: Gen. John P. Jumper (Ret.) on ‘The Spirit of Air Power’

Oct. 16, 2022

Retired Gen. John P. Jumper delivered a keynote speech on “The Spirit of Air Power,” 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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Gerald Murray:

Ladies and gentlemen, we are off to a great start this morning. One of the things that we wanted to do at this conference was celebrate our heritage and the spirit of air power. When I think about that spirit of air power I can’t help thinking about my old boss, the 17th Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General John P. Jumper. Ladies and gentlemen, I had the opportunity over the past month to take and spend time with boss again as we completed what we called a legacy tour across eight bases of air and our space bases across our nation.

How good to be back with him to hear the stories and many others that we were with. Boss, thank you. Thank you for being here. It is an absolute honor. Ladies and gentlemen, the 17th Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General John Jumper.

Gen. John P. Jumper (Ret.):

Thank you, Chief Murray, my wingman, and thank you Secretary Kendall, Chief of Staff of the Air Force number 22, C. Q. Brown, Chief of Space Operations number one, Jay Raymond, our manage comm commanders and senior enlisted leadership joining us today. And thank you, AFA, for the honor of addressing this generation of Airmen and Guardians about the past, the present and the future as we celebrate this 75th anniversary of the United States Air Force.

I have the right to claim some expertise here, because some of us here in this room were alive at the birth of the Air Force. I was only two years old at the time, so nobody cared much about what I had to say, but my dad was a World War II fighter pilot and his career in the Air Force was shared with the pioneers of air and space power. These pioneers used to hang around my house. I met Robin Olds when I was in kindergarten. I met Chuck Yeager when I was 12 years old, and the Mercury Seven astronauts lived on my street at Langley Air Force Base in the early ’60s. I was 16 years old.

Later, as an instructor and commander at Nellis Air Force Base we hosted the Tuskegee Airmen, the Flying Tigers and members of the Doolittle Raiders, and listened to these humble heroes tell stories of unbelievable courage and selfless call to duty. That’s when I learned that the spirit of these Airmen, these heroes who helped save the world in World War II, the real spirit of air power is not merely seeking the thrill of higher, faster, farther. They were possessed with that warrior spirit thrust into the souls of those who simply would not allow our nation to lose.

These heroes of that era are mostly gone now, their duty done, their commitment fulfilled. But that warrior spirit must live on in us, the Airmen and Guardians assembled here and on guard around the world today.

For decades our Air Force has been deployed around the world and fought against persistent terrorist threats. That fight continues. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan does not mean that we can excuse ourselves from the battle against terrorism, against an enemy that is as committed as ever before to our destruction. That fight continues.

Our present and future are now complicated by the return of peer adversaries eager and ready to compete for primacy on the global stage. China speaks of the demise of the United States and our form of government. They mock our internal strife, our democracy and our national values. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was largely based on assumptions of America’s weakness and lack of commitment.

So how do we address these future Airmen and Guardians? How do we address these issues? Do we still possess that warrior spirit that has always leveraged aerospace and cyber power to reassure the American people who depend on our courage, our commitment, our integrity?

Our secretary, Mr. Frank Kendall, and our Chief of Staff, General C. Q. Brown have given directions for all of us to follow into the future, clear instructions that we must accelerate change or lose, a focused list of seven operational imperatives; not operational initiatives, not operational suggestions, not seven tasks to be abandoned because they’re hard to do, but imperatives as we as an Air Force, a space force, and a nation require to compete with the real world that confronts us.

We’ve also heard General Jay Raymond, our Chief of Space Operations, state his imperative that space capabilities must be operationalized and delivered at the speed of relevance rather than the speed of committee, or the speed of over-classification, or the speed of typing. The speed of relevance should be much closer to the speed of light.

Can we do these things? Yes, we can. Over the past few weeks I’ve been on the road with several others of the older generation of Airmen. We’ve been on a tour of air and space force bases called the legends’ tour. If you’re old you get to be called a legend, by the way.

My fellow legends were General Dick Myers, General John Hyten, General Fig Newton, General Lorie Robinson, General Larry Spencer, General Suzanne Vautrinot, former Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Jim Finch, and my wing man, Gerald Murray, and Chief Master Sergeant Gerardo Tapia.

We visited several thousand Airmen and Guardians and we saw them working on acceleration and doing their part pursuing the seven imperatives. We saw space warriors on the front range of Colorado who are operationalizing space and creating that speed of relevance, information flow to warriors on the surface and in the air.

Progress is being made and momentum is building, but there is more to do. Emerging doctrine for the employment of aerospace and cyber power will require proficiency and disbursed base operations, and the ability to deploy, set up, sustain operations, and rapid relocate as threats emerge. This is a degree of operational agility that exceeds any previous demands on Air Force expeditionary proficiency.

Pre-deployment preparation, base security inside and outside the fence, sortie generation, engineering skills to build, sustain, tear down and relocate, other essential capabilities like ground based air defense, combat medicine, new concepts of combat search and rescue, new ways to think about tactical airlift, rapid staging of command and control, cyber and space links, and importantly the training of a new generation of installation commanders who think, train and exercise disbursed base operations every day, these are our tasks.

Many needed changes are already underway. Technologies to improve our standoff and precision are constantly improving. Accelerating the kill chain is embedded in the operational imperatives. On the ground or battlefield Airmen in units like the 820, our Security Forces Squadron, our contingency response groups, and work being done by Special Operations all address the tough issues of expeditionary warfare, but they must scale to deliver the combat power necessary to deter and engage a large, well equipped enemy.

Air combat commands, agile combat employment operational concepts, along with the Air Force’s fourth generation concept, shows us the emerging organizations and Force presentation, but the execution of these concepts are in the hands of the Airmen, Guardians and cyber warriors who know how to train for these needs, who know how training needs to be adjusted and what new and modified equipment is needed to deliver these capabilities at scale.

Airmen and Guardians on staff, who are just as much warriors as the people in the field, must work to realign resources and policies to rapidly facilitate leadership’s directions and enable those in the field who have heard the chief and the secretary to strive to comply with their directions. As in every generation, when we place the concept in the hands of our Airmen they will make it better than the concept developers ever imagined. I’m thankful to General Kelly, General Manahan, our manage comm commanders. They get it, and they’re doing the work that the nation needs.

What I’ve seen at our bases during the legend tour has reminded me of every generation of Airmen during my nearly 40 years of service and beyond. The questions that we were asked by our Airmen were not self-serving questions, but about the mission, about how to make things better. We have always lived with frustrations that divert our attention away from the mission, but there has never been a greater need for our Airmen and Guardians to facilitate that accelerated change that General Brown has directed.

If any one of you in uniform doubt the importance of what you are doing listen to this ancient Airman when I tell you that there is nothing more important you could be doing with your life than you are doing for your country today. You are fulfilling the greatest, the least recognized ingredient of human satisfaction, and that is that you are a part of something bigger than yourself. When you look back on your life you will see that it will be hard to match the contributions that you are making now to the greater good of our nation.

As we set about to reinvent ourselves we do so with obstacles. It’s hard to accelerate change as we live through a decade of budget disruption and continuing resolutions and the uncertainty of the threats of government shutdown. The reality of our disruptive and dangerous world demands that the United States remain the beacon of hope and justice, and we rank our ability to deter the fight above the partisan political divides that diverts the nation’s focus and masks the reality of external dangers.

We need and are thankful for focused support from our elected representatives who equip our warriors with the tools they need to fight and win. As we celebrate our 75th anniversary there’s no better symbol to demonstrate that than this star I wear on my lapel today. The star was given to me by General Russ Dougherty, the former Commander of the Strategic Air Command and former President of the Air Force Association.

The star was given to General Dougherty by General Ira Eaker, who is the architect of the bomber offensive in World War II. The star was given to General Eaker by General Hap Arnold, the Air Force’s only five star general in World War II and the leader most responsible for the creation of the modern Air Force. On this coming November 6th I will pin this star on my daughter, Catherine, who will become the third generation of general officer in the Jumper family.

Another big anniversary on the horizon is the 250th anniversary of our nation. We should take time to reflect on our own history and we should celebrate our form of government that through the centuries has always been self-correcting, even as we endured crises, political, financial and social, more severe than we are experiencing today.

As Airmen and Guardians, we took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear to a ruler or political party, but to our Constitution and to the rule of law. By virtue of this common oath we wear the uniform we wear, we dedicate ourselves to our mission and our fellow Airmen and Guardians. All these things we know are part of something bigger than ourselves and essential for us to sustain our way of life and the security of our families and fellow Americans.

The spirit of air and space power is bound in the hearts of the warrior. It is the spirit of the nation, the spirit of air power, the spirit of the warrior, the spirit of the nation, the spirit of America. I leave you with the warriors that I think of often when I recall my days at Nellis Air Force Base, with huge numbers of airplanes in the sky ready against one another and the aggressors start inbound and the mission leader pushes the mic button and utters the words, “Fight’s on. Fight’s on.” Thank you.

Watch, Read: ‘Unlocking the Power of Digital Engineering’

Oct. 16, 2022

Retired Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider moderated a discussion on “Unlocking the Power of Digital Engineering” with retired Brig. Gen. Steve J. Bleymaier of Aerospace and Defense, Ansys; Scott Nowlin of BAE Systems; and Dave Stagney of Pratt & Whitney, 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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Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

I hope everybody’s doing well this morning, day three of this amazing conference. Well welcome to the Unlocking the Power of Digital Engineering panel. I was just saying to General Richardson, thank you for joining us this morning, sir. This is going to be an enthralling dialogue on this topic, and I know we’ve got a lot of folks out there that are doing some amazing things in the digital engineering space. And our panelists here are going to talk to you about some really cool things that are happening in their world that I think we can all take advantage of. So I’m Kim Crider and it’s my pleasure to be your panel host today. As I said, I see lots of familiar faces out there, so thank you, friends, for being here for what I am sure is going to be a rich panel discussion.

As many of you know, I retired last year in June and prior to my retirement, I was the Chief Technology Innovation Officer for the United States Space Force. These days, I’m involved in a number of exciting projects with a variety of organizations, including Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation, I see Robin out there, as well as my role as the Executive Chair for AI Innovation for National Security and Defense at Deloitte, where we’re advancing digital engineering and immersive simulation capabilities to optimize the design, development, production, manufacturing, launch, operation and sustainment of national security and civil space capabilities. So let me take a moment and let each of our panel members introduce themselves to you. We’ll start with you, Steve.

Brig. Gen. Steve J. Bleymaier (Ret.):

Thank you, General Crider. So I’m Steve Bleymaier. I retired from the Air Force three years ago and joined Ansys two and a half years ago. And Ansys is an engineering simulation company. And I am not an engineer, so I think I’m here to be the translator for all the non-engineers that are in the audience. I was in the sustainment side of the Air Force. So I want to start with why? So in two minutes, basically digital engineering is about accelerating acquisition and going faster and decreasing lifecycle costs. In 2018, the NDS said that we need to move towards becoming a more lethal force. I haven’t read the 2022 NDS yet because it’s classified. But to increase lethality, you must accelerate acquisition, you must reduce costs, you must reduce risk and you must increase readiness, reliability and availability. In May of last year, SAF/AQ sent out a memo saying digital acquisition holds the key to unleashing the speed and agility we need to field capability at the tempo required to win a future conflict with a pure competitor.

Our pure competitor, China, increased its military budget 900% between 1990 and 2017 and they have 2030 goals for AI and ML, and to be the dominant power. And they are nationally mobilized and they are moving out towards achieving their goals and objectives. And they don’t have the barriers that we have. So that should give us a sense of urgency. The burning platform is China. Just ask [inaudible 00:03:34]. But even knowing that, knowing about China, there still seems to not be the sense of urgency there should be with accelerating and adopting digital engineering. Christian Brose, the author, says that the only way to deter war is to clearly be capable of winning a war. Two years ago, he wrote The Kill Chain and in The Kill Chain, you basically want to gain a better understanding so that you can make better decisions and produce better actions to achieve objectives. But as one war fighter said, none of my things can talk to each other, hence the need for JADC2.

And Christian Brose said that the root cause of the problem that the things couldn’t talk to each other was that available technology was not available to the military, or is not available to the military. So in business, we have to change or become obsolete. And the classic example is Netflix. General Brown says accelerate change or lose and Christian Brose said that we have to reimagine the ends, ways and means of war. General Richardson yesterday said that he’s focused on the ways and changing those ways. Well digital engineering technology is available today, but it’s not necessarily available to the military writ large. Now, there’s silos that are mainly the classified where they have it, but not the masses. So I like to say not only do we need to unlock digital engineering, but we need to unleash it. We need to unlock it and get it into the hands of the military. And then once you have it, you need to unleash it like that husky that wants off the leash.

Otherwise, you’re not going to experience the power and the full value and its ability to accelerate acquisition across the lifecycle. So with thinking about China again, it’s time for us to move out. And as we like to say in the engineering simulation world, take a leap of certainty. I know that was longer than two minutes.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

That’s okay. No, you’ve put it out there, Steve. Thank you so much. Go ahead, Scott.

Dr. Scott Nowlin:

Yeah. Hi, I’m Scotty Nowlin from BAE Systems, retired five years ago after a career as a developmental engineer doing flight test engineering, some time teaching at the academy, some time doing systems engineering, mechanical engineering. Digital engineering is a reality today. It’ll ought to be a reality for all of you no matter what your function is, right? Financial functions, operation support, maintenance, you all deserve to benefit from systems engineering or from digital engineering and systems engineering. We’ve been doing it for five years, so I’m blessed to be working with about 800 people at Hill Air Force base on the ICBM integration support contract.

We’re a prime on that with a number of great subcontractors. We’re partnered with great companies like Ansys to bring modeling and architecture and linking it from original requirements, linking it along a digital thread, I hope you don’t get bored by all the buzzwords today, linking it along a digital thread, two modeling and simulation tools, two supply chain and sustainment issues. And we’ll get into more of that with some of the Q@A we’re going to be involved in. So I want to thank the AFA for being here and thank all the service members who are here and all those who support the military. Thanks for this opportunity.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

Thank you, Scott. Amanda.

Amanda Brown:

Hi, my name is Amanda Brown. I’m the Director of Digital Transformation for a Sixth-Gen Fighter program at Pratt & Whitney. My role covers the digital and agile transformation that all of our military development programs need to make in order to successfully deliver our customers’ requirements. I have a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, so don’t hold it against us. I have a PE license, an MBA and 25 years at Pratt & Whitney. So I’m coming from a position of… Well if you were to examine my career, you would find a very processed slant to everything that I’ve done. I’ve been a mechanical design engineer on parts, module integration, working at the system level with our class one engineering, change process, configuration management, things like that.

But every role I’ve had, I’ve been inordinately bothered by inefficiency. And heaven forbid, you ask me to type the same information into two fields, I just get irate because I find it so annoying. So it has made me particularly responsive to this current role. I’ve spent the last five years working in model-based and digital transformation areas and I am so excited to see our industry, our customers, our competitors, all responding to this need to change not only what we do, but how we do it. Not only the products that we make, but the processes we use to make those products. So I am very pleased to be here today and I look forward to our chat.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

Wonderful. Well thank you so much. Steve, you really laid it out there. We’ve got to unlock it and we got to unleash it. So we’re going to get into that right away. I think this panel is ready to just get after it. And I want to start with Scott. We’re going to start with you in the middle there, Scott. So you guys, each of you, I think have some really great stories that you can share about where digital engineering is successful and how it’s working in your organizations in industry and in the government. And Scott, as you mentioned, the role that you’re playing at BAE right now is directly contributing to some of our programs there at Ogden. So help us understand, Scott, from a DOD perspective, where is digital engineering really happening? And what results are you seeing that are being delivered by applying digital engineering?

Dr. Scott Nowlin:

So first some terminology. I would encourage everybody to dig out the 2018 digital engineering strategy for a good summary of what the heck we’re talking about when we use that buzzword digital engineering, I appreciate General Richardson coming up with some more specific terminology like digital material management. We’re living digital acquisition with the Sentinel program, previously the GBSD program. I’ve got lots of specific scar tissue with watching that program mature from milestone A to milestone B. And now, we’re living the dream with digital sustainment with Minuteman 3, a 50-year-old weapon system that is going digital where and when it makes sense. So my first hand knowledge is with this breadth of experience along the lifecycle, right? So the left hand side there, we’re dealing with turning paper requirements into government reference architectures that are then put on contract with primes, all the way down to our right side where bills of materials are driven by PLMs, product lifecycle management tools.

I know it’s happening in other places, I see it. I come to venues like this and I see it with industry booths and I hear about it from the stage from senior leaders. And so without knowing all those specifics, I would just encourage folks read that strategy, see where you’re already using those digital capabilities and then look for ways to integrate because the real power of this nebulous thing called digital engineering and the digital tools that you’re using and the digital data that you’re accessing from your seat as a financial analyst, from your seat as an operational planner, from your seat as a maintenance troop out on the flight line is to link that with the other data that’s out there. So I won’t try to give a whole lot of other examples. I know that Pratt & Whitney’s all in though with digital models of very complex systems like air breathing turbine engines. So lots of examples out there and I would just encourage everybody to look for those in your own workplace and integrate with them.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

Thank you. All right, well let’s hear about some of those examples on the industry sides. Scott laid out some things that are happening in the Sentinel program and the ways in which we’re implementing these capabilities for success. But industry’s been ahead of this for some time and I know Pratt & Whitney’s been doing some really great things. So Amanda, help us understand how has digital engineering been applied in industry? What results have you seen?

Amanda Brown:

Yeah, thank you. And just building off of what Scott was describing, we are seeing applications and successes in every corner of the business. We call it digital engineering, but it involves and it impacts every corner of our business. So some of the recent examples, we had a couple, we had two digital PDRs, preliminary design reviews over the summer. And these were examples where a typically very burdensome labor intensive process of lots of PowerPoint slides being sent back and forth and being very static and difficult to digest, difficult to prepare and really difficult to store for later data mining was replaced by using system modeling. Our model-based systems engineering capabilities and organization have really grown through these demonstrated examples over just the past year where document-based processes and information is replaced by model-based, or models that represent the same information and convey the data in reusable and structured forms. So now, requirements don’t come from a customer as a 500-page sentence document. It is a system model that we can then decompose, distribute across our organizations and then measure actuals against. So everything comes as data, is treated as data and gets used as data.

In the two examples I was talking about this summer, we saw what was estimated to be a 48-month process based on our legacy ways of doing things get improved by about a 20-month improvement. So we cut it almost in half by using these digital and model-based ways of communicating and of sharing information. One of the programs in particular found again a very burdensome process that had to do with our control schedule generation for fuel burn. It was normally a many months process was executed in several days and we were elated by this. And then the question is what do you do with that unlock? So now, you’ve unlocked some great capacity and the beauty of digital is it gives you choices. So either you’re three months ahead of schedule, which is amazing and valuable from our customer’s perspective if you are meeting the requirement. But if you’re three months ahead of schedule and you’re read for your requirement, that doesn’t do you much good except that now you have plenty of time to add additional iterations, perform more requirements evaluation. And so you can either translate that unlock into better performance or schedule improvement.

And there are other examples where you get choices than in a digital world that simply aren’t available when you’re doing everything paper-based.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

That’s great. Wow. So really seeing some value added results coming from the application of digital, saving time, saving money, capturing that unlock and turning it into value for the customers. But we know it’s hard. Steve, you gave us the sense of there’s this burning platform out there. We know China is the pacing threat and we’ve got to get after it. But it’s hard. It’s hard. So in your experience, why is it so hard for organizations to adopt? And what are some of the impediments, what can we do about that?

Brig. Gen. Steve J. Bleymaier (Ret.):

So that’s an excellent topic and I’ll cover it focusing on the organization being the Air Force and the Space Force. Although there’s many similarities to what I’m going to say to industry, but the context are completely different in many ways. So we can look at this through the lenses of technology, process, culture and training and funding. It’s not a technology problem. The technology is available and it’s open architecture. But sometimes, technology runs into culture in cots versus gots and that’s just a reality. And then anything that is a change like digital engineering or is new, a new process, it takes time to get up to speed. So look at the process, the current processes, they are outdated. And one of General Richardson’s lines of effort is to revolutionize processes and that’s excellent. They need to do that to allow the Airmen and the Guardians to adopt digital tools. Just look at airworthiness and how we do it or how it’s done in the military. It’s still based on a paper method. While commercial industry is doing like [inaudible 00:17:30] certification using models for the past 20 years.

Test processes are focused around physical testing, but the physical infrastructure of test and evaluation, it’s expensive to fix and there’s huge backlogs. So are they at a fork in the road? Do they invest more and commit to computing power and software to do more virtual tests? Sustainment, the sustainment arena is very challenging. There’s often no drawings, there’s no digital thread, there’s no requirements for things like condition-based maintenance and there’s no dedicated funding. And data analytics and artificial intelligence, that’s currently the process that has been chosen and that’s slow. But data analytics and physics-based models, they’re not in competition. In fact, you can actually fuse them together. You can take data analytics and artificial intelligence and sustainment and you confuse it with physics-based models to create a hybrid digital tune and get a higher accuracy rate. So culture, culture and training. You all have heard the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? So culture, it often keeps people from being able to hit the, “I believe,” button,

Digital engineering and model simulation analysis and taking the place of build and test and physically test, that’s a big change. So that’s difficult to make happen. And it’s hard for folks to hit the, “I believe,” button. So couple that with the fact that in Lifecycle Management Center for example, 35% of the engineers are retirement eligible, there’s a thousand vacancies, the SPOs are manned at about 50% of engineers. So they are stretched thin. So when you introduce this type of a process change, it’s difficult in that context. So for the culture, really the DAF needs to transform its people because digital engineering is not about hiring people to do digital engineering, you’re going to use the same people, but you’re going to transform the processes. So you’ve got to train them to do that. So training and building the digital workforce means providing them the tools that are available. And culture change of course requires leadership at all levels. And then finally, funding. The best vision in the world is just a good idea until you fund it.

Yesterday, the honorable Hunter said that one of his priorities is to transform the acquisition system into the 21st century, moving to a software-based acquisition system, changing business arrangements and processes, adding digital thread and increasing acquisition speed. And that is awesome. But nothing in the DOD is a priority until it’s funded. So this is an enterprise problem, that’s how I see it. And really to achieve the full benefit and the value of digital engineering, it requires an enterprise ecosystem. But it’s currently funded at the SPO level, so it has to compete with SPO resources. So what you’ll end up is siloed capabilities that aren’t connected and there at different levels of maturity and scale. So that’s a mismatch.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

Wow. So there’s a lot there, right? There’s process challenges. We’ve got to do the hard work of revolutionizing these processes. There’s limited data available. Of course, we know the data that is available is typically not clean or curated very well quality. So there’s time that’s needed to deal with that. You talked about the culture in and of itself of just adapting to a new way of working and operating. There’s that resistance that goes along with limited skills or needing to develop and up the skill level of our staff. And of course, funding. That’s a major constraint. So you’ve laid out some really high level enterprise challenges that are for sure creating some impediments. But yet on the ground, certainly again we’ve seen with programs like Sentinel, GBSD that we’ve gotten through some of that. Scott, tell us what’s going on there. How have you begun to overcome some of these barriers to adoption that are real? And I’m sure many in the audience are feeling these challenges today.

Dr. Scott Nowlin:

So Steve did a great job hitting on some of the major touchpoints across what I think of as being the quad chart of digital engineering, right? I think about the people and the processes and the tools and the infrastructure. Sentinel, GBSD was fortunate to have the resources to invest in infrastructure. I’m not going to talk a lot about that, especially because of the classification level they have to act at. The processes. Steve did a great job talking about that. Tools, there are many, many different tools out there. Let me go back to the people because this room is full of people and you all ought to be thinking about on my next civilian appraisal, on my next EPR, OPR, on my next CPARs that I’m going to give to my support contractor or my prime, where’s the word digital going to appear? What impact am I having on the organization because I’m willing to step out and get innovative?

So if I think about the people at your level, wherever you are in the organization from a four star all the way down to… There’s probably some Arnold Air Society members in here, right, who are doing capstone projects in college. Where are you looking to apply digital from your seat? I know within BAE Systems, we’re implementing culture change at a boots on the ground level. We do MBSE boot camps where we bring our employees in for a week long program where we get into a CSML model. And yes, they can go take a class and learn about CSML and prepare for CSML 2.0 as a modeling language, but they don’t see it in action until they can trace. And one of the benefits we’ve seen is an engineer being able to sit down in front of an architecture of Minuteman 3 that captures 1,400 configuration items and be able to identify the departing baseline for a change.

In other words, you want to take out the guidance computer, the Minuteman 3 as a notional example. Instead of spending days looking through drawings and chasing down interface control documents, in minutes you can generate a report that shows if I rip the brain out of the Minuteman 3 in its guidance computer, how that ripples across the weapon system and what other piece parts does it touch down to a chip level if you want to go that deep, if you’ve decided to model that deep. So really the people issue as it percolates up, the return on investments come when you’re able to invest in your people I would say first and foremost. And that includes leadership getting smart on where to make the investments because you can’t boil the ocean. Minuteman 3 for example cannot afford to become a digital weapon system. They don’t have the time or the resources. But Sentinel was born digital starting from a government reference architecture that captured its requirements in a digital framework and they’re now able to reap those benefits.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

All right. So invest in your people first, build digital engineering from there. Leadership has a critical role in that. And hold ourselves accountable are some of the things that I heard there. Where are you going to find digital in your personal performance outcomes that you’re going to hold yourself accountable for? I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Pratt & Whitney to get started either. You’re a big industrial age company as well and while you guys have achieved some significant successes and have done some things that have really started to lead the way, how did you get traction in this? Tell us, Amanda, how that got started and what are some of the successes that led to you being able to move out?

Amanda Brown:

Yeah. I think Steve, you hit the nail on the head. Culture change is at the heart of digital transformation, agile transformation, all of it. I think the best way to engender more success is to show success. So we started, as you might expect, with some small pilots, some energized excited people who just wanted to go and explore this. They became knowledgeable and then they pushed it with their management and then were able to grow a critical mass of energy behind it. So our model-based systems engineering and model-based product definition are the two areas that are probably the farthest ahead. And if you’ve worked with model-based product definition, this is eliminating 2D drawings and replacing it with 3D forms of product definition where all of the engineering data that’s typically text only, dumb text on a drawing is embedded as machine readable content in the 3D solid model. So now, you have reusable data. So our model-based product definition team did a couple of pilots and had some great success and we demonstrated how you can create this 3D form of product definition that’s easy to access.

You don’t need a specialty CAD license or fancy CAD training, you can use some light CAD readers that are on the market. And then we demonstrated how our supply base, a producer outside of Pratt & Whitney, can consume, that’s file import, right? Not typing the information over again, but can consume the 3D product definition, the digital data and use it to build their CNC program, their CMM program, their op sheets, and then perform the inspection in 3D ways. And they actually did it. And those early successes have to happen for culture change to ever occur. Not only do we need to provide training like Scott was mentioning, there are some new things that people need training on that you can’t just thrust them into an unknown environment. But it’s critical that the senior leadership be brought along the journey and be prepared for things that are different. Just being able to show a little bit of vulnerability is something that’s foreign at Pratt & Whitney and probably in most of the industry environments.

And to go in there and say, “I don’t know if this is going to work, but I think it has a lot of potential and we need to try this.” Creating leaders who are willing to respond to that, provide top cover for these energetic teams. It is an innovation and an exploration. We don’t know the crystal clear path to get there and I think the advocacy from leadership to allow the space for innovation has been a key point in our success. It’s also been critical for us that we go the full enterprise and the full lifecycle. And Pratt & Whitney Engineering is one major organization within our company and there are other major organizations just as big and just as loud and just as opinionated. And if you do digital engineering and engineering alone, you’ll never be successful. You just won’t get there. So bringing the operations community, the human resources community, the finance community, all these other parts of our organization along because they are impacted, You can’t run a good engineering project if you don’t have financial data on your actuals.

Are my people charging? Are they spending? Am I behind? Am I ahead? All the EVMS stuff, hey that’s data. I need that data to be reusable and accessible. So I think a lot of our success has been because we are forcing, and it’s not always easy, the conversation to occur across the enterprise and across the lifecycle. So by lifecycle, I mean we tend to have different communities of people who work early conceptual design, different communities of people who work are production support and design, different communities of people who support the aftermarket. Again, we want that data leveraged up and down the lifecycle. If you have actual manufacturing data, we want to use it to evaluate our service part. Can it go back in for another thousand cycles? Because we know that the part was on the high side of the tolerance band or no, it was on the low side of the tolerance band, we better pull it and replace it now. These are decisions that Usage Based Lifing lets us make.

This is something we’ve been instituting on the F119 fleet where we take actual manufacturing and actual flight history data to determine additional life or usability of parts rather than just using nominals or typical flight conditions. And having that data accessible unlocks a lot of doors that can not only extend life on wing, but can then let us step change, improve the performance of a given aircraft or engine based on using that data in different ways.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

Wow. So not only is leadership critical and pulled on that thread for us a little bit, which was great to see that how important that’s been in your organization in getting those early wins as successes with the pilots, having leaders be willing to allow for failure and experimentation. But you’ve also reinforced the point that was made earlier about the criticality of data and making that data available across the full lifecycle so you can really start to reap the benefits from design all the way through to sustainment and be able to unlock those silos that we all operate in and find insights all along that lifecycle.

I want to jump ahead a little bit here to some terminology. And you guys have talked on some of this a little bit, but I want to make sure that we level set everybody on some of this. What Amanda was just talking about in terms of leveraging data across the lifecycle speaks to what we typically refer to as the digital thread. And I want to ask Steve to help us understand what is it we mean by a digital thread? I know his company works a lot in helping organizations put in place the types of tools and capabilities that will enable the digital thread and also be able to empower a digital twin. So tell us, Steve, a little bit about what is a digital thread? What’s a digital twin? How does it fit into this whole activity of digital engineering that we’re trying to get our arms around?

Brig. Gen. Steve J. Bleymaier (Ret.):

Sure, and I’ll try to be fast. So digital twin, it’s not just doing simulation, it’s not just building a CAD model, digital twin is about connecting a physical system and a digital model in real time or near real time so that you can do prognostics and other activities across the lifecycle. This could be taking telemetry data off of a satellite and then moving it offline to do anomaly resolution before putting it back into and physically implementing it on the space asset. Digital twins can be multi-fidelity. They don’t all have to have physics and be physics-based models. They could just contain data analytics and AI, or you can combine the two and it really depends on the criticality of the system or the component that you are producing the digital twin for. Just like Scotty mentioned earlier, we wouldn’t have the funds to ever be able to do digital twin on all of our fielded systems and every component on those systems. So you can be surgical and you can produce the right digital twin that you need.

And if you just used data analytics and artificial intelligence, you get to about an 80% level of accuracy, like I mentioned earlier. When you combine those together with physics, you can get up to 98% level of accuracy. The twin can also be used for activities across the lifecycle. So these include things like virtual verification of performance, operational decision making in wartime training, predictive maintenance on the asset, and even developing a future system to include training and validation of AI and ML capabilities as those come on board more and more. And then digital trend, this is commonly thought of as the digital fabric that connects the different parts of the lifecycle together. And that digital thread allows a model to progress in fidelity from research and development to acquisition, to test, to deployment, to operations and to sustainment.

And as it goes along that path, you’re aggregating that data. And so then when you field it and it performs, that data can get fed back into the digital twin. And then you can compare it against what was expected and what was required. And you’ll have that traceability and that repeatability all the way back to the as designed, to the as manufactured and to the as fielded versions. And you’ll be able to see what has changed and figure out the root cause of why it’s changed. And as was I think mentioned earlier, you can accelerate when you have to make a change or an upgrade. You now have that knowledge and that data that was used and produced all the way back in concept development and design. You don’t have to recreate it, which is what has been happening for years and that’s why upgrades take so long.

Maj. Gen. Kimberly A. Crider (Ret.):

Thank you. Well unfortunately, we’re out of time. I’ll tell you, we could go on all afternoon I think talking about this topic of digital engineering and so many great examples here. Thank you for sharing your insights, your success stories, telling us about the challenges and reinforcing the important points of investing in people, investing in data, investing in process, and most of all, just getting started. Just getting started. Unlock it, unleash it, see where it takes you, take advantage of those opportunities to accelerate your capabilities. We have to do this. Thank you for being a part of our panel today. Thank you all for participating. We look forward to chatting with you afterwards.

Dr. Scott Nowlin:

Thanks, everyone.

Amanda Brown:

Thank you.

Watch, Read: ‘Air & Space Warriors Now & Tomorrow’

Oct. 16, 2022

Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, moderated a discussion on “Air & Space Warriors Now & Tomorrow” with Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson, commander of Air Education and Training Command; Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton, commander of Space Training and Readiness Command; and Maj. Gen. Case Cunningham, commander of the Air Warfare Center, 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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Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula (Ret.):

Well good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Dave Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and welcome to our panel on Aerospace Warriors, Now and Tomorrow. Professional military education in the broad sense of the term is critical to ensuring that our Airmen and Guardians have the knowledge and skills necessary to stay on the leading edge of strategy and tactics, whether it be flight school, operating or advising at Red Flag or a fellowship at a place like the Mitchell Institute. These experiences shape our war fighters into the world’s best.

But professional military education has to be baked into an Airman or a Guardian’s career to give them the opportunity to grow as they progress. Innovative training and education’s required to prepare our Airmen and Guardians for the fights of the future. Today, we have the leaders whose responsibility is just that, training the very best US Airmen and Guardians possible. Lieutenant General Brian Robinson is Commander of Air Education and Training Command. Major General Shawn Bratton is Commander of Space Training and Readiness, or Star Command, and Major General Case Cunningham is the Air Force Warfare Center Commander. So welcome gentlemen, and thanks for taking the time to be here today.

Now just a little bit about their backgrounds. Prior to command of AETC General Robinson, also known as Smokey, served as the Deputy Commander of Air Mobility Command where he was responsible for transcom’s air component. He’s a weapons officer and command pilot with over 4,400 hours in airlift and training aircraft. Major General Bratton, also known as Governor, was the first Air National Guardsman to attend the space weapons instructor course at Nellis. Previously, General Bratton was at Northcom director of Space Forces Commander of the American Maryland International Guard 175th Cyberspace Operations Group and Deputy director of Ops at US Space Command.

And as the commander of the US Air Force Warfare Center at Nellis, Major General Cunningham, also known as Basket, oversees Air Force Operational Testing and Tactics Development, as well as the advanced training schools exercises in venues that are all out there at Nellis. He’s the former commander of the Thunderbirds and previously served as director of plans, programs and requirements at Headquarters Air Combat Command. So gentlemen, thanks for joining us again today. What I’d like to do is offer you each the opportunity to give a couple of opening remarks and we’ll start with Smokey, so General Robinson.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Sir, thank you very much. And I just want to start with saying thank you and acknowledge the great effort and support from yourself, the Mitchell Institute and AFA, for allowing us, the directors and the board, allowing us to have this opportunity. And then I’m absolutely honored and humbled to represent the first command here as the thousands of many tens of thousands of Airmen that serve in that capacity and do what we do. But also humbled an honor to be alongside my colleagues here on the stage to talk with you today. You asked about what is it we’re getting after today. So I’d like to start with at the broad sense in work a little bit more further and down into detail. But essentially what it comes down to, and you’ve heard it here many times over already and you’ve heard it before coming here, but our Airmen are our competitive advantage, vis a vis the PRC, and or Russia, any other significant adversary there.

So it starts there. And what I’m really trying to get after with the team that I have working around with me and working with and through is how does AETC leverage every possible touchpoint it has with our Airmen from the time they enter the Air Force, come back for PME advanced skills training to make sure that we’re pushing them, developing them, recruiting them in the right direction so that they have confidence that they can go forth and help the Air Force return to the great power mindset. Can they be confident and comfortable with the mindset of multi-capable Airmen? Are they able to think critically and employ and advise on the concept known as agile common employment? Are we training them and giving them the talents that they need in that space? And then mostly returning to our roots where the Airmen are actually empowered, right?

They understand with that training and the repetitions that options they get, that they’re actually empowered to go forth and do the things many examples have you heard from there. I’d like to touch on four specific things and perhaps it’ll lead into some of the Q and A. Our first most strategic concern we have is recruiting, recruiting and retention but recruiting specifically. We have to figure out how to evolve our approach to recruiting in a way that gets us… That increases the Air and Space Force’s value statement to the generation that we want to join our forces. And as it was said by the CEO of Google yesterday, if you saw that, they can see themselves contributing to our mission and our why.

After that, just speaking of the brand, the other piece of that is we have to change the narrative or evolve the narrative where we come back to talking about the strengths of the brand, the brand of the Air Force and the Space Force and what it is that we’re about, what it is that we’re going to do, and how they can contribute to the advancing air power, space power in the United States of America in this great competition.

Below that, the second concern I have is optimizing the efficiencies and the ways that we train and develop learning and training for our Airmen, particularly UPT 2.5. That’ll be fully operational capable here the first quarter of ’23. But then I want to take all that we’ve learned in that space with the greatness of debt 24 under 19th Air Force and start looking at how we apply that to tech training transformation. You may not know this, I’m sure most of you in this crowd do, but many outside the Air Force especially don’t know. But pilot training is like 12% of what we do in terms of what we train and provide. The other 88% is all the other enabling functions, civil engineers, finance, weather, et cetera, et cetera. So we want to figure out how we can take what we learn there.

Third point, the inflection points that I see that provide the greatest opportunity for us to transform and help the Air Force achieve its objectives is through Air University, the PME schools, both the officer and enlisted, how we get after that and start getting our folks calibrated in the ways that they can get after understanding the joint war funding concept and apply that in their daily goings on and the staffs that they serve on.

Second, I think, is our intel school. We’ve got to get away from sensor to shooter and to get to sensor to decision maker and that information rides along our war fighting functions. And we need the joint task force commanders, the leaders at every level, to understand all those elements as best they can to make the best decisions in the battle, in the fight. Underpinning all of that, so I use this last, but is not by any way, means or shape the least important. It’s the data and the systems approach. We have to be able to access the data, push the data, understand the data with how we train our folks, develop them, deliver learning, understand the competencies that they’ve gained, how that works in partnership with half A1 and staff MR and the development side and talent management and putting people in the right places that they contribute the most.

We’re in a digital age. Conflict is already occurring in the digital age environment. If we get to that point, warfare will occur in a digital age and we have a very foundational piece as AR education training command and making sure the force is ready for that. So I look forward to the conversation and thank you for the opportunity.

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

Very good. General Bratton?

Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton:

Good afternoon or late morning. Day three of AFA. You guys look good out there. Need some energy, so stay alive with us. There’s probably a lot of instructors out there, ATC and STARCOM instructors, maybe some recruiters in the room. Thanks to you guys, first and foremost. None of this business goes anywhere without that frontline of instructor duty and we value it in both services and the secretary values it. It was clear in his guidance to the promotion board. So shout out to the instructors and the recruiters in the room. Really, we go nowhere without you, so thanks. I’ll tell you, it’s been a busy year in STARCOM. We’re the newest thing in the newest service. One year old, we just turned one year old. And we have been working hard. Mainly the first year was about accession into the force.

What does that first 12 months of service look like? And we made really, in partnership with the ATC, some leaps and bounds and basic training and how we onboard people into the service. Great partnerships throughout the enterprise there. Year two, we’re really now looking at that second tranche. How do we get into advanced training? And this is driven just, as General Robinson pointed out, by the threat. They are coming to get us in space, right? Russia and China’s capabilities are legitimate threats on orbit and they’re coming to get us in space not just to deny space but to defeat the Air Force in air superiority. They think there’s a weak link there that they can defeat land forces, air forces, naval forces, if they beat us in space. They’ve seen the advantage that it provides to the joint force and they’re coming after us.

And STARCOM’s job with a bunch of teammates is prepare the force. How do we get ready for that fight. If the operators succeed or fail, we carry that burden to prepare them properly, to engage the threat. And so we’re really focused on readiness in this second year and how do we tie our training events to the readiness of the operational force and how can I prove that in metrics? What’s the range activity we need to build? We’re teaming with the Warfare Center on a lot of advanced training activities to make sure that we’re not just doing space operations to protect and defend on orbit, but we know that we are protecting and defending on orbit to ensure air, land, sea superiority as well for the joint force. So a lot of focus year two in advanced training activities, and I think we’ll talk a little bit about that.

Just a quick update on what happened in year one, where we are right now. We’re still in a build phase. We have basing activities going on for STARCOM headquarters and as Deltas, we’re still onboarding civilians. So civilians, we’re hiring. Come talk to us. And building out the force and that’ll go for the next two or three years. We’re still in very much a build phase and there’s still this incredible dependence, I think always will be, on big Air Force. The Space Force is such a small service. We assess about 500 enlisted members per year, about 300 officers a year, just tiny numbers compared to the bigger enterprises in the other services. It lets us do some things in different ways, maybe be more agile, but it also creates an incredible dependency on ATC and Air Force recruiting and all the Air Force services that help us out.

And so we’re trying to understand that, where does it make sense to separate and go do our own thing to ensure space superiority for the joint force. But there’s other places where it absolutely makes sense to stay tied together. And I think we’re working with our teammates to work through some of that and I think we’ll probably talk a little bit more about that. I got to finally give a shout out to STARCOM Squad in the air, three taz is here in the house. I saw we’re real proud of them. They just got that award at our first birthday, first ever squad in the air. So Sumo, good job with the team over there.

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

General Cunningham?

Maj. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Thanks sir. Echo the thanks to AFA for this awesome forum and awesome opportunity and the honor to be up here on this stage with these leaders. What I thought I’d do this morning is just give you, in this time, just give you a quick run through of what the Warfare Center is, because sometimes that’s not a commonly understood fact, and then talk to you a little bit about our three priority efforts in the Warfare Center. So first, we’re about 13,000 folks, not only at Nellis in Nevada, but across 20 other states and about 53 other locations. There’s only about 55 folks in the headquarters. So by definition, everything that happens in the Warfare Center is really through the wings that make up the Warfare Center. So briefly, the 57th Wing is our advanced training organization headquartered at Nellis, Red Flag and Weapon School are some of the events that many of you would know best there.

The 53rd Wing, our operational test and tactics development organization, doing that not only for ACC but also a global strike headquartered at Eglin. And then also in the panhandle, the 505th command and control wing. If you take everything the 57th does and the 53rd does put it together and then focus on C2, that is what the 505th command and control wing does. So JTAC to JFAC as it’ll often say there. And then our newest organization, also in the panhandle, is the 350th spectrum warfare wing focused exclusively on dominance in the electrode magnetic spectrum, been up for about a year there. Blitzing back to Nellis, we’ve got the 99th air base wing who does a fantastic job maintaining the installation that makes all the magic possible at Nellis. And then our two named organizations, the NTTR, which is a place and also an organization, the Nevada Tests and Training Range, responsible for that national asset that exists there in Nevada.

And they are also responsible for the virtual test and training center, which I think we’ll get a little bit of a chance to talk to today. And then last but not least, the Air Force Joint Test Program office, one of our lesser known organizations in the Warfare Center, but does amazing work across the joint community with Air Force sponsored joint tests that are nonmaterial in nature. So across those organizations, we’ve got three priorities. And when I say we’ve got three priorities in the warfare center, it requires the synergistic and integrated effects across those wings in order to make them real. So the first is we have a pacing challenge campaign plan. And really what that is, is all about the operations activities and investments that we do within the warfare center, making sure that they’re laser focused of the pacing challenge that is China. That is fundamental and underlies everything else that we do within the warfare center.

The second is the virtual test and training center, and more specifically, turn the virtual test and training center from what it is today into the synthetic range that we need for the pacing challenge. Like I said, we’ll get a little bit of a chance to touch on that a little bit more here later. And then the third is revamping our advanced training enterprise in line with the things that you heard the chief talk about in his talk on Monday. Those five key factors for culture change in our Air Force, reflecting all of those in our advanced training enterprise. So it’s an honor be here with you. Look forward to the conversation. Thanks, sir.

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

Well great. Thank you all for those introductory and background remarks. Let’s dig into a little bit more detail with some questions. Now, the title of this panel’s, Air and Space Warriors, Today and Tomorrow. And today the vast majority of what the Guardians provide is critical to enabling the success of US war fighters inside the atmosphere. Tomorrow, there’s going to be more fighting external to the atmosphere and the actual space domain. So Governor first, but all of you, feel free to chime in. How are you managing the evolution about the way Guardians are viewed not simply as critical enablers, but as war fighters in and of themselves?

Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton:

Yeah, sir. Thanks. There’s a couple pieces there. One, we’re working hard on the war fighting doctrine. We don’t have the history of war fighting in space. We’ve never had a single battle in space. And so you think about how air power evolved and we learned and we developed doctrine. We fought World War II, we learned and developed Vietnam, Korea. I mean, long history there of lessons learned, applied, and applied, and applied. We’re writing that 3.0 doctrine right now that we need to teach our war fighting. But how do we think about terrain in space? What are our centers of gravity? What are the most valued targets? How do we do intelligence collection? How do we disseminate command and control? All the things that the Air Force has a history on and proves dominant in since Desert Storm on, for sure. We’re back in the early days of the air corps tactical school and we’re right there.

And so as we onboard Guardians and General Thomas is here, as his team brings them into the service for us, early in their training, we want to incorporate those lessons. But first we got to write the war fighting doctrine. And so there’s a big effort going on right now for 3.0. We’re developing exercises and war games to try out the things we think are true and prove them as concepts and eventually write them in. And so to develop that war fighter, we got to understand command and control. We got to understand what it means for space superiority in the domain, but also what’s the most important thing for success in air, land and sea? And so that certainly influences how we think about targets, how we think about high value assets and things that we have to defend and then train and exercise to prepare the force.

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

Very good. Either your other two like to comment on that or are we going to leave it to the space guy?

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

I would say we’re all in on the partnership and you said air corps tactical school, so we’ll gladly give you some space at where air corps tactical school started, which is at Randolph. But all I would add really for everyone out here, and this is what I talk to folks about, right now I think is an incredibly exciting time to be in the Air and the Space Forces. We are no longer getting after the same old problems looked at slightly different ways that are very, I think, have become rudimentary over time. We’ve got some wicked hard problems to solve. We got to solve them fast and we’re coming to America’s best and brightest and our very intelligent Airmen that are on the line who oftentimes have the ideas and the solutions or key components of those. So I’ve not been this excited about being part of the Air Force since I joined many, many years ago, a couple minutes ago, but I just think it’s exciting.

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

That’s a great segue to our next question. Professional military education is, as you alluded to, the bedrock for developing future leaders to be as lethal as possible in a fight. There’s been some feedback from recent attendees that indicates that PME content may not be as focused on war fighting as it could be. Could you all talk about if there’s an effort to increase and improve, refine our PME content to address this concern?

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Yes, sir. I’ll take that. Great questions, thank you for that. So all credit to General Hecker, but under his tutelage and command of Air University, that feedback was heard. They took a pretty formal look at that and in the last year or so, redesigned the Air Commander staff college syllabus and the Air War College syllabus to focus more on joint war fighting. So 60% of the syllabus now is aligned with joint war fighting with the particular adversaries in the NDS in mind, the bulk of that, again, being with the PRC. This academic year it’s under full execution. We’ve got it dialed in, General Tullos now has it dialed in for a quick assessment and stride assessment and adjustments to that. Some key components of that are the ability to, basically, there’s a series of war gaming events that go on.

So they’re looking at how they use gamification, if you will. And each of the semesters, each semester formally ends with a war game environment with a op four Red Force versus Blue Force kind of approach to it to evaluate what we thought, what the students and the cadre thought would work or not is actually going to work in that way. They’ve also changed some of the staff to bring more military uniform members back onto the faculty versus relying so heavily on civilian PhDs and academia, if you will, to get to war fighting. So those in and of themselves, I think, are very exciting.

The next turn on that is at the enlisted core PME, so NCO Academy as well as the Senior NCO Academy, about helping them understand how to be critical thinkers and leaders at the NCO level and threading the needle with the why, the objectives, how to defeat the PRC and how to contribute to that. And again, back to the multi-capable Airmen and the concept. So we’re going to have a good turn on the wheel of that this year coming and get that rolled out. So it’s going to be crosscutting across the board for all the PME sources there.

Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton:

For the Space Force, we have clear guidance from the boss from General Raymond in the planning guidance to develop independent PME for the Space Force. Vosler NCO Academy came over, so we’re running senior NCO and NCO Academy within the Space Force right now and developing new curriculum taught by Guardians. But we always start with what we got from the Air Force and we’re grateful for that. I think ID and SD, we’re getting real close to final on some announcements and where we’re going to go with ID and SD. We’re working some new partnerships. We will continue to send folks to Air War College, Navy War College, Army War College. We’re required to do that for both those systems. I think that where we’re going, the next big challenge, is what do we do for the captain’s course as we call it. And when I think about PME, it’s really… There’s things I learned at War College that really I wish I had learned as an oh three early in my career, especially the joint planning process and how we interact with joint forces.

I learned some of that the hard way in deployments just having to figure it out. But I think that evolution of early PME will be real important for us on what makes an operator successful as they transition from a operational unit into that next level of operational command and control, we’re on a combatant command staff and how do we take a little bit more of the joint education and move that earlier in the career rather than my experience, which was later in the career. But at the same time, we’ll keep strong partnerships with AU and with the Army and the Navy as well as we bring in interservice transfers. They’ll start showing up as instructors and they’ll bring that flavor to the Space Force, their service culture and ultimately this will come out with our own thing, I think, within a short amount of time for the Space Force.

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

I’d suggest that this is a pretty exciting time for all the things that you both said. I had the opportunity to meet with the ACSE commandant just prior to this session, Colonel Barry, and it was fascinating to hear the change in the curriculum and turning ACSE into the air power school. So I think, like you said Smokey, lots of changes that came down the pike and they’re now being realized. Basket, here’s one for you. It’s becoming evident that we may not be able to have a full up modern multi-domain flight replication with fifth generation aircraft space systems and so on the same way we did it Red Flags when I flew in them 40 years ago. The airspace is too constrained. Our enemies are always watching from overhead systems and achieving realistic numbers of adversaries is challenging. So what’s the progress in building joint integrated training centers that will allow us to overcome these physical constraints so we can exercise in realistic fashion against peer adversaries?

Maj. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Yeah, thanks sir. Appreciate the question. I think you’ve characterized the challenges quite well. Hopefully we’ll get a little bit of a chance to talk about what we’re doing in relation to those challenges in the live fly arena, but certainly in the synthetic arena. And for those that aren’t familiar, the joint integrated training centers are by name mentioned in the joint TAC air synthetic training analysis of alternatives, that was a joint requirements document that came out a couple of years ago. And specifically what they highlighted was the need for a single site location to get the kind of high-end advanced tactics test and training that we need for the pacing challenge. HEATTT is the acronym there. So at Nellis, I mentioned before, it’s one of my priorities in the seed. What we’re doing is transitioning the virtual test and training center that exists today, which is really a collection of proprietary platforms that are a legacy in nature and transitioning that campus of about four existing facilities into a capability that has a few key attributes.

The first is that it’ll be on the joint simulation environment backbone. The joint simulation environment is the synthetic environment that’s being used to support F35 IOT and E. The second is single site high fidelity, low-latency physics based, and that is all resident in the government owned JSE capability. The third is integrated by design, not only across multiple domains, but also across our partners and particularly our key partners of the Australia and the UK in addition to the Navy there. So all of them have space in the design for this campus there on Nellis. And then the last is an integration and capabilities that one might expect in a multi-domain world to see on night one of a fighter all represented there so that we can get the kind of high-end training that we need to do in the synthetic environment. That’s the first instantiation of a joint integrated training center concept within the Air Force. I think there’s plenty of opportunity and conversation for more like that to be planned for the future. Thanks, sir.

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

Well I had a follow up for you but you answered that, so I’m not going to ask it. We’ll move on to Governor. As the Space Force grows, it’s got direct hiring authority to fill billets. Has this helped the Space Force recruit the talent that it needs to fully stand up the force and what other work needs to be done to ensure that the Space Force gives the talent that’s required to focus on that war fighting in space that you talked about?

Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton:

Yeah sir, thanks. I’ll tell you the great thing about being a very small service is there’s more people that want to come join us than we have positions for. And so it’s really in the pool that wants to come into the Space Force, identifying the right talent. We’re doing some direct commissioning pilot programs, folks coming in from industry in the first instance, cyber skills who can come in anywhere from a first lieutenant to a lieutenant colonel. And so we’re experimenting with that. We’re heavily civilian. 50% of the force is civilian. And so we’re using some new civilian hiring authorities to bring in talent. And then of course the recruiting team is out there finding the best folks for us every day. We’ll continue… The Space Force is doing a lot of things on its own, but it’s doing a lot of things with help from the Air Force, like I said.

And so Air Force Academy, ROTC, Air Force recruiting service continue to serve both the Air Force and the Space Force. And those are areas where I don’t think we’ll ever go our own way. It doesn’t make sense to do that. We’re just too small. And so I think we rely on the recruiting team out there for sure. But also academy admissions. We got the detachment up, the academy kept green woods here, working hard to explain then to cadets on here are your opportunities both within the Air Force but also within the Space Force if you’re interested in space, cyber intel, acquisition and engineering, come join the team. And so far it’s been a successful enterprise. We’re bringing in top talent and we’ll just get better at it, sir.

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

Very good. Smokey, the Air Force has faced a pilot shortage for many, many years now. Even with crewed, un-crewed teaming on the horizon, we’re still going to need experienced pilots in the cockpit. What are some of the things that AETC’s doing to recruit the talent that we need to fill this and resolve this pilot shortage?

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Great question. Thank you for that, sir. So complex answer to a simple question, but what I would say is the pilot career, just like any career track, but it’s got three major segments with it, right? There’s the production of pilots, then there’s the absorption of pilots when they move out to their respective gaining sea match coms that they’re going to fly for. And then there’s the retention aspect. For the production aspect we’re doing, I think, very strong work on the recruiting side. The Aim High academies for example, trying to get to young men and women in our country that have expressed interest in aviation. And you can see that as simple as air shows. And General Minihan and I think he hooked this young man, this young lad I’ll say, at the Andrews Air show. Seth was his name, six years old, but clearly he wants to fly.

And so we spent time talking to him and ultimately with his mother and grandmother too. And he could see, took photos with us and things of that nature and just venues like that. The Aim High Academy is another one where we take folks that can go with mentorship from uniform wearing instructors in the summer period where they go out junior ROTC or with a civil air patrol or a contracted flight school and get some rides in some aircrafts, some academic construction to understand aviation better, but understand that they can actually do it and get exposed to it. Those are some of the examples there. Within pilot production, 19th Air Force has spent a lot of great work and effort refining UPT to 2.5, which soon will be known as just UPT once it goes fully operational and get away from the nomenclatures that we’re using that we have now.

But the ways that we can tailor the pilot training toward the skill sets and the track that they’re eventually going to go on. So we have accelerated path to wings, we have the mobility fundamentals course, and we have in development now with the fighter bomber fundamentals course now that we understand how to do competencies-based syllabus development and work backwards to design the syllabus itself. Some aspects of that nature. But I think it’s critical, back to my data point when my opening remarks, we have got to see all of this as a system and understand with each one of those different lines or lanes of effort in production add and then the retention. We can’t push pilots out the door to AMC, ACC, AFSOC. They can’t be absorbed or experienced at the rate that we need them to be experienced. And there’s lots of factors that contribute to that experiencing.

There’s logistics pieces, there’s sustainment from the weapon systems, sustainment portfolios, wear and tear on engines, the amount of manning that you actually have where they fly in our program is how that’s resourced. So we’re working to understand that as a system of systems in each of the phases and how we make that as smooth as possible so that our Airmen that are going in that track can get through in the way that they can. UPT 2.5 in and of itself will allow us to meet the Air Force’s standard goal by a little bit. It doesn’t allow us to account for uncontrollables in attrition, which would be weather events that are significant, hail storms, winter storms that are unexpected in some places where they don’t normally occur, for example, or seldom but impactful maintenance thing that pops its ugly head from time to time with an engine or aircraft component.

So the challenge before us now we’re resourced, planned to produce at the number of the Air Force would like us to achieve. We’ve got the things that we can control to get there. Now we’re just working through how we just refine and understand what’s actually happening in the system and smooth float as best we can.

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

Just to follow up a bit on the UPT 2.5, you’ve given us a bit of insight there. What are some of the challenges that are faced in moving from this traditional training approach into a more modern approach?

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

That’s great. So I think the biggest challenge would be cultural. It’s a new way of training. I’ve had it… Other peers that are our age say we don’t understand, it’s not how we came up so they don’t understand it. And frankly, if you hadn’t gone through UPT in the last four years, you don’t understand it because you haven’t experienced it is what I would say. But really a lot of goodness has come out of it. The innovation, the use of immersive training devices and what they can contribute to advancing learning, the use of virtual reality and augmented reality. I was at Laughlin Air Force Base about a month ago and then the B flight T-6 and just by chance the student was talking about he’d gone out and done some acro in the T-6 and his comment was, “Hey, when I was upside down in the Cuban eight and looked down, looked above through the top of the candy before the ground references, it looked just like it looked in the immersive training device.”

So they’re confident, more prepared and we’re actually able now to work some of the agility of mind, if you will, where they no longer step out from the briefing desk with the set profile that you’re going to fly because they’ve had the ability to do the reps and sets and get through the cognition piece, and the process and procedures rather, there’s more agility and the instructor will mix up the profile or add something, subtract something if based on the student’s performance and they’re expected to be able to adjust to that. So those are some of the good things we’ve seen come out of it. Now we want to leverage that technology, those different approaches and expand it to the rest of learning and how we deliver content.

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

Very good. Thanks.

Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton:

Sir, I think we can learn from you there a little bit because right now in the Space Force, you don’t fly a spacecraft until you show up at your first ops unit. And we’re trying to understand the value, how to place a value on virtual simulated training versus live training. Do we need to move more live training earlier in the training pipeline? Certainly the one place that happens is at the Air Force Academy where they’re flying the Falcon Set Program, but we’re trying to of find that right balance. Sounds like the Air Force is moving more into simulation. I think we need to move a little bit more towards live training, but how you do the value proposition of which one is better at what point in a career, I think, is something we can learn from you guys.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Absolutely. Happy to work with you on it.

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

Basket, many of the folks in the room today have been or will go to a Red Flag. It’s been the cornerstone for our war fighters to get realistic combat training for a long time. 2021 saw space and cyberspace deliberately built into Red Flag. So moving forward, what can you say about how we better integrate space and cyberspace into Red Flag? Or would it make more sense to host an independent space Red Flag at Nellis or elsewhere?

Maj. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Thanks, sir. I’ll blitz through a long answer to a short question on that. First, I think it’s good to pause just for a second. You mentioned Red Flag 1975, the first time Red Flag happened over the years, the thousands of Airmen that have been impacted by that exercise. It’s really hard to measure, but that happens because of the folks that make it happen. The 414 CTS currently doing that at Red Flag and it’s a great team there. Talk just briefly about the things that we’re doing to adjust Red Flag that’ll reflect your question. First is that out of the three Red Flags we execute every year, two of those are specifically in relation to the pacing challenge. So the folks that come to Red Flag at dash one and dash three can expect to see nothing but the pacing challenge threat as replicated by our aggressor nation forces, the best that we can get on that.

Having the 350 Spectrum Warfare Wing as a part of the Warfare Centers is incredibly huge there for the spectrum dominance piece of what that means for advanced training. Another one is the fact that we’re expanding the airspace, so not just the NTTR but portions of the Utah Test and Training Range, restricted area 2508 at China Lake, which gives the geography a little bit more representative of the pacing challenge. The third aspect is pulling in, and this gets back to the five key elements that the chief talked about on Monday, elements of high tactical, low operational C2 ACE staff, ACE into our Red Flag events and integrated war fighting and the importance there. And then last, which you’ll get directly at the question, is we’ve started… The Weapon School is leading the way on this, doing vols out over the water Whiskey 291 airspace that’s off the coast of California, about 200 by 600 miles full integration with the Navy, both blue and red on the surface and the air and that, because the Weapon school is leading the way there…

Gov Squadron, the 328th Weapon Squadron, which is our Space Weapon School Squadron, fully integrated into that event as well as the 32nd Weapon Squadron, which is our cyberspace professionals in the Weapon school. So that integration templating that, bringing that over to Red Flag, what we’re seeing there in over water execution is really going to be important here as we move forward. The specific answer to your question, sir, I don’t think it’s an or. I think it’s an and. And the work that Gov is doing in his Sky Series of events, I think, is a great follow on to that.

Maj. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton:

Yeah, sir. I’d just say real quick, we are putting a couple Guardians back into the 414th. We kind of pulled a lot of folks out of Nellis and we’ll always go back there. We’re staying at the Weapon School, of course. We’re putting a couple Guardians back into the 414th to maintain that tie, space support to enable air superiority. The Sky Series is all about space superiority. Black Skies is going on right now for the first time. It’s an electronic warfare live-fire exercise. Red Sky’s next year, orbital warfare, live-fire exercise. We’re excited about all these things where we’re going with the force.

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson:

Sir, if I could piggyback on that. This work is probably underway if I were a betting person, but with regard to where we’re going with the Air War College and ACSC, we’ve got to get the war gaming piece that incorporates these other domains, which is going to raise it to a higher classification level. The only way we’re going to do it the PRC quickly and the ways we want to is either be the speed of light or the speed of sound. And these two domains are getting there first, and then after that comes the speed of sound, which is the rest of the Air Force.

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

Very good. Real quick follow up for Basket. Air Force Warfare Center’s well positioned to support the development testing and training of collaborative combat aircraft or CCA that you hear the secretary talk about. Is there a plan for embedding government and industry technologists with the war fighters out at the weapon center to do this kind of work?

Maj. Gen. Case Cunningham:

Thanks, sir. We’re closely following the work that’s being done, the operational imperatives there in line with Frag Job, but who’s at ACCA 589 and then Dale White as the PO there. So we’re closely tied into that and I think there’s a great future there within the Warfare Center for those efforts.

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

Okay. Well, very good. Unfortunately, we’ve come to the end of this session. What I’d like to do is thank each of our panelists for being here today, and for all of you in the audience, for taking the time to come and listen. And so with that, have a great aerospace power kind of day. Thank you.

Watch, Read: ‘Nuclear Modernization’

Oct. 16, 2022

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins, deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, moderated a discussion on “Nuclear Modernization” with Michael Beltrani of General Dynamics Mission Systems, Elaine Bitonti of Collins Aerospace, and retired Lt. Gen. James “Jim” Kowalski 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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Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Good afternoon and welcome to this session on Nuclear Modernization. I’m your moderator, Lieutenant General Jim Dawkins, and I serve as the Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration. Nuclear deterrence underwrites every US military operation around the globe. It is the back step and the foundation of our national defense and the defense of our allies. Our deterrence capabilities are especially critical in the emergent strategic environment where the US is competing against two nuclear armed peers who are not only modernizing their arsenals, but also pursuing new novel capabilities. The threats we face today and into the future are especially concerning when juxtaposed next to the Cold War era nuclear weapon systems and infrastructure that we continue to operate and depend upon.

As such, the modernization of our nuclear deterrent has become a top national security priority. This presents a complex technological challenge since all three legs of the triad and our nuclear command and control and communication systems are undergoing modernization simultaneously. By 2030, the Air Force will be fielding a new stealth bomber, the B-21, a new ICBM system or Sentinel, a new strategic bomb, the B61-12, a new ICBM warhead, a new cruise missile, the LRSO, a B-52 that’s modernized with new engines, radar and advanced communications equipment, a new helicopter for missile field security, the MH-139, and a myriad of NC3 systems, with the SEOC soon to follow. There’s no margin for delay on any one of these systems. The emerging threat, the need for speed, and increasing cost demand that we pivot away from ponderous processes. We have to do things right, but on a faster pace that we’ve done in the past.

Fortunately, the introduction of innovative processes like digital engineering and cloud-based computing can help us get there. We’re also aided in our nuclear modernization efforts with great industry partners leading the cutting edge of technological transformation, and these folks are critical to helping us with modernization challenges. With that, let me introduce our expert panelists. The Vice President of Strategic Mission Systems and General Dynamics, Mr. Michael Beltrani. Vice President JADC2 Experimentation and Demonstration, and Business Development at Collins, Elaine Bitonti. And vice President, Government Programs, Northrop Grumman, Lieutenant General Jim Kowalski, retired. Michael, we’re going to start with you for some opening comments.

Michael Beltrani:

Thank you, sir. I would first say that you called three of us experts. I’m definitely not an expert, the other two are. I’m honored to be with them. Ask them all the hard questions. Just a little bit about GDMS for the folks who maybe not as familiar, we’re pretty different in that we have our entire strategic portfolio on one team, my team, and that portfolio spans about 60 years of legacy. Whether we’re talking about the work we do with the Navy and SSP on Ohio and, now, Columbia-class submarines, the guidance and production work we do with Lockheed and Draper and SSP on the Trident missile or what we do more close to live, you here at AFA for the Air Force, both with NC3 legacy, NC2 systems like Direct, Direct Light, NC3 systems like Global Ascending Two.

What we’re doing on the Sentinel program and as well as with Northrop Grumman, as well as some of the Minutemen programs that we continue to support and sustain. It’s a crazy time. Right? The world has changed. Modernizing all of that stuff at the same time is kind of crazy when you… It’s almost insane. It’s long overdue. Really look forward to digging into some of these topics today. Thank you all for being here.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks, Michael. Over to you, Elaine.

Elaine Bitonti:

Good afternoon and thank you Lieutenant General Dawkins for hosting this very timely panel. I’m Elaine Bitonti. I’m here from Collin Aerospace. From Collins Aerospace perspective, we have been involved in supporting the nuclear command and control and strategic deterrence mission really since the inception of Strategic Air Command. We partnered with them back in the initial days to set up the first network that was used in the very first bomber missions. Since that time, we’ve really focused on how do we continue to expand that support with a lot of the enablers. At Collins Aerospace, we don’t make any platforms. We don’t make any effectors like our partners at Northrop Grumman, but we do make many enablers that make those systems very effective from the communications, VLF, UHF, HF, also to the message processing systems and the other mission systems that are so critical to the NC3 enterprise and the strategic assets that we’re all here supporting.

We’ve really taken a focus from a Collins perspective of as we look to speed up, how this modernization happens and make sure we deliver on the schedule needed for the war fighter. How do we leverage more from the conventional space into the NC3 space and how do we leverage open systems to really keep pace with those threats? Because we’re modernizing the systems today, but as we know, the threat will continue to evolve. How do we make sure those newly modernized systems are resilient and flexible as we go forward? We look forward to your questions today and talking further about that.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks, Elaine. Jim.

Lt. Gen. James “Jim” Kowalski (Ret.):

Thanks. Well, thanks, General Dawkins. I appreciate what you said there in your opening too. There’s widespread acknowledgement of the problem the nation and really all the democratic nations are facing now with the rise of these authoritarian regimes, the return of great power competition in this multipolar near peer nuclear deterrence problem that we’re currently facing. I want to touch on this briefly because it’s important to step back and see the larger picture before we get too much into the acronyms and the details of how we’re solving this problem. From the government side, they’re the ones, along with academia and the think tanks, they’re going to have to do the deep thinking on this problem because it’s not a problem we faced before. And then we think about, well then, what’s industry’s role here? Industry’s role at this point, I think, right now, is take full advantage of digital engineering, take full advantage of the open architectures and where we can go with those and to take full advantage of cloud, cloud software, and agile software, as ways to update our systems as fast, as quick as possible, as this threat rapidly evolves going forward.

Fortunately, we have started the nuclear recapitalization just in the nick of time. It started during a period where we really didn’t see this threat that we’re facing now on the horizon yet, but now we’re heading in the right direction where we’ve got some headwinds out there. One of the things that was really highlighted, and I don’t know if everybody caught it, but we’ve run out of time. The schedule for all of these programs is very critical and we’ve got some headwinds out there. We’ve got an inflation problem. We’ve got a workforce problem, and we’ve got supply chain issues. I don’t think those are permanent, but I also don’t know when they’re going to end. Right now, that’s part of what all the programs are having to struggle with as we focus on the schedule. Thanks.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks, Jim. We’ll stick with you for the first question. As industry proceeds with the modernization, the challenges that you just mentioned, how does Northrop Grumman or how do you account for the rapid evolution in the environment that you also spoke about?

Lt. Gen. James “Jim” Kowalski (Ret.):

Well, I sort of laid that out first because I talked about digital transformation, the agile software, open architectures, and digital engineering. When you have that digital design and you start with a digital design, and you’re able to take that design and weave it through all of the systems that you have there, your production system, your maintenance system, how you maintain a platform, how you sustain a platform, how you train people in platforms, and when they all have that digital model of the platform itself and their elements within that platform, you can see quickly how all of this ties together. The use of VR tools to do training, the use of VR tools to figure out where the problems are in the design and work them out early, where the problems are in maintenance, and get those worked out early. Those are all key elements as how we go forward.

Let me give you an example of this. That is you’ve got a weapon system that has been done with digital design. You have these digital tools. It’s an open architecture. The threat evolves. Now, you need to put a new weapon. Maybe that weapon needs new guidance, maybe it needs new overhead, maybe it needs maneuverability or some other attribute, but you need to put a brand new weapon on a system. Today, that takes years. With digital designs, we can do it in months. That’s really the power of this. That’s how we’re going to get inside of the adversary cycle times going forward.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks, Jim. I also think there’s going to be some carryover from how you design these systems and build them with that digital engineering on how we train our forces, whether it’s virtual reality or other things. I look forward to the implication of that as we field these systems in or between now and ’30, and then how we train on them and sustain them using some of these same tools. Turning to Elaine. I can touch on a little bit of hypersonics. The development of hypersonics, AI and machine learning technologies. We’re going to cut into the time that national leadership has to make a decision during a crisis. What technology investments should we be making to address this and how should we account for emerging technologies when we think about modernizing our NC3 systems?

Elaine Bitonti:

Yes, thank you. I think that’s a really important thing to think about is Northrop Grumman mentioned the threat will continue to evolve. I think some of the things we need to make sure we’re investing in is advanced sensors so that we can properly detect what’s happening from the enemy side and be prepared to react. I also think how we’re going to integrate artificial intelligence into the decision making process is going to be really critical. Humans can only process data at a certain rate. Let’s just talk about from a communications perspective. You may have multiple different contingent plans if your communications go down. Humans can only remember so many. If we use artificial intelligence, the machine can remember only an infinite number, right? To what it’s programmed. I think thinking about how do we use things like that to make sure when the threat evolves and a contingency occurs, we’re best positioned to address it.

I also think to the point that Jim made about how do we keep these systems updated? I think, one, it is about the open architectures, but it’s also about how quickly can you change that? When we look at some of the networks, if we have an emerging threat and we see a particular wave form, a particular link, as not being effective, how quickly can we change that on the platform? Do we have to take that subsystem out and do it? Can we reprogram it over the air? That’s really where we have to get to from an industry perspective to be able to be agile.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks for that. Michael. As important as our weapon systems and platforms, they are nothing without people. Given the urgency of the nuclear mission in today’s environment, how has industry changed to attract, retain, and develop talent for the nuclear mission? Something by the way that I’ve sensed from a lot of the industry that I’ve engaged with this week, that is a challenge.

Michael Beltrani:

Yeah, I know. Great question. It is a huge challenge, right? Coming out of COVID, everybody I think had much higher attrition than normal. Folks now have flexibility to work remotely at other companies and that relocate their family. That was never a problem statement that we had before. How do you reduce your attrition and attract new talent in a different model? As all of you know or many of you know, I’m sure, the security program classification of these programs makes it really hard to work remote most of the time. You’re competing in a workforce against companies that offer that as an option. That’s pretty desirable for the work-life balance. What do you do to really drive that in the other direction? What we’re really focused on is, I mentioned before the GDMS’s portfolio across the triad plus NC3. With all the modernization going on plus the sustainment, there’s so many different challenges that engineers can go work on where you’re not just a sustainment engineer on program A for 10 years. You can move around and have diversity of experience within the deterrent.

I think that’s really important to get people excited about work. But, more importantly, what we’ve done recently is taking our higher potential employees and giving them exposure to customer engagement activities. Admiral Richards hosted a symposium, NC3 symposium, back in June in Omaha. We brought 20 of our best and brightest future leaders to that symposium. How often does 22, 23, 24-year olds get to listen to Admiral Richards kind of talk about the state of StratCom? Each person was really excited coming out of that event. When they get back to the office and they were able to communicate what they heard, everyone’s raising their hand and said, “Hey, when do I get to go there and do that?” Now, it was also held at a zoo so that was cool too. But I think at the end of the day, I think giving it maximum exposure to senior leaders that a lot of them in the room and, many of us talked about that today and yesterday, goes a long way in keep keeping people excited about the mission and wanting to stay with the company.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Elaine or Jim, would you care to comment on some of those challenges and how you’re addressing them?

Elaine Bitonti:

Yeah, I think we’re facing definitely similar challenges as Mike outlined, especially a lot of our programs like this are executed out of major metropolitan areas where there’s very high competition for talent. One of the things that we’ve found is we can’t take away the fact that people do have to be on site to do this type of work, but we have invested at Collins a lot of money and, I’ll say, upgrading all of our classified skiff space so that it is, I’ll say, not the skiff space of old.

You really have more amenities inside of the skiff, right? Things that people can do. We’ve really worked to build a team culture in there, have different food. I think things that just make people feel more at home. Yes, they have to be in this in enclosed area, but we have found, especially with the younger generation, that has gone a really long way to say, “Yes, we know you have to come into the office, but we’re going to make sure that the workspace you’re in is very up to date, very modern.” That has been, I’ll say, one of the biggest positives that we’ve heard from our workforce, is the changes we’ve made in that area.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

“No cell phone but we’re going to feed you,” is what I heard there. That’s great. Jim, any thoughts on that?

Lt. Gen. James “Jim” Kowalski (Ret.):

At Northrop, we sort of have both a near term approach and a long term approach. Near term approach obviously is to be out there with competitive pay, flexible work hours. We’ve upgraded, particularly in the Sentinel program, we’ve upgraded the campuses to state of the art. Long term, there’s a minimum requirement for a small business participation in a contract. We’ve expanded that, not only to share that workload, but also get some of the innovation and the good ideas from the smaller businesses that are out there. We’ve partnered with universities. We’ve got internships. A lot of the things that are in the toolkit for solving a hiring problem longer term and building out that pipeline. But I think one of the most important things we offer, particularly with both the B-21 and the Sentinel program is that opportunity to participate in something historic. I mean, if you want to graduate from college and go to work for TikTok and figure out how to load videos faster, hey, knock yourself out. Or you can stand tall against anarchy by authoritarian regimes. Come work for Northrop.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks, Jim. Jim, keeping with you for the next round of questions. After repeated criticism of the defense industry is the lead time between contract award and roll out of the weapon systems, what has Northrop Grumman done to maintain a sense of urgency during the years long development processes and how do life cycle costs and acquisition processes help or hinder this effort?

Lt. Gen. James “Jim” Kowalski (Ret.):

Well, one of the things that we do in our programs is we build in milestones earlier than the contract baseline. We sort of induce that kind of schedule pressure, that idea of having stretch goals out there because we want to drive the workforce to be looking for ways that we can reduce risk. That is really one of the advantages that digital engineering has allowed us to do, is it’s given us more opportunities to find and mitigate that risk early on, as opposed to programs where you don’t find a problem until somebody who’s putting a component together realizes that this isn’t going to work and everything has to stop and you go backwards. We’re looking for that risk reduction early on and then we find it. Can we bring the critical path down that way? There’s constant pressures in a program that… Major acquisitions program. They all want to slip because all you’re going to do out there is find issues.

But the digital has been really huge in helping us overcome this. In terms of the life cycle cost, really what we have found… Both of these programs were designed to use digital in those other systems so we’re bringing that digital forward. We’re actually looking at maintenance. How do we do maintenance before anything has even produced. We were through the VR process figuring out how to replace components and the best ways to do that. We were bringing down the time it takes to repair items before the design was even fully baked. We brought maintenance into that process to be able to sign off on those kind of things in our programs. What you find out when you do that is that doesn’t make it take longer. What it does is it shortens that cycle. In particular, and what’s really critical here, is it shortens the cycle to fielding and to initial operational capability. How everybody gets wrapped up in a lot of milestones.

The one we really ought to be focused on is when do we put an effective weapon system on the ramp or in the silo? That’s what’s really going to make a difference for us. From the acquisition perspective, really, I think the acting RCO director, Melissa Johnson, had a comment yesterday about the tightness of the team and about how the transparency and what a close-knit team they are in the B-21 program, and how much of that helps because they share common goals. They’re in a transparent system. They have daily communication and they’re working together to find, not only ways to solve the problems, but ways to get out ahead of those problems. How can we be innovative and how can we invest money a little bit differently and sort of actively manage this contract? Together, the government and the industry partners, can bring down that risk. Of course, Global Strike Command, as the user, is tied into that loop also.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

No, that’s great. Of course, keeping the requirements stable has been very helpful in these programs as well. To your point, after you get the missile on the ground with the airplane in the air, how do you modify that as you go forward and evolve it for the threat, whatever they may come next? Elaine, you know I’ve talked about NC3 before and JADC2. As the secretary just mentioned some… I made some news this week about program manager for JADC2, ABMS, if you will, as well as the consortium defense industry to help tackle this problem. Again, we’ve talked about how do we leverage what they’re doing or how do they leverage what we’re doing in NC3 to get after that challenge?

Elaine Bitonti:

Yeah. I think that’s a really interesting question. If you step back, right? The ability to sense, make sense and act, underpinned by a robust network that will allow you to communicate that is really the same need of what we’re trying to do in JADC2 and what NC3 needs. I think a lot of times we get caught up, the NC3 community has typically been isolated because of what it does, but really the need to communicate and control that data is the same. I think what we need to look at is when the JADC2 strategy was announced, strategic deterrence was announced as a line of effort under it. I think that was a really smart decision because if we don’t architect both of these systems with the fact in mind that we want them to integrate, we won’t get there.

I think one example I would bring up is we’re developing a lot of new communication systems for JADC on the conventional side. A lot of investment we’ve had in open architectures on programs that were working with Hanscom. We were initially developing these programs to field tactical data links faster and able to change out tactical wave forms faster for advanced fighters. But we found recently, Hanscom had a requirement to upgrade its VLF receive capability. They wanted an open system. They wanted it done rapidly. We went and looked at what are we doing in the conventional space that can be applied here? We applied that baseline from the tactical side over to the nuclear side. We found because we did that, we could do it much faster and much cheaper. Right? To your point about how do we field capability faster, I think it’s about really looking about what is happening in across the DoD and how do we leverage that, making sure that we have architectures in NC3 that will support being able to plug in to the next higher level things going on from a JADC2 perspective.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks. I think we’ll have to continue to educate folks on what really NC3 is or… I mean, C2 is C2 at the end of the day. Have different users sometimes with the NC3 piece but, again, we can’t afford to have two distinct systems, particularly given that conflict does not just stay in its little lanes. We can’t have a C2 system that stays in its lanes either. Michael, one of the biggest innovations in the acquisition community has been the advent and use of digital engineering and digital transformation. Has general dynamics integrated these concepts into its processes and what has your experience been with digital engineering?

Michael Beltrani:

Yeah, thank you. We’ve talked about this. Jim talked about it a little bit from Northrom’s perspective. First, yes, we have. Any new program now is moving towards more modern engineering methodologies like agile development, digital engineering, digital twin. Some of the legacy programs that we’ve had for a while was still in the process of transitioning some of that because you have to do it when it makes the most sense. We’ve seen, I would say, some benefit from cost schedule, technical early retirement of risks that you wouldn’t have seen with the traditional waterfall development. I think that’s really important. But then, and I’m always going to go back to the people piece, there’s the benefit to the workforce. The newer regeneration of engineering really wants to use newer engineering methodologies, not old waterfall, PDR, CDR. I mean, we’re doing the scrums and the PIs and the storyboards and all the stuff we’re doing in agile is exciting to people.

At first, there was some resistance because, hey, I’ve been working on the deterrent for 60 years and some dudes in my business actually have been working on it for 60 years. It’s really hard to change. But they’ve seen, when we talk about attrition, how excited the engineers are to move to that digital engineering methodology and the model-based system engineering. That’s gone a long way in increasing morale of the engineering workforce on these projects and kind of giving them a shot in the arm. I think I can’t quantify well the overall cost savings or schedule reduction across the portfolio. I do know that folks seem to be more motivated and more energized and they seem to be exciting about doing things differently. I think there’s value in that alone.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks, Michael. Back to you, Jim. A similar topic, anything more to add on what digital engineering has done for the B-21 and Sentinel? Or are there other things, developments that are coming down the pike that could help speed up weapon system delivery?

Lt. Gen. James “Jim” Kowalski (Ret.):

Yeah. I think it helps sometimes to take all of these buzzwords and say, “Well, what is that…” Sort of, “What does that really mean?” We’ve signed the first ever data rights agreement with the Air Force so that we could move the B1 data up into the cloud and then that gives access across to the program to a lot of this data so people can work faster out there. We’ve launched that shared environment. We’ve also demonstrated the migration of ground systems data to the cloud environment. That, of course, makes available a lot of mission maintenance data in the cloud. When you think about how the airplane gets fielded and employed, that’s really important to reducing forward operating footprints and those kind of things and improving your maintenance timelines.

Another example is the flying test bed for the B-21. We’ve used that for a while. We’ve recently completed another demonstration of the integration of the hardware and software using the flying test bed. This is how we get time out of the program because we’re able to say, “Well, does that count as a test? Did we fully test all that and does that reduce the testing requirements later on?” We’re making a lot of progress there. On the GBSD program, they were recognized by the Air Force last year in a biennial review for everything that they’ve done in terms of digital. On the one hand, I think B-21 became digital Sentinel because of when the contract was let back in ’20 and in how we put data in for the RFP, Sentinel was conceived digital. I mean it was digital from the very beginning and that’s led to a lot of really great progress in that program.

The contract was led, I think, in September of ’20. Seven months after that, they completed the initial baseline review of the program. Seven months after that, they were doing the first case windings on the first stage rocket motor. This summer, they completed the software, hardware connection there, that first milestone. They call it IFC.5, but as you take a program to completion, that was a critical step. Just yesterday, we announced, I want to make sure I get this right, the casting for the first and the second stage motors. A lot of times, until you actually see something fielded, a lot of people not really sure if it’s a program. I assure you, GBSD is a real program doing a lot of great work out there. Yeah, I think we’re making good progress.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

To that point, I always try to tell the program office, “I need pictures. I need pictures that I can show Capitol Hill. I need pictures that I can show other folks out there because there is real progress being made and real things being produced for EMD and they’re, again, making very good progress.” Elaine, HF, High Frequency radio, I mean it’s been around for 80, 90 years, known at… I think a lot of us who’ve flown airplanes remember using it to, “Hey, can I get a phone patch? I can be over to the Pacific. Can I dial up on HF and say to a command center somewhere, “Can you patch me into my headquarters back home so I can have a discussion with them?”” I mean that’s command and control, yet, it’s not used as much anymore these days. But I understand there’s some new ways to use HF called digital HF and what’s going to make it relevant in NC3 in the area where we’re at with the high bandwidth and low latency comms that we have with StratCom. What’s the next big innovation?

Elaine Bitonti:

Yeah. I think that’s a really good question. We have a lot of engineers, as Mike said, had been working in Collins and working on HF for over 60 years. We like to say, “This isn’t your grandfather’s HF as you used to think about it.” There’s been a lot of advancements so far. Some of them are the automatic link establishment. Right? Before, like you said, you had to call. You had to wait for someone to pass you in. Now, there’s software that does all that for you, finds the link, makes it ready to go so when you’re ready to talk, it’s good to go. The other thing is you’re used to kind of point-to-point, right? Now, we’re talking about digital HF mesh networks. You have much more resiliency. If one point of the network goes down, the other point is automatically reestablished. I think the other change that has really happened that makes it much more useful in the future contested environment is that the data rates and the latency used to be very low data rates and it was rather slow. Right?

We’ve had significant increases in the amount of data that can be passed through HF. We’re actually, right now, upgrading on an army contract with a congressional modification that we got for a PACE plan. Right? When you need to have your alternative and your contingency plans, HF is actually a great choice now given all of the advancements that have happened. We’re actually fielding some of those advancements now, like I talked about in other conventional means, and we can think about how can that be applied from an NC3 perspective, right? As you have multiple diversity of links. You have AEHF, VLF, UHF, but HF can be an augmentation source as well. You can carry HF, I’ll say, on nuclear, but also conventional platforms, right? Which continues to extend your network. I think there’s a lot of really important advancements that are being fielded right now. Also, looking at how we have HF and open systems.right? HF could just be one component in a radio you have that carries multiple different wave forms.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Well, that’s great. As you mentioned, a lot of our airplanes already have HF, but that’s the legacy type HF. Well, there are some replacement underway for that. This is something totally different. I know the Air Force and Global Strike is looking at this very… With a lot of, I guess, excitement. Might be the wrong word. But I think it is something that is sort of cutting edge that we can use in going quickly. Michael, a significant portion of the nuclear modernization effort is updating a complex web of 200 NC3 systems. In my opening remarks, I said we’re going to modernize a myriad of NC3 systems by 2030 and, of course, use myriad because there’s just… You lose count and you get caught in an acronym soup. What is the price to deterrence if these systems aren’t updated? What’s General Dynamics’ approach to updating these systems?

Michael Beltrani:

I mean, NC3 really is the fourth leg of the triad, right? It’s kind of silly we have to say it that way, but it doesn’t get the same, I say, publicity as large programs like B-21 or Sentinel or Columbia on the Navy side from a modernization perspective. But it’s really important, right? A lot of weapon systems could work 99% of the time and that’s could be good enough for that mission. Not so much at NC3, right? If that link gets broken at the time when we needed to work, that’s really bad. Right? I would not want us think about what consequences would come from that. What we did at GD is, and it’s pretty basic stuff, but it’s something that you kind of forget, is we went on a campaign to just listen and understand problem statements. Global Strike Command and Strat throughout the user community.

Not coming with pay, we have this technology that we’re trying to push, but do we understand the CONOPS? Do we understand the gaps that they have? Where are the problem statements are? We did that for a couple years before we even engaged in that space in the modernization world. What we found out is, wow, we have a lot of mature technology in the corporation that we use for other customers. Elaine mentioned the HF example earlier that we can now apply to this problem statement and it’s not recreating the wheel. It’s tweaking and getting it to the right folks to move forward. One thing we are doing is the Nebraska Defense Research Corporation is having a series of demonstrations over the last couple years. We’re heavily involved in that. We won several of the contracts last year, planned to win several more this year. We’re going to demonstrate some capability that’s mature, that is maybe not as well known in the Strat community, but clearly is important and really will make a difference to make sure that that link is never broken.

I think it’s a little bit harder for NC3 because of the 209, or depending on how many systems… Who you talk to, you get a different number from everybody. But in 68% of the Air Force or 70% or 75%. But there’s a lot of systems that they’re not all under one program office. Right? It’s a little bit convoluted from an acquisition strategy perspective and who’s who in the zoo and who really owns the acquisition going forward across the services. But at the end of the day, all we’re trying to do is just make it a little bit easier and make sure that connection is there.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks. Of course, it’s not just an Air Force thing, the Navy’s got to work through that although we… DISA has to work through this. You’ve got special users that have to work through all of this. Of course, inside for the department of the Air Force, it’s not just an Air Force thing. It’s a Space Force piece. Very heavily invested the Space Forces on NC3 and early warning. We’ve got four minutes left and so what I’m going to do in the final round of questions is ask you for about 45 seconds and answer so that we can get through everybody and we’ll conclude. Jim, you talked about the B-21 and the Sentinel contract and when they’re rewarded. How are you adapting to ensure the platforms, again, in production, are going to be able to be ready for the next fight? What kind of challenges have you seen? In 45 seconds.

Lt. Gen. James “Jim” Kowalski (Ret.):

I hate to say the phrase digital engineering again, but that is really how you are… Get everybody on the same baseline and you are able to field an airplane, field a missile system, that is up to the standards and can fight the day that it’s fielded because you’ve got this digital architecture out there to help you do that. You’ve got agile software that doesn’t… You don’t have to wait 18 months to get a software upgrade and you’ve also got your folks in a position to accomplish the maintainability and sustainability as quickly as possible.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks. Elaine, let’s talk accreditation for a little bit or 45 seconds anyway. With a push towards open standards, are there differences in how we accredit and ensures availability in securing the networks for the NC3 mission?

Elaine Bitonti:

Yeah. I think, in 45 seconds, there are. I think if you look, there’s open standards in other areas. There’s open standard face for avionics. There’s OMS for open mission systems. There’s OCS for open communication systems. But we, in the NC3 community, we don’t yet have an open standard, right? For NC3 systems. I think that’s really something that government and industry should work on because I think we’ve seen the benefit of the implementation of the other standards when the government is clear about the standard and industry can develop to that. We can all field capability faster. We can understand what’s going to be needed from a certification perspective and we can work on how do we isolate the needed aspects for certification to make that go quickly, while not losing the ability to bring in new capability. I would make the analogy if you’re in an avionics business, which we also have, you segregate flight critical and non flight critical. I think we should take the same approach from an NC3 perspective and we would see significant benefit.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Yeah. Not only for NC3, but nuclear certification is going to be an issue that we’re already starting to work through of these systems and how do we take advantage of these digital models that we have and use new certification methods to do somewhat like you said, to separate those systems so that we’re not waiting until we produce it and then, okay, over to certifiers. I think that’s going to be something we’ve really got to pay attention to. Michael, what does industry see as the barriers to modernizing and implementing in modernized NC3 system?

Michael Beltrani:

I will answer this in less than 45 seconds. I kind of touched on it already. It’s really the clearly well-defined roles, responsibility, and accountability of the department. Who is responsible for what? Is it well understood within the department and then is it well understood within industry? That’s, to me, the technology in NC3 is available industry-wide, I believe. When you look at the best and breed of what we have to offer today, it’s not a development program like Sentinel as much as it is a leveraging what we have today. But it’s really hard to do that in that space with the way we’re structured.

Lt. Gen. James C. Dawkins:

Thanks, Michael. Well, thanks to all of our panelists for being here today. We appreciate the candor and the insights that you provided us. A big thanks to Air & Space Forces Association as well for hosting us and the great event they’ve put on for the last three days. Thank you.

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.