Watch, Read: ‘Communities in the Fight! Creative Solutions Make a Difference’

Oct. 16, 2022

AFA board member Kathleen Ferguson moderated a discussion on “Communities in the Fight! Creative Solutions Make a Difference” with Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.; Robert Moriarty, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations; Matt Borron, executive director of the Association for Defense Communities; and Glen McDonald, vice president of Bay Defense Alliance, 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:

Communities in the Fight. Creative Solutions Make a Difference. General Charles Q. Brown Jr is the chief of staff of the United States Air Force. He is responsible for the organization, training, and equipping of 689,000 Active duty, Guard, Reserve, and civilian forces serving in the United States and overseas. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he is an advisor to the Secretary of Defense, National Security Council, and the President. Mr. Matt Borron is the executive director for the Association of Defense Communities, a national nonprofit organization representing communities and states with significant military presence. For over a decade, Mr. Borron has dedicated his career to advocating for communities, service members, veterans, and military families on the local, state, and federal level. He has also served as a member of the United States Army Reserve for the past 18 years.

Mr. Robert Moriarty is the deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations. He oversees the management, policy, and oversight of Air Force installation programs. In this role, he is responsible for Base Realignment and Closure, installations planning and strategy, strategic basing, public and private partnerships and more. Mr. Moriarty served as an active duty in a variety of Air Force civil engineering positions before serving as a senior executive.

Mr. Glenn McDonald is the vice president for strategic projects and development for Gulf Coast State College in Florida. He serves as an alternate to the Air Combat Command Civic Leader Group and co-chairman of the Tyndall Community Service Committee. He received the 2017 Chairman’s Award from the Bay County Chamber of Commerce for his work to help Tyndall Air Force Base. Mr. McDonald participates in and chairs many community, civic, and military organizations.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Well, good afternoon everyone and welcome to the last panel of today, Communities in the Fight. Creative Solutions Make a Difference. My name is Kathleen Ferguson and I’m your moderator for today’s panel. I spent nearly 35 years working for the Air Force, the entire time as a civilian, never in uniform. I was an active duty military spouse and I am an AFA board member. Just before retiring, I was the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment, energy. And what I would tell you is during my time there, I used to meet with about 70 communities throughout the United States each and every year. And what I would tell you also is they’re all very committed to the mission of the Air Force and the support of military members and the families that live in their communities. So really today, we want to open all of you in this room up to that, and how you can be engaged, and how you can help out in your local communities.

During my time in SAF/IE we created the Air Force Community Partnership Program as a pilot. It was assisted by new legislation that Matt Borron down at the end here was very effective in getting passed. And what we learned is there’s tremendous opportunities to create win-win opportunities for both the installation and the community outside the gate to solve challenges. Mrs. Brown, thank you for the opportunity to participate or for allowing me to participate in the panel today and for your vision to foster community partnerships. Chief, thanks for being here and for your leadership and support to Airmen and Guardians and their families. And for the rest of the panel, again, thanks for being here. Community partnerships are not new. They’ve been around since the very beginning of the Air Force 75 years ago. In 1947, communities often provided land free of charge to the Department of the Air Force to allow the construction of the new military installations. DOD and Congress provided the rest, they did the housing, the hospitals, the flight line, the schools, and the shopping, and everything was on base.

An Airman in the 1960s, and even when I started working for the Air Force in the early 1980s, you never had to leave the base. You had everything inside that confines of the base and really the base did not talk a lot with the local community. Well fast forward, a number of years that I’m not going to do in my head for you, but 70% of our military families live off base and the military family has changed. Back in the 1960s and even early 1980s, spouses didn’t work. It was highly discouraged for spouse to work. And today, we are looking for opportunities to increase opportunities for spouse employment.

In other words, the fight has evolved. And really today, our panelists are going to discuss how our military members and their families and their commanders can engage with the community to help solve some of the most affecting quality of life challenges that we have. And you all know them as well as I do, housing, medical, quality of education, spouse employment, and childcare. But just quick before I begin with questions to the panel members, there’s a group of folks in the audience today that I want to recognize, and they’re the head of the Chief Civic Leaders Program, very engaged. And if you could all stand up, I think we’ve got a 10 or so of them in the room today.

These are the folks throughout the United States that support the men and women in uniform each and every day. They don’t do it for money. They don’t do it for themselves. They’re all volunteers. I’ve known some of them for over 20 years, and they do it just because they love the Air Force. So when you’re around here the next couple days, go ahead and meet them, find out what they’re doing in their communities to help the military members. So given that short introduction, I’d like to turn now to the first question, and chief here get the first question. You and Mrs. Brown travel all over the world and meet with Airmen and their spouses. Can you share what you’ve seen as some of the primary challenges facing Airmen and their families today? And what are some ways that communities can help?

CSAF Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr.:

Good. Well, thanks Kathleen for moderating today. And also thank to our Department of Air Force Civic Leaders for not only being here today, but the work that you do in your communities at the support of Airmen, Guardians, and their families. Well, it’s pretty simple because Sharene actually put it all together on what impacts our families as she put together the Five & Thrive. Let me just give you a little background. I have nothing to do with Five & Thrive, never came up with the idea. This was all spouses writing this and putting this together. And it’s the five key areas that the feedback that we get when we travel and as we engage with families and Airmen, childcare, education, healthcare, housing, and spouse employment. If I’ll take a minute just on each one of those, we hear a lot about childcare and it’s the same thing either on base or off base around the communities, the availability of the childcare.

And this is why it’s so important, again, to not only what we do on base and it’s not all the brick and mortar, but it’s the other ways that we help families with childcare. But it’s also what we are able to do in communities and some of the initiatives we’re trying to do to make it affordable for families to get childcare and not get on a long waiting list when they show up at each location, you have to start over again. It’s particularly important for our military to military couples that have work hours that aren’t always predictable, and so that’s important. On the education piece, we are an EFMP family and so it’s been something we’ve been focused on for a long time, just not only for us but our EFMP family members, almost 30 now. We pay attention to that aspect of education and how it drives decisions for our families of what base you want to go to what communities are going to live in.

At the same time, the housing is a key factor. And then housing is we want affordable housing and not everybody loves on bases. Kathleen described many of our families live outside the base, but they also don’t want to have a long commute to get to base. And they want to have quality schools where they can send their children and feel safe about their education and their just safety in general. On the healthcare, I think we’ve all dealt with TRICARE. But we also think the aspect of how do we make sure that, as we go to various communities, that the healthcare is there one, and then that they accept TRICARE. And this is something that we’re going to work on and continue to work on as well. And then the spouse employment. I really applaud the work that’s been happening around the various parts of the country on reciprocity, but we got to continue to push on those.

What I will tell you is when, probably three or four secretaries ago, the secretaries, all three secretaries, the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Navy, Department of the Army signed a letter that talked about, as we made basing decisions, how education and spouse employment was going to be graded or be part of the decision making process. And I will tell you, it is driven a full out competition. So when we travel, I hear so much about what different communities are doing to support on education and spouse employment, but you got to hit the other three of the Five & Thrive. And part of that is how we open up our bases, get to know the communities.

And the last thing that I’ve also highlight, which is really important is the School Liaison Program. If you were here in the panel last night or yesterday, spouses in the fight, Suzie Schwartz help get school liaisons in every community. They actually have the access and have a good understanding of how to support. And for all of us in uniform and our spouses and our families using the school liaison, and then for the communities embracing the school liaison will be important. So many different factors I think that we can work through, but it takes a team effort not only for those in uniform but also in our spouses, but to the communities as well.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thanks Chief. Chief, you mentioned a little bit about the housing crisis and what impact that has on military families. Can you explain a little bit about what DOD may be doing to help mitigate the lag in basic allowance for housing? And what the Air Force can do to maybe mitigate some of these challenges?

CSAF Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr.:

Well, I mean there’s a series of events that have happened all over the course of the past couple years. I don’t think anyone of us would’ve predicted a global pandemic that drove the housing prices up to where they are, and then you tie in inflation as well. And then we have a process for housing allowance that is not as responsive as it needs to be in some cases. This is something we’re working with the Air Force but relate to the Department of Defense because it impacts all the branches of the service. Last year, we were able to do some temporary, pretty quick reaction to raise housing allowances and some key areas, realizing we probably didn’t hit all the areas. No matter where you live, there’s probably someone in your organization or someone on your base who’s being impacted by the housing crisis.

At the same time, we extended the temporary lodging allowance, partly because it was taken people so long and families so long to find housing. The typical 10 day was not long enough, and so that was one part. The other thing we also try to do too is make sure that the lodging matched up with your housing allowance so that you weren’t getting the hard, large lodging bill and your housing allowance wasn’t matching up. So those are some of the areas. Areas that we’re focused on right now is how do we be a bit more responsive on some of our allowances to match up with what the economy’s doing. At the same time, what I’m advocating for is it’s not going to be a roller coaster ride. So as a family, you can actually have a budget, build a budget, and you can get a little plus up when the economy gets in a position where it’s not so good.

But it may come down a little bit too when the economy gets better. But we don’t want to make it such a big swing that you can’t predict each month what your paycheck’s going to look like and you can actually have a budget. But we got to be a bit more responsive and I think we have all the data and all the tools, but our processes are thought out modem time versus internet time. We got to actually start to move in a direction to move a bit faster, and that’s the area we’re focused on. I know CMSAF, she’s here in the audience. That’s something she’s focused on with her counterparts from across the other services as well.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thanks, Chief. So next question for Matt Borron. Matt, we talked a little bit about Five & Thrive and the quality of life stressors, the five quality life stressors and that they’re directly tied to military family readiness, resilience, and retention of force. As executive director of Association of Defense Communities, you see firsthand what communities are doing to help Airmen, Guardians, and their families. Can you give us a couple of examples of what you’re seeing and what communities have done in this area and what makes them successful?

Matt Borron:

Sure. Thanks, Kathy. But first of all, who here is not heard of the Association of Defense Communities? No hand. Okay, shame on you, who’s ever holding their hand up. Quick history, we’ve been around for 50 years and we got our start back when DOD could close bases and they didn’t have to ask Congress for permission. They could literally just padlock the gate, throw the community the key, and say good luck. And they did that, they closed a lot of bases, and then the dreaded BRAC process up to the ’80s and ’90s in 2005. So we were these communities who had gotten together where this had happened and they said, “What do we do now? How do we recover from having the biggest economic engine in our community ripped out? How do we replace X thousand amount of jobs?” And so for a long time, probably the first 30 years of our existence, we were worried about things like economic redevelopment, environmental cleanup, land transfer, kind of all of these awful issues.

But if you fast forward to today, our membership is almost entirely communities that host active military bases. Some of them are here in the room. The issues are different but the impetus is the same, right? It finally dawned on communities that they couldn’t take their base for granted, right? That they had to be doing everything for that base, that they would do for an Amazon HQ2, really looking at it through that economic development lens. The issues keep increasing, it used to be about land use and infrastructure and encroachment, and that’s still a big issue. But now, you’re seeing the issues that Ms. Brown is worried about and concerned about. This quality of life and these five issues that her initiative is tackling, I think, drive home something that ADC has always said, “The issues you want to tackle cannot be tackled only within defense line.”

All of this stuff transcends that defense line. And if you’re not working with your community, you’re not going to make a dent into it. And it’s good to see that the Air Force a beauty, I think writ large have come to understand that. The intergovernmental support agreement, I think helped really drive home that message. Now we have the Defense Community Infrastructure Program, which Congress funds up to a hundred million, allowing DOD to provide grants for off base infrastructure that somehow supports the mission. We wrote that very broad, so it could be quality of life, it could be schools, roads, utilities, rail, kind of, you name it. But to your question, there are a lot of cool things happening out there. But I’d tell you what, it’s an issue that I’ve been hearing more and more about. I was in California for a defense forum two weeks ago and what the Space Force folks talked about and then what the governor talked about was workforce and the need for a pipeline for a defense workforce.

We were in Tullahoma two weeks ago, Arnold Air Force Base, 57 active service members there, but then X thousand amount of contractors, but they talked about that too. I was up at Sub Base New London in Connecticut, the folks from Electric Boat came up to me and said, “We’re worried about a workforce. We’re worried about it 10, 15 years from now.” So they’ve started investing in grade schools, creating STEM programs for fifth graders, and then advanced welding and manufacturing for high school students. If you go out to, where was it? Little Rock Air Force Base, we went and toured the high school off post. The air base is teamed with the high school to create a class around cyber security. So Airmen actually come and teach a class three times a week that they get credit for all on coding and cyber security, creating that pipeline right into that installation.

These folks are in uniform, and that really transcends the different types of problems that we’re talking about. Now you need recruitment, right? Are the skills that we’re training our service members for right now, are those being trained in high school and grade school? And if they’re not, then we’re missing out on something that’s going to be more and more important as we move forward. We have future missions and evolving missions. Also, I would point out that in Maryland, they’ve done something really innovative that brings the state to the communities and the bases together every month to talk about just these types of issues.

And then the state starts putting additional resources into school programs, the spouse training programs. This is happening all across the country, but the point is you have to tell those stories. It takes a lot of risk from that mission support group commander, right? He has to be willing to maybe think outside the box and say, “This might fail. And I don’t know if the lawyers are going to let me do it, but I’m going to give it a shot.” A lot of times, they succeed. And when they’ll succeed one place, you can steal those ideas for other places. Thanks, Kathy.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thanks, Matt. Mr. Moriarty, building up what Matt just talked about and Five & Thrive, can you tell us how the Air Force Community Program works and how the program and Five & Thrive are related? And what the installations and communities can do to get the most out of those programs?

Robert Moriarty:

Thanks, Kathy. So for the last several months, Mrs. Brown and I and the partnership team there within my area meet and discuss ideas and do that. I think one thing that’s apparent is the Air Force is a large organization, and we have a lot of authorities at our disposal. Sometimes it takes a little bit of effort to make sure we’re in concert with that and also working with the communities and the installation. So with the conversation Mrs. Brown and I have, it allows us at least to sync up what she’s hearing on the road within the Five & Thrive program. Those are five pillars that are very important we work. Then there’s all other pillars that we work in addition to that to include mission requirements and other requirements. One thing that’s interesting is we’ve got three communities here that we’re going to recognize at the end for some innovative work.

But as I was talking to them, they reminded me every installation has unique problems and unique solutions. If I was to issue policy that said we shall do this, like Fairchild, we’re going to have everybody work with the community to build a CATM range, a firing range for it to keep our folks up, that would not work, right? Because every base doesn’t have that and every community’s not willing to do that. But there are other things they are willing to do. I think as we look across the needs and we work with the installations, the thing we’ve seen successful is where the installation and the installation commander. We don’t fund a billet to this out of the secretary or the Air staff, but where they will dedicate an individual to do that and lead that effort and put the unity of effort? Because I’m looking at JBSA, and we’re missing one commander two from the last four years.

But some of their initiatives, one thing, is you got to pass the baton to the next commander. Some of these initiatives can take long time. General Brown challenge us to break down barriers and try to look for new ways to do it. It doesn’t happen fast though, right? Sometimes we have to get legislation, sometimes we have to look at different authorities. I would say when you talk about a partnership program, I would say it’s more of a mindset than a program. Because within there, we talk about intergovernmental service agreements, which are basically services that we want to do, grass cutting, trash pickup, snow removal, fixing roads. But that’s only part of the partnerships that we have. We have a whole host. I see the two chiefs up here, I mean we’ve gotten dormitory capacity in some of our smaller communities through partnership.

We’ve gotten educational opportunities through partnerships, but all started with some installation devoting resources, a community devoting resources, us figuring out a way. And what we try to do is enable that. So if Mrs. Brown identifies a problem that she’s heard on the street or our folks, we have partnership brokers out there to help so we can trade good ideas, but it’s not one size fits all. And you recognize, Kathy that the Air Force is much different than some of us came in, and we are more and more dependent upon the communities than we ever were before. I think that’s good. I think there’s things that the communities can do very well for us and things that we still need to do ourselves, but it’s really dependent upon where we are. But as Mrs. Brown says, we got to listen to those voices out there and see what those needs are.

I think in some cases, there were some needs that weren’t met, not because we didn’t want to, but because they didn’t funnel in the right place. We have tremendous amount of authorities. People say, well, you need more legislation, probably not. There are some things maybe in some areas, but for the most part, we have a lot of tools at our disposal. It’s getting a smart people that can look at it and go, “Man, I use a hammer normally, but I can use a screwdriver here.” And you go, “I never thought you could do that.” “Well yeah, we can. I mean we can write different things.” So I’m really excited about the opportunities for the future. So thanks for that.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Yeah, thanks Bob. That was very interesting. Now Glen, we’re going to take it down to the installation level. You’ve been active in numerous organizations in Northwest Florida over the years, specifically designed, help Tyndall and your military members and their families that are stationed there. Can you tell us what makes Bay County and Panama City a great defense community? And give us your most satisfying example of helping Airmen and their families.

Glen McDonald:

Thank you Ms. Ferguson. I live in a community of about 185,000 people. I know several of us in the audience live in smaller communities. We know out of 185,000 people, there’s one person out there that doesn’t support the military members of the military families. And I am still trying to find them. I’m going to find them, and if anybody out there knows, let me know. We now judge ourselves in Bay County as in pre Michael and post Hurricane Michael in 2018. Most people judge themselves by families. When they had kids, when they went to college, we judged by hurricane and pre Michael. We put together a Thanks a Million campaign that we started in our community so that there was no gap that a military member could have that we could not sustain. So military gets reimbursed for books and tuition. We were finding through the Airmen that some of them need their engines repaired, some of them need transportation, some of them need childcare, some of them need food.

So we created a Thanks a Million campaign and that’s thanks a million to all of the military so that there are no gaps. We have paid for engine repairs, we have paid for tires, we have paid for bicycle tires, we paid for food, we paid for childcare. There will be no gap in Bay County. We also really got encouraged by the Air Force taking the leadership role on support of military families. I want to thank you for the courage because those things that you put out for license reciprocity and for education have made our communities better.

It’s not only made our military families better, but it’s made us better. We started working simple things, work with your teams. We have great teams mostly associated with economic development. We put all of our economic development in our chambers in one room and we said, “What would you do?” And some of the greatest things that came out of that room were really small things. I have a couple of examples that I hand out after this, but we created a sticker for all of our businesses that is very simple. It says, “Support our troops hire military spouses.” So in every business…

Thank you, I only have 50 to hand out here so you can take them home. But we have them at our college, our universities, at our city halls, in our businesses, everywhere you go. And it sends a message where you don’t have to tell people, you can just see it on a sticker. The next thing we did was career source, hired two employees just to do military spouse employment, but also dependent employments and to put our money where our mouth is. Those are both military spouses that do both of those jobs. And the last thing, which is the big thing, we started small, thank you, was we were the first 5G community that returned small community after Hurricane Michael. So Verizon came in and put 5G into Panama City, and we had a lot of time with their leadership teams. Their VP of HR was sitting down with me and she said, “Glen, what can we do?”

And I said, “I would like for you to put a fully transportable job for military spouses into Verizon.” And she said, “What does that mean?” And that I said, “This means if you work at Tyndall and you’re a military spouse, and you move anywhere in the world to another base, you still have a job. You’re still vested in your retirement program. You’re still vested in your culture and you do it.” And Verizon, she said, “First thing was a great thing.” She said, “Glen, that’s a great idea.” The second thing she said, “It scary me.” She said, “Nobody’s ever asked us to do that.” So today, every big company that’s downstairs, if you can do that, put a fully transportable job for not only military spouses but for military members on your roles, so that they can transfer all over the world and keep all of the benefits, and they don’t have to start again at every place that they go.

We’ve also worked very hard on education. We knew first a lot of low income families need mentors. So recently, our chambers put out an initiative to recruit enough mentors so that no child, any child was on a waiting list for a mentor. So I want tell you all the really good story for my wife. My wife was one of the new volunteers. And about three weeks ago, she went to her mentor training session and she was up front with all of her friends and all the other people we had recruited. And then seven military members from Tyndall came in and sat in the back of the room. They looked great. They were young. They were very diverse, and they cared about our families in our communities. And my wife had a smile on her face for two weeks. She was so proud of America, the Air Force, and those young men and women that Tyndall sent to be volunteers.

I was talking to her earlier today, she saw one of them on the school and she’s so proud. So in the education, we did mentoring, we’re putting business members on our school boards. School boards are the hardest races in this country to elect for. People don’t want to do that job, but they’re the most important jobs we can do. So we’re recruiting business members. We just put our first business member on our school board unopposed in our election. We have a pretty good agenda. And the last thing we’re doing is we need really good data systems. The chief talked about data systems. We need data on every student, not just at the school level, not just at the teacher level, but on every student. So we know exactly when they need to be read to at the end of the day, when they need a mentor to read to them when they come to lunch with them. We need to know exactly where that student is and we need to help them in everything we do. So Kathy, I hope I answered your question.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Yeah, thanks very much, Glen. Thanks for what you do for our military members and their families. Chief, another question to you. Collaboration is a key term in your strategic approach, accelerate, change, or lose. Can you give your thoughts on how the Air Force communities and Congress can work together to develop creative solutions to quality of life, mission readiness, and installation, resilience, challenges, and opportunities?

CSAF Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr.:

Sure. Bob kind of highlighted that it doesn’t necessarily requires legislation, it just require support. And too often, we try and we make problems harder than they have to be sometimes by not knowing who to go to or who to engage with. The key part for us is with our wing leadership, squadron leadership, and I look at our honorary squadron or Honorary Commander Program to build those relationships within the community.

Now, I’ll go back to the time I was a squadron commander. We still stay in contact with our honorary squadron commander and we can go back to that community and still connect. The collaboration areas as we look at our various base is that, as I mentioned, we’re not in a process to close base, but we want to make sure that the base we have have the right facilities, have the right support. And a lot of that happens in the relationships we have with the community and with the Congress.

So the examples that I would give you is as we start to make transitions and missions is not holding onto the past, it’s really not so much the platform that’s there, but we want to make sure that there’s still valid employment, number of jobs, those things within the community. And that’s where the collaboration and dialogue happens between the Department of the Air Force, with our Congress, mayors, with our communities. We want to make sure the same level of jobs. We also make sure they support the mission of United States Air Force, and that’s where that balance is. We’ve done that at Robins, we’re going at a Grand Forks. And the same time, some project brings in new facilities that come in, but there’s also the collaboration on enhanced use lease and other areas that we’re able to do in communities. And part of that is really the engagement with the communities.

Later this week, I’ll have a chance to meet with all the wing commanders from across the Air Force. And one of the things I’ll talk to them about is get to know your community leaders. If you know them, they can actually help move some things along and may have some ideas that was already been mentioned by my other panel members that there’s plenty of opportunities there. If you make the right connection, you’ve already heard, they’ve got a lot of energy and a lot of things they want to be able to do. And that to me is one of the key ways about collaboration, getting to everybody in the room, sitting around the table, and figuring out, best of all, how to do this. We’re not talking past each other, we’re actually talking to each other, and then figuring out how best to bring together some solutions for Airmen, our families, and for our Guardians. And as it was mentioned earlier, it doesn’t only help the military member and their family, it obviously helps us community at large, and I think that’s an important aspect as well.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thanks, Chief. Very well said. So I want to circle back to Mr. McDonald and you mentioned Hurricane Michael back in 2018. Can you tell us how there were partnerships and relationships that the community made with the Department of the Air Force prior to the hurricane helped in recovery efforts? Give us some thoughts on how the military members in the communities out in this audience can learn from that.

Glen McDonald:

Yeah, I appreciate the chief. I think empowering your wing commanders to go out and integrate with the community is probably the most powerful message you may be send in the future. We had done five community partnerships in six months in the summer before Hurricane Michael. So in June, we completed five community partnerships. And what that had done is given us some small wins, some momentum, but most importantly, it given us relationships and trust and connectivity with the entire community. So when the hurricane hit in October of 2018, when the wing commander… Hurricane Michael was the third most powerful storm ever to hit the United States and it went bridge to bridge to Tyndall, so Tyndall has a bridge on each side. The eye of the hurricane was bridged to bridge. So after the hurricane, Colonel Laidlaw, our wing commander at the time, he knew everyone from the community partnerships. He knew the county manager, he knew the city manager, he knew the sheriff, he knew the police, and he didn’t have to reach out to Tom or I to get that.

He knew everyone. So we first set up a direct line of communication to our emergency operations center. That was the first thing that we did. And then when we started working on the rebuild of Tyndall and the rebuild when the water was going to come back, when the electricity was going to come back. All that information was directly communicated from the business and civic leaders directly to the wing commander. Then we were talking about rebuilding Tyndall. We had our entire legislative delegation, and our Governor Scott was in place when the hurricane hit, and now, Governor DeSantis. They were able to make the rebuild of Tyndall, the number one initiative on their entire priority list.

So that immediately put our congressional delegation, our senators, our local and state legislatures all on the same page. It was very, very helpful. But I will tell you the foundation was set with community partnerships and community leaders that work with our wing commanders here today. We don’t wait. My advice to everyone, do not wait. Don’t think someone else is going to do it. Be kind and courageous and go talk to your military members. And when you have an idea, don’t be scared to talk about it. Some of the greatest ideas come out of the smallest thoughts. The hurricane was an example of the relationships that we had and what we’ve been able to do since then. We’re still working on building the base of the future and we’re very excited. So thank you for the question.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Yeah, thanks. So Mr. Moriarty back to you. Can you give us a few examples of some innovative partnerships that the Air Forces execute with some of the communities? And then as a follow on question, if you can explain to the audience what they can do to learn more about community partnership program, and how they can become involved?

Robert Moriarty:

Sure. Last week with the governor from Idaho in talking about Mountain Home, interesting partnership where we’re having a little water issues out there at Mountain Home with the wells we’ve got. They’re going to put a pipeline into the Snake River and the state’s going to pay for that, and we’re going to build a water plant on the base, and that partnership has gone. The wing commander at the time was a colonel. Now he’s a one star. Hopefully, he is not a two star before we finished that. But that partnership started to make sure that base is viable in the future, and we both had an interest in that. But again, that broke down a lot of barriers. I’ll tell you, I started work in supporting the wing commander at that time in a previous job. And when it came back to me in the building, I was like, “Well, this doesn’t look exactly like what I thought it was going to look like, but it works.”

So I mean, again, this gets back to there might not be the answer you started with, but you need a solution, and smart people figured it out. We got three communities here today we’re going to recognize. One is Fairchild range. I mentioned earlier firing range, which typically we would do as a milcom project. We would go to Congress, ask for the money, build it, and then operate it ourselves. In this case, the community needed a new firing range for their law enforcement and we needed it. So they went out, got the money, and they’re building it, and then we will pay as a service to use it. Innovative solution, we get our folks trained and we didn’t have to tie up a lot of money and we worked with the community there. JBSA has a whole host as you can imagine, Joint Based San Antonio, it’s a mammoth of an installation, but we have a lot of partnerships with the community there with the City of San Antonio.

One of them is a blanket in intergovernmental service agreement where we can stripe and repair roads and do other things. And then there’s a whole host of other agreements we have with them. And then Altus, we were talking earlier, I think this conference actually is the size of Altus, the community. I mean literally 16, 17,000 people here. And yet that community we were talking, years ago, they identified, we put the training unit for our new tanker there, and it created a lot more folks there in a very small community. So they worked to the city, provided land, and they went out to developers and developers said, “We still need a little more help.” So the state provided money for the infrastructure, the electrical piping, water piping, and infrastructure work.

And then the developer comes in and we’re going to end up with somewhere between a hundred and 150 ish units for Airmen at E4, E5 range and apartment style. So those are three creative opportunities that are out there. These don’t have to be big, big wins. They can be little things that we partner with. I think communities, if you look at outside England right now, we’ve been, I see Mr. Oshiba in the audience, we’ve been working with the community leadership there and the community for CDC. Sometimes we can work with the community. They can facilitate commercial development there for childcare where we didn’t have it before. I think some of you, and I know in San Antonio you do this where you mentor other communities. Probably, the best place to get help is to talk to other communities. People you’ll meet here today that you can go to and say, “Hey, how did you do it?” And you can learn from them.

Toniann Fisher from my staff runs the partnership program. We have a website. We can give you afterwards and advertise, but that’s a good place, and we have brokers for each of the installations which we can help. So I think part of it is, just if you don’t have a good setup with the Five & Thrive, some of the communities have actual committees that are focused on the Five & Thrive, those five things. So they have set groups that are meeting on that. Maybe for some of you that isn’t what you need, but I think getting our spouses more involved and our family members to help, and as where Mrs. Brown’s really been instrumental in this really grassroots kind of helping us while the military members are doing what they do, but hearing from the spouses of where they need help, and then Mrs. Brown helping them get educated on where to ask.

I know sometimes we get very frustrated because we don’t know where to go. But the installation commanders, the command chiefs, they have a lot of resources available. The only last thing I’d say is I don’t see people walk by something. Our leaders will grab an issue if they know about it, and they’re looking for them. But I think sometimes we just got to get it into the leadership, whether it be at the wing, the group, or the chiefs, first sergeants, channel it up and then we’ll get the right people involved. So for the spouses, if you’re not getting your message acrossed, then I would say keep at it. And certainly, Mrs. Brown had offered you that she’ll get it and… I’m not saying bypass the chain of command. What I’m saying is if you’re that frustrated, there’s people inside the Air Force that will help.

I mean there’s people outside that’ll help too. But I mean we got people inside the Air Force that will help if we know about it. So Toniann Fisher runs our partnership program and I’d offer that up. I also offer up the people that you meet out in the community that are doing this. I see Laura Lenderman’s here and she was a wing commander back at JBSA in the day. Some of the issues she started with and Heather Pringle started with, now the general’s got there, and he’s working those issues. So they take time to foster. But your civilian community, they’ll be there to continue. So Kathy-

Matt Borron:

Bob, are there any other places maybe in a couple of months where communities and installations can learn from one another, maybe cross service-

Robert Moriarty:

There might be an opportunity in Phoenix with Association of Defense Communities coming up and Mrs. Brown may be on a panel there strangely you would ask. She might be on a panel there hopefully where we could further discuss this if folks wanted to in more detail. Good question. Thank you, Kathy.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Well thank you. So we have just about two minutes left and I wanted to give the panel members just one last opportunity to give 30 second pitch on the one thing they want the members in this audience take away. And I will start with Mr. McDonald in the end.

Glen McDonald:

Yeah, I would recommend that you get engaged, be forthright, go have the conversations. The Air Force and the military needs to tell us the community what they need, and we need to tell them what we can and can’t do. But start small, develop the trust, the relationship, the collaboration, and go really hard and fast. Because communities are in the fight and we have to make a difference.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Mr. Borron.

Matt Borron:

I would just reiterate that community, that one community concept, whether you’re talking climate change, whether you’re talking quality of life, housing, defense line doesn’t matter anymore. And we’ve heard it here, whether it’s a hurricane or other types of natural disasters, if you’re not working with your community partner, you’re not going to solve the issue. And frankly, a lot of military leaders I talk to, those missions support group commanders, they need top cover. They need to be told that seek out those partnerships, do this. It’s okay, you’re not going to get your hand slapped for talking with the mayor and the chamber of commerce and the county and trying to figure out innovative solutions that your lawyer might not like, but there are ways around that.

Robert Moriarty:

We got a lot of lawyers, so sometimes it’s a matter of finding the right lawyer. And I only mean that tongue in cheek for the lawyers in the room because sometimes there’s a lawyer that understands the authorities is different. So I just challenge it, keep pressing hard as General Brown says. Let’s make sure we know what our problems are and then we’ll lock arms. I’ve been impressed with the Air Force my whole career, which has been a little while now, that we get the right leaders in the seat today to solve these problems. So thank you for your service and thanks for what you’re doing. Thanks for the spouses that are here that are part of the fight. And Five & Thrive is a good thing, it helps connect us. So thank you.

CSAF Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr.:

Two points. Relationships matter and proceed until apprehended. Let me just explain those very quickly. For your relationships, you never want to cold call somebody in a crisis. So build the relationships before you need them. And that was really highlighted what happened there at Tyndall that you knew just to call because there was an issue. You never burn a bridge. You may not use it very often, you may not see eye to eye, but you may need that bridge at a later dates. Never burn it and proceed until apprehended. What I mean by that is figure out what it is you want to do, start down a path, just communicate what you’re doing, that provides a top cover. You have my top cover.

We cannot continue to do the same thing, expect a different result. So we got to challenge ourselves. I believe in challenging the status quo and driving some things. And sometimes we need people at a lower level to start doing some things to make us nervous, and then let’s have a conversation. I often talk about Ted Lasso. I’m sorry, I want to keep going for a second. I started watching Ted Lasso because of my staff and one of the things he said, “When you’re driving change or going against a challenge, it’s like riding a horse. If you’re comfortable, you’re probably not doing it right.” If we’re driving change, we should be a little bit uncomfortable. If you’re too comfortable, then we’re not doing something right. So think about Ted Lasso next time we want to drive some change. Thanks.

Kathleen Ferguson:

I wanted to say thanks to everybody in the audience today for participating. And thank you to each of the four panel members for being up here and sharing your experience and expertise and helping to get that word out. Just finally, we have, as Mr. Moriarty already pointed out, we have three outstanding communities in the audience today that are receiving recognition letters that were signed by the Secretary of the Air Force for their innovative partnerships that Bob talked about. So I’d like to invite each one of them. First, Altus, if you can come up to the front to get a picture taken with the team.

Cybersecurity Is the ‘Soft Underbelly’ of Space Operations, SpOC Commander Says

Oct. 14, 2022 | By Chris Gordon

The Space Force does not fully understand its cyber threats, and cybersecurity is an overlooked vulnerability of space operations, one of the service’s top leaders said Oct. 14.

“We have to be cyber secure in everything we do,” Lt. Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, head of Space Operations Command (SpOC), said during a virtual event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s really the soft underbelly of these global space networks.”

Whiting said the U.S. military has long understood its vulnerabilities as physical ones. It engages in intelligence to detect threats but can also rely on basic defenses at installations, such as fencing and armed security to fall back on. But cybersecurity is more amorphous than physical security, he said.

“We don’t yet have the intuitive understanding to say, based on the threat that we’re seeing, ‘Have we done enough?'” said Whiting, who also heads the USSF element of U.S. Space Command (SPACECOM). “I don’t want to act like we don’t have any of those tools, but it’s not the same comprehensive understanding we have for physical security.”

Viewing space as a contested environment, the Space Force and civilian branches of the U.S. government have acknowledged material threats to space operations, condemning anti-satellite tests and working to reduce the number of objects in Earth orbit. Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David D. Thompson has said the number of objects in space could become “unmanageable.” With the increase, the Commerce Department is taking over some of the Department of Defense’s role in space traffic management, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will require operators to deorbit defunct satellites within five years.

Cyber threats, however, are largely invisible until they become a problem. In addition, cybersecurity tools can seem intrusive rather than viewed as a practical necessity. The U.S. is also seeking to connect all its military operations further and to expand data sharing, growing risks to networks by increasing entry points.

“We’re working to improve our cyber capabilities to defend those operations,” Whiting said. “The joint force cannot fight the way they want to fight without the space capabilities we provide to all levels of conflict.”

American adversaries such as Russia and China engage in cyberattacks against other countries, including the United States. The threat is ongoing. More than a dozen U.S. airports had their websites knocked out Oct. 10 in an attack claimed by a pro-Russian hacker group.

The Space Force is not the only U.S. service that conducts cyber operations, nor is it the only service that views cyber threats as one of the most significant issues they must address.

“This really is a global problem,” said Lt. Gen. Laura A. Potter, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, said at the Association of the United States Army conference Oct. 12.

“We really need to pay attention to this,” added Lt. Gen. Maria B. Barrett, head of Army Cyber Command. “We need to pay attention now.”

Air Force leaders have also acknowledged vulnerabilities.

“There’s been a realization that, quite frankly, we can’t protect everything we have,” said Brig. Gen. Chad D. Raduege, the chief information officer of U.S. European Command, at an AFA event in March.

However, the Space Force sees itself as having a broader responsibility to the U.S. government and the general public, which rely on it to conduct day-to-day operations. Disruptions in a Space Force network could have wide-ranging implications for the rest of the U.S. military. As well as relying on intelligence and surveillance to recognize threats, the Space Force is also working on adding cybersecurity to its networks.

“Today we invest in cybersecurity at the weapon system level that we’re putting that in, although we do have legacy systems that were built before this was a consideration,” Whiting said. “We’re trying to bolt on cybersecurity there. We’re building Mission Defense Teams of Guardians who are actively monitoring our systems in the cyber domain. We’re building in higher-level security as well, where we’re looking at overall networks and what kind of activity is on those networks.”

Ultimately, the Space Force views better cybersecurity as necessary for its role enabling operations by the rest of the U.S. military.

“That’s really our moral responsibility to the joint force,” Whiting said.

Early Planning for B-1, B-2 Retirements Depends on B-21 Progress

Oct. 14, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Initial planning has begun for the retirement of the B-1 and B-2 bombers, but the game plan depends largely on progress in fielding the B-21 Raider—and on Congress—the Air Force’s bomber program executive officer said.

“The approach we’re taking” on the road to a two-bomber force for Air Force Global Strike Command is “maintaining our current capability and readiness in terms of our near-peer adversary” as the B-21 ramps up, said Col. (Brig. Gen. select) William S. Rogers in a recent interview.

“At this point the team’s really focused on maintaining that readiness, availability, survivability, and operational capability” for the B-1 and B-2 “while we get ready for the B-21 fielding.”

In an Air Force bomber roadmap from 2018, the service planned to retire the B-1 and B-2 in the 2031-2032 timeframe, but USAF has not updated those plans publicly since. Long-term, AFGSC plans to field “at least 100” B-21s and 75 B-52s.

The Rapid Capabilities Office, which manages development of the B-21, is taking an “events-based approach” to fielding the new aircraft, so hard plans for the B-1 and B-2 departures are not yet possible, Rogers said. The “divestiture planning” is “looking at what makes sense, if there are any … unplanned delays on the B-21. Or if things just change.” He noted that “Congress gets a say in our divestiture plans, but at this point, we’re looking at multiple … avenues, to make sure the Air Force has the flexibility needed” and to provide as many options as possible for the Secretary of Defense and the President.

Both the B-1 and B-2 suffer from “vanishing vendor” issues, and the PEO shop, part of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, is “working with the primes on parts obsolescence,” Rogers said. During the pandemic, “there’s been instances where subs [subcontractors] went out of business, so … We engage with the primes and the Air Force Sustainment Center” looking for form, fit, and function replacements “that may be out there” as well as identifying new vendors and possible vendors. If the Air Force has the rights to parts, “we’ll work with the Rapid Sustainment Office to see if there’re any innovative ways to solve some of those problems.”

The B-1 and B-2 are doing well in terms of aircraft availability rates—the preferred metric over mission capability rates—and are hitting their goals, Rogers said. For the B-1, aircraft availability is 42 percent; for the B-2, it’s 55 percent.

The B-1 saw a surge in aircraft availability last year, when 17 airplanes retired from the fleet, but USAF left the number of maintainers at the previous level, meaning more maintainers were available for each airplane. Spare parts from 12 of the 17 aircraft also helped improve the B-1’s availability, which had suffered greatly from exhausting use in the Middle East over the last 20 years.

Results of a B-1B carcass physical teardown as well as a fatigue test on another carcass and the creation of a “digital twin” of the airplane are expected to yield benefits in availability over the long term, as the Air Force moves toward a predictive maintenance model.

Early discussions have taken place about what to do with the B-2 after it’s retired. Due to its sensitive and secret materials, if the aircraft are to be stored, they will need a special climate-controlled and secure facility for that purpose. The bomber PEO shop is watching to see what the Air Force decides to do with the 33 F-22s the service plans to retire, if it is permitted to do so. Whatever approach is taken with those aircraft will likely set the model for B-2 storage, Rogers said.

The fate of the B-2s will “ultimately depend on higher-level decisions of the Air Force,” he said. A decision on long-lead military construction funds will depend on whether the aircraft will be stored intact or scrapped. A MILCON decision “assumes we’re building facilities to store intact, full aircraft. That decision hasn’t been made, yet,” Rogers said.

“It’s still event-driven, depending on the numbers of B-21s we need out there, also weighed against the threat … Against the peer competition,” he said.

Asked if the B-2 will be used in testing the B-21, Rogers said that, too, remains to be seen.

“We’ll try to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, and if there’s ways to reduce risk on B-21, we’ll certainly talk to and coordinate with the B-21 program and Global Strike Command” about using the B-2 in such a role. Typically, the Air Force has two B-2s available for test purposes at any given time.

The B-1 and B-2 have largely completed their modernization programs, but Rogers said the term “modernization through sustainment” summarizes the approach to be taken, which means software updates will take an open approach to make improvements easy to add. AFGSC may yet need improved communications in “a highly contested environment” or advanced weapons.

“Any upgrades [or] mods are really focused on keeping it viable and operationally relevant as needed, until the Air Force makes final decisions on divestiture,” Rogers noted. Major upgrades of aircraft destined for mid-term retirement aren’t affordable right now, so the goal is to only make “wise choices” for inexpensive improvements that can add significant capability “without a lot of development.”

For the B-2, the only new weapon in process is the B61-12 nuclear bomb. There is “not currently a requirement” to outfit the B-2 with capabilities to direct numbers of collaborative combat aircraft—uncrewed, re-usable or “attritable” air vehicles likely to make up a big part of the 2030s USAF force structure.

For the B-1, however, new weapons are likely, but Rogers couldn’t give details due to classification.

“Anything additional at this time is classified and early in planning … At this point, I can’t discuss it,” he said. However, AGFSC has said it plans to fit the B-1 and B-52 with hypersonic weapons. Both aircraft will carry the weapons externally, and the B-1 will carry the AGM-183 Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) on external hardpoints once used for nuclear cruise missiles, when that aircraft had a nuclear mission.

The first B-52s equipped with the new Rolls-Royce engines, under the Commercial Engine Replacement Program, will be ready for testing in a few years, Rogers said. Asked why the Air Force can’t go faster with the CERP—which was initially planned to be a quick replacement with off-the-shelf powerplants—Rogers said “there’s more to it” than that.

To go with the new engines, “there’s new nacelles, flight controls being changed and upgraded, new throttle systems going into the aircraft, displays, and other things,” each of which are interconnected and which depend on each other’s success.

He said the B-52 CERP is a far more complicated program “compared to the C-5 re-engining,” which took more than a decade.

The AFLCMC is working with AFGSC to determine the rate at which B-52s will re-enter the force after receiving the CERP, as well as a radar upgrade and other changes.

“All these [changes] have training and mission support type impacts, but it is the goal to try to feed them in a logical, smaller batch into the fleet versus having large batches” all at once, Rogers said. In smaller batches, the upgraded B-52s will generate some experience and teach AFLCMC what it will need with regards to spare parts, for example, he said.

Overall, the bomber PEO shop is “doing all we can on the acquisition side to support the Air Force’s position and plan for a two-bomber force. And it’s our job to give the Secretary of the Air Force, the DOD, and the country … from a bomber standpoint, the flexibility to defeat China. We take that role seriously,” Rogers said.

Air Force Needs to Cultivate More Hispanic Officers, SECAF and Report Say

Oct. 14, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

The Department of the Air Force needs to do a better job of identifying, recruiting, and mentoring Hispanic officers—especially at its very highest ranks, according to a new report and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

Speaking at a conference sponsored by the Air Force’s Hispanic Empowerment and Advancement Team (HEAT) and hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association on Oct. 14, Kendall highlighted the scarcity of Hispanic or Latino general officers as an issue that he and other Air Force leaders have been focused on as of late.

“[Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.] and I briefed [Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III] recently, we went through our general officer posture basically, and the thing that jumped out at us was that we are not promoting enough Hispanics to the senior ranks,” Kendall said. “So we’ve got to ask ourselves: Why is that true? And we’ve got to go figure out what to do about it.”

According to the most recent data, just three generals in the Active-duty Air Force and Space Force identified their ethnicity as Hispanic/Latino—less than one percent of the entire general officer corps. None are three- or four-star generals.

Getting a general officer corps that better reflects the rest of the Air Force and the U.S. won’t happen overnight, though. It will require a concerted effort to develop officers through the career “pipeline that delivers people to the top,” Kendall noted.

“We want to make sure that people are getting the opportunities that they have, and that there’s nothing that either the Air Force or individuals are doing that prevents them from reaching their full potential,” Kendall said.

Such an effort will likely entail a prolonged, multi-faceted process, and it will require individuals and leaders who can understand and appreciate the unique challenges that Hispanic service members face, Kendall said.

“One of the things I found is, as I’ve led diverse groups or been involved in diverse groups, is that if you don’t have people there who represent different segments of the population, so to speak, the people who don’t have those backgrounds—it never enters their head to consider things that would be obvious and immediate to people that do have that backgrounds,” Kendall said.

As an example, Kendall cited the success of HEAT, a barrier analysis working group, in introducing a policy change that allowed Airmen and Guardians to have name tags and tapes with accent marks.

Such proposals are necessary, Kendall added, to go along with efforts of leadership. Noting that he is a “WASP”—White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—Kendall praised the diversity of his own leadership team, including undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones, the department’s first Latina No. 2. But he also urged conference attendees and other Hispanic Airmen and Guardians to propose and pursue their own ideas.

“We need your ideas. We need your input. We need your thoughts,” Kendall said.

A 28-item action list arrived later in the day with the release of a report from the Hispanic-Serving Institution-Air Force ROTC TableTalks (HART), a initiative from HEAT that surveyed Hispanic advocacy groups, recruiting leaders, AFROTC personnel, academics, and officials from Hispanic-serving institutions—colleges and universities with 25 percent Hispanic enrollment—to identify and address disparities facing Hispanic candidates for Air Force ROTC in particular.

“When we talk about tapping the unlimited potential … it takes 20 years to grow and develop a colonel,” said Lt. Col. Daniel Mendoza, one of the study’s authors. “How are our Hispanic and Latino students doing at the beginning of that journey, as they enter higher education, as they enter undergraduate programs?”

From a series of regional and national symposiums involving hundreds of participants, a group of 10 Airmen and Guardians, guided by academic advisers from some of the HSIs, produced a 59-page report breaking down the disparities facing Hispanic officers and Cadets—disparities the Air Force itself acknowledged in a inspector general report last year.

The report also included more than two dozen “implied tasks” for the DAF to pursue for the purpose of increasing Hispanic representation in Air Force ROTC, and especially for career tracks such as pilots or operators—fields that often feed into the highest ranks.

Those action items largely broke down across three areas—targeted outreach, resources aimed at specific issues, and “holistic individual development.”

For outreach, some changes can be as simple as providing recruiting material in Spanish. But more broadly, the Air Force needs to do more to “recruit the family,” Mendoza said.

“Our parents, our abuelos [grandparents], in many cases in the family, their word is law,” Mendoza said. “Their weight in terms of how we make these decisions in our lives holds a lot of influence. And if we’re not recruiting, if we’re not educating them and showing them what we as a professional organization are all about, it’s going to be difficult.”

It’s a dynamic Kendall noted in his own remarks, explaining that in his own experience, leaving home and striking out on his own “was nothing for me.” But in many Hispanic or Latino cultures, there is a stronger emphasis on staying close to and connected to family.

A key outreach tool cited in study is the Gold Bar Recruiter program. GBR takes 40 newly commissioned second lieutenants and places them in AFROTC detachments to recruit potential Cadets.

In addition to outreach, the department also needs to find ways to better allocate resources and increase flexibility so that Hispanic candidates aren’t denied opportunities. The report’s suggestions covered everything from paid internships in the summer to scholarships to scheduling and transportation accommodations for “cross-town” Cadets who don’t attend the university where the AFROTC detachment is located.

One of the biggest barriers, though, was cited by both the report and service members speaking with Kendall—the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test.

Since the 1950s, the Air Force has used the AFOQT to assess its officers, but its verbal portion has created issues for some who learned English as a second language.

“When we talked to ROTC detachment commanders, you could see the frustration on their faces,” Mendoza said. “They talked about these amazing young men and women that were in their detachment, who could communicate effectively, build a team, lead their folks, but because they could not pass a verbal portion of this test, [they were denied]. And oh, by the way, do the other services have similar tests for this to become an officer? … No.”

In 2021, after recommendations from HEAT, the department changed some of its rules around the test, reducing the amount of time candidates must wait before retaking it and allowing individuals to combine their best scores from different sections.

But still more can be done, Mendoza said, citing academic research that has found standardized tests are not always predictive of success.

Further reforms to the AFOQT is one of the top three action items identified by the report’s authors for prioritization, Mendoza added, alongside expanding the Gold Bar Recruiter program and refining the way the department collects and analyzes demographic data.

Watch, Read: ‘Cyber Technology’

Oct. 14, 2022

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo, program executive officer for Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence, and Networks, moderated a discussion on “Cyber Technology” with Latisha R. Rourke of Lockheed Martin and Thomas P. Michelli of Leidos, and Quinn Bottum of Swoop Search, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

All right. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. That was absolutely weak from the hundreds of faceless, hopefully smiling people in the audience today. Good afternoon everybody. Outstanding. I am very excited to be here today to moderate this panel of experts in their field. And one of our advertisements we just saw was a great lead in for, what exactly are we doing in the realm of cyber technology? And the word we’re going to be using today is cyber resiliency. My name is Major General Augie Genatempo, and I’m the program executive officer up at Hanscom Air Force Base for our C3i and networks directory. A large part of my portfolio exists down in San Antonio, working right next to the 16th Air Force, providing capabilities to that incredible mission set. And we’re going to talk a little bit about that today. So, let me set the stage for all of us a little bit.

Information technology, operational technology, weapon systems are all dependent upon the cyber domain, more so now than ever before. And our ability to generate air power and ensure peace depends on the confidentiality, integrity, availability of our data in this domain. Now for a long time, we’ve protected it simply by using perimeter security controls. Every Airman is responsible for cyber security. But right now, we know better than ever, that our near peer threats and our adversaries are not just going to be kept out from perimeter controls. So what are we doing to say once our adversaries have penetrated our system, how do we still ensure mission success when that happens? And that’s where resiliency comes in. And the point that we are going to hopefully be making and to getting everybody on board with this movement, is that we need to ensure resiliency is baked into every system that we procure.

That starts at the very beginning. For too long, as a program executive, as a program manager, cyber resiliency, or cyber security, was the add-on after development. It was the thing we had to correspond to, but we had to come up with our full design first. And more often than not, we did not accommodate for the threat that was out there, the evolving threat that was out there because we’re talking about years of development things change over years. But if I have to take care of cyber security after my design is complete, I am pretty much out of money and out of time at that point.

So one of the other main points that we’re going to make today is how do we move that back into the beginning of the development process using the models that the development team is using and having the cyber experts as part of the development team? So today, I have three members from industry that are absolutely experts in their field. And what I’d like to do is have each of them briefly introduce themselves, tell you a little bit about where they’re from, and then I have a couple of questions to pose to them to get after some of these topics for you. So I’d like to start with my immediate left here. Tom, go ahead.

Thomas P. Michelli:

Hi, my name’s Tom Michelli. I’m with Leidos. I’m a strategic account executive for cyber across all of our operating groups. Before that, I spent 17 years in government. My last job was on the joint staff. I was Vice Director J6, command control, computers, communications and cyber. And before that, I was acting deputy CIO for cybersecurity and CISO for the Department of Defense, had the opportunity to be CIO for immigrations and custom enforcement, US Coast Guard, and back in the day, I did offensive and defensive cyber as a Virginia National Guardsman deployed for OAF102.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

Outstanding. Ma’am.

Latisha R. Rourke:

Hi, my name’s Tish Rourke and I’m the vice president for cyber and intelligence for Lockheed Martin. My career, I’ve done everything from anti-submarine warfare, mine warfare, electronic warfare, and now I’m involved in the cyber and intelligence industry. So it’s just been a great growth experience and I’m really excited to be here and talk to you about cyber and resiliency and the challenges that we have.

Quinn Bottum:

My name’s Quinn Bottum. I’m one of the founders of a company called Swoop. I do not have the distinguished pedigree of these two, but I started Swoop 10 years ago. I was doing it while I was in college, I was doing an undergrad in Chinese computational cybersecurity in applied math. I finished my graduate thesis on Chinese exploitation of power management systems and decided to start a company around some of the software that we were using. And somehow, 10 years have flown by, and I’m getting to work with these two now. I’ll give it back over to you, Augie.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

All right, thanks very much. So, all right, the first question I have is to Tom. And Tom, what I’d like to do is for you to share your thoughts on what you think we as a department of defense should be doing to increase the speed and scale of adopting of greenfield technologies while ensuring cyber resiliency? And then conversely, what do you think the biggest challenge is for our systems that are already fielded to make them more resilient?

Thomas P. Michelli:

So whatever cyber conference you go to, the first thing they talk about is people. And we have a talent shortage, and it’s not just the programmers or the computer geeks or the cyber geeks, it’s everybody in the ecosystem. And as General mentioned, we’re talking about resiliency now, too. So resiliency is not just your system, it’s fighting hurt with your partners on the left and right, and downstream and upstream. So when I talk about people, we definitely need to improve the STEM research, the STEM capabilities of everybody in our nation, assess them into the military or contractors or academia to help us with this problem. But it’s also the mission owners, it’s the contracting officers, it’s the CFOs. General Hyten, when he was commander of STRATCOM, talked about bowling the frog. You have risk management. And when you have the frog in there and you take a risk in not putting in some cyber security, not taking the time to design in cyber security in the system, you take a little bit of risk.

Well that’s one part of the system. Let’s say it’s the satellite in the air. The ground system, they take a little bit of risk. Well, the satellite, the hardware in the sky, relied on the ground system. Well, they don’t realize they’re both taking risk. So the risk all of a sudden becomes compounded, the heat goes up. The contracting officer, they’re folks like Leidos, Lockheed Martin, and others, are interested in internal research and development to help mitigate some issues, to bring things to speed. Competition with China and Russia, bring that to bear. But the contracting officer doesn’t know how to enable the requirer or the PEO or the PMO, to go out and work with industry to accelerate that. So it’s building a culture across the high schoolers, the college folks, the Airmen, the Guardians, the contractors, on how we bring this all together to provide design in the system, the resiliency of cyber security we need.

The other pieces back to the dollars. The first thing is, well, we want more functionality. We want the whammo dying capability in our system, but we cut back on transport. Transport being how we communicate to other systems or the user. A lot of times, we want backup, but that’s the first thing to go. So as soon as we lose transport communications, the system’s useless. So we need to educate the whole ecosystem on deploying that greenfield. On the brownfields, it’s the same thing. It’s getting us, as a nation, and our allies and partners. I see some allies and partners are here. We’re not going to fight alone. So how do we ensure that capability of cyber secure across all our allies and partners, ourselves?

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

Outstanding. Any other comments?

Latisha R. Rourke:

Sure. I would like to say, you’re exactly right, Tom. Hey, design it in. But what’s more important is making sure that we test, we continually test and we share those solutions and those failures with other systems and platforms. It’s not just, “Hey, it works in my system,” or, “It’s defensive against my system.” It’s, “How do I share those lessons across multiple platforms and sensors?” So ensuring that, from a cyber, we talk about the defense industrial base sharing those cyber attacks to protect each other. We’ve got to do that across platforms and sensors.

Quinn Bottum:

I think the only thing I’d add to it is that maybe at a less strategic and more operational level, is we field these things and we try to exchange lessons learned and how something might defend against one vector of attack on one given system. It really becomes a matter of how do you get ahead of the off the offense? Because as much as lessons being shared helps, you also need to be able to do it in the moment. If I’m the attacker and I go after a system and given defense works, that informs my next attack. But in a lot of the times, the defensive systems out there, that system then stops until maybe an after action report or a war gaming when that comes out. And so the next defensive system that needs to know about that, the previous attack, has no idea. There’s no information sharing. And so the attacker is constantly at an advantage that compounds over time against the defense. And so it’s got to work across multiple different time horizons for us to really get an impact.

Thomas P. Michelli:

Can I expand on it? Exactly right. Another thing is when I first got started in this back at OAF102, we red team things and we would say, “Drop the mic, you’re all messed up and walk away.” The defenders then, would try to mitigate what we found. And it would be this two instances where, if the offensive was working with the defensive, we could train the defenders on where we’re coming from. And the defenders will say, “Hey, you didn’t get this because this is what we were thinking. And oh, by the way, we were more worried about this.”

So we need to do the red and blue team. We need a purple team. And that’s all the way from requirements to design to fielding. And when we field, we need to work with the mission owner to say, “Hey, with all the cyber security built in and the resiliency, there’s still going to be times we’re going to fight hurt. So what are you going to do with your CONOPS?” And I think you brought this up before, “How are you going to fight hurt? With all the stuff that we’ve put into this, all the risks we’ve known we’ve taken because there is restrictions on money and capability. How are you going to fight?” So we need to purple things up.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

And some of you may be asking out there, “Well that sounds like an awesome idea, Augie. What are you doing to get after that?” Well, the answer is we are. Your acquisition community is getting after that and especially for the newer systems and platforms that we are bringing online. So some experience that I’ve recently had, my job previous to this one, I worked in the nuclear weapon center and I was the program executive for strategic systems. So working on our ICBM replacement, the Sentinel program. A lot of the acquisition forums that you may or may not sit in, you hear a lot about digital transformation, you hear a lot about model-based system engineering, hear a lot about digital twin. What we found in Sentinel is that an extraordinary amount of time was being taken up by the safety community, the cybersecurity community, and my very own nuclear certification community.

By waiting for the design of the system to get to a certain point, then each of these communities would create their own model of the system to apply their own controls, which took an inordinate amount of time and money and manpower, and then feed that back. Getting to the point that I mentioned before, at a point where I as the program manager, have run out of time and money to do anything. So, the Sentinel program as incorporated, is basically a unified theory of certification and safety. Nuclear certification and cybersecurity are using the digital twin model that the developers are using. They are running their controls, they are running their tests, they are running their red teaming against the design at the time and then feed that back. And then, when the design changes, they are right there to do that again. So the iterative process that we are going through is ensuring that when I get to the end of the engineering, manufacturing, and development program, I don’t have this big gotcha going, “You are neither safe, nor nuclear certified, nor able to be connected to anything out on the AFNET.”

And for something as large and as critical as Sentinel, not saying that the rest of it is not, but that program needs to be ready to go when it needs to be ready to go. And I can’t have those tent poles be the long poles in the tent. So the red teaming aspect of it, Sentinel has brought that team in sitting right in the same sandbox computer model that we are running different design iterations on, making sure we don’t go outside of any of the cyber security bounds. So thank you very much for that. Okay. Onto you, ma’am. From a larger extent, you and I had a conversation about this on Friday and the conversation we had, I think, would be of very interest to the team here. So what do you think the biggest challenge is that the DoD and our industry faces with the cybersecurity field and what should we be doing to face those challenges in a head-on fashion?

Latisha R. Rourke:

Sure. I believe our biggest challenge in the cyber arena is our workforce. For every job out there, for every 10 jobs out there, three of them are left unfilled. So number one, we’ve got to grow the talent in our cyber workforce. We’ve got to organically grow it. And how do we do that? We’ve got to start right at the K through 12 level, get students, all students, minority students, females, everybody interested in STEM. You saw in the public service announcement prior to the session, where industry is advocating for STEM, we’ve got to do more of that. One thing that we’ve talked about is, there’s that old adage, if you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime. Well, we’ve got to teach teachers about cyber because they are that force multiplier that can help us to encourage students in K through 12 to go into STEM and specifically, cyber.

And then secondly, we’ve got to, I’ll look at all my industry partners that’s in the room. We’re doing a great job of poaching all of our employees. It’s a vicious circle. Yeah, it’s the truth. We’re spending a lot of money recruiting talent, but what are we doing internally to encourage our employees to stay in cyber? Giving them challenging assignments. I’ll look at the Air Force, I’ll look at DoD and say, “Gee, a lot of what we do, our employees are working in skiffs.” Well, we’ve just spent three years in COVID and the country went on and we learned how to work from home.

So maybe people that work in skiffs every day, three years ago and work every day now in skiffs, maybe we can figure out a way to say, “Hey, this part of your work isn’t classified and so you can do this part of your work from home.” How do you grow that workforce by saying, “This is unclassified. You can work from home.” Because that is something that is causing people to leave this industry. They’d rather go where they can work from home than stay in this industry. So we’ve got to encourage more students into STEM and we’ve got to keep the workforce that we have.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

Let’s see. Any other thoughts folks?

Quinn Bottum:

So I think, building upon that, there’s the notion, you never waste a crisis and there’s no secret that we’ve had some leaks in the last number of years of exploits and different capabilities. I’m sure I’m going to get myself in trouble with every lawyer or policy person in the room. But if we’re not going to waste that crisis, part of that STEM process is making it cool and jumping into it right away. So there’s, let’s call it the hacker community. There’s this counterculture, rebellious type nature. I can guarantee you because we see them when we’re recruiting and it becomes a clearance process problem, they’re going and getting those tools on the dark web. They’re going and downloading them. They’re playing with them. They’re, hopefully not happening, but probably using them from time to time.

So how do we create sandboxes at a high school level, at a collegiate level, where we’re actually trying to harness that and take control of it a little bit and maybe guide it and steer it towards something good where, if they’re trying to defend a system now and as part of a class project or part of some type of program. They have to now try to defend that system against something that’s real, that’s been out in the world and has actually had an effect.

Or if they’re learning how to use that offensive capability, they have to apply it against many different systems and look at how different defenses respond to it so that they see it’s not a one size fits all. And they actually start to bridge the gap of what they understand about worlds that typically only live in a skiff, but somehow have gotten out.

Thomas P. Michelli:

And I think the other thing, back to the greenfield. Getting everybody together from the imagination, the thought in the eye, all the way… Sorry. Thank you. The imagination all the way to the requirement design to fielding, it is getting together industry, the services, our allied partners, we’ve got a tech bridge now in the UK and I think we’re expanding elsewhere, getting it all together and learning how we can make up the people gap with artificial intelligence, machine learning.

So for example, back to resiliency. When I was CIO with the Coast Guard, on the cutters, we had a switch. It was a manual switch. We had to have a person move the switch. ESPN, no ESPN. The bandwidth, if we needed the bandwidth for a mission as opposed to morale and welfare, somebody had to go flick the switch. Well, if we could automatically say, “Hey, we now have more mission requirements, we’re going to cut off ESPN.” That could be done automatically. Also, in the red teaming and blue teaming, the defense and offense, if we could incorporate artificial intelligence, machine learning into that process and have faith that it’ll work ethically, that will help, as well. So again, it’s using all of our national assets and our allies’ assets, people and technology together.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

I’ll expand a little bit on what Tish said, and I absolutely am not going to devolve into a conversation about telework and telework policy. What I will do is, as Tish mentioned, life did change and we did operate. And as we get back, what I have seen amongst some of my organizations that I’ve worked with, they’re just hitting the easy button and say, “Okay, we went from 100% telework and then policies changed and morphed over time as the conditions changed in our local areas. And we went either to a 70% or a 60% or a 50% posture.” And now, when we got to a point where there was an all clear in a large part of our country, all supervisors said, “Okay, everybody back to work full time.”

I personally, don’t believe that that’s the way we’re going to be able to go. People have had this experience, they have had this taste. And I will offer up the personal observation that people who never, ever expressed a desire to telework in their entire lives now like it a little bit, for a numerous number of reasons. And it gets directly to, are we going to be able to retain the people if our competitors, and by competitors I mean other industries that can capitalize on the expertise, the same expertise that we’re looking for, are offering different things that people now like and are accustomed to?

And if we don’t get on board being in front of that bow wave, I feel we’re going to see more of a drain in the critical skills that we need. So what my ask is, what I’m asking my team, sitting right here in the front row, what I’m asking all of you is, don’t hit the easy button. Try to come up with the solution set that incorporates what has happened to all of us into the path moving forward and let’s see if that actually does help in our retention.

All right. Mr. Quinn, all the way down at the end, what I’d like to ask you about, and you’re going to have to do a little bit of explaining for the group because you had to explain it to me. How do you think DoD and the industry should be changing its operations to get after the asymmetry between attackers and system operators to close the imagination gap? Now when you first used that word, I had visions of Mickey Mouse and Disneyland and that’s not what you were referring to. So if you could expand on that a little bit for me, for the group, and then really dive into the essence of your position right here.

Quinn Bottum:

So imagination gap. I’ve touched on it a little bit in some of the other comments I’ve made. There’s a fundamental asymmetry between how offensive operations work and defensive operations work for a lot of people that build defensive technologies. The reality is, is that the best of the offensive capabilities we hope are typically not widely known. They’re not widely publicized. Hopefully they’re highly classified. And so what that means is then there’s this imagination gap where those that are building the systems to defend, they can’t even imagine what an attacker might be able to do. They can’t imagine that they might be able to jump from this air gap environment to another. They can’t imagine that a clock could possibly be used nefariously against them. And that’s not a knock, that’s not a criticism. It doesn’t make them less intelligent. It’s just, it’s such an opaque and ambiguous world that they can’t imagine it.

So if you can’t imagine it, then oftentimes, you can’t build something to defend against it. And that’s where we find ourselves, in my opinion, maybe incorrectly, we find ourselves fairly often. And it actually, then I think you see it happen in red teams or you see it maybe another asymmetry similar to it in how we do red teaming today. To be truly ready to be resilient, to be cyber resilient, to be able to fight through the inevitable compromises or system outages that are going to happen, you have to be tested against the best of the best and know how you’re going to respond to it, where there is degradation. But to be tested against the best of the best, you have to be proven technology. To be proven technology, you have to be tested against the best of the best. And so we get into this constant do loop where you’re going around and around and around and it’s a chicken and an egg problem.

And what the impact of that is, you get a number of, you get reports that come out of penetration testing where there’s statements like, it is vulnerable to X, or this could happen. And that’s where the sentence stops. Even as you move into classified environments, that’s where the sentence stops. And that does two things. The defense has no idea how to incrementally or iteratively actually start to maneuver or to revise their capabilities. So we don’t get better and we don’t take the lessons learned from project to project. But maybe even more critically, it means that we have situations where the conditions, the operating environment, what comes before that potential vulnerability or after it and the impact and how far it could move or proliferate, that’s missed.

And so when you give then, a commander that decision on how they want to bound the risk, how they want to manage that risk, there’s a bunch of context that’s missing and that’s not decision quality data. So I think, as we look at red teaming, we have to find ways, and it’s difficult because there’s a reason why a lot of these capabilities are as classified as they are, but we have to find ways of being able to close that imagination gap, but then also, get into much more just nuanced red teaming that allows for a much better decision quality data and a much faster iterative loop on building better defensive systems.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

Outstanding. Any other thoughts? No other thoughts. All right. And I’m going to get to our last question, and this is for all of you. No matter how we look at cyber resiliency, I don’t think any of us would disagree that there’s always going to be a human in the loop. So with that said, I’d like to hear from each of you about how you think CONOPS should be changed to best utilize AI and machine learning cyber tools.

Thomas P. Michelli:

So, go back to Quinn’s imagination, I think [inaudible 00:26:59]

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

Microphone, microphone, microphone, microphone, microphone, microphone, microphone.

Thomas P. Michelli:

See, it was artificial intelligence if I looked at it, enough. The imagination thing, is just great. So how do you imagine incorporating all these great new technologies? And I know it’s going to sound boring, but I keep going back to the same thing. And that is educating the whole ecosystem from the people we’re going to be assessing, either in our country or our allies and partners, getting them thinking about all the cool, neat ways to do things, from the first initial idea of a requirement, getting the contracting officer, getting the financial people, getting the legal ethicists involved in what we’re doing, the programmers, the cyber folks, the financial folks, so that we have a complete understanding of where we’re heading and how we’re going to build in the resiliency.

War gaming, red teaming, blue teaming, defending, supporting, and then also sustaining. We look at a weapon system, we talk about sustainment. Well, all our IT tools, all our cyber capabilities, our weapon system, we need to look how we’re going to sustain, support, and fight that system hurt from the very beginning. And then, again, both in our nation and our allies and partners, we have folks who are doing internal research and development who would love to hear further, “Are we spending the money in the right place? Are we meeting your requirements? Will we fit into your CONOPS? Can we do this war game to get ahead with speed?” And we’re all talking the same language.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

Outstanding. Tish?

Latisha R. Rourke:

Okay, I’ll pick up from there, Tom. Thanks. Quinn said it, tom said it, the general said it. How do we get ahead already in this CONOPS? Instead of being reactive, how do we become proactive? How do we get to a point where we’re willing to fail a little because we’re going to learn a lot. Bringing those requirements back into the design phase, that’s got to be the CONOPS and it’s got to be funded. What often happens, even when those cyber requirements are there, all of a sudden they get prioritized out. They’ve got to be prioritized in. So building that resiliency in, be willing to fail a little so you learn a lot, and you incorporate those resiliency facts into your systems, and then continuing to work as one team. It’s not us against them. It’s, “Hey, we are one team.” And getting to the best answer will help us in changing that CONOPS to get ahead of the ready, as opposed to, we’re in our reaction mode.

Quinn Bottum:

So I think on two different levels, that AI and ML can play a role in development. I think first, if you look at a lot of… If you look at some of the exploits and some of the offensive capabilities that are out there, one of the things that you’ll see quite a bit of is assembly code. There’s a lot of assembly code and machine language that is used to write these tools. But then, if we go back to the talent question we’re bringing up, the vast majority of college and even graduate curriculums, they’re not teaching assembly right now. You see kids come out and they write C, maybe. They write a lot of Python. They don’t write assembly. And so that right there, I doubt that’s going to change anytime soon because Python and C, that’s what’s sexy to write. And C is even not that fun for a lot of kids to write anymore.

But that’s an area where AI and ML might have a role. Assembly can be discreet. AI and ML have pretty good application to discrete problem sets. Finding ways of using it to actually compile code into whatever’s been written into assembly could help from a capability perspective. And then, in terms of how you use that in a CONOP development, I’ll go back to something I said a little bit earlier. We have to find ways of coordinating and orchestrating these defensive capabilities. And if we’re going to be proactive, if we’re going to try to maneuver the cyberspace towards positions from which we have the advantage, that maybe we can drive, we can postpone needing to be resilient for as long as possible. Not to say we’re not going to have to be resilient, but postpone it for at least a few minutes.

Reinforcement learning is a phenomenal application, has a great application towards probabilistically taking steps. It’s where it first really came into, at least in the public sphere, it’s fame was in when it was playing, Go. When it beat a human in Go. And that’s nothing but a back and forth. That’s a great way that can be abstracted into how do you take defensive systems that have been built by Leidos, by whoever, and all of a sudden make them actually work together because the machine is actually the one that is exchanging the information between the systems and adapting how the systems are actually prepared to defend faster than the attacker can actually take the information that they’ve gained and actually use it to craft their next attack. So I think those are the two that I’d highlight. But Tom, you’ve got a lot of experience in this, so I’d be curious to hear what you think there.

Thomas P. Michelli:

I’m just rubbing off of Tish, you and Quinn. So Quinn, you talked about the assembly. So one of the things too is for speed and agility and perpetual movement and improvement, the software build materials. So going back to the whole of nation all the way from a prime down to a sub, a individual who’s new into the business that we want to get their intelligences. Having a standard way of getting some sense of level of security in all the pieces parts that we put into the system. And then, the other thing is, when I first got into this business, I was a real estate IT guy and I got into government because I was a army guardsman who really enjoyed doing offensive, defensive stuff in OAF102. But then I would get into exercises and the first thing that we would wave a magic hand over was cyber.

We couldn’t bring down networks because that would impact the pilots being able to fly their missions. Well, that’s the whole point. But they would’ve gotten to fly their mission. So we just waved a hand over the cyber stuff. So the other thing is, you’d mentioned about exercising and learning how to do AI, ML in an actual exercise where cyber really matters. If we’ve teed up 10,000 partners, 10,000 people in an exercise with our allies and partners and we shut it down because we didn’t do cyber right, we should learn lesson from that. So the other part is exercising for real resiliency and how we’re going to fight hurt with our allies and partners.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

Outstanding. All right. We have a few minutes left. The doors are still locked from the outside and you have a captive audience. Closing comments on resiliency, workforce, imagination, to share with the audience.

Latisha R. Rourke:

Sure. Thanks for inviting me to be part of this panel. Great discussion that we’ve had. Great to meet two great peers in the industry. We all know it, we experience it every day, engaging and continuing to make cyber a priority in our platforms and in our systems and in defending our nation and the homeland, is got to be a priority. Without it, the rest of the domains, air, sea, land, and space, as Tom just said, they don’t have that connectivity and we’ve got to get ahead of that. So make cyber a priority.

Thomas P. Michelli:

Yeah, again, engage everybody. Find ways to work with our contracting officers to do demos, to bring demonstrations in, to work with our allies and partners and get their great companies into what we’re doing and get what we’re doing to our allies and partners. Exercise. Make exercise real. Really work through the resiliency and transport, confidentiality, integrity of our systems. And back to boiling the frog, every time you take a risk, a small risk, because you think somebody else has taken care of it for you, for you and you’re left or right or up and down, look at the big picture because pretty soon, that temperature gets so high and the risk gets so great, you’ve boiled the frog. In other words, you no longer have a mission capable system that you can fight hurt.

Quinn Bottum:

So [inaudible 00:35:58], thank you very much for the opportunity and it’s been great to meet both of you and thanks General, for the opportunity for leading us here. I think, the last thing I’ll say is I’ll build upon that. As we exercise and as we look at risk, as we see that the temperature rising. I think for everyone in this community, it’s a matter of, can we raise the discourse around cybersecurity? Can we try to start to remove some of the generalizations, the statements without context and actually start driving it more nuanced discussions. Because as we do that, I think that speaks to the harder resiliency where we start to acknowledge the fact that our systems are not likely going to be as secure as we want them to be.

No matter how hard we try or how much money we throw into it, there will be holes and we will have adverse situations occur. So if we’re open and we talk in more nuanced level about where the actual issues are and why they’re arising and how we mitigate them today and in the future, we recognize the issues that legacy presents and we figure out, we actually start to look at resiliency from an eyes wide open approach. I think that’s something that this, as a community, will find results a lot faster than we think we will.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo:

All right, thank you Quinn, Tish, Tom. I appreciate your patience with a brand new member of the cyber enterprise standing here at the podium. I really appreciate your time here and the conversations that we had. Folks, we are going to step outside. You can find us out there. The chief is actually going to be in this room right after us. So we’re just going to move out to the front and the side. I’d like to give our panelists of big round of applause for their time.

Watch, Read: ‘Long-Range Strike: Fielding Tomorrow’s Bomber’

Oct. 14, 2022

Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula moderated a discussion on “Long-Range Strike: Fielding Tomorrow’s Bomber” with Maj. Gen. Jason R. Armagost, director of strategic plans, programs, and requirements, Air Force Global Strike Command; Melissa A. Johnson, acting director of the DAF Rapid Capabilities Office; Thomas H. Jones of Northrop Grumman; and retired Col. Mark Gunzinger of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

If your firewall blocks YouTube, try this link instead.

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

Well, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I’m Dave Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and welcome to our panel on the next generation bomber force. One of the fundamental credos of the Air Force is to be able to strike any target anywhere, anytime. No other mission speaks to this as much as long range penetrating strike. However, this is also one of the most challenging missions to accomplish in highly contested operational environments, particularly during a peer conflict. That’s why it takes stealth bombers equipped with advanced sensors and the right mix of munitions to hold our adversaries most important assets at risk. Northrop Grumman is continuing to develop and test the next generation penetrating bomber, the B-21, as the premier capability in our nation’s future long range strike family of systems. Today, we’re going to discuss the B-21 and the need to rapidly acquire the appropriate sized B-21 force, that’s sized to meet and defeat peer aggression, as well as meeting the national defense strategy’s other operational requirements.

With that, let me introduce our panelist. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Major General Jason Armagost, Rapid Capability Office acting director, Melissa Johnson, President of Northrop Grumman Aeronautic Systems, Tom Jones, and Mitchell Institute’s own, retired Colonel Mark Gunzinger. General Armagost is a director of strategic plans, programs, and requirements for Global Strike Command. He’s responsible for funding and requirements for modernizing the Air Force’s nuclear deterrent forces, including both the Sentinel ICBM, the B-21, and other systems, with a budget of over 13.5 billion. He’s logged over 2,900 flight hours, including time in all three bomber types in the current inventory.

As the RCOs deputy director, Melissa Johnson helps lead the Air Force’s high speed acquisition efforts. The RCO was given responsibility for the B-21 program to take advantage of the RCOs efficient and streamlined process. Before joining the RCO, Ms. Johnson served in a variety of roles on active duty from aerodynamic propulsion analyst to material leader for several highly classified programs.

And Tom Jones is the Northrop Grumman corporate vice president and president of Northrop Grumman Aeronautic Systems, with almost 30 years experience in the aerospace and defense industries. Northrop’s Aeronautic systems sector is the prime contractor for the B-21 project. So far, the B-21 has progressed well into EMD with six aircraft and various stages of test and final assembly, making it one of the Air Force’s premier acquisition success stories. And you all heard Assistant Secretary Hunter release the news today that it will be unveiled the first week in December.

Colonel retired Mark Gunzinger is director of future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute. And Gunzinger got over 3000 hours in the B-52. He served almost 20 years on the air staff, National Security Council staff, and in OSD as deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Thank you all, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us. And what I’d like to do is offer each of our distinguished panelists the opportunity to make a few opening comments. We’re going to start with General Armagost. Over to you, Arma.

Maj. Gen. Jason R. Armagost:

All right, thanks, General Deptula. I do want to start with thanks actually, because you’ve kind of been an icon as I’ve come up through my time in the Air Force. It’s a pleasure to share the stage with you, but I also want to thank Gunzo and what you both are doing with the thought leadership through the Mitchell Institute. It has been a great help to me about how we think about the things we’re going to try and tackle together, and how the environment is changing and how we adapt to that changing environment. I know I’m going to steal thunder here, but getting to go first, I got to do that. Being part of this team, between industry, acquisition, and the requirements owner war fighter, is really powerful. I think when RCO was stood up, it really set the stage for some really powerful transparently requirements driven interactions that don’t just sustain themselves. They sustain themselves through relationships.

I would argue that the success that we’ve seen as we march towards getting the B-21 out there is a result of that. And then I would offer, for my initial comments, when I first got in the A58 job last August, almost immediately I got assigned to be an ops lead for one of the secretaries operational imperatives between B-21 Family of Systems. And all that did was really energized this relationship, not to say that it wasn’t before, but it really did energize it. And it has helped me, as a MAJCOM plans guy in support of General Cotton, to really think differently about the gaps and seams. And it’s actually helped us to work on that transition piece for our legacy bombers and our weapons portfolio to really make the near turn different, burn down risk and kind of change the environment really quickly. That’s what I would offer for my intro.

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

Very good. Ms. Johnson?

Melissa A. Johnson:

Hi, good morning or good afternoon General Deptula. Thank you so much for the generous invitation to participate with my ESTEEM colleagues here and I’m just really proud to represent the men and women of the B-21 program office and I know some of them are sitting in here today and all the DAF RCO and I think I’m, you’ll probably hear some themes. I think General Armagost kind of hit on that, but if I could look back before we talk specifically about B-21, I think there’s really an important linkage to make between the DAF RCO and why the B-21 and for me as I go back 19 and a half years really as a plan holder in the organization, it really boils down to three things and it’s really our core values. It’s talent, trust and teamwork. When we look at the talent that comes into the organization and it’s really a highly skilled multifunctional workforce, if you heard some of the other panels, especially Mr. Hunter and General Richardson today, they talked a little bit about the workforce.

We over the past 19 and a half years have had a very highly skilled, not just program managers and engineers, but it really is embedding the operational community with the program office and that is really a key component to being able to get the right weapon system out the door. The second thing is the trust. You have to have the trust not only from within the organization and with your partners, but it’s the trust not only from the leadership meaning all the way up to the secretary of the Air Force, but really congressional support. That trust and transparency that we have with them has really enabled the stability of funding for this program through the course of its inception. Then the third thing is really the teamwork. And I want to unpack that just for a second, a little bit more than Armo did and that teamwork really manifests itself in a couple of different areas.

First and foremost, it’s our acquisition teammates. The B-21 program office, it’s in the RCO, but we could not do this without our Air Force Life Cycle Management Center teammates up at Wright Pat. In fact, I’d say the majority of the team is at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. We have a smaller contingent here in the DC area. And what LCMC offers is really a large scale of workforce to recruit from every area of the acquisition system. That’s from program managers, financial managers, engineers, contracting, and really you cannot underestimate the need for really great functional support in that contracting and financial management. The second one that doesn’t get talked about a lot but really needs to be emphasized is our partnership with the Sustainment Center. We all get really fixated on developing whatever weapon system and being able to deliver that. But if you don’t bake in the sustainment and the depot planning and how you can have not only sustained operations but also a life cycle affordability, everything else on the front end will start to devolve.

Building that really strong foundation with the sustainment center is really bearing a lot of fruit for the long term for global strike.

The third piece in is our operational support and that relationship with the war fighter that is really key and quite frankly is a core value of the RCO from the very beginning days to the point where global strike personnel actually live within the program office, which is really great. Our program director, Colonel Spalding has a counterpart at the 06 level and they go everywhere together. In fact, if it’s to the point where they’re almost probably finishing each other’s sentences and that is how tightly knit global strike and the organization really are and we value that relationship. And then finally, and just as important, it’s that trust and teamwork with industry. The model that the RCO uses and has used over the past almost 20 years is really making that a partnership.

It is not just a throwing contract actions over the wall between an industry partner and a program office. We know that we each have our roles and we know that there are certain limitations of how closely it can work, but quite frankly, our teams spend so much time at the industry plant that sometimes it is hard to tell who is government and who is industry. Again, everybody is synchronized and it is the constant transparency and communications, which if you don’t have that trust built between the teams, it really gets tough to mitigate risk. And we know in a complex weapon system like this, there’s going to be risk, there’s going to be challenges. And that teamwork with Northrop Grumman, Tom specifically and his team, really is enabled all of us to be able to get those challenges head on and be able to keep this on cost and schedule with the right capability to be able to deliver to global strike.

I’m just very thankful to be a part of this team. We are going to do, we have that great teamship and then quite frankly, again, it’s the congressional support that we get and all of those things coupled together again, bring back that talent trust in teamwork, which is going to give us the best bomber that we can get.

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

That’s a great segue to our industry partner. Tom?

Thomas H. Jones:

Okay, thank you very much. General Deptula. I’d like to thank the Mitchell Institute and AFA for allowing me to participate in this panel. Great honor to be on stage with my teammates here and very proud on this special day to be able to represent the B-21 industry team. The last several years have been a challenge for all of us with the pandemic and other things, stressing normal working conditions, supply chain, things like that. And this team that we have of really 400 key suppliers over 40 states across the United States, the Northrop Grumman workforce, our partners, the work they’ve done to keep this program progressing along on budget, on schedule is phenomenal. Again, very proud to represent that team today.

There’s been a lot of positive talk about this program. General Deptula even made some nice comments at the beginning, but to Mojo’s point, this is a aircraft development program. It has not gone without its various problems like any program would. What is different, and I can say that as was pointed out in the bios as someone with over 30 years of experience in industry now is the way the industry government team has approached those problems has been very unique and again, a great thing to be a part of. Very excited to have a chance to crack the door open and talk a little bit about some of the things we’ve done to keep this program rolling along as it should. One final point I wanted to make last year there was a rendering release of the B-21, which generated a lot of interest, although probably to a casual observer that is not into windscreen design.

They probably looked at and said that looks like the B2. And obviously flying wings are a great place to start airplane designs to operate in a highly contested environment. What I think the real key and the magic once we get past survivability, which we actually will not talk about, but it is the brains and the architecture inside B-21, the open architecture system which is going to take this very capable aircraft to make sure it stays on the cutting edge of technology for decades by being able to be modernized very quickly and easily. And that hopefully is also something we can talk a little bit about today. Those are my comments. Again, thank you very much. Looking forward to being on the panel.

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

You bet. Gonzo.

Col. Mark Gunzinger (Ret.):

Yeah, so I’m really honored to be sitting on the stage with three individuals who are working every day to make the B-21 a reality for our Air Force and for our country. That’s pretty cool. Thank you very much.

I’ve been an advocate of a new penetrating bomber since the 1990s. I was in every study you can imagine in Department of Defense that took a look at what we really need in the way of long rain strike capabilities. The bottom up review of 1993, I’m dating myself, the 1997 deep attack weapons mix study all the way up to the tiger team effort that culminated with the decision to proceed with the LRSB, now the B-21. And here’s some of the key insights from all those studies. Only penetrating bombers can deny an adversary like China or Russia or others sanctuary deep in their interiors.

Only a combination of stealth, wide ban all aspects stealth, will give us the kind of survivability we need to operate in highly contested environments that are going to exist throughout a conflict with China. The range the B-21 and other bombers bring to the fight will allow us to respond within hours of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or venture in a South China Sea to go on the offensive and be to strike their high value targets and show them that we are determined and we are not going to allow this aggression stand. Only bombers can bring the payload capacity that’s needed to strike thousands of targets and hundreds of hours in those kinds of invasion scenarios, including an invasion of Taiwan. A second insight is the size of the force. The size of the bomber force is way too small today, come to a panel this afternoon, we’re going to talk about that a little bit.

We need a penetrating bomber force of at least 200 aircraft. We have to have the capacity to continue to go on the offensive and strike Chinese targets, Russian targets, to halt their fade a comply, plea aggression, deny, and then defeat that aggression. And finally, we still hear occasionally where it’s, well why don’t we just rely more on standoff weapons and avoid the cost of a penetrating bar. Study after study is shown that that is not a more cost effective way of delivering large numbers of bombs on aim points. In a conflict with China we might have to strike 80 to a hundred thousand aim points in the cost of those standoff weapons alone, make it prohibitive. That’s why we need a penetrating bomber that could use lower cost weapons at scale to defeat our adversaries. With that General Deptula, back to you.

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

Okay, well thank you all for those insightful opening remarks. What I’d like to do is dig into this subject in a little bit more detail.

Armo first question for you, as a director of strategic plans, programs and requirements for a global strike command, what’s the demand signal that’s coming from the COCOMs for future penetrating strike force and how about that future force size given our national defense strategy and all the requirements that it entails?

Maj. Gen. Jason R. Armagost:

I think I’ve seen a patch from every MAJCOM here at AFA and it won’t be a surprise to any of you from within your own perspectives, but the demand across the COCOMs, whether they’re regional or global, is ubiquitous and unending. And to Gonzo’s point beyond the capacity we currently have. Actually does kind of touch back to my point about the operation imperatives and how we’re thinking differently about this because the B-21 is not operationally fielded yet. So we’ve had to figure out how we’re going to do this in transition and with legacy platforms and how can we burn down risk for the B-21, but simultaneously increase our capacity and our ability to get into that denied airspace and turn it into a contested airspace so that we can compete and deter actually.

And a lot of really interesting thinking, again it’s coming out of that. We’re quite often now doing on bomber taskforce, we’re going COCOM to COCOM right on the same mission. And the integration that happens along the way with our partners and allies is not just a signal, it’s a real thing to show that we are not limited by lines on a map and it gets us, again, thinking differently about the capacity problem and the timing and tempo problem for how we would do this at scale.

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

Very good. Well here’s a bit of a follow on for both Tom and Gonzo. B21’s envisioned as a dual capable conventional as well as nuclear mission long-range bomber that’s aimed to replace the B2. How does the B-21 stack up to the global operational demands that Armo just laid out?

Col. Mark Gunzinger (Ret.):

Yeah, you want to go first?

Okay, B-21 is America’s China Deterrence bomber, no question about it. The combination of payload, range, survivability will allow us to respond to a short notice scenario where China invades Taiwan or pick another scenario to begin to thwart their campaign plan to defeat their campaign. You mentioned dual capability. There’s something else going on here and that is China is building up its nuclear warhead inventory.

Now Admiral Charles Richard said that frankly we’re in a China is in a strategic breakout with regard to their nuclear weapons. General Cotton made the point during his confirmation hearing that frankly China is quite obvious that they’re not building a minimal nuclear deterrent. They have a triad as does Russia. We need to rethink our nuclear posture. Do we have the right posture today now that we’re facing two peers or maybe near peers? Peers in the future when it comes to nuclear weapons, how are we going to deter both of them? We might have to grow our nuclear forces. What’s the most cost effective way of doing that? Build more Columbia class submarines, which are horrendously expensive? Dig more holes in the ground for ICBM, and I love the GBS, I’m not saying that, but B-21’s would allow us to hedge against risk in the future, grow our nuclear deterrents if necessary. Plus they’re dual capable. We get the benefit of their conventional capabilities as well.

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

Okay, this question is for Ms. Johnson to start and then each of you…

Thomas H. Jones:

I was going to have some thoughts on that if that’s all right.

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

Didn’t mean to cut you off Tom.

Thomas H. Jones:

Fair enough. First of all, Global Strike Command was very clear on the requirements there. Looking for this platform in that transition that you mentioned general and working together with Global Strike Command and RCO, I think we made the platform that answers those questions. Gonzo, you’re far better at talking about nuclear force structure than I am. I’m just a nerd engineer. I’ll focus in a little bit more on some of the aspects we’ve attempted to address as we’ve developed a B-21 that we think is going to give the capability that Global Strike Command is asked for us focusing mainly on maintainability, survivability and data.

From a maintainability standpoint, it’s been very important to us right from the inception of this program to design a system, a weapon system that is capable as of operating as a daily flyer. We’ve had a real focus on maintenance from the start.

We actually today and for over a year now I believe have had members of global strike command maintainers with us in our facilities working side by side in the labs. We also have something we’ve talked about in the past called a highly immersive virtual environment, which you can basically go into a virtual reality space, work on maintaining the system, understand what things in the design need to change before you ever started. I’ll use the phrase bending metal, although we don’t bend too much metal on the program and are able to address those maintainability types of aspects there. I think that’s a big step. Now I said I wasn’t going to talk about survivability and I said I’m going to talk about survivability. Well obviously a great platform for operating in a highly contested environment, but specifically what I want to talk about is we took lessons learned from the B2 and other programs about the difficulty once again in maintaining stealth types of platforms.

Actually went out and looked at the major drivers on the B2 and right from the start had designed that, addressed those to make sure that we could once again live up to that ambition of being the daily flyer. Finally, went to talk a little bit about data yesterday we made an announcement at a media event that earlier on this summer we entered into an agreement with the government where we’re actually sharing program data in a common data environment. Which I think for a program of this scope and at this phase of the program, at least from our experience, it’s kind of unprecedented to have that type of shared access between our government partners and ourselves. And what that does is once again enables us to spot risk, to address risk, to burn them down, make sure we’ve got the right approach to verifying requirements and get this system operational as soon as we can.

We also talked about the fact that we were able to move the B-21 ground support system up to the cloud, which again we think is another great movement for the digital enterprise and for digital transformation. Because what that’s going to do is drastically reduced footprint at main operating bases and other deployment locations as well as driving down costs. Lots of different things we’ve taken, not just looking at it from a pure technical performance, but how can we make sure that for the men and women of Global Strike Command, we’re providing a platform that’s going to give them the operational utility that they need

Maj. Gen. Jason R. Armagost:

And I will…

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

Hope in there.

Maj. Gen. Jason R. Armagost:

Back to Gonzo’s point about breakout in China, as Admiral Richard clearly spoke about with triads and you have two adversaries with real capabilities now. There is not a lot of history. History points us to some interesting studies on deterrents, but not a lot of the thinking right now has gotten us very far down the field on multi-polar deterrents having to deter two adversaries at the same time.

But one of the things that you’ll find is a common discussion point that we have to be able to do to be able to do multipolar deterrence is to be able to integrate that conventional and nuclear force activity such that there is no escalation for free. There is no escalate to win, there is no escalate to deescalate. And by having that baked in conventional nuclear integration, we literally are kind of taking that off the table. We have to do that so that we can further through the thought leadership of those in the room, but also the think tanks and our policy makers, how we get to that multi-polar deterrence future knowing right now we’ve got to be able to do things in a very predictable way in denied spaces.

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

And that’s a panel subject all on its own and hopefully the folks recrafting the National Defense Strategy are taking that into consideration.

As I already previewed earlier, Ms. Johnson, this one’s for you to start, but I’d like everyone to chime in. Speed by which I mean the rapidly maturing and fielding of a B-21 force is obviously critical. The B-20’s going to soon reach its rollout as we heard this morning and first flight milestones. What’s the RCO doing to ensure the program continues to remain on track and on time? And should we be discussing today the need to increase the acquisition rate of B-21’s?

Melissa A. Johnson:

Okay, yeah. There’s a lot to unpack right there. Let’s kind of go back a little bit of, in my opening remarks I talked about a couple of the philosophy. How do you go fast? A lot of the going fast is really getting that initial decision to go. Well we’ve got that. We got on contract, we have a very stable requirement, and we have consistent funding. And those three things, it’s not magic, I mean it’s pretty simple recipe, but making sure that that can stay stable through the years does get more challenging as the years go on. And I think that the team overall, and it is only because of the partnership that we are able to be successful at that. I think that’s a key thing and that’s for any program, but I think B-21’s a great exemplar of that.

The second thing internally within the RCO, we’ve coined a term but it’s really been done over the past 19 and a half years and we coined the term active management. And really what that means is my team along with Tom’s team, along with Armo’s team are so close knit together. Again, it’s all kind of coming together as this partnership, but we are not just waiting for Tom’s team to send us information and then we are not just spending some time back in our own little enclave and then sending information back over to Tom or direction back over to Northrop. It is a daily interaction and that actively managing and really getting ahead of where are those risks going to start to manifest and how do we come up with the plans, not only just identify that a risk could manifest, but what is the plans to mitigate that and really get at that early.

And there’s a couple of things that the program really did in the very early days and I mentioned the sustainment piece kind of really laying in the foundation for how do we depot maintenance and sustain us for the long term. But even on the development piece, there’s some really key things we did with the company and one of them is how do we go and building the tooling and the processes so that you’re actually building the production asset. A lot of programs will build a lot of test assets or a couple of test assets first, you’ll test it out, you’ll see what goes right and what goes wrong and then you’ll make adjustments in the tooling to go build your production. That takes a lot of extra resources and time. And so we’ve been able to shrink down that time by starting right from the get go and it’s really been enabled by the digital engineering tools that the Northrop team has embedded into that process from day one.

And so when you kind of start building these things up upon each other, you really start to consolidate and get the most efficiency you can, knowing that there’s still systems engineering that has to go on. You mean we cannot break the laws of physics and there’s still going to be challenges, but you want to get yourself to the point where that team has enough information that we have stable requirements and that we have the tool sets between the production processes, the engineering digital, the digital engineering that you are enabled to go and solve any technical challenge that we could come upon. And so that allows us to stay on schedule and really kind of look for areas to scale to go faster.

Now if I kind of go a step further and start talking a little bit about how do we go faster in the future, can we increase that scale or increase that rate? When we look at the provisions that we’ve put into the program, I think we can always look at that, but you want to kind of get this on a solid foundation and once production aircraft start coming off the line, the team’s going to learn some things.

But because again, the foundation that we built, we can roll back those lessons learned into the system very quickly and through the open mission systems being able to modify things, if there is a requirement’s change, if there’s a new threat that comes along, if there’s modernization that we can continue to be able to move at a very rapid pace, compared to the way that we have done things years ago.

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

Nice job. Gonzo.

Col. Mark Gunzinger (Ret.):

Yeah, really quickly we’ve heard endo-paycom and the DNI talk about China might be ready to make a move on Taiwan 2027-2030 timeframe that’s going to occur at the same time we’re at a Nader in the size of our bomber force. If we allow the bomber ramp B-21 acquisition ramp to be reduced because that’s where the money is. We’ve all seen that happen program after program because once the acquisition begins, then that becomes a very lucrative target, just slides some money out and put it towards other capability, that is going to hurt our ability to deter or respond to a Chinese aggression. I call the B-21, the China deterrence bomb is not going to deter if it’s not on the ramp. We need to maximize our acquisition ramp and continue to flow the dollars toward that program and not allow the green eye shade folks to just cut a little bit here and there for other programs.

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

Armo and Tom, care to comment?

Thomas H. Jones:

I think Ms. Johnson did an excellent job covering most of the points I was going to hit. I just foot stomp one or two things here. The collaboration and the active contract management I think is a key feature and one of those things when I said it’s something unlike anything I’ve seen in my time in the industry that is only going to improve with this digital environment that we’re bringing on the ability to share digital data back and forth. I think that’s a very important element.

And at the other point that I think is really important is that building a first article that is production representative, and frankly I think that is a best practice we need to look at trying to perpetuate as we go and build other aircraft. There is a lot of time that can be lost in putting together prototypes that are at the end of the day, not very representative of the final thing that you need to build. And barring super sophisticated design, usually most of the problems you run into these programs are the basic manufacturability and the processes that you have to go into production. I think that is a great path that the RCO has enabled us to take on this program and again, the best practice we should really consider on future aircraft programs.

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

Very good. Here’s one on transitioning the force. Air Force currently plans to have the B-21 replace the B2, but as we all know, the Air Force is in desperate need from long range strike capacity given accelerating advanced threats during the transition period from the B2 to the B-21. What are some of the risks that you see in the long range strike mission area and do you have any recommendations on minimizing this risk by retrain retaining B2’s longer or building more B-21’s sooner?

Maj. Gen. Jason R. Armagost:

I’ll take that one. As a MAJCOM a forced provider, we have to constantly assess what the future, what’s changing under our feet and how we address that. But I will say this, one of the things that allows us to understand that environment in ways maybe that we might not have in the past is our connectedness, not just to this team here, but across MAJCOMs. AMC, we have, there are dependencies from every MAJCOM into other MAJCOMs that if you don’t pay attention to them can bite you very hard. That transition piece as we get to B-21 is really driving us into understanding what are the expectations that PACAF has for us as far as tempo and number of targets like Gonzo points out.

But there are dependencies backwards through AMC and we’ve built some interesting relationships and partnerships there. As you look at how the conduct of a China fight would go down, there’s an insight force piece of that where SOC is very interested in connecting and understanding their environment in new ways, which is beneficial to us. That system connectedness really is important to understand that and characterize it and move forward together so that we don’t build ourselves handmade wooden shoes that don’t talk to other handmade wooden shoes.

Thomas H. Jones:

If I could add something on there also just as the prime on the B2 as well, obviously the decision of what happens with B2 is global strike command decision and we’re going to support that. That said, we are continuing to work on modernization of that platform. Recently, I think you probably saw the integration and test of a Jazzem ER. We’ve also brought in a radar assisted targeting system that is going to provide improved targeting and probably one of the things I’m most excited about, we talked about the open architecture to B-21, but we’ve been able to do a open mission system architecture that’s decoupling a lot of the mission systems avionics from the flight control, which means we have a platform that can be easily upgraded without affecting flight worthiness. If that desire is there to extend, we have a platform we think we can scale forward.

Col. Mark Gunzinger (Ret.):

If you’re in a hole, don’t dig it deeper. I’m a advocate of maintaining B2 in a force at least until the B-21 reaches IOC. Not doing for one swaps as soon as an operational B-21 hits the ramp. We already have a bomber force as too small, we already have a penetrating bomber force that really is a silver bullet force. We need to build up that capacity, especially in the late 2030s again to deter China, be prepared to respond, instead of making a resource driven decision to retire B2’s as B-21’s. Come on, let’s keep them in the force until 2030s, reduce that risk and then gracely retire them.

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

Okay, we’re coming in the final stretch here, so please I’d like to give you each an opportunity to answer this last one. And this is about advanced weapons. Our leaders, Air Force leaders and all of us recognize we need advanced weapons for our advanced aircraft and we’ve also heard people talk about the need for affordable mass. Could each of you give us your quick thoughts in terms of what kinds of weapons that would help maximize war fighting potential to B-21?

Maj. Gen. Jason R. Armagost:

The only thing I would add to that question actually is we need the right advanced weapons mix. Because a lot of times if you get to the, what’d you call them, a green eye shade folks, right? I won’t say that, but I think that’s what you call them. They might tell you, “Hey, you need x thousand of this.” Right? That answers your question. I will tell you categorically it does not answer your question. You need the right advanced weapons mix and preferably that’s a joint problem. We can capitalize on money that is being spent in the Department of Defense, not just in the Air Force. And there are capabilities that where you have to compress time very quickly to make an effect very quickly. And then there are times you need mass and tempo and if you sequence and build that portfolio properly, then it opens up new possibilities to do things that may not require as many weapons and is a cost efficient answer to that question.

Melissa A. Johnson:

Yeah, I think to tag on a little bit to what Armo and even before what Tom was talking about with open mission systems, I think on the acquisition side, we are really kind of the enabler to whatever that requirement turns out to be and having as much flexibility and giving the MAJCOM, giving global strike as many options as they can, but that open mission systems. And really again, it’s all about how you build that foundation. If you don’t build that in up front, you know can always do it later. We’ve shown that through many programs, but it takes a lot longer and becomes much more cost prohibitive.

I think what we’ve done, and then obviously the operational imperatives are really driving some of this right now. We’re already looking at what type of advanced capabilities. Even a year ago we laid out a modernization plan that Chief Brown signed off on. That was a combined effort between us in global strike and really kind of been able to again, lay that foundation for when that time comes and the resources are there, we are ready to take action right away instead of, to Gonzo’s point. You don’t have to study it for the next five to seven years. Again, that’s really where a lot of time gets expended. If we’ve done all that work up front, then it’s just an execution issue.

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

Okay, go ahead Tom, real quick.

Thomas H. Jones:

Yeah. Couldn’t have said it better. We’re here to implement requirements and I think Ms. Johnson hit the nail on the head.

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

Okay. I’ll just say, do we have sufficient weapons in the inventory to deal with a hundred thousand aim point campaign? That’s a good final parting thought to think about. We’ve come to the end of our panel, really appreciate all our panelists for being here today, and we thank all of you and for what you do to defend our nation. For all you in the audience, thanks for being here. The next discussion here in Potomac C, you’ll be Cyber Technology. And with that, have a great aerospace power kind of day.

Nice job.

Watch, Read: ‘The Digital Domain, Intelligence Operations, and Targeting’

Oct. 14, 2022

Department of the Air Force CIO Lauren Barrett Knausenberger moderated a discussion on “The Digital Domain, Intelligence Operations, and Targeting” with Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback, deputy chief of staff for ISR and cyber effects operations; Maj. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, director of operations for U.S. Cyber Command; Brig. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, director of intelligence, Space Force, 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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Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. Good morning. How’s everybody doing out there? All right. Okay. We have people very excited about intelligence operations targeting and the digital domain and we are well aware we are the last thing between you and lunch. So we’re going to have a good panel here today.

I’m Lauren Knausenberger. I’m your DAF Chief Information Officer and more importantly, I have with me here today, Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback from the A26… All right. We got a fan favorite. Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy from the 16th Air Force. All right. Last but not least, Brig. Gen. Greg Gagnon from the S2. All right. We got some Space Force in the house. That’s always good. It’s always good. All right. So let’s jump right into it. Starting with Leah, would love to have you guys just introduce yourselves a little bit more. You’re all pretty new in your new jobs. What’s hot as you’re coming into your role and tell this audience something that they don’t know about you.

Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback:

No. You told us you weren’t going to ask that question. All right. Thanks for having us to the AFA crowd and everyone, thanks for being here today. We weren’t too sure it was going to be full but appreciate that it is because intelligence, cyber, electronic warfare, those are all things that are in now in my portfolio as the A26 and I know those things are all important to you. I could probably actually wrap all of those things up into information warfare and then add on a little bit of that but I’m not going to talk too much about information warfare today.

What I really want to talk about is about intelligence and targeting, the intelligence that is required in every domain, not just the cyber domain to actually get to prosecute targets or get to the commander’s intent. And so, that’ll be a big part of, I think, my conversation and piece to this today.

I have been in the job for about seven weeks now. Back at the Pentagon… Well, I mean I’ve been at the Pentagon a number of times now so that’s not so great but it is nice to be home back in the Air Force. So Greg is doing the job that I was doing just a few weeks ago and it was absolute privilege and an honor to help the Space Force stand up. So if you’re a Guardian out there, good luck to you. I’m really excited for the Space Force and where it goes.

However, I know we’ve got a lot of challenges in the Air Force and specific to my portfolio, we got a lot of things to get to. I will tell you one thing that you might not know about myself is that, or about me, is that I completed a full Iron Man about 10 years ago. So I can’t even say that I have a triathlon card anymore. It’s been so long but it’s not something that I tell folks too much anymore but I think it’s 112 miles on the bike, 2.4 miles in the swim, and a marathon. I tell you that, it takes a lot to be able to do that. Greg knows it as well, the commitment, the lonesome training that you do, but part of a team if you get to be part of a team. And so, I wrap that into the commitment that I have to what we’re doing in National Defense as part of that team and the commitment to intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, as well as cyber and communication so that’s me. Thanks.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. That’s awesome and I didn’t know that about you either. We have a good crowd. All right. Trap, over to you.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy:

All right. Thanks, Lauren. Again to echo, I really appreciate everyone coming here to hear our discussions about the importance of targeting, understanding the cyber domain, and really how we’re supporting our CNAF, CFAX, and really bringing effects upon the adversaries as they threaten our national interest across the globe.

Been in the job about 60 days now with the 16th Air Force folks. There we go. All right. We got a few here. And so, for those that aren’t completely familiar with our NAF, we have nine wings, one center, and OC and two really close partners across ACC and the air staff being NASIC and the Spectrum Warfare Wing. So that’s really the capability that comes together in 16th Air Force as the Information Warfare Numbered Air Force.

To echo Gen. Lauderback’s points, not focused necessarily directly on IW today but if we don’t have good targeting, we don’t understand what the adversary is doing and we’re not aligning it with the commander’s intelligence requirements, then we’re not going to be able to produce outcomes for information warfare either. So I think that’s tremendously important as we think through on this.

For my remarks today, I’m going to focus mainly on three of our wings, the 70th, the 363rd, and the 480th and the distributed common ground system and how that is really our engine that helps with that process as we support the various CFAX across the globe. As far as something to know about me, I can’t compete with the triathlon because I swam a mile once and it took me an hour and 20 minutes. We can talk about that later but I did it. So there’s resilience there but I could barely walk. But anyway, something about me is I used to be the backup quarterback from New England Patriots. Just kidding.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. Should I let him off the hook? I’m hearing no. We need a real thing.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy:

A real thing.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy:

So I grew up in a small town in Putnam, Connecticut, about 8,000, used to be a mill town. Not very big. Two stoplights but the most famous citizen for those with kids there is Gertrude Warner who wrote the Boxcar series books from Northeastern Connecticut. So if you have little kids, they’re still fantastic books and I highly recommend them. If you’re ever in Putnam, Connecticut, they got a nice little museum.

Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback:

Awesome.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. Well done.

Brig. Gen. Greg Gagnon:

Hey, good morning. I’m Greg Gagnon. I’m the S2 of the United States Space Force. Many of you know this but I’ve been the backfill for Gen. Lauderback three times in my career so I feel like that’s a little bit of a train that continues. But I will tell you, last October, after 27 years in the Air Force, I raised my right hand like you saw five soldiers do this morning and I raised my right hand to join the Space Force. So crossed over to the Space Force in October. It’s been an absolute honor. I finished my joint assignment and then had the opportunity to follow Gen. Lauderback one more time. There will not be another following back into the Air Force but it’s been really great and what drove me to want to make that shift was the opportunity to help stand up something new, to help shape a brand new element of the world’s greatest intelligence community, ours, and to be the 18th member of that.

So that has taken my initial time with a lot of up and out activities from the Pentagon and it’s been a real blessing to be here and to be here this week with all of my brothers and sisters of the last three decades. So a little bit about myself that you may not know but Toupe knows and many of you who are close know, I’m the baby of eight kids. So I grew up outside of Boston but the baby of eight kids, explains why I eat so fast. So when you sit down, I get it all there and I eat too fast and my wife tells me it’s incredibly impolite but I’m working on it and I continue to be a work in progress.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy:

Also, for those that don’t know, Gen. Gagnon’s, a major general select for these offers. Congratulations there. Well done, Greg.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. We have quite the panel for you here today but it’s always good to start with why. I’m sure you guys have read that book as well and our why, a big part of that is starting with the threat. So we’re going to start with the threat today and I want to send it over to Gen. Lauderback. So you are focused on threats in US national security, let’s talk about China and Russia for a moment. You know what, I’ll just leave it open to you. What are the principal threats? How do you see us deterring our adversaries in the digital domain? You can take that where you want to.

Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback:

Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you, Lauren. And so, I know Greg will riff off of this for sure and you’re welcome too, Trap, too. Actually yesterday, you probably heard the secretaries talk about the threat brief that he takes over to the hill. And so, Greg and I actually did that last week and previous in our positions Gen. O’Brien and I did that about 10 or 12 times over the last year and it is all about China. It’s the scary China brief. It is, I think, instrumental in educating. It’s not just about educating members within Congress or the staff members there but it’s also educating just the American public as to the modernization that China has done over the last really 20, 25 years. It’s pretty stark. Of course, I won’t be able to talk about any of those details in this session today but I do think that I take to heart exactly what the secretary mentions when he talks about China China China and the One Team, One Fight.

I do think that we have to understand what it is that the Chinese or the PRC are… How it is that they might fight, what their capabilities are, and guess what? How do you know all of that? It’s through your intelligence professionals, whether that’s the intelligence community or those of us within the Department of Defense. I mean, there’s a whole host of folks that will add information to what we know about the Chinese and how they might fight. But I want to, I’ll let Greg continue because he can talk all day about China’s posture in space or Russia’s posture in space, but what I would tell you is that intelligence is a war fighting function. It is one of the seven war fighting functions within joint doctrine.

And so, we use the term ISR a lot in the Air Force and we started to use that in the Space Force. Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance is in operation. I mean, if you read that within doctrine or within writing, it’s an operational term because there’s action. You have to go out and survey or you have to go survey or you have to go out and do reconnaissance in order to get intelligence, right? And so, I use it more as a messaging campaign so that folks understand that the threat picture just does not show up on your door. You don’t just get the 3-1 Vault 2, somebody has to do that. That’s probably about 75% of the people that are in here is collecting that data, making sense of that data, turning it into intelligence. And then providing that to our decision makers.

I see Gen. Kelly in the front row here as the commander of ACC. He needs or Trap needs intelligence every day about capabilities and intent. Now, we have tagged on, not necessarily in doctrine, but we are starting to tag on the T for targeting. So ISRT which I think is a good thing and the reason why is because it’s not just about intelligence providing predictive intelligence or I&W, indications and warning, but there is an end to this, right? The end is that we want to have an effect. If Gen. Kelly wants to have an effect either kinetic or non-kinetic, he’s got to have that intelligence that is helping to do target development years before that conflict even starts. And so, there’s a lot that’s packed into ISRT. I’m glad that we’re starting to use that. But aside from that, Greg, you want to talk anything about the threat?

Brig. Gen. Greg Gagnon:

Just a few points to bring forward. We have all been tremendously busy doing our nation’s work for the last two, almost two and a half decades, often away from home. But while we’ve been away projecting power for our nation, someone’s been studying us and those students and those scholars live in Beijing. They’ve watched how we operated. They’ve looked at doctrine and concepts like we had when some of us were younger called Joint Vision 2020. They took Joint Vision 2020 as their blueprint and call it System Destruction Warfare. It’s how they bring together power projection capabilities for their joint force. They also looked at Joint Vision 2020 and they said, “How do I defeat it?” I attack information, I attack nodes, and I attack decision makers and that is the unifying concept of a power projecting PLA. The PLA is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party.

They’re not the army of the people of China and people forget that. The PLA is now formidable, more surface combatants, more submarines, more SAMS than the United States. They are rapidly expanding in space and what can space do for a power projecting military? I don’t need to tell this audience. You know that allows you to see further, sense at greater distance, and with the correct position navigation and timing, strike before they can touch you. That is what they are building in outer space.

They reorganized their military six years ago and in that reorganization they created the strategic support force. In that strategic support force is this room, it is their cyberspace operators and their space operators. In that strategic support force, which stole resources, if you will, from the army, from the PLA Navy and the PLA Air Force, they gained people in kit. That kit in outer space since they stood up the Space Force is now 320% greater. There are over 600 satellites in outer space. Many of those satellites over 260 are designed to look at us and our brothers and sisters as they move across the Pacific. Why? To provide warning and to provide strike capability if directed by leadership. They have a formidable space layer. One that before they did this was really us who could do global reach, who could do global power. This room could do that. There’s another room now and it’s in Beijing.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy:

From the operational perspective as we look in 16th Air force, and I couldn’t agree more with the comments of the two generals to my right, is that it’s a operational activity. And so, when folks ask me what does that mean as an operational activity, it’s adversary focused. That’s what it is. It’s a thinking about how do we bring effects to bear upon the adversary. When we’re talking about the PRC and Russia and thinking about the spectrum of conflict, we clearly are in competition with both. We clearly are in crisis right now with Russia given the Russia Ukraine invasion. And so, they think that, “What’s the dominant activity that governs these two conditions?” The dominant activity is informational warfare and specifically ISR operations and cyber operations. This is where they really come together in our force in 16th Air force and our operators are looking and focused on that.

In the cyber domain, the aspect of it, we are being targeted, you, personally, are being targeted right now by our adversaries in the cyber domain. Whether it’s via social networks or your personal devices or the information that you’re using to accomplish your mission. PRC and Russia are very interested in that. If we’ve seen the escalation of capabilities by the PRC that Gen. Gagnon mentioned meant much of that was enabled by their ability to take our intellectual property and scale it into real strategic capabilities for their nation. We need to stop that and that’s where the cybersecurity aspects of our NAF come into play.

And then, with this respect to the information operations and the ISR professionals in our NAF is really understanding the adversary to the point of that we can bring effects to bear as also to the point of understanding where they’re trying to go and we can thwart their activities as we go forward. As Gen. Lauderback mentioned, every single day across 16th Air Force, we focus on the threat first thing every day.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. Thanks, Trap. We’re going to stay with you for a minute because we’ve just heard about the scary China brief. We’ve heard how the threat is changing. You spoke recently about DCGS’s transformation in light of our shift to a near-peer competitor. Can you expand on what that looks like?

Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy:

Absolutely. Thanks, Lauren. I’ll ask Gen. Lauderback and Gen. Gagnon, the two of ISR professionals that have actually served in DCGS, so if you have comments as we’re going forward, I understand and appreciate that if you’d be gentle with me. But as we’re going forward on this enterprise, what we tell you so the DCGS enterprise was optimized for the wars where you’re fighting in the Middle East. And then, about two years ago, Air Combat Command and 16th Air Force made an affirmative decision that it was time to evolve the enterprise to make sure that we could bring capabilities to better… Rather than a sensor or aircraft focused type of alignment of our Airmen to one that is a problem-centric focused alignment. And so, that was the big idea and the why is like, “How do we bring more capability insight to generate outcomes for our senior leaders?”

And so, from the national defense strategy all the way down to our combat commanders to our CFAX and into our AOCs, to our squadron level folks that are performing this function across. So that was the idea is like, “How do we make our information that we’re providing, our insights that we’re providing more relevant to what the senior leadership is doing versus just the tactical execution that we got highly skilled at as we were fighting the war on terror and focused on EO threat?”

And so, there are two key organizational elements that were designed to help this. The first one is the linkages to the CFAX which is our mission management teams. These are the linkages that make sure that the air operation centers across our various CNAFs have that linkage into our DCGS enterprise and so they can make sure their private intel requirements are being pushed into the enterprise that we have across our NAF.

The second key and really the tactical edge is the analysis and exploitation teams so this is where the rubber meets the road. The design is roughly 15 Airmen, 2 officers, 3 senior NCOs, 10 other Airmen that are looking across all source intelligence products, intelligence sensors, and to really focus on the problem versus, “What can you find from Sensor X that staring at this part of the world?” to versus, “What do you know about Russian intent and activity in southern Ukraine?” And then, that would be a requirement we would then push to use safely as we look through in China, really bring to bear the entire capability of the enterprise.

Also, with having that kind of focus in the enterprise, the 480 is able to pivot across the enterprise and have backups. If a DCGS is over resourced, over taxed, our total force partners can bring that to bear as well as that alignment and they can use their expertise and ability to fuse all those types of all source intelligence to bring those insights to bear. It’s been bearing fruit and as you heard Gen. Hecker talking yesterday from the main stage, I think USAIF is more than happy with the results that we’re seeing with that evolution. As I visited there just a couple weeks ago, it’s really some motivated Airmen that are on mission having a real impact in directing our vital national insurance and holding the NATO coalition together.

Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback:

I would just say I took a briefing from Gen. Kennedy’s teams, a couple of the wing commanders, just last week I think it was, and trying to get educated, re-informed on what we’re doing from an ISR perspective, especially within the DCGS. I was, I won’t say blown away, but encouraged very much so of these AETs and where it is that we want to go. We can’t just do PED. There is a certain amount of PED that still has to happen, there’s no doubt about that because of the capabilities that we fly. But it’s got to be more than just a small numbers of folks doing PED alone, that stove pipe. It’s all about fusion. I would say, we see this across all of our services in the defense intelligence enterprise, okay? So that’s all of the military intelligence folks as well as NGA, NSA are considered part of that DIE.

I mean, we all need to be talking about fusion. We recognized this during 9/11 as a failure of being able to do that fusion and speak across lines. And so, that’s what I think folks need to be thinking about. This is an evolution of over 20 years of getting to a point of being problem centric and fusing as much intelligence as we can together.

There was one other point I wanted to make about that. Ah. Yes, it is. Those AOCs that they’re supporting, okay? So it’s not DGS supporting DGS, right? Again, this goes back to ISRT, back to an effect that you want to have or the information that you want to give to the CFAC or maybe it even goes up to the combatant commander or the JTF. Those AOCs that we have built today do not have a large enough intelligence manpower to do the things that we need to do in every single one of those divisions that’s within the AOC. So I see really great things that are happening and I look forward to us getting faster and much more mature as we build out those AETs so well done to you and your team.

Lauren Knausenberger:

Greg, I have a follow up question for you. So in your recent remarks you talked about the unblinking eye the US Space Force has trained on our top pacing adversary and would love to hear a little bit more about that and how we’re going to maintain space dominance.

Brig. Gen. Greg Gagnon:

So that was a wonderful misquote so I’m glad I made the press but I did talk about the unblinking eye and the unblinking eye was talking about what we’ve just seen in Ukraine. We have seen the power of the commercial space industry brought to bear for Ukrainian forces and brought to bear for foreign policy. In the past, the United States intel community and our national leadership have told our allies what we thought was going to happen. Our allies didn’t always believe us and they had reason to doubt us based off of past performance. But based on this year when we told them there was proof that we could drop on the table and what we dropped on the table were wonderful images of, not wonderful images, horrible images of Russian BTGs just basically lined up against Ukraine. So the story became way more powerful when you had the proof of commercial assets that are at unclassified levels.

The commercial space industry is expanding immensely and this impacts DCGS. When I was a young lieutenant, the core value proposition was collection. You wanted to get your image on the target deck so that you could do something and figure something out whether it was warning or targeting. Today, the core value proposition is no longer collection. We have plenty of collection whether it’s airborne, space-based, or cyber-based. What we need is sense making or fusion or analysis, that is the core value proposition moving forward for an intelligent service. That’s what your AETs are inside DCGS. They’re the first vanguard of going after that as the value proposition. The challenge inside the department is explaining that to people when people want to minimize manpower, right? Because manpower still matters and I am a believer, and I’m pivoting a little bit, but I’m a believer in AI and ML but I’m also a realist.

In my realism, I tell you that today we have this much data. Has anyone seen a projection where this stays where it’s at? Where do we go here? Do we go here? Do we go here? So our value proposition moving forward as a workforce is how do we use those new tools to help get through that new data, right? Maybe not continue to put a resource manpower constrain on our services but how do we use that to keep pace? In warfare, there’s fast but what really matters is relative speed, right? We always talk about going fast. What matters is that you’re outpacing, out-thinking, out-deciding your adversary so your pace setter can be your adversary.

As we pivot to China, what gives me concern is how fast they’re moving. We have to tell that story because that’s the story that I think people who make resource decisions need to hear and they need to understand that warfare in the future is not less intel, it’s more sense making and probably more intel.

Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback:

Yeah. I’m just going to pivot off of that or riff off of that for a second. That ROIs that the secretary has developed for us and we’ve done all of this fantastic analysis, these operational imperatives, I want you to know that intel is foundational to every single one of them. We are not going to be successful in any of those OIs if we don’t actually understand the threat.

The B21 as an example, you think, “Well, how is intel foundational to our B21 operational imperative?” Well, there’s this thing called acquisition intelligence where you’re trying to predict what does the threat look like if that’s 10 or 15 years from now and how is it that the B21 might be able to mitigate that threat, right? So just as an example, that’s one to all of those operational imperatives.

So I want the intel folks in here to understand that you are in every single one of those operational imperatives. Even though it might not say it, but truly you are. I think one of my charges that I’m going to take on, I haven’t cleared this all with my team yet, but is we have spent a lot and we talk a lot about the platforms, the S and the R of ISR. And so, I really want to start talking and I want to get some resources. I want to show, exactly to Gen. Gagnon’s point, that we’re going to need more intelligence in the future and so, how do we make that happen?

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. So you all are teeing me up pretty well for the question that we need to answer, which is are we well postured to pivot to a wartime posture with a peer adversary? If we’re not, then what has to happen for us to get there?

Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback:

Okay, I’m going to go first. The answer is no, we’re not ready. Though I was really encouraged by Gen. Brown’s comments yesterday of we can do this, right? We just need to pivot us all to where it is that we think that we need to go which I think these operational imperatives… I mean, the SecAF’s vision, he’s got it right as well as the resources when those turn to those capabilities.

One of the things that I do want to say here though is that, and it’s not necessarily on the intel side, I think I’ve made my points, but on the cyber side and then on electronic warfare. So the other two huge items that are in my portfolio within the A26. On the cyber side of the house, if you are unfamiliar, I want you to understand where we’re moving with the cyber mission analysis task order. We are doing a lot of great work to understand what it is that we need to do from a cyber effects standpoint but also a communication standpoint.

I was on the air staff when we merged the 2 and the 6 and I realize now that we probably did not name it correctly. We called it the A26 and it’s ISR and Cyber Effects Operations. When somebody hears about cyber effects operations, I think that they immediately go to offensive or defensive and hackers, right? That does not speak to the 90% of the other communicators that we actually have. Running comm squadrons, delivering your iPhone to you as a general officer or wing commander, those types of things. All of those functions that happen at the comm squadron, we aren’t… Well, I want to make sure that we’re messaging to those folks as well that this cyber mission analysis task, the 47 tasks that are in that, are going to get after that entire portfolio so that we can have a resilient communication structure or we determine how do the comm folks out at the bases actually operate within agile combat employment or the ACE concept.

So we’ve got a lot of work but I want you to know there’s a lot of brain power that is going towards this right now and we’ve had a couple of winds. Just recently, the SRBs that are going out to the 1B4s, so these are our, I call them the ethical hackers who are playing in somebody else’s pool. So one 1B4s are getting their bonuses put back in. 1D7s, we got a little bit of an increase in some of the SRB as well. There’s a number of things and a few other quick wins that I could talk about but I don’t want to take up all the time.

And then, the last thing that, I’m sorry I do have to talk about electronic warfare or electromagnetic spectrum operations, EMSO, we are nowhere near where we need to be with that. And so, we are just starting the sprint. It’s with the acquisition community, it’s with the operational community so ACC is taking a lead in this and then those of us on the staff to determine what are the gaps, what do we think that we need, what are the requirements, what are the gaps, how do we go about funding this. And so, you might see this turn into another operational imperative a year from now or something of that nature but it is something that we do not have a deep bench on at all and we’ve got to develop that so that’s one way of getting after the threat.

Lauren Knausenberger:

I want to piggyback on one thing that you just mentioned. The greater focus on the cyber, the communications, Airmen, and we’ll talk about people in a moment too, but Gen. Lauderback shared that ISR was foundational to all of the seven topics and I don’t think we’ve said that in enough rooms yet. We’ve said it in different rooms but I’ll repeat for this room that cyber and IT are foundational across all seven of those initiatives. The secretary just came down to share with our cyber and IT force down in Montgomery, Alabama. But for the communicators, the cyber and IT folks out there, I want to know that you are foundational across all of those things. Secretary knows it as well so thanks for that.

Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback:

Yeah. 100%.

Brig. Gen. Greg Gagnon:

So if I could, I’d just talk a little bit about one of the great advantages we have over our pacing threat and those great advantages are in this room. There is a 2 million person PLA armed forces on active duty and that outnumbers us but no one in this room is a conscript, right? Everyone raised their right hand to choose to join and in that willingness comes motivation. We see this when we watch foreign adversaries and how they perform in battle. As I look across this room, I have many friends in this room. There are many very well decorated combat veterans in this room. Another great advantage of the US military over some foreign militaries to include our pacing threat.

Those things, those intangibles matter at the point of contact. Many of us know that and that is a great strength for us. Whether we are targeting a $2 billion precision-guided munition or a $2 million precision-guided munition, we are generally doing that as a force based off of mensurated coordinates from a 26 year old staff sergeant because we trust them that much because our force is that proficient. That’s a huge advantage and if I’m playing cards against somebody in the PLA strategic Space Force, that is my pocket aces.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy:

All right. Lauren, with respect to the readiness question, first, are we ready for conflict? I completely agree with Gen. Lauderback. We’re on a good path but we have to stick to the strategy as Gen. Lord said in the other room and make sure that we fund resource and continue to move out.

With respect to competition, we are in a level of conflict today, every day as we mentioned. The PRC and Russia have a different worldview and our Airmen and 16th Air Force are out there every day either hunting, exposing, contesting their activities every day, specifically in the cyber domain, ISR, EW, and IO across our Numbered Air Force as we’re looking forward to do that. But then, as we think to the next, we’re ready to defeat them. One of the key things that the recent crisis in Europe has shown us is that from a cyber perspective, we need to expand our ability to leverage the whole defense intelligence enterprise.

What I mean by that is that traditional targeting and mensurated coordinates are great, difficult to target off that from a cyber perspective but what we need to understand is what are the networks, what is the space that they occupy from an IP perspective, what are the alternative access means that I have to either get in their C2 system or their weapon systems. As working close partnership with DIA, NASIC, and others, we’re starting to get more fidelity in that with respect to our AF cyber role and with US cyber command to understand, “Okay, how do we gain access to these capabilities?”

So first, we can gain more insight, we can expose malicious and malign activity, we can contest disinformation but also, how do we make that leap into the weapon system? So if we go into a hot crisis or conflict that we’re able to bring those effects to bear, on timing a tempo that matters for the commander of the conflict at that time. And so, as we look and expand upon those things, that’s one of the areas we’re looking. From us, from a perspective, from ISR, the people in this room like Gen. Gagnon are our key asymmetric advantage and also, the people on the other side is their vulnerability. And so, the people that are accessible either for them or for access or to get into their capabilities. And so, that’s where we focus in 16th Air Force.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. We’re already headed toward people and I know this audience wants to hear what’s going on with people. Trap, let’s start with you. What are the skills and capabilities that you need from this force to be able to meet that pacing threat?

Lt. Gen. Kevin Trap Kennedy:

So I think there’s three that go in addition to our core values, characteristics that if I were to mentor a young officer, enlisted or civilian, that’s coming into our force and whatnot. The first one is, I need problem solvers, right? Folks that can see complex challenging problems, not looking to simplify them, looking to solve them and take them into pieces and how do we do that.

One of the other key is critical thinking. This is the key for the disinformation fight that we’re in, is really thinking critically both as a citizen also as an Airman or a Guardian to understand, “What is the adversary intent here? Where’s that information getting in the environment? How can I contest this on behalf of our nation?”

Finally, as we think about multi-capable Airmen, there’s going to be a level of self discipline and rigor that you’re going to have to hold ourselves accountable to. What I mean by that is the process we had before of we developed you very finely with a well defined enterprise to give you one skill and a very specific AFSC to accomplish that task 100% all the time. First time, every time, right way, right reasons. Now, we’re asking you to do other tasks because we need you to, as we go across the force. One of those would be digital fluency, not just for the cyber folks, not just for the ISR folks, but for every Airman. We’re going to have to be rigorous with our time and hold ourselves accountable to making sure that we’re using our really critical and finite amount of training time that we have to make sure that we’re getting as skilled as possible so we are ready to compete and defeat our adversaries.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. Lightning round with three minutes left. Leah, how are we going to make sure that we have the cyber and our ISR forces ready to support that mission?

Lt. Gen. Leah Lauderback:

Yeah. Thanks, Lauren. I’d say there’s quite a bit of that within our CMA task board. Certainly on the cyber side of the house, I think there are already things that we’re doing. We know that we’ve got an FGO shortfall as an example of about 300 folks that we have empty billets and we don’t have anybody to put into those. And so, right now we’ve just started with A1, a grade review to understand if those truly do need to be 04, 05s or can they be senior 03s? Can they be a master sergeant? So we got to do that work.

Next part is the educational part then is… So we moved to this multi-capable Airmen concept and yeah, the digital fluency, we all need to have that. And so, we just briefed the SecAF just last week on how it is we’re actually, I think maybe stealing a play out of the Space Force playbook, as to how do we get these folks to understand more of digital fluency and not just the stovepipe what it is that they’re working on, on a daily basis.

And then, lastly is the retention, I would say, is how do we retain those folks? And so, we had some wins from a perspective of the SRBs lately but we need to look holistically at how is it that we keep Airmen and Guardians doing the things that they do for our nation. That this is an important business and we absolutely need every single one of you to stay, to get better at what you’re doing, to become expertise, and then move into doing other things, right? That multi-capable Airmen that we’re looking for in the future.

Brig. Gen. Greg Gagnon:

I would tell you, at birth, the Space Force framed the discussion a little bit differently. The Space Force is a digital service and digital fluency is expected of every Guardian. It’s not just Guardians who are the cyber Guardians, it’s every Guardian because everything we do is a remote op and every remote op is either connected through RF or ones and zeroes. It’s that simple.

So we have taken out a course ware with Udacity with the Department of the Army and we’re expecting people to take those courses as they articulate through jobs to gain the right skills for particular jobs that we’re coding each individual job. I took my first course about two weeks ago. One of seven is done. So next year, ask me what I’m on and I should be seven of seven but that’s how we are tackling this. To pretend we don’t live in the cyber age is ridiculous. It’s all of our job and it’s all of our job to protect our information at home, protect our information at work, and continue to do those proper things that make sure we don’t give advantages to the adversary. We called it OpSec in the old days. It extends to the digital world today.

Lauren Knausenberger:

All right. We could have talked another 30 minutes easily on these and the many other topics that we had teed up but we are out of time. Thank you all so much for coming. Let’s give it up for our panel.

Watch, Read: ‘People First: Spouse Employment, Health, and a Better Life’

Oct. 14, 2022

Mollie Raymond, spouse of Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, moderated a discussion on “People First: Spouse Employment, Health, and a Better Life” with USSF’s Paula Krause, resilience and wellbeing program manager; Christine Heit, holistic health assessment lead; Jason Lamb, talent strategist; and Christina Parrett, director of civilian policy and programs, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Voiceover:

People First spouse employment, health, and a better light. Ms. Christine Heit is a holistic health assessment lead for the United States Space Force. Her professional background includes mental health, sexual assault prevention and response, primary prevention, and public health. Ms. Heit’s efforts in overall health will lead to a better life for our Guardians, Airmen, and their families. Mrs. Paula Krause is the Resilience and Wellbeing Program Manager for the Space Force. She manages numerous programs including interpersonal violence prevention, suicide prevention, and the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program. As the sexual Assault Prevention and Response program manager for Space Force Field Command, she was responsible for planning and implementing programs that will ultimately strengthen the Guardian and Airmen culture within the Space Force.

Mr. Jason Lamb is a retired colonel and talent strategist for the Space Force. He wrote and implemented the Space Force’s first ever Human Capital Strategic Plan, The Guardian Ideal. This plan guides how the newest service will acquire, develop, engage, promote, employ, and cultivate resilience in its members. According to Mr. Lamb, the only way we are going to be successful is with our teams and those teams are based on the Guardian commitment. Mrs. Christina Parrett is the director of civilian policy and programs for the United States Space Force. She implemented a workforce plan designed to maximize existing alternative personnel systems to position Space Force to be more competitive in the market for top talent. Her efforts are creating unique opportunities for not only the military and civilian Guardians, but for spouses and family members as well.

Kari Voliva:

Welcome friends. We are so happy that you’ve joined us for this very special session today. I am Kari Voliva, AFA Vice President for Member and Field Relations. I am honored to introduce our moderator for today’s People First Spouse Employment, Health, and a Better Life Panel, Mrs. Mollie Raymond, spouse to Chief of Space Operations General John Jay Raymond. Mrs. Raymond has accompany General Raymond on 17 assignments around the globe in 35 years. Mrs. Raymond has long been a champion for military spouses and families working tirelessly to support them by promoting family engagements, building genuine connections, and creating a strong sense of community. She is an avid supporter of families through her selfless service in numerous military philanthropies and assistance programs. Mrs. Raymond, on behalf of your AFA family, welcome.

Mollie Raymond:

Katie, Is there a light here by chance? Yeah, it’s okay. That’s okay. That’s all right. No worries. Good morning. Thank you, Kari, for that wonderful introduction. If I’m a little distracted, it’s because I have this great new song that’s dancing in my head. I would love to just say thank you to everyone for being here today for our Space Force Panel, People First Spouse Employment, Health, and a Better Life. I’d like to start by saying a huge thank you to Air and Space Forces Association for including Guardian and Airman Spouses as attendees this year. If you are a military spouse, please stand up and let us give you and all of us a round of applause. As you all know, the Space Force is the newest service since the Air Force was established 75 years ago. Happy birthday to the United States Air Force.

With a new service comes new opportunities and new ways of doing things differently when it comes to people, Guardians, Airmen, civilians, and their loved ones. After all, people are our best asset. Today our goal is to talk about these new opportunities, especially what it means to families and spouses and loved ones. My husband Jay often says that with our smaller size, the Space Force can apply a bit more art than science when it comes to people. If that’s the case, I’m so excited about our panel of artists, subject matter experts on quality of life issues to include spouse employment, wellness and resiliency, and our core values in the United States Space Force, all contributing to a better life. Our panel members are forward thinking and they find solutions through creative ideas, innovation, and best practices in industry.

They are trailblazers changing the narrative on how a service can take care of its people. I’m honored to share the stage with them. We have Chris Parrett, Christine Heit, Jason Lamb, and Paula Krause. After I ask a few questions of our panel, we will open it up to you, the audience, so start thinking of your questions, don’t be shy, and we’ll give all the hard ones to Jason. I’m going to start with Chris. Chris, the Space Force is the smallest military department with a little under 16,000 Guardians and civilians in a very competitive, hard to fill career field. How do you acquire new talent?

Christina Parrett:

Oh, that’s fun. When I came into the Space Force about two and a half years ago, I looked at our skill set that we were going to be recruiting for and said, “Oh, okay, so we’re standing up a service in the middle of a pandemic and I have five of the hardest career fields that we know of in the workforce. This is going to be fun and how are we going to challenge and how are we going to compete?” And it’s not just competing with those that are called the service on the military side of the house. When you’re competing for talent on the civilian side of the house, there’s even more options throughout the federal government, throughout the private sector, all over the place as we’re competing. And so we got to thinking, all right, we’ve got to do this differently. We’ve got to be very bold.

We have to be very proactive about where we’re going to the talent. If we say we want top talent, we have to be going to the talent. And that was a really big founding principle. The other thing that we had to really look at was sources, sources of talent. And so I don’t believe that the federal government can’t compete for top talent. I absolutely believe it because I see a lot of it in here today. What I believe is that we have some processes that we’re not maximizing the available flexibilities that we had. And so that’s the other piece of it that we had to really get bold on how we were going to use these flexibilities that we already had afforded to us that we weren’t using the best we could. And so I looked to the authorities that we had, the sources, and looking to different sources that we hadn’t always tapped into.

And I will share a story very quickly when we say sources that when I came into the Space Force, I knew one of the things that our size was not going to… We were still going to have to answer how are we taking care of families? How are we taking care of spouses and employment? And as I was thinking about what is our position going to be and how are we going to articulate that, I met a spouse from the army that had just won an award for coding her own app. And I got the chance to talk to her and I said, “You’re a coder. What did you do?” She goes, “Well, I taught myself how to code.” Okay, first of all, you can teach yourself how to code? I did not know that. I thought that was amazing. And then I wanted to know why she wasn’t working for the federal government.

Why was she not already working for DOD? And she said, “Oh, that ship has sailed. I have tried so many times to do this and I could never get in. And once I did get in I could never get to the next assignment.” And I said, “That’s a missed opportunity right there and we’ve got to do better about that.” And so we were able to explore some opportunities there and start looking at how we’re taking care of spouses and family members better. And that just opened a whole new door for how we’re taking care of the family members while meeting a recruiting challenge with our hard to fill career fields.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you, Chris. And I would just like to say a big thank you to our entire S1 team. You started out with one Guardian in 2019 and now you’ve grown to nearly 16,000 in less than three years. To that S1 team led by Kate Kelly, I can’t thank you enough for your accomplishments and I want to say congratulations to all of you. Thank you very much. And Chris, in your answer you alluded to spouse employment and it is a real challenge for our military spouses, both in finding and retaining meaningful employment. It is a real quality of life and retention issue. We often have our employment interrupted while supporting our military member. How can the Space Force help spouses?

Christina Parrett:

Oh, another fun question that you hear quite a bit. And I will say I took my own personal experience of coming into the federal government after 123 job applications with a master’s degree with middle management experience and I took a GS5 position to become an assistant to learn HR all over again. And so that story has always stayed with me, but I always wanted to be in a position like today to be able to make that change and make that difference. And so coming into the Space Force, while we don’t have a lot of the traditional opportunities that you find on the base that are also not transferable, we do have an opportunity for careers and so we alluded to those five areas that the Space Force really hard to fill, but yet we have this talent source that we’re not tapping into well enough.

Can we and how do we, this is what we’re defining right now. We’ve launched a program called the Guardian Family Career Program and it’s career, it’s job, it grows. And we identify opportunities that are either transferable from base to base or that are remote telework. The pandemic has taught us that we can be flexible and productive in a virtual environment. And so taking those opportunities and being able to now match spouses with opportunities that are going to continue with them into their Guardians and while being able to still serve their service member. It’s been really great to see the initial successes of our first few placements and I look forward as we codify what our remote position is and what our telework position is to be able to have that program continue to grow. And I think that is one of the most meaningful things that we are able to do for family members if that’s the opportunity that they want and have that afforded to them because we have not set those conditions well.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you, Chris. I want to take an opportunity to mention how important it is to match those skill sets with opportunity and education for our spouses. And Chris and I recently learned about a program through Hiring our Heroes Chamber of Commerce called Career Forward. And these are the opportunity to earn Google Career certifications in those wonderful areas of project management, data analytics, digital marketing, IT support, user experience. And so thanks to Hiring our Heroes and Google. We decided that spouses have this opportunity and we need to promote this opportunity to get these certifications. On my social media I did a poll. I said, If you were to take one of these five certifications, which would you choose? Asking for a friend. And the next week our answers, we came back with the poll, the course that won was project management and then I asked who was going to do this with me? There’s a lesson here.

It’s one thing to just say these programs are out there, the resources out are out there. But when you say and invite spouses to join you, it just brings it to a different level and it says that hey, we can do this together. We can support one another and inspire one another. I’m proud to say that we have 90 spouses join me in this journey and that in about three to six months we will have a project management certification. And I’m really proud of it. It’s been so inspiring to me to get the emails from the spouses on why they’re choosing to do this. Spouses have been out of the workforce for a long time like me. It gives us courage. It gives us confidence to do this. And a lot of spouses said, kids are back at school or I’m an empty nester or I want to reenter the workforce, I want to do this, but I’m so grateful that I don’t have to do it alone. We’re really excited. It’s this Space Force cohort that Hiring our Heroes has helped us establish.

But we have more than space spouses, we have navy spouses, we have active duty members, we have Air Force spouses all, are welcome. And we’re going to have a study group and we’re going to have guest speakers. Hiring our Heroes has already had a quick orientation for us, but we have the support there to uplift and encourage one another to get through this and to have a current certification. We’re really excited and I want to say thank you to Chris because you were the one that just showed how much spouse employment means to the quality of life and you’ve been an inspiration to me, so thank you, Chris.

Christina Parrett:

Thank you.

Mollie Raymond:

And thank you to Hiring our Heroes and Google. The support is phenomenal. Next, Christine, would you explain holistic health and why is the Space Force moving towards a different model for physical fitness?

Christine Heit:

Absolutely. Thank you. I had the privilege roughly six months after I started with Space Force to have a conversation with Chief Toberman at an award ceremony. And I have been in the DOD for a long time. I came from Marine Corps. I’ve seen a lot of leaders and he said, “People first. Everyone always says mission first, but if you take care of the person, the mission takes care of itself.” Holistic health is focused on the person. What we do is we’re combining science and we’re combining the person-centered, person-focused approach to create something that promotes short and long-term health outcomes.

Instead of saying, Hey, a run will do this for your health, we looked into science to find out what does promote health. Holistic health assessment is focused on those short-term health outcomes to include helping somebody know what to eat for their body type, promoting consistent physical activity in line with the CSOs intent and the Guardian ideal, while also focusing on a person’s health after they take off the uniform. So much of what is pushed across the DOD is a one size fits all model and this is tailored and garnered to the individual.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you, Chris. We juggle so much in our lives that we often forget the importance of things that contribute to self care and continued wellbeing. And if you are educating Guardians on these health issues, I know families will reap the benefits. If we can avert a crisis to begin with, it helps all of us. Thanks, Christine. Jason, could you describe the Guardian Ideal and why the Space Force is going with this different talent management program?

Jason Lamb:

Because General Raymond told me to. General Raymond did a really, I’m not just saying this, he’s leaving, did a fantastic job of explaining the why of the Guardian Ideal and why we’re taking this approach. But you don’t start a new service every day. It was a new opportunity and my marching orders were very clear, Jason, relook everything. Work with the team and relook everything. Why are we doing what we’re doing? Very happy to take that type of order, a mission type order. And so we looked and said, okay, what is it that we’re actually trying to do here? We are trying to create high performing teams so let’s begin with the end of mind. Then we roll back to the beginning.

We created very intentionally a modern tailored approach that is looking for individuals with the right character, potential, and desire to serve as Guardians because we’re really willing to invest in them to develop them and place them in line with their personal professional goals as those evolve over time within the context of what the space force needs, so that when we develop them, when we place them, people are actually developed doing what they want to do instead of maybe just doing what they were told, which sometimes is necessary, but that’s not how you want to operate day to day because that isn’t how you get the best out of people. Why? To be a part of a high performing team because we absolutely need teams to defend and secure space for the nation and our allies.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you, Jason. Collaboration on teams is so very important and a lesson for all of us. It’s great to be part of a team. I love this question. Frequent moves is definitely a major challenge of a military lifestyle and family stability is a huge quality of life issue. What are you doing to improve stability and decrease the number of PCSs for Guardians?

Jason Lamb:

I love this question. And again, so much of what we do draws from our personal experience and we ask the question why. It’s very powerful and if you don’t have a satisfying answer, you need to go back and work it again. Being in the Air Force service I love, Happy birthday Air Force, my daughter lived in five states before she turned five. Why was that? Hugely disruptive. Hugely disruptive. And for what purpose. It’s disruptive. It hurts families but at least it’s expensive. If you want to do it, you should have a really good reason. Part of that mandate from General Raymond to say look at what we’re doing, why are we doing it? It all needs to serve a purpose. We need to be able to explain to our Guardians why we are doing what we’re doing. Especially when we have much fewer bases that we’re moving people to.

Are we really going to bounce people back and forth, back and forth? Are they going to own two houses and just rent them to each other when they’re moving? The going in position was, unless there was a really good justifiable reason to move somebody, don’t move them. It sounds basic, but if there’s still an opportunity for someone to professionally grow and meaningfully contribute to the mission, the person doesn’t want to move, or there’s not some other factor driving it. We really are trying to take into the consideration what is going on with families and Guardians at different ages and stages. As a colonel, all my fellow colonels and I love to complain about, or the senior enlisted, I’ve got kids in high school or I’ve got aging parents. Not that anybody has to deal with that. Talk about the human condition.

Why wouldn’t we be more intentional and take into account what’s happening to the maximum extent possible. Acknowledging that we really do have to focus, the reason we exist is our very important mission, but it should be in balance. And when we have those conversations they should make sense and not simply the very poor parenting technique of because I said so. Good luck with that if you’re a parent and that’s your go to by the way. That was it. What are we trying to do and why? There’s this old mantra from the rest of the services that homesteading, that is staying in one place for too long, is bad and we’ve thrown out that out the window. It is not bad in and of itself. It’s bad if it hurts the mission and it’s bad if it’s stagnating or hurting Guardians but otherwise we just need to look with a fresh new eyes at what we’re doing and why.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you, Jason. That is huge. I come speaking from a family with three children. All three of them had three high schools. But I also want to share another story, a personal story from our family. 28 years ago we chose adoption as a way to grow our family. And when you choose to adopt you have to start the process and complete it in the same state. And so we waited to move because then we thought we could start it right away. And then I was under such worry and stress, it’s a life stressor. Are we going to complete this in time before we get orders because this is so important to me. And 28 years ago as a spouse I could have worried less if I had the Guardian Ideal. Thank you so much for this forward thinking opportunity to have a little more stability, flexibility, and choice. It’s huge to military families. Thank you very much. Paula, could you tell us a little bit about the brand new integrated resilience and response operation center at Vandenberg Space Force Base?

Paula D. Krause:

Sorry. Thank you. My mic’s not working. For those you that were here yesterday and heard Secretary of the Air Forces remarks, the IRC, so sexual assault and sexual harassment, we had 82 recommendations across DOD that we are working to implement. One of those recommendations is that we need to centralize our services and this is something that our under secretary of the Air Force is very passionate about and actually mentioned at the national discussion last fall. Within the department of Air Force, we have seven locations that we are piloting integrated response. Vandenberg was selected for our space force installations for many reasons. One is a very isolated site. If anybody’s ever been out there, it doesn’t have a city right outside of the gates, like a lot of our installations do. And so it’s a little more isolated. And so we felt like services at Vandenberg need to be centrally located where it is easy for spouses, for families, and for our service members to find what they need.

I don’t know how many have ever gone translation. You’re trying to find something and you’re like okay it’s building 3-0, what? Where is that building? And so we’re trying to just integrate that where it’s an easy one stop shop where if I walk in as a survivor or a victim of something, I don’t have to tell my story over and over again. I can tell my story one time, the services are either in that location or we bring the services to you at that location. It’s a great program that we started end of July. It was when Vandenberg’s program started. They actually have taken a step further. The bare minimum was get your SAPR, which is your sexual assault and response services, and your DAVA, which is your domestic abuse victim advocate, co-locate them. Vandenberg took it above and beyond because that’s what we do. They are co-locating. They have a satellite office for the chaplain. They have a satellite office for the victims’ council, which is the special victims attorney for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.

They are putting their prevention services there as well. We are growing our prevention team and we’re putting those in that same location. And so really it’s going to be a response and resilience center. They’re running it similar to what our Airmen, well used to be Airmen family readiness, now our military family readiness centers are where you walk in, somebody greets you, and we get you to the right office. They’re going to have center hours. And so it’s not, oh sorry that person’s out. That door’s going to be opened during the hours. We’re going to get those people the help that they need in a timely manner. And we’re not going to send them all over the insulation to, oh sorry, that’s the wrong service. You need to go five doors down, take a left, and then a right. And really it’s going to be client focused, survivor focused. And we’re hoping that this helps people not only heal quicker but also have those warm fuzzies that, okay, I came to the right place, the help I need is here. I’m going to get what I need and the services are here for me.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you, Paula. I think it’s a great idea. As a spouse sometimes you don’t always know which helping agency that is the right one for your issue. If you can walk in these doors and the key is to, you don’t have to have an appointment. You can walk in reducing barriers to access. Walk in and you will be guided to where you need to go. And I think that is going to be such a wonderful opportunity for our spouses to feel that they are welcome and that their privacy is intact. There’s different waiting rooms that they can wait in. But I just think this is a fabulous idea and I’m really excited to hear in the months ahead how much impact it makes. At this time we are ready for some questions from our audience. If you have a question, we’d love to hear it. Raise your hand and we have several microphones that will be brought to you. Do we have any questions yet? Oh, we do.

Dr. Ann Bennett:

Dr. Ann Bennett, I’m a space engineer and currently working on the contractor side of things, but I’m also an active duty air force spouse. My question is are there opportunities to modernize the command climate and promote culture to support service members with fully employed spouses so that they can take a more active role. And of course this has to be as mission needs permit, but to take a more active role in their family so the spouses can actually take advantage of the opportunities that we’re setting up for them. Setting up opportunities is great, but in order for spouses to actually have the time, the bandwidth to take advantage of those opportunities, you do need a little bit, not a huge amount, but at least a little bit more parenting of quality at home. And I feel like the military culture is a little bit archaic and doesn’t really support service members in providing that to their families. Are we doing anything to help modernize military culture in that regard?

Mollie Raymond:

Good question. Spouses are multitaskers, aren’t they? And one of the reasons why I think project management was the most ideal course is that spouses, that’s our life. We’re always managing everything. But I think Chris, maybe that’s a good question for you. Tag you’re it.

Christina Parrett:

Well, if I heard the question correctly, I think we’re looking at the culture to afford not just the spouses, but the service members as well to be able to idealize what that family life balances with the work life and mission support balance. And I think that is a fabulous opportunity to then take the culture one step further because it’s not just leaving it. That’s always been on the spouse or the family members to make sure that the household’s running. And I do see that culture starting to change where we do as we grow in a society that understands and accepts the dual income roles. And it’s been a shift. It’s been a growth even in our household when we’ve had to have that conversation of what a career is and what that means. And so yes, we see the work starting. It’s just at the very beginning of how we enable that culture to support the dual income, the dual family, the dual career side of the house while supporting the mission. We’ve got a lot more work to come and I appreciate you highlighting that for us as an importance.

Jason Lamb:

If I may, I’ll just add onto that. We are actively working to instill something that’s called psychological safety. For those of you who aren’t aware, it’s not a cry room where you fill out your hurt feelings report. It’s creating that environment where people can speak up. Because quite often what happens is there’s this, if I express that I need something or that maybe I need to go home or I need to create some bandwidth, I’m being selfish and I’m not being a team player. There are a lot of team leaders and supervisors out there who also have families who also know how complicated and challenging it is to balance, but they’re never told that somebody wants something that they need something and so they sit quietly and goodness does not happen.

We are actively working not just to give a PowerPoint slide presentation on psychological safety and the importance of teams and speaking up, but actually reinforcing the environment, doing more to assess what’s actually happening in that environment. These are all things that we’re building. They don’t exist yet, but general Raymond’s intent is very clear on this and we’re building towards it to create that environment where people can speak up because that’s what real resiliency looks like when you’re connected and you can actually voice those concerns and count on your teammates to support you instead of shame you because you actually need something at home. Because we all need it. We just need to have that environment where we can express it and feel like we can do so without penalty. Because we’ve all been there. Hey I want to go to my kids’ game. Hey I got you covered. No problem.

By the way, my kid has a game next week so I’m counting on you. Yeah, we got it. We got it. We just need to express it and we’re building towards that and it’s going to be a part, spoil alert, of our performance appraisal system. How are you doing as a leader? How are you doing as a teammate? If you’re not there supporting each other. That matters to us. It’s not just the what, it’s the how. The how matters to us as a space force. And I’m super excited about that because I think it’ll be a game changer for Guardians and their families.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you, Jason. Both Jason and Chris, thank you. Do we have another question? Couple, yes. Microphone’s coming. We have one from Heba. One from Cassie. Oh, over this way. Sorry. Sorry. I should do my job appointing.

Heba:

Okay. Hopefully I’ll go super fast. Mrs. Raymond, thanks so much for moderating this panel and panels. Thank you for participating. My name’s Heba Abdelaal. I was on a panel yesterday. I just have a quick question about on the military spouse employment front. How are you identifying those skills that a spouse can bring on the front end to the left of that PCS and then ensuring or trying to place them or at least see if there are opportunities for them through that transition if it’s not something employment wise that they can take with them? I’m just really curious the mechanism that y’all are using to facilitate that particular placement or at least identification of what potential career skills they might bring to a job opportunity at the next location. Thank you.

Christina Parrett:

Thanks for the question. And I love getting questions from the crowd because now we know what’s on everybody’s mind. And so one of the things that we’re looking at, so we’ve got to do a couple things here. We talked about proactive recruitment and so a lot of times spouses are registered out in USA Jobs, have gone over and over and over again applying for job, but there’s the ability for us to be data mining those resumes. And so we’ve started going out to spouses looking for the opportunities that are out there or the skill sets that they bring to the table for the one to one job opportunities. We know that we have a vacancy. We know we have a need to fill.

We’ve started looking and placing that way. A little bit reverse traditional. Now how do you position yourself as a spouse and bringing those skill sets to the table? And that’s what we’re starting to work on with Hiring our Heroes, with the Google certificate program to be able to say, Hey, if this is what you want to do, if you want to be marketable, these are the opportunities to be able to do it. You’ll see more of that coming in this next fiscal year is where one of our big focuses are going to be.

Mollie Raymond:

I appreciate how Hiring our Heroes works with everyone in the program after we complete our certifications with their fellowship program and their amplified program to further professional development and education and identify opportunity. Lots ahead of us, lots of great things happening. Thanks, Heba. Any other? Cassie?

Cassie Cable:

Hi, I’m Cassie Cable. I’m a spouse. One of my questions I want to make sure that formulating correctly is that you guys were talking about some culture and especially with it being a new branch, we’ve got the culture from many different services all coming in. How are we going to try to combat some of the cynicism? Because it’s awesome and I’m one of those, I’m out there, I’m a go getter spouse, and I love champion for encouraging spouses to be involved and encouraging that family unit and getting the services because sometimes it’s just the fact that we all know that service members don’t always take the information home. And so trying to encourage the spouses to go out there and find. There’s all these amazing resources and trying to encourage those spouses, the military does care about you and the military does care about your family, but how are we going to combat some of that culture and some of that narrative of, okay, they just say that. Where are we actually going to put the work into it?

Like I said, I know it’s all there. It’s just that combating some of that cynicism and some of the old thinking that’s still there. I was part of the AFWERX think take several years ago, and we talked about using things like the Air Force Connect app, some of those different things of trying to integrate some more things to reach some of the spouses who are at home sitting there thinking the military doesn’t care about me, but in it’s there, it’s just breaking some of that barrier. How are we going to combat some of the culture and the narrative of no, we really do and we’re not just saying it, if that makes sense.

Jason Lamb:

That 100% makes sense. And most of it is people enter into a life of service, most especially spouses. Y’all volunteer just as much as we volunteer to be a part of this craziness in the service of the nation. But what we don’t want is to feel lied to or taken advantage of. And so we are very mindful of the trust that is being placed in us as a new service. And we are working very hard not to overpromise under deliver. What I would offer is it takes time to build that trust, especially if we DOD have transgressed or violated that trust in some way. We would appreciate, but we don’t ask for anything to be taken on faith. And we are very mindful that as we are building things in culture like the Guardian commitment and our values, I can’t even tell you how many conversations we have about, hey, we’re looking at this policy, how does it align to our values?

Which is a conversation that I frankly didn’t have a lot and I served with all the services. I’m very, very joint. It was always mission, mission, mission, mission, mission. And if you have time, let’s sprinkle a little values on it. Everything that we’re doing is really aligned to the commitment and the values because we do not want to break the faith. We want to say that if there is going to be a thing, there is a mechanism to provide transparency and accountability. Because we really fundamentally believe that we owe the reason why. And if we can’t do something, why we can’t do something, which is something that was quite frankly missing for a lot of my career and those that I talked to was you’d submit something, you’d go into a black hole, and then it came back no, and it was just suck it up.

Inherently ungratifying, unsatisfying. We’re very conscious about closing the loop and building those loops. You’ll hear this a lot, but we really mean it. We need your feedback on the, Hey, we asked this question and we never got a response or we got a response, but there was never an explanation why. Most of you are very, very tolerant if you know why. And we need to make sure it’s a dialogue and not a one way thing. If you bring up specific programs or those things, we can tell you how we are building the loop to close the loop with you and making sure that it is fair, consistent, transparent, and just for all the Guardians across the board. I know I’m doing a lot of hand waving, but reach out to us and we can close the loop on whatever issue you are working. Thanks.

Christine Heit:

I would add from a holistic health assessment standpoint, some of what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to build is attaching action to what we’re promising, understanding that unless the family’s ready, the service member isn’t ready. We will have embedded teams, they’re called Guardian resilience teams, and one of the members of those teams is charged with developing relationships in the gates and in the local community with a focus on prevention. Not a focus on, oh, somebody has something wrong, let’s fix it. It’s what can we build with our families? What skills can we build to promote overall health? I’ve partnered with Mrs. Raymond. We did self-care sessions with spouses back in May.

Very mindful that there are working spouses, so we did multiple days across multiple time zones. We’re working to do different skills. We’re going to have a self-care skill learning session with children. And then we’re also going to, as we build these relationships with the community, recognizing most of our service members live in the community, our spouses, our children, our families are going to have more access to positive activities focused on prevention, focused on protective factors across the Space Force total force.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you. I guess we are out of time, but I so appreciate our panelists and thank you for the responses, speaking from the heart. I can’t thank our panelist members enough. And just finally, as Jay and I head into retirement, a lot of people ask me, Are you happy? Are you sad? And I think my daughter had the best word and she said, “Mom, I bet you’re reflective.” And I am. I’m reflective over the past 35 years as a military spouse, almost 39 years for Jay. We’ve had so much joy and opportunity, but it hasn’t been without challenge. I often didn’t always know where to go for resiliency or wellbeing. Spouse employment was a challenge for me, stability a challenge. But I am so excited for the future, for your futures. As a new service, how we can think out of the box and take advantage of our size and put our best asset, people first for a better life. Semper supra thanks for being here.

Watch, Read: ‘Manned-Unmanned Teaming: Myth and Reality’

Oct. 14, 2022

Heather Penney of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies moderated a discussion on “Manned-Unmanned Teaming: Myth and Reality” with Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements, Mike Benitez of Shield AI, Robert Winkler of Kratos, and Patrick Shortsleeve of General Atomics, Sept. 19, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Lt. Gen. David Deptula (Ret.):

Well that’s good. That’s good. The audience is kind of silenced and we’ll wait for the last few stragglers to come in, and I’ll go ahead and introduce myself. I’m Dave Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and we start this next panel with a very special presentation.

So first let me ask the representatives of the 178th Attack squadron to please come to the stage and surround this magnificent trophy here. Now the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Study is very pleased to announce that the recipient of the General Atomics Remotely Piloted Aircraft trophy of the year for 2021 is the Happy Hooligans of the 178th Attack Squadron. And you can clap again. The Hooligans are based at Fargo National Guard Base North Dakota. And to join me in presenting the award, I’d like to introduce Lt. Gen. Russ Mack, the Vice Commander of Air Combat Command, Maj. Gen. Vinny Mac McDonald, Commander Air National Guard Readiness Center, and Mr. Dave Alexander, President of General Atomics Aeronautic Systems. So Gen. Mack over to you.

Gen. Russ Mack:

Thank you Gen. Deptula. And sir, thank you for your leadership at the Mitchell Institute. This award is presented annually for outstanding performance by RPA squadrons in achieving intelligence, surveillance, and persistent attack and reconnaissance over the preceding calendar year. While I can tell you firsthand what it takes to organize, train, and equip this incredible enterprise, I know that our RPA community is in high demand, and our combatant commanders just can’t get enough of what they provide. So I wanted to say thank you to the Happy Hooligans of the 178th. They have exhibited exemplary performance this past year, and I’d like to offer a hardy well done by the Air Combat Command Commander Gen. Mark Kelly. Thank you.

Maj. Gen. Vinny Mack MacDonald:

In 2021, the 178th Attack Squadron continually stayed on the leading edge of MQ-9 war fighting excellence in innovation. The Happy Hooligans many accomplishments while protecting the American people, our homeland, and the American way of life distinctly identify them as US Air Force most outstanding RPA Squadron. Importantly the 178th is the first National Guard unit to be presented with this prestigious title, and I’m honored to be part of awarding them this trophy today. Air National Guard RPA units contribute to the total force the combat power needed to safeguard our nation’s interests worldwide. And in 2020, the 178th sent the benchmark for this performance. Thank you.

Dave Alexander:

So General Atomics proudly sponsors the Squadron of the Year Award. We honor all the RPA Airmen. But during 2021, Air Force selected the Happy Hooligans as the top rank unit. The Hooligans completed their 14th straight year of 24/7, 365 combat operations. So I’ll say that again. 14th straight year 24/7, 365, every second, every day supporting two combatant commands, an incredible achievement. So congratulations to the 178th, thank you for your service, you’ve made a difference, and most of all, thank you for our freedom.

Lt. Gen. David Deptula (Ret.):

Well thanks Gen. Mack and MacDonald and Dave Alexander and all of General Atomics. Once again, the Mitchell Institute’s proud to present the General Atomics RPA trophy for 2021 to the 178th Attack Squadron, Fargo National Guard Base, North Dakota.

Okay ladies and gentlemen, please join me in one final big round of applause for the Happy Hooligans of the 178th Attack Squadron.

Heather Penney:

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our panel on autonomous teaming. I hope you’ve had an engaging day and learned a lot. And thank you for being here as we close out day one of the Aerospace and Cyber Conference. I’m excited to announce our latest Mitchell paper, I’m even more excited to announce our panelists. But first let me put a little plug in for a report, Five Imperatives for Autonomous Teaming. We know that the capabilities and capacity of the US Air Force’s current force design falls far short of the requirements to deter and prevail against Chinese aggression, which is DOD’S pacing threat. The service must develop innovative operating concepts and grow its force size, resiliency, and ability to present complex challenges to Chinese forces that conduct large scale systems versus systems of warfare in the Endo Pacific. A family of unmanned collaborative combat aircraft have the potential to achieve these force design objectives.

Developing this family of CCA will require the Air Force to increase its understanding of human machine teaming dynamics that are critical to conducting effective CCA counter air missions, precision strikes, and other operations in contested battle spaces. The Air Force is now at risk though of making potentially irreversible force structure decisions, based on a limited understanding of how CCA can or should team with manned aircraft. We’re looking to divest nearly 500 aircraft in the next five years. CCA can be a key component of achieving the force design that we need, but we need to make sure that we develop them properly.

CCA effectiveness and combat primarily correlates with how well they team with humans, not simply the capabilities they carry like weapons and sensors. Understanding these human machine teaming dynamics will be foundational to the development of CCA algorithms and the software brains, “brains” that drive these CCA behaviors. These software programs cannot be bolted on after we produce and field these aircraft.

So in the report we offer some areas that the Air Force can focus on to ensure that we get this right. Our panelists today will be able to contribute some great insight for military and industry for this critical issue of collaborative combat aircraft. So here to discuss with me our Gen. Clinton Hinote of the Air Force Futures, then we also have Mike Shortsleeve from General Atomics, then Robert Otis Winkler from Kratos, say hi Otis, and finally Mike Paco Benitez from Shield AI. Now Gen. Hinote… Now Gen. Hinote is the Deputy Chief of Staff, strategy, integration, and requirements on the air staff, the Air Force A5. We all know he is the thought leader for the Air Force. In his duties General… All right, let’s give him round applause for that, thought leadership. Woo.

In these duties, Gen. Hinote focuses on developing future strategies and assessments of the operational environment. To that end, the A5 host war games and workshops to focus the development of future force design. And we at the Mitchell Institute are very fortunate to have Gen. Hinote give introductory remarks for our recent CCA workshop. Then we have Mr. Mike Shortsleeve. He’s the Vice President for Strategy and Business Development at General Atomics. He’s been with General Atomics for almost three years, having come from a rich experience that includes Big Safari, chairing the Air Force’s C2 and Global ISR Panel, and as an A2 and other impactful assignments as an Air Force intelligence officer. Otis Winkler is a vice president for national security programs and corporate development for Kratos. His experience in a wide range of national security roles from Air Force fighter leadership and congressional liaison, to DARPA, to the Senate Armed Services Committee staff, to industry, and he has a master’s from War College. At Kratos, he focuses on aligning their strategy with DOD, executive, and legislative strategy.

And Mike Paco Benitez next to me is the product manager for autonomy for Shield AI, focusing his work on a concept he calls AI for maneuver, using AI to increase combat mass and enhance mission outcomes. He’s also the founder of the Merge Defense Technology Newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed, here’s a plug, do it now, it’s great. And he’s a contributing editor to War on the Rocks. His 25 year active duty career included both time in the Air Force and the Marine Corps, where he flew combat missions in both Strike Eagles and Super Hornets.

So with those introductions, we’re just going to dive straight into today’s discussion. Big news just a little over a week ago is that the CCA competition may kick off in 2024, which is really exciting for all of us to hear, even though we won’t hear that much about this highly classified program. But the nearness of this means that it’s time to separate myth from reality. So today we’ll explore among our panelists where the technology is right now, and where it might be in the future and where it needs to be.

So to kick this off, Gen. Hinote, I’d like to direct the beginning of the conversation to you, because this is something I think you’ll have very useful things to say for our audience. Secretary Kendall has stated his very ambitious timeline for fielding combat collaborative aircraft. But those of us who’ve been around the building for a while, this kind of sounds a little bit like a myth. 2027 is already within the [inaudible 00:11:18], right? And the Air Force typically can’t even complete the capabilities gap assessment analysis of all alternatives and finalized requirements within five years. So are we going to have to wait for perfect, or can we buy and fly CCA in timelines that will deliver meaningful capability on an iterative basis?

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote:

Okay, so thanks Heather for setting me up with that great question.

Heather Penney:

I know. Well, we’re not going to give you the easy ones.

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote:

First of all. Thank you AFA and Mitchell for sponsoring [inaudible 00:11:53] on the paper and I’m really excited about my fellow panelist and learning from them. So let’s start with this. If we do it the same way, if we try to get the requirements perfect, try to [inaudible 00:12:11] we will fail [inaudible 00:12:18]. That’s not where they’re coming from [inaudible 00:12:30].

Heather Penney:

There you go.

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote:

Okay. Is that better? Thank you. All right. That was part of the technical training that we did not get to before we walked in. Well first I said thank you to AFA, to Mitchell, and to my fellow panelists. And I said that if we were to do things the same way as we always have, we will not accelerate change, we will not get to solving the imperatives. And so we’re committed to thinking about requirements, thinking about acquisition, thinking about capability development in a different way. Now what’s this going to require? It’s going to require us to have war fighters and acquisition experts and testers and evaluators all together working together for the same goal. I also think it’s going to require working together with our allies to be able to share the load and move forward faster. And I think there’s one part of it that we need to discuss amongst ourselves as Airmen.

Because when we go fast, I’m not going to take credit for this, but I will say, I won’t tell you who said it, he might take credit for it later, but it is important for us to realize that the first one sucks. Right? I mean so let’s go back. I flew the first 89s, some of us did, I wasn’t quite there, but they weren’t all that great, and the first versions of certain weapons systems, they weren’t all that great. It’s important for us to realize the first few that we’ll get will learn, will grow, will make it better.

They’re called min viable products for a reason. We have to think about flying aircraft in the way that we think about developing software as a min viable product. And if we make improvements between today and tomorrow, we’re winning, but we’re not going to get it perfect the first time. In fact, we’re not going to even know very much the first time we fly these things. And we’ve had some great partnerships with some of our great companies about flying, and figuring out what these are all about. But it will be important for us to realize that we will iterate and make improvements over time. The alternative is we wait for perfect, and you won’t get it anytime soon. And that’s not an alternative that I am willing to accept, and it’s certainly not an alternative that we’re hearing Secretary Kendall and Chief Brown talk about.

Patrick Shortsleeve:

Yeah, I just add a couple points to this. I would say that day one of strategic competition isn’t going to be 2027, 2030, 2035, whatever date seems to be floating out there, I would offer that occurred decades ago with the Chinese and the Russians. And in my mindset, it’s not so much about maintaining an advantage, it’s about regaining the advantage. So we have no choice but to move fast on this. I mean it’s simple as that. The chief staff of the Air Force I think said it best when you have to accelerate or you’re going to lose. And so that’s where we’re at today. So from a technical standpoint, certainly companies like Kratos and General Atomics, we can go out and we can build the best unmanned aircraft that are out there. But I would offer that you’ve got to hone those skills well ahead of time before that platform arrives two, three, four years down the road.

Today you just saw you’ve got some Airmen up here who 14 years, 24/7, 365 days. That’s a lot of experience. And I would offer that you could go even faster by leveraging perhaps some of the unmanned capabilities you already have in your inventory as sort of your first mover tech demonstrator for some of this development work. You don’t have to wait for a platform to arrive two, three years down the road, you need to hone those skills today, because in order to meet those timelines that have already passed, you’ve got to use what you have at your disposal right now. Continue with the development process on the other side, but I would tap into what you already have from experience as well as platforms.

Heather Penney:

I saw you leaning forward there. Is there anything you wanted to add about minimum viable products in building them today?

Robert Winkler:

No, I think that honestly is key to where we’re going. If you wait for perfect, as he has already said, right, we’re we’re going to wait for 10, 15 years. We’ll get to something that’s relatively close to perfect, but it won’t be time relevant to either contain China, or be a factor to any fight that might be coming up in the next three to five years. And I think that that mindset has to grip us. I mean it’s been adopted by most of the commercial industry to do a minimal viable product and then build off of that. We have that ingrained in ourselves in the military and specifically in the Air Force. We’ve spent a lot of time doing block upgrades over every single major weapon system. But we need to have the, in my opinion, the attitude that we’re behind and that we need to catch up as Mike said already, that to get after it instead of waiting 10 to 15 years for the next perfect.

Heather Penney:

So Otis, I’m going to follow up on that because one of the concerns that we all have is in order to be able to field these aircraft, they have to be affordable. Affordability is actually one of the objectives to be able to create the mass and the numbers that we need. So how do we begin looking at breaking that cost paradigm? I mean we’ve heard Secretary Kendall throughout a rough estimate that the teammate for the B-21 would be about half of the bomber’s cost, but that would be about hundreds of millions of dollars. And that’s not really attainable if we want to be able to do this in mass. So it’s not a cost equation that works for us. So how do you see making CCA more affordable?

Robert Winkler:

No, I think it’s a great question, and as you said it’s key to the overall program. I mean, I didn’t realize this until I started working with industry and in Congress, but we buy aircraft by the pound, which is, it sounds nuts, but if you go back and look at the analysis, it’s about $2,500 per pound to buy a military aircraft. And it goes back through modern history is it stays relatively constant. AFRL has done a fantastic job and doing some really innovative development, and they’ve brought that down by a quarter. So now we’re talking about 600 pounds for $600 per pound, which is fantastic and honestly revolutionary. But I don’t think that even gets us to where we need to go. If you’re taking let’s say an F-35, which is by far probably the most capable and cost effective airplane that we have out there at $80 million a copy and you do one quarter of that, you’re still going to be in the $20 million range to produce the thing that’s relatively similar to the capability of an F-35, but unmanned.

That is cost effective and that would be wonderful, but I think the real key to getting affordable mass is going to be the disaggregation. So figuring out what subsets of mission systems that you can put on each individual aircraft unmanned teammate, that the whole of the formation is more cost effective and more combat effective than the individuals. And so by doing that, the only way to do that is to fly those mission systems. We’re not going to have enough information and data. We can think about it a lot and there’s a lot of great thinkers in this room, on the air staff, and in OSD and the like that can think about it. But until you’re actually going to go out there and fly these mission sets with real people in combat situations, whether in training or out in the fleet and the field, we’re never going to really know what the maximum effectiveness is by combining those different disaggregated mission systems.

Heather Penney:

And for those that aren’t familiar, the dollars per pound rule of thumb for aircraft is that’s a stand in for the raw materials, for the complexity of the systems, the engines because the heavier the aircraft, the more powerful the engine has to be, and all of the weapon systems that are on board. And what we’ve seen recently is that as we’ve had more capable aircraft, we’ve aggregated. So we’ve brought on board far more complex and advanced systems, which has also then increased the cost of aircraft. So that’s why I think Otis is recommending that we disaggregate these onto unmanned aircraft. So by separating out and having more single function or simple function type aircraft, we can create greater affordability.

We actually wrote about that in our Mosaic Warfare Report, so I think that’s a really important piece. But I’d like to get to the current state of technology and Mike, I’m going to toss this over you and then Paco, I’d really like to hear what you guys are doing at Shield AI, because that’s really interesting. Mike, General Atomics has been a true disruptor in the field of unmanned aircraft. After all you guys were visionary in how you developed the MQ-1 and MQ-9, and these platforms still do a lot of important mission sets, and they have got the potential to continue that in the Pacific like base defense. But let’s talk about the future because you’re still looking to disrupt. So how is GA thinking about collaborative combat aircraft, and can you give us a current state of play for these unmanned systems?

Patrick Shortsleeve:

Yeah, it’d be great to offer you sort of what we are doing, not only today, but what we’re looking at for tomorrow. Most people associate General Atomics with the MQ-9 and rightfully so, it’s a phenomenal platform that I think has not been fully utilized. But I will say that for us it begins with really a far reaching vision. And this is an interconnected framework. So you got this far reaching vision, you do an intelligent design, agile capability development, and then rapid fielding, right? You have to get the capability out there as quickly as possible. So all of our future designs and concepts fall under this umbrella of being sort of collaborative combat aircraft in one form factor or another. One of those particular ones that I would like to just address today is an aircraft we call Gambit.

Gambit actually is a family of aircraft. And we looked at the ability to strike a balance in what I would say is an advanced aircraft that’s durable to do whatever job it needs to do, but not so exquisite and so costly that you wouldn’t want to be aggressive with it. Meaning if the platform, while it’s intended to come home, if it doesn’t, that’s okay. Because obviously the cost issue is a big factor when you talk about these platforms, and what’s going to be needed in mass. So the approach that we’re taking is slightly different. It’s been done before, not maybe necessarily in the airline or air aircraft manufacturing I would say, but imagine if you will, that you’re at an automobile production facility and you see the wheels and the chassis coming down the line, it turns off to the left and becomes a luxury model. The one behind it turns off to the right, becomes a family economy model.

So that same kind of concept is what we’re looking at with Gambit, and that’s why I say family of aircraft. What you’re looking at is a core capability, sort of a core baseline of what we’re roughly estimating about 70% of the cost of the aircraft. This would be common across multiple variants of that aircraft. So the approach here is to have a common baseline that establishes a chassis, landing gear, baseline avionics. And then what you do after that really is left up to the choice of the customer, sort of like the trim line that you would have. What do you want? You want a sport model? Do you want a four by four? So in this case for Gambit, it could be that you want an ISR platform, you want a weapons platform, you want an EW, you want something that’s going to provide adversary air training.

So all those additional pieces and parts are added afterwards. So 70% of the cost up front with the core capability, which allows you to actually to mass produce these things. And then at 30% cost for the airframe comes into the types of wings that you want, the engines that you want, all of that. And again, that’s separate from what I would say is the autonomy that’s going to fly these things. But that approach that we’re taking now is not so much just focusing on really a platform, it’s more about the capability. So you got to figure out how those mission systems are going to be integrated into this. And so for us, obviously open mission systems, open architecture, I could throw out all these different terms to you, those are the ways that you’re going to get after this. So for us, we’re looking at it from a different perspective. Instead of going out and building four separate type of variance or models out there, let’s use a common core chassis, and then let’s start adding on to what it is that you actually need.

Heather Penney:

That kind of modular approach could be very interesting. But Paco, I really want to come back to you because you’ve been working on the agents, the behaviors, the autonomy, really how the system thinks. And this is actually what makes this capability realistic, right? Because we have to have something that has the ability to think, perform, behave, and act within the battle space that isn’t tied to a human in the cockpit half a globe away. So Paco, can you please speak to us about where you are with the autonomy, how you’re approaching it at Shield AI, and where you’re moving forward?

Mike Benitez:

Sure thing, thanks. So I think the three things I pulled apart here was time, platforms, and cost. Okay, so I’ll just kind of run down the line with some somewhat coherent thought, we’ll see what happens. So time. 2027, is it possible? Yes, it is not a technological problem, it’s a bureaucratic problem, and I think everyone recognizes that the path to get there is a min viable product. We are passed to proof of concept, we’ve demonstrated autonomy in a simulated environment. We’ve demonstrated how to build modular systems and subsystems the components, and now it’s about put it together, get it in the air, and get the sets and reps to fly, fix, and fly. And so to that, I would say that that min viable product is not CCAs, it’s CCA Block 1. Define it, do something, snap the chalk line, and we can get the work. Industry is waiting.

For the platform, great discussion from Mike. What I would say is at Shield AI, I don’t care about the platform, I care about the platform model, I don’t care about the sensors, I care about the sensor model. And I don’t care about the weapons, I care about the weapons model, because we need the models to then ingest to build the behaviors, which start to look like what a human would do with tactics. And so that’s the thing that’s the most important as we look at the integration of that. And those models, we have to get over vendor locked when we have this kind of system. We have to be forthcoming with those models, so we can train a behavior for it. If the Air Force wants a behavior to do X, Y, and Z, but the models aren’t available to do that, well you’re not going to get capability X, Y, Z.

And to Otis’ this point about cost, just realized just like when Block 4 F-35 starts feeling the cost is going to go up because it has more capable systems. I don’t think the government is ready quite yet to have a conversation about costing autonomy, but we are, and we’ll be happy. In the next six months we’ll have a lot to talk about as far as cost models, business models, and way we can go forward.

But I will say that software is not cheap, it’s more expensive than you think it is, and I will tell you that even the software today is more expensive than you think it is. To Otis’ point about $2,500 a pound, an operational flight program, one software drop to get it from development, test, and field it to the war fighter for a fourth generation fighter averages $250 million in the Air Force today. So let that sink in, that is not cheap, and we are going to have to adopt new processes and agile means to fly, fix, and fly this autonomy, because that autonomy is never quite fielded. Because once it fields, it is evolving with the operator in the environment. So if the red threat changes, the blue capabilities change, we have to put that back and relearn those tactics and behaviors so we can establish that trust and effective tactical autonomy.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. The fly-fix-fly, would you please unpack that a little bit for the audience because I think that fly-fix-fly is a really important concept for how we think about fielding minimum viable products, and then beginning to iterate them to achieve something that is really combat effective in the battle space?

Mike Benitez:

Sure. So I’ll tell it in three steps. So step one of we call fly-fix-fly happens at the engineer level internal, and that’s in a simulated environment. So not like a fighter sim but an actual engineering sim. So AFSIM, those type of environments. So what we do is we’ll go and we’ll build a behavior, we have objectives, we have a risk, we have commander’s intent, and then we actually break it down by mission tactics, task behaviors, and primitives. And that’s kind of the structure we use. And in that we field these systems internally and then we actually put them through a red team analysis, and we would call team play. So they actually fight each other, play with each other and they’re learning about what to do and what not to do. And we use reinforcement learning for most of it, but that’s how we iterate on a very, very fast scale.

And that is one level of the fly-fix-fly. The second level is when we get the models provided from the systems integration lab so SIL, some of you might have heard of that. So now we’re going to take that out of the simulative models, and we’re going to actually plug it into the actual hardware on a bench in a lab and run the same things. And then the next step of that is taking an airborne. So we have engineers down on the squadrons for this experimentation for min viable products, CCA Block 1, we go fly, I like this, I don’t like that, and we fix it. And how do we fix it is debrief. The most important part of everything we do is not the planning, it’s not the execution, it’s the debrief, and having a way to have explainability of what the autonomy is doing and what it’s not doing, and what we want it to do and not to do is the feedback loop that we need to rapidly iterate to fly-fix-fly and establish trust in the autonomy.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. Gen. Hinote, I’d like to come back to you because again, you are the thought leader for the Air Force. We’re a firm believer that to build effective human CCA teams, we must deliberately compose them to exploit the strengths of both the humans and the CCA. So in your mind I’d like to understand what do you think humans are good at, and what are CCA good at, like what’s autonomy good at? And how do we then begin to compose and build those teams, Moneyball style so that we’ve got the right package going forward?

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote:

Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s a question that I don’t think we’ve fully understood or answered yet, but let me give you some thoughts that I think will help us all kind of move forward together in this. The first is that humans are… We’re going to be making the decisions on lethal force, the employment of lethal force. That’s an important principle that our government has placed on these systems, and I think it’s the right one. That doesn’t always mean that it’s the next instant. Somebody says “Yes, I am ready to shoot a weapon,” and the weapon comes off and it hits. There have been times when we’ve used autonomy, and there’s some length of time between when the decision is made and when the outcome is achieved. I think that will happen again with CCAs, but the original decision to employ lethal force is going to be a human decision.

And in many ways the invocation of values into the way we fight is likely to be a human endeavor. And so in many ways when we go fight, we bring our values with us. That might include things like ethics, that might also include things like we’re not going to leave our wingman behind and things like that. And so those types of decisions are likely to remain in the human realm. Machines are really good at executing, and they’re really good at seeing an input and creating an output. So the execution of tactics is likely to be something machines are good at. They will know when they’ve trespassed or when they’ve gotten into a minimum abort range, and they will have the ability to execute off of that, in ways that humans can sometimes be challenged in because of all the information coming into the cockpit. Clearly autonomy in flight is going to revolutionize flight.

That will not only be true for combat, it’s likely to be true for a lot of different areas across our economy and across our country. And I’m really excited about the democratization of flight that happens with autonomous flight. Lots of capabilities out there. We’re seeing it with things like the delivery of logistics and the sensing of crops and such, and we’re going to see a lot more of that. But clearly we do not need to have humans do the flying of these aircraft. There was a concept at one time where somebody thought it was a good idea to have a pilot in a single person cockpit with one hand flying his or own aircraft and the other flying the autonomous vehicle, and that’s not going to work. Any of us who have tried to actually go execute air tactics, no that would be very difficult. We expect that machines are going to be pretty good at execution.

Where I do think there is going to be kind of a gray area is in between that, in between execution and the use of judgment. And we’re going to have a lot of experimentation to do in that area, and I expect that people in this room are going to be leading us in that experimentation. And when we talk about having war fighters in the development of these systems, I think that’s where that happens. And I know that we have started that process. We have brought in war fighters to help in certain areas to help us understand what the human machine teaming might look like, but that’s only begun, there’s a lot more to go. And that’s where it’ll be fascinating to see what we all learn together.

Heather Penney:

So as we’ve been thinking about it at Mitchell, what it comes down to for us, and this is just one small component in addition to the form, fit, and function, right? So we’ve talked about disaggregating autonomous systems so that they can have different capabilities to feed that together, and how that might potentially change those formations. But what are the cognitive benefits, what are the cognitive differences between humans and autonomous agents? So what are humans good at? Thinking through uncertainty, improvisation, applying a cross domain learning, single shot learning. These are all things that humans are good at, and those judgment calls when there’s no clear right answer.

Whereas autonomy seems to be really good at things like mass data processing, pattern recognition, and other things. So how do we begin to understand and create greater fidelity around those particular strengths so we can then field formations in ways that create conundrums, and cause uncertainty for the adversary and confound their ability to target. So with those thoughts from Gen. Hinote and how we’ve been thinking about this, I’d like to pass this back to both Mike and Paco. And Paco, we can start with you for a moment. What implications do you think, or Mike happy to go to you as well, whoever wants to jump in first. How do you think this is going to impact how you build the autonomy?

Mike Benitez:

Great question. Well, that’s a lot to unpack in just a couple minutes remaining. So what I’ll say is that war is a human endeavor, there is always going to be a fog and friction of war. When you look at the concepts of man on man teaming and CCAs, at the end of the day, outside of 10 miles, if you’re flying at F35 that’s outside within visual range, you are relying 100% on your sensing and your ability to sense and make sense of the environment, so your perception. We can do that with autonomy.

Decisions is where it gets the… That’s where rubber meets the road with the conversation, but once the decision is made, that execution is machine speed and optimized to perfection based on the RL. And so what you’re talking about is decisions, not perception, not execution, but making decisions. And that’s where it gets back to the different degrees of autonomy and where we want the operator. Do we want the operator in the loop, on the loop, or off the loop? And I think we already said probably not off the loop, especially not in the CCA Block 1 min viable product, but eventually CCA Block 3, 10 years from now, there’s a lot of things we can do in that decision space, that cognitive, and we’re going to learn so much in the next just 24 months. It’s going to be amazing.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. So while we’ve just got a few moments left, this is going to be the speed round, and so we’ll go from Paco down to Gen. Hinote, because sir, we want to give you the last word. What do you gentlemen believe is sort of the top two or three priorities that the Air Force needs? What actions do we need to take to begin to make these capabilities real in the timeframes that we will need them? Speed round.

Mike Benitez:

Act with a sense of urgency, aligned resources, leadership, and accountability.

Robert Winkler:

Well done. That gives me extra time. I think most important is to get this capability in the hands of the war fighter. Let them go out and execute, gather the data that Paco needs to be able to develop the algorithms to be relevant in a war fight.

Heather Penney:

Buy them and then fly them.

Robert Winkler:

Yeah. Buy them asap to get the data to fly them.

Heather Penney:

Mike.

Patrick Shortsleeve:

I would say prioritization of the mission and roles that you want to start with first.

Heather Penney:

Gen. Hinote, wrap it all up for us.

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote:

Okay. I 100% agree with what’s been set up here. Paco, that was really good. Can I use that later on? This…

Mike Benitez:

It’s yours.

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote:

Yeah, we need it. I think the only thing that I would add is that I have had our allies come to me and come to our Air Force, and say how much that they want to be involved in this process of learning and development. And I think that there’s a possibility that it looks different with them than it does just with us and in a good way. I also think that with some of the agreements that have been put into place, AUKUS is an example, it’s not the only one. But there are some incredible opportunities for us, as Airmen across different countries and different nationalities to learn together in ways that increase our ability to actually use this in a deterrent way, and in a way that helps us fight and win in the future.

And what I’d say is, in addition to everything we’ve talked about up here, I can’t wait to be involved with our allies in making this real. Because I think it has the potential to do some really great things, not only in the furtherance of the technology, but also in bringing us together for a common cause in a new world, in a world where we actually do have to stand up against something that feels somewhat evil, and feels quite urgent and we’re not alone.

So I think the thing I’d like to close out with is I’m really excited about the possibility of partnering with these allies, and making this a really interesting journey that we all get to walk.

Heather Penney:

Thank you sir. Well, that’s all the time that we have for today. And gentlemen, thank you again so much for being here on the panel today. Gen. Hinote, thank you for the leadership of everything that you’re doing for our Air Force and for our war fighters. This is how we are finishing out the first day of the conference. We’re excited to see you back tomorrow for our Mitchell panels on long range strike and future force development. And don’t forget to pick up a copy of our new report on CCA teaming imperatives and back. If we run out, swing by our booth and have a great air power kind of day. Thank you.