Watch, Read: ‘Standards and Digital Engineering’

Oct. 11, 2022

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei, program executive officer for Weapons, led a discussion on “Standards and Digital Engineering” with Naveed Hussain of Boeing, Layne Merritt of Elbit Systems of America, and Alan England of L3Harris Technologies, 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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Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, welcome everybody to the afternoon session on digital engineering. We’re really excited to have you here and we’ve got a great panel for you. I know this morning when I heard from the secretary and the chief, it was very motivating words, and I think we’re really blessed to have forward leaning chief and secretary really, really inspiring us to accelerate change in the future. This topic that we’re going to talk about today, I think is one of the most exciting areas, particularly in the world of the industry military partnership. And that is our digital transformation. We’ve got a really great panel of leading experts and thinkers.

Starting first year with Layne Merritt from Albert Systems America. He’s Vice President of Technology and Innovation. Dr. Naveed Hussain, Vice President and Chief Engineer for Boeing Defense Space and Security, and Dr. Allen England, L3 Harris Director, Strategic Programs, Advanced Systems Technology, Agile Development Group. Sometimes when we get medals, we have long titles in the military, and I see that nothing’s different in industry. Now we just wrapped up my fantasy draft, and so I thought maybe we have a little snake question here where we’ll go through the panel and ask some questions in the spirit of fantasy football.

I thought maybe I would start at the end with you, Dr. England. I think my question begins with, from your perspective in the entire panel, where exactly are we today on the road towards our digital future? Do you see us at the beginning? Are we in the middle state here, or are we an end game? Where do you place us?

Dr. Alan England:

Thanks for the question yeah. I see us as not at the very beginning, but transitioning from the beginning to the middle. We understand what digital engineering means now. 10, 15 years ago, maybe not, but as I was preparing for this, it surprised me to learn that SysML actually started back in 2000, and then in 2007 was when MBSE 2020 was actually published by INCOSE. So digital engineering has been growing, it’s been evolving, but I think we’ve gotten to that point where we’re at the knee and the curve where it’s starting to really take off.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Great. Dr. Hussain, any thoughts from your perspective in Boeing?

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah, I just to add on to my colleague, I think we’re in the middle if we zoom out on the S-curve of model-based system engineering in an integrated digital environment, we have been working with digital models, physics-based digital models for decades. That is how we’ve optimized our designs, that’s how we’ve optimized the way we think about test, and that’s how we’ve thought about optimizing across the life cycle. I think what’s accelerating now as we are in that middle of the S-curve is how all these models interconnect and how we think about not just the platform, but the production system and the sustainment system altogether.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Oh, excellent. Any thoughts from Albert?

Layne Merritt:

Sure. So I think we’re in the middle or in the beginning to middle transition. I think the new thing now, as you said, we’ve been doing digital models for a long time. Functional models, right? We could do thermal analysis, structural analysis, system dynamics, but putting those together, connecting them to the requirement and be able to simulate the entire system as we’ve never done before, is going to be the game changer.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Fantastic. Dr. Hussain, in the same spirit, in my first engagement with the secretary right after he became SecAF, we gave him an update. One of the questions he asked me, I’ll ask you is, do you see what’s happening as an evolutionary change or a revolutionary change for how it is that we’re doing what we do?

Naveed Hussain:

I think it’s revolutionary. While pieces of it might look evolutionary when we think about how we optimize at the platform level, interconnecting various digital models, I think it’s revolutionary as we move from these digital system models for the platform to interconnecting those models to the production and the sustainment system, and then evolving from digital system models for design development and test and integration to digital twins to sustain the fleet. And that opens up a whole new category of innovation and I think, a game changing, a revolutionary capability for our customer.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Layne, any thoughts on revolutionary versus revolutionary?

Layne Merritt:

Sure. I think it’s revolutionary. I think what we’re going to be able to do, connecting the various models that we had before, the interaction that we can have between not only the customer and the OEM, but the OEM and the lower system suppliers is going to really change the game and bringing this into the production line and the supply chain is really a big game changer.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Great. How about you, Dr. England?

Dr. Alan England:

I agree with them. It’s a revolutionary way of doing engineering. It’s a revolutionary in that the amount of data that is available to the engineers as we start making these systems and analyzing these systems and looking at alternatives, that data that’s available through the model is data that’s never been available in the quantity and the interaction that we can get when we put the data in the model and interact with it in the model environment.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

I had the opportunity to go to the UK and see how F1 does their business. It was interesting that if you look at their journey, they started their journeys about eight to nine years ago, and they’re to the point now where they are making improvements to their Formula One cars every 20 minutes, 365 days a year. I really think that Dr. Hussain your comments about what does it mean for the fabrication and the production and the sustainment is really thought-provoking. I’d be interested to say, are there any areas that you see as revolutionary that we’re not talking enough about currently? And maybe Mr. Merritt, why don’t you start lane and maybe say your thoughts on that and then we’ll go through.

Layne Merritt:

I think there’s two things from the Albert America perspective. First, the subsystem suppliers, and we do a lot of mission systems, black boxes, sensors and things like that. We don’t have to wait for the OEMs to finish their design or to get fairly well down the road in their design before we start designing. If the customer publishes and architectural framework, all the interfaces, the performance requirements, they’re all defined. How that happens in the end as part of the competitive nature of business. The other thing is how this fits into the industrialization process. We talk so much about the design and then the operational use stages.

For industry, how we industrialize that, how we manufacture it, and how we manage the supply chain can make or break a program. Digital engineering, the models of the system flow right into the production process, the manufacturing floor, and then to the supply chain process, and it’s going to make us much more effective.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Yeah. Dr. Hussain?

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah. One of the things that I think we should talk more about is the experience at the desk of the engineer. At this point, an engineer at her desk has the ability to think about the trades that she’s making in the work that she’s doing at her section of the life cycle, whether it’s design or integration or sustainment or production, and how that decision affects the entire life cycle and the trades that, that unlocks between performance and producibility and the value engineering that, that will unlock for the customer. The knobs that can be turned at the desk of an engineer, as Will Roper says, they’re sort of a godlike power. I think there’s an important story here that we need to talk more about to inspire the early generation, the early career engineer, and even the students on why they should come into our industry and the capability that they’re going to have to change the world.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Dr. England?

Dr. Alan England:

I agree with that a lot. The people that I interact and work with a lot, I tell this story that I’ll share with you, and it’s about back when I was a young engineer and you wanted to go start evaluating at change, you had two or three systems engineers on a program, but one of them knew the requirements really well. You would go talk to him or her and you would say something about, “What’s going to happen if I change… Fill in the blank.” this person either looks at the ground or looks at the ceiling, depending on if they’re introvert or extrovert, and they say something like, “And what’s going on?” As they’re going through the Rolodex of requirements in their minds. And they say, “Well, you need to go check on 26, 27, 33, 198 and 227.”

Those are the requirements that they have been tracking through the whole life of the program. Now, that’s one example of what you get to do as my colleague next to me was saying that the engineer gets to do on their desk. That happens inside the model in realtime. So as things are changed, you start to see across the full system of how those requirements are being met or maybe one is not being met now and it’s unbelievably powerful.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, it’s an anecdote. I remember pulling one of the chief engineers aside in the last couple years and asking him 40 years of experience, done everything. I said, “What do you think?” His response to me was, “I like it. I love it.” He said to me that in his 40 years, he would ask his engineers a question and he’d have in his mind, to your point, Dr. England about it, might take him a two weeks before they get back to me on an answer. Because I know what they would have to do to get that. Their engineers are coming back in a day and saying, “Hey chief, we’re ready. Let’s talk about what we learned.” And he’s just blown away at how quickly his young engineers are able to come to him and show him what’s going on.

That speed has some huge benefits, but I have a feeling to really, the bridge you made for us, Dr. Hussain, is there’s something in the human terrain that we need to talk about. I guess Dr. England, could you talk us a little bit from just the human terrain of your company, organization, culture, process. What is digital? What is it meaning for your company and how you’re leading? Are there things that you’re having to think differently about?

Dr. Alan England:

I think the main thing that we’re thinking differently about is the interaction between all the team members through the life cycle of the program. We are more interconnected now across disciplines than we’ve ever been. So I don’t think it takes away from the humans experience at all. I actually think digital engineering enhances the human experience. Because, engineers can focus on what they do best, and that is to engineer. The tools and the model and the systems that are capturing the design enable them to be better engineers. Dr. Hussain?

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah, just to add on to that, which is right on. When we think about digital engineering, model based systems engineering, this is not a corporate initiative, not there’s anything wrong with corporate initiatives, but this is how we work, this is how we learn by doing. I think we huddle… It takes courage of our engineers to go do this, and we’re asking them to, rather than huddling up around PowerPoint, let’s huddle up around a digital model and interrogate the model in real time. That’s not open to interpretation, it’s the model. And talk about trades, move sliders around and see what happens. I think that that is how we inspire the culture that we seek.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Absolutely. Mr. Merritt, any thoughts on that?

Layne Merritt:

Sure. I think this helps the functional engineers connect to the entire system. It should make designing a system more fun. You don’t have to send it to somebody via EMR or leave it on the server somewhere for the other functional engineering team to take a look at. You can do it together, right? And you can actually sit there live and work on the same model, even if you’re not in the same location. I think it makes this the whole design thing more fun and it certainly will make it more accurate.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

I’m curious if the experience in your companies are similar to some of the things that we’re seeing, The commercial world, non-defense sector. Again, we mentioned the Mercedes F One team or John Deere or perhaps Tesla and some of the others. One of the things that you see is that they’re introducing organizational models more agile, more scaled, agile approaches for how it is that they’re integrating. In fact, that was one of the key themes from the chief today was integrating better, which is fundamentally a leadership challenge. I guess I’m curious, what is happening in your digital agile journeys in your companies? Are you seeing that your companies are having to transform a little bit of how you work with these tools? Or is it very similar to what you would’ve seen 20 years ago? Can you talk a little bit about that? Any thoughts on that, Dr. Hussain?

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Couple points. We build roadmaps around our digital environment, around our digital tools and our process. We’ve had some learning in this. We had ambitions to converge on one roadmap. We build commercial airplanes and we build a whole host of defense products and services at Boeing. Of course we have an ambition to be on one enterprise digital roadmap, and we found that point where we all come together is sliding to the right. Because of unique tools and needs because of sometimes unique customer requirements, unique interface and environment connections into various suppliers or to various customers. It’s important to have an ambition to all come together at an enterprise level, but it’s also, we got to be realistic and face into these challenges on sometimes you do need a few lanes on this roadmap, before you all converge.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Great. How about you, Dr. England? I mean, Agile is in the title of your position description. So yeah, any thoughts about agile transformation and what that means for digital?

Dr. Alan England:

Yes. Agile is in the name of our organization and we are very agile group and digital supports that and embraces that and enables us to be agile. It allows us to make changes quickly and to be confident in those changes if need be on the early end. It also allows us to develop a system that can be fielded today to meet requirements today, but also be able to be rapidly upgraded when a new capability can come in. That’s all supported by the digital model in the digital ecosystem.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Excellent. Great. Shifting gears, Mr. Merritt, we’ve got several really [inaudible 00:16:55] and senior leaders from the government side in this session. I think I’d like to ask each of you, and starting with Mr. Merritt, what could we as the department of Air Force and Space Force do to accelerate change in this domain? I’m thinking specifically about standards, tools, environments. Certainly there are things that we could do to be better partners, and I think that several of the leaders here would love to hear your thoughts.

Layne Merritt:

Sure. It’s a two way street and you need some infrastructure. You don’t have to go crazy with standards, but you have to have data formats and architectural standards such that we can communicate digitally, if we’re talking about digital. I think the challenges with reform are very deep. Right? You have to start with requirements, generation, design processes, approvals, contracting, everybody along the way, the operational testers, the airworthiness people have to embrace the change. So a lot of these folks do what they’re told. Right? If the regulations say, “Do it this way, they’ll do it that way.” So we have to start addressing the policy and the guidance that allows this new concept to be used every day.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Excellent. Dr. Hussain, any others?

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah, and I’ll just add on, because clearly standards, we are all spending a lot of energy and really great thought on the whole stakeholder community on standards. I don’t necessarily think I need to emphasize that anymore. But, one thing that we’ve been thinking about is the old adage of you get what you measure. How do we think about benchmarks? How do we think about measuring our progress from the value proposition to the war fighter, ultimately? As these systems and the requirements of these systems grow ever more complex where relative measurement becomes difficult?

So thinking about benchmarks, thinking about whether it’s speed, whether it’s performance on these programs, I think that would be a great discussion on how do we measure how we’re all interfacing so that we continue to get better.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Excellent. Dr. England?

Dr. Alan England:

Just to add to that, I would suggest that we also start broadening the thoughts of what and who is the consumer of the digital model. There’s no reason that we can’t let contracts have a spot in the model or the acquisition side so that we can all get around this same tool. All of the documents that… Or the artifacts, I’ll call them, not even documents, but the artifacts are captured in the model, and then creating the standards or the processes so that you can also deliver content artifacts in the model. Then the model becomes truly the single source of truth across the whole program.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, that’s a really tangible way, and I know Dr. Hussain, we were talking earlier about having a partner in the government that would be actually willing and having the courage to work in the models with industry rather than the classic data artifacts that we’ve seen forever. I’d be interested if you and the others have any thoughts about some practical things that we might consider.

Naveed Hussain:

If I may, I think we all on this panel have seen this work where we have enabled unprecedented development speed going from a concept to first flight, for instance, using digital engineering. It’s like in any, I don’t know, value stream map, if you will. When you’re thinking about the new way you’re going to do something, it’s important to not just think about all the things you’re going to do, but the things that you’re no longer going to do. What are you going to stop? Because, if you’re going to just keep adding to the process, it’s probably going to take longer. So in this journey, thinking about interrogating a model as a new kind of designer review, thinking about data in a cloud as a new way of exchange, thinking about the ways that we interface between many times in these complex engineering models, we break it down and we define the interfaces. Then when we think about value engineering, could we do those requirements reviews in cameo? I’ve seen, we have seen this work.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, I’ll tell you, my first view of a recent weapon system that I was involved in was a six-hour deep dive with a single briefer in cameo that showed me from message receipt to contact exactly how the system designed was designed. It was quite incredible to see the mass of traditional artifacts that would’ve had to have been generated, that was solved by just having that open dialogue. So I think that that is a really interesting thought. In the spirit of General Brown talking about commander’s intent, one of the questions that I have, or at least from where I sit as the PEO weapons, is my intent is more certification-ready designs, designs where I’m pulling tests farther and farther to the left so we can learn and avoid rework cycles, cyber-ready designs.

I’m even looking for innovation friendly designs where we can innovate more quickly. I guess my question maybe for you, Mr. Merritt and the whole panel is how could we clearly define intent to where we could really get an airworthiness ready design at CDR or a cyber certifiable design at a CDR? I think digital can get us there, but we’d need to work together. Any thoughts on that?

Layne Merritt:

Sure. I think right away when the program’s established that those kinds of goals need to be stated. If you want to make a source selection based off of the operational model, state it right up front and we’ll respond to that, right? We’ll optimize our processes and designs and the information we present to meet that.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Dr. England, any thoughts about using digital in our partnerships to actually create more pace and speed in some areas that we really have problems?

Dr. Alan England:

No, I agree. If we stayed up front the intent, commander’s intent up front and then create a partnership, a government industry partnership where we’re looking and reviewing the content of the model, regularly rather than generating some separate artifact that took somebody a lot of time to do when it’s there in the model and then interacting in the model in a partnership type of way and bringing cyber in and bringing tests in and bringing them in early, so that if there is a concern, we resolve that concern early. But if there’s not a concern, we built a relationship together through the course of the development so that when we get to the end, everybody’s on the same page.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Dr. Hussain, anything that you would say about?

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah, just to add on, I think that operating in these kinds of digital environments, there’s a form of transparency that’s built in. It’s a high trust collaborative environment enabled by a digital thread and just like in multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization, sometimes your configuration’s non-intuitive. You’re like, “Whoa, I didn’t think it was going to end up there.” I think at the system level across a life cycle, we could end up with that same kind of magic when we unlock this digital thread.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Oh great. Great feedback. I guess what feedback are you getting from your government partners? Each of you all have customers, and I think we heard from you all that you’re very sensitive to the sorts of things that you’re asking. Are they staying ahead of you? Are they just keeping up or are there some legitimate frustrations where they’re behind? You can not answer the last part if you don’t want, if they’re in the room, but if you don’t mind, Mr. Merritt, any thoughts, how would you assess where your customers are and what could they do to catch up?

Layne Merritt:

Sure. Well, we’re all learning here. Right? Our customers want to ask, will admit they have to establish some infrastructure, some training. We all have to do that. If we agree to work together, we can all learn together and we can get where we want to go.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Okay. Boeing?

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah. I think that our customer interactions have shown ambition probably ahead in terms of, this is where we want to go and we need to work together on how to get there. So we’re seeing that ambition, the vision and ambition, that’s very much there. I think that as was stated, some of those standards defining the digital environment that we’re going to be working in. Then the trades around, the more we prescribe these environments, sometimes the less we can optimize inside our own company. Because we want to comply, we have to comply. So could we end up being less prescriptive but still get to those goals?

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Very good. Dr. England?

Dr. Alan England:

Yeah. The customers that I interact with on a regular basis, I think it’s fair to say that we’re at about the same level. I think that for them to stay at that same level, they’re going to have to get staff in the program offices that are digital engineering savvy, that understand SysML and it’s going to become a new element to the program office is, there’s going to be a digital engineer or somebody that understands the digital engineering side of it. They have the systems engineers, they have the subsystem engineers, but getting into the model and getting the data out of the model is going to be a place where the government’s going to have to probably go get the right staff to be able to address that.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, I’d like to pivot to the subject of data. Set the table for that. How many times in our careers have we thought, “Boy, I wish we had collected data on that because if we had, we would’ve been able to figure something out.” But now in the digital as we digitize the development cycle, the product development cycle of systems engineering, I wonder that if we don’t think about where we want to be in our data future, we may fall short. I guess, I’m curious to see what your thoughts are about just what kind of data we can be collecting, what does that mean for what we could do in production and sustainment and future development, if we really get in front of it and think about it? I’ll start with Boeing. Dr Hussain, what are your thoughts about data? And maybe share with us where you see the future.

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah. In terms of data, I’ll give you an example. I asked my team to do a three-week sprint on a predictive analytics project around fleet maintenance, health management of a structure. And we had some data. We’ve pulled off various platforms in our fleet. On that three week sprint, I sort of checked in and I hadn’t heard. So I checked in two weeks going, “Hey, how’s it going?” I expected to see some pretty advanced neural nets being developed and folks showing me the big parameters and the partial derivatives, if you will, on what they were learning.

Instead, they were like, “We finally got all the data.” So on a three week machine learning project, we spent two weeks just wrangling data. That speaks to the need for architectures, data architectures. It speaks to the need for configuration control. It speaks to the need for secure data in the cloud that’s accessible, that’s trusted. When we think about the future, it also speaks to the need of collecting data ahead of opportunity, collecting the data that we need to train the AI of the future.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Yeah. Absolutely. Any thoughts Dr. England about that?

Dr. Alan England:

Well, it’s not only the data, and I agree with everything that was said about the data. You got to have the data. But we also have to think about how does the model parse data access data across security boundaries?

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Yeah.

Dr. Alan England:

Because a lot of times when we get the data, we know we have the data, but the data, it’s in a container somewhere. That’s not where the model is. Or the model’s in a container somewhere. That’s not where the data is. So you got to go figure out how to work through the boundaries that are put on us by security. We have thoughts on how to do that, but that’s a struggle.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Yeah. Mr. Merritt, any additions?

Dr. Alan England:

Yeah, data is both the power and the big challenge with digital. All right. Then just to add something different onto this, the way you analyze it and the way you apply algorithms to help you make decisions about your system is going to be really important, as important as the data itself, I think.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, Dr. Hussain brought up AI machine learning and we’ve heard for several years an appetite to have a more AI machine learning friendly force writ large. I wonder if the kernels of AI and machine learning don’t start inside the programs and the weapon systems that we’re building a priority. I’m not sure we’re actually thinking that far ahead, particularly in the realm of sustainment and how we can connect those systems with the other systems. I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind elaborating some more, gentlemen, on if we wanted machine learning and AI-friendly systems, do you see a connection between what you’re doing in early acquisition in the middle and how we might be able to take advantage of that, Dr. Hussain?

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah, absolutely. Colonel, you hit it right on the nail on the head there. When we think about the power of a structural prognostics algorithm, for instance, the actual technology around the neural net, whether you’re going to use TensorFlow or PyTorch or any of those tools. That actually, we pull that right off at GitLab. That’s available to each and every one of us. I mean, sometimes if you have high school students, they’re using this today, frankly, and the differentiator, the power of that algorithm actually is the data. So preparing for that now, sometimes instrumenting platforms now, even if you don’t need a sensor in a particular way, thinking about, “Well, should we should instrument in a way that prepares us for a future in which an AI or an algorithm could be helping us and allowing us to manage our fleet?”

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Any thoughts from the other two on that subject?

Layne Merritt:

Definitely, you can start collecting data and then have way too much of it. You have to find a place to store it. But I think we need to do that, because you just don’t know today what data you might want, and the key there will be now architecting and organizing the data so you can get to it. Because the algorithms, if you talk about AI and machine learning, they need lots of data. You have to feed them, they have insatiable appetite and we use synthetic data as well, early on in the system to help us shape how the designs are going to go and what kind of decisions we’re going to make. But over time, you’re going to start collecting operational data and you need to have it available.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, so the idea of data as a sensor and the sort of data we’d require to train, the time nature of that means that you have to think about it far earlier than most people are thinking about it. That’s I think a really fruitful area for where digital’s going. Which leads me to my last series of questions, really focused on the latter half of the systems engineering be. I think digital engineering as we currently talk about it, is so much more than just affecting our engineers. It really is affecting our lobbies, it’s affecting our finance-oriented people, our contracting officers, et cetera. I guess I’d like to talk a little bit about a few of these things. One thing we’re seeing is that the ability to fabricate the barriers are becoming easier and easier.

The machines that make machines are getting less expensive, they’re getting more capable. We’re starting to see that the Ford assembly line is not really the future. In fact, we’re starting to see smaller batches. We’re able to see flexible manufacturing that really I think is enabled by digital, but very different than what we’ve seen in historic development. Could you start share with your thoughts on where you see us going in fabrication and manufacturing? Maybe start in the middle.

Naveed Hussain:

Yeah. And that’s a great question and this gets to what does the factory, the future look like?

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Yeah.

Naveed Hussain:

We think it looks kind of like a big empty room. And with technologies like additive manufacturing and full size determined assembly, precision assembly, the aircraft becomes the tooling itself and batch sizes get smaller and parts are produced additively. Frankly, when we build a 787 fuselage with composite tape, that’s additive manufacturing. I’ve been in some of these factories, the T-7 factory is one where we assemble the aft and forward fuselage in 30 minutes and it feels different. You can almost play classical music. I mean, it feels quiet. Parts are coming together and holes are lining up.

So how we think about data [inaudible 00:36:24], how we work with our supply chain in these technologies and manufacturing processes and the design that’s done to the left of all of this up front for producibility and the trades that are involved in that. Sometimes, it’s a heavier part that enables these kinds of builds. This is the factory of the future in our view and it’s enabled by this digital thread.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, we’re going to do a little rapid fire. This is the last minute for each of you. From your perspective, starting with Dr. England, if you could share with us what do you think the next big digital thing is going to be. When you look in your crystal ball, each one of you, what are we going to be talking about next year at this time or later, that we’re not talking about today? Over to you Dr. England.

Dr. Alan England:

I’d like to see us talking about essentially, a digital, an environment where we have established contracting through delivery inside a digital model. Where everything’s captured in the model and the model is the single source of truth from contract award or maybe even from RFP through contract award through C deliveries to product delivery.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

PEO Weapons will take that one on. All right, doctor?

Dr. Alan England:

Yeah.

Naveed Hussain:

For me, I think many times we think about the digital thread going in one direction. The other part of the digital thread is the feedback loops that it allows. The feedback from your production system and the feedback from your fleet that’s being sustained. I think as we employ and enable digital twins for our customers, we’re going to be talking a lot about feedback loops.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Fantastic.

Layne Merritt:

Those are both great answers and I think the tools that we use to do this across the life cycle and across the system are still under development. I don’t think that they’re as mature as they need to be. I hope that next year we’ll be able to talk about at least two full system lifecycle tools that really enable the digital engineering model that we’re talking about.

Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei:

Well, this is the toughest time block, day one after lunch. Look at the room grew and I noticed that we hardly lost one person, so let’s give these guys a round of applause for their great answers. Thank you all for your time today at this important subject and we hope you have a great AFA. Thanks everybody.

Watch, Read: ‘The Art of the Startup: Creating Something From Nothing’

Oct. 11, 2022

Dave Harden, CEO of Outpost, led a discussion on “The Art of the Startup: Creating Something From Nothing” with Col. Nathan P. Diller of AFWERX, Lt. Col. Walter McMillan of SpaceWERX, Trevor Smith of Atomic-6, and Diem Salmon of Anduril, 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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Dave Harden:

Good morning, National Harbor. How you guys doing today?

Audience:

Woo.

Dave Harden:

Good? All right. Woo. Get ruckus a little bit. It was hard to get into some of those earlier sessions, wasn’t it? It was packed out. It’s great to see you. So many familiar faces. It’s an honor to be here. I’m Dave Harden, managing partner and founder for Outpost and Outpost Ventures. Shout out to the Outpost Ventures crew here in the audience today. So great to see you guys. Great to have the team out here. So many familiar faces out there. Some of you, we might have crossed paths. Previously, a co-founder for AFWERX. We might have crossed paths as a host for Spark Tank. If you guys are familiar with Spark Tank, an amazing show of innovation from our Airmen. I’m always moved every year to see it. It was an honor to be able to help start it. To have people like Mark Cuban, George Steinbrenner’s, previous judges.

More importantly had a Airman come up to me last year literally with a tear in his eye and he said, “Spark Tank changed my life. For the first time I was able to take an idea and it was heard by the Air Force. I was able to transform it into something.” The very first year we had Spark Tank, the winner went on to implement it within 18 months across 440 aircraft. Unheard of. And so it’s great to see that culture change. It’s great to see it being continued today and so excited to be here with you all.

We might have crossed paths in other ways. I see a few great clients out there, Docker and Duralock, couple other folks. I see some portfolio companies we invested in like Hyper Giant AI and it’s been an honor to be part of this innovation ecosystem out there trying to make a difference, to do good, to change the landscape that we have today. And startups can really get into the exhilaration of getting into the DOD. It’s super exciting. You get some of your first contracts. Things are really rolling, but then there’s a heartbreak, a heartbreak of failure. And it’s been a rough year for me personally because some people say I look like Alec Baldwin. And I got to admit, Alec hasn’t been doing me any favors this year. Body double bookings have gone down significantly and the guy’s just got to stop shooting people. So, that’s my shout out to Alec to kind of bring it down a notch. He’s really hurting my street cred.

But on a serious note, we wind up with the Pentagon really interested in this innovation thing, right? In fact, last year 1,635 companies received over $1.5 billion of US input. And despite the Pentagon’s new enthusiasm for innovation, startups in the defense market continue to encounter longstanding obstacles. We effectively call it what the Valley of Death, right? Most companies face uncertainty when trying to bridge prototyping awards with more permanent follow on contracts. When you talk about today’s budget, you talk about fiscal year 25, that’s like a lifetime for a startup. And so as they try to push their product and get revenue, it can be frustrating.

And so while earning that first million dollars is so sweet, the success is so sweet. The most difficult part is earning that next $10 million. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today is the art of the startup. Because it’s not easy. And we have amazing talented people who have been in the trenches, who are out there doing it today on our panel. And I can’t wait to hear what they have to share with us today.

Maybe unlike other panels, we like involvement. We’re going to get to Q&A pretty quick, but we want to talk about some stuff first, if that’s okay with you all? And most importantly, I want you guys to be involved and maybe be a bit little bit loud. So every time I introduce a panelist, it’s got to get a little loud in here. It’s got to get a little ruckus, all right? So up first we’re going to start down at my far left. The one the only, let’s get our hands together. Colonel Nate Diller. Done an amazing job carrying the torch. More importantly, he leads strategy execution for over a billion dollars for our air force and our space force. And I think he’s got some big announcements too today, right? Couple big announcements later? All right, we got some big announcements later. Amazing, amazing.

We’ll stick with the Air Force theme here for a second. I want you guys to get your hands together for Lieutenant Colonel Walter the Rock MicMillian, let’s go. This guy’s a USC guy. If you guys are hailing or following any of your football stuff, an amazing individual. I’ve got to see him make a huge impact and he manages over $300 million of innovation input to our space force. An amazing human and amazing innovator.

We got folks from industry today. And so I want to introduce to my left, right here, put your hands together, the CEO of Atomic-6, Mr. Trevor Smith. This guy’s a passionate and focused entrepreneur. He’s breaking the mold on manufacturing and trying to make it happen for our nation. It’s great to see his work out there, it’s amazing. And he kind of jokes because he said I should be a PhD but I’m just a guy who turned my real estate finance degree into something good. So Trevor, thanks for being here with us today. Appreciate it.

Last but not least, the very talented, the amazing, put your hands together for Diem Salmon. We luckily have Diem here today. She’s the senior director for business development for Anduril. So many amazing things to talk about her. She is trying to change the way we do Autonomy. So she leads Autonomy at the Anduril force. And fun fact, she was the chairman of McCain’s campaign for over five years and his staff. So if you want to talk politics, meet her after for a little political chat.

We are super honored to have amazing people here and so we’re going to get into it. We kind of talked about, we had a lot of great conversations. We said, “Hey, we want to get some tips out there, we want to get some strategies, talk some stories.” And so that’s what we want to do today. What are the lessons learned from the hard knocks that these folks have experienced? And so, one of the things we talked about was it’s really hard to get customer feedback. It’s hard to get some feedback on how to get this thing to the next stage. And so I think that’s a great tee up for you, Trevor, to really kind of dive in. You’ve experienced this journey, right? Talk to us a little bit, get some tips and tricks out to the crowd on. “Hey, how do we deal with this market input, end user input? How do we gather that intel?”

Trevor Smith:

Yeah, absolutely. So thanks Dave. As Dave said, I’m Trevor Smith, president and CEO of Atomic-6. And the mold pun was great because we have a proprietary mold technology that answers the question that the composites industry has tried to solve for the past 50, 60 years, which is, “How do we get high performance at high volume for low cost?” That’s what we’ve addressed. So using the SIBR and STTR programs have a few tips for the small business folks out there and then the Air and Space Force folks who want to work with us. One is you can be the smartest inventor in the world, but unless you identify demand, you’re dead in the water.

So I want to thank the AFA for introducing me to Rock over here. About a year and a half ago I was working out of my house, didn’t have an office, didn’t have a customer. I flew out to LA. COVID wouldn’t let us meet in person. So we Zoomed called about a mile away from each other, but he spent an hour of his time. Rock MicMillan spending an hour his time with someone he didn’t know at all. But he took the time and saw the value in what we’re working with and pointed us in a couple directions. And so I brought a piece with me today that phase one turned into a phase two and we’re working with AFRL Space Vehicles ate to manufacture NextGen composite structures for things like the Rollout Solar Array on the International Space Station. So we’re making low cost radiation hardened redeployable structures which are going to be critical for all space emissions in the future.

Using that development has led us to working with companies like Red Wire and big deployable space systems. We’ve gotten a lot of attention. And it was like, “We want to track this. Let us know how your phase two works out?” And so Rock explained to me what a Phase I, II, III, TACFI, STRATFI, all the acronyms. It was great. So thank you for that.

The second is you should always, being the real estate guy, you want to leverage your assets and align incentives for a one plus one equals four situation. So we just submitted a phase two for hypersonic weapons research. And I do this with every proposal. I use that as a way to outreach for commercialization for private companies. Like, “Hey, if we’re going to do this proposal, what would be of interest to you? And if it is of interest, would you actually have interest in supporting the effort at a minimum with a letter of support or actually diving in with us and showing us some of the materials you’ve used in the past and best practices?” So we got Beyond Gravity, one of the largest space structure manufacturers in the world to support our hypersonic phase two submission. So it’s really great.

And then the last I want to talk about a case study. We’re in the middle of a Phase II, we’re making a bulkhead. So the initial proposal was to make a metal mold and a 3D printed mold. So we have a proprietary mold technology and AFRL wanted to see a cost analysis and performance comparison. So the initial piece was we did cost analysis on the metal and 3D printing tool. The 3D printing tool is way too expensive. So I talked to my technical point of contact and I said, “What do we do with the rest of this contract? It would be pointless to do this 3D printed tool.”

So again, going back to that commercialization and reaching out to industry, I reached out to one of the defense primes who’s been down selected to potentially make this unmanned airframe. And I said, “We’ve got an opportunity to present value to the Air Force to compare two different style bulkheads and two different technologies. Would you have interest in supporting this through materials and testing and all that stuff?”

So it’s a win across the board for the AFRL. So they get to see different technologies. It’s a win for us because we get to demonstrate our technology with two different bulkheads and geometries. And it helps us get that customer buy in and support from a massive defense prime, letting us skip over that Valley of Death that you talked about, which is critical for small businesses. So, we got that first million, we all partied, we’re accelerated and it’s so important to get that commercialization pull through so you don’t get stuck in that Valley of Death.

Dave Harden:

Awesome. Well congrats on all your successes to date.

Trevor Smith:

Thanks.

Dave Harden:

And no, I mean I think the message is loud and clear. That’s about persistence. I think that’s why I would take away from your thought and persistence and then matchmaking. And this was kind of a good transition over to Rock because you kind of got referenced in Trevor’s answer there.

Trevor Smith:

Thanks again buddy.

Dave Harden:

Yeah, so nice lead in. It was a good tee up. So Rock, you’re out there, you’re trying to make this matchmaking happen for hundreds of millions of dollars, a bunch of companies. And so what are you seeing in terms of what companies need to think about to scale. You get in the door, you start getting some traction, What does that matchmaking look like? What does that scale up look like? Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Lt. Col. Walter MicMillan:

Right, so first step for the company is really to understand your value proposition, understand what problem you’re getting after. A lot of times when a company come to me, they jump right into the check. I had one company they were getting after space nuclear power and they’re like, “Are you nuclear engineer?” I’m like, “No.” So normally first tip for a company is when you approach a potential customer first, understand what their mission is and what potential challenges they have. If you start there, then you understand how you can possibly solve their problem. And if you don’t start with a strong problem statement, a strong value proposition, then you don’t have the foundation that’s needed to truly scale and transition your capability into the military architecture.

And then for my fellow Airmen and guardians out there, this is a portfolio where you can go and explore for solutions to some of your toughest problems. So if we’re paying companies, like Trevor said, we gave him his first millie. If we’re paying companies phase two contracts on average 750K, that 750k, that’s coming out of my pocket, criminal dealer’s pocket for you to explore solutions to some of your toughest problems. And then guess what? If you sign an MOA, that’s not money coming out of your unit again, it’s coming out of our portfolio. So this is really all of your portfolio to be able to come and explore for solutions, help these companies understand what their value propositions are, get after what some of your toughest problems are, and then explore what that solution will look like for you and your unit.

And then if you sign a let over support, trust me, you’re not going to be the one that’s getting called by the three star, it’s going to be me, “Rock, what are you doing on this SIBR?” And that’s fine, I’ll take the heat for it. But I want you all to realize that this portfolio is empowered for you all to really explore for solutions to some of your toughest problems. So when you have a small business startup that approaches you with a SIBR Phase I, have that conversation with them. Later on today when you make your way down to the exhibit hall and you see a startup, small business with cool technology that you want to get after, it’s as easy as telling that small business, “Look for the next SBIR open topic and apply to that SBIR open topic and I’ll meet you on the other side.”

So it’s just that simple to get after some of your toughest challenges. And I’ve seen it plenty of times as referenced by Trevor so I don’t have to be the one taking all of the meetings with the startup small businesses. This portfolio is really for all of us to explore for solutions to our toughest problems.

Dave Harden:

Awesome Rock. Thank you. So try to maybe just summarize what you said and I think you threw out a gauntlet. I think you said everyone in this room can be an innovator. Everyone in this room’s challenged to be an innovator because there’s great programs. You run a great program. Colonel Diller has run great program. So if you have a problem but you don’t have budget, bring it through Spark, bring it through SpaceWERX, bring through AFWERX. Everyone here should not be frustrated in your day to day job. That’s what I got from your message. Thanks man, that was awesome.

So as we all know, I think Anduril’s probably like the poster child for the non Boeing Lockheed kind of story. So if you get any press clip, Anduril’s hit this ceiling, they want to get into the big contracts, they’re trying to scale up, trying to make it happen. And so we see that conversation a lot played out in the media. And so I think as businesses get going, they’re scaling up that maybe they get over that initial hump, get that Phase II, maybe get a few more million dollars. What do the big contracts look like? How do you get make a big capability impact for the Air Force and for the nation?

So can you maybe give some words, I think, since you’ve been through that experience Diem, can you really talk to maybe some tips for the crowd on how do you scale up? You’ve been through that roll up your sleeve sausage making, how do we make it happen? How do we scale up? How do we make it happen?

Diem Salmon:

Absolutely. And sum it up, it’s really, really hard and it takes years and years of work. So what happens when you’ve won your SIBR Phase II and you have around $750,000 and you have a good idea. And that’s when the actual work starts. Because at that point there’s really two key things. It’s one, you need to have a transition partner and you have to have a very dedicated transition partner that believes in you. Who not only knows the things that you’re working on, whether that’s in SIBR or at AFWERX, SpaceWERX or any other kind of the DIU innovation type efforts. But they need to believe in the technology that you’re building and that it’s actually going to help them as the end user.

And that transition partner actually very much needs to be willing to pull you through all of the knot holes that’s required to actually get to the point that scales. And this is a very long process. This is a two to three year process. One of the worst things that a startup can hear is, “I love it, I love your technology. I’m going to palm for it.” And then you’re waiting for two to three years, maybe the money will come and you have no idea where your company’s actually going to be at that point.So the only way this works though, the only way to transition is you just need to get ahead of it. And so you need to start that transition process the moment you start any kind of, as soon as you get a toll hold, basically.

And then the second piece is, especially for startups, when you get to the larger programs, the department is typically going to favor known mediocre performance over completely unknown. And so what do you do over those two years, those three years that you’re waiting for that RFP or for that program to start? It’s just you have to prove your capability. You should be going out there, you should be demonstrating constantly. You should be trying to get in field experience and proving that your technology actually works and in many ways getting ahead of your competitors. By that time that RFP drops, you should have been working with the transition partner already and they should have complete belief that the technology that you’re proposing actually works. Because you’re just not going to be given as much of a, well, you’re not going to be given any benefit of the doubt.

This is exactly what we did on Counter-UAS. We started with a very small DIU shoot-off. It was, show up the range, see if you can intercept small drones. We did very well. That’s when we started building relationships with SOCOM and matured that over the next two years. We did combat validations, we worked very closely with them on understanding what their actual needs were, how to actually build out the capabilities that they would need in the field. And after all of that work, two years later, that’s when we actually got the SOCOM SIP award, which was about $1 billion.

Dave Harden:

Awesome. Great insights. Make sure you come up and get more answers because Diem is someone who’s been through the ringer and understands the business. And so super, super helpful. Thank you. And the beautiful thing is AFWERX has tried to put together some transition programs. Many of you’ve heard of the strategic matching program within AF Ventures, so it’s kind of a TACFI, STRATFI Trevor alluded to that earlier. How do you transition? And there’s been some big wins but there’s been some hold back too. And I think sometimes a lot of the clients we talk to, the companies that we’re trying to help in this dual use tech space, they wind up trying to figure out, “How do I balance this commercial market?” My investors are kind of like, “Hey, I got to get my ROI. You got to get some return, we got to get some revenue. We got to get the projects going, I need some momentum.”

And at the same time the defenses might be like, “Hey, I really like your stuff. Let’s talk in two years when I can get you some scratch.” So it’s this weird dynamic that happens. Super frustrating sometimes for companies and businesses. So Nate, this question is really for you. You’ve had an amazing experience. You’ve been building out this great and continuing the journey AFWERX. So super proud what we see and the impact that you’ve made. Tell us how you can get some tips and tricks out there for folks to think about, “How do I balance this commercial thing but also align these needs that I have that are coming from real war fighter needs in the Air Force?”

Col. Nathan P. Diller:

Yeah, absolutely. Dave, first, huge thanks to you, the founders of AFWERX for creating this tool. Guys like you, guys like Glass Gordon in the trenches at the beginning, the frozen middle layer that was not frozen, the notch or two above that really allowed us to launch. And most importantly, huge thanks to our Airmen and our guardians who’ve been out there and created new concepts to bring in these new technologies. Because as was discussed earlier this morning, it’s not just the technologies. And so what are a couple of tips? Well one, I think if we have been successful in AFWERX, it’s because we have created these teams, right? Teams of teams across a multitude of different stakeholders, in particular as you’re seeing that merger.

So tip one is if you’re a company that’s out there, great, really go look for that feedback from those Airmen and those guardians out there. Because what we’ve found is that while we certainly bring money forward, maybe the most useful thing in many instances is the great ideas of our Airmen and guardians who not only unlock a military use case that may be unconsidered, but in many instances start to unlock some of those commercial use cases. So listening to them, fighting for those opportunities to engage with what truly is the core of our innovation engine in the department of the Air Force with those Airmen guardians.

The second tip I would recommend is provide feedback. As you look at AFWERX, if you look at the evolution, Dave, since you were here, we do not see ourselves as a static institution. And so we saw kind of the AFWERX 1.0 that opened up culture in a different way that we are looking at problem, a level of humility that there are great ideas out there if we change our structures a little bit. AFWERX’s 2.0 was then really, “How do we go and implement these tools, $1 billion of funds and get it out to the right people at the right time at the right scale with a level of rigor that’s expected for using taxpayer dollars?”

As we start to evolve then, into this AFWERX 3.0, we’re looking to wait feedback that we’ve had. We’ve talk clearly about the Valley of Death. We talk about what are those other emergent technologies that are out there that we could really launch? And so a couple of specific examples where that feedback loop closely between the innovators inside and outside the Air Force, a couple of new initiatives that we’re launching. The first is Autonomy. Obviously we’ve seen some great effects that in Autonomy, again, both inside and outside the Air Force, we cannot afford to lose commercially this race for autonomy or militarily. And so today we’re launching our Autonomy Prime Effort in the same spirit of our Agility Prime, our Orbital Prime Efforts that really create now this conversation and a way to be more deliberate about bridging the Valley of Death.

The second initiative is this AFWERX Nexus approach. Again, in an AFWERX 2.0, what we’ve seen is some amazing tools. We’ve talked about STRATFI, talked about the open topic, talked about obviously some of the specific approaches, the Prime programs that have been out there, the AFWERX challenge. What we’re now able to do is bring those together in a coherent way. A couple years ago, the Air Force corporate process, right, again, if I’m not sounding very innovative, I forgot my flip flops and t-shirt today. This whole effort was seen as innovation theater.

Today it’s seen very much as a core part of our Air Force corporate process to bring in talent that exists outside of our traditional channels and to bring in actually capital. That we believe there’s a path where if effectively executed, we can increase the effective toe-up for the department of the Air Force by multiple percentage points, leveraging the amazing capital out there, and building this larger team across industry, across our Airmen that really gets to a whole nation approach to attack the problems that we’ve had. So huge thanks to you Dave, and really excited to continue that feedback loop to try to institutionalize, that’s a naughty word in an innovation board, but to get rid of some of those pain points that we’ve seen as we start to move forward in this innovation process.

Dave Harden:

Awesome. Thank you Nate, you got a couple big announcements too. You want to hit them?

Col. Nathan P. Diller:

Number one, Autonomy Prime. Go out to our webpage today, AFWERX.com. And this other one is this AFWERX Nexus program where that bridge across the Valley of Death, those events that AFWERX challenging program did amazing things in terms of really bringing together and curating the problem, bringing folks together. What it was potentially missing that led to multiple calls from across the river and from CEOs is, “What’s that follow through? How do I take this from cool innovation theater to, hey, here’s real contract.” And scaling that relationship that we’re going to continue to put out 1000s of contracts at the 1000 a year of Phase I contracts. We’re going to go make 300 companies, $1 million companies in a year through the phase two and we’re going to go pick the handful of those that are those STRATFIs.

But most importantly, the beginning of that process, as you heard General Brown say today, making a decision that, “Hey, we are going to invest in autonomy. We’re going to invest in these next generation technologies where there is,” we’re not going to go build the next Stealth aircraft most likely in AFWERX, right? But when we look at those technologies that are out there that have this dual use capability, this becomes now the form to bring those in and move across that Valley of Death in ways we haven’t before.

Dave Harden:

Super helpful. Awesome. Well we like to keep this stuff interactive. We got to hear from amazing panelists, but we want to hear from you all too. So I can ask some more questions of the panel, but it’d be great to hear what’s on your mind if we don’t have someone going around with a mic, shout it out. I’ll bring the mic to you. We’ll figure it out. But let’s have a convo. So we got a mic over there. Someone’s got to have some question on their mind. Well, we’re going this way. Let’s go. Keeping it moving.

Lt. Col. Sarah Forton:

Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Sarah Forton, tech commander of the OSS at Fort Bragg. Listening to this all pan out in the Air Force WERX. I’m actually new to this. I’m here because of my Spark sale. Draco Spark sale team has invited me to see what they’re doing and it’s fantastic. And I hear about all these awards of contracts and several million dollars. So my question is essentially awarding startup contracts, what are the safety nets in place to hold these contractors accountable along the way?

Dave Harden:

Okay, awesome. We’ll get to the heart of it. Hey, we put this contract out there. Some of it’s to see if we can work things out, but we want to make sure that certain things are being held to a standard. Panel?

Col. Nathan P. Diller:

So the big thing is we’re not going to go drop a $30 million contract. These are companies in many instances have never worked with the federal government before. In fact, we’ve been told by some CEOs they had to hide from their board of directors because of the horrors they had heard of SIBRs before. And so part of it starts with those initial $50,000 contracts. Are they delivering something? And then we’re scaling that relationship and we are really counting on those technical points of contact to make sure that there’s rigor in those deliverables. The other piece that we’re going to do that comes in this AFWERX 3.0 model is under Spark, we’ve seen a lot of the bottoms up innovation. As we start to take some of these top down innovation efforts that come through our primes really being deliberate about curating the DOTMLPF-P so that when it goes back out to the wings, there’s this iterative process to keep the contractor.

We’re not expecting someone who’s never worked in government before to immediately hack the system. And so through this grown relationship, we have a path with Spark that now actually Spark is curating that problem. We’re not imposing an innovation tax on the wings, but rather we are creating that relationship early to build out, “What is the doctrine, how are we going to use this, what is the policy that can be used?” And as we’re checking each of those pieces, the training pieces, can that contractor actually deliver over this kind of two year cycle? That ideally within a year we can take a company. And we’ve done this in many instances of $50,000 to $50 million in a year. So it is a piece of learning that keeps us relevant in industry and it keeps us relevant strategically against the adversary that we’re there to meet.

Dave Harden:

And I think the more we can add processes to bolster that up, we can look at other things like foreign influencer companies, et cetera, cetera. So I think there’s some well-documented stuff and when you go fast, things fall through the cracks. But my sense is that we can continue to shore that up as an air force here moving forward. I saw lots of other hands going up. Let’s try to get as many questions as we can. You get to run with the mic now instead of me, so that’s good.

Jade Baransk:

Thank you so much to the panel. My name is Jade Baranksi, I’m the CEO of Vision, one of those SIBR companies. Very happy to be here. And I have a question, I don’t exactly know who it’s best for. So I’m just curious about your thoughts on transitioning from the Air Force, which we’ve already done, right? We’re in a couple other branches. But any tips or tricks on how to have that conversation? Specifically what you spoke to ma’am about those transition partners? Because as soon as you go talk to the Navy, they’re like, “We do things differently.” Which is great, but now we’ve never worked with them. So just really curious about any thoughts on that.

Lt. Col. Walter MicMillan:

So if you have a product that’s great for not just the Air Force but the Navy as well and it’s at a point where it can scale. Normally what I tell companies is our STRATFI program and our TACFI program, we don’t discriminate by the dollars that’s coming through that pipeline. So if it’s Air Force dollars, if it’s Navy dollars, that’s a good program for multiple services to converge upon scaling a product and understanding what a scale product for the department looks like. So, that’s one piece.

So yeah, if you’re at that point where you’re at the end of a SBIR Phase II, the Navy’s interested. I have a couple of Space Force companies like that right now where they’re at a STRATFI, the IC community is interested. The IC community is contributing funding to that STRATFI so it’s not a total Air Force bill. So, that’s one convergence point that you can look into.

Diem Salmon:

Yeah, I would just add that, yes, they’re very different. The Navy’s different. The Army’s even more different. And sometimes you feel like you’re just going to build the same thing three times over. But especially in some of the more innovative technology areas, I’ll use Autonomy as an example. It’s actually a pretty small community and they all talk to each other. So if you can find a way to break into that group and you can have those conversations with all of those folks, they’re sharing ideas, they’re paying attention to what they’re each other are doing and they’re using that to compare notes. And so it’s never going to be one for one. It’s going to be a little bit unique, but for the most part I think, especially if you can get into one service, it will really help you move into others just because there’s a little bit more of that validation occurring.

Dave Harden:

Great inputs, appreciate it. Even greater questions and love it coming from the audience. Who’s up next? We’ll go up front.

Robie Samanta Roy:

All right, thank you Dave. Good morning, Robie Samanta Roy with a company Electra.aero, that is funded by Agility Prime. Question I have for the panel is one of the big elephants in the room right now. And Diem, I’m giving you a past experience. SBIR reauthorization, this is a big elephant in the room that’s going to hold up funding for the next cycle. Any thoughts and comments on where we stand and the way going forward?

Col. Nathan P. Diller:

So I’ve had the great opportunity to brief staffers on a regular basis for several months now. I think there is progress being made. Certainly, I think it’s been some appreciation for things that we’ve really pushed in particular in AFWERX, things like due diligence, things like building out a team of operators, acquirers, and that war fighter right at the beginning that helps accelerate the transition across the Valley of Death.

Obviously for others to decide. I think there’s also been a little bit follow up to the previous question Naval X recently, they’re looking at taking the SIBR budget and putting that under Naval X. So you’re seeing kind of a multiplication across the services and a collaboration across agencies to create a little more common model that’s create data sharing. And so I think that’s given some confidence in areas where maybe there was some concern about reauthorization. But you probably know better than I do, Trevor.

Trevor Smith:

And I’ll speak to that from a very small business, it’s the lifeblood for especially a material science manufacturing company to get off the ground, we have a lot of expensive assets to put into place. So this is critical for us to get that commercialization interest and that flywheel has to start somewhere. And the SIBR and STTR programs have allowed us to do that. But I’ve told our team, we’re not going to keep doing Phase IIs and Phase Is. We need to drive in and get into commercialization and ultimately not rely on that program at all because it’s baby formula. And if you want to grow your company, you have to start eating meat and potatoes.

So the program is designed to help companies grow out of that and get over the Valley of Death. I use the baby formula because I’m going to have a kid in about a day. But from my viewpoint, that’s how it should be viewed. We’re all in the same team here. We shouldn’t be taking advantage of the program from a small business perspective. And you should really drill into what’s getting traction within the Air and Space Force or whatever branch it is.

Dave Harden:

Awesome, thanks. The art of the startup is really about businesses and the DOD kind of coming together. And everyone in here, each of you has a chance to be an innovation superhero. If you have a problem in your workplace, a challenge. If you’re an Airman or Guardian, bring it up, fight for it, search for solution, connect with other people. If you’re a small business and you’re agile, you’re innovative, fight to bring your good works, your good team to our nation because we need it. We need it at this time in history more than any time in history. And I know for myself, I do not want my grandchildren speaking Chinese, not by choice, Russian not by choice. And so my plea for us is to band together to continue to solve problems and to kind of find the innovation superhero within each of us. That’s my challenge to you.

It’s been a great honor today to be part of this panel, to be able to moderate it, but more importantly, to have far more smarter people than myself. So if we could put our hands together, Trevor, Rock, Diem, Nate, thank you so much. Thank you to the great staff supporting this. AFA and all of you that came out today have a great rest of the conference. It was an honor to be with you today. See you.

Watch, Read: ‘Accelerating Space Acquisition’

Oct. 11, 2022

Royal Australian Air Force Air Commodore Johnny Haly led a discussion on “Accelerating Space Acquisition” with Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration; Kelly Hammett, director of the Space Rapid Capabilities Office; Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space; and Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney, military deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, 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:

Good morning, please welcome to the podium, Royal Australian Air Force Air Commodore, John Haly.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

All right, good morning ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here, and a pleasure to be joined on stage by four space acquisition professionals today, who are going to talk about accelerating space acquisition. Please help me welcome the honorable Mr. Frank Calvelli, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration. We’re going to get the Oscar’s music every time here. Dr. Kelly Hammett, Director of the Space Rapid Capabilities office. Brigadier General, Steven Whitney, Military Deputy Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration. And Brigadier General Steven Purdy, PEO, Assured Access to Space.

So we’re talking before about the audience today, and I think we’ve all agreed that the one thing that we’re a 100% sure of is that the one thing that we are all have in common, is that you’re all here as volunteers, and so I’m going to ask the panel as we start to not only deliver opening remarks, but I’d also like them to talk a little bit about what they do, and what the role is and in particular what the roles of their respective offices are as well. So we’ll start with you, Mr. Calvelli.

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

Hi, so I’m Frank Calvelli. I am relatively new, four months into the job as the first assistant secretary for Space Acquisition Integration, responsible for space acquisition across the entire department of the Air Force. A few opening thoughts, my top three priorities in this job are really simple. It’s speed, it’s resiliency, and it’s integration. It’s speed in our acquisitions to enable us to deliver new capabilities to our war fighters faster, its resiliency in our space architecture to make sure that space can be counted on, during times of crisis and conflict. And its integration, it’s integrating space with other war fighting domains, to support our operational imperatives in the department, and to give our war fighters a strategic edge. Now, in 30 seconds, let me tell you how I think we get speed into acquisitions. I think we get speed by doing three things.

The first is building smaller, building smaller spacecraft can be done faster. It’s just a matter of physics, and so going small with space, and going smaller and more manual bite size chunks of ground, are key enablers to speed. A second key enabler to speed is reducing non-recurring engineering using existing technology and existing designs. If we have smaller systems using existing designs, and reducing non-recurring engineering, we can go faster. And then finally the third element of speed is execution, it’s actually delivering our programs on schedule and on cost. One of the things as I prep from my hearings this past spring that I noticed was that there’s a track record of being late on programs. We have to turn that track record around, and actually execute, and if we build smaller, reduce non-recurring engineering, and execute to our plans, there’s nothing that can stop us.

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

Thanks sir, good morning everybody, thanks for being here, and thanks to the Air and Air Force and Space Association Conference for having us on the panel today. I’m Kelly Hammett, I am just under Mr. Calvelli in terms of tenure in my position, three months and 14 days. But I am in my 34th year of acquisition and federal service into the department of the Air Force, came out of the lab primarily. So as I was trying to think of my three opening points last night, instead of sleeping as I came from the mountain time zone to the eastern time zone, I think I’m going to go off the rails on number one right away. You said in the last panel session, there was a talk about prioritization. For me, it’s focus and alignment, and I don’t want to upset my boss here, but my predecessor said, “Speed is king.”

Well, I am a rocket scientist, actually a degenerate rocket scientist, and so speed is not king. I told my people, “Velocity is king, because velocity is speed with direction.” And so that’s kind of point number one. Number two, was competent workforce with the right experience and training. And so at the Space RCO, we’re a selectively manned organization, we hand pick everybody that comes in, and we have all the acquisition, quals, and experience that we’re looking for to be successful there. And then the third, was wait for it, I’ve lost it (laughs). I’m telling too many stories.

No, it is working the seams of partnerships, and breaking down the bureaucracy, right? Because we can go really quick, and what I’ve told my folks on this several times is we can develop something really quickly and hand it off. But if we haven’t built it into an architecture that’s integrated and accepted, and you heard Chief Raymond this morning talking about the swack, designing our force so that we have an architecture, and things can plug in and we’re all in agreement, and alignment. Back to my point number one, if we’re all pulling in the same direction with the same unity of effort and purpose, we can go fast. And that’s what we do, primarily in the classified space domain area, thanks.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

Good morning, I’m Brigadier General, Steve Whitney, I’m Mr. Kelly’s military deputy. So I help him run the organization, help him set things up. It’s a historic time for our department, for department of the Air Force, for our Air Force, for our Space Force. We heard General Raymond talk today a lot about the F Y 21 National Defense Authorization Act, which created the Space Force. At the same time that same act did something that’s not anywhere else in the federal government. It created the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space acquisition, and made them a second acquisition executive inside the department. Nowhere else in the federal government, whether it be agriculture, interior, on the Hill, is there two acquisition executives in one department. And they did that specifically so that we get after this problem of space, and we’ve been spending a lot of time over the last several years making sure we get set up, and in culminated with Honorable Calvelli’s confirmation in this last spring.

And I can tell you nobody was more excited than about his confirmation than me. And so we’re all thrilled to have you on board, boss. I think my role if I could for my priorities is real simple other than supporting my boss, but I think we do that in three very distinct ways. First, as you heard the boss talk about programs, right? We’ve got to get our programs right. We’ve got to deliver our capabilities.

Our second one is our organizations and our relationships. You’ve heard a lot of talk over the last several days about how we play together with different entities, how the space side plays with the air side, how we work together and different programs. We’ve got to get those right, we’ve got to be able to work together. And the third and most important in my mind, is we got to make sure we develop our greatest resource, and that’s you, our people. And we’ve got to make sure that we’re growing the future leaders. Because at the end of the day, what we’re up here about is setting the future of space. And we’re excited to do so. Steve?

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

All right. Good morning, I’m Steve Purdy, and no space conversation is complete without talking about launch.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

Just ask him, it’s all about launch.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

That’s right, it is all about launch. It’s fascinating you build to satellite, but you don’t get there without launch.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

It’s just a ride.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

Ah, it’s ballast. It’s ballast. We all know it’s ballast.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

The satellite guy, the launch guy.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

Right, this is unity of effort sir.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

(Laughs).

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

But let’s talk about unity of effort-

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

[inaudible 00:08:14].

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

… because I’m blessed to run this enterprise that’s called, “Launch” assured access to space. I’m actually quad-hated to do so. And it’s been a fascinating evolvement within the space industry. So I am the PEO, programming executive officer for shared access to space, which means I run the $16 billion NSSL heavy program, to make sure we hit our most important payloads in orbit. We also handle small launch through that, we also handle the range upgrade systems through that. But I’m also the space launch Delta 45 commander. As part of that, I run the bases for Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and Patrick’s Space Force Base and Ascension Island. I’m also the director of the Eastern Range, which means we run the entire DOD test range, which is most of the Atlantic.

And then finally, I’m the commands S3, so the Director of Operations for Space Systems Command. What’s fascinating in that, and I think there’s an interesting lesson, is the unity of command. That was unit of effort that was just mentioned. We actually are vertically integrated now within the launch arena. Requirements, acquisitions, operations, sustainment is all within our own [inaudible 00:09:27] way. We’re about a 10,000 person organization scattered across multiple different states. But that is the true end-to-end system. The earliest acquisitions our ranges, our bases, a mix of Airmen and Guardians to manage those bases, and then the sustainment. And so what I think is the key interesting learning point here is that vertical piece, we’re actually structurally designed to work together.

In the past it was four different organizations scared across these multiple locations, and then you had to get that cooperative effort going. Now they all report to me, and we were able to flatten a lot of that organization, very space force-like, flatten a lot of these elements in these pieces. Which has enabled us structurally to go faster in ways that I didn’t really predict before I was actually running this organization. So it’s an interesting object lesson I think, and probably a topic of discussion about a vertically integrated organization that owns its own operations and acquisitions.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

Yeah, it’s interesting. What do you think the limitations are? Like how scalable is that in a context of vertical integration when you start looking across the entire force? Mr. Calvelli, what are your thoughts?

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

I think it helps you to actually be able to do a lot of things internally yourselves, and I think it’s positive, I’m not sure how far it can scale. You’ve seen it.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

So sir, if I could I just take a moment. The ecosystem that we have I think is an incredible change that has happened over the last several years. So growing up, Steve, and I, and Kelly all grew up in this era where there was one PEO that decided everything, and it was a three star general. And so now today, you look across the PEOs, the program executive officers that run programs that report to the assistant secretary. And I think if I counted correctly, there’s eight different PEOs, and one CEO that all support that, and they push that decision making down to try and go faster, but then follow those things. I think that gets to Johnny some of your question about scale is you’ve got these eight different senior leaders like Steve and Kelly here, who can make decisions that are empowered to go with inside of something, and that’s I think part of how we get after speed too.

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

So vertical integration inside a product line to deliver a capability, but then horizontal integration across the architecture, and I saw Joy sitting down there. So SSEs, stand up of the systems integration office, your space acquisition council, the forums we have to get the senior leaders together, make decisions and give direction at the senior leader level, that is then implemented across lines of authority to integrate into an architecture is how we scale.

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

It’s a great point because I mean from an integration perspective, we have to work across the entire department, right? So we want to make sure that space is fully integrated with air, and then we have to work across the entire Department of Defense. To me, space is the great enabler. So the integration of space capabilities with ground, with sea and with air, are what we need to be doing to give ourselves an advantage as a nation, so really critical.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

And we shouldn’t discard the point. I mean, Steve mentioned the splitting apart of the PEO and Space Systems Command, is a really powerful notion that’s that’s been a single three star for a long time. That allows us to go a lot of faster just naturally. These PEOs can now operate within their mission area, and do that horizontal integration with Spock and StarComm in the joint war fighters in a much faster way than we could have done in the past.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

So General Romans this morning spoke about the space development agency coming within Space Force in the next couple of weeks. What does that change? What does that bring into the stable?

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

I think it brings a great deal of resiliency into the architecture with their proliferated LEO transport layer, and their proliferated LEO Tron Zero One in terms of tracking satellite as well. I am generally excited about their approach to doing business, they are building small, they are doing things on two year centers and they are delivering capabilities faster. And I actually think that’s a model that we could take advantage of and actually push across the organization, across the other PEOs, and something we can learn from. When SDA comes on board in a couple weeks, they come on board as is. There’s no dramatic organizational changes coming, and they’ve been given the same authorities that they currently have today, as they come into the space force to execute their plan. And so I’m excited about the first launch of Tron Zero coming up in December, second one in March of 23. Tron One is well underway in terms of development and acquisition. We’re thinking through ideas on Tron Two, and I think it’s a way to add a great deal of capability and resiliency quickly to the architecture.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

I think if I could add, it gives us an opportunity as a broader ecosystem. Whether you got a traditional program like my beloved GPS or SATCOM or something and you want to do consistent type of things, then you’ve got a different way with Dr. Hammond’s space RCO to get after something real quick, that’s a quick short term deliverable. And then you’ve got SDA, with its tranches and it’s small spiral growth and its different patterns. It gives a great opportunity for us to use different tools to try and get after the problem set.

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

But I really think that, Sorry Kelly-

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

It’s okay.

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

… I really think the old approach of these sort of seven year development contracts that we’re doing, I mean if I look at NextGen G, right, that should not be that hard. Forgive me for saying that, but I mean it’s a seven year development for a class of spacecraft, a missile one that we’ve been building as a nation for 30, 40 years, right? And it comes again to the matter of the size of the satellite itself, just the physics behind building those large structures, those large reaction wheels, those large star trackers, those large everything, take time. And building brand new focal planes, and brand new asics, and brand new optics and everything else.

So we really truly have a threat from China. I mean the secretary is right, it’s about China, China, and China. And if we really want to go fast, we have got to stop the traditional way of doing satellites and these sort of large seven year cost plus contracts, and go to smaller systems, more proliferated whether they be at MIO, or at LEO or even at GEO, and stop redesigning everything. And when we do that, we’re going to add a significant amount of speed. That plus industry, executing the plan.

And so my message to industry I would say is please bid on programs with realistic costs, and realistic schedules, and please bid on programs that you can be successful with. And then when you win that contract, execute. Deliver those programs on cost, deliver those programs on schedule. I think it’s going to be key to all of our success as a nation, and to counter the threat against China.

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

I was just going to jump in on the SDA thing, one last time. So the last mission directive I saw, they come across like us as a direct reporting unit, vertically integrated to deliver capabilities, but sit on your acquisition council, and Derek becomes another space force PEO.

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

Correct, that’s the model.

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

And so, that’ll work great.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

Hey boss, you want to talk for a minute? You know mentioned you were talking about cost and schedule realism, but you didn’t really get into the tech realism. And you and I, have had several conversations in your office about bidding to technology that exists today, rather than trying to do that outreach, and that grab for the $10 million for, “Just two more percent, I can get it, I can get it.” And that’s where we tend to struggle. You want to talk about your thoughts on that?

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

So we love as engineers and scientists to ourselves in the government as well as an industry, we say, “Hey, you know what, I’ve got this existing system that works, but I could redesign and get you 10% extra off this asic, this FPGA, this focal plant assembly, this ROIC, whatever.” And we say, “Oh that sounds really cool, let’s go do that.” And then we end up down this development path for that 10% extra in performance and we end up adding years to the schedule. And I think that was a perfectly fine approach 10 years ago, when there wasn’t a real threat. But now that there is a threat, and now there is a sense of urgency, I think we have to back off on that, and we have to start to use existing technology and existing designs in different ways to get speed, and then folks are going to say, “Well if you do that, then you never do any development work.”

Not true, AFRL does an amazing amount of development across the lab, so they’re constantly doing that. Industry has a great amount of IRAD going on. I’m just saying, “Don’t do new development on these rapid space contracts that we need to get there faster, whether they’re being done by SDA, SSC, space RCO, or others.” And so it’s really going to be key for us to enter this new paradigm of how we want to go develop things faster. We just can’t afford to do things that we did in the past.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

Well I think I’d add, I mean the proliferation concept allows you to get after that R&D in a more rapid cycle, which benefits the R&D on the production sides and keeps them live. On the launch side, we see that change occurring as the architecture is shifting out of the larger systems into that proliferation. But I’ll go back to one of the main reasons we have these larger systems, is because we had exquisite launch and very minimal launch, couple launches a year. The bosses up here talking about a future where we’re going to have 300 plus launches a year, most of which has commercial. Commercial’s enabled us to leverage that, and as they started building commercial small lift, commercial medium lift and soon commercial heavy lift at mass rates, that allows us to finally go after a different architecture, which allows us to then get after that speed.

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

You’re right, I mean it’s amazing what launch, where launches come from in the old days where I think General, you said 25 or 30 launches a year to where we are today, so close closing on a hundred. So just phenomenal, and I think it allows us to think differently about the architecture across the board for all of our US Space Force.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

Absolutely.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

So structurally, how does the launch business going to change or need to change to facilitate these sorts of visions?

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

Yeah, so from a launch perspective, you really have to go all the way back to the beginning. So it’s not only our launch contracts and leveraging the commercial elements, and not just building an exquisite one-off system that’s designed for government requirements, but trying to figure out ways to leverage commercial launch itself. But also extends all the way into the range, and the base management. In a world where we were manned to launch 10 launches a year, and there were 10 government launches a year, everything was fine, everyone focused on that. Now in a world where we’re launching 60 missions this year on the eastern range, and we’re planning for a hundred next year and the 300 in two or three or four or five years from now. We really are restructuring at a range level in a base level how we even think, we’re not a launch base anymore.

We tell ourselves to think like an airport, and when you tell yourselves to think like an airport, it’s a new paradigm. And an airport is all about mass operations, and mass takeoffs, it’s all about providing services such as terminals, and terminal support. And you have paying customers that come in, and whether they’re paying customers are humans or cargo, it’s a little agnostic to the airport, it’s about providing all those services. So from a port perspective, from a range perspective, we’re trying to think an airport, a seaport, airport, kind of a model. Which is what range of the future is all about. It’s really about that range of the now to figure out how to do that dynamic pieces, and then it goes all the way back to the left side, figuring out a way to maximize commercial. And we’re helped tremendously by our paying customers on the government side that can take commercial, take commercial ICDs, that don’t want a bunch of mission uniques.

The more we’re allowed to get into that common methodology, the more we’re allowed to get into a commercial buy, which gets to we talk about our freight train to space and that freight train is forming, the tracks are forming, and the train is forming, and pretty soon we’ll be at a point where there’s a train going almost regularly, and you can toss your payload when you’re ready, on that next hour or next day. So it’s a pretty exciting time in launch and we love it because it will be able to facilitate on the war fighter side, new capability on a constant pace.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

So we spoke before about the length of time that these projects take to build a great big bus, and get it ready to go. So how long do we have to wait for all of those projects to I guess get pulled through the system before we’re focusing exclusively on the build smaller launch, smaller model? Or do you see there always being a place for those large exquisite things as well in almost a hybrid approach?

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

You want to take a grab at that?

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

Want to take a grab of that? Sure, I’ll go first, sir. My personal opinion is I think there’s a balance, I think the opportunity that allows us to go forward with these small things, we’re kind of in that transition stage, and so we got to kind of balance. There are systems that we have that we cannot let fail, and we’ve got to continue to those services, and make sure that they’re available, but at other times there are things where we can go fast, to try and get a new capability on online. As we talk about missile warning, missile track, and we’ve got our SBIRS architecture, and we’re looking at the pivot to this new proliferated architecture. We’ve got that backstop right now of that existing architecture, and so we’re trying to make that pivot underneath, but there are other services, and it’s just going to take time for us to get through that.

I think the other thing that we could take advantage of though is on a lot of things there’s probably industry opportunities for us to just to quote General Gutline, “Buy directly”. And I think of SATCOM, and I know there’s number of different vendors out there that offer things, and as we look at our force design for space data transport, “What are those that we could just buy directly so that we then don’t have to invest our own systems? This is all part of that transition.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

Yeah, that’s interesting. General Raymond spoke this morning about General Gutline’s methodology of, “Exploit what we have, buy what we can, and then build only what we must.” What are the areas there that you think are most need to be improved, to realize that sort of a methodology?

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

So I’ll take a shot. Having coming out of the lab and listening to the discussion we were just having really in the acquisition community, have to stay closer to the S&T community, and be smart buyers. We have to be able to appropriately evaluate high TRL systems and as Mr. Calvelli’s plea industry give us realistic proposals, but if they’re not realistic, and they’re risky, or it hadn’t been done before, we need to know that and we need to be making source selection decisions appropriately from that perspective. One other thing I was going to say for a couple years, and this dovetails into the last session in on the space side of things in AFRL, we created a new position to do just that. The deputy TEO for space science and technology, I did that job for 18 months before coming over to do this.

So we have an opportunity, and we’ve made some changes to tighten up that linkage, and break down some of those themes between the organizations to help us do that. As well as prioritize the S&T investment we want out of the lab, to go after the things that aren’t as mature. So we have to be a demanding customer, and give them those prioritized demand signals.

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

To add to that, I think it’s also really important that we all understand what commercial can and can’t do. I mean, whether it’s in communications, or ISR, or space and man awareness, we need to understand commercial industry, what the capabilities are, and then take advantage of that.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

I would add in general, go line also says for the PEOs to act as PEOs for the mission areas, not just the programs, that’s a bit of a shift of a mental shift. Traditionally you would have your set of box programs, and then the PEO manages these boxes and that’s it. To do this method properly, you really need to understand what else is out there, and you need to really own your mission area, and go after activities and follow a concepts and commercial ventures, and international ventures that you wouldn’t normally do as part of these other programs that you’re running. So it forces you to expend some time, and energy, and funds to follow and track all those other elements, so that when those capabilities present themselves, you could go after those and switch, and exploit, or buy, versus having to actually build.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

I think the other thing then, if I could tie it actually to the previous panel that was up here with General Richardson, he talked about optimization and at some point you got to optimize for the enterprise and maybe sub optimize for individual programs because you’re going to have to make trades to be able to do those. And so we’ve got to figure out how to make sure we’re doing that effectively. And I think there’s some structural things we’ve put in place, but at the end of the day it’s going to be a culture shift, and getting people to think that way, just like Steve’s talking about, to make us really move forward.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

And I think it’d be a fairly poor version of an international officer if I didn’t also note that there are a lot of technologies and opportunities that exist outside of the United States as well, that are available to be considered in that stable of things that can be bought. And frankly, some of the elements of changed that probably need to happen are the interpretation of some of the language components of control regimes, which at the moment are preventing your allies acting in their best interest of the United States, and they don’t seem to be presenting other, preventing other people from developing me cell technology very well. But anyway, let’s take that as a comment as I step back into my moderator role (laughs). We heard before Mr. Calvelli, you spoke a little bit almost directly to industry about some of the things that you’d like to see them concentrate on. Perhaps we could hear from the other panelists about some of those components that you’d like industry to focus on, or cease focusing on.

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

Sure, I’ll start-

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

Go for it.

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

… if you don’t mind. So we’re trying to go fast. Mr. Cavelli said, “No seven year development contracts.” Our contracts are typically two to three to four years, that’s very hard to do. So there’s a couple things that we have to work on jointly. One is you talked about executable spending profiles, and for us that’s that’s going to be a nontraditional spending profile. That’s in many cases going to be front-loaded, because the long weed parts that we need for microelectronics, precision optics, other types of things, if you wait to go through a year or two of design to get to a CDR, and then order long leads, you’re into a seven year development effort. So like he said, you either have to buy something that exists right now, and that may or may not meet the requirement or you have to shift a bunch of that emphasis upfront to get after things you need immediately. And so I’ve been having several discussions with our industry partners of utilizing things like capital, to bring some of those things in house and then sell them to the programs.

Back to my point number one, alignment industry has to know where we’re going, what programs are coming to make those bets to go off and do that and as well with their IRAD investments. So getting that alignment on what the architecture is, where the technology gaps and the mission capability gaps are, and getting us all working to solve that problem rapidly is what we’re pushing.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

Do you think if we take a pause before we go down, do you think in government there’s sufficient appetite for risk and for the failure states that will occur, or are likely to occur if we’re in the develop while we fly it?

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

I’ll defer to you for the first answer. I think there is. If you’re building just two giant Battlestar Galactica satellites, there’s probably very, very low tolerance for risk. You build proliferated systems, you’re building 50, 60, a 100 systems, there’s a lot more tolerance for risk like that. And so when you’re spending billions upon billions of dollars on taxpayers’ money and a seven year, 10 year development cycle, yeah, the taxpayers should rightfully so expect it to work when it finally launches. And I think building smaller, allows you to take on more risk.

Speaker 4:

Well, that goes down the line too. If we’re launching a $2 billion satellite, we’ll go spend $300 million on mission assurance on launch. That’s $300 million I could have bought a lot of satellites with, if those payloads had been more commercial oriented. Back to your question on industry, from my perspective, and it’s colored by my own personality, I need an honest frank conversation with industry. What I don’t need is the BD sales pitch. And the reason is, because we are getting into a hyper more technical world, especially this space force is getting into a deep world of cloud, and DevSecOps, and cyber, and a lot of technical stuff that a lot of us may or may not have grown up in. And so when you get an industry pitch that says they can go solve the world in 60 days or less, and do it for 20 million, there’s just a bit of credibility discussion that you got to have.

And so what I really, really need is for industry to understand where our systems are, and what our needs are and how you can plug into those needs in a non-pro proprietary way, so that we can continue to move along, and not try to sell me on something that I’m going to have to go buy a license for here to eternity, et cetera. So plugging in, and being a part of that broad team is critical. And understanding that you may have a great solution, it may work great in your lab, but I have 12 other contractors that are saying exactly the same thing, and it’s very difficult to figure out who’s telling who. And so you got to get past those BD sales pitches into some real discussions. And when we could do that, it helps a lot, I found those conversations with industry extremely valuable once you get past those early kind of marketing pitch at the levels.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

So with regards to industry, I’d state that I agree with my fellow panelists, but I just harping back to the opening statement, “Industry, we need you to deliver on your commitments.” Nothing will set us up for success more than you delivering on your commitments, okay? Nothing’s going to help us change the attitude, change anything else if we can’t deliver what we’ve signed up to do, and we need your help in that.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

Yeah, I’ll jump back on that in echo, in the launch area in particular. we’ve got just a wonderful opportunity to launch right now. So many much interest, so much venture capital pouring into launch, it’s really an exciting time for our world. But there’s a lot of new internet age style thinking, and BD sales pitches going on in our world, and there’s are a lot of slips involved as a result. And so that if we start depending on you and laying contracts in, we need that delivery. I need the deliveries to get on time because we are depending on you to launch national security mission critical payloads, and those are for war fighter needs. The war fighter needs that data, and so in order to do that, we need the launch vehicles hitting their marks.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

So perhaps coming back to our own spheres of influence, and in your case command, let’s look ahead to 2023. What are the practical things that you intend to, or seek to do within your roles to accelerate space acquisition? And we might work sort of backwards from you, General Purdy.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

Okay, 2023. Well, launch and range is an ever changing, ever increasing activity, so there’s a plethora of stuff in our world. I really want to see responsive space get up there, which is really more of my fellow PEO activity, that we have a launch support to that, and that’s getting to that 24-hour time period. We need to be able to get to the point where we can go launch a rocket in a mission in 24 hours, and get that data flowing. That’s like almost unattainable right now, but we need to find that point, I’m looking to ’23 to really try to hit that home. We’re looking to come in with more development of small launch in large launch. On the range of spaceport side, we’re really bringing together industry here on the spaceport side within the next month or so. And then we have another conference in February, to start bringing together the spaceports themselves for the first time ever, and start developing a spaceport strategy, a national spaceport strategy to start that integration, at a spaceport level.

And then the new exciting portion of our portfolio was the on orbit element. We’re not just ground based launch, we are on orbit. So the whole concept of on orbit maneuver, on orbit logistics on orbit, servicing on orbit junkyards, depots, fuel, all of those kind of futuristic concepts. We had a great first industry day last week, and so we’re going to start levying that next year and really start formulating. We have an ICD in place, we’ve had industry in place, they’ve got great commercial activity that I think we can leverage commercially. So that’s an entirely new mission area for the Space Force, and a missionary that right now that we’re kind of taking on completely from an acquisitions, and operations thinking perspective insured access on the acquisition side. So I really hope to get to a maturity level on that piece because I think once we understand that, it can backfeed into the architecture, and inform the architecture. We can refuel, we can do repair, we can do other activity that will enable war fighter benefit down the long term.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

All right, so I’ll take a slightly different tack. I think as I look ahead to 2030, I think about, “That’s eight years from now.” So all you captains-

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

2030, or 2023? I thought I heard you say.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

I was asking what you intended to do in 2023.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

Got it.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

But sure, you have to be on your velocity, on your vector, 2023.

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

Yeah, It’s that Minnesota public education.

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

(Laughs).

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

But as I look ahead, answer’s still the same. When I think about what we need for 2030, and where I want to focus in 2023, it’s really the same. I look at the captains and majors out there and think about who’s going to be leading our programs. And so, “How do we develop them, how do we give them the skills? How do we give them the experiences?” We talk about what skills and what scar tissue, for lack of a better word, that the program manager needs to have to be able to know when to make the right choices, and know how to work through these different tough problems. And so, “How do we spend time over those next couple of years setting them up for success?” And that’s going to be my focus.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

Getting them ready for those godlike authorities that were discussed in the previous pound, right?

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Whitney:

That’s right. Kelly?

Dr. Kelly Hammett:

From a parochial perspective, over the next three years, we’re going to be delivering 10 to 12 systems. That’s where we’re laid out. And so I talked about earlier kind of the alignment piece, and the integration piece. I need to have the processes in place for rapid fielding, and acceptance of these things, and that’s not getting a lot of traction right now. So I have rapid acquisition, I’m going to build these things, I’m going to be like, “Here’s your satellite.” And I’ll be like, “Okay, stand in line for three years, while we figure out how to use it.” And so we can’t have that. And then similarly, in many cases, our model is to build the first few of something, and then give the production line to SSE. So we’re working all those products, “How do we palm for money, and then move budget and set up contractual transfers?”

There’s a lot of details, mechanics, that we as a space force have to come together onto to get the benefit out of the things that we’re building quickly. On the enterprise side of the house, so this was alluded to earlier, I’m excited by all the work that Swack has been doing. We need to get the timing of those mission designs to influence our budgeting process, and so we’re working on that, and then that is the way to do this. It is project the force design you need, do the analytics, and then get the resources you need to go execute, and then defend it in the process. And so I’m excited because as a deputy PTO, I saw the Air Force process, and I saw the Space force process, and we really have an opportunity to move the needle with how we’re doing it on the Space Force side of the house.

Hon. Frank Calvelli:

For me, I’m rather happily surprised by the pivot and the architecture changes the Space Force has already started. They have done an absolute magnificent job of getting to more of a hybrid architecture that includes more proliferated systems, more smaller systems, more some larger systems, and a much more resilient architecture. For me, the focus of next year is executing. It is actually making sure that we deliver now the great set of work that’s been done over the past couple years by the department and by the Space Force. And then following that execution is really going to be making sure that we integrate in with the new PEO in terms of BMC2, BMC3. With Luke and his team, making sure that space is integrated fully across the department and really defining the next block of programs that we have to go off, and build, and execute. So execution is really a key thing for us this next year.

RAAF Air Cmdr. Johnny Haly:

That’s awesome, and before I give you the opportunity each to give 30 seconds of final words, I think that’s great to have those actionable things to go out there. And I particularly applaud General Whitney, the focus on the human being development component to that. Because ultimately without that, you know, can have all the funky things floating around that you want, but we’re not going to be doing anything with them. General Purdy, why don’t you start us off with any closing points, or anything that you want us to think about. Noting we haven’t touched on all the topics we might have always spoken about.

Brig. Gen. Stephen J. Purdy:

Sure, I think one last thought piece I’ll put on the table is we talk about accelerating acquisitions, I’ll bring it back to the beginning. You can’t just do things in operations, or do things in our operations and acquisitions are our contracts, et cetera. [inaudible]

Update to KC-46’s Troubled Refueling System Delayed Until 2025

Oct. 7, 2022 | By Chris Gordon

The troubled KC-46 Pegasus tanker faced yet another setback Oct. 7. The Air Force said the new Remote Vision System (RVS) 2.0, which will be used to operate the airplane’s refueling boom, will not be available until October 2025. That is a further 19-month delay from the previous plan the Air Force and Boeing, which makes the airframe and the RVS, agreed upon.

The Air Force and Boeing put the delay down to broad supply chain issues in the economy, though the RVS problem existed long before supply chain troubles came to the fore in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our defense industrial base continues to face supply chain issues and we’re seeing effects in the acquisition schedules of technically complex systems,” said Andrew P. Hunter, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, in a statement disclosing the delay.

The boom operating system has been troublesome since the Air Force first received the aircraft in 2019.

The KC-46 was only recently cleared for worldwide deployment, including combat missions, Gen. Mike Minihan, the head of Air Mobility Command, announced at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September.

But the problems with the refueling system have not been solved. Instead, Airmen on the KC-46 fleet work around them.

“I think the concern would be that we’re saying that those limitations are OK,” Minihan said. “And they’re not.”

The trouble arises from a complex and unconventional setup. The KC-46’s boom operator is stationed in the front of the aircraft and operates the rigid, telescoping refueling pipe via an array of video screens fed by cameras around the aircraft. That replaces the trusted method of the boom operator simply looking out of the back of the jet through a window.

But the KC-46’s display setup, the RVS, washes out or blacks out in certain conditions, such as in direct sunlight, and sometimes causes problems with the operator’s depth perception. That creates the risk of the boom operator accidentally hitting the aircraft the KC-46 is refueling. That hazard is especially troubling for the Air Force’s stealth fighters and bombers because any scrape could damage the coating used to hide the aircraft from radar.

In 2020, Boeing and the Air Force agreed to fix the problem.

“This agreement addresses deficiencies that hindered safe and effective refueling operations,” the Air Force said at the time.

The solution is known as RVS 2.0 and includes upgrades to the display resolution. But RVS 2.0 essentially just fixes the serious problems the new system created. It will be incorporated on new aircraft and retrofitted to existing models and was supposed to be operational by 2024. Now, the Air Force says it will not be ready until late 2025, though Hunter opened up the possibility that the timeline could move forward.

“We’ll continue to examine possible opportunities to accelerate the schedule to bring this increased operational capability to the tanker fleet,” Hunter said.

In addition to hardware issues, the KC-46 also has to be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has increased its scrutiny of aircraft following criticism over its lax review of Boeing’s commercial products.

“The revised schedule factors in hardware availability due to global supply chain shortages and estimated timelines to complete the regulatory review,” a Boeing spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

For now, the Air Force will make do with its fleet of around 60 KC-46s and aging tankers such as the KC-135 Stratotanker that have been forced to fly more sorties while the KC-46 was on the sidelines. Overall, the KC-46 program is still behind schedule.

“My job is to win tomorrow,” Minihan said. “Nobody’s going to care about my plans for the KC-46 or my fleet in 10 years if I lose tomorrow. I need it now.”

Watch, Read: ‘The Future of Air & Space Power’

Oct. 7, 2022

Royal Air Force Air Commander Jez Attridge moderates a discussion with Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force for strategy, integration, and requirements, and Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, director of staff for the Space Force on “The Future of Air & Space Power” on Sept. 21, 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

Airmen and Guardians, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Royal Air Force Air Commodore Jez Attridge.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Good afternoon, everybody. The King sends warm greetings. Well done for making it to the end. So, this is the ultimate panel here. I’d like to start by thank you all for the kind mark of respect that you showed on Monday by holding a moment silence to mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth.

The Queen was a great friend and admirer of the United States. She paid six official visits in total, many more to the Kentucky stables, addressing Congress as well as speaking to presidents and attending football and baseball games and commemorative events.

She was at the America’s Bicentennial, the 400th Anniversary of the Jamestown Settlement. She well understood the affinity between the U.S. and the UK, stressing not just our common heritage in kinship, but our common values.

We over at the embassy in the United Kingdom have been humbled and honored by the immense number of tributes from the President and First Lady visiting the embassy, right the way through to the Union Jack flag lowered to half-mast at the site of the Battle of New Orleans, the last time U.S. and UK militaries fought as enemies.

There are many stories about her majesty. My favorite is when some people were walking in Scotland and approached an older looking lady on the horse with a headscarf and said, “You look just like the Queen.” To which her majesty replied, “How reassuring.”

Her duty to public service is what resonates with many of us. On the 21st of April 1947, she pledged to devote her life, whether it be long or short to our service. She carried out an official meeting with our new Prime Minister the day before she passed away.

She kept her word. I know that she would’ve wanted to wish you a happy 75th birthday, so I’ll do it for her and on behalf of our new King Charles. So, happy 75th birthday, U.S. Air Force, it has been a fantastic journey. Well done. Now, on the future of air and space power contemplating your 75 years of progression leads nicely into this ultimate session of the 2022 AFA Conference.

In September 1947, the maximum speed of an airplane was probably about 500 miles an hour. Ships traveled at about 20 to 30 knots, tanks at about 30 miles an hour. But since then, America, the U.S. Air Force has introduced us to stealth bombers, stealth fighters, supersonic fighters.

You’ve introduced us to global strike, global lift, all at the speed of relevance. Whereas, ships still travel at 20 knots and tanks at about 30 miles an hour. And also, during that, those 75 years, the U.S. has put 12 men on the moon, built exquisite constellations of space satellites, and given the world amongst other things, GPS, which if deleted, would impact every facet of life we have today.

But what are the future from a 2022 standpoint? Five years ago, we would’ve been talking about doubling down on capabilities that would enable us to concentrate fires against violence and ex-violence extremists. But now, the focus has shifted to reconfiguration of our capabilities for potential state-on-state activity against a peer that is moving at pace.

A major influence on how we move forward may be the war in Ukraine, although there are many factors to consider. The headline is that Russia has been fought to a standstill and even lost ground in some crucial areas. In the face of fierce resistance from a smaller, theoretically less capable country, which we won’t necessarily dwell on, but we need to figure out what we can learn from this particular conflict.

It’s led to some interesting speculation from several think tanks noticeably the Atlantic Council, which has postulated that the war has signaled the democratization of air power and the return of master air and space operations. So, to unpack some of these, we have two luminaries from the air and space domains. Gen. Nina, or as was on her AFA badge, Ninja.

She’s the Director of Space for the U.S. Space Force. Previously, she directed the development of procurement of space programs for the Air Force. She has also serves as the Director of Plans and Policy and held command positions at multiple levels. And we have Gen. Hinote who is a Deputy Chief of Staff, Strategy, Integration and Requirements.

He oversees Air Force Futures with a focus on air force strategy and concepts. And as you would expect, he’s a SAS graduate, holds a PhD in military strategy and has a rich aviation heritage in F-16 and F-117s. Ladies and gentlemen, please show your appreciation of our panel today. Gen. Armagno, I’d be grateful for your opening comments.

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

Thank you. Thank you, Jez. Thank you everybody. It is really wonderful to be here, the last panel of AFA. Happy birthday to the Air Force, 75 years old and happy birthday to the Space Force coming up on three. I do want to express my gratitude to the Air & Space Forces Association.

This has been quite a conference and I’m happy to cap it off with this conversation. Thanks for allowing this conversation. When we first started the United States Space Force, one of our first meetings with Gen. Raymond was, “How do we grow a Q Hinote?”

And we all looked around at each other, staring at each other and said, “Well, my gosh, we better start now.” Because of how accomplished you are Q. So, I’m really humbled to share the stage with you. And as we were looking at each other around the table, we were just, “Hey, it ain’t me. It ain’t me.”

But we’re here to talk about the future of Air & Space Forces. So, what is the future of the Space Force and what is the future use of Space Forces? In a word or two, it’s space superiority. That’s what we’re here to build and provide ultimately for the all-domain war fight.

Look, space is booming. It is really exciting. Again, to think about the possibilities of space. Think about Artemis, which is about to launch. The pictures coming back from the James Webb telescope, the establishment of the United States Space Force and U.S. Space Command.

There’s a palpable excitement across our country for the support of space. But there’s a threat, still, a threat looming, and I don’t have to talk to this audience too much about the threatening capabilities that Russia and China are placing on orbit, and the surprising speed at which they are developing these capabilities.

So, the threat will possibly stifle space superiority. In response, what we have started doing as United States Space Force is building resilient architectures. We’re doing this by force designing, deliberately force designing and studying each one of our mission areas to build resilient architectures.

But if you’re going to be superior in the space domain or any domain, resilience isn’t the only thing you need. Resilient forces can be worn down or even destroyed if you don’t have offenses and defenses, if you don’t have allies and partners to go in with.

And if you don’t have amazing Guardians and Airmen to fight the fight, that’s what the United States Space Force is doing it and INR future is space superiority. And what that really means is the ability to take a punch and to continue to fight.

The ability to take a hit in any one of our mission areas, absorb that hit and fight back from the ultimate high ground. The ultimate high ground to us is space. But this isn’t just about space for space’s sake, this is about space integrated in the all-domain fight, air, land, sea, under sea forces plus space, plus cyber.

That is the capability that the United States brings to the fight. We bring our allies with us, but we will be unstoppable. And if we do this right, if we lay the foundation as we are doing with these very capabilities that we’re putting together today and we lay this foundation, we will be unstoppable.

We will achieve space superiority. And as a nation, we’ll be able to deter attack, defend our country when, where, any time, any place against any threat that might come our way.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Thank you Gen. Armagno. Excellent. Especially the allies and partners. But let’s keep going. Gen. Hinote.

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

Jez, it is such an honor to be on the stage with you, and of course with what we have seen between our peoples, the friendship and alliance that we share. And we certainly saw that this last week with the celebration of the life and leadership of the Queen.

And just it means a lot to have the friends, the friendship that we share going forward. So, thank you. And Nina, it’s great to be with you. I’m so excited about being able to share the stage, talk about the future with the Space Force. So, a force that is obviously looking toward the future.

And as I was thinking through what has been a fantastic conference put on by the Air & Space Forces Association, so thank you to the leaders. I think it’s remarkable. The mainstream message is the message of the future, that was not always the case.

And we’ve had great history and we are celebrating 75 years of it, but we have a fantastic future. Sometimes, that doesn’t come across. And the mainstream message from our chief is accelerate change. The mainstream message from our secretary is we have to get after the most important problems that are facing the joint force so we can win.

That is incredible. And I’ll tell you, I’m going to give some feedback back to our industry partners and the people we collaborate with. I am so excited to see industry focused on the future. Every stop that I made, and I made a bunch of them, I’ve been doing a lot of speed dating. I know you have too.

What I have seen is that industry is spending their research dollars well. They’re learning things. They’re failing, even failing and growing. Learning, adapting, that helps tomorrow’s Airmen, that helps tomorrow’s Guardians. And that’s different. And I want to tell you how much I appreciate that on as we call ourselves in Air Force futures, the voice of tomorrow’s Airmen.

Tomorrow’s Airmen thank you for thinking about the future. We’re going to talk more about it. But I just think that that’s just a remarkable characteristic of this extremely successful conference this year.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Thank you, sir. That’s set the scene well. Well, let’s start on the questions. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of literature at the moment, a lot of analysis that’s going into the Ukraine war. And there’s also a lot of speculation about the way the air and space power will go as we move forward.

And in fact, Gen. Hinote, AFA have got their money’s worth from you this week. You’ve been on two panels, I think, to do with Manned-Unmanned Teaming, drones, et cetera. And if you look at the Mitchell podcast, there’s some great Peloton PME there just listening to some of those podcasts.

But what I’d like to ask you is, if we look at this democratization of air power, what were exquisite capabilities now in the hands of possibly anybody. Do you agree with that premise? And do you think it brings real military capability or is there a weak side to it?

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

Jez, great question. Because I think you can actually see that down on the floor where have, what you might call, young entrepreneurial companies that are in essence taking the best of commercial technology and the investments that have been made there and proposing the application of that to the military side.

Where you also have the established defense industry that is spending millions of dollars trying to learn things about technologies that might look like counter infrared or low observable or low probability of intercept communications. These are incredibly important things.

The way that I like to think about it is I do believe in the democratization of air power, we are seeing a revolution in air power. It is not something that is military only. We are going to see the economy of the United States grow due to the democratization of air power. Autonomous flight is going to change a lot of things.

And I hope that we as a country, can reap the full benefit of autonomous flight. If we don’t, other countries would but we’re the leaders in it right now. We ought to do that. I don’t necessarily believe that the role of established defense industry and especially the research that they’re doing at the high-end of warfare is now negated by low-end commercially available technology.

And what I have seen as I’ve gone out and talked to our industry partners and some of the great companies of our country is that there are things that are especially important for military operations going forward. And we are seeing those being matured and being ready to be fielded by these great companies.

And because of that, I think we have to be ambidextrous. I think we have to be able to accept that commercial technology can really help us in a lot of areas, and we need to be good at adapting that and being fast followers into those technologies.

But at the same time, we are still going to need to be able to lead the way in certain technologies. And I’ll give you one that has the potential to be both. And my former boss, Bob Works, has a hypothesis. And the hypothesis is that we cannot be second in the field of Man-Unmanned Teaming and the confluence of Man-Unmanned Teaming and artificial intelligence.

There are commercial sides to that and there are clear military sides to that. And as I walked the floor, I found pieces and parts of both. And I think we can be first in the confluence of Man-Unmanned Teaming and artificial intelligence. But if we’re not, the hypothesis is that China will be and that would not be good for tomorrow’s Airmen, tomorrow’s Guardians.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

And do you see that as a cliff edge? So, if you’re beaten to it, is it a disproportionate amount of time that you have to catch back up?

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

I don’t think there are any cliff edges in the most complex of human endeavors, warfare. I do believe that it would put us at a tremendous disadvantage and our strategy would be the strategy that we have of a denial of aggression by either China or Russia against one of our friends would be put in jeopardy.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Thank you. Gen. Armagno, same question to you. Democratization of space power. We’ve seen it with the use of what were exquisite capabilities in space now commercially available. Your comments, please?

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

I agree with Q. Next question. No, I’m just kidding. The democratization of space. The first time I heard about it was during a presentation by Rand. So, Rand had done a study about what this means, the democratization of space.

And basically, it means that things that used to just be the weapons of space forces or it was the Air Force and space operations are now produced and used not only by commercial companies but for commercial purposes. And once you have access to space, you will not believe the kinds of things that will go into orbit and the kinds of things that space will deliver for us as a nation beyond military means.

But what we’re seeing in Ukraine is absolutely stunning. We as a space force have, in our recently architectures, we talk about that being layered and hybrid and distributed and diverse. One of the layers, if you will, we’ve been contemplating very seriously is commercial.

And the questions always was as we’re debating this and deliberating, will commercial be there when the bullets start flying? Will commercial be in the fight? If they don’t have to be, will they turn tail? And my gosh, you don’t see that at all, Maxar.

And anytime you turn on your new source of choice, there’s Maxar. And the photographs they’re providing to the Ukrainians from space. Their photographs from their capabilities, and they’re figuring out how to get that information down to the ground in the war fighters that need it faster and faster and faster.

I met with them this week. They’re not scared. They’re under threat. They’re under threat by Russia. Viasat’s been jammed, SpaceX has been jammed. These companies are not scared. They’re not turning tail. They are in the fight with us. And one quick story about SpaceX.

You heard that they had gotten jammed and their Starlink constellations, they’re trying to use Starlink to supply communications and other data to Ukrainian forces. Well, they started getting jammed by Russia. And what did they do? They went into Ukraine and started fielding essentially transceivers.

And I was just surprised by this. This is a commercial company going into a war zone. I got to talk to Gen. O’Shaughnessy about this who recently retired but now is working with SpaceX. And I said, “Gen. O’Shaughnessy, how in the world did you get people to volunteer to go into a war zone and then place these transceivers, this ground equipment?”

I said, “How in the world did you do it?” He said, “Well, we asked for volunteers.” And I said, “How many volunteers?” And he said, “Everyone volunteered.” Everyone. These are partners. These are partners for the future. Thanks.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Excellent. I’d like to dig just a tiny a bit more into what we’re seeing from Ukraine and then we’ll move on. But Gen. Hinote, you recently commented that mutual, and this was fantastically controversial it turned out, commented that mutual denial of air superiority may be enough to turn enemy in the future. Could you explain this observation and give us some insight into how the status quo could be broken if no side is able to dominate the airspace?

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

Well Jez, thank you for that question. It did earn me the accusation of being heretical by some folks out there. And I guess, my solace is that Billy Mitchell was accused of heresy too. And so, what I would say is Billy Mitchell’s most famous book is titled Winged Defense.

The entire first section of that book makes the argument that the United States needs an independent air arm to accomplish what you might call air and maritime denial around the United States. I believe in the context of what the Atlantic Council put out and what we’re talking about, the words defense and denial are very similar.

And in fact, our doctrine talks about that superiority in the domain. Nina, even talked about this in space, requires both offense and defense. And in fact, we talk about offensive counterair all the time. Our doctrine absolutely agrees that defensive counterair is important.

And in fact, our doctrine even suggests that we may not be allowed to do the full range of offensive counterair emissions, do the political restraints. And that means we better be good at defense. Now, let’s think about the situation in Ukraine. Here’s what I think I know. Nobody gave them a shot.

They denied Russian air over their territory using asymmetric means. We might have helped them, others might have helped them, but they did it. They’ve been good defenders. I think it saved their country. I don’t think any of us gave them a shot to being here right now.

I think the denial of air superiority over their country was fantastically consequential. They have not been conducting large scale offensive counter era into Russian territory. They’re still playing. They’re still strategically viable. They could win. Nobody thought that was possible.

If this is something that is happening today, the worst thing we could do as Airmen is to ignore the evidence in front of us. So, young Airmen leaders, young Guardian leaders, what I want to ask you and what I want to inspire you on, don’t let the established way of thinking, getting the way, your way of questioning what you see.

Critical thinking is incredibly important for the Air Force and the Space Force. Without it, our solutions become brittle. I think there is a reason why the joint war fighting concept is an air and space concept, that didn’t just happen. I think there’s a reason why the National Defense Strategy is an air and space strategy that didn’t just happen.

The view from above is important in today’s world, but we can’t let it grow stale. So, young leaders, I ask you and I invite you to think to see what the evidence is, to form hypotheses about it, to talk with your friends about it and not to allow the established ways of thinking get in your way of creating a better tomorrow.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Thank you, sir. Put that one to rest. That’s perfect. Gen. Armagno, we’ve seen from recent Russian ASAT activity that not only do some powers appear to have a laissez-faire attitude to maintaining status quo in space, but that they also have no respect for the safe use of space. Can you discuss the consequences of mutual denial of space?

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

I think that if space were to be mutually denied, it would be different than air being mutually denied in one specific way. I think it would lead to the destruction of the entire domain. When an air platform is denied, it either lands or, God forbid, gets shot down.

When a space platform is denied, it’s most likely destroyed, especially how you led the question with ASAT. Anti-satellite capabilities today are destructive and we saw that back in last November with the Russian destructive ASAT test where just surprisingly, unbelievably, they destroyed one of their own satellites causing 1,500 pieces of debris that we’re still tracking.

And so, that’s one target. Think about multiple targets in various orbits and destructive capabilities that currently exist. I mean, we can talk about their missile ASAT capabilities. We can talk about jamming and lazing and such, but both them and China have a significant number of military ASATs.

And if they take out a significant number of our capabilities in various orbits in the space domain, I fear it could destroy the very domain that we’re trying to operate in. And the consequences, of course, will ripple down to every other domain that uses the space domain and the exquisite capabilities that we provide on a daily basis to the American public and to our joint war fighting partners.

So, to me, a better way to think about it is how do we deter, not only by establishing space superiority and proving that we have the military might, but how do we also deter by talking about and establishing norms of behavior and rules of engagement and things that we can talk about now internationally with our partners and other space faring nations to establish some rules.

So, that when those rules start getting encroached upon, it’s almost like a signal or a flashpoint that tells us, okay, now, we can start pointing fingers or accusing or moving on maneuvers from another country rather than waiting for a destructive attack. And again, the very domain will be unusable. So, we need to start by communicating, talking and establishing international rules.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Thank you. Gen. Hinote, fifth, sixth-gen technology, so that’s the future for the U.S. Air Force. Mass and agile combat employment with that technology appear to be competing force design concepts, and that you need runways, you need to be able to maintain the logs supply lane to these particular capabilities. What challenges do you see configuring a fifth, six-gen force to conduct ACE? And do you see these challenges being different in the Indo-Paycom and EUCOM AORs?

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

It’s a good question. And of course, agile combat employment is something that we have postulated is very important both for the European Theatre and for the Pacific Theatre. And I do think they’re different. I believe that we have many more runways available to us in Europe.

The adversary has fewer missiles to shoot at those runways. And there’s quite a bit of ability to get logistics through landlines of communication. And the combination of that means that ACE is especially potent in the European Theatre. We saw that and that NATO had been practicing ACE at the beginning or before the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.

And it did help us as we were generating air power on NATO’s eastern flank. The situation in the Pacific is different because of the amount of water and the islands. There’s fewer runways. China has many more missiles than Russia does to be able to target those runways. And the logistics lines go over the ocean.

So, because of that, the challenge is more than just ACE, it’s ACE plus something else. It’s ACE plus logistics under attack. It’s ACE plus active defense. And so, I think that one of the things we see as being an absolute joint requirement going forward is that the passive defensive ACE is not enough in the Pacific.

There has to be an active component of defense. And back in the ’80s, there was a great compromise between the Air Force and the Army. The Air Force took the air-based cruise missile and integrated air and missile defense. The Army took the ground-based portion of that.

And of course, by implication, the Navy had the maritime-based part of that. What we see is that the vulnerability of fixed infrastructure in the Pacific is a joint problem. There are depots that are in jeopardy of being hit. There are ports that are in jeopardy of being hit.

Certainly, there are runways that are. And so, what that means, I believe, is that the joint force has to re-double its efforts on integrated air and missile defense. I think in the Air Force we have to do our part, the air-based version of that. I think the army needs to step up and do more in the area of ground-based air defense. The missile defense agency has to step up in creating hypersonic defense. And all of that has to come together in order to make ACE viable in the Pacific.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Gen. Armagno.

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

And I think there’s a space layer that, and cyber, that enables and supports not only the exquisite data that you need from for precision navigation, timing, communications, early warning of those attacks. Our new missile tracking layer will be able to track the hypersonics and report.

That space layer is very crucial to ACE and really any other services, priority strategies that are out there or and priority future capabilities that are being built. And what we have to do is, I probably will sound like a broken record, but our resilient architectures are going to be a piece of it so that we can take a punch and keep providing that good information.

Offenses and defenses that we develop. But all this has to be now integrated into operational plans or O-plans, the war fighting plans that each COCOM is responsible for, integrated into global campaigning so we can put together all domain type of capabilities to campaign together to deter Russia and China.

And ultimately, it’s for the protection and defense of our nation. I mean, the National Defense Strategy calls upon all forces and all services to come together for the, ends ways means, the ends are defense of the homeland, deterring aggression and being able to fight and win when called upon, that’s the ends.

The ways, the Air Force talks about ACE as a way. And the Space Force talks about air superiority as a way to an integrated deterrence, where a piece of integrated deterrents, which is all levers of national power coming together, not just military but diplomatic information and economic coming together to deter aggression against the United States of America. So, we’re there too.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Thank you. I’d like to pick you up on a comment you made earlier about how important the Guardians are, how important the people are for an organization. And it’s interesting that space has hit the limelight again because of things like the James Webb Space Telescope, SpaceX, the Space Force TV series, which was excellent, but it got scrap, sadly. How is the U.S. Space Force exploiting this interest to ensure it is able to attract future generations to serve in the Space Force and pursue a career?

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

I tell everybody if that Netflix would have 10 years, if they had just come to me for material. I’m the Director of Staff, believe me, there’s a lot going on that we could make quite a series out of. But Guardians and attracting, you’re talking about attracting talent, which I think has been a theme this week as well.

We’re all almost in competition for talent. We want the best and brightest across our country to join the Space Force. Just like I’m sure Q wants the best and brightest to join the United States Air Force. We’ve written a strategy, it’s called the Guardian Ideal. We’re trying to make it real, put it on a path to success with implementation pieces along the way.

But essentially, that strategy talks about attracting the best and brightest, recruiting them, retaining them, which is also a challenge I think for not only the Space Force but other services and probably industry, Retention in those middle years and then taking a Guardian all the way to a successful retirement.

We are working on something called a single component, which is legislation that we’re working on with Congress. Our concept is to bring active duty and reserve together. So, this would be, yes, the Air Force reserves who do space operations, bring together to create a single component. And this way, we can create flexibility for Guardians.

Guardians who may want to go have a family or someone wants to maybe finish a master’s degree that requires lab work or requires a lot of your time away from your job. Guardians who may want to go off and try some time in industry and then come back with that new information and new experiences and talents that can feed again back into the United States Space Force.

We’re working on these kinds of concepts. We just hired our first direct hire. She is a cyber operator and she came from industry. We made her directly a first lieutenant in the United States Space Force. Her name is Jessica Thompson. She’s an OTS right now.

And we plan to have many more direct hires, just like the Air Force does, where you bring over a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer. We’re looking at that concept as well for the Space Force. And that will bring unique talent over to the Space Force as well.

And just one other thing, university partnership program is an effort to partner with universities and academia across the country. We have signed our 14th UPP memorandum of agreement. It’s a win-win for the Space Force. It’s a chance to recruit and teach people about the Space Force and get them excited to potentially come and join the Space Force.

Each one of these UPPP schools has Air Force ROTC, which is a big piece of the program, but they also do research. And it’s not just the technical research that we get from labs and programs like GTRI, Georgia Tech Research Institute or MIT Lincoln Labs. But it’s also strategic problems that they’re going to help us solve.

They want to help us do research with the most difficult strategic questions we have. The Sam Nunn School, for example, is clamoring for topics to help us and complex problems to help us solve. So, I mean, honestly, the future is bright and Guardians are the secret sauce. They are not afraid of Russia or China. They are all in and ready to fight.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Thank you. Gen. Hinote, we’ve literally got two minutes. Anything to add to that in terms of bringing in people maybe laterally from industry?

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

Thank you, Jez. I do want to follow up on that. And something that I think that we have seen in Air Force futures that I’d like to share with you. As Nina talks about the importance of creating a single component, what I hear about that is the importance of treating Airmen and Guardians in ways that allow them great choice within their careers.

And I see that as being something we are either going to do in the Air Force or we will accept who we get in the Air Force. We are in a competition for talent. It’s a rough competition. It will get rougher. And we need to be able to offer flexibility to be able to help each Airman be who they want to be and reach their full potential.

What we see is there’s a very interesting connection between full-time service inside of the Air Force, the Space Force, the Army, wherever, and time away. That was not the model for us. But you can see it in people, especially in our reserve component who have had that opportunity.

They offer something different. And I would offer, they represent the American people pretty well. If we are going to be the air and space force that reflect the best of America, and I believe we will, I would like to see the opportunity for Airmen to have full-time service and do some great things in the uniform.

But also, to have the opportunity to go outside the uniform and do things that they see in their unique journey that help them become who they want to be. And oh, by the way, they’ll bring that back in. And we benefit in Air Force futures and I know the Space Force benefits from the experience that comes back in.

And it’s not just the experience of going from base to base to base to base to base, it’s the experience of doing different things of starting a company, of getting a PhD, of going out and working in a very different way and coming back in, that’s what America was founded upon.

We were citizen soldiers at one time. And I would like to see the Ar Space Forces reflect that, because I believe in the best of America and I believe as we look to the future, if we could bring that idea of back and forth, it would be powerful, powerful for our future.

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

It’s an utter disaster, we’ve run out of time. But your comments were nothing short of a triumph and it’s always a privilege to go and have the opportunity to not only ask you questions, but to listen to what you said. Thank you very much for participating

in this, the last panel at AFA 2022. And I’d like to invite you, ladies and gentlemen, please to join me in a round of applause for our panelists.

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

Thank you.

AFSOC’s MC-130Hs Grounded by Cracked Parts Along With ACC, AMC Fleets

Oct. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Air Force Special Operations Command’s fleet of MC-130H Combat Talon IIs, used for infiltration, exfiltration, and resupply of special operations forces, has been grounded due to the same cracked propeller parts that led Air Mobility Command to keep its C-130H fleet from flying.

AFSOC spokesperson Lt. Col. Rebecca Heyse confirmed the grounding to Air & Space Forces Magazine on Oct. 6, saying the major command had inspected its MC-130Hs in accordance with the safety time compliance technical order (TCTO) issued by AMC.

Those inspections revealed that the MC-130Hs had cracked propeller barrels, Heyse said.

“We are working with AMC to determine timelines on fixes,” Heyse said in a statement. “The Air Force has been able to mitigate operational impacts with other aircraft.”

The issue was first discovered by AMC during a “post-depot operation engine run check” at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, Ga., when a maintenance crew discovered a leak from one of the propellers. A further inspection found a crack in the propeller barrel assembly, and the same issue was subsequently discovered in two more propeller assemblies.

AFSOC is now the third command to confirm its aircraft have been grounded by the issue—AMC has said up to 116 C-130Hs could be affected, while Air Combat Command previously told Air & Space Forces Magazine that its fleet of seven EC-130Hs and one trainer TC-130H had also been inspected and weren’t flying while the service looked to “prioritize serviceable propellers based on requirements as quickly as possible while ensuring the safety of our aircrews.”

According to the most recent data, AFSOC has 10 MC-130Hs in its fleet. The Combat Talon II can provide mobility and tanker capabilities and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2021 as part of the withdrawal and evacuation from Kabul.

AFSOC is in the process of replacing the MC-130H with the MC-130J Commando II, just as AMC is replacing its C-130Hs with C-130Js. All C-130J variants are unaffected by the propeller barrel issue, as they have been outfitted with the newer NP2000 propellers.

Some C-130Hs have also been upgraded from the older 54H60 propellers, which date back to the 1970s. It’s been a ongoing, years-long process. In 2019, USAF officials noted in a congressional hearing that some of those propellers were prone to cracking. Collins Aerospace, which produces the eight-bladed NP2000, noted in a 2021 release that the Air Force has ordered upgrades for 83 C-130Hs.

The Air Force may look to speed up those upgrades to get C-130Hs flying again.

“Accelerating NP2000 production and installation is one of multiple avenues we are pursuing to resume operations as soon as possible,” AMC spokesperson Maj. Beau Downey told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

DC’s Air & Space Museum to Reopen With T-38 Exhibit Honoring ‘Jackie’ Cochran

Oct. 7, 2022 | By Chris Gordon

The T-38 Talon was the world’s first supersonic jet trainer. Airmen and astronauts have flown it. It entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 1961, and nearly 1,200 were produced.

After more than six decades, the venerable trainer finally has a replacement in the T-7 Red Hawk. It also gets a place in the world’s premiere aerospace museum thanks to a remarkable female pioneer.

When the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., reopens to the public Oct. 14, it will showcase a T-38 for the first time. The Smithsonian received the plane from the Air Force in 2004. It was stored outside of public view but was recently restored and briefly displayed at the museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., to prepare it for its place in the nation’s capital.

The T-38 has remained a stalwart of Air Force training. The Thunderbirds used it—the Air Force’s aerial demonstration team. Hardly cast off, the aircraft has served the Air Force well into the 21st century, but the airframes are aged, and its characteristics do not suit the skills required of pilots of the Air Force’s current fighters and bombers.

But the T-38 has always been fast.

“This Trainer Can GO, GO, GO!” Air Force Magazine proclaimed in March 1961. The epithet is now quoted on a massive video screen behind the museum’s T-38.

That speed was why Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran chose the aircraft to set eight aviation world records in 1961, including a speed record of 844.2 miles per hour over a 15km oval course Aug. 24, 1961. Those records are painted under the aircraft’s canopy.

Records set by Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran are displayed on the side of a T-38 Talon at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Staff photo by Chris Gordon.

With many T-38s in existence, the National Air & Space Museum is selective when it adds to its collection. When the aircraft flow by Cochran became available, they chose it for a prominent role in the redesigned building on the National Mall, one of the world’s most visited museums.

“It has qualifications as an exciting design and record-setting design on its own,” Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the museum, told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Then you add Jackie Cochran to it and all her legacy.”

Cochran, nicknamed the “Speed Queen,” was a pioneer of women’s aviation. She became the first woman to break the sound barrier in 1953 while flying the Canadian variant of the F-86 Sabre.

Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran is pictured in the cockpit of a Canadair F-86 with Chuck Yeager. Photo courtesy Air Force Flight Test Center History Office.

Born in the Florida panhandle, Cochran wanted a more prosperous life. She became a hairdresser in New York City.

“She was determined to make a life for herself, to become someone of note,” Cochrane said. “Then, because she was in the cosmetic and hairdressing business, she rubbed elbows down at Palm Beach, Fla., with some very wealthy people down there.”

Cochran met Floyd Odlum, a financier who was involved in aviation. They married in 1936. Oldlum suggested Cochran use the glamor of flying to market her business.

“She was so good at it, so adept at it, that it became her driving force,” Cochrane said. “Her business was fine. It flourished for years. But then her business was setting records. And being the best pilot out there.”

Cochran was more than just a daredevil. As World War II broke out, the U.S. military was unsure if it could find enough men to be pilots. Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, turned to Cochran.

“In that emergency, I called in Jacqueline Cochran, who had herself flown almost everything with wings and several times had won air races from men who now are general officers of the Air Forces,” Arnold said in a speech in 1944. “I asked her to draw a plan for the training and the use of American women pilots.”

The program, which eventually became the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), was a massive success. It trained about 1,100 pilots for wartime service, with Cochran at the head. It played a crucial role in the war effort, as women ferried aircraft from production facilities, towed targets for live-fire training, and served as instructors. Thirty-eight women died in service.

Technically, the women were government civil service employees and were not entitled to any military benefits or honors. The women lobbied for the WASP to be militarized, which Arnold strongly supported.

However, male pilots pushed back, and the media and Congress soon piled on. In the face of public backlash, the program ended in December 1944.

“If ever there was a doubt in anyone’s mind that women can become skillful pilots, the WASP have dispelled that doubt,” Arnold told the last WASP school graduates on Dec. 7, 1944.

The Air Force did not allow female pilots until 1976. In 1977, WASP members received retroactive military status.

After the war, Cochran turned her attention back to civil flight and attempted to set more records, which she did in 1961 at the age of 55 in the T-38 that will now be on display.

A T-38 Talon flown by Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran is displayed at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Staff photo by Chris Gordon.

“Her goal that at that point was to set these records,” Cochrane said. “The T-38 was what she chose because it’s so fast and nimble.”

Cochran died in 1980 as a retired Air Force Reserve colonel and a recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

“When she died, she had more records than any man or woman at the time—speed, altitude, distance,” Cochrane, the curator, said. “Because that’s what she did. She loved speed. She loved to set records.”

Watch, Read: ‘One Team, One Fight: A Force Multiplier’

Oct. 7, 2022

Retired Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Kaleth Wright leads a discussion with Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost, commander of U.S. Transportation Command; Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, superintendent of the U.S. Air Force Academy; and Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas, commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service on “One Team, One Fight: A Force Multiplier” on 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:

And now please welcome to the podium, the 18th Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Kaleth Wright.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

All right, well good afternoon teammates. It’s good to be back amongst so many familiar faces and even some new faces. Today’s panel is titled, One Team One Fight, A Force Multiplier. So today we’re going to talk a little bit about diversity, equity and inclusion. And so let me begin by introducing our panel members. On my far left, we have Major General Ed Thomas, who is the Commander of Air Force Recruiting Service and he’ll be talking about diversity, equity and inclusion from a recruiting lens.

Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas:

Thanks, Chief.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

We also have Lieutenant General Rich Clark, who is the Superintendent of the US Air Force Academy and he’ll pick … Okay. Yep. And he’ll pick up the discussion from a developmental and building the force perspective, General Clark.

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

Thanks sir.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

And finally we have General Jackie Van Ovost, who is the Commander of US Transportation Command. And she’ll be making linkages to both the operational and strategic imperatives for having a more diverse and inclusive joint force. I think this promises to be a very informative panel. So thank you all for attending. Let’s start to the discussion with each of our panel members and just providing their perspective. So, General Thomas.

Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas:

Hey, Chief Wright. Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here, pleasure to be with you again. One of my wingman and battle buddies here in my last assignment, General Van Ovost and General Clark, humbled to be on the panel with you.

There are so many things that I would love to be able to say about recruiting and how we get after recruiting and diversity, but I’m going to try to keep it brief. Let me start with this. Back in 2017, I was on a trip with the Chief of the Secretary going through the Middle East and we had a New York Times author and columnist, Tom Friedman, that was on the trip with me, I’ve really gotten to know Tom well over the years. And I got to see our Air Force, after at the time having been in it close to 30 years, through just a little bit different lens. And to have this civilian on the trip watching the kind of Airmen that we had all throughout the theater, whether it was Al Udeid or Al Dhafra in Afghanistan or Iraq.

And he was visibly moved and humbled by the kinds of Airmen that we had from all walks of life. And he came out of that trip just a little bit amazed at how they all came together, even as our nation dealt with issues that were divisive, he didn’t see any of that out on the front lines or in the theater. And he compared it to our traditional US motto, “E Pluribus Unum”, out of many, one. And he described these Airmen from all demographics, from all walks of life, how they pulled together and how they made one American clenched fist for the nation. And it was refreshing to me to see our Air Force again through this lens of an outsider and what it meant.

So from my perspective, leading recruiting for our Air Force and our Space Force, let me just real quickly, just give you two whys. The first is, why recruiting? This is the easiest and the simplest. Because I would argue that recruiting the best and the brightest Airmen from around the country is the single most significant factor in combat radius. That’s the first one. Okay. So the one that’s been a little bit harder and it’s been an interesting journey over the past couple years, explaining this to people and helping them understand it is, why diversity? “Okay, recruiting I get, but why does diversity matter?” Well, I’ll tell you in my mind, there there’s two key reasons. Some of this you can look at as idealistic or pragmatic, I think it’s both as the recruiting commander, very pragmatic for me.

Generation Z is the most diverse generation ever in American history. So if we’re going to get after and recruit the best of our citizens from all across the United States, the only way we’re going to be able to do that is to be able to do intensive outreach and be able to connect in meaningful ways with folks from all across America in every demographic. And we have to be deliberate about it. That’s the combat readiness piece of it.

The second piece of it, as we serve, we’re in a military who serves in a democracy. We serve the American people. So from a historical, from a military sociological perspective, if we do not look like the country we serve eventually, including our rated, including our leadership ranks, that’s going to eventually be, that’s going to be a problem. And not only do we risk having the best, most combat ready Airmen, because we’ve truly pulled out and called the best, we also risk a further division in our nation where we’re already struggling with somewhat of a sieve mill gap.

Okay, I’ll just end with this though. The best thing we still have going that excites me every day, that makes me love my job, I’ve got one of the best jobs in the United States Air Force, is we’ve got an unbeatable value proposition. We’ve got an unmatched opportunity for people to come join us, to come be part of something bigger than themselves and be part of that American clenched fist. Back to you Chief.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

All right. Thank you, General Thomas. General Clark.

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

Okay. Well, thank you Ed. And General, it’s so good to be back up here with you as well, two long time friends, real honor. And certainly Chief Kaleth Wright, everybody’s hero. So it’s great to be here. Thank you, Chief.

So from USAFA perspective, diversity and inclusion has to be woven throughout everything that we do and that is an imperative for us. And when we talk about our priorities at the academy, I think that’s probably the best way to share with you just how important it is, not only to us but our Air Force, our Space Force, our country as we’re developing leaders. And our number one priority has always been to develop leaders of character. That’s the number one, that I say, the prime directive of the Air Force Academy.

And when we talk about developing leaders of character, we start with our core values, right? Integrity first, service before self, excellence in all we do. But there’s an ancient Chinese philosopher who really helped us to line this up with a quote that I’m sure many of you are familiar with but it starts with, “Your thoughts become words, your words become actions, your actions become habits, your habits become character and your character’s your destiny.” And we have to start with character.

So when we think about the thoughts and the words of integrity, service and excellence, they lead us to the actions and habits that we want to see from our cadets. So for, when we talk about integrity first, that leads us to honorable living. People that live honorably in everything they do, no matter what it is, where they are, whether someone’s looking or not, they live in an honorable way.

When we talk about service before self, we want to see a leader that lifts other people to be their best possible selves. No matter what they look like. Whether they look like them, come from the same city, country, wherever it is, we want those people to lift everybody else around them, even if it means that they have to sacrifice themselves to be their best possible selves.

And when we talk about excellence in all we do, that’s about elevating our performance. Every day we have to be better today than we were yesterday. And that means that we have to look at our team as a whole and help our teams get better by creative thought, by innovation, by doing the things that diverse teams bring to the fight. And it’s scientifically proven that diverse teams make better decisions, that they can think more creatively and innovatively. So, developing leaders of character is first and foremost, and diversity and inclusion is core to that.

Our second primary, our priority, is to ensure that we are preparing our leaders for future conflict. They have to be able to go out, not just five years from now, but 15 or 25 years from now, to be able to fight and win our wars as warriors. They have to solve problems that we don’t even know about yet. They have to be able to present problems to our adversary that they won’t be able to handle. But in order for us to be able to do that, we have to be able to, just like General Thomas just talked about, we have to be able to glean talent from across our country. We have 435 congressional districts, diverse districts that we have to bring the best of the best in. And it is a strategic imperative for us to be able to do that, to bring them into our academy so that they can be a part of a team that understands what it means to lead into the future.

But here’s the thing, if our cadets don’t understand, if they don’t understand how to lead people that don’t look like them or think like them, our country is only getting more diverse every day. And if we want to fight with 30 or 40% of our population, then let’s keep doing that. But if we want to use 100% of America’s power, then we have to be ready to lead with all of America. If we’re going to defend America, we need to look like America. So that is the number, the second priority that we have to be prepared for future conflict.

And the third one is to inspire a culture of dignity and respect. And that is something that encapsulates everything about diversity and inclusion, but really just about being a leader and about being a great fighting force. And diversity or dignity and respect is something that we instill in our cadets from day one. But I had a video that I wanted to show you, because I could give you a hundred words, but in two minutes I can really show you what we believe about dignity and respect. And I hope that that video is teed up so that we can show it to you. Is that possible? It is.

Video:

We don’t rise every morning and hope to do the same things we did yesterday. We don’t resolve to remain the same. Our minds expand with every person we meet, every place we travel and every time we step outside of our comfort zone. The more we grow, the farther we dare to go. The only question is, how far will that be?

We come to the Air Force Academy because we want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. We want to be challenged like never before. We don’t expect it to be easy, we don’t even want easy. In 1955, Air Force Secretary Harold E. Talbit said, “The academy is a bridge to the future.” This bridge is not laid out in front of us like a red carpet, it’s a long blue line started by the cadets who have come before us. We look to it to see how far we’ve come, but also to acknowledge how much farther we have to go.

As a nation, we’ve always fought for freedom, but we still struggle to guarantee equality. We’ve seen what happens when we fail to listen to each other and worse, when we don’t even try. Our academy is not perfect either.,Our history is proof. Until the seventies, we only had a handful of cadets of color in any class. It took 20 years and a presidential order for us to admit our first woman. Some of us have experienced racism or heard inappropriate jokes in our halls. These failures weaken that long blue line. Where we go from here is up to us, because with every failure there’s opportunity. So let’s take a long hard look at ourselves, have the tough conversations and lead the way. The more willing we are to understand and respect backgrounds and beliefs that are different from our own, the stronger we’ll become. This ideal is not a finish line, it’s a north star we follow.

The faces around here have changed over the years, but our graduates have always inspired others. They have fought bravely in wars, stood on Olympic podiums, served in Congress and flown in space. These achievements are a testament to our own potential and inspire us to aim higher. Soon we will have the opportunity to be the new faces leading the way and they will be the most diverse to date. Some call that progress, but it’s just the beginning, because we can’t represent the best of America if we don’t look like America. We can’t defend the rights of every citizen if we don’t stand up for the rights of our fellow cadets. If one of us is disrespected, we are all disrespected.

The academy is a pillar of leadership. Airman have led our society before and we must lead the way today. We have the power to shape what the Air Force and Space Force become, our fellow Airmen and Guardians are counting on it. It’s an incredible honor, but an even bigger responsibility. The academy helps cadets to live honorably and to become the leaders our country needs. It’s up to us to show the world who that is. We’re taught to always look to the future, but first we need to recognize where we are right now. We can’t move forward without looking at where we stand. So let’s stand for each other before anything else. The more we treat each other with dignity and respect, the higher we’ll rise. They say it’s lonely at the top, but we wouldn’t know because we’re all up here together.

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

Nice.

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

So I’ll end there, but I just want to say one more time, those priorities, developing leaders of character, preparing for future conflict and inspiring a culture of dignity and respect. Thank you. All right. Ma’am.

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

That’s nice. Yeah. Gerald Clark, Major Thomas, wingmen. And I know you were all here on the late session on a Tuesday to see Kaleth Wright though, and that’s actually why I came as well. So what a great video. I don’t have a video, I have a slide. But first of all, thanks for an opportunity to come up here and talk a little bit about the effects of diversity inclusion to the joint force and frankly to our allies and partners. As I think about lethality, that is the bottom line for diversity, equity and inclusion a lethal, agile and resilient joint force. But a joint force that can manage the strategic environment and these complex situations, as General Clark talked about, that we need all these diverse minds to get after in these diverse experiences.

But I’ll take it a level further because we have to be able to integrate with our allies and partners. If we don’t understand our own culture and our own people and our own development, how is it that we can be that shining beacon on a hill? And how can we better and how we have to do integrated deterrents and increased relationships and interoperability with our allies and partners if we can’t lead ourselves, right? Because they represent those different cultures.

So, I wanted to talk about, throughout histories there are plenty of battles where the military force lost because they did not represent the people, the nation, the tribe that they fought for. And I commend you to a book from Jason Lyle, where he, it was called Divided Armies. And he looked back in the last 200 years on battles around the globe. And what he did, was he linked the citizen status within the nation and in their military to battlefield performance. So it was very interesting and I commend you to read it, but spoiler alert, internal discrimination leads to battlefield defeat. You don’t see any of those results when you have a more inclusive force. So that’s what we want to avoid, is over time if we don’t have that diverse, recruit and train, we could be in for failure into the future. So it is a strategic imperative that we have and raise an army that is reflective of our nation and reflects the core value for which our nation was founded. Around the world we’re looked at to be that beacon and we need to act that way.

So, I want to think about, how is it that, concretely, that we’re watching how diverse and frankly all of our actions we’ve been taking to ensure that diverse communities are more welcome and that we remove friction areas and we have a better understanding of what they’re like when they’re in the force and how we have to develop them. So a couple of [inaudible 00:18:38], we have seen results at the strategic, operational and tactical level.

So I’m going to start with one tactical level from the female side. Lieutenant Colonel Melissa Donbrick, and I think we may have a slide if we could. She’s an OMSAD scholar and she was the first American, much less woman, to graduate from the University of Rabat in Morocco. So courageous to go into that culture and get a master’s degree. She then became the 76 Airlift Squadron Commander. And during her pregnancy she wanted to fly for Operation Allies Refuge. So she sought a waiver and got the waiver to fly. And not only did she fly in and supported the missions, she was also the air boss pulling midnight shifts managing the flow into Ramstein Air Force base. So here we have an Airman that not just provided readiness to her unit, but she provided one heck of example of a leader in a contested environment that’s making a difference.

And speaking of making a difference, on a side note, you should ask her what her experiences were like between her first child and her second child. And between those two times, we instituted a lot of policies to support women and pregnancy and maternity flight suits and hair and fitness that made her experiences completely different. So someone who really can appreciate all of those policies we’ve worked together and that’s just in [inaudible 00:20:12] on the women’s initiative team. But we’re working, [inaudible 00:20:15] analysis working groups all the time and they are making a difference. And I thank all of you have been involved in those.

And now let me talk about at the strategic level. So it’s not just in the Air Force, across the Department of Defense we have a program called Women, Peace and Security and we’ve deployed gendered advisors to support the Afghan refugees flow, really to communicate and support them as they were going through the process. And this program is led by the combatant commands. So we send out officer enlisted leaders to go to different countries to help them understand better how to manage all of their resources and how to be more effective as a team in leadership. And it’s making a difference. We send out from the Air Force and what I do in AMC, they send out MCSs that do that work. But Chad, Ghana, El Salvador, it’s making a huge difference.

Again, it’s American leadership and when we can do it right here, we are that beacon and we can translate and show those policies and show them the way that they can do it. Indeed, we have a very strong program in South America and just last week in Columbia they announced that their next senior enlisted advisor to the chief of defense is a female. That’s a huge step there. And they get support when they see our policies, we do workshops to show them how to fix things, to make a fulfilling career in the military for them, not just with women but all of their minority groups. So it’s really great, it provides us opportunities, again, to thicken those relationships with our allies and partners because they are our strategic advantage.

And just like we want to use a 100% of what is in America, we want to use a 100% of what our allies and partners can bring to the fight every day and it truly makes a difference. So as I think about, it takes this team from recruiting all the way to force development to continued development in your career, to then showing our allies and partners what it is we can do. And that’s the value factor for what we’re talking about. So thanks. Thanks here Wright.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

All right, thank you. So General Clark, in the video, amazing video by the way, so thank you for sharing with us. At one point it said, “If one of us is disrespected, we’re all disrespected.” And I was wondering if you could share a personal story of when you were disrespected and how you handled it?

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

I get disrespected every day, but let me… No, but-

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

Your kids do?

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

… Yeah. No, my kids are gone, I’m still getting disrespected. But no, I think about Chief, think back to pilot training and there was an incident there that I started out, out of the academy, I had a great team that I was studying with, that we had a study group that we shared. And one night we decided we were just going to take a break, play some cards, hang out a little bit and we were at another guy’s house, one of our fellow students and his wife brought out their dog and the dog’s name was Rudy. And I said, “Hey, why Rudy?” And she goes, “Oh, we named her after Rudy on the Cosby Show.” And one of the guys that was in my study group said, “Rudy, from the Cosby Show, she’s just a ugly old…” N-word. And I was like, “Did he just say that?” And it was, at first it shocked me, but then the next thought that went through my mind was homicide. I was thinking, “I think I have to take action here.”

But I took a breath and I stepped back and I said, “I can’t believe you just said that.” And he said, “Oh, don’t take it so personally.” And of course I was the only black man, only black person sitting around the table and we had a couple words, I won’t repeat them. And then I said, “I have to go.” And I left. And from that point on, I couldn’t be a part of that study group anymore. And that, in the early stages of pilot training is detrimental. But then two of the guys that were sitting around the table came to me later and said, “Hey man, we should have said something there, but we want you to come back into the study group.” And I thought, “I can’t, not while he’s there.” And they said, “He’s not going to be there, but we want you to be there. Come back into the group.” And it just, for them to reach out and pull me back in and to realize the wrong that was done there meant everything to me and I remembered that.

Fast forward to 2003, I’m a Squadron Commander and we deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom, B-One Squadron. And I’m in my tent one day and we had built our crews very deliberately and I had a crew with one of our amazing instructor pilots, I’ll just say her name was Tank, just to keep names out of this. But her name was Tank. Tank was fantastic. And she had a wizo on her crew that was an older guy who I had known for a long time. And one day that wizo came into my tent and he said, “Hey Rich, I can’t fly on this crew. I can’t fly with a woman in combat because I don’t buy into that, I don’t agree with that and I just want you to move me to a different crew.” And I started getting this hot feeling in my head and I’m thinking, “Man, this is going to be my first combat kill because I’m about to do this guy in.”

But then I thought about it and I had two choices. It would’ve been real easy just to move him to another crew and nobody would’ve been, nobody would’ve known. But I think back to those guys that stood up for me when I needed someone to step up and say, “That’s wrong.” And I said, “No man, I’m not moving you off that crew and you have two choices.” I said, “You can either go home with paperwork that describes your dereliction of duty or you can fly the mission as stated. And I will tell you this, that you’re on the crew with Tank for a reason, because she’s going to save your life.” And he said, “Oh. Don’t…” And I said, “No, those are your choices.” And he said, “Well, I didn’t mean for it to get all like that.” And he left and he flew a Tank.

Well, two days later they flew on a mission. And in that mission, first when they took off they had an engine problem, they had to circle back and land the airplane. And while they circled back, Tank arranged for a spare aircraft to be brought up, they left that aircraft that they were in, they moved to a spare aircraft, they took off, they had troops and contact, they delivered their full load of 24 joint direct attack munitions and they probably saved 50 to a hundred lives because there was, during that tick that troops and contact. That crew was decorated and Tank really did probably save, if she didn’t save her crews life, she certainly led to the saving lives of other Americans.

And to his credit though, that wizo came back later and said, “I got to tell you, I was wrong. Tank’s a hero and I’m glad that I was on her crew. That was the best experience I’ve ever had in an airplane and I appreciate it.” To his credit, he realized the err of his ways. But to Tank’s credit, she showed him the err of his ways. And that’s what we need to do, two things. First, we need to stand up for each other, we need to stand up for each other. And I thank those guys that stood up for me to lead me to stand up that day as a Commander. And then, when people don’t want to stand up for us, it’s up to us to show them what we’ve got, as a country, as a force, that diversity does matter and it does help us. So, that was my one example Chief.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you sir for sharing. General Clark was a football player back then and he was probably a lot bigger. So, I’m going to speak for those two guys and say they probably didn’t want that smoke. General Van Ovost, one of the things that we’ve heard and we experienced after the George Floyd incidents was the difficulty for leaders in the Air Force to talk openly about diversity, equity and inclusion issues. What are your thoughts and what ideas do you have on how we can talk openly and candidly about the challenges faced, particularly by minority populations inside the Department of Defense?

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

Yeah, thanks K. Wright. Look, not just after George Floyd, but along the same lines. The Air Force did a lot of soul searching, did a lot of data digging and we had real examples, real data that said we weren’t doing it right. So to the credit and I credit the leadership of the Air Force, first thing they need to do is own it. Own the problem. And that requires a lot of self-reflection, a lot of, “Where was I, when?” But you own the problem. There’s a reality of the data. And then as you… Don’t chip away at it with, “Well, it was the wrong assumption.”, or, “It just was one person on the diox that was mad, everybody else was not.” Take it for face value. Listen for understanding, listen with empathy, hear the stories. And you will find as, even as the first level supervisor, there are things that are not in your wheelhouse, you’re like, “Well, I don’t know how to change that.” But it doesn’t mean that you let it go. You have to elevate it. You have to get everyone involved in what the concerns are with the policy or process or the data and so that you can really bring it up and come up with different solutions.

So you may not own the problem because it could be some sort of corporate promise or some sort of policy problem, but you own the solution. Why do you own the solution and you don’t own the problem? You own the solution, because again, it’s all about readiness, it’s all about taking care of your people. So if we’re going to take care of our people, we’re going to own that problem. And by owning it, I mean again, ring the bell, elevate the problem, let’s have a discussion about it and lay it flat. Because as a commander at any level, it’s terrible to hear something discriminatory that occurred on your squadron that you didn’t know about had been going on for months. That’s happened to me once and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why did we let this propagate? Who walked by this? Who should have known? Who should have acted?” But own it and walk around you own it and listen for empathy.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you ma’am. So General Thomas, you’ve been criticized for-

Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas:

A lot.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

… for lot, for lot, but specifically by a network anchor, we won’t mention which network for your recruiting, lowering recruiting standards, allegedly and for being too woke when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. Does recruiting focus on diversity somehow put, weaken the military or put our overall readiness at risk?

Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas:

Yeah, thanks for that question Chief. No, look, unconditionally no. Unconditionally no. This is a red herring, it’s a distraction. To just give plain Aggie speak here. At the end of the day, our job is to be prepared to kill bad people and tear up their stuff. War fighting has got to be and is mission number one. So just briefly, here’s how I explain it because this is the part that really just kind of rubs me wrong. Is people, when I said this has been a bit of a journey explaining diversity, because here’s what people hear sometimes. “Hey, we’re really thinking through diversity, how we’re a diverse force, how we draw the best.” Here’s what they hear, “You want to drop standards. You just want to put quotas out there so you have different flavors of people in our Air Force.” That is so absolutely wrong.

There’s two main things we do in recruiting. We attract and we select. Picture this, this big circle, attract. We go and we throw a wide net out across America. We want them to be part of us, like a football team, like any athletic organization. “Hey, come try out for the team. Think about wearing our jersey.” But then, we select the best athlete, who throws the furthest, hits the hardest, because that’s what our organization is about. And these Airmen out in uniform today, they’re here because they made the team not because of any other reason. And we’ve got to make sure people understand that piece. So thanks for the questions Chief.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you. Thank you, sir. All right. We’re getting close to our time, but General Van Ovost, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about any positive steps that the Department of Defense and the Air Force has taken to incentivize women to continue to serve in the military?

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

Yeah. First of all, I’m proud of everyone that’s working on our bear analysis working groups, whether it’s Indian American, the Heat, our Hispanic team, the wit, they’re making real strides in both major policy changes and just getting rid of some irritants that don’t allow us to really serve and get that fulfilling service that we really desired when we joined in the Air Force. I think it makes a difference. I think it makes a retention difference and that turns into a recruiting difference. So congratulations to everyone and keep working. Why? Because our culture continues to change. And Gen Z will bring in some new challenges to what we’re thinking, the next generation will as well. And we should continue to change our policies and procedures to ensure that they can serve at the highest level and give us the very best talent of America.

So between our career and our mission, the pregnancy waivers that we have, our ability to relieve ourselves in flight, it’s an improvement. But the fact that we are investing small resources to ensure that we’re comfortable throughout all phases. And then I think about childcare. It’s hard, it’s Milcon, but I tell you that I appreciate the secretary. He’s been trying to prioritize childcare Milcon and then it’s about getting into and getting more people to take care of the children. So, it’s the people side as well. And so, he’s investing in some of the people side and some contracts.

So that, all the biggest barriers as we grab the information from when people leave the Air Force and grab that information about what were the main determinants or why’d you make these decisions, the flash to bang, on understanding that and then rolling it into one of these work groups and then getting after it. I think we are absolutely leading for the Department of Defense. And again, our work that’s here is not just for America’s military. We are taking this stuff overseas in our Women Peace and Security, not just for women, but for minorities and trying to promulgate that information. So keep at it.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Excellent. All right. That’s about our time today. There’s lots and lots of things that we can discuss in this conversation. I encourage each of you to continue having these tough conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion.

I want to, especially, I want to thank each of the panel members, not just for being here today and sharing some of their personal insights, but for being role models when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. I had a chance to personally work with each one of them and they practice what they preached. They all had very diverse staffs. They engaged on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, at least during the time when I was serving, I didn’t see General Clark knock anybody out at the time we were serving. But it does mean a lot. It’s one thing to talk about it and it’s certainly another thing to actually practice it and be role models for all the people who look up to each of you. So thank you once again for being here. Thank all of you for sticking around to hear at least a part of this conversation. And again, I encourage you to continue having the tough conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion. Thank you.

New Mitchell Paper Urges USAF to Involve Operators Early in Collaborative Combat Aircraft Development

Oct. 6, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The Air Force should build its capacity and striking power with collaborative combat aircraft but must put the teaming aspect of the new class of weapons first, getting the concepts and software right at the outset to ensure that autonomous airplanes do what’s needed and expected—and can be trusted—a new paper argues.

“The Air Force is not putting sufficient priority on the teaming aspects” of CCAs, said Heather R. Penney of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, author of the new paper “Five Imperatives for Developing Collaborative Combat Aircraft for Teaming Operations.” She told reporters at a preview of the paper that the service is rushing to develop autonomous aircraft technology without an adequate focus on how, specifically, they’ll be used.

The Air Force’s technology enterprise and the defense industry have been preoccupied with “how … you take the human out of the cockpit,” she said, solving problems such as navigation, terrain avoidance, sensor and weapons management, etc.—“decomposing the mission threads into all the tasks” in a fighter mission.

While that’s important, “What’s being neglected is how CCAs are going to team with humans … How do they engage with humans in the battlespace; how do they fly with humans, handle changing scenarios?” she said. That interaction is “critical, because it’s foundational” to making CCAs succeed operationally.

Based on surveys of combat pilots, Penney said they harbor “great skepticism” about whether CCAs can be absorbed into combat formations without creating new problems that will make the fight more difficult. Pilots must be convinced that CCAs will provide a combat benefit, and that can only be accomplished by involving pilots in the development of tactics, techniques, and procedures written into CCA control laws and software.

She acknowledged, however, that the Air Force is short of pilots—particularly pilots of fifth-generation fighters—who could be spared to help develop tactics, techniques, and procedures for CCAs. While the industry is hiring some reservists and former fourth-generation fighter pilots to help in this regard, they may not be fully up to speed on the modern air war.

Still, “a fourth-gen pilot is better than none,” she said. Engineers alone cannot and should not have to guess how to build an easy-to-use, valuable interface for pilots and CCAs.

Penney argued that the Air Force is right to purse CCAs because they offer many advantages and solutions to tough Air Force problems. They address USAF’s need for a quick operating tempo, the ability to mount attacks in mass, “attrition tolerance,” the ability to have a strategic reserve, and operational resilience, and they create operational complexity for the enemy, she said.

Unlike crewed aircraft, if a CCA is shot down, no pilot is lost, and an inexpensive replacement aircraft can be fielded by the same people with no loss of skill. Given that USAF already faces a chronic pilot shortage, this is a major plus, Penney said.

The CCAs must also be autonomous, because relying on remotely piloted aircraft demands numbers of pilots USAF can’t generate.

“A one-to-one ratio” between pilots and CCAs “is not going to meet the needs of what we have to do for the future,” Penney said.

Autonomous aircraft “that outnumber humans in the battlespace” are becoming possible because “the miniaturization … the speed of processing, the advanced software techniques, and the advent of machine learning/deep neural networks, artificial intelligence, and datalinks” have all matured at the same time, she said.

But the ability to adapt to changing conditions and new instructions on the fly will be the discriminator as to whether CCAs really work, she said. Those capabilities must be built in from the start; they cannot be “bolted on afterward.” The software must take a DevSecOps approach and be ready before the CCAs are fielded, Penney argued.

If they’re not, “we won’t get this right,” she said.

Penney also said pilots need to understand how the artificial intelligence in CCAs will behave, so the autonomous aircraft can be trusted. Aircrews must also not be unduly burdened by the task of managing CCAs “without them becoming task saturated.” The preferred approach now—and “the direction industry is leaning in”—is to direct CCAs by voice, Penney said. But that “may or may not be the best way” for pilots to coordinate with the unscrewed aircraft, she said. Multiple means of control may be needed to provide redundancy. It may turn out that the direction is issued in part “by someone on a workstation aboard an E-7” or similar command and control aircraft.

“It’s important that we not split leadership” of combat formations, she said. “But that is something that will only be discovered through experimentation, and with actual flights with actual crews.”

Gen. Mark D. Kelly, head of Air Combat Command, told reporters at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September that USAF must put the new CCA technology into the hands of the pilots to wring them out and find out what works and what doesn’t, in a rapid series of exercises and iterations. Otherwise, USAF is headed for an “exquisite” failure with CCAs which will require the service to, at great cost, “start over.”

Penney recommended that USAF observe five imperatives for CCA development:

Figure out the best mix of human-CCA teams “based on each teammate’s strengths.” That means leaving humans to apply initiative, experience, and creativity and relying on the machines to do brute-force calculations and other mechanical functions at which they are better than people.
Include operators in CCA development and make sure pilots understand how CCA control laws work, just as they understand how their missiles and other weapons work.
Ensure that warfighters can trust and depend on CCA autonomy.
Ensure that humans can maintain “assured control” over what CCAs do “in highly dynamic operations.”
Ensure that teaming workloads are manageable for the humans.

Penney noted that USAF plans to retire some 500 or so crewed combat aircraft in the coming years, using some of the savings to develop CCAs.

“The Air Force is making big bets on unproven technology” with CCAs, Penney said. And while the new aircraft will go a long way toward fixing USAF’s capacity shortfalls, it’s “an irreversible decision,” so the service “has to get this right.”