Watch, Read: ‘ACE and Enlisted Leadership’

Oct. 16, 2022

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

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

CMSgt. Brian Kruzelnick:

There’s like three of them.

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

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

CMSgt. Brian Kruzelnick:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

CMSgt. Benjamin Hedden:

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

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

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

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

CMSgt. John Storms:

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

CMSGt. Jacob C. Simmons:

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

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

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

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

CMSgt. David Wolfe:

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

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

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

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

CMSgt. John Storms:

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

CMSGt. Jacob C. Simmons:

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

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

CMSgt. Benjamin Hedden:

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

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

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

CMSAF Jim Roy (Ret.):

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

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

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

Oct. 16, 2022

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

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Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

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

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

Maj. Gen. Daryl L. Bohac:

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

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

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

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

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

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

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

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

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Thank you, General.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

It’s out.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

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

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

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

Maj. Gen. Daryl L. Bohac:

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

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Gen. Healy?

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

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

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

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

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

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

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

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

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

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

Lt. Gen. John P. Healy:

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

Yes sir. Gen. Loh.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh:

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

Maj. Gen. Daryl L. Bohac:

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

Maj. Gabbe Kearney:

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

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

Oct. 16, 2022

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

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Voiceover:

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

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

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

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

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

Kari Voliva:

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

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

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

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

Susie Schwartz:

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

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

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

Susie Schwartz:

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

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

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

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

Heba Abdelaal:

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

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

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

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

Heba Abdelaal:

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

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

Eddy Mentzer:

I’m ready.

Sharene Brown:

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

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

Eddy Mentzer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

Eddy Mentzer:

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

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

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

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

Melissa Gilliam Shaw:

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

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

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

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

Melissa Gilliam Shaw:

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

Kat Hedden:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharene Brown:

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

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

Watch, Read: ‘Creating the JADC2 Architecture’

Oct. 16, 2022

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson, mobilization assistant to Chief of Space Operations, moderated a discussion on “Creating the JADC2 Architecture” with Robert H. Epstein of Leidos, Teri Williams of Raytheon Intelligence & Space, and Dave Spirk of Palantir Technologies, Sept. 19, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

All right, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. It is my privilege and honor to host as your moderator the Creating JADC2 Architecture panel. And we have that coveted immediately post lunch time slot here, so we are going to have a dynamic and fast paced dialogue and we’re going to focus on the action side of that, creating a JADC2 architecture. We’ve got an all star line for you here, three great panelists. And we’re going to keep it fresh and fast. And so without further ado, I’d like to introduce who our team players are here. First, from my left, or I should say… I guess working from closest to meet over, we’ve got Rob Epstein. And Rob is the senior solutions architect for C4ISR Solution operation in Leidos. And Rob focuses on developing strategy, vision and technical capabilities for Leidos’ C4ISR command and control framework, their modeling simulation and training portfolios. And he was also an Air Force 26 year veteran, retired as a colonel just the last year in 2021. So, let’s have a big welcome for Rob.

Next up, we’ve got Teri Williams. She’s an engineering fellow with Raytheon Intelligence and space, and Teri has over 25 years of experience in systems engineering and program management, also holding a bachelor’s, master’s in a doctorate in engineering. And she graduated from the Air Force Academy, class in ’96, so bringing it strong. Welcome. And then finally, we’ve got Aki Jain and he is the CTO for Palantir Technologies, as well as their president for Palantir US government. He’s also deeply behind the software and the brains and the execution behind our our vision and Warp Core and other great Palantir products. So welcome, Aki.

So as we look at… Let’s see. I’ll make it work here. Give me a little love. There we go. Setting the context for today, as we talk about the JADC2 architecture, I think it’s really important to understand where it all started. These are the direct slides from the joint staff J6 looking at the joint war fighting concept. That’s really what underpins the way in which we fight across the joint services, the way we execute integrated deterrence, defense and war fighting operations. And of course along that, we have the four pillars of the joint war fighting concept. And throughout, across all those domains, is the joint all domain command and control. And as we look at that specifically, the definition for JADC2, it’s really the ability to sense, make sense, and act across all domains, across the joint services in a contested environment at the speed of relevance. And I think every single one of those words matter, but as we look at the challenges that big, hair, audacious set of problems poses, it also is going to require the absolute best and most integrated solution sets.

That’s a partnership across all of the services, across the whole of government, the whole of nation response. And I think as we have reflected here on our panelists, the industry side is so very important to this, because as we look at our competitors and adversaries that have civil military fusion as they have command direction, it’s the richness and diversity and the intellectual curiosity and capacity, the entrepreneurial capability and the industrial base strength of our United States, as well as the partners and allies that are so vital to our success. And so as we look at this forward, this is what underpins joint all domain command and control. And I think today, the theme is going to be about the operational capability, getting beyond the rhetoric, getting beyond the lexicon, and talking about the solutions that we’re driving at breakneck speed to implement. And as we do so, we look at this very same chart in terms of the data and AI being so critical.

These are strategic imperatives. They underpin everything that we do. As we look at it from the combatant commander perspective, 10 out of our 11 combatant commands, those commanders all say that data is in the top three of their integrated priority list, or their one to end top tough challenges. A third of those have it as number one. And I think the lowest is number four, and we’re pretty confident that that’s a mistake. So, this just lets you know how critical data and AI are to that. And it’s not just data itself. It’s operationalization of data and AI/ML readiness to drive the timely decision advantage and information advantage outcomes that we absolutely need. And what underpins that is an enterprise IT infrastructure, a digital infrastructure that leverage dev sec ops, and that’s for both data and AI. It leverages the DAF data fabric, a vital part of our capability set, and as well as machine to machine speed.

That’s of course AI/ML and deep learning capabilities. And as we look at that, you’ve heard this morning from the secretary, and he outlined in the seven operational imperatives, the criticality of the sense of urgency with which we are tackling with these. So, as we look at those, certainly OI2 is the operationally focused advanced battle management system, otherwise known as battle management and command and control or command control computers and battle management. However you want to reference it, it is vitally important that we adopt a distributed and distributable command and control and battle management concept, and that’s what we’re doing as part of the four pillar approach going forward. You’ve heard the great news. We’re excited to have Luke Cropsey, Brigadier General, Luke Cropsey, join Brigadier General Jeff Spaniard Valenzia and I in forging forward the Air Force and the space forces side of a joint all domain commanded control.

But underpinning all of that is, again, huge partnerships. You see that depicted industry throughout international and our friends and allies across the board, but we’re really focusing on four things. Nailing the foundation. You got to be able to talk on the same sheet of music, the same lexicon, the same concepts, but we’re driving far beyond that. We’re also talking about approach, a consistent model based systems engineering approach so we can show and justify and really leverage the potency of the deep functional decomposition that the team has been working on. It’s about setting a context, one with an operational imperative, a set of scenarios that help focus, in a vignette form a way, that everybody can embrace. And then finally, when we had all five of the service chiefs, their operations leads and the JADC2 two leads, the common thread out of that is we need a concept of operation that underpins and stitches it all together, because after all, this is the operational way in which we go forward.

So, this is what’s driving our requirements across the department of the Air Force. And so now, we’re going to probe more fully with our panelists exactly what their perspectives are as we drive forward to that. So, I’ll back us up and we’ll just highlight… There we go. Thank you. And so first question of the day is for Rob. Rob, Secretary Kendall’s seven operational imperatives to cope with our peer adversaries and competitors calls out the need to achieve operationally optimized advanced battle management systems, or ABMS, and Air Force joint all domain command and control, JADC2. So, how do you see this effort supporting the secretaries increasingly urgent roadmap?

Robert H. Epstein:

That’s an easy question. Hey, first off, good afternoon everybody. Thank you General and to my fellow panelist, and thank you for surviving lunch and coming to hear us talk. 75th anniversary. So I’m just totally excited to be here to answer the question. Look, this is about decision space for leadership. And decision superiority is going to lead us to operational superiority. So, I’m probably the dumb operator on the panel here, so I’m going to stay focused on that. So as we look to create this, it’s creating the pipes so that we can push data around, because data is everything. That’s how we make decisions. Most of the operations I’ve been in, we were never the only service that was there. Matter of fact, we were never the only flag that was actually represented on the org chart of how we shared information.

For Libby operations, I saw pilots actually coming back and having to sit there, and on a whiteboard tell us what they saw, because we couldn’t share information with one another and we had to do it on the fly. In a pickup war or what we did in Afghanistan, you can use superior people and probably get away with that. In a pure competition, we’re going to lose because this gets into an OODA loop and a turning battle, which is we need to outturn our adversaries and the way we make decisions forcing them to react to us and not the other way around. So, the urgency right now is, dear God, thank you that we’ve actually started moving out. So, I give credit and kudos to the DAF, our office. And I give credit to ABMS CFT and the space force for what they’re doing, to actually stop doing the little science projects and actually start getting after the real problem, which is create the architecture and the standards that allows industry to help you solve your problems. I’ll end it there, and I’m going to get into banter with everyone else.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

So, that’s great. So, as we pick up on the sense of urgency, as we pick up on the sense of action, Teri, what do you think the importance of experimental is in order to realize our ABMS and multi domain operations objectives?

Teri Williams:

Well, General Olson, that’s a very good question. Raytheon intelligence and space is very focused on experimentation, but just went to level set everybody in the room. I’m not meaning experimentation as a science experiment in the lab and throwing something on the floor. What we are doing is exercising capability, and we are refining our TTPs and we’re using AI and ML algorithms to gain confidence in operational capability. So take for example, we have Valiant Shield, Raytheon intelligence and space participating in that. Now, there is a lot of other industry partners, FFRDCs and government participating in that. And what we did is we have a very robust digital engineering environment that we take that operational scenario back. We have it in a model based system engineering approach. And we were able to test our hypotheses, we’re able to test new TTPs, we’re able to refine our way ahead so we can gain confidence by the next exercise to deliver that operational capability.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

I agree. And so with that extraordinary model based systems engineering capability, how do you see it? And this is a little joust between you and Rob. As you look at it, how do you balance the risk there between testing the operations environment, testing in the digital environment? How do you know when you get the mixed right, or is it the sum of both parts is better than the whole?

Teri Williams:

I’ll start, and then I’m going to pass it to you to tie a bow on it. How about that?

Robert H. Epstein:

Fair enough.

Teri Williams:

So, when it comes to these experiments is trained like you fight. So, you’re going to have an initial 60% solution, 70% solution that you’re going to try your best to model it. You’re going to take what technologies you have and you’re going to refine those concepts. But then you go out and you exercise that. So instead of the old antiquated tabletop exercises we’re doing, we’re using real software, real hardware out in the field. Som we take that and we test it. And then we refine our algorithms, and then go back and test it again. But by having that digital engineering and those models we’re able to reduce the risk to the combatant commanders. We’re able to reduce that cost and bring in operational capability faster.

Robert H. Epstein:

So, my last job in the air force was commander of the Air Force agency for modeling and simulation. And one of the things we always talked about was if you create JADC2, how do you train the operator? And this becomes a problem and it gets into what you’re saying, where the risk is if you don’t, the likelihood of success is close to zero. So, it’s about the gray matter between the ears of the operator as much as it is the system itself. So when you talk about risk, not doing it is riskier. So, we get into this, if you do the engineering properly, you can create opportunities where you can actually refine the operator. And what’s more interesting now is you actually now have that digital twin of the world that you can actually train your AI, because that’s something, as we talk about artificial intelligence, you have to get the reps and sets in for both the operator and now the machine so that you can take advantage of machine to machine speed, right? Because then it gets into your operational superiority.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

Excellent. So, we now have a big question for you Aki. As we look at JADC2 being a longtime horizon, kind of everything utopian program. And as the secretary is first to point out, the track record hasn’t been so great for everything systems. But given the longtime horizon, the complexity and the broad strategic concepts, what, in your opinion, are the most viable and quickest steps that the DOD can take to bring JADC22 capabilities to the war fighter today?

Akash Jain:

Cool, thanks, and thanks everybody for having me here today. Well, I’d kind of build on what Rob and Teri just talked about a little bit here. And actually, I thought the slides, I thought I was done, so… No laughs. So look, from my perspective, if you think about really everything that has to go into actually delivering capability today, and I think we can see this in a lot of context today, both in the experiment and training kind of aspects of it and taking MBSE and some of that work, taking the networks and the anchors and the data that’s moving around, and ultimately putting software inclusive of artificial intelligence and machine learning on top of it, that is happening today.

And I think the key thing that we’ve really observed over the last almost two decades that we’ve been doing this is, it’s going to take the whole commercial industrial base, all the things that the general referred to earlier, the strength of our country, the entrepreneurship of our young students and those that are coming here and have advanced technologies, the full defense industrial base, as well as academia and FFRDCs, to come together and kind of work together on these solutions in order to provide the government with some kind of speed to capability now. And I think if you look at, for example, some of the things that are happening in Europe right now, you’re seeing kind of the early inklings of the last probably couple of years of JADC2 strategy actually play through. There is interop. There is data moving around. We’re using MBSE and we’re using those models and simulation and training that was done, whether it’s through a Scarlet Dragon series, or through the global information dominance experiments, or through Valiant Shield.

And it’s all coming together in a way where decision makers, to the original point that was made, the speed to decision and actually the decision space they have to make the best decision is, I would argue, a couple times better than it would’ve been maybe a year or two years ago.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

Thank you. Teri or Rob, do you have any thoughts, or anything to add or amplify?

Teri Williams:

All I can say is he did an excellent job and completely agree. As we move forward, it is not just a single person or a single company that needs this solution space. Instead of kind of like the one chart for Dr. Grayson, it’s not the government that is the integrator. It’s not the industry that is the integrator. It’s all of us working together in a tightly coupled fashion to make sure we’re all in alignment. It’s going to take the academia, FFRDC, going to even take our commercial industry and government all working together. It’s a big problem. There’s enough work for everybody. We just have to get after it and move forward.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

I really agree with you. We have currently over 200 companies on ramped on the IDIQ contract just because we want to have the ready ability to quickly put people on contract for the digital infrastructure, which is one of the first three strong initiatives. We had 30 companies, and now we have distilled that down to seven in the industry consortium. The purpose behind that is to pull the absolute best and brightest and to have a diversity and a richness because we think when you amalgamate all those those best and breed entities, you’re getting the best overall solution rather than one single winner take all. Do you have any thoughts on that from your perspective, Rob?

Robert H. Epstein:

Yeah, thank you, sir. So, the beauty of this is… I think if it’s sort of in the similar vein of the way we look at the internet. It’s not owned. It’s something that’s shared, but it’s creating protocols and standards that we can all work together. It’s got to be non-proprietary. It has to be. The government’s demanding it and industry, everybody wants to play in it. So, it’s creating those opportunities. And it’s got to be perpetually modernizing, which means it’s got to be plug and play. This gets to the government actually saying and demanding that there is interoperability by putting some standards forth, an industry who has opportunity to play in that building to those sets of standards to allow us to modernize and continually make it relevant, which, is an organizational problem. But I think we’re actually getting after it right now with some of the things that were actually discussed by the chief earlier today. So, [inaudible 00:18:31]

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

Great. I appreciate. Aki, you had a follow-up?

Akash Jain:

Kind of double tap something. I think Rob said something is really, really important here. This is never going to be done. And I think that a lot of times when we think about whether it’s a competitive process or procurement process… And some of the space, certainly Congress has afforded the last couple years offers a much more diverse set of ways to get at the problem, but this problem is never going to be done. I think the thing that we really believe is that strongly software and data are going to be the thing that we’re constantly going to be iterating on as a nation, the west more broadly, and will be our determinative competitive advantage going forward. Certainly, there are going to be some very exquisite hardware capabilities that will hopefully provide the deterrent necessary to prevent actual war. But when it actually comes down from our perspective, the thing that in the moment we as a country, and the west more broadly, need focus on is how do you apply software? How do you apply data?

And how do you change the physics of how we do that if and when we need to fight? And so it’s never going to be done. It’s going to be a constant developmental. It’s going to keep going and keep going and keep going. And the more we invest in that, just as we’ve seen in the commercial space, more the commercial industrials have actually invested in software and data enhance their operations. That continuous cycle is the thing that we have to get really, really, really good at in order to actually solve this problem.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

I couldn’t agree more. I think when you look at that, we’re 22 and a half years into the 21st century. The digital age is absolutely upon us. This is the way in which we execute the joint war fighting concept. This is the context. And so that underpins everything that we do. And I like what you said, JADC2 or ABMS, which is the [inaudible 00:20:20] instantiation of JADC2, it’s a concept. It’s part of program, part of a continual evolution. And I think the only constant is changed there, but we need to be smart because we’re competing and we’re potentially engaging against a pure adversary or adversaries that are economically and militarily very, very potent. And I think when we look at the amalgam of the potential for multiple actors in a global arena, this presents a fairly existential and a fairly potent level of urgency and action. And as we talked about urgency and accomplishment… And [inaudible 00:21:03] operational capabilities are kind of really the buzzword. So, let me pick up a little bit more, just more specifically, and we already kind of touched on this.

Teri, the department of the Air Force’s ABMS digital infrastructure consortium is supporting the development of our JADC2 architecture. Can you talk about your work, your thoughts and perspectives as how that can be leveraged to further amplify and accelerate the timeline to getting to real, actionable, operational results?

Teri Williams:

Thank you very much. Som now I have approval to talk about that. So, it’s very relevant, as you saw on the new release announcement that the digital infrastructure for ABMS has been awarded. I’m currently serving on the consortium, and I’m very excited about our pathway forward with our industry partners. What we are in doing in the digital infrastructure is we’re chartered with the design, development, and deployment of the digital infrastructure and ensuring that the data there is correct. So if I’m in a disaggregated environment doing distributable C2, which is a new method of fighting, how do we break that problem apart? But how do we get the data? How do we make sure it’s secure? How do we distribute it? And how do we make sure that we have connectivity? And so when I am using it, are we all operating under the same context?

Do I understand what my data is? Do I understand it from my mission set, knowing that it’s going to be different for whatever type of node you are utilizing? And so this is a consortium activity, but we are working together tightly with industry, FFRDCs, academia, utilizing commercial solutions space, utilizing other IDIQs as we move forward, but we’re really trying to get after the problem. And this is a consortium environment, so in less than 90 days we have a lot of best practices. Lesson learned. Instead of taking six months, 12 months to get started, we’ve done it in less than 90 days. We have our government customer that is ensuring that we go fast, but we’re also really making sure, do we do it correctly? And so as we have forward, we’ve met with the government, having that tight feedback loop to make sure we’ve developed our initial roadmap. So, we already have a game plan on moving forward and we are all vested, industry, FFRDC, academia, government to all make sure that we deliver operational capability to the war fighter.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

You’re spot on. As we talk about data and AI, operationalization of data and AI/ML readiness is so fundamental to everything that we’re doing. But from an AI/ML side, it’s really 80 to 85% data driven. The data wrangling, it’s very time intensive, complex, messy, dirty, non-sexy. The formatting, metadata, tagging, cleansing, data integrity validation, all that is required. So, I got a focal question for you, Rob, and that is, how can the air force and industry accelerate getting our trusted data into the war fighters so that it can prime the pump for AI/ML readiness, since we know, much like the JADC2 definition is, to do that at the speed of relevancy? To make sense [inaudible 00:24:29], we need machine to machine speed, because simply put the OODA loop or the kill chains must… The timelines have to be radically reduced in the modern peer competitive environment. What are your thoughts on that? How can we accelerate that?

Robert H. Epstein:

How do we accelerate it? It’s getting humans out of loop and on the loop. It’s getting machines to do most of the work for you, which means you have to trust your AI. How many used Waze to get here today? Nobody used Waze to get over here? All right, there’s a couple hands. Thanks. You know, Waze isn’t any good unless you trust what it’s telling you. And so you got to have open algorithms. You got to have it in such a way that you can actually take advantage of those things. And then it’s getting you relevant data the way you need to ingest it. And to Teri’s point, this is all about flexibility. One of the things when I look at this, because we too, Leidos, are on the digital consortium. I can say that now. Flexibility is key to air power, always has been. So, this gets back into the, if I need to get data out, it can’t be a single stove pipe solution anymore because our adversaries know about it.

So, how do you get it to the point where you can get it out opportunistically to where it needs to be to make sure that we can actually be relevant? AI’s going to have to take a huge part of that because it’s going to have to make a lot of decisions based on networks being up or down, radio frequencies, what adversary or what asset is out there that can receive it to get the right information to the right user at the right time resiliently. It’s a complex problem, but that’s sort of where we’re at, and we’re making significant headway. And I’m going to lob that ball over to my partners here on the panel.

Akash Jain:

I want to follow up on the Waze analogy for a second, because I think it’s… So, how many people in the audience have actually ever used Waze? All right, for the people on camera, it’s maybe like 90% of the people. All right, how many people in the audience do Waze tells you to do when you hit traffic? Only about 40% of you. And I guess I’ll throw two whys maybe. First why, is the reason for those of you who don’t do what Waze tells you to do, is it because you don’t understand why it’s telling you what to do? Is that the reason For those that don’t follow the Waze directions? Why don’t you do what ways tells you to do? Somebody just yell it out.

Audience Member:

I know better.

Akash Jain:

Oh, right there. I know better. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the first problem that we worked on with the DOD in the AI/ML space. And for clarity, Palantir does, I think what General Olson talked about, which is really about the data munging, the T&E, the ModSim environment, some of those things, and then the CICD of AI/ML models. We don’t actually build AI/ML models. There are folks that are much better at that, that have been studying systems for years and know exactly what this is going to look like, and they have the experts. We try to create the environment that gets them the data to do that. And the first thing we did when we sat down with operators is we put them in kind of a zip cop environment. They’d have a FMV [inaudible 00:27:33] up. They’d have a computer vision algorithm. It’d be highlighting a truck on the screen. And we’d say, “Oh, it’s so cool, isn’t it? Hey, AI.” And they’d be like…

I don’t know if I can say this on the video, but they’d be like, “No shit, Sherlock. There’s a truck on the screen. I’m a human. I can tell you there’s a truck on the screen. Who cares? Why is that important? Why do I need the AI to tell me that?” And then when I think about the concept of Waze, “I know better,” this is the number one thing that we really run into when we’re thinking about how to adopt AI and how to enable the department to drive it in to effectively become the Jarvis for humans in some of these decision spaces. It’s how do you make it explainable? How do you get the humans really trust it? How do you do the training and the ModSim kind of work, such that when Waze tells you to do something… Admittedly, I don’t…

I’ll admit, I don’t follow Waze most of the time as well, because I do know better. But how do you get to the point at which you’re working through an ATO cycle or something and the human says, “Hey, you, the machine, helped me come up with a better decision, or a more timely decision, or a more cost effective solution to a problem.” And we see this, I think… Again, I’m not a pilot, and many of you in the audience are, but in the ways that we trust autopilot systems today and how they ultimately help with task and saturation and overload, how do we get to the point where AI is really doing that? And I think that’s why these activities and the continuity kind of across industry, across the government and really doing these exercises and training components to the point where, hey, when Waze tells us, “Hey, no, really, you’ll save five minutes if you do this,” we do it, and it actually is helpful and augmentative and we’re not kind of pulling an office and driving into a lake because Waze told us to do so.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

And I think if we amplify that a little bit further, when we talk about edge node and edge capability and edge AI, to operate at the speed of need, at speed of relevance, one of the challenges in a contested environment, in a multi domain environment is everything is perfect. And we know the criticality, and certainly we see it with the airborne edge known capability release one that’s going to be on the KC46. We see extensibility to that, to the fighter side too, but the space node two. As we start looking at the criticality of space sensing, space networking, space command and control, and the space transport, of course, enabling so much of that, these are both great opportunities, and I think the technology and the operational capabilities are evolving where we can have some excellent solutions, but we also need to be very mindful of this degraded, very challenging environment. Primary alternate contingency, emergency operation space, operations are key.

How do you see that? In particular for air and space operations, how do you see solutions from either your teams, your companies, or your perspectives coming forward in this domain to provide those solutions, not just fight tonight, but fight right now and as we evolve and continually evolve towards a more rigorous and challenging future?

Akash Jain:

Yeah, no, that is a great question. I think that… So, if I look at the last four years of what this has looked like, and again, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of the collaboration with our DIB partners, with the government, with academia. A lot of what we really try to do and the way that we try to enable that is by going to the field, by participating in the Scarlet Dragons, going forward, seeing what’s actually going on in Germany and Poland right now, working a lot. As a multinational, we work globally.

About half our business is global government, most of it defense. We work with the Five Eyes really closely. We spend a lot of time in the UK and with our partners in Canada and Australia. And if you really think about it, across all those experiences, our greatest approach to this is, “Hey, bring commercial software, make it open to non-pro proprietary, make it so anybody come and play, and then really work with users to iterate on building things like trust,” enabling them to understand why the software is suggesting something to them. And then getting a few layers down and doing a fair amount of IRAD to say, “Hey, it’s not good enough.” As a commercial software company, we kind of stop at the point at which we’ve built something and try to throw it over the wall and say, “Hey, just use it.” You have to invest in things like IL5, IL6 and beyond. You actually have to build that infrastructure. You have to have the 24/7 knock and sock that can ultimately garner trust with the cyber folks.

And you have to have really resilient software and capability, alongside amazing partners, in order to actually then deliver that to the war fighter. And that’s kind of how we’re seeing our software actually make its way into the fight. But I will say that has taken us… I’ve been a Palantir for 17 years now. Company’s been around for 18 years, so I like to joke, there’re allowed to buy cigarettes finally, couple years to be able to drink. But at the end of the day, that’s taken us 18 years and a lot of investment to get to. I think the way we see this now is that we have to pay that forward, and you have to get a lot of smaller companies involved and we have to help them do that.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

Amen. It’s definitely team sport. Teri, how would you amplify that? Or can you take it further and one up?

Teri Williams:

So, I’m currently doing the ABMS, but have spent some time in the space domain, and as we move forward, realizing how do we integrate and how do we interoperate, because you have multiple pathways to get to the end state. And so understanding the data, bringing it back down to that, getting the good backbone, making sure we have the right context, making sure we have open standards, realizing that our solution isn’t the only solution. So, how do we make sure that we are all working together? Because we’re all mission focused, we’re all trying to get to that end game, but instead of it your spot, your spot, mine, how do we work together to move forward? So, if you have a particular piece, how does it interoperate, integrate with mine? How do we keep it moving forward? How do we make it plug and play? How do we embrace digital technology to keep it moving forward? How do we get the feedback from the operators, from the government to make sure that we’re continually evolving as well?

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

Great. Rob, any follow ups?

Robert H. Epstein:

Yeah, the evolution is key in this process. In a perfect world, you’d want to, okay, scrap everything. I’m going to start over. I’m going to ability to exactly right that everything works together, and that’s [inaudible 00:33:54]. I mean, we don’t have the money or the ability to stop doing what we’re doing and start over. So, it becomes a challenge where collectively we’ve got to work together to make sure that if you create that architecture, the digital infrastructure that’s open and it can start taking things in, eventually it sort of absorbs all the old software and it evolves in the right direction. And that’s where our fifth and sixth gen airplanes and the new systems coming board are where we snap the chalk line and try and move forward, but it’s taking legacy today to making sure we can operate together. And that’s a team sport. There’s no other way to do it.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

I think that’s the common thread. We’re hearing a lot of interoperability, a lot of collaboration, and a lot of sense of urgency when we do that. I think this is a very daunting challenge we have before us, and certainly there’s been a fair amount of criticisms about the rate and pace and the sense of urgency, but I would like us to focus on, for each one of you, what one opportunity would you say is most fertile, most important in the minds of either you or your team or your company as we go forward to drive timely and responsive solutions to JADC2 at the speed of need? Anybody want to go first on that one? The word of the day or the opportunity most fervent, where you think you can bring a solution to the myriad of challenges ahead?

Robert H. Epstein:

I’ll go from a Leidos perspective. We look at it as being a partner with the government to help take the OEM platforms that we currently have today and be an integrator, an honest broker. And I think that’s part of the process that the government needs, that honest broker to help tie things together. And so collaboratively, I see that being what’s going to probably get us across the finish line.

Teri Williams:

My put for the one thing is delivering, understanding, working collaboratively, and taking it and producing that product, say “We are going to do this,” and go out and go do you can. And then we iterate to refine and make it better.

Akash Jain:

I’m going to use software. Sorry, it’s kind of generic, but as a software company. I think the number one opportunity for us is how do we take our kind of software capabilities and apply it to the space in a way that, again, it’s open, it’s interoperable, it is enabling those outcomes in real time. And that ultimately, whether it’s the fight tonight kind of solutions or the longer term helping change the physics of agility, kind of making it so that our Airmen and everybody kind of across the different forces as well as with our mission partners can move at the pace of the mission or at the pace of relevance, together as one through software, that’s really, I think, the thing that we most contribute, which is that software expertise and track record of almost 20 years of delivery.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

I think we heard some ethereal interoperability and collaboration and technology based solutions as well. I think it goes without saying that at the core of all this is also people. It takes a rich team, not only in and across the government, a diverse team, one that includes data and AI/ML folks, operational personnel, technologists, and as well as driving across the spectrum. But indeed, as we look at the commercial and the academia relationships, as well as the international relationships, we’ve seen a lot of those. We’re starting to accelerate those. We’ve certainly seen that the Ukraine war, how critically important. And it’s really now showing that as much as it’s a kinetic war of attrition, in some ways, it’s the first true war of cognition for the 21st century. And I think as we drive forward, what is absolutely going to be true is data and AI and the ability to sense, make sense, and act at the speed of need is fundamentally tied to that.

So, from a personnel development and from a growth perspective, what do you see as important next steps that you think we ought to be taking to cultivate our people, both locally and systemically?

Teri Williams:

I would like to take that one to start off with. We need risk takers. We need people who are able to meet a multifaceted environment. You do need the STEM background, but we also need this people who think strategically. And we also need to have people who are willing to make mistakes, willing to fail and learn from them. And so that’s the critical things, as we are growing our new team, is saying that, “Hey, we want you to go out there, try new things, learn from them, get those best practices and showcase the new skill sets.”

Akash Jain:

Yeah, I would double tap that. I think the only thing I would maybe add… So, our CO is a little bit famous for saying we’re a colony of artists, which many of us software engineers enjoy. But the way that we think about this is also know thy self. I think just within the government workforce, within the commercial workforce, defense social base, et cetera, everybody has a spike. They have something they’re world class in. And I think that the ability to take people with spikes in world class areas and bring them together to form a much stronger team, I think it’s what America is best at in the world, is really critical.

So, I think one of the things I think about when you bring on risk takers and entrepreneurs to grow these programs is, how do you equip them with a set of people who can really help them understand software? They don’t have to do kind of the crash course in understanding software and kind of be a minus minus version of it, but instead they have a world class software engineer next to them that can really help them understand that and push things forward. And so I think it’s really about helping take folks with very different spikes and creating that circumstance under which they can do really great work together as a team.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

Any final words, Rob?

Robert H. Epstein:

Yeah, to piggyback on my co-panelists, it’s piggybacking on that scrum mentality of the operator and the software developer so that we can scale this at speed. The time is now to act, and we need people of action.

Maj. Gen. John M. Olson:

Well, with that, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve had a fantastic panel discussion, a lot of back and forth. Thank you for engaging. Creating JADC2 is the imperative of today and we’ll be so for the future. At the core of it is people, interoperability, and collaboration. So, until next time, thank you very much.

Watch, Read: ‘ISR/Remote Sensing’

Oct. 16, 2022

Royal Australian Air Force Group Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith moderated a discussion on “ISR/Remote Sensing” with Stacy Kubicek of Lockheed Martin Space, Eric Sindelar of Comark, and Luke Savoie of L3Harris, Sept. 19, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made available by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Okay, good morning everybody and welcome here to our panel on ISR and Remote Sensing. My name is Group Captain Hannah Jude-Smith. I’m clearly not from around here, so I’m going to speak nice and slowly today and hopefully get engaged in a really interesting conversation about ISR and Remote Sensing.

When it comes down to it, ISR is the sense in sense, decide, and act, and it is so foundational to how we do warfighting that, to be honest, I find it sometimes gets taken a bit for granted. And yet if we don’t have a really good understanding about what is happening in the battle space and also be able to have that understanding of the adversary as well, then we can’t actually warfight at all. We have a lot of challenges that are sometimes out of our control. It’s a huge area over which we need to be able to sense environmental challenges, and certainly many others that the fact that the adversary doesn’t even want to be seen.

But there are other challenges that we face within the ISR and Remote Sensing that are within our control. Things like how are we going to share information across allies from national to tactical levels across domains and agencies. So our panel today are a group of people who are also passionate about ISR, and they want to discuss today how we can ensure that the US and its allies have the capability to sense and then decide and act to be able to defend and advance our interests.

So today in our panel we have Eric Sindelar, who is the executive vice president business development and partner alliances at Comark. We have Luke Savoie who is the president of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sector for L3Harris Technologies, and we have Stacy Kubicek who is the vice president and general manager for Lockheed Martin Space Mission Solution.

I’m just going to give the panelists a chance to introduce themselves, and then we’ll kick off with some questions.

I’ll hand to you first, Eric.

Eric Sindelar:

Thank you. So once again, Eric Sindelar, executive vice president at Comark. We are typically a subprime to companies like L3Harris and Lockheed Martin focused mainly on ruggedized displays, ruggedized computing, compute platforms. I spent most of my career in the commercial space, so over 20 years at Intel, worked at a large server vendor. When I’m going to be answering these questions, it’s going to be much more from a commercial angle and talking about compute platform.

And if you saw that break video, couple things I saw from the panelists on that video was that we don’t have a technology problem, we have a speed problem. That’ll be the angle that I’m going to be addressing these questions from.

Luke Savoie:

My name is Luke Savoie. I’m the president of ISR at L3Harris. My background? Pilot by trade, flew AC-130 gunships and then U-28, so ISR is what I’ve always done. Then ran an industry, actually ran a small software company, worked in large businesses, and now run essentially all the aviation air breather work in L3Harris, specifically around this particular job set.

My perspective will be that, and I think we have a good pair here in terms of every layer of this domain: cyber on the compute side, airborne and space, and I’m hyperfocused on providing things in this side, the air layer, through the prism of the connectivity that we had over the last 20 years, but expanding that to the contested environment.

Stacy Kubicek:

Stacey Kubicek with Lockheed Martin Space. It’s absolutely a pleasure being here today with everyone. And within Space, I lead a line of business called Mission Solutions where what we really perform for the space assets that we manage everything from the end-to-end ground capabilities. So think everything from C2 command and control to your analytics, your development processing, and also 24/7 operations for a lot of our emission partners that we have the opportunity to work with on a day to day basis. Thank you.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Thank you, everybody.

All right, to our first question, I’m going to direct this first to Luke and then everyone else can jump in. What does ISR collaboration look like in the future?

Luke Savoie:

So I think in the future when we look at collaboration, there is both asset collaboration, data collaboration, allied collaboration. I think especially in INDOPACOM, you’re going to see multiple elements responsible for the scheme of maneuver and then have that be seamless. So it’s one maneuver, even though people are given particular portions of that.

I think collaboration happens in real time. The cycles that we’re used to, ATO cycles and stuff like that, get reduced down to minutes. So things that we used to do in niche environments where the planning cycle was 20 minutes but for a very specialized group of people.

I think that exact same thing now applies to the future where that planning cycle, reaction cycle, is measured in seconds or minutes in terms of how we react. That comes down to the sensing environment. There’s no longer two week pattern of life, IMET soaks, that you’re going to do on a target. It’s going to be instantaneous, multiple sensors get what you need, react to that, and then put an effect on it. And so I think we will see collaboration across multiple platforms, multiple things, ecosystems of things, and then have that be resilient. Day without space, a day with space, a day without air, a day with highly contested air, but penetratable.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Did you want to add on that at all, Eric?

Stacey?

Stacy Kubicek:

No, I think you bring up a really valid point as far as the integration. There’s going to have… It’s going to take all piece parts. One asset is not going to be able to do it alone. Not one capability, not one domain’s going to be able to do it alone.

I think it’s really being able to build upon it and being able to prioritize where you’re needing the data, at what pace you’re needing the data, and how you’re connecting that data in the field to get the right intelligence at the right time moving forward.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Just pulling a little bit more on that thread then, Stacey, how do you foresee commercial space and space-based ISR and Remote Sensing supporting the warfghting function? In particular joint fires, targeting, those sorts of things?

Stacy Kubicek:

That’s a good point, actually. I’ll take it a little broader and I feel bad talking commercial, so you’re going to have to follow this up since you’re the commercial representative here.

But commercial data is absolutely part of the fight. I mean, I think any of us would be remiss if we didn’t say that commercial data is absolutely playing a role in everything that we’re doing today, especially when you think about the Ukraine crisis and the role it’s playing there. Absolutely, across the board it’s a piece part.

That being said, taking it down to a commercial ISR standpoint and the data and what that’s going to do, I’m going to have a little bit different of flavor. As with anything, there’s going to be benefits and there’s also going to be challenges when you start integrating these types of things. When you’re thinking about the tactical effects that you’re wanting from an ISR standpoint and what that’s going to do, then quickly you see some benefits.

Some of the benefits I would highlight, and please feel free to add in, obviously one area we really look at that is good to leverage is when we think about all the stuff that we’re automating, the analytics that we’re automating, AI and ML, they’re learning so much faster because of that commercial data. That commercial data is helping to feed those analytics, having to feed those models. It’s also increasing the size of the metadata lakes that we have for the capabilities and for the data that we have, which is just going to help us be smarter and make better decisions.

Data can also be used as a sentinel. It can help to better understand situational awareness, patterns of life, maybe give us insight into a threat earlier than we would’ve had before. I definitely see some benefits there.

On the flip side, there’s going to be challenges. Absolutely, right? One of the biggest challenges that I would see from the commercial data, and that we are already seeing, is the security piece of it. We’ve got to be able to trust that data.

I don’t necessarily need to trust the data as much if it’s helping to predict whether if there’s going to be clouds in the sky for a day. But I absolutely need to be able to trust the data if I’m using it for targeting, or different desired effects along those lines. Because there some serious implications if that’s wrong, if that data’s been compromised, if I can’t trust where it’s coming from, I can’t trust the data source, or have the right infrastructure and rigor around that data that’s coming in and see that as a big challenge.

That’s where we have to balance that. Identify what the risk we’re taking with that data, and do we have the military-grade data, or how are we using it? So going eyes wide open of what the data is, how we’re using it, and what we’re using it for is absolutely a must when we start talking about the data moving forward and balancing between the military versus commercial data.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting point about when operational risk is going to outweigh security risks, particularly when we are looking into competition. And as you say, that’s going to come down to the kind of mission that we’re trying to execute here.

Eric, did you have any further to add?

Eric Sindelar:

Just to add on to what Stacey was saying, if you really look at it, we’re not even in through the first ending when it comes to AI and ML in the space. And if you look at what’s going on in Silicon Valley with the large companies, there’s really only a handful that truly have the type of developers needed to really unleashed the power of AI and ML. And so the partnership between commercial and the defense contractors is extremely important.

From what I’ve seen, though, once again, if you’re deploying three to five-year-old hardware, you’ve already lost the game. And so partnering together such that we can get the latest and greatest out there and really take advantage of the development that’s going on both in the commercial space and the defense space is important.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

So I’m going to pull the… Oh, sorry. You got to [inaudible 00:10:03] on that.

Stacy Kubicek:

I was just going to say it builds off of what during your introduction you brought up, it really is a partnership. If we’re not bringing it all to bear, we’re not going to be as successful as if we’re finding ways to collaborate and we’re finding ways to drive those synergies together.

But again, it’s eyes wide open of what you’re getting and what you’re not getting so that we can optimize it for whatever desired effect we’re going for.

Luke Savoie:

Yeah, this is a segue really quickly to bind the two things together. You mentioned something that was very key, which is metadata, and you talked about commercial innovation.

It’s interesting cause over the last 20 years the things that we have leveraged from an ISR and a target perspective hasn’t been, “I need to listen to someone’s voice and get voice recognition.” It has been about metadata exploitation.

On top of that, the commercial environment innovates at a rate to develop and make things that are very convenient for them. And so things that we used to do in the past that were very cumbersome, like facial recognition through CCTV cameras, et cetera, well, now all I have to do is intercept the hash table because my biometrics on my iPhone automatically unlock it for me. Commercial market made that so much easier in terms of stuff that is measured in bytes versus megabytes, processing that happen had to happen in the rear.

Their innovation of the infrastructures that we use commercially actually provide us the next level and layer of targeting, which really changes how ISR is done and the things you care about versus the things we used to care about.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

So I guess then to all three of you, based on where you see the potential for the integration of commercial and military and where you see that could go, what do you see as the biggest risk to what that future ISR looks like?

I’ll start with you, Eric.

Eric Sindelar:

Sure. I think the biggest risk is having the qualification cycles that we’ve always had. I would ask everybody here from the Air Force and the Space Force to, how do you think different? How do you push faster?

When I come from the commercial space, it’s the tortoise in the hare. I’m amazed at how slow all the defense organizations move, and that causes the prime vendors to move slow as well. We can move much faster.

I’m not asking for technology to be deployed the day after it launches, but one year is a pretty good metric. I will tell you. 20 years at Intel, I wouldn’t touch a server platform the first six months because a lot of the bugs will be found, and they’ll be fixed. But three to five years is just ridiculous. We have to change this, and we have to go faster.

Luke Savoie:

Yeah, I 100% agree. I mean, one, the acquisition system does hinder our ability to iterate quickly. We sit here and talk about… I had a conversation around a technical piece and the customer was like, “That seems really risky.” And I was like, “That’s five years from now.” I’m like, “Elon Musk is going to build a gas station in space and build a world’s largest rocket in less time than that, and he’s already built three of them.” Boca Chica didn’t exist four years ago.

So, empirically, we know certain things can be done, but there’s process that gets… Process is warranted and needed, but how do we get through that?

But I think the other piece, and I’ll give a little bit more… Obviously, there’s a lot of threats from the threat itself, i.e. how serviced air systems have been, the proliferation, the mobility thereof, our legacy assets and where they hang out in the domain space. How do we get beyond the horizon or to the horizon? How do we deal with resiliency in space or contested LEO? I mean, these are things that massively complicate and make much more important edge processing, edge C2 versus in the…

We’ve become addicted to kill TV, management in the rear, dealing with one and a half to three seconds of late and saying, “I think that’s good.” Now, when that gets cut off, who’s making the calls? Who’s making the shots? What do we even have infrastructure-wise, people? I’m showing my age because I’ll mention things like ABCCC but those things don’t exist anymore. But that was your edge C2 back in the day.

Those things don’t exist today, so what fills that gap or fills that role?

Stacy Kubicek:

Yeah, I’d say one of the biggest risks, it’s piggybacking off a little bit of what both of you have said so far, is really the speed. How quickly can we move?

The threats aren’t getting any easier. The contested environments are ever increasing. We continue to have more implications against what we’re trying to do and being able to do that. Finding the ways to continue to add to the speed of getting the right data out to the edge, wherever it might be, whatever the edge might be, whatever mission partner might be, whatever military partner it might be, it’s getting that data out quickly. How you do that is having to expand at a rate that none of us have ever seen before. You’re integrating… You talk about JADO and you think about aerospace, sea, cyber, land, you’ve got all these different domains, and they all need to interoperate seamlessly now.

So to be able to do that though is not going to be just using one type of data or one type of communication. It’s how do we leverage everything that’s at our fingertips to be able to do that and not at a slow pace. Because you also have latency problems when you start thinking about the massive amounts of data that we have coming off of some of our assets now. And how are you processing that to get the information, or the right insights or intelligence, that we’re needing to be able to go do different effects?

So I think it’s really that balance and understanding, “All right, if I don’t necessarily have all the pieces of data here for this, is that going to still be okay for this situation?” And balancing that with, “Okay, maybe I need more here, so it’s going to take a little bit longer,” and being able to weigh those out but still moving at a fast enough pace that we’re keeping up, or keeping ahead, of whatever threat we need to.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

I’d really like to pull on that thread, actually. I think it’s a really important challenge that we’re facing and that is how are we actually going to be able to wade through those masses of data to be able to pull out the information we need to be able to affect that mission and yet not to be overwhelmed so that we can find that needle in the haystack.

I’ll pass to you first, Luke, on that one.

Luke Savoie:

For sure. I think this is where it gets, “Hey, what did we record and what do we do and what do we wade through?” Do we have a retention pond that is filled with stuff and then we sift through other things, and this comes down to edge processing quite frankly. This gets down to when I record a video, or I’m recording steering erst, or I’m recording SIGINT at the raw RF side, and I have edge processing, the things I should be recording is, “Hey, in this particular video frame there are three trucks, two sedans, and four people.”

And, okay, that’s the piece that the data that matters and those are the tags. These are the tags that you use to then get to the larger repository but you can’t sift through the whole ocean. You got to create smaller, richer pockets of all of that.

When you’re sifting for gold, you don’t just sit there and pick the little pieces out of the bottom of where you’re sifting through. You get it into a refined piece, and then you do another layer of that to how you actually extract it out of everything that’s there. The same thing is there with data, but I think it comes with further forward edge tagging and processing, and that only comes through automation. That only comes through AI/ML.

Eric Sindelar:

To add to that, how many people got the new iPhone 14 yet? Am I the only one? That came out on Friday. I think everybody here knows that the iPhone comes out every year, and then so that’s the cadence and every time you get a new one you’re like, “Oh, there’s not going to be anything better.” But there always is something better. I will tell you that battery life is huge on the new phone. Some of the other things, not a big deal.

So along those lines, getting to that one-year cadence, the technology is so much better and the commercial… We know how to do this. We know how to develop products and test it and make sure it works. There’ll be some tweaks after it launches, but for the most part we know how to get it right.

And also, talking about edge, as Luke was referring to, the biggest thing about edge is the fact that you don’t have to deal with the latency in the bandwidth issues.

I mean, standing in the line today to get my badge, it took me 45 minutes. I mean, there has to be a better way. If you look at Uber… Yes, thank you. I can get on an airplane in San Francisco and fly out here faster than it took for me to get my badge here. We know how to do this. And so we have to keep thinking about how do we process at the edge. And I’ll use my first joke here, cloud stands for complete lack of understanding data centers. So to think that everything that goes into the cloud is going to solve things it’s not because there’s always a latency in bandwidth issues.

I’m sure a lot of people use Uber but you didn’t get rid of your car and that’s because latency is always an issue, and it costs more. It’ll never be cheaper to take Uber the rest of your life. I don’t care where you live. So trying to embrace the technology, the commercial knows how to do this. We just really need to push from the DOD to make sure that we move faster.

Because if you look in history, only recently do we have an adversary that probably will move faster on compute technology. We had such a large gap against our adversaries in the past that we could afford to be three to five years behind. We can’t afford to do that anymore.

Stacey, any comments?

Stacy Kubicek:

Yeah, you guys covered everything really well there. I think the only other component that I would add is the cyber component because to me that’s just such a critical component. When we start talking about our adversaries, especially the predominant ones that we all know and love so much that we’re trying to fight against, the cyber piece is going to be such a critical component.

So as fast as we can move may not always be the pace at what we are able to because of needing to have some of those buffers on there to make sure we’ve got the right data and we’re trusted data, but also it can process at the speed that we need to.

I think that cyber component is going to be really important as we continue to look forward as well and start to formulate our entire position on how we’re handling data for the different purposes that we need to. Like I mentioned earlier, some things absolutely open, that’s fine, open source code, software, whatever for a desired piece of tactics that we’re doing. But then you start looking at some more of the sensitive things that we’re doing and the cyber becomes very, very important.

Luke Savoie:

I’d like to also then get [inaudible 00:21:03] So we talked a lot about edge, we’ve talked a lot about AI/ML and its application, so then there is in the rear, in the PED, and/or in how we deal with data and how we experience it.

Then there’s the temptation that AI is like this… It’s like Motrin, taking 800 milligrams and it cures everything. So there’s a temptation for that, “Okay, I’ve got a bunch of data. That AI’s going to tell me what now what it all means.”

But there’s also a way of, we, over the last 20 years, have gotten really good at certain things. And I don’t know how many MQ-9 drivers we have in here, or folks who have interacted with their sensor systems and their platforms, but we’ve taught a lot of people how to use their thumb and… [inaudible 00:21:47] this but my airplane, we used our thumb sensors around, and the entire crew had a sensor for multi types of operations.

We taught a lot of people how to interact with their environment, how to follow things, how to understand atmospherics. How do we leverage that? And we’re doing all this work and our training pipelines with virtualization and VR and all these other things. [inaudible 00:22:08] we once to look at whammy data this way and how we looked at hey creating virtual MQ-9s and having operators interact with the whammy like they had virtual sensors.

Oh, by the way, everything downstream worked. So you could operate in exploit data, but then actually live assets could prosecute to what you’re doing. But I think the key thing here is finding ways to interact with that data in ways that we know how to interpret it that relates to our experience that now the AI in our head, the gray matter portion at AI, that understands I’m looking at a compound that vehicle went into it. There’s four people in the backyard, one of them smaller than the other, and the atmospherics understanding when someone’s pulling weapons out of the back of a car versus the milk crate.

Those are the things. How do we apply that to the pieces in the back that the AI doesn’t necessarily catch? How do we make the same things similar even with large pools of data that may be in the past or present?

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Yeah, I think it’s really important to… I’ve heard explained before that it’s an iterative process of building trust with the people on the loop versus off the loop and just slowly being able to build that trust to be able to let AI and ML take where it needs to go, but in a way that helps us to control the risk still.

Luke Savoie:

[inaudible 00:23:33] I’ve exceeded the bounds of the battery of my microphone, but I mean that’s the operative word. The T word is a key word there. And in all fairness, I said this at the AFA in the fall in terms of modeling trust.

But central to ISR is that word trust. When we looked at what makes certain platforms, or certain capabilities, highly effective, we found out it wasn’t the sensor. It wasn’t the SIGINT. It came down to trust. The person using the data inherently trusted the data, and that allowed them to use their processing power. They could pay attention to other things taking everything they were getting at 100%, not having to double check.

And so having that, so we’ve done MBSE modeling. We put trust into cameo and at the base of a platform gone, the key capability is trust. How do you model it and make sure that your requirements flow through and amplify and ensure trust in what the capability is?

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

So one of the other risks, or I guess challenges, that I mentioned that the outset was about integration and I think Stacey, I’d like to throw to you with your background and giving me a bit of, I guess understanding about how you see… What do you see as the challenges to fully integrate that space data into those combined and tactical operation centers?

Stacy Kubicek:

That poses a very interesting concept, and it builds upon what we’ve already been talking about a little bit here today of space is absolutely a critical part of this and it’s a critical part because of the speed that it’s going to bring. Are there challenges with it? Absolutely. We’re not here because what we do is easy. We’re here because there’s good challenges ahead of us and there’s a lot of good things we can go do with that.

But space, this is what gets me so excited about the work that we get to do, is space is really bringing a whole nother dimension and it’ll continue to bring a different dimension as we continue to look forward. There’s going to be challenges with that. There’s going to be trust challenges. There’s going to be speed challenges. There’s going to be all of the above, but it’s absolutely a critical component when we start talking about the interoperability.

A lot of times I like to talk about it, everything in our systems now, whether you’re an airborne asset, whether you’re a sea-based asset, whatever asset you might be, if you’re a space asset, you’re a node in a broader system now moving forward. They’re all nodes that need to be able to play together and need to be able to interoperate together to really be able to do what we need to do at the speed that we need to do it. Especially from an ISR standpoint, especially when we start talking about tactical capabilities at the edge.

So that is absolutely critical, and space plays a huge role in being able to do that. We’re able to operate in contested environments that, historically, maybe an airborne asset, maybe speaking to another airborne asset or speaking to an ETIDs, or whatever it might be. Those are contested environments now. They may not be able to communicate, but now you have space sensors that are able to still get that information out.

Normally, it’d take a day to get out to the Pacific if we’re here on earth. I can do that in a matter of minutes with space to get data out there. So there’s a lot of capabilities, and this is really an area in Lockheed specifically, that we’ve been focused on with our 21st century security is how do we integrate all that to get those desired effects. How are we making sure that we’re optimizing in whatever environment might be to be able to get that data transferred quickly?

So I see space being a very critical component of that, which is exciting because you’re adding to the additional layers and assets with all of our different mission partners that can come to bear against the fight.

Luke Savoie:

Let’s see if this one works better. Okay.

Absolutely, and I think for the audience we have here, I think there’s some critical questions that need to be answered by the Air Force and the Space Force. When we talk about agile space or responsive space, we only talk about in a single dimension, which is time.

Yet this is how many sites there are that can do it. They’re 100% predictable on location. So if I’m going to adversary now, I want to deny ourselves LEO and GEO, I mean I have five [inaudible 00:27:41] and it’s gone. So how do you provide agility to responsive space, both unpredictability, unpredictability of orbits, unpredictability of launch site. Who owns that by the way, in terms of agile launch? Is it the Air Force if you do it with an air breather? Something like a Virgin Orbit capability? Does Space Force own that? Does Air Force own that? Who’s the owning command that does that.

What other ideas are out there other than, well I can iterate and make a payload quickly and a commercial provider, or a military provider, can get it off in hours, or whatever, in terms of prep, et cetera. Okay, but it’s still the same place, and a well-thought out special op could take that out. I don’t even need a hypersonic from across the planet to take it out.

It’s an interesting challenge, and that’s a question I put out for the thought leadership that’s in the audience to think that through. So us an industry, can we put some thought about that, but where should we be placing investment, et cetera, to address agile response?

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Yeah, I think one of the other challenges I see with the integration of space though is that space has traditionally been, from my experience anyway, an intelligence community function. I think it’s now broadening out obviously to be much more utilized clearly with the US Space Force.

I’d really like to understand how you guys see the intelligence community and the service communities, that title 10, title 50 challenge, how do we get around that?

Luke Savoie:

I know everyone here will want to speak about that because traditionally just put space is traditionally been title 50 a lot of… And it’s gone through this interesting permutation in the military. Pre-9/11, it was almost purely a title 50 type of activity. Then we started using a lot of title 50 tools in the title 10 environment, but coming up with weird rules to make it all us sleep well at night. Don’t listen to the conversation, and as long as you kill the guy, you’re fine, but you can’t like listen to him. Let him live another day. We did a bunch of weird procedural rules to get around it.

And then we get in the contested environment, and then we’re back to very heavy on our title 50 side. But then we’re starting to realize that it goes from cold to hot like that, and you really want the tool sets you have in title 50 because now the focus is on passive. The focus is on domain awareness, completely passive, and then putting an effect on that where your adversary cannot react until it’s too late.

So how do we bring bear the tool sets that we use to inform decision makers and hopefully deescalate? But at the same time, how do we take those exact same tools and then, on a dime, they both can be proliferated to more penetrating type of assets, et cetera, but at the same time provide a targeting capability that is legal with underneath title 10?

And then in space that’s even more complicated given treaties and everything else that are out there about how we utilize space.

Eric Sindelar:

I’ll let you go, Stacey.

Stacy Kubicek:

Oh, well, thank you so much. I appreciate that. Building off of what you’ve said, my program spanned both sides. I’ve got operations programs on both the intelligence community and the DOD side as well as development support from a space standpoint.

I think the only thing I would definitely want to add on that is working close hand in hand with our customers and our partners on this, everybody is looking for ways to just continue to evolve and do better. We’ve got so much capability, and it’s not just a, to me, a title 10, title 50. It’s also how do we utilize our Five Eye partners? How do we bring everything to bear because this is not a fight that we’re going to go in alone and win alone. This is going to be a team effort, absolutely a team effort, and how we bring all those capabilities across every area where there’s been a lot of investments.

That goes into commercial partnerships. That goes into partnerships with other countries and how we share the data, how we share the capabilities, and how we optimize that for what we need to go do to get ahead of this.

Luke Savoie:

I think you brought up a great point on the allied side because the allies do not have the same rules. And so it’s interesting to have context, especially when we look at decisions around, for instance here in the US around the E3 and transitioning to a different platform.

But we look at the allies, in your case Australia, but Australia’s a very specific CONOP on how that works with the growlers, how that works with platforms like MC-55. And there’s a very specific CONOP up in the F-35 on how that all ties together as part of one single scheme of maneuver.

It’s not just left or bang or right of bang, it is a continuous transition from left to right of bang in terms of that. Whereas here, we still deal with a lot of individualized procurement, the IC community does, and we look to fill these gaps but we don’t understand, “Well, hey. I really like that capability to have over there.” Yeah, but it’s paired with three other things with the connective tissue for a very specific use case. We need to make sure we adapt those things appropriately or understand the gaps if we’re going to replicate those gaps.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Eric, did you want to add on that at all?

Eric Sindelar:

I think both my peers here covered that quite well.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

I was just going to say I think that’s something that’s really important when you start working in alliance is to make sure that you’re sharing the right data but not imposing regulations that might apply to one country and automatically don’t necessarily apply to the other.

I think that is one of the strengths of the partnership of an alliance is that other people don’t have the same regulations and therefore can act in more agile ways across various areas.

We’re coming to close this session, so I do actually just want to bring out one last topic that I think is probably going to run throughout the symposium is about JADC2 and the Joint All-Domain Command and Control. What I’d really like to understand from you all is how do you see JADC2 and ISR? What is going to… Is it going to enable it, is it going to be in hindrance? What’s the relationship between those concepts?

Eric Sindelar:

From my perspective, I work with a company that’s one of the key parts of stitches. That’s part of the JADC2. And we definitely think it’s going to help enable it. Once again, this is something that could have been done in the commercial space 10 years ago, so it pains me to see how long it takes us to do that. We’re looking to support that in any way we can.

Luke Savoie:

I think we’re starting to finally… I mean, it was obviously announcement this morning, and there continues to be a lot more form coming around this particular topic. I think JADC2 ends up becoming the connective tissue around ISR.

At the end of the day, sensing does happen on something we just don’t pull it out of… We do pull it out of the air, but something has to do that ,in any of the domains we deal with whether to cyber to space. So there’s always stuff that’s part of it. JADC2 more certainly takes on that topographical network layer, the governance around metadata, the governance about around are we a J series or K series message world, or are we all OMS UCI? Well, I mean you go to the Navy, they’re all face. What level are we capital open? Are we lowercase open standards types of things. But I think it comes around governance of those things, the topologies of those things, the connective tissue around it.

I mean, at the end of the day, we want to interact with sensors as if they’re our own independent of platform we’re on. That is critical to getting to as minimalistically processed data as possible. So we want as raw data, but with metadata as possible from any sensor in the environment and then be able to come to our own conclusions on that for our own use case.

Because someone may care about passive earth station keeping and someone then may care about missile warning detection and someone else may care about, I’m using that to collaborate in just things I’m getting the net spectrum that come to a refined target that gives me, “Hey, I can classify something from unknown to hostile.” That’s JADC2 will provide the connective tissue around all of that.

Stacy Kubicek:

Yeah, I definitely agree that JADC2’s enabling right from that perspective is going to provide a lot of enablements.

To your point on the governance as well, I think again, you talked about all the different sensors, again, all the different nodes. It’s how are we making sure it’s going to help to enable that connectivity across so many different things that we, historically, haven’t always had the connectivity for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a data format issue maybe, whatever it might be, a system.

But it’s driving the need and the urgency of being able to connect everything and make smart decisions on the data that we have. I think that’s really helping to enable and help to drive. We’ve always worked to attach different and connect different domains. That’s nothing new from a JADC2 standpoint. What’s new is how quickly we’re able to do that, how we’re able to process the data, prioritize the data, and be able to make decisions on that data.

There’s cultural shifts that happen anytime you start doing that from a data standpoint, trusting that data, trusting the intelligence, especially when you start thinking from an AI/ML standpoint and you’re making decisions, very serious decisions off of that data.

I think it’s going to be a balance of moving quickly, but also with the confidence that we need to have with what we’re doing.

Luke Savoie:

I was just going to piggyback on this as well. The other aspect of it does also is, as a commodity, JADC2 will turn processing into a commodity.

Because when we talk about Cloud, capital C Cloud, it really does get into that, “Hey, independent of hardware that’s out there. How do you leverage unutilized processing at the edge, even if it’s not on platform?” Two hops away is an F-35 with a card that’s dormant inside that is unutilized. I’m tapped out on, my AI is tapped out over where I’m at, but I’m going to get metadata over to available processing.

JADC2 two will provide, I think, the topology not only for sensor connectivity, but actually processing connectivity, which gives us scalable degradation. It isn’t a one to one, a platform falls out. We don’t lose just the processing on it. The processing can be offloaded and utilized in other places.

Gp. Capt. Hannah Jude-Smith, RAAF:

Right. Well, I think that comes to the conclusion of our panel today. I just like to thank our three panelists very much for coming. It’s been a really interesting exploration, I think of the challenges that we’re facing in the ISR Remote Sensing world.

And they’re not going to go away, but I do think that today, talking about AI and ML, helping us deal with the scale of the data and to try and do so at speed, has been really reassuring. I think we haven’t really solved the answer of how to do that faster, how to acquire it and get into those commercial opportunities faster.

But I think that to me that’s a conversation about risk, and it’s actually about understanding where is the risk that we need to accept now, particularly given the strategic environment and the uncertainties. We need to start being a little bit braver and a little bit more optimistic about where we need to take that risk now.

Please join me in thanking our panelists for today.

Watch, Read: ‘The Senior Executive Service: Today & Tomorrow’

Oct. 16, 2022

AFA board member Kathleen Ferguson moderated a discussion on “The Senior Executive Service: Today & Tomorrow” with Anthony P. Reardon, administrative assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force; Alex Wagner, assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs; Venice M. Goodwine, director of enterprise information technology; and Darlene Costello, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, Sept. 21, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Kathleen Ferguson:

Good afternoon. My name is Kathleen Ferguson and I’m your moderator for today’s panel. I spent nearly 35 years as a civilian in the Air Force, served as an SES for 14 years in numerous positions, and retired as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Installations, Environment and Energy. I’m now a member of the Air Force Association Board of Directors, and thank you all for being here today.

Congress established that Senior Executive Services part of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. The SES Corp was established to ensure that executive management of the government of the US is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the nation, and otherwise is of the highest quality. Members of the SES typically serve in key positions just below the top presidential appointees, and are the major link between these appointees and the rest of the federal workforce.

The Civil Service Reform Act also gave greater authority to the agencies to manage their executive resources, including attracting and retaining highly competent executives, assigning executives where they will be most effective in accomplishing the agency’s missions, providing for the development of managers and executives, and then holding executives accountable for both their individual and organizational performance.

Today you will hear from Honorable Wagner, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force from Manpower and Reserve Affairs, Mr. Tony Reardon, and Ms. Venice Goodwine about the Senior Executive Service in the Department of the Air Force. You’ll hear how the department manages and develops senior civilians, how the department utilizes the Executive Resources Board and Performance Review Board and gains some insight on what they see as the future for SES’s and the Department of the Air Force.

So with that, I’m going to ask the first question to Mr. Wagner. You’ve been the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs for just about three months now, but are not new to DOD. You’ve worked in the Army during the Obama Administration and you’ve also spent considerable time leading talent management at the Aerospace and Defense Industry, while you were at Aerospace Industry’s Association. In your current role, you provide overall policy direction for the management of both military and civilian manpower. And Mr. Wagner, can you tell us what your biggest surprise has been in your return to DOD specifically related to talent management and development of senior executives?

Hon. Alex Wagner:

Thanks so much. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you all for showing up to this panel, the very last panel of the last day of AFA. You guys are real troopers. I am a little nervous today because this is my first time at AFA since 1997. So I’m so excited to be back. Many of you might be wondering why the Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs is even on this panel. And for that you can blame my partner in crime, Tony Reardon. He and others in the Air Force prior to my confirmation moved SES management and that office from a one over to M&RA. And so, I am so excited because this is something that as Kathleen mentioned, I have a little bit of experience in both as a GS 15, and OSD policy, but also working directly for the Secretary of the Army in helping him approve and manage our SES Corp.

So eventually I’m going to get to your question, which was what surprised me? And I’ll tell you, I’ve new to the Air Force, but I’m not new to the reputation of the Air Force and I’m certainly not new to the Air Force’s senior executives because a number of them have been senior executives or GS 15s and partners in crime and colleagues of mine in other parts of my life in the Pentagon. And now they’ve found their way from different agencies outside of DOD or within DOD over to the Air Force.

So my answer to your question is the SES Corp of the Air Force is unlike and unrivaled by the other services and by OSD. And I’ve seen it up close and personal the last three months. I’ve known of it by reputation, but every single day when I work with the SES Corp, when I engage with them, when I meet people for the first time, the depth of knowledge, the breadth of experience, the knowing how to manage up, me and some of my new colleagues, some of whom have never served in government before, and the focus on mission is truly exceptional.

And I’m just so pleased and proud to be your colleague. In some cases, be your advocate, and looking forward to in this new role, helping ensure that we’re able to grow each of you and those who aspire to be one of you as professionals. And also ensure that at the end of every day we are focused on the war fighter. We are focused on mission, we are focused on our US National Security. And I think that’s what distinguishes the SES Corp and the Department of Defense, but more importantly, in the department of the Air Force, that we’ve got such a great crew. We’ve got them in the right positions, and we’ll talk about that I think a little bit more in the day. But I’m so pleasantly surprised that the reputation has met the reality.

Kathleen Ferguson:

And thank you Secretary Wagner. And want to ask you a follow up question. Can you describe a little bit about what your vision is for the SES Corp?

Hon. Alex Wagner:

So I’ll say this, the Army’s SES Corp that I became pretty familiar with very slightly in how they manage from the Air Force’s. And I see a lot of depth of expertise, but I also see people who have been doing similar jobs for quite some time. My vision is not to move people around like general officers, but my hope and my goal is that we can expand the breadth of expertise because I think a broader expertise helps people find more meaning in their job, challenges them with new skills. It’s more fun to get out of your comfort zone and build relationships with different people. And one of the visions is essentially saying, “How do we broaden the SES experience in the Air Force learning from what the Army does?” Well and what the Army could do better to continue to keep the Air Force SES the envy of the other services and the envy of OSD?

Kathleen Ferguson:

Perfect, thank you. So turning to Mr. Reardon who is not new to the department of the Air Force, you’ve been in SES now for about 13 years and have held a number of different positions as a senior executive. And certainly over that time you’ve seen a lot of changes, and changes in both military leadership and the political leadership in Department of Defense, both democratic administrations, republican administrations. Can you share some of your lessons learned over that time and what advice you’d give new SES’s and existing SES’s?

Anthony P. Reardon:

Thanks. I thought about this question a lot. So I’m going to use two words that are kind of the opposite of each other. You need to be flexible. We all remember that growing up in the Air Force. Flexibility is the key to air power. Seemed that was on a water tank at one of the bases I was stationed at. But then more than that consistency is the other thing. So what we’ve seen over the last couple years is changes to our processes. Without that consistency in the SES Corp, it’s hard to maintain the balance as you move forward. I guess when you look at it as a new administration comes in, they see issues inside the processes with any bureaucracy, they see that and then they move to change those. And we go through a cycle with every administration where you make major changes to major processes. And sometimes, we finish them in the term of that administration. Sometimes we don’t. I think oftentimes, when we don’t, we build kind of sub-optimized processes on top of other sub-optimized processes.

So the real goal of an SES, I think is to kind of whether that storm to be able to provide that consistency throughout the organization to understand what the outcome is and how to drive them towards the outcome. Probably the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is networking. So I can tell story. I just did a senior leader orientation course last spring where I have 22 years in the Pentagon. Got here in September of 2000, which I never would’ve envisioned being in the Pentagon for 22 years. So I actually had longer time in the Pentagon than some of the general officers had in the Air Force. So it’s kind of interesting to see the changes throughout the years as the new group come in. But the networking is what makes my job attainable right now. It’s the people that I’ve grown up with, the people that I’ve seen as they come through on the numerous assignments into the building, then leave, come back again, being able to work through processes with them and drive towards the outcome.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thanks Mr. Reardon. So turning now to Ms. Goodwine, you are also relatively new to the Department of the Air Force, but you were an SES before you came over and working in Department of Agriculture. Can you tell us what prompted your move to the Air Force and what you’ve experienced since coming on board?

Venice M. Goodwine:

Okay, so thank you. Good afternoon and yes, you are brave. I appreciate it. And so got here with the Air Force in June of 2021. And I will tell you, having served in the military myself for over 30 years, I was familiar with the Air Force’s commitment to training and education of its enlisted and officers because I had done both. When I got to the Department of Agriculture, I expected that same commitment and I was surprised. So if there’s any USDA implants here, I’m sorry I’m not being negative about you, but in three and a half years I had one training class as an executive and I had no training budget for my team. And I was flabbergasted because I just assumed because the way we did it in the Air Force and DOD that the entire federal department did it that way as well.

So that’s not true. And so when the opportunity came for me to get back to the Air Force, to my roots and what I knew about their commitment, I took that opportunity. And what I liked is when I got here within my first 30 days, shout out to Mel McGuire and Virginia Reynolds, and the senior leader team because within the first 30 days they told me the expectations. That I would continue to grow, they’d give me opportunities for courses that would allow me to continue to grow my leadership skills, also my functional skills. They also told me my responsibility of mentoring others and developing others as well as an executive.

But also what was more important was that they were going to offer these opportunities, but that was up to me to take advantage of those opportunities. And so while originally I was envy of all my friends, my Air Force SES’s because they were going to Harvard for class, and MIT, and Chapel Hill when I got back. So I’ve now been here what Mr. Reardon? About 18 months. I too have gone to Harvard, and MIT. So now I’m the envy of my other friends. But truly, the deliberate management that is provided by the executive office is what to me makes our executive service in the Air Force very unique and special. I’m excited to be a part of it.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thank you. Turning back now to Secretary Wagner, I’ve heard that there’s some angst among the SES’s in the Department of Air Force about the need to reduce the overall number of SES’s from about 190 to 160. Two part question for you. One, can you shed some light on how the department is going to do that? And then second part of that question is, do you think there’s going to be reassignments or terminations associated with that reduction?

Hon. Alex Wagner:

So you give me the softball to start and then throw a curve over the plate with spit on it. I’m going to try to take a swing at this. What I’ll say is that these reductions are not by fiat from the Secretary of the Air Force or from me. These are congressionally mandated reductions since 2017. That’s the first thing. The second thing is I believe they’ve also come with geo reductions. Similarly, I think we’ve taken about a 10% cut. So that’s the bad news. The good news is that we have been managing down effectively. And the better news is we’ve actually never had 190. We’ve actually only had 166 allocations. And so as retirements come, what we’re doing is we’re trying to be focused on making sure we’ve got the right people, in the right roles, at the right time.

So, your second question is about reduction termination. So, I used to be a lawyer, I dabbled a bit in employment law. I know you never talk about firing people, but what I can say without question, is the answer is no. As I alluded to before, we are managing down. We are managing down to 160, we have a plan to do that, which for 2022, we’re going to easily meet. There might be some challenges going forward, but that’s our overall allocation within all of what the Department of Defense is allowed to have. And so, we’re doing it proactively. We’re utilizing and leveraging the Talent Management Council, the Talent Management Board. The goal is to make sure that people are in the right place, for them, but also the Secretary of the Air Force’s priorities. So we’re looking where we can move SES billets to support those priorities. I think that’ll create additional opportunities for people looking for new ways for professional growth.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thanks Mr. Secretary. Going back to Mr. Reardon again for this one. I think we gave Mr. Reardon the softball part of this question. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 gave the department so the federal government great latitude to manage their senior executives and within the Department of the Air Force, Mr. Reardon, can you talk about the roles of the ERB and the PRB, and what they do and how they’re organized?

Anthony P. Reardon:

Sure. We actually added a third. Years past the ERB was a little bit more inclusive in what it had oversight responsibilities for. What we’ve taken now at the ERB, we almost do just SES hiring actions and allocations of positions. So what that group does is it follows the merit principles, it reviews an SES package as it comes forward, makes sure that everything’s been done in accordance with the merit principles, and that the selection was processed properly. It also kind of reviews the request from different organizations that want to stand up specific SES position, or an HQE type, position or a CSE is probably the best way to say it. What we did a couple years ago is we split out of that a group called the Talent Management Committee, which manages the tier ones. There’s another one that does tier twos and tier threes, and they do a little bit more of the reviews of the development of the individuals.

They make the recommendations for school selections, they make the recommendations for slates. We slate all the different SES positions inside the Air Force. So we will pick SES’s that have the skills that are needed for that particular position. We’ll put them on a slate and if that position opens up, we use that slate as the first measure to see if we have available people to do it. The PRB is kind of where we review the end of the year appraisals. We’re under a certified system, so because of that we have a little bit more of a formal process, but we review the performance objectives and the accomplishments of each individual by name. We have three PRBs. One of them does tier ones, one of them does tier twos, and then the other one does tier threes. And then obviously it’s high and below. So tier threes have a select group of tier threes and then the tier twos are evaluated by tier threes, and then tier ones are evaluated by tier ones.

One of the things that we’ve tried to do with all three of the processes, that’s been a little bit of a thorn in people’s side over the last couple years, is to increase the transparency of the process. The talent management committee, for example, gives a rating for an individual whether they should continue to build tenure in their job, whether they should be available for increased challenges, or a promotion, or whether they should be available for career broadening, which is a lateral move.

We’re trying to find ways to help people understand what the ratings are, what the discussion was prior to the TMC. So what we do is we’ve assigned SES’s to other SES’s. So anybody that sits on the TMC has a core group of 10 to 15 SES’s that they’re responsible for. So they reach out prior to the TMC, they kind of get the idea of what it is they want to do with their career, how they’re doing in their job, what their timeline is to move out of that job and what they’re interested in the future. And then they match those to the discussions of the individual when the TMC comes back. And then we provide feedback after it to say, “Hey, this is kind of what the TMC thinks you should look for. These are some of the leadership classes that we should think you should take.” So I think we’re making great strides in the transparency and I think that’s the thing that we’re working on the most, making sure that we have meaningful feedback to the senior executives and we help them when they have requirements to enhance their leadership skills.

Kathleen Ferguson:

I’m going to circle back to Secretary Wagner for a second part of this question. And I want to have you respond to what happens. Can you tell the audience what happens when the ERB is done putting together their recommendations, and then the package goes behind the glass doors. And for folks that don’t work in the Pentagon, don’t work for the Air Force, behind the glass doors is literally behind the glass doors. It’s where the Chief and Secretary work, the Under Secretary works there, the Vice Chief of Staff works there, and the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force and Space Force. So, Secretary Wagner, if you can talk about what actually happens to that package when it moves down there?

Hon. Alex Wagner:

Well first it moves to my office, and if anyone in this audience has ever heard me talk about the SES process, you’ll have heard me say the same thing over and over. If there are challenges, I want to fix the process, not fix the outcomes. And my goal is if we are going to have an interview process that when the results of that interview process and a primary and a secondary or maybe some additional secondary candidates are selected, alternates, I want to see what the value of the interview was. I’m going to read why one person was selected over another because otherwise we could just pick it via resume. And so anything that gets to my desk, I’m going to work with our SES management office to make sure that those of you… And I know many of you have been on these boards, these interview panels. The goal is to extract meaningful differences that can’t be seen in a resume only based process. And then to articulate those differences to demonstrate the value of that process.

So I’ve worked with Mel McGuire and her team a number of times to say, “You’ve got two candidates that seem very evenly matched on paper. Help me understand when I’m reading this package, what the meaningful differences are? Why you picked one candidate over another? What’s the right skill set for this job?” And throughout all of that, I want to make sure we’re asking the right questions. And to date, I can tell you in report that someone who has been a member of an SES before when I was in the Army, and I’ve written some of those reviews of the interview process to help influence a senior leader or a hiring…

Hello? Oh, there we go. A hiring official’s decision. I thought I was being pulled off stage here. Is my time up? No. What I’m focused on is making those meaningful, and allowing senior leaders to understand the thinking, and the rationale clearly. And I’m pretty convinced from what I’ve seen, that we’ve got the right process, we’ve got the right questions. I mean, one of the things I’m always looking for is when we ask the question about how do you value diversity? How do you create an inclusive environment? How people answer that, because that really matters. And I think that’s one of the strengths of our SES Corp.

I also think it’s something that we need to continue to focus on and grow. And so when I get that recommendation, and I read that rationale, very often, in fact, more often than not, I’ll write a note up and I’ll say, “This candidate in the interview process was able to articulate this, which is a value proposition for this particular job.” Or, “This candidate displayed a skill that I know we’ve been looking for that we don’t have yet.”

And so when it gets to the glass doors as Kathleen, we a… I wouldn’t call it an unwritten rule, but a deviation of responsibilities where the Under Secretary reviews the tier one and the tier twos, and then the Secretary reviews the tier threes. And sometimes if I haven’t done my job well enough, the Secretary, or the Under Secretary will call me in and say, “Hey, help me understand, why you endorse this recommendation.” But, if there is something that’s not working for the Air Force, my focus is ensuring we have the right process in place. And if we have the right process in place, the right outcomes will be the result. And I’ll defend those, you’ve got my word on that.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thank you for that. Ms. Goodwine, back to you. You talked about in your earlier response about the Air Force providing deliberate talent management to you as a senior executive. And having worked in the building for a long time and managed the Civil Engineering Career program, I know the Air Force doesn’t provide talent management and educational opportunities for just the senior executives. Can you share with us what your development team is doing now in deliberate talent management and how you are identifying grooming people for future leadership opportunities?

Venice M. Goodwine:

Okay, good. Yes. So if you’ll know, there is an office that manages the Chiefs. There’s an office that manages Colonels. There’s an office of course that manages GOs. There’s also, as we talked about, office that manages the SCS’s. There’s not an office like that for Senior Civilians. So what we have instead in place is a career field team, which has a functional authority who is normally the Senior Civilian in that career field. We have the functional manager that executes the direction of the functional authority. And then we have a career field manager. So I serve as the Functional Manager for the Cyberspace and Information career field, 11,000 individuals across department of the Air Force. And so the way we identify high performing individuals, or provide educational opportunities is a couple of ways.

One, we have a vectoring program and all of these civilian career fields have the same. And with that program, it’s a voluntary program where individuals can submit their applications through my vector and a panel that’s chaired by myself and some of the other senior civilians in our career field, we will provide them advice about their career. And that advice is based on what we value as a career field. For instance, it is we value PME on par with our military counterparts. So if at a certain grade, if they have not completed SOS or ACSC, we’ll recommend that they complete that.

Or if they don’t have a degree, a civilian degree, which is civilian education, something else that we value, we’ll make that recommendation on par again with our military counterparts. And that also includes functional credentials but also career broadening opportunities as well as key civilian positions. And so when they submit that application and we give them back a vector saying, “Yes, do this. Go do this. You’ve had enough of this.” Just so we talk about you should probably move, because it’s based on the goals that they have set in partnership with their supervisors of where they want to go in their career as a civilian.

So besides that, after the vector is done, which is done in the fall, just stomp, stomp right now vectors are due by the applications are September 23rd with endorsements by September 30th by supervisors. So if you have civilians, please help them with that. Your endorsement is very important to us.

But also we have our development teams just as they do for the military where we’ve board our civilians for selection into courses as well. So another way that we build our civilians. The other way is those are the formal processes that we use and it’s uniform across the civilian career field for the entire department. But some of the other things that we do in our career field is webinars. We hold webinars at all levels. A webinar if you want to be an SES, we talk about our ECQ process. If you need help writing your resume, we’ve held webinars on doing that as well. And so with the combination of the formal and the informal process for the career field, we are using that to identify those senior civilians who want that next opportunity to make sure they’re prepared for that. But also that we can identify high potential candidates as well that we can help them move into some of our key civilian positions throughout the department.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thank you, Mr. Reardon. One of the questions we’ve heard from a number of individuals is other federal agencies have career development programs that provide training for and groom folks that are in GS 14, 15 positions to be future SES’s. Can you talk about why the department of the Air Force and DOD don’t have a similar program?

Anthony P. Reardon:

I think it’s a DOD decision. I think OPM spends a lot of time helping us do our jobs to start with. And I think if we stood up one of those programs, I think the rigor of it would overcome the department. So instead of that, I think we’ve turned to the development teams to have them mentor the folks and develop them in the right way. There are other programs that are out there. We do have a couple of programs, DODY, the Defense Senior Leader Development program, DSLDP is probably the big one. The difference between that and the program that the question addresses is your ECQs aren’t certified on the other side of that.

Kathleen Ferguson:

And I have a follow up question on that relative to ECQs. So there was language in the National Defense Authorization Act that requires just a resume and not ECQs. Can you walk through a little bit and explain how that works and when that applies?

Anthony P. Reardon:

I can. I think it’s an excellent opportunity. I’m not quite sure the other services utilize it to the same degree that we do, because I think at the end of the year we get some of their allocations and we use them. There’s a good and a bad side to that. The bad side of it, we’ll start with that, is the fact that you’re limited then to be an SES inside of DOD only. If you move out to another agency, your ECQs are going to have to be certified by OPM. For those that have written ECQs, it’s not easy to do and oftentimes it’s an obstacle to people moving forward to an SES position because of the rigor that’s involved in capturing all the executive core qualifications in the way that they want it done. And for those that aren’t familiar, you only have a couple bites at the apple when you send it to OPM. If the panel reviews it sends it back with a couple of changes, if you don’t correct the changes suitably, the individual kind of goes into a probation period.

What the resume only does, is it allows you to capture those ECQs in a smaller format, so it’s contained in the resume. All you have to do is put… All you have to do. It sounds easy. It’s actually hard to review the resumes with the ECQ qualifications put into them. But it gives you a little bit more flexibility. It’s limited to fewer pages, and then it kind of walks you through your career. The flexibility that we have with that is basically speed. It allows us a faster process to get an executive through the screening board, through the approval process and into the seat, because we don’t have to rely on OPM running a board to get their ECQs done. Plus, I think we get better and more applicants for each one of our panels based on the resume only format.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Okay, thank you. And I have just one last question, and I want to ask it to each one of the panel members, and I’ll start with Ms. DeWine. I’m sorry, Ms. Goodwine. Sorry. Can you explain, or just give us your thoughts on what does that one last thing you want to share with the audience relative to senior executives, leadership development, what they should be looking at?

Venice M. Goodwine:

I’ll tell you what my grandmother told me. She said, “You have to stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.” And I looked at her the way you just looked at me like, “Huh? What? What do you mean?” And she said that to me when I was probably 12 or 13, and I didn’t understand. But I’ll just tell you real quickly. So every Saturday morning in my house, it was the deal that Saturday morning was the time that she did errands. If you went with grandma when she did errands, you either got McDonald’s or you got ice cream. So that was the goal. It’s not like today where everybody has Uber Eats, right? Going to McDonald’s in my day was a big deal. And so there are times when she would get ready to go, and I wasn’t ready. I’d run downstairs, and I would be frantic, like I want to go. I ended up standing at the door with tears in my eyes because I wasn’t ready.

She’d always say, “You have to stay ready, so you don’t have to get ready.” Well fast forward to where I am now, and I now understood what she meant. So here’s what I say to civilians. If your goal is to be a member of the Senior Executive Service, the goal and the steps to get there are known. You’re going to have either ECQs, or you need to have resumes that show the demonstrated qualities, the ECQs within that.

And so, to stay ready means are you ECQ ready? Have you written them? Have you practiced your interview questions? Do you have your resume ready? Have you talked to a mentor? Get ready. Have that stuff ready so that when the opportunity comes and presents itself, you won’t be like me standing at the door with tears in my eyes because I wasn’t going to get McDonald’s. You will be able to just submit your package when you see that USA job announcement. Or, when your mentor who’s advocating on your behalf tells you about an opportunity, you are ready.

The other thing I like to say is to my military, I know that you like that your civilians are your consistency. And I agree we do offer that. But some of your civilians have goals and desires to do more. So I ask you to support them with their endorsement package for DT, because as a chair of the DT, I read that and I look for the strats just as you do on the military side for civilians. Help them and mentor them as well into what it means to move and have career broadening. That’s why our officers move around. And sometimes as civilians, we need to move around as ready. So my last piece of advice to my civilians is stay ready so you don’t have to get ready when that opportunity comes.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Very well said. Mr. Reardon?

Anthony P. Reardon:

For me, hey, I wish I could tell you that being an SES included all these great things, but for a lot of people, they struggle with the decision as whether they move from GS 15 to an SES position, and it’s more than a little bit of more money. It’s more than a parking space inside the contained area. And it’s more than the executive dining room. But it’s a responsibility that I think I would like to see more of our GS 15s aspire to. I think the core leadership of the SES’s right now in the Air Force is pretty good. It’s actually great.

And I think what we provide to the service is that continuity, and that understanding, and that stability, and the organization that allows us to succeed. So more than anything, I’d tell people, if you’re interested in it, know what it is that you want to do, know what direction you want to go, know what type of jobs you’re interested in. And then just like Venice said, make sure that you get all your ducks in a row. You know what it is that you need to get done before you sit down for that first interview. It’s actually an excellent opportunity. I think it’s something that everybody should look at at some point in their civilian career.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thanks, Mr. Reardon. Secretary Wagner?

Hon. Alex Wagner:

Well, those are two really hard acts to follow. And given that I’m new, I figured maybe it would help you understand a little bit about me and how I’m approaching this class of issues. He’s not my grandmother, but my friend, and mentor, and twice former boss, Eric Fanning, former Air Force Under Secretary and Acting Secretary has always told a story of the 2013 shutdown. And when he’d travel across the country to bases, the Generals would come out and they greet him on the runway and the first thing they’d say was, “We need our SES’s back. We need our senior civilians back.” And so that helped me understand at the beginning of my career in the Department of Defense, just how valuable the SES Corp was to this incredibly important mission.

What I can say about myself, and I know it’s true for nearly all of you in the audience and those of you at home, is that the power of being a senior civilian, whether you’re a political appointee, presidentially approved, or a senior career official, is that you’ve got the rare, unbelievable opportunity to have an idea in the shower in the morning, have a meeting on it, convene a meeting on it by noon, convince the senior military leaders of the military department that it’s the right thing to do by three o’clock and help sign it out and affect the lives of, at least in the Department of the Air Force, 700,000 civilians, Airmen and Guardians before you drive back home and or metro in my case.

And so I think that unbelievable mission and impact that we can have really embodies what… This is not just parroting the boss, which is always a good thing for me to do, but every day I think about what one team, one fight really means. And it’s not only we’re the Department of the Air Force comprising a Space Force and an Air Force. It’s not that we are civilians and we are military.

To me it’s that every day, the politicals in the Department of the Air Force, the military, the career civilians, the SES Corp, come into work and have such awesome responsibilities and yet have such incredible abilities to make an impact and make a difference. And my goal and my hope is that, that I am an incredible advocate for you, I am someone that can help open up additional opportunities to challenge you and make sure you’ve got a challenging career. But at the end of the day, that we all realize that we’re in this for the same purpose. And it’s the war fighter and those young civilians who are looking to grow their career in National Security that we’re looking to make the department and frankly the world a better place for.

Kathleen Ferguson:

Thank you very much. And with that, I would like to conclude our discussion this afternoon and just want to thank… If you can join me in thanking Secretary Wagner, Mr. Reardon, and Ms. Goodwine for being here.

And then finally to all the folks out there in the audience, thanks for sticking with us till the very, very end of the AFA conference. I know there’s a big dinner tonight celebrating the Air Force’s 75th birthday. And as a member of the Air Force Association Board, we welcome your feedback. What did we do right? What did we do wrong? Just don’t say anything about the fact that we ran out of lunches on Monday. We got that. But tell us what we can do better next time to make a more rewarding conference for you. And again, thanks for being here, and joining us this afternoon.

Watch, Read: ‘The Future of Propulsion’

Oct. 16, 2022

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, moderated a discussion on “The Future of Propulsion” with Michael Gregg, director of the Aerospace Systems Directorate; Shawn Phillips, chief of the Rocket Propulsion Division; John Sneden, director of the Propulsion Directorate; and Howard Meyer, senior adviser for Air Force Futures, Sept. 21, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

All right. Can you hear me? Oh, good afternoon, everyone. How are we doing? Yeah. I know you’ve been waiting with baited breath for today’s panel. We have a very exciting group of panelists with me up here. We’ve been waiting all week to come to you and tell you about the future of propulsion. I’m the Air Force Research Lab Commander and Technical Executive Officer. It’s one lab for two services, and we’re really proud to be a part of telling you about the future of propulsion. It’s often an unsung technology, but it’s really helped us achieve the air power and space power that we see today. In the air domain, for example, propulsion is a critical component of our quest to attain faster speeds, greater range, higher altitudes, and improved power and thermal management capabilities.

Propulsion, of course, is also important to our space domain operations, as it takes extreme speed to escape the earth’s gravity and to get to those far reaching orbits beyond geo in cis-lunar, but it also helps us efficiently manage space operations once we’re on orbit. So really, all this is to say is that engines, rackets, propulsions, they’re really here to stay. And so today, I’m really honored to have with me three experts to join us in this very important discussion, strategically chosen to represent the programs of today, as well as the potential technologies of tomorrow. I have with me, Dr. Mike Gregg, who’s the Air Force Research Lab aerospace systems director out in Dayton, Ohio.

And to his left, we have Dr. Shawn Phillips, who’s the chief of the Rocket Propulsion Division out at Edwards Air Force Base. And to his left, we also have Mr. John Sneden, who’s the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center Director from the Propulsion Directorate. Unfortunately, Dr. Howard Meyer, who represents Air Force Futures, was unable to join us today, but I’d like each of our panelists, starting with Mike, to give us a quick intro and tell us about yourself.

Dr. Michael Gregg:

Thank you, ma’am. As general Pringle noted, I’m the director of aerospace systems. So, what does that mean? In the portfolio, there’s hypersonics, there’s traditional turbo machinery and propulsion. We have the Rocket Lab folks out at Edwards. We have autonomy, power and thermal management, and we have the air vehicle. So, one of the big things we’re working on right there is the CCA type vehicles, and leaping ahead. A little bit about myself, spent 25 years in uniform, really covered the whole life cycle. I started life at the Rome Air Development Center way back, 30, 40 years ago. And then I got involved in missile defense, in acquisitions, C-17, and then I did some space work for a while, and then I ended up in sustainment of C-5 and C-17. So, seen it soup to nuts, and I’m really excited to be back in AFRL right now.

Dr. Shawn Phillips:

All right. Hello. As General Pringle said, I’m Shawn Phillips. And maybe you caught that I have two level of bosses right here, so I will stay in line the entire time during the presentation.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

And it’s going to be hard for him. I’ll just tell you.

Dr. Shawn Phillips:

Yes, it will be hard. So, a little bit about the Rocket Lab out at Edwards, which is part of AFRL. And what I want to say is we really embody the one lab, two services. I got the pleasure of being assigned, voluntold to be part of developing the CONOPS for AFRL during that time. And our division has about a 60/40 mix of Space Force Guardians and Air Force Airmen, which has really been an, I think, an exciting thing for us to take on in the areas of rockets that we have. So, a bit about myself, I’m a lifer out at the Rocket Lab. Usually when you go there, people don’t want you to come back, so I’ve really enjoyed that 25 years of actually being out in the desert, the Mojave Desert, where we don’t have this thing called humidity. And today hopefully, we’ll talk a little more about the technology and stuff that we have.

Mr. John Sneden:

Great. Well, good afternoon. I’m John Sneden. I’m the Air Force Director of Propulsion, and I’m also a member of the Senior Executive Service. It’s an honor to be here with you today. And I think as General Pringle indicated, this is a very important forum, so I’m glad we’re getting some airtime to discuss this key technology. I’ve been doing lifecycle weapon system management for well over 20 years now, encompassing space systems, aircraft systems, propulsion systems. And I will tell you that being in the propulsion directorate has been one of the most challenging and rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. This team really enables the propulsion center of excellence for the Air Force. They support ready, affordable, safe, and effective propulsion systems for 10 major commands, and over 50 international partners.

And the technology spread that they have is just immense. It goes from the 1950s, systems that were developed and produced in the 1950s, all the way to the most cutting edge technology that we have out today. So, truly a tremendous spectrum of activities going on today. And our focus overall is to innovate, it’s to drive effective solutions, and it’s to ensure ready, affordable, safe, and effective propulsion systems across the life cycle. And the team that supports that is just absolutely fantastic, and I’m honored to be a part of it.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

Well, thank you all for joining us here today on stage. I really appreciate you taking the time to be here. So, we’re going to start with Mike. And as you said, your career has spanned the entire acquisition life cycle, but now you’re leading the future of research and development in the propulsion area. So, what are the major developments that AFRL is working on, or any new areas that are exciting to you?

Dr. Michael Gregg:

This is really a very exciting time to be in the propulsion world, and that’s no hyperbole. And when I talk about propulsion, it’s across the whole spectrum. It’s not just fighter jet engines. It’s rocket engines, it’s solid rocket motors, it’s some small at triable engines, it’s rotating detonation engines. So, we’re really covering the whole spectrum of what it means to propel something in air and space. Shawn is going to be talking much more about our end space and to space propulsion work, but that is really just an exciting frontier to think about multi-mode propulsion and how we can use green fuels in space and how we can enable maneuver without regret. So, it’s a really exciting time and we are trying to make the right investments based on the demand signals we are hearing. How do we support the OIs? How do we support what the war fighter needs today? Which is different from historical norms.

So when you hear that the lab in particular is drawing down some investments in the larger engines, that’s true, but it’s still a very exciting portfolio, and we are innovating truly at the edge. If you think about just the small at triable engines, there’s a tremendous amount of work and research that needs to be done working in the lab and working with our industry partners. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance later to expand a little bit, but it’s really exciting to be looking at and investigating rotating detonation engines. Once again, we are doing some research in the lab, but we also have great partnerships across the spectrum of looking at this really interesting technology space.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

Hey, thanks Mike. All right, Dr. Phillips. So, you’ve an Air Force Guardian civilian. You’ve been out at the Rocket Lab for some time now. And the Rocket Lab has been an important part of our nation’s development in rocket propulsion and been truly a part of some of the major developments that we’ve seen over the years, whether it’s missile development, but particularly with the space launch areas. And in fact, I don’t know if this audience knows, but the vice CSO, General Thompson, started his career out at the Rocket Lab out at Edwards. So as the director of this really amazing lab that we have, how have you adjusted propulsion investments to align with what they’re doing in the commercial industry, which has really seen an uptick in activity, and it’s really pointing us to some new and exciting directions?

Dr. Shawn Phillips:

So that was great. And the General Thompson thing is awesome. We got to see him the other day again, to mention that. And he still talks about that was the highlight of his career, at least that’s what he tells us, going out and testing at the Rocket Lab. So, when you ask that question, General Pringle, the first thing I’d like to do is go back, and you mentioned the history, and I [inaudible 00:09:26] two sentences on that because we have so much history there over 60 years of it. And I think the pride that everybody can take in this room is that we know the aircraft side and all the history there, but every large liquid rocket engine ever developed or tested the United States has its footprint at the AFRL Rocket Lab. That is great, but the development at times were eight to 12 years, sometimes 15.

The other thing in commercial space, we had… We’re looking at things, we were leaders. We were doing all this. We talk about the space access and in space. So, stepping forward to what you’re saying now is how we changed. We had to change. It was almost like the other… This morning I woke up and said, think about everything that’s happened in quantum computers. The Air Force couldn’t step and say, “We’re going to lead this.” They had to say, “How can we leverage this?” So, what we had to do is stop being that lead that’s trying to push the engine technology, when you have a multibillion dollar a year commercial space market, and say, “How can we go to the next phase of what the Air Force and Space Force needs?” And that was rapid capabilities. I know that’s preaching to the choir. Rapid capabilities development, but also architect enablers.

We went from doing point designs, which really meant that you have a mission set, and you need to go from this point to here. We went to same… We have to be capability developers, and we need to use what’s out there with commercial market. So, things like responsive space access, which are first launch with SSU, October 11th with ABL. So, we just got the word today. We looked and said, how do we actually get this responsive market happening at the S&T front and bring these companies that turn their eye towards the DOD? And we did that. Rocket Cargo, which I know you’re very familiar with, we helped out with TCO on that area, the first start [inaudible 00:11:00]. So, that was how we had to change our portfolios. We went from these large engines to the space access capability. And in space, just real quick, what we had to look at was the same thing.

We did point designs for how do you get from A to B? But as we know from the talks yesterday about the Space Force, space operations is a different regime now. It’s not about what’s that mission right there. It’s our operation aperture is open to the point of, what can we do and what do we need to do? So our job, as Dr. Gregg mentioned with multi-mode propulsion, is we have to enable an architect out there that can be resilient in space, but maneuver without regret, give you the tools, that propulsion capability that allows you to go where you need to go without saying, “I just lost three years of my satellite life.”

It’s part of your RV director. I know that that’s the architect for that, and the propulsion enablers come from where we are right now with our scent fuel, which is in-house, and then moving on to combining electric and chemical propulsion to move forward. So, we’ve had to change really to a capability and architecture enabler, if you want to say it, and move away from that point design, which I think has been an incredible thing to do. Hopefully, that answered it completely.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

No, thank you John. That was absolutely great. So, no worries there. So, John, you mentioned you have one of the toughest jobs that you’ve had in your career. And of course when you look at your portfolio, it’s soup to nuts. It’s propulsion development, acquisition fielding, sustainment, as well as modernization. And you’re doing all that to ensure that the war fighters needs are met today, but also in the future. So from your perspective, why do we continue to invest in propulsion, and what more is needed?

Mr. John Sneden:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I’ll just open and say it’s all ties back to what the SEC have laid out in the operational imperatives. The reason we invest in propulsion is to do exactly that type of thing for a war fighter, ensure that we have next generation air dominance, ensure that we have a family of systems capability to be able to support the fight, ensure that we’re ready to drive to a readiness posture that meets a wartime footing. And there’s multiple factors that pour into why you should invest, but at the end of the day, they all support those operational imperatives. And I’ll offer you a few thoughts in terms of what I think is key. The first reason you want to invest is because it drives capability out for the war fighter. It’s capability that the war fighter deserves. And what does that look like?

Well, typically, it looks like fuel efficiency, which drives range, which means that there’s more time on station. It means that you can start your operations from further out. It means that you have less tanker dependency. It means survivability, because we have better acceleration capability to get in and out of the fight, and it means that you have better power and thermal management capacity to be able to feed those advanced mission systems that all the next generation weapon systems seem to have. So, it is a game changing technology that we have to continue to invest in to make sure that the war fighter has a cutting edge. The other key thing here is that this investment allows us to stay ahead of China. And China has a very specific focus of catching up to the US, getting to propulsion parity, and exceeding our capacity.

In order to be able to move further, we have to be able to transition our next generation technology, we have to be able to update the performance capability of our legacy systems, and ensure that the war fighter has the readiness, has the capability to be able to go fly, fight, and win. Another reason that you want to invest is quite simply that it gives us a place to practice. Practice what? Practice digital transformation. Some of those tools that allow us to move faster, drive costs down. And this is an area that needs vast improvement in the propulsion world. So, an ability to move in that realm is critical for us. And finally, what I’d offer is that investment propulsion means that you’re helping maintain a viable propulsion industrial base. And I want to be real clear on this point. Our engine OEMs, they’re not going anywhere.

They’re all well maintained by the commercial market, by fourth generation military workload that they have, and we’re applicable to fifth generation workload. But what we’re keenly focused on is that advanced propulsion space, that advanced propulsion technology space, and how do we maintain it? And I’ll offer to you that there are more countries that can produce a nuclear weapon than can produce an advanced propulsion system. So, it’s very key that we keep that very thin sector of the marketplace alive. And there’s a variety of ways that you do that. So, when you talk about what more is needed, one of the key things that you have to do is you have to focus on investment, tech transition, and speed. And that means that from a laboratory perspective, we have S&T efforts that cover large, mid, small, and that we have this constant pipeline that’s moving, we’re transitioning the technology we have from the labs to the war fighter, and to make sure that we have the engineering development, manufacturing production capability to be able to move forward.

And frankly, we need to be able to do that with more than one propulsion OEM. We need two, at least two propulsion OEMs to be able to make that maneuver, so we can keep innovation and we can keep cost where they need to be. And then the final thing is that we have to continue to sustain. That means investing in programs like our component improvement program that drive safety, reliability, maintainability, looking at our digital transformation type of activities, whether it’s using big data, big data analytics, advanced manufacturer repair capabilities, that whole ecosystem to lower cost, pick up speed, and drive the readiness that the war fighter deserves. So there’s a lot of maneuvers that have to happen here, but again, the aggregate team is capable of yielding that outcome.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

Well, that’s really helpful, John. And I’d like to go just a little bit deeper on how we can maintain our advantage in propulsion. And of course, you’ve overseen eight different systems with 30 different propulsion variants, so you’ve kind of seen it all. But based on your experience, let’s talk about more from the industrial base perspective and technical technology transition. So, how do we maintain our advantage?

Mr. John Sneden:

Yeah, that’s perfect. Thank you for that. The first thing I’ll offer to you is that the US has the propulsion advantage over China, and we have long head propulsion dominance. And I’ll offer that our intent is to maintain that propulsion dominance. And it’s not just in performance capability. It’s also in system reliability, which drives time on wing and readiness, and it’s also in safety. And I don’t want anybody walking out if you’re thinking anything other than the US has the world’s most capable, reliable, and safe propulsion fleet in the world. And with that, we have all the capabilities that go along with that. But I will tell you that anytime you have an advantage, it’s important to check your six. How fast is your adversary coming up behind you? What’s going on? We can’t keep living off the advantage. We have to always be innovating, always be moving forward.

So, I will offer to this crowd that China’s catching up. They’re catching up at a rapid pace, and they’re leveraging multiple things to get there, including their commercial market, their partnerships with other nations, intellectual property, theft, frankly, and investments and propulsion technology, manufacturing capability, materials, infrastructure that outpace our own. All right? So, if we were to stand still, which, again, is not our intent to go do so, then we would see China reach propulsion parity from a performance based perspective within about a decade. Obviously, it’s not our intent. And then we also have to look at not only what China’s doing, but what’s happening within our own environment? What are we doing that’s contributing to the degradation of some of that lead? And I would offer to you that it’s… You look in our labs, we don’t have any large engine S&T efforts, haven’t had those in a couple years.

When we start talking about fielding capability, we don’t do that at the same pace that we used to. Sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, all had rapid capability moving, always moving propulsion technology for. Our last fighter engine, derivative fighter engine that was fielded, was done a couple decades ago, the F135. So, we’re not moving at the same pace that we used to. And then frankly, we don’t focus as much as we used to on performance updates. We’re very safety and reliability focused, but don’t put as much emphasis into that particular portion of the world. And then finally, I’d offer here that from our engine technology, our next generation engine technology, we’re still working the transition pathways of how we move ATP forward, how we move in gap forward. So, there’s still a lot of work to do. But with that said, again, what I’ll offer to you all is that we have no intention letting China catch up with us.

And there’s a lot of things that we can do to yield that outcome. And a lot of those things are already in work. So, if you look from a lab perspective, we can continue to bolster our labs, and that means not just small and mid-size engines, but also putting large engines back in there, transitioning our key to engine technology, like ATP, which yields a 30% range improvement, 18% acceleration and double the power thermal management capability out there, moving in gap forward to ensure that we have next generation air dominance through a next generation propulsion program, all those small and mid-sized engines that are in the lab today, getting those fielded to be able to address our munition and CCA capabilities of tomorrow, updating our modernization programs for our legacy systems. All of those things are either in work or can easily be moved forward. And again, it’s our intent to do so. And I would offer that, at the end of the day, we will continue to maintain our propulsion advantage, but it will be through an investment and transition and deliberate action.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

So, there’s a lot that we can and are doing to maintain that technological edge. And so on that note, I guess I’d like to go back to the racket lab, and Shawn, have you tell us about how you’ve made that transition from large liquid racket engines to the responsive launch systems to really take advantage of all the innovation that is out there. Shawn?

Dr. Shawn Phillips:

So, thanks. Oops. I’ll be the first one not to put [inaudible 00:22:58] mic. So, that was probably the funnest challenge with my career, and I really loved it, because I always like… When people say they don’t have enough money, they don’t have enough stuff, you have resources like you wouldn’t believe, like the AFRL rocket lab, 10 billion of facilities. And we’re sitting there looking at this commercial space market, new space, and all the other existing companies say, you have tens of billions of dollars going into this, if not more right now. It’s crazy how much is there. How are you going to leverage that? We didn’t want to let one contract to say go this way.. As to mentioned, we’re doing capabilities. So, the challenge is how do we bring the entire commercial space market, both on the space access and in space, to the DOD? How do we turn their eye towards us?

And we looked and said, what are their needs? And it really came down to two things. The first one was resources. We had a facility that’s been there since the 1950s, up and growing over 1960s. And these companies can’t just build these facilities, get the air permits, get the environmental factors. And then we have, and I’m proud of this, the Department of Air Force, the top subject matter experts in the field, and the companies don’t have all that. So, we start engaging in public-private partnerships. And those partnerships, we brought the companies in as true partners. Not saying here’s a GOCO, saying, “We’re going to work with you to develop the technology.” As we work with them, we start showing the DOD requirements. What’s the needs? And they started changing towards that. So, the biggest challenge was getting that part. And there’s a second part or the second challenge. How do we change our culture at the site where we were always the leaders?

We were always the ones that were saying, “Here’s our contract. Here’s what the Air Force needs. Here’s now what the Space Force needs.” Now, it’s, “How do we work with that company and we help leverage what they’re doing to the DOD?” And the results have been phenomenal. I smile when I think about this, just over the three years, when I can look and say how many companies we have on site. How many are doing things for pennies on the dollars for launch services, for in space, the companies that are invested in our multi mode propulsion for the nation, the modular propulsion, so we can actually do a quick form fifth change of things in space, as opposed to everybody having a different propulsion system? And the space access area, that whole thing I mentioned with the public-private partnerships, when I say it’s a collaboration, we’re talking about companies sign up have to live onsite, well, not their people live onsite, because we are in the middle of the desert, but the company’s onsite for 10 to 20 years. And they’re there, hand in hand, doing work with our researchers, which we’ve never seen before.

And our researchers have a sense of value that they’ve never had before, where they get excited. I had one person I’ve seen for 20 years. I know this is anecdotal. And he’s walking and he’s smiling. And I was like, “Jacob, why are you smiling?” He goes, “I’m going to work on this new rocket factory in a box, and I’m right there in the box with the people that are doing this.” He said, “We never going to see this part.” And so when you look at it, we’ve changed that hardest part. The two parts was the companies are looking at the DOD needs and they see the investment, not just looking saying, “Let’s do this launch. Let’s do this for commercial.” And we’re seeing our research culture change to that we can leverage and have great impacts and do it in the shorter timeframe. So, I think those are the two biggest challenges that we’ve turned the quarter on, and it’s really exciting to see.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

Well, that gives us a lot of hope about the things that we can do to maintain our advantage in propulsion. I was going to keep this story to myself, but I was recently out at Edwards, and I met one of their newest aerospace engineers. And he actually came to Edwards, the middle of the desert, and he’s top in his field for propulsion. And he left Stanford to come work in the research lab. And I said, “Why? Why would you leave Stanford to go to Edwards?” And he said, “Because rockets are here to stay.” And it’s really an exciting time.

Dr. Shawn Phillips:

Completely agree with him.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

Well, we’re a little bit of a biased panel up here, so what can you say? But given what we’re learning about how we can better partner or leverage what’s going out there in industry, Mike, I’m going to turn to you. And you’ve been in this research ecosystem for… We won’t count how many years, except you already told us, but how do you see our ability to maintain our advantage in propulsion? Are there some things that are exciting to you? I’ve heard you say already, twice, rotating detonation engine. So, you want to make it three?

Dr. Michael Gregg:

So, first let me say, working with Shawn for a number of years now, one of the hardest things about working with this guy is keeping him motivated. So, if I could feed off at some of his enthusiasm, there are two things I really want to highlight, and one Shawn mentioned, and that’s what we’re calling Rocket factory In-A-Box. And why is this important? Because we’ve been working with industry, we’ve been using true digital engineering to design a new manufacturing way of doing business with a digital way of doing the propellant, and new ways of doing the solid rocket motor cases. And it’s the size of… A little bit bigger than this front area up here. Why should I be excited about that? That is changing. That has opportunity to change an industry that’s been using the same methodology for 50 years. That’s significant on how we do business.

And if we think, going forward, we need to be rapid in our ability to manufacture, that’s what we need. If we need to be rapid in how we design new solid rocket motors, that’s exactly what we need. And we’re able to do that precisely because we have those digital models that help us design the layout. It’s completely automated, and we can rapidly change. That’s the power of digital transformation. That’s a concrete example of why this is so exciting to be in this space right now. The other example, and actually I think the other directors and General Pringle, they play RDE bingo with me. Every time I say it, they get another chip on their card because I say it a lot, because this is so leap ahead in what we’re trying to accomplish here. And for those of you who don’t know what RDEs are, it’s called a rocket detonation engine, rotating detonation engine. You can apply it to air and rockets. And so instead of a traditional turbo fan engine that has a configuration in the combustion chamber, it’s really a detonation.

That’s not what you want in a car. But for something like a propulsion system, it’s great. And why is it great? Well, you can achieve anywhere from five to 25% levels of efficiency and no moving parts in the combustion part of that, which means you have a smaller form factor. Or if you want to keep the same form factor, you can double your range. I mean, this is a significant leap ahead, especially where we want to go with things like long range strike. And ultimately, it will have applications to potentially an afterburner or an augmenter or potentially even to a jet aircraft. It is so significant. But we know there’s a long way to go, and it’s really based… What we’re pushing really hard on is, once again, this digital environment. And an example that we’re working with industry on is…

One of the key things that we’re developing is how do you inject the fuel and air into this rotating, into this cylinder? And instead of… Historically, we may have done 12 different designs that took a long time and took a lot of very expensive material. Now, we can use digital modeling to help us focus that cone of uncertainty on, here’s where we really want to experiment on. Now, maybe we can only do threes nozzles. And we can shrink the time, we can shrink the cost, and we can drive in on exactly what we need to do that much faster. So. This is a perfect example of how, once again, we’re using digital to really focus in on something that’s really exciting.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

So, I think we’re up to seven times that you’ve said rotating detonation engine, but it’s all right, we can keep going. It’s a great topic. But I’m really glad that you brought up the digital transformation, the digital thread that we can use for our propulsion systems. And so since John is responsible for the whole life cycle of propulsion, what can you tell us about how we can use these kinds of agile tools to drive a responsive industrial base and build a better partnership?

Mr. John Sneden:

Thanks for the question. I’d actually like to talk about rotating detonating engines, if that’s okay.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

Eight.

Mr. John Sneden:

So, I’ll just broadly say that our intent is to drive, improve, readiness, affordability, safety and effectiveness through a digital transformation, and we’ve got a lot of work to go do. And really what we’re trying to tie into is the operational imperative of being able to yield readiness at a wartime posture, yield responsiveness that the war fighter requires in a wartime type of a posture. And there is a significant problem across the propulsion community. And I know some of my OEM partners are here in the audience today. We have all had this discussion and we’ve all to been talking about how we can do better, but we have to do better. So, when we talk about on the developmental end, it takes about 10 to 15 years to develop a new engine system. And some of that, frankly, is a little bit of the Air Force’s requirements piece of it.

Some of it is how we’ve also been buying in the past, and that we haven’t really had a lot of chance to practice in a digital environment. But 10 to 15 years is not moving at a threat relevant cadence. And then when you flip over to sustainment and we start talking about how agile capable, either the engine OEMs are themselves or their supply chain is, it’s not very responsive. What we see is there’s a lot of out of specification components coming in, and we see lead times that sometimes rival two to three years. Again, not a really responsive type of movement. And then on top of that, you’ve got the worldwide inflationary aspects that are driving up costs. So, there is a lot of room here to drive costs down, improve speed, and improve readiness for the war fighter. So with that, we have a handful of initiatives that we’re really proud of, and my intent is to get these more and more on scale.

So, we started what I think to be kind of small, and we’ve got some great pathfinder projects, but we’ve really got to start bolstering this out, and we’ve got to be able to do it faster, go further faster with this. So, the very first thing is, on the developmental end, is we are designing and validating our next generation adaptive propulsion system that will support our in gap program in a digital environment. And that’s a huge transformation. Even our ATP engine wasn’t designed in a digital environment, just kind of predated some of that. So to be able to do this, we think will help us get onto on a threat relevant cadence associated with being able to develop new engine technology. And again, 10 to 15 years needs to get brought way in. So, a lot of room to go, but in gap is our start. And on the sustainment end, we have a host of programs that are going on right now, and we keep picking up more.

And I’m really proud of everything that we’ve done so far. Things like using big data and big data analytics for reliability center maintenance activities, to make sure that we’re doing the right things to keep engines on the wing longer and drive readiness. We have adopted a advanced manufacturing and repair ecosystem that’s yielded the first airworthiness approved component that is flying in a F16 today and was additively manufactured. And we have a handful of other additively manufactured components in the pipeline of varying complexity, and even recently established the first organic capability for advanced manufacturing, for adaptive… I’m sorry, for additive capability.

So, a lot of activity going on there. We’re doing our first digital twin, which helps us validate performance models, helps us simulate performance of a system, and helps us be able to move forward into doing a modification of an engine system. We’re even looking at AR, VR, moving that into a digital type of environment as well. So, a lot of activities, but they’re all focused on how do we move this enterprise further faster? How do we drive costs down? How do we drive readiness up? And again, a lot of room to go make. But what I’ll share with you in closing is that this team is leaning fully into this. They have embraced the digital transformation. And while we still have a lot of room to grow, we are equal to that task, and we look forward to bringing the war fighter more in the future. Thank you.

Maj. Gen. Heather L. Pringle:

Hey, thank you. So, we’ve really only scratched the surface, but this has been an invaluable discussion. I really appreciate you joining me here up on this stage and talking about this really important topic. You’ve covered how we’ve transformed from liquid rocket engines to more tactically responsive space access. And if anyone in the audience is interested in learning more, we have our booth down there on the floor. It’s number 703. And you can talk to the second lieutenant who has been on the job for three months, and she would love to regal you with her knowledge of tactically responsive space access, but it’s really exciting to learn from her as well. But there’s lots more that we can do as well, and I appreciate all that we can be excited about. And I think it’s pretty clear that we can’t take our foot off the gas pedal because there’s more we need to get after in terms of smart propellants. And I’ll say rotating detonation engine just one more time for Dr. Gregg.

But as we see new missions in space, or even in air, we’re going to have to adapt our propulsion systems to accommodate that. And as General Brown likes to say, accelerate, change, or lose. So, thank you all for being here today. Thanks for being partners with us. And again, let’s give a round of applause to our panelists here on stage.

Watch, Read: ‘The Reality of Space as a Warfighting Domain’

Oct. 16, 2022

Tim Ryan of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies moderated a discussion on “The Reality of Space as a Warfighting Domain” with Maj. Gen. Douglas A. Schiess, Space Force deputy commanding general for operations; Derek M. Tournear, director of the Space Development Agency; Robert Atkin of General Atomics; and Brad Tousley of Raytheon, Sept. 21, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Tim Ryan, the senior resident fellow for Space Power Studies at the Mitchell Institute Space Power Advantage Center of Excellence. And I’d like to welcome you to our panel today on the reality of space as a war fighting domain. Let me introduce our panelists to set the session. Today, I’d like to welcome Major General Doug Schiess, Dr. Derek Tournear, Mr. Rob Arkin, and Dr. Brad Tousley. General Schiess is the commander of Combined Forces Space Component Command, United States Space Command. He’s responsible for planning, integrating, conducting and assessing global space operations to deliver combat relevant space capabilities. I would also be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the newest member of the AFA Thriving Forces and Family Committee member, Ms. Debbie Schiess. Congratulations and welcome to the team.

Dr. Tournear is the director of the Space Development Agency. He tasked to unify and integrate space capability development and deployment across the department to achieve the DOD space vision, while reducing overlap and inefficiency. Mr. Arkin is the vice president for Special Space Systems with GA-EMS Tiger Innovations. Prior to this, he was the president and CEO of Tiger Innovations Incorporated, which specialized in developing spacecraft and space related systems for a broad range of US government customers, and particularly, small, lightweight and low power innovative solutions. Dr. Tousley is the vice President for strategy and technology with Raytheon Intelligence & Space. Prior to this, he worked in various senior positions across the aerospace industry. He spent 13 years working for DARPA as the director, program manager and senior scientist in the tactical technology office. Welcome to you all.

Before we dive in, I have a couple few announcements on some upcoming Space Power events for those of you in the Space Power Nation. I’m really proud to announce that the Mitchell Institute will be sponsoring the first annual Space Power Security Forum on 25 October at the Army Navy Country Club. Now, what’s so unique about this particular forum is the fact that it’s happening in the DC AOR. This is the place where both strategy and resources are shaped, and we’re going to provide that voice to be able to influence those. We’ll have national security space leaders address Space Power strategy, operational concepts, policy and budget priorities to better understand the important vectors in this crucial war fighting domain. There’s flyers that were left out on your seats. If you need additional flyers, there’s some at our booth that’s outside the escalator. Please feel free to frequent the Mitchell Institute’s website. We’ve got plenty of information there as well and we hope to see you there.

Additionally, I’m really excited about the upcoming release of our latest paper on the critical role of space and command and control. CSO has clearly stated our ability to sense from space domain, transport that, make sense of that data and get that data in the hands of our joint war fighting partners, be it on land, see or wherever, is what the Space Force delivers to JADC2. This paper takes that, will explore those critical attributes that are going to be needed for not only the transport, but the sensing piece from space, as well as how are we going to be able to defend that. So that’s going to be a rollout that you’ll see in the next couple weeks. And I’m really excited to be able to get feedback on that as it rolls.

So let’s turn to the panel and why we’re here. Earlier this week, we listened to Secretary Kendall. In the morning, he said that it’s still all about China, China, China. The stark reality is China has carefully studied the core strategies, the operational concepts and technologies favored by the United States for over three decades. And this has drove their modernization efforts. To that point, make no doubt about it that our Guardians today are continually challenged in the space domain. An example of this, last October, China launched a satellite named the SJ-21 into GEO. They moved that satellite into close proximity of other objects. Now here’s the thing about the SJ-21, it’s got a robotic arm on it and it will certainly continue to practice Rendezvous Proximity Operations. So why should we be concerned about this? Well, as the former assistant commander, Major General Burt liked to say in many of these forums, she would say, “Who likes the show Space Force?” Hands would go up and she would say, “Well, in season one they had a satellite with a robotic arm and it severed the solar panels off of a satellite rendering it completely useless.” That’s why we need to be concerned about this.

We must continue to develop and field the weapons and capabilities needed to be able to maintain our advantage and space that we have today. So with that, I’d like to extend the opportunity for each of the panelists to provide some short opening comments. And we’ll start with you, General Schiess.

Maj. Gen. Doug Schiess:

Hey, Tim. Thanks. First of all, thanks for inviting me to be a part of this panel. And then I just want to say thanks to the Air and Space Forces Association for putting on an incredible professional development conference this week. And thanks for what you do for our Airmen, our Guardians, and our families each and every day. And it’s an honor for me to be able to participate in this forum. I think everybody in here probably knows how important space is to our national security. And I’d say probably a majority of the people in here also know how space is important to our way of life. I’m not sure that the average American knows how important space is to our way of life, but I know that the farmers in the bread belt know that they use space to be able to seed their farms, water their farms, do the things that they need to do to be able to feed all of us. And I like to eat, so that’s good that they’re doing that.

Obviously, our financial markets need our navigation and timing to be able to do the things that they need to do. And then I think probably everyone here, especially if you’re like me and you traveled, you probably used a navigation app to get here. We were talking about the traffic on Monday, to be able to do that, and maybe even used an app that told you how to get around that. But that was brought to you by the Space Force and the Global Positioning System. And so obviously, space is important. And I have the privilege along with Chief Coffin of leading the women and men of the Combined Force Space Component Command, who every day come to work, thousands of people across the globe, to ensure that we can provide a safe and secure environment in the space domain. And that maybe as we work together with our allies and our commercial partners, that we can deter aggression, so that we can continue to keep space, the peaceful domain it needs to be, but also do the things that we need to do. Because our joint war fighters, they have become reliant on that combat war fighting effects that we bring to them. And we have to make sure that we can continue to do that on a daily basis. And just thanks again for allowing me to be a part of this. Thanks to my colleagues as well.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Great. Thanks. Dr. Tournear.

Dr. Derek M. Tournear:

Well, that was a great overview of how we all use space. I really enjoyed that. Think about that. So at the Space Development Agency, that’s kind of what we focus on from the start. We focus on the terrestrial war fighter. We talk a lot about space. Obviously it’s in our name. But realistically, everything we do at SDA, Space Development Agency, focuses on speed, delivery and agility. And why do we do that? We don’t do that just for space. Everybody uses space and space and loves it, but you really have to focus on why. And you did a great job of setting that out. And so from SDA’s inception, we focused on saying that we want to make sure that we can give the capabilities to the terrestrial, airborne, and maritime war fighter so that they can rely on that.

So if you think about what do we really need to provide them? What are we saying we’re going to provide? Two main capabilities. Number one, beyond line of site targeting for mobile targets. Think mobile missile launchers, think ships, detect them, track them, calculate a fire control solution and send it down directly to the war fighter so they can use that in their solution. And then capability number two is to do that exact same mission, there’s no difference except the targets. Now, instead of looking for mobile missiles and ships, I want to actually do that same mission for advanced missiles in flight. We’ve heard a lot about hypersonic glide vehicles, detect them, track them, calculate a fire control solution, send it down to an interceptor to take out that thread immediately. And the purpose for that is exactly as the general said, it’s to deter aggression. So once you can demonstrate that we have these capabilities, that’s the whole goal. That will prevent war because everyone will see that and see how rapidly we can employ those capabilities and know that if they choose to actually engage in the United States, then we will be able to defeat them. And so that’s where deterrence comes in.

So at SDA, we were established just shortly before the Space Force, so we’re pretty excited to be where we are. We had some experimental demonstrations that we flew in 2021, six satellites. We did that all within a year of our first funding. And now by the end of this year, we’ll fly our first tranche. We do everything with spiral development. We focused on proliferation, hundreds of satellites and spiral development, get new capabilities up there every two years. So our first tranche of satellites will begin launching later this year. And then that will be 28 satellites to show that we can actually do this missile warning and global network of communication satellites so that the war fighters can actually start to use that to develop their techniques. Because just around the corner in 2024, we’ll launch another about 150 satellites to be able to actually do the mission and perform the mission, to be able to give us that global capability for those two capabilities, beyond line of site targeting and advanced missile detection that I laid out.

We’re pretty excited to do this. It’s a great time to be part of SDA and to be pushing this forward. And we’re looking at moving into the space force here in the next couple of weeks, which I was apprehensive, to be honest. I was apprehensive about that at first. Because right now we’re outside of the Space Force, independent, which is where we needed to be so that we could do this disruption. But now the Space Force is embracing this model of proliferation and spiral development. And so once we move into the Space Force, we’ll be able to make that operational to get those capabilities to the war fighter where they need to be. So thank you for the opportunity to talk about that.

Robert Arkin:

This is a very interesting commentary. I like what you guys are saying. And the interesting part to me is that it’s primarily focused on space as it assists earth-based [inaudible 00:10:42] things. So as commerce is starting to develop out more towards lunar and eventually martian uses, we have to protect our assets, we have to protect our civilian uses of those things, and then of course there’s going to be military uses for those things. And we need to be able to observe and figure out what’s going on and be able to deter things just like you suggest. And I think in order to do that, we are going to need to proliferate many, many more sensors. Cislunar volume is enormous and it’s expensive to get there, it’s hard to get there, it’s hard to maintain things there, it’s hard to communicate with things there.

So I think it’s very incumbent upon us to try to develop new techniques, smaller SWAP, size, weight and power, smaller things that can get there more easily, be able to proliferate more, do more, in terms of measuring and seeing what’s happening and getting that information back here is very difficult. So we need to have infrastructure that’s surrounding in the cislunar volume that can enable, and I know Derek, you’re in particular developing a lot of infrastructure for near earth things and we need to start expanding that into the cislunar volume. And that’s a huge amount of information. And I know that the transport layer is meant to push huge volumes of data around, and there’s important data and there’s less important data. And the problem is, the more sensors we get, most of that data, generally speaking is unimportant, some of it’s really important. And so we need to start trying to develop edge processing techniques and small SWAP devices that can do some of that pre-processing in order to reduce the amount of information that we are needing to transmit so that we can have room for the important information.

And so I know that we as a group are really trying to push along in that direction, but I think our adversaries are investing a lot of money and they’re trying to take away our military capabilities and eventually prevent us from doing commercial activities. And so we need to operate in an environment where we can develop these techniques very, very quickly, which means risk. And this is one of my government colleagues here, the risk has to be acceptable and I have to be able to build things and fail and repeatedly fail, much in the way that we previously developed aircraft or submarines or other things. And thankfully, with spacecraft there are very few people involved that are losing their lives. But we have to operate that way so that we can have disruptive change rather than the evolutionary change that we seem to get mired in because it’s lower risk, but we’ll never get to where we need to be. So that, I think, really for me frames a lot of this kind of conversation. And I appreciate being here to discuss it with these gentlemen.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Great. Thanks, Rob.

Brad Tousley:

Thanks, Tim. Yeah, my name is Brad with Raytheon Intelligence & Space, and I work strategy and technology. And it’s a pleasure to be up here on the panel, thanks to AFA and the Mitchell Institute, and it’s great to be up here on stage. I’m a little bit of a different fish out of water here in that, yeah, I spend time at DARPA, I spent time at the NRO in the past, but long, long ago I was a 20 year Army officer. So to me, understanding space as a war fighting domain within the JADC2 infrastructure extends all the way to the ground and back up. And I think that’s going to be one critical way to deal with pure adversaries like Mr. Kendall’s talking about another, is that we can integrate all of our war fighting domains in real time, not hours and days, but minutes and seconds. That’s where the transport layer comes in. We need to proliferate essentially the space layer, LEO and others to provide the blanket coverage on earth to provide the targeting information to those that need to get it into harm’s way, are maybe Air Force, Marine Corps, special ops, all of them.

And the last thing I’ll say is that the proliferation story is one way of dealing with our peer adversaries. Quantities at some level are inherently resilient, they’re inherently affordable and they’re inherently survivable. And that gives nested combat systems a lot more capability now and in the future. Within Raytheon, two specific ways that we’re trying to address this. One is we’ve now been selected by the US government to be the lead for the Digital Infrastructure Consortium as part of JADC2. That’s going to be a really important framework. We believe we’re really positioned well to help the government addressing those critical problems to get that air, space, ground, maritime layer all nested together.

And the second thing is we’re actually working on a program, competing on a program [inaudible 00:15:14] with the Army called Titan, which is about the long range targeting node. And if you consider where Derek and SDA are going of enabling long-range fires, there was an example of this, an exemplar was done back in the sixties, seventies and eighties called Assault Breaker 1.0. US Air Force and the Army involved, it was [inaudible 00:15:29] and JSTARS. And you can think that the same thing is going to happen now, but it’s going to integrate the space layer nested deep within our national security infrastructure to enable the same sets of targeting and kill webs that have happened in the past. Thanks, Tim.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Great. Thanks, gentleman. I appreciate that. So to start with General Schiess, can you provide us, sitting from CFSCC, you’ve been out there now couple weeks to a month

Maj. Gen. Doug Schiess:

One month.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

There we go. So can you provide us an update on what space war fighters are doing today? And then can you talk to us a little bit about the importance of and how you see our partnerships not only with our allies, but with the commercial sector as we go?

Maj. Gen. Doug Schiess:

Yeah, thanks Tim. I’d be proud to talk about what the women and men of Combined Force Space Command do on a daily basis. But first of all, I think everyone knows this, but I just want to state it, and some of my colleagues talked about it, and I’d be happy to talk about SDA at Beyond Geo later if we get a question on that. So one of the things is obviously since the early 1990s when I was starting my career, our adversaries have seen that space is the underpin of how we fight with a joint war fighting system. And they know that that could become an Achilles’ heel for us. And so we have to be able to protect and defend our assets, but we have to be able to also provide those capabilities in a contested environment. So we do that day in and day out, 24/7 from CFSCC with our tactical units that are presented to us from the services.

And one of the things that we do that is very, very important, and I know I’m looking forward to what Dr. Tournear is going to bring to the fight for that, but that is missile warning, and that is a critical thing that we do. It was great earlier today to sit… One, it’s always great to see your boss on stage. So I got to see General Jim Dickinson, the commander of the United States Space Command up there. But he had his two other fellow combatant commanders, General VanHerck from NORAD NORTHCOM, and Admiral Richard from STRATCOM. Those three combatant commanders expect that CFSCC every day provides exquisite missile warning to be able to, one, protect our joint force and protect them from giving them the amount of time they need to be able to take action from an incoming missile, but also to provide our national leaders timely decision making. And they need to be able to do that. So a missile warning is a huge part of what we do each and every day.

We talked about GPS, so I’m not going to do that. We talked about you using applications here. Satellite communications, everybody that’s in the military knows that it’s very important that you have to be able to shoot, move and communicate. And you can’t do that in some kind of environment if you don’t have satellite communications. And so we can talk more about that later as we’ve consolidated all satellite communications within CFSCC, but we need to be able to do that in all different bands. So narrow band, protected, wide band. And that gets to some of the things that Dr. Tournear is doing too with that transport layer and be able to get that information out.

And then obviously in this, we have to be able to surveil our domain. We have to know what’s going on in our domain. We have to know what our adversaries are doing, what our partners are doing, and we have to have exquisite space and ground based sensors. And we have some, and we’re doing a great job with what we have right now, but we need more. We need to be able to do that in a much better fashion so that we can provide that critical information to our war fighters and to our decision makers as well. And then obviously, we have classified capabilities that I can’t talk about here. I’d love to, but I can’t talk about, that the folks are doing on a daily basis to make sure that we can do our mission.

How do we do that? Well, at CFSCC we do that with four operations centers. A lot of people know about the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Space Force Base. And I don’t know if there’s anybody from Space Launch Delta 30, but I just want to say thanks for the support that you give us out there. Colonel Rob Long and his team, we can’t do our mission without you. But that is the integrating ops center for all of CFSCC, and quite frankly, a lot of what US Space Command does.

Let me talk to you a little bit about a day in the life of the CFSCC crew. One, they could be watching a missile launch from a really important area of the world. Being able to, like I said, provide those decision makers the decision space and also protect our forces. At the same time, there could be a ground based radar that we need for surveillance going through an issue and they’re working with a team to make sure that they can bring that up. Maybe they’re working a GPS outage somewhere with some equipment, all that while watching a SpaceX commercial launch from Cape Canaveral to ensure that we are providing collision avoidance and conjunction information. And then at the same time, doing sensitive capabilities in AFRICOM or CENTCOM, all in period of time. And so making sure that all of those tactical units are being commanded and controlled.

Then we have the Joint Navigation Warfare Center down at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Thanks to the Air Force for the support that they give them. These are a team of experts that know that GPS spectrum and that signal and know exactly what they need to do with it. One of the things they’re doing really well right now is we have to bring on M-code. We have to bring on that new capability for GPS. And so they’re helping us with the testing of that, making sure that we actually have the receivers that we need and that those capabilities are there. But they also provide exquisite analysis to the COCOMs. As a matter of fact, they could be providing information right now to UCOM in a very contested environment and spectrum.

And then we have two more centers in Colorado. We have the Joint Overhead Persistent Infrared center at Buckley Space Force Base. So thanks to Space Base Delta 2 for the support they do. And the Missile Warning Center at Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station. So thanks to Space Base Delta 1 that provides us the support there. I can’t talk a lot about what they do in this forum, but they do that critical role of providing that war fighting support.

And then to pivot onto what you just said, we can’t do any of that without our coalition partners. And so it’s really exciting for me to be a part of CFSCC because we have exchange officers that work on our floor. As a matter of fact, I can get a call in the middle of the night from CSpOC, and when I answer that phone, I don’t know if that’s going to be an American, a British, a Canadian or an Aussie that’s on the other end of the line telling me what the situation is. And so they’re working there right side by side with us. We have partnerships with the UK, their SpOC, the Australian SpOC, and then the Canadian SpOC as well to be able to do that mission.

What’s really interesting is, so those are exchange officers, we put space force officers or other service officers in their formations and then they’re in ours as well. But then we also have liaison officers. And it’s really cool that we’ve brought on some new capabilities there in US Space Command’s multinational support cell. And that is we have Germany, the UK, and we have France, and we have Japan that is right there in our floors working with us, and they can provide information back and forth. And so that coalition partnership is key to being able to provide the operations that we need to do.

And then lastly, I had a hard time saying this other day on Monday, but our commercial integration cell, I did it, they work with us on a daily basis. Started out from a Schriever war fighting game, putting together all those commercial company’s operators together. We had six, we had [inaudible 00:22:41] 10 and we’re growing. But that provides information back and forth very quickly so that we can share, they could provide us information if they’re seeing something with their constellations, and we can provide they’re clear to the right levels. And so we work together that, and that’s going to continue to grow. As a matter of fact, last thing I’ll say in that area is we just finished up what we call Global Sentinel. We brought a bunch of different folks in to be able to do multinational operations, collaborate together, and just an incredible effort that all of all the nations that came, we’re very happy with that. And we’ll continue work that, we’re already working for our Global Sentinel for next year. So thanks for allowing me to talk about the women and men of CFSCC.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Great, thanks. Appreciate the robust update on that. So Dr. Tournear, Tranche zero is scheduled launch, as you said in your opening comments, towards the end of the year. Tranche 1, that’s going to fill out the rest of that in 2024. Can you tell us a little bit about the progress on, when we start talking about these tranches, how’s it going to enable the ground based radios, the ships, the aircrafts connecting directly to satellites, Link 16 type, no data? How is all that going to work and what’s that network doing?

Dr. Derek M. Tournear:

Sure. Let me unpack that a little bit, there’s a lot of different things there. There’s JADC2, which a lot of people here talk about. And one of the things I learned as an intel officer is, to confuse the enemy, you always try to obfuscate information. And sometimes we do that to ourselves. No one knows what JADC2 is. It’s just completely confusing. I’ll try to simplify that, because it really is a simple concept. The whole concept is how do we get any and all sensor data to any and all shooter at the right time? And in order to do that across the J in JADC2, for joint, across all the services is extraordinarily difficult. Everybody uses different comm systems and they use different networks, and it’s just very difficult to cross all of those lines.

So historically, this is you go back into the Cold War days, the way this was originally done, there was a network called Link 16 that kind of tied all these things together. And Link 16 was designed so that we could have command and control and pass targeting data within a certain region, so roughly 200 to 300 nautical miles. So you could set that up and you could have that be all joint. So you could have a bunch of different sensors, a bunch of different shooters talking to one another on that Link 16 network with a roughly 200 nautical mile range. And then that’s a managed network that’s handled. So that was great, that worked. And it’s what we use today and it really is the only thing that has tied all of our joint services and our allies together since the eighties.

And if you look at that and you say, “Okay, well is that the way we’re going to be fighting wars in the future?” “Well, no.” Why is that? Well, because it exists and allows us to prosecute targets on the order of a dozen or so targets a week, maybe a half dozen or so a day. If we get into a conflict where we need to prosecute hundreds of day, how are we going to do that? I can only have this communication within 200 nautical miles. How am I going to actually sense, calculate a fire control solution and send it to a weapon all within only sensors and radios available within that? Well, that’s not going to happen. So that’s what SDA looked at and said, “Look, we’re not a commercial entity. We can’t come out with the new service for iPhone and expect all of the services to buy that. It just doesn’t work that way.”

So we had to say, “We’re going to use the existing radios.” Link 16’s already there, so that’s where we said we’re going to use Link 16. We’re going to allow those radios to tie into our transport layer, system of hundreds of satellites in low earth orbit, so that now that they’re used to operating on this local 200 nautical mile area, they can plug into us. And essentially that’s like plugging into the internet. They can tie into targeting cells that are located anywhere on the globe and they can talk to any of these other Link 16 networks that are located anywhere on the globe so that you can tie all of that processing and targeting capability and get that to pair with your weapon systems immediately. So what’s that mean? That means that now if I have an F-35 coming in, receiving the Link 16 signal with targets, those targets could be coming from sensors that are either within my 200 nautical mile AOR, area of operations, or a fire control cell that’s located back in continental US crunching all this data, calculating it, and sending it over my existing radio.

The whole idea is to tie all of that together seamlessly using already existing fielded radios. And so that’s what that’s going out with to be the backbone of JADC2. And then we’re tying in with the Army’s version of JADC2, which is called Titan, the Navy’s version, which is a Maritime Targeting Cell. They have one that’s ashore and one that’s expeditionary. And then the Air force with their ABMS. We tie into those, we can link all those together. We go down to existing tactical data links, so the services don’t have to worry about fielding new equipment, they can just tie into us and make sure that we can actually take a fight and make it a global connectivity and be able to prosecute those targets in real time. So that’s the vision, that’s the goal, and we’ll get there. We’ll start to demonstrate this in ’23 and we’ll be able to affect the fight starting in ’24.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Great. I appreciate that. So Dr. Tousley, when we talk about from a Raytheon perspective, how do you see JADC2 coming together in space? In other words, how do you see it being knitted together, particularly when it comes to the transport layer that Derek was talking about?

Brad Tousley:

Yeah, thanks. No, I think the next step beyond that, where Derek’s going is you have to create the framework from a multilevel secure mesh network perspective that you can take a DOD centric model, from a standpoint of red black configuration, and tie it red black across the DOD, the IC and commercial, all three of those together. And Link 16, you have to be backwards compatible for it. But from the standpoint of propagating forward, the Air Force has done this with a particular schema called Stitches or Dynamo, which is a multilevel secure mesh network for the air domain. And we extended that between air and space together and that allowed that fabric to come together routinely. And the reason that the multi-level secure mesh network is important is because the network will be under attack from the threat. It’ll be under threat from coverage reasons and things like that. And so the network is going to come up, it’s going to go down in different periodic locations. And some of these advanced protocols that are coming online that can get nested into the transport layer will allow it to be inherently resilient from a network perspective, as opposed to purely directed energy or some other threat.

Within Raytheon, there’s some ways we’re working on this. There’s a small entity, a subsidiary called BBN, that has been doing the multilevel secure mesh networking for the intelligence community for a long time, and others in the Air Force. That’s one aspect. There’s a particular set of algorithms, Stitches and Dynamo that allow those networks to get set up and torn down. And then from a command and control perspective, there’s another set of tools, it’s called a [inaudible 00:29:29] subscribe framework called Arachnid that’s being developed on early versions of ABMS. And that’s also something that we hope can be populated into the transport layer in the command and control infrastructure in the future. We think those two things together can really make the network and the command and control inherently survivable against a peer adversary that’s going to attack it.

Dr. Derek M. Tournear:

And that multi-level security mesh network is critically important, not only for just making sure it’s resilient, but commercial industry is fielding a bunch of sensors and a bunch of different comm networks up there. How are we going to plug those in to make sure that those are readily available for our war fighters? And the whole idea is if we have this multilevel security, we can have a trusted way to move data on and off the transport layer, which is essentially, we call that the secret outer net or the [inaudible 00:30:16] net if you will, of the outer net being in space, and then we’re the secret version of that. That multi-level mesh network is how you pull data on and off to make sure you can get data from whatever source to whatever shooter at the right classification level.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Great. Thanks. Rob, I know that you guys have made some significant progress in bringing laser comms to the table. How do you see fitting into the next generation of space architecture? What does it do to be able to enable in space? How does it ensure, when we talk about some of the security stuff that we talked about, how does all that fit together from your guys’ perspective?

Robert Arkin:

Lasers are very important for a communication because, you can imagine, Derek was talking about all these different kinds of data that are being generated and sensors. And Brad is talking about ways to keep things secure. So lasers are very much point to point. They can transmit a lot of information, but historically they come at a large SWAP cost. So we’ve been making a lot of advances in trying to squeeze the most amount of optical power out of the smallest lasers that we can, so that we can increase the communication bandwidth and also decrease the swab to be able to have disadvantaged users, like individual soldiers out in the field, have comm up into the transport layer to be able to disseminate that information as much as possible. So I think it really goes back to my comments earlier about reducing SWAP for a whole variety of reasons. And we’re doing that with the laser comm, with trying to shrink lasers and increase the communication bandwidth. But we also are trying to press forward and do more edge computing and eventually bring AI into it to so that the general doesn’t get woken up in the middle of the night unnecessarily, because the data is only getting sent there if it’s really actually something that’s worth looking at.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Great. Good. Thank you. So Brad, the CSO’s discussed over time how since small satellites have become more operationally relevant, the cost of launches have dropped, there’s actually a role for the Space Force in tactical level ISR, as he’s put it. What do you see their role in tactical ISR?

Brad Tousley:

Yeah, I think the Space Force is going to be critical. You’ve pointed something out to him. I like to remind people of this, I know Derek knows this, but I want to be really explicit in how I state that over the last 10 to 12 years, the cost of launch per pound has dropped by a factor of 10 to 20, 25 and it’s going to go down even further. And from a strategic trend standpoint, that’s completely obliterated all the legacy assumptions of space based architecture. It just has. So coming back to why it matters for me as a former ground pounder and wanting to see the maximum support to the soldier and the fight on the ground or the Marine, the ability to proliferate more and more capabilities, and to low LEO, MEO, HEO, GEO and beyond makes it more difficult for the adversary to figure out what we’re doing. It allows us to revolutionize our architectures faster, and allows the military to provide a variety of a set of capabilities very quickly to support the war fighter for deployment.

Because the cost of launches dropped, the ability to experiment with cheaper payloads, that cost has dropped, which means that Derek gets to run these tranches and get more capability every 18 to 24 months on orbit. That enables the support to the tactical war fighter because you can more rapidly get a set of capabilities up on orbit. Instead of waiting for something 10 or 20 years to get the capability. Maybe I can get something up in 24 months.

Robert Arkin:

But that also means that we have to be willing to accept risk and failure. Right?

Brad Tousley:

Absolutely.

Robert Arkin:

And historically, I think that’s part of the problem is that people don’t want to stick their neck out to do something if it’s going to be a failure. So we kind of have to get over that.

Dr. Derek M. Tournear:

We’re willing to accept risk and failure. But you’re talking about it a lot, you’re not planning for failure, are you? Just checking. All right. Just making sure.

Robert Arkin:

Definitely not.

Maj. Gen. Doug Schiess:

Yeah, Derek, you have a great point. The CSO has told us to be bold and so that does bring risk and we just got to do that smartly.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Wonderful. Great. Thanks for the exchange. So General, you mentioned earlier, General Dickinson, commander of the US Space Command, he’s identified SDA as “the command’s top priority.” And when we start to-

Dr. Derek M. Tournear:

Space domain awareness. No, you got space domain awareness, Space Development Agency, and then the real mission of SDA, speed, delivery agility. So obfuscation, remember that?

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Now we’ve let all the secrets out now. We talked about space domain awareness, and especially when we tie it into the things that Derek’s talked about and Rob and Doug’s talked about, that’s not just mapping it, not just knowing the physical location of the objects, which traditionally has been as we’ve come up through that is kind of what we’ve looked at as traditional space domain awareness. But you have to know the intent of what those assets, both friendly, and be able to understand what our foes are doing at the same time. So can you talk a little bit about not only where we’re at today, but what’s that look like as we go forward?

Maj. Gen. Doug Schiess:

Yeah, thanks. And I think General Dickinson does think what you’re doing is important, whether it’s Space Development Agency or space domain awareness. And great, we’ll have a couple more acronyms with SDA before we’re done for today. But no, critically important. And what we do at CFSCC, I think we are probably the best in the world at space domain awareness right now. And we do really well in the orbital regimes that we’re familiar with, low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, highly elliptical orbit, and even geosynchronous orbit. But as we’ve talked about, there’s going to be different orbits and there’s going to be different things that the commercial and even national security space are doing. And so we have to move out on that. But it’s not just, as Tim said, cataloging. That’s what we’ve done in the past and we’ve done that really well.

But the 18th Space Defense Squadron at Vandenberg, and then now the 19th Space Defense Squadron, they’re charged with not just doing the catalog, but they’re charged with making that continuous war fighting relevant information to the folks that need it, because we need to know what our adversaries are doing. You talked about a joke from Space Force, but we really need to know what our adversaries are doing. And to do that, we have to have the capabilities to do that. And right now, Guardians and other services are using just innovative ways to do that with systems that quite frankly are pretty darn old. But we’ll continue to work with our partners and we’ll get those upgraded and we’ll continue to make strides and being better at that. But there’s also things out there that make this more difficult for us.

Obviously, last November, Russia tested an anti-satellite system and created 15 more hundred parts of debris that we have to make sure that they don’t run into very critical national security space stuff. But we also have to make sure that we’re protecting not only our astronauts, but the Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station. And we’re making sure that they’re safe from that debris that they created. But also the Chinese taikonauts and their system. And so that is a big mission. We have to be able to use some AI and some other capabilities to make that much faster so that we can do that. But then we have to look to the future, and as my colleague talked about here, that’s beyond GEO. Our sensors and our systems right now are very capable for 23,000 nautical miles out. But anything beyond that, they’re a little bit more. But that is something that both General Dickinson and the CSO are working.

And we know, I think the CSO has said, “Hey, in the next five to 10 years, we’ve got to get after that, maybe even faster.” But the smart Guardians and men and women of CFSCC, are getting after that to be able to do what we have with the capabilities we have now. But we have to look to the future to be able to get after that because obviously we are exploration humans, and so commercial is going to go out there, civil’s going to go out there, and we have to be able to protect that domain as well. So thank you.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan (Ret.):

Great. Thank you. Well, it looks like we’ve come to the end of our panel. I could talk for the rest of the afternoon if we had more time, but unfortunately we don’t. I really appreciate you guys all coming here and being here. Thank you so much for everything that you guys do in your roles to help defend this nation. Thank you to the audience for coming out. Just as a quick plug, you might be interested in the space innovation to the tactical edge that’s in Potomac D starting at 1350, and we’ve got another session that’ll be here in Potomac C as well when this is done. So as we like to say in the Mitchell Institute, with that, have a great aerospace power kind of day.

Watch, Read: ‘AI Integration’

Oct. 16, 2022

Space Force Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Lisa Costa moderated a discussion on “AI Integration” with RB Hooks III, Oracle National Security Group; Kay Sears, Boeing Defense; and Justin Woulfe, Systecon North America, Sept. 21, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible by the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

If your firewall blocks YouTube, try this link instead.

Lisa Costa:

Good morning everyone, and thanks for joining us today for what I’m certain will be an interesting and informative panel on artificial intelligence and machine learning. I hope that this crowd is indicative of the number of people interested in this topic and interested in developing artificial intelligence and machine learning for the Department of the Air Force because it will take a consortium of partners to move forward.

I’d like to start off by providing a quote by John F. Kennedy, and it was interesting because he was speaking about space at the time that he made this quote, but I think it’s really applicable to the AI environment that we find ourselves in today. So he said, “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge that must be gained and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill, depends on man. And only if the United States occupies a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of power or a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.”

That’s really quite prescient in terms of just thinking about the space environment that we find ourselves today. But then, add the potential for artificial intelligence and the use of it in space, and there are a lot of challenges I think we find ourselves in. And I’m very excited to have this panel here to discuss some of those challenges and then some of those opportunities.

We’re really sitting at a crossroads. We know AI is critical. We know AI algorithms are being used today in vast quantities of data, and we in the Department of Defense know that it’s our industry partners who are investing significantly in these types of technologies. So we want to partner with you, we need to partner with you, and that is what we are exactly looking to do.

Across the DOD and the Department of the Air Force, we’ve made great strides toward technical modernization. In fact, earlier this year, the National Defense Strategy directed us to establish new acquisition systems, which have the ability to be interoperable with modern and AI ready open architectures. Further, the US has plans to use AI in a variety of space missions while complying with current laws and policies.

We’re leveraging AI to continue building enduring advantages. Some of these advantages exist in current US space applications such as space domain awareness, command and control, missile guidance, automatic target recognition, position navigation and timing applications, and object classification. But we can’t do this alone, and we can’t do it in a vacuum certainly. We have to partner with our allies, industry, academia to solve these problems.

As the chief technology and innovation officer for United States Space Force, I used to be a Special Operations, my team and I look forward to working on these challenges and delivering advanced AI enabled capabilities. With that, I’d like now to introduce our panel and get some conversations started on this very topic. What I’m really excited about is that our panel represents a great mix of strategic, operational, and tactical experiences, and applying AI, and in space in general. So I’m very excited to have that degree of experience here on this panel this afternoon.

So I will introduce Mr. Justin Woulfe, who is the CTO and co-founder of Systecon North America. He has expertise in predictive analytics and systems, as well as logistics and cost optimization. Next is Ms. Kay Sears. She’s the vice president and the general manager of autonomous systems at Boeing Company. And finally, we have Mr. Nick Toscano. He is a machine learning engineer and data scientist at Oracle, with experience in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. He’s also been a national security analyst and consultant.

So with that, I will hand the mic over to each one of these panelists for a brief intro themselves on their background and what they’re doing in the areas of AI.

Justin Woulfe:

Yeah, thank you. Good morning everyone. Or afternoon, I guess, soon. I’m really bad at this. I’m really passionate about data science, not so good at the whole panel intro side of things. So I decided to actually load several thousand hours of transcripts from things just like this into some NLP algorithms that we use, and let it actually write the intro for me. And actually I was pretty impressed. Sometimes you kind of wonder how this is going to turn out, and it actually turned out pretty good. So here it goes.

So artificial intelligence has prompted us to rethink the very nature of the innovation process. And the pace of innovation in this area is moving fast with 50% of all AI patents being published in just the last five years. Artificial intelligence is being used across the globe to help solve some of our biggest challenges from fighting hunger, to landing reusable rocket boosters, to enabling vehicle commutes with limited human intervention. As we constantly work to cut through the buzzwords and vaporware that drive Gartner’s hype cycle graphs towards the trough of disillusionment, there are some real opportunities for the US Air Force to leverage AI for efficient data analysis, model generation, and to enable better, more defensive analytics that will increase platform readiness.

So look, at its core, if we can do this, imagine what we can do with NLP and reading maintenance records, or enabling better predictive analytics models so that we can really capture future state readiness. I mean, this is some pretty cool stuff. This is real. It’s available today. So, pretty excited about being here. Thank you very much.

Lisa Costa:

And I’m impressed with that auto generation.

Justin Woulfe:

Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa Costa:

Pretty good.

Kay Sears:

Okay. You had a humor AI engine, obviously. My intro, I think, is a little more serious, I guess. I run the autonomous systems part of Boeing, and autonomy is kind of a place where AI has incredible potential, I think, beyond what we can even conceive of right now. We’re focused on introducing autonomy first, and then really evolving the capability with AI and machine learning. But the potential is amazing. If we think about sending autonomous systems out as part of our war fighting initiative, and then those systems can actually perform missions that are performed in different ways today in an increasingly complex environment, I think that, that potential is something that is not only awesome in itself, but is going to be absolutely necessary when we think of the adversary, when we think of the pace of war, when we think of the density of war.

So, we tend to fall back on a simulated environment, which is the tools that we have today. We’re simulating autonomy. We’re simulating the potential for AI applications. But we’re also trying to be very sensitive to the safety around that. How are we going to actually prove and gain the trust of the war fighter in this autonomous and AI enabled environment? And so, I think we just have to be very cautious there. We have to be very thoughtful for how we’re going to apply this AI learning, but the potential is amazing.

And I think in one of the questions, I’ll try to describe more of a crawl, walk, run approach that I think leverages a lot of the digital tools, the autonomy framework, and environment that’s at the core, and then how we gradually add the AI and the machine learning in a safe and predictable way. Because I think that’s going to really make us successful, and it’s going to solve the trust and adoption problem so that we can actually really go to war with these tools and have them perform the way that we’re expecting them to. So I look forward to the discussion. Thank you.

Nick Toscano:

Yeah, everybody. My name’s Nick, and thanks for letting me be here. I’m really excited about this. I think I’m echoing what the rest of the panel here is saying, but I’m taking this from a more data-centric approach for AI. So my experience, I spent about 20 years in this community, 12 of that doing tactical operations overseas, and then later went back under the guise of intelligence community doing unconventional operations. And all that time, we employed advanced analytics, we wanted to use it at the edge, but today we have the capabilities to start to really bring it to the edge. And so, some of the questions that I wanted to approach today were questions related to data, and how to manage that data so that we can get it to the tip of the spear where it needs to be. So I’m looking forward to this. Thank you very much.

Lisa Costa:

Thank you. And it should be a testament to how short I am that they have had to adjust the mic about five times while I’ve been up here. I think General Thompson might have been up here before me. So my first question is really for Kay. And as you know, we in the Department of Defense have been implementing AI and ML into our systems and our acquisitions for a few years now. In fact, that is exactly how we’re mostly getting AI and ML into our systems. From the 50,000 foot view, what do you see as the primary enablers but also challenges to getting AI and ML right?

Kay Sears:

Right. Thank you for that. I think some of these enablers that I’ll talk about obviously have a challenge to them. It’s kind of both sides of the coin. But it does start with this modeling simulation and ultimately test environment that we are going to create, are creating, are building on. And certainly with the Air Force and AFRL, ensuring that industry and the Air Force are coming together in these environments, that they have the tools, whether it’s AFSIM or some of the industry tools, to really start to build accurate modeling and simulation of AI capabilities. And then, I think we have to take that to test, and we have to test and build those engines again and again. The predictability building in additional complexity, additional processing of inputs, so that we ultimately get to the machine learning aspect of AI.

So I think that that collaborative environment is absolutely critical for us. And I think the Air Force is actually doing a fantastic job in setting that up, inviting industry in, allowing us to bring our platforms, our sensors, and our apps, and start to demonstrate and interact.

We have a virtual Warfare Center where that is where we start to think about the mission that an autonomous with AI enabled system would go try to solve. So understanding those CONOPS is really critical. That’s a critical enabler. What are we solving for? How is this platform going to be used? What is the data that the sensor is going to need to generate in what timeframe? So really understanding the complexity of the problem that we’re trying to solve, that’s how we start to program the AI engines on what data to gather and how to build those. And we do that in a virtual Warfare Center, then we move it in to actually operational software on real platforms, and then we take it and we actually fly it and we start to test it. All of that gathers the data necessary. So I think that’s very key as well.

Open systems. I think, as in your introductory comments, this is a team game. We need everyone. As I’m building right now to autonomous platforms, the MQ-25 and the MQ-28, I want to work with the sensor providers and the payload providers in a very open way. We want to make sure that the vehicle management software is integrated, has some protection, but there’s mission software and apps that have to be brought into that, each of which will have its own kind of AI characteristics. We want to understand what those are and make sure that we’re all talking in the software realm. The digital thread, I think, is a very critical enabler to all of that as well.

I’m just going to throw this out there. Policy. Policy is an enabler. It can also be a major challenge. So as we start to talk about autonomous systems that are making decisions and reacting with input from data that they are getting, not just identification and classification, but actually moving into decision making, the real war fighting tool that it can become, ee are going to have to have policy guidelines around that we all understand and that we can monitor. Leveraging other industries. I think that’s a big enabler as well. How do we leverage the car industry in terms of the AI capabilities that they’re deploying right now. The medical industry. So what can we learn from that?

Ensuring we have a common language when we talk about that. A lot of buzzwords in this environment right now. How do we want to talk about it? I think that’s certainly a big enabler that can also be a challenge. Constant updates from our customers on the threat data. That’s a continuous piece that industry needs. We need to constantly be understanding the threat data and being able to model that. I think the challenges, some specific challenges, go to when you really get into validating non-deterministic behavior, how do we validate that? That’s a new frontier for us. And it’s going to be very important, because the one thing that we have to convey with these AI systems, especially autonomous AI systems, is trust. If you’re a pilot and you have a few of these things on either side of you, you want to be able to trust that you know what those are going to do and they’re going to do it right and they’re not going to cause harm. So that’s very, very important, I think, for that. Adoption. That’s going to be a challenge. I think it’s helped with trust.

Let’s see. And people. I’m just going to throw that out. We’re in a battle every day for the right people with the right skill set. Obviously, AI and machine learning is an area that’s in high demand. We have to be able to attract and hire the right people in the aerospace and defense community within the services as well. So those are just a few enablers and challenges to discuss.

Lisa Costa:

Absolutely. And I absolutely love your comment about the density of war. And this next question is for Nick. And it’s not only the density of war, but it’s the speed of war, and that’s really where AI and ML will have a huge payoff. So for Nick, what role does clean, plentiful, and consistent data have in getting the most out of AI? And what will help achieve faster time to target, additional time on target, additional time to decision making, and higher confidence scoring on decision making?

Nick Toscano:

Yeah, thanks Dr. Costa. And Kay, that was some wonderful points. I really appreciate you talking about the trust in AI and machine learning and bringing that out. That kind of sets up the data piece. I think these questions were wonderful, by the way. You see I have some paper on my lab here because I was iterating over them for a couple days because there’s so much you can go into on some of these questions. But I want to be efficient for you guys on answering this with the limited time that we have.

So the simple answer is, and I think we all know this, is that data’s the lifeblood of AI. I mean, AI is there to reason, to make reason out of data. So how do we handle that and how do we think about that? Well, I asked a counterpoint question is why would you want to work on dirty data? You don’t. As an AI professional and a machine learning engineer, you don’t, because it’s not secure, it’s costly to the organization, it’s not performant. There’s a lot of issues in dealing with that, and you really can’t do enterprise AI on poor data practices.

So it comes down to, really as an organization, we have to think about how do we want to build our data pipelines? What’s the best way to do that? What kind of data management platforms do we want to use within our AI systems? And I’m talking to you about this from an operator perspective as well, having deployed some of these systems down range, having worked on them within National Intelligence. From a user basis, I’ve seen firsthand how poor data management practices can shut down a project or terminate an operation because you don’t have the ability to make the right decisions.

So some of the things I wanted to point out here. Another piece of this question I just want to touch on. We often get wrapped around with what’s called munging data. And we’ve spent about 80% of our time, “statistically” I guess, as machine learning engineers doing that process. So one answer to this question for me is that in terms of having better data pipelines, we also have to make those practices better. And I think that comes to some of the things that Kay is saying in working with industry, looking at our applications and some of the things that we’re bringing into the building, and aligning those resources so that they’ll help us to be more efficient at the data munging or data cleansing and preparation processes.

Let’s see. The last thing on this that I will point out here, and actually Dr. Costa, do you want me to go ahead and answer the second piece of the question on that, or do you want to save that?

Lisa Costa:

Yes, please.

Nick Toscano:

Okay. Oh, wonderful. Okay. So on this piece, I really wanted to give you guys a couple examples of where I think we’re going as an organization. Some the AI tools that we’re adopting as an organization that’s going to help with creating better data and getting faster time to target. So, one of the examples I think is using Managed Data Science Services. These are services that are stood up. It’s click button services that we can use, launch rapidly, but the important thing is we’re not spending time as operators building these environments and managing them. Those are done for us behind the scenes. I’m seeing those things come in at a high level to organizations. They’re providing great benefits. And I think those are things that are going to come into our organization here with air and space, and really improve the processes we’re doing.

Some other things I’ll touch on, and this is something I want to conclude on with today, is leveraging augmented analytics. This is the process of enabling our intelligence analysts, our business analysts, to leverage machine learning applications within their analytic workflows and decision cycles. And what we want to do is not require them to be machine learning engineers, but to give them the ability to leverage those algorithms without having to have a deep statistical or data science or computer engineering background.

Last thing I’ll just throw out there, that I think is a really interesting advancement in AI is called AI services. Really, these have been around for a while. They’re pre-built models, but the interesting thing about them now is we’re getting to the point to where we can operationalize these on a wider scale and deliver them in a manufacturing sense to a defense organization or to our national security organizations to leverage them. And I think the important thing with those, is it’s enabling more pervasive AI services across the organization. It’s enabling more people to leverage complex models and algorithms in the work that they’re doing. A good example would be computer vision or natural language processing as we opened up with at the beginning. I think that’s it.

Lisa Costa:

Absolutely. And that leads to our third question, our next question, for Justin. And it’s really a key question that we struggle with, I think, in the Department of the Air Force in terms of AI and ML. And that is, what are the elements do you need to implement AI and ML that is scalable, sustainable, and successful with the users?

Justin Woulfe:

That’s a great question. So I guess, first step is certainly policy. When we look at the algorithms and things that we develop at Systecon, and certainly many other organizations do as well, making ensure that we can predict the future, make sure we have the right spare part, the right person, the right system available to meet our mission requirements. That’s, of course, bringing together multitudes of traditionally disparate silos of information. And so, as we look at some of the initiatives with Advana and BLADE, things like that that are looking to consolidate and bring this data into a single environment to make it available for these algorithms to actually run. And that’s going to be a big first step.

And then second is, I think, helping to cut down some of those barriers as part of our policy initiatives between industry and the DOD to get industry access to that data set very, very early in the process, so that as they’re designing systems, they’re able to interact a certain way. We’ve got to find a way to get past PDF c-drills being delivered to a program, as we think about delivering logistics product data or reliability and maintainability information, and find a way to get more direct access to those systems, and then get the DOD access on the backside to that OEM data set as well. And I think if we can bring together these traditional silos, we’re going to be very, very successful in being able to not only have autonomous systems operate, but use AI and machine learning to predict outcomes right before we ever even step onto the battle space.

Lisa Costa:

Absolutely. And this question is for all of you, but I have to just set the scene because this is my favorite question. I have science, technology, and research under my portfolio. And part of what we do is we run the space futures program. And what is amazing to me is that if we were to have a 50 person working group, and we were to have met 50 years ago, we would’ve probably put 80 to 90% of the current space environment that exists today in the cone of impossible. Certainly improbable, but much of it would be impossible. And you think about that, and now at the time that technology is moving at such a quick pace,

And the business environment is being driven so much by the commercial enterprises in space. So I’m not going to ask you as hard a question of looking 50 years out, but if you were to look 10 years from now, if you had a crystal ball, what are some of the things that you would imagine that the Department of Air Force would be able to implement in AI/ML that we have not been able to do so today? And you can take your turns.

Justin Woulfe:

I mean, I’m certainly happy to jump on that. So I’ve got a 13 year old and a 10 year old and an eight year old, and I think the eight year old will probably never drive on her own. And so, I think, you’re going to see that across the Air Force where you’re going to have autonomous systems operating alongside of humans. That’s, I would say, almost a guarantee inside of that 30 year window for sure.

And then I think when you take that one step further with the advancements in edge devices and things like that to do on platform analytics, so that we can understand not only from a strategic level what our SAF/SA group does, understanding the probability of mission success and sordid generation rates for the next two, three, four years, you’re going to see that at the wing level before an aircraft ever takes off. They’re going to understand what the probabilistic outcome is on a tail number by tail number basis. You’re going to see in air combat effectiveness on being done like, you should not do this maneuver because, and that’s assuming there’s even a person still in the plane. And so I think you’re going to see more augmented information being presented and being available so that we can actually make better and better decisions looking forward.

Lisa Costa:

Thank you. Okay, Nick?

Nick Toscano:

All right. Thanks, Kay. That was a wonderful answer. Thank you. This was a really good question. So I spent some time the other night trying to use our regression algorithm to get a good answer for you guys, but the confidence score wasn’t high enough so I’m going to throw that out. Thanks for laughing at that joke. Yeah.

Lisa Costa:

Hey, I wanted to borrow the algorithm.

Nick Toscano:

Yeah. So I do want to give you guys, too, a tactical example and a strategic vision type example for this very quickly. My tactical example kind of relates exactly to what we were just talking about, in that very specifically, I think, advances in computer vision are going to do wonders for how we do operations overseas. For example, as a young soldier, I spent a lot of time watching drone feed, and I’m sure we’ve all been there, right? Staying up all night, 3:00 AM in the morning, watching the drone feed fly over, and marking what was important that we saw. That was a mind numbing experience. It was a great experience, but mind numbing. Computer vision can do that for us. We’ve already got great examples of this occurring in computer vision. What I haven’t seen is I haven’t seen us adopt this widely. And that’s going to be a conversation that goes back through some of the stuff we’ve talked about.

That’s going to be a conversation with leadership on what do we want to give AI automation task over? And so do we trust it to look for some of these important targets and recognize some of these important objects? I think we can do that. It’s just a matter of employing it. As a strategic vision, a little bit bigger, I want to talk about augmented AI workforces, and we’ve already been echoing that through conversation. Okay, you brought that up in the very beginning, I believe.

And I think we see evidence of this occurring already through DOD’s ethical AI principles document that’s out there. It’s on the web. There’s five principles that you can all read about. You all probably know about this. But I think that’s opening the gateway for us to create more augmented AI workforces. And what this really is it’s about human to machine teaming to get faster time to target, to be able to make better decisions in the operations sense. And that’s very real. I think we can do that in the near future, and I think that’s going to grow and become a better and better piece of our operations over the next 10 years. I think that’s it. Thank you.

Lisa Costa:

Thank you.

Kay Sears:

Great answers. I’ll build on that, I guess, a little bit. Again, I think in the future fight, I would imagine in 10 years, and I would hope, that we have collaborated as government and industry so tightly that we have the best answer, better than our adversaries, in terms of the balance between human and AI/ML. And that balance gives us an enduring advantage in the fight, a better lethality, better use of our human assets such that we can execute a campaign and ensure our victory. Maybe that’s a little Pollyanna, but that’s my wish in 10 years. I think some of the things that would enable us to do that, we have to get right now, right today, to enable that future.

And I think, again, that’s a very cautious approach to AI/ML in this environment. It’s a balance between the human element, the pilot element, and the unmanned autonomous AI element. I do think some things like neural networks and future technologies that will enable those AI enabled assets to become better decision makers, certainly faster decision makers, and very accurate in terms of their decisions. And I think that’s going to be something that we want to take advantage and deploy in the right ways. So, that’s kind of my vision for 10 years ahead of us.

Lisa Costa:

Thank you. As the panel was speaking, I was reminded of, I was the senior tech advisor to the senior-most SEAL at the time, and I remember talking to him about technology and where the future was going. And he said, “No, absolutely not.” I said, “Well, we’re going to have cameras on your gear. We’re going to have monitors on you. We’re going to know what your heart rate is and things like that.” And he said, “No. First thing we’re going to do is we’re going to rip all that gear off. We don’t need anybody second guessing us and we don’t need any…”

And so I’m thinking, this is maybe 23 years ago, and look how much has changed the fact that we do have persistence there in terms of UAVs, the fact that we do have individual cameras and monitors and being able to intercede in a good way during operations and during ISR applications.

And so, I just wanted to, because I can see a lot of people are standing around on the walls too. Can we just have a show of hands of the Space Force Civilian and Military Guardians? Can you raise your hand? I just want to see how many we’ve got. Okay, everybody look around. Not many. Not many. These people are unicorns. Why are they unicorns? Because when we look at the number of people who are in each service, the Space Force has the fewest and it has the largest AOR.

And so what struck me from the conversation of the panelists is that this construct of having digital assistance, and I think that’s regardless of whether it’s wartime operations, but it’s also about digital assistance. I have an executive officer. I have a front office team, but not everybody has that. So, I think that there is a lot that will happen in the space in terms of just being able to have AI assistance that everyone is able to take advantage of, and to be able to actually build low code, no code solutions themselves, and just present an answer as opposed to…

And I think I read, this was many years ago by the way, that Amazon had over 10,000 engineers working on voice interfaces. So imagine, I mean, we barely have that. We don’t even have that in military in the Space Force. So I think that it just indicates the critical partnership that the Department of the Air Force and the Department of Defense will have to rely on, in terms of it’s not just these point presence partnerships, but it’s these partnerships that will endure and will gain strength over time.

Kay Sears:

Just another comment on that.

Lisa Costa:

Yes?

Kay Sears:

Because I think you’re hitting on a way, again, to build trust in future AI when you talk about decision aids, because as the feedback that we get from the human side of that is fascinating and it really helps us evolve the AI in the right direction. So for example, we’re deploying decision aids for pilots right now. If you think about manned/unmanned teaming there, we’re learning the point at which a pilot might be overwhelmed. I can’t be burdened anymore with controlling this unmanned system. I’ve got fighters coming at me, or whatever it is. That is great information to understand, because then we can take that and we can say, “Okay, here is the human element of a point where we really need more AI, because now this system is going to be dropped. It’s not tethered anymore. It’s got to go fly on its own. It’s got to go continue a mission.” So I really believe the decision aid piece is a great way to get more feedback on how to point the AI in the right direction.

Lisa Costa:

Absolutely. I’m going to do a quick speed round, 30 seconds for each panelist, on a couple of words that you would use to describe what is the key to finding the right partners for exploring AI and ML for the best outcome, based on your experience?

Justin Woulfe:

Well, I think Kay used a great set of words, “the crawl, walk, run approach.” And so I think we can talk about things, we can generate requirements documents, we can try to boil the ocean, so to speak. I think it’s better to start with a limited set of information, a limited knowledge base, and then iterate that over time. So I think, in finding partners, it’s finding partners that are willing to work in a very agile way, are willing to learn, are willing to use whatever they learn through that process to continue to get better and actually go prove what they’re claiming, what they’re saying that they can do. But in a very iterative way, rather than trying to gather everything together all at once and then dump a waterfall approach out, and that’s sort of doomed to fail, I suppose.

Lisa Costa:

Thank you. Nick?

Nick Toscano:

Yeah, thank you. So something that I often say is AI is not a transactional thing. So what I’m saying here is, let’s build consultative relationships around AI problems. So between defense, national security, air, space, and industry, we need to build consultative relationships that allow us to understand these problems, interpret the data that you’re working with, and then engineer complex solutions around them that can be reproducible and repeatable. So what I would say is, move from the thought of this is a transactional activity to a consultative activity with your partners.

Kay Sears:

That’s great comment. I would say that the power of AI is in the data. And so we shouldn’t think of it as a proprietary thing. We should think about it in collaborative environments where we can build the engine, the data. We can repeat and challenge and make that really the center point of what’s going to prove out to be ultimately how we leverage AI, how we get the outcomes that we want. And so whether you’re a platform provider, a software provider, a sensor, or a payload, we all have to come together to build that AI engine, because the power of it is in all of our data that we can create together.

Lisa Costa:

Absolutely. And I know that we are standing between you and your lunch, so that is a critical point that I don’t need to be reminded of. But Justin, Kay, Nick, thank you so much for your expertise and your time today.