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

Oct. 7, 2022 | By Chris Gordon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oct. 7, 2022

Royal Air Force Air Commander Jez Attridge moderates a discussion with Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force for strategy, integration, and requirements, and Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, director of staff for the Space Force on “The Future of Air & Space Power” on Sept. 21, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Voiceover

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

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

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

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

Gen. Armagno.

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAF Air Commander Jez Attridge

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

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

Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote

Thank you.

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

Oct. 7, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oct. 7, 2022 | By Chris Gordon

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

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

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

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

But the T-38 has always been fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oct. 7, 2022

Retired Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Kaleth Wright leads a discussion with Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost, commander of U.S. Transportation Command; Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, superintendent of the U.S. Air Force Academy; and Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas, commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service on “One Team, One Fight: A Force Multiplier” on Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

If your firewall blocks YouTube, try this alternative link instead.

Voiceover:

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

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas:

Thanks, Chief.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

Thanks sir.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video:

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

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

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

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

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

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

Nice.

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

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

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

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

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

Your kids do?

Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark:

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

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

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

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

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

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

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

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

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

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas:

A lot.

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Maj. Gen. Edward W. Thomas:

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

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

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost:

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

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

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

CMSAF Kaleth Wright, USAF (Ret.):

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

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

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

Oct. 6, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penney recommended that USAF observe five imperatives for CCA development:

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

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

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

Watch, Read: Accelerating Acquisition

Oct. 6, 2022

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg led a discussion with Andrew Hunter, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics and Gen. Duke Z. Richardson, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, on “Accelerating Acquisition” on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Voiceover:

Ladies and gentlemen, the Executive Vice President of the Air and Space Forces Association, Major General Doug Raaberg.

Moderator: Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you, and good morning. The topic of this session is accelerating acquisition. Our Air and Space Forces of today are operating some of the oldest equipment in our history. The forces are smaller and inadequately funded to meet the requirements of the National Security Strategy. For the Air Force, it’s now a balance between capacity and capability to deliver operational capability to the war fighter. Time is not on our side. We must modernize our forces to keep pace with peer adversaries. Accelerating acquisition is key to challenging our strategic competitors. With us this morning is the Honorable Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition Technology and Logistics. Please give him a warm welcome.

And in tight formation with him is General Duke Richardson, Commander of Air Force Materiel Command. Welcome.

Gentlemen, set the stage for us. If you think of the Secretary of the Air Force’s Operational Imperatives as the Department of the Air Force’s guide for moving fast in the right direction, and the question is, how are you implementing and institutionalizing the processes in Air Force acquisition? Mr. Hunter?

Hon. Andrew Hunter:

Well, thank you. It’s a real pleasure to be with everyone this morning. I just want to start by saying that I’ve been watching the visual that says, “This is a professional development event for every event,” and it kind of got me thinking that I’ve got to be really professional today in order to live up to that standard. But, the good news is I have, as my partner in this discussion, the premier professional in the acquisition enterprise, Duke Richardson. I’m really pleased to join you, Duke. I think you’ll hear, as we go through this conversation, that we are linked in every way that we can find to be to drive as partners, to lead the acquisition enterprise towards delivering the capabilities that the Force demands that the secretary and the chief have given us the mandate to produce. That really comes down to setting priorities.

My last job in the Department of Defense, prior to having the privilege of coming back to join the Department of the Air Force earlier this year was as the Director of the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell in OUSD. We were working on operational needs and fulfilling those needs, at the time that I was in the job largely for Iraq and Afghanistan. What I learned from that experience was it was all about setting priorities, and about the senior leadership focus and drive on those priorities that made that effort effective. With the operational imperatives, which have generated a strong sense of urgency for our acquisition community, we’re looking at delivering capabilities in the mid to late 2020s that are critical to success in a high intensity peer-to-peer competition. We know that we need that sense of urgency, that sense of focus, and the ability to prioritize and focus on the most important issues and what we have to deliver to get the job done.

For my part of the acquisition enterprise and AQ, I’ve been working to set priorities, I just want to briefly mention what those are and turn it over to Duke. I think we’re really focused on the discussion part and getting into the Q&A, but let me just let you know how I’ve been thinking through priorities for AQ and for our workforce. I’m working closely with Duke in doing so because I think we can really amplify the effect of our efforts when we’re working closely together. I’ve got sort of three broad areas of priorities that we’re focused on. The first is delivering operational capability to the war fighter. That obviously includes focus on the operational imperatives are absolutely critical and one of the top main thrusts of how we’re going to deliver operational capability to the war fighter. It’s critical to me that we do that in close collaboration with the war fighter, working with our major Combatant Commands to make sure that we understand what their requirements are and that we’re delivering on those and not just taking a path that works for us in the acquisition community.

The second big aspect of this is our nuclear modernization, absolutely critical, and a top mission for our acquisition enterprise, to carry that forward successfully and to sustain the nuclear deterrent as we’re modernizing it. Then, the last is on sustainment of our capabilities because we can’t meaningfully deliver operational capability if it’s not sustainable, ready, and able to go into the fight. My second major focus area is shaping the innovation base for strategic competition, and very much in concert with what the National Offense Strategy and National Security Strategy identify as a strategic competition the United States is engaged in with a pacing competitor in China. I think we have an incredible opportunity in the Department of the Air Force to lead the way in shaping how we prepare for and how we carry out strategic competition, not only in the military sphere but in the economic sphere by working with the innovation base and a wider range of partners.

We’re working there on how we build together our capability development pipelines so that we are effectively leveraging S&T to generate the kinds of technology advances we’re looking for, and at the same time, connecting that to the military capability developments that we’re looking for. We want to expand access to innovative suppliers on the industrial base and work with small businesses and new entrants. We want to protect our supply chains, because again, just like with sustainment, there’s no capability if you can’t sustain it. We’re not going to be able to deliver capability if we can’t make sure that we have resilient and secure supply chains. Then, the last major focus area for me is transforming the acquisition system for the 21st century. How do we make sure that the way in which we go about acquisition is actually fit to purpose for the kinds of capabilities that we have to deliver?

In many cases, they’re incredibly software intensive. They may not lend themselves to the kind of industrial models of acquisition that were the foundation for the acquisition process back in the sixties and seventies, but we have to have different business arrangements and different processes to be successful today, to be much faster, to be more iterative, to be able to deliver increments of capability in weeks and months rather than in years. A big piece of that is the digital thread, something that my predecessor put a lot of effort and great thought into. Duke’s team has a number of major initiatives there with the Digital Transformation Office, and we are absolutely doubling down on those and going to make sure that we carry that out successfully. I look forward to the engaging of the discussion and having a talk about how we can make sure that we focus on our priorities in order to accelerate acquisition.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you. General Richardson?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

Well, yes, I’m going to echo what Honorable Hunter said. I’m really thrilled to be here. This is a really a fantastic topic. If you do a literature search on it, there’s no shortage of thought, ideas, and studies put into this area. I consider myself a student in this area. I like to read all those studies, in fact, I have a lot of them still, and try to look for themes, what’s changed, what’s different. The world’s different than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, there’s a lot that’s very similar in terms of how we have to get our job done. I’m really excited to be teaming up with Honorable Hunter. I think having been a PEO for four times, I’m on a different area now and it’s really up to the secretary and Honorable Hunter to kind of determine the ends, in other words the secretary likes to talk about what direction we should be going, and so that’s not my job anymore.

My job is not to determine the strategies and even the priorities for the programs, my job is more of the organized train-and-equip variety, so much like Air Combat Command, we’d organize train-and-equip forces to go off to a Combatant Commander to fight a war. I consider that very similar to what my job is, and that is basically to organize train-and-equip forces, acquisition war fighters if you will, to do Honorable Hunter and Honorable Calvelli’s business, and so that’s really what I’m about. I consider myself more the ways, so Honorable Hunter is the ends, I’m more about the ways. That’s what I’ve been thinking a lot about as I’ve stepped into the job, tomorrow actually marks about 100 days into the work. You can expect Honorable Hunter and I to be partnered very, very closely going forward, and that won’t change. We committed to each other that we would do that, and I think that’s what you’ll expect the whole time that we’re together.

To the question at hand, General Raaberg, back to the studies. Of all the studies, there’s two people that I tend to always go back to, and the first one is General Pawlikowski, and she always talks about you really just need three things. You need a program manager with what she called godlike authorities, and I think she’s really talking about limiting oversight and questions, I guess. Then, the next thing you need is sharp people. The third thing you need is money for risk. That’s an interesting recipe, if you think about it. The program that quickly comes to my mind is B-21. I think the B-21 program has got all three of those elements in it, and heretofore it’s doing pretty well, and so we’re pretty proud of that program. Another one, of course, is I would certainly be remiss if I didn’t talk about Secretary Kendall… he wrote a whole book on it called Getting Defense Acquisition Right.

He talks about four things. He talks about setting reasonable requirements, which for me kind of hearkens back to Kelly Johnson, the father of Skunk Works about hey, each project should probably only have a single miracle, don’t throw two in there. It’s more than just that, it’s other things. The second thing that he said was, “Put professionals in charge,” which is a lot like General Pawlikowski’s one and two. The third thing he said was, “Give them the resources they need,” and I think for me that means the personnel resources, the organized train-and-equip acquisition war fighters that Honorable Hunter needs to be successful. The fourth thing is provide strong incentives for success. I think a lot of folks in the audience will probably think about things like contract incentives, and it certainly does include it, but for me it really is about incentives for the workforce within Air Force Material Command. I’m going to be giving that a lot of thought, about how I incentivize the government workforce, because I know Honorable Hunter will be thinking very much about how to incentivize industry.

But at the end of the day, I start thinking about what is different and what’s not different, and really it comes… there’s a couple things that are just not different and that is the need for a competent workforce. That’s both leadership and the actual workforce below the leadership across all functionals, and I won’t list the functionals, everybody knows what they are, but I’m going to be very focused on that. The second one is this need for systems engineering. Secretary Kendall about that, I mean, the requirement for systems engineering is not going to change, I don’t expect it will, and so we’re going to be pretty focused on that. In a similar fashion that Honorable Hunter just went through his requirements, I’d like to very quickly go through my what I’m calling Four Lines of Effort. The first one is deliver integrated capability, every word is chosen for a reason, especially the word integrated, and so we want to make sure that the work of the six centers that comprise AFMC are integrated across the centers but also inside the centers so that each PEO is not operating like a silo.

Also, it means making sure that the programs that we deliver to Honorable Hunter are also integrated across each other. I think things like ABMS and the announcement of General Cropsey, that will also help in that regard. The second one is strengthening the team. This is where, Honorable Hunter, I really got to double down for you. That is recruit, retain, reward the team and train them. You mentioned digital, and so there’s a very large effort, I hope we can go into that a little bit more later, about what we’re doing to try to make sure the workforce is trained in these new techniques. We do think that digital’s very likely not going to… it probably doesn’t require less people, in fact it might even require a few more people at the beginning. I don’t know that it’s going to save necessarily a lot of money.

I do think it has a real opportunity to accelerate what we do, and not just for the initial delivery but in perpetuity. When we get into the product support aspects of it, if we built that digital foundation, we also think that it will actually allow us to accelerate all along the life cycle, especially as we get into mods and product support. The third one is this idea of revolutionizing our processes. I mentioned part of my job is to organize, train, equip. Organize, train, and equip includes the processes that we use to deliver work on these programs for Honorable Hunter. Revolutionize was chosen for a reason, it was meant to be provocative, to kind of challenge ourself. That’s really where we’re going to dig in deep on this idea of digital material management, and that is where we’re not going to just digitize current processes, we’re going to look at the digital tools to see if we can actually reinvent the processes that we use.

We will always have the process. Systems engineering is not going to go away. [inaudible 00:14:44], those things are not going to go away, but how we do them, using the digital techniques is what’s going to be different. The last one is what I’ll call amplifying a war fighter culture. I’ll use the term engines metaphorically. Engines don’t turn without every AFMC member doing their job, and that’s more of an internal probably thing, just the AFMC, but I want to make sure the AFMC workforce feels very connected to the tip of the spear. Those are the four lines of effort. If you are taking notes on mine and also Honorable Hunter’s, you’ll notice there’s very good alignment on those, and where they’re different, I think it makes sense. My strengthening the team really is his workforce that he’s using, and then he’s got one on the industrial base, and so where they’re different makes complete sense and where they shouldn’t be different, they’re not different.

We’ve been trading these back and forth and so, again, I’ll close just by saying that the teamwork is really super strong. After three months, I’m just really excited to see what we can get done over the next couple years.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Mr. Hunter, do you want to add to that?

Hon. Andrew Hunter:

Well, I do want to double down on what Duke said about the workforce. Workforce is critical, I actually mistakenly didn’t include that when I talked about transforming. Our third focus area definitely includes a focus on workforce and making sure that the workforce that we have, which is incredible, is fully equipped to carry out this transformation, certainly on the digital piece as well as on the business model, two critical areas where we’ve made a lot of progress and we’ve still got work to do. I do think it’s a key piece, and that the Duke talked about what are we really going to get as an advantage from doing this digital thread, and what I am seeing in our programs that have been implementing this is a much higher degree of maturity earlier in the design process. As we get I think a little further in the discussion talk about how do we make trade-offs so that we can deliver at pace and achieve acceleration, a lot of it is making informed choices. That design maturity is I think a critical enabler.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

I think my next question’s going to pert the ears of industry. You’ve talked about one of the focus areas, your top one there is delivering operational capability to the war fighter or the last tactical mile, putting in operational parlance. But as you both focus on literally digital acquisition, how are you engaging the industry partners and your own workforces to embrace that transformation, especially in digital acquisition?

Hon. Andrew Hunter:

Well, one of the things that strikes me as you look at the operational imperatives is several of them, if not all of them, cut across a whole range of stove pipes. We’ve developed a system which is highly specialized and it has stove pipes, and in some cases for a reason. You build up the expertise in a sophisticated aircraft design, sophisticated weapons developed, in sophisticated mobility solutions and you leverage that expertise and you create a center or PEO and someone that really is able to leverage that expertise, get the best evidence for you, work with the suppliers, many of whom we know well and know us well. There’s power in that, right? There’s a reason why our system has operated that way, and it’s been very successful. But when you look at the OIs, they really force us to cut across those stove pipes.

The premier example is the one the secretary discussed yesterday, which is C3 Battle Management. It touches every single system that we operate, across every domain in which we operate. It requires coordination among tens of PEOs and hundreds of program managers in order to actually be successful. That kind of organizational complexity is not something that the AQ enterprise was really established or has processes in place to handle. We saw that the secretary identified that problem, it’s a very significant problem, so it’s a technical problem of how do we set standards and interfaces, and then there’s the organizational problem of how do you create the institution that’s capable of developing those standards but also distributing them across the entire enterprise, and if you will, enforcing them? Then, how do we support that PEO in being successful in carrying out the direction across all the elements of the acquisition process to include requirements in budget, none of which are under any one single entity below the level of the secretary?

It takes that top-down leadership focus, which I think self evidently from the remarks that we heard yesterday that we have, and which I’m committed to working on with Duke, with Frank Calvelli, with the CFT and others to make sure that we are able to not just admire that problem of organizational complexity, but manage it, tackle it, and overcome it. To me, that is really illustrative. There’s a reason why that announcement was the announcement for AFA because it is an example of us committing to tackle a really challenging problem, one that we haven’t always succeeded in solving in the past, in fact, our track record there is not sterling, but this time we’re going to take different approaches to get after it, and likewise with industry… Here’s the connection to your question. Likewise with industry, the traditional model is, okay, we’ll pick a prime, we will operate on the assumption that we’ve got primes who can solve the problem that we’re asking them to solve.

I think the record shows that when it comes to some of these problems of enormous technical and organizational complexity, they’re bigger than one company can really address on its own, and so you need a team approach. That’s how we’re approaching several of these initiatives, including C3 Battle Management is we are definitely going to be looking for expertise, we are looking for industry partners who can manage large parts of the problem, who can integrate, who understand systems engineering, who have systems engineering expertise, we need that. But, I don’t believe there’s any single company that has everything that we’re going to need to be successful, and almost by definition there isn’t, and so we’re approaching it with that idea of building an industry team to support our efforts.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Especially in a family of systems acquisition environment. General Richardson?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

Honorable Hunter just said something interesting about how the OIs are really crosscutting. He mentioned the C3BM, certainly is a… I mean, that one’s clearly a cross-cutter, but really all of them crosscut. Back to focus…by the way, I don’t know if everybody picked up on it, but the first priority that we both have is deliver… I don’t know if anybody noticed that, but that wasn’t by accident. We know that our job is to actually deliver, and so that’s why that’s the very first thing. Going back to the integrated, we’ve got to work towards getting the work of the PEOs integrated across all of them. We can’t have exquisite stove pipe systems that don’t talk to each other anymore, so that’s why we’re also focused on enterprise solutions. Really, there’s a lot of buzzwords I guess that roll through my head daily, but integrated is certainly one of them, and enterprise solutions is one.

But, to answer your question about what we’re doing with industry, I go back to what General Brown said on the stage yesterday about Mission Command. What I’m trying to do is provide Commanders intent to all 89,000 people that comprise the Air Force Material Command, give them the tools that they need to be successful, tools and training, not just… I’ll talk about tools in a second, and then just stay at it with a steady drum beat. I think where I spend my time is going to tell them where my priorities lie, and so I want to make sure that I focus my time, there’s only so much of it, in this space, and then try to limit the amount of distractions that I get. I think that’s where the workforce will end up spending their time.

The workforce, I think that commander’s intent, giving them the tools and training, and then empowering them, that’s really what the chief’s talking about with Action Order B. Not just empowering them, but equipping them so that they can be empowered. The tools and training, there’s an overlap here between we’re setting up… by the way, this work is not finished. We have a long way to go. We’ve got a digital guide website where we’re sort of parking a lot of the stuff, the workforce is getting up to speed on some of the tools. I won’t go through all the class of tools, but suffice to say there’s a bunch of them. Honorable Hunter mandated one tool, and I think that’s all he’s going to mandate. It’s called Team Center, it’s the product cycle management tool, and it really for me is the quarterback. That’s kind of where we’re going to house a lot of the data, including things that might have intellectual property stamped on them. We’ll have to come up with ways of making sure that we can protect that intellectual property at the correct boundary.

When we queried industry on this topic, it turned out that they each kind of use a different set of tools, and so we decided maybe it wasn’t smart to mandate a set of tools. We’re kind of working through that right now, sort of prime by prime to figure out how to make that work. At the end of the day, back to my job, organized, train, equip, these things have to get placed into requests for information, requests for proposals, model contracts. They’ve got to get into contractual vehicles so that we’re clear and we’re not just doing happy-talk, and so that work’s also going on. We’ve made a lot of good headway. I should say, we’ve got some Pathfinder programs out there that are kind of doing it on their own. I think that’s great at first because they’re leading the way, so think about NGAD, GBSD, even B-52 Serb. We’ve got a bunch of Pathfinders out there, and I think what we need to do is kind of look at the work they’re doing and get the best of breeds.

You’re seeing that PO Weapons, General Bartolome is doing that down at Eggland with this weapon open system architecture, and so now we’re coming up with ways of, hey, if you’re going to build a new munition, it has to be WOSA compliant. When we’re in source selection, we’re actually going to evaluate how open it is and you’re going to get graded on it. To answer your question, we need to continue collaborating and teaming with the industry and then we need to actually inculcate these ideas into the contractual and the business processes that we use. I will tell you, if you’re a senior leader out there, I am not an expert on digital material management. I am also a student, so I am working to learn as well. It’s incumbent upon… the younger folks in Air Force Material Command are super duper excited about this. Folks at the higher level, like myself, are super duper excited about it.

But, we got to get what I consider the enabling level of leadership, all the folks kind of in the middle. You might call them middle managers, to me they’re the enabling levels of leadership. We’ve got to get them super excited, and I think then we’re going to be cooking with gas.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Can I ask just more of a side question because both of you are starting out together, this is an incredible relationship and a real fighting team, but I’m going to touch on amplifying the war fire, your culture, because you both are now developing the culture of acquisition for the war fighter, especially as the Department of Air Force is enforced provider to the Combatant Commanders, and all I can see is from conventional to nuclear, you have a big job. The real question is just in the initial phase, are there opportunities you’ve seen already just in going through the enterprise with your focus areas themselves, those opportunities that presented themselves?

Hon. Andrew Hunter:

Well, I’ve been enormously impressed by the professionalism, the skill, the knowledge of the workforce that is here. I’ve been just absolutely delighted to be able to come in and lead this group. It is phenomenal. As Duke mentioned, we do have Pathfinder programs that have been out there literally forging the path on how do we actually do a business arrangement with industry that brings in both traditional primes and tech companies, non-traditional, small business who each bring their unique skillset and we can get them engaged in a high-end aircraft design problem, which historically we would’ve said, “Hey, let’s get the two or maybe three companies capable of building such an airplane together and we’ll have a competition, we’ll pick one, and then we’ll give them the development resources to go build the airplane.” A fundamentally different approach, and that is something that was designed by the team that we have is being executed, they’ve got digital thread, they’re out there absolutely making it happen on a daily basis.

Then, as people who have been engaged in that effort, reach the point in their career where they’re ready to take on more responsibility, we can take those folks who’ve seen how this can be done, how it works, and make them program manager in a different area, they can spread that knowledge. Others can come in, see the program, and bring that back to their program. I talked to some of our material leaders I think last week and said that all of you talking to each other is probably the biggest single thing that we can have to help our enterprise move forward on these things, so all of that’s in place.

I really see my job is to come in and be, as Duke said, be the enabler at my level, hopefully I can be the senior level enabler and make the connections to the secretary, to the chiefs to get whatever direction, whatever authorities that we need… in most cases, the authorities reside at the assistant secretary level, I can execute them, sometimes we need a little help on things like… well, I wasn’t able to create a new PEO all by myself, I needed the secretary’s help, I needed Duke’s help to make that happen. That’s what we can bring to the table. I think the team is ready to go, they’ve got the right skillsets and they’re motivated, and it’s really incumbent on us as I see it to bring what they need to make them successful at it.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

That’s insightful. General Richardson?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

I would answer that question in two ways. The first one is I think the obvious way, and so we talk about the collaborative combat aircraft, a huge opportunity. I mean, it goes without saying. Not only will we apply digital material management techniques to that program from the very start, but in terms of how we… I mean, just across the board, across all the centers, how we test it. I think that’s pretty pervasive. But then, the interconnectedness of the CCA, so for that construct to be successful, it really goes back to this whole C3BM thing, all this stuff. The environment that we’re in now and going forward, we cannot afford cylinders of excellence anymore, and so rather than each PEO optimizing a single system and basically cutting off all barnacles, they’re going to be connected. I do think that we can optimize the whole, but it might mean that we have to maybe sub-optimize certain capabilities because certain capabilities can’t work on their own anymore, and the secretary’s made that crystal clear.

The second way I would answer that is that when I look at all six centers that comprise Air Force Material Command, huge opportunities. If you look at what’s happening in the lab, we’re applying digital to all six centers, even installation and mission support center. We’re making a digital twin out of tindle as we rebuild it, so this cuts across everything. The sustainment center, the way we do heavy maintenance in our three organic depots using digital workflow techniques. We have a long way to go, digital depots is part of our long term strategy for the depots. Clearly, it applies to LCMC and Nuclear Weapons Center. Test center, the same thing, we’re doing a lot of work to figure out how to… one example that I would give you is this thing called the Joint Simulation Environment, which we started that program because it really has… it’s needed to essentially finish IOT&E for the F-35.

What we’re learning is that it has applicability much beyond F-35 and we’re starting to look at that could be used for development tests for other programs, and so you can kind of see the Air Force Test Center is really going down this road as well, not just that but training. The JSE has got huge training benefit to it. Then of course, I guess the trifecta would be capability development. When we start, I don’t know what OIs are coming, I don’t know what subset OIs are coming, but the ability to use that tool as a way to basically model and simulate ideas I think is going to be very powerful. Opportunities abound, Doug, I mean, I don’t know there’s a shortage of opportunities here. Back to Honorable Hunter’s point, I think our challenge is going to be the priorities. We’ve got to not get distracted by all those opportunities and try to figure out which ones we really want to get after.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Fast question, the secretary started off yesterday morning, he said, “China, China, China.” With China’s seeming ability to move faster in the innovation and technology realm, how are you both better connecting your S&T or science and technology efforts to war fighter needs and ensuring you can meet emerging requirements? Mr. Hunter?

Hon. Andrew Hunter:

There’s no doubt that China has moved incredibly fast in a number of areas, and honestly it’s quite impressive and daunting that when we say that China’s the pacing threat, the pace is fast. Having said that, their requirements are not our requirements, they’re fundamentally different problem sets that they’re forced to have to solve, and then there’s others that we’re forced to have to solve. We obviously are focusing on what our requirement sets are and then working fast and hard to get after those as fast as we can. I think the OIs created the infrastructure to allow us to do that because when you focus on a specific operational problem, I think it enables you to do that prioritization when it comes to setting requirements. The secretary has said, “The timeframes that we have to deliver capability by are really short, so we have to be willing to take risk.”

But as Duke said, you want to be judicious in taking risk, you don’t want to bet on we can achieve three miracles, maybe you pick one. I just think this construct gives us the disciplined approach that will allow us to make those good trade-offs. Then, as much as anything, it’s the process. It’s the way in which the OIs were formulated with the requirements community and the acquisition community doing kind of, if you will, the initial scene setting, and then we engaged the resource community at the same time to make sure that we would be resourced appropriately to achieve these initiatives. Incredible work’s done, it’s really set the stage for us and created the right framework, but it’s yet another task to turn that into programs, into programmatics. Saying we’ve generally got the right requirement, which I think is correct, now we’ve got to say, “How do we turn that into a technical specification that we can send to industry and get bids on, evaluate those, determine risk, make good choices in setting our specs and then in managing programs?”

We’re going to have to keep that collaborative approach. I think being very closely linked with the requirements community, with the MAJCOMs every step of this process, because in some cases the risk may be that maybe we’ll bet on a second miracle and just say that the payoff will be so huge, if we succeed then it’s worth taking what would be a substantial risk. In other cases, the risk may be ultimately the OI may have originally envisioned one kind of a capability, but as we get into it, we say, “We only want one miracle here because we got to have something,” and so in order to deliver on time, we may not do everything that was originally envisioned, but we’ll work closely if we were to make such a choice with our operators to make sure that’s the right choice and that we can still close the mission threat.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

General Richardson, what message would you hand your counterpart?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

You talked about the S&T here. General Pringle… I got to give a shout out to General Pringle, our lab commander, doing really great work and leading a fantastic team. She’s just an authentic leader and is very quick to always give credit to her lab for the work that they do. We’ve got three processes. I know process is kind of like a dirty word, process. But, we got three that I think are worth highlighting very quickly. One is called the TASR, Technology Acquisition Sustainment Review. Honorable Hunter, myself, and the MAJCOM Commander meet once a year. We do that for each MAJCOM where we actually go through technology acquisition, IE acquisition programs of record, and then sustainment, the product support aspect. We go through that once a year. That’s one thing that’s worth mentioning.

General Pringle at the lab has created this process called the war tech process, where we team up war fighters, technologists, and PEOs to get after problems and things that we should be looking at. That process has spawned a whole bunch of laboratory work. It’s also spawned some OI recommendations, not all of them, but some of them. I think that’s working really well. The third thing I would mention is we have an experimentation and prototyping campaign where we get together with A5, S5, AQ, SQ, where we talk about how to spend… we have a whole separate pot of money for experimentation and prototyping, what projects to go after that would inform an OI, and so that work’s been going on. Those are the three things that we are doing now. This is a very long topic, so I’ll probably have to stop because we’re going to run out of time.

But suffice to say, I think General Pringle’s got the lab oriented… historically the lab was really… tech directors, for example, the Air Vehicle Directorate, which is really good domain expertise. She has created… I approved it, she recommended it, I got to approve it I’ll say, this Integrated capabilities director where it is really a cross cutter organization that’s led by Mr. Chris Ristech to look across all the tech directorates to inform and be very closely linked to the war fighter to make sure the lab, our S&T work is directly linked to the war fighter. I gave you three processes and then a little bit of a reorganization within the lab, which you may have picked up on, we announced it last month, but it’s pretty major.

Hon. Andrew Hunter:

I’ll just double tap on that.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Absolutely.

Hon. Andrew Hunter:

There’s a buried success story in the operational imperatives, which is when we went out and surveyed the landscape for what were the things we could quickly bring to bear to solve these operational problems, we found a lot of technology that AFRL had been working on that was ready to harvest. I think I want to mention that. The other related piece is we also found technology that had been developed by other countries, think of the E-7 here, which we could quickly acquire. We found technologies that were available in the commercial realm. There’s a real success story there and one we want to continue.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Well gentlemen, we’re down to about two minutes. What final thoughts would you like to leave the audience? Mr. Hunter?

Hon. Andrew Hunter:

Well, let me just kind of return to the theme of prioritization. I think we’ve been talking the happy side of it, all the good things that we’re going to do. I think it’s fair to point out too that prioritization has a flip side of the coin, right? It’s still critical that we divest the things that aren’t fit to fight. We’re going to have to probably be careful about how we apply resources to things that we don’t see as directly relevant to the operational imperatives. That’s a message that I send to my program managers, in some case, I may be managing programs that are not the priority, we still have to do them or we would’ve canceled them, but they’re not going to be the priority. Then, the mission is how do you do what you need to do as efficiently as you possibly can so that you could potentially free up resources for the rest of the enterprise? Success there will translate to, I think, to success in their careers and success for the enterprise.

Gen. Duke Richardson:

I’ll take a page out of that book, and I’ll kind of finish where I started as well. A lot of studies in this area, nothing new under the sun here. How we do it is… I think there’s some new stuff there in terms of digital material management. I think that’s clear. Compute power, the software tools that are available to us, the Cloud allows us to distribute the workforce and work much closer together with our industry partner, that’s never been done before. The basics of systems engineering haven’t changed, and so we’ll do that, but we’re going to do it differently. I want to caution us though. There’s this idea called polarity management. There was a book in 1992, I don’t know if anybody’s heard of it, that I’m reading right now. It’s fascinating. What got me on this is this constant left to right, we take risk, risk averse, fixed price, cost plus, perfect solution, just get it out there.

We tend to ratchet between the two extremes and the book will go through a bunch of these things. If you think about it, it really in a lot of ways captures how we think, “Oh, well we need to do it this way.” The premise of the book really is you have to manage the polarities. In most cases, the answer is not on the poles, it’s somewhere in the middle. That thought runs through my mind because I can tend to be somebody who likes to run to a pole, and so capability versus capacity is another one. Differentiate versus integrate. Specialization versus enterprise. You heard me talk about enterprise, I have a propensity to want to do just that, but there’s going to be times when we will need to specialize. I would just leave the audience with, this is complex stuff, there’s probably not a simple answer. If you think you’re going to run to a pole, you’re probably not going to be able to do that because then two years from now you’ll run to the other pole.

I think it’s going to require all of us to be a little deeper in our thinking and explore these ideas. I’m really excited to lead the women and men of Air Force Material Command across all six centers. We have these six centers that are purpose built. I think they’re built for this task. I hope it’s clear that Honorable Hunter and I, and Honorable Calvelli, to the extent that we’re able to and we overlap to partner, to team, and to get after this for our nation, because at the end of the day, it’s not about any single individual or organization, it’s about our nation. That’s what excites me.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, USAF (Ret.):

Teamwork starts with the leaders, and you both demonstrate a very, very close coordination and formation. Again, thank you for your leadership. It has been absolutely incredible to hear your thoughts and share your insights this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please give them a warm hand.

To Deter China, Pentagon Must ‘Marry’ New Tech With Legacy Systems, Flournoy Says

Oct. 6, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

As the Pentagon looks to deter China in the coming years, officials need to find ways to make new technologies and existing systems work together to build capacity, former Defense Department policy chief Michèle Flournoy said Oct. 6.

In particular, Flournoy—a defense analyst who served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012—touted the concept of manned-unmanned teaming as especially promising during a livestreamed fireside chat with the Atlantic Council about deterring China through the 2020s.

Manned-unmanned teaming is a technology area the Air Force has been pursuing for several years, a pursuit that’s heated up recently as Secretary Frank Kendall has pushed for cheap, autonomous drones to fly alongside fighters, an effort that has been dubbed collaborative combat aircraft.

Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. has also said such drones, which could carry sensors, weapons, and pods to disaggregate and complement manned platforms’ capabilities, aren’t intended to only pair with the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance fighter.

“We want to not constrain ourselves and say it’s tied to NGAD,” Brown said this August, but “how do we look at it from a broader perspective?” Other potential platforms include the F-35, F-15EX, E-7, and KC-46.

Such an approach would seemingly complement an issue Flournoy identified in her remarks—the need to mesh rapidly developed tech with already-fielded systems.

“A lot of people … kind of create a false trade-off, I think, between, we’re either going to divest of all of our legacy systems and create all these new capabilities,” Flournoy said, or just keep only legacy systems. “And the answer is that’s wrong. We are going to have a largely legacy force for the foreseeable future. That’s just a fact.”

Working within that reality, the Pentagon must find a way to “marry” those legacy systems “with new technologies and capabilities—some defense, some commercial—that are emerging that give them meaningfully different capabilities,” Flournoy said.

Some of those new technologies are “very mature” and even available “off the shelf,” Flournoy added, pointing to “particularly unmanned systems that can be operated by a manned platform.”

That description seems to mirror the vision Kendall has laid out for collaborative combat aircraft in which a pilot has multiple unmanned “wingmen” and can “be essentially calling plays and employing uncrewed combat aircraft as wingmen in tactically optimized ways,” he has said.

Particularly within the context of deterring China, Flournoy said manned-unmanned teaming could be critical because in “trying to deter or fight in China’s backyard … they will always have a quantitative advantage. Lower-cost drones to pair with manned platforms could close that capacity gap and give the U.S. “greater mass in the near term,” Flournoy said.

The Air Force is aggressively pursuing such a concept—Kendall has said he wants to hold a competition for the CCA program in 2024—and that approach could be needed, depending on China’s strategic considerations for attempting to invade Taiwan, a scenario that could very likely draw the U.S. into a conflict.

Because so much of the Pentagon’s modernization plans focus on fielding capabilities in the 2030s, Chinese president Xi Jinping may decide that if a military confrontation is needed, “maybe there’s a window where it’s better to use force before the Americans and their allies have fully set the region with the right posture and capability mix,” Flournoy said. “Because that would [mean China will] have a better chance of success sooner than later.”

Such a scenario in the mid to late 2020s is a key issue the Pentagon needs to do a better job of preparing for, Flournoy said, starting with putting someone in charge of considering the medium-term outlook.

“The service chiefs have the 2030-and-beyond perspective. The [combatant commanders] have the next-two-or-three-years perspective,” Flournoy said. “There’s no one focused on this problem every day, accountable to the Secretary every day, for making progress in this area. So authorize someone to be in charge.”

In considering that mid-range timeframe, Defense Department leaders need to take an “Apollo 13” approach, Flournoy added—making the best use possible of what they have instead of waiting for future capabilities so that they can “meaningfully enhance deterrence, so that we undermine Xi’s confidence in using force and we avoid the conflict if at all possible.”

There has been plenty of speculation as to whether Xi and China’s calculus for a potential Taiwan invasion has changed after seeing Russia struggle to make gains after its invasion of Ukraine while the U.S. and its partners have banded together. But Flournoy warned against assuming Chinese forces would struggle as much as Russia’s have.

“There’s a temptation because the Chinese military is untested from a combat perspective, to sort of say, well, maybe they’re just as feckless as the Russian forces were. I think that would be a mistake,” Flournoy said. “You know, I don’t think we should say they’re 10 feet tall, [and] they have their own problems and their own challenges, and they are untested. But they’ve also made tremendous strides in the professionalization of the force, particularly over the last decade, and I don’t think we should underestimate them.”

Watch, Read: Families in the Fight! Senior Leadership Perspective

Oct. 6, 2022

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller, Air Force deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel, and services, led a discussion with senior leaders and spouses including Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Sharene Brown; Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond and Mollie Raymond; Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass and Rahn Bass; and Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman and Rachel Rush on “Families in the Fight! Senior Leadership Perspective” at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 21, 2022. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

Good morning and welcome to the last day of AFA. It’s been a phenomenal conference. I am, as he just said, Lieutenant General Caroline Miller. But it is my honor to be here to moderate today’s Families in the Fight: Senior Leadership Perspective panel. We are asking questions to our Air and Space Force leadership and spouses covering a variety of challenges impacting our Airmen, Guardians, and their families. We only have 50 minutes, and it’s going to go quickly, so let’s introduce our panel members for this session.

Voiceover:

Families in the Fight, Senior Leadership Perspective.

General Charles Q. Brown Jr. is the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force. He is responsible for the organization, training, and equipping of 689,000 active-duty, guard, reserve, and civilian forces serving in the United States and overseas. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he is an advisor to the Secretary of Defense, National Security Council, and the president.

Mrs. Sharene Brown was raised in an Air Force family and has accompanied her husband on 20 assignments around the globe. They have two sons who have become wonderful young men. Mrs. Brown is an avid supporter of military families and is committed to improving quality of life within the Department of the Air Force, especially for those in EFMP. This passion led her to create Five & Thrive, an initiative that encourages military families to thrive.

General John W. “Jay” Raymond is the Chief of Space Operations in the United States Space Force. He is responsible for the organization, training, and equipping of all organic and assigned space forces serving in the United States and overseas. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he is an advisor to the Secretary of Defense, National Security Council, and the president.

Mrs. Mollie Raymond has traveled all over the world and moved 19 times with her husband as a military spouse. They have raised three amazing children. Mrs. Raymond has long been a champion for military spouses and families, working tirelessly to support them. As the spouse of the first Chief of Space Operations, Mrs. Raymond desires to build a culture of family within the Space Force by promoting family engagements, building connections, and creating a sense of community.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, JoAnne S. Bass serves as the Personal Advisor to the Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Air Force. She advises on all issues regarding welfare, readiness, morale, proper utilization, and progress of more than 600,000 total force Airmen. She represents the highest enlisted level of leadership, providing direction for the enlisted force and representing their interest to the American public and to those in all levels of government.

Mr. Rahn Bass served in the United States Army for 27 years and continues to serve in retirement by volunteering to support service members, their families, and the local community. He is married to Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass. Together they have two children and could not be more proud of the sacrifices their children have made.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman serves as the highest enlisted leader for the United States Space Force. He provides direction for the enlisted force and represents their interest to the American public and to those in all levels of government. Chief Towberman acts as the Personal Advisor to the Chief of Space Operations and Secretary of the Air Force on all issues regarding the welfare, readiness, morale, proper utilization, and development of the United States Space Force.

Mrs. Rachel Rush is a psychiatric registered nurse with specialized experience in adult, adolescent, forensic, and trauma inpatient settings. She is married to Chief Master Sergeant in the Space Force, roger Toberman. Mrs. Rush is committed to working toward a culture of resilience while navigating mental health resources and services. She is both humbled and excited to serve Space Force personnel and their families during this historic transition into a new branch of service.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

All right, let’s give a round of applause for our panel members. OK, we’ll start this off. We’re going to go … I’m going to start with General and Mrs. Brown. With the current trend of inflation in the economy, what resources are available to Airmen, Guardians, and their families to assist with current economic challenges?

CSAF Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.:

Well, first of all, it’s a pleasure to be up here with this distinguished panel. Good to see y’all. I think one of the things I would highlight as I dive into this particular question is there’s a number of things that have happened over the course of the past several years that none of us really predicted. One is a global pandemic that impacted many of us in certain form or fashion, really on housing was one of the key areas, as well. But it’s also the aspect of how inflation has come about very quickly on top of COVID. And so, with that, many of you know, we did make some adjustments to our housing allowance and temporary areas, but we’re all going to see a rise in our housing allowance, a rise basic allowance for subsistance. Also, a rise in our pay raise. But that doesn’t do it all. The other aspect we’re really trying to do is be a little more working with OSD in looking at the local rental markets to have a better sense of how quickly the housing market is changing, so we can have a little bit more adaptable system.

The other piece we’re also looking is, as we’re making adjustments in COLA. The COLA adjustments were made about a year ago, the decision. It’s also impacting at the same time as we’re seeing inflation. So, we’re looking at how we slow that pace down and again, have a more adaptive pace. And then, just this past week, there’s been some engagement within OSD to take a look at, for some of our families, or those at the lower end of the pay scale, a potential for a kind of a one time outlay of money to help support those families to really get them back on track. But it’s something we’re going to have to continue to pay attention to and really engage in, not only hearing from our Airmen and our families, but at the same time, things we can do internal to the Department of the Air Force. But there’s many times, things we’ll have to do within OSD and the Department of Defense to make some of those changes.

Sharene Brown:

He almost forgot me. So, I just wanted to say, in addition to some of those adjustments that are being made at the headquartered level, what we don’t recognize oftentimes is there are a lot of resource and programs that we have that’s currently already in place. Sometimes, we forget that even at our local level at our Military Family Readiness Center, the name has just changed from Airmen and Family to Military Family and Readiness Center, there might be programs and resources that are out there. And I would suggest highly for some of our spouses that are in the crowd and families, think about reaching out to the key spouses that are out there. They might have some ideas as to how to combat some of these challenges that you’re facing because sometimes, the combination of all these things are high stressors. And so, how we react to them can change how we feel emotionally about some of these things.

Reaching out to our key spouses, if you feel like things are affecting your family, there might be programs out there for you to better engage with your kids about how these things are affecting you. You don’t think that they have a ripple effect, but they really do. The stressors as to how you engage, maybe that’s an opportunity for us to go look at that spouse resiliency page that’s on the website on the airforce.mil website. Take a look at some of those things that might be able to help you. Yes, I realize in the moment, the housing crisis, the inflation that’s going on, they have a toll on us. The other thing is we have key spouses that are out there. You just don’t know what kind of programs they might have available to be able to contact them, get in touch with them. They may be trying to reach out to you.

So, as you think about these things, there are ripple effects that happen as a result of this. And we don’t want this to really affect you, but we do have the programs that are available, and if you could just reach out to different people, the key spouses, maybe even the resiliency page, finding out what kinds of things might be able to help you feel like you can take this all in with a little bit of stride, then I think we’ll be a little bit better for that. Because as you know, sometimes this is a rollercoaster ride. We don’t know what kinds of things are going to be happening down the road, and we want to be better prepared as we go forward. So, with that, I’ll turn the mic back over.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

Thank you. Just a real quick follow on. What resources are available both off and on the installation for childcare?

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr:

Well, for childcare, this is an area that we’ve heard loud and clear from our Airmen and families on providing childcare. It has been a challenge. And it’s not only what we do on our brick and mortar, actually having the facility, but it’s also the aspect of actually having qualified talent that wants to work in our childcare facility. One of the things that we did was took a look at the wages across the board for childcare providers that work in our child development centers and got that to a level of about $15 an hour, if I have that number correct. But it really matches up against what’s happening in the community. At the same time, it’s our home care program, as well. It’s childcare in your neighborhood. Also, being able to share a childcare spot, as well. And the last piece is really working with our community, as well.

And there’s also the money we put into fee assistance and that was a lot of our Airmen and families have taken advantage of that fee assistance program to help defray the cost, particularly if they’re off base because, as was talked about on one of the panels in yesterday, about 70% of our Airmen and Guardians and families do not live on base. And so, it may not be convenient, depending on who’s dropping off the kids, to go back to the base. Maybe better to do that in the community. And this is why we really appreciate the work from our civic leaders to help us focus on childcare in the community.

Sharene Brown:

Okay. I’ll hold it up a little bit. So, I just wanted to highlight, we have several programs, and believe it or not, we have, for Molly and I, we have the opportunity to sit down with our child and youth programs director. And we often have the opportunity to come back, and we go on base visits and go out and share with, or at least listen to some of our families when we’re out on visits with our other halves. We hear some of the issues and challenges that are out there, but the child and youth program director is trying very, very hard to provide the programs so that we can better serve our communities. Let me just highlight just a couple of programs that we have out there currently. There’s the Kinderspot app. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but this is an opportunity that if members are not using their week let’s say, or a couple of days, then you might be able… They’ll kind of advertise. It’s an opportunity to sublet their spot at the CDC.

And so, you can do this and it’s an app that’s out there now, but it’s a pilot program. And so, here, let me give you the list of locations. There’s nine. They’re trying to expand it to 15. So Luke, Davis-Mothan, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, Andrews, MacDill, Malmstrom, Maxwell, and Peterson. Schriever is also included in that. So, this is an opportunity if you want to be able to take advantage of maybe the spot, and the rates that you would pay are equal to what your particular rank would be. So, it’s an opportunity to be able to use that. Part of the reason it’s in the pilot program is they want to be able to secure the information that’s on those sites.

A while back on this panel, I heard Jeff Bezos say a thing, a quote, I think that followed the military where it’s, “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” So, bear with us as we kind of roll this program out because we want it to be in the right direction and not have to go back and reiterate or make changes to it so that it will be correct.

The other program I wanted to tell you about is the in-home childcare, which is the program where you could hire a nanny to come into your home. And that, also, is a pilot program. And right now it’s located in five locations, Hawaii, the NCR, National Capital Region, Norfolk, San Antonio, and San Diego. Again, it’s a pilot program. They’re trying to stand it up. There’s a couple, mil-to-mil, who are working this program so that they can make it a little bit more accessible and help you understand how it works. There’s a lot of initiative on your end in order to find that nanny and bring it in, but this couple that’s working it happens to be Space Force and has children of their own, and they’ve been through this several times, so they want to make it easier for you.

So, we are working the programs. Just so that you know, there’s also an incentive-based program that they’ve given to all the different childcare programs, CDCs, where they can use the funds themselves for [inaudible 00:13:58]. You all know that in different locations, the problems are different. So, how they tackle this in each individual region, or at least CDC, is up to that particular flight chief for that. So, we’re trying to find different ways to be able to approach this, but it is difficult. It is challenging. So, I hope that is at least helpful to be able to use some of the resources that are out there. Thank you.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass:

Ms. Brown, if I could add. I’m going to give a shout out because that Kinderspot app that you talked about was actually developed by one of our very own majors, so kudos to our Airmen who are out there developing some of these apps for us.

Sharene Brown:

Thank you.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

Mrs. Raymond, this question’s for you. At the end … Oh, don’t worry sir, I’ve got one for you, too. At the end of 35 years of active service, what advice would you give to new Guardians and their spouses?

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you. Thank you for the question. First, I’d just like to say thank you to Air & Space Forces Association for the inclusion of spouses in attendance and virtually. And welcome, spouses. Thank you for that opportunity. And yes, I can’t believe 35 years as a military spouse and almost 39 years for Jay. And it’s been a great, great life. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I do have some nuggets of advice, but I’ll stick to just three ideas that I would like to share today.

And the first is to know your resources. And life, as Sharene mentioned, military life can have many, many challenges, but there’s help for you. I always, every time we moved, went to the Military and Family Readiness Center and attended Heart Link. And yes, do it at every location because you’re going to build your network of support that way. You’ll learn the who the subject matter experts are. And then, you can also help other people to know who they are. And there’s so many wonderful programs there. There’s employment assistance. There’s transition assistance, relocation assistance, military and family life consultants, and financial readiness consultants who can help you do a personalized budget. I mean, there’s so many things there. Heart Link is awesome, especially I like to recommend that for our inner service guardian spouses so that they can learn what resources are available within the Department of the Air Force.

Second nugget would be to embrace change. I have to admit, I complained a lot at the beginning of many of our moves. I grew up same home, never moved, had never had to transition and build my life over continually. But when I learned to embrace change, embrace new locations, there’s always new opportunities. And I firmly believe, as far as our children, we really struggle with a lot during the years. But they’re young adults now. I believe they’re the product of the experiences that they had and the people that they met. And I couldn’t be more prouder of their resilience and their worldly views that they can contribute in their workplace right now and their compassion. So, embrace change.

And then finally, one of the core values for the United States Space Force is connection. And it is so important to connect where you are in your units, connect with your Guardians, connect with your Airmen, show up to retirements, show up to promotions, host a potluck, go to potlucks, go to a 5K run. It’s how you make your life fun and enjoyable, and it’s how you get support, and then how you can offer support.

I want to share a quick little story. This summer Jay and I had the privilege to attend BMT graduation. And it was the first graduating flight of Guardians. The only Guardians in the flight. And we were standing taking pictures afterwards with the family and, excuse me, their daughter was just graduating from BMT as a new guardian, had just graduated from high school a few months prior. And we were standing, had pictures with her family, and her little brother was probably about 10. And after the picture, he looked up at Jay and said, “Please take care of my sister.”

So, think of your Guardians that you work with, your Airmen that you work with as your sister, your brother. We have the opportunity, and you can think of Jay and I as your grandma and your grandpa. It is what it is. But we have, in the Space force, this opportunity with our size to build and cultivate that family-like culture. And it’s an opportunity of a lifetime, and it’s a privilege of a lifetime. So, thank you.

CSO Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

Thanks, Grandma.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

All right, Chief Bass and Mr. Bass. A constant challenge for Airmen and Guardians are the deployments. What advice can you give to families to help in support in keeping them connected during deployments?

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass:

Well, we are not your grandma and grandpas. Just put it out there right now. I still feel young, Ms. Raymond. I still feel young. I’m going to turn the mic over to my husband, Ron, since you might have thought about this a little bit more, only because, right, you’ve done five one-year deployments in the Army, five one-year deployments, folks. And then, certainly when I was deployed, you were raising our two girls, and they had ponytails on all sides of their heads. And I had to learn to be okay with that. And I had to learn to see that you guys ate at Pizza Hut quite a bit because I saw that on USAA. But while I think about this question, because I was still thinking about grandma and grandpa, I’m going to turn the mic over to you, and then I’ll figure something out really clever. Okay?

Rahn Bass:

Right. So, staying connected. Staying connected with your community, but staying connected as a family, I think, is more important. And I think it just requires that honest conversation with your significant other and really knowing that individual because when you deploy, if there are kids in the house, that service member that’s deploying, hey, you are the relief when you come home from work. So, I think you just have to really, really sit down and have that conversation, know everyone’s strengths and weaknesses.

If you do have school-aged kids, you need to understand, and I don’t want to steal anybody’s thunder, but you really do need to understand the school liaison officers. You really do need to engage the military family and life counselors because if you have kids, it’s not only impacting the spouse, but it’s impacting the kids, as well. We were very fortunate when we were in Mississippi to have a very active military family life counselor engage me the first day of school, engage my daughter throughout the school year. As a first sergeant, I’ve always talked about them and shared that info with my service members and their families, but to actually sit there and have one present and show up and actually doing the things that they’re supposed to do to support our families was huge for us in Mississippi.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass:

But how did we stay connected?

Rahn Bass:

So, we’re a little older, not quite grandparents, but when we were down range, we were able to do videos. We were able to read stories to the kids, share those things, but more importantly, just talk about our days because it’s Groundhog Day, really on both sides. There’s the mission down there, and then there’s the life back here. So, sharing those things. But I would have to say, I’m going to go back to a statement she made earlier about us deploying. And I had the little girls, and unfortunately, I just don’t know how to do hair. But there were some strong people in our community, in our church, that I was humble enough when they offered to take them up on that to even have a… Because we have two daughters. So, to even have a girl’s day, things that I can’t do. So, I really enjoyed that. That was huge, honestly. And it was always right on time when I was about ready, tapped out, you get these offers. So, it was awesome.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass:

Absolutely. We were talking about, last night, how do we stay connected? Today’s generation has a little bit of an easier time because when we deployed earlier, we didn’t have FaceTime. It’s fascinating because we can’t see y’all, just so you know that. The lights in our faces. But I mean, how many of y’all remember the days where you had to go and wait outside of… There’s like one phone booth, right?

Audience:

Yeah.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass:

You had 10 minutes per phone call, and you were waiting on the other person to move out. We didn’t have that. But there are so many resources available to his point, right, with it, for the person who’s back home, but also to down range. I remember the USO. I’m a big fan of the USO. And we always used to take opportunities to do videos to connect with our families. And I’ll never forget. You used to do videos and read to our kiddos, and it was pretty fun for me to then play the video and let our kiddos read it with the book. And you never quite said the words right. And I could see that on the video. And I’d be like, “I’m not going to tell my kids. They know that Dad’s a rockstar.” But anyway, there’s lots of ways to stay connected. Count on your neighbors. Count on your community. Count on your coworkers. And that is a great way, but never forsake spending that quality time with your significant other.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

Thank you. Thank you. All right, Chief Towberman and Ms. Rush. You both have a positive reputation for taking care of people. How do you balance that commitment with Rachel’s career and your relationship?

Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman:

We’re like the cool aunt and uncle by the way? I just want to point that… It’s pretty obvious. You know the one, right? And they go, “Hey, Mom. I want to go hang out with Auntie Rachel.” And Mom’s like, “No. She’s too cool. We’re shutting that down.” I can’t even remember the question. [inaudible 00:25:51]. One, I remember.

Rachel Rush:

Okay.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman:

One, because I was trying to be funny. And two, because I’m in the presence of my beautiful wife, and she makes me speechless. Rachel hates this. There is nothing she hates more than a spotlight in her face.

Rachel Rush:

30 of them.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman:

So, I listen to the wonderful introduction, and I can’t wait for the day when people say I’m the husband of Nurse Rush instead of the other way around. Rachel’s career, the difference that she makes in the world, is easily as important as what I do. And I think that everything we do to navigate this together begins with that understanding and that kind of embracing of that truth. We’re a team, and we do everything together. I’m going to get in trouble later by myself, but everything else we do together. And so, I think that’s where it starts, and you find that kind of equilibrium, that harmony. I don’t know that they’ll ever be balanced. It’s hard to be a nurse. It’s crazy schedules that you work, and we’ll just get out of sync.

And so, it’s really, it’s about finding the kind of perfect, perfect moments, and then amplifying them like we do. I mean you got to see one of the cats. We’ve got three cats. It’s literally all we talk about. If you live with three cats, it’s living with a sitcom. It’s just amazing. But I mean you always pick the stuff. I don’t know if you want to talk about the things that we do together to stay connected and invest in each other, since Joe got to play interviewer, so I thought I’d try it. I’m getting a look. I’m just going to do this.

Rachel Rush:

Oh, man. So yes, I do think that the stresses of this normal life, the unique stresses of the military can definitely take its toll. We both do work full-time jobs, and he’s away a lot. And so, I am caretaker of my three furry babies, and it can be really stressful. So, I think Toby and I navigate this pretty well because, ultimately, we are very candid and honest with one another. We tell each other what we need. We tell each other what works for us in ways of comfort and what doesn’t. I think a lot of times people forget that each person has a very unique mind and that that is a product of DNA and a lifetime of experiences, good and bad. And so, Toby’s very rational and objective. And I’m extremely anxious, and I catastrophize things. So, something that may be very stressful to me, something as benign as public speaking, Toby’s just like, “This is awesome.”

And so, we engage with things in a very different way. But what I love about our relationship, he is my best friend and my little teammate, and I can come home and if there’s something that’s worrying me that he may think is kind of ridiculous, I’ll say, “Hey, I’m worried. I need to talk about it.” And so, we’ll sit on the couch, and I’ll tell him this thing that happened to me. And he’s able to ultimately help me find peace, and oh, I’m going to cry, and that’s just so beautiful.

But on a more fun note, what do we do as companions to de-stress our life and ultimately bring joy in our lives? And I think that we have found a way. We love word play. We’re both linguists. Saturdates, because I work every Sunday, so on Saturdays we do ridiculous things like take our cat for a stroller ride. That happened. It happens a lot.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass:

[inaudible 00:30:56].

Rachel Rush:

It … Yep. There. And Toby bought this RV van, so he’s very excited about it. And we’ll take short day trips and just jam out to Phil Collins and Lionel Richie and just live our best lives. And you need somebody that is able to share those moments with you and know what brings peace and happiness in your life. And I mean, that’s how you get through it because it’s very hard to do alone. You can try, and some people are very successful, but I definitely do better having him by my side.

Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

Now that our playlists, we’re slightly less cool, aunt and uncle.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a cat in a stroller.

Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

Lionel Richie and Phil Collins. That’s

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

Okay. All right, General Raymond. What are the main challenges for Guardians families and what is the Senior Space Force leadership doing to address those challenges?

Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

First of all, I want to go hang out with the crazy aunt and uncle in the van listening to Phil Collins and Lionel Richie. I think there’s three challenges I’d highlight. First is we’re new. And I’ll tell a story. I was in the Pentagon, and I saw somebody walking around, and they’re looking at pictures and I said, “What are you looking at pictures for?” “I need to know how to wear my uniform.” They came in from another service. They didn’t know where everything went on an Air Force uniform that… And so, little basic things that we just take for granted about, well not about, 895 folks that have transferred in or in the process of transferring in have to learn everything. And that also adds a layer of stress on families who are building new career paths. They’re going to bases that they may never have gone to before.

So, all of that newness brings a level of stress to it. And so, the way we’ve been working to help de-stress that a little bit is to over communicate. And so, Mollie, every month… It’s interesting. Mollie sends out a newsletter every month. I send out a newsletter every month. Mollie’s newsletter gets rave reviews. Mine is like delete. So, if you want to read anything, read hers. But it’s trying to communicate to the force things that we’re doing and just bring this sense of connection and awareness. But I’d say probably the newness part is the biggest.

The other one is childcare. I don’t want to… It’s been talked a lot about. One of the challenges that the space community has in relation to childcare is the 24/7 work environment that we operate in. A lot of our operators, especially in Colorado Springs and in Denver. Work on 24/7 shifts and 24/7 childcare availability is tough.

At Peterson-Schriever complex, there’s also been a capacity challenge, and there’s been a significant wait list, largely because we haven’t been able to hire the childcare workers to work in the childcare centers. And that’s not at Peterson-Schriever. That’s around the country. But in Peterson-Schriever, there’s been some significant challenges. What we’ve done, what they’ve done, and it’s really been pretty innovative, is to have hiring fairs where they bring everybody together. You get your background checks. You get all the different checks that you have to have all done in one-stop shopping. They’ve been able to hire more childcare workers and have actually reduced the backlog by about a hundred children over the course of this past month.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

And then, the last piece, I would say, is spouse employment. And there’s obviously challenges for spouse employment, especially in populations that move frequently. There’s a lot of work going on across the department of the Air Force on licensure, making sure that if you’re a nurse that you can transfer your licenses from one base to another base.

There’s also a program that we’ve started called the Guardian Family Career Program, and that’s an effort to hire guardian spouses to fill Space Force jobs or to hire military spouses to fill Space Force jobs. As we’re building this service, we’re hiring, and we’re hiring a lot of civilians. About 50% of our force are civilians. And so, we’ve been doing a lot of work on trying to connect family members to those jobs, so they can stay connected, and they can keep those jobs as they continue to progress throughout the year. We have hired, so far this year, four, and our goal is five. And so, we’ll get one more by the end of this year, and we’re going to keep that going.

One of the ways that we’re doing this, Hiring Our Heroes has a great program that they sponsor to get certificates for different career specialties like data science, project management. There’s several others that they offer. And so, Mollie is going to start class this week. Mollie and about 90 Space Force spouses are going through the Hiring Our Heroes certificate training. They’re going to get a project management certificate, and then hopefully, the goal then is for us in the Space Force to be able to tap into those spouses and hire them to be on our team. I’m about to be unemployed, so we need a certificate.

Mollie Raymond:

Thank you Jay. Look forward to starting our project management certification course. Thank you to Hiring Our Heroes and Google. And they offer the certifications in five very highly sought after career fields, as Jay mentioned, data analytics, digital marketing, eCommerce, and IT support. So, it’s for all spouses, air force, we have navy spouses, and it’s going to give us confidence. It was wonderful to hear a lot of the spouses reply back when we were starting this project. I’ve been out of the workforce for a long time. I don’t have the confidence, but doing this together as a cohort where we have study groups and are there to help and support and encourage and uplift one another, it made all the difference. So, we are looking forward to this. We’ll see where it brings us. But spouses are so talented, so smart, and they make a wonderful contribution to the workforce. We are adaptable, resilient. We want to work. We have all the qualities that companies desire in an employee. And so, please consider hiring a military spouse. Thanks.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

Thank you. General and Mrs. Brown, with the new school year starting and various concerns parents may have to include the worldwide pandemic, natural disasters… I’ll start over. Time. … natural disasters, social unrest, how can families obtain information about their community and about the specific schools to which they are zoned?

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr:

I’m going to hand the mic to the expert in a second, but I want to real quickly tell you for two of us how important schools are. I’ll just talk to you about just from our own personal experience. Many of where an EFMP family. Our oldest son is on a autism spectrum, and I purposely worked my career to stay stateside for his development early in my career until I became a general officer. It was my first overseas assignment as a family.

On the other end of the spectrum, our youngest son is a high achiever. And one of the things we found out, and we didn’t realize it until he was doing us his college applications, but for his first eight years, he went to a different school every year either by PCS or by choice. And that didn’t really dawn on us until he was graduating from high school. And for us, that was something to focus on. And I’ll just tell you that Sharene is volunteer in high school. She went back to the high school our boys graduated from. They were long gone. We went back to MacDill, and she went back to volunteer again. So, it’s really important to her. So, she is the expert, and I’m going to hand that mic to her.

Sharene Brown:

He’s cracking me up. Anyway, the whole process of, for the question as you refer to it, I can’t say enough about school liaisons. And there’s a lot of folks who just don’t know much about who they are, what they do, and where they are. But they’re at every base location. And if you happen to be at a joint base that’s led by another service, other services have those school liaisons, as well. And so, if you reach out to them, they have a lot of knowledge and connection, specifically with relationships to schools, but in other areas, as well. Because, let’s say your child is home and is not feeling well or something happens medically with your child, but you still want to figure out the school situation. They can help you.

They are there not just to do the job every day. Because we all have issues with when you move from one location to another, maybe the credits for the school don’t transfer. Or maybe you have a child who’s on EFMP, and you trying to get your IEP transfer. They can help you with all those sorts of things.

The other thing I would suggest is try to find out a little information before you even get there. And contacting your school liaison is one way to do it. It’s huge. They also have the relationships that go all the way up to the superintendent at those locations. And depending on where you are, there may be a number of different counties, cities, where the military connected student may be further out from the base. As we were saying earlier, families are not all living on base anymore. They’re further out in the communities. So, being able to reach out and touch your school liaison is one way.

Some other ways that are impactful is if you haven’t or can’t reach out to your school liaison or finding it difficult to do that, make note of that. Call into the base leadership, or there’s this little thing called ICE. And I think I got this right. It’s the interactive… Help me with that. [inaudible 00:41:57]. I’m trying to remember it. So here now I wrote it down. Interactive Customer Evaluation. Yes, that’s it.

And it’s on every base installation website, where you can write in, usually by email, and if you want to be contacted back, they’ll let you do that. And just identify that you had issues. It’s not usually the school liaison that doesn’t want to get back to you. It’s because they’re so busy trying to help other people. And so, sometimes we find that the school liaison in those locations, they’re so busy managing four or five different counties and all the people that are there, that their ability to spread themselves out are just not available. So, we want to be able to say, “Hey, we want some more school liaisons in this location.”

The other thing I would suggest is, a lot of you do this already, find out what’s happening on the school website. Try to see what information is available there because I don’t know if you realize, many of you probably do, we have a national law that says, “Hey, we’re going to have education,” but ultimately, it’s the states that determine how they’re going to implement their educational curriculums. And it’s not just at the state level. It goes down to the county, down to the district. And one district can look so much different than another. So, being able to figure out how that works before you get there is monumental. So, whatever you can do to help with that.

And the other thing I would say is because we talked about national crises that are happening, and right now around the world, we’re seeing all kinds of crazy things happening. At every location, there probably is a crises management person who can provide information and usually has a website associated with that. So, if you need assistance with trying to figure out… We’ve lived in Florida for a good deal of time, and I had no idea what hurricane damage could do.

And usually, if I am correct in this, I’ll never forget our first assignment down in Miami. And my husband never lived in the South or in an area where tornadoes were prevalent. And so, I was working at the time, and my husband said to me, “Hey, there looks like a hurricane is coming. You’re going to have to pack up and move.” I’m like, “Yeah, right. I got a job. There’s no way my folks at the job are going to understand that if I leave three or four weeks in advance because they think this is something that’s going to blow through.” But it’s then opportunity to understand what that means, how damaging that could potentially be when you’re in an area. So, the crises management person can at least provide you with information. They usually have a website. And they can share that information with you. Does that make sense? Yeah?

Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

Could I jump in and pile in on this a little bit?

Sharene Brown:

Yes.

Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

One thing that I wish I would’ve known as a younger officer. As a younger officer, and we were all like this. We all signed up. We all took an oath. We all want to serve our country. The core value’s service before self. “Put me in. I’m ready to do anything.” I didn’t communicate the needs of my family to my leadership. It was like whatever they need me to do. And so we moved five one-year moves in a row. Probably didn’t have to do that. And I think it’s important for you to be able to understand that there are ways that we can help take care of your family, and you can still have a spectacular career. And I think sometimes we think that might be against our nature of service, and it’s not.

So, I would encourage each of you. And it wasn’t until I was a one-star general that, he’s been here this week, General North called me, and we were talking about a future job. And he asked me about how old my kids were. And I told him, and he said, “Hey, let’s… Not now.” And I remember, after I hung up the phone, I thought, “Man, I shouldn’t have told him that because I… ” And I should have. And lo and behold, it worked out okay for me. I would just tell you, you’re allowed to care about your family. You’re allowed to. It’s important. And we’re all big enough that we can find opportunities. Now, there will be times, I am sure, that, “Hey, we really need you to do this.” And I got that. And that’s what we’re all committed to doing. But you can take care of your families, and you need to.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

I get … Feeling uncomfortable here. Anyway. All right. We’re going to swing over to Mr. Bass. You are in the unique position to be the first male spouse of the chief master sergeant of the Air Force. And that has come with highlights and challenges. Can you talk to some of those challenges and how you and your family overcame them?

Rahn Bass:

I’m sorry. Can you say that … You caught me by surprise. I’m sorry. Can you repeat that question, please?

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

Just trying to wake you up over there. All right. I said you are the unique position to be the first male spouse of the chief master sergeant of the Air Force. And that has come with highlights and challenges. Can you please talk about some of those challenges and how you and your family overcame them?

Rahn Bass:

So being dual military, I’ve never knew how unique the spouse role was, so we just did it for the time that we were married, whether it was deployments, PCS moves, or what have you. And I guess you never really have time to look at it from that perspective, but when I retired and I had an opportunity to be amongst these phenomenal, and I really mean that, to be among these phenomenal spouses here, the things that I’m privileged to see behind the scenes, the things that they advocate on behalf of our Airmen and our space force personnel, again, I’m in awe, sometimes.

So, I would tell you the adjustment for me was just being a spouse. And I don’t mean that in a way that… I just didn’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. So, when I retired and I took on the spouse role, it was just like putting on a different set of lenses and looking at life differently and sitting back and watching the amazing things that she was doing and the amazing things that she continues to do. I love that front row seat. And to keep it in perspective for me, I just maintain, “Hey, I need to be a good husband still, and I need to be a good father to my kids.” And that’s where I keep it at even keel.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass:

So Ron is … Yeah, y’all give him a hand clap. So Ron’s super humble. I’m proud of him for a couple things. One, I’m proud to see an army guy wearing some airplane socks. This has been a big feat. Right? When he went to full-time spouse from army husband and started to go to some of the spouse socials, I had to remind him, I said, “Hey, don’t get First Sergeant and don’t get army. You’re a spouse.” But I’m really proud of the fact that he is because I think he’s helping to redefine what today’s modern military family looks like, which is very different than it was in the ’60s or ’70s. And we all look different. We have more single-family homes, we have more dual military family homes. We have more dual working homes. We have homes with children, without children, with fur babies. And so, this is normalizing it.

And so for our home, we’re helping to redefine what normal is. He doesn’t have spouse socials that are teas. I love teas. I want to go to a tea. But he actually has football spouse socials, and they love it. So, I think that this is starting to normalize that we have a whole different look when it comes to our military families.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

Thank you. Okay, we only have a few minutes left, so this is the lightning round. So, basically what I want everybody to do is just do quick closing comments or leave the crowd here with some last thoughts. And we can start with General Raymond.

Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

I’ll just say thank you. Thanks for your service. It is great to be at an event that has so many active-duty Airmen and Guardians. So, my hat’s off to AFA for making the professional development week that it is. And it’s not just a professional development week for the active-duty, it’s a professional development week for the families, as well. And I just want to say thanks again, to each and every one of you that wear this uniform or wear a uniform of our country. Hats off to you, and thank you.

Mollie Raymond:

Yes, I’d like to also say thank you for this wonderful conference, and congratulations on the attendance record. That’s great. I just like to say to our guardian families, members, loved ones, you have a front row seat in shaping the future, and remember our core values and know that you have a purposeful, powerful role in developing a fantastic service ahead of you. And Sempra Supra. Thanks.

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr:

Well, I’ll also echo the thanks, but what I’d also highlight too, hopefully as you heard us all talk about our lives, that we are just like you. And we’ve had stressors. We’re parents. We’re brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. Some people are grandparents. But the fact of the matter is, we’ve walked in the same paths many of you have. And our goal here is to make sure we make it better for those that follow and come behind us. And that’s what our focus is. And we want to really… We’re our hands on. We want to get engaged and break down as many barriers as we can to make serving in our Air force and Space Force the most enjoyable thing you could ever do. Thanks for being part of our team.

Sharene Brown:

I just want to say thank you. I’m going to join the team here. Thank you to AFA, especially for increasing our spouse availability or be able to attend this conference. It’s a huge deal for all of us. As we become more aware of the things that are happening with our military members, we can better support in a different way. The thing I would leave with you, we’ve had a couple of years where we’ve all been away from one another or maybe we’ve had just our nuclear family that we’ve been taking care of.

So, as we come out of this, hopefully, to connect a little bit more, communicate with one another a little bit more. Join those communities, activities, or programs. Because the more you’re connected with things and people, whether it’s at work, at church, at school, whatever programs, activities there are, sports programs, you get to see life in a different way, and you can open yourself up a little bit more. And when you do that, when one area might shut down, you have another area to go to and open your ourselves up to.

So, if you could just get out just a little bit more and enjoy yourselves and maybe bring that work-life balance into a little bit more equilibrium, I think it’ll make us all feel a little bit better. And when we build that community with one another, as the Basses were saying…

I just had to smile when he had went to his friends, his community, to get the girls’ hair done. That’s what it takes sometimes, the village. And if we could all go someplace or feel like that somebody could step in and help us out, I think we’ll all feel a little bit more comfortable. So, with that, thank you so much.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman:

I will say thanks, too. I know the Space Force Chiefs are out here and probably, Chief Frasier has already started a pool. They all know Rachel pretty well and they’re taking bets on how fast her lightning round is going to be, so I’m really excited to hear who wins later, but thank you. And you’ve heard it. You heard it from the CSO and from the chief of staff of the Air Force, what they’re willing to do. We can’t want more for your families than you want. You’ve got to hold us accountable. You’ve got to know that they are important. And you’ve got to see this. I told someone yesterday that the strongest things we say, we don’t say with words. Look at these relationships, not just as teams, but as all of a team. If you can’t feel the genuine love and appreciation for each other up here, if you can’t see how powerful that is, come hang out with us later because it’s real. And we want that for every single one of you. So, please hold us accountable and get your stopwatches ready chiefs, because I’m giving the mic to Rachel.

Rachel Rush:

So, I wanted to take this opportunity because it will probably be the last time I share a stage with you two, just to tell you I love you both, and it’s been a beautiful journey. And thank you for bringing us along with you. Thanks.

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass:

That was fast. All right, we’re down to zero seconds. Love takes work. When I hear you talk about that, love takes work. Never treat somebody you don’t know better than you treat your own spouse. That’s a good one.

And to all the family members out there, thank you so much for being here. To our service members, I want y’all to text your family members, your loved ones, your supporters, doesn’t matter who it is, and tell them that their Senior Air Force and Space Force leadership teams appreciates the heck out of everything that they do to support you.

Rahn Bass:

Thank you to AFA. Thank you for all that you do. And really, just thank you for highlighting the spouses and giving us all an opportunity to show a side of us that you normally probably wouldn’t get a chance to see. So, thank you.

Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller:

All right, we are down to zero seconds, but I do just want to also thank General and Mrs. Raymond. Our journey started at [inaudible 00:57:14], and we’ve seen you… I mean, it’s amazing. So, thank you very much. Good luck to you on your next adventure. Thank you all to all the panel members. This was fantastic. So, let’s give them one more round of applause.