Watch, Read: Gen. Mark Kelly on the Air Force Fighter Enterprise

Watch, Read: Gen. Mark Kelly on the Air Force Fighter Enterprise

Oct. 5, 2022

Gen. Mark D. Kelly, commander of Air Combat Command, delivered a keynote address on the “Air Force Fighter Enterprise” at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, 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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Voiceover

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Executive Vice President of the Air and Space Forces Association, Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg

Good afternoon. Air Combat Command is the primary force provider of combat air power to America’s war fighting commands. ACC’s mission is to organize, train, and equip combat-ready Airmen to control and exploit the air on behalf of the Joint force. In short, be prepared to close the kill web.

To do that, ACC must accelerate change to grow an even more lethal, capable fighter force to defeat a peer threat. The commander of Air Combat Command is responsible for leading and paving the way for both the change in capability and the capacity to defeat the burgeoning threat from China and Russia. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to the commander of Air Combat Command, Gen. Mark Kelly.

Gen. Mark D. Kelly

Thanks. Well, good afternoon and welcome back from lunch. It’s great to be back here at AFA amidst fellow Airman friends and warriors and again, thanks to the Air Force Association for the opportunity to talk to you today about the Air fighter force, kind of where it’s been, where it’s at today, and where it’s going.

Last year, I got up here and talked about the Air Force’s ‘4+1’ fighter roadmap with the four being F-22 for air superiority, which needs to stay dominant until we can facilitate a hot handover with NGAD. The F-35 and the Block 4 capabilities that we need to penetrate adversary airspace and execute air defense take down. The F-15E and EX to provide the long-range big payload and disruptive fifth-gen sensors for day-to-day competition and homeland defense. And the F-16, which remains our capacity fighter for contested competition, homeland defense, and global force management and the plus 1, A-10, which has served our nation well but is severely limited in today’s world of increasing peer challenges.

Our fighter force has always faced and continues to face a mix of challenges and opportunities. Those challenges are presented by our adversaries, budget realities, political realities, global demands, technical aspects, and readiness equities. To get the correct fighter force mix, we have to engage all the enterprise dynamics at play.

Today, like yesterday, we need our fighter force to go further. We need to sense further in a more robust electromagnetic environment and we need to engage adversaries at long range. That engagement range, advanced sensors, and weapons requirement combined with operator proficiency and readiness defines high-end capability. And the hardest thing that an Air Force does, the hardest thing that an Air Force does, that helps define a nation’s combat power is maintenance and sustainment. While sustainment also contributes to an Air Force’s true capacity, it’s what I’ll focus on today. So why capacity?

First of all, capacity is not more important than high end capability like NGAD or advanced weapons like JDAM or advanced mid-band RF or long wave IR sensors. But the specifics of advanced platform sensors and weapons are difficult to discuss in open venue.

The other reason is capacity matters a lot. Capacity matters to our Joint force, which is organized, trained, equipped, operate with air superiority and not remotely, not remotely designed to operate without it. Capacity matters to our allies and partners who look to the United States to fulfill treaty obligations and lead coalitions. Capacity matters to our elected leaders charged to raise and support our forces and who provide direction and resourcing through the National Defense Authorization Act. Capacity matters to our strategic adversaries who are committed to winning the sensing battle, the readiness battle, the high end capability scrum and unquestionably, unquestionably defeat us with greater fighter capacities.

A bit about our capacity readiness and peer competition journey over the past three decades to review how we arrived at the present day. We deployed to Desert Shield, Desert Storm in 1990 with a portion of our 4,000 fighters that were organized, trained, equipped to fight the Soviet Union.

The Air Force went to Desert Storm with at least seven significant advantages over any other air force on the planet. We had an aircraft capability advantage. We had a fighter capacity advantage. We had an advanced sensor and weapons advantage, a combat readiness and warfighting credibility advantage. We had uncontested logistics, uninterrupted command and control, and adequate air base defense.

Thirty two years ago, our fighter capacity, combined with these other six attributes allowed us to deploy from around the globe without risking our ability to compete forward, our ability to respond to crisis without risk to our homeland defense requirements. Although Desert Storm technically ended on 28 February 1991, the Air Force fighter force, along with many of our fellow service and joint partners, never left the Middle East. But lacking a peer adversary, we significantly reduced the fighter capacity required to support that 24/7, 365 CENTCOM effort.

We continue the reduction in our fighter capacity through the ’90s and on 9/11, essentially one decade removed from Desert Storm, we had divested from 134 fighter squadrons down to 88. For a lot of obvious reasons, 9/11 was a huge inflection point for the entire nation and our military. Throughout the week immediately following 9/11, we understandably executed a week of crisis, action, global force management sourcing.

While that pace of force element sourcing was expected from 12 to 19 September 2001, we probably couldn’t predict at the time that we’d follow that first week with another 1,000 weeks of crisis action global force management sourcing, where we deployed our force from across the globe at a rate that exceeded our ability to generate the force. Whether it’s money, muscle, tissue, morale, or combat power, if you expend it at a rate that exceeds your ability to generate it, that rarely ends well. We literally ate the muscle tissue of the Air Force in the form of reduced fighter capacity, reduced readiness, putting hard miles on older aircraft, driving more extensive sustainment efforts.

While the collective we, we the U.S., might have overlooked the impact to our conventional combat power, our peer adversaries definitely took note and they saw a once-in-a-century opportunity to increase confrontation and secure gains at minimal risk. With this increased competition in our two pacing theaters, it’s understandable that today, the INDOPACOM commander considers the PACAF-assigned fighter squadrons as essentially threshold forces required to execute his day-to-day combatant command theater campaign plans.

With Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and threats to NATO, it’s understandable that the EUCOM commander also considers the USAFE-assigned units as threshold forces required to fulfill NATO commitments and execute his combatant command theater campaign plans. This increased peer competition requiring combatant command exclusive utilization of their assigned fighter squadrons has left a smaller U.S.-based fighter force to fulfill rotational requirements to CENTCOM, to respond to crisis, execute homeland defense, and POTUS support.

A little bit about that peer competition. Whether it’s international airspace, high seas, outer space, the Arctic or cyber space, the majority of peer competition occurs in the global commons. While sometimes aggressive, most of this competition is professional as nations convey their national perspective and their intentions.

The most intense area of competition is when and where a nation seeks to migrate a common area into a new national sovereign. There’s a lot of reasons for this. Access to resources, area of influence, and the fact that once they subsume a common area into their sovereign space, it is significantly harder to compete against the nation in that new sovereign space.

Competition in the global commons often precedes competition of the highly contested sovereigns. It’s important to delineate between forces that compete in the global commons and forces that can actually compete in the highly contested sovereigns. It is that stark increase in pure competition in the sovereigns, it should garner undivided attention because competition in the sovereigns runs the risk to escalate into conflict in the sovereigns.

This is why you need a high-capacity, highly cable air force to keep adversaries out of your sovereigns and to retain the capability to punch into their sovereign space. That’s why we designed to build SR-71s, RQ-170s, F-117s and B-2s, to operate over sovereign territory, built cyber capabilities to punch into sovereign networks, advanced fighters to establish air superiority across contested airspace.

If you’re going to be a resolute world power, you have to compete not just in the global commons but also in the highly contested sovereigns because if you can’t compete in the highly contested sovereigns, you can’t fight in the highly contested sovereigns.And you have to recognize the correlation of capacity, readiness, competition, and risk.

Since we’re at AFA, and since I only have 40 minutes with you, we’ll limit the timeline discussion to 32 years and limit the force element discussion to Air Force fighters, a rather narrow scope of time and combat power, but the relationship of conventional capacity, readiness, competition, and risk could be discussed over a timeline of centuries across numerous capabilities for any service across any war fighting domain.

As discussed, we’ve become smaller over the past 31 years. There is little risk to becoming smaller if there’s a commensurate decrease in deployment taskings and global security risks. The exacerbating challenge of getting smaller over the past 31 years is also getting older in terms of airframe life. The slide’s a little counterintuitive, as newer is up top and older is towards the bottom of the graph. There’s a lot that goes into readiness equation and one of them is airframe life. As airframe life directly drives your overall sustainment capability by aircraft downtime for maintenance, down for supply, down for depo repair, and down for modernization.

One of the other readiness levers is aviator flight hours and exercises. This decrease in flying hours added to the decrease in our fighter capacity, an increase in aircraft age, represents a significant impact to our nation’s conventional deterrence.

Accordingly, we should not remotely be surprised at how our strategic adversaries have responded to decrease in conventional deterrence. Nature abhors a vacuum, and unfortunately so do geopolitics. While I’m not going to beam off in a Newton’s third law of every action, there is corresponding opposite reaction, there is an unambiguous contrast of conventional deterrence and over peer competition.

A quick visit to our peer competitors would likely have detailed information on the third Taiwan Straits crisis in 1996, as well as the Mischief Reef incident. Then, PRC introduces the Su-27 into their air force. Four years later in 2000, they add the Su-30 to their arsenal. In 2001, a Chinese J-8 collides midair with a U.S. Navy EP-3 resulting the loss of the J-8 and emergency divert of the EP-3. U.S. Navy boat incident occurs in 2001, and in 2005 Chinese introduced the Chengdu J-10, their first production fourth-gen fighter.

Soon after, they field the PL-12 air-to-air missile to directly compete with U.S. fire power. More high seas confrontation with the U.S. Navy ship Impeccable incident in 2009. 2014 to ’16 saw the height of PRC island building in the South China Sea. Russia annexes Crimea in 2014. Also, in 2014, the Chinese introduced their advanced flanker, the J-16. In 2016, the PRC deploys surface-to-air missiles to the Paracel Islands. That same year, Su-35 enters service with the Chinese air force. In 2017, the J-20 China’s own fifth-gen fighter enters service.

Soon after, they introduced the PL-15, long range missile, which greatly challenges U.S. long range missiles. USS Decatur incident occurs in 2018. 2021 starts a spike of aircraft incursions in the Taiwan Air Defense Identification Zone. 2022, Russia invades Ukraine on 24 February, exactly 31 years to the day of the Desert Storm ground invasion. Last month, PLA live-fire drills are executing in response to Speaker Pelosi’s CODEL visit.

At this juncture, some folks may surmise that I’m trying to make a case for 134 fighter squadrons of 10-year-old aircraft, where pilots get over 20 hours a month. While that wouldn’t outright be wrong, it would completely miss the point. The point is, in 1990 what nation state would want to challenge that level of conventional combat power? What nation state wants to pick a fight with an Air Force of 134 highly cable fighter squadrons that are organized, trained, equipped, and honed to a fine edge to fight a peer adversary.

The answer is no nation in their right mind, and accordingly, when you have conventional overmatch, strategic risk is low. But that’s not where we’ve arrived in terms of conventional deterrence and that’s not where we’re headed with respect to peer confrontation.

By any measure, we have departed the era of conventional overmatch to arrive at growing strategic risk. We’ve seen an increase in peer confrontation from Russia, to drive the nations of Europe to increase their defense budgets, to rapidly change national policies, to assist Ukraine and for Finland and Sweden to apply to join NATO.

Similarly, the discussion for our nation, in our nation’s air force, is how. How after 30 years of increased peer confrontation do you best contribute to our nation’s conventional deterrents to better manage strategic risk? To solve any fighter force challenge, you must engage in work—the range, sensor, weapons, readiness, sustainment, enterprise, as well as capability and capacity. We don’t have time to discuss all those equities, and it’s challenging to discuss high-end sensors and weapons in an open forum, but that said, capacity also has to be carefully navigated also due to releaseability concerns.

Every service has classified readiness metrics provided by the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Combatant commands have operational plans that are also close hold. Our own internal TACAIR study was classified and global force management, once you tie specific units, specific locations and specific timelines, outstrips this venue.

However, the Air Force We Need study, the 386 operational squadrons directed by the 2018 NDAA was unclassified and correctly highlighted that the Air Force needs 62 fighter squadrons. So accurate and unclassified studies do exist for our discussion.

In basic terms, the fighter aviation arm of Air Force has to do four main tasks. We have to compete forward across the globe. We have to respond to crisis wherever it presents itself. We have to protect the homeland, including the president, and we have to be ready to fight, which requires a robust training regimen.

As we compete forward, we first have to compete per the National Defense Strategy in our pacing theaters. With China growing more confrontational every day, the INDOPACOM commander requires 13 fighter squadrons to execute his combatant command theater campaign plans. The EUCOM commander tasks six fighter squadrons, and it’ll grow to seven, to fulfill our NATO obligations and execute theater campaign plans, amidst Russian aggression in Europe.

As mentioned, we can’t dive into the specifics of global force management in terms of exact units, numbers, dates or locations, but we’ve had seven, eight, upwards of nine fighter squadrons in CENTCOM at any one time just in the past few years. As we don’t have any permanently assigned fighter squadrons in CENTCOM, those units are rotational through our four-bin Air Force Force Generation readiness construct.

For ease of explanation, if, and that’s an if, we only had two fighter squadrons in theater for CENTCOM commander tasks across each of the four bins of AFFORGEN, that would require eight fighter squadrons for CENTCOM, so 28 fighter squadrons is required to compete forward day-to-day across the globe.

To respond to crisis, we have immediate response force options for the secretary of defense. Again, I can’t say exactly how many fighter squadrons we provide for crisis response options, but it’s called SECDEF options plural, not SECDEF options singular. We’ll just say two fighter squadrons across the four bins of AFFORGEN requires us to have a minimum of eight fighter squadrons dedicated to respond to crisis.

Those eight immediate response force fighter squadrons added to the 28 compete forward fighter squadrons is 36 fighter squadrons, but before we compete forward and before we respond to crisis, we have some must-pay bills here at home. Homeland Defense is the National Defense Strategy’s number one priority. The Air Force has protected our nation skies for decades from a high of 5,800 fighters on alert in 1958 to a low of four armed fighters on 9/11.

In 2010, the Air Force operated 18 alert locations across the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. Our homeland defense lay down has not changed dramatically since then and the specifics are not releasable, but for day-to-day capacity requirements, while these alert sites do not need an entire fighter squadron to execute their homeland defense operations, the Air Force needs eight fighter squadron equivalents to ensure the skies of our nation remain safe.

Those eight fighter squadrons combined with the previous 36 that are required to compete forward and respond to crisis brings us to 44 fighter squadrons. Related but completely separate from Homeland Defense is support to the president. Everyone knows that there’s top cover for key presidential events—State of the Union, Summit of the Americas, United Nations General Assembly, Camp David, et cetera. While this is related, it is not the same as Homeland Defense and is a completely separate force element that provides POTUS support.

Our Air National Guard and our Air Force Reserve fighter squadrons are mobilized to execute most of our POTUS support requirements across a 24-month cycle. When they’re done with that unique no-fail mission, they often go straight back to Homeland Defense at their home station. The eight fighter squadrons that rotate in and out of POTUS support added to our compete forward force, our respond to crisis force, our homeland defense force, totals 52 fighter squadrons.

Whether it’s new F-35s in the Lakenheath or Vermont, Madison, Alabama, et cetera, or as new units receive the F-15EX, we always have units in conversion and modernization. If there is an insufficient number of units in conversion, that means your fighter force is either getting smaller, getting older, becoming less capable, or all three.

When these units are training new maintainers or aviators or resetting sustainment infrastructure, they are not available to deploy unless there’s a national emergency. Those eight fighter squadrons combined with our compete forward force, respond to crisis units, homeland defense, and POTUS support total 60 fighter squadrons. So 60 multi-role fighter squadrons is the simple, unclassified math required for day-to-day ops, not combat.

A few things as we navigate this challenge and chart a way ahead in an increasingly dangerous world. We don’t have 60 multi-role fighter squadrons. We have 48 fighter squadrons and we have nine A-10 attack squadrons. The beauty of the A-10 and it’s a beauty, is that there are sons and daughters of our nation over the past 20 years of counterinsurgency ops are alive today because the A-10 showed up to an intense troops in contact close air support fight, so the Hog has rightfully earned its spot in the Combat Aviation Hall of Fame.

But today, permissive airspace is drying up. All of our pacing theater campaign plans, Homeland Defense, POTUS support, Baltic air policing, much less a high end fight, requires multi-role fighters. With 48 fighter squadrons working to execute the requirement of 60 fighter squadrons and with the must pay bills of Homeland Defense and POTUS support, we take a hit in our compete forward effort, a hit in readiness, a hit in modernization, and a hit in our respond to crisis requirements where the crisis that they’re responding to is often a crisis of insufficient fighter capacity.

This is an acute issue for our Air Force and we are not the first nation to face this challenge, nor are we the only air force currently facing requirement-to-resource disconnect. The Germans face this challenge in 1942 and they developed some incredible weapon systems in their strategy to win World War II. This effort realized a generational leap in capability. The first rocket-powered fighter, ballistic missile technology, unmanned aerial vehicles, the first fighter jet and the first operational jet bomber, which, by the way, was the last German aircraft of the war to fly over the U.K. in April 1945.

These capability advances are truly remarkable, but the fatal flaw on the German strategy is that they accomplished these incredible capability advances at the expense of both their fighter capacity and their combat readiness and were completely destroyed by overwhelming Allied capacity.

Our nation, our Air Force are at their finest when we’re faced with a big challenge. We have one now and that’s to field a combat credible conventional deterrence in the face of overt peer confrontation. The requirement for 60 multi-role fighter squadrons for day-to-day ops around the globe is not going away anytime soon.

That’s one of the reasons that the Air Force We Need study accurately determine that we need 60-plus fighter squadrons. That’s also the reason that former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson’s Senate testimony that, “The Air Force is too small for what the nation’s asking it to do,” is still factual. In terms of the how, first, follow the fighter roadmap, with a minimum of 72 new fighters a year to a highly capable, high capacity, multi-role fighter force.

Second, when you’re working this topic—range sensors, weapons readiness, capability, sustainment capacity, all of it matters. The strength of your fighter force is only as strong is your weakest attribute. Third, when you’re operating in a tough neighborhood, travel with friends who know how to fight. We have to leverage key security pacts like AUKUS, key alliances like NATO and key partner agreements to keep a coalition fighter capacity and capability advantage.

I didn’t have time to talk about it today, but we have to accelerate the combat collaborative aircraft research and development as well as the requisite autonomy authority and resilient comms that they’re going to need to address our fighter capability and capacity challenges.

Finally, we must realize that our multi-role capacity fighters that execute our capacity missions, they free up our high-capability fighters, our long range killers, that are need to execute peer competition and close our long-range kill chains. With that, thanks again to AFA and for your time. I’m happy to take any questions at all. Thanks.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg

You got a packed audience, so why don’t I just take the questions for you.

Gen. Mark D. Kelly

OK.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg

This is not rehearsed by the way. What we’d like to do is pick up from last year’s presentation, which Gen. Kelly just addressed, and that’s the fighter force. And we still had some folks in the audience back then that I’ve kept the questions. I’d like to touch on a few of those, sir. The first one is, since the 60 fighter squadron replacement that you laid out just now, it is day-to-day ops, what is the quote capacity solution for a major theater war?

Gen. Mark D. Kelly

Well, major theater war is aptly named because it’s going to consume a majority of anything and everything you thought you had enough of—your fuel, your weapons, your aircraft, your equipment, your Airmen, your money, your time, your focus and resourcing in major theater war from a force that is considered healthy is still going to drive challenges and it’s going to require some pretty quick discussion, some prioritization, and decisions.

Rapidly, it’ll be evident that, well, the chess pieces you have are the chess pieces you have. In terms of the fighter force, as I described, as 48 fighter squadrons and nine attack squadrons. We’re going to put them exactly where we’re told to put them, but it goes a little bit to former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, I think it was 2003 or 2004 when he stated, “You go to war with the military you have, not the military you want or wish you had.”

As we resource a major theater war from a capacity limited force, by definition it’ll require utilizing units that were originally intended for some other task and purpose. First one that comes to mind because it’s often the first one that comes to mind to our great friends and the joint staff is utilizing units that were intended for another theater.

Today, as we sit here, our F-22s are deployed from our pacing theater at Elmendorf over to EUCOM to help buy down the risk brought on by Russian aggression. Second way is to utilize units that were intended for another timeframe. When theater risk spikes, the theater forces engage that, we augment it with units that are earmarked for this time period, our commit bin, but if the risk still outstrips that, there’s going to be people that peek over the fence and look at the other bins of our AFFORGEN model, ones that are earmarked for six months and a year down the road who do not have the requisite rest or the requisite readiness. And if we choose to use them, we could do that, but we would continue decades of overconsumption of the Air Force.

Similarly to that, the third way would be to utilize unit that are intended for another rung of your escalation ladder. We don’t normally mobilize, activate our garden reserve at the first spike of risk, but you could, but you wouldn’t have that option in reserve for your forces in reserve.

The fourth option would be to utilize units intended for frankly a completely different mission within your peer fight requires. You could send in your 9, 8, 10 attack squadrons, and Hog pilots are incredibly courageous, brave, skilled warriors. They’re going to go and their performance would make our nation proud. Guarantee it.

But I would offer that while every human endeavor in a shooting war requires some semblance of individual courage, skill, and the acceptance of individual risk, if the gap between your theory of victory and your force construct needs to be bridged by extreme skill, extreme courage and the acceptance of extreme personal risk, that’s probably, in my opinion, a key indicator you need to look at your theory of victory or your force construct.

Probably, the last one, at least the last one I could think of is, and because it’s often the last option chosen by militaries that are on their final leg, is to utilize units intended for your institution, i.e. your institutional force. For the fighter force, that means you could commit all, part, or some of your formal training unit, operational test, aggressors, weapons school, et cetera. If you use part of the supply chain in there, it’s probably not going to break glass, but if you’re leaning heavily, heavily on this course of action, my opinion is, and history would tell you, a thousand years of history would tell you, that you’ve probably migrated past the juncture where you’re trying to win and you’ve essentially, I’d say, pulled the goalie and you’re trying really hard not to lose.

These are decisions we would make and we’d expect to make in major theater war. One of the themes of the brief that hopefully came out is we are just challenged by having to make those decisions day in, day out, in our day-to-day fight. Thanks.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg

Sir, let’s take a second question here. That since you referenced to Germany’s capability development, absent a parallel capacity surge on their part is an example from 80 years ago, let’s bring it to today, do you believe that it translates well to today’s challenges?

Gen. Mark D. Kelly

Well, short answer is absolutely, yes. I believe it translates. It frankly doesn’t matter if it was 80 years ago or 80 days ago. A nation’s strategy almost always, almost hinges on three rather timeless foundational criteria that most folks that’ve been doing this for three decades are aware of. That’s first of all, national will, commitment, sense of urgency. Number two is a nation’s ability to identify and develop true war winning capability. Three is the nation’s ability to produce those capabilities at scale and sufficient capacity.

As far as the question goes, Germany, one, they were facing an existential threat. There’s some natural motivation, sense of urgency and commitment. Number two, their research development, science technology, engineering enterprise was world class. Matter of fact, it was the world standard in almost every line of effort, shy of nuclear physics. It’s proven out by what they developed under fire.

Their Achilles heel was essentially what the RAF and the Eighth Air Force bombed day and night, which was their production capacity. They couldn’t produce that scale, at least not any scale that would appreciably changed the difference. If folks don’t have my affinity, they’re more aligned to my wife, the lack of affinity for history, they want a more contemporary example, there’s a reason why Secretary Kendall, Chief Brown and others often reference China.

Three of those reasons are one, very well-articulated, unambiguous national commitment and their worldview of their autocracy at the top of it. Number two, their research development, science technology and engineering enterprise, well-developed to identify and develop true war winning capability. Three, they’re resourcing strategy to produce those capabilities at scale. That doesn’t mean they’ve had an easy or short path. They’ve been working at this for decades, decades and they’ll get together, I think it’s next month, mid-next month, to do their 20th National Party Congress.

It’s mostly a political get-together, but they’ll be breakout sessions if not official, unofficial. They’ll assess essentially that slide, their ability to produce the airspace, cyber, and naval force to fight the U.S., as they’ve done in every National Party congress, which they do every five years. Those discussions generate, I’m sure we’re not invited, significant amount of discussion, debate, decisions. Their decisions in the past that have seen them cut their ground force in half to resource the airspace, cyber, naval force they need to fight the U.S.

I think it’s 300,000 they’ve cut just in the last five or six years, I think, so don’t quote me on that and definitely don’t misquote me and say Kelly recommends the U.S. to do the same thing. The fact of matter is, the Chinese example and the German example are simply statements of fact, and we’ve been running parallel processes in our nation, the exact same timelines. As a matter of fact, 80 years ago when the German Reichstag was directing the Luftwaffe to develop game-changing capability, the War Department was directing the U.S. Army Air Force to produce more winning capacity to the tune of roughly 2.3, 2.4 million Airmen, just shy of 80,000 aircraft.

As that process runs its course in our nation today, and it does, if we’re told to accelerate the development of NGAD, our sixth-gen air dominance fighter and produce it at significant scale, that’s how we’ll execute and we’ll defeat any force on the planet. If that process runs its course and we’re told to commit billions of dollars to refurbish 35- and 45-year-old airplanes, that’s how we’ll execute. I apologize, the short answer to your question is yeah, I do believe that any industrial nation’s journey through this force buildup and strategy is applicable to help inform our journey.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg

Sir, final question. Obviously the Space Force and the Air Force is observing and oriented on the current events that you just laid out in your presentation. What do you think the lessons will be for the fighter force coming out of the Ukraine conflict?

Gen. Mark D. Kelly

OK. I believe, this is a personal opinion, I believe that institutions and individuals will largely, I’d say focus, highlight, and learn what they want to learn out of the Ukraine conflict. I think our great Army partners will highlight that you shouldn’t take an undisciplined, untrained, unprofessional, unprotected, unresourced, undisciplined armor column and race it to another nation’s capital.

I believe our shipmates in the Navy, finest Sailors on the planet, will highlight fleet defense and sea control. I believe our brother and sister Guardians will highlight the incredible contributions of our unblinking ISR constellation, our communication infrastructure, our precision navigation and timing infrastructure in LEO and elsewhere. I think all those observations will be accurate.

I think folks that are in the know, and that’s the key word is in the know, of what our cyber and our intel Airmen have done in this conflict for the defense of Europe, support of NATO and frankly the bastion of defense of freedom and democracy in Ukraine will know that this conflict was their finest hour by every sense of the word.

To your question, fighter force, I frankly think it’s more of a question for the nation that we should have. We should elevate it out of fighter force, out of bomber force, out of ISR force and ask ourselves, as contributors to the national discussion is if a nation wants an air force that can establish air superiority at the time and place of its choosing, execute air defense takedown at the time and place of its choosing, execute persistent global decision attack at the exact same time and place of our choosing, set the conditions for a low-casualty, 100-hour ground campaign comparable to Desert Storm, well then you need the first-class Air Force.

If on the other hand, that’s considered too fiscally challenging or you’re constrained by legacy budgetary rules and makes it unobtainable and you’re OK, and, it’s not an or, and you’re OK with months, more like years, of bloody trench warfare and a grinding artillery duel with thousands of casualties on the scale of Ukraine or World War I, you don’t need a first rate Air force. A second rate Air Force will handle that just fine.

But as we visit all of our great Airmen here at AFA and I get the privilege of going over with Gen. Finerty to visit the great elected leaders we have on the Hill, and they work hard, their staffers work hard, they commit a whole lot of their life and energy away from home here. We, by definition, whether you’ve been wearing the cloth of the nation for 36 months or 36 years, you owe them by law you best military advice.

When this topic comes up of a first rate Air Force or a second rate Air Force, I would offer that one—or they’d be voters and taxpayers—one, choose wisely. Two, choose knowing that China’s building a first rate Air Force. Three, finally, I’d say choose knowing what we knew before 24 February, and that is when it comes to a nation’s blood, treasure, stature on the globe, the only thing more expensive than a first rate Air Force is a second rate Air Force. Thanks for your time. Appreciate you being here.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg

After a combat sortie, there’s only three words you want to hear in the debrief, you crushed it. Let’s give Gen. Kelly a big hand. Thanks very much.

Watch, Read: CMSAF JoAnne Bass on ‘Today’s Airmen with a Focus on the Future’

Watch, Read: CMSAF JoAnne Bass on ‘Today’s Airmen with a Focus on the Future’

Oct. 5, 2022

Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass delivered a keynote address on “Today’s Airmen with a Focus on the Future” at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, 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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Voiceover

Airmen and Guardians, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome AFA’s Chairman of the Board, the 14th Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Gerald Murray.

Air & Space Forces Association’s Gerald Murray

Thank you. Thank you. It is so great to see such a grand audience and I will tell you the excitement as I walked the hallways here, the selfies and all the groups taking pictures and all and just the excitement around here, it is so wonderful to see. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to know that we are here to talk about Airmen. Airmen yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Before we get started and being able to introduce the next great leader that we have, I want to share a short clip from a wonderful video our Air & Space Force Magazine team put together from the Mitchell Institute interview with Vietnam Ace and AFA Central Oklahoma Garrity chapter member, Col. Charles B. DeBellevue, which I got closer to right that time in my Southern accent. DeBellevue. Please roll the clip.

Col. Charles B. DeBellevue

Once we got started going into Hanoi every day, we took losses. I will tell you that the first day we, first day of Linebacker on the 10th of May, they recalled the squad in the Wing and we were sitting in Intel. And it’s about 4:30 in the morning and nobody knows what’s going on. The curtains, the briefing boards are covered. Finally, Col. Gabriel, Wing Commander, walks in and sits down and they pull the curtains right on the board and pointed to Hanoi and said, “Gentlemen, target today is downtown.” You could hear a pin drop on the carpet. You could smell the fear. Nobody had ever been. At the end of the briefing, Gabriel gets up and says, guys, because in those days we just had guys flying for us, he said “Guys, we’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Let’s do a good job. Take a look at the guy sitting next to you.” So you and your buddy looking at each other and he says, “He might not be coming back” and you go, “Damn, can I have your stereo gear?”

And matter of fact, we didn’t lose anybody that day. It did wonders for our morale. So when we took losses in the future, yeah, it was bad. We always showed up at the bar. The bar was the watering hole, the main meeting place after flying, and we’d always toast those that didn’t come back, knowing that tomorrow was just another day.

Air & Space Forces Association’s Gerald Murray

Ladies and gentlemen, throughout our 75-year history, brave Airmen like Col. DeBellevue, Medal of Honor recipient John Levitow, who also served in the conflict of Vietnam, who sacrificed and almost sacrificed his life to be able to save his aircrew and his heroic effort during that timeframe. These Airman, these two are just an example of those that have made us the success we are today. Today, more than 75 percent of our brave Airmen also are in the enlisted force. That’s why it’s so critical to develop that force to be stronger leaders who are capable of taking on the many threats that are facing our nation. There’s no one better to walk us through now, how we get there than there is from our own 19th Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne Bass. Jo, please.

CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass

So it was going to be DMX. But I thought that some heads, especially in the front row, might actually explode. So, by the way, to the folks in the sound booth, if we’re going to key music to our Airmen that we highlight, let’s keep it with this theme. Maybe some DMX, but it has to be the clean version. So y’all, to my PA, help him out, help him out.

All right, so hello AFA. It is so exciting to see all the faces in the audience this week. It is so exciting to celebrate our Air Force’s 75th birthday. To Mr. Secretary, Madam Under, Gen. Brown, my boss, Mrs. Brown, Gen. Raymond, Ms. Molly, to my wingman and teammate, Chief Towberman, to all of you all, thank you so much for allowing me to share this stage with you, more importantly for allowing me to share life with you as we serve together. And I very much appreciate you all, always giving me the opportunity to be last, to be the last keynote, when all the good content is taken. And when I mean good content, I mean the Secretary reinstated SDAP, my boss kicked it off with, “We’ve been here before and we’ll do it again.” The CSO rolled out the Space Force song and then Toby taught us all and signed us all off on how to actually sing the song.

So it’s always rough being last, but a big thank you, as you’ve heard throughout the week, to AFA for making this week possible and all the work that you do to educate, advocate and support our Airmen and Guardians. Y’all give them a hand clap. A special thanks to my wingman, CMSAF number 14, Gerald Murray, for his years of dedicated service to our Air Force, but also to AFA as the Chairman of the Board.

To my other wingman, who I’m told is in the House, SEAC, stand up teammate. Such a rock star. I’d love to say that I taught you. So we served together back in the 24th Special Tactic Squadron when I was a young senior Airman. He was a young staff sergeant and sometimes we’d walk in the halls together and just shake our heads and yeah, thank the good Lord. So anyway, it’s great to see you. It’s great to see you.

To our industry partners that are here, to our community leaders and our civic leaders that are here, thank you so much for the work that you do. We cannot be the air force that we need to be without your support. It takes a whole of nation approach. Your work, your service, and your love for our air force, our space force, our Airmen and our Guardians and our family is needed, now more than ever. And to the real MVPs that are here, our Airmen and Guardians, y’all give them a hand clap. I have never seen a AFA this big before.

Thanks for taking the time to be here at one of the largest professional development events and venues that we have in our Air Force. A huge shout out again, as I mentioned on the panel, to our family members that are joining us today.

So time does fly. On August 14th, I celebrated our second anniversary of serving in this position with Team 19. And I definitely could not have done it without my team. I also couldn’t have done it without the partnership and the friendship of your Air Force Senior Enlisted Leader Council, the AFSELC, and my teammate. So to our major command Command Chiefs and our Senior Enlisted Leaders who are doing the work in the Pentagon to make stuff happen, I’d love for y’all to stand up. I’m going to owe them beer later.

But anyway, this is a cohort of leaders that truly inspires me daily. I don’t tell them that often. We do a whole lot of cussing and discussing, which is what happens when you have a room full of people who care and are committed to make our Air Force better. So for the past two years, we have remained focused on you. We’ve remained focused on our people, our readiness and our culture. And those who know me, I have a serious bias for action. That said, let me highlight some of the things that we’ve been working on this past year since I last spoke at AFA.

Before I do, it’s only fitting to do a quick recap of the great work done last August with Operation Allies Refuge and Operation Allies Welcome. Which, by the way, I mentioned it AFSA last month, but it’s worth noting again because of all the goodness from those operations. We talk a lot about the importance of strengthening our alliances and our partnerships as well as joint interoperability. But sometimes we forget the importance of MAJCOM interoperability and I can’t think of a better example than OAR and OAW. So last August, Airmen from across our Air Force when above and beyond the call of duty—without a complete playbook by the way—and executed the largest NEO in history.

Let me first give a shot out to the Personnel Recovery Task Force within ACC. It was this task force who held aircraft on alert for 864 hours. This very small team of less than 200 people over a 53-day period ultimately ushered in the complete joint tactical exfield from Afghanistan. It was also a team of special tactics Airmen from AFSOC who established control of HKIA after civilian air traffic controllers abandoned the field. Our Airmen maintained security of the airfield by directing fires and ISR aircraft while simultaneously tracking friendly movements in and around the airfield, controlling 285 aircraft.

It was AMC Airmen who flew in the first C-17 out of Kabul. And it was on this flight, Reach 871, where the now-famous photo of a child covered in an OCP blouse was taken. Airman Baron’s uniform is now housed in our Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson. AFCENT Airmen then received C-17s and C-130s around the clock, welcoming more than 60,000 evacuees within a month. USAFE Airmen turned Ramstein into a safe haven for 35,000 Afghans, earning the installation the nickname of the Global Gateway. All in all, their efforts encompass 1.5 million meals, 1.2 million water bottles, 33,000 vaccines, 552 tents—go CE—and 38 newborn babies.

I spent a lot of time on that flight line at Ramstein. As Afghan evacuees made their journey into the U.S., they were cared for by a community of Airmen, Joint partners, interagency teammates, and of course our amazing local communities, to include Airman from AETC who transformed Holloman Air Force Base—where you at—who transformed Holloman into a temporary location for more than 7,000 evacuates once they arrived the United States.

And when I got a chance to visit Task Force Holloman last October, I met the brother-sister Airman duo, Senior Airman Peel and Senior Airman Kamil. They were both deployed to Holloman, in fact, volunteered to be there, to support our Afghan guests. They understood the impact that their experience and that their language would have in support of Operation Allies Welcome. They themselves came to the U.S. in 2009 as refugees from Iraq. They were there helping men, women and children who were in the same situation they were in, that they once found themselves in 13 years ago.

When I think of one team, one fight, Mr. Secretary, I think of how Airmen from across the Air Force, every single major command, came together to cause effects greater than themselves and their respective parts. That is interoperability and that is integrated by design. And it is that integration as well as how we present forces that my boss talked about on Monday. When it comes to presenting forces and the readiness of our Airmen, I’d like to highlight an example coming from the 27th SOW.

Airmen there are doing incredible things with this concept that they call mission sustainment teams. Mission sustainment teams are small groups of individuals selected from the Wing, who train and become proficient in areas outside of their normal career fields. The teams are built from the ground up through months of focused training, instilling a sense of family and camaraderie. Why does any of this matter? Because with the limited resourced environment, the mission sustainment teams give AFSOC the ability to enable the larger Joint force with unique capabilities that we are going to need, to be able to get after the high-end fight. Cannon is showing us how to capitalize on multi-capable Airmen, at least the mindset piece. They are leading the way in creating what they call multi-functional Airmen, prepared to assess, respond, and fight adversarial threats anytime and any place.

Another aspect of readiness is our resiliency. And when it comes to resiliency, I’ve seen a whole lot of goodness coming from the force. During a recent trip to RAF Lakenheath, I heard about their squadron-level resiliency teams. They’re comprised of master resiliency trainers, resiliency trainer assistants, volunteer victim advocates, and torchbearers. These Airmen have the training and the resources already to help guide, coach, and listen and to be there for their fellow wingmen. And what I love most about this concept is that these Airmen wear designated patch that identifies them as MRTs, RTAs, VBAs and torchbearers, so that everybody in that unit knows who they are and we of course are capitalizing on the support from our very own Airmen. And that is a great example of Airmen supporting Airmen within our spectrum of resilience.

Here’s another example of how we’re getting after resiliency across the Department of the Air Force. We established a Fortify the Force initiative team, which by the way is a grassroots effort led by Airmen, Guardians, family members, civilians, veterans, retirees, all in an effort to fortify our force. This team is championed by myself and Chief Towberman and is getting after a whole lot of initiatives that impact you and I, our Airmen and our Guardians, and their family members. And in fact, right now, they’re kicking off a sprint to crowdsource ideas to help with mental health, enterprise-wide solutions, policy changes, and fostering a connected force. If you have ideas, folks, we actually want to know them. Please, please reach out to the Fortify the Force Initiative team. In fact, if you are a member of FIT, I’m going to ask you to stand up right now. Can we get the lights? All right, I see some over here.

To the FIT team, thank you for what you are doing. We know you have full-time jobs, but you care so much about our force. I hope to see more of this kind of goodness across our Air Force, whether it’s Airmen supporting Airman in the fight, at the flight section or squadron level, or helping with solutions that help drive policy or cultural changes that make us a better force. We need it, and we need all of it.

When it comes to some of the other things that we’ve been focused on this year, let me tell you, we’ve been pretty focused on leadership development. You’ve heard all of our senior leaders talk about our most competitive advantage being our people. To that end, we cannot take you for granted. When it came to leadership development, we started with a strategy, and when we presented that strategy to my boss, he quickly shared that he loved everything about it, but a strategy doesn’t mean anything unless you apply some action. And so overnight, our strategy became an action plan.

And so this spring we published the very first Enlisted Force Development Action Plan. This action plan has 28 objectives, with the first one focusing on our threat environment, specifically ensuring that every Airman understands what strategic competition is and what is at stake. We are at an inflection point in history, where every single one of our Airmen and Guardians needs to know their role and their purpose in our force, and especially for our Airmen, how we get after delivering airpower. And that’s where the Blueprint comes in. Something every supervisor and Airman should be tracking. This Blueprint gives us much needed force development tools and resources to guide us from the very first day we join the Air Force until the day we take this uniform off. In fact, I wish I had a Blueprint when I was a young NCO. What I did have, and how many of y’all out there had this, a Blue or Brown book?

And so I have to just give a big shout out to the team who work those updates. We now have an updated Blue and Brown book and a big thanks to AETC for printing out over 100,000 copies to ensure that every Airman who comes into Basic Military Training and every Airman who’s entering into any of our PME centers gets a copy of them. And I think y’all probably saw some tables out here with some Blue and Brown books.

All right, y’all. Now for those of y’all who have your phones, pull your phones out, because another thing that I wish I had to make me a better Joint-minded Airman, SEAC, is this Purple book. And we just released it today. Right, boss? I think if you look, my boss’s signature’s in there. But anyway, check that… Like this isn’t even out. I don’t even think you can Google it, but that QR code right there will take you to the Purple book that we have, the first service and the only service, who has a book to help us become a better Joint-minded service member.

In addition to some of these foundational documents, we also did a complete re-look at PME and we’re making some of those changes this fall. Big thanks to our Air University team, the Barnes Center, and all the Airmen that have been part of the teams to help define what the future of education needs to look like. These will be big wins across the force. And speaking of winning, I think there might be too many general officers in here that even know what that is. So Gen. Brown, I actually submitted myEval to you, but I think it’s somewhere lost or stuck in the ethernet. I don’t know. I was having some issues with my computer.

So how many y’all are having those #fixmycomputer issues? So in all seriousness, y’all are acting all dignified right now, you know you have a whole lot to say about #fixmycomputer. But in all seriousness, we all realize that we have a whole lot of work to do on some fronts. That said, we have dedicated leaders who are well aware of these IT and these system challenges and they are very committed to getting after this, especially our CIO. Just last weekend Gen. Miller, the A1 Miller, we have three Millers, Lt. Gen. Millers, announced some much needed updates and improvements to myEval and they’re going to be coming this fall. She also announced that narrative 1206s will start at October and that narrative evals will start with our colonels and our chiefs. We will start field-testing digital WAPS and finally bring promotion testing into the 21st century.

For those who don’t know what I mean, what I mean is 80 percent of your force still takes a No. 2 pencil into promotion test every year. And so big thanks to the A1 and AFPC teams for getting ready to roll out. And something else that we are rolling out today, in fact, is some changes to assignments, from the enlisted assignment working group. And by the way, they’re going to benefit the whole of Air Force. So a big thanks to Gen. Dunn and our AFPC teams for their efforts to get these wins to our Airmen. A big kudos, by the way, to our Airmen who were part of that working group, who came from across our Air Force to look at assignment policies, to dissect that 571-page AFI, to identify and make recommendations that will make assignments better for all of us.

So we’re rolling out changes on assignment priority codes for our MTIs, MTLs, and our recruiters. We’re going to remove time-on-station requirements for expedited transfers and we’re also including acquitted Airmen into expedited transfers. For our Airmen returning from deployment, you will not have a report no later than date within 120 days from the date that you return. And another one that I’m pretty excited about is we’re going to have an assignment swap policy.

And there’s a whole lot more coming, but I knew this would get on media and I’d get the details wrong. So there’s more coming. How we develop and retain our Airmen is paramount to winning our future fight. Our strategic competitors are deterred by strong NCO corps and even more so when we come together with our allies and partners. That is our competitive strategic advantage. In fact, last month I hosted a senior enlisted leader International summit here in D.C. with a 60 nations as well as NATO for a whole week. This was one of the largest Department of the Air Force international gatherings where we had the opportunity to share experiences, develop, learn, and collaborate with one another. And we spent a whole lot of time talking about the importance of developing our NCO corps. The work that we did will be a huge force multiplier in the years to come, with impacts across our globe. The one thing we all agreed on is that wars of the future will not look like wars of the past. Future conflict will look very different, spanning across multiple domains, air, land, sea, space, cyber and information.

And if I can just pause really quick to talk about the information domain. It’s something that I don’t think we’ve talk enough about when it comes to the information domain, we can no longer be passive observers. It is a battle space and our adversaries are weaponizing information at speed, scale, and scope. They are able to leverage social media, digital media, and the information environment to directly impact the people, readiness and the culture of our Air Force. In my article published through Air University, A New Kind Of War, I speak about the challenges associated with information warfare. In fact, if you got a hold of the 1950 copy of the KGB Manual of Disinformation, you would see this quote right here.

The Russian disinformation model has remained relatively unchanged for more than a century. Why? Because it keeps working. And meanwhile, China, our pacing challenge, has been watching and learning. Social media has a huge impact on information warfare and the need for digital and social media literacy has never been greater. And that is whether it’s in grade school and most certainly throughout the military. This impacts all of us, folks. A generation of American sons and daughters who will enter our Air Force spend nearly, on average, four hours a day on platforms. And I’m being pretty generous. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube. And don’t get me started on TikTok. I know. There’s a whole bunch of people who don’t want to hear what I have to say about TikTok, so I’m not, to include my own kiddos.

But the adversaries know this and they are taking full advantage. Information warfare threatens to disrupt our way of life and to some degree, our will to fight as a unified nation. And every one of us has a responsibility to ensure that we are ready, alert, and aware of the tactics of the adversaries. They don’t care if you’re at home or at work. The information domain is ever present. The Airmen today and into the future have got to be critical thinkers who are collectively focused so that our Air Force can be what it needs to be when our nation calls on us.

As your fellow Airmen, what I remain encouraged about though is that no matter the challenges that may come our way, they can never compete with you. In fact, the most lethal and advanced weapon systems that we have would simply be a static display if it wasn’t for you. But we can never ever take that for granted. We have to maintain that advantage and we can’t assume that good enough today will be good enough for tomorrow. As we look at the force that we need, we need to recognize that today and especially into the future, that we are in a race for talent. We have to change our modality of thinking to attract, recruit, and retain the best that America has to offer.

Because let me tell you folks, our Airmen today have choice. Whether it’s our generation or the generations to come, the question is, have we set the conditions where people actually want to continue to serve? Like Gen. Walter shared on Monday, those serving today are part of the most talented, educated, and innovative force in history. This year alone, nearly 1,000 enlisted Airmen joined our Air Force with a degree, adding to the more than 33,000 of our enlisted Airmen who have bachelor’s degrees and more than 6,000 with masters. And oh by the way, 68 with PhDs. And three of those PhDs are from Airmen First Classes.

And while we’re on the topic of education, let me give a huge shot out to the Puerto Rico Air National Guard. Fifty-seven percent of Puerto Rico Air National Guard Airmen have college degrees—164 associates degrees, 393 bachelor’s degrees, 90 masters degrees, eight doctorate degrees, not including the professional officers in the medical group with doctorate degrees. And of the Airmen who hold the doctorate degrees, seven of their eight are enlisted. That’s incredible. And what’s more incredible is those Puerto Rico Air National Guard Airmen are mobilized right now in response to Hurricane Fiona. Otherwise a few of them would be with us today. Y’all give Puerto Rico Air National Guard and all of our guardsmen a big hand clap.

This is the kind of talent that we have and this is the kind of talent that we have to retain. And oh, by the way, this is the kind of talent that we have to attract. Speaking of talent, let me also highlight some of the amazing talent within our Air Force that we don’t always get to see, but we all get to benefit from. Talent like Staff Sgt. Derek Jimenez, a defender stationed right here at Joint Base Andrews. When our leaders were shaping the new Brown Book, he had the courage as a Senior Airman, to stand up in a room full of chiefs and say ”Airmen are not going to read this.” He advised that people would read two pages in and say it looks too much like a AFI. So he helped design the Brown Books that we are using today. Sgt. Jimenez, are you out there? Where you at? Come on up here. Y’all give him a big round of applause.

So you were pretty instrumental in this Brown Book, so I’d love to give you my first copy where myself and Gen. Brown signed it. So thank you so much. Thanks for this and it’ll be my honor to give you my coin as well. Thank you. So thank you. Very cool. All right, brother. Thanks for doing this. We’ll take a picture. So show our brown book. Awesome. Thanks Sgt. Jiminez. I hope they read more than two pages.

So our Airmen today, they’re paying attention folks. They’re going to hold us accountable. In fact, Airmen like 1st Sgt. Desiree Holmes from PACAF, who last month during the AFSA conference stood up in a room full of about 300 of her fellow first sergeants and asked Team 19 where we were on a few of the things that we promised to get after the year before. She went line by line to remind me of what I said we were going to get after. And I was happy to share that we actually made progress on a whole lot of those things. Big thanks to AETC and A1. And I appreciated her holding me accountable. So Gen. Wilsbach, Chief Wolfe, a shout out to both of you for developing Airmen and PACAF and having a shirt like her. I was impressed and I know that Sgt. Holmes isn’t the only Airman out there listening and taking notes. So to all of you, keep holding us accountable.

That accountability is what we need to ensure that we are developing the Air Force that our nation needs. These are just a few examples of the amazing talent and the amazing Airmen that we have within our Air Force, if only we get to know our Airmen and, mostly, empower them. So while we are the world’s greatest air force, if you are waiting for a solution to come out of the Pentagon, you might be waiting a long time. Do not wait on us. When we talk about the culture that we need, the time is now. Help collaborate in your units now. Find better ways now. Problem solve now. Innovate now. And get to know your Airmen now. If you can’t get across the finish line the first time, don’t quit.

Things change, opportunities arise, stay persistent. The late Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, number six, James McCoy once said he heard many people say that the Air Force and its Airmen of today are not the same as they used to be. So to that, he responded, well, it’s not supposed to be like it used to be. It’s not supposed to be like when we were serving because they are better. And so he’s right, wingmen, we are better and we will be better because it’s folks like you who are at the helm.

I don’t know when the next conflict will arise or the next humanitarian disaster might occur. But I do know one thing. Whenever our nation calls, Airmen will respond. It is because of you that Americans sleep well at night and will continue to do so for generations to come. These are challenging times where our adversaries are watching and they seek to outpace us at every turn. And we cannot let them. We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to our pacing threats, any more than we can overlook the challenges that we face within our own service. The call to serve has never been stronger and our role as United States Airman is more than just a job. It is a commitment to duty and our nation is indeed counting on every single one of you. So happy 75th anniversary wingmen. It is an honor to serve alongside of you. God bless our Air Force and God bless the United States of America.

Air & Space Forces Association’s Gerald Murray

Chief Bass, my goodness, I am so honored to be able to present to you the 75th anniversary coin in wishing the Air Force a happy birthday. Ladies and gentlemen, I and Chief Bass, everyone, every Airman, everyone on this stage, I mean everyone in this audience, and I certainly as a predecessor, am so proud that you are leading our force today. That you are the 19th Chief Master of the Air Force, that you are the top senior enlisted leader of the United States Air Force. We could not be better served whatsoever. The announcements that you made today and what the team is getting after, as you say, to be able to do, are nothing less than historic today. Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, the 19th Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force.

New $625 Million Weapons Package for Ukraine Includes 200 More MRAPs

New $625 Million Weapons Package for Ukraine Includes 200 More MRAPs

Oct. 4, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

The U.S. will provide another $625 million worth of military items to Ukraine, to include 200 Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, more HIMARS rocket launchers and nearly 200,000 rounds of artillery, mortars, and missiles, the Pentagon announced Oct 4.

The total value of arms provided by the U.S. to Ukraine since Russia’s February invasion is now $16.8 billion.

Laura K. Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, detailed a list of new items to include four HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) launchers and ammunition; 16 M777 Howitzers with more than 75,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition; 1,000 anti-armor missiles;  and the 200 MRAPs, nearly doubling the number pledged or provided so far.

The MRAPS “provide Ukraine with a resilient capability for transporting troops in heavily mined terrain,” Cooper said at a Pentagon briefing. The vehicles were rapidly developed during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to deal with the threat of improvised explosive devices; after those conflicts ended, many MRAPs were declared excess to U.S. military needs.

“This package will provide the Ukrainian Armed Forces with additional capabilities and munitions that it needs to maintain momentum in the East and in the South, including additional artillery and precision fires,” Cooper said.

“Ukraine has demonstrated the ability to use these capabilities to degrade Russian logistics and command-and-control, creating opportunities for Ukraine to maneuver and to advance. This has created, as [Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III] said recently, a change in battlefield dynamics, even as the Russian government moves legislation today to claim parts of Ukrainian territory illegitimately.”

Cooper said Ukraine continues to “reclaim territory and to consolidate their gains.” The liberation of Lyman, accomplished in recent days, “was a significant operational accomplishment, and Ukrainian forces continue to make deliberate progress in the Kharkiv region, and also further south around Kherson,” she added.

The U.S. will continue to provide weaponry and equipment to Ukraine “to meet its urgent needs on the battlefield, while also building Ukraine’s enduring strength to defend its sovereignty over the long term,” Cooper said.

She also noted that Pentagon acquisition and sustainment chief William LaPlante participated in a meeting with 45 NATO and European Union armaments directors last week to make plans for the long-term provision of military aid to Ukraine during its fight against the Russian invasion.

While Congress has approved aid above and beyond what President Joe Biden has declared excess to U.S. needs and provided Ukraine, some members of Congress have raised the alarm that such transfers are cutting deeply into U.S. stocks. LaPlante said on Oct. 1 that NATO nations are making plans for sustained and “interchangeable” munitions production at a number of sites—likely to be in the U.S. and in Europe—to build weapons, but also to provide components critical for weapons.

LaPlante warned that the “long lead time” needed for components and materials means replacing weapons could be a lengthy process.

Cooper said the Pentagon is “looking very closely” at the rate at which Ukraine is consuming munitions and ammunition “to make sure that they have what they need for the counter-offensive and then the types of capabilities.”

The HIMARS have received a lot of attention “because you’ve seen how the Ukrainians can use these capabilities to take out critical Russian logistics nodes, command control nodes, ammunition depots, etc., and really weakened … the Russian forces’ ability to respond,” Cooper said. The additional HIMARS will give Ukrainian forces “flexibility in how they employ these capabilities…as they look for additional opportunities to seize the strategic advantage.”

A list of munitions and equipment provided to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began in February, released by the Pentagon on Oct. 4, also noted 700 Phoenix Ghost tactical unmanned aerial systems; an unspecified number of aircraft-launched AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARMs); more than 8,500 Javelin anti-tank missiles, more than 1,400 Stinger shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles; “hundreds” of HumVee armored vehicles; eight NASAMS surface-to-air missile systems; electronic jamming equipment; cold weather gear and protective equipment for operating in a chemical/biological/radiological environment.

Cooper said the U.S. agrees that Ukraine need tanks, but stopped short of saying the U.S. would provide some of its M1 Abrams main battle tanks.   

She also noted that the U.S. is not assisting Ukraine alone, but that many other nations are donating lethal and non-lethal aid, as well. Russia, by contrast, does not have such support, Cooper said.

“What is Russia doing? Russia is turning to North Korea for assistance. It’s turning to Iran. It doesn’t have that depth of support,” she said.

SDA Joins the Space Force as Agency Looks Ahead to Demos in 2023

SDA Joins the Space Force as Agency Looks Ahead to Demos in 2023

Oct. 4, 2022 | By Amanda Miller

Having become a part of the Space Force on Oct. 1, the Space Development Agency expects little disruption—so to speak—to getting its initial constellation into orbit in time for military exercises next summer, SDA director Derek Tournear said recently.

SDA predates the Space Force, though not by much—both started up in 2019—and SDA became “this disruptive innovator” with its concept for an “architecture based on proliferation and spiral development,” Tournear told reporters at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. The idea is to field numerous, comparatively lower-cost data transport and missile tracking satellites and to refresh the constellation by de-orbiting some and adding more in two-year cycles.

As a new direct reporting unit in the Space Force, SDA’s reporting structure now parallels that of the service’s two other acquisition-oriented bodies, Tournear said—Space Systems Command and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office—by reporting to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration for acquisition purposes, and to the Chief of Space Operations for administrative purposes.

In a separate event at the ASC conference, the first-ever assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration Frank Calvelli complimented SDA’s “approach to doing business” for “building small” and “delivering capabilities faster,” he said. “I actually think that’s a model that we can take advantage of and actually push out across the organization.”

Tournear anticipated no personnel changes from the transition. SDA’s 210 people include uniformed service members, civilian government employees, and contractors who are looking ahead to the launches, scheduled to begin in December, of 28 satellites dubbed “Tranche 0” to test the concept of SDA’s planned National Security Space Architecture in low-Earth orbit. 

Tournear said all of Tranche 0—a combination of data transfer and missile warning satellites—should be operational for demonstrations in the summer of 2023: “That’s when you have Northern Edge and a lot of these [other] exercises.”

SDA’s disruption in the form of proliferation and spiral development—a departure from so-called “exquisite” conventional military satellites developed over long timelines—couldn’t have taken place from within the Space Force, according to a theory Tournear attributed to the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

Because an organization with “a de facto customer base” is inherently set up “to give that customer base exactly what it needs and what it wants … that means that you will give them incremental solutions,” Tournear explained—“because that’s what they’re used to. That’s what they expect. And you will continue to build off of that.”

For the disruption to take place, “you have to have a completely different set of values that will drive different processes and will utilize different resources that will give you a completely different solution,” he said. “Now, once that disruption happens, and then you get a new customer base that says, ‘OK, this is the right way to do it,’ or the existing customer base buys into that new model, then you can start to get into this model where you provide updates.”

Even though he expects the new approach “to need a lot of advocacy within the department and externally to make sure that industry can perform at these scales in these timeframes,” he senses that the Space Force is already onboard.

“Look at what Space Systems Command is doing with the [medium-Earth orbit, or MEO] missile warning, missile tracking layer,” Tournear pointed out. “They’re following the model of spiral development and this two-year timeframe to get things up and operational.”

With three organizations in the Space Force now tasked with acquisition, Tournear laid out his “bumper sticker view” of the breakdown of responsibilities, describing SDA as best suited to highly proliferated constellations in LEO; Space RCO as “very well suited for rapid acquisition of the prototype-type of solutions, especially on the classified side”; and Space Systems Command for “making sure that the overall architecture fits together.” Exceptions include the likes of SSC’s responsibility for the missile warning constellation in MEO.

A combined program office will function as “a technical interchange working group … to make sure pieces and parts are going to fit together when you’re done,” Tournear said. “For example, we have a deputy program manager from SSC … here with SDA to make sure that what SSC is building in the middle layer is actually going to fit in with us,” particularly “getting data formats that match up.”

The Missile Defense Agency also has a role in the working group because “eventually you want those data to actually support fire control, and the bread and butter is being able to take data from a lot of different sensors … and fuse those together for fire control solutions.”

One noticeable change will be Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David D. Thompson’s co-leadership with Tournear of SDA’s “warfighter councils.” The next one in March will define the minimum viable product for Tranche 2 of SDA’s planned data transport constellation.

Air Force and Space Force Need to Modernize IT and HR Practices, Leaders Say

Air Force and Space Force Need to Modernize IT and HR Practices, Leaders Say

Oct. 4, 2022 | By Chris Gordon

The Air Force and Space Force are trying to make service members’ lives easier, with new information technology and human resource practices to ensure Airmen and Guardians can be more effective in accomplishing their mission and have a better day-to-day experience, leaders said.

“It starts with understanding where you are,” Wanda T. Jones-Heath, Principal Cyber Advisor for the Department of the Air Force, said during a discussion hosted by GovExec. “The environment has changed, and so we have to change. We have to modernize our legacy applications and systems. We have to think about our infrastructure. We have to think about our people.”

As the broader economy shifts towards a more flexible work-life balance for employees and the job market remains competitive, the services need to better attract and retain talent. While the Air Force and Space Force were largely on target with their recruiting goals in 2022, the armed services have become less appealing to the general public.

The Air Force and Space Force are implementing practical changes, such as offering a second chance to recruits who test positive for marijuana and are making broader efforts to be more accommodating of their workforce’s personal lives. That includes more mundane tasks, such as making computer systems more accessible.

“It touches your life in so many ways,” Jason D. Howe, chief information officer and deputy director of plans and integration for the Air Force, said during AFA’s Air, Space, & Cyber Conference. “It’s not about an IT system anymore. That’s cold and somewhat heartless.”

The Air Force’s IT practices have been the source of ridicule online. Service members and some civilian leaders have taken to Twitter and Reddit to complain simple tasks, such as checking their email, take an inordinately long time due to outdated hardware and software.

The Air Force must be more proactive in understanding what Airmen need to accomplish their mission before a system is implemented, rather than reacting to negative experiences after the fact, Howe said.

“Now we’re getting better at establishing relationships with people so that we know when we deliver capability, it’s the capability that they want and need,” Howe said.

Additionally, the service’s IT systems are often inefficient but also unnecessarily expensive.

“You’re spending your money on sustainment and you’re not investing towards the future anymore,” Howe said. He added that some of Air Force’s efforts to “digitally modernize” have shifted towards using existing systems used by the private sector.

As a new service, the Space Force has more room to create a new culture and implement new IT approaches.

“A lot of what we focus on in Space Force is how do we articulate where it makes sense to be different and where it makes sense to be the same,” said Katharine Kelley, deputy chief of space operations for human capital.

In drawing its workforce primarily from other services and industry, the Space Force has the advantage of getting people who are dedicated to its mission, not those who may not have many other options.

“That means finding pockets of people in this interest base with this technical skill, no matter what your background is, and no matter what your race and gender is,” Kelley said.

But if the Space Force is going to retain its new workforce, it has to deliver on its recruiting promises.

“Part of our strategy in Space Force is how do you employ that talent in a way that they don’t feel like they’re being underutilized or that the value proposition that brought them to the organization in the first place is not what they’re actually realizing and experiencing on a day-to-day,” Kelley said. “They want hands-on keyboards, and they want realized experiences that allow them to continue to grow and develop.”

Watch, Read: CMSSF Roger Towberman on the Guardians of Tomorrow

Watch, Read: CMSSF Roger Towberman on the Guardians of Tomorrow

Oct. 4, 2022

Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger A. Towberman delivered a keynote address on “The Guardians of Tomorrow” at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, Sept. 20, 2022. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Voiceover

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

Air & Space Forces Association’s Gerald Murray

Ken, I don’t think I’m Kaleth.

Voiceover

No, sir. I don’t think you are.

Air & Space Forces Association’s Gerald Murray

So is Kaleth coming or is it me?

Voiceover

Right now, sir, it’s you.

Air & Space Forces Association’s Gerald Murray

All right, ladies and gentlemen, it is good to be back with you. And yes, Chief Wright will be joining us just a little bit later this evening, but I have the great pleasure of making an introduction now that I look so forward to. We talked about, and of course, the Secretary yesterday, and I said it earlier about the founding father of our Space Force and that being of course, Gen. Raymond. Of course right beside of him is the second Guardian of the United States Space Force. And back a year or more ago and I turned to Chief Towberman, I said, ”Toby, you are going to be the Paul Larry of the United States Space Force.”

And I will tell you that the Space Force, the Guardians could have no greater Guardian to be the first Guardian to be able to lead the enlisted force of the United States Space Force. Ladies and gentlemen, it is just an incredible pleasure for me to be able to introduce after three decades of service of wearing Air Force Blue, Chief “Toby” Towberman. As I said, became the second member of the new Space Force in April of 2020. Since then, he has worked very closely with the Chief of Space Operations General Raymond, to build the brand new service from the ground up. His work is setting the stage for our future Guardians. And ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome the Chief Master Sergeant of this Space Force, Chief Roger “Toby” Towberman.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

Thank you. Sit down. We got work to do. Sit down. Stop it.

Thank you. I remember when Chief said that, and I’ve said this many times and I mean it: If the only thing they can put on your tombstone is your job title, you didn’t do your job. And so I hope however they remember any of us, and we’re all in this together, that it’s by our works, and it’s by the difference that we make in the world and the changes that we make in the lives of Guardians.

So thank you so much everyone for being here. Thanks Mr. Secretary, it’s great to see you as always. Thanks again for the [inaudible], you’re like the biggest rock star on social media right now. To get above Chief Bass in rock star status isn’t easy, so we really appreciate it. To AFA, thanks as always for a fantastic event. Thanks for embracing the Space Force. Thanks for embracing our enlisted leaders and giving us an opportunity to talk. We always truly appreciate it and don’t take it for granted. So thank you so much.

Gen. Brown, thank you, sir, for being such a fantastic teammate and hiring really my closest teammate. And thanks Jo, love you and glad you’re here and glad we get to hang out every day and bang our heads against the wall, it’s fantastic, I appreciate you.

Gen. Raymond, I remember that day I was working for Mr. Manasco and they said, “Hey, you got to go talk to Gen. Raymond down in… you know where they got the exec com?“ “No.” And that was the old visiting GO office, and I don’t know, a 15-minute conversation and my life changes forever. And I just really appreciate the opportunity still to this day and you and Molly welcoming Rachel and I. Thanks so much sir. I really appreciate it and thanks.

Now one story I’ll tell though. So Gen. Raymond calls me up to tell me that he’s hired me. And he talks about, “Hey Chief, this was such a difficult decision, and I really had to think through it.” And he tells you what… I know what’s coming. He didn’t hire me, he’s going on about how difficult this was. And so I go through all the stages of grief in my own head, in what was probably four actual seconds, but seemed like four minutes of you apologizing. And then he says, “So how’d you like to come work for me?” I’m like, “Wait a minute. That’s what you start with.” I felt like the guy on the Daily Show, like, “Why didn’t you lead with that? How’d you like to come work for me?” Life changed forever, sir. And I’m just so happy.

Mary, hi. I know Gen. Thompson had to go back to work, because that’s what he does. He keeps us afloat and I’ll give him a big old bear hug later. Anyway, happy birthday United States Air Force, we appreciate you. Give a clap.

On Sunday, the Air Force cycling team tried to kill me riding up from Quantico. Gen. Goldfein was there on some fancy rig and we rode with the team. And I would encourage anyone, it actually wasn’t that bad of a ride from Quantico, 54 miles or whatever we did, next year. This Monument to Monument thing that they did, raised a little bit money, great advertising, and public outreach for the department. What a fantastic event. So I’m really proud of them, and Air Force cycling team for putting that on and then to invite us to be part of it, really cool. So next year, if you feel like going down to Kitty Hawk and getting on a bicycle for a few days, it’s really worthwhile. So happy birthday.

And this morning, Gen. Raymond showed the photo and I was reminded—he showed the photo on the plane and the champagne, I mean there’s only a handful of us. It was just those of us that were in D.C. But what I remember, and some Guardians have heard this story before, but what I remember from that evening was you saw him opening the champagne. Well, there’s not glass on the aircraft, and so they have the old little plastic cups. That’s what we…I’m like, “Am I rinsing at the dentist? Or am I drinking champagne?” And so for me on the Space Force birthday and at Space Force banquets and such, I will always look for the plastic cup. That was our beginnings. There was no big cake, there was no big celebration. There was this humble and wonderful intimate beginning. And I will personally always remember it by toasting with a plastic cup. Plus it’s a cheap gift. So you can, one day when I retire, just give me a plastic cup, I’ll be happy. Not that kind. Not the red solo kind, just the little one that goes on the plane.

So we learned, two great things happen this morning. One, we swore in five new Guardians, which for us adds actually measurable difference to our end strength, so I was very excited to see them. Like, “Yes, we’re getting closer to 8,400, we’re going to get there, we’re going to get there.” And then we released a song. And it is really, except for this, there’s some sort of apparently really important dilemma the world is trying to solve involving chicken and cold medicine, which is really trending on social media. But except for that, we’re doing really well, sir, hundreds of thousands of people have seen the video and I know many people here have seen the video. And so I grew up in the Air Force being told that the commander gives you intent, the commander puts you on the mission, and the NCOs are supposed to rally your team and pull it off.

So we got the intent this morning, we got this song, we unveiled it. And if I look at [AFI 36-2618], what it tells me, is that Senior Airmen are the effective trainers of the United States Air Force, and that senior NCOs help them. And so Dr. Teachenor, when he still wore a uniform, was a Senior Airman. So Jamie, if you don’t mind coming up here, what we’re going to do is we’re going to learn, properly ,the Space Force song. And I’d ask you all to do this. We’re going to warm up with the Air Force song. So this is all inclusive, fun time. But we’re going to start, warm up with the Air Force song. I’m serious. I really am.

All right, here’s the truth. Here’s the truth. Maybe don’t stand up yet because the truth might take a second. But here’s the truth. So the public affairs guys came and they said, “Chief, I’m not sure you want to do this.” I said, “What do you mean? This is going to be great!” They said, “Well, we’re afraid it might not resonate with all groups.” And I said, “First of all, my brand is crazy so I literally can’t go off brand. I’m good. And second of all, come on, I’m not afraid of anything.” And they said, “Well, we’re afraid it might not resonate.” And I said, “What’s the secretary’s priority?” They said, “China, China, China.” And I said, “And how do you say afraid in Chinese?” “Pa.” P A. This is a coincidence, I’m sure. It’s a coincidence.

I was a Chinese linguist, I’m telling the truth. I said, “Well we’re not going to be afraid. People are going to get into this. It’s going to be fantastic.” I heard us sing the Air Force song in this very room last night and it blew the doors off. So Jamie, you know the Air Force song, right?

Jamie Teachenor

Yes sir.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

Yeah. So we’re going to sing the Air Force song. Stand up, we’re going to sing the Air Force song first as warm up. Y’all know the words, we don’t need to put them on the screen, right? We’re following your lead, Dr. Teachenor.

Jamie Teachenor

(singing)

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

(singing)

That’s pretty good. We got the lyrics. Jamie’s going to walk us through one line at a time. Here’s what’s going to happen. He’ll sing the line, and then we are going to all repeat it back. We’re going to learn, we’re going to go through it, let’s see how it goes. Go ahead.

Jamie Teachenor

All right. First line, just one line.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

One line. Go.

Jamie Teachenor

(singing)

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

(singing)

Jamie Teachenor

(singing)

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

All right. Jamie and I are going to sing a one time through all the way through. Join in whenever you’re ready. We’re just going to do the first verse, right, next verse, same as the first. We’re going to do the first verse twice, one lyric sheet. Whenever you’re ready, jump in. By the time we finish the second time, it needs to be at least as loud as the Air Force song was. Fair? And then I will sign off all your JQSs and Jamie will help me, and we’ll all be certified. Fair enough? Because who knows? Tomorrow at an event we might have to sing this, right? So we got to be ready. Are you ready?

Jamie Teachenor

Yes sir.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

All right. Two times. We’re going through two times. Jump in whenever you’re ready to jump in. But by the time we’re done, got to sign you off, got to be loud.

Jamie Teachenor

Ready? (singing).

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

(singing)

One more time.

Jamie Teachenor and CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

(singing)

Jamie Teachenor

Great job.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

Thanks brother.

Jamie Teachenor

Thank you brother.

CMSSF Roger A. Towberman

That’s great, right? It’s great!

Thank you. When your brand is crazy, you can’t go out of bounds. Thank you all. And see, PA was OK, everything was OK. So I’ll tell you the truth. This is actually what happened. I did my normal thing and I sat down with the PA guys and they said, “You can’t do any baby boomer jokes this year.” And I said, “But boomer jokes are super easy, why would you take those away from me?” And they said, “Nope, doesn’t resonate with all groups. No.” I said, “I have to make fun of someone.” They said, “Make fun of us or make fun of yourself.” So I wasn’t going to pick me. So I picked… So thank you for being great sports. … They rarely write stuff that I say, but they’re constantly crossing out the things I can’t say, right? Keeps me from getting fired. So I really appreciate them.

And to be perfectly honest, I was going to play this whole thing straight, nothing funny today, I’m totally going to be this very serious. And then I sat next to Gen. Hecker yesterday and he said, “Chief, are you talking tomorrow?” I said, “Yes sir.” He goes, “You’re so funny, I love it, I can’t wait!” Oh well now… So I’ve been directed to be funny, it’s not my fault.

So last year I stood up here, and I don’t see… I don’t think she’s here, but we talked about building an orange. We talked about how important it was for the Space Force, that I felt if we got into an apples to apples comparison to industry, to commercial space, to the other services that we might not fare well. That we needed to be unique enough while still being in the family, right? Because that way, not everyone had to like oranges, but some people could like oranges, and it was really important.

And afterwards the [undersecretary] came up and she said to me, she goes, “Chief, I want to be in orange.” And it was really so beautiful. And so what I’m hoping, is that we’re going to lay out some things and give you some updates. But of course, the goal is not really to get people to want to be part of what we’re doing, but to want them to continue to be part of what we’re doing. So hopefully we’ll give you some updates today and talk through some things and when we’re done, all of us that are already in this orange get to keep being the orange, and everyone else, they want a little bit.

Where do we start? So last year we talked about… We unveiled these. And people are wearing them, right? They look great. By the way, they tell me that we’ve been getting a lot of good feedback, and we’re going to start wear testing the uniforms soon-ish, right? Over the next year or so, we’re going to really start getting the testing done, so that over the next couple years we’ll be able to put this service dress on everyone. I would ask everyone to remember that Gen. Raymond and I are incredibly handsome men. So just because it looks this good on us, doesn’t mean you’re going to pull it off. So get on your Peloton because, I could wear a gunny sack, let’s be honest.

But these chevrons, which were still in design last year, are now being proudly worn by Guardians all over. We can’t keep them in stock, and we just couldn’t be happier. So thanks for you, thanks for coming up with the ideas, guys, and thanks for helping us go through the process. I couldn’t be happier.

So we also talked last year about talent management and some of the things that we wanted to do and I touched on why we thought we had to look in different places. And why you couldn’t necessarily predict outcomes based on qualifications. How do we really find the right people? And so we’ve been really tweaking our recruiting, and Gen. Raymond touched on a little bit of that this morning. And Gen. Lord said something this morning, he said ”who?” He said, ”Who are you?” And I thought that was so important, because one of the things that we’re doing in this central booking process, is that prospective Guardians tell us why they want to join the Space Force.

And in case you are wondering, if their why is to hunt down and kill aliens, we put them in this pile over here. And if their why is, “I want to be part of changing the world. I want do great things. I want to serve my country. I want to help people. I want to enable modernity itself because that’s what space does.” Well then we put them in this pile. But to be able to walk through with that kind of intimate look into who they are, is, we think, really important.

The other thing that we’re starting to do, he mentioned we bring in about 520 enlisted folks. We had 41,000, 42,000 people express interest last year. And that 42,000 ends up with the 500 that we selected. I think it’s important that we ask questions, not just about that 520, not just understanding who they are, but who are those 41,000 that we said no to? And why did we say no? And are we sure that none of them got put in the wrong pile accidentally or arbitrarily or automatically because of some predetermined rule set that we’ve laid down that maybe needs to be tweaked? So we’re trying to look not just at who we picked but who we didn’t pick, and why. And make sure that we know that and that we dial in that process.

The other thing that we talked about last year was that ever-present career field pyramid. And I get a lot of feedback on this chart because, I don’t remember now because I was dreaming last year, but I mentioned the mollusks on this chart, and now this is a really fun word for people to say to me. But this scholar naturae, which is how science used to believe things existed, like you could be a bell or you could evolve into a human being, this pyramid, we didn’t like it. We talked about how we could tweak it, and we’re working through that. And Gen. Raymond this morning talked about the tailoring that we think we can do with competencies and that’s a lot about both the individual and the opportunity.

But the entire environment is tailorable. So on the enlisted side, we don’t have key leadership duties anymore. We don’t have key leadership positions anymore. We don’t have stratifications anymore. We’re doing all we can to eliminate anything that could be used as a proxy for truth, that we should be able to learn and know about a human being, if we look hard enough. Because we believe if you look hard enough and you see truth, and you really know the size and shape of the human being, of the peg, if you will, then you’ll be able to find a size and shape hole for that person. Is that as soon as you label an opportunity as more important than another opportunity, why would I be motivated for the latter? And so we’re moving away from those things, and we’re saying, it’s not about the opportunity that you were given, it’s about what you do with the opportunity regardless of what it is.

We’ve let go of those proxies, of those labels, and that’s allowed us to do some pretty cool things. For instance, we’ve got a young lady, I think she might be here, is Sgt. Olavera here? I don’t know if she’s here, I can’t see anything. There you are. Hi. How are things? I’m going to clap for you. Nobody else knows why, but we’ll clap.

So there you were, out in Kadena. Sit down. It’s making me uneasy now that you’re standing up, sit down. But there you were out in Kadena, and you don’t fit. I don’t have a requirement anywhere. Your husband’s a two alpha, right? He is an Airman maintainer. We need our maintainers. It was important to us to keep the family together. We didn’t have a fit, but we did have this important intel job that needed to be done, standing up just this little thing called the National Space Intelligence Center.

So we take a Cyber Senior NCO that we believed in, because she’s a leader and she’s proven and her intentions are noble. She just wants to be a good family member, and a loving spouse, all of these things are wonderful. I know before I meet you that you’re a fantastic human being. And sure enough today at Wright-Patt, you’re killing it. And that never happens if we label you and ignore the human being that’s underneath those labels. And so thanks for letting us trust you and thanks for letting me talk about it. Because if you would’ve messed up, then I’d have nothing to talk about. Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Oh man. So we got a couple other folks on the picture there. Sgt. Laughlin up in the top, another Air Force, Space Force mil-mil couple. Him and his wife, she was the first sergeant. But here’s an intel guy and we said, “Hey, why don’t you go help stand up this cyber squadron?” And Sgt. Mussick down there on the bottom, He’s a cyber guy and we say, “Hey, why don’t you go help us with ops for a little while?” We can do these things when we let go of the labels and they’re all killing it. And we see this over and over and over again in our new talent management system, that looks at human beings and really tries to find the fit that works.

 In the bigger picture there on the right Sgt. Langat, he had this crazy desire to have his wife be with him. She was in Africa, she was in Kenya, and she was just about to move to the state so that they could be together and the process said, “Hey, we’re going to non-vol you to an unaccompanied tour because that’s how it works. Or you can quit.” I’ll talk about quitting later. But thankfully we had Senior Dempsey there, I think still wearing Master stripes at the time—now she’s got her senior stripes on.

We had leaders that raised their hand and say, “Hey, what about this? Is this really what we want to do?” And of course it wasn’t, right? They showed courage. One of our core values, we say let’s operationalize our core values. Let’s talk about the courage to say “Why?” Why would we let this happen? Let’s talk about the connection required to see it in the first place. So long story longer, Sgt. Langat is still with us. We didn’t make him separate, he just reenlisted last week in fact. We found a wonderful volunteer to go to the non-vol assignment and we’re moving forward.

We do these things because we put them out there, and we said “This is our ideal. This is what we believe.” My team gave me a little ‘Believe’, like on Ted Lasso, it’s in my office. If you haven’t watched Ted Lasso, there’s like 75 leadership lessons an episode, it’s fantastic. A little study in leadership and positivity and persistent optimism.

But we believe in the Guardian Ideal. And we believe that it’s important to remember that it literally is a standard of perfection. It is a principle to be aimed at, it’s not a goal to be achieved. We will never be done. That doesn’t mean we can move slowly. Doesn’t mean we can leave things undone. But it means that this is about continuously improving. This is about our commitment to mastery of ourselves, of our team, of our domain. That’s what we get from the Ideal and it’s why it was so important, it’s why it’s such a great book. Over the next few months we’ll release the handbook. If you have a better name than handbook, I would love to hear it. I don’t really like handbook. We went through all this work to give a Guardian Ideal, I’d love to follow it up with something better than handbook. So if you got ideas, send them our way.

But this will be the long text, if you will, that walk through our values, in this really neat way of “I will” statements. The entire book is “I will.” “This is what I will do as a team leader. This is what I will do as a team member.” These “I will” statements are important because they remind us many, many books that have been written to guide our lives that they’re written for us to use for ourselves, not for us to judge other people. To hold ourselves accountable. So these “I will” statements all put together will be released—It’s with me actually, it got to me this week. So we’re looking through that book. We appreciate everybody’s hard work on it. But I think that’ll come out here very soon. We’re in the final stages, and if you got a better name than handbook, I’m all ears.

The other thing we’re working on is the Guardian value proposition, and of course that’s part of what we’re talking about as well. What is it? Because it’s not just compensation. Man, we have to pay people enough to take money off the table. But like we’ve heard multiple times a day, it’s about mission, it’s about autonomy, and mastery, and purpose. It’s about being part of something that’s bigger than you. We’re collecting all that data from Guardians. We’re talking to them, we’re listening, well, what is it? Because everyone from the Secretary’s first words yesterday, all through every speaker, has talked about people. And people are everything.

So we do these things because we need you to keep wanting to be an orange. We do these things because that’s the greatest advantage we have. And in particular, to borrow some words that have already been said by all the leaders, but I would drill down a little bit, and I would say that the most decisive military advantage in the history of the world is the enlisted force of this nation. You could probably clap for that, I think, yeah.

I don’t believe the atomic bomb is the advantage over adversaries like the enlisted force of this nation. There is nothing, there is no greater delta than the enlisted force of this country and everyone else. And so we’ve got to be proud of that. We’ve got to lean into that. We’ve got to take care of people.

Chief Bass and I sat down with Mr. Wagner yesterday for actually quite some time, we talked about a lot of things. We talked about the barrier analysis working groups. And so since I’m talking about people and I knew I was going to be talking about people, last week, I had a couple wonderful young leaders come and talk to me. Col. Moon and Col. Salinas from the WIT team and specifically from the childcare line of effort. They came to me and they said, “Hey Chief, things are getting better. They’re not great yet. We’ve got work to do.” And it really made me think, and we talked and I said, “Hey, I promise you if you send me what you’re talking about, I’ll talk about it. I’ll be your champion.”

I think this is a great single example and there are many, many, many examples. But on the left, this is the steps to ask for childcare. And on the right are the steps to ask to separate. Now if we charted other things, EFMP, assignment change, ETPs for blah blah blah, and this is on the enlisted side, we don’t have to ask for separate. We do nothing and it’ll just go away. We live in a one-click world. In fact, we’re starting to live in a zero-click world. If I get on the right website and take one look at a fly rod, there’s a chat bot saying, “Hey, you want to buy a fly rod?” I’m like, “I always want to buy a fly rod. I don’t even know who you are and why you’re talking to me. I didn’t click on anything yet.”

We live in a one click world. And we must be retention focused. The technical expertise, the depth of experience, the phenomenal craftsmen that we need to stay ahead of China and to win, cannot be built in six months or a year or in four years. We have to be retention focused. And that means that no one has a reason to quit. It can’t be easier to leave than it is to get help. It can’t be easier to walk away than it is to stay on the team.

I get asked a lot about competition. The word drives me nuts. There’s only one competition. There’s two competitions. One, against our adversaries, and two, against ourselves. I’m not worried about industry, I’m not worried about commercial space, I’m not worried about other services. I’m worried about never giving a Guardian a reason to walk away. Moving towards meaning is always good for us. Moving towards something is generally healthy. Moving away from discomfort, moving away from stress, moving away from things I don’t like, personally or professionally, institutionally or individually, is no way to live. But as an institution, we’ve got to make sure there’s not a reason to do that.

So this really is about building an orange that continues to taste like the orange you wanted. Thanks for being on the team. The one team. And for the Guardians in the audience, I’m right there with you. I would do anything for any one of you, and we won’t stop. We use the startup analogy a lot, right? And you went on Kickstarter and you put a little dash in our company, you believed in us. We had a good idea, we had good talent, we were working pretty hard. I appreciate it. I’m glad you put a little in. We want you to get a good return on your investment.

This is what I promise you. I put everything in. I sold my house, like sold my business, quit my school. I was doing OK, job was doing OK, right? I do a pretty good Airman. I traded it all in for this. I will never leave you. I will do everything I can until my last breath to build a Space Force that you deserve. And for the Airmen in the room, and especially for the 10,000-ish Airmen that support our missions, we love you just the same. And we couldn’t be here without you. So thank you for being on the team. Thank you for being great teammates in the building. We absolutely have to continue to do this together. We can’t do it without each other. We can’t do it alone. I hope that the orange tastes good tomorrow, but certainly today I would say thank you. I appreciate y’all and from the bottom of my heart, Semper Supra. Thanks everybody.

Air & Space Forces Association’s Gerald Murray

Chief Towberman, thank you so much. It’s an absolute pleasure to be able with a token of our appreciation with the 75th coin that commemorates, our Air Force and your recognition, there of that. My old boss, Gen. Jumper said yesterday, and often talks about the vertical integration of air and space. And I will tell you, your comments and the talk and discussion with that, you and Chief Bass are working collectively together. Not only what you have taken from your years of experience in our Air Force, but what now you’re able to give back, and with your integration with Chief Bass that is making and will continue to make our great enlisted Force of Air and Space even greater. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, Chief Towberman.

Pregnant Candidates Can Now Apply to Air Force Officer Training School Without a Waiver

Pregnant Candidates Can Now Apply to Air Force Officer Training School Without a Waiver

Oct. 4, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

Pregnant candidates, both civilian and military, can now apply to the Air Force’s Officer Training School without needing a waiver, the Department of the Air Force announced Sept. 30.

If selected, the candidate will then have between six and 14.5 months after the pregnancy to either pass a physical fitness test or get a qualifying physical, depending on whether the candidate is an enlisted or civilian selectee, and then start training. Those wishing to start training less than six months after their pregnancy can apply for a waiver.

John A. Fedrigo, principal deputy assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, authorized the policy change in an Aug. 17 memo. Prior to that, female Airmen, Guardians, and civilians who were pregnant and wanted to apply to OTS needed a waiver for up to 12 months postpartum.

Undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones highlighted the policy to reporters this past March during the AFA Warfare Symposium as part of her push for a broader review of Air Force policies that are gender-biased and present barriers to female Airmen and Guardians’ careers.

“We’re in a race for talent, and our policies need to reflect that,” Jones said in a statement. “This policy change will ensure we’re able to fully tap into the talent amongst our force as well as those looking to join us.”

The policy change marks the latest effort by the Air Force to offer pregnant Airmen more opportunities. In 2019, the service cleared some pregnant aircrew members to keep flying without needing a waiver; and all pregnant Airmen to keep flying with a waiver. In 2020, it began testing a maternity flight suit.

Yet despite those changes, initial reports indicated that relatively few pregnant Airmen took advantage of the loosened restrictions, and earlier this year the Air Force sought to clarify and amplify the policy.

It is not yet clear how many women will take advantage of the new OTS policy, but Capt. Frances Castillo, a member of the DAF Women’s Initiative Team, said in a statement that the previous rules “kept or delayed hundreds of women from competing” for a commission.

The change comes as the Air Force is trying to boost its recruiting numbers, especially among underrepresented groups. In August, the department unveiled new “aspirational” goals for diversity in recruiting, calling for OTS and other officer commissioning sources to increase the proportion of female candidates to 36 percent.

According to data provided by the Air Force, commissioning sources such as the U.S. Air Force Academy and Air Force ROTC have typically averaged around 30 percent for female applicants. Data for OTS candidates was not immediately available.

The total USAF officer corps is 22.6 percent female, according to the latest data.

US Nuclear Posture Unchanged Despite ‘Concerning’ Russian Threats, Officials Say

US Nuclear Posture Unchanged Despite ‘Concerning’ Russian Threats, Officials Say

Oct. 3, 2022 | By Chris Gordon

The U.S. has not seen anything that indicates it should adjust its nuclear posture, a senior U.S. military official told reporters Oct. 3. The official’s remarks came as the Biden administration has sought to calm tensions following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hints that the country might consider the use of nuclear weapons.

After announcing the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin said he would use “all available means” to defend the territories, which Russia does not fully control. In comments that caused anxiety in the West, the Russian leader also said the U.S. had created a “precedent” for the use of nuclear weapons in warfare during World War II.

The senior military official declined to say whether the U.S. has detected any movement of Russia’s nuclear forces, citing the need to protect American intelligence. But the official’s overall assessment reinforced recent comments by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III.

“To be clear, the guy who makes that decision, I mean, it’s one man,” Austin said in an interview with CNN that aired Oct. 2. “There are no checks on Mr. Putin. Just as he made the irresponsible decision to invade Ukraine, you know, he could make another decision. But I don’t see anything right now that would lead me to believe that he has made such a decision.”

Putin is reportedly in an increasingly precarious situation in Ukraine, with his forces in disarray as a result of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the east and south of the country. In response, Russia announced a partial mobilization of around 300,000 troops, leading to some displays of unrest across the country.

Some of Putin’s most prominent and vocal supporters have blasted the country’s military leadership and have demanded tougher action, including the potential use of nuclear weapons.

Russia has around 2,000 short-range tactical nuclear weapons that analysts worry it could use on a battlefield or as a show of force.

Though the two sides are not currently engaged in arms control talks, Russia has adhered to the New START treaty, which limits the U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear arsenals, U.S. officials say. The treaty has been extended until 2026.

Another senior Defense Department official criticized Russia’s loose talk of nuclear weapons.

“Russia is a major nuclear power,” Celeste Wallander, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said at an event Oct. 3 hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It sets the tone for the global community along with other major nuclear powers in responsible stewardship of a nuclear capability. And that does not include saber-rattling and threatening small, weaker, non-nuclear countries on his border, specifically Ukraine.”

“This facile reliance on nuclear threats is really concerning,” she added.

Watch, Read: CSO Raymond, Google Cloud’s Kurian on ‘Digital Transformation—Unlocking the Cloud’

Watch, Read: CSO Raymond, Google Cloud’s Kurian on ‘Digital Transformation—Unlocking the Cloud’

Oct. 3, 2022

Air & Space Forces Association President retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright led Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a discussion of “Digital Transformation—Unlocking the Cloud” on Sept. 20, 2022, at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

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Voiceover:

Airmen and Guardians. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage the President of the Air & Space Forces Association, Lieutenant General Bruce Wright.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Well, good afternoon, Guardians and Airmen. What an honor it is to be here today. And I would offer that in the front row. Secretary Kendall, Mr. Calvelli, Chief Brown, among others, thank you for your leadership. And now it truly is an honor to be here today with two digital giants to talk about innovation, leadership, and the lessons the defense industry and our new Space Force can learn from each other. As the first Chief of Space Operations, General Jay Raymond, has the monumental task of standing up a brand new service for the first time in 72 years. And what a magnificent job you’ve done.

Of course, with that responsibility comes enduring opportunities and General Raymond has set out to create the first ever digital service built to accelerate innovation. The new services, digital vision, highlights the need for cultural and technical transformation, to keep advantage over peer and near peer competitors in the increasingly contested digital domain. We’re also pleased and honored to have Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian here today and in the spaces here with all of us to talk about his own experience. Thomas took the reign as the Google Cloud CEO in November, 2018. And over the past quarter century, he has built enterprise software and deep ties with government customers, not only at Google Cloud, but also at Oracle. At Google Cloud, Thomas is now focused on helping to accelerate digital transformations. So welcome to both of you and let’s get started. General Raymond, please, can you tell us about standing up a new service from scratch and what kind of rapid transformation did that necessitate?

CSO Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

Oh, well thank you. And it’s a privilege to be back on stage. I’ve never been called a digital giant before, so that’s a good one. In fact, I would say a digital dinosaur is probably a better description for me. I largely tell a story about, when you’re in college, I didn’t see a computer with a mouse until I was a senior in college. And cyber attack back then was, when your college roommate mixed up your punch cards when you typed up. And so, to say I’m a digital giant is an overstatement, but I did recognize that if you look at the space domain, the way you experience that domain is through data. Unless you’re one of the lucky 600 or 700 ish or so folks that have had the opportunity to be in space, you experience that domain through data.

And I knew that if what was pacing us to innovate was not the standup of a service, it was the threat and the competition with both China and Russia. And so we had to move fast. And one of the things that I have long thought of is that we were too hardware focused rather than software focused. And that we needed to have the agility that we needed. And to be able to experience that, to harness that data, apply some analytical tools on top of that data, to solve some of our tough problems, this transformation was going to have to take place.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Well, thank you sir. And if we could, Thomas, you’ve been at Google Cloud for over three years and after spending decades in leadership roles at Oracle, you’re overseeing the creation of thousands of new products and features across the digital domain. And could you please talk about how you balance innovation and growth? What has been the biggest challenge and what advice do you have for others?

Thomas Kurian:

We’ve been through a period of extraordinary change since I joined Google. When I joined Google, no one told us in 2018 there was this thing called the pandemic that would happen in 2019. At one point, more than 60% of our employees were new to the company and had never met their colleagues. They never met their clients and they were brand new. And so we were creating a digital organization through necessity, because it was our digital platforms that was letting us get all of our people to work together. It was our digital platforms that were helping us serve customers in what they were trying to do. And we translated everything that we were facing through three simple lenses. Challenge creates opportunity. It’s the fact that we were facing this challenge of having to make people work in a totally different way that created the opportunity for us to bring digital technology to make our people productive.

Innovation drives growth. We had to come up with new ways to solve technology challenges. Every one of those helped us grow and find new ways to serve customers. And lastly, we created a culture in our organization where people could work on missions that they cared about. And our view was, our mission was to bring technology to provide lasting transformation and lasting growth to organizations around the world. And so it’s been an incredibly fast paced three years, but all of these lessons that we take in many ways, speaking to General Raymond, and so many service men and women, we’ve learned that there are many commonalities that we share, in the kinds of problems we’re solving and the kinds of problems you’re all solving for.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you, sir. Well, General Raymond, you’ve already alluded to this, but you’re now leading an organization that is making a push to be the first fully digital service. What does that mean, again, in your own words and how are you going about working towards that goal?

CSO Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

Yeah, first of all, I don’t think it’s a goal. I would steal a word that Secretary Kendall use. It’s an imperative, if you have a service that has 16,000 folks and if you have a headquarter staff that has 600 folks, you cannot afford to do business the same way we’ve done business. We just don’t have the manpower to be able to make that happen well. So the way we have defined a digital service, and I’m not saying we have the patent on this, we looked at it in three ways. First of all, we wanted to raise the digital fluency of the entire force. And so we’ve partnered with digital university to give licenses to every single Guardian in the Space Force to be able to take classes and raise their digital literacy. I think that’s really, really important. The second thing that we wanted to do, the second line of effort on that, we wanted to have a digital headquarters that was data driven.

Our secretary talks about it all the time. I think he has a sign, bring data, over top of his office. We want to be a data driven, we want to be able to harness that data. And so we wanted to have a digital headquarters. And then the third thing, and I talked a little bit about this in my speech this morning, was we wanted to embrace digital engineering. And in our force design work that we did, we’ve actually done that all digitally and using model based systems, engineering came up with the digital models, both of the threat that we see and of the architecture design that we want to move to.

And then rather than just print out documents, we actually did the computer models and we handed that to industry and said, Here’s what we think. Let’s have this earlier conversation. If we do this right, then we can take everything from the force design, to then requirements, to then acquisition, acquiring the capabilities, then testing those capabilities, and then training our Guardians on those systems, all using that same digital thread. That’s nirvana. We’re not close to that, but we’ve taken a good step, we’ve taken a good first step. We’ve done the digital design work, we’re figuring out what a digital requirements process is, and I think it’s going to pay significant dividends for us as we move forward.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Well thanks sir. And back to Mr. Kurian, I love your notion that challenges create opportunities. We thought 14,000 people were going to show up this week and somehow it’s 16,000, so we’ll build on that opportunity. So connecting to the challenges and the opportunities that General Raymond is going through, how do you align with what you hear from other national security counterparts, customers, across a wide range of customers? And what similarities and differences do you see?

Thomas Kurian:

Now, what General Raymond said struck me, we all experience the world today through digital tools. And Space Force is unique in the sense that, the entire domain that it faces the average person doesn’t experience it except through digital technology. When we look at the lessons we’ve learned as Google over the last many years, digitizing the entire world. And when I say digitizing the world, all the information in the world is indexed and served up every day through a search mechanism. Many of you probably use our maps, which is a digital representation of the whole world. There are large infrastructures, networks, computers in data centers in many, many different parts of the world that we deploy in order to support it. But our average person never sees or touches those machines. They’re seen as digital tools that we manage, secure and operate remotely. So when we look at what’s the experience we’ve had and how listening to General Raymond’s comments that, what’s the commonality?

I would say three things that are really important for lasting change. One is the tools and capabilities, whether that is protection with cyber machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand the large quantities of data, or third capability to build software that deals with large scale systems. That’s a common purpose we’ve had and we share with Space Force. Second, to help attract talent because eventually all these tools and technologies only work if it can attract the best people. And attracting the best people, the best people in the world are always attracted for the purpose of a mission. And what you have sir is a real purposeful mission in protecting the next frontier.

And the third is, making it possible for people culturally to learn from digitization. Digitization is a journey. If we all look at years ago, we would all go to a retail store not remembering or knowing if the product that we are looking for really was available in the store. We just drive down and say. Hopefully it’s there. Digitalization through Ecommerce made it possible to actually know the product was there before we got there. But all of that came through a process of learning and experimentation. And I think what we all conceive digital could be, is only the start of a journey. And so being open to experimenting and learning is the other thing that we’ve learned a lot from these past many years.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks sir. Well, General Raymond, shifting gears a bit, the defense department has always been innovative in its big ideas, but going from an idea to product can be a challenge, lots of ideas have died in what is called the Valley of Death. What are you doing and your team doing in your transformation efforts to bridge that technology Valley of Death or advanced technology Valley of Death? And how would you describe your relationship with industry to do so?

CSO Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

I think I feel very fortunate in that… There is a, and I jokingly say this all the time, a big explosion of commercial activity taking place in the space domain. And there’s lots of folks that are investing dollars to develop capabilities, because it’s a cool place to, cool mission to be focused on. We want to be able to leverage that and harness that. We want to expand the industrial base, so it’s not just the big primes, it’s others as well. And if you look at what we’ve tried to do, we’ve stood up a couple of significant efforts at Space Systems Command out in Los Angeles to be able to harness this and develop these partners. So the first thing that we did, we stood up a commercial front door at Space Systems Command. And for all the new companies that have come in, that might not have had the experience of working with a department, we provide them with a sponsor, if you will. Somebody that’s there, that can help them walk through the process and help us work better together.

We have leveraged AFT works and stood up a Space Works initiative as well, to get after the bridging the gulf, if you will, from having an idea, that capability. We have something called SpEC OT at SSC and we put a significant, there’s a significant amount of new companies that are involved in that initiative and provides us a way to get those capabilities onto contract faster. So we’re putting a lot of work on this. We think, if you come up with a new force design, we think there’s two big opportunities. We think there’s a big opportunity in our relationship with commercial industry and we think there’s a big opportunity with our relationship with our allies and our partners. And we’ve got to work together to be able to capitalize on this and harness the good things that are coming out of our industry. I would bet, as I say every time, I would bet on US industry every single day. We just need to make sure that, one, we all are kind of rowing in the same direction.

Two, that we all understand how to work together. And three, that we can develop capabilities and get them in the hands of our war fighters on a tactical timeline, that is important. I’ll tell you a quick story, and this is honest, honest against truth. It happened back in 2011 when I was stationed in Japan and there was a earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor disaster. And we were having trouble coming up with a common operating picture for radiation. We were flying aircraft, Air Force was flying aircraft over Japan to measure radiation. There was sensors around Japan to detect radiation, but we didn’t have a way to display it, and it was really causing issues. And so I reached, I called Google and I said, “How would you do this?” And they said, “If you go up to Google Tokyo, they’ll be able to help you.” So I got a helicopter, flew to Google Tokyo, and in this little conference room, walked two engineers with a laptop. And I explained the issue and they… About 15 minutes later, less than that, here’s how we’d do it.

And I said, “Well, how would I do that?”

 And they said, “Well, if you know somebody that knows the computer language, Python…” They didn’t even say that. “If you have anybody that knows Python, we can teach them.”

I said, “What’s Python?”

And they said, “That’s a computer language.”

I said, “Well, I don’t know if we have anybody.” But I got back on the helicopter, flew back to Yokota, and I put an all call out across Fifth Air Force. “Anybody know Python?” Our first lieutenant at Yokota and a brand new Airman, literally been in the Air Force for less than a month, Ed Kadina, we send a C12 down to pick that young Airman up and funny story, funny story, they can’t find him. I said, “What you mean you can’t find him?” Well, he showed up at the airport with 36 pounds of bags and the Air Force had a rule that you’re on space…

Or On that airplane you’re only allowed to have 35 pounds of bags and we sent him home. I said, “Listen, this Airman is the most strategically important Airman in the entire United States Air Force. He can PCS up here on this plane, just whatever he owns, get on the plane.” And literally that lieutenant and that Airman got on the helicopter next day, flew down to Google, and I think, don’t quote me on this, but within a couple days, we were up and running. I thought to myself at that time, man, we’d be lucky to get the TMT Tasker done by that time. And here we are with the capability. We’ve got to figure out how to harness this, if we’re going to get after the challenges that we face.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

What a compelling story. That really leads to the next question for Thomas. Just listening to that example, could you and your extensive experience across the IT world, talk a little bit about how we can build on such communications, responsive communications, with the technology industry that can move at a faster clip than the military acquisition cycle sometimes can traditionally keep up with. Your thoughts and advice building on that great story would be terrific.

Thomas Kurian:

First of all, I think many of the problems that the United States government, defense, Air Force and Space Force face have analogies or equivalent problems that the commercial industry has solved. Having, for instance, a global representation of cyberspace and being able to keep it secure is something that we as a company have to solve every day, because if it was compromised, people would not feel comfortable or trusting in searching, sending email, accessing maps and other services that we offer. So the first thing I would say is, there’s a lot more commonality in the kinds of problems that the commercial industry has solved and that the Air Force and Space Force needs to solve. The second is, in working together through partnerships, you can actually lower the cost to do many things, both in terms of physical infrastructure, computerized software, et cetera. And to some extent, because you learn from experience in technology, you can stand on shoulders of problems that have already been solved before, you don’t have to reinvent and resolve problems that have been solved many, many times before in other contexts.

The third is, the pace of technology is moving extremely quickly. And if somebody told you that today you have in your pocket a smartphone that has more than five times the power of the fastest computer in 1995, you’d have a hard time believing it. And it’s available for a few hundred dollars. The best thing that we can see is in helping the government, is to have procurement and standards adoption processes be able to use the pace of technology. The faster you can ride the technology curve, obviously with the appropriate procurement standards, certification processes, et cetera, the better. But when you are competing with adversaries, China, Russia, who are investing lots of money in equivalent programs, you want to be able to leverage the great capability that the technology industry in the United States brings to the government and the defense department.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks sir. General Raymond, back to building on your Japan story a bit. How can military services including the Space Force and companies such as Google Cloud, take advantage of their similarities and their differences to advance their respective goals and priorities? And I would add on, I thought your example really as a model for younger, mid-career, if you will, NCOs, officers and program managers and younger engineers to get together. So, I’d ask you to share your perspective in that context.

CSO Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

We’re trying. We’re working really hard to develop, again, digitally affluent Guardians and to not just be able to use apps, but to do more coding. We want to have more people than two that can do Python. And so, one of the things that we’re working on is, we have a program that we call Super Coders and we’re trying to build indigenous software experts inside of our service. I think today, we’ve got just shy of a hundred that have gone through this program, and we’ve got more being developed all the time. And then as we develop these super coders, we’re looking what’s the best place to put them? And so we’re putting them in software factories, for example, Kobayashi Maru out at Space Systems Command. We’re putting them in innovation cells in our deltas to be able to give them the tough challenges to work on, and see if they can write code to be able to help us.

And there’s been some really good examples of where we have made some progress embedding those folks with our operators. We’ve developed some apps that have been on our command and control systems. We had a young Guardian at one of our units build a digital representation of some equipment that we used to have to take offline to train on. Now you can train. It was all done in house. And so we, as I went a couple years ago to that software factory that I mentioned, Kobayashi Maru, what I saw was a lot of great folks really working hard in trying to get after some really hard problems, but it was all an additional duty.

It was like, “Hey, anybody out there know software? We’ll give you a little bit of training, you come work here and then you’ll go back home.” We’re trying to build a more… We’re not to the level yet where we can stand up a separate AFSC, if you will. It would collapse under its own weight. But we’ve got some identifiers out that we’ve put on their AFSCs to say that they’re a super coder, and then we’re purposefully assigning those folks at critical positions to help us harness the innovation that we think is out there, by becoming more digitally fluent.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks sir. Well, Thomas, listening to General Raymond, day to day, somewhat different missions and infact in some ways very different missions, but at the same time, again listening to General Raymond and some of his examples, what are some things that industry could learn insight, internal to industry, to make your own processes better? And could you provide some examples of, again internal challenges that you face and solutions that you work, that could give us some more insight, again in sharing information. And I would kind of cap that question with, could you just talk a little bit about the national security focus, internal to the broadly defined IT industry? So please.

Thomas Kurian:

So just listening to what General Raymond was saying, in the long term, the capability that Space Force needs to be a digital force is very similar to the capabilities that we’ve had to build in our own organization. The first one is, what are the key technology components you really need to be world class at? Software development, making sure as you develop software, you keep systems secure. Cyber, being able to process large quantities of data, being able to use algorithmic expertise. When we were talking about Python for example, being able to program in artificial intelligence, those are capabilities that are going to be critical to maintaining an enduring organization. The second is to attract people. We always think about at our organization, there are, every year from universities across the United States, there are young men and women graduating with great ideas and they are the people over the next five to eight years who are going to transform the technology industry, or the next five to 30 years transform the technology industry.

So the second thing we always look at is the best people work not just for money, but because they have a mission. And the mission is, needs to be a key factor in attracting people. And to retain them, you need to give them digital tools and culturally a rewards and recognition process that rewards them for what they’re doing. At Google for example, we have two examples of things we run internally, a process called OKRs, objectives and key results. One of the things we’ve had explicitly with our managers is to say, you can get to only 80% of the OKRs. You can define 20% to be aspirational that you may not attain and we’re not going to hold you accountable if you don’t attain them. So it recognizes that people want to stretch and you’re not going to penalize them for it. Similarly, when things go wrong, because in many cases we’re working on technology that’s really at the frontier, and you cannot be perfect in predicting how that technology will go.

So we have a process where when things fail, we recognize it as what do we want to learn from it, as opposed to who do we hold accountable for the failure? And so we run a process called Blameless Postmortem, to understand why did something go wrong, what could we have learned from it, and how do we get better because of it? So the second big piece is making sure culturally and enabling the young people who want to come to serve in Space Force, for example, to come knowing that they’ll have the right tools and the right culture, that will make them successful with their mission.

Lastly, we are at Google investing heavily in bringing, not just developing technology but bringing it to the government. We know that part of bridging the private sector and public sector is having people who specialize in understanding the needs of the government and how they use technology. How the Air Force, how Space Force will use technology? And we have specialists that we’ve hired to really understand deeply not just your needs, but how you apply technology to solve some of them. All these in our view, are part of finding a common purpose in bringing technology now as a key differentiator in the work all of you are doing.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks for both of you. And you’ve addressed this somewhat already, but in an opportunity to sort of reinforce your really the message of your leadership. General Raymond, some 30 years in the Air Force and now building a new service, a proven leader. And Thomas, very similarly a proven leader across the demanding corporate world information technology. As you continue to work on establishing a culture of growth, a culture committed to innovation and growth, can you both talk a bit more again about approaches you’re taking to continue to encourage a culture of innovation? You talked about blameless innovation in your own organizations, and I would just add onto that, my guess is, you see your organizations, it’s being flatter and flatter, more communications, sideways, up and down and less hierarchical, so General Raymond, please.

CSO Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

So we really felt when we stood up this service that we wanted to design us, for speed, innovation, and bold action. If you look at the domain that we operate in, it’s vast, things that operate in the domain are traveling at 17,500 miles an hour just to stay in the domain. And we thought that a hierarchical structure and a very large structure was not going to be what we needed. So we worked very hard to flatten the organization. We got rid of two layers of command to be able to reduce the distance, if you will, between the experts that are doing the work, largely the folks that are sitting out here, and the decision makers. And so that was one of the key tenants that we put in place to limit the bureaucracy. The second thing… Well I’d say first of all on the limiting bureaucracy, I think we’ve done that pretty well.

I think we’ve again completely flattened the structure. We’ve got our headquarters down to, as I mentioned up front, about 600 people. It’s requiring us to think through how do we develop people differently? How do we develop squadron commanders differently, that don’t have a group commander on top of them? How do you develop Delta commanders that don’t have the second layer of O-6 command? And so we’ve had to think through that. One of the things that we’ve thought about on culture is, we want to be a war fighting culture. We want to be innovative, we want to be bold. And as we started to orchestrate that, we’ve been waiting for people from other services to come in, so we could blend the culture from all the different services and build our culture of our own. One of the things that we’re going to do here in a couple weeks, when we go out about a month from now, when we go out to the Air Force Academy to host Corona, we’re going to actually do a session on culture.

And what we’re going to do is figure out, rather than just see where the wind blows us when we meld these cultures together, we’re going to look at how do we purposefully engineer the culture? What do we have to do? Things like flattening the bureaucracy, what are those other things that we should do to engineer, to get the culture that we want spitting out the other side. We’ve got work to do on that. And, it’s not something… People ask me all the time, “When are you going to get your culture?” Well, it’s not like you can order this online and get it delivered overnight. It’s going to take some time, but rather than just let it evolve and emerge, we’re going to work to figure out how best to engineer from where we are today to where we want to go. And that’s the work that the entire Space Force leadership team will be doing for pretty much most of half a day here at Corona to make sure that we’re moving in the right direction.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thomas, please continue on growth, innovation, a culture of growth and innovation.

Thomas Kurian:

Just a couple of examples to illustrate, the first thing when I listen to having a flatter organization, our view is one of the core elements of our organization is trusting those who are closer to the situation and closer to the data, to identify not just the problem but also the solution. We have, one of our core beliefs is that, if you really are hiring world class engineers, you have to trust that they will find a pattern in the data and they often will find a solution that senior management may not have thought about, and you need to trust them. One example, we’d run every time one of you uses our services, is being powered by computers in different parts of the world. And the computers take power in order to kind of run. And you need power also to cool the computers. So it’s something that we pay a lot of attention to, both because of cost reasons, but also because of our commitments to more sustainable environment.

One of the things that, a few years ago, one of the engineers was looking at the problem, he was a fairly junior engineer, he said, “Hey, I noticed that we’re spending more money cooling the coolant that’s used to cool the computer. And that just sounds crazy. Why don’t we just run the computers hot?” Now for 30 years it had been the theory in all of IT, that you ran computers at a certain high degree of temperature would cause damage to it. You had to run it in a certain level of… In a certain air condition, temperature controlled environment. He stood the theory on his head. We said, “He’s probably right, let’s experiment with it.” But the first thing I would say is, in order to empower a culture of change and a culture of innovation, you have to trust those who are recommending the change and we empowered him.

He was right. The data showed he was right and we gave him a shot to prove it. The second thing I would say is, we find that the best ideas come from collaboration. One example of something we did within Google, when you have a network of computation as wide as we do, almost every day we are pushing the boundary on something that has not been done before. So you can’t solve it purely based on past history. One of the things we did was build simulation, and we did large scale simulations. For instance, what happens if there’s an earthquake in the Western United States and we lose all of California, which means we wouldn’t have a management team, there would be no buildings. How would you handle a situation like that? And what systems and processes do you need to ensure that we would continue being operational?

All those principles, and not just the principles, but the technology behind it, now we bring to clients around the world. And so one of the things that we see a lot is, collaboration between our teams, helped us think through some of the solutions we encountered. And we always have asked our teams, because we serve a mission to keep all the people in the world who are accessing information safe and secure, we have to have them dream big because they will need to solve problems every day that we may not have encountered before.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks sir. And General Raymond, if you might just wind up. Recruiting STEM talent, recruiting engineers, certainly for the department of the Air Force, for industry, is a national security imperative. And even we constantly talk about our own STEM programs at AFA, Cyber Patriot, Stellar Explorers, being again a national security imperative. And by the way, our vice chAirman for aerospace education is an MIT graduate, Stephen Gurley. So we’re all in on the national security imperative, again for STEM education. And then, how do you go about recruiting? How can we help you go about recruiting?

CSO Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond:

One of the things that we’re doing, and I… Sir, I don’t know if you would agree with this, but when I go out and talk to universities, and I remember specifically talking to the Air Force Academy about a year and a half or so ago, and the entire class was there, and I started talking about software and how we were going to build… Heading towards an AFSC, but some first steps towards building organic software capability. There was a ton of excitement about that. I mean, cadets were turned around talking to another cadet, that’s what I’m doing. I think, it’s a little bit of what you said earlier, sir, that’s what attracts talent, this new cutting edge ability. So what we’ve done is we’ve gone out and partnered with, we’ve developed a university partnership program with 14 different universities from around the country focused on two things.

One, recruiting and developing the talent that we need, and two, doing research and providing some of our tough problems to those students. To help them think through it and get them excited when they get there. So that’s one thing that we’re doing to really attract that talent. It’s already paying dividends, as I mentioned in my speech, we’re getting a lot of good talent coming in off the street. But I listened with great interest, what you were talking about. That’s what attracts talent, these cutting edge tools and that’s what we’re trying to get after.

Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks sir. Well, let me again, thank both of you. You certainly have given us much to think about in a fascinating discussion. Such opportunities abound I think for an ever stronger department of the Air Force, Airmen and Guardian, and across our industry partners, a team to defend this nation. So please, thank you again. And if you would join me in a round of applause…