Watch, Read: Warfighter Training and Readiness in the Air and Space Forces

Watch, Read: Warfighter Training and Readiness in the Air and Space Forces

March 14, 2022

Retired Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, executive vice president of the Air Force Association, hosts Brig. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton, commander of the Space Force’s Space Training and Readiness Command; and Lt. Gen. Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, commander of Air Education and Training Command in a discussion of “Warfighter Training and Readiness” at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 4, 2022. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg: Well, on behalf of the Air Force Association, good morning and welcome back to this discussion of Warfighter Training and Readiness. We’ve talked a lot about technology and equipping the future fight. Now we’re turning our attention to the most important weapon system in the arsenal: people. Training and preparing war fighters to be masters of the war-fighting domain is absolutely pivotal. If we’re going to take America’s best and brightest, and put them directly into harm’s way, then we need to be absolutely sure we’re investing in the right resources to make them successful. That’s especially important today as we prepare to engage peer threats in the contested realms of air, space, and cyber.

I’m delighted to be joined by Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, commander, Air Education and Training Command. And joining him is Brig. Gen. Shawn Bratton, commander of the newly formed Space Training and Readiness Command, STARCOM. Sirs, I appreciate it, and thank you for being with us today. So I’d like to begin with your initial thoughts and perspectives on your commands’ role in events playing out on the global stage. In keeping with our theme, ‘Air and Space Power: Indispensable to Deter, Fight and Win,’ some are perhaps wondering why America has an Air Force and perhaps a Space Force. Sir, thoughts? Gen. Webb.

Lt. Gen. Marshall B. “Brad” Webb: Thanks, Doug. And thanks for having us here. Kind of be the close-out session, before we get on to the other festivities. Let me just say—and I will answer the question—but I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge right off the bat, today: 20th anniversary of Operation Anaconda. The last Medal of Honor recipient, John Chapman—‘Chappie’—gave his life in defense upon that mountain. It’s germane, obviously, because it’s 20 years ago, and for some of us in the room, I can’t believe it’s been 20 years. But the other thing is, it’s germane to the topic we’re going to talk about, which is Airmen and Guardians and the importance of that weapons system.

So the question, ‘Why does America have an Air Force?’ If you listened to Gen. Brown’s comments yesterday—and actually, this has been an ongoing discussion that we’ve been grappling with in the senior leaders of the Air Force, and I really like where we’ve landed. If you ask a soldier, ‘Why do we have an Army?’ he’d say it’s to fight and win our nation’s wars. If you asked a sailor, it’s to project power abroad and protect sea lines of communication. And in the Air Force, sometimes we’d roll back into the five core missions of the Air Force—air superiority, rapid global mobility, etc. But why do we have an Air Force? And Gen. Brown was loud and clear on it yesterday. It’s to defend the homeland, project our power abroad, support the joint force, and he’s added this corollary—which I love and you would have heard it yesterday—‘all done on the bedrock of our foundations.’ And our foundations for the Air Force are readiness, infrastructure and people. Obviously, in the Air Force, Airmen, and Space Force, Guardians. And I think that’s really, really important. And that right there encapsulates grit. And how you do that, of course, becomes the core missions inside the Air Force. But right there I think is very germane, and Gen. Brown was really, really sharp on articulating that yesterday.

Raaberg: Thank you, sir. Governor, over to you for STARCOM.

Brig. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton: Hey, thanks. Thanks. It’s an honor to be up here. And for the folks in the room that there’s a pretty good crowd here for the last session at the end of the hallway on Day 2, so way to get your money’s worth out of AFA. Thanks for coming out to hear us.

I’ll tell you on the Space Force side, STARCOM is the newest of the new thing, right? If the Space Force, I think Gen. Brown or Gen. Raymond said, ‘is a toddler running around.’ We’re in our infancy for sure on the STARCOM side and couldn’t do it without our partners in AETC, among other places across the Air Force. So I see a lot of AETC patches out here. Thanks to you guys for helping us figure this out.

The STARCOM mission is pretty straightforward: prepare every Guardian for competition and conflict. And we see, you know, we see a great example of that going on in the world right now. What we ask ourselves every day is, ‘What are we doing inside of STAR Command to ensure those Guardians are ready to go when the combatant commanders need them?’ But whether it’s basic training, as we work through the transition, OTS, or all the way up to weapons school and advanced training activities, we owe the force, operational force, just the best training we can. So they’re ready when called upon, whether it’s in EUCOM, INDOPACOM, CENTCOM or in the space AOR in support of U.S. Space Command. So that’s on our mind. Chiefs here with me, we think about it, and how do we develop those activities to train Guardians to be ready for competition and conflict is what we’re working through. And like I said, can’t do that without our partners in AETC. So, with that, happy to have a discussion.

Raaberg: Well, thank you, sir. So let’s go. Gen. Webb. I have a feeling you’ve been asked this question quite often from the top echelons of the Department of Defense all the way out in the field. So from a session to combat readiness, how well do you now feel you prepare Airmen to support a COCOM mission?

Webb: How do I feel about how we’re preparing Airmen?

Raaberg: How well you prepare them.

Webb: How will we prepare them?

Raaberg: How well?

Webb: OK. It’s ‘will’ and ‘well.’ You get both. Well, the other thing that you will have heard that I think is consistent with the themes, you heard from the secretary yesterday, and also the chief. And, you know, while the statement may be Agile Combat Employment or multicapable Airmen, this is about an agile mindset. And yeah Gen. Brown in his comments was actually remarking on, I guess, for instance of someone that was building a checklist to, you know, check off the box to become an Agile Combat Employment Airman or something like that. And then he said, ‘No. Throw that away. This is about a mindset.’ Now, I mean, I, you know, we could argue on the margins of whether capabilities need to be documented or not. But this is more about the mindset. A mindset that has understanding of mission-type orders. Mission command. ‘Being comfortable with being uncomfortable’ is really how I like to articulate it. And that’s a goal, of course, but it’s a mindset. And so uncertainty is going to be the coin of the realm in these future fights. And without, you know, developing into a long lecture, the bottom line is, you know, culturally in the Air Force, we like to talk about weapon systems. That is, culturally, what we are. But the asymmetric advantage in this great power competition, when we talk about China or we talk about Russia is, in my case, the Airmen. I think, you know, I won’t speak for Shawn, but it’s kind of the same case with Guardians in the Space Force. This is the asymmetric advantage, and part of that is getting outside the box and allowing our Airmen to be all that they can be. And I have any number of examples where I feel very confident that, within the United States Air Force, we’re well on that path.

Raaberg: Now, Gen. Bratton, you probably get asked the question a little differently, and that is obviously, with STARCOM, you know, being less than a year old and growing. To begin with, I imagine most people ask you, ‘Can you describe STARCOM for us?’

Bratton: Yeah, sure. No, thanks. We stood up just last August—August 23—last year and hit you know, our six-month birthday a couple weeks ago. So it’s been nonstop build, but the foundation of it existed in AETC, in Air Combat Command, in the squadrons that transferred over from the Air Force into STARCOM. AFOTEC, as well. So the broad mission at STARCOM is training and education just like AETC, so the AU, inclusive of the LeMay Center. So we do doctrine as well in STARCOM, similar to AETC, but we also pick up a little bit of the Warfare Center activities. And so the weapons school, the 328th out there making weapons officers falls under STAR Command, the Space Flag—Red Flag-like activities that you see across the Air Force—what I think of as advanced training, although probably not exactly the right label, but that falls under us, as well as the AFOTEC mission. So Gen. Sears in the AFOTEC team down there at Kirtland doing all the operational tests. We take that on, as well.

And tying all that together—especially the training and test missions—is really the range. And so range and aggressor units that came over from Air Combat Command, and then what we’re building out to be able to do training and test for orbital warfare, which is really the growth area as we respond to the adversary is the hard work ahead of us. We’re leveraging everything that AETC has done. We pull Guardians from Keesler, Goodfellow and the Vandenberg unit that’s actually part of the Space Force, as well as that fundamental training done it at OTS and BMT and AETC. I mean, those are our partners. But the mission is a little bit bigger in a sense of there’s more things, but a lot smaller in a sense of the scale that the Air Force has to generate and train to, you know, the size of the Space Force lets us do things in a much smaller scale.

Raaberg: If I stick with you, Gen. Bratton, and so how’s your roadmap coming along? How well?

Bratton: Yeah, pretty well. I mean, we’re certainly in a build phase. So it’s everything from, you know, a lot of facilities, a lot of civilian hiring going on. The unit that came over, you know, we’re through kind of the paperwork thrash of OCRs and all that. A lot of basing activities ahead of us. So there’s sort of the bureaucracy that’s demanded of any new organization occupies a lot of our time. But at the delta and squadron level, we’re really getting after what are the advanced training requirements.

And so, for example, you know, orbital warfare. The adversary’s got a lot of capability on orbit today, and they continue to demonstrate that—direct-ascent ASATs, rendezvous and proximity operations. We don’t live or, historically, we haven’t trained live against those things. We’ve done some sim activities. But we’re really starting to think through Guardians in training, before they show up at their operational squadron, really need to have a couple of those sorties under their belt for what do you do when an adversary spacecraft approaches you on orbit? What does hostile intent look like? What’s a hostile act in space? There’s a lot of policy that goes to that. But in the training environment, that just the basic TTPs for war fighting; we got to figure those out. We got to figure them out right now. And so we’re after that in the simulated environment, and I think we’re going to see some of that training move to the live environment.

Raaberg: So between both of you, starting with you, Gen. Webb, what are kind of some of the similarities and perhaps differences now that you see both commands formed up?

Webb: Yeah, so obviously, some very similar functions and Shawn’s kind of articulated some of the differences with Space Force and STARCOM. The charge that Gen. Goldfein and then Gen. Brown gave to me and is, you know, obviously, I got intent from Gen. Raymond as well, is still playing out. And so there’s some areas, there’s a lot for us that STARCOM is biting off and trying to really form from the ground up. We in AETC want to be in a position where we can be value-added and take those things that maybe aren’t first order pieces that Space Force wants to address, but that they’ll address—or not—down the road. They … can have the decision space to take that on later.

For instance, recruiting. Recruiting service, is we, AETC, is doing the recruiting service function for Space Force for the time being. And we’ll see down the road where Space Force wants to go with that. And, you know, a maybe it’s a little-known fact that when Air Force stood up, back in 1947, the Army recruited for the Air Force for about the first five to seven years before we stood it up. So we want to be in a position to do that with Space. And frankly, any other of the areas that Space Force would like us to take on so they can get after their first order pieces.

One other difference is, of course, is we have the 59th Medical Wing in AETC. They’re stationed there at Lackland, alongside BMT. I mentioned that only because it’s not—and it’s not an ‘only’—through the last two years of the pandemic, that that wing was game-changing in our ability to fight through. That’s a whole other story that I won’t necessarily go into. So there’s a little bit of nuances on the side that are different. The wheelhouse or the center of gravity is kind of similar, but there’s some little bit of differences there.

Raaberg: Gen. Bratton, but it’s gonna be the same questions, differences, similarities, but let’s start with the fact that the U.S. Space Force is a digital service.

Bratton: So we say that a lot. We’re still learning what it means, I think, in many ways. We looked to our partners in AETC, and they’re stepping out on this as, I think, as much as the Space Force is, with leveraging technology and digital aspects into the training environment. And so, you know, the chief and I were down at the 37th Training Wing seeing the BMT enterprise last week. A lot of discussion going on about their about AETC’s plan to introduce that, and I think we’ll benefit.

Again, a little bit it goes back to the scale. There’s some things that AETC is able to do, just because the scale is so large, that we’ll be able to just leverage and ride on their coattails a little bit. Conversely, there’s some things that we’ll be able to do because we’re really small that we can act as a pilot program for AETC to maybe watch and see how that goes. You know, we’re all up on the wearables right now for PT and trying to think through what that means for holistic health. I think that might be an area where the Air Force’ll watch us closely. Conversely, you know, we had a lot of talk about technology and BMT introduction of iPads, where AETC is going and where we want to go and leverage that as well. So the partnership will stay close, I think, for a long time. Certainly places like Keesler and Goodfellow, you know, across this sort of second Air Force enterprise. We have tight partnerships, and we’re not in a rush to kind of separate and do our own thing. I think there’s places where we will, for sure. But that’ll come in time, and we’ll do it smartly, both for the realities of cost, and then just there’s no need to rush into something when there’s nothing that’s broken right now. There’s things we want to do, absolutely. But I think we’ll stay pretty tightly coupled for a few years.

Raaberg: Thank you. Gen. Webb, so you’re dealing with the full spectrum, and not just from entry to the combat readiness, but rather from culture to really doctrine. So what does it really take to be an Airman?

Webb: It’s really back to my, I guess, second point that I made with you. And I’d just like to summarize that as being ‘comfortable with uncertainty.’ This is about the Airman that has an agile mindset. As a case in point, and I don’t know if I’m skipping ahead on some of the questions, but it’s germane. All of the Air Force was involved, you know, really deeply with the Afghan evacuee situation a few months ago. And AETC was as well. In fact, one of the bases that was identified to be one of the landing spots was Holloman Air Force Base. And, in fact, the general—the National Guard general, Gabrielli—was assigned out there in conjunction with the 49th Wing.

Anyway, Chief Thompson and I went out to visit them early in the days. And in two instances—I would share two instances with you, both of them female first lieutenants, by the way. We’re on the ground. We happened to be there when one of the evacuee planes landed from overseas there at Holloman and got to watch this process. There was a female lieutenant—actually not from AETC, she was from Seymour Johnson—her name was first—at the time, she may be a captain now—1st Lt. Whitney Longenecker. She was a personnelist assigned there at Seymour Johnson. And she’s running around just organizing chaos, frankly—of people that are coming off the plane, what lines they’re going to get into, where are they going to go for their various in-processing. And I’m looking at her, and I’m going, ‘Hey. Lt., have you ever deployed before?’ And she’s, ‘Oh, no, sir. This my first deployment.’ I mean, it kind of is it looks like a deployment, you know, in the sense of the chaos as there’s cranes literally building the tent city as we talk and scads of kids runnin’ around kicking soccer balls. I mean, it was chaotic. And she’s organizing this thing, and she’s taken to it. And this is what I’m talking about. ‘Is there a process for what you’re setting up?’ ‘No, sir. I just understand what needs to get done. And we’re doing the best with, we’ll try it. If this doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.’ That’s precisely what we’re talking about.

The other one was a first lieutenant—now she is a captain—Saleha Jabeen. She is the DoD’s only female imam in the Department of Defense. And I mean, we were there probably less than two weeks into this thing, and every one of the Afghan refugees oriented directly with her. And especially the women that were coming—and the children—that were coming off of the planes there from Afghanistan. And she became—I would say from Gen. Gabrielli’s perspective—the first she had the first seat with him on everything.

And in fact, she’s from Sheppard; she belonged in my formation. We started looking to, ‘Hey, she needs to redeploy for some other duties.’ And Gen. Gabrielli said, ‘We got to have her.’ And she stayed for the entire duration of this piece. And that, these, and she was kind of a little bit maybe she had taken more than just a narrow path of what maybe a [unintelligible] but it was very important. And she could see what is the right thing to do.

Raaberg: Sir, I think what you’re almost describing is almost a new ethos of an Airman—agile Airmen, and we’re gonna touch on agile Guardian. Just the previous panel, the Air Force reserve deputy, Maj. Gen. John Healy, described the new agile Airman loadmaster, delivering not only cargo but also babies and in real time, everything going on. So let’s talk about that ethos of a Guardian, because this is important, Gen. Bratton, and that is, how does STARCOM at the leading edge begin to mold that ethos through your training pipeline?

Bratton: I’ll tell you, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about this. And the foundations of the Space Force are in the Air Force. I, you know, was an Airman for 35 years, prior enlisted, I walked the parade field at Lackland and then through OTS. And so, you know, that certainly informs our thinking. You know, same is true for the chief, that same background went through Goodfellow as a 1N.

But we’re bringing in now the counterparts from the Army and Navy, so the interservice transfers—about 1,000 of them, including the civilians coming across this year—that’ll bring some different perspectives for us. You know, there’s been incredible space capability in the Army all along, and a lot of those folks are coming over. And so that will, I think, over time, it will lead us to diverge from the Air Force. Certainly, there’s a challenge that we’re working through on how do you—really on the training side—you know, how do you equip someone to operate in the space domain when they will never go to the space domain? You know, the flyers in the Air Force, look out the window, they see the air domain all around them. We can all stand on the ground and look up and see their aircraft. We can’t do that in the space domain, and so we have to present a training environment that enables Guardians to visualize, to understand, you know, the physics of the space domain and how movement and maneuver there is so very different than movement and maneuver on the sea, on land, in the air.

I think conveying those in the training environment, providing a range that lets them experiment and test and train and develop tactics, will be key for us. But that sort of visualization, understanding of it at the cognitive level of how to operate in a place that you will never go, you know, unless you’re fortunate enough to hitch a ride with SpaceX, if you’ve got the money, or, you know, take the astronaut route through NASA, which, you know, the Air Force has historically done. But that’s just a handful of folks who are ever going to actually get there. So it’s a big challenge. We’re thinking through it. How to best present that and then build that into the culture and identity of all Guardians.

Raaberg: Go ahead, sir.

Webb: Doug, can I, I’d like to circle back just a little bit on the, on this concept of the Airmen we need going forward. In the Air Force, what’s gotten traction in the last couple of years is the term ‘developing the Airmen we need—DAWN.’ And fundamental to that, and then I, you know, these, we run the risk of kind of becoming buzzword bingo sometimes with our words, and what does that really mean when we talk about, you know, certain phrases. And one of them is ‘foundational,’ you know, kind of stuff. And another one is ‘competencies.’ And, of course, in AETC, there’s this phraseology of foundational competencies that become really important when we talk about the Airmen we need going forward.

One of the advances that we’ve done with Gen. Brown is really slap the table on what we’re calling, ‘What are these competencies?’ And they really bucketize, I won’t, that’s a, it’s a laundry list — it’s 24 terms, I will go through that — but they’re bucketized very well, I think. When we talk about developing the Airmen we need, we’re talking about development of yourself, development of others, development of ideas and development of the organization. And if you kind of think about it in that terms, it really kind of adds to this agile mindset that I’m talking about this mission, multicapable Airmen. But it’s in those buckets of development that’s really going to be key with AETC going forward.

Raaberg: It’s really true. You know, the young Guardian and the young Airman are really the innovators. So we just got to equip them that way and train them to think that way even more, even though it comes naturally for them. So on that note, I’d like to get into your kind of your command mindset, especially as you see your commands setting the foundation for developing leaders of tomorrow. But at the same time, you’re developing readiness for today. So really, how do you, what’s changing from that perspective as you foundationally?

Webb: Well, the developmental competencies or the foundational competencies of development is really ground zero for us. The, you know, inside the AETC vision is developing exceptional Airmen of character—the foundation of our United States Air Force. It’s right there in the phraseology. So foundationally, you know, if you were to ask me this foundation, you know, what’s your role in AETC with respect to building that foundation, it’s right there. And so all of those categories of development from self to others to organization to ideas are fundamental with us going forward.

Raaberg: Gen. Bratton?

Bratton: Yeah, I think we’re trying to think through for the Guardians coming in, I mean, they’re very demanding and want access to just the both the best training, which we owe them, but also a variety. They’re nervous. We in the Space Force, to some extent, we put people into what we call a space power discipline, so like electronic warfare, orbital warfare, space battle management. There, when I talked to the lieutenants and the young Guardians, they’re concerned about being tracked into that for an entire career.

Now, in my career in the Air Force, I got to do all sorts of things. I cross-trained, I was an O-33, SO-17, I became a 13S space operator, I was prior enlisted radar maintenance. So I, you know, I had a ton of variety in my Air Force career, and I went back to training over and over as needed to support those decisions—both that the service needed from me and that I got to make. You know, going to weapons school, going to PME and residence. We’re thinking through something that the Air Force does on a large scale. How can we do that on a smaller scale and allow a lot of cross-training opportunities? … We have so few AFSCs today, I think it lets us be a little more nimble there.

And then these advanced training opportunities, and these things like Test Pilot School, Weapons School, Super Coders—which is a Space Force, kind of advanced coding school—SAS, I mean, these opportunities. So when you build a career, from the service point of view, I’m constantly making a better operator. More lethal in the space domain but also a lot of choice for the Guardian, that I would, we think may positively affect retention—reasons to stay—because you’re constantly given opportunities to cross-train, but also maintains a high level of interest. There’s always another thing to learn, another opportunity. And that’s true in PME, in training, in advanced training activities.

And so, I think, we’re small enough, we can build the construct. I don’t think there’s anything new there. Like I said, this is exactly my career that I had in the Air Force, and the chief has similar experiences where there’s always another thing to learn. And so we’re working through that now. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of just kind of the numbers on the personnel side of, you know, someone’s still gotta be on the console up at Thule manning the radar. And so we gotta do the operational mission but then be able to pull them out for training as much as we can over and over and over.

Raaberg: Generals, for the audience, I think it’s time for us to look into your Rolodex and see what’s on your speed dial or your telephone, because you must be talking to other air and space commanders out in the field, perhaps even the combatant commanders. So who do you talk to to help inform your command’s direction?

Webb: On my side, I’d say it’s principally the MAJCOM commanders. I wouldn’t say that we don’t talk to the COCOMs but, in a lot of ways, you know, the MAJCOM commanders—depending on who we’re talking about—are the component commanders themselves from an air perspective. There’s all kinds of areas that we delve into from, you know, which has kind of been one area, which is kind of wheelhouse for AETC, and has been for a number of years is how do you modernize modern learning methods from, you know, kind of 1970s-style to with technology today? That’s an area. But the bottom line—and the one that I won’t come off of in my realm, and which I think really resonates with our MAJCOM commanders—is quality.

You know, it’s very easy to get into a discussion on production. I mean, it is. This is a production engine at the end of the day in AETC. And it’s very easy to get sucked into the, you know, meet that number. And maybe it’s my background, I don’t know, but and it may sound cliche-ish, but job one is still quality. So it’s way more important to me if I’m going to stand in front of the secretary or the chief and say, ‘We didn’t make a number’ or ‘We have a crappy product,’ I’d way rather be in the position of, ‘We didn’t make that number, but here’s the feedback from the field. It’s a quality product.’ And that for me is is, as cliche-ridden as it may sound, is job one.

Raaberg: Thank you.

Bratton: Yeah, you know, we’re blessed to have a lot of help from the Air Force. And so the counterpart organizations for sure Gen. Webb, Gen. Tullos, Gen. Edmondson at 2nd Air Force, give us a lot of help. Gen. Sears and the AFOTEC team down at Kirtland, and then Gen. Cunningham and the Warfare Center are kind of the counterpart organizations on the Air Force. So spend a lot of time talking to all three of them. The test center folks at Edwards as well.

We’re talking to the other services, too, though. So TRADOC, Army Futures, little bit Army Recruiting Command to understand how do they do things. Chief’s headed out to talk to the Coast Guard. You know, scale-wise, they’re a little bit closer to us to understand how they do things, especially in the training pipeline in the kind of awarding of what we call an initial skills training or AFSC awarding schools, and see how they do those things so we can bring in some ideas from others, in addition to our teammates on the Air Force side.

So that for sure is the Rolodex. Lots of help from the operational side of the Space Force and SpOC with Gen. Whiting. And of course, if you know Gen. Burt, she is a force to be reckoned with and helps me every day with ideas and thoughts. And she’s been working this training business a long time, so I get a lot of help from her specifically. So that’s kind of the Rolodex of helpers.

And then I’d say in the build-out of the range, maybe our most significant activity is sort from scratch is the build-out of the, we call it the National Space Test and Training Complex—the NSTTC—sort of like the NTTR would be the equivalent out at Nellis. And as we think that through, and that is a lot of industry help coming in for that. And so we’re working with industry on ideas. How do we think about this? What can we do live? What makes sense to do digital and simulation with our industry partners?

Raaberg: Fellas, let’s take a step back now and talk about training, especially in an era of autonomy, artificial reality and breakthrough technologies. It seems to me, at least, to be getting pretty complicated, especially after a recruit puts on a uniform and has just learned how to march. Are you training to a certain concept? And then I’m gonna have a follow-up question that’s going to be more in the area of your thoughts about immersive experience or immersive training. Sir?

Webb: Yeah, so the good news on this is that while, you know, us here on the stage are at best digital immigrants, the people that are joining our services are natives. And so, a lot of this conceptually, we have to be paying attention to how this is being received and really being responsive to how Airmen—in my case—that are entering the service today think and how they learn. And it is in a continuous fashion. And so these immersive technologies are definitely important. I think, for instance, Wi-Fi, today, in the United States Air Force is, is a utility, just like electricity and running water are a utility. It’s easy to say. It’s expensive. So it’s a little bit harder to do, but fundamentally, this is a necessary item. And it’s very useful in continuing the process of being in a situation where you are a continual learner.

Now, we have we have a number of programs inside AETC that have fundamentally reshaped how we teach and learn, like Pilot Training Next, which has grown into you Pilot Training Transformation. And also on the technical side, Tech Training Transformation. But and so we see instances of where you can have AI and big data and virtual reality that are very helpful. Sometimes it’s blended together. Sometimes it’s in a mixed situation. And we’re experimenting, but it’s very helpful.

And it’s not just for technical things. Air University, for instance, has a course that’s a massive hit with the Air Force called Leadership Development course. And we use avatars to be able to teach leadership situations. And you may kind of be skeptical unless you’ve run through it, to where avatars that are responding and reacting to situations project a right mentality that you don’t get when it’s obvious that you’re role playing with live people. So there are a lot of really cutting-edge areas that we’ve seen a lot of fruit of the labor. So technology has been very beneficial. And we’re gonna continue to be on the vanguard of that for the Air Force.

Raaberg: I can’t wait to hear your answer, Gen. Bratton.

Bratton: I tell you, we were, I was at the Air Force modeling agency just two days ago. And they had a cockpit with VR goggles there. And they put me right, I was in T-6 in their pattern at Randolph and crashed it. So, you know, sorry about that. It was a pretty incredible capability. I mean, to put that on and see all the building, there’s ATC headquarters that were just in a couple weeks ago. That it goes right back to the space domain where Guardians will all, you know, never go into the domain, that is the way to access it for sure.

Now, how do we think about that? And what makes it you know, not a gimmick, and actual hitting training objectives and value-added in training is the important piece to work through. Because, you know, it’ll be cool to put VR goggles on and be in the space domain, you know, make it dark and cold for them and work through that. But what is the training objective we’re getting after? How does that lead to development of tactics, techniques and procedures? I think we’ve got to really think that through before we just go all-in on that. But absolutely the future, I think, for space training.

Raaberg: We’ve got about four minutes remaining. And I’d really like to bring this all together now but more in a real-world perspective. So really, I’m sure you both are keenly evaluating both training and readiness impact as a result of the most recent withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan and as Russia’s war against Ukraine intensifies. You know, that’s serious business for somebody who’s beginning their service. So, you know, essentially, how do you now grasp that diversity of thinking that’s out there in your command as a result of events going on now?

Webb: Yeah, there’s a lot. I’ll try to keep this concise because current events of the last few months, whether it’s the Afghan situation with evacuees or ongoing missions now—really drive home for me the importance of the human domain, the Airmen, the Guardian. And so I’m not joking when I say the asymmetric advantage is how we as Americans, and we in the Air Force—the Department of the Air Force—grow our Airmen and Guardians. There are allies that look at the United States of America and go ‘professionalized NCO Corps is the difference in what we got.’ Because we have allies that have officers and conscripts and nothing in between. And the fundamental difference they see is the professionalized NCO Corps. I would add that it’s a professionalized NCO Corps and the midcareer officers that are the fundamental game-changers. And you have to look no further than current events to recognize that the human domain—people—make a fundamental difference. OK? I don’t have to get into specifics; you know exactly what I’m talking about. Leadership still matters. Being well led is very, very important. This is why I’ve loved being in AETC because it’s about at the end of the day, the people—the Airmen and the Guardians—and this is the asymmetric advantage.”

Raaberg: Governor? Final word, please.

Bratton: Yes, sir. Thanks, I’ll tell you that the Air Force has prepared me, over and over again, for all the challenges throughout my career. You know, from time in Baghdad as a space operator, with 50,000 Army folks around me, I was well prepared for all those things, because of the training, education, PME, advanced training that I’d received and felt comfortable that I could contribute to the fight. We owe that to all of our Guardians, that when they come into conflict in the space domain, when they’re up against an adversary—whether in low-Earth orbit or out at geosynchronous—that they’re prepared for that. You know, those first 10 sorties are under their belt, that they’ve got the education and training that they need. And this move to orbital warfare to threats on orbit, that is very different than what I grew up with as a space operator.

We have to up our game a little bit on the space side to make sure that they’re not in a position where they’re facing an adversary and don’t feel that they’re ready for it. And so I think there’s things that we’re doing right now, there’s things that were started before the Space Force that we’re going to accelerate on, especially in the advanced training, the on-orbit activity. But I think laying that foundation and then reinforcing it, reinforcing it, reinforcing it—throughout a career—is what we’re all about, and we’re getting after it every day. We’re getting after it, quite frankly, with a lot of help from the teammates in AETC and other places. So, thanks, y’all. Thanks for the time today. Really appreciate it.

Raaberg: Yeah, Gen. Webb, Gen. Bratton, boy—what an insightful panel. All I felt was one team, one fight. So thank you on my behalf and on behalf of the Air Force Association. Just so everybody knows in lieu of speaker gifts, the Air Force Association made a donation to allow additional Guardians and Airmen to attend last night’s barbecue. So thank you. Our final Air Force Association session, the award ceremony, and Spark Tank event—which you do not wish to miss—is taking place at 11:20 in the big ballroom, the Gatlin Room. So come join us. And, again, big round of applause for our two leaders up front.

PACAF’s Wilsbach: China and Russia Cooperate but Are Not Interoperable—No One in Charge

PACAF’s Wilsbach: China and Russia Cooperate but Are Not Interoperable—No One in Charge

March 14, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

China and Russia cooperate militarily and have held a number of joint exercises, but they don’t have interoperable forces, and there’s competition between them as to just who’s in charge of their erstwhile alliance, said Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach, commander of Pacific Air Forces, during an AFA Mitchell Institute streaming discussion March 14.

“We’ve seen some integrated bomber patrols,” Wilsbach said, in which Chinese and Russian bombers, “along with their command control aircraft and tankers, have done very short exercises together through the Pacific,” but these have not been numerous.

The countries have pledged mutual support in recent weeks, particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which some have argued may present China with an opening to attack Taiwan. Wilsbach did not mention that the two countries have jointly practiced amphibious landings in recent years.

“There’s been a couple of other exercises that we’ve seen them do together, but I would not say that they’re interoperable in any way,” Wilsbach added. “Their systems are quite different.” He added that it’s “interesting to see the power play: China thinks that they should be the lead, and Russia thinks they should be the lead, so I’m fairly happy with that tension, there.” Wilsbach said he believes this issue will “be a problem for them” in the future.

Besides their own lack of interoperability, China and Russia can’t help but see that the U.S. and its allies and partners in the Pacific do possess this advantage, Wilsbach said.

“They see us flying with Republic of Korea and with Japan and Australia,” as well as with Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and Singapore.

“We fly with them routinely,” he noted, “And we’re interoperable … We’re flying a lot of the same equipment. We’re even data-linking together, in some cases. And, the tactics are very similar.” This interoperability is something “the Chinese really don’t have.”

The level of joint activity between Russia and China has dwindled since the invasion, Wilsbach reported, as “I do think they [Russia] are pretty well occupied” with Ukraine.

He said he also can’t tell whether China was in on the Russian invasion and played a role, or was as much a spectator as the rest of the world. Chinese president Xi Jinping said he did not expect Russia to invade Ukraine, despite its bellicose rhetoric.

“What happened there?” Wilsbach asked rhetorically. “Was Xi wrong? Was [he] part of the disinformation campaign that Russia was putting out? Or was he surprised, duped by the Russians?

Wilsbach said he didn’t know the answer but “it certainly makes me wonder about everything else that Xi says.” He added that he thinks China is taking “a pretty cautious approach right now, based on uncertainty of how this might turn out” and the “international backlash that’s happened toward Russia. They probably don’t want to get caught up in that.” Even so, “it still is very surprising that they’ve come up with the support rhetoric that they have.”

Broadly, China continues to operate in the Pacific “in many instances, outside the rule of law,” Wilsbach said, periodically making incursions on neighbor territory, using “predatory lending practices” to achieve influence in a number of countries, and denying democracy to Hong Kong.

The U.S. Air Force continues to do daily training in the region, which is one of the key differences from “a year or two ago: our frequent daily operations” that are “fully integrated” with the Navy and Marine Corps, Wilsbach reported, “mostly west of the [International] Date Line, to demonstrate what U.S. forces can do in that part of the world.”

 He said he hopes that one of the “key lessons” the Chinese are taking from the Russian invasion of Ukraine is “the solidarity of the global community” in opposing “an unprovoked attack on a neighbor,” and the onerous sanctions that have economically crippled Moscow.

“I’m hoping China recognizes that,” he added, and that if China behaves in a similar way against Taiwan or another neighbor, “something more robust will happen,” Wilsbach said. An unprovoked attack would “provide solidarity for the nations to come together and oppose something like that.” He said it makes him chuckle that China accuses the U.S. of trying to create a NATO of the Pacific, but it’s China’s own actions that are inspiring those discussions. China should also consider, before undertaking adventurism like Russia’s, ”some of the terrain they would have to contend with” and the opposition of regional countries. Russia’s aggression has consumed much of its national treasure: “They’ve killed many of their own people as well as Ukrainians, and I’m hopeful China will pay attention to that, as well.”

New Calls for Adding Ukrainian Air Defenses and ‘More Deadly Sanctions’ on Russia

New Calls for Adding Ukrainian Air Defenses and ‘More Deadly Sanctions’ on Russia

March 14, 2022 | By Abraham Mahshie

Russia’s cruise missile attack on the Yavoriv military training facility near the Polish border in western Ukraine on March 13 highlights Ukraine’s need for more air defenses, and the United States and the West can do more to help Ukraine, a Ukrainian defense official told Air Force Magazine.

A day before Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III was to fly to Europe for a NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels and a visit to NATO eastern flank allies Slovakia and Bulgaria, the battle for air superiority remains critical to the defense of Ukraine.

“First of all, introduce some more deadly sanctions for Russia,” the Ukrainian defense official told Air Force Magazine on the condition of anonymity. “Point Number Two, close the sky. But at least close the sky over the nuclear facilities.”

Russian forces took the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the opening days of the Feb. 24 invasion and captured the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant shortly after, raising the risk of a terrorist attack or a nuclear disaster.

“No one controls what is going on,” the official said. “So, air defense is crucial.”

A U.S. senior defense official said March 14 that Russian long-range missiles were used in the assault of western Ukraine, including more than two dozen cruise missiles that damaged seven structures at the Yavoriv military training facility. The official said the base was not a transit point for Western defense assistance.

The Ukrainian official said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s newly formed International Legion of volunteer fighters were not training at the facility, where dining, medical, and housing facilities were damaged. The official could not confirm whether Ukrainian jets were damaged in the round of strikes in the west that began March 11.

The Pentagon underscored that the long-range attacks by Russia highlight that even if the United States or NATO were to establish a no-fly zone, it would not have prevented the weekend strike. In order to avoid direct confrontation with Russia, the U.S. has rejected calls to establish a no-fly zone.

“These air-launch cruise missiles were launched from long-range bombers,” the Pentagon official said—“Russian long-range bombers from Russian airspace, not from inside Ukrainian airspace.”

Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby said March 14 that U.S. statements such as ruling out a no-fly zone or the transfer of Polish MiGs do not give Putin carte blanche.

“Let’s talk about what actually is happening,” Kirby said in response to a question from Air Force Magazine. Kirby highlighted how the U.S. is talking to Ukraine about its needs and quickly delivering defense assistance.

“I doubt Putin would, after making as little progress as he has made in this unprovoked war of his, would be hard pressed to say that somehow he is being aided by statements that we are making about what we will or what we won’t do.”

New Defense Assistance

DOD said it is working with partners and allies in the region and beyond to coordinate the assistance Ukraine needs. Before DOD could even close out a $300 million drawdown package of assistance to Ukraine, President Joe Biden authorized another $200 million in assistance March 12.

The senior defense official told Air Force Magazine that DOD is trying to “get them the systems that they’re good at using,” including Turkish drones, surface-to-air missile systems, man-portable air-defense systems, and Javelin anti-tank missiles.

The Ukrainian official said the type of assistance flowing from the United States, including ammunition, Javelins, and stingers, have been “crucial” but that Ukraine needs aircraft and ground air defense.

On March 8, DOD flatly rejected a Polish proposal to transfer 24 MiG fighters to the United States for onward transfer to Ukraine. The Pentagon called the proposal not “tenable” for its potential to provoke Russia. NATO Supreme Allied Commander and U.S. European Command chief Air Force Gen. Tod D. Wolters said combat jets would be of little use to Ukraine.

Russia is believed to fly some 200 sorties per day while Ukraine flies 5 to 10 sorties in skies covered completely by Russian surface-to-air offensive missiles capabilities.

The Ukrainian official said some Eastern European and Middle Eastern countries possess the Soviet-era systems, including S-300 and Buk medium-range missile defense systems, capable of shooting down cruise missiles.

“We asked [for] some systems, which, first of all, we know how to how to handle,” the official said. “We are ready also to go to send our specialists to learn something on other equipment which we do not have now.”

The American senior defense official told Air Force Magazine that training Ukrainians on an unfamiliar system was not yet under consideration.

Austin is expected to discuss with Slovakia how it can provide additional support to Ukraine. Slovakia possesses S-300 missile defense systems and, along with Hungary, is thought to provide possible alternative overland supply routes. Poland has handled the majority of defense resupplies from the 14 nations supporting Ukraine.

Another defense official told Air Force Magazine that the U.S. military is beginning to worry that Russia may start to strike supply routes.

“My big concern is at what point do the Russians decide that they have to cut off the … ground line of communication?” the official said. “The supply lines from Poland into Ukraine or from anywhere into Ukraine. When does Russia feel like, you know, between the sanctions and the military support to the Ukrainians, when do they feel like that’s provocative enough to strike back?”

The March 13 missile strikes and the March 11 strikes against air bases in Lutsk, near the Polish border, and Ivano-Frankivsk, near the Ukrainian border with Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, did not target supply routes.

“We have a different network of supply routes,” the Ukrainian official said. “At this moment, I don’t have information that they managed to hit something with foreign aid.”

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian official said trucks continue to deliver goods from Germany across the Polish border and into Belarus, indicating continued trade with Russia.

“There are still many companies who are working in Russia. There are still some banks who are working in Russia,” the official added. “They should be cut off from all the civilized world. They have to feel it. Everyone in Russia has to feel these sanctions.”

Germany to Buy F-35 and Typhoon Fighters as It Boosts Defense Spending

Germany to Buy F-35 and Typhoon Fighters as It Boosts Defense Spending

March 14, 2022 | By John A. Tirpak

Germany has decided to buy 35 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighters and 15 Eurofighter Typhoons to bolster its air forces, after officials there said they had settled on Boeing F/A-18E/F fighters. The new jets will replace Germany’s fleet of Tornado interdiction/strike aircraft.

The F-35s would be used for air superiority and strike, while the Typhoons would be used for specialized missions such as electronic attack and escort. Germany has previously said it needs the new aircraft to be operational between 2025 and 2030. The Tornado fleet dates back to the 1980s.

The stealthy F-35s would also be used to carry tactical nuclear weapons for NATO.

German defense minister Christine Lambrecht said the F-35 provides “a unique potential to cooperate with our NATO allies and partners in Europe.” Luftwaffe chief Gen. Ingo Gerhartz said the German air force will be “very well prepared for the future” with “the F-35 and the further development of the Eurofighter for electronic warfare.” Germany has operated a dedicated electronic attack/suppression of enemy air defenses version of the Tornado called the Tornado ECR (electronic combat/reconnaissance).

Germany would join fellow NATO allies Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the U.K., and the U.S. as F-35 customers, as well as non-NATO European countries Finland and Switzerland, which each ordered the jet in the last few months. Canada, an original F-35 development partner, is also believed to be leaning toward buying the F-35 this year.

Details of the sale, such as price and delivery timelines, were not immediately disclosed. Pentagon officials said the Germans would buy the F-35A conventional take-off model of the jet.

Lockheed Martin, F-35 builder, said it’s “proud of the confidence” in the jet shown by the German defense ministry and Luftwaffe in making the selection, and noted the high interoperability now possible with other European countries that have also bought the F-35. The Lightning II is “the only 5th generation fighter available today to strengthen Germany’s operational capability with allies,” and the company touted the jet’s stealth and survivability, offering a “critical advantage against any adversary.”

The March 14 announcement follows Germany’s decision in February to increase defense spending by $112 billion. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany would surpass the NATO goal of member nations spending at least two percent of their GDP on defense after years of criticism for falling well short of that target, despite being one of the wealthiest NATO members.

The boost in defense spending was prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which highlighted Germany’s lackluster defense investments in recent years.

German officials in 2020 said they planned to ask the U.S. to buy 30 F/A-18E/F fighters and 15 EA-18 Growler electronic warfare variants. Industry officials said the F-35, however, offered interoperability advantages that outweighed other considerations. Only Spain and Finland in Europe operate the F/A-18, and Finland recently chose the F-35 for its future fighter.

Germany said the F-35 purchase does not affect its plans to pursue the Future Combat Air System fighter, which it will develop jointly with other European countries.

Human Battle Managers Will Remain Essential in ABMS, Industry Experts Say

Human Battle Managers Will Remain Essential in ABMS, Industry Experts Say

March 14, 2022 | By Hope Hodge Seck

The Air Force is working to develop a command-and-control system that will anticipate the needs of Airmen in battle and use advanced technology and resilient communications to enable faster decision-making—but none of that will replace the person in the loop, a panel of military and industry specialists said.

“We are not computerizing battle management. We are not taking the sophisticated functions that sit in the hands of the profession of our battle managers and writing them into an algorithm,” Brig. Gen. Jeffery D. Valenzia, Air Force Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) Cross-Functional Team Lead, told an audience at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 3. “In fact, battle management is essential—that we have the man in the loop and part of that process—to take the data, the information, and turn it into knowledge and direct the actions if we’re going to win.”

Valenzia moderated the panel, which included Ron Fehlen, vice president and general manager for broadband communication systems at L3Harris Technologies; Lanny Merkel, director of JADC2 capabilities for Collins Aerospace; and James Dorrell, vice president of ABMS at Lockheed Martin Corp.

ABMS is the Air Force’s component of joint all-domain command and control (JADC2), the Defense Department’s all-encompassing effort to own the future battlespace. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who delivered the symposium’s opening address, listed operationally optimized ABMS as the second of his “seven operational imperatives” to meet emerging threats.

While algorithms won’t take over command functions in ABMS, Valenzia said getting faster will mean becoming more comfortable with machines making many more decisions.

“I don’t need [battle managers] calling every shot in execution,” he said. “I need them to hand it over to a control node that has the tools and the ability to direct that action to meet that intent. It has to happen in a matter of microseconds in some cases.”

Merkel said creating a system that presents only necessary information to make command decisions is a key ABMS challenge.

“We know that’s underpinned by having these resilient networks that allow us to move data and information around,” he said. “But, ultimately, it does come down to the battle manager to make those effective decisions.”

It’s important, too, Fehlen said, that as powerful algorithms become part of command and control, human battle managers stay informed about what the algorithms sense and the decisions they’re driving.

“If the system is sensing the environment, wouldn’t a battle manager want to know that?” he said. “So it can be pushed into a battle manager’s picture to say, ‘Hey, there’s something going on over here. We may not fully understand it, but then you can allocate resources to understand.’”

To move ABMS from concept to reality, industry experts recommended embracing several concepts that originated in Silicon Valley: minimum viable product, or MVP; and development, security, and operations, or DevSecOps. Both support rapid development and communication and emphasize getting a product out into the world quickly and securely, with continuous iteration to improve and strengthen it.

“Engineers think they know how the operator is going to use a certain product, whatever that happens to be, and they think they’re smart,” Dorrell said. “And then when it actually gets in the operator’s hands, they find ways to utilize that product, that platform, that software that engineers never imagined. And DevSecOps tightens that loop.”

Cyber Troops Stretched Thin in Ukraine Response as NATO Builds Common Air Picture

Cyber Troops Stretched Thin in Ukraine Response as NATO Builds Common Air Picture

March 14, 2022 | By Shaun Waterman

The war in Ukraine has provided a wake-up call for U.S. military cyber defenders, who are facing hard choices about how to deploy limited resources, said Air Force Brig. Gen. Chad D. Raduege, the chief information officer of U.S. European Command.

“There’s been a realization that, quite frankly, we can’t protect everything we have,” Raduege told a virtual luncheon hosted by the Gabriel Chapter of the Air Force Association on March 9.

He added that this realization had been growing for some time. In his prior job in 2021 as chief information officer of Air Combat Command, “we found ourselves … identifying the key [IT] components for us to fly, fight, and win. And we were applying mission defense teams from a cyber component against those weapon systems and saying, these are our crown jewels that we need to protect.”

But faced with a crisis that is demanding agile U.S. deployments alongside a wide variety of partners, meaning small teams operating from unfamiliar locations, there weren’t enough cyber defense teams to go around, Raduege said, answering an audience question from retired Maj. Gen. Burke E. ”Ed” Wilson, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, who previously commanded Air Forces Cyber. 

“I think the area that we’ve got to continue to figure out is this idea that we were going [to] protect the weapon systems themselves, protect those smaller groups, with our mission defense teams. That’s a really great vision. What we found is we didn’t have enough capacity in the cyber realm to even stand up some of those capabilities,” Raduege said.

He said the Air Force is deciding which weapon systems it can afford to protect.

“The Air Force, right now, through Air Combat Command, is working through a prioritization of which weapon systems we will apply those mission defense teams against,” he said. The overwhelming “demand signal” for cyber protection, Raduege said, was driven by the circumstances of the U.S. response to the Ukraine crisis, which combined NATO military operations with humanitarian relief efforts involving a much wider alliance of partners—all requiring connectivity.

“There’s an insatiable appetite to have connectivity. And we’re seeing not only fielded forces at the home stations, but now we have all of these tactical edge airfields and logistics hubs that are standing up,” Raduege said. “We have fielded forces all over the place that have an air picture that they want to share. … We have logistics hubs that are all over the European theater right now. … We’re seeing our own nation want to put donations and goods into the European theater. And so we’re seeing coordination centers stand up” to manage that flow of incoming goods and their onward distribution.

Coordination was required, not just with the 30-member NATO alliance, but with “a whole bunch of other allies and partners for this current fight,” he said. “And the ability to track all of that aid, all of that hardware and software that is going into different places … requires information-sharing requirements at a protected military level,” Raduege said.

That secure connectivity required developing the mission partner environment, or MPE, “a coalition network,” which could move data, classified as highly as “secret,” securely between the military networks of allied nations. The MPE was an alternative to the “sneaker net”-style of manual exchanges NATO partners had to cope with for many years in Afghanistan, but Raduege suggested that some kinks still being worked out.  

“Every nation brings their NIPR [Non-secure Internet Protocol Router] and their SIPR [Secure Internet Protocol Router or] computers, and then they want to join them together. So how do you work through those joints? How do you work through that federation to make mission happen?” he asked. “I will tell you, the amount of information sharing requirements that are taking place right now is off the chart,” he added, citing a common NATO air picture as one result.

Link 16, the NATO standardized line-of-sight communications protocol that can be used by fourth- and fifth-generation fighters, “is more important than it has ever been,” Raduege said. He said new nations were keen to join the Link 16 club.

Raduege noted that open-source data was also increasingly being used in creating a common operational picture, even superseding, in some cases, traditional intelligence feeds available to commanders. 

“Every morning, I get up and check my open source app to get the latest on the Ukrainian front. Because open source intel provided by a commercial partner is providing as much information as our J2 [joint intelligence function at EUCOM headquarters] is able to pull. Now, of course, our J2 has more exquisite information—they fill in a lot of the seams. But that open-source intel allows us to rally around things quite a bit.”

Watch, Read: The Future of Air and Missile Defense

Watch, Read: The Future of Air and Missile Defense

March 13, 2022

Maj. Gen. David A. Harris, director of integration and innovation for the Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy, Integration and Requirements, moderates a discussion with retired Maj. Gen. Jon Norman, vice president of air power requirements and capabilities for Raytheon Technologies, and Garret Johnson, precision guidance and sensing systems technology director for BAE Systems titled “Air and Missile Defense” during the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 4, 2022. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

Maj. Gen. David A. Harris, director of integration and innovation for the Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy, Integration and Requirements: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. My name is Major General Dave Harris, I work in the Air Force A5, Futures, which is strategy, requirements and integration. This morning, we are honored to have two incredible reps with us today to talk about integrated air and missile defense. First, we have Maj. Gen. Jon Norman, US Air Force Retired, Vice President of Air Power Requirements and Capability at Raytheon. We also have Garret Johnson, Director of Precision Guidance, Sensing Systems and Technology. How about a big round of applause for our panelists? So let me start just by turning it over to both of you, gentlemen, for a few opening remarks. Gen. Norman. 

Retired Maj. Gen. Jon Norman, vice president of air power requirements and capabilities for Raytheon Technologies: OK, I’ll start up first. First off, I want to say thank you to Orville Wright and the entire AFA team for putting on this event for us. It’s so nice to do this in person, and not look at the Hollywood Squares of Zoom. It’s worth its weight in gold. Certainly these events like this, all the engagements that we can do in between the events and then certainly down the floor. So thank you again to the AFA. And thanks for the Air Force for breaking free all of our, our general officers and our airmen so that we can do that direct interaction that we need from industry.

This topic is incredibly relevant. I look at what our peer adversaries, so both Russia and China, have done and their investment in long-range defensive capabilities. So you look at the S-400, the S-500. The effect that A2AD environment can impose upon us as a US warfighter and our coalition partners, and you sit there and scratch your head. We’re Americans, I firmly believe that we can make a SAM that goes far beyond the range of Patriot and THAAD. And we should look. I look the cost that’s been imposed upon our forces by the A2AD environment that our adversaries have placed in different parts of the globe. And I think that would give us a significant advantage. We can impose costs on the Russians, we could impose costs on the Chinese, not give them that freedom of movement, freedom of action. And more importantly, it frees up our resources from doing these DCA/CAPs for that air threat to now doing offensive ops.

On the defensive side, we have an adversary has been watching us at war for 20-plus years, they see how we work our C2. They see how we do our TTPs and they see how we’re organized trained and equipped and how we work as a joint force and coalition force. It gives them a significant advantage over us not seeing them in action. They’re able to design offensive weapon systems that can then hold those key command and control centers and our key force projection capabilities at risk. As you look at the nature of warfare, it’s really an evolution in what they’re doing. So what went from aircraft in the past to ballistic missiles, to now hypersonics that travel up in the ionosphere just above where our historical defenses have been, or our historical sensors have been, and to maneuvering in terminal where it complicates our targeting ability with our current defenses. So certainly the Defense Department’s been taking notice, and we across industry have been working very closely both with the services and with MDA to come up with counters to that, you know, the Navy’s SM-6, phenomenal capability. The work that MDA and the services are doing with the ground phase interceptor, very incredible capability. I think what we’re seeing is a transition to defense in-depth. Instead of everything being that terminal “glove save” capability where you’re hitting the incoming threats just prior to impact. We’re pushing that further and further out during or throughout the threat envelope.

And so now you’re able to sense and target these threats while they’re in mid-course guidance. Ideally, you’d hit on that boost phase intercept. The challenge with all the investment that we’re doing in this defensive capability, and you know, it’s going through weapons school, and I look at defensive strategies as loser strategies. You have to have them, but it doesn’t compel a change in threat behavior. So it’s a force protection, right, requirement, we have to have that for our forces to operate and to impose a threat upon the enemy so you can compel a change in behavior.

From a deterrence standpoint, you have to have that defensive capability so that they understand that they don’t have freedom of action. But you also have to have a … very real and very credible offensive capability. I look at our investment in this hopefully an investment in in a longer, much longer range surface to air missile capability as a force multiplier for the U.S. Air Force, because it frees up all those assets we previously had doing defensive operations for offensive. I think the service has been doing the right thing as you look at both what Gen. Wilsbach and Gen. Harrigian are doing for PACAF and for USAFE, and pushing the envelope on air-based air defense. We’re seeing that through our Air Force Research Laboratory through the [inaudible] program. They’re doing a bunch of experimentations. And then we’re certainly seeing it through NORAD and NORTHCOM for homeland defense. It’s a critical requirement, we have to be able to protect our forces at our bases of operations. And the threat is a huge spectrum: anything from, you know, a enemy combatant trying to penetrate our outside wire, we’ve seen that in Afghanistan, to mortar shells coming in, to drone attacks—a very low cost drone flying over the wire and dropping an explosive device near one of our aircraft has just as much impact as a potentially as a ballistic missile coming in—to defense against cruise missiles and defense against aircraft. And so it’s a spectrum. But it’s that terminal defense that right now we’re seeing the gap. So I know the Air Force has engaged heavily with the Army and within OSD, looking at roles and missions. But while that’s going on, we can’t afford to have our forces at risk. So I’m happy that the Air Force is pursuing that. And I think across industry, we’re fully in support of it. And I think, strap in and watch how this unfolds. 

Harris: Those are great comments. And I think we’re gonna have questions just following on with that. So looking forward to getting into the Q&A here shortly. Garret, over to you for a few open comments, please. 

Garret Johnson, precision guidance and sensing systems technology director for BAE Systems: Thank you. Yes. My name is Garret Johnson, I’m honored to be given the opportunity to speak here today. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am currently the Precision Guidance Sensing Solutions director for BAE. Prior to that I worked with the Missile Defense Agency advanced technologies, extending the next-generation system. Before that, I actually worked for Raytheon helping out on their missile defense applications.

So my background is I’m an engineer, my subject matter expertise is guidance, navigation controls and precision point applications. So when I think of this problem space, when I think of the next emerging threats that the air and missile defense systems have to accommodate, when I put it into the context of a peer threat engagement and extended peer threat engagement, and conceptualize the quantity of aimpoints that we have to be able to service, one of the themes that I think is critical for us to address and look forward to is the ability to identify a capability spectrum that allows us to put the right energy on the right target at a competitive price. And so when we think of how do we handle the next-generation threats, how do we engage the near peer threats, that’s an aspect of the equation that we need to factor in. We will need to really be able to focus and achieve the quantity required to be able to surface those large quantity of aimpoints. So I look forward to the discussion. Thank you. 

Harris: Very good. And I think the piece on the cost and position in the emerging tech is something we’re going to pull the thread on here in a little bit. But Gen. Norman, over to you first. As we go through a lot of the wargames, I know that we’ve seen the need to power project is so critical early, and then be able to mass effects on one area, then disaggregate. And what complicates that, quite frankly, is the air and missile defense systems of the adversary. One thing that we found that was really compelling is this air weapons layer. So when we talk about air-to-air munitions, and what they can do today, but how we can make them complementary to this problem set. What are your thoughts?  

Norman: I appreciate that, you know, it’s pretty easy to be pejorative on legacy, whether it’s platforms or weapons. I think it’s important that we understand that through the [inaudible] investment that the services do, and that we work with our partners, the capability is vastly different.

We talked about this before in previous AFAs. But, you know, a 1958 Corvette is fundamentally different from a 2022 Corvette. Still has the same name, but it’s fundamentally different. I look at the advancements that through MDA and through the Army that we’ve done with the Patriot system. Fundamentally different capability than when that system was fielded, still called the Patriot. From our aspect of Raytheon, so we make we make the AMRAAM. So the AMRAAM that we’re building today, on the D-3, so you’ll often hear it referred to as F3R, form, function, fit, replacement, the entire stack is different. Within that missile, the missile capability is fundamentally different. Its ability to address defenses, from DRFM jammers, Level Five and beyond, is fundamentally different. We’re changing the way that we run the flight control computer within that missile, so that we’re able to see much further ranges out of that same missile still called an AMRAAM.

And we’re working with our partners, Kongsberg and Nammo to develop an improved back-end rocket motor. And that’s getting integrated into the NASAM system. So that we can give a range beyond where Hawk is, from a surface-launched AMRAAM. And that same system, we’re integrating AIM-9X so that you ca,n you can increase the capacity against a wide variety of targets sets. I think across industry, we’re working on both directed energy and laser weapons.

Garret, to specifically address what you talk to there, you have to have magazine depth. You know, the Air Force is looking at Agile Combat Employment. So it’s history repeating itself. You know, we used to disperse forces all the time. Why? Because the threat demanded that. We’re seeing that threat reemerge that’s demanding that. So we can’t consolidate all of our forces into a single location because it greatly simplifies an adversary’s investment requirement. Let’s hit that single point and overwhelm any defenses that they have. So it started out actually in PACAF, we’re doing Rapid Raptor. So the concept of taking the F-22 with a tanker, a contingent of maintainers and munitions, and rapidly deploying throughout the Pacific theater. That’s evolved into what we’re doing today with Agile Combat Employment. So Gen. Guillot over in AFCENT is working that, certainly Gen. Harrigian is working that in USAFE, and then Gen. Wilsbach is working the same concept unique to their specific theaters in the Pacific theater.

So then we complicate an enemy’s ability to hold our forces at risk. As we continue down this path, you talked about this, we’ve certainly heard it from Secretary Kendall, we have a finite budget, we’re under a CR right now and that the CR expires at the end of next week. They’re working on the ’23 POM, hopefully they’ll be released very soon, out of The Hill. But we’re in a constrained budget environment. It’s a zero sum game. So every dollar we invest, we’ve got to squeeze the most capability out of, out of that investment. And so for the near term, we have to look at where the threat has created gaps. What can we do with our existing platforms and weapons through PQ-DI, and then very smartly invest in that next incremental growth? I think across industry, what we’re seeing is the investment, our technology investment in modular open system architectures, and weapon open system architectures, so that everything we develop can be rapidly integrated into the platforms or the systems, we’ve got to do that.

And what we do in PQ-DI today, we should use that as a building block. Ideally, as we’re looking at that mid and long term investment, we should make a family of weapon systems that can be rapidly upgraded, so we can scale them up or down to add that capability. And then we just change propulsion to affect that attribute of range or speed. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. We certainly have a lot of capability in the near term, through PQ-DI to improve and modernize our existing platforms and weapons. And I appreciate the direction the Air Force has gone through OI and our engagement with the Requirements Directorate in the Air Force so that we’re investing every dollar of limited IRAD that we have against their priorities. Thank you. 

Harris: And I think the speed in which we get after that that change and how fast we can keep pace is also going to be important. And I think that’s a great partnership between the military and industry on this one. But I love your analogy about the Corvette, that the Corvette of the old, or today is not the same as the Corvette of yesterday. So I’m going to go over to Garret real quick and just say that you know that this speaks to me of emerging technologies. And we talked about the Corvette of today, the first thing that comes to my mind is hypersonics. Can you give me your thoughts on what we see right now as far as technologies available, and what can we do to be able to either counter that hypersonic threat, or challenge that in the air and missile defense domain? 

Johnson: Oh, it’s a great question, actually. And it’s a challenging new threat that we have to address.

So if you’re going to look at this, what my recommendation would be is to understand clearly the distinctions between those two main classes, the cruise, hypersonic, the boosting glide, probably the most challenging out of those. But understand that each one of those individuals is a product of a kill chain. Understanding how to attack that kill chain, the ability to confuse, disorient, deny, those are technologies capabilities that we have that will come into play.

If you look at using both the kinetic and non-kinetic aspects to address these threats, and the combination of those in something that I would call cooperative engagement, but that’s another key. In each one of these weapon systems there is a trajectory. In the boost glide scenario, there’s the boost, the mid course, and the terminal phase. Looking at each one of those individually, identifying those sensitivities, and applying them is going to be key. If I look at the kinetic piece of it, and I focus in on, say, the, boost glide element of it, there’s really a spectrum of solutions that be brought to bear for this. On one end of that spectrum, it’s the kind of the air-to-air philosophy of, if I’ve got a threat, it’s got a certain capability, a certain maneuverability. What I want to be able to do is, I want a maneuver factor above that. I want to be able to use that factor to sense respond and engage. And so that really, in the context of a new weapon that is being defended against, causes you to go down a path of developing a comparable asset, and then enhancing that capability to be able to go toe to toe.

So that’s one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is the call of the overmatch situation, where you fundamentally have a set of capable weapons, but they don’t have the same capability of the threat that you’re going against. So the ability to use a set of weapons in a cooperative engagement, for lack of a better term, to partition the scope of that solution, to have the M act as one, the many act as one. So on an M-on-one type engagement, that’s the other end of the spectrum. And when I look at that side of the spectrum, what I end up seeing is that that’s an opportunity, open door, actually, to take some legacy products that have inherent capability, add some technology to it, incorporate a different conops relative to how you engage, look at it as the ability to allow the weapons themselves to make certain decisions at speeds that are not able to be done when we have a direct human in the loop.

At the same time though, what you’re going to want to be able to do is to assure the warfighter that they have control of the outcome. And so when I think of this, what can you basically do for this emerging threat? It’s really a spectrum of answers here. It’s the kinetic and non-kinetic, the combination of this, it’s the ability to look at the problem a little bit new, to be perfectly frank. Thank you. 

Harris: So at Air Force Futures, we do a lot of thinking about long-range kill chain and looking at these mission engineering threads is what we’ll call it. And a lot of times it’s capability that we have today that might not be perfectly suited against an adversary to have that equal matchup, but there’s some gaps in it. With just some minor modifications, we can make some tweaks, and those are the concepts that we try to develop, and then we test them out through wargames. So General Norman, I’ll go back to you with what we’re seeing rise globally, and the importance, really, of base defense. You said before we’re going back to the future with ACE. How important is, or how can we better address these concepts, to defeat the integrated air and missile defense systems by employing different concepts and and getting after the enemy in a different way? 

Norman: I appreciate that question. I think first and foremost through the future games that your team runs. So it gives industry, through our model-based system engineering, to bring—whether it’s a sensor or an effector—into a war game that the service is running against a future threat, to see where we get the most value for our investment, to see where we can modify our TTPs. So we can add incremental capability to our existing legacy effectors and sensors. And where those gaps still exist, so that both the service understands where that investment’s required, and then certainly from the industry side, where we need to invest our very limited IRAD money to help accelerate that delivery.

When you look at the air base air defense, I love how open our Air Force leadership is. I think across industry, we have very, very good access to both the folks that are that are making all the decision briefs, as well as our decision makers. And when you talk with some of the major command commanders or our combatant commanders, you find a pretty consistent theme. So there’s an appreciation for how much sensing capability that we have, whether it’s from commercial networks, commercial sensing, space, as well as our tactical and theater level sensors.

The challenge is how do you pull all that information together, do the correlation and fusion to develop a common operational picture. And I think that’s what the A5 is really taking on with this JADC2 and ABMS, and then the other services, through Project Overmatch and Project Convergence. Vital that we get this right and get it out fast. I would suggest that we have got to have a layer in our, in our sensing capability, so at extreme range. So that we’re able to provide that defense in depth to allow the fires to engage at midcourse against these hypersonic threats, engage the ballistic missiles as they’re coming down from apogee, engage the cruise missiles as they’re flying in low, perhaps popping up. And then certainly any type of swarming activity, whether it’s from aircraft or uncrewed vehicles, I’ll listen to the SecAF.

We’ve got to be able to do that. So we have a system called the Early Warning Radar. [Inaudible] Well, it’s working today. It’s in operation 24/7. Globally, we’re fielding this. It’s been modernized the entire time, and is able to look at an advanced threat. Lockheed is investing heavily through requirements direction from MDA on LRDR, which gives us an S-Band. We have Space Fence, which gives us a look up in the LEO. This isn’t just from air, it’s also from space. So as we bring that threat in to our dispersed forces, that we’re working on their ACE, we’ve got to be able to defend not just from our existing locations before we disperse our forces, but from those new locations. And so it’s picking that right capability. So what sensor do I need to have an operational picture around this, this ACE-located operating location? And my main base operating area? And then what effectors do I need?

The challenge I think that the Air Force has with this is that close-in threat, it typically tends to overwhelm the defenses. So I think that there’ll be a big need for non-kinetic, whether that’s laser or microwave. I could see also a big need for the kinetic to defend against the cruise missiles as well as the aircraft that are coming in that were able to get through the fences. I see our biggest need as an investment as a nation and its roles and missions for the Air Force and Army to work together to drive consistent messaging for the need for that new air defense surface-to-air missile that drives out our A2AD. So we’re able to give that defense in depth and everything isn’t final. All this, it’s a state, it’s a requirement, we have to have this to operate. And then that allows the Air Force to free up resources so that we can do the offensive capability. So we can actually compel a change in behavior from our adversaries. 

Harris: Good points and I think these new munitions that we would need, just in order for us to be able to even for short periods of time protect these cluster bases or even the outpost bases that we’re trying to approach multiple axes on the adversary on, it’s going to stress the system. And one of the things we found, I’m going to go back to your new Corvette, is on the hypersonic technology. At a minimum, it’s going to stress our ISR system. But at best, we’re going to be challenged kinetically on this. Any other thoughts on defeating this type of threat or things that we might be able to do differently and then in wargaming simulate? 

Norman: I think you’re seeing some advances with the Army. So we’re making a system called LTAMS, low tier surface-to-air missile system. It’s a new radar for the Patriot. This radar greatly extends the range far, far beyond THAAD, and beyond Patriot. And it addresses really that sensing and targeting need for that future SAM. The Navy through SPY-6 and future radar upgrades, is greatly enhancing the range that they’re able to provide targetable data. I think that the Air Force looking at this as a joint solution for ABMS and JADC2, we have to certainly look at those capabilities that are being developed and fielded. And as much as we can work to drive the requirements for the follow on PQ-DI for each of those systems. 

Harris: Good points, and we see it the same way as well. It’s getting after him in a very different way. But Garrett, that leads me to, you had mentioned before this piece about cost and position, and what we’re doing with the massive buildup of enemy air defenses at this point, what are some of your thoughts on maybe some asymmetric advantages that we already hold? Or some things that we need to invest in for the future? 

Johnson: Yeah, when I think of that, and I think of it in the context of the near peer engagement and extended engagement, what it really calls out in my mind is a balanced set of capabilities, be it range, maneuverability, survivability. And so what does that really break down into, hypersonic platforms will be a piece of it. There’ll be long-range and medium-range standoff weapons, there’ll be stand-in weapons, there’ll be direct attack. A question that we have to ask and answer is, can we buy enough munitions to be able to service the large number of aimpoints needed in the perceived next major conflict?

So I’ll talk a little bit about you know, in my context, what is a stand-in weapon, this is that 50 nautical mile to 200 nautical mile range, it’s got a price point of about $250,000. This is a low-SWaP-C capable system. So these are these are fairly small munitions, that affords the ability for you to pack a large magazine in some penetrating platforms, a stealth bomber or fighter or future UAVs. An enabler to this really is something called cooperative engagement or autonomy behaviors, but the ability to have as a set of weapons, them perform the search, the ID, the prioritization, the weapon-to-target assignment, and execute the engagement, the further that you can push those decisions to the terminal phase, the more effective these less expensive weapons would be. And so I think that is a key piece is that there is roles, absolutely, for the exquisite multimillion-dollar assets. When you think of what we’re going to be faced with in a near peer conflict, the ability to service those type of quantities of aimpoints, is going to require us to be able to look at a balanced set of capabilities, make sure that we can afford to purchase the number, the quantities and utilize them in such a way that you’re putting the right weapon on the right target that is effective from a PK standpoint, but also as important, effective from a cost sustainability standpoint.  

Norman: I’ll comment on that. So I think Garrett makes a brilliant point, you know, quantity has its own quality. For sure. I think every A-10 pilot, Active, Reserve, Guard or retired, is sitting there drooling, looking at a 40-mile convoy of vehicles sitting on the road, just going, “Sign me up.” You have to have the quantity of weapons. Every target set, every threat environment doesn’t require the high-end solution. So we have to have a capacity to address threat.

Certainly, you’ll look at the initial stages as you’re kicking down the door or achieving a localized level of air superiority. You will need a higher end vector. And you’ll need a sensing network and a command and control network that will support that engagement. And you need lawyers on board so that you can get the ROE. So you can actually employ at range. Once that’s down, we need to be able to mass forces. And, you know, we can afford so much as a nation. And so that’s a tough job that your team has, because we have to balance that inventory requirement to be able to mass forces, hold a large variety of targets sets at risk and execute a war plan. So I’m excited for industry working with the Air Force. I’m excited for the work that you’re doing. So thanks. Thanks for that comment. That’s good. 

Harris: One of the things we’ve seen is that the INDOPACOM theater very different when it comes to this problem set as it would be from EUCOM. And we’re seeing that play out today. Right. So this question is, the last question is for both of you. And I don’t mean to put you on the spot. But here’s my thought. And it’s, I believe it needs to be a layered approach. And not only does it need to be a layered approach, but it has to be tied into effective cueing, which he just brought up. But what would be your architecture for this affordable, layered missile defense system that we see now? Because it also has to be mobile enough that it moves with the force. What are your thoughts on this? 

Norman: So if I was king for a day and had the unlimited budget, I’d help the Army field that extremely long range surface-to-air missile, I’m thinking 500, 600 miles, that gives me an A2AD which now, I force Russian, and China, and any other emerging adversary, to invest heavily in a defensive capability against that so they have freedom of operation. I’d make that mobile, I’d put it on every ship. We saw an example with the SBX platforms so that you can have X-band radar that you can move around and make survivable. I would make it deployable, so it can fit on the C-17 or C-5, and I can rapidly move it as part of my ACE concept so that I can constantly complicate the adversary’s ability to hold those at risk.

And I would ring the entire second island chain with those so that now I can impose cost upon the Chinese if if they have aggressive intent. I think that the path that the MDA and the Army are going down with the with the glide phase intercept, I think it’s the right path. I would invest heavily in sensing for that entire theater.

If you spent any time over in INDOPACOM, you hear the tyranny of distance. And it’s absolute fact, it takes forever to get anywhere there. And having that ability to sense in that environment, to bring it back, to do the command and control and provide that common operational picture is critical. And I would also invest heavily in the way that we connect our networks. So you can’t have that very, very vulnerable link. We often looked at mission-type orders, because we just assume that C2 locations were going to be targeted first and foremost, and we had to be able to operate, we can’t take a knee in the middle of a conflict.

In Europe, Gen. Harrigian’s challenge is that he has a force, it’s not the force that we had back in the ’80s. And so how do we execute a TPFDD to rapidly deploy forces in while not creating vulnerabilities elsewhere in the globe? How do we outfit partners that may have under invested in defense, whether it has munitions or platforms? And then how do we present a strong defensive capability to deter Russia from further action? Not an easy challenge.

In the Middle East for Gen. Guillot, it’s even more complex, you have a range of adversaries that you have to face from Iran to to very, very small terrorist cells. And being able to have domain awareness across that entire region, being able to rapidly respond, it requires heavy investment in sensor network. It requires constant work with partners so that we maintain access and our freedom of action. And more importantly, it requires assets in theater. And so their investment is probably more likely going to be in that sensing network and then the land base fires capability. So that’s my turn. 

Harris: Around the world in 80 seconds right there. That was great. And I think he captured, I think some of the nuances of each of the AORs at least that we struggle with. When you look at EUCOM such a robust road network. And when you look at the allies and partners piece and I think the other challenge that Gen. Harrigian has is in the days of old when we had multiple bases in there where you could layer in other elements of base defense are shrinking, we don’t have as many bases. I don’t think it needs to be gold plated. But you have to be additive in the capability that’s there compared to INDOPACOM, where there may be nothing. So I appreciate bringing that point out. Garret, over to you. 

Johnson: Thank you. Yes. When I think about affordability as a technology, I put it in the context of where we are. We’re in a very fiscally constrained environment. The last couple of years has been a challenge relative to affording the COVID. On top of that, we have the national debt. So you take this and you merge that with a focus on near peer threat, and the challenges that we were talking about relative to large quantities of targets. And we can use history as a guide, we can basically say, over the last 20 years, roughly, we were able to develop 700 interceptors if I look at GBI, and THAAD and SM-3, the cost was about $180 billion. Now, if we want to have 1,000 hypersonic strike weapons, is it reasonable to assume that we can extrapolate that data point and it’ll be roughly a $200 billion ask over, say, a 20-year period? Additionally, if you look at, currently there’s 70 hypersonic programs that are in play, roughly $15 billion a year being spent. So what is this, there’s a lot of wants, there’s a lot of needs, it’s a challenging environment. So what is affordability is a technology really mean? It means that we’ve got to have the ability to understand the right mix, the right qualities and capabilities required for our precision guidance munitions, so that we can do both the offensive and the defensive role to support this next fight. And, importantly, it has to have an achievable cost position as well. Thank you. 

Norman: So I think he makes a great point on the affordability. And I know your team has talked to that quite a bit. So as we look at these future factors, we don’t have the time or money to make everything platinum plated. So from the service standpoint, it’s spending the time and making the threshold requirements accurate. And it may only be that 80 percent solution, but designing the architecture and system design of that future weapon, so that it is upgradable, so that it can address where we expect the threat to evolve. And I think that’s where your team’s been very masterful from industry. For us, what would help a lot is, as we’re looking at these new effectors, we know there’s a price point, we know that there’s a finite amount of money. So as we’re looking to do that design, if you can, if you can help us scope ourselves by coming in and saying, here’s the price point or price range that we’re looking for, for that [inaudible], for whether an effector or a sensor, that’s going to constrain. We have brilliant engineers, but they’ll engineer till the cows come home. And we’ll spend a lot of money and we’ll create something phenomenal in 10 years. But if we can constrain that so that we can field rapidly and we can deliver that 80 percent solution, I think industry can really accelerate the way that we develop new capabilities. And we present those to the warfighter for operational deployment. 

Harris: So I do too, and I think you bring up a good point that will probably end on this one. And that’s, so there’s probably a range or an optimization of the high-end pieces and the low-end pieces that need to come together. And I think they’re different for every theater. I also don’t think that we can accurately describe to you what our threshold or objective requirement would look like in this, and how fast things are changing. I think it may be, a better approach would be iterative. If we can continue to work with you, both companies to say, here’s the challenges we see, here’s what we think is up on the horizon. How can we get after this in an approach that formulates both of them together, because there’s probably some price point things we want to buy their high end. And there’s probably a lot of the low cost pieces that we need to do, because again, you know the status of our budget, we have one budget, and it has to get one Air Force that can do all these different things. So I think that’s the beauty of working with industry on this one. So as we come to the end of our time, let me just say that before we started this panel, I had an opportunity to sit down and talk with both of these gentlemen. And I’ll tell you in the short time I think I got a PhD understanding of what missile defense is all about. And we have two pros up here that know it from both ends of the spectrum. So once again, give me a big round of applause for the panelists we have up here. OK, next up we have about a 30-minute coffee break. Let me encourage all of you to go see the booths, lots of great industry partners that are out there, a lot to learn from. And thanks for your participation today. 

Watch, Read: A New Urgency for Nuclear Modernization

Watch, Read: A New Urgency for Nuclear Modernization

March 13, 2022

Lt. Gen. Jim Dawkins, Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, hosts Jim Kowalski, vice president and corporate lead executive of Air Force Customer Relations Team at Northrop Grumman; Paul Ferraro, president of airpower at Raytheon Missiles and Defense; and Christine Jeseritz, director of nuclear command, control and communications with Lockheed Martin, to discuss nuclear modernization at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 3, 2022. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

Lt. Gen. Jim Dawkins, Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration: Well, good morning. My name is Lt. Gen. Jim Dawkins. And I’m the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration. And I’m hosting today’s nuclear modernization panel. Before I get started, I’d like to thank AFA and our industry partners for hosting such a great event. In my role, I am singularly focused on ensuring that we advocate for the needs of nuclear enterprise. One of my primary roles these days is advocating on the need for nuclear modernization. We’ve heard a lot about threats yesterday. We heard about pacing threats and strategic competitors. We see it on the world stage every day. The threat is real, whether we’re talking conventional or nuclear. Just a couple of data points, though, on the nuclear front.  

With regard to Russia: Russia is over 80 percent complete with their nuclear modernization programs. More worrisome is that they’ve delved into novel nuclear weapons concepts and capabilities, things that we don’t have an answer to other than a strong deterrent that we currently have today. Those novel weapons are not covered by any treaty, at any rate, not covered by New START, or anything like that. And that causes us great concern. Turning to China, you’ve heard Adm. Richard and others talk about a breakout, a strategic breakout. Really what that means to the everyday person is that China’s gone from being a lesser nuclear state to having a couple 100 weapons to a state that’s projected to have over 1,000, or up to 1,000, nuclear weapons by the end of the decade. That’s a rapid growth. We’ve seen it in open source intel, how they have gone on a breakneck pace to develop ICBM launch facilities in their country.  

And again, that is what has caused us a lot of pause and concern from STRATCOM. For the first time ever, we are deterring two peer nuclear competitors. That has to change how we look at the world. Well, the U.S. just started our modernization journey, or we’re in the beginning of it now, just fielded, or again, started to produce with NNSA, B61 Mod 12. We’re taking the 1970s Minuteman III, designed for 10 years of service life; it’s been extended for 40 to 50 years now. And we’re transitioning or we’re going to transition to GBSD at the end of the decade. We’ve got a 1950s B-52 flown by several generations of people in some cases. And we’re going to modernize that with new engines, radar and comms suite. We’ve got a 1980s B-2, and we’ll be transitioning to a B-21. Our 1980s Air Launch Cruise Missile will be transitioned to the Long-range Standoff missile.  

And of course, all of this is underpinned by an NC3 system that is very old and has been modernized as we go and as we transition to what we call next-gen NC3. The challenging piece is that we’re filling all of these systems or modernizing all these systems simultaneously. And they will be come into play toward the end of the decade. That includes the Navy’s Columbia class. So all three legs of the triad are being modernized at the same time. And we don’t have a lot of margin after a lot of extra time here for program slips or delays or things like that, because we have to keep what we currently have safe, secure and reliable as we transition to more safe, more secure and more effective systems that can meet future threats. The sense of urgency has never been more important.  

If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said the same thing. But Ukraine has brought that into sharper focus. Time-certain delivery is required, and what that’s going to take is a joint team between the Air Force and our industry partners, represented by the three panelists to my left. We are guided in our work by Christine Jeseritz. She’s the director of nuclear command, control and communications, or NC3, as we call it, with Lockheed Martin. To her left is Paul Ferraro, president of airpower, Raytheon Missiles and Defense. And finally, Jim Kowalski, vice president and corporate lead, Air Force customer relations, government relations with Northrop Grumman. What I’d like to do, we’re going to start off with brief opening comments from each of the panelists and then go to three rounds of questions. So Christine, over to you. 

Christine Jeseritz, director of nuclear command, control and communications with Lockheed Martin: Thank you, Gen. Dawkins, for allowing me to be a part of this panel and talk about how industry and government can collaborate on this important issue. In many ways, NC3 represents the final phase of reinvigorating the nuclear enterprise, and I believe the most critical. But how do we tackle this problem? It’s very large. I’d offer four thoughts. First, we have to be willing to change. Change is not a technology problem. It’s a psychology problem. People fuel change and sustain its momentum. We need to look at the policies and processes and procedures and ask, ‘Do they transcend architectural decisions, or were they the result of implementation of the system at the time?’ 

Next, we need to subdivide the problem into smaller pieces: a comms layer and a processing tier. The comms layer today did not benefit from an enterprise architecture that was ubiquitously connecting assets. Why? Because commercial tech was a rotary phone, and comms as a service was a party line. Our spot in the technology continuum allows us to connect all these intergenerational systems together to provide that foundational layer for the processing tier. The processing tier today relies on preconnected circuits, and data aggregation was the net-centric dream. We now have the means to aggregate the data and distill that data into important information for the war fighter.  

Next, we need to infuse technology. Adm. Richard says, ‘NC3 fits hand in glove with JADC2.’ And we need to make sure that we introduce the technologies that we’ve been doing in JADC2, like 5G.mil. And then once we have that super connected weapons system, we can aggregate the data into cloud technologies and use AIML to distill information to have optimized course of action plans. And then finally, we need to garner funding support. But how do we get decision-makers to prioritize electrons through wires and algorithms? The experts in marketing intangible products offer a couple of thoughts. First, humanize the product. Have operators that use the system day to day be able to provide testimonies. And through digital engineering, we can then animate the problem, demonstrate through movies what they’re feeling today and how the modernization can really help.  

This is a difficult problem. But we’ve been here before. And I have optimism that we will attack this modernization with the same fortitude that built the system that’s kept us safe for decades. Thank you, and I look forward to the questions.

Dawkins: Thanks, Christine. Paul, over to you.

Paul Ferraro, president of airpower, Raytheon Missiles and Defense: Thank you, General. Thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning. So the National Defense Strategy and the Nuclear Posture Review are yet to be released. But as the general mentioned, I don’t think any of us are going to be surprised when we see China and Russia prominently mentioned in each of those documents. Regaining and maintaining our ability to deter and defeat near-peer threats like China is a top priority for the United States Air Force, and its industry partners are top priority of ours.  

Continuing modernization of the triad is central to that strategy. Each leg offers a unique element of the nuclear triad, and each are equally important. The sea leg offers survivability. The land leg, or the ICBMs, brings responsive deterrence and deterrence in numbers. And then the air leg provides a visible and flexible response, and that visibility and flexible response can compel behavior internationally. With respect to the air leg, LRSO provides the nuclear triad’s modernization hedge—the gap if you will or gap filler if you will. The program provides unmatched visible, credible and strategic deterrence. Rooted in nuclear assurity, it must be safe, secure, reliable and, above all, survivable.  

And that’s what LRSO, or the Long-range Standoff program, does. The program is progressing well. Since its earliest inception, since it was a New START program, we’ve infused model-based systems engineering and digital engineering and truly have designed it not only to meet the stringent performance requirements of the weapons system itself, but designed it from the earliest phases of the program for producibility and, equally importantly, maintainability. We’ve undergone a very successful and extensive ground and flight test program throughout 2021, and that test program continues today. And again, the focus on maintainability throughout the lifetime has been paramount as we design this program. We’ve entered the EMD phase following TMRR phase approximately eight months ahead of the original baseline program, and to this day, we maintain the eight-month margin.  

So critical to maintaining our need to fill this capability as quickly as possible is going to be maintaining and securing the presidential budget request for both ’22 and ’23. And allowing us to maintain that accelerated scheduled performance as we headed to both milestone C and then ultimately IOC. With that, sir, I’ll hand it back to you.

Dawkins: Thanks, Paul. Jim?

Jim Kowalski, vice president and corporate lead executive, Air Force Customer Relations Team, Northrop Grumman: Thank you, Gen. Dawkins. You know, one of the fundamentals about the world, and there’s a lot of comments about a new Cold War, about the rising threat of China, but the fundamentals of deterrence have not changed. And it’s about an adversary’s perception of our will and our capability. And by not only modernizing the triad, but recapitalizing, replacing with new systems designed for the 21st century, using 21st century tools, using 21st century concept of operations, not only puts the marker on the table for pacing the threat with capability, but just as importantly, if not more importantly, it shows that the will of the United States to remain the responsible global leader is still there. And you get both of those by recapitalizing the force. This is foundational to everything we do. One thing that we used to say is that when the secretary of state walks into a room with an adversary country, or an ally, the gorilla in the room back in the corner, that 800-pound gorilla, is our nuclear force. Thanks.

Dawkins: So, now to Round 1 of questions. So, Christine, the addition of NC3 as a line of effort within JADC2 is critical to ensure reliable communications and information sharing across all domains and competition continuing. How do you see the relationship between conventional C2 and C3 and NC3 evolving the development of JADC2 the pursuit of conventional nuclear integration? A lot of things we threw at you there, a lot of acronyms, but tell us how you’re going to make it happen.

Jeseritz: That’s OK. I can do this. The investments that we’re making in 5G.mil, band-agile comms and zero trust networks really encompasses both requirements and needs that NC3 has, as well as JADC2. It encompasses the needs that both systems have. And day to day, NC3 really operates in a fairly benign state. But it also has to remain survivable through conflict. And so, traditionally that survivable line between the president and the nuclear forces has been called the thin line. Today, we have the technology to be able to thicken that thin line. And as we go into conflict, we’re going to expect deprecation in that communication infrastructure. And so we’re also working with key business partners to provide persistent communications through contested and denied environments in order to deliver those important messages to the shooters.  

Additionally, we’re looking at AI and ML solutions. Because once everything is connected, you then can have data aggregation and operate on that with AIML. You’re able to distill large quantities of data quickly and really be able to get after increasing that decision-making timeline for the decision-makers and senior leaders. And so that’s how I see them going together.

Dawkins: Yes, thanks. That decision-making timeline, giving them more time to decide, is truly a key piece of this as we go forward. So thanks for that answer. Paul, so during your discussion on LRSO, you mentioned design for manufacturing and design for maintainability. And we discussed this the other day as well. How does Raytheon maintain this balance?

Ferraro: It’s a very unique program in this regard. As I mentioned, since its earliest inception, we’ve used model-based system engineering and digital engineering processes and this program, again more than any program that I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in throughout my career. We fully modeled our factory floor and then included that into our design process. Since its earliest phases, it’s beginning with our first flight-test vehicle and ground-test vehicle, all of our test vehicles are being built on our factory floor using factory personnel, factory procedures, factory processes, collecting the units, if you will, and productions, metrics that we use to enhance our cost model and build our cost model with an eye toward manufacturability and recurring cost. But perhaps even more importantly, as the general mentioned, the life expectancy of these programs is decades, and building these systems for maintainability throughout that lifetime is absolutely critical.  

So, to that end, very early in our design phase, we brought in the Airmen from Vandenberg, Minot, Tinker and Barksdale to partner with our design team, the design team that oftentimes doesn’t work with the logistics folks and the maintenance folks, and really inform the design process and inform some of the design attributes. We went so far as 3D printing a translucent model of the missile itself, ran the wiring harnesses through, put in mocked up versions of our line replaceable units and asked the Airmen to go and perform the maintenance procedures as they were drafted at that point and really took note of what worked, what didn’t and where we needed to modify the design so that it would be maintainable as intended throughout the lifetime of the product and then updating our cost model accordingly to really optimize the life-cycle cost of the weapons system. So pretty exciting stuff.

Dawkins: Oh, that’s so important. You know, as I mentioned in my opening remarks about how many of these systems were designed for maybe a 10-year service life to include the ALCM and, of course, the Minuteman III, and they’re decades beyond that, because based largely due to the Airmen that are carrying the weight of this work on their back day in and day out, working the supply chain issues with your companies, to continue to find those vendors to be able to produce those old systems. And that’s becoming more difficult every day. And I’m happy about your comments about designing this in for more than a 10-year life, if you will, and making these things more or easier to sustain for those Airmen so they don’t have to come up with new ways to do things on the fly, that they’re actually doing processes that have been proven out with folks on your team. So thanks for that.  

Jim, over to you. Today’s global security environment appears to be very different from that at the end of the Cold War. How has this affected the modernization of our nuclear forces?

Kowalski: Probably the biggest change, and this is at the national level, and it really isn’t so much a change as it is an improvement from our perspective, and that is growing bipartisan support in Congress. There’s a recognition of the threat by Congress, and they’ve enacted their … or acknowledged it as they proceeded with the budget. So not only have they agreed to modernize the programs and agreed to retain the triad, but they’ve agreed to recapitalize GBSD. And that’s a big and important step, and the result of that is that we put stability into our program, which long term keeps it on time. And that funding stability also preserves the workforce and allows us to grow that workforce. And it improves the morale of the people in the program, both on the industry and government side, and in my mind improves the morale of the Airmen and the folks that are out there in the field, because they see their nation cares about what they do.  

The other place that I think this has an impact is this idea of a sense of urgency behind how the global situation, global security environment, has evolved over the last seven or eight years. In particular, we’ve had a number of the senior leaders who are responsible for this mission set, responsible to defend the nation and provide that nuclear deterrence, go to the Hill, go to the media, go out to think tanks, walk the halls of the Pentagon. And they’ve carried a consistent message, and this would be from Gen. Hyten, Adm. Richard, Gen. Ray, Gen. Cotton, and that message has been, ‘We have no margin left. You have to do this program now. We can no longer afford to sit back and do another study and wait a few more years.’ That, in turn, has this sort of a drumbeat of a sense of urgency into the programs. Now there’s limited ability of government and industry to accelerate a program.  

But by golly, we’re gonna stay on this schedule. And you can put discipline into both government and industry when everybody makes it clear that the schedule is priority one. And that in turn, and I’ve seen this over my last six years with Northrop, is it has actually driven a culture shift in some programs, where they’re not sitting on opposite sides of the table negotiating every line of a contract. They’ve got the communications and transparency and common goals. And they’re figuring this out together. So that kind of partnership and that kind of trust is really critical. So I think, you know, those, the global security environment has reawakened a lot of folks to the importance of this enterprise. Thanks.

Dawkins: Thanks, Jim. And to your point, you know, I see that every day when I go and talk to staffers or Hill members, as well as engaged with think tanks and others. Once you get them in the room and explain to them what these programs are and the history behind the current programs, they have a better understanding. I mean, we’ve got broad bipartisan support on the Hill. And I’ll say it, again, broad bipartisan support on the Hill for the nuclear modernization programs, both of the Air Force and the Navy. But it’s going to take that constant communication, because more than once I’ve heard with regard to GBSD and Minuteman III, ‘You mean it’s more than just a simple missile swap?’ Yes, it’s more than just a simple missile swap. It’s all the launch facilities and all the C2 and all the alert facilities, all that in LFs being modernized, all that goes into GBSD. And it’s important to keep folks tracking on the context surrounding the modernization we’re about to do.  

So, Christine, you talked about hypersonics. And we’ve talked about other novel weapons that are out there, AI and machine learning, and how that can cut into decision timeline, particularly the hypersonics that national leadership has to be able to make a smart decision on how to, whether or not to employ nuclear weapons or other strategic type of capabilities. So what are some of the concepts and some of the solutions that we can be pursuing now to accelerate communications and increase decision space through complex and shortened timelines?

Jeseritz: Sure, the orthogonal relationship between detecting that fast-moving threat, that hypersonic threat, against the need to elongate that timeline is truly a difficult problem. And, you know, it’s gonna require some different ways to think about how we sense the problems of our sensing tier, as well as make us a lot more dependent on data aggregation, and AIML type of technologies in order to distill very large sums of data. So as we move forward with this, we can we can look at the sensing tier and look to figure out how we can use additional sensors. We have to increase the amount of sensing surface that we have in order to be able to track this threat properly.  

So we can consider commercial sensors or even government sensors that are in the ground, air and space tier. This will require some policy changes in order to accept the observations from these nontraditional sensor sources into the algorithms that eventually confirm and type the threat. Additionally, we’re going to become more dependent on higher volumes of data. In order to distill that data into information that’s meaningful to the war fighter, we’re going to use AIML to do so so that we can optimize the O plans going forward.  

All of these things together really help to shrink that processing timeline and elongate the timeline for the decision-maker. And kind of foundational to this, and others have talked about this this morning as well, we really need to have digital technology to tell us as we’re making this modernized system, what are the second, third and fourth order effects from a systems of systems perspective, and so we need to have digital twins so that we can do that and really make the best decisions as we move forward in this modernization.

Dawkins: Thanks, Christina. A key point there, I think of what you’re getting at as well as resilience, we want resilience in our NC3 architecture in to be able to do in C2 over a host of different types of systems. We want to leverage what we can from JADC2. Why spend double money on two different systems? And we don’t today. We use, you know, conventional command and control systems even today for this mission space. And we have special carve outs for the hardened nuclear comms as we degrade from the thick line as you call it to the thin line. That’s the same thing that we’ve been trying to get people to understand with JADC2 is that they take what we can from JADC2 and have a carve out for specific thin-line-type things. I know that Gen. Cotton and Mr. Stevenson up at STRATCOM are working hard on these these architectures.  

So, Paul, going over to you a little bit more on digital engineering and model-based systems in engineering, there are key components to Air Force acquisition now. That seems to be the wave of the future force. How’s Raytheon meeting those requirements?

Ferraro: Requirements for model-based system engineering?

Dawkins: And digital engineering.

Ferraro: Digital engineering. Well, I mentioned earlier some of the work that we’ve done to design our factory floor and how we very early on adopted a very high-fidelity cost model that captures not only the cost of the unit itself but the life-cycle cost and really fold it in the expert opinions and feedback that we received from the Airmen that inform not only how we’re going to maintain this system throughout our procedures and tooling and test equipment, but really informed the design at a very early stage, make sure that was we’re very mindful of that with our design team, who oftentimes doesn’t have that direct interaction with the Airmen who maintain these weapons systems throughout their lifetime. But also, digital engineering and model-based systems engineering really allows us not only to move faster through the development cycle but really augment what has classically been our testing evaluation program.  

So I mentioned earlier that throughout 2021, and continuing 2022, we have our ongoing ground and flight test program that is well underway and will continue to inform our design and assess our performance through that. But equally important, if not more important, using model-based systems engineering is the flight simulation capabilities that we have. So again, we have a very high-fidelity model, or digital twin, of the model itself or of the missile itself. And using DevSecOps in an agile environment, we’re able to upload new versions of software almost daily and essentially fly our missile in a virtual environment upwards of 6 million miles an evening. And we fly it in a representative theater environment to really exercise the system itself. Find out there’s a software work the way is intended. How does the overall system perform? What’s it survivability? Were the objectives met? Share that information real time, not only with our overall design team, but with our Air Force partners and leaders, and collectively decide how do we modify the design from here. How quickly can we can respond to what we’ve learned, can we anchor on models when we did. Then we do go to a flight test and really augment that program in a very, very meaningful way. So not only are we moving faster, we’ve developed a much more robust, much more robust process, and design capability.

Dawkins: Thanks, Paul. And you mentioned software, you know, with our current systems, it was all about hardware. And today, it’s becoming more and more about software and making sure you have software engineers that can write the code fast enough for the hardware development. So that’s just a key component of all of our systems that I get to be exposed to. Jim, a little bit more on the digital engineering from Northrop here. Is it important to nuclear modernization and why? 

Kowalski: As we’ve already talked about here, it completely changes how we do a lot of business. Digital tools, digital solutions, allow us, first and foremost, to reduce the risk. And by reducing risk, you get more confidence in your schedule. You’ve taken things that could have been problems out in the future that would put the time back in a schedule, and you solve them ahead of time by doing things in parallel. That in turn, because you’re not going to be wasting time redoing work, that’s going to reduce your cost. And then one of the most important things as we face a world where we’re dealing with China as our primary competitor, is we’ve got to be able to upgrade our systems faster.  

And one of the key things that digital tools, digital solutions, does for us is allows us to get a much faster cycle time out there. So when we talk about the B-21: The B-21 has been using digital engineering since day one to design, test and build out that system. And then what that has given the B-21 is it’s allowed us to build that airplane much faster and, at the same time, be able to keep it up to speed with the pace of the threat so that when it is fielded, it’s going to be a fully capable airplane. And those of us who’ve been in this business for a while know that normally when you field an airplane, it’s out there with a baseline capability. And as you learn and train with it, you slowly grow and add things on, and we see, you know, the major command that owns it finally get it up several years later to what we call a full operational capability. Well, we don’t want to be doing that with our B-21.  

And one of the important things here is that that idea of rapid upgrade ability not only in the design and build process but after the airplane is fielded. So by using DevStarOps open-mission systems, we can get away from, I know Global Strike doesn’t want to do block upgrades; they don’t want to have a list of things to put on the airplane to update or upgrade and then go through 18 months or a two-year process, and then all of a sudden, they get that upgrade. They want it to look like your phone, where there’s an update, and it happens in the middle of the night. And your phone is better as a result of that upgrade. You know, we see a lot of companies out there doing that. That’s driven a lot by that idea of DevStarOps and agile software to be able to do that kind of upgrades so that when we can not only do it virtually instantaneously, but when you get to bigger upgrades, for example, weapons, we’re able to do it in months and not years, and that’s huge.  

On GBSD, GBSD is the first program to get the E program designation from the Air Force because of its use of the digital tools, digital engineering and open-mission systems and those digital architectures. GBSD has also been recognized by the acquisition community in a recent biannual report for their use of digital twins and modeling, not only to make decisions within the program, as they’re moving forward, but also to start teasing out that digital thread so that we’re not just being digital while we’re building the platform, but we’re going to carry through those digital models and digital twins, we’re going to carry that digital thread forward into training, sustainment, maintenance, all the aspects of how we do that. And then once it gets out in the field, our Airmen are going to tell us what else they need and how else we can use it. So, you know, I think we’re, we’re making great progress with that.

Dawkins: Thanks, Jim, those risk-reduction efforts I’m seeing across our industry partners. And that’s definitely been a, I think, a big win. Again, allowing us upgrades faster in an open-mission system architecture, I think, is another key piece of this to allow others to plug and play and determine how best to integrate with the systems.  

So, Christine, and this is our final round here. We talked about all three legs of the triad been modernized simultaneously. So the challenge I see, and I’ve been talking to folks like you, how do we ensure that NC3 is able to keep up with that and maintain our reliable access now and be able to transition into the future?

Jeseritz: Yeah, truly NC3 is, you know, the fourth leg of the triad and is the Manhattan Project of our time. And it’s going to require the same results-based tenacity to solve. And as we look at the triad being modernized, there’s an asynchronous modernization to that. They’re not all coming due at the same time. And so I’d offer much like we’ve been talking about here today is that digital engineering can also help us chart that path to a transition plan. So through modeling, we’ll be able to understand how we can modernize things the quickest in the comms tier and the processing tier to optimize the solution. And as we move forward, there’s certainly, you know, complexities. And across the industrial base, we have all of the knowledge. And so something that I’d also like to offer is the thought of perhaps using a national team approach. The complexities of this and certainly the knowledge base, if there’s clear governance, we can really be a force multiplier in modernizing this and maintaining that good continuity of operations as we do so.

Dawkins: Thanks. And that is going to be the, I guess, the Manhattan Project of our time, as you talked about. Just linking all this together, there are 204 NC3 systems; Air Force owns about 70 percent of that. It’s space; it’s ground; it’s airborne. It covers all the regimes there.  

Paul, turning to you, you mentioned the Nuclear Posture Review. We heard our chief talk about continuing resolutions. How does the company work through that, you know, with those unknowns?

Ferraro: Well, like all of us, we’re interested in Nuclear Posture Review, and when it’s published, we’ll certainly dive into that and make sure we understand the implications of that as that’s going to define our national policy with regard to nuclear modernization. So we’ll await that publication, the availability of that document. Regard to CRs, the reality is we’ve been here before, and the good news is I think we’ve learned how to work through it, sometimes more gracefully than other times. But I think this really speaks to the partnership that we as industry partners need to continue to maintain and bolster with the Air Force. And, you know, as with any program, there’s always three elements that need to be managed: cost, schedule and technical performance. And in this case, I have never seen a situation where all three are so vital and so critical to our national security. We need to deliver the capabilities that were asked to deliver. And we will certainly maintain our focus on technical performance. Cost is paramount; there is no more money, and we simply don’t have the resources that we need to do all the things that must be done. But schedule is paramount. And as an industry partner, teaming with our Air Force counterparts, we will certainly bring to bear all the resources that we have available to maintain schedule and make sure that we deliver these capabilities on or ahead of schedule.

Dawkins: You know, something that I think is really important here is the stable requirements piece of this. And as the Air Force, we’ve got to make sure that we have stable requirements and we don’t continue to try to change things right now. Right now, we’ve got, I think, we’ve got those locked down pretty well. And then the teaming aspect, I think it’s really important with the program managers and PEOs. And I see that when I go out to visit with them.  

Jim, our final question. Again, you mentioned this a little bit. You’re working two of the Air Force’s largest programs, and they are for nuclear modernization: the B-21 and GBSD. What have been the key challenges?

Kowalski: Well, there’s certainly no shortage of challenges in any large acquisition program. And, of course, we’ve seen, you know, COVID and workforce and continuing resolutions have been out there. But what I mentioned at the beginning was that drumbeat of what’s going on in the world, that drumbeat of we’ve got to have a sense of urgency here. How do we put the speed into the program. And really, digital engineering, and to circle back to that one more time, has given us the ability to design, test and build this bomber, or the ball of these weapons systems faster than ever before. And we’ve put ourselves in a position where we have the ability or the potential to take a bomber or a missile from contract award to initial operational capability in less than a decade. We have to stay on that track.  

And what’s important for us here is to not only acknowledge that there’s challenges out there, but how do we take advantage of the opportunity? How do we evolve the acquisition processes so that they can learn from these other programs, so they can also advance at the speed of technology. Because that’s what the digital engineering and all those tools and solution have allowed us to do. And that’s the only way we’re going to keep up and stay paced with the threat. And, in particular, the B-21 program has been a great example of how to manage this, the kind of relationships that the RCO has built with Global Strike Command. RCO on the acquisition side, Global Strike Command on the user side, as they’ve clarified the operational needs, as they’ve worked through the trade space, have been essential to this kind of speed, and the role of Northrop Grumman and our industry partners in this, we bring that expertise and the tools and technology to help make all of this happen.  

So what we’ve seen here is communication, transparency, common goals. And the term that we oughta all hope becomes more familiar is to be able to move not only at the speed of technology but the speed of trust so that we don’t let our bureaucracies and our mistrust create the friction in there that slows programs down. Thanks.

Dawkins: Thanks, Jim. That’s a great point. I mean, needing that trust has never been more important. And, I think, again, as I started out, the current conflict in Ukraine has brought all this into sharper focus. And if it’s not energizing the collective, the defense industrial base and the program offices and everybody that’s a part of this nuclear deterrent, then, you know, then it should, because the threat is real, and it is there. Thanks for all to the panelists for your time and the preparation required to come up here and talk about this very important subject. These discussions are great opportunities to ensure that the team that’s out there maintaining and operating these systems every day understand the work that’s going on right now to bring them a new capability, better capability, something easier to maintain, if you will. So let’s give them a round of applause.

Dawkins: Alright, so I’ve been I’ve been asked, hey, don’t forget the exhibit hall is still open and we’ve got Spark Tank at 11:20, so don’t miss it. Thank you.

Watch, Read: Lessons on Joint Distributed Ops from CENTCOM

Watch, Read: Lessons on Joint Distributed Ops from CENTCOM

March 13, 2022

Retired Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, executive vice president of the Air Force Association, moderates a discussion with Vice Adm. James Malloy, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command; Col. Anthony J. Mastalir, commander of U.S. Space Forces Central; and Lt. Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of the 9th Air Force, on “Joint Distributed Ops – Regional Commitments and Security,” during the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 4, 2022. Watch the video or read the transcript below. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the stage AFA’s executive vice president, Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg.

Maj. Gen. Doug Raaberg, executive vice president of the Air Force Association: Thank you and good afternoon. It’s good that we have some stalwart people hanging on. Appreciate that. You know, most of us know that Central Command has been the main American presence in many military operations. I have no doubt that many in this room have served inside Central Command. From the beginning of Operation Desert Shield on Aug. 2, 1991, to the Aug. 30, 2021, closure of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, with the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Now, since 2014, Operation Inherent Resolve continues in Iraq and Syria in supporting and advise and assist roles. For over 30 years, Air and Space Forces have maintained and sustained continuous combat operations in the CENTCOM AOR. If we look back, CENTCOM’s lines of effort in deterring Iran, broadly countering violent extremist organizations and destabilizing the influence of Russia and, verbally, China, call for an ever-increasing demand signal for war coalition capability, especially for the U.S. Air and Space Force capability. Now, the strategic landscape is changing in the CENTCOM AOR as quote, “Mr. Putin enjoys escalation dominance,” where he can attack, he can pull back for a while—at least—he can stay put, and all the while commanding the world’s attention.

We will touch on the challenges CENTCOM faces in this panel entitled ‘Conducting Joint Distributed Ops, Regional Commitments, and Security.’ Absolutely delighted to be joined by Vice Adm. James Malloy, deputy commander, U.S. Central Command. Joining him is Lt. Gen. Gregory Guillot, CENTCOM’s air component commander and Col. Anthony Mastalir, director, Space Forces, U.S. Central Command. Please. Let’s give them a warm welcome.

Admiral, General, Colonel, I’d like to start with a brief perspective from each of you on the evolving changes you face in your support to the CENTCOM commander and the mission at hand. So Adm. Malloy, let me start with you. Perhaps with some opening remarks, since you are in fact responsible for the integration of Israel into the CENTCOM AOR. Over to you, sir.

Vice Adm. James Malloy, deputy commander, U.S. Central Command: Thank you. Gen. Raaberg, thank you for your introduction. And, General, we’re right where you are. Thanks for the invitation. On behalf of Gen. McKenzie, it’s an honor to be here, especially with the two panelists—shipmates of mine—that I’m honored to work with every day.

Gen. McKenzie could not be here today. He’s traveling; he’s in the region right now. But he certainly accepted the invitation with every intent to be here. And so he sent his sidekick to two hours down the road to come to be with you, and I’m honored to represent him in this forum. And I think these forums are important looking through their very robust agenda that you have to be able to exchange ideas, assess what we’re looking at as a global threat and then try and outpace it. And it is a combination of government and contract people that are working toward this.

What I’d like to do because our panel looks at the CENTCOM AOR—and you did introduce that—I’d like to spend a couple minutes setting the theater and also letting you look at the theater through the lens of our commander, Gen. McKenzie, setting his priorities and how he looks at the region. As most of you all know—I mean, it’s just the statistics here—CENTCOM has over 4 million square miles of area populated by 560 million people, 25 different ethnic groups speaking 20 different languages, hundreds of different dialects and confessing multiple religions, which transects national borders. And across history and today, the demographics of this AOR create opportunities for competition, for tension and for rivalry. As you know, the geography region consists of the intersection of three continents, globally vital commercial sea lanes, flight corridors, pipelines, overland routes, etc. We have 21 nations in the AOR, with the addition of Israel, that stretch from Northeast Africa across the Middle East to Central and South Asia. Forms of government ranging for the political spectrum from emerging democracies, hereditary monarchies, autocracies and Islamic theocratic regimes. And the region is one of the least secure and least stable places in the world. Adversarial relationships among neighboring states widespread ethnic and sectarian struggles, failing or failed states, malign influence, destabilizing activities, cyber-based threats and growing arsenals of sophisticated conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction, all combined to imperil enduring U.S. vital and national interests.

With this as a feel-good backdrop, CENTCOM’s mission is to direct and enable military operations and activities with allies and partners to increase regional security and stability in support of those U.S. national interests. U.S. CENTCOM, through its service components—one of them to the left of me—their actions and activities across the AOR run the spectrum from cooperation and collaboration to competition and conflict in accordance with Gen. McKenzie’s five priorities. Three are strategic, and two are functional. Priority one: deterring Iran—job No. 1 for us. No. 2 is disrupting and degrading violent extremist organizations. We focus specifically on Al Qaeda and ISIS as it metastasizes across the region. And then competing successfully with China and Russia to maintain primacy and stabilizing the enduring partner of choice in the region. And there’s a lot of competition in that part of the world.

Our other two focus areas are functional in nature. The first one is countering the growing threat posed by unmanned systems, where the offense favors the defense, as you know, and supporting whole of government international efforts to address refugees and displaced persons and counter the weaponization or exploitation of those refugees, creating a crisis in the future. ISIS 3.0 or 4.0 into the future. Today as we wrestle with enduring challenges as well as some current events: ISIS in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan, the civil war that rages in Yemen, Iran and their proxies and the malign activities that they conduct, and the dangerous resonant among those refugees and displaced persons in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. It is clear that our approach to these problems must be collaborative, involving not just the U.S. military but the whole of government and our partners and allies and international frameworks with regional and other like-minded nations working toward common ends, common interests.

For us, this involves purpose-built organizations, such as CGATFOIR, the NATO mission in Iraq, UNIFIL, IMSC or Sentinel, and CMF. But it also recognizes emergent collaborations, such as those that made the Afghan NEO possible last summer. So to close, and as I look at this changing region, I see both risk and opportunity. As the president’s interim National Security Strategy guidance directs us, we must work with those regional partners to deter Iranian aggression and threats to sovereignty and territorial integrity, disrupt al Qaeda and ISIS-K and other related terrorist networks, and prevent an ISIS resurgence, address humanitarian crises, and redouble our efforts to resolve the complex armed conflicts that continually threaten our region.

Our challenge then, and our responsibility is to adopt the correct posture and build those partnerships in order to mitigate risks, leverage opportunities in support of our national interest and, as always, should deterrence fail, be prepared to decisively prevail in combat. As Gen. McKenzie made clear across all priorities, maintaining readiness to decisively defeat Iran remains our primary war-fighting focus and the principle means by which we achieve credible deterrence. Avoiding conflict by demonstrating both the capability and the will to wage it relentlessly remains our key line of effort. How we optimize our posture, activities and operations—ranging from Phase 0 gray zone type of operations through major theater war—is the topic I believe of this panel. So I thank you for letting me introduce this, and I look forward to your questions when we’re done.

Raaberg: Thank you, DeCom. Gen. Guillot, your perspective from a CPAC position.

Guillot: Thanks, first of all, Gen. Raaberg, for the opportunity to be here and AFA inviting this panel. I think from the air perspective, the most evolving threat in the region is Iran’s increased capability in terms of number of weapons, quality of the weapons and accuracy of the weapons. And when I say ‘weapons,’ I mean ballistic missiles, UAVs and also land-attack cruise missiles. And not only the fact that they have more and better systems, but they’ve shown the willingness to use them, whether directly by their state or through their proxies. You know, every single day in the AFCENT AOR, there are attacks by either Iran or the proxies from Yemen, Iraq and Syria on U.S. and coalition forces or Saudi Arabia, UAE or Israel. And more and more frequently, those attacks have been complex, where they’ll have multiple types, two or three of those types of weapons at the same time, in a coordinated manner.

So what the air component can do to help Gen. McKenzie address this, I think, I look at in three areas. One is we certainly help deter, and the deterrence there is on state-on-state action, keeping Iran from doing something at the state level. The second is assuring our partners of the U.S.’s commitment to the region, to peace and stability in the Middle East. And we show that through, not only our combat actions, but also by performing defensive postures with the partner nations’ exercises. And something that we’ve seen recently, perhaps in the news, when Gen. Cotton sends B-52s or B-1s on Bomber Task Force missions. We’ve had up to 10 different countries escort those bombers through the region to show the regional adversaries that they’re committed to the U.S. and vice versa.

And the third way that we can help is due to the airpowers’ speed, precision and lethality, we can respond to those threats where and when needed. And, you know, that happens all the time based on what I said previously about the number of attacks that we’re seeing in the region.

Raaberg: Thank you. Col. Mastalir, little shift, but your views but really more through the lens of a real changing Space Force role in Central Command.

Col. Anthony J. Mastalir, commander, U.S. Space Forces Central: Well, thank you, sir. And really, thank you to AFA. It is great to be back here. Flew in from Doha, and I’m just so thrilled to see my family, right? Despite wearing blue threads, spice-brown threads, we’re all one family. We grew up together. We fought together. And it’s great to be back with the AFA.

Yeah, it’s an exciting time. I was sitting in my office at Al Udeid just last week, kind of thinking through some of the comments for this. And I looked up at my wall, where I have, there’s a large piece of felt in my office with the name tabs of all of the DIRSPACEFORs that have walked through the CAOC. First, when it was at PSAB and now of course at Al Udeid. And it struck me that, you know, in your opening comment, you talked about 30 years of continuous combat and, certainly, if you look at Desert Storm, I think the impact GPS had on the land maneuver was significant. And then again, after 9/11, when the very first DIRSPACEFOR reported to the Middle East. In fact, I talked with him—retired Maj. Gen. Dick Webber—talked with him about a month ago, reminiscing of those first days with then-Lt. Gen. Buzz Moseley and how they were kind of laying out the blueprint for how space was going to integrate into combat operations.

That blueprint has persisted, I would say has evolved, has gotten better over the years—over the better part of two decades of having directors of space forces in the air component. In a lot of ways, it’s been a symbiotic relationship between then-space professionals—Airmen—space professionals learning, honing their joint war-fighting skills here and in the desert. At the same time, the joint war fighters learning more about the combat effects that space capabilities can bring to bear and how to better integrate that. So we’ve kind of grown up together over the last two and a half decades.

But looking forward … we’re kind of on the precipice of something new with the stand up of the U.S. Space Force. It’s time to look at how we present space forces to combatant commanders. And that’s what we’ve been busy with—Gen. Guillot’s leadership, Gen. McKenzie’s leadership, Adm. Malloy, looking at exactly what that means. And for a new service, I think that probably looks like a service component. That’s what services do. That’s how they present forces to combatant commanders. So that’s what we’re building toward and putting the building blocks in place. So … the future is exciting in CENTCOM, not just because of our history, and the close relationships we have, but because over those years, we have matured the processes of air and space integration, and really space integration now across all the components. So a lot of work ahead of us. But it’s been, it’s been really wonderful.

Raaberg: You’re at the leading edge and change. Thank you. You know, Adm. Malloy, I’m going to take it to more of the strategic level, especially with the Unified Command plan change that brought Israel into your AOR. So really, what do you and the commander—Gen. McKenzie—see as the primary operational imperative to assure success regarding both your regional commitments but also security?

Malloy: That’s a great one. In Sept. 1, Israel went from EUCOM to CENTCOM in the AOR. And we have seen that—and I’ll be honest with you—two years ago, if given the vote, I would have voted that’s not the right place for Israel to be. So that’s how short-sighted I’ve been. Abraham Accords was a game-changer for that in a lot of ways. We have been operating with Israel in the J3 realm, A3 realm, for a long period of time. And so it has been a relationship that we built that we’ve just reinforced with the official change.

A couple of things that make it an opportunity: One, there is a shared perception of where the threat is coming from. The regionals, the established partners in the region, see the threat much the same way that Israel sees the threat. They both look eastward toward that threat. So that’s issue No. 1. Issue No. 2 is there is a—at the operational level—a recognition that there is a capability there that the new partner has significant capability, technical expertise, operational experience, that come to the show. And then the third thing—and I’ll have to thank Gen. Guillot for this—the third thing is that we have been able to show them in key elements of combat, what integration looks like in terms of improved capability. In two realms specifically, one is integrated air and missile defense. And the recognition of ‘This is what we look like, not partner. And this is what we look like partner,’ in terms of a layer defense surveillance that can come in. Gen. Guillot convened a grouping outside of the area, to have that discussion with heads of Air Force, and the first to do it.

And basically, this is what this looks like in a recognition of ‘this is the value-added.’ If your job, Air Commander, is to defend your country. This is the added value of that—without sacrificing sovereignty, because everybody defends their own space—this is what it looks like as you layer this out and link it up. So people see that in the air and missile defense realm. The other place that they see it is in the maritime. And because there is something called ‘international water’—there’s no such thing as ‘international land’—it’s somebody’s land—but in international water, like-minded countries can meet and organize. And in this way, free flow of commerce between Europe and Asia, and out of the Middle East with energy, is key to the global economy.

And everyone sees that, recognizes that and wants to make sure that that is maintained. There’s common ground there for people to operate in. They saw what happened when the Suez Canal was blocked up for several days and the loss of millions upon millions of dollars just because they blocked that. So they recognize that the choke points in our region, the three of them—the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab Al-Mandeb and the Suez Canal—maintaining that is critical. So between the air component and the naval component, they have moved this forward in an operationally pragmatic way. And we see that as all value-added.

Raaberg: Sir, I’m going to bounce off that point right there—the integration piece—and go to you, Gen. Guillot, because this is important. Specifically, what approach is AFCENT taking, especially to achieve joint distributed ops? And perhaps maybe there might be an example on the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.

Malloy: Sorry. Us bragging on you.

Lt. Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, Commander, 9th Air Force: Yeah, thanks.

Raaberg: Not a tough one, sir.

Guillot: So the distributed ops, in AFCENT began about two and a half years ago. And that was when Gen. McKenzie and my predecessor, Gus—Lt. Gen. Guastella—determined that they should move AFCENT’s command and control capability both at the tactical and at the operational level, back to CONUS, to improve survivability against the threat that I mentioned in my opening comments. Since then, we’ve moved a long way there.

So with the tactical C2—which is the 727th Expeditionary Air Control Squadron called Kingpin, if you recall that—they moved fairly quickly from Al Dhafra back to Shaw Air Force Base. And in May of ‘21—so almost a year ago—since then, they’ve been operational, controlling all of the ground-based tactical-level C2 in AOR from Shaw. Interestingly, they’re in the ARCENT building—Army Central Command building—which is a good demonstration of teamwork and jointness. And just as another note, that building number is building 1947 on Shaw Air Force Base. And so we let them know that we remember. But they’re great partners, and that’s where Kingpin controls the ground part. So the distributed part of that is the airborne TACC2s is still from the AWACS in the theater. So it gives us some survivability and resiliency in place.

The operational level, which is the CAOC, is taking a little bit longer because it has to be more deliberate, a lot more moving parts, especially with the number of countries that we have involved in the CAOC and the systems that it entails. But right now, we have about one-third of our CAOC capability is at Shaw, and two-thirds is that Al Udeid. And then, over the next couple of years, I’d expect those ratios to swap where we have about one-third forward and two-thirds of the capability back at Shaw. And there will always be a presence in the Middle East. But when we have that fully distributed capability, we can go 24-hour ops from either location, or from a number of other locations.

And the last thing, Gen. Raaberg, that I think we’ve seen as a benefit that I didn’t expect going in is access. And not necessarily access to different countries, but access to talent and individuals that we weren’t able to get into the CAOC because of the, you know, the manning premium that all of the air forces feel; it’s really hard to send somebody forward. But now that we’re distributed, they can very easily join us in our battle rhythm by VTC. And we have access to more experts from the U.S. and other countries on a routine basis through VTC in normal battle rhythm meetings than we would have if we were at one location anywhere. And so we’re seeing a lot of benefits to the distributed ops in addition to the survivability that we were seeking at the beginning.

Raaberg: Fantastic. I’m going to keep bouncing to you, Col. Mastalir. So what is distributed ops look like now from a Guardian’s perspective, especially in, through and from space?

Mastalir: Yeah, so, to a Guardian, distributed ops is standard ops, right? So it’s kind of in our DNA. When you think about one of the first things you learn if you’re doing satellite command and control is what information do you need to have available to you to operate a satellite that’s 22,300 miles away? And being able to ensure that you have those data feeds, being able to ensure that you have the access to that information when you need it and over the years kind of evolving to today, which is trying to understand, alright, what are the threats in that space domain that we need to be aware of, and how do we kind of manage that, again, from a very distributed perspective?

One of my first missions as a lieutenant was out in Sunnyvale, California, when we were flying the inertial upper stage for a NASA payload. So, long story short, you had an ops center in Massachusetts, you had the ops center in Sunnyvale, California, it was on a space shuttle mission, so you had Kennedy and then you had Houston. And getting all of those operational centers to integrated crew exercises, rock drills, understanding how that all goes together, and that was, you know, 25 years ago.

So we have a little bit of history when it comes to distributed ops, and I think we are also an enabler for distributed ops. I think what allows, you know, Gen. Guillot, for example, to do what he needs to do from Shaw is enabled by a lot of space assets and space technologies that we provide every day that Guardians provide from CONUS base locations, you know, around the globe. So we’re real fond of distributed ops.

Raaberg: Now that’s great. Adm. Malloy, former 5th Fleet commander, obviously, combined force maritime component commander as well, let me put your Airman and your Guardian hat on as the DeCom. How do you and the commander actually see vertical integration of air and space in the AOR?

Malloy: Chachi stole my talking points, but he wrote them, so I guess he can steal them? Um, yeah. In our region, I think that, you know, if you get a PACOM group up here, they’re going to say differently, if you get a EUCOM—well, they’re not going to be here today—but if they were here, they’d say it’s different. Our region is unique. It’s pretty much the only place I’ve ever, you know, put my hat so I can speak to this. We have always operated as an economy of force theater—austere locations, long distances between, and so access and basing has always been at a premium. As Chachi said, you know, the … only way we operate in that theater is with an integration of space. Utilizing space for communications for ISR, for command and control, as a naval officer, I’ve never sailed over there without leaning on that very strongly.

So with the advent of the new badge, there does not change the key enabler that space has been; what it does is it optimizes it. It creates an organization that has man-to-man coverage on that and doesn’t lose the tactical eye toward the war-fighting requirements. And so and Chachi talked about the component commander, we in the Navy have actually elevated information warfare up to a warfare level at the strike group level for much the same reason. And so the idea of a component—a space component, space for CENT—makes absolute sense for us as we’re sitting around the table, determining our way forward, having that voice with those equities, linked either as supported or supporting commander, depending on what the mission set is. And able to change hats quickly, like they do has been very beneficial. And I think it will be moving forward.

Raaberg: That’s fantastic. So, Gen. Guillot, what’s the air picture look like now in the AOR, you know, especially with ‘other actors’ and especially in the region itself?

Guillot: Well, it’s extremely complex. And I know, probably many, if not all, the people in the audience have been over there at time. And so you work just as hard now, as you did then, or you work just as hard then as they are working now. But the complexity is at a higher level than I’ve ever seen before. And that’s because if you look at Syria, and if you considered AFCENT and Air Force—which of course it’s multiple Air Force’s and Navy’s and Marine Corps’ aviation in one—but if you considered that one air force, it would be one of seven air forces that are flying day to day with combat aircraft in Syria. And only one set follows CFACC SPINS, and so it’s highly complex. And the way that our aircrew respond to each of those other air forces with the ROE is different for each one. So the level of complexity is very high in the airspaces over there.

Over the last, you know, I’d say a year, year and a half, we’ve really seen a dramatic rise in the number of UASs—enemy UASs—that are flying all across the region. And so in my other hat from the CFACC hat, also the area air defense commander—AADC hat—we built a layered network that goes from, you know, the ground commander up through the fighter and electronic attack aircraft in the air to try to address this threat that’s changing and growing very frequently. And we have a variety of systems that are stitched together and with kinetic and nonkinetic capabilities to knock these aircraft out of the air before they crash into our bases and do harm, which is the intent of the enemy there. We’ve gotten pretty good at it. We’ve improved quite a bit. And through all of those ground systems and fighter aircraft, and everything in between, we’ve gotten pretty good at knocking down these shooting down these aircraft. But I will say that the enemy has also gotten really good, and they’re advancing and adapting very quickly.

The last thing I’ll say about the way the airspace looks over there now, as opposed to it did maybe even a short period of time ago, is the level of partnership that we have with the partner nations over there and the coalition. Almost every sortie or mission that we fly is with a partner and, in the past, it was a lot of exercise. But now we’re seeing a lot more not just bilateral, but multilateral, participation by air forces in the region, which is new to that region. And we’re seeing it not only with exercises but in combat and in defensive patrols against that threat, which is really a unifying capability. Adm. Malloy kind of referred to that earlier, some of the meetings that I’ve had, and we have a group of air chiefs that you never thought would be in the same room at the same time and they said, ‘We all wear American flight suits, we fly American aircraft, and we’re going against the same threat, so we need to work together.’ And so we’ve gotten out of—to handle that complex situation that I opened with—we’ve gotten out of bilateral arrangements, and we have a lot more multilateral now.

Raaberg: Col. Mastalir, so I’m going to carry through with that, because very interested in terms of the allied and partner investment, you know, in the space domain, especially for this AOR.

Mastalir: Yeah, so the, you know, when the Space Force was established, actually, that created a very interesting demand signal from a lot of our partner nations in the AOR to kind of better understand what is the U.S. doing? What is the United States Space Force, and why do you need it, and what is the purpose and whatnot? So that’s kind of been, you know, an entry point to some of these discussions, and then what comes is full spectrum, right? So some of our partners are well invested in the space domain, and they’re looking at sharing information with an eye toward interoperability. Some of them are interested, you know, from an organizational perspective. How do you build this? How do you integrate the Space Force into the Air Force? How do we merge those? And how did you do it, and what worked well, and what didn’t work well?

And then some are interested in just very niche discussions. I had a very interesting discussion with one not too long ago about resiliency, and how do we achieve resiliency on orbit and with our space systems? So a lot of interest that varies across the spectrum in terms of where they are with their own programs and what they’re interested in and what their needs are. As far as the allies are concerned, our allies have never been stronger. You know, the C in CAOC is a capital C for ‘combined.’ And … I had for the last six months, for example, I had a U.K. wing commander leading operations for, you know, for the DIRSPACEFOR staff. So our allies are as close as they’ve ever been with us in the space domain.

Raaberg: Thank you. So this is gonna be a double round. Both you, Adm. Malloy and Gen. Guillot, because this is important. So you two have been together in your respective seats and led through incredible changes, especially in this AOR. And given what’s happening today, I think this question is even more relevant. Especially as you all have been together for the last year and a half. You know, what do you believe will be the next strategic surprise you must be prepared for? And then, the follow-up question will be, how does that change or not change the strategy you’ve put in motion through? Gen. McKenzie? Sir?”

Malloy: And he’ll have a smarter answer, so I’ll give him most of my time. But I want to leverage a little bit off of what Gen. Guillot said and Chachi as well, the game-changers that have occurred in the last 10 years or so—and there are several—on the bad side, you know, there has been a growing complexity of the threat both in the promulgation of advanced conventional weapons: UAS, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles. And they’re not only by Iran but also those that they arm with those weapons. And so the level of sophistication, as Gen. Guillot said, we’re seeing complex attacks by people we haven’t seen attacks by before. And in that way, cruise missiles combined with multi-axis UAS designed to hit air defense systems at the same time, that they’re going in different directions. So we’re seeing this threat metastasize in the region, and no sign of that abating.

We are also seeing the increased attention that is being given to this region by global competitors—China and Russia. Both are utilizing different levels of the dime, if you will, to compete with the United States for influence access, to try and displace us as a partner of choice with quick draw, foreign military sales, very transactional sorts of relationships. And that’s on the opposite side. On our side, as Gen. Guillot said, we are seeing much more capable regional partners, both at sea and in air, I think that you would agree. And, you know, in the old days, there will be an exercise, and we would water it down and you’d get a plaque and ‘best ever’ and that kind of thing. And it didn’t meet the requirement, and it certainly wasn’t a burden-sharing environment. And our current guidance is clear, you know, we are going to be focusing on another region.

So how do we squeeze optimization out of this region? Our partners are stepping up to lead and to operate with us at the level that they can, investing in the things that interoperate with us, you know, the CAOC is like the Tower of Babel, and so is CMF, and NAVCENT. And, you know, that has benefits far beyond the fact that they’re reading SPINS. It’s established relationships over generations of time that they’re used to operating with us, the leaders know our leaders from exchanging. So we have that going for us. And then the other side of that, like we said, is that we’re much more linked than we were before. So that makes us resilient to that game-changing threat that you talked about. I yield the remainder of my time to …

Raaberg: Gen. Guillot, we’re down to two minutes. So fire away, sir.

Malloy: Sorry. I’m Irish.

Guillot: Sir. Well, I agree with everything Adm. Malloy said at the strategic level, so I’ll just … how about I just tell you a little bit of how I see it at the operational and the tactical level, from the Airman’s perspective, how the next strategic challenge might manifest itself? And day in, day out, what I really worry about is how we might be pulled into conflict because of one of two ways: One would be just a miscalculation. I mentioned that we’re beak-to-beak with aircraft from six other air forces every day, and one does something wrong, and then we go from a normal day into a strategic-level crisis. And that can happen on the sea, that can certainly happen with indirect fire into one of our bases, and certainly it happens in the air. And it can happen in space and does happen to some degree in space.

But the other concern I have is the fact that if general is C2 and the ability to C2, and I have absolutely no question about ours. Gen. McKenzie could say, ‘Don’t fly here,’ and, within minutes, our aircraft—everybody—will know not to. But I don’t have that same confidence in our adversaries. Whether it’s rogue activity where they just don’t believe what their superiors are telling them to do, and they do something different and we see that. Or they just don’t get the message and they operate the way they think they should, and it’s not the way that their senior leadership wants them to. That’s the type of situation that I fear could take us from what should be a normal day that we can handle through our, you know, normal practices and take us into conflict. And I have no doubt that the first responders will be the air component because of our capability, our lethality, our precision and our speed to respond. And so my job is to make sure that we have everybody ready to respond there, not just what we do day to day in OIR, but we can respond to these variety of challenges.

Raaberg: Well, Admiral, General, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna apply combat rules when it comes to protocol. Can we let the colonel end on the high ground with a final remark about perspective from space?

Mastalir: Sure. Well, I can tell you … this is an exciting time, not because we’re beginning to stand up on our own, really, it’s because the investment that the Space Force is making in all the combatant commands—in particular in CENTCOM. It’s actually going to drive integration to a new level with the air component where it’s been very, very good for years. We’ll continue to grow. We’re going to continue to operate out of the CAOC—C2 air forces out of the CAOC. We’re going to continue to take that blueprint that we have developed and now export it across all of the components. And that’s really what Gen. McKenzie’s vision is in terms of … the impact he wants us to have within CENTCOM. It’s a great place to do it with great leaders, mature processes, and we’re just really excited to be here, so Semper Supra.

Raaberg: Excellent. Admiral? Seriously, on behalf of our entire audience, your entire team has traveled either from far or near, but thank you for making the effort to be with us. It’s been a privilege. Everyone? This is a conclusion of this panel. The next three sessions begin at 3:50. You can check out our programs for the details. Let’s give our panelists a big warm welcome. Thank you.