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

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

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

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

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.

Watch, Read: Lessons from the Afghanistan Withdrawal

March 13, 2022

Lt. Col. Joshua “Doc” Holaday, moderates a discussion on last year’s withdrawal from Afghanistan with Brig. Gen. Daniel A. DeVoe, commander of the 618th Air Operations Center; Col. Colin McClaskey, deputy commander of the 821st Contingency Response Group; and Col. Gregory Cyrus, commander of the 621st Contingency Response Group 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.

Lt. Col. Joshua “Doc” Holaday: Good morning, everyone. I’m Lt. Col. Josh Holaday, I go by Doc. A couple years ago, I was a PACOM planner and I learned there that you learn who your true friends are, whoever shows up at the last day. So my good friends, welcome to the final symposium here today. I know your books say that you’re here for mobility, global reach for the warfighter. We’re absolutely going to talk about that. But we’re going to spend the first third to a half of it, though, deep-diving on Afghanistan. And when you hear who we’ve got on the panel with us today, you’ll understand why I am honored to have three mobility leaders here with us to discuss the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and lessons we can apply to future operations. It’s important to highlight the importance of today’s topic and set the scene for you in the audience in at home. The capability that undergirds America’s international diplomatic and military power is the mobility forces, from tankers to cargo aircraft to contingency response forces—and to the thousands of Airmen required to keep the mobility machine running every day. The US military simply cannot operate without global mobility. As you all know, the Air Force’s mobility forces sustain everything the US forces do from exercises and training events across the globe, to presidential support missions, to homeland defense every day. Most recently, Air Mobility Command earned international accolades for its efforts throughout the Afghanistan evacuation. If you need another reminder of the importance of logistics, take a look on the open-source imagery coming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stunning. Looking to the future, Air Mobility will continue to play an essential role across the board. The Joint All Domain Command and Control, Agile Combat Employment CONOPS, global contingency operations in an ever-changing world, we do it all. Even after major US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended, we should expect no reduction in demand for rapid global mobility for the warfighter. That’s why I’m pleased to be joined today by three leaders who not only witnessed the Afghanistan withdrawal from various strategic vantage points, but are looking to the future of rapid global mobility. I’m pleased to be here today with Brig. Gen. Dan DeVoe, the commander of the 618th Air Operations Center; Col. Gregory Cyrus, the commander of the 621st Contingency Response Group; and Col. Colin McClaskey, deputy commander of the 821st Contingency Response Group. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me today. The evacuation operation we saw in Afghanistan would later become the largest NEO operation in US history, successfully transporting over 124,000 qualified evacuees out of the region, and onto intermediate staging locations. To kick off this conversation, I’d like to give each of you a chance to make some opening remarks on Operation Allies Refuge and what you saw from each of your vantage points during these crucial days. And we’re going to start at the strategic level and get down towards the tactical level. So Gen. DeVoe, sir, you’re up first, Where were you during this operation? And what did you experience?

Brig. Gen. Daniel A. DeVoe, commander of the 618th Air Operations Center: All right, Thanks, Doc. And first, I just like to say thank you to AFA, our corporate sponsors and partners for hosting this panel today and the larger symposium, and to all of you both online and here in the room that of that have taken time to join us. So I get the privilege to be the commander of the 618th Air Operations Center Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. And we provide the command and control for rapid global mobility. So airlift, air refueling, aeromedical evacuation and the global air mobility support system to include the CR forces, the AMOW, the JI teams, the EAGLE teams, etc, they’re out there making mobility happen for the department events in our nation every single day. Typically, on a given day, we C2 about 1100 total force aircraft. And so that’s about 180 higher headquarters requirements out of that pool on a given day. Right now, there’s probably about 40 of those in the air somewhere around the world. And you’ve heard that a mobility aircraft takes off every, or lands every two and a half minutes around the globe. That provides us a tremendous amount of flexibility, and that’s steady state operational requirements in day to day competition. However, when a crisis occurs, we get to leverage that flexibility and bring to bear the rest of that Air Mobility power. And that was the case in August for OAR. So at that time, on that day, you know, mentioned 124,000 PAX moved in 17 days. Air Mobility Command moved about 75,000 of those, the CR forces on the ground that we were C2-ing, and that was led by Col. McClaskey here, to my far left, they handled and processed just about all of those. So Air Mobility touched the lives of each and every one of those individuals, as we prosecuted that fight. It was 329 C-17s in the course of that 17 days, that went into Hamid Karzai International Airport and subsequently back out with full loads of packs, but it was 2700 total mobility sorties in those same 17 days around the globe that affected this operation and enabled that to happen. So this was a mobility-centric operation. But it was a whole of government effort. It was a coalition effort. It was a joint effort. And it was by no means all TRANSCOM or Air Mobility. So nearly every aspect of the Air Force’s core capabilities touched OAR in some way. Same for the Space Force. You know, whether you’re talking about the overwatch overhead with strike assets, the ISR, the space capabilities that were enabled, the BOS-I Airmen, not just the folks operating at HKIA. But throughout nodes across the system, nearly every AFSC was involved in some way. And it wasn’t just the uniformed members. We had civilians on the ground, civilian family members on the ground in USAFE building tents, setting up infrastructure, preparing field food and meals, not only for our Airmen, but also for the evacuees coming through. So truly a total force effort and a tremendous accomplishment by the entire team. The one thing I will say though, it is also offered a tremendous opportunity to assess and to learn some lessons, not just for the next NEO, but for high-end competition, kinetic fight against a peer competitor. And if we don’t leverage those lessons and opportunities that we had from this great successful operation, then that will be a true tragedy. So my vantage point was from the Air Operation Center at Scott. And they were long days and my team was working hard to C2 all of those missions. But the two gentlemen to my left here were on the ground, dealing with those challenges in their raw form, day in and day out. So, Doc.

Holaday: Perfect. Thank you very much. As you said, Col. Cyrus, you’re on the ground from before the evacuation began. So can you tell us about your experiences out there?

Col. Gregory Cyrus, commander of the 621st Contingency Response Group: Yeah, first of all, thanks, Gen. DeVoe. Thanks, Doc. Thanks, AFA for having us today. So I was actually deployed as the DIRMOBFOR I was in place in AFCENT at the CAOC on one July. And because of my CR background and assets tasked from CENTCOM to employ an 0-6 JACE, and ensure the airfield services remained intact at HKIA, the CFACC in his role decided that I was the right person to go forward. And so they put me into HKIA on 6 August. I spent my first week over at the embassy doing JACE duties for USFOR-A. In that capacity. I had the opportunity to brief the JTF-CR Commander Gen. Sullivan at the time. His concern obviously was essential airfield services to make sure that the airfield stayed operational and viable. On 13 August, he decided that he needed to pull me back over to the airfield and perform my JACE duties from that location. We all know what happened obviously on 13 and 13-15th of August. The State Department declared NEO, the operation began. And then we started obviously, pushing the sorties into HKIA. I just want to make one point clear, HKIA was the only airfield and only runway in Afghanistan at the time, right. So very important that we maintain that hub, that spoke, whatever you want to call it, in order to ensure that the airlock remained open to get those evacuees out of Afghanistan. And so over the course of the next 55 to 60 hours, we know what happened, we had a couple invasions. Obviously, when the Taliban pushed into the city of Kabul, it forced a lot of the Afghans to flee into the airfield. Immediately, they saw US aircraft and coalition aircraft, and they said that’s my best opportunity to get out of here. So they fled across the runway at that point. At that point, obviously, I was lucky enough to have seven aerial porters from AFCENT on the ground with me and former Marine air traffic controllers. They’re at HKIA. So when we talk about multi capable Airmen, I can really get into what I saw those aerial porters do and what those Marines did for us to keep that airfield open over the next 55 hours. Obviously, we spent our time, I assumed senior forward authority from the Turkish forces there, and worked our best to get 82nd Airborne and so that they could secure the airfield and then get the CRG on the ground where we bought Col. McClaskey in.

Holaday:

Perfect segue, sir, you came in with the 82nd, or right before, or just after?

Col. Colin McClaskey, deputy commander of the 821st Contingency Response Group: Doc, thanks. And I want to echo everybody’s comments here. Thank you to everybody being here at the end of the day into the conference, it’s been a great conference and thank you to the AFA for putting all this together. So I’m at a very tactical point on this and most people that I’ve talked to said I participated in some way. And that’s awesome. Because to Genral DeVoe’s point, almost every AFSC did, and that included, you know, at the time I was in the Horn of Africa, on an assessment mission. I thought that was the most stressful mission that I was going to do in several years. And then I received a phone call, and a phone call said, You need to get out to Kabul—Afghanistan is collapsing. And this was the middle of, earlier on in August. But something else that matter, something that we do in a very smaller force is we have really good relationships. And Col. Cyrus listed a whole bunch of acronyms because he had so many different hats that he was wearing. And he mentioned that he was out there because he was the right person. He had a diverse background. He could speak air mobility, he could speak the connected system that we call GAMS, he understood the C2 system. And so the first call that I made was to Col. Cyrus, and he was still in embassy at the time and he let me know how dire the situation was from their assessment. And my hope was that the team that I had with me in the Horn of Africa could go forward. But that ended up not being the case. There were many plans. And I know Gen. DeVoe’s team had very well thought out deliberate plans for how this would happen. But everyone gets a vote, the enemy gets a vote. You know, you name it. Things are very dynamic. So I ended up going forward as fast as I could to fly on an Air Force Africa, AFAF-owned C-130 to Ramstein. And then that day, I jumped on the next C-17 coming through to fly out there. But it’s important to note that while we were overhead, it was a Guard crew out of California that that flew me out there with the team that happened to be passing through. We couldn’t land. I could see the ground. I’m on NVGs in the cockpit, sitting [inaudible] for any of the C-17 folks that know that. I can talk to Col. Cyrus on the ground on the handheld radio, but we couldn’t land. And we couldn’t land because we had an expert already on the ground, who was able to assess the airfield. And think about this when you’re thinking about ACE and future concepts. But having that expert on the ground, who’s able to look and say, This is not safe for MAFF aircraft land right now. We need you here, we need the people, not me, they need the rest of the people and the equipment that were that was on that aircraft with me. So something that’s unique that our country can do is, the system already had tankers out there, over Afghanistan, because there wasn’t anywhere else to land or launch aircraft, our CAFSC that was going on there needed fuel. So we were able to go to a tanker, but we still weren’t able to land. So we ended up diverting to the ‘Deid, landing, getting a new crew, and then going back as soon as the airfield open. From then on, I’d love to talk at length about what all those incredible multi capable airmen do day in and day out, and what they did at Kabul because it was absolutely incredible. But they did it alongside partners, allies, friends, locals that were desperate to get out to save their families, that kind of stuff. And it was it was really inspirational to see everybody come together in a situation like that, and, and take care of those people that needed to be taken care of, and make sure we could get as many folks out of there even if they weren’t going to go on beyond the Middle East. We could at least get them out of that dangerous situation.

Holaday: Oh, appreciate it. I know the Mitchell Institute and certainly AFA would love to publish your stories if you’re willing to write them down or get your execs to write them for you. But we as officers are paid not just to look back fondly on our experiences and praise our teams but to keep a wary eye on the future. So Gen DeVoe, this OAR clearly required a tremendous amount of logistics planning and real time movement oversight and effort that was led by your men and women in the 618th AOC. However, in a future fight against a pure adversary, and again, I’m a PACOM guy, so China, the battlespace will likely be even more chaotic, untested, unpredictable, and lethal than what we saw on Afghanistan. So what lessons is AOC learning from Afghanistan, and how will we use those to shape the future of command and control in a much more contested environment?

DeVoe: Oh, great, great question, Doc. And so there are many, and to my earlier point, as far as if we if we pass up the opportunity to assess what transpired here, that will be the true tragedy. And I’m proud to say that I don’t think we are. At the Air Force level, at the joint level, down-echelon, units at every level are looking at this. And so that’s great. So we have we a trove of lessons earned. And I’m not going to touch on all of them A point that Colin had made, right, we had a plan going in and there was there was an initial, the initial was we’re going to flow these folks straight out of HKIA all the way back to the States. And so on those initial deployments, we had air bridges stood up, we had a plan laid out time, and we had all the C-17 capacity, we needed to go all the way back. But this is a State Department led effort, right. And eventually that transitioned over to Department of Homeland Security. But DOD was supporting and providing a bulk of that lift of that effort. And so you know, that no longer became an option, we had to stop somewhere, we couldn’t take everybody back direct to the states. So all I’ll say about that is the flexibility that’s needed, right? Best laid plans, and to Colin’s point, everybody gets a vote, those votes start coming in, and you’ve got to adjust on the fly from the C2 standpoint. And that’s what happened here. Without going into too much detail, I will say there were three major adjustments from how we conduct and flow aircraft and operations during the course of this. But some of the significant, at a higher, more strategic level, lessons that we learned—and we’ve, we’ve held Lessons Learned conferences through the LeMay Center for the AF on this very topic that lasted days. So I’m going to cover this very quickly. Data management, and C2 systems integration into common automated systems. Not just to drive decisions at my level, but to inform as well, up and down echelon. And we need that for a number of reasons, right, sometimes just to satisfy interest, sometimes to drive higher level decisions, sometimes to inform lower level subordinates. So they have the situational awareness. And if we end up in an in a situation where mission command needs to kick in, they’ve got the latest context prior to that point from which to base their decisions and take charge and move out. And so that one was significant. The joint mobility enterprise has a robust set of procedures that aren’t perfect and could use some improvement, but that do work pretty well. But, not so much an Air Force equity, but holding our joint partners accountable to following not what are Air Mobility processes and procedures, and that’s how it’s commonly represented, but joint processes and procedures to deploy. And those 17 days, we deployed combat air power from intra theater from within the CENTCOM AOR, from the CONUS. And then we started flowing evacuees out. And then we started sustaining personnel, flowing supplies in. And then we did aeromedical, evacuation, all along, flowing evacuees out. And then we did redeployment and retrograde of those combat forces and CR forces in less than three weeks. And so that was significant. And there were times that we needed to be agile, we took off with forces from the CONUS. And while they were en route airborne, the user said, Nope, we want to go to this location instead of that. And what do I have on that plane. And so systems with the information, the ability to manage that data and make those adjustments on the fly, are absolutely essential. And in the spectrum of competition through conflict. Remember, this was a relatively benign environment. Clear command relationships. So this was a CENTCOM led effort for the DOD. But in practicality, not directed, not officially, this was really a US TRANSCOM effort, really, as a supporting commander, as I said, spread across five combatant commands three geographic, two functional. And so understanding that is important. Because when we talk about things like mission command, if commander’s at each of the nodes and steps along the way, would have been left to make—and I’m not talking about the aircrew level, I’m talking about higher echelons—to make decisions based on their individual circumstances. The mission would have failed because they were in some very difficult positions. And they had very legitimate reasons to try to drive in other directions. But that wasn’t in concert with our highest guidance and with what the mission objectives and goals were. And so that drives to the need for centralized C2. But our crews on the ground, the CR forces, the aircrew folks on the ground at Al-Udeid, were making decisions that went against the books, were making decisions that they normally wouldn’t make in routine days. They were executing mission command, and they absolutely needed to, and had the full support of the structure, and authorities over them to do so. And so we needed mission command. At the same time. If you were in the keynote address yesterday with Eric Schmidt, you heard him say, when the internet was developed, it was initially developed, you know, from a disaggregated point, a decentralized point, and then has become centralized. But we’re actually, what we need today is both. I will tell you, from my perspective, C2 is the same way you need both, and we need to be able to move back and forth. There are many other lessons, again, at echelon, at many different levels. In the interest of time, and I know we’re gonna touch on some more as we talk here. I’m gonna, I’m gonna pass it over.

Holaday: Thanks, sir. So you talked about mission command and decentralized execution. A key part of that is commander’s intent. So Col. Cyrus, you’re on the ground early. Did you have commander’s intent? How did you get it? And how effective were you and your airmen at executing that commander’s intent?

Cyrus: Yeah, I would say I absolutely had commander’s intent, obviously, be in the DIRMOBFOR working directly for the CFACC. I had daily touch points with him leading up to the operations at HKIA. So I clearly understood what needed to be done from a strategic and operational level. What I came to realize really quickly when I got on the ground at HKIA and went into those JACE roles, slash CRG roles, was that unity of command became a challenge at that point, because we had multiple general officer-led joint task force USFOR-A forward, 82nd Airborne Division. And we even had the Resolute Command, general officer, still on the ground there. So each and every one of them had their commander’s intent, but it ultimately came from the President of the United States. So we needed to keep that airfield open and viable and operational, so that we could evacuate the people that needed to be evacuated. We needed to ensure the essential airfield services, those that was charged directly from CENTCOM to AFCENT. Make sure those airfield services stay open. And unfortunately, when that first crowd of Afghans came across the runway and breached the runway perimeter that caused the NATO contracts to cease operation, right. So the air traffic controllers that are part of the NATO contract, the port operations, the ramp services, all those were civilian contracts managed by NATO. Unfortunately, because of that incident, they couldn’t stay on the airfield and continue doing those things. So commander’s intent at that point, then became, you need to get out there and keep that airfield open. You need to assume senior forward authority and we need to take those [inaudible] and those Marines and make sure that they can do multi capable ops. We had we had aerial porters, expediting aircraft, marshalling aircraft, we had the Marine air traffic controllers, obviously providing security of the ramp, at the same time landing aircraft and taking off aircraft, it was a pretty amazing thing to watch on the ground, being a leader there for the CR forces and for the operation that happened. Commander’s intent, obviously, you know, strategic, making sure the strategic mission of getting those folks out of HKIA happened, but then taking that down all the way to the tactical level and making sure that we got the 82nd Airborne on the ground, provided the aircraft the opportunity to land eventually and eventually get the the enablers on the ground too so they continue working airfield services.

Holaday: I appreciate that very much. Col. McClaskey, you raised a great point in a previous discussion you and I had, and I’d love for you to expound upon it for us. As a weapon school graduate, I’ve seen my share of Red Flag [inaudible] where the fighters go out and do their thing. A peer fight in the Pacific is going to be different. Can you detail for our warfighter audience how Red Flag is really hard and important, but the things that need to happen before a typical fighter ‘vol goes down, maybe should not be assumed to have happened in a fight in the Pacific against a pure adversary. What kind of hard work does an ability side of the house have to do before the guys and then pointy nose aircraft get to work?

McClaskey: Thanks. I think all that starts—the how do you prepare, I talked earlier about having the right expert on the ground who could assess the airfield. All that starts well in advance. And for the Pacific that started many, many years ago, looking at all the potential airfields and this kind of thing. You talk about Red Flag, how many times have we gone out to the same locations, the same chunks of airspace on the West Coast, right, or over the Nellis ranges, that kind of thing. Things to think about. That’s the easy stuff. It may seem hard, but that’s the easy stuff. The challenge becomes when you go into a complex and very dynamic environment. And that’s what we had in the Horn of Africa and then in HKIA. And so if we go back to our roots and what we’ve studied in doctrine on this, it talks about mission command and the principles there. You know, being that you have to have commander’s intent, mission type orders and adaptable mindset. But there’s something else that’s more important. And that’s trust. And we saw that with trust up and down the chain, that trust doesn’t happen because an event’s going on. That happens in the exercise in the workups, working with their coalition partners ahead of time, working out at Red Flag and maybe failing a couple times until you can figure out how to get through that. But there’s a whole lot more that was relevant to the scenario. How do you get to Nellis? Fly in early, you build up everything. How are we going to get to that island that was Hamid Karzai? We weren’t floating stuff in and we weren’t driving stuff in, it had to fly. So it came down to logistics, air logistics, the air bridges, and we weren’t going to do any of that without having the risk bogged down by the persistent ISR, by the satellite communications, the BLOS, beyond line of sight stuff that we had provided there, by the multiple stacks of combat aircraft, and ISR aircraft, and all of the folks on the ground, from the soldiers and the Marines to the coalition partners to those mobility experts that were able to assess it. But I would challenge you, when you’re thinking about any major exercise, whether that’s one of the flag exercises or even a smaller exercise, start thinking about, how do we get to the scenario? How do we get our medical teams here? What medical teams are going to be here? Are they trained to be here? Are they prepared for global reporting instructions or local reporting instructions? I know that’s something Col. Cyrus is big on, right. What about the air refueling? Where am I going to put my tankers? Am I gonna have enough fuel? Are they compatible with all the aircraft that are gonna be operating in this arena? What about the threat ring? Gen. DeVoe highlighted that as complex and uncertain as Hamid Karzai was when it came to airspace, we were not facing a peer threat. When you think about that, how are we going to get that the enablers in there for the assessment, to get our fuel in, to get our medical teams in, to get the global C2 nodes in there. So we work through a lot of those challenges, but those are things that I think we as a service need to if we’re not already doing that, I’m just not aware of it, start working towards integrating MAFF more into those exercises.

Cyrus: Can I just add one thing on, Doc? So when it comes to Red Flag obviously we launch, we prepare, we move out of Nellis as the main operating base. Why don’t we try opening Nellis as the main operating base and practice that with our ACE concepts, right, and then when they’re returning from the vol, hey, maybe Nellis isn’t available for the aircraft to land and rearm and refuel at that point, and we send them somewhere else and that just happens to be a spoke that our that our forces went out and opened.

Holaday: Concur. I agree completely with all those statements, which is why I asked you the question. I’m gonna ask both of these questions to this question to Cols. Cyrus and McClaskey, but mainly Col. Cyrus here. So a key part of ACE is the idea of the multi-capable airman, right? And it’s designed, originally at least, to reduce the number of people we have to push out the door and then sustain at those operating locations forward. When I first thought of this concept, I thought to myself, so the CRG, that’s what you’re describing, right? But there’s a catch. The reason the CRGs are so good at what they do is because they train and exercise all the time. That’s a pretty big bill for an average wing to pay. It’s probably too big of a bill for an average wing to pay. And so during the Afghan withdrawal what parts of multi capable airman did you see working successfully, and what lessons have you brought back to be tailored from average wings’ MCA training plans?

Cyrus: Yeah, thanks. Um, so in my mind, what makes a good multi-capable airman involves three pillars. One of those, obviously, is the multi capable aspect of it, right. We’re training somebody to be good in one AFSC and maybe have some basic skills and another AFSC. We call that cross functional skills in the CR. Pretty much any one of my CRG airmen can go out and operate a forklift or man a defensive fighting position and do other things to help manage the airfield in the safety, in the operations. Another thing we saw is expeditionary skills. We’ve got to get away from this mentality that we’re going to a main operating base, let’s say Yokota or Ramstein, for example, and we’re going to start working out of operations or locations that we haven’t been to. It could be a dirt landing zone in the middle of nowhere. Or it could be an austere international airport where we’re just at the request of the host nation. And we’re not going to have all those accoutrements that we’re used to when it comes to working at a main operating base. Right. So expeditionary skills come in, they’re critical at that point, right, we need to start building that mentality from the ground up. During our assumptions, we need to change the culture, we need to make sure all our airmen understand that from the from the get go. And then finally, one of the things that’s going to be an issue, I think, in my mind, for the mission generation wings, is going to be proficiency. You mentioned it right, we train and do this and in practice, and operate this mentality on a day to day basis in the CRGs, we are allowed to do that because that is our job in garrison, is to prepare and prepare for that mission. What we’re going to need to see when it comes to lessons learned coming out of HKIA is that those skills that we practice are eventually going to atrophy over time. And we’re gonna need to make sure that we provide the time and space for airmen that are that are working toward that multi capable concept to be able to go out and do that at a more frequent basis.

McClaskey: Can I speak up here real quick, because everything Col. Cyrus said is 100 percent spot-on. And I’m very thankful that we have big brains like that, that are thinking about the forward, how do we develop and get better at this. But I want to just pass on some of the amazing stories that I observed personally, with some of our airmen doing multi cable things out there at HKIA. And what I’m trying to avoid doing is saying that, if you’re multi cable or cross functional, that you can do that other AFCS’s job as well as they can, you cannot, every single one of us are M4, M9-qual’d, we practice with defensive fighting positions, all that kind of stuff. There’s a big difference between securing the airfield, which the Army and the Marines did a very, very good job of, and controlling that movement area that we’re so used to, right. You call tower for clearance to cross and all the stuff—they’re not used to dealing with that. They have checkpoints. I did not have enough cops. Full stop. I did not, to the point where the defenders that I had were doing an incredible job of trying to control the movement on the airfield. But I had other career fields who had basic weapons qual, defensive fighting positions, stuff like this. And so they had the training, that they could augment, that they could help reduce that risk to safety, reduce that risk of bending aircraft, or having someone get hurt on the ground during taxi or flight operations. So that’s what I think is necessary when we talk about MCA or multi cable airman, is being adaptable in your mindset, and being willing to support whoever that lead is. So whether that was the vehicle maintainer, that I said, we have a lot of commercial aircraft here, but I’ve got old Russian air stairs, and they don’t work, can you help. And they’re thinking about ways that they can get this to work. And they found that there was a local person there who had worked on these air stairs for a previous contract, and they got them connected in or whether it was aerial porters, who found themselves augmenting security details with the Marines on the gate. So those are just some examples where you don’t know what is going to be needed at the time. But the huge advantage we have are really smart Airmen. We train in a variety of things. And they remained very adaptable.

Holaday: One of the things you guys haven’t mentioned in your training is the basics. And that’s something I saw. We went and put F-22s in Palau in 2016. And the number one issue is a lack of shade and potable water, like stuff we don’t necessarily think about, but in the South Pacific is a basic. So the importance to get out there and train, we’re going to fight super, super important. General, I’ve got one more question for you. And we’re going to be out of time, I think, here. Obviously, we’ve talked a ton about allied and partner support internationally, either at HKIA on the ground or moving throughout the network moving across those countries. In the Pacific, one thing I’ve seen firsthand is that smaller countries are hungry for sustained US presence to help them offset Chinese pressure locally, usually economically. Because AMC conducts missions around the globe each day, and very few of our aircraft come with the security requirements of say putting an F-35 in a random country, what role do you think AMC’s AOC can play both in coordinate geographic AOCs and in working with allies and partners to strengthen relationships and increase US presence across the world? So if something with an adversary like China were to kick off, the US would be in better shape with regards to its allies and partners?

DeVoe: OK, great, great question. So one thing that’s foreign to me is this notion that allies and partners are something separate from who we are and what we do day to day. And so right now, in the AOC today, I’ve got a Canadian officer on the floor, who’s running airlift missions, helping run airlift missions since I’ve been there. I’ve had Aussies in my AOC assigned, working. Last couple of years had delegations from Japan, Korea come visit, tour through, interact among others, even in a COVID environment, because there’s an operational imperative for them to understand and to integrate and be able to do business with us. This week, not really supposed to be talking about current ops. This week, I’ll just say we’ve had three coronets, we’ve planned and executed. [Inaudible] foreign fighters. And none of that’s in support of the EUCOM effort. I won’t mention that for what’s going on there. We had an airlift mission being flown this week, earlier this week, by a coalition partner and I won’t name any names. They broke, it happens, I probably got a dozen just broken in the system right now. But the cargo needed to keep moving. And as soon as they realized that they weren’t going to get their fixed jet fixed in a day, we were able to bring a C-17 in, transload, this isn’t at a military base, this is at a relatively austere location, transload, get it up and keep that mission happening. That’s integrated, interoperable partnerships between allies, and our peer competitors, and adversaries, they don’t have anybody they can do that with. And we have a whole list of folks that we can do that with. We’ve got MSAS teams today in Africa, regularly down in South America. We do this day in and day out—not to say that we can’t do more, and that we don’t need to do more to integrate with our allies and partners. Because we do, we can’t rest on our laurels. But what all those examples are that I described there, that’s winning in the competition space. And that is an advantage again, that our adversaries do not have. And it was no different in OAR. And it actually got pretty complex too. So we had we had allies and partners flying with us who were fully into CFACC’s ATO. Right. And 609’s ATO. They’re running and you couldn’t, you didn’t, you couldn’t tell, just as smooth as could be. We had allies and partners who are running their own missions, if you will, but still able to integrate and Colin’s team interacted with and operate with. We had allies and partners who gave us capacity, whether military jets or commercial aircraft. And I didn’t mention our commercial partners were heavily involved in this and we activated the craft as well. But we had, they gave us capacity that we could schedule and use. They crewed and flew, but we could dictate. And then we had very loosely I’ll use the word partners or other countries, let’s use it that way, that showed up. And we’re involved in this operation as well that weren’t necessarily allies and partners. But our ability to see to and bring all of that together, or to just at least operate in the same space, was absolutely crucial.

Holaday: Gentlemen, appreciate that very much. Dear friends, we’ve come to the end of our time. If you’ve liked what you’ve seen today, and like the questions you’re getting out of guys like me, I urge you to go over to Mitchellaerospacepower.org. The Mitchell Institute is where I am currently working, but they do a great job of putting out papers and podcasts that talk to you, the Airman and Guardian out there in the force. You can subscribe to their mailing list and receive updates analyst reports events and podcasts etc. Reminder next up in Gatlin D where we’ve been doing the big events, they’re going to do the award ceremony and the Spark Tank next. But special thank you to Gen. Devoe, Col. Cyrus, McCloskey for joining us today as a great panel. Thank you gentlemen. Appreciate it.

Watch, Read: Keeping Humans in the Loop of JADC2 and ABMS

March 13, 2022

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia, Department of the Air Force Advance Battle Management System Cross Functional Team Lead, moderates a discussion on joint all-domain command and control with Ron Fehlen, vice president and general manager of Air Force Programs, Broadband Communications Systems, L3Harris Technologies; James Dorrell, vice president of ABMS of Lockheed Martin; Lanny Merkel, director of JADC2 Capabilities Mission Systems at Collins Aerospace during 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.

Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia, Department of the Air Force Advance Battle Management System Cross Functional Team Lead: Good afternoon, I’m Jeff Valenzia. I, in partnership with Brig. Gen. John Olson, who was the lead from Space Force and the rapid capabilities office in the lead of Mr. Walden, are responsible for the modernization of Advanced Battle Management Systems. And so we’re going to talk to you a bit today just about where we are in that conversation of modernizing what we call command, and what we call battle management. And we have a really esteemed panel here of experts from industry, they’re going to talk about the incredibly close partnership that we have as the warfighters with industry. If we’re going to bring this reality of changing the way we sense, make sense and act and put it into your hands as a warfighter—out of curiosity, how many in this room here are battle managers? OK, a couple—I will tell you that the system of which we are designing, what is absolutely essential in this system, and our success, is the role of the battle manager.

Let me just put down this: 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. 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, turn it into knowledge and direct the actions if we’re going to win. The imperatives of how we do that, however, have changed. If you take a look at our battle management processes today, and I’m not going to surprise any of you when I tell you, that’s way too slow. I’m not going to surprise any of you when I tell you it’s way too vulnerable. And I’m not going to surprise any of you, when I tell you, not only just within the Air and Space Force, but across the entirety of the joint force, it’s way too stovepipe. And if we’re going to modernize, the way in which we make decisions, and the way in which we direct actions is going to have to get at the core of these foundational challenges that we have. And to do that, we have to put a stake in the ground in what we call our theory of victory. And our theory of victory is this. We believe that if you’re going to succeed against an advanced adversary, as essential as the bombs, bullets and platforms of which we know and have come to rely on in war is going to be how you sense, make sense and act in your environment.

And to do that, we’re going to have to make the functions of command and the functions of control separable. I did not say separated, separable. That does not mean that I need a commander inside the loop of every decision once they’ve allocated the resources and authorities and provided the intent. I don’t need them calling every shot in execution, 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. But that’s not going to be the case in all of our missions. For instance, I’m not going to separate control from command when it comes to nuclear operations. Instead, we have to design a system that has the ability to accommodate based upon the tactical scenario, and the risk — how we can separate those two—and it’s a lot harder than we initially thought. Second, we’ve got to go from our model of coupled battle management into a decoupled and distributed model of battle management. That means I can’t expect if I’m going to affect an outcome on the tactical edge, that I have to put the battle manager, their information systems, their sensors, and their direct communication into one platform and fly it where it becomes a missile magnet. We’ve got to be able to decouple those and decouple those in a very smart, methodical way. And it begins with the notion that they shouldn’t have to sit under or on top of their sensor to be effective. Rather, we’ve got to be able to deliver the information they need to be effective from distributed sensors, through sophisticated but very effective fusion models. I also can’t put them in reliance that they’re sitting in direct comms with every single platform which they control. The tyranny of distance, or the tyranny of speed, depending upon what you want to drive and what AOR you’re talking about, has put us into a position that conventional communication networks are no longer survivable or effective.

Finally, I have to integrate them. I have to integrate their processes, I have to drive commonality amongst the way in which we plan, allocate resources, measure and account for risk. But we also have to create commonality in their systems. And this drives a horizontal-vertical integration in our designs that we have both within the Air and the Space Force, but also across the joint force in a new and novel way. But I’m gonna go back to what I started with. Absolutely essential is there will be battle managers involved in this system. And we’re going to design it into the system in a way in which we’re to give them the applications to interface with the information, they have to transition that into knowledge. And then they can direct the action. But we’re also going to write some algorithms. So let’s not kid ourselves, there are some processes of which we relied on people, manpower, to do that we don’t anymore. And that we have a sophisticated enough understanding of those functions and those tasks and those processes to be successful, that we’re able to start to parse out some mundane, or error-prone tasks. And we’re able to allocate those to some machine activities. And what I’m painting for you is a picture where battle management achieves the same outcome of which it always has sought to achieve, but the manner in which we achieve that outcome, how we pull together, the technologies, how we mature, our tactics, techniques and procedures is changed. And it’s changing now. And so with that, just to set the course here, I want to give this panel an opportunity introduce themselves. And I’d love to have a conversation with how industry is going to be a part of what is ostensibly a really difficult task in front of us. So Ron, I’ll start with you.

Ron Fehlen, vice president and general manager of Broadband Communications Systems at L3Harris Technologies: So hey, thanks for the intro. Ron Fehlen, I’m the vice president and general manager for broadband communication system at L3Harris Technologies out in Salt Lake City, I tell you, when I listened to you talk about the networks, I immediately go back to what our core capabilities are, to ensure that we have a secure, assured resilient network to be able to push that data around to get to where it needs to be to feed all those algorithms, first of all. But I will tell you, as well, as I listen, I think back to my military career after 20 years, and the first part of it, as I mentioned previously, was spent on AWACS, and got to ride in the back end on the mission crew for about seven years. And I couldn’t agree with you more that the human part of the battle manager and that is so critical to the decisions, life and death decisions that are made every day. And I got to witness that firsthand.

And I’ll share as well, we never at that time, this was the ’90s timeframe, watching no fly zones and things of that nature. Never at that time did we talk about space, never talked about yet. You just talked about the fact that you’re not the only one that’s advocating here. It’s the Air Force and the Space Force working together. And then the third part is the joint force. While we always had the joint force, the level of integration, I think going forward, as you mentioned, is going to be actually absolutely critical going forward. So as a matter of intro, at least, and I’ll pass it on, Lanny.

Lanny Merkel, director of JADC2 Capabilities Mission Systems at Collins Aerospace: All right, thanks. So Lanny Merkel, I’m the director of JADC2 capabilities for Collins Aerospace, based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Unlike the other two members of the panel here, I never did serve. My background is in engineering, actually. Right. So I resonate a lot with some of the comments that the General made, right.

And sometimes, as engineers, right, we think of capabilities and delivering capabilities. And we also need to consider the operational constraints and context of, you know, engineers want to give you all the data and put it on all every inch of every display. And one of the challenges that we really need to get through is what data do we need to move around for operational benefit for the warfighter, right? And how do we reduce the amount of information that you need to go through so that you can really accurately make the decisions that you need to make as battle managers. And like Ron said, we know that that’s underpinned by having these resilient networks that allow us to move data and information around, secure processing so it’s always available. But ultimately, it does come down to the battle manager to make those effective decisions.

James Dorrell, vice president of ABMS of Lockheed Martin: Thanks, guys. Good afternoon, James Dorrell, Lockheed Martin. I’m the Vice President of ABMS and we’re trying to put a finer point on that within our corporation. Along with my esteemed industry panelists here, I just want to thank AFA, first of all, for giving us this platform to talk about a real critical, critical topic. I’m so excited to be face to face and not on a Zoom call. That by itself is, has been worth its weight this week. But just a couple of quick thoughts and when we can get back to Spaniard and maybe have some more robust discussion. I think we do have, as an Air Force, some foundational building blocks to that are important to ABMS. We have survivable platforms; we have many today and more coming in the near future. Those platforms have very capable sensors, which are going to provide that that plethora of data that we have. We have, you know, open system architecture technologies, that the RCO has played a vital part of the last decade in maturing, I think that’s an important building block. And then we have ground stations like the Shadow Ops Center at Nellis and common mission control center.

But even all those foundational building blocks, the drawback is they’re not tightly integrated. They’re not integrated horizontally, vertically. Many times, they’re in a single domain construct. And they’re very capable within that single domain construct. But that’s not what we need going forward. So just to kind of echo Ron and Lanny, what we need, resilient networks, absolutely. Multipath, self-healing that the network has got to be able to sense when it is under threat, under fire and be able to direct multiple paths. The data, I think Lanny talked about the data in many ways. ABMS is all about the data. And that data on those platforms is coming in at multiple security levels. And the network and the data managers have got to be able to condense that down to a common security framework to pass it ubiquitously. And then the third part I would say is, we’ve got to have a common set of standards and architectures and ones that are non-proprietary. That has proved extremely beneficial in the past. The UCI consortium that the RCO did, I think it’s a model we can use, but we got to be able to have, easily, third party applications move the data on resilient networks in some common standards. So let me stop there and pass it back to Spaniard.

Valenzia: Now, thanks. So recency has its primacy. So James, I’m going to pick on what you just said there. I’m an operator. And so a lot of the language that you use there doesn’t translate well into the operational construct. And I’d be interested to go a little bit deeper, because the imperative that you’re driving towards is interoperability. The approach that you’re driving towards interoperability is this idea of open mission system architecture. I don’t really know exactly what that means. And I bet you there are probably others. Could you maybe talk a little bit about from an industry perspective, what does that really mean? And how does that translate into the systems that you deliver? And so you guys are off the hook because I’m going to springboard to each of you to see how you think about that, because I’m gonna add another hook into it. There’s what we build, and what we have, and some of what we have, we inherited.

Dorrell: So let me give you an analogy here that hopefully resonates with some people. What is a closed architecture, maybe if we start there, then it’s easier to define open architecture. A closed architecture is one in which an industry member has vendor lock. And every time there is an upgrade, or an update that the Air Force needs or wants, they have to come back to that industry partner, and pay us over and over to update that closed architecture. That is absolutely what we don’t want. If all of industry is designing these resilient networks, and designing these algorithms that Spaniard talked about to a common set of standards and architectures, then every industry partner is bringing the best of breed to the table. And we can easily affordably integrate those apps or kinetic capabilities, non-kinetic capabilities in that open architecture rapidly, affordably and get capability in the warfighters’ hands more quickly. I don’t know if Ron or Lanny want to add on to any of that.

Merkel: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think I view open architectures as kind of table stakes, if you’re going to participate in this type of industry going forward. And like James mentioned there, it’s really important to be able to bring capabilities together across, you know, the companies that we have and the rest of industry together relatively quickly. And when we have those common set of standards, then we can bring them together, integrate them and more importantly, update them over time, right? Because one of the biggest problems you get into with a closed system, right, is you always got to go back to the same vendor. Right? And it’s usually slower, you know, takes a lot longer and it costs more. Right. So I do believe that that is the way that we adapt things more quickly. I guess the the only other thing I would bring up is, it’s also not a panacea either. We see some proliferation of standards across the different services, right. So one thing that you know, I think industry, we can also help out on is how do we drive commonality between the standards, between the different services. Between Air Force, Army and Navy so that, you know, we’re doing one implementation that helps the joint fight.

Fehlen: So I’m gonna pick on something you said just a moment ago, sir, you talked about what we have today versus what we need in the future and, and relate that to the open architecture piece in particular. So using a standard open communication subsystem standard, sometimes known as OCS, is an example of where it’s a, it’s pretty much a standard set of hardware, if you will, but you’re able, because of the architecture, to roll in, not just new capability, but capability that’s on the shelf today. So now I have a capability that I can hand somebody and say, with respect to vendor lock, or otherwise, hey, you’ve not only got what you have today, but when the threat changes its mind because it does get a vote that you’re able to, we’re able to make modifications, and it’s a it’s a much quicker process than what we’ve seen in the past. So those are, when we talk about open architectures in particular, and the need to buy into it, the closed system to be able to break down those some of those silos is a key piece of that, but it’s also being able to deal from an acquisition approach, how do I get what I have to still be able to use what I have today, while adding capability incrementally over time. And from, you know, just exposure, the data, if you will.

You know, James, you mentioned just a moment ago, self-healing networks, that they’ve got to be able to sense the environment and understand what’s going on and then make decisions in the box as to how to maintain that connectivity across the network. So that data keeps coming off the platform. Well, I tell you, if the if the system is sensing the environment, wouldn’t a battle manager want to know that? Wouldn’t they want to know, oh, hey, by the way, I’m making decisions on this. And I’m reframing my network, if you will, reconnecting to maintain to maintain an assured link. But by the way, here’s some data for you that says, This is what I’m seeing in the environment. And this is why my machine, my box is making these decisions. 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. So there’s sort of that two pieces of it, there’s some, the data movement and consistent standards to make sure that we’re able to push that wherever it needs to go. And then making sure there’s the connections underneath that not only encompass what we have out in the field today, but enable us to rapidly integrate new capabilities as the threat advances.

Valenzia: That’s helpful. So if I put it into terms that maybe some of us with dirt under our fingernails would say is, it gives us the ability to change your mind. And that means that we don’t have to imagine the solution and have it fixed today, to have something that’s delivered to us, maybe when we no longer remember the problem that we were trying to solve. And so that kind of introduces, there’s some new lexicon that we’re starting to have to cope with within the military that maybe in industry is a little bit more common type of lexicon. So open system architecture is one of those things. But there’s also this discussion about DevSecOps, this introduction of this idea of an MVP, a min viable product. And so maybe Lanny if I start with you, those are maybe some commercial practices that we’re trying to learn. And we have to adapt them a bit into our way of doing business. I’d be kind of interested in your thoughts on on how we go about adopting some of these principles.

Merkel: Yeah, and that’s something as industry, right, you know, MVP was really a concept that came out of Silicon Valley, right? If, if you’re going to do a startup, and you want to make money quickly, you got to get your minimum viable product out there. So you get a user base, and then keep iterating, iterating, iterating, and making your product and services incrementally better, right. And I think that concept is going to be what it takes to build up JADC2 system like ABMS, right, because if we did the traditional waterfall approach of trying to capture all the requirements, looking at every corner case, before we actually try and build something and deploy, right, it’ll never meet the pace of the threat, right.

And so what we’ve seen over the last few years is we’ve really focused on how not only it helps us operationally, but also in our development environments, right, we want to get a product out there, get it into the field, have a DevSecOps pipeline, which just really means, hey, if you go take out a product, or radio, for example, I see a threat that I haven’t seen before, you know, maybe I can get that data back now. And I can turn an update and push it back out in the field in a matter of, you know, hours and maybe days as opposed to weeks and months that we would have seen previously. And so key to enabling all of that is not only the technology pipeline that supports that, but also the policy that supports rapid updates out in the field. But I think that, you know, that mindset integrated with not only the technology but the policy is going to be key factor moving forward.

Fehlen: I’ll jump in. So let’s take it a slightly different way for a second. DevSecOps, development, security operations. So how long, how long have we seen that chain unfold sequentially? It’s been this process of, hey, we’re going to develop something, security is going to bless it off again, get the ATO uploaded to the system. And you as an operator sit at the screen you say, well, that’s not really what I was thinking. And now we have a loop that’s measured in years and millions of dollars rather than a, how did I get here, and how do I decrease that loop timing? So the purest view of DevSecOps out of Silicon Valley, the ops was actually not operators, it was the network operations piece. But I’m really glad to see that, at least in the service, we’re thinking about ops as the operator. So we have places like Shadow OC, where the developer is sitting next to the security folks so that we can know we can ship to the floor quickly. And then the operator sitting right there as a part of the scrums to be able to say, You know what I got, let’s put that one on the backlog. This one is the one that’s important to me, let’s prove that out in the MVP, and then we’ll iterate it.

So we’ve basically taken that long sequential cycle, and being able to shrink it down. So from that perspective, I’ll tell you, from an industry perspective, it’s one thing to have the experience of being in the military at one point. But for those that don’t, it’s amazing what can happen when you sit the operator next to the developer, and of course, the security side to make sure that it can actually get uploaded, and see what they do. We’ve watched this proven out over the last five years, no different than the commercial industry. It’s what gives us these amazing, you know, whether it’s Waze or Google Maps, take your pick, we’re seeing updates all the time, we need to get to that loop. And this is the process by that we can do it. But frankly, for us on the industry side of me in particular, it’s how do I make sure the person that at the end of the day is going to rely on the tool that I’m giving them, has had input direct input before delivery, so that we’re building up that MVP over time, rather than shipping something to yours and finding out it’s the wrong tool for the wrong operational environment.

Dorrell: One more quick thought. And I’m in violent agreement with both Ron and Lanny. But one more quick thought is, 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. And then when it actually gets in the operator’s hands, they find ways to utilize that product, that platform, that software that that engineers never imagined, and that DevSecOps tightens that loop. You know, the best analogy I have of that is, when we were first introduced the fifth-gen fighter F-22. We had designed it for 10 years, we knew exactly how the pilots going to use it, they take it out to red flag, start using it and all of a sudden, they’re spreading apart. They have operations, conops that we never even dreamed of. That’s just one macro example.

But in a software, we want that operator input early so that we can adjust that design. And then as the guys said, you know, continue to iterate it very, very rapidly.

Valenzia: So if I play the word police on commercial industry, and a lot of words that you guys deliver to us, I would say there’s probably this some phraseology we use within the military, I’m not so sure is defined in the same way we used to use it. And so one of those is the tactical edge. We’d like to talk about the tactical edge. If you’re a cyber operator, where’s your tactical edge? If you’re a space operator, where’s your tactical edge? And in fact, what we’re finding is that’s not maybe as descriptive of a term as it could be. We look at it through the lens of industry, who’s looking back at us? Are there ways in which we need to improve how we communicate to you so that you guys can be effective as a partner and helping us to modernize how we do advanced data management?

Fehlen: So I’ll jump on that one. So your point on tactical edge, and I think from an industry perspective, I understand the nomenclature, I understand the lexicon, right. It’s pushing, pushing data forward, letting operators forward in the field at the operational level or at the tactical level. But I do find it interesting that it focuses us on, no kidding, getting the data forward, not pulling the data back. That’s been one thing we’ve seen over and over again. And a lot of the systems as was mentioned previously, that are still piped in nature, they can talk to a few things and ship the data back somewhere. But then they have to ship it all the way back forward into quite a loop in order to do that. And sometimes there’s process and policy involved. So the mentality of an edge actually forces us to think forward how to connect those things. But to your point on what where is the edge for a space operator as an example? I’d say that’s where the lexicon shifts to where are the effects at? Where are we driving the effects? So it’s not just the strategy.

It’s not just the implementation, the resourcing, etc., but where do we—It helps us look at the effects that are going to go and actually to complete the mission. So that way we’re thinking about not just what do I need on the big screen maybe in the back that, that people have time to deliberate on and figure out strategies and so forth and risks and COAs, but actually are thinking forward and more of a fast pace. I’ve got to make decisions now because it’s tactical in nature. And how do I speed up that loop at the very front. And so again, it goes back, we keep harping on it, right, it’s about data, it’s about getting the data out there to make sure that it doesn’t have to travel, even if it’s milliseconds back to somebody’s inbox that they didn’t have to review, take a look at and say, Yeah, this is good. Now send it all the way back forward. And then a dynamic battle environment, that’s the other piece is your tactical effects. There’s a temporal nature to them, not just spatial. And so from that perspective, you you really have to close that loop down from a communications and networking and make sure the data gets there. So that’s that from both the tactical side is where the effects are, at least that’s the way we think about it, or I think about it, and on the edge, it’s really about forcing us to think about the people that are actually going to use it in a campaign at a tactical level to accomplish objectives.

Dorrell: I’ll add on. And I think it’s a great point, Spaniard, because different terms mean different things, right. And when I think tactical edge, what I think is the most stressing environment that we’re going to have, which is a very highly contested environment, right, with a lot of threats in multiple domains.

And so I think, as we go forward, you said, how can government, you know, help industry. I think it’s to define what those environments are that the resilient network is got to operate in, and the environments that the data has to be passed. And, again, the more stressing that is, it’s going to exercise the network to be able to self-heal, to be able to replicate and get the data where it needs to be. But those have got to be defined, what are the threats in all space, air, maritime ground that this network is going to have to operate in define that, and I think industry can, working with the government, help define the characteristics and the performance of that network.

Merkel: Yeah, I would just add that I don’t think there is one definition of that, you know, there’s, there’s gradients of everything, right. I think of the, you know, the very edge as the most disadvantaged platforms and users, right. But there are edge platforms that have more capabilities, but still don’t have all the situational awareness you might have in an op center or areas like that. So, you know, when we’ve been thinking about it internally, we’ve had the same discussion actually, in the last week. When we’re working through some of our strategies of, you know, there’s stratification of how far you are in the edge. And when you get from high bandwidth, you know, I’ve got SATCOM and all these other high bandwidth pipes that I’m used to having in like a telecom environment, it’s fairly straightforward. As long as that current activity’s there, it’s when we get to the platforms that are much more disadvantaged, that have links that come and go but still have to fight through. You know, that’s, that’s really where I see the challenge in terms of how do we maintain connectivity, and situational awareness for those platforms when they’re disconnected. And they have to fight through and provide better capabilities when they’re connected back up to the, to the networks that they have

Dorrell: Spaniard, mind if we ask you a question?

Valenzia: Why not?

Dorrell: He told us we could, right? So I think we all recognize in this community how important the technology is and what the technology can bring. But I think equally important is the TTPs. And have have you or the ABMS team within the Air Force looked at, you know, combining the technologies and the TTPs. And what that yields.

Valenzia: Yeah, actually, I really appreciate the question. And I appreciate the fact that you guys don’t look at this just as a technological challenge. When we went out into the modeling simulation, we started working with the warfighters. And we watched them operate and realistic and stressing training scenarios, we came to that conclusion that when we put some pretty nominal technologies into their hands, the warfighters very intuitively knew what to do with it. But the technology alone was not sufficient. What we watched the warfighters do through iterations in the exercise, as they started to very quickly adapt their TTPs, a lot of learning was going on. So some muscle movements, and this is where we ended up seeing an exponential improvement in the outcome. And in this particular case, just so I’m honest, I measured the outcome by the time it took them to identify a viable target to when they tasked it to a resource to go in, generate an effect on the tactical edge. And this measurement of time in one performance measure, it was the coupling of them.

I think this is when the DevSecOps becomes really interesting to us. Because as operators are imagining, better and better TTPs, the opportunity to directly talk to the developers, to adapt the tools to their problem set are fantastic. However, caution, but we’re also finding is a lot of operators who want to take these technologies, and they want to use them in very novel, but tailored ways. The consequence of that is actually a repeat of the mistake that we made that drove stovepipe C2, which is we allowed every seat, you know, to be this wooden shoe.

And so we have to drive this in an enterprise approach. We have to learn from and then institutionalize both the technologies and the tactics if we’re going to see the real performance or return on investment. So I’m going to go back to, and I don’t have somebody to hit the question over to next. So I’m just gonna go back with my next one. Because there’s something that, you know, many you said, that resonated, because, first of all, in the spirit of being in Orlando, we all like to be Imagineers. And we oftentimes hear people who talk about command and control and they say, Well, we’re just gonna, I want it all in my pocket. You know, why can’t it work like Uber? Why can’t it work like my Google Maps? Why can’t it work like TikTok, and how we distribute ISR data out? You mentioned, hey, we got a lot of data, we got to figure out where we got to put that data, you started talking about the big P word, policy. And so I’d be interested in your guys’s thoughts, and Lanny, I’ll put you on the spot first, 10% of our expectations, because it’s not that simple, and as somebody who leads an organization that tries to deliver these technologies to our hands, us as warfighters expecting it to work the way our smart devices work. Tomorrow, maybe it’s time for us to set some expectations. I’m interested your thoughts?

Merkel: Yeah, I mean, when you start to talk about edge capabilities, and what people want, like the cell phone is the number one example that everybody always uses when they’re talking about this. And there’s just additional complexity that you have trying to replicate that in a battle space, right of that’s built on top of billions and billions of dollars of telecom infrastructure. And it’s built on lots of large data centers. And, you know, to have that experience where I’m sure you’ve all had it, with your cell phone of scrolling through social media. And then I see it makes a product suggestion that I don’t think I’ve searched before and only thought about it, but somehow it knows that I need it or want it. And I think that’s the kind of experience we want to have for the warfighter. But, you know, there’s some unique challenges that make it a problem, right? We’ve talked a lot about the connectivity challenges associated with that. Because, you know, I mean, we’ve all also experienced, like losing connectivity, and not having a cell phone signal, and then it all falls apart, and we can’t have it just all fall apart. So I think we need to think through what’s a, you know, a graceful degradation of capabilities, as we, you know, drop some of the connectivity and some of the capabilities, and also recognize that we have some unique challenges and security classification, that, you know, just because we can connect pipes from different networks doesn’t mean that we can always transfer all the data. So I think we’ve got to, you know, keep that as sort of the North, the GuideStar, of ease of usability, right, but try and start with that minimum viable product concept, and try and incrementally add in this, you know, I’m going to add this connectivity that I didn’t have before I discovered that I need some cross-domain solutions, you know, in order to get that data across, put this together, and sort of incrementally build that up over time, and try and get to more of where we want to go.

Fehlen: So I think there’s parallels, but you’re right, it can be taken to an extreme from that prospective. And Lanny, you mentioned a couple of them just because of the investment and the global coverage, and so forth. By comparison, our data set is sparse in nature, to what, you know, is collected off of our phones and so forth, as well as what’s just purely available. But then look for the similarities. What is it and unfortunately, it’s not the convenience things, but it’s the important aspect of it that goes back to the standards. We have all that information. And we can get that because there’s a standard interface into the dataset that’s provided. So whether or not we have that massive amounts, we’ve got to have those standards that say, Hey, this is how I can go retrieve that data from anywhere. As Lanny mentioned, the security aspects of it are critical as well and being able to solve, some of that’s policy. Some of it’s technology. Some of its just pure ownership, but being able to actually produce and be a producer of data and get it out into the right hands. So I think there’s parallels there. But it’s fair that it can be taken to an extreme. But the real key is if you have the interfaces, that’s the thing that enables.

So there is a point at which today, we may not be able to do it as effectively as we can call an Uber ride as an example. But there is a point in history, I believe, if we establish the standards, we look at it through an architecture view and a reference architecture view, and go after that, we will actually be able to get to that point, we’re actually getting more data. Because we’re collecting it, we’re making it more pervasive within the community for analytics and otherwise, so battle managers aren’t in the middle of the fight trying to figure it out, but they’re actually using the data from last year that they watched in an exercise and I get to play it over and over and over again, and even modify it. So we, it gets that. So we would all like that luxury at some point day. But man, it starts with the standards. And underneath that, then the data has to get there, as we keep talking about. It’s got to be over a network that’s assured, it’s got to be resilient. And it’s got to be secured, if you don’t have those, unlike me not being able to find my way to the restaurant downtown, because Google just can’t connect, it’s not going to work in an operational environment. And oh, by the way, in that operational environment, somebody’s actually trying to prevent me from getting to that restaurant, so to speak. So it’s a good analogy, but it’s really boils down to the standards, and being able to get the data out of very siloed systems. James?

Dorrell: Just one more thought there. I think we have to all acknowledge that there are a lot of legacy systems in the Air Force and the Navy and the Army, that were not developed with open architectures, you know, for the past decade or so. And going forward, that’s table stakes, as we said, and they will have, but think about all of the platforms that the Air Force is operating today that were designed 15, 20, 25, sometimes 30, 35 years ago, they have a closed architecture. And taking them to a fully open architecture is very expensive. And so we’re doing it gradually over time. But we cannot flush the entire architecture on a B-52, or a C-130 or an F-22 and go to a completely open architecture. That’s just another challenge on top of what Ron and Lanny said.

Valenzia: I appreciate that. So in the last couple minutes that we have here in this panel, I’d like to give each of you just an opportunity with a few closing remarks. To start with you.

Dorrell: I just want to thank again, you know, Spaniard, for your leadership. I think, you know, we saw Secretary Kendall and heard him this morning, talk about his operational imperatives. I think we all recognize how critical those are. Industry just responded to all seven of those over the last month or so. And believe me that was that was fun and challenging to get those responses back in just a couple of weeks. We look forward to some feedback on some of those are sitting down maybe in an industry, government industry, environment and discussing how those go forward. We’re also, I’m also excited about Capability Release One which is now being released out of the RCO. And we responded to that. So I think we see this ABMS momentum now really starting to build, and we just look forward to partnering with you and our other industry partners to start to realize that vision.

Merkel: Thank you. Yeah, I just want to thank you and other panelists here for taking the time. You know, I, I think it’s really interesting that, you know, we all, we all see the same challenges, right. And, you know, a lot of these discussions go in similar directions, right. But as James just said, I think it’s really encouraging to see progress being made, you know, capabilities starting to be put in place, and we can look forward to really working together on it.

Fehlen: So again, also, I’ll third, I guess, my thanks both to AFA, as well as yourself for coming out and just having this opportunity to talk through this because it is absolutely critical. And I’ll second both James and Lanny. And that it’s great to see the progress now moving forward some real focus on getting stuff out the door, getting the industry on contract, etc., just start working these issues, and coupling that with as the Secretary Kendall talks about the operational focus, so that we’re really driving those two together. It almost goes back to what we talked about a few moments ago on the DevSecOps really driving together the development aspects and getting that going, but also an operational effectiveness focus, so that we can solve these problems quickly.

Valenzia: Well, thank you all. Thank you, not just for today, but thank you for every day. Thank you for being in the trenches with us as we work through this. You know, AFA this year in lieu of speaker gifts has made a donation to enable some Airmen and Guardians to enjoy the barbecue tonight. You’re welcome. The next session is going to start here in this room here at 1:15. It’s gonna be a panel on unmanned and autonomous systems. Thanks for being here.

Watch, Read: Future ISR Will Include AI for Faster Decision-Making

March 13, 2022

Maj. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback hosts Brad Reeves, director, C4ISR, Elbit Systems of America; JR Reid, vice president of strategic development, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems; and Luke Savoie, president, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, L3Harris Technologies, to discuss “ISR / Remote Sensing” at the AFA Warfare Symposium on March 4, 2022. This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of JobsOhio.

Maj. Gen. Leah G. Lauderback: All right. Well, good morning, everyone. I hope you had a little bit of coffee in between the break there and are ready to get started talking about a topic of course that is near and dear to my heart. I’m the senior intelligence officer for the Space Force, Major General Leah Lauderback, if I have not met you yet, and we have a really great panel today to talk about ISR and remote sensing, both from an air and a space domain. I am hopeful that we’ll be able to talk a little bit about that as well. So the lineup of specialists that we’ve got today, I think they’re going to be able to talk to really maximizing and enhancing the capabilities that we look for in in those two domains. And then of course, how that helps to help the joint warfighter in all domains. So let me just do some introductions real quick. So Brad Reeves here, director of C4ISR at Elbit Systems of America. Brad is a retired Air Force colonel and fighter pilot who served as a director of the NATO Deployable Air Operations Center while in uniform. Mike Shortsleeve, who you do not see on the stage, who is the sector vice president of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. He was unable to join us here at the very last minute. So JR Reid, thank you very much for being here. Vice President of Strategic Development, doing the pinch hitting for Mike today. Thank you, JR. And then finally, we have Luke Savoie in the middle here, president of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance at L3Harris technologies. In his role, he oversees a leading aerospace mission and modernization prime integrator to U.S. and international militaries for ISR, strike, and strategic command and control platforms. So first, what I’d like to ask you all to do is just take a minute or so to introduce yourselves, and kind of what you want to, if there are any thoughts immediate off the top of the head, off the top as to this topic for ISR and remote sensing. So Brad, I’ll start with you.

Brad Reeves: Thank you so much, General Lauderback. Well, first, if I can, I just want to admit how envious I am of our Airmen and Guardians in the room. And here’s why. Because you are going to make history. You get to do what only happens about once every quarter of a century. And that is rewrite completely the doctrine, TTPs of how our Air and Space Forces are going to fight a peer threat going forward. And so to me, that’s very exciting. Naturally, ISR is going to be a huge part of that, even more so important in that type of environment. And so here’s what I want for your future. In simple words, to be able to think faster, and break things faster. I think we all want that. But what that looks like is, it’s ISR that can leverage the capabilities of autonomy in AI to be able to increase the speed of decision making, and also to be able to decrease the kill web timeline. Right. And so what does that look like? Well, quickly, we go from how it was, to how it is, to how it can be, right? And so how it was, that’s kind of my generation. That’s the old guys in the room. And oh, by the way, you know who you are. If you flew airplanes, and everyday you took off, it was a GPS denied environment, then I’m talking to you. But in that time, just to share a quick story, what that was like for the ISR and getting information. I was sitting on the ramp, engines running, about to taxi, it was a combat mission. I get a call from ops and they say hold taxi, intel update en route. And so, sure enough, a young intel superstar Airman comes running down the ramp towards the jet, pop the canopy, he hands me physical, you know target paper pieces of paper with targets on it. We didn’t have the Link 16 and FMV, and all these great cool things right? And we take off, of course, there’s no more updates after that because he there’s no way to do that. And so that that’s not the future I want for you. Right, that’s certainly not enough. We have … especially thanks to General Atomics and L3Harris, you know we’ve got some really cool stuff going today on aircraft, there’s a lot of sensors integrated, you can correlate and fuse that stuff in a helmet that’s displayed to the pilot, gives a whole new meaning to the term death stare, right? So that’s pretty cool. But it’s still not enough for the future. So that’s not what I want for your future. But what it looks like, is very similar to your everyday life. When you walk out and you now have, you have activity and proliferated sensors everywhere and access to that, you can almost know everything. It’ll tell you what movie to watch, where you should shop. If you get lonely, Alexa and Siri are always there for you and they’re always listening. They’re always listening. So this is kind of you know, so now if you take that image, transplant that into on the military side and you imagine proliferated remote sensors, right? You have autonomous capability that can operate those at the edge, you have AI built in that can make sense of what they’re seeing and can then push recommended actions to the warfighters. And the warfighter could be a pilot, a console operator, could be someone in the SPOC, could be someone in a DCGS, could be ISR-D, CRCs, ASOCs, all that information is now available. So that’s what I want for your future. It’s ISR capability that leverages autonomy and AI capability to increase decision-making speed, decrease kill web timeline, think faster, break things faster. That’s what I hope for your future and I look forward to the conversation today.

Lauderback: Thank you, Brad. I like that future very much. How about you, Luke?

Luke Savoie: Yeah, sure. I’ll sum it up in one word, when we look at it. The one word is trust, right. We’ve done over the last, it’s hard to say 20 years, over 20 years in the War on Terror. The unconventional fight, we brought an enormous amount of tools to bear to build up information. And that has created an enormous amount of trust in every action that we do. Whether a decision-maker has confidence in what they’re doing. A person who is watching a target, which I spent an enormous amount of time doing in U-28s and gunships, understanding the atmospherics of what’s going on before they strike, or put boots on the ground to do direct action. And as we transition now, and geopolitical events are a pacing item that do that, right, we don’t have the luxury of 2035 roadmaps. You know, roadmaps are great on PowerPoint, but the adversary does what they do, and we have to, you know, outpace that as a pacing item on how we transition. But how do you model trust so that when you look at disaggregated systems, or you look how you work in contested environments, between, whether that is, how you bring the space layer into it, and people talk about, hey, how do I get, you know, dots out of a space layer onto an ATAC on a guy’s arm, and in when you talk to that guy about his ATAC on his arm, he’s like, I don’t want dots on it. I just want to trust the information. I’d rather have someone tell me something in the air. And just I have confidence that they know what they’re saying. And so how do we do that. And every tool that we bring to bear, whether it is you know, AI/ML, or the next buzzword that’s out there, it has to drive trust. And that’s what our future will be. So that when we are working in these very highly maneuvered elements, with very contested comms and our sensors completely disaggregated around the battlefield, the sensor, the shooter, and the decision maker all have high confidence in what they’re doing.

Lauderback: Thank you, Luke. That’s great. Thank you. How about yourself, JR?

JR Reid: Good morning. Thank you, Ma’am. Thanks for letting me sit on the panel, replace Mike. I was not the better looking guy in the middle there. So I’m retired Air Force as well, was a Herc driver, C-17 driver, and then have been in the unmanned business for about nine years, kind of looking at all of the DOD. I like the, kind of the one-word summation that you provided. My one word is going to be risk. And so I’m taking my perspective, both as a former uniformed officer in our service, and now as a businessman. And I think our unmanned … your perspective is from where you come, right, and nine years in this business. I’m going to give you an unmanned perspective. And we’re not bold enough. There is there we are tepid when it comes to taking risk. It’s unmanned. Yeah, an MQ-9. It’s not like it’s free. Yes, it costs something. But where are we really pushing boundaries when it comes to risk? And to quote, our chief of staff, right, accelerating change, we’re crawling through change, we’ve got to be more bold. I mean, if the current environment tells us anything, we’ve got to be bold, we’ve got to take risks, we’ve got to explore all the opportunities. So that, because trust is there. In industry, trust is, you can have it now with data, you really can implement that trust, take a little more risk. And you’ll be amazed at what we have the capabilities to provide all the warfighters out there. So I’ll be kind of centering on some of those discussions today.

Lauderback: Okay, excellent. Thank you very much for those one word, and more than multiple word, opening pitches. Let me ask, I mean, this is a topic we could talk about, I’m sure, for the entire rest of the time that we have. But the next conflict, what does that look like? We know that that’s going to be contested, denied areas where we might not be able to get manned into. It’s going to require much more, I think from a space capability looking down. We also need to be looking up, as I like to say, in the Space Force to be able to characterize what’s on orbit as well. But across all of those domains, what do you think our ISR architecture needs to look like in order to be successful in a contested and denied near peer contest? In the future? Brad, I’ll start with you and then just open it up.

Reeves: Yeah, sure. So I love the question, because it helps us think through what the problem sets are. Right? And so I’ll start by saying, I don’t have all the answers clearly. So hopefully, I don’t portray that I do. But I’ll just will offer some thoughts that I have on this. And those are that we will, it will require some resiliency, right. So the kind of the future I was painting, one of the challenges of that, or the risk there, is that things have to be networked. So it’s pretty easy to do in the US with all this all the data and bandwidth we have. But in a contested graded environment, certainly anti-access area denial environment, it’s going to be a lot more difficult, because we’re now not as far forward. And so part of that is, we won’t have the luxury we’ve had over the last two decades where we have boots on the ground right in the middle of the conflict. We will have limited systems. So there’ll be exquisite systems that can get forward. And we’ll have to rely on those. There’ll be many unmanned systems, as you know, we’ll have to rely on those a bit. It will take resiliency and networks to make sure that we can actually connect that stuff and get the data back to the warfighter. It’s going to be critical, as General Lauderback mentioned, that we have all available assets, this is almost redundancy, or it’s an all-in type of fight where the space layer is, is connected to the terrestrial layer, which is connected to the platforms. And so we will have to leverage everything. And we’ll have to be able to leverage the goodness of space. And for the times where maybe a satellite is, let’s just say blinded, for example, in one spot, and maybe there’s a terrestrial layer that picks that up, and maybe it’s degraded, but you can still fill in that gap. Maybe on the ground, you can’t get as close. So you’re not able to actually put eyes on from the ground, from a ground sensor or an airborne sensor. But possibly you can do that from a space sensor. And so, you know, we have some, we call them stovepipes of excellence. Right. You know, we have some of those in our military today, and we’re making great progress to break those down. And that’s, you know, this is the whole this is what JADC2 is all about, you know, just to throw another buzzword in. While that buzz word is, is kind of the latest and greatest, I’m sure there’ll be another label for it in the future. But the meaning behind it is still relevant. And the meaning is that we do have to leverage the resources that all the services bring, whether it’s space, air, land, sea, subsurface, you know, depending on whether we’re talking Pacific fight, there’s a, you know, we at least think of subsurface as another domain. That’s the way we think of that, because we have to have awareness below the surface of the sea. So naturally, we haven’t talked cyber, and I know we’re not going to go there today. But clearly, that’s a domain that we’ll have to battle in. So for me, so connecting all those together, and having a network that’s resilient to be able to do that. So you can leverage all of those capabilities, I think, to a point of convergence, is going to be where we need to go in the future to overwhelm the enemy. Which is really ultimately what we want to do to create that asymmetric advantage that we all enjoy.

Savoie: When it comes down to space and we have to look at it, One, it’s a domain and it’s a maneuver domain now, right? So it’s an operable maneuver domain, along the entirety of the scheme of maneuver of any conflict. When we look at it, we really need to be thinking about three things. One’s agility, one is affordability, and then one is multimodality. We’re not going to be afforded for like one trick ponies, though, size and scale do drive that, but the micronization of things in terms of how we’ve gotten things down the capabilities of cubesats are enormously powerful, where we are capable of doing you know, Midway EO or GMTI types of things, even in small packages, that addresses multi-modality and it also addresses affordability and the micronization in the size. The agility piece is one we don’t talk a lot, right? We have fixed infrastructure for how to inject things into that domain. And then Newtonian physics takes over and it becomes a very predictable, you know, maneuver, right. I mean, it’s up there. It does what it does, and the laws of physics kind of take over and fuel and stuff like that, you know, prevents you from making significant maneuver. So we know talk a lot about, hey, how do we, on demand in an agile environment, create constellations. We don’t talk about a lot, hey, what happens if our fixed infrastructure, Vandenberg, the Cape, right? I mean, we’re literally to hypersonics and now we have no way of doing combat loss replacement, or adding capability to that, and denied, right. So, you know, I personally, I do a lot of work with Virgin Orbit, we’ve actually helped build that current aircraft, but you look at that type of capability, how does that play into the agility side of it, both the ability to create very interesting orbit geometries in LEO, the ability to combat loss replacement, the ability to on demand, you know, I’m a SOF guy by trade. So I started now looking at what is SOF’s role, you know, in space, right? And is that, hey, how do you deploy four satellites for a four-hour window when we talk about n minus one to create an effect or capability. And space plays, and will it will play a role, you know, in that n minus one to the left of bang type of opportunity.

Reid: So, I’m going to take a little different tack to the question. The question focused on, you know, how does, how does space act in the next fight, a contested fight? I’ll contend that the contested fight is started, right? The competition environment is well underway. And it’s been well underway. It’s geopolitics. And I think when it comes to space, we’ve shown a dependency. And it has provided great agility for our force in order to maneuver, in order to pass data. And I think the redundancy that is being put in place in the space layer, so that it’s, it’s not Ku you it’s not Ka, it’s not just GEO, it’s not just MEO. It’s not just LEO, it’s all of it. And the tight pairing of it, though, with your air layer, and then your ground layer to offer the redundancy. So that as you are operating over the spectrum of conflict, that will be for decades, and I contend in a competition environment, may be for days, weeks, or, or months in a contested environment, and back to a competition environment, you got to be able to jump from the layers, you got to be able to use space, when it’s there. When I can’t get to exactly what I want, I go to my alternate, when I can’t get to that, I maybe move to my space, moved to my air layer, and be able to move seamlessly through all of those places in order to deliver the effects that airpower brings throughout the spectrum of conflict.

Lauderback: Okay, thank you. How about with the amount of or the proliferation of ISR capabilities that are, you know, coming online or in the future? I mean, with the commercialization of space as an example, that we can, I mean, there’s only going to be more sensors to gather more data. So the question is really, how do you specifically see getting that data to the right folks. You talked a bit about sensing, of course. And so now that it’s a capability of, like, sifting through all of that data, turning that into intelligence or turning that into something actionable for, for somebody that’s going to put lead on target, if you will, thoughts.

Savoie: And I think, you know, we use big data’s, these buzzwords that are kind of out there, right. So I mean, the good thing is, and space has kind of led this, I think in the video world, we’ve adopted extra standards that the national technical means and what has been done in the past on stills, and when we go back to it, I mean, they really were actually, space was the leader in creating open standards for things like metadata tagging, how you do rectification of things, etc. So it brings that commonality to it, right. It doesn’t matter if it’s a, you know, a Maxar open satellite, or if I’m, you know, sitting on the high side, you know, looking at something [inaudible] type of thing, which is great. So applying, you know, the big data analytics that we have out there, which is honestly our space problem, is an easy problem, right? I mean, how does Facebook listen to every microphone and every camera on every phone on the planet Earth, and sift through that and figure out that, you know, I like venti chai lattes, right? I mean, how does it figure that out? When I said it three minutes ago, and, you know, gives me an advertisement queued up for that. It really does come down, though, to a lot of metadata tagging, and it comes down to how do you get things down to that piece? Cloud is, you know, how we scale processing is—We are very tactile people in terms of the government likes to buy things they’d like to see what they buy. It’s very good to see now what we’re doing in the Gov cloud and the secure side, because that’s really where we have to scale processing. Because that’s exactly what the commercial side does. They don’t have, you know, server farms where it’s a one to one ratio, they really scale from, you know, burying in the in the ocean floor server farms everywhere that were with the distributed processing, etc. So, and we need to follow suit on that to manage the data.

Reid: I just have a just a quick comment. Just to kind of tag on to that. It’s when I said, my opening comments are taking risk. Moving quick, you know, you just talked about best in breed applications that are here today. You can use them right now. You know, I don’t care if it’s Google or Microsoft, if it’s Facebook, they’re there. They’re sifting through, I can’t even describe the amounts of data that they’re sifting through and applying it as needed. Let’s move quickly in that arena. I compliment what JAIC is doing right now. Because they’re trying to run fast with scissors. They are really taking some bold steps and some bold moves. But the amount of information, and I think we also got to be careful when I say this, I don’t want to be to questioning you. You can look at all the data and just be drowned in it. Right, you got to look at the right data. That’s got to be looking in the right spaces. We can use some best in breed practices that are available in the commercial space to help us sift through it quicker, you know, get the information out of the data to the warfighter. But that’s those are the kind of applications that you can do right now.

Savoie: And I will say that just add on to this. Those best of breed systems we talk about are not a pull, you do not ask Facebook for ads, it gives it to you, it’s a push. And so when we talk about how it feeds data to the consumer, the consumer does very little asking, it gets told a lot of things. And so and that’s, that’s a difference of paradigm for how a lot of our systems are, query and ask for X, Y, and Z over this area. No, the system should be predictive in nature, right. We should have saw early last week, Wow, why is the system giving me a bunch of metadata or is bringing a lot of focus to Eastern Europe? I mean, that’s kind of weird, right? I mean, that’s what, but honestly, had we been oriented the same way, it would have naturally have done that those tools exist today. That’s not science fiction. I mean, if we would have applied the same principles, the same really … the same AI’s that they had in a slightly different way? I mean, honestly, that’s what the system would have told us is, I think you really want to talk about this. This is what this is what you want to really pay attention to.

Reeves: No, I think I think those are really good thoughts. And that, you know, the question is, how do you get all that data that’s available out there, all the sensors we have? And how do you get that to the people that need it? And, it’s the, you know, part of that future state is the, you can just sum it up as AI enabled decision making, right? So that’s how the commercial world is doing all this and how exactly what Luke was referring to. When you just you have a conversation with your spouse, you’re talking about that you like the Corvette that just drove by. And next thing you know that you’re flooded with Corvette advertisements, right from Chevrolet. That technology exists. Now militarizing it is a whole other step, right? Again, there’s, there are privileges that the commercial world has. And the biggest one is they operate in a completely permissive environment where no one is trying to attack them and stop them. We have the exact opposite problem. So how do you now handle that? How do you bring something to bear to solve that problem? Well, it’s really good, I believe, at least the way we see it, as we see that you’re going to have to have AI processing at the edge. So the sensors are going to have to do a lot of that work for you. The if you have the modern model, the commercial model, which is, you know, huge centralized data lakes. I mean, these buildings, you know, that are using nuclear power plants just to keep on going because there’s all this compute power in there. You know, for the military, that’s just an easy target, right? So you take that out and now you’ve just taken our advantage away. So we will have to leverage the technology, to have edge processing, to have that AI and the algorithms there that can help us make those decisions. So again, they see something, they make sense of it, they push a recommendation, recommended action to us. And oh by the way, we have to have that technology to help us connect all these sensors because we have a space ops center that’s going to be monitored, you know, that may be monitoring space. You may have a DCGS, it’s maybe it’s monitoring, you know, RQ-4s and U-2s, etc., you know, you have, you have an Army intel section, you know, and they’re there with their, their systems and what they’re monitoring. And all that stuff again, today is almost swivel chair tactics, right? So you’re in Jchat and you see that satellite found something, maybe that makes it a Jchat window, you swivel over this computer and now you transcribe from one to the next to let someone know that and it’s almost this telephone game, right? Very manual, very human in the loop driven, you know, to get that overwhelming advantage to it to think faster and break things faster. It will require that AI processing at the edge to do that work for us.

Lauderback: So let me get back to some of your opening comments about risk and then trust. And I’ll ask, do we have, do you think there’s trust built up between industry and then the Department of Defense to be able to capitalize or to be successful in this next JADC2, or whatever it is that we you know, in the contested environment that we want to be successful in passing all of the data in, you know, all of the sensors that are sucking up information? I mean, do you think that, One, we’re taking enough risk? I think I know the answer to that. Second question is do we have the trust between our industries, if you will, to be successful? What do you think, JR?

Reid: Sure, I’ll take a take a stab since I use the word first. I think they’re stressed. I know they’re stressed. I mean, so many of us that do our job right now, as I said in my opening comments, we wore the uniform and we do our job, because all we see is, you know, we want to make our nation stronger, more secure. And so I think there’s trust, almost kind of bringing in this last conversation, talking to Amazon or Facebook, you got data. The thing that I see not happening, is doing something in and trying not to speak from a position of ignorance on the many activities that we have going out with JADC2 and ABMS. And the demos we did before and the and the ways we’re moving out, we’re trying to connect stuff. But I’ll tell you, from my industry’s perspective, I would like to see us talking to Amazon. Let’s put an Alexa on the table. Let’s mention Corvette as it drives by. I want to run that through a cubesat over to a rivet joint, pat on existing data links that he makes, that can pass through an MQ-9, then link it through Link 16. And then have a F-35 target a Corvette. We can do it. I don’t see it happening. I don’t see the scale. I’m a crawl, walk run kind of guy, you know, let’s take bites at this elephant. Because the the amount of data that we talked about is it’s a mess. But let’s take some bites of this elephant, deliberate bites, let’s take some risk and go and let’s fail 1,000 times in order to get one right. But let’s do it again and again and again. So that we can we can get to the point where I really didn’t want a Corvette, I wanted a Porsche. And I can figure it out. Because of the interactions that can occur right now, with ensuring that we get the right data passing over existing data links with existing platforms to have decision advantage.

Savoie: It’s ironic, because I actually, we’ve actually talked about taking Alexas and just putting them at every one of the operating stations in the RJ and putting the headset on it and going. If we wanted tech, the methods are there for how to like get the stuff in there. If you really want to do an interesting demonstration of what does the system kind of come up with? That’s this is something you can do for about $1,500. But I would say that to continue kind of the conversation to trust as their expectations and understanding the business models is tough, right? We use these best of breed examples. And then but the expectation is, well, hey, I mean, Android is free. Well, sort of, right? I mean, it is but they get to listen to everything you do, and they monetize you, right? So we look at these environments, the commercial business model does not translate over to the defense side. So when you’re building an infrastructure from scratch, without billions of dollars of venture capital behind you, and by the way, business models where your margins are, you know, 70%, they’re not 10%. Right? Those things and how they translate over is always kind of where we always get our wires crossed. Right. No pun intended. And that’s not a trust problem. That’s just an expectations and understanding thing, business acumen, understanding the models behind all of that. Overcomable things. But we all we all run into software things and people are like, why software so expensive? You’re like, because those other things are free, but they make it up on the back end, and you just don’t understand how the how they monetize it.

Reeves: Oh, it’s good. You know, one, I see a very positive trend. And so Joe [Inaudible], I think he started this. I’m not I’ll give him credit, at least. He’s at ACC, and, and he started a classified briefing that he’s sharing with industry. And that is gold for us. Because we understand what’s, you know, for a lot of folks in industry, there’s folks issues have been in the Air Force or, Space Force is a little harder to sell to. But understand, right. But where you’re going, a lot of the information, especially when we’re now starting to get into A2AD, peer threat we’re getting in, you’re starting to get behind some doors, there’s barriers. And industry has to be pulled along in that conversation. And so I just want to say that was a huge step, because it’s sharing information, because there’s a partnership in the military industrial complex that has to occur. And that partnership goes like this. The Airmen and Guardians know the requirements that you are the experts in how to fight a future battle, right? Like that is your expertise. What you may not know is what the realm of the possible is from a technological standpoint. And so that’s where industry’s expertise is, now we know what the realm of the possible is. And so if you can marry those two together, which is what the US has done so marvelously through history, that’s where you get, the great power happens. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s a little late, because it may take a big conflict to really get all those dialogues going and get those the things moving. And as you know, technology takes time to develop and to get fielded and to get it to the point—And oh, by the way, which is extremely important to us is that it has to work, right? You know, there’s a different, you know, if you’re driving down the car, and you ask Siri for something, and she doesn’t know the answer, OK, it’s not the end of the world, you know. But if you’re in an aircraft, you know, it has to work, whatever industry’s providing for you, it has to work, we don’t have the option of failing. And so that is a whole other layer that, again, the commercial world, generally speaking, doesn’t have to worry about. So, so that dialogue, I just want to encourage, I mean, I think there’s absolutely trust, I think the relationships are great, but I would just encourage more and more of that type of dialogue. And also understand, you know, when I was, you know, when you’re an Active duty, you got SIPRnet are JWICS, or whatever, it’s like at your fingertips 24 hours a day, you know, seven days a week. That’s not the case in industry. It doesn’t matter who you are, it’s very compartmentalized. And so we don’t have that same level of SA that you have, and it takes effort, obviously, for on your part to, you know, to try to share that with us. But that dialogue is absolutely critical.

Lauderback Yeah, thank you. I asked that question because I wanted to, you know, I think there’s about 50, or maybe 70% of the audience in here are our Airmen and Guardians who are probably asking, like, you know, yes, I want to get better at this. How do I, and then how do I partner with, with industry to make it happen?

Reid: Can I just add one, one, comment back to your point, just there. If you’re in a position, and when you’re trying to make an acquisition decision, or a test decision or something, just make a decision, you’re not going to hurt our feelings. You like his stuff better, it’s better, you think it’s better go with it, go with it. Test it, fail, and then come to me. Or, or it works and you keep moving, right? Because industry needs that feedback. So I can look and go, you know, his stuff is better. How come? All right, back to the drawing board. Industry has internal research and defense dollars, right, that we’d love to sink into making something better, but we don’t know unless we’re it we’re allowed to partner. And even if it’s not a contract, right, it’s look for ways to just go, hey, I want to do a cooperative research agreement with you. Let’s just let’s do let’s again, run fast with scissors and take the risk and fail and go do it. But don’t be afraid to pick a vendor. Don’t be afraid to pick just, pick one. Pick one, go succeed. If you hit a brick wall, right, in pilot training, they said, hey, I’m coming to the edge of the my operating area. Alright, student, you got to turn left? Right, up, down? What are you gonna do? I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m coming to the edge of the operating area. What should I do? What should I do? Pick one. Because it’s going to put you in a new direction, it’s gonna lead to new opportunities, and you’re going to, there’s new pathways to find success.

Savoie: I would say also just don’t be, we’re all adults, right? I mean, there seems to be this mentality. And when I was in a service, I just, I got embedded with the contractor, right? We were building airplanes really, really quick. When we were doing the U-28. We had two weeks to deploy with it the moment we got it. So I mean, there was no time, right? So we embedded ourselves with the contractor. You know, I lived in the plants and then trained people then and then took the plane downrange myself, but had to be part of that process. And that set a tone and our end user’s right there. We, people talk about the customer. And we talk about like the contracts folks and the PMOs as the customer just because they’re the ones write the checks. But you know, someone gave them money, and someone uses the stuff. And it’s a customer mindset across the board. But it’s really a team, right? And so people, we’re not scared to have people in the buildings and collaborating and part of the process constantly. Specs are specs, right? They were written by someone and headquarters, they’ve been staffed and looked at. But there’s a lot of white space between each one of those lines in terms of the context of the whys. And we’re always looking for the whys, right? And making sure that everything meets its intent, along with the letter of the spec. And so be involved. And you’ll find very industry very, very receptive to having people involved and we know what’s in scope, we know how to take contractual direction and all those things. We know how to do that. And that does not that does not preclude people from being involved, so be involved.

Lauderback: Thank you. Thanks, really, for those techniques, and some tactics there. Brad, you had talked about classified briefings that are happening. I know that in the Space Force specifically, we’ve started to do that as we’re trying to develop the force design for what is it that we need on orbit for a resilient architecture and for getting, right, making, making everyone successful from a warfighting perspective? So thank you for that. Okay, I think we’ve only got a couple of more minutes. So the only last thing, and you may or may not have expertise in this area, but I do. And so I’m asking a question about, as the senior intelligence officer for the Space Force, there are capabilities on orbit today that we can and cannot characterize, just like we need to be able to characterize on the ground or in any other domain. I guess the question is, are you thinking, or your company’s thinking at all about that about looking up and helping us to gain that persistence that we might need as well as the high fidelity of a sensor to be able to truly characterize out to 47,000 kilometers what it is that an adversary might be doing? Any thoughts?

Reeves: Well, so certainly, we are. Now another way, we’re approaching largely as obvious as you know, AMTI, GMTI is a big is a big, important, right, and we need to be able to leverage those assets for that. So there’s two parts because I think we don’t have much time. One is, is making sure we can connect and correlate and fuse the AMTI GMTI of space terrestrial layer, point one. Two, we also need to make sure that we can get that data. That’s all the cool stuff from satellites, it’s generally reserved for the privileged few. We need to democratize that and get it to everyone.

Lauderback: Thanks, Brad.

Savoie: But, you know, most certainly, I mean, I would say especially, you know, at my company, we’re, significant investment on the sensor side, you know, larger and larger apertures, lighter weight, less power. A lot of the connectivity pieces. You know, I’ve been directly involved a lot the space avionics piece, the entirety of that business was the connectivity. How do you get data from GEO or LEO contested etc., but we’re only, I mean, we’re primarily looking up from a business perspective. Even in you know, the air breather side that I manage, where we’re trying to get as high up in the air as we can, but I will say a predominance of the focus is in that arena, both on the sensing side, like you said, GMTI, etc. How do you have collaborative radar you know, in that layer with also air breathers etc. But there’s a lot of looking up and I know we look to partner both in the classified side in the unclass side and you know, whole vehicle architectures etc. for that.

Reid: Just come back to my comments previously, obviously, you know, we have beyond line of sight operations, you know, globally with unmanned airplanes. So our dependency on the capabilities that space brings is, is an absolute, but we need redundancy. Right. And that comes back to this, you know, I got to use it. But I’ve also got to have, you know, kind of, I’ve got to degrade gracefully, you know, in those environments, until I can go in and get back up into that, you know, the the gold standard, which is what space provides me. And so I think we got to make sure that, you know, we’re investing appropriately in space. Ensuring that we can, we can degrade gracefully, when, when the situation and the conditions require it, and then move back up into it.

Lauderback: Excellent. Thank you. Thanks very much. I love the idea of looking up and being able to characterize things on orbit as we will absolutely need to. So can I get a round of applause for our panelists? Thank you. And it’s, just so you know, in lieu of the speaker gifts this year, AFA made a donation to enable our airmen and guardians to participate in the poolside barbecue last night. So thank you very much. So right before I leave, and I know we’re already over, but I really thank you for the risk, the trust, right, those one-words that you used in the beginning, and then the ability to be able to write our own doctrine. Right, to be able to be successful in a in a peer conflict that probably is coming. And we can, we’ve got a lot of work to do in order to get there. So thanks very much to you all. Alright, hey, next up, we’ve got a 30 minute coffee break in the Exposition Hall. So please take some time to check out the exhibits, build the trust, communicate with the industry, and if you haven’t had a if you haven’t been able to do that yet. Next session starts back up at 9:45. So thank you so much.

Watch, Read: From Warfighter Requirements to Operational Capability

March 13, 2022

Retired Air Force Gen. Lester L. Lyles moderates the panel discussion “From Warfighter Requirements to Operational Capability” with commander of Air Force Materiel Command Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr.; commander of Space Systems Command Space Force Lt. Gen. Michael A. Guetlein; and Randall G. Walden, director and program executive officer for the Department of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office 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.

Overhead Voice

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome General Lester Lyles.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

Well, there is a cheering section out there. That’s very good. For an old guy who retired 20 years ago, I didn’t think anybody would be out there, remember my name at all. Well, it is an honor to be here to moderate this excellent panel talking about a subject that many of us are very, very familiar with. And all of us, in some form or another, get a chance to live parts of this, whether it’s in the birthing, developing, operating, sustaining capabilities for our warfighters. And so the chance to have an opportunity to talk to three—just literally, the word outstanding is not strong enough—three excellent, outstanding, superior leaders in our Air Force; and particularly, that deals with providing capabilities to the warfighter. I couldn’t be more proud to have the opportunity to do this. General Arnie Bunch, of course, Air Force Materiel Command commander; General Mike Guetlein, now the Space Systems Command commander—had to think about that, Mike, just a little bit—and Mr. Waldo, Randy Walden, who we all call Waldo. And Mike, I’ll call you, Mike; and Arnie, I’ll call you Arnie If you don’t mind.

This is a very unique time for me. In so many respects, time goes by so quickly as I look out into the audience. And definitely, as I saw some of the Airmen and Guardians who are here participating in this event, I didn’t realize how many babies we have in our Air Force and Space Force today. Everybody looks so very young. Even the general officers look very young. So it’s a sort of a weird, weird time. And for this panel, one of the unique things about it for me is that, at least for two of our participants, I’ve sat in their seat in the past. Now, it was some 20 years ago when I was in the seat of Air Force Materiel Command. And I wasn’t quite in Mike’s seat, because his name and title—the organization’s changed. But I was the SMC Commander from ’94 to ’96. I know you want to look—I’m sure there’s some people who weren’t even born in ‘94—that are part of our Space Force or Air Force today. So it’s, again, an honor to have a chance to participate in this event. We don’t have a lot of time. And I want to make sure we get an opportunity for these three gentlemen to talk about what it is they’re doing in this particular area. And we hope there’ll be sort of a dialogue amongst us, if you will. I’ll have a few questions to ask and encourage the others to either add in if they want or give them a chance to make comments relative to their particular spectrum of the business that we’re in, and acquisition and requirements, etc. But first, let me just go one by one. And give us about two or three minutes just to make some comments. So and what do you think are some of your challenges and opportunities or accomplishments. So, Arnie?

Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr.

So General Lyles, thank you for the opportunity for—if the Airmen and the Guardians that are out there do not know who this fine gentleman is, regardless of how many years ago that he retired, you are missing a great opportunity. He has mentored and led many of us. Lieutenant Colonel Bunch learned great numbers of details from this fine gentleman, and he is a great American, has served this nation in various capacities. And no one’s going to forget the mark, the indelible mark, sir, that you’ve left on our Air and Space Force, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The second one that I would say initially before I go into remarks, the characterization of me as an outstanding individual, my wife would sincerely disagree with. And that’s why I spend so much of my time on the wife appeasement plan, based on the activities that I’ve done over time. So for AFA, thank you very much. Great venue, great symposium. We’ve had a lot of great dialogue. It’s an honor to be up here with these two great gentlemen who are executing the day to day J-O-B right now trying to make things happen. It’s fantastic to be up here to represent the 89,000-plus uniformed and non-uniformed Airmen that are part of Air Force Materiel Command. It’s an honor to get to work for them each and every day as they execute their wartime mission each and every day. And I often say that we’re the most important major command in the Air Force. I do not say that out of arrogance. I say that out of the fact that what we do, we do for everybody else in this room—to include a lot of things that we do for the Space Force today—but what we do for all the other major commands and for overall the Department of Defense. Since this has got to warfighter focus, I’m going to use a little bit of analogy to get a little better idea what we kind of do within Air Force Materiel Command. One of the things that my command chief Dave Flosi, my wingman, had recently happen: He had a chief master sergeant within the Air Force asked him, Why do you at Air Force Materiel Command warrant having an F-15 on a pole out in front of your headquarters? What do you have to do with any of that? And the answer was, well, we partner with industry to do the research on the materials and the engines, and the radar, and all those things that we took to try to make the airplane. We partnered with industry by procuring the assets and trying to put them in the field. We partnered with field and operational testers to do the testing. We every day sustain those still today within what we do within our depot. We were using Supply Chain Management wings to keep them flying. We did the research and the development for the weapons that they carried to be able to go execute their missions. We continue to do the modernization. We did the experimentation and the development of the uniforms and the helmets and everything else that they were. And if you take it to the extreme, we actually do the MILCON to build a runway and provide all the support structure for everybody at the base. That’s why we have an F-15 on the front of our [inaudible]. So a lot of the other things that we’re doing, I’ll wait and I’ll hit on. There is one thing, though, that I do want to talk about that as my Number One priority. And that’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. And I had someone at Air Command and Staff College go, Secretary Kendall’s Number One priority is China, China, China. How can your Number One priority, General Bunch, be diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility? And the answer was actually pretty simple. I see them as very completely aligned and integrated together because our most valuable resource is our Airmen. And if I cannot create within the Air Force Materiel Command an environment where every Airman has the opportunity to perform to his or her full potential and feel valued, then we’re not going to be able to move at the speed and execute the operational imperatives to do all the other things that are critical to what we do within the command. So that’s enough for me, for the short bit, and I’ll talk more on other things. Thank you.

Gen. Michael A. Guetlein

Thank you sir. I really appreciate you hosting us today, and for AFA hosting this important dialogue. This is a little intimidating for me; all three of these gentlemen have been my mentor and are my mentors along my career all the way going back to asa captain, sir, with General Lyles. So I’m up here as the brand-new field command for Space Force. We’re about six months old, stood up last August. It is a field command in the aspect of we are equivalent to a MAJCOM but much, much smaller. So the best way to think of Space Systems Command is the AFMC of space. And whereas warfighting starts with AFMC, space starts with SSC. Why do I say that? Because every system that we buy, every system that we purchase, every capability we deliver to the nation and to the warfighter for space starts in some way, shape, or form with Space Systems Command. Space Systems Command was stood up to do basically two things. First and foremost is, to get a warfighter focus on space acquisitions. And then the second was to actually get after some of the criticisms that we’ve been receiving in space acquisitions over the past 20 years. We did that by doing a couple things. First, we stood up five new PEOs. Where SMC used to be one PEO, we are now five PEOs. Those five PEOs report directly to the service acquisition executive like you would expect all other PEOs to do.

I am not, as the commander, one of those PEOs. My job is a little bit different. My job is to organize, train, and equip. But I also have one more job under the acquisition hat, assisting the assistant secretary of the Air Force [inaudible] for system of systems integration. What do I mean by that? Over time, and one of the criticisms that we’ve had over time is that we focused a whole lot on our system-by-system capability, that we weren’t doing a really good job integrating across. Nor were we focusing on the capability that we needed to actually deliver to the warfighter. We have completely changed all that by standing up the SSC commander, the system of systems integrator, and I am now an adviser to the SAE for all milestone decisions so that we, as a department, can better integrate horizontally across the system. In addition to that, we stood up to get unity of effort. One of the criticisms that we got, and the GAO talked about a lot, was that there were 60-plus organizations that had a say in space acquisitions, and all 60 of them could say no. Standing up the Space Force was to try to get after that. And one of the ways to get after that is unity of effort. And the reason we talked about unity of effort is because we have to go across organizational boundaries, both title 10 and title 50. And we have multiple organization authorities above us that have to be somehow integrated. And they don’t all come together in one location until they come to the president of the United States. That causes [inaudible] integration challenges. So we’ve been, SSC has been, charged with trying to gain unity of effort. And we have done that through a collaborative process called the Program Integration Council, which I will talk about here in a little bit. The other reason we are a field command is because we are no longer geographically centered on Los Angeles. The Cape and Vandenberg both fall under Space Systems Command, as well as 13 other geographically separated locations to include a lieutenant colonel in Australia. We’re gonna put a lieutenant colonel in U.K. and a liaison out in PACOM to get that warfighting focus. So that in the gist is what Space Systems Command is and what we’re all about, and I’ll wait for the rest of the questions to talk a bit more about it.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

All right. Thank you, Mike. Right. Thank you. Waldo.

Randall G. Walden

Well, let me start by saying it’s great to be on this incredible panel. And also great to be on this panel with friends, very close friends. And it’s great to see so many familiar faces in the audience, all the Airmen and Guardians that I hang out with, I’ve been hanging out with for a very long time. So I’m going to start off by saying a little bit about the organization. I’d like to touch on three programs I can talk about publicly. Number one, little bit about the RCO. There was our founding fathers, a guy by the name of Dr. [Pete] Aldridge, he was the USD AT&L; Dr. Jim Roche, who was the Secretary of the Air Force at the time; and General John Jumper, who’s the chief at the time, that said, we’re frustrated. And here’s a mythbusting, not just with acquisition, but requirements process. And they wanted an organization that was some somewhat similar to the Lockheed Skunkworks. And the reason for that is they felt as though what they wanted to get done, and a high priority for them, was not getting done. And they created the Rapid Capabilities Office. And that’s been almost 20 years ago. And I’m happy to say I’ve been part of that organization, not the entire time, but for the most time. And I love it, got some of the best folks on the planet, there. A little bit of mythbusting. So all of a sudden, you get a sense of, well, how you get your stuff done is you have waivers to laws, and you have waivers to policy. That’s not true. We follow all laws and statutes. We follow all policies. Now, here’s the part that’s important and was talked about yesterday by the former CEO of Google. So what we did is we read 5000, I would not recommend that to anybody. If you’re familiar with the Defense Acquisition System, I would recommend reading the part that talks about tailoring and streamlining. We took that section, put it in a charter, and I’ve got a board of directors that are very senior leaders. And that’s how we do our business. We try to minimize bureaucracy and maximize producing capability. That’s our goal. Now three programs, briefly. So I’ll start with B-21. You may have seen the press release, talked to John Tirpak the other day on Air Force magazine. It is true, we had six bombers on the production line. We actually took one out, and we pulled it over to do the loads calibration, which is where you go over and start to bend and flex the airplane and make sure that the design that you intended to build to actually matches the predictions. And, Two, and this is the part that’s different, we actually are using the same production line that we’re going to build a minimum of 100 bombers. So we’re also verifying that the production and the manufacturing matches the predictions as well. And we’re going to learn that very shortly.

Now let’s talk a little bit about the X-37. So the X-37 we’ve been doing since April of 2010. It’s been a heavy lifter, no pun intended, of doing experimentation in space for a lot of modernization activities for space. And some might even say we were actually ahead of Space Force and helping them out as they were maturing. And it’s been really, really good. And I’ll talk about the one that’s on orbit right now. So Mission Six is currently on orbit. It’s been doing a lot of experimentation, which has been publicly released. It has 655 days on orbit. And as you know, we probably fly about two years. But once we’re done with the experimentation, and we’re ready to come back and land, we will do that. And almost two years ago, as part of a public release, we talked about the service module attached to the back end. The reason for that is, it allows us to put more experiments onboard. And so before we deorbit the X-37B we need to release that service module. And the plan right now is to do it safe and professionally in a manner that burns up in the atmosphere. That’s the plan. And that’s what we’ll do. And then we’ll recover the X-37B and refurbish it and get it ready for the next launch. Mission Seven’s coming up right after we land that one. And it will also go up with a service module. We’ll go into the details of when we’re going to launch. But suffice to say it’s not far behind when we land.

And then finally, a little bit on Advanced Battle Management System. And so there’s been a lot of conversations both in the public and on the stage this week. Just some insight, and I’m just going to offer this up right now: I could really use defense industries’ thoughts, through their lens of how we get after joint all-domain command and control. And the reason I say that is, industry works with all the services. And having that insight gives you the best lens by which you can help inform how we do ABMS and being able to meet all the service needs when it comes to sharing data. And I’m looking for everybody. And I walk the floor, every time I meet with someone, I tell them the same story: I’m looking for your thoughts and your expertise to make that real. So if I was to describe ABMS, it’s essentially really two components. The first one is you have to have an infrastructure, a digital infrastructure that allows you to, One, contain data, apply applications to that data, and share it globally. That’s the premise. And if you don’t have that infrastructure, it’s not going to work really well in sharing data. And by the way, the best part is we can leverage what commercial industry has invested in for many decades and continues to invest in, you may be familiar with it, it’s called the internet. And you probably don’t think about how those standards work, and how it all works when you log in. But you know what, that’s where we are, to leverage that expertise. And it works really well. The second part of ABMS is, OK, the capabilities. Now, we’re working on Capability Release One, which is really trying to turn the KC-46, or any other platform that can carry the pods that we’re going to go invest in. And that is being able to share data in a manner that allows not only the aircraft, whether it’s a fighter or bomber, to get replenished from fuel, whether they’re going into a fight or coming out of the fight, but also share and replenish data that they’re going to need before they go into the fight or coming out of the fight. And the thought is, if I can share that data not only with a tanker, but it goes beyond line of sight back to an air operations center, or back to strategic users, it’s incredible. It’s all the same data. It’s how you want to apply applications in a manner that allows those users, whether it’s strategic, operational or tactical, the information they need to make decisions. That’s what ABMS is about.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

Thanks, Waldo. There’s very informative. Thank you very much. Arnie, let me just ask, you know, in your previous capacity as the deputy acquisitions czar in the headquarters, you are a staunch supporter for doing things quicker and doing better. And I particularly remember a briefing you put together about faster, smarter acquisition, and the various tenets that are part of that, like supercharging the acquisition engine, creating a big ideas pipeline, and expanding industrial partnerships. So I’m just saying things that Waldo just touched upon and I know Mike is using very much in Space Systems Command. In your capacity at AFMC, have you been able to really bring those things to your trained, organized, and equipped function, or do you think you’ve actually, were able to carry through some of the things you talked about a few years ago?

Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr.

So, great question. And I believe we’ve got a couple of examples of things that we’re doing that definitely bring that home. If you look at what happened when we got into COVID, I got an email on a Friday night from the Vice Chief General Wilson. It said, ‘Hey, we need a means to be able—we need the transportable isolation system certified on a C-17 as quick as you can.’ All I got was an email. Three weeks later, we flew our first COVID-positive individual that went through all the certification, went through the right things that we need to do to get it out in the air. At the same time, Air Mobility Command said, ‘Hey, we need something better than that.’ We needed a negative pressure CONEX so that we can carry this. We needed to be able to go, and we need one for a C-17. We need one for a C-130 that was called light, and we need to get going. We did that, delivered it. It flew the first patient 88 days later. So when people tell you you can’t go fast, you can’t make these things happen, the reality is you can make them happen. Why was that a success? To me it was a success because there was a clear priority from all parties involved that we needed to go do this. We did not have to worry about trying to fight to get money to try to make everything align. We had the acquirers, the requirers, the medical field, the research lab, everybody, right? They’re working together with a clear sense of purpose. And when we align all of those things together, what we really do is we take the shackles off of the acquisition community, and they’re allowed to move at the speed that they need to be able to deliver those capabilities. We can’t do that in every case. But when people tell me you can’t go fast with acquisition, I point to this and go, yes, we can. What most people don’t realize is, we actually went through testing and redesigned the interior of that negative pressure CONEX in the middle of that, because it would not have survived the landings we wanted to do, the way the seats were designed. And we redesigned them within the last couple of weeks so that we would have that capability. That’s an example of going through and doing that. The other one that I believe is really successful right now is we’re moving out on our digital campaign. If you look at that and the way that we’ve got the team and AFMC focused on the assets from research all the way to retirement, we want it for test, the acquisition, the sustainment—we want all of it blended in together. GBSD has done great in that area. Working with General Cotton’s team at Global Strike Command and working with other industry partners, we went through millions of examples to find the knee and the curve for what we needed to put on contract.

Next Generation Air Dominance, it’s taking it to a whole ‘nother level in the way that we’re working with industry, the way industry is utilizing our labs and partnering with what’s going on there, all to another level for that we’re using on all platforms. The A-10 wings, we’re getting ready to get the first one done probably seven months earlier than we planned. And it’s done because we’ve done digital modeling of it. And we’re able to design it in a way that we probably wouldn’t have been able to do before. Critical for the B-52 commercial engine replacement program. We’re doing all that in a digital environment and making it happen. The other one that we started pushing on that you talked about, sir, was being innovative. We have extremely innovative Airmen. They are doing great things at the installation level. We do not have an innovation problem at the installation level where I believe we still have to do work. And we may have an innovation problem, is trying to go to scale from what we’re finding at the local levels to take it out and put it all the way across. We’ve got to find a way to move faster there so that our Airmen who are being innovative don’t lose faith that we as senior leaders are going to move out and make those things happen. And we’re going to work with people to get some money.

The last one that I will touch on is what we need with authorities. Last NDAA I was a big proponent of what I call BA-08. That is an authority that Congress gave us that gives a single program element to do coding of software. Mike is the beneficiary of that at Kobayashi Maru. Right now he’s the only program in the Department of the Air Force that gets to do that. We have three more Air Force programs that, if we can ever get the NDAA passed, will be out there. And we should be able to do them, three more of those. That is something that gets at what Dr. Schmidt talked about yesterday, about being able to move at speed, not go through the bureaucracy, put money where it needed to be put so that we can drive change and get it out into the field. We need to continue to work those things. Nothing says innovation like saying, that’s a great idea, come back in two years, and I’ll have some money and we can go. That’s what we’ve got to get extra authorities and flexibilities so that we don’t put ourselves in that position, and so that we can move at speed.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

That’s great. Thank you very much. Along those same lines there, Mike, you know, when I think back, in some respects, Space Force was created to address acquisition and for the space activities, and to do it quicker and do it better. Whether you look at SPD Space Policy Directive Number Four, which created the Space Force, or you look at your organization, you look at Frank Calvelli, who was just, I think, confirmed as the acquisitions czar for Space Force. And I look at you as a commander in your background, your unique background, your MC-130 program office, a big [inaudible] program, you’re in a B-2 program office, you’re at Missile Defense Agency, NRO, all those organizations noted for doing things fast. Are you going to be able to bring that same kind of culture to the Space Systems Command? Are there some things that perhaps scare you a little bit about trying to do that?

Gen. Michael A. Guetlein

Yes, sir. It’s a great question. When we stood up Space Systems Command to get exactly what we did, we went to Missile Defense Agency and said, how do you do business—National Reconnaissance Office, RCO Space, RCO, and even our own SMC 2.0 when we established it. I’ll tell you SSC is established on the best of the best of all those organizations. And how do I say that SSC really embraced the ACC. The SMC 2.0 really embraced the adaptive acquisition framework, which gets into what Waldo talked about tailoring. DOD 5000 allows an enormous amount of flexibility. And Secretary Lord, before she walked out, added even more flexibility. SMC 2.0 was built upon that flexibility. And we capitalized on that when we stood up SSC. You look to the Missile Defense Agency, probably the best systems integrators and the best digital engineering environment in the DOD. We capitalized on those lessons learned. You get to the National Reconnaissance Office, very flat, very empowered PEOs. We capitalized on that. Then you look at the way the Rapid Capabilities Office does business. We capitalized on all that. So that when we stood up Space Systems Command, we really did harvest what we thought was the best of the best of all the organizations to give us the agility, not only in acquisitions, to begin that system-of-systems integration approach, unity of effort, and focus on the warfighter. That’s why we are extremely flat. We just pulled another layer of leadership out with the objective of getting to the Space Force a model of no 0-6 works for an 0-6 or NH-4 equivalent. That, by doing that, pushes the authorities down and gets to what we talked a little bit about yesterday—about empowering our junior Airmen and Guardians. They are capable of an enormous amount. And they are the most innovative and the most driven individuals that I’ve ever seen. We’ve got to take the handcuffs off. And we’ve done that by trying to flatten out the organization. In addition to that, we now took what was the span of one PEO and spread that to five PEOs. That allows us to get more of a focus on the acquisitions and delivering a capability faster to the warfighter. And then integrating across them to figure out what’s the best of the breed. So in the best of the breed, we’re actually looking at our partnerships with our allies and partnerships with commercial, if I can buy it out of commercial—but buy before build, that’s what I want to do, if I can integrate with allies or take advantage of what they’ve already built. And that’s what I want to do, is integrate it. But also when I build it, I want to integrate back into their stuff. So that we are not chasing the new, next-generation thing that’s going to take us 20 more years. Instead, we’re actually integrating what we already have to get more and more capability out of the systems that have already been delivered.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

Great. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Why don’t you—you mentioned earlier about, you don’t break any rules in terms of the authorities and all the legal requirements, etc. Yet, when I think about all the things that people are able to do, whether it’s with OTAs—other transaction authorities—the flexibility DOD 5000 does give you, and other things like a couple of ones that that Arnie mentioned, you sort of described your secret sauce of getting things done. But I keep thinking you’ve left one ingredient out that you’re not telling us about, because other people have those same authorities, but they’re not achieving the rapid capabilities that your office does. So can you tell us what that secret sauce is?

Randall G. Walden

Yes, sir. I get to brag about my organization even more. I love that. So let’s touch briefly on how we were created. I’ve already given you that insight of why we were created. Now what are we doing today. And so we are managed, governed, and overseen by a board of directors. So similar, not identical, to the way corporations work today. Why? Because the leadership wants their personal touch on what we’re doing. And so today, the board of directors we have includes undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment; the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering; the Secretary of the Air Force; the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. And we added the Chief of Space Operations, because we have some space in some of the things we’re working on. And on top of that, now, the acquisition authority’s associated, so SAF/AQ is a part of that. And when the space acquisition executive is confirmed, they will become a part of our board. That’s what governs and oversees what we do. And so that’s a part of the secret sauce. Now, here’s the real secret sauce. And everybody knows this. And Arnie, you mentioned this, this is all about trying to do the right thing as fast as you can, but legally, and under the right bureaucracy that makes sense to execute the program. And I’ll tell you that that’s a culture. And that culture has got to extend from the lowest level, program managers, contracting officers, financial managers, etc. that worked for me, and we call them melting pots. We form teams—some call them program offices—we form teams, and their primary goal is to assemble this team in a manner that executes the programs. That’s how we do it. And the culture of getting things done with the least bureaucracy has to extend all the way up through to that board of directors I just introduced. Everybody’s got to have that culture. They don’t have it, then you won’t succeed. And today, I can assure you that culture exists, and it still exists. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do have to spend most of my days fighting off bureaucracy, because they want to help us. And I don’t mind doing that, for that melting pot of teams that I want to actually get those handcuffs off and let them execute. And when you empower teams with that level of expertise, it’s incredible. And I’ll just share this thought with you, I can’t remember the last time a program manager or a contracting officer has come in to me and said, ‘Hey, boss, I’ve got a great idea. You know what, we should slow the program down and increase the cost.’ They’ve never said that. And here’s the amazing part. It’s only when bureaucracy gets in the way that the schedule slips to the right and the costs start to click and creep up. And I will tell you, the more I can do to fight that bureaucracy off and let those empowered teams execute, it’s incredible. That is our secret sauce. And I’ll tell you what, I am proud to be a part of that organization and love hanging out with those individuals. They’re incredible. Thanks very much for the question.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

Waldo, that’s outstanding. And you pointed out the key, I think, component: individuals and people. The culture really translates to people in all the organizations. Let me just wax nostalgic just a little bit. When I went out to Los Angeles, as a colonel coming from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to, uh, to run the space loss recovery program after Challenger. So we birthed Atlas, to Delta, to all those things that have now grown up to little bigger launch vehicles, if you will. But what surprised me, even though I’d been in Los Angeles as a second lieutenant, as a young rocket engineer, what surprised me was going out and finding out that the acquisition communities, space and air, they had not talked to each other. They really didn’t share best practices. I found things at Los Angeles, out at the space realm, that the aeronautics people were not doing, and vice versa, found things that they are not as committed at, that they never even heard about in the space community. So let me ask Arnie particularly, and Mike, what are you guys doing to make sure that, I know we have Guardians. Obviously, we have Airmen. What are you doing to make sure that there’s the oppos… opportunity to translate information, to share best practices, even to potentially move people so that a Guardian can become an Airman and an Airman become a Guardian? If I can, can use a term, I’d like your thoughts on how we’ve got to make sure that we don’t have stovepipes.

Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr.

Yes, sir. So one thing I want everybody to clearly get out of this, that I’ve got to go back to what Waldo said: We do not have anybody in mine or Mike’s organization that comes to work and says I want to go slow. OK, just so we’re really crystal clear here. We all want to get things done as quickly as we can. Some of us are just not as at the lower levels as effective at being able to get to get people to stop helping me. Which is a line that, ‘please stop helping me,’ a line that I quite frequently use. So this is a great partner right here. And we know that we’ve got things that we need to be doing together, or we’re not going to be doing the ‘One Team, One Fight’ that our secretary keep continues talking about. You know, so right now we are partners on what we’re doing in our digital campaign. When we started our digital campaign within the command roughly eight months before the bend-the-spoon presentation that happened at AFA, SMC was sitting in the room, at that time SSC. Today, we’re partnered together for how we’re going to implement this, how are we going to do it? I made a commitment roughly two years ago to Chief Raymond, that there was nothing that we were going to do in what we were doing for our digital campaign, that would preclude the Space Force from being able to tap into whatever tools we had, architectures. We had things that we were going to do together. Mike and I have continued that. We’re right now working together on how we put in packages and how we do spectrum management. That’s an area that both of us have struggled with from a process perspective. We’re working together to make sure that as I have people sitting in his monthly meetings, he has people sitting with my team and doing those very things. We are working together. We’re going to brief them on what we’re trying to do to change the way that we look at software. The software factories have grown all over the place. We need to put a little attention while they stay innovative, but we don’t have everybody competing against each other. I actually found out recently that I had three of my own organizations bid against each other to try to do some work. Industry would never do that. We’ve got to put some rules and guidelines in place so that I don’t have that happen and within my command, trying to pick up work that we would love to do, and we’re going to share those kind of lessons learned. S&T, one lab, two services, Heather Pringle’s done a great job trying to work together to make sure we’re linked. The words that I use are, Technology does not know its application until you tell it. In other words, there’s stuff that’s going on at Rome, New York, that’s predominantly funded by the Department by the Air Force side of the house, that Mike’s folks may want to use in command and control or whatever else they’re trying to do. There are things that are going on in Space Vehicles Directorate or in Sensors that would apply over, and we need to keep working that, and I think we’ve got a great relationship and how we’re doing that test. The Air Force Test Pilot School stood up a space test fundamentals class. We did that in short order. We’ve graduated quite a few Guardians, sharing those lessons learned to make sure we don’t have to go re-plow ground; and share what we’re doing from a test infrastructure place to try to keep from duplicating efforts that we don’t necessarily need to duplicate. And the last one that you hit on is extremely important. People. We have got—I know that he has Airmen that are running programs right now. I know that I have Guardians that are running part of our AFRL directorates and working in various parts of us. What he and I need to do is continue to communicate, so that we put the right Airman or the right Guardian on the right program at the right time, and not let the bureaucracy that wants to look at the eaches of what slot is it and who owns it. We’ve got to continue to work together to make sure we’re doing that collaboration and making that happen.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

Mike, your thoughts.

Gen. Michael A. Guetlein

Yes, sir. I do want to I want to start with what General Raymond said yesterday: Without a shadow of doubt, we have the best, the greatest Space Force in the entire world, built on the foundations and by the greatest Air Force in the world. And it is absolutely critical that we maintain that integration and that connectivity going forward. And General Bunch and I try to stay as connected as we can. I also integrate a lot with Waldo here to make sure that our systems and our people are aligned. I send folks—I send my best to him; he sends his best to me; and vice versa with General Bunch. All right now the way the Space Force is set up, General Bunch is our servicing MAJCOM. He makes everything go around. He provides the gate guards. He provides public affairs, contracting officers, financial officers, and a whole host of more capability that allows the Space Force to operate. So we’ve absolutely got to stay integrated.

On the lab front, the director of our [unintelligible] is co-chosen by myself and General Pringle with a dotted line to me to make sure that under the one lab-two service construct, that we stay connected. The TEO, technical executive officer works, it works on my staff and works on her staff. So we get the integration back and forth. At the lower levels, at things like RATPAC, things like GHOST, all those, we’re transferring our junior Guardians and junior Airmen back and forth. So we are working very hard to keep that technical expertise going back and forth. At the SML and ML level, we have worked very hard with the personnel folks to allow us to choose off both lists. It won’t be 100 percent one way or the other. But when I’m filling out my space SMLs and MLs, I can actually reach into the Air Force list if I need that Air Force talent, working with General Bunch and actually move that talent across. So it is absolutely critical that we stay connected and we’re working every way we can to remain connected, sir.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

Great. That’s fantastic. Thank you. We’re running a little bit short on time, so let me just ask a couple of quick questions, slightly different, if you will. We’re talking about the generation, today’s Guardians, today’s Airmen, looking at the future generation, particularly smart STEM-focused, STEM-literate people that we are going to need for Space Force, for the Air Force, for RCO, etc., etc. Are any one of you, your organizations, doing things to reach out to the school systems to begin to really make sure that people understand the value of STEM and encourage them in some way to be part of that? Not necessarily to be part of the Space Force or the Air Force or, if you will, but we’re going to need that kind of talent, and so I’m just interested if any of you are doing things to reach into the communities to really spark that.

Randall G. Walden

So the answer is yes. And so from my office it’s a little hard just to go out to the school system and start to train or try to recruit that talent, but we know it’s there. So you’ll see me every so often get in a public forum similar to this and talk about what we can do from an acquisition point of view and the engineering that we need to make sure that we can actually accomplish our job. And so we’re also creating a PhD program within the organization to allow some of those really good engineers to go get a doctorate in whatever they want to go do to include but not limited to engineering. And so we’re trying to increase a capability of the talent pool we have in the organization in a manner that helps not only us—because I want to try to hire them back after they’re done—but helps others and the greater portion of the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force. That’s our goal.

And by the way, I’ll just share this with you, last question, just briefly. So I was asked by General Raymond, when the space RCO was standing up, ‘Waldo, you got any talent out there, you know?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ And I gave him two names, the contracting officer, and the financial manager that I knew had already left, and they were out there in the talent pool. And I gave them those names. And guess what, they wanted to move to Albuquerque. So it was easy. He hired them. And oh, by the way, we populate that organization as well as other organizations to get that talent pool. And the lessons learned that they have in our, my organization spread across the map, not only to help organizations in the Department of the Air Force, but also to spread the word to that STEM. And it’s important, I’ll tell you, most of those folks go out into the world, and they spread, I think a good news. Yeah, go work in an organization that, One, empowers you. And, Two, has challenging tasks, engineering tasks. And trust me, they are hungry for that. I hope that helps.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

It does. Mike?

Gen. Michael A. Guetlein

The Space Force actually embraced it from the top with our talent market, talent management office, that’s doing a whole lot of reach out. I just signed a university partnership agreement with the University of Southern California on Thursday of last week, to partner on not only technical stuff, but also on Space Policy. We’re also doing some things with California Polytechnic, with Congressman Carbajal. So we have an enormous amount of reach out that that starts all the way at grade school level all the way into our PhD programs.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

Great, thank you. And by the way, your university partnership program, I think General Raymond was going out to my alma mater, Howard University, in April to formally make them part of the UPP program. I’m very, very happy to hear that. Arnie.

Gen. Arnold W. Bunch Jr.

Sir, we do have STEM programming—I know we’re running out of time. We do have an active STEM program trying to reach out, getting into schools. I’m doing, I did the video for the LEGO competition in Ohio, that they’re going to show for the junior and the more senior LEGOs, so that we’ve got a face out there letting them know and trying to encourage them to do this. The other thing I think is really important, we’ve done under General Pringle, and Dr. Welsh, we’ve really expanded out the partnerships that we’re doing with a lot of universities, and you see the benefits of that when you bring them in as interns. That’s a little later than what you asked, but you also need to get some of these PhDs and others who are ginormous brains—you’re worried about whether they’re going to tip over because their brains are so big—and you need to bring them in. So I was just recently at one of the directorates. And it was a Dr. [inaudible], and she was there. And she was explaining to me how on the end of the nose, she was designing the materials so the nose could turn, and we could more actively respond and be able to take out weapons along the way. She had never heard of the Air Force. She had no idea what we did. She came and did an internship. She is now in her second or third year. Talking to her was so motivating and inspiring for me that it was beyond belief. We just have to expose them to the great things that they’re doing in any one of these organizations. And we can move out.

Retired Gen. Lester L. Lyles

Great, fantastic. Well, we’ve run out of time for this panel discussion. I tell you, I could talk about this all day. And I’m sure you guys could too. So I wish we had more time to delve into some of the topics and subjects. It really is broad and I can’t think of three better leaders to talk about and to not just talk about it, but to actually enact and make sure we’re doing the right things for our United States Air Force and United States Space Force. So please join me in a round of applause for our three panel members.