AFA Day 3 Transcripts
14 February 2024
Transcripts Include:
- Airmen and Guardians in the Fight
Speakers: Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass, Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John F. Bentivegna, Moderator: Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force #14 Gerald R. Murray, USAF (Ret.) - Fireside Chat: Connecting and Empowering Weapon Systems
Speakers: Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey, Brig. Gen. Daniel C. Clayton, Moderator: Heather Penney - Commercial Space Integration
Speakers: Col. Richard A. Kniseley, Dan Jablonsky, Becky Cudzilo, John Springmann, Moderator: Maj. Gen. Roger Teague - Building the Next Generation of Leaders
Speakers: Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson, Maj. Gen. Timothy A. Sejba, Lt. Gen. Bradford J. Shwedo, Moderator: Col. Patrick Donley - Fireside Chat: Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition: Closing Thoughts
Speakers: Frank Kendall, Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright
Airmen and Guardians in the Fight
– Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass
– Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John F. Bentivegna
– Moderator: Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force #14 Gerald R. Murray, USAF (Ret.)
CMSAF Murray
Well, good morning, everyone. This bright and early morning, your as we kick off the final day of the most historic warfare symposium, and just happy to see everyone here, and especially a pleasure to be here with two fellow chiefs. The Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Joanne bass, and the chief master sergeant of the Space Force, John have been devayne Yeah. So absolutely. So we were also together just a few days ago as well, and of course, for a little different and certainly more somber occasion but also one of celebration. As we were at Lackland Air Force Base for the funeral and interment of our fifth Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Bob Gaylor. And I’ll tell you that we wish all of you could have been there. It was one of the most memorable memorials and celebrations of life that I think I have ever attended. And to my side of the Air Force base delivered an incredibly eloquent eulogy of chief and chief guy Taylor’s life 93 years and over 73 years of service and chief mass if you would, please. Maybe share what Chief galer meant to us.
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
Good morning AFA. You can tell this is day three. Hey, real quick. Thank you, Gerald. It really was an honor to be able to honor sim SAF five and his family. He actually served over 75 years 31 in uniform 44 years afterward, he was a defender by trade and then an MTI and then our sim SAF right like he has timeless leadership lessons and many of you all know many of you have heard his stories like what have Fry’s name on the mailbox, attitude, aptitude and opportunities and so, you know what’s amazing about chief mastering the Air Force number five Bob Gaylor is his lessons are timeless and they will be forever remembered. If you’ve never heard of Bob Gaylor. I would ask you just Google him and you will see his Wednesday’s with a chief. Here’s a man who served honorably and well and took on his nation’s calling and so it was really an honor to be able to recognize our beloved Chief Master Sergeant, the Air Force Five, and it was really great to also have the chief master of the Space Force there to honor him as well. Yeah,
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
I mean, you know, I was an airman for 26 years before I became a guardian and, you know, the influence and impact he had on me and some of the other senior enlisted leaders across the Space Force who are airmen prior to that, but as you said, it was very fitting. There was a lot of laughing, some crying, a lot of storytelling, but I think it was very appropriate. I think you’ve been very, very happy for our chance to kind of get together to honor his legacy and what he did, but he said it was an emotional couple of days, but it was phenomenal. It was a great tribute to a great man.
CMSAF Murray
Because you know, Sherry couldn’t be there. And I and so she sent it but she watched it live, and she sent me a text during that time. And she said, there’s no doubt that everyone that was there was served hot french fries as she cried and laughed her way through that we will miss him. So thank you very much. Well, again, thank you all for being here. I think it is very fitting, you know, to be able to have both the Chiefs here to be able to take and provide inputs and about their direction and priorities here. So chiefs, you know, of course on Monday, Secretary of the Air Force, Kendall, Undersecretary Jones and both general Alban Alban and general Saltzman unveiled the plan for the RE optimized Department of the Air Force for great power competition. Throughout this conference, many other people also spoke about the various aspects of the plan and purpose, Chief bass. I’d like to begin with you on if you might share what your perspective is regarding the plan changes for the Air Force, and how do you see it affecting our enlisted force?
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
So first off, Gerald, good morning to everybody. Again, thank you for your service and for having us here. Big thanks to the FAA team for always hosting such an amazing event. This is actually the largest warfighting AFA that I’ve ever been to, largely in part because of the announcements of great power competition. And so what I would say to what I feel about it or you know, or what’s my take on it? It is about time. Many of our airmen have heard me say, I think you’re gonna see more change in the next four to six years and I’ve seen in my entire almost 31 year career, it is about time. Our airmen are ready. They’ve been ready, they’ve been postured for it. The question that most of them have even today is ready for what? Right like what does this mean to us? And so what I will tell you is we understand why we have to reorient toward the threat that we have. We understand the why. We just got shared some of the what but some of that what is still going to iterate based off of you all the how we’re going to get there. is still being worked out through all the real work starts now. And so each and every one of our airmen will be crucial to helping us get after how we will do this and reorient the force toward these things. And what I would say to you too, is don’t wait on us, right like there are things that all of us can do within our squadrons within our flights within our sections. All of us ought to be thinking about how we can reorient ourselves toward the threat in my section and make things better for us but our airmen are ready. It’s about time
CMSAF Murray
right? Well along that line chip in intervening Secretary Kindle recently stated that the changes proposed by the department and the airforce leadership and Department of Air Force leadership are more than just organizational structure. It also is how we train people. What kind of skill sets that we want to have and what that mix of skill sets is. So with that in mind, we’re SpaceForce Guardian civilians making up nearly 50% of the Space Force and the enlisted in the officers being about 50% 5050 What unique skill sets and or roles and responsibilities do you see the enlisted force taking on as you continue to focus on growing and developing the service?
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
Yeah, so a general right thank you very much. Let me start by saying thank you for your service. And for the years you put into AFA and allowing us to have opportunities like this to come together with some professional development, make some connections and talk about what a great department of the air force that we have. Thank you very much, sir, I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. So, you know, General Salzman talked about how we just went through a review of the officer enlisted and civilian roles responsibilities was such a small service that we have and we kind of inherited a lot of the infrastructure of the organization from not only the Air Force, but the Army and the Navy. Other entities that we had pieces of piecemeal that we brought together and realized was such a small smoke as focused service. On the enlisted side, we only have cyber operators, intelligence operators, and satellite operators. So how is it that we maximize those functional areas with the number of officers and listen civilians so we went through a drill and said, with such a small mission focused service, how do we appropriately apply those talents to get after that? And then that’s what we’ve done. So what does that mean? What’s the training skill set? So in addition to what, you know, how we employ them, you know, in that document, it talks about that the enlisted force or the warfighters, or the service, they are the subject matter experts in their weapons system, and they are responsible for the training and the readiness of the unit of action, or the combat squadron or the combat detachment, that we’re going to present for it. So it opens up an opportunity for us to kind of embrace and own that mission set. And you know, general salts have talked about the right now their initial focus is on how do we train in a different way the officer corps or the Space Force, but that’s the first endeavor, but we’re already looking at what does that mean for the civilian corps and their development model and for the enlisted, so some of the career field managers already been looking at the work that doing on the officer course, and identifying new 20 or 30 Different syllabus items that, hey, we’re gonna have to beef these up for the enlisted corps. We’re gonna have to add these into the curriculum as we continue to develop what that is, and those roles responsibilities as an example, you know, how do we look at what the NCO of the guardian does? So we have Tech Sergeant Joshua Khosla from Delta nine, he just certified as a mission director for the x 37 B, experimental spaceplane. That’s an example of someone who’s a subject matter expert, who’s a warfighter for the Space Force and getting up to the mission set. So I think this evolution, this journey that we’re on, is going to empower the enlisted corps to really get after what they want to do, which is the mission and stay focused on that. So I’m really excited where this is gonna go.
CMSAF Murray
All right. Well, chief bass since you’ve been in the seat, you’ve been focused on building what you call the force of the future. You’ve put a lot of things in place, you know, along that way with other things. So what do you hope that what you have been in place and what you envision now with these changes, will look like maybe one year one 510 years from now of how you see the force? Yeah,
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
I would offer the force of today and the force of the future like you’ve heard it from the top four from the Secretary, the Ender, the CSO Chief of Staff of the Air Force on what our thoughts are on what that force of the future looks like. I will tell you the force of the future is reoptimize. For great power competition. The force of the future is empowered by the force of the future or critical thinkers, its force of the future. value, what the total force brings and the one and the one team brings to the fight. You know what I’ve seen as I’ve been walking around and talking with some of our airmen throughout this AFA is I’ve been able to see the total force and full effect even as I travel I see the value of the total force Do we have any guard guard in here? We have one where’s the guard at? What about our reservists? Our Future Force will value what the art component brings to the fight. We’ll figure out ways to integrate by design everything that they do. I tell people all the time our guard and reserve teammates are actually the secret sauce that we have. They’re part of the skill sets they bring to us with their civilian expertise and oh by the way, most of your guards when you see your Guard and Reservists you really need to you know just give them a high five and a thanks because it’s not lost on us that most of you lose money to wear this uniform you bring with us huge skill sets. For our guard teammates you have, you know, the state partnership programs, it will be a future force of values.
CMSAF Murray
All of those things are true, but I don’t know if you want to maybe pick up on that, you know, because of course you are still building. You have guardsmen, you know, Air Force guardsmen doing space missions, you know, still but that hasn’t been worked out yet. As you reserve and drill Saltzman spoke there on Monday about having you know full time part time being able to rotate how to how do you see and what’s you know, what is your view how that’s gonna work?
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
Yeah, so we’re really excited about the Soza SpaceForce Personal Management Act which came into law with the NDAA that was signed by the President in December. So what worked with it so throughout my career as an operator doing this mission said, partnering with the reserve units, right, for example, flying a GPS constellation, we have individuals from the activity side from two stops and we have their teammates 19 SOPs that are out there. And even when I was doing missile warning up at Buckley, right, I had the seven Swiss who were up there partying with me when I was in two Swiss spacewalk squadron. But the discussion was about a future service. How do we expand optionality for the service member and not be challenged with the changing of components? So it’s kind of sometimes a challenge for someone to go from active duty into the guard coming on orders off orders, and how do you kind of leverage that expertise that you pass talked about? So the Space Force personnel management act is gonna allow us to bring that kind of what exists today as a reserve component, primarily 3d Space Wing under the Ark into the space force. Now, it’s not going to be just picking up and recreating the reserve in a space where we want to have a completely different model. And it’s going to allow not only for members who are active duty guardians today, but part timers exist, but how do you flow seamlessly between life happens, opportunities? And like Joe said, people want to you want to leverage that expertise, people who are dedicated to the space mission set, but how do we enable them to say, I’m at a point in my life where I think I’d like to go part time to go back to school or focus on something in industry, but then be able to seamlessly come back in active duty to be able to do that on full time status. So we’re going through that, but it’s, it’s, you know, because we’re not going to just duplicate what we have to figure out the laws and policy. How do you pay a part time or what is a part time or mean, on the full timers today that are in the arc? It’s kind of easier, right? There’s a model for that, the systems understand it, compensation is understandable. We’re really excited where this can go. They really take advantage of that. But for the long run, it’s how do you retain the talent by offering flexibility without a lot of bureaucracy and the red tape?
CMSAF Murray
We’re excited where it’s gonna go in an AMA. Let me say, though, and I agree with you, I agree to be excited about that. Because you’re gonna have the opportunity to do some things and break paradigms, not just for the Department of the Air Force, but I see it for the Department of Defense and the other services, and you’re going to be able to do it at a scale that to where the space force can be leading the way in how the Department of Defense might be able to take and make some changes that have long been needed.
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
So she passed and I’ve talked about this and the other senior enlisted advisors from across the services, you know, this small 9400 Active Duty force that we have. For guardians, we’re trying to pay for a little piece of hay, how do we change the paradigm but what it means to serve your nation in uniform? And we talk all the time like, what can we share that can be upscaled, right to the other services. You know, I was running some numbers this morning for you know, for every active duty soldier, or every Guardian there’s like 47 soldiers on active duty. I mean, just the sheer size capacity general Saltzman told yesterday, you know, how many Space Forces could you fit in for Carson? But there’s advantages to Agile: to do that, and then share what we learned with our teammates. How can we upscale that?
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
And we’re watching you know, it kind of goes back into the previous question on the force of the future. I think it’s important to know right, as we’re thinking about how do we attract, how do we onboard, how to retain this force today and and the force of the future? It’s not going to look like it did when I came in. If we think we’re going to retain the force that we need, with 9090s policies or 2000 policies, we’re probably wrong. And you know what, one thing that I might offer right now is that I do a lot of studying on Generation Z. Generation Z is the most misunderstood generation. People always say, Oh, this generation doesn’t want to serve. That’s not true. They actually want to serve, they just want to serve in their own way. And so we’re going to have to think deeply about how we balance that flexibility that you’re talking about? Some Sif with the fact that we’re serving in a profession of arms a uniform service, and it’s just it’s a bit different. So I’m excited for what that might look like.
CMSAF Murray
We’ll turn it back to you for a second there. Another thing that I think it highlights of what a difference with the Space Force in the air forces we’ve long known but if you’ve talked about the 24/7 employment in place, you know, that’s in place missions, where if many, if not all of your conversation with the public and the airmen and guardians how the Guardians continue to develop if they’re locked into this 24/7 model, and maintaining our nation department offense space power around the clock. 24/7
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
Yeah, so that’s been a really big initiative that we’ve looked at, you know, as an independent service as a separate service. You know, we have how we present forces to the combatant commands, right and that’s our, that’s our space for spa for Jen model that we have. So because back when I was still an operator, you know, when I had hair back in the day when I was watching, or I was cheating myself, I was in the fight 20 for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So you’re right, like what was a time that the service at the time Air Force Base command had to develop me? Can we upgrade training and do the thing that they needed to do if I’m constantly my readiness was burning away, because I didn’t have the chance to do that. So on the spot for Gen model that we’re doing not only on the on the joint side for OSD to the understand how we’re presenting forces that are committed to the combatant command, but with the prepared with the Prepare ready commit model is for for Gen. It allows us as a service for the OTD side, to have guardians in that targeted window. To say this is when your upgrade training is when you do exercises. This is when you go to PME to balance that model, because as a point in place for us primarily, the ponders are forces all the services have some equity that’s employed in place all the time. But for us it is such a small service. When you look at our combat capability. It’s almost everything all of us are put in place. Now we do have guardians that are in austere locations that pack up in the back of a of a jet that that cheap fast provides for us to get someplace but that’s a small contingent but for the most part, they’re they’re employed in place model, if we have to have the service shaped that allows them to do their job. But also we do our job as a service to do the training organization and prepare and be able to provide ready forces to the combatant commands. So the spa for mountain Gen model that we’re implementing allows us to kind of get after that unique challenge we have as a service because we’ve just primarily employed in place. Right.
CMSAF Murray
Well, yeah, we mentioned speaking publicly and both of you do in multiple ways, but I don’t know if everyone knows this, but two weeks ago, both of you testified before the House Armed Services Committee on military personnel. Can you share with us a main point are the priorities that you expressed to the congressional leaders regarding the readiness of our forces. And how receptive Did you find the congressional leaders to you and what you and your fellow fellow Sel is? Advocate for the Air Force to pass?
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
So I will tell you that the quality of life panel, those congressional leaders were very receptive, right. Like they want to know what they can do to help our servicemembers and their families? First and foremost, I’ll tell you, we had a good time on that panel, by the way, so chief wrestlers braced to sat right next to me, and I told him I said, Hey, dude, when I kick you, that means I need saving. So So So, so I didn’t like that we’re so far away now because I said I might need saving and I can’t kick you from here. But But I’ll tell you so some of the key points were things by the way, that we are always advocating for all the time, and all of your senior leaders are advocating for all the time for me for the past, you know, three and a half years it’s been paying compensation. It’s been health care, it’s been housing, it’s been child care, every single thing that matters to you, your family members, your fellow wingman or guardians, those are the things that we really do advocate for. I would also offer that testimony is one thing, but the real work happens during the office calls and happens during the phone. calls that happen during the trips on the hill. So lots of work for all of our senior leaders to help get after some of those things. If I can just say one thing on the pay and compensation because I do think we’ll make some movement there. But we haven’t had a targeted pay raise to our pay chart since 2007. We have the most educated, talented enlisted force in history. It is about time for a targeted pay raise.
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
when I got into the role in September, you know, right away the team, you know, understood the criticality importance of getting me up on Capitol Hill and I started doing office calls immediately, and I will tell you to cheapass this point, every single office call after the pleasantries about hey, you know, welcome ended with what can we do for the men and women of the Space Force? How can we help? So there is a relationship, there’s opportunity there and, you know, one of the things that, that I say one of my greatest honors, you know, wearing the stripes in his position is getting to brag and on the behalf of Guardians and our families, when we get a chance to do that, and the quality of life panel, which I think chief has correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the first time we actually had a dedicated panel like that. For us.
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
That is the first time and really driven by the Department of the Air Force, right. Like, those panel members are like, Hey, how can we help?
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
Yeah, it’s so it gives us a platform and I think all the essays are pretty much right lockstep about paying compensation and that the the, not only the quality education, the digital literacy, but the talent that we’re recruiting today on the enlisted side across all the services far exceeds anything we’ve seen in history. But beyond that, what we’re asking these men and women to do for seeds, anything we’ve ever asked him to do before so it’s really looking at the model and being you know, it works in some of the opportunities in some meetings and reviews in the building. You know, looking at the pay compensation model, when they do the analysis, the measuring stick that they’re using, it seems like Well, hey, we’re doing okay, as a military service. But the stick we’re using the measure has to be reevaluated, I think, based on where we are today. As an example, one of the things that I talked about in my testimony was we talk about bh. And when you look at what the anchor points are for housing, say, what does it cost to rent a three bedroom townhouse in every area to say, well, we’re paying BH, you know, the 95%. You know, it hits the mark, for members. But here’s the challenge. With a measuring stick. If you’re an enlisted person with a family 99% of you do not get compensated for a single family home. Nine if you don’t get competent, the measuring stick reuse for a three bedroom single single family home. You don’t hit that anchor point. Until you’re 39. This is just 1% of us, right. So is that model that we’re looking at maybe just a little outdated, what is the value proposition of service? It’s changed. And I think that’s kind of the goodness of the dialogue we’ve had and you know, our minute you know, our elected officials are very much interested in that conversation, but we have to talk about it.
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
If I can add one thing to that point, right. I think there’s a balance while your senior leaders are fighting the good fight for quality of life and trust me, we are. There is a balance still and that balance is at the end of the day, our service members stated well, like we can’t we can’t forget the things that we have while we still have room for growth, right? Like we can’t forget that we still have health care. We still have housing allowances. We have things like Air Force School, we have tuition assistant, like all the things let me tell you what the PLA doesn’t care about. They don’t care about clothing allowance. Air Force, cool. BH like they don’t care about those. So I think sometimes we can wonder Right? Like, you know, how can we get more I would offer it’s a balance, right? We’ve got to figure out a different, more modern model. I think because civilian organizations are offering great compensation packages 10 years ago, they weren’t. So we’ve got a set. But our military by and large is a calling in and worthy and I think we do a good job on making sure that we take care of today’s service members. Yeah,
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
and we just had the one last point that we had the opportunity to to highlight was, you know, for the quality of life, the investments, we’re making dormitories, and CDCs. Right. We’re making great strides. We’re trying to get policies out there. But we talked about the need for stability and our funding. Right? We pump stuff out and there’s things we want to get after, but like you know, if you can’t if none of that when you can’t execute what we plan for then we fall behind. And that’s where we get into some challenges where, you know, we have men and women. Maybe the quality of life isn’t where it needs to be. It’s not for some time for lack of trying. That’s right. We can execute on time and on budget, because of the challenges that we have. We tried to make that point and we had the opportunity on the hill as well. It’s
CMSAF Murray
good because as we know the secretary drove the point home hard on Monday about these continuing resolutions, don’t allow the funds in multiple ways, including to our personnel. And again, thank you all for being able to testify and how passionate you are. Because we know that quality of life and we know the effects on our families and everything is readiness and affects our readiness as well. So thank you to the point about money. You know, Benjamin, Benjamin Franklin once wrote, the best return on your money for your person to your head. Chief: Can you share some of the investment the Space Force is looking at for guardians with training and education opportunities?
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
Yeah, I’d love to readiness. We have to make sure our guardians are trained and ready. So you know one of the large initiatives actually in the 24 budget, I think it’s over $30 million in OT ti which is operational tests and training infrastructure. Because the Guardians thirst for the opportunity to apply the skill craft that we’re teaching them in tech schools, but how do they get a chance to actually fight the fight in an environment that prepares them? For China? Right or the high end fight conflict? How do we execute in practice? What does it mean competitive endurance but from a force perspective? It’s not a checklist positional training environment we need. We need to be able to at the Forest Service level the forces we provide, whether it be GPS SATCOM spintronic warfare over to warfare, how do we integrate that in an environment where our guardians can actually train and fight? That’s what they want. And we’re working really hard to invest and give that to them, because we got to get the training, but we’re making strides. You know, I think in December, we had the first Red Skies, which was a warfare exercise that we had. Were very successful. That was the first one we’ve had several black skies exercises, which are like electronic warfare, and we have blue skies that think we’re trying to do, which will be cyber, but we have to be able to have the infrastructure to allow them to do that. In regards to being innovative. If they don’t, if they don’t have it, they don’t have the infrastructure. We’re helping to train even if a whiteboard is a piece of the paper right? We’re getting after it, but we have to make the investment because we have to train them accordingly to be able to succeed in the high end fight. So we’re gonna have to do that on the education front. Right now. You know, we have our own NCO Academy and senior winter Academy Peterson Space Force Base, to bring to Britain the commandant, last couple of months had to stand down and kind of re re imagining what is EPMD look like for enlisted guardian and are ready to get to get the outreach and kind of see what that curriculum changes are coming up in the next couple of months. But we’re also leveraging all the opportunities that we can have education with industry, we get slots to do that. We have a guardian. That’s right, right now down in Norfolk and JP JP, me too. So we’re leveraging traditional things that the other services have to offer. Just maybe not as much of a grander scale because we’re so small, but we’re having the discussion based on what we needed from a training perspective to be the warfighter. But then how do we educate the Guardians as well? Especially in light of the officer enlisted and civilian roles responding to these papers, all these things are feeding into the development model, what does that career path look like? You know, whether it be eight years, 10 years, 20 years? What is that journey for a guardian and all these initiatives are coming together. The synergy of all will define those investments that we’re making, but I’m really excited where we’re going. Because we like journalists, I was told that yesterday, you know, we don’t know look at us, we’re like we have to reoptimize we have we have the opportunity we’re going to embrace it and we you know, having the Guardians on the team today, especially when you talk about our into our airmen that were airmen prior, but Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and then when I have to call OG the original guardians came in out of society, right? Whenever in another uniform, and leveraging Hey, what when we decided to become a guardian, what was in your head, like help us define what that looks like? What is your development model that you want us to provide to you? And we’re bringing all that together to really to really shape what education and training looks like, but the first thing was warfighting. Oh TTI funded gotta get executed. Alright,
CMSAF Murray
we’re closing in. And of course, I’ve saved a little bit at the end, but there was an audience question that was asked of John Waldron on Monday and after General often announced the changes to the force and one of those was affecting the force by in personnel by bringing warrant officers in a tech sergeant asked you, sir, when you’ve made open up to other career fields. This question has been around for a long time. In our force, I made an off the cuff statement. You know, during the time I was chief Messer, the Air Force Over my dead body. But then I went on to highlight you know, and be able to describe the fact that it perhaps in time, and if we did that, where we may start in the career field was exactly what general officers said it was in our it in our cyber area, which has grown exponentially technical and the demand of those and so, so, Chief, if you would, you know to answer the tech sergeants in your perspective of that and then on top of that, drill Salzman said that right now that that’s another consideration for looking into Space Force. So both of you may be given a quick opportunity with that question.
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
I say what my boss says. So back to how do we maintain our competitive advantage? Right for all the right reasons I’ve I’ve never said that, by the way. If you’re on Murray, right, like, you know what, but I would offer when I first got in the seat, and people would ask me, What do I think about Warrant Officers and do I think that we need them? The answer was originally No, I don’t know that. What and what I said is I don’t know that that’s the model we need. But I do know that we need a model to be able to retain our technical experience, right, like that’s a fact. And so you know, and oh, by the way, there’s been studies on should the Air Force have worn officers or not, I don’t get excited about any studies kind of because a study you can get any study to say anything that you want it to say, right. What I would offer is it gets back to, you know, today’s airmen and guardians want different pathways to serve. And, and and we are in an organization that we’ve got to keep some of our technical expertise, deep technical expertise. And that’s all we need them to focus on. Right? Not necessarily the leadership path, if you will, that that some and so we’ll have to balance out what that looks like. And so I’m excited for where we’re going. I think it’s the right move. And I think there’s more to come in terms of it getting back to, you know, how do we retain the force that we’re going to need, it’s not going to be by policies from the 90s or the 2000s. We really do have to reimagine what that looks like. Great.
CMSSF John F. Bentivegna
Yeah. So, you know, when we started, even before the Warrant Officer discussion before it for just GPC initiative, but as the space was established, we only started with three functional areas for the enlisted corps within the Space Force. We already kind of envisioned a very technical focused, steeped in the mission set that that we train them in, career path to be to start with, so we looked at the Warrant Officer discussing as we’re looking to define, you know, how we want to employ or enlisted guardians, and a lot of times I just want to do my job like I could train to do something I love doing. The warfighting or model kind of inherently already kind of provides that like, like you said when you read the officer enlisted civilian roles, responsibilities, technical experts responsible for readiness, the warfighters of the service. So that pathway kind of exists, be able to do that. The other thing too is such a small service that we have. I still want to try and provide guardians with options, a cheap asset. They want options in how they serve. Right, but because we’re so small, how do I grow my replacement? Right? So um, I reached out regarding I, I’m a cyber operator and I love what I’m doing. I just want to do this. Hey, that continues to do that. By the way. Maybe you can replace me someday. Maybe you can replace Carmen Pogue, it’s Star calm someday. So I don’t limit their options. But I also want to be able to allow them to stay focused on the warfighting and the skills that they have. compensate them where we can reward talent, not necessarily by engineering, but also allow them to follow the path where they are. I don’t want to put limitations on them. We’re just too small. And then we talk about the numbers. You know, we look at the Navy, I think it’s like point 6% are worn officers in the Marine Corps about one army a little bit more. But our size, those numbers are just so small to have a third category of guardian just from just the logistics perspective isn’t feasible for us.
CMSAF Murray
It’s great. To fast, you’re getting ready to turn the seat over the Chief Messer, Air Force number 20. If you would share what accomplishments are you most proud of during your time and your tenure as our 19th Chief Master the Air Force in three
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
weeks number 14 and three weeks. You know when it comes to the accomplishments that I’m probably most proud of? I would say it’s the accomplishments that our airmen make every single day, right? Like I always tell my team and I wish I had a GoPro on because I want our I want our senior leaders to see the the the excellence and the greatness and the innovations that I get to see every time I come to one of your installations and I want our other airmen to see the greatness that’s happening across the board. I would also say the other accomplishment is really over the past few years and I think most of our senior leaders would agree. We have helped raise the strategic IQ of the force. It wasn’t lost on me that over three and a half four years ago most of our airmen were probably more concerned about beards than they are about China. That by and large has changed. And so I’m really proud of that. But that’s because of the good work that our teams have been doing. We rolled out things like in the list of force development action plan. How do we have the airmen that we’re going to need in 2030? It’s just not going to happen by happenstance. We rolled out an updated brown book and an updated blue book, we rolled out a purple but because we will never fight alone and we have to understand what we bring to the joint fight. We rolled out a blueprint if you’ve never seen a blueprint. It’s something I wish I had as a young Airman and as a young NCO, and certainly a great product for our officers and civilian teammates. To see, we rolled out a lot of foundational documents to help raise the strategic IQ of the force to understand this threat that we have. And so those are some of the things that I will probably be most proud of, as well as after meaningful talent management initiatives and creating frameworks for that. Lots of work to do but we’ve done a lot over the last three and a half years
CMSAF Murray
as you have well chiefs on behalf of the Air and Space Forces Association. Thank you both for sharing your insights and some of your priorities here today. Without question, our guardians and our airmen will lead, cared for and represented by you. And Chief bass, our knife Chief Master to the Air Force and all of us used to be asked a question, When will there be a woman chief Messer the Air Force and she, in his great wit that he had, would do a pregnant pause and he said, I hope never. Someday there’s going to be the best chief in the Air Force selected to be the chief master of the Air Force and she will lead the Air Force and our enlisted force in the greatest way. cheapass you have ladies and gentlemen, our 19 Chief mass or the Air Force historic is the first female chief not only Chief Master, the Air Force was senior enlisted leader of all the services who has led us in such a great way please ladies and gentlemen a round of applause for Thank you Joe. On behalf of our Air and Space Forces Association, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to thank you for your leadership and your inspiration. And gosh your heart. What some of us don’t know is that Chief best shot of the Air Force Joe bass started out running an operations desk in a fire squadron. And she’s never lost the heart of a warrior and that heart that’s out there inspires all of us and around the world. So thanks for letting me just stand up here for a minute. On behalf of their aerospace Force Association. And thank you and oh, by the way, our governance in our Aerospace Forces Association says there’s a spot on our board or as a board of directors, or the outgoing retiring chief minister of the Air Force, so please know there’s lots of runway in front of you. And it’s just thank you for everything.
CMSAF JoAnne S. Bass
Thanks again to IFA Orville, thanks so much. It’s an honor to serve with you. I always appreciate your emails to me because he always said on your wing, and so I appreciate that. You know, when you’ve been doing this over 31 years, you’re an airman for life. Even if you’ve done it for four years, you’re an airman for life. So it’s an honor to serve with y’all. And y’all aren’t gonna make me cry. This AFA. Alright, y’all take care. Thank you.
Fireside Chat: Connecting and Empowering Weapon Systems
– Brig. Gen. Luke C. G. Cropsey, DAF Program Executive Officer for Command, Control, Communications, and Battle Management
– Brig. Gen. Daniel C. Clayton, Director, Advanced Battle Management System Cross-Functional Team
– Moderator: Heather Penney, Senior Resident Fellow, AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies
Heather Penny
ladies and gentlemen, good morning, and welcome to this fireside chat on connecting and empowering weapons systems. I am Heather Penny, a senior resident Fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace studies. And we all know that modern air warfare relies on rapidly gathering information and pushing it out to the battle managers and the warfighters who are quarterbacking and executing the air campaign. This requires tightly integrating the sensors, the battle managers, the shooters and the weapons through robust and survivable data links that are empowered by advanced decision aids to discuss how to best connect and empower our weapon systems to defeat adversary threats. We’re lucky no pun intended to be joined by two remarkable Air Force leaders. To my far left, we’re delighted to welcome Brigadier General Luke cropsy. General cropsy is the Department of the Air Force has a program executive officer for command control, communications and battle management. In this role, he oversees the delivery of the Death Battle Network, an integrated system of systems delivering decision advantage to the joint and coalition force. And we’re also very happy to have Brigadier General Daniel flax Clayton, general Clayton leaves the Air Force’s advanced battle management system, cross functional team and in this role, he guides the modernization of command and control systems to improve decision making advantage and competition crisis and conflict. So gentlemen, this is such a rich topic. Let’s dive in. But the first thing that I like to cover is terms of reference. Because I think too often we’ve become we’ve conflated C three BM so the systems, the actual technologies and the networks that we use computers with the functions of command control and battle management, because the operational architecture, how we wage war, and the functions, the decision and the information architecture, they rely on the technologies and because they are so closely married, we’ve often conflated those so can we get down to some terms of reference? You know, like I said, in the Venn diagram, they often overlap, but we have to be careful to not muddle them. So can you please describe and differentiate command from control battle management, and then describe the Death Battle Network. And this is really important because it gets into the work that you’ve done with modeling, modeling the network.
Brig Gen Clayton
Alright, look, I’ll go ahead and start with this one. So thanks for the question. Miss Penny, and I think it’s probably an appropriate time to take a little bit of a journey over the last 25 months to answer that question, and I’m not specifically going to differentiate differentiate between command and control just yet but in January of 2022, Secretary Kendall charge the advanced battle management system cross functional team with giving him Specific, measurable improvements to command and control. And so that was the charge that we were given. And that’s the path that we’ve been on for the last two years or so. As part of that. We did a literature review and market research, we kind of scoured the interwebs to figure out you know, when people say command and control, what does that really mean to them? Right? And so there is a definition in the DoD dictionary for command and there’s one for control as well. That’s the theory, but the practice for how the different service cultures employ that is vastly different. And so, as this journey has gone along, I’ve also recently learned that, you know, in addition to religion and politics, you shouldn’t talk about commanding control outside the family. Because the second that you do, you’ll get emotional, visceral, visceral responses from the other side, saying that’s not how you do command and control. And so, back to the Secretary General’s guidance to us what we’ve what we did is we went out to industry we went out to the private sector and said, How can we better define and kind of have a common framework for the lexicon and the taxonomy for what you just described at the beginning? So with that, we landed on a rules based approach to performance delivery. A subset of that, as most of the engineers in the room will know is a model based systems engineering approach. And so we took joint and military operations, which are extremely complex and we decided to try to functionally decompose those to the maximum possible. So in doing that, we discovered Hey, that we think that there are as everyone knows, like, all models are wrong, some are useful. So our transformational model broke it down into eight different decision domains. And then the ninth was the operational environment, which is basically planet earth and everything on it. But within that context, we said, we want to differentiate discrete and orthogonal decision domains to include planning command and battle management. So that is how we have defined what your question was about, which is command and control. Within that. We’ve done some extensive work the last two years, battle management was probably the most complicated so we started with that one. We’ve done functional decomposition down to the tier three level. What that means is we have very specific knowledge and understanding of what the information exchange requirements are from this C two node to this C two node, which are platform agnostic. Of note, the transformational model for planning. We’ve worked with the United States Navy on one that has 12 Some functions the T MBM, the battle management, one has 13 Set functions. We can get into a bit more detail on that in the future. But what I will note is that on this journey the last two years and socializing outside of the normal air force, we’ve talked to Haskin, SAS PSM at some level, we’ve talked to SACD clerks. We’ve reached the OSD keep their analytic working group last fall, we briefed the OSD ans acquisition working group last fall as well. In addition, we’ve also released two RFIs to industry the previous two September FAS, so that they can understand this is the direction that the Department of Airforce is headed. And then finally, I’ll just note that from an allies and partners standpoint, we’ve shared this with all of our five AI NATO partners to include France and Japan as well. And so from our perspective, we think that we’re plowing some new ground and trying to again have that common understanding of when you say command and control. When we say command and control. This is specifically exactly what we mean. And it’s all about decision advantage and ensuring that the future warfighters have the skills, the knowledge, the applications and the tech stack to make sure that they have that decision advantage going forward.
Brig Gen Cropsey
Yeah. So Heather, just thanks to you and AFA for giving us the opportunity to do that. So flaking are very comfortable in our role together in this this endeavor that we’re doing called advanced battle management. But one of the things that I think we need to unpack a little bit more or the labels that we’re using because I think there’s a lot of confusion to your point earlier about, Hey, what is this a BMS thing versus a C three VM thing versus the ABMS, c of t? And you know, now this thing called a Death Battle Network, like there’s a there’s a lot of jargon going around on that topic. So what we’re trying to do is provide in the flex point, right, specific, concrete definable and measurable definitions around what we’re trying to do to make CTE work better. And the key point here is that if right if it’s not measurable, we don’t know whether or not the things that we’re doing are actually moving the needle in the right direction or not. Okay, so a lot of the work that quite frankly is CFT is done on the on the modeling piece is absolutely essential to what I have to pull over on the acquisition side to know whether or not the right the kit that we’re providing is actually given the warfighter anything that matters in the outcome, but in regards to the the acronyms themselves, okay, so, so AVMS as a historical term, started aways back right, and it went from air battle management system to advanced battle management system. We did these things called OnRamps back in the 2018 to 2020 timeframe, and right and then we graduated that conversation into a program of record that the DAF RCO was running. Okay. And we still call it ABMS. So we had AVMS, right? The rolling on replacement is something that might look like J stars to Hey, now it’s this internet of things that we’re doing on these on ramps to Hey, now it’s this thing that we’re doing as a program of record and quite frankly, the maturity in that conversation and the rigor being applied in that conversation just continued to go up and we got better and better definition around what we meant when we said advanced battle management system. When the secretary stood up, see three BM a year and a half ago, right it was to take that ABMS program out of the RCO and the architecture work out of the chief architects office and combine them into one place at one time. And right we still had this ABMS thing that now meant at least five different things all under the same label. And so part of what we did when we when we brought the terminology of of the Department of the Air Force’s Battle Network into play was to acknowledge the fact that we were now talking about an entire system of systems, of which a part was the advanced battle management system that that I now had underneath me directly, but it also quite frankly involved 50 additional programs across seven different POS around the rest of the Air Force. Okay, so you can see where the scope of the problem has changed dramatically. And we said, look, there needs to be a way for us to talk about the scope of that system of systems in a way that doesn’t involve a right 15 or 20 minute dialogue every time we do it. So right we we’ve used the term now Death Battle Network to describe this very now expansive and extensive system of systems that we are now providing back up into the joint force as a way of connecting not only what we’re doing across air and space, but quite frankly into the Navy into the army into the Marines and into our coalition partners. And right that’s also been part and parcel to the conversation that we’ve had with Congress. So the one thing that we did do is we kept ABMS as a label tied to the money, because we didn’t want to confuse anybody with regards to where the budget was at and what we’re doing with the dollars. And we wanted to make sure we were transparent about how that thread kind of flows through this whole conversation. So now I mean, if you want to get technical ABMS is actually a term that we use for the program element that we fund, all the work that we’re doing on but the terminology in terms of the operational capability that we’re providing into the fight is what we’re calling the DAF Battle Network.
Heather Penny
Thank you and the DAF Battle Network I think is crucially important because it helps us transition away from thinking we’re going to have one battle management to rule them all or one command and control system to rule them all and to your point flag. With this is a lot like the religion and politics discussion with the different services because each service has their own command and control philosophy. And that’s dictated by their domain and their operational concepts, the way they fight war and the speed of their war their scheme of maneuver. We all know the army for example loves me very, very organic. Well the scope of the Air Force is vastly different. So we should not try to impose the same command and control philosophies across all the different services. But the DAF Battle Network as the information and data exchange backbone allows you to do so many different things especially when you do the functional Deacon decomposition of what are these what are the functions what are the things we need to do? And what are the specific data requirements that we need to be able to execute more. So thank you. That’s a very, very good discussion. Gentlemen. I appreciate it. So you’ve already described sort of how we’ve evolved from ABMS to the DAF Battle Network, and feel like you have a phenomenal analogy to help make it clear for us to understand what this now means. Would you mind going into that?
Brig Gen Clayton
Yeah, of course, I will say is, it also seems that fate is not without a sense of irony, because when it was the air battle management system, I was the human being in 2017, who would have to hit print on the slides and then walked into homes around the building, to Secretary of the Army Chief of Staff of the Army and explain why even though J stars was being recapped, like something was gonna come in behind it. And so I’ve seen this progression for the last seven years. And as I try to get my mind wrapped around it I’m probably the least smart person on this stage. And so I have to go to analogies that work and as much as I would love to take everyone in this room out to SpaceForce Buckley and say, Hey, let’s go check out the Daffodil network. Like it’s not a it’s not a thing right. And so for me, when I tried to explain this to my neighbor or to my spouse I say it’s kind of like the Verizon 5g network for instance. And so the average American doesn’t really care about Wi Fi routers and cell towers and fiber optic cables and software algorithms that manage data flows through networking centers, and I probably lost about half of you like 10 seconds ago. The point is like they just want to turn on their phone and see the content or when their family, in my case my children, want to turn on Disney plus and watch a movie like they want it to work. And so the analogy then come back to the military use case, which is if you have a battle manager sitting in a talk light staring at a CBC to a cloud based command and control application. They don’t, they don’t really care about the non sexy stuff. They don’t care about all of the infrastructure behind the scenes. They just want to make sure that they have the data that they need to say, Okay, I need to launch a force ship here, I need to launch an E ship here and just go do it. And so that’s kind of where Luke and I were trying to think about it that way so that we are actually focusing on all of the non sexy stuff that will enable the warfighter in the future to do that. If I may, right here, I will just note that you know, in the transformational model, so I would like to take all of you on a quick thought experiment to imagine yourself in the Indo PAYCOM theater and a couple of years from now, that one of the 69 Ace locations that your your airmen or guardians could be at. Just think about in the first 12 hours of that potential conflicts, how many decisions are going to have to be made and we’ll just narrow it down to just the planning decision or the battle management decision. Is that hundreds is it 1000s Is it 10s of 1000s From our perspective, even if it is 10s of 1000s of different decisions that have to be made, through our transformational model, all of those could fit neatly into one of those 25 sub functions that I just described. 13 for battle management, or 12, for planning, and in that I will say and this is again for a lot of our industry partners that are with us today. Each of those 25 bins, or the sub functions are an opportunity to provide a software application or micro service to the warfighters. And so, again, back to the analogy that seems to work for me and it seems to resonate. But again, this is an extremely complex and complicated situation that we’re trying to connect the folks that need to potentially fight tonight, as well as design and build the future architecture that we want in the future. It’s getting some of the transition from a platform the platform fight to a system the system fight.
Brig Gen Cropsey
Yes. So let me get a build off of that a little bit of flack. So one of the things that I think is important for everybody to understand, is it like we’ve left the deterministic war flight in the rearview mirror. And when I say deterministic, what I mean is I can put in a single input and know right based on the input and how the system works, what I’m going to get for an output right so one input equals one output cause and effect. The complexity of the environment that we’re talking about is so high that I now have what in systems theory is known as emergent behaviors in the system, where I’m going to put an input in and I’m not sure what’s going to come out. Okay, because of the complexity that’s involved. And because of that my ability to predict the future around what’s going to happen and whether or not if I do, thing, X, thing y will happen is going down rapidly. In order to act actually build out a system that’s capable of dealing with that level of complexity. You have to thin slice the problem and when I say thin slice it what I mean is you have to be able to actually boil the problem down to something that’s actually humanly solvable in the context that FLAC just talked about. Know exactly what decisions have to be made by WHO and in what context and you had to get laser focused around what that particular human needs to have in order to make that decision. And you’re going to apply everything that you have in okay to figuring out how to help pull the complexity out of that person’s brain and put it onto the system so that every single bite available to that brain is being focused on the one decision that actually matters in that fight. And what that means is the right the work that we have to do on our end because of the system complexity, right? You’re not going to be able to rules and a bunch of complex rules in your brain simultaneously with all the things that you actually have to manage, which means that the rules have to be that much more simple. So to manage all of that we have to actually abstract that complexity out. And to go back to your your cell phone analogy, right. Your cell phone is really simple to use, right? You push a button and you hit an app and things work. But if you look at the underlying product architecture in your phone, it’s wickedly complex to make all that happen. So what we’re trying to do is build that system in a way that takes that complexity, puts it on the system and then gives the warfighter that bandwidth back to manage all of that operational, dynamic decision making that has to happen. And for that to work, we have to take the the simple system that to work and then layer it successively one after the other in rapid iterative fashion so that we get to the outcome that we need.
Brig Gen Clayton
I’ll just pick up on that as well. So everyone here has a cell phone right and so right now without even thinking about it, your cell phone is pinging the closest cell tower, the closest Wi Fi router to determine which has the best signal to give you the data that you want. Or in this case like because you can I have friends if I go to his house, it might say his Wi Fi router is the strongest signal so I’m gonna go to that one. It does all of that automatically. So you don’t have to think about it. One thing that I’ll bring up from an experimentation standpoint, so when we built a model, we said this is kind of the first step, the next step is we need to experiment with it. So out of the shot Capstone, and this is, I think, again, perhaps plowing new ground. We’re trying to apply a level of scientific rigor that maybe has never been done before. So oftentimes, you’ll hear about the art of CTE or the art of command. We’re trying to apply specific, measurable scientific rigor to some of those microservices and some of those applications that Luke was just describing. So just recently, back in December, we had a shot capstone event. We ran a transformational model battle management for match effectors experiment. And I can definitively say so that we just released the report yesterday, but we can definitively say that we baseline last summer. And then back in December, we brought in a new piece of software and said, if we apply this software to this human machine team, will it move the needle? Good, better, ugly compared to what the baseline was in December? And I can say definitively Yes, it does actually move the needle. So back to my comment about the 13 sub functions for better management and the tool for planning. Now, we just need to do that 24 more times. To ensure that each of those sub functions, we can actually validate and this gets back to the connection that Luke and I have with respect to our teams. And the model that we’re using then informs the architecture that his team is designing and building.
Heather Penny
Would it be fair to say that the work that you’re doing across the Battle net, which really comes down to transport so that’s the information architecture, literally the data links, the processing infrastructure, the software and the apps, that you’re doing that kind of complexity, using processing automation, and so forth so that you can leverage what humans bring to the fight, which is our cognitive abilities. And that I think is really going to be an asymmetric advantage against adversaries like the PLA is that our warfighters are smart. And that’s the what you’re doing within the within ABMS within the def Battlenet is not taking away the art. It’s understanding what we can automate so we can best leverage and optimize the advantage that humans bring to the fight.
Brig Gen Cropsey
Yeah, so I think the piece of this that is often lost in this conversation is that if you don’t have something from a target perspective that you’re trying to hear in an acquisition science, right, well, whatever you whatever you got, right is got to be better than what I’m doing. Not necessarily. And so one of the things that we’ve been doing a lot of dialogue and discussion around is really in the requirements space. And like so if we’re going to do a system of systems architecture, and we’re going to build out what that needs to look like and how it needs to function. We’re going to end up with a set of a lot of derived kinds of things that have to exist in order for those mission threads to close, that today look a lot like a platform requirement. Right? I’m gonna say hey, in order for you to get the transport that you need to connect into the Battle Network, you’re going to need to connect this way. Right, that’s going to look like a requirement on individual platforms. But I don’t actually need a requirement at the platform level. I have one up at the system level. So we’ve had a lot of conversation about hey flack from a requirement standpoint, I need a architecture level requirement that you need me to point the whole system as systems add, and then the conversation about hey, what do individual platforms need to put on in order to make that architecture real turns into a much more straightforward discussion around how you actually make the architecture real as opposed to being an individual conversation on a platform by platform basis. And I think that’s a key. That’s a key difference in the way that we’re looking at this problem right now. And one that I think from a GPC perspective, you heard the Secretary talked about, you know where we needed to go on the requirements front and some of this is actually driving that conversation around, hey, how do we get to the point where we’ve gotten these consolidated system of systems requirements that allow us to very rapidly now go after individual platform things?
Brig Gen Clayton
And on that note, I will say that I would challenge everyone in the room that you need to be empowered to think differently, right. So I think everyone knows that the pacing challenge is putting us in a position that what we’ve done in the past may not help us win in the future, per se. And so with that in mind and back to the requirements point, I will say that, you know, the 1950s 1960s there was a if you look at air to air missiles, there was a specific requirement for four to five humans had to be able to physically pick this missile up and connect it to the lugs on the side of the plane. Well, the size and the length and all of the things that went into that requirement, are essentially driving some of the next gen air missiles that we’re talking about today. Right? And so that’s in our mind this is kind of like legacy thinking. We’re unnaturally constraining ourselves to something that you know, occurred 50 or 60 years ago. So in the command control space, what Luke and I are trying to do in our teams are working on how can we think differently about command control in the future? And so not being contained, constrained to? Well, if I just made the workflows faster than I would, I would have won, you know, yesterday’s war better. Like we’re not trying to do that. We’re not trying to, you know, automate things that fundamentally it was a broken process in the first place, but we’d never acknowledged that and so we’re trying to fix both of the process and then the architecture that will allow us to make quicker and better command control decisions. In the future. And we’re not constrained by legacy thinking.
Heather Penny
Thank you and general cropsy Thank you for bringing up how important the new organizations especially the integrated capabilities command will be to supporting a new system of systems for the Deaf Battlenet and that’s not simply just Air Force or air breathers, but it really integrates both the air and the space domain in a way that I don’t know that we could have really done without this kind of reorganization. I’d like to shift the conversation a little bit more to the command and control piece. So could you describe or discuss the relationship between command and control and battle management? How does this relationship adapt the responsibilities and the authorities in a contested environment?
Brig Gen Clayton
And this question, I will default back to you the transformational model that I said previously. So for our perspective, it is planning command and battle management period. Within that context, though, we think that there are lots of growth opportunities for how to think about this differently. And I will say that, for instance, you know, we talked about the wars of the past and perhaps I’ll use the arrow tasking order as is as an example. And our understanding, that is just an output from the transformational model for planning, right. And if I could just again, bear with if everyone could bear with me for another analogy, I will say that, you know, in the past there was more perhaps like a symphony orchestra right where you have one conductor, you have 100 musicians that have trained in rehearsal to the best of that they’re at the top of their game. They know exactly what they’re going to do. It’s going to and that’s going to be amazing because they’ve rehearsed it 1000 times. And then contrast that to like maybe a jazz ensemble where you have like a handful of folks who generally know that hey, we’re going to be playing the blues today. Or we’re going to be you know, maybe playing something little bit happier tomorrow. But but the point is, as we go forward in the future, the ATO again, it may be this legacy construct that comes out of planning. In the future, we may need more of a joint tasking, order or even perhaps a mission type. orders or an MTO. Where we know that even if we build one of the most resilient architectures possible that we’re going to lose the primary alternate contingency method of communication. And so our airmen are going to have to be more trained and equipped to be put in those situations. So again, back to my analogy or my scenario and to pick on which is if we have 69 Different ace locations, how are those airmen and guardians going to be able to pick up and fight my my assessment and our team’s assessment is that’s probably going to be more like the Jazz Ensemble than it is that Symphony Orchestra so we think that there’s going to be this you know, maybe sliding scale of deliberate and deliberate targeting deliberate planning that most of us have experienced the last, you know, 2030 years of our career. And there’ll be more in the dynamic side of the dynamic targeting the dynamic force employment of how do we, how do we still make those decisions? How do we get after the commander’s intent, but do it in such a way that it’s we’re not tied to the single product at or that comes out every 12 hours? We’re gonna have to iterate more rapidly.
Brig Gen Cropsey
Yeah, I guess what I would add to that is the this distinction between strategic operational and tactical see too, is becoming increasingly less helpful and the reason I say that is because at the end of the day, the right the decisions, the data flows, and who has access to them are becoming increasingly blurred with regards to the echelon of command. And so if at the strategic level at the CCO comm level if you’re looking for information and insight to make decisions at that level, that aren’t congruent with the way that you’re actually doing the operational and tactical side of the business, our ability to move things at the rate and at the speed that we need to move them is going to fundamentally be disconnected. And from a technical standpoint, as a guy that’s, you know, kind of running the nerd herd side of this. It’s the same stack, right? At a technical architecture level. We’re running all of those things on the same infrastructure. It’s not different infrastructure, right? It’s the same infrastructure. You might have separate specific applications that you’re using for the type of decision that you’re running. But it’s all running on the same underlying infrastructure. So I think what’s going to what’s going to continue to evolve in this conversation, especially as we continue to engage on the CGSC two front as we engage in the Indo PAYCOM network conversations, as we continue to reach out to the CIO and the CIO on the OSD side of it. Those conversations are going to be important because if the team doesn’t realize as a whole that you can’t just cut it off at Echelon to right and do separate things across those. We’re going to end up potentially paying ourselves into a corner that that fundamentally doesn’t work at the warfighting level. So again, another reason why we keep going back to this transformational model is because it puts very discrete specific decisions and information exchange requirements into the space no matter what decision you’re making, and right that provides a level of continuity. And integration across all of those that we haven’t had in the past.
Heather Penny
And just to clarify for the audience, when you’re say transformational model with respect to the DAF Battlenet what you’re really saying is we are looking at the all of the different functions so the what 2624 functions that need to be need to be executed, that they’ve derived through that functional decomposition analysis. So all of the all of the broader functions, their sub functions and so forth, how they’re related. So it’s really the transformational model is referring to this architecture that you’ve developed through a very systematic engineering analysis, so that you’re approaching this entire project with that kind of data driven rigor and architecture.
Brig Gen Cropsey
Yeah, so maybe to just try to simplify this a little bit. I’ll do it this way, in life. There are nouns and there are verbs. Right? You need both. And you have an engineer now talking about English, so just right. So you need both to make a full sentence. But if you don’t want to get trapped with the nouns that you’ve been using for the last 50 years, you’ve got to figure out how to understand what verbs those nouns are enabling, right so I have an F 15, I have an F 16. They have a particular mission that they’re capable of doing. Right? The noun is the is the platform, the verb is the mission. What we’re what we’ve done with the transformational model is we’ve pulled the verbs out and away from the nouns so that we’re no longer in a CTU construct. Trapped by the right the way that we have done them for the last 50 years. But we now understand the function that those things have to do with a much higher degree of precision. So that FLAC can now hand those functions back to me and he can say, okay, genius, boy, what do you have for me today? Right and then how do we keep iterating on those things rapidly? Because in this space, the nouns are changing every 18 to 24 months. Okay, this is not like a right a 25 year airplane program. This is a 25 month software and infrastructure program, that if we aren’t like rapidly iterating on this and I don’t have an exquisitely clear sense for what verbs What missions I have to be able to do with those things.
Brig Gen Clayton
We’re not going to we’re not going to get there fast enough, just as a quick example, planning command and battle management is what we’ve defined command control as but there are six other decision domains to include intelligence, connects them data syncing, etc. We have definitely decomposition of those yet. And so in some cases, we will say that those are kind of see two adjacent. So those are things that enable the command and control that we’re talking about. But you know, one epiphany that you know, I personally had within the last six months or so, is that if a battle manager on on in the sky is trying to make a decision, and they say, Hey, I have this weapon and this shooter and I have this target the decision to pair those two together. And then if I have a collection manager on the intelligence side, and I have a sensor and I have that same target with the decision that those two humans is making is essentially the same decision, right? And so as Luke is describing this, our transformational model is allowing us to talk apples to apples. So it’s not just between, it’s within different across different tribes in the Air Force and the Space Force. And so that’s the other bit of complexity that we’re treating typically, is our service has been phenomenal at doing vertical integration for the last 75 plus years. But the horizontal integration, maybe has been a little bit lacking. So back to the nouns conversation and how we potentially trapped ourselves as this platform is amazing at this and this platform is amazing at this but at some point in the future, they need to talk to each other. But we never figured out how to talk to each other. And so we built those two platforms, we’re trying to say is, here’s the digital infrastructure. Here’s the foundation at the beginning that any future platform could tie into if it wanted to.
Heather Penny
So we talked a little bit backstage about the information requirements, right. And this gets a little bit to what you were saying about how we can tie these together. And that targets have their own unique and organic information requirements that I can for if I’m looking into sensing and targeting a tank that’s moving at 10 miles an hour, I can have much larger error probability of their location when I’m doing the initial part of the kill chain, but if I have in that, so that drives certain sensor requirements, data requirements, and network requirements, but if I have an airborne target, that’s moving at Mach and highly maneuverable, I need to have a much tighter, more precise error look, or location with a much faster update rate. And so that’s what you’re really talking about. We’re saying, hey, look, we don’t we’re not being so platform centric. We’re really drilling down into the attributes of the data and then network to enable more of a more integration across the entire force.
Brig Gen Clayton
I will just say that on this front, Luke usually does a pretty good job of talking about not the abstract but the specific and so one of things that we’ve also provide from our team to his team is joint mission threads. So as specifically as possible based on the pacing challenge, these are six missions that we’re trying to close so that he can be as specific as possible and go as deep as necessary to understand the architecture requirements at that level.
Heather Penny
Much, much more specific or concise than I said. So I appreciate that. So I do need to give my air battle managers a little bit of love here. So I need to sort of send this question out for the battle management professionals with J stars gone and the future of our experience battle management. What what is the future for these for these folks? In the Air Force? Our manpower billets are tied to our platforms. And there’s a serious gap before we feel these seven, which may leave key bands of battle managers with no option except for out. So what do you see is the future for this crucial career field? I mean, I look at our electronic warfare experts and we just decimated them when we retired the E F 111. So can we give those guys a little bit of love here? Give them some hope?
Brig Gen Clayton
Absolutely. So pick up scenario of 69 Nice locations. I think there will be an even higher demand signal for battle managers, not necessarily air battle managers. But just battle managers in general. And so that skill set and that transition, I think will be hugely important going forward. And so just as an example, I know that a couple bases that have those platforms that you mentioned, as well as the the US Air Force weapons school, the transformational model that I described earlier. Those 13 sub functions of battle management are already being taught as part of the syllabus to ensure that going forward, the next generation of air battle managers will be able to have those skill sets. And more broadly, I think that the more that we start to experiment and test out ace across the world, we’re going to have an even higher demand signal for people who have the humans who have the critical thinking skills to make those battle management decisions in the future. And we’re going to have to continue that across the death.
Heather Penny
Absolutely. So we’re kind of getting close on our time. So I’d like to do this not quite as speed round, but I do want to focus on what initial operational capabilities are. So we’re taking an iterative approach, and this is on everyone’s mind, how long do we have to wait for the def Battlenet? Is this a 2035 capability? Or are we starting to feel these things a little bit sooner?
Brig Gen Clayton
So out there, I’ll say what I said at the last day, which is the Department of the Air Force is modernizing command and control for decision advantage today. And I think Luke has more specifics than that. Yeah, so I think again, I alluded to it at last AFA but Death Battle Network is here now. So between the conversation in September and the one that we’re having now, we have operationally deployed command, cloud based command control to the Eastern Air defense sector and to the Canadian air defense sector, with more on the way that’s that’s now in the rearview mirror. Okay, they’re actually up and operating. The other thing that we’ve done in the last four months is we’ve put 16 Talk l experimentation kits out in the field, because at the rate that things are moving, right, we actually need the nouns and the verbs to run so we get the full sentence but because they’re they’re moving so quickly, we’ve got to get some of those those kits out to the right to the operational field before we go into your eyes. So we understand exactly what we need to get into that scale capability. So they’re out there. And on that note, I’ll just that you know, so the tactical operation center light is going to be part of Project convergence. Capstone for which is happening later this spring. And on that it already has the cloud based command and control. So again, because of my interesting history with this current topic, seven years ago was a lot of lightning bolts on charts were those those days are behind us. We have actual stuff in the field that is allowing warfighters to test and experiment with it and have that decision advantage today.
Heather Penny
Thank you. I think that’s what we all want to hear is that this is not some PowerPoint, strings and on charts that this is actually things that you are delivering today. And that’s important for everybody to know as you deliver this iterative capability and you build that out. You’re going fast and you’re going through cycles. And that’s crucial to make sure that you’re getting it right. So we’ve got just a few more minutes and gentlemen, you have the center stage. What do you want to say to this audience? Before they go, what is that one piece that you want them to walk out of here, having learned from attending today’s session?
Brig Gen Cropsey
So I’m just going to double down on the Secretary and the Chiefs comment from earlier in the week when when my team walks in the door. I tell them we’re winning tomorrow’s war today. So whatever mindset you walked in with, it better be game on kind of a mindset, right and we push that mindset to the entire team. So whether you’re whether you’re working for me directly, whether you’re part of that broader Death Battle Network on the government side or on the industry side, like we’re getting after it right now, right our time of consequences here and it’s and it’s happening, and if you’re not all in on what we got to do to make that real, you need to find somewhere else to get work because you’re not going to last very long with the two of us. So we have an extreme sense of urgency about what we’re doing. We’re actually delivering capability now. Okay, and it’s fundamentally up ending this game. So if you thought you understood what this looked like and how it was going to work, I got news for you. You don’t if you’re not literally in the cutting edge of this conversation. Pretty funny.
Brig Gen Clayton
Thank you to AFA, and to Heather for this opportunity. I think that from our perspective on the requirements and operation side, I would say again, what I said previously, everyone in this new room needs to be empowered to think differently about the problems we’re trying to solve in the future. I will also note, I won’t go so far as to say that the transformational model, again, to give true credit to the genius behind this. It’s Colonel John Zol a lifelong ebma Right. It’s not going to probably supplant the OODA loop because that’s been around for decades. But I have a feeling that at an AFA in the next 10 or 20 years people will be talking about this with the same importance that the OODA loop has presented over the last few decades. So again, the partnership that Luke and I and our teams have is phenomenal the opportunity to blend the operator and acquire together is amazing. And, again, I’ll just double down on what I said previously, which is the Department of the Air Force is modernizing command and control for decision advantage today.
Commercial Space Integration
– Col. Richard A. Kniseley, Senior Materiel Leader, Commercial Space Office, Space Systems Command
– Dan Jablonsky, Board of Directors, Maxar Technologies
– Becky Cudzilo, Senior Fellow, Astroscale
– John Springmann, Senior VP, tomorrow.io
– Moderator: Maj. Gen. Roger Teague, USAF (Ret.), Founding Partner, Elara Nova
Moderator
It’s great to be here. Thank you all for coming to what we anticipate is going to be a great discussion with regard to commercial space, commercial space integration, the challenges and opportunities that we face. And as you start to think about great power competition, it’s important that I think we collectively look in examine all of our national capabilities and what we might be able to collectively bring to the fight and commercial space is no exception. It has a lot of capabilities that it’s ready to offer today. Our job our collective job is to figure out how to do that and how to do it effectively and efficiently. I’m pleased to be joined by our fellow panelists that I’ll introduce in a moment, but I wanted to first offer a couple of points that might help shape the conversation. First is the rapidly changing landscape. It’s no secret, obviously, commercial space market has grown exponentially over the last couple of decades. And it really influences how we think about space and about what the future is going to look like. It’s no longer a province for sovereign governments alone. We really have to think about how we’re going to interact with commercial systems and capabilities. But most importantly, and what this panel is going to discuss is how we can leverage those space capabilities. And then that really leads me to point number two, and that is really the opportunity that we see for collaboration and synergy. And it’s very, very important that we start to think about how we can best collaborate and leverage and create synergistic effects through both government purpose systems, as well as the commercial capabilities that might be able to brought to the bear where ultimately, those systems can be fielded in a manner that that helps complement, augment and supplement and ultimately enhance resiliency across all of our space systems. Finally, it’s the there’s a little bit of a discussion and an idea with regard to the role that innovation will play. Commercial capabilities can offer a tremendous amount of innovative power. They work at a completely different time and scale and speed and bring tremendous capability very, very rapidly through Rapid Refresh and technology cycles. But it’s important and it has to be balanced by the challenges of those opportunities. And that you know, the integration of it can sometimes be challenging. You know, whether or not you’re talking security, cyber hardening, ultimately, systems integration. All of these represent challenges that must be overcome if we’re going to be able to integrate commercial systems effectively. So with that, let’s get into it. First, I’d like to introduce our panelists. To my left is Colonel Richard nicely. Riches, the director of the commercial space systems office at Los Angeles Air Force Base Space System Center. Becky could Zillow. She is the Senior engineering Fellow at Astro scale. To my right is Dr. John spring min who is a Senior Vice President at tomorrow IO, and finally Mr. Danza Blonsky former CEO and president and current board member of maxar technologies, panelists, welcome. With that, rich, could you kind of get us started with your opening remarks, please.
Col Kniseley
Absolutely. You’re consistent. Some are so general Tate. Thank you for moderating today’s panel and thank you AFA for welcoming us all today. It’s especially great to be back in Colorado back at home solid bunch of Colorado State cadets around so ago CSU just want to kind of start with you know, kind of a history lesson the messaging and the enthusiasm that have been revolving around great power competition at this event is just been refreshing and it’s it’s been very exciting. But when we stood up a Space Systems Command back in 2021 Secretary Kendall asked us to relook at that organization and optimize how we do things. And to start looking at number one, start looking at producing and delivering abilities, not just systems so we are here to deliver an overall effect for the warfighter. So when we stood up Space Systems Command we’ve formed five PEOs at that time, one for space sensing, one for assured access to space one for MILCON PN T, one for SDA and combat power, and one for BMC three and actually, since then, we have stood up a sixth PEO for organized, training and, and, and testing infrastructure. And we push that decision making all the way down. But when we also stood that up we started a mantra of exploit what you have by which you can and build only what you must, knowing that in order to to tap into the innovation that you were talking about sir, and to focus on what we truly felt we need to build in house. We need to start looking at the commercial market and also start utilizing our capabilities in different ways than we normally intention, for instance, utilizing Siver satellites to help the US Forest Department and to find hotspots for firefighters. But what we also did was we started a commercial space office and that was actually kicked off in 2022 under the Commercial Services Office, and now we rebranded us the commercial space office, because we’re after more than just services. We’re after the components. We’re after the capabilities and we’re looking at what industry has to bear so that we can deliver that quickly and effectively to the warfighter. And then also not wait for the 100% solution, get what we can out there fast and then and then utilize the innovation that industry has and do that a lot through the contracts that we set up. So we also don’t feel like we need to own every single contract to be successful. We have established a number of partnerships out there in the ecosphere, with the NRO with the NGA with diu with AFRL and, and Spaceworks is also aligned with my organization to figure out the quickest way to get things on contract to utilize each other’s funding where we can and to also kind of pave that valley of death that a lot of companies are just scared about to really start moving things past a direct to phase two and start looking at some tack fives and strap fives and in working with the PEOs to start thinking about program of record. We have to start looking at things as an overall space enterprise because I think now we’re at that point where military and commercial lines are getting kind of blurred there and we need to start thinking about it as overall capability, overall effect and delivering that to the warfighter. And the last thing that I’ll mention is and I think sir, we’ll probably talk about it on the panel is the commercial augmentation space reserve. It’s been talked about on a few different panels, but um, we are moving forward with proceeding with that framework. It is a voluntary framework where companies will be put on contract to provide a peacetime level of capability and kind of echoing some of the talking points that we’ve heard this week. We have to do it now. We can’t wait for it. We can’t wait for a conflict because we have to get that capability out there. You have to do the proper integration. You have to wargame it and then the operators need to know what this capability is used for and how to operate with it because like I said, it will be an overall enterprise because if you try to introduce this during a conflict, it’ll just sit there on the shelf. So that’s really the foundation of Kasur which is going to be managed mostly through the contract pre price negotiated tables on how we’re going to scale that capability from peacetime all the way through the spectrum of conflict. But also when you sign on to be a chasm member, you are signing on in the event of a national war or a national emergency. To prioritize your capabilities for US government use, mostly for US government use but also allowing the ability for us to potentially say don’t serve that customer over there who may or may not be a pacing challenge, but I look forward to answering more questions.
Moderator
Thanks great. So that was great stuff. A lot of interesting tidbits there that we’ll be able to get into. Becky, please. So
Becky Cudzilo
So Aster scale is a on orbit servicing company. We do things like inspection, life, extension services, debris removal. And our latest is a refueler for the space mobility and logistics office run by Colonel Bolson. We are a new entrant to the US government. We have done work for other countries and for mainly commercial operators providing services on orbit. Our vision is to provide a development of safe and sustainable space, you know for future generations. All the airmen sitting out here. So we focus mainly on things that are good to advance space activities, but also make sure that we don’t provide more to the clutter, add more debris. We provide new capabilities. We have a roadmap that takes us out many years to figure out how we can provide services to the government. Like I said, our latest one is refueling we’ll be building a demonstration in the next couple of years and then that will become more of a service that we can offer to all our commercial customers.
Moderator
Thank you very much, John, please.
John Springmann
Yeah, thanks, Sam. John Springmann I run our space program@tomorrow.io. So tomorrow overall or whether an intelligence company and what that means is rather than providing weather forecasts to our customers, we provide actionable instructions on what to do based on the weather. So there’s tremendous use cases. You know, simple one would be like for NFL stadiums when you open and close your roof, all the way through planning, like flight planning and planning o CONUS operations. To do that. We need to have really strong weather forecasts, of course, and really accurate all over the world where we’re serving. So that relies on good weather models, but as importantly, good weather observations and that’s where our space program comes in. We’re launching a large number of weather monitoring satellites to collect unique weather observations around the world to really enable much better weather forecasts and that downstream weather intelligence, and of course it’s a truly dual use. One of the keys for this audience is we want to enable proof provide much better information for your mission planning. Right so for the warfighter is to have more information as they plan and execute their operations. Through our SaaS offering. We provide this weather intelligence already to a few groups within the military. There’s a couple aviation squadrons within the Navy and we just started an evaluation within a Marine Corps, piece of infrastructure and then the data the satellite data itself. We do provide to groups that are capable of using it right so weather modeling such weather modeling centers, such as Air Force weather we launched our first two Precipitation Radar satellites last year, and it provided some of that data already. And we’re going to be launching about 25 satellites here in the coming couple of years. And thanks for having me. That’s terrific. Thanks, John.
Moderator
Dan, please.
Dan Jablonsky
Thanks, Roger, and thanks AFA for having us today. I think this is a very important set of topics as we think about as the colonel mentioned, the larger space enterprise and how commercial and industry fit into what that picture looks like. Mac’s are build spacecraft fly spacecraft takes data from spacecraft works with massive amounts of data hundreds post petabytes, runs artificial intelligence across it. And really ultimately tries to help the warfighter get to solutions to hard, hard tracking problems very quickly. If you’re a guardian or an airman and you’ve got a cat card, you can get access to millions of square kilometers of data every day through the global GDP system. All you got to do is is log in and get trained up. You can get billions of archived data of the entire planet, just with that CAC card. So those systems are up and running. They run on classified and unclassified environments, depending on what you do, where you work, you can get access to all that kind of commercial data. And we’ve been doing that for over two decades now. As we think about that bigger enterprise, a bigger fight is part of the the equation here. I think that the more the most important thing that I think about when I reflect on this is that not just the augmentation, but the integration and the architectural decisions that are being made in terms of those commercial capabilities because when you start to think about not just you know, near peer, but full on peer and great power competition sets, we need all of those resources. We need the capital going into the development, the technology, and in the industrialization of that space capabilities. And we can’t do it alone.
Moderator
Thanks, Dan. Terrific. Let’s get into some of the questions. So a little bit more. Chrome Isley in your remarks. You mentioned that the government has been trying to successfully integrate commercial for several years now. And it’s frankly had various kind of a mixed report card with regard to varying degrees of success and being able to do so. I’d like to talk a little bit about the perspective of our industry panelists. Are there barriers to entry? Are there impediments real or perceived financial policy regulatory all these are real issues that I know that as commercial providers, you’ve dealt with, as you’ve come on here, and then as well, I think that there’s an important discussion to be had about financial, the financial implications as part of a commercial integration process and that their commercial world operates at a different financial stopwatch than the government does. It’s a little more paced. And while we can fail capabilities much faster, the government sometimes has trouble financially keeping up and it creates a unique set of problems. So I’ll get into it. Maybe with three different questions. First, are those those barriers to entry? Are they real or perceived? And are they you know, what are some of those? And then secondly, what are the implications to capital formation, particularly for small and mid sized companies? Dan, you’ve got a lot of experience here as you’ve grown maxar You were front and center on a lot of important than tough decisions as that enterprise grew. And then it finally rich. I would appreciate your perspective. Does the government have a responsibility? To you talked about the valley of death? It’s real. As a former commercial provider, I can tell you I mean, though the challenges are real. Does the government have a responsibility to help fund and identify promising technologies early and help make sure that they’re going to get across that valley of death, and that they will be core contributors to a government architecture? Becky, if you don’t mind, let’s start with you.
Becky Cudzilo
Sure. So we’re a mid sized company and the government does love their SBIR ours. So we don’t qualify because we are too big. So we have to go find somebody else, a small company that has maybe an innovative technology that we can use to prime this. We ended up being kind of the prime behind the scenes, because most small companies don’t have that capability. So the whole OTA effort, other transactional authority has opened up things at least from our side. We’re not a big prime, so we can’t compete with the Lockheed Northrop’s, the people like that. But being able to go after an other transactional authority, through spec in particular, has proved to be really useful because we can actually put forth the fact that we’re a non traditional prime, we can leverage off of that and actually use it to fund things that we want to do anyway. But maybe the commercial market is not ready for that demand signal and commercial is not there, but we’ve heard it from the government at the you know, conferences. And stuff where they talk about things like that. And they’re starting to put their money where their mouth is, which is really kind of nice, at least for our perspective as to how to go forth with that. So that’s kind of a little financial and policy thrown together. There are differences in the way the government does policy versus commercial restrictions. So, you know, we have to deal with the FCC, the FAA, various authorities get licenses, things like that, that the government can go around or do without trying just bridge that gap makes it a little harder, because I don’t mean to monopolize I’d like to hear what Dan has to say also from that perspective,
Moderator
Dan, you’re on.
Dan Jablonsky
So I you know, kind of I always say when I’m when I’m meeting with government, customers or policymakers to actions if you want more of something incentivize it, if you want less of something tax that are regulated, and so the whatever level of burden or regulation you put on the companies, you’re going to have less of them. It’ll be harder for them to go out and raise capital will be harder for them to go out and get other people to put money into a venture than to go out and do something that the government might like you to do. And you know, we can’t be pollyannish about this space is expensive. We’ve brought the cost curve way down. There’s a wealth of companies out there, we’re doing amazing things. But when you go out and you want to say hey, I want to put stuff into space, and they look at you and they say well, what’s my rate of return on that? How am I going to get paid back for the capital I’m putting into whether I do it through equity or debt or venture funding? And you have to say, Okay, here’s my business plan. I’m going to do this commercially. I’m going to do this with government customers. And they say, What’s the timeline? What’s your resiliency in that timeline? How are you going to build that out? And so the more predictable the government can get, the more is not just signals but information they can give to the marketplace about what its timelines look like what its budgets look like. And every you know, every time in Congress, there’s a holdup on any type of a budget legislation passing that slows everybody down. It slows industry down. It slows the development of technology down. So you know, shameless plug for Congress getting the budget passed here, hopefully soon. But I you know, it’s it’s a really fun and hard set of problems to solve. And there’s, there’s a renaissance happening among these companies. They’re partnering they’re working together, the more the government lets us into what that looks like classified and unclassified environments. brings us into those architectural decisions industry will evolve around that and make the smart bets that it thinks it can make, to generate a return and develop those critical technologies for the warfighter. Exactly.
John Springmann
Yeah, I think there’s been a lot of improvements over the last I think, kind of five years in particular, actually opportunities for commercial companies to engage with the government. strat fine takfeer I think are great examples. Were recipient of a strep phi. It’s partially providing some partial funding for our first two satellites that I mentioned. And what I’ve seen on the regulations and licensure it’s it’s eased a little bit as well, you know, my background is in the earth, earth observation side as opposed to the communication side, but on the Earth observation side, you know, you’re seeing companies that are being authorized to take you know, much higher resolution ‘s and different spectral bands, etc, than has ever been done before. So that’s all good. I think one of the keys is really understanding what the commercial incentives are, right, which is ultimately revenue and that commercial companies are accountable to their board and to their investors. So if you think of kind of a spectrum between, you know, purely commercial, you know, we kind of do what we want aside from government requirements right on one end of the spectrum, the other end of the spectrum is we worked from government requirements only. Right? Ideally, you need to meet kind of in the middle. And I think this dual use can’t be like under emphasized because of it ends up being if you’re a commercial company, and 80% of your revenue is from the government. You’re not necessarily a commercial company are not commercially valuable. Right. So I think it’s really key to help enable commercial viability, and is that the government’s responsibility, not not for me to decide. But I think really, it’s a win win, right to enable this, this innovative industry and to acknowledge that many of the commercial outlooks like on these huge markets first observation really haven’t come to fruition commercially. They’re growing, of course, but again, when you look at the revenues, they’re they’re fairly small on the commercial side compared to government funding. But I’m really optimistic that whether I’m a little bit biased of course, but I’m optimistic that we can crack that nut a little bit with how dual use weather is right, and it impacts everyone. So if we can serve that up properly, and usefully to both the commercial and the military user side, I think it’ll hopefully be a very interesting success story that we can we can leverage.
Moderator
Great stuff. Great stuff. From Eisley. I know that there’s not necessarily a direct investment model here. But at the same time, and I think there’s been several great initiatives, whether it’s been through diu Spaceworks AF works, a number of sibor awards, a number of great initiatives, trying to help sort the wheat from the chaff. And to be able to understand what the most promising capabilities and technologies are, are, is that the process that you foresee and being able to help understand and help some of these companies get their critical capabilities implemented more rapidly.
Col Kniseley
So a couple of things that were just said here and I want to and I resonate with a lot of those number one over classification and not having the visibility into into our requirements. I would definitely say that that’s something that’s a challenge that I’ve put on my team that we need to really crack the nut and figure out the best model to get these companies more clearances, or at least have visibility into the requirements because it seems like it’s this chicken in the egg round go round robin. Well, I can’t get a clearance until I get a contract. Well, I don’t know what your requirement is. So how am I going to get awarded a contract? So I’ve been talking with a lot of different groups DARPA being one of them that I think there’s a there’s going to be a process that we can partner with to figure out you know, some mechanism whether it be through a crater or something so that we can you know, at least get a couple clearances off to these companies. So that they will be more more promising towards some of these, these other missionaries kind of going back to what I was saying, sir, about that line being drawn. And now I also want to mention like over prescriptive requirements, because what I’ve been learning a lot through industry and you know, in the short time I’ve been in this job, I’ve learned with industry, just basically tell them your problem and let them come up with a solution. So we’ve been having a lot of we’ve been kind of redoing the model on how we do Industry Days through through comm. So and also Space Systems Command where we’ve been introducing what we call more reverse Industry Days where we’ll have, you know, the traditional stuff up front, the government will will, you know, give the briefing, talk about the mission area where we’re going, but before that industry day happens, we’ll usually release a vignette or a problem statement and offer companies one on one time to kind of say, Okay, here’s how we would go after this. And then that way we can kind of rope in technology and innovation and that helps us kind of craft out what that that acquisition strategy would be. But going back to the question, you also asked, sir, do we have a do as a part of our job to keep these companies going? It’s kind of a two pronged approach there. So obviously, we have a force design. We have requirements. We know what the what the we know the amount of capability that we need, and we need to go after the companies and the capabilities that are going to help us and the warfighter, and to get to, to Yes, and to accomplish our goals and everything but back to that speed component. We have to find ways to on ramp companies faster. We need to have find ways to leverage innovation faster because the longer we wait and you know, we stay more with that build. You know, obviously you all have a profit to make. Okay, now you’re starting to look overseas and everything and what we want to do is make sure that we harness that capability at home. We’ve done a great job through launch space domain awareness, commercial SATCOM, and general Saltzman was much mentioning some of the successes that we’ve had with surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking. And this is all being done with commercial capabilities and data but there are so many other ways that commercial can help us with our to prosecute what we need against a pacing challenge. Whether being one of them sir, like an alternative alternate PN t constant constellation or capability when you’re talking about dual use, we found a number of different companies that can can utilize their capabilities to provide a PN T capability. And what I would ask everybody in in the crowd, you know, through our front door website we’ve been posting when these Industry Days are going to be some of them are even going to talk about, you know, Kassar, but you’re going to have ones coming up. We just completed a great one on space mobility last month, down in Orlando. You’re gonna see ones on weather coming up, and also sta as well as as SATCOM coming forward. So we’re trying to get out to industry and vocalize where our needs are very good.
Dan Jablonsky
Yeah, I think too, you know, on kind of regulatory or policy side, like I said, I think the bar has come down a lot. I think going forward. It’s not about just lowering the bar. It’s about proactively helping commercial companies kind of cross cross the line and cross that bar, which it sounds like is very much happening with some of the programs you’re referring to so I’m excited about that. Ultimately, these commercial companies, they need to be successful one way or the other, and that’s going to be with us investment or go find customers elsewhere. So again, we just need to set up these Win Win Win Win scenarios.
Col Kniseley
One thing I did want to mention when we’re talking about financial incentives, so having will realigning commercial space office and bringing space works underneath Yes, now we’re aligning Spaceworks challenges to some of our industry days. So last year, we tried it with all PN T. We released the solicitation and some of those should be awarded in the upcoming year. But we were able to with Spaceworks set aside, I believe it was over $30 million. And so we have the Industry Day, we understand where industry is, we develop some of our problem areas and then we’re able to fund industry through direct to phase twos. And then so we’re able to see how some of those progress. We’re also working with Spaceworks on in certain areas to waive the $1.9 million limit, and in certain certain ways we’re able to get up to $10 million. So think about what $10 million. You’re doing more than just software and paper now you’re able to bend metal. And so we’re really trying to bridge that valley that we were talking about rific
Moderator
Thanks, Rich. Shifting gears chromatically you talked and you set the table a little bit with regard to Kassar the commercial augmented space reserve that concept that helps bring in capability when we need it. Should crises arriver or a situation worldwide situations demand that and the need to have it ever ready? That it be exercised and ready to employ at any one particular period of time. You unique among our panelists? Dan, I think you’ve got a lot of experience here, particularly within the ISR business and having dealt with this. How do you balance commercial interests against DoD requirements when you start hearing about Kaiser and potentially being a participant Kaiser? How do you balance your commercial interests against the government requirements? And then maybe Secondly, in a little provocative B would you expect as a commercial provider, you’re now entering a different realm. You got to target painted on Yeah. Do you expect that DOD will defend your assets? And or is that part of your Calculus says, when you consider that I’m going to introduce my my assets into the fray here that you may suffer losses?
Dan Jablonsky
Very, two very good themes there. Roger on the first one let me let me take them in reverse order. I think when Max our satellites, were providing a lot of information and data about the Ukraine War, Russia made statements about what it might do to commercial satellites and it did it about us it did it about space and it did about you know other other providers. I thought it was very, very important that John Kirby walked out to the podium outside the White House and made a very clear statement that said, you know, we will respond in kind to attacks on US commercial assets. He didn’t mince any words. He didn’t say exactly what we would do, but he said a very clear policy marker down to say, you can’t just go blow us stuff up. You can’t, you know, you just can’t touch our satellites or airlines or other stuff that’s on cool. We’re going to respond to that kind of thing. So I think that it’s very important that the US sets the policy guidelines about how it thinks about its industries, its commercial opportunities, you know, something in space is there. In space, something on the ground. You know, there’s Lockheed Martin factories in Texas that we don’t expect anybody to bomb without it being an act of war kind of thing. The second thing I think about that is that it’s been very helpful and important to the government. has taken big steps really fast in the commercial Integration Cell of Vandenberg Air Force Base, and other places where they shared data with industry. And that on the classified and unclassified side, that’s really important because as executive former executive board member, someone that manages someone else’s investments, we have a fiduciary duty to do the right things for those those investments. You wouldn’t want to wake up someday and think that the investments that the executives were making were Benjamins about where you put pension money, your kids money, your college tuition funds, the firefighters and police unions, returns, like we have fiduciary responsibility to that money. So we have to take into consideration someone that says hey, we’re gonna blow up those assets if you do these things. And so that that’s just, you know, whether the policy decisions go you know, one way or another there it’s a it’s an important consideration that companies have to take into account. Now on the on the on the cows are on the the ability to, let’s call it buy on the spot market, yes. For what a commercial service might be. I think it’s it’s, it’s an incredibly hard thing to get right. I think it’s it’s wonderful that we’re doing it because I think that it’s it can be an augmentation, it can be just like with the civilian airlines, the maritime industry and others. It can be a force multiplier for times of combat, but it’s really hard to figure out the economic incentives in how much extra capacity you’ll have and where that extra capacity comes from. Some examples where you know, it hasn’t worked well that we you know, you should turn your brightest and best minds to these case studies are things like the natural natural gas markets. States have said you know, what, it’s okay, there’s a natural gas right, we’ll just buy on the spot market when we need a little bit more power. And it invariably turns out disastrously because the spot market spikes and somebody’s on the wrong side of that equation comes out, you know, either losing a lot of money or not getting what they need. So I think it’s it’s a worthwhile undertaking. I would just, you know, encourage the teams to really think vibrantly about how complicated influencing markets setting up a future augmentation that might be five years from now might look like, and what pricing looks like and availability, because if it’s, if it’s bought out and it’s under contract, it may not be available.
Moderator
Yep, exactly. Terrific. Thank you. Becky had some thoughts here.
Becky Cudzilo
I have some thoughts for you because at the Schriever war games, this came up about you know, as we’re playing through the different scenarios, that the operators very clearly wanted to use commercial assets. And many of the commercial people there in the cell said, Wait a minute, you don’t have a contract. You don’t have anything in place to use my asset you don’t have and what about indemnity? What happens if I get shot at and it it brought up all those very valuable questions that need to be answered? that need to be addressed in whatever you move forward? With on Kassar? Because there are some commercial providers who probably are not going to be willing to subject their assets. Maybe they’re too critical. Maybe they only have one, to a possibility that they would lose their entire company for maybe not a replacement amount. So that that is something that has to be discussed, and at least made very clear to each commercial provider that signs up to Kassar as to you know, what actually would happen in a crisis versus you know, something maybe regional, but just kind of clear lines of responsibility and delineation of what you’re expected to do as a commercial provider versus what you’re not expected to do. And can you say no, like we’re a transport. You know, we provide transportation services also. You know, can we say no, if you ask us to go move something out of the way of something that we know might be shot at, you know, what is our liability and our responsibility to so thank you.
Dan Jablonsky
I had just kind of one more thought on that and trust is a really essential element to setting these up. Because you could write hundreds and hundreds of pages of contracts and clauses and everything like that, that what you really need those you need to get to the nub of the issue. And you have to have a high degree of trust between the industry participants and the government officials about what that’s eventually going to look like. And I I, when I made my trips back to DC, and when I spent time with the policymakers and the heads of agencies, it was very important that we had that sort of trusted relationship about we had an understanding.
Moderator
Great point and it’s a great segue, Dan. Yeah, I just wanted I know that. You know, general Garonne had been working very hard on all these issues.
Col Kniseley
So a couple of things back to what you said, sir. Two things actually. So one, there’s not going to be one Kassar model to rule them all. I think Kassar is gonna be tailored by the mission area. Even the the the age clauses that we put in that kind of spell out what Kaiser is, I think that those might be even modified by the provider through negotiations as well. So I want to be pretty clear that we don’t think like we’re gonna set up one model and it’s like, okay, you as SAML provider, weather and, and, and imagery that that that that would be how this will be run. This is going to be an open dialogue between the government and industry, and that would probably bring me into my second point. As we develop some of these things. We are going to continue to have those industry engagements with you all. I think we’ve been pretty transparent so far. Number of industry engagements face to face contact. I know I think my emails floating around everywhere and I don’t mind talking to anybody that has questions, but we’re gonna be pretty transparent because we do want to have that dialogue because this isn’t, you know, government shall do wall and you know, kind of back to where you’re going, man. So you’re exactly right that the defense production act, if we’re not on contract or anything like that, and we can’t just odd we can’t automatically just take your capability or anything that has to be negotiated and that’s one reason why I want to get after this quickly and to get those contracts to have that that discussion going forward and everything
Moderator
terrific. Great. Job. Well, we’ve reached the end of our session, offer our panelists a chance for any closing remarks. Gills start with you.
Becky Cudzilo
I guess I just wanted to say thank you. This is our first time at AFA and this has been a wonderful conference to go to I’ve learned a lot about what’s going on in the military. I’ve been able to relate it to things that we’re doing. Because of the recent contract we won the level of collaboration and the amount of openness between the SML group under Colonel Bolson and US has just been amazing. So I guess I just want a shout out there that we’re we’re seeing that speed start to really pick up and we appreciate it. And thank you for having me. And thank you for all the panelists here to great conversation, John. Sure.
Col Kniseley
Like I just want to echo some of the channels and Becky’s comments around you know, the methodical the it requires very much a methodical approach on kind of balancing commercial and government and really just being mindful of the incentives. But it’s a problem that we can certainly solve you know, by collaborating, working together and building that trust. But then tomorrow, we’re very excited about the government engagements and the traction that we have so far. Like I said, we have a number of government users. Happy to elaborate more on those, you know, outside of the panel. But excited to hopefully enable, like I said the warfighters to make more informed decisions. With our weather data and weather satellites. Thanks, John.
Dan Jablonsky
It’s an honor and a privilege to be able to serve the warfighter the policymakers that have to wrestle with these really hard decisions and be out at the pointy end of the spear. Just huge kudos and thanks to the Air and Space Force Association for bringing together this kind of forum where we can, you know, hash out ideas like this to pose the hard questions, and then to go wrestle with them and to bring you know, the interconnected touch points for people to get together. Thank you. Great, great conference.
Col Kniseley
I think some of you have heard me say before, you know spaces, it’s interesting. There is no dividing lines in space. It is governments operating together. Industry academia, there’s there’s just no dividing lines. And and you all are you know, when you’re developing your capabilities, you’re, you’re operating over the AOR right now many of you are actually supporting the warfighter. So I know when you know when someone asks me or says to me, thank you for your service. You know, it makes me very proud but you all are supporting the warfighter as well. So thank you for what you do. And, you know, through the commercial space office, you know, believe me, my team is we are a bunch of believers in everything and we need to move faster and facilitate getting these capabilities out there. But thank you, sir, for moderating thank you for the panel and thank you for AFA for hosting us. Thank
Fireside Chat: Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition: Closing Thoughts
– Frank Kendall, Secretary of the Air Force
–Lt. Gen. Bruce “Orville” Wright, USAF (Ret.), AFA President & CEO
Moderator Lt Gen Wright
Well, good morning. What an incredible day. Thanks to all of you and an incredible three days. I think we’re sending a strong signal around the world about what we airmen and guardians and our industry partners are really all about. And so we couldn’t be more thankful for the leadership that goes back a few years. Secretary Frank Kendall is a warrior statesman in so many ways, and as we prevent, present the final event of the 2024 as a warfare symposium, and we welcome our 26th, Secretary of the Air Force, the Honorable Frank Kindle. We’re gonna spend a few minutes today talking about just what and reiterate just what we’ve been talking about the past few days, in re-optimizing for global power conference, golden power competition. This is by far thanks to all of you, the largest ever AFA warfare symposium. With nearly 20,000 people registered. I would argue it’s also one of the most important we’re at a pivotal point in our history. It’s a time of consequence, in general Alvin has said, And, Mr. Secretary, as you have said, we’re out of time. We must re optimize now for great power competition. Let me start with the first question the Secretary and I have been listening and our staffs, and you all have been talking no surprise. To start off, Mr. Secretary airmen and guardians are still understandably wrapping their brains around exactly what all this change means for them. In their view, what do you think are the changes that our airmen and guardians will feel the most and what changes will be most apparent to them?
Frank Kendall
It’s a great question and before I start, I do want to thank you for all of your service both at AFA and in uniform. You’ve been a terrific leader. I think this is your last thing in the stage like this, you’re gonna do it anyways, let’s give him a big round of applause. I also want to thank the other members of the senior leadership team in the department. You got armor Jones here. John Saltzman Hi, gentlemen. This is a terrific team. You guys are all so lucky to have those leaders leading the department so give them a round of applause to Nami. Take your question. We roll out a lot of things right. What you see gonna go going forward is that the undersecretary will take a leadership role in the Secretariat for the changes that she talked about, she Saltzman and she often will take growth leadership roles in the two services. In implementing all the things in the services. On that list, there are a lot of things that are going to affect this down. I think at the unit level. It won’t happen overnight, but I think it’s going to happen reasonably quickly. We’re going to orient our operational units on being ready for the fight. We might have to be entered at any time. And the leaders associated with commanding Those larger organizations, all the way down to the wings squadron level are going to be tasked with and you don’t need to wait for somebody to tell you what to do about this. This was in my letter from a few months ago. Start thinking now about what do we need to do to be more ready and do it you don’t need to wait for the conflict can happen at any time. We need to be as ready as we possibly can, which you’re going to see a greater focus on readiness for the kind of fight we might be in. We’re going to be making some changes to how units are set up. So that all the things that units need to be able to deploy, if they’re deploying units. That they have an r, then that those people can train together. For the unit set fight are employed in place. We’re going to do the same sort of thing. We’re also going to look at our Garrison’s and make sure that our bases are set up, as was described by mostly the Roman so those are the things we’re going to be doing that I think you’re going to have an impact. You’re going to see opportunities open up for career paths, enlisted tech tracks and more officers and so on for a small subset of the force. In general, I think you’re going to see your training oriented more on the things you’re going to need to be effective in a great power competition. So all of those are things that I think you’re going to touch the force, the reorg will affect some people, we’re going to try to do those without disruption. We’re setting up some new units, but the core capabilities that will be for part of those units are generally in place already. And so we’ll be doing some things there a way we’re going to minimize people having to move and we’re going to try to minimize the costs what we’re going to move on pretty quickly on all those as well. So buckle your seatbelt don’t sit still go ahead and move forward. Don’t Don’t wait for guidance on this horrible settings we’ve all said over over. We don’t have any time to waste. Thank you, sir.
Question
Another question that popped up. And we’ve discussed this at length. In small group and large group sessions. China has the aim to be able to take Taiwan one way or the other by 2027. Is there possibly a risk that restructuring this restructuring focus we have could cost us readiness in the near term?
Frank Kendall
There’s a risk that we’re not gonna be readiness in the near term that I don’t think so. I think we can maintain our current readiness while we’re doing this transition. I don’t see any fundamental impact on what I’ll call the fighting force, if you will, elements of the department. There shouldn’t be any that’s certainly not the intent. And the goal is to as quickly as possible get to a better posture. And I think when we make these changes, hopefully we’ll make them quickly. And then the units that we’ll be setting up the way we’ll be configuring units will happen fairly quickly.
Question
Thanks, sir Gerald Saltzman is also introducing space futures command. How’s that similar or different from Army futures command?
Frank Kendall
Well, let me talk let me contrast the three the Air Force, Space Force in the army, but the army do not want to be critical the SR servers but I’ve spent 50 years of my life listening to arguments about whether requirements comes before technology or technology comes first and requirements come second. It’s an irrelevant conversation. Basically, the two have to work together as a team. One of our senior acquisition leaders use the phrase and some of the work he’s doing extreme teaming. I’m a big fan of extreme teaming. And I’m also a big fan of having balanced between the different elements of the organization to try to get to better solutions. So requirements come from the operational world, technology comes largely out of the acquisition technology world and the two have gotta work really closely together. The army i My observation with the outside. Tip to that balance too much towards the operational side. And you’re seeing they’re cancelling one of their major programs now. And I think there’s a relationship between those two things. The Space Force is very small. And in the Space Force side, we really couldn’t set up teams that were focused more on technology, and teams were focused more on operations and ask them to work together. So the futures command, the Space Force and Euro Saltzman can get an add on to this. There’s going to be an integrated organization, which has that integrated perspective, and will bring technology and operational concepts and swarm together within one organization. On the Air Force side, we’re doing a little bit differently. We’re going to have the integrated capabilities command which will be operator led, that’s going to be a very important career person position for an operator Believe me, Jonathan and I have had a lot of conversations about that. That’s an important job. It’s gonna be a three star, but it’s going to be I won’t know that it’s done. I don’t want to get ahead of the chief. But if you’re looking for a good three star job, and you’re a three star operator, or a two star, one star operator in the Air Force, you gotta have your eye on that job. This can be a very important job. It’s gonna be very powerful job, but it’s not going to have complete power over the future of the Air Force, that that that team will be working with the Integrated Development Office and FMC with the integrated Capabilities Office in the Secretariat, and within the system centers that we talked about earlier for nuclear error and information to try to get to the best possible solutions for the entire department for the in particular for the Air Force in that case. Again, extreme teaming and iterative there’s a tension in this. It’s a healthy tension, if it’s done right and I’ve had 50 years of experience with this. You want the operators and the technologists working together and listening to each other. If you do things that are operator dominant you’re going to get unrealistic things that can’t be executed with technology. Typically, if you let the technologist do it on their own and dominate, you’re gonna get things that don’t operationally make sense and are practical. So you’ve got to bring the two together. And it isn’t a game of I wrote the requirement that you deliver it, or here’s this cool thing, why aren’t you smart enough to buy it? It’s a game of working together to figure out the best answers that are affordable, that are feasible, that operationally make sense and are going to give us an advantage. And we tried to set up the structure to make that happen. When we first came in, and we started the operational periods, we built these teams. And I think everybody who was involved in that knows that work really well. Having an operational and a technical lead, working together to try to solve problems, apply technologies intelligently, and apply operational concepts intelligently led to some really good answers. We’re going to try to do that. There’s something we institutionalized in the entire system.
Question
Is there and building on that and bill, it seems very valuable. And given that you had a pretty great start as a warrior statesman. We were two super military schools, military academies about the same time. You’ve been very recently getting updated. traveling around the world. Absolutely. Pack F. You safety. So not only do you have that experience, but you’re pretty current, obviously in operational fluency, if you will. You also have a great deal of experience in the Pentagon, which can sometimes be labeled as the frozen middle. So could you talk a little about I know and extract and describe your intention, certainly your motivation, your intention to really keep the Pentagon updated across a spectrum of patriots and decision makers who may not have the benefit of that operational currency.
Frank Kendall
It’s hugely important that life of the Pentagon tends to be a team sport. And one team one fight applies to the Department of the Air Force, Air Force Base for us all working with others who are stakeholders, whether it’s the Congress, that’s the White House, its OMB management budget, the OSD staff, the Joint Staff, combatant commanders or customers ultimately, for the forces we provide. You’ve got to keep their interests in mind and you’ve got to communicate with them effectively, to be successful. And I learned a long time ago I started out in the Pentagon in 1986. And very early learned that you don’t get anything done. On your own by forcing things through. You get things done by informing people, bringing them along, explaining to them what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, getting their buy-in and getting their support. And we were hugely successful with the operational errors work. One of my dilemmas of building budgets, which was one of my central jobs for the department, was how we would present our situation to Cape and to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary. After we had done the operational imperatives work. We couldn’t afford 85% of what we thought we needed and we were able to really put that 15% or so into our budget. And what we decided to do, and I had good advice on this for a number of members of the team was make the case for what we need, you know, just go in and say, here I’ve done the things you asked me to do. I’ve kept the force structure you want me to have. I prioritize the strategic assets to determine and I’m trying to modernize to stay up with a threat and here’s all I could do. And here’s all the work we did to show what we need to do to be successful. We need more money. We walked away from that conversation with another $30 billion. So teamwork and building teams and explaining what you’re doing works. The people we’re dealing with want to do the right thing. But you got to persuade them that what you want to do is in fact the right thing. And so it’s constant effort. It’s one of the things that the undersecretary and I can engage in constantly. It sir.
Question
You know, it seems to me that an integrated capabilities command has been needed for some time. Air Force Systems Command went away. I’ve said to many of my friends that if I had the Air Combat Command leadership job to do over, I spend a lot more time at Wright Patt. A lot more time. I didn’t really appreciate the fact until I got some industry experience how important that relationship is. So I think you could probably talk a little bit more about building on the opportunity, really credible acquisition professionals and right bat, some pretty current warfighters and Air Combat Command and certainly AMC and Global Strike command. I think I’m starting to appreciate your thoughts and I kind of think I know what you’re thinking but I think it’s a great move. And that’s integrated capability.
Frank Kendall
I think it’s important for missions to have our organization to have clear missions and our forces that are designed or intended to be ready to fight now. And their leadership should be focused on that. I talked about this in my comments and I think the chiefs of Apple fight on this. We want our unit or organizations that are about readiness to be about readiness. And we also need integrated capability. We don’t need stove piped sets of individual sets and capability when the capability that works together to achieve the overall mission. So by putting integrated Combat Command together, as well as the other things that we’re doing, we’re gonna have an organization that’s focused on that. We need to be aware of the fact that we’re in a long term competition and not just we have to have ready forces today and people that are focused on that we have to have people that are building that pipeline devising, inventing, creating that set of new capabilities that we’re going to feel over time, that insurance there’s a robust pipeline there and making sure that resources is devoted to that are used as efficiently as possible. So that’s what we’re trying to set up.
Moderator Lt Gen Wright
With, we shift some gears a bit, there’s a lot of interest in warrant officers. And your perspective would continue, I think, really informed answer questions that are out there, the intent behind worn officers and really what you see in your own vision for the future. Of what more officers will bring to the fight. Let
Frank Kendall
me tell you why we need more officers, particularly in cyber it. In last few years, we’ve had about 100 people leave the Air Force to go be worn officers in another service in those areas. That’s why we need more officers. Somebody else made the comment this morning in a panel I listened to that the thing that warrant officers didn’t have was from industry actually, but the third but he had experience with other services. The things that warrant officers can bring to think can provide you with is is people who are very technically proficient and stay current all the time that’s all they’re going to do. They’re the mentors and the trainers. Both for the young officers that come into their units and for the enlisted people in their units. And they provide tremendous technical continuity. And you don’t get that unless you stay in the field and do that and do that only. I remember officers that I talked to several years ago when I was in OSD who were cyber officers who had just done three, three years doing something totally unrelated to cyber and are now going to go back to it. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I had a doctor who is treating me who had been not doing medicine for three years and he was about to do surgery on me, I’d be a little nervous. We need continuity in some of these people. And they’re often people who like doing that sort of work and don’t really want to do managerial or supervisory or leadership work in a different context. So I think there’s a great opportunity there we’re going to do with sunburn it I know that community is embracing this. And I know there’s a lot of interest in other fields that you’re often said the other day, we’re gonna go get this done, because the operational lead there is really greatest. And we’ll give it some period of time. I think it’ll be up to Jonathan how long we live before we do before and I think I’ll probably be gone by then but maybe not. We’ll see. I could do another four years. It’s possible. I’d like to thank you. That wasn’t a lot of applause though. It was a little I’ll take it. So I don’t know if it’ll be a year or two years or whatever. But I think at some point, we’ll want to think about are there other fields that make sense into but the emphasis right now is in getting sunburned right? Well, in many ways, keeping you around for four more years would help in one area of interest for your Air and Space Force Association and that sir, giving your voice every airman and guardians voice to Congress. You’ve talked recently about the impact of the continuing resolution. And I sit here in the front row and acting Undersecretary Jones put up a QR code. So I actually put my camera up there. I took the picture and I got the download of an incredible paper that goes by state in the US of a continuing resolution. And I sent that out to all our board members emeritus chapter presidents regional presidents, state presidents said please in your district retransmit this as widely as possible, that will or will not have an impact, but we want to help in the meantime, foragers, and we’re with you on the incredible devastating impacts the crime really that is the continuing. It’s truly devastating. I mean, we’re watching the drama right now in the Congress about the supplemental aid for Ukraine and for Israel, as well that these are historic times, with a lot of stake on the table, both for our military and our continuous strategic competition as well as for the conflicts that are currently happening. We it’s impossible to overstate the importance of doing these things. The idea that we could fail in preventing Russian aggression from succeeding, I think is really almost unthinkable to me that we could not be as prepared as we possibly can be, to meet our patient challenges equally unthinkable. We’ve got to get these resources and I’ve lived in most of my life, that we were united politically about our threats, and about what we needed to do about them and also about the value of our alliances. NATO has been around for 75 years, and it’s kept the peace that helped us win the Cold War. That was one of the most amazing historical accomplishments I think in entirety, human history. It’s enormously valuable to a show we’ve got to continue to support
Question
it would be this is a pre break this question with you, but I know you’ll have fun answering it. So as you traveled around and you met airmen from here sent back after you saving what did you learn that you didn’t know before?
Frank Kendall
I get I think I increased my appreciation of the high quality of our force and the quality of the people in it and particularly our enlisted people. Joe bass is smiling out there somewhere. I know. I’m not going to say anything negative about the army. The army has great force as well. I served in the Army initially, when we still had draftees. And then when the army was trying to recover from the devastating experience with Vietnam, and it were huge issues as a troop leader at that time. You were a social worker, you were a copier and a lot of other things that you had to be. Today’s force is dramatically different from the force we had them. And it’s one of our greatest strengths and I want to give a shout out to our enlisted people in particular, the officer corps is very professional, and I’ve worked with them a lot. I’ve gotten a greater appreciation in this position for what our enlisted people bring to the table. And it’s fantastic. So thank you all.
Moderator Lt Gen Wright
Well, I don’t want to encourage you to, to pick sides, but was there a base or a mission as you traveled around the world that kind of, you know, informed you in the context of mission focus or added to your thinking on the fact that you know, the reorganization that we’re going through optimization.
Frank Kendall
What I found is I talked to Wing Commanders and and goop and squadron commanders and so on. I started asking questions about what kind of rehearsals for operations they were doing and then I started to learn relatively recently as we did the task force set up, how we’d been sourcing our units that we were deploying, particularly in the Middle East. What I see is a lot of people who have their head in the game and want to do better. See the deficiencies we have, see the things that we could do better, and are trying to make improvements. The I see a lot of innovation as I go around. I can’t point to any particular part of the forest. I see it everywhere. I see it in the nuclear part, whether it’s the bomber or the or the ICBM force, I see it in the mobility forces. I see it in fighter and ISR forces. I see it in the acquisition community, which I knew better probably than some of the operational communities. And I see it wherever I go, whether it’s overseas, whether it’s, you know, Alaska, whether it’s Europe, the Middle East, I’ve been pretty much all over. I haven’t got to Diego Garcia yet that’s on my list. I’m gonna get there but I didn’t get to the South Pole. One of the guys on my staff did and I’m jealous. But anyway, I’ve still got a few places to visit that I’m gonna try to get to at some point, but we’re a high quality organization, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, and I think we’ve got all the raw material we need to make the changes that we talked about and to prepare for ourselves. And, frankly, it’s all about deterrence again. We don’t want a war and if we’re really ready, and the Chinese understand that we’re not going to have one
Question
you know, the other thing you’ve led important leadership emphasis. Really a national security emphasis is one team and one fight focused on touring credibly literary and socially defeating the threat. I often say the most lethal arm of a more capable lethal Joint Force is our airmen and guardians at the merge together. There’s an industry piece of this. So for our industry partners or industry, national security counterparts, are you starting to see sort of a in some ways in stovepipe space industry, merging and talking more across the aisle, if you will, who are everything? Industry?
Frank Kendall
There’s been a lot of conversations here and in other forums about that the man made a comment during the q&a the other day about working with industry more closely and I think we need to do that. I got to sit in on a few panels and I got to meet with several companies during the during the during the conference, and for both our traditional defense industrial base suppliers, as well as a lot of new entrants that have been, you know, with us less time and don’t have the same scale and scope. There’s an enormous intellectual capital there and we want industry working with us to solve our problems. Goes back to the, you know, extreme teaming idea, if you will, right, that. Now that that that has to be done with a recognition that industry does have an incentive, the industry is trying to make money. That’s what corporations exist to do. But that doesn’t mean they’re not patriotic. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about the mission and what we’re trying to accomplish. And it certainly doesn’t mean that they don’t have good ideas about how we solve our problems. Industry is populated with a lot of retired people. That gives them a lot of expertise that helps them work with us. They’ve got tremendous technical talent and I and that the traditional defense industrial base gets trashed a little too much. I think sometimes. There’s a lot of great talent in the traditional industrial base. But there’s also an enormous amount of talent in the commercial startup world, and in the world of new companies that are being formed to exploit technology, opportunities, we need to bring all that members of the team together to help us make better decisions. And one of the things we started doing with the operational imperatives that we’re going to continue is to give industry information about the problems we’re trying to solve. Give them some of the data that they need to attack those problems, and then have them work with us to try to come up with better solutions. We’re gonna get much better answers if we do that.
Question
I think it’s encouraging for industry that the former Air Force leadership is looking very closely at integrated kinetic and non kinetic effects, and obviously, B 21 F 35 are a great source of kinetic capability. That’s not very effective at all. Without the integration of space capability. There’s a growing obviously GMP, overhead, space based AMTI and AMTI capability that I think can be merged when we think we see merged with well established and growing air breathing reconnaissance capability that’s out there with Cooperative combat aircraft, for example. So could you talk about that merging a bit as you see it for industry as well as for airmen and guardians, and how we bring together space based targeting with everything targeting with kind of capabilities going to three main points a
Frank Kendall
few years ago, Bob work was Deputy Secretary of Defense and he started an initiative he called the third Offset Strategy and he was trying to derive new operating concepts based on emerging technology. There was a first draft was tactical nuclear weapons when the Russians didn’t have any, any nuclear weapons. The second one was what we did in the first call for precision munitions. Stealth, network capabilities, wide area surveillance operating together as a team. So Bob was looking for the next generation and we never really identified that he focused on autonomy as being one of the things that would be be a part of that. I think we are moving towards that. Now. We are I think the operation pairs are designed to identify that and flesh it out and move his moves towards that. I think we’re in a race. We gotta go as quickly as we can. The other guys are figuring these things out to try to adopt technology more quickly. No, I think we are becoming better positioned, but all the things we announced are just designed around the underlying ideas of competitiveness and urgency. One of the central features of what we’re trying to do to modernize is going to be increased reliance on space. When I did that work for Bob workflows years ago, one of the questions on my mind was given the threats to our airborne assets and given the threats to our space assets. Which way do we go for the future? And it’s kind of to your point earlier, or do we gamble on more resilient, more more capable aircraft for some of these functions for comms relays in particular, and for wide area surveillance, and targeting? Where do we go to space? The answer back then was we have to go to space. We have to rely more on space based capabilities. And that’s what we’re doing. The MTI architectures that we’re building that we’re working on with the NRO and with others, the distributed disaggregated communications architectures that SDA is leading fielding the missile warning architectures days and SOC are working on the Air Force’s and the whole Joint Force is going to become more dependent on space. Because we don’t have any choice because the threat is dealing with some of our traditional means of dealing with this pretty effectively. We’re not going to walk away from that entirely. We’re going to have a mix of capabilities and try to prevent confronting our adversaries with more than one problem. But space is going to be increasingly critical. And I think ultimately, probably decisive when you’re talking about pure comfort. I think that’s where we’re gonna go and that’s what we’re starting to invest in. makes lots of sense, sir. We’re running out of time. I just say sometimes about the space for us to provide services to the joint force that are critical for the joint forces success, and it protects the joint force against the other side’s assets. Those are two really critical missions, and their variety of things. We do that from to and through space, but the Space Force, make friends with Space Force people if you haven’t already been there, you’re going to count on them going forward for your operational success.
