General Bruce Carlson
Commander, Air Force Materiel Command
AFA Air Warfare Symposium
Orlando, FL
February 22, 2008
[Click here for printer-friendly version]
Moderator: Our next speaker does indeed have hair. He’s the Commander of the Air Force Material Command at Wright- Patterson Air Force Base. His command conducts research, development, tests and evaluation and provides acquisition management services and logistics support necessary to keep the Air Force systems ready for war
Please welcome to our stage the Commander of Air Force Material Command, General Bruce Carlson.
[Applause].
General Carlson: Good morning everyone, it’s a pleasure to be here with you. I join the others who have spoken today to thank the Air Force Association and their industry partners for putting on such a forum, allowing us to spend a few minutes with you to tell you about things that are happening in the Air Force.
I personally am delighted to be here. I was in the AOR just a few months ago and I was able to come home on one of General Lichte’s C-17s and almost everything that he talked about today was demonstrated during that flight. We had four aeromedical evacuees. In fact we even had a family travelling space available, and fortunately there was plenty of space available and they even put up a tent for the five little children. It was a long flight, so as you can imagine, those five little kids were a little rambunctious.
And when we landed at Andrews of course the first guy in the airplane is the Customs guy and I decided that we’d let that young mother go first and she handed the Customs guy her passports and he asked her what I thought was kind of a goofy question, he said do you have any illegal drugs or weapons and she said, you’ve got to be kidding, if I’d of had those I would have used them five hours ago. [Laughter].
It was a marvelous flight and a great example of what modern airlift can do.
Well, if you’d go to the next chart there, or go to the first chart and then the second one, please.
I’d like to talk for just a little bit today about some of the challenges that we face in the United States Air Force. I think the Chief talked about this at length yesterday and you’ll hear more about it the longer you stick around here.
Our goal, our job, our task in the United States Air Force is to anticipate emerging threats, changes in the way others conduct war, new enemy behaviors and of course, evolving technologies, and part of that is where the Air Force Materiel Command comes in. We’ve simply got to maintain our ability to operate at all levels of war. And as you know, the Chief has said, we’re America’s first in/last out force and we have some significant challenges on our plate.
I’d like to talk about those in general for just a few minutes and then I’d like to zero in one of our responses to those challenges and then leave you at the end with, despite all those challenges, I think the future’s bright, I think there are great things happening in your United States Air Force and I’ll sort of conclude with that.
So if you’d go to the next chart, I think there are lots of ways to view the challenges we find ourselves in today. This is just one way of them, this is one of the ways we’d look at what’s on our plate inside Air Force Materiel Command.
It’s simply a matrix that allows us to look at what and how we prioritize our people, our other resources, and our finances.
In terms of the fight, of course we’re obligated to and we expect to and we’re thrilled to be part of the current fight. We need to prepare for the next one, wherever that may be. And of course we need to develop those systems that will shape the future fight and allow us to maintain the asymmetric advantage that we have in air power.
In terms of the fleet, our job is to sustain the current fleet, plan to plan and invest to be able to modernize the force that we have, and then to reinvent ourselves and our capabilities so that we can match others in air, space and cyberspace in the future.
In terms of our resources, today we are operating in, as those who have come before me have spoken about, we’re operating in a very constrained environment. I’ll talk more about that in a couple of minutes.
In the future we’ll have to leverage our resources in ways that we haven’t done before, so we look across the enterprise and not just inside our own MAJCOMs in a very myopic way.
And of course in the future our goal will be to optimize everything that we do. We simply must find a way, especially inside the support command, the Materiel Command that I operate in, a way to not just simply be more effective, which we have done remarkably well, and I’ll give you a couple of examples about that, but we also must learn to be efficient and that’s a difficult task when you’re in the middle of a war and the goal is to continue to turn out more and more product.
So, let’s just take a brief look at each one of these stovepipes and what I want to share with you is just some very limited number of success stories so that you know that despite these challenge, your United States Air Force is responding to them.
I won’t talk at great length about each of them because each could be essentially a separate speech or talk in itself. But in terms of supporting the current day fight, we turned out the MQ-1, I’m sorry, the Reaper or the 9, a year early in partnership with the great people in industry. We tackled a helicopter brown-out problem and did that in five months; a problem that was downing helicopters and killing people.
In terms of sustaining the fleet, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines and friends at SOCOM asked us to add a considerable amount of work, about 65 days worth of work, to the C-130 line at Warner-Robbins. That would have extended the C-130 line there from 181 to over, nearly 250 days and they simply couldn’t do that. The people down there devised a way to turn out those C-130s in about 145 days with the added work package.
In terms of constrained resources, we are paying a heavy price to fight this war and to continue to develop systems of the future. Inside the United States Air Force we’re looking at a tax of about, and inside Air Force Material Command, of about ten percent of our people just in direct support of the war and of course, in addition to that, we are trying to build and maintain the systems that fight there.
If you go to the next chart. In terms of preparing for the future I’ll just mention one thing, the advent engine, an engine that’ll allow us, in the next generation of airplanes, to not just have high performance, but high efficiency as well.
In the terms of the fleet, of course, we hope that the KCX will be awarded here in the next few days. The CSARX will hopefully move into production here very soon. And as you know, one-tenth of our HH-60 fleet has already extended its designed service life and the others are aging very rapidly.
In terms of leveraging the future, I think General Lichte mentioned a few minutes ago that the C-17 had just flown across the country on Fisher-Tropes fuel and our goal, and we’re on the path to do that, is to have every aircraft in the United States Air Force certified on synthetic fuel by 2010, in just two short years. And not only that, we will have a certified process in place so that if we have another new fuel, a biomass fuel, or whatever other fuel might be developed out there that’s synthetic in nature, we will have a process to certify all of our airplanes very, very rapidly.
In terms of the next column over, the long term, let me just mention one thing. We think that space will be a key, as it is today, to future warfare and so we’re leveraging the small amount of money that we have, and by 2015, inside the Air Force Research Lab we will demonstrate the ability to constitute a small tactical satellite within six days; to rapidly turn around launch capability in 24 hours; and to have that capability on call within eight hours. That will be a dramatic, dramatic shift in the way we prosecute space warfare today.
In terms of the fleet, we’re rethinking our maintenance and supply product support strategies with things like the Global Logistics Support Center, consolidated asset management, regionalization of repair, and so on. In the long term, we are standing up a capability inside of Air Force Materiel Command today to do something that we have lost the art of doing and that is developmental planning, and I’d like to focus the rest of my remarks on that particular capability because I think it will be a lynchpin in our future ability to develop, test, and procure weapon systems. In addition to that, of course, we’re working hard to lean out processes in our acquisition and test and sustainment arenas.
Now what I’m going to do to talk about developmental planning because of the importance that I think it holds for the future, is to walk you through a couple of charts here that I hope demonstrate the lessons that we’ve learned in the past and how we hope to apply them in the future.
So if you’d go to the next chart. What this one highlights is, and this is not a scientific analysis and it’s probably not even objective, we just sat down in a group and pulled these numbers together and I’m sure that you could find that we’re off by one or two, but I think what you can’t deny is the direction of the arrow here. And this just highlights the number of new starts that we’ve had in the fighter and bomber aircraft arena by decade.
The other thing that’s interesting about it is the number of new starts that we had, and then after about four years we just threw in the junk heap and said well, we learned some things that didn’t work out and so we’ll go on and do something different. We have lost that art form in the United States Air Force, and in fact, if you go back to the decade of the ‘80s, you’ll find that was the last time we ever picked up something, worked on it for a while, for about three years, and then threw it in the junk heap. And some of you remember that particular project that’s highlighted there in that red color. That was the F-20 Tiger Shark. As you can tell from the byline on the bottom, we’ve really only had two new starts in terms of aircrafts since the decade of the mid-‘80s. And of course, this doesn’t include the JUCAS and the CV-22 because I’m talking about fighters and bombers. But the point is that we are not developing as many new airplanes as we used to.
If you go to the next chart. In addition to that, sort of running counter to that, is the average number of years that it takes to develop a fighter on your left and a bomber on the right. This represents the number of years from initial RFP, for what we used to call DemVal, and now called Technology Development, until the first production of aircraft is rolled off the production line.
Now, a great deal, one of the reasons for this huge spike in the last few decades here, is this art of developmental planning which we had in abundance in the Air Force Systems Command and the Logistics Command in the past. A great deal of developmental planning used to be done before RFPs were released and that of course is not captured on this chart, but what is captured is the amount of time without that developmental planning that you have to spend in what we now call SDD or full scale development.
Now if you’d just go to the next chart, what this shows is another troubling trend, and one that I believe General Corley and General Lichte both spoke about today, and that is the number of average years that we’re going to have to fly airplanes that we will develop in the future. And I could do this analysis, I could have done this chart work for airlift airplanes and tankers, but I just chose to do it for fighters and bombers. And this is from the time the first production aircraft rolled off the line until the last airframe, and this is not by block, this is by type, by MDS, is retired. And there’s some assumptions in here, one of them is the F-15, F-16 will fly until 2025. I don’t know how good that assumption is, we’ll just have to wait and see. It doesn’t include the 179 Golden Eagles, if those things emerge.
We highlighted the B-52s separately because it’s sort of a, we hope it’s an outlier. We’re going to fly it for at least 80 years. That’s not anything new to our friends in the airlift business, but it certainly is in terms of the bomber force. It also takes into account the, well I guess it was about a four or five year hiatus in the B-1 development, when we went from the B-1A to the B-1B.
So you can see there are some fascinating trends developing there, even if you want to discount the numbers one or two. Either way I think the slopes of the lines and the directions of the lines are perfectly unmistakable.
So what does this all mean? If you’d go to the next chart. Simply the financial resources, the political support, and the industrial base is no longer supportive of multiple weapon system aircraft starts. With aircraft that are flying longer than ever before, sustainment issues simply must be more critically analyzed up front in program acquisition. We have to develop these aircraft one at a time instead of in groups.
Each program simply must, must succeed. There’s just no room for error because we’re only going to get one or maybe two per decade. There are fewer dollars, fewer new starts, and our aircraft are flying longer.
So it’s just a very restrictive environment. I think one example of this that we’re all familiar with would be instructive. So if you’d go to the next chart, I think this shows what I mean.
You know the timeline on the blue line and the green line as well as I do, you’ve all been part of that. But I think it’s instructive to see what our friends in the former Soviet Union have done with their PACFA, which is their acronym for Advanced Aircraft System for Front Line Aviation, it’s the next, the first fifth generation airplane to come out of Russia, and in the late ‘80s they started doing this pre-developmental planning, requirements analysis, and so on and in fact even flew what we would think of as prototype airplanes. You remember them, the S&-47 and the Mikoyan 1.44. They were on the front pages of Aviation Week and several other trade publications.
But in about the late ‘90s, they began to settle down and do the analysis necessary to make a decision. And in 2002 when SUCOY was chosen to lead a design for a new combat airplane, which is now known as the PACFA, probably what will be called the T-50. It’s the Russian counterpart to the F-22. And they have recently announced, and I think they will hold to it, that the first flight of that airplane will be in 2012 and they will reach IOC on a supercruise, low observable, and I don’t know just how low observable, advanced aircraft, by 2015.
So it’s possible to do this and to do it in a shorter timeframe than we have demonstrated our ability to do so in the recent past. So what do we need to do to fix that problem? Well, we’re going to focus on, one of the things we’re going to focus on, is this developmental planning art form that I believe we have lost inside of Air Force Materiel Command.
We simply must realize that developmental planning is a key part of our acquisition and sustainment process. In December, in fact in December of 2007 the National Academy of Sciences under the chairmanship of Dr. Paul Kaminski and retired General Les Lisles, published a report that chided the Air Force and the other services for their lack of developmental planning, an art form that was readily available back in the ‘70s and ‘80s and led to the rapid development, by today’s standards, of airplanes like the A-10, the F-16, F-15 and so on.
So I think there is a way ahead, we’re working hard to establish this capability inside of Air Force Materiel Command and to by the 2010 budget, make it a funded Air Force program like it was a decade and a half ago.
Now, what is developmental planning? I think it’s made up of, if you’d go to the next chart, three specific elements, and I won’t spend a lot of time on this but I think it’s instructive to just dissect it for a minute.
Overall I think developmental planning is performed up front when the need for material solutions, either in air and space or cyber is first identified through some sort of strategy development inputs that are received from the MAJCOM. And I think General Corley instructed us very, very well this morning on that process and how he’s going to put that back in place in Air Combat Command.
Developmental planning then would ensure appropriate engineering, cost, and technological expertise is available assess threats, capability gaps, and then define those matching requirements and then understand the technology considerations that have to take place to answer those questions. So the first step is this threat analysis, which defines the environment at IOC, or initial operational capability, and then also at proposed IOC plus ten years.
The idea here is to prevent scientific or technological surprise on the battlefield. We have to take time during that stage in developmental planning to define and identify emerging foreign capabilities and future environments and do that in a way that is educational and informative to the strategic planning capability inside each MAJCOM.
The next segment of developmental planning is requirements definition. The idea here is to look at viable materiel solutions from across the spectrum, not in terms of a fighter solution or a bomber solution or a command and control or a cyber solution, but from across the spectrum, and look at then concept development, system performance characteristics, and so on to see what kind of system would respond to our requirement, and then to educate that requirements process so that it develops and publishes an informed capability requirement.
Also, it would evaluate system of systems, alternative concepts so that we don’t look simply at the weapon or the weapon system, but we look at the system of systems and how it fits into the architecture of the future and how we would choose to fight in the future.
The final element is this look at technology. That’s where we would work to balance the technology pull and the push. Sometimes in the past, in the recent past, the push has overcome the pull and we have gone into programs where we have been unable to deliver the technology that’s been asked for and this balancing act is a difficult one, one that requires seasoned judgment and people with experience. So it will take some time to rebuild this capability inside of Air Force Materiel Command.
It’s just like growing a squadron or a group or a wing commander, we simply can’t do it overnight. We’re going to have to rebuild this capability over time.
So when you put all three of these together you end up with the capability to do developmental planning -- requirements definition, a technology focus during pre-milestone A efforts. And if you look at the programs we currently are trying to execute inside the United States Air Force, you will find that there is very little pre-milestone A effort. Most of them essentially started at milestone B.
So developmental planning, then, I think does seven basic things. One, it supports the definition of future capability needs; two, it defines and evaluates a system of systems, alternative concepts; three, it recommends some preferred concepts to the users; four, it identifies and assesses technology, maturity levels, and risk drivers; five, defines sustainment and lifecycle cost issues, so that decisionmakers in Washington can make educated decisions about the length of interim contractor support, the decision between organic and non-organic support; next, it develops executable acquisition strategies before we have gotten to milestone B and begin to argue about them; and finally, it conducts trade studies to support the definition of effective and achievable system requirements. And I’m convinced that if we can harvest the talent that’s out there inside the contractor, inside the civilian and military communities in this country, we can again, reinvigorate developmental planning inside the United States Air Force, and as a result of that make much more informed and educated acquisition decisions in the future.
Now those are some big challenges. We have a long way to go there. And I didn’t want to leave you with the fact that we’re behind, we’re getting further behind, and we’re going to have a real tough road to hoe. I wanted to leave you with some thoughts about some of the things that your United States Air Force is doing today and will continue to do in the future. These are just a handful of them, I’ve already talked about alternative fuels and the fact that we are going to, we’re on schedule, we’re on track, to certify every one of our airplanes in alternative fuels by 2010.
We’ve installed a laser countermeasure, IR countermeasure, on a lot of our C-17s and a good portion of our C-130 flight, those that fly in danger. I’ve told you about the Reaper and its early delivery.
Small diameter bomb is another success story, delivered ahead of schedule. It essentially works every time and is doing great work inside the AOR. Rover, another capability that was delivered very rapidly, allows not only those on the ground, but those in the air, in the cockpit, to have real time video of targets, of intelligence data, and so on.
Those are all things that you, in concert with a small number of people inside the Air Force have delivered to our war fighters.
So I would just close by telling you that you’re doing a great job and we appreciate you. We think highly of your talent, of all that you bring to the fight. We’re proud to partner with you and look forward to continuing to do so in the future.
Thank you very much.
[Applause].
Moderator: Thank you, General Carlson.
Let me ask you to look out a few years in advance and what technologies do you see on the horizon? Nano, bio, laser, cyber, et cetera, that have the potential to excite you, that have the potential to be game breakers, either in our hands or in the hands of potential adversaries?
General Carlson: Well I think there are several categories of technologies that will be significant in the future, but before I do that let me just say that I think one of the most significant changes that we will have to make are changes in our organizational structures and the way we conduct business.
We simply have to become more efficient. We’re remarkably good at being effective. If you look at the number of KC-135s that used to be on the ramp at Tinker are waiting maintenance, and now the number that are back in service, you’ll see that we know how to be effective. And we’ve done that in C-130s, F-16s, A-10s, F-15s, and so on, and so we know how to be effective.
But what we’re not as good at as we need to be is getting efficient, and I talked a little bit about that, but I think that will be the most dramatic change we make inside of the United States Air Force. But there are other very, very exciting technologies.
One of them is one I briefly touched on, which is this rapid responsiveness in space, and that’s a whole series of technologies that will come together in terms of miniaturization and integration and production techniques, new materials, and just the process we use to put together space vehicles. That’s one.
The other one is biotechnology. And now when we think of altering our sleep cycles, we think of taking a go pill or a no-go pill. Well, we think there are some tremendous advances to be made in terms of keeping people free from disease, keeping people healthier, and changing their sleep cycles faster, and all of those sorts of things will change.
Nanotechnology is another one. Miniaturizing things I think will take another generational leap forward here in the very near future. All of those things are important.
Moderator: This is a risky question given this very astute audience, but can you comment on the state of the industrial base that supports the acquisition logistics system, especially not only in the major tier, but the second and third tier suppliers? Are there gaps or risks that you’re worried about?
General Carlson: Yes. We’re concerned. We’re concerned for several reasons. One of them is just basic materials. Metals, compounds, just the source, the global nature of sourcing of basic materials and the stockpile of those kind of materials is less than what it used to be.
The lead times are getting longer for things like titanium and specialty metals, composites, and so on. So we do have concerns there.
We’re also concerned over what I would just generally call the “brain drain.” This idea that we’re educating in a superb educational system inside this country a great generation of young people, but many of them are coming from foreign countries and then going back home, and that’s doing two things.
One it’s filling up classes at our universities, but it’s also now taking that learned expertise and leveling the playing field outside this country. The technological lead that we had in the ’80s in several areas -- in propulsion, in metals, in nanotechnologies, and I could list others -- has decreased significantly and it’s decreasing at an ever-increasing rate.
So we do have concerns, but as I highlighted at the end of my remarks, industry has partnered with us, I think remarkably well and has responded to the input that this nation has given them and done well, so I’m confident about the future, I think we can do just as well in the future.
Moderator: The F-15 grounding has shown that old airplanes are finding new and creative ways to break. What kind of tools, what kind of processes, what are you doing at FMC to try to predict this problem on other series of airplanes and at the same time keeping availability rate of the fleet high?
General Carlson: We can keep the availability rates high. We know how to do that. The thing that we’re having problems with is what the next unknown is going to be.
In the ‘70s we transitioned from one set of design criteria, which was safe life, and that design criteria said every part that comes off the assembly line is going to be absolutely perfect, we’re going to test those parts and predict the service life of a vehicle, let’s say four thousand hours, and when they get to four thousand hours, we’re going to ground them.
We went away from that and went to a new philosophy, and we did it because the F-11, we found that not every part was pristine and wings were falling off of them at 150 hours or 400 hours or whatever it was. So we went to a new design philosophy. And what that new design philosophy said was we’re going to assume that not every part is pristine. In fact, we’re going to assume that there are cracks, flaws, and so on, in the parts that we put on airplanes, so we’re going to develop an inspection regimen and a repair or replace regimen for those things, and when we find flaws, or we find cracks, we’re going to inspect, replace, and then continue to fly.
The problem with this F-15 was that it was in a, the crack was buried under four layers of coatings and paint in a place that was never predicted to fail, and there was a small manufacturing or quality control or some other defect in there that that part was about 60% less than it should have been, and of all the nearly 1,300 of them that we inspected, that was the only one we found. It flew for 27 years and didn’t fall apart, which is a remarkable testimony to the integrity of that design.
But what we’ve come to question now is, is our philosophy right? Is our design philosophy right? We don’t think it is, so we have put together a team that’s headed by Mr. John Aug, who’s a chief engineer at Air Force Materiel Command, and he has a host of people with him. In fact I had a conversation with the Chief yesterday about this, and he just said, I can’t tell you which philosophy of when we’re going to throw airplanes away we should adopt, but we need to get one because the one that we have right now is not serving us well.
What it has done is sort of work against us because, if you go to Tinker, Warner-Robbins, or Hill, and ask them how long can you keep A-10s or how long can you keep F-16s or how long can you keep C-130s flying, those guys will tell you I’ll keep it flying forever. If that’s what you want me to do, by golly I’ll make it work forever.
Well, when you’re trying to buy new airplanes, that’s not the right philosophy. So we sort of backed ourselves into a corner and now we have to figure out a way out of that. We’re in the process of doing that and I hope to roll that out here in the next couple of months.
Moderator: As we look across the force, and this is a question that maybe I should have directed to General Lichte, as we look across the force, we find that probably one of the lowest FMC rates is the C-5 aircraft. And of course it’s quite an old airplane.
What kind of challenges does trying to keep this OR, what kind of challenges does that present to AFMC?
General Carlson: If we can get the airplanes AMPed and then some portion of the fleet RERPed, and I don’t know just what that is, it’s still a discussion item to be held in Washington D.C., you’ll see the availability rates significantly increase. Now they won’t increase to the state where the C-17 is, but you’ll see a big change in that.
Our, and I think General Lichte hit on this as well as I could, our challenge is simply, this is old stuff. And when you try to run a 1975 Ford Falcon at the Indy 500, you’re going to have problems, and you’re going to have the same kind of problems that we’re having today with parts obsolescence and parts availability and repair times and different technologies, and we’re having that. But we do have the skills in place to keep those airplanes flying if that’s what we have to do. We certainly hope that it’s not.
Moderator: A little bit on the periphery of your responsibility, but we’ve had many studies on the DoD acquisition system and it seems that the trend is increasingly more and more oversight. It seems there are more and more protests from some of these major awards.
Are there any changes that you would recommend to the acquisition system or that you would see would help in the acquisition system with speeding on the production of aircraft and systems that we need?
General Carlson: Mike, that’s sort of one of the fundamental questions that’s I think being asked in Washington, is how do you get something on contract, how do you execute it rapidly, and then put it in service as fast as you can and make it as reliable as you can.
We have already done a few things and we have many more on the plate to go, but let me just mention the one that we’ve stepped up to here recently and that is we have finally made, within the United States Air Force, a commitment to look, to make acquisition tests and sustainment decisions based on a life-cycle evaluation of the weapon system. We have never done that before. We’ve made isolated acquisition decisions, we have made isolated test decisions, and sustainment decisions.
We now have what we call an ILCM executive form, that’s Integrated Lifecycle Management executive form, which has replaced most of the other acquisition, sustainment, and test forms inside the building. It’s chaired by Ms. Payton and I, Bill Anderson, Kevin Sullivan, others in the test community, and then selected other individuals from inside the staff or inside the acquisition and sustainment community in the Air Force are part of that. And we have already begun to make life-cycle decisions instead of just acquisition decisions and I think we’re going to make progress there.
We’re also working hard inside the AFSO-21 process to streamline our acquisition processes. That has met with some success, but we have a lot of work to do.
Moderator: This one’s from the audience, and I’m going to let you off the hook, you don’t have to answer it. How many F-22s do you think we need? [Laughter].
General Carlson: As a matter of fact I have the answer to that question right here. Let me just say in a public forum here that I spoke in error here a couple of weeks ago. I spoke out of my own personal feelings, and I misrepresented the position of the United States Air Force.
I think the record has been corrected, I think you’ve seen a copy of that, and if you don’t I have it right here, and you’re welcome to get a copy of it from me afterwards, I have 140 of them in my notebook down there. [Laughter]. But the point is I have been corrected, in fact I have been reprimanded, and rightfully so.
It is not the job of a senior Air Force officer to speculate about these things and so my plan is now to move on and I’m going to leave things like that to the Chief and to the Commander of Air Combat Command to determine the number and I’ll go buy them and sustain them as best I can.
Moderator: Sir, thank you very much for sharing your time.
General Carlson: You bet.
[Applause].
# # #
Return to AFA's 2008 Air Warfare Symposium Transcript Page |
