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Lieutenant General Scofield: It's great to be back. This is my second stint with the Air Force Association in this conference format. We did one last year on developing combat capability and comparing the current Air Force Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition system with the current Foreign Military Sales (FMS) acquisition system, and the various timelines and ramifications of how things can get done rather quickly in the FMS world without having to live with a lot of the reforms that the current Air Force acquisition system has.

Today I'm going to talk a little bit more about that same type of scenario, but I'm going to focus more on the front end, and the Air Force's Industrial Preparedness Program.

Now I have a disclaimer on here that it's an independent assessment. This is going to sound a lot like an advocacy briefing, but I'm not advocating for any constituency within the Air Force for any particular reason. Instead I'm offering some thought on things the Air Force maybe could or should be doing if we really want to get our arms around acquisition management and have successful acquisition programs. In my mind, successful acquisition programs are those that get delivered pretty close to on time, pretty close to cost, do very well in the field, and are supportable for a number of years. I'm going to talk about this in the context of some of the DoD guidance that exists today.

The purpose of this briefing is really to be able to respond to four different questions. There are enough young faces in the room that a lot of what I'm going to cover is somewhat historical in perspective, but I think it's important for you all to understand what has been done in the past and what could be done in the future given the right set of circumstances.

So what is the Air Force Industrial Preparedness Program? It's probably not a well known or well understood program. What does it bring to the fight for the acquisition community? And more importantly, what can it bring to the fight for the warfighter and for the operational capabilities that we need to get into the field through the acquisition system? What has the Air Force done in the past? What are the successes and what are the things that probably could have been done a little bit better?

The last question kind of deals with okay, what could be done to increase the effectiveness of the Air Force's Industrial Preparedness Program, and the Air Force's operational force today, if we had a mind to do that?

I don't like to deal with issues unless I understand the context of the issue. One of the major contexts of this issue today is there's a pretty widespread opinion, especially inside the Beltway here, that the Air Force and the DoD acquisition system is broken. It's being criticized for schedule stretch-outs on some major programs. I think there are some reasons for that. We can talk about those. And there are cost and funding increases as a result of those schedule stretch-outs.

There's been some recent Congressional criticism about the use of inventory technology. If you go back and read the literature in the 2002, 2003 timeframe, when Pete Aldridge was the Assistant Secretary for Technology and Acquisition Logistics, “spiral development” became a fashionable word. It was clarified that we really mean “evolutionary development,” which gets into the incremental versus evolutionary versus spiral. It all comes out about the same when you get into managing the program itself. In a letter that he wrote he was careful to say, and I think it never really got fully communicated, that we need to use mature technologies in the spiral development approach, and I'll talk a little bit more about that.

Everybody knows we've got increased OpsTempo. We're burning systems faster than we probably would like to be at this point in time. There's going to be a need to replenish, recapitalize at some point. We ought to see if we can get our act together prior to that point and do a good job for the users.

There are a shrinking number of defense contractors which leads to further industrial base concerns. The good news is with fewer contractors we may be able to structure some proper incentives, contractual arrangements, which will allow the Air Force and the contracting community to get some win/win programs in the future, or make the future programs more of a win/win.

Here's a pictorial of what the Air Force Industrial Preparedness Program is today. It's really four components. It has a manufacturing technology piece which is codified in the U.S. Code in Title 10, and that's usually where the bulk of the money that comes into industrial preparedness goes. That's the major activity within the Industrial Preparedness Program. Manufacturing technology is an area where a group of folks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and at other places can help you in solving manufacturing issues that are keeping programs from getting their work done on schedule and at the rate they had planned.

Supportive Defense Production Act Title 1 and Title 3 is a task that's really associated with making sure we have modern facilities, capabilities in plants and depots throughout the country to support the force. Industrial base planning are the folks who worry about surge capacity and how would we handle wartime situations. Of course with FedEx and all of the rapid shipping techniques we have today, that's not as worrisome a job as it used to be at some point in time.

Then the industrial facilities ... Some of this is managed out of a group within the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL). Some of it is managed by a group at Aeronautical Systems Center and they really worry about the Air Force plants around the country and how we best manage those.

This was all created as part of the original Air Force in 1947. It's now managed by Air Force Research Lab. It's actually been managed by Air Force Research Lab very much from the beginning, but it's managed quite a big differently today than it used to be in its heyday. The purpose of the Industrial Preparedness Program is to advance key Air Force-required manufacturing capabilities. Right out of the Air Force Research Development Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) descriptive summary, to include reducing acquisition sustainment costs, reducing new system capabilities risk, and reducing technology transition time—three key elements to getting a program off on the right foot and increasing the chances of having a successful program.

What can an Integrated Program Plan (IPP) bring to the fight? The 5002 acquisition system is currently described in DoD documentation today. And then you have advanced technology demonstrators. Getting involved in helping to understand the manufacturing readiness and expediting anything that needs to be expedited so that when you get to Milestone B you've got a good idea of how it is you want to go about producing the capability that you're looking for.

Underneath the development and production, the Program Executive Office (PEO) programs. There are all kinds of opportunities within PEO programs to advance the manufacturing technologies leading to lower cost, on-time production and increased effectiveness of the product.

Then in sustainment, there's a function that deals with reducing depot cycle times and depot support costs for systems. I'll show you an example of each of those later.

Throughout the whole spectrum, of course, there's the industrial base assessments that need to be done as well as looking at various initiatives that can be done by organizations within the government and looking for ways to assist them in doing it. So the IPP program is meant to be involved throughout the acquisition process, and if you're in the business and not using them today, I'd encourage you to think about getting in contact with those folks.

One of the things that's being worked very hard today in the joint arena, between the Army, Navy and Air Force, is the issue of manufacturing readiness levels. We've had technology readiness levels for about 10, maybe 12 years now. They have become very useful in making sure that we understand how to move a program forward at the right time based on those technology readiness levels. So the joint community is working very hard to do the same thing for manufacturing readiness levels, to align them with technology readiness levels, all aimed at the idea of having increased knowledge of what you're buying into at Milestone B and reducing the transition risk or being able to understand the transition risk so you can more appropriately manage it.

They get into the business of materials, machines and tooling. First in the lab environment and then in a relevant environment similar to Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E), in the technology area. Then at the end they get into the processes and procedures which really help to find the high rate production, if we have any high rate production programs today outside of weapons, to get the program on track.

It's all a matter of reducing technology transition, risk, cost, and time.

IPP was part of the Air Force in 1947, but it really became a part of the landscape in the 1960s. I think as we began to understand the number of programs we were going to take on like the F-15, F-16, A-10s, AWACs, all the recapitalization that we did throughout the '70s, people began to realize we really needed to beef this up. It was strongly supported throughout that timeframe and even up until the 1995 timeframe. The Defense Manufacturing Board was a parallel to the Defense Science Board, treated the same way you would treat science.

In 1991, there were 17 technology thrusts within the department. One of those thrusts was technology for affordability. In 1992, there was an advanced manufacturing initiative. This is when Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began to get involved in manufacturing and a big chunk of the DoD budget went to DARPA. Some of used to wonder why that wasn’t coming to the Air Force in manufacturing technology, or to the services, but it in fact it ended up going to DARPA, to put more emphasis on advanced technology, up-front development activities. Then the integrated product and process development that occurred in the 1993 timeframe where we began to address some of these issues of how do we integrate the activities that exist throughout the country and within the Air Force in instituting better programs?

To give you a feel for the level of support, the ManTech budget doubled from 1970 to the mid '80s. Not the case today, unfortunately. DARPA's budget throughout that period of '93 to '95 was over $500 million. That's a lot of money to throw at the manufacturing technology area. And the federal manufacturing Research and Development (R&D) investment throughout that period was significant. It's a number that ends with a B. Within this landscape the Air Force had some pretty significant accomplishments, but let me lead into that a little bit more.

For those of you in this room, at one time we had an Air Force Systems Command (AFSC), prior to the 1991 timeframe. The IPP landscape was really shaped by Headquarters, Systems Command, and the product centers on the basis that the product centers were responsible for developing mission capability portfolios of programs, if you will.

At that time the center commanders also had a portion of the research lab associated with those technical skills that were necessary to those programs working for them. So there was a level of integration that existed prior to 1991 between the product centers and the laboratory support mechanisms that doesn't quite exist at the same level today. There was strong industrial preparedness sponsorship at Headquarters AFSC at that time.

Priorities were driven by mission capability requirements. F-15, new air-to-air; F-16, light weight multi-role fighter; A-10, cheap, low end of the spectrum-type activities. The idea was that we would achieve new capabilities through new technology, but we would deliver these new capabilities with mature technologies. If you step back and look at the F-15 and the F-16, they are probably the best definition of spiral development programs that have existed for some time in the Air Force.

There was also a group of people within the product centers called Development Planning. The Development Planning folks are really the ones who did the front end, what is now known as “concept refinement” and “technology development.” They are the folks that really worked their way through the issues of having options available and how you'd satisfy certain mission capability with new programs. And being able to work with the users, work with the headquarters, build constituencies within the Washington environment, so when a new requirement came along there was a product to put on the table that was pretty much sold and supported within the system.

One of the other things that sometimes doesn't quite come out in the new System Design and Development (SDD) activity is that Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) really focused as much on manufacturing as it did on engineering the product, back in the pre-1991 timeframe.

Now here's just the tip of the iceberg on what IPP has done for the Air Force in the past. I tried to pick four different examples that not only resulted in a more affordable program, but ended up providing the warfighter new capability.

I have personal experience on the B-2. There was a two-year effort in the '81 to '83 timeframe where we had two options for building the B-2: A metallic wing and a composite wing. InTech did a super job of helping us work our way through all the things we needed to worry about to build and support a composite wing airplane, to include full-size test articles of the wing structure itself prior to going into the actual development program. So not only did we get a new capability—without that composite wing we would not have built the B-2 airplane. The weight just would not have allowed us to make the requirements.

F-15 depot maintenance ... ManTech working with the folks at Warner Robbins over the last four or five years have reduced the depot maintenance cycle time on F-15s by 50 percent, providing the equivalent of an additional squadron on their Advanced Management Program (AMP) for Air Combat Command and the General Officer Commands (GOCOMs) throughout the world.

Automated inspection of engine components, which ended up in a program where we actually began to retire engines just prior to the point at which we know they're going to have a potential catastrophic failure. It has reaped great benefits in terms of supportability within the engine program, plus the fact that it has allowed us to avoid having to use additional critical materials to build and/or extend the life of engine programs.

Then an improved plating process on electronic boards which has reduced the scrap and rework by 75 percent, which ends up in improved quality and reliability as well as affordability.

If you look at ManTech's effort over the 15 to 20 years, we're looking at a return on five to ten for every dollar invested. That's a pretty healthy return. The reason I wanted to make that point is I hear a lot today about initiatives that make it inside the Beltway regarding ways in which we could reduce the cost and improve the schedule performance of the programs if you invest some money in the current year. The answer usually is, “what do you want me to give up?”

Well I would assert you don't have to give anything up. You may have to bite the bullet in a year, but over the next four, five or ten years of that program life, you're going to get far more return and end up with far more product and capability than you would by not making that investment. It's hard. I know it's hard, but the Air Force today really needs to examine programs from a four- to five-year cycle as opposed to a one- to two-year cycle and see if there's not a way that we can do the best thing over the long term.

One of the luxuries of being a black program in the early '80s was you could think in the long term and you could make decisions about how you invest things like manufacturing technology dollars because you didn't have to stand all the questions and all the scrutiny that came from either DoD and/or the Congress. We ought to step up to that in today's environment and maybe we can get Lieutenant General Ronald T. Kadish, USAF (Ret.) and his group to help us step up to that.

Here's a more elaborate example of the International Manufacturing and Engineering Technology (IMET) program of the ManTech program in the form of the F-16 multinational program. Back in the' 77, '78 timeframe there was a technology modernization activity that was created by the F-16 System Program Office (SPO) and General Dynamics (GD), drawing on the resources of manufacturing technology, to include their budget. The government would invest $25 million, the contractor ended up putting in about $100 million, and they made some significant improvement in the way in which the F-16 would be built. No doubt, a big program, lots of airplanes, GD could see the benefits of stepping up to the investment.

Anecdotal story ... The F-16 program manager at the time was a guy by the name of Jim Nabors. Many of you probably know him, have heard of him. He retired out of one of the original missile defense agencies, offices, whatever they used to call it in those days. And he learned about this PE called 78011, and so he got intrigued about how could he use their money? So he got the lab involved, took $25 million out of the ManTech budget, put it in his next briefing to come up to Headquarter AFSC where General Alton D. Slay was the commander at the time and said, “General Slay, if you'll let me use this $25 million, I'll reduce the cost of F-16s by $220 million in the first contract.” Slay said, “great,” walked out of the room, called the folks in AC and said, “take $220 million out of the F-16 budget over the next five years.” [Laughter] That's the kind of leadership that the Air Force really has to have today. Make the investment, take it out of the budget and get the program and the contractor to perform to the new level of activity.

So what can we do to increase it today?

Last year I talked about delivering combat capability. As a result of all the acquisition reforms that took place from the 1975 through the 2005 timeframe, we have really put the acquisition community in a tough work environment. It's just hard to get something done quickly and easily. There's a General Accounting Office (GAO) report that came out in March of 2005 that essentially says programs are being run with an inappropriate level of knowledge at major milestones. The conclusion was that the department really needs to think about what level of knowledge you need to have at Milestone Bs and Milestone Cs. Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) has led the criticism of the Air Force on using immature technologies as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Users continue to be concerned about their inability to move S&T in the systems at a quick rate and at an affordable rate. Sometimes you've got to trade quick for affordable, but if you plan it properly and you work it properly, I think you can get both. You may not get it as quick as you think you would like, but I'll bet you in the end you get it as quick as you would have if we'd thought about it more up front.

Then, of course, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Air Force are currently conducting a study on how to modify the acquisition system, a new set of acquisition reforms if you will. Ron Kadish is heading that up and they owe recommendations to Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy Gordon England by November.

The current industrial base landscape ... There are fewer major system programs, which means we need to do a smarter job in how we're going to spend our resources, at least in my mind. There is limited Independent Research and Development (IR&D) funds being spent by the contractors because they see reduced opportunities and cannot legitimately satisfy their shareholders by putting additional dollars into IR&D.

All that says to me that we need to do a better job on the pre-systems acquisition phase of program management and acquisition management and in the way in which we invest our technology dollars to develop capability. In my mind, an executable acquisition strategy not only identifies how you're going to deliver the capability on time, but it emphasizes the discipline necessary for evolutionary development.

When the F-15 started development in 1970, the A&C was a replacement air-to-air fighter because we didn't have a good one in Vietnam. They had a motto in the F-15 SPO at that time that said, "not a pound for air-to-ground," and Ben Bullis, who was the program director at the time, would kill anybody who came into the F-15 program and said, “hey we've got this new requirement.” Great. Put it on the list for the D's and E's an F's, and we'll get to it. That's the way that the F-15, in my mind, was able to deliver on-time, at cost, with a very functional air-to-air machine.

Now it wasn't the most functional air-to-air machine when they first delivered it in '74, '75, but look at the evolutions the F-15 has gone through without ever having changed the airframe. In 30 years they have not changed a component of the airframe structure to accommodate new mission capabilities. It can be done. They did that by putting mature, producible technologies into the airplane at the right time. That gets you new cost credibility with the Congress and with the OSD inside the Beltway, but you also have to hold both the government, the program office, the headquarters, the users accountable for making commitments, decisions on requirements, choices on design trade-offs. It can be done. Then the contractor also has to be held accountable to deliver to the contract.

I would assert that the best example of how this approach can be made to work is to look at the F-15K which is being developed, produced and delivered in less than four years to Korea. The F-16 Block 60 which is being developed, produced and delivered to the United Arab Emirates in less than four years. Because they are using defined requirements, mature technology and they've got discipline in the program as to how changes get accounted for.

Establish content, manage risk and meet expectations. To me it's just no more complex than that.

Now I happened to get my hands on a chart from OSD that said the first order factors for addressing in pre-systems acquisition have to do with added or changed requirements, engineering changes, manufacturing efficiencies, and they had one other called “work labor.” I couldn't quite figure out what that was.

It comes down to the fact that if you have a pre-systems acquisition phase which looks at stabilizing the requirements, because you understand what technology is achievable over what period of time and what technology is producible over what period of time, and you do that through the new Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) system. I'll bet you a bag of donuts if we had good cost estimating capability we'd have a lot less flack from Congress and other people who want to attack the Air Force and its acquisition system.

5002 says that a successful strategy starts with requirement stability, but then it says "the maturation of technologies that lead to discipline, development and production" is the way in which we ought to be managing the programs, even though it may not be getting implemented quite that way today.

Going back to manufacturing readiness, I think we need to embrace this. We need to institutionalize it. By institutionalize it I don't mean we need to go through all these steps in order to get something in the field, but we do need to apply some discipline and understanding as to what it is. What do we understand about how to produce this, make it good quality, make it reliable, and make it more cheap?

This is the crux of the briefing. This is Dick Scofield's wild idea of how the universe could work if we really put our minds to it.

We've got the new Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System. General Richard B. Myers signed it off I think two and a half years ago. It's still maturing. Guys and gals are trying to figure out how to make it work.

As a result of doing the research for the earlier study and given the feedback I’ve received on that study, one of the things I've heard from contractors is they don't know how to get new ideas into the capabilities requirement system because the Joint Staff is still having trouble figuring out how to make it work.

So what's their outlet? Their outlet's to go to Capitol Hill. The marketing guys go to the Hill, sell some capability that yeah, it can come about, but it ain't going to come about in the timeframe of the dollars that they indicate. Now that's the function that the development planning shops used to serve back at Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) and other product centers in the '70s. They vetted the contractors' proposals. There was agreement between the technical experts at the product centers and the technical experts at the contractors in terms of what was doable and what was not doable.

So when somebody asked inside the Beltway “what can we do about this?”, there was a good solid answer supported by a number of people.

The study that I did last year was in response to a question that former Air Force Secretary Dr. James G. Roche had asked about regarding how it is that foreign countries can get their airplanes so much faster than the US Air Force can get their airplanes? When I went to out-brief him, he and former US Air Force Chief of Staff General John P. Jumper got all over me about, “how do we get the contractors to stop going over on the Hill and selling programs that we don't want and that we can't afford and that they can't do in any manner?” My answer was that they got rid of the expertise, the functional skill, that would keep them from doing that, that would have vetted the programs, when we got rid of development planning at all the various product centers. That was the end of my discussion with the Chief and Secretary then on the topic. [Laughter]

We have the joint capabilities, which really ought to be looking at the long-term technology investments consistent with national strategies. And where does DoD want to go? The Air Force has got the Capability Review and Risk Assessment Program (CRAW) and the iSummit requirements, which are really dealing with the nearer term deficiencies in our operating forces. What could the technology community bring to the arena to solve these things more quickly?

I would assert that there are really two processes we need. One with the JCIDS and one with the CRAW and that process really ought to be managed by the product centers. General Gregory S. Martin, before he retired, established or re-established capabilities integration offices at the product centers for the purposes of starting to integrate requirements, to develop the road maps and the architectures that would get us the capabilities that we need. Back to the future… Acquisition has about a 21-year cycle with three seven-year minor cycles, but we're back to where we were in the late '70s with the development planning function.

The AFRL, working through the capabilities integration office, developing the technology road maps. They know what can be done over what period of time. We ought not to plan programs for something that can't be done any quicker than what our technologists are going to step up to.

Then we've got to bring the aerospace industry back into it. We need to harmonize or bring together the investments that are made within the Air Force with the investments that are made within industry because there's not enough of this to go around. There are not enough programs, not enough money, very few contractors. We're relying on them, they're relying on us. So we ought to have them in the game as partners like we used to back in the old days.

If we took the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) process and used that process to work these kinds of trades, by the time we got to actually submitting the President's budget, we probably would have some programs that were pretty well documented, substantiated and executable. And with that, we begin to reestablish the credibility of the way in which we do the work.

So what would a new, and I'm calling it now an “Integrated Industrial Preparedness Program,” look like if we were to adopt these processes? We'd get to influence judgments early in the concept requirement technology phases. We'd get to reduce the transition risk at Milestone B because we understand what we're asking the decision-makers to sign up to. We'd address critical manufacturing issues throughout all of the program phases. Then we integrate the sustainment and modernization efforts to include the depots. There's nothing that says a depot can't do repairs or create its own manufacturing capabilities in order to compete with industry or as a way of maintaining some leverage with industry.

I think we can increase the effectiveness—this is where I get into a little bit of advocacy here ... We can increase the effectiveness of that by having a four-prong implementation strategy. Support Advanced Technology Demonstrations (ATDs) consistent with the Air Force road map.

Today, ManTech's budget allows them to support about 16 out of 45 ATDs. We ought to be willing to put $10 or $20 million to get it up to where we're working all of the ATDs which could be useful to the Air Force. Support the depot improvements, and they're doing that through the Distributed Mission Interoperability Toolkit (DMIT) program in part. Increase the infrastructure to provide additional support to the acquisition programs. The programs have really gotten away from working with the folks in the labs on manufacturing technology because they're scared to death that if they do, we'll try to ask for help, they're going to ask for money, they're going to take it out of the program that makes their job harder on a day-to-day basis. But somebody's got to take a long term view of this.

Enhanced support to the PEO programs. Those are the ones that we need to make work right because they're the ones that get the most visibility.

Then we ought to start to leverage joint centers of excellence. The Navy has done a super job of creating about six centers of excellence in manufacturing technology, all funded out of the Navy's manufacturing technology budget. There is no center of excellence for stealth. Maybe there ought to be, since the Air Force is the one that's got the biggest investment in this technology.

And if I had my way I would grow the IPP budget to $135 million a year over the next five years. Today, they get about $35 million out of the Congress. Let me say that differently. The DoD and the Air Force submit a budget for about $35 million. Congress has added $15 million each year for the past five or six years and then told the Air Force and DoD, “you guys aren't listening.” We need to get this up around $50 million at a minimum.

We ought to step up to increasing the support for the PEO programs, the infrastructure, and moving on and creating some centers of excellence and doing a better job of working with the other services in the centers of excellence that they have.

This would be my approach to a transformed Integrated Industrial Preparedness Program funding profile.

The next step, one of the biggest steps, is that IPP is managed out of the research lab. It used to be more separate from the science and technology area than it is today. Currently it's a division within the Materiels Directorate. So every time somebody says, “we ought to give more money to ManTech,” all the scientists cringe and say, “but I don't have anything I can give up.” The point we need to make is that ManTech is something that needs to be harmonized with the S&T investments so that when you get to Milestone B you've got not only a good technology product, but you've got a manufacturable product. It's not an either/or situation. We ought to be able to harmonize how it is we bring technology to the table and with that you can end up with an executable, responsive program.

So here's my summary ... We need to fix the acquisition system. We just can't continue to live in the environment we're in. And I think getting the pre-systems acquisition phase right is the best way to go about doing it. All bets are won on the first tee. You golfers in the room know what that means. It's how you handicap whoever's playing in the game, and you've got to get the bet right on the first tee if you're going to get the money at the end of the game.

The IPP is proven, but I would assert it currently has untapped resource capability. If you're in the business, you need to find these guys. And I think improving the acquisition technology transition can be leveraged more effectively by the PEOs. The PEOs as the product center commanders were, prior to the AFMC creation, responsible for providing users a portfolio of capabilities by mission area. They are the ones that ought to feel most responsible for putting together the architectures on how it is we support the operators. So we ought to take advantage of that capabilities integration function and do that.

I think there's a significant opportunity if we did this, that we could really drive down cost and do a much better job of delivering capability to the users.

With that, I'll open it up for questions and discussion.

Q: With the information intensive environment that we work in, a lot of embedded computer systems and a lot embedded software, is there an analog here with regard to manufacturing software, if you will, getting it right the first time and the problems we're having with fielding some of our software intensive systems?

Lieutenant General Scofield: There is. As a matter of fact, there are people on the manufacturing technology staff who focus on software activities.

But you know, the software area is probably the one where we may have the hardest time controlling requirements because everybody wants the next iteration. “It's only software, we can make it so much better.” But really, there isn't any system that we have today that if you were to make one change somewhere in that system and do it without doing the proper analysis beforehand, that you wouldn’t have bought yourself a big problem.

There are folks who have done it, and I think there are ways you can structure incremental or spirals of software development. The F-16 has done that for years. They have, I think, a four-year cycle where they do two years worth of requirements and two years worth of software development. They know which iteration is going to have what capability. And if it requires a hardware change, they know two years in advance what the hardware change is going to be.

It can be done. It's a matter of discipline, really, in my mind.

Q: I'd like to go back to a problem you mentioned earlier and that is the importance of the requirements definition process. That's the beginning of it all. That sets off the chain of events that leads to fielding systems on cost, on schedule. Yet that's the one step in the whole process where industry is precluded from participating. I don't know why we do that. Why don't we include industry so that we know what's fieldable, what's manufacturable, what can be sustained? Industry's only alternative is to go to Capitol Hill. It’s not an easy process.

Lieutenant General Scofield: But it is—it's a matter of trust and teamwork. Now that sometimes gets to be an overworked phrase, but if you haven't read my earlier study, and I'm not trying to sell studies, I don't get royalties on them, but you ought to go back and read about an organization, a prototype program office that existed at in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (ASD) then in the late '60s.

The A-10 didn't get created out of one program. The A-10 got created because industry working with the development planning folks at ASD had about six options for how you do a low end, close air support, low cost airplane. And when the call came, “what are you guys going to do about this?”, they were up there with six options, all of which had done some team-building inside the Pentagon and over on the Hill prior to their arrival. So people weren't sniping at each other as to, “well, you guys are not telling us the whole story, there's no way this airplane can be built the way it is.” The A-10 requirement document I think was no more than ten pages. The Request For Proposals (RFP) that went out was something 38 or so pages.

As I was telling my friend Larry Gravitz earlier, there is nothing new to acquisition. There are all these things that we have done that have worked well that we ought to go back and revisit, under the name of “lessons learned” if nothing else.

Q: For those of you who may not be aware, that study that you referenced is available on the AFA website at www.afa.org. Without sounding like a heretic, it sounds like some of it is an experience issue with some of the senior leadership. Would it be more beneficial to maybe not put non-acquisition folks in some of the key senior leadership positions? [Laughter] We bring in overrated people and expect them suddenly to be acquisition program managers.

Lieutenant General Scofield: Well, there have never really been a lot of acquisition senior leaders in the corporate Air Force, except maybe in the old Air Force before we made it a secretarial task.

You've got to go back to 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. 1990, a new threat. Globalization. Defense downsizing. We're going to respond to Goldwater/Nichols. We're going to create the Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition. We're going to change roles and responsibilities. We're going to take program management responsibility away from the product center commanders and put it in the PEOs and not give them the resources to manage it. We've done all this to ourselves over the years.

An anecdotal story ... I retired as the Commander of Aeronautical Systems Center on May 29, 1996. As a product center commander, I was not allowed to know anything about the F-22 program. I was not to get involved in it, I was not to offer help, I was not to do any of that.

On Monday morning my wife and I are having breakfast, late for the first time in years, and Bob Roggio calls and says, “Darlene wants you to do a study on the F-22 program.” I said, “wait a minute. Friday I was too dumb to know anything about the F-22, but today I'm going to be the guy that's going to lead the team to go look at what the F-22 program…”

We've done it to ourselves. It is an experience factor. Unfortunately, we've lost a lot of experience in the last ten years. I have a lot of good friends in the acquisition community who over the last ten years have just been worn down. There's nothing to say, however, that we couldn't create a manufacturing center of excellence and go get some of these good folks to come help out the Air Force on a periodic basis.

I think what happened from the, and I won't say just from the time the Secretariat was approved, based on the relationship that I had with General Larry D. Welch when he was at Strategic Air Command and then as the Chief, and the relationship I had with General Tony McPeak and General Ronald Fogleman, I think General McPeak really didn't have a high regard for the acquisition community. I don't think he hid that from very many people. So he created an environment, if you will. And it was about that same time, and it may just be, it's a confluence of events is what it is, because it's about that time the Secretariat is now standing up so there's a whole new set of ways of doing business that people haven't quite figured out. And as programs start to go south for a number of reasons, it builds on itself. So we need to dig ourselves out of that hole. I think the way you do that is we're going to get the front end right, we're not going to promise anymore than we think we can do. You may not get this requirement in 2008, you may have to wait until 2010, but we know we can give it to you in 2010.

If I were a planner in the ops world, I would rather know what I'm really going to have available to me than, “well, they say this is going to be available, but I don't believe it so I'm not going to plan for it anyway.” That's probably what happens. I've never been in the planning shop, but I'll bet that's probably what happens.

Q: General, I'm Air Marshall Chris Scoville, and I'm now Chairman of Western Helicopters. It’s a different scale altogether in the United Kingdom, but it's amazing how many of the lessons that you've learned we've learned the hard way, too. We've recently had a review of our whole acquisition process, having tried to smarten up the acquisition in the past, but it never worked. The conclusion we reached is exactly the same as you did, if you don't get things right at the front end of the program, you will fail, and we've got lots of examples to prove just that; very costly ones.

Actually, the Investment Approvals Board now insists on at least 20 percent of total program costs being allocated at the front end of the program and they will not clear development and production unless there's a demonstration that about 20 percent is technology that has reached maturity.

The previous comment, by the way, on the acquisition specialists, I entirely agree with that. I'm not an operational requirements man, given my background, but I entirely agree with that. The big problem is, and we've tried to set up an acquisition stream in the UK, is that it's just not very popular. It tends to push people into a corner, it tends to make them too specialist, and the experience we've had is that you do need to move people out from time to time, back into the acquisition stream, to get that sort of whole life experience which is necessary to understand the whole program.

I entirely agree with the other point about the trust which we put in the aerospace industries, and particularly the requirements people. Again, that's something that we failed to do ourselves in the United Kingdom, and we're trying to do it now through the establishment of what we're calling “strategic partnerships” which will actually allow companies to start at the concept phase and not the requirements capture. It's early days here, but we're hoping we'll make that work.

In particular we're looking at risk transparency, shared risk. What is the risk at the operational level, what is the risk at the industrial and informational level?

But we believe that none of this will succeed unless we have an overarching defense industrial policy that leads to a defense industrial strategy and then a defense industrial plan. This is really my question. To what extent is what you're suggesting, your IPP, what is that in the context of a national policy?

Lieutenant General Scofield: Well, the day I made brigadier general I said, “this is great, I'm going to get to see the master plan.” [Laughter] Whoops.

There's supposed to be a flow-down here from the White House to the department to the services to the operators and there's supposed to be a progression of where we're going in the future with the kinds of capabilities that we want. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say the JCIDS process was put together to do that, or at least to take some strategy, some national strategic perspective, and say, “if we're going to do this in 2020 this is what we think we're going to need in the way of capabilities to do that,” e.g., “this is what we think we're going to need in the way of technologies to do that.”

I don't think they can make those kind of judgments without a close working relationship with the people in the product centers within AFMC and the technologists in AFRL. So I think that dialogue has to be created. The PEOs to me are the folks who have the vested interest for the benefit of the Air Force to go figure out how to make that happen. Now that they've put the PEOs back in the field, as the product center commanders, we are back to the future. So now we need to get the process working the way the process used to work.

AFA National Chairman of the Board Pat Condon: Can I answer that?

Lieutenant General Scofield: Sure.

Mr. Condon: Your point is exactly right on in my view. I'm currently privileged to participate on the Manufacturing Technology Task Force at our Defense Science Board under the auspices of DoD, and one of the things we have discussed—and our report is not out yet, we have not concluded all of our work—but one of the things we have discussed is exactly what you brought up. There is no apparent defense-related manufacturing strategy or manufacturing capability strategy for defense industry capabilities. And as a result, we let the free marketplace dictate the direction that we go and we find ourselves in a situation where we may or may not have the capability resident in this country or resident in a trusted ally to meet the needs that we might have.

Now whether a recommendation for the establishment of such a plan ultimately finds its way into our final recommendation product is uncertain at this point, but that's something that we are certainly advocating and I think you will see that come out.

At our Air Force Association National Convention yesterday, one of our orders of business was to approve our annual Statement of Policy and Top Issues. In it you will see an element on the defense industrial base, and one of the things we are advocating as an association is the establishment of exactly the kind of defense manufacturing capability strategy you're talking about. I think it is being recognized that that is lacking and something that really is sorely needed.

Lieutenant General Scofield: Two follow-ups quickly if I can…

Let me go back to the question from the back about putting acquisition-experienced people in leadership positions.

How many of you in this room recognize the name Mike Lowe? Mike Lowe was a captain and a major in the F-16 SPO as a projects officer. Then he went back to Tactical Air Command. Then he came back as the Commander of ASC. Then he became the Commander of Air Combat Command. There used to be a concerted effort in the '70s and the '80s to move people from the operating commands into the SPOs for a period of time, get them aware of what the acquisition process really entails if you want to get something done, move them back into the operational command for a period of time, pick the right guys and gals, and bring them back at the right levels at later points in time.

Ron Yeats, who ended up being the Commander of Air Force Systems Command and Air Force Materiel Command, was an operator early on. He got in the A-10 SPO first, in the F-15 SPO, ended up being a SPO Director for F-16 at one point. George Marnahan who, unfortunately, passed away right after he retired, was the F-16 SPO Director. He had been an operational fighter pilot for a number of years.

There's nothing hard about being a good program manager, other than that you've got to deal with the inside-the-Beltway crowd, but it's all logic. It's all pragmatic judgments in my mind. So it's not like you have to know how to fly the airplane or operate the radar or launch a missile or do the other things. It's just a matter of being able to drive the process, make decisions and get on with the work, and if you make a mistake you tear it up and start over again. Then you take the heat for being able to do that. Unfortunately, I think the heat has gotten to such a high level and with such bravado every time it seems to come up that we have discouraged a number of people who knew how to do this job well over a period of time.

I'd look at the world in the last ten years in the acquisition business and say, “why would I ever want to be a junior officer who would want to go to work in the acquisition business?” All those guys do is get beat up all the time. It's tough, but it's very rewarding. A very rewarding opportunity.

Q: General, your discussions on the future and how we can plan for the future, new weapon systems … How can we modify this for where we're at today, the systems we have today in production?

Lieutenant General Scofield: I think the first thing is we plug these folks into the PEO programs. The F/A-22, F-35 … I had a suggestion as to why couldn't the F-16 International Military and Education Training Program (IMET), with the partnership that existed between the Air Force and General Dynamics on investment, why couldn't that apply to the F-35 starting tomorrow?

The other point was you talked about how there was no strategy. It's worse than what Pat described.

In 1992, Don Atwood as the Deputy Secretary of Defense said DoD was no longer going to fund the technology efforts of the contractors. The contractors are going to have to fund the effort on their own. We still see a little bit of that. Vice President Dick Cheney is not an advocate of helping industry directly with funding. But without industry we don't get the capability we want. Why would we not want to invest in helping industry build us the capability that we need?

So the F-35 might be the best visible opportunity. If we carefully picked, we could give ourselves a high probability of success and we could start to beat the critics back probably within a year or two. It's not near as long as it's going to take to field the F-35. It's a long time when it comes to satisfying the Congress, but it's not nearly as long, and the guys and gals who get the F-35 in 2013 or whatever it's going to be, are going to have to live with it for 30 or 40 or 50 years. We ought to get it right before we do that.

Thanks very much for your time.

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