2024 Air, Space & Cyber: Battle Management

The “Battle Management” panel at AFA’s 2024 Air, Space & Cyber Conference featured Patrick “Mike” Shortsleeve, vice president of DOD strategic development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems; Joshua Conine, director of Space C2 Growth at SAIC; and Akash Jain, CTO and president of Palantir USG. The panel, held on September 18, was moderated by Shannon Pallone, program executive officer for Battle Management Command, Control & Communications. Watch the video below:

Shannon Pallone, Program Executive Officer for Battle Management Command, Control & Communications:

Good afternoon. I’m Shannon Pallone. I’m the Space Force program executive officer for battle, management, command, control and communications. Part of the job interview is, can I actually say all of those words and get them right every time? But I’m really grateful to be here today, and I’m really grateful to be leading a great panel of our industry partners to have a conversation about battle management, and in particular, with a focus on innovation and how we’re using technology to enable battle management across the force. So, I would like to start with a quick opportunity for each of the panelists to introduce themselves, and then we’ll jump into questions.

Patrick “Mike” Shortsleeve, Vice President, DOD Strategic Development, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems:

Sure. Hi everybody. I’m Mike Shortsleeve from General Atomics aeronautical systems. 28 years in the Air Force, retired as an Intel officer, been with General Atomics for just almost five years now, and I work as the VP of their strategy and business development, looking at what are the future type of things that General Atomics needs to be pursuing. So that’s just me.

Joshua Conine, Director, Space C2 Growth, SAIC:

Thanks, Mike. Joshua Conine, also go by Pooch.

Certainly a pleasure to be here today and see a lot of familiar faces out there that I’m sure are going to correct me after, after this is all done today, but my role right now at SAIC is to build and grow the space C2 campaign within the company. I am a little bit of an outsider within the company, from the perspective that I’m also probably a disrupter, because I don’t have a space background per se. My bow management experience comes from within the air side and with the E3 and AOC type of capabilities. But what I will say, it’s been amazing to see the evolution that CJADC2 has been has taken based on the prioritization that’s been put upon it by by the DOD, and then also the innovation that industry, you know, has brought to us. And if, if you if you understand battle management from a historical perspective, it started out as just being able to provide Broadcast Communications and threat warning, which you could probably take all the way back to the Civil War from looking out of a tethered balloon over the battlefield with some flags out there trying to communicate orders and direction out there. Now, from an air perspective, or from the air component, we’ve transitioned through that to where we were more air component centric, where were we able to parse orders and give some more detailed guidance and direction to today, where we need to synchronize forces across all the components, up and down, all echelons of command and through and all domains. And I think that’s a great journey, and a very rapid one within the last five to 10 years, it’s great to be here.

Akash Jain, CTO and President, Palantir USG:

Hey everybody. Akash Jain, I serve as the President and CTO of Palantir government business. Been at Palantir almost 20 years now, so really have the good fortune to build a lot of the original technology. Work closely with folks in the field as we’re kind of fielding it and learning as we were doing that. And I’m excited today to be helping kind of drive the vision for how we support the important CJADC2 and other kind of battle management portfolios across the DOD.

Shannon Pallone:

Thank you, Josh. I love that you took a little bit of time to walk through your definition of battle management and how it’s evolved over the years. The question for the rest of the panel would be, how would you do a similar definition? And then, what do you think the role is of space in battle management?

Patrick Shortsleeve:

Okay, I’ll go ahead and jump in. So, I mean, I think from our perspective at General Atomics, we always look at things from a problem solution standpoint. When we look at battle management, we look at it from the perspective of optimizing military forces and the resources associated with them. And that means, how could you do that? Well, that could be the application of enhanced technologies or sort of advanced type of capabilities that exist out there, whether it’s artificial intelligence or data fusion, but really the intent of what we try to do. And our definition really comes down to the fact that we’re just trying to enable decision makers to understand what the world is actually telling them at that moment, so they can just focus on what to do about it. That’s kind of how we look at the problem set.

Akash Jain:

Yeah, absolutely. And to build on, kind of the thoughts from Mike, the way that we really think about battle management is there’s a core problem around communications, obviously, and there’s getting data from point A to point B in contested environments. And that isn’t what we do at Palantir, right? What we do is we think about, you know, if that’s kind of like the, I don’t know, the veins in one’s body and the arteries, we really think about the blood, right? The data. And the data is really the critical aspect of battle management, where we, you know, have deeper expertise and understanding, and for us thinking about whether it’s a strategic leader who needs a particular view and understanding against the same common data asset as somebody at the lowest level who has to make a decision on whether or not to pull to hit the big red button, whatever that big red button does, and vice versa. How do you enable that kind of cross echelon? Shared understanding of the world at the data level, enable advanced technologies like AI, like different software modules and advanced capabilities to interact with that data, and therefore, thereby increase the decision space that those senior leaders, but also those folks that are on the ground that actually have to make that mission happen and do it in a coordinated fashion. How do we increase the decision space that they have and the time they have to make the best possible decision in that moment? And that’s a lot of what we really focus on when it comes to battle management.

Joshua Conine:

Yeah, I think also for battle management, when you when you define it formally, the definition you know, would be to manage and execute inside the operational environment based on the orders and direction on proper authorities, right? So, it’s simple, right? Who can’t build something off of off of that you can’t you it comes becomes an art at some point. But the way that I look at battle management in that way, is it is actually a subset of command and control where a lot of folks think command and control is battle management and vice versa. So, when you totally look at battle management, you have to understand that it has a level of interdependencies that also include the data piece, but it also includes the orders, the command, the data communication capability, sensing capabilities, intelligence as well as what’s going on in the operational environment. It could be weather effects as well as disrupting communications. So, all those interdependencies that you have within that create the function out create and enable the functions that battle management needs to do, whether it’s from the beginning of parsing orders to all the way of executing a particular COA based on deciding what the COAs to be, and then afterwards evaluating what those COAs are. To me, that’s what’s there, and I think that’s what we’re here today. Shannon is to talk about the data centric piece of that, and why it’s that has that interdependency to make battle management happen.

Patrick Shortsleeve:

If I could just kind of play off a little bit of that, because what you guys have hit on, I think, is extremely important. You know, a lot of times people associate battle management with having a common operating picture, so you understand everything. And that’s certainly an important piece of this, but I would offer that it needs to be a user defined operating picture. You want to be able to have access to all the data, but you really only want what you need at that moment in time, and it gets to kind of what you’re talking about. It’s different at the tactical the operational and strategic level, what’s required. So, I always like to say, from a three striper to a three star, what is it that they need so they have the ability to access it. Your point on decision space is absolutely critical, right? If you have the ability to make a decision in five minutes, Vice two minutes, wow, you’ve just given a lot to that decision maker, regardless of what level they’re at and where they’re at, your point about the course of action, I think is really important as well, because that’s what we need to be driving to in order to enhance the ability for decision makers to make the right decision at the right time, they need technology to help them sift through that data. What you see today, and I’m sure everybody here has experienced it, and it still goes on today. You sit in front of multiple systems at different security classification levels with multiple windows open, and the fusion, or the ability to understand what’s going on occurs between the ears of the individual, and if it’s me, it’s not a very good job. So that has to go away in that sense. So, the ability to leverage, whether it’s artificial intelligence, the machine, the machine, but presenting information that gives you opportunities for courses of action and gives you the decision space, I think, is absolutely critical to any kind of future warfare when we talk about battle management.

Shannon Pallone:

So, I’d love to dive a little deeper into the topic of data, because really, what you’re describing is that how we use data has changed over the years, and how we need to use data going forward needs to change as well. What are some of the innovative things you’re seeing, or what are some of the ways that we can do a better job of leveraging that. I love, Mike, your example on the common operating picture. I think every user comes to me and says, if only we had the magic common operating picture, it would solve everything and but it’s really about the data behind that. So, can you guys elaborate on that a little bit more?

Joshua Conine:

Yeah, I think there’s several elements of that, from, from, from an SAIC perspective, one of those key elements is, is the resilient and distributed architectures that are out there. How do we take large C2, systems and break them down and get them distributed? You know, similar from a space perspective, you know, pwsa and proliferating the Leo orbit. So, we make sure we maximize the resiliency so the data can’t get cut off from the warfighter, from that information that is going up and through space, or maybe it begins in space and comes down, all that warfighter information is important. Mike mentioned it as well when you need. You have speed to need, or you need to, you know, be ahead of the speed of the adversary. Decisions are going to be coming in quickly. The amount of data that we’re talking about, because of its distributed capabilities and its rapidly increasing evolution and capabilities, whether it’s on our side or their side, is heavily important, but the amount of that data’s got to be managed. It’s got to be categories categorized the right way. It needs to be at the right secure level, so that what I see as a US fighter, if you will, is the same as my coalition member. That may be a Romanian, but the information behind it may be behind a different curtain, but I am, at the end of the day seeing the same thing. The processing of that data is important, though, because of the AI. So when you take those two elements together, I do believe that common operating C3 capability is needed that is tailorable to whatever Echelon you’re working at, I think is highly important, not only from current fights, but as war fighters move from assignment to assignment, platform to platform, they see a commonality in what they’re doing, and they don’t take a step backwards.

Akash Jain:

Yeah, if I could add on to that, I think, I think some actual work we’re doing with SAIC on a few aspects of this, I think they’re kind of three big things, if I were to layer down. The first one is security, absolutely and from that perspective, it’s not just the ability to bring all your data together, but your ability to understand tag and label that data at the lowest level. So some of the work, the zycam work and work that covers does, and kind of the team over there does with CDL, I think is like a really good example of where having the data in that format, but then being able to project that data subject to security classification guide, policy guidance, which changes very quickly in conflict, and to leverage advanced AI to figure out, well, what can we disclose to foreign through the FDO process, to our partners, both traditional and nontraditional, right? What does it look like to do that? You know, maybe an unclass level, an SPE level, in certain kind of very tactical situations, and also to get data backup. So kind of the first leg of kind of battle management that I think is really important at the data level, and requires kind of all of industry and government guidance, is figuring out kind of the security aspects of this, and how do we make sure that the data is properly classified, properly labeled and tagged, and then that kind of flows through the full pedigree and lineage of the system. The second thing is, truly, how do you do that at pace with partners, right? And so once you’ve got your data properly labeled and tagged, you have security classification guide, you have the fdos hooked in and able to move fast, leveraging AI to accelerate that, how do we actually now disseminate that information to them, and how do we actually enable communication, you know, true human communication, because there are humans involved right there. So, some of the work that we’ve seen kind of in the dopacom ao with Australia and Japan, and the ability to use, again, AI with data to do real time translation has been really effective. The interesting aspect of it is kind of this isn’t as simple as taking a standard natural language model that does translation between English and Japanese and just kind of pushing it back and forth because of the military specific language symbology, understanding and terminology that those models were never trained on. So how do you actually enable that kind of chat and interaction enabled to move fast alongside data that represents a cop, so that you can actually get kind of the red, the blue and the green kind of pictures altogether? And then the third aspect is the importance of digitally native and enabled users in the field. It’s, you know, we have a great team at Palantir. We love what we do. We love the fact that we get access to the field and to users that are doing real operational things. But, you know, I’ve got 650 people in the US government business at Palantir, right, against 4,000 total people in our business. You know, 1500 of them are building the core platforms, managing, maintaining and running them. There’s no way we could be everywhere to support everyone, nor would we want to. So how do you actually enable folks, whether they’re from our partners that are out there, truly embedded and building an open kind of most of platform, with open languages and standards, or actually enable service service members to do that, and what we’re really seeing, we’ve seen kind of through Ukraine and kind of prior in a couple of different areas that we’ve worked through as well. A lot of the exercises is more and more, it’s, you know, guardians and airmen that are actually building right they’re building in the capability on the edge, not just in the cloud, and augmenting, tailoring and changing that, both at the algorithm level, but also the UI UX level, right? Because there is no perfect cop to actually meet their commander’s intent in that moment, and that has to be the way the future, right? This can’t be a, you know, we send a request back to our program, and four months later we get an act that they got the request, but not a result, right? It’s got to be something where people can self-serve. In the field to drive where they need to go. From battle management perspective.

Patrick Shortsleeve:

I could just add one thing on this that kind of hit me as we’re talking about this. You know, a lot of people focus on its data, the data, the data, and that’s true, and there’s so much data that exists out there, right? But the data transport. How do you get it to where it needs to go is absolutely critical. So, space-based layer plays a big factor into this, because that’s going to help with some resiliency. In some stance, if you’re looking at sort of low Earth orbit type of capabilities to transport things. But even in the air domain as well, having aircraft that are just conduits, you don’t really care, it could reside on any aircraft, and it just passes through to get to whoever needs it. So the data transport aspect of this is also just as critical as getting the right type of data and having in a format that is usable, but putting it in a format that you can actually push it to somebody who needs it, who might be, as I used to refer as disadvantaged users, right, who don’t have the big com bandwidth that they may need at the very forward edge, but they still need that information. Do they need a full image? No, but maybe they need the coordinates, or maybe they need something with that. So, the data transport is hand in hand when we talk about data as we go forward with this.

Joshua Conine:

Yeah, I mean, this is a really good question. Shannon, so I appreciate that. And these are your spot on Mike. And when you look at the evolution of data and how it supported battle management, you know, through its time, going all the way from flag waving to spotlighting to voice data networks, chat, IP, streaming services, all that type of good stuff it with, with space being the ultimate high ground that out there, that’s out there, and the data transport that’s needed to go up and through space to deliver this information to the warfighter is going to continue to be, you know, critical. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to get from space where there’s coming from a SIGINT bird, comment bird, P and T, SATCOM or radar, if you will. That reliability is always going to be there, but the data transport and the functionality of that data on the other side through those MLS, CDs capabilities so the information can ultimately be petted and decided upon to do that entire sense make sense and act type of loop is never going to change. So, a couple of elements just, just to quickly add to this was other than from a tech perspective. I think, you know, Aki already kind of mentioned as well, the partnership amongst industry is vital. We never like to say that we’re necessarily competitors against each other. We’re more competitive mates. But there’s not a single industry partner out there that can solve CJADC2 all on all on their own. It’s going to have to come with partnerships and friendships and things like that to solve. I would also be remiss to, you know, take into account private and public partnerships as well. When you look at SpaceX and blue origins and what they’re doing for Space Launch capabilities, can you find the same type of thing within a C3 type of structure that enables battle management? And then lastly, don’t forget about the coalition aspect and what those partners can bingo fight, because they’re doing some very smart things as well within the space piece. So, if we don’t continue to pull on the data thread of how we keep them included and keep everything else protected at the right levels, then we’re probably missing something and not taking the best capabilities that are out there globally.

Shannon Pallone:

I love that each of you identified what I would call a key enabler to really doing business differently in the space of battle management, I’m curious, putting my government procurement hat on, what do you think are things that we could be doing differently, whether that’s through how we incentivize industry, how we’re structuring our programs, how we’re structuring our data and contracts, what are some of the things we could be doing that would help us better take advantage of this? Because I hear this constant willingness to do it, and I don’t know that I fully see it at scale yet. I see pieces of it. I’m really excited about where we’re going, but how could we really accelerate that?

Patrick Shortsleeve:

I got a lot of comments on this again, you know, as I said, 28 years in the Air Force, you know, I had engagements with the defense industry side, and I thought I was transparent. Transparency is probably the biggest thing, but it needs to be a consistent transparency. Having an industry day is great, right? You get a little bit of information, but there’s many times I’ve walked out going, I’m not sure what they really want. So, the consistency and the ability to open up and share what it is really is that problem set. And I have to tell you, I’m having talked to a few people here in the Air Force just earlier today. You know, the integrated capabilities, command, the IDEO, all of those things are going to get after some of these problems. Problems to help with that transparency. But I also would say that, you know, and I’ll throw my hat out there to help with some of the small business and startups out there. They don’t always have the facilities to be able to do some of this testing, or even seeing if their stuff could be integrated into anything that’s in on the military side, and some of it is just they can’t afford to have a facility that’s secure, or any of that. So the ability to open those doors up, not just from a here’s what our problem is, and here’s how we could collaborate and do things, but perhaps actually inviting them in to help these, these companies that are out there that have solutions that may not get over the, you know, over the line, because they simply don’t have the accesses or even the ability to test it in an environment that is the military system that they want to, want to apply to. So, I would leave those I don’t want to. I got 1,000 I could add, but I’m not.

Joshua Conine:

I would say tongue in cheek, wise, less FFP, but no, really, I agree with what with what with what Mike is saying, what I see within SSC, and also from previously working with General Cropsey’s organization, is keep the industry days going. Really appreciate what AFA brings us, as far as you know, this event and multiple other events around the year, but what comes out of that is the transparency between industry and the warfighter is really, really important, and I’ve seen a lot of improvement out of that. I feel like a lot of times I can go within the office and have the awkward conversation, and that’s always good to have. But if there’s one thing that that I would like to key on is we need to make sure that the warfighter all the way down the chain is also tied in, to make sure that those requirements aren’t getting convoluted, even from a development point of view, whether it’s in the DevSecOps environment or anything like that, making sure that they’re involved to, at a minimum, Give get them that men viable product, so they know that what they’re getting is something that they wish for at the beginning, it may not be the Ferrari that they asked for, but at least it’s giving them confidence that the system is listening to them and giving them what they need with minimal discrepancies and disruptions.

Akash Jain:

All right, I gotta spice it up. Pooch, more. FFP, but I should be more specific on what I mean by that, because I do think there are places that the government honestly has to take the risk and do cost plus, right? And I think that that is when you were buying something that is bespoke. It is unknown. There’s not a commercial item. There isn’t even something that looks like the thing you’re trying to do. Or it’s really, you know, you are a customer of one, maybe a couple others. If there’s an FMS, eventually, it should probably be cost plus, right? Because it’s a very different model than a lot of where we typically live, which is, you know, hey, we’ve got a commercial software platform, and American industrial base is another part of this. But we’ve got a commercial software platform, we think, you know, it gets you kind of 80% of the way there. That last 20% is absolutely going to be bespoke and unique. And frankly, the government needs to own that last 20% they need to own the data, they need to own the derivative data, they need to own the code, they own the understanding. They need to be part of that process. But that first 80% as a software company and as a pure software company, if you’re going to buy it as SaaS, right? And you’re going to have something that isn’t you’re not going to be stuck with the next 10 years. If it sucks, you kick it out, and you stop paying the bill, and you get the next thing that’s better. And you do have to switch, but that should be done as FFP, right? Because I do think that the way a modern software company works, and for us as an example, and we’re a little bit of a weird one. You know, half of our revenue is coming from a commercial source, right? Truly, half and half are coming from global government, of which about 80% is US government. So the pricing comps to drive an FFP outcome are there from the commercial industry and through the GSA schedule to understand that that is a fair price and that it is a good price, and then obviously things that you do and you customize on top of it, or obviously need to be in the remit of the government, but more FFP and software specifically would be, would be, my slight tweak. The other part of it that might kind of hit on, that I think, is absolutely critical, is, if you’re a small startup, and there are probably some small startups in the audience. We work with a lot of them. We started an initiative called first breakfast. And what first breakfast is all about is, it’s a little bit of a play on the Last Supper and kind of consolidation of the primes, kind of post-cold war. But really, what it’s thinking about is, hey, you know, everybody’s always talking about the latest greatest algorithm or company or startup coming out of, you know, some great school or something. And then everybody talks about, you know, all right, how do they get access to the problem? And then, once somebody wants it, how do they get through this proverbial valley of death before, seven years later, their stuff is useless, but somebody has it on their desktop to solve a problem within the DOD like that doesn’t need to happen anymore. And. Of the things that we’ve really focused on, and again, with a lot of really great partners, is, how do we help take software from modern software companies, get it through the ATO process quickly, using a lot of the things our own accreditations and relationships with the government, to get that in front of a warfighter, to then say, Hey, this is interesting or not, and figure out some mechanism through the authorities Congress is granted to DOD for rapid acquisition, whether it be with DIU, through OTAs, through consortiums, to then get it into some kind of stream. And so that initiative with first breakfast is a combination of, you need ATO, right, small companies not going to spend all that money and time, and you need data, right? Again, it comes back to data, right? Having a great capability on my desktop that I can’t put any interesting mission data into because it’s just not hooked up, or they got to spend two years on MOUs and MOAs does not make sense. It is the DODs data. And if it’s been integrated somewhere and there’s new software that needs to touch it, it should be put into an open ecosystem where that software can now be used. And so that’s what we do with kind of the first breakfast initiative, and what we’re seeing is actually a massive reduction in time. Probably the most public version of this is CDAO’s Open DAGIR initiative, a massive reduction in time that it takes to get net new software into the hands of somebody to try it out, put it with real data and use it in an operational exercise.

Shannon Pallone:

You guys have really highlighted both the need to work together and the disparate business drivers that you’ve each got, right and so pulling on that first breakfast idea a little bit more. So that’s a really great way to bring some of the newer industrial basin I’m also seeing as technology evolves rapidly, a desire to bring in best of breed across the board, which means breaking it into smaller problems. Which also means, how do we better encourage industry to work together? And how do we provide you enough that you say, this is enough of a problem that I’m going to come in and solve it, while I’m not promising you, kind of the traditional large prime contracts where you’re going to have a billion-dollar contract over 10 years to do this. How do we balance that better?

Akash Jain:

Yeah, I can hit this from a software perspective. I think there’s probably other aspects of it when you do the fully integrated software, hardware and comms part of it. But I think when I think about it from a software perspective, look, I think the most important thing for most commercial software companies, right? Where, you know, we have a broader business is we are always going to be wanting to invest our own money to stay ahead, right? And so, you know, the amount of money we put into R&D every year to make sure our product is the best possible product, and that we’re staying ahead of our competitors, and frankly, that we have some differentiation. That’s kind of that’s our job, ultimately, to, like, manage that part of innovation within us within our broader tech stack. I think that anybody from a software perspective who came to you and said, we don’t think that vertically integrated, if you give it all to us and let us vertically integrated end to end is the best way to go, is, frankly, probably lying to you. People in software think highly of themselves, not me, of course, but many people do and sure, like there’s a version of the world where, if you gave somebody in the technology space like that type of vertically integrated end to end problem, they’d be so excited, and, you know, they would want to get after it. Now, the reality is that that’s not a good business model for the government, right? And I think there are plenty of studies have been done on this. The need for the government to have a MOSA architecture where they can control the different parts can take on some of the integration risk, right? I don’t think the government should be the integrator right for the entire thing all the time. I think you have great people in industry who can do that alongside you, but that ability to have that modular, open architecture and to compete smaller parts of it, in order to continue to ensure competition like you shouldn’t take like scouts on or we’re going to keep innovating. You know, you want to actually have that optionality. I think it’s absolutely critically. And I think I’m certainly within the DAF. I think I’ve seen you guys do that in a lot of different ways across the different allies, both in C3BM and in PMC3, for the architectures that we’ve gotten to participate with, as well as with our partners, where you’re able to actually take those things and change different components of it. The one thing I would flag though, is that to have that optionality, you will go a little slower, and it will likely cost you more, right? Because you have many different people that you need to work through and with. Parts of it aren’t going to work together, but if you get the complexity to the right level, I think you’ll come up with a better outcome on a slightly slower timeline, and probably at a higher overall cost to the solution. And so that’s just kind of the tradeoff that you have to balance. From acquisitions perspective.

Patrick Shortsleeve:

I would add that industry will adjust to wherever the government wants to go. To be honest with you, if you’re just strictly in the defense industry side, not having both commercial and defense, but if you’re just strictly defense, you’ve got. One customer defense. And I think in some ways, if you’re breaking it up for the best of breed, some ways that’s actually helpful, because some companies live and die by the one contract that has been let out. You know, for the last two years, you get one contract. If you don’t get it, it’s an existential threat to a company, in some cases, but if you have the ability to still be able to bid on certain portions of it, that maybe you’re good that’s a good thing, I think so. I think industry will adjust as needed. I will kind of test a little bit about, you know, it’s all about money. In many ways, the IRAD or the internal research and development dollars that are spent by defense industry, or even commercial and defense industries is tremendous. I’m telling you, it’s way more than what the defense budget spends on R and D and so if you’re in this situation where you’re looking for Best of breeds, people are going to spend their money to make sure they have the best of what it is that they’re trying to produce. So, I think you’ll see an adjustment to what that is, there probably will be some resistance, no doubt, because it’s nice to have a winner take all and but the reality is, that’s not the way things are going. Technology is moving too fast at this point that you know, if you’re not innovating, you’re losing, right? If you’re not agile, you’re losing. So those are things that I think, from a defense industry standpoint, the government moves more and more as I’m seeing that in that direction of best of breed, not only does it help the warfighter, because you’re getting the best of what you really need, but ultimately, I think you’ll see that adjustment on the defense industry side, for sure.

Joshua Conine:

Yeah. Mike, I agree. I believe the industry will, will adjust with the military or the DOD in this aspect. But what I would ask there is, as the warfighters are thinking through the problem set; to bring those problems out a little bit early so we can stay ahead with you. A lot of them stay behind the doors. You know, we talked about the transparency. Earlier I get the difficulties to that because of the classification levels, but the earliest, earlier that we can get that and chew on it, the more we can help out and share ideas and investments as well. On that, there are a ton of small businesses out there that that do a fantastic job and provide exquisite capabilities to the warfighter. The turn on that, though, is that they probably have an inability to fully integrate it into a larger architecture or system that’s out there. So, you got to make sure that, that we’re piecing, you know, all that together, and finding out where that where those partnerships exist.

So, what, I’m sorry I dropped my point there. So based on the small business pieces, you see a lot of elements, whether it’s shock in, or the TAP Lab, the elements of space in, where they can come in and do competitions, and obviously they’re already bringing their innovations in. But out of those compositions, innovations are made, and that’s where we find a desire to develop and deliver white papers. And you ask at the beginning Shannon to say, well, what can we do? You know, better, it seems like a lot of times when a white paper goes into, you know, back into the government, it just spools around and the offices, and you don’t really get a lot of feedback out of that. And I think that’s something where industry would probably appreciate getting a little bit better response on so we can continue to evolve and make sure, do we have this right, or do we not? How do we continue to work with you?

Akash Jain:

Yeah, and if I can build more space right, yeah, that was the goal. We want to win best panel. But the one thing to the point on feedback, and this is not an Air Force thing. This is a different, different service branch. I had this really interesting conversation. It was actually like a high-quality discussion, but, um, the issue of profit margin came up, and they said, well, shit, just lower your prices, right? Like you guys, I look to your public I can see your financials, and you make a bunch of money. Said, Yeah, we’re a software company. That’s kind of, if you look at every other comp for every other software company in the world, marched below probably some of their operating margins. But two things that were really interesting, they’re like, look, just do cost plus for software. Like, well, how do I do that? Right? If we get a request from one of our commercial software or commercial customers, and we end up putting points behind that in our next sprint on, like, the core platform, and that’s interesting to you. Am I passing that cost onto you? How do you even do cost plus, or cost accounting for 4,000-person software company with over 1,000 clients like this doesn’t actually make sense against that common platform. And that kind of made sense. But the most interesting thing at the same time that I was kind of getting drilled on the profit margin thing and why it just must be so easy to change your business model and lower your prices. Because why not? It’s like. Like, do you realize how much money is in overhead fees that the DOD pays that literally is just for stock buybacks? Because that’s not IRAD, right? And it’s not GA, right? It’s not you guys are private, but you should look at that sometime. Look at the DIB and look at and, yeah, I’m a huge fan of the DIB. Most of them are our customers. We work closely with them but look at how much of that overhead is actually going into billions of dollars of stock buybacks every year. That’s not driving innovation, that’s driving shareholder value, which is their responsibility, but it’s kind of hard. You know, these are two different business models. You can’t compare them, but you can’t be worried about profit margin at the same time as you’re sending $7 billion on stock buybacks every year. Like that doesn’t make any sense from my perspective.

Shannon Pallone:

So, I’m going to give each of you a chance to give kind of a closing statement. But as you think through that, could you couch it in terms of we’ve heard a lot this week about how fast the threat is evolving and the threat is changing. We talked a little bit about how fast technology is changing. Can you take a minute to tie those two things together and what can we really be doing to better take advantage of that innovation in light of threats and to counter threats?

Joshua Conine:

Six seconds, it is what the amount of time takes to make a decision against a hypersonic glide vehicle. Okay? So that that’s the entire sense makes sense, and act loop on that. So, what do you do to try to keep that from happening? Obviously, the left of launch scenarios is, is where you want to try to be, and we start to get into other areas that need to go behind other doors, but that’s just one aspect that you know, when I think about that, it scares me. It scares me as a veteran, it scares me as a civilian, and it scares me that we’ve got war fighters out there trying to protect us against that. So, we’ve got to chew on that problem set, and we’ve looped around this all, all today, all this week, of how the data needs to needs to be processed, how it needs to be transported in order to make that decision happen, you know, very quickly, or pull it further to the left. So, we kill these things before they get in that position to launch. You know, I know I might sign up sound a little bit like a broken record. This is what’s going to make it happen. You know, friendships, the partnerships, trying to find a common need to help what this audience needs to make it happen. So, we just need to continue to do that and have those open dialogs and get after it.

Patrick Shortsleeve:

I’ll just add that the threats are always going to be evolving, always changing. So, in order for defense industry to help you in the battle management space with those you know, the challenges that you’re facing is, you got to let us know. You got to let us know as they’re happening, so that we can adjust. Industry can figure out the technical aspect of this. That’s not a problem. What the problem is we don’t know exactly what it is. We need to figure out for you. There’s a lot of people that are smart on this end. A lot of people have their own internal dollars, and we’ll pursue it. But we need to know what those threats are and how they’re actually affecting you and as they’re changing. We need to be kept up to date with that.

Akash Jain:

Yeah. And I think I would say two things. The first one is culture, right? You know, ultimately, like, I think about the last 20 years of serving the DOD from industry, from a software perspective, and I think of kind of, it should not be lost on folks just how much progress has been made over the last 20 years. And frankly, not only has the fight evolved, but the humans have evolved. They’re curious. They’re a lot more of them are digitally native. They grew up with a cell phone or an iPad or something and want to get after problems in a different way. And so, I just look at I see nothing but like optimism on this as we get to work with folks every day, from a culture perspective, of people wanting to embrace those data-oriented problems and take them on. But then the second aspect of it, I think, is kind of what we measure and the honesty that we need to have right when we’re looking at the solutions that we’re handing to those folks that are really excited and want to move forward and want to drive kind of the problem to a good resolution. And the most important thing we can do there is not look too hard on anything in one moment, right? Because look, everything in any given moment looks awful like and look, we’re all going to pick out just because we’re all critical people that are trying to solve the problem and defend the nation, you know, we’re going to see everything that’s wrong with something in a given moment. The main thing to do is to measure the rate of change, and to actually measure, kind of, like, how quickly we’re getting better with those really capable humans at using the technology to solve problems. And as long as we’re measuring that, and we’re evaluating things from that perspective as the outcome, not just the in this moment, can we, you know, close every single kill? Well, probably not, like, right? I don’t know. Maybe. As can. But my point is that, are we getting better and better and better and more and more proficient at this, such that when we need to, whether it’s tomorrow or in 10 years or never? We are. We are in the best possible position to do so. And I think that that’s kind of the most important thing: the humans. And then how they’re actually adapting and leveraging that technology.

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