2024 Air, Space & Cyber: Failure is Not an Option: Confronting the Modernization Challenge
September 16, 2024
Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics; Frank Calvelli, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration; Gen. Michael Guetlein, Vice Chief of Space Operations; and Gen. Jim Slife, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force participated in the “Failure is Not an Option: Confronting the Modernization Challenge” panel during the 2024 Air, Space & Cyber Conference on September 16. Kirk Rieckhoff, leader of McKinsey & Company’s Public Sector Aerospace and Defense Practice, moderated. Watch the video below:
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff, Leader, McKinsey & Co. Public Sector Aerospace & Defense Practice:
All right, welcome everybody. A fun job to get to follow the Secretary and the Chief, but today what we want to do is convene these four gentlemen to talk about why failure is not an option, in particular for modernization. So, to start it off, I think we just heard a number of the reasons about the imperative that’s going on in the deep why here, but in your all’s mind, what is it that’s going to make this so hard given the current context that we’re in? Modernization is not a new thing. We’ve been doing it for a long time, pretty successfully. Why now? What is it that’s going to make it so hard? Over to you first, General Guetlein.
Gen. Michael Guetlein, Vice Chief of Space Operations:
Lovely. Hey, so I think the Secretary hit on a lot of the key points here. What is making modernization so hard? So, I’m going to come at it from a Space Force perspective, but it resonates across the entire DAF. For the Space Force, first of all, we are the smallest service. We have the smallest budget and the largest AOR, and we’re starting behind the power curve with kit that was optimized for a benign environment. So, we have nothing in front of us but a vertical curve. In order to get up that vertical curve, we need two things. We need people and we need money, and right now being the smallest service, we’re struggling to get the resources we need to do the modernization that we need, but also to buy the new kit, the leading-edge kit to get after the threat that is accelerating at an exponential pace.
Right now, there’s a capability gap between us and the adversary and that capability gap is in our favor, but that capability gap is rapidly closing and what we’ve got to do is invest and invest to a point that we can stop that gap from closing but reverse that gap and make it wider.
Gen. Jim Slife, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force:
Kirk, from an Air force perspective, I think Secretary Kendall’s closing comment, talking about we don’t have an innovation problem, we have a resourcing problem, I think really gets to the heart of it. When you think about the trades that we have to make every year as we develop the budget, in our case for the Air Force, people talk a lot about colors of money and there are essentially five colors of money, five types of appropriations that the Congress gives us. One is operations and maintenance. And so, this is fuel, its civilian personnel costs, it’s spare parts. It’s those types of day-to-day operating expenses. That’s our O&M budget. Then we have a research development test and evaluation budget, which is really the seed corn for future technology acquisition programs. And then you have a procurement budget, which is the dollars that you spend buying new things. You have a military personnel budget, which is of course, how we pay our service, men and women, and then we have a minuscule military construction and family housing budget.
And so given a fixed resourcing top line, any trades have to take place across those portfolios and essentially it comes down to military personnel, modernization or readiness. Those are the trades. And so, the challenge with modernization is you have to pay for it somehow. And so, we know what we have to do. It’s not a particular mystery. Secretary Kendall gave us a good rundown of that. The question is what is the trade to pay for that? Are we going to take in strength away from the service? And I would suggest we already know that we have some critical shortages in a number of our career fields, security forces, aircraft maintenance among others.
And so, we don’t really want to bring down our end strength and then you go, “Well, then what’s the other alternative?” The other alternative is for structure and readiness. It is the O&M dollars. It’s the things that it takes to keep us flying. We don’t want a hollow force. And so, it’s really the very difficult work in deciding how to modernize is you either have to have more resources, to Secretary Kendall’s point, or you have to make very difficult choices within the resources you have. And so that’s really what it comes down to.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Thanks. Dr. Hunter.
Dr. Andrew Hunter, Asst. Sec. of the Air Force for Acq., Tech., & Logistics:
Yeah, I’ll try to follow up on that. It’s not just about how much resources we have. There are too few and I think Secretary and the Vice Chief are exactly right about that, but also about how we structure them and how we execute them. And so, when the Chief described that need under capability development for closer, tighter integration, which is what we need to get after the pace and scale, the intensity of future conflict, we have not requested our resources in a way that optimizes for that outcome. We have done the opposite. We have requested resources; we’ve executed programs in a way that stovepipes and that emphasizes platform over system. And so, the actual things that we need the most in the future fight, that integration, that ability to tie things together in ways that will be inside the loop of the adversary, those are the things we’ve undervalued in our resourcing approach.
And with the restructuring that we’ve done with our PEO realignment, with the way that we’re pursuing new programs, and with the creation of the IDEO and its partner of the ICC, that is the problem we’re solving for to get after that hard part that we have neglected.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Thanks.
Frank Calvelli, Asst. Sec. of the Air Force for Space Acq. & Integration:
It all starts with doing a system engineering right up front. We have to get that right step one. Step two, then we have to get the right acquisition strategy, something that’s going to lead to an executable contract, something that we award realistic cost and realistic schedule. And then third, we need to execute and deliver on cost and schedule. Every time we overrun a program, or we slip schedule and it costs us more money, we’re robbing our future to modernize, and we’ve got to get into the habit of delivering everything on cost and schedule.
Gen. Michael Guetlein:
Can I build on those two comments? So, I want to take it one step further and the Chief started to go there. With this threat, we are never going to go alone. It’ll never be the Space Force alone. It’ll never be the Air Force alone, never be the Navy alone, won’t be the Marine Corps, definitely won’t be the Army alone. We are all going to have to fight in a very integrated fashion. That is a completely different way of acquiring our systems that the Secretaries are talking about. We have to acquire our capabilities from the start, understanding that they’re part of a larger enterprise and architect that enterprise in. The work that Luke Cropsey is doing under the DAF Metal Management Network is all about networking all this stuff together, but not just within space and air. He’s also now looking at across the joint fight with Joint Fires Network and integrating in the Marine Corps, the Army and the Navy into that solution.
That’s going to be a much larger challenge to us going forward because it’s not only a technology challenge, but it’s a culture challenge, which gets back at what Secretary Hunter said, how do I pivot from buying widgets to buying capabilities? That’s a mind shift that we haven’t done yet.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Yeah. Let me just pull on that thread a little bit here because this idea of basically shifting from a platform to the system’s way of fighting has been echoed in a lot of the comments that the Secretary made and the Chief made, and even up here. What is it that makes that such a pernicious problem and why is it so hard for us to shift into this new way of fighting and acquiring?
Gen. Jim Slife, Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force:
I would say it is simply counter-cultural. It’s not the way we have built our Air Force over the 77 years of the Air Force. The Chief of Staff talked a little bit about One Air Force that was the theme of his talk this morning and he talked about mission over function. And so, I’ll describe an example of that. If you’re building a platform-centric force, you would take a function, air superiority for example, and you would build a platform to do air superiority. And so, you would design the characteristics around the platform, around the size of the radar you need, the range of the aircraft, how many G’s you want it to pull, the performance characteristics. You optimize for all of those things inside your platform. We have gotten to a point now where our systems level integration. We have the ability to disaggregate these capabilities and look at air superiority more broadly than just, “Hey, we have to build a platform to do a thing.”
And so, the radar may be in one location, the munition may be in another location. The data links will almost certainly be heavily reliant on our space architecture. And so, to General Guetlein’s point, the necessity for us to operate as an integrated joint force is greater than it’s ever been. And if we can get this right, this will be an enduring source of competitive advantage for the United States military. We’re already the world’s best at joint operations. This is now down to the systems level integration and not just the battlefield operations that we’re talking about integrating. It is a potential step change in American military capability.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Mr. Hunter, this is something you certainly have talked about before. In your mind, what is it on the acquisition side of this with industry and within the building that makes this a hard one?
Dr. Andrew Hunter:
Well, it is hard, but I want to say we understand the key ingredients and we understand them because we’ve actually developed many of them, at least for some of our systems that are operating in a more systems fashion and we know what it takes to be successful. And so, I’m talking about things like technical architectures that govern the interchange of information between platforms, between elements of a system to allow it to achieve its function. I’ll give you one quick vignette of how it cannot work when you’ve optimized the other direction, right? We did an exercise a few years back. This is part of the buildup in ABMS to look at could we go to a location and link together Air Force and Army and Marine Corps, air defense assets in order to defend a location? They were able to connect them, but it was exceptionally hard for them to share data because they were fundamentally designed around different data constructs, and that’s a really hard challenge.
In other cases, what we’ve done is we’ve built the technical architecture so that multiple platforms are operating off the same data structures, and they all get everything they need to do their job, and the system has everything it needs to do its job and the ability to transfer the information is readily available to all the platforms. They’re all designed for that. So those technical architectures are huge enablers. Having a network that allows us to connect with our industry partners in a secure fashion to build not only those technical architectures, but the systems designed to meet them, that’s a huge enabler and there’s a series of these key enablers that I think we’re starting to have a pretty good understanding of that let us build in this new fashion. I like to call it next generation, but it’s not necessarily radically different from what we’ve done in the past. It’s just a very tailored application for today’s needs.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Fantastic. On the space side.
Frank Calvelli:
Yeah, just a quick message. For all our government program managers out there and for all of our industry contractors out that way, the chances of you building something that standalone are slim to none. 99.99% of the time, what you build has to be integrated other parts of the system to make sure the system works and it’s your job to act and behave like a systems engineer, like a systems integrator, not just a program manager, and make sure what you’re delivering actually works, is properly tested and interfaces appropriately with all the other elements to make sure everything does close as a system. So, we all have to get into the habit of thinking bigger picture across the board and not just thinking about the cost and schedule of the component that we’re building.
Gen. Michael Guetlein:
Go back to where General Slife started with culture change. It’s also, we need to change our incentive structure. Our program managers are rewarded on cost and schedule of their widget, not how that widget plugs into a broader enterprise. Our platform flyers are rewarded or judged on how well they take care of that platform, not how well the joint fight is going. However, in a conflict, the equation changes, the incentive structure changes 180 degrees, and we are now all incentivized for the joint fight to survive. How do you flip that equation back today during peacetime to get that sense of urgency, to get that sense of focus, to deliver integrated capabilities that are going to be combat effective when we need them the most? We’ve got to figure out how to flip that incentive structure around.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Well, let me take that and build on it. So, we’ve been talking about the challenge in front of us of modernization and how failure is not an option. So, to your point on incentives as one example, what do we go do? What do you want to see the department doing that will ensure that we have a successfully modernized force to beat our adversaries?
Gen. Michael Guetlein:
I will go back to where Chief Olin was a little while ago. Our entire force today is optimized for efficiency, optimized for peace. Warfighting by its sheer nature is not efficient. We’ve got to flip that equation around. By the way, our industry is also optimized for efficiency right now, and we have skinned it down to single providers across the board and we’ve somehow got to get comfortable with an inefficient system that is more combat effective and that includes our industry partners, our allied partners, as well as our DOD capabilities, and then integrate all this together. That’s going to be a huge shift going forward and it requires resources, back to where we started.
Frank Calvelli:
I’d say it’s all about speed and the way you’re going to get speed in the space side of the house to make our systems more resilient and more integrated is by building smaller. There is no physics out there that drive us to build large complex satellites anymore. We did that in the past because space was a benign environment and launch was obnoxiously expensive, but now with launch costs come down, the ability to build smaller systems is the way to go and the ability not… We have to be careful not to worship technology. Not everything has to be brand new acquisition.
And so if there’s existing payload technology or a low non-recurring engineering, we need to take advantage of that. Derek and his team have proven in about three years’ time we could build spacecraft and get them launched from contract award to launch. We do more of that across multiple orbitology, not just at LEO, but also at GEO and at MEO.
Gen. Jim Slife:
General. Guetlein highlighted how we have optimized for efficiency since the end of the Cold War. We’ve collapsed our defense industrial base. We have centralized functions throughout our Air Force. These are all things that were perfectly appropriate, as General Allvin talked about that post-Cold War moment where we’re unipolar superpower. These were all appropriate actions. They’re not appropriate for the environment we’re in now. And so, we have to look at ways of reinflating our defense industrial bases. Once again, America is the arsenal of democracy as you look at what’s going on in Israel and Ukraine, and of course, they’re relying heavily on American industry to produce the munitions and weapons they need to defend their democratic states.
And so, when we think about how we reinflate the defense industrial base, part of that is instead of asking for these exquisite, fully integrated platforms, we’re able to disaggregate and allow companies to focus on a particular thing that fits into a government architecture so they can be part of our system. Air superiority being just one example of that, and we’re already seeing some pretty impressive steps in this direction. I think the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program that the Secretary referenced, he talked about us being full speed ahead on our first increment of that. You’ll see the prototype platforms here this week out on the exhibition floor. Those are not built by the major defense primes, although we need the defense primes to continue to operate in that space and continue to advance the state-of-the-art. They have an important role, but we have to expand the defense industrial base.
I think the enterprise test vehicle program that is going on right now is another great example of a place where we’re leveraging non-standard defense suppliers to provide mass and scale on the time frames that we need. So, I think General Guetlein’s point about efficiency is exactly right. We have to look for ways to reinflate the defense industrial base.
Dr. Andrew Hunter:
Yeah, I want to come at that from two perspectives. One is the government side and our acquisition community, and the second is the industry relationship. Within the government, I think we have to practice what preach at the leadership level. It’s one reason that I work so often to integrate as much as I can, the work of the acquisition Secretariat, part of the Secretariat which General Richardson and his team at the Air Force Material command. Ultimately, his workforce is my workforce, and my workforce is his workforce. The PEOs, the Acquisition Program Managers, all those officials who report to me for the purposes of executing acquisition programs and acquisition decisions also report to General Richardson for organized training equipped. So it is an essential partnership and I approach it that way that every time I make a major decision, I like to consult with General Richardson to make sure that we are on the same page, that the workforce will receive a single message from myself and from him, and it will be entirely consistent and entirely focused on the strategic objectives that the Secretary and the Chief have given us and that they share.
Well, actually, yesterday, but it’ll probably be dated today, I signed a memo assigning to General Richardson the authorities of a new position, the Capability Development Executive Officer. This is something we haven’t had in the past. It’s modeled on the Program Executive Officer role, which comes from Goldwater Nichols, but it’s focused on things that are not yet programs of record, prototype programs, if you will, or proto programs, technologies coming out of the S&T base that are almost ready to go in an acquisition program, but they need a little more work. What is that little more work? Often that’s that ability to integrate into a broader system, a broader network, a discrete technology becoming an enabler of a system that needs to function. And that’s the role that General Richardson and his team, the Integrated Development Office, will be essentially the Army behind… Or I should say the Air Force behind the CDEO function and doing that integration work pre-program of record. Then when it’s a program of record, it goes to a PEO to execute in the traditional framework.
On the government industry side, the Secretary made an allusion to this when he talked about under our next generation air refueling system that we’re doing this RFI in part to establish vendor pools, and just pause for a second on what that vendor pool concept is, right? It sounds fairly benign, but it is in itself a message to industry about how we’re looking to work with them, right? It’s not, “Hey, we’re going to pick one of you to be in charge of something for the next several decades.” It’s about creating a pool of talent, if you will, a pool of industry capability that we will continuously access and continuously work with over time to achieve the objectives of delivering a capability, delivering a system. So those are just couple examples of that cultural instantiation of the approach that we’re describing.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
We’ve got the audience out here. When you think about what is the help that you need in order to make this thing happen, in order to make the modernization successful, and besides asking Congress for more money, which I think has been a pretty clear message, and the continuing resolution, getting that done, what else? What is the help that you all need from the Air Force and from industry?
Gen. Jim Slife:
Yeah, I’ll answer for the Airmen in the audience. The thing that we need as much as anything is we need help understanding how to characterize the risk that we are carrying across the Air Force. And so let me talk just for a brief second about that. When we ask organizations to do something, it typically will boil down to a requirements and resources conversation. You want me to do more? You need to give me more resources. You can’t ask people to do more with less. That’s typically where that conversation ends up. But in fact, there is a third variable in this equation, and it’s the variable of risk. It is how you balance the requirements with the resources you have available and what the attendant risk is of doing that. And so, if you think about a silly example, you might say, “Well, can we defend Little Rock Air Force Base with one Security Forces Airman?” Well, of course, the answer is yes you can.
You can have one airman, and you can have him walk around the perimeter of Little Rock Air Force Base over and over again, and every time he comes by the front gate, he opens it up and unlocks it and lets three cars in, lets three cars out, and then he locks it and keeps walking. And 17 hours later, he is going to pass out from exhaustion, and we’ll revive them and tell them to keep walking. And we would look at that and we would say, “But that’s unacceptable risk.” Okay, well, can we defend Little Rock with 2,000 security forces Airmen? Oh, sure we can. In fact, we’d probably only be working three-day weeks and six-hour days, and it’d be magnificent. Well, what about 1,000? What about 800? What about 400? What about 370? 368? 367? How do you talk about risk as you see these incremental changes, right?
And so, as we change the way we do business in the Air Force and we move from an institution that has been optimized for efficiency, the changes we make in order to be most effective in combat, absent an influx of resources is going to manifest as risk. That’s how we’re going to experience the re-optimizing if we don’t add resources. And so, what does that risk look like? Because it is the leadership’s job to make a determination about whether that risk is acceptable or not.
And so, for the Airmen in the field, as things change around you, particularly at the base and unit level, as these things are changing, understanding what risk actually looks like when it’s manifest. What does it actually look like to defend Little Rock Air Force Base with one defender? That’s pretty easy to characterize, but the difference between 368 and 367 is a little harder, and that’s where we really need help from the force is understanding where we’re carrying the risk because here’s the thing that we all have to keep in mind. We are already carrying this risk. We are already carrying this risk. There are no new requirements being put on the Air Force. We’re already carrying the risk. The problem is we have masked it by peanut butter spreading shortages around the Air Force and by centralizing for functional efficiency.
And so, the risk is already there. We just can’t see it and articulate it as clearly as we need to, and that’s where the force is going to be most helpful in helping us advocate for more resources is by saying, “Hey, if you don’t add resources, this is what that risk is going to look like when it manifests.”
Gen. Michael Guetlein:
Can I build on that real quick?
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Please.
Gen. Michael Guetlein:
So, I want everybody to understand what the Vice just said. He didn’t say, “Avoid risk.” He said, “Characterize risk.” I grew up in a very risk-adverse Air Force and Space Force. We’ve got to change that culture. In order to change that culture, you have got to be willing to step out. We have got to protect those that are stepping out and make sure we’re making conscious decisions, that we’re understanding the risks that we’re taking, but that we’re moving as far forward as we can. The number of times I step out into the field, and somebody gives me a great idea and I say, “Well, why are you not doing that?” “Well, nobody told me to go do it,” or, “I don’t have the resources.” The resources you have today are the resources you’re going to have to fight with. They’re the resources that we have to win.
The Chief said it and the Secretary said it. We have the greatest Airmen and Guardians on this planet, with an enormous amount of innovation and creativity. When you ask me what I need, I need you to leverage that creativity. If you ever watch the MacGyver show, I know I just showed my age, but MacGyver could put together anything to get himself out of any kind of problem. That’s the mentality that we’re asking from our Airmen and Guardians going forward. But as you do it, we need you to inform us of what the risks are that we are taking so that we are making conscious decisions going forward and not unconsciously taking risks.
Gen. Jim Slife:
I would point back to General Allvin’s video, one of the clips in there when he had Colonel Mills and Colonel Cassidy out at Davis-Monthan. That’s a perfect example of this. We have created an air task force at Davis-Monthan. There hasn’t been a massive influx of new Airmen into Davis-Monthan. And so, what does it mean to create an air task force there? Well, it’s going to create some risk in Colonel Mills’ organization, but by having that leadership exchange between the Task Force Commander and the 355th Wing Commander, they’re able to articulate it and work through it in a way that is appropriate to the environment that they’re in. It’s a perfect example.
Gen. Michael Guetlein:
Thanks. Andrew?
Dr. Andrew Hunter:
I think it’s been said pretty well. Just a double tap on the theme of risk. We do have to take risk. We do take risk in our programs, and I think in terms of, I think you started out kind of asking a message to Congress. When I communicate with them, a lot of it is about trying to articulate, “These are the programs where we don’t need to take any more risks than we currently are. In other words, don’t cut them.” Because it tends to be the case that you see a lot of little cuts across the budget and you see the same cuts sometimes year after year, after year. And you might start to imagine that that is because, well, if a cut is applied to a program in one year and we don’t fuss too much about it, or it happens and then the program doesn’t seem to suffer disaster, it could maybe tolerate the same cut the next year and it becomes a little bit of a routine.
And sometimes that may be a reasonable way to do business because things do change in execution. Sometimes there is a little extra or something that we plan to do that we are not able to execute when we get to it, for a variety of reasons, program changes. And so, it’s not necessarily the end of the world, but in some programs, it’s not the right way to go. We don’t need to add risk to those programs. They’re too essential and they’re already postured in a way that we don’t want to add risk. A lot of it to me in communicating with the Congress is identifying, look, this is the one where that’s not a risk that’s worth taking. And just making clear communication on that.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Thanks. Frank?
Frank Calvelli:
I’m going to shift it back to what help I need from industry, and that would be two things. One is when you bid on a program, bid us realistic, executable costs and schedule that you can meet. And two, if you don’t have the skills to do the job, please don’t bid. That’s really important. There are some of you out there that are looking for growth and expand to new things, and sometimes we give you the benefit of the doubt, but if you really don’t have the skills to do your job, don’t bid the job.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
All right. Well, to bring this to a close, any final words of advice?
Gen. Jim Slife:
Advice for whom?
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Well, for me, but actually, no, more for them. Put yourself in the-
Gen. Jim Slife:
Advice for China?
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
That’s pretty clear. Now imagine you’re the 06 or the GS-15 out there. We’ve talked a lot about, hey, take risk, innovate, be ready to go. We can’t fail here. What advice would you have? You’ve come from these places where you’ve had to do the same thing in order to be successful.
Gen. Michael Guetlein:
I think everybody needs to understand the threat. Coming up in the Air Force, I got one threat brief a year at the secret level at best, and I never really understood the connective tissue between whatever I was doing that day to day and what I was going to do to get after the threat. I think it probably held me back on some of the things that I could have done. So as a force, we’ve got to do a couple of things. We’ve got to get smart on the threat. We’ve got to be the experts on the threat. We’ve got to be experts in our domain, but then we’ve also got to become experts in joint doctrine. And that’s something new for us because like where we started with, our capabilities are going to have to integrate into the broader joint fight, and we got to understand how the joint fight’s going to manifest itself so that we can be productive in that situation. That requires us all to become students of doctrine, students of the threat.
I would ask you to encourage your Airmen, your Guardians to do that, but at the same time, our number one resources are people and have fun. Have fun with your people, communicate why they’re here, reward them for all their sacrifices, reward their family members for their sacrifice and just take care of one another.
So, the advice that I would have for Airmen, and I’ll assume it applies to Guardians as well, is we have to grow comfortable not being able to see the complete end destination and every step along the way required to get there before we get started moving. And so, belying my age here and maybe some of the folks in the front rows, in the mid-1970s, there was a really fantastic movie. It was called Smokey and the Bandit. And so, here’s the setup in Smokey and the Bandit for the younger Airmen that may not be familiar with it. So, it’s a NASCAR race in Atlanta, and they wanted Coors beer, but Coors beer was only being sold as far east as Texarkana. And so, the bet with this truck driver was that you can’t get from Atlanta to Texarkana and back with 400 cases of Coors in 28 hours. And so, the whole movie is based on the hijinks that ensue as they drive a semi-truck in a Pontiac Trans Am to Texarkana back in 28 hours.
But the theme song for Smokey and the Bandit was, “We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there.” And that’s to the Secretary’s point. We are out of time. We have a long way to go and a short time to get there. And if you’ve got the Smokey and the Bandit problem, you don’t spend the first six hours of your 28 hours looking at a map and figuring out where the lunch stop is going to be and which highway exit, you’re going to take and where you’re going to get gas. Instead, you get in your Trans Am and you start driving, and then you figure it out as you go.
And so, as you look at where we are as an Air Force and a Space Force, we’ve got the Smokey and the Bandit problem. We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there, and we need to just get in the Trans Am and our 18-wheeler and get moving. And so, we have to be comfortable with that. We can’t always know every exit, every off-ramp, every lunch stop. We can’t know all those things now, but we know generally what direction we have to go. And so, it’s time to get going.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Thanks.
Dr. Andrew Hunter:
Yeah, I try to keep my advice to both internal and external pretty consistent with one another because I think that makes sense. I think we have to embrace this approach to making integration the priority over other things, or at least something that we have to look hard at what trade-offs we’re going to make. The traditional metrics for acquisition, cost schedule and performance. Those are still valid, they’re still true, but they tend to incentivize programs, both programs that our industry partners are performing and program managers and PEOs to say, “How do I excel at cost schedule and performance?” There’s a natural desire to simplify, to reduce external dependencies, make it easier to control those things, those levers so that I can achieve success across those metrics. But they may drive you away from the integration that you truly need. So, we are pushing hard towards this approach, systems engineering based approach, systems-to-systems thinking and architectures that say you have to prioritize those things. Maybe you’re going to put more into that than something that is optimized around cost schedule, performance.
And then there’s the capacity to do that. Systems engineering is hard, it turns out, and it requires really significant expertise that not everyone has, and with protecting some of the innocent. But I’ve talked to several senior industry leaders about this challenge, and I’ve said, or we’ve started, and they say, “Our assessment is the government doesn’t have the expertise to do these systems engineering problem.” And I said, “I think you’re probably right about that. And by the way, my assessment is that you don’t have the expertise to do this systems engineering challenge, and I think that’s right too.” So, the only answer is we’re going to get there together. We’re going to be Smokey and the Bandit.
And by the way, other panels I challenge you to top Smokey and the Bandit. Good luck. We’re going to be Smokey and the Bandit together and we’re going to do this together and that’s how we’re going to get the systems engineering problem looked.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
Fantastic. Thanks.
Frank Calvelli:
I think for folks in the audience, there’s a lot of really positive examples out there across the Space Force. If you look at what the department took to build a space-based infrared, first geo-satellite took 15 years. SSC through great action strategy back in 2018. The use of middle tier acquisition is poised to deliver the next-gen geo-vehicle in about seven and a half years. 50%-time reduction of a satellite that is actually more complex than Sivers GEO-1. Space Rapid Capabilities Office delivered from two years from contract award to fielding what they call the Remote Modular Terminals. They’re a jamming system that’s a threshold-based system, but they did in two years’ time and space development agencies shown that by using commercial satellite buses off production line, existing technology, you could actually go from contract award to a launch of spacecraft in less than three years’ time of how they capable of spacecraft. So, there’s really a lot of positive examples across the Space Force and I would look to those positive examples in terms of what to learn for the future.
Panel Moderator: Kirk Rieckhoff:
All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much. I really appreciate the time here. Now let’s get after it and go win.
This transcript was auto-generated and may not be 100 percent accurate. The source audio and video can be accessed above.
