2024 Air, Space & Cyber: Next Generation Air Combat

Lt. Gen. David Harris, Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Force Futures, Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, Commander of Air Combat Command, and Gen. Duke Richardson, Commander of Air Force Materiel Command, participated in a panel discussion titled “Next-Gen Air Combat,” moderated by Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.), Dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 17, 2024. Watch the video below:

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.), Dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies:

Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our panel on next generation air combat. Now I think all of you are aware of this, but the Air Force is at an inflection point today. It’s now the oldest, the smallest and least ready in its history. This isn’t a criticism, it’s a fact. At the same time, China’s air force is the newest, the largest and the most ready in its history. Now, despite these trends, Air Force leaders are hard at work to meet these challenges. So here to speak with us today about the realities that the Air Force faces and how it’s preparing for the future is Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, Commander of Air Combat Command, General Duke Richardson, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, and Lieutenant General David Harris, Deputy Chief of staff for Air Force Futures. So, gentlemen, thanks very much for taking the time to be here today and discuss this incredibly important topic. So, let’s jump right into some of the questions.

Now, I don’t think we can talk about next generation air combat without talking about the continued imperative of air superiority in warfare. So, what I’d like to pose to each of you right now is to tell us a bit of what you see coming out of the Russia, Ukraine fight that validates that imperative for air superiority. So General Harris, why don’t we kick it off with your perspectives?

Lt. Gen. David Harris, Deputy Chief of Staff, Air Force Futures:

Hey, General Deptula, thank you and thank you, and thank you for having me here today. You know, when I hear you talk about next generation air superiority or air combat, the first thing that jumps into my mind is really just the changing character of war. What’s been changing? How fast is technology changing? What are we doing to adapt and overcome? When I think about the pacing challenge before we jump into Russia, Ukraine, you know, I’m seeing that air superiority completely, or at least, very closely tied to space superiority as well. So, I think that’s one of the interesting trends as we go through war gaming studies and analysis, different things that we’re highlighting, the need for that air superiority to be connected into space superiority. Fundamental. Back to Russia, Ukraine. The problem that I see really is just the density of threats in the eye ads that are out there in the eastern part of Ukraine, and without air superiority, you’re finding the Ukrainians are finding asymmetric ways to try to overcome this. So, when it comes to actually supporting or having maneuverability on the ground and other things that they need to do, they’re limited. They’re limited by the techniques, the tactics and the technologies, these asymmetric technologies that they have to apply, and that’s because they don’t have the air superiority. So as an Air Force, air superiority is a core mission to what we do, and it’s something we have to constantly look and scan across all the different domains and all the threats.

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.), Dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies:

Gen. Wilsbach, yeah, thanks.

Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, Commander, Air Combat Command:

Appreciate the time. Appreciate everybody being here. Joan Deptula, thanks for moderating our panel, and also thanks to AFA and, and just the entire AFA team for setting up, you know, another great symposium. I agree with everything that General Harris said, you know, the aspect of Air and Space superiority, I think we as airmen should be talking about that together, because air superiority will be that much more difficult if you don’t have space superiority. And airmen should be advocating for the Space Force, and so should the other sister services as well, because the Space Force provides so much situational awareness to all of us that in one part, helps us with air superiority. So, air and space together absolutely true. When you look at what’s happened in in Ukraine, I asked, you know, I asked myself, early on who established air superiority? Well, nobody did, and then that resulted in quite a bit of attrition warfare. And so, both sides have lost tremendous number of people, tremendous number of assets, and it really limits what other things you can do in the battle space if you don’t have that air and space superiority. And so just like you said, German Deptula, so important for us to talk about and as we heard yesterday from the Secretary, we as a service are not walking away from that. It is a core mission. When we think about that in Air Combat Command, as we move forward, we look at four elements of how we modernize such, that we can achieve that air superiority in a future conflict or potential future conflict. And we look at four elements, and those four elements are, first of all the network, because we are going to want to network all of our sensors and shooters and command and control. And if you don’t have that network that is extremely robust and resistant to jamming. You’re not going to be able to see to this. You’re not going to be able to be able to see what’s going on in the battle space. And so, the network is the first thing that we need to work on. And we are working on that general Luke Cropsky, he has been working on that for the last few years, and we’re really starting to realize some of his efforts. The next the next thing is the sensors, so you can have the network, but if you can’t sense what’s happening in the battle space, then you’re not going to get very far. And so we definitely need to have sensors, and they are sensors on the ground, in the air, they’re in space, and they all need to be tied together through that network, definitely shooters and platforms, and oftentimes we think of the platforms as, you know, fighters or bombers, and certainly that’s true, but other shooters that often we don’t think about is electronic Combat, cyber fires, other like decoys that are out in the airspace. Those are all part the shooters. And the shooters may be crude, they may be uncrewed. And, you know, we can, we can talk later, perhaps, about the advantages of crude and uncrewed. But the platforms that are networked together, that have sensors, you know, get, get, get a lot more done in the battle space. And then lastly, the weapons. And we’ve been talking a lot about the long range Kill Chain and those extremely long range weapons that perhaps allow you to shoot as far as 600 or 1000 miles on the other side of the horizon, which takes back to that network again, because you’re not going to be able to guide that weapon to a completion if you don’t have the sensors to give that weapon an inflight update to finish the finish the kill. So that’s the way that we’re thinking about the four parts of the modernization and just two additional enablers I touched on one, but electronic warfare as well as cyber warfare as well as artificial intelligence. And so, the ID behind these two enablers would be to accentuate all of your kill chain and then also to deny the adversary their long-range Kill Chain.

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.), Dean of AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies:

Thank you. Joe Richardson?

Gen. Duke Richardson, Command, Air Force Materiel Command:

I think that was a good setup for me. Now, I’m a closet engineer. I guess I’m a program manager now, but I started as an engineer, and I like to think of myself as a systems engineer specifically. So, I’ll probably attack this question a little bit differently. And I think yesterday, the Secretary was pretty clear, you know, air security is a core function United States Air Force, and that will never change. And so sometimes, if you start, you know, I like to break that down again through a systems engineering process. So, what is exactly does that mean? Well, I think it means, you know, freedom from attack, freedom to attack. But that still doesn’t quite get you there, in my opinion. And so, then that leads to me to two more questions, for what purpose? So, air superiority for what purpose. And then the second question is, how you know? How would you go about doing that? And how would you build a system that actually achieves it? And so, and by the way, I think those same two questions apply not just to air superiority, but all the core functions the United States, Air Force that. So, there’s nothing unique necessarily about air superiority. And heretofore, I feel like we’ve had what I’m going to call a concatenation of loosely integrated systems. I’m not going to say our systems aren’t integrated, but I would say it’s really concatenation, in other words, sort of joining things serially end to end in a loosely in their sort of loosely integrated I think what General Wilsbach just said really gets after it. And the need for a system of systems, you know, that loose concatenation of loosely fatigated systems is not going to work in the future. And so, we really need things that are integrated. And by that, I mean, you know, the various parts are coordinated, and they work together. In fact, not only do they work together, but they’re required to work together. Otherwise, the end-to-end system won’t work. And the other one is that they’re interoperable, and that sort of gets after being able to share data, but just not data, but also things like support equipment, all the things that you probably don’t think about.

And so that’s what we’re working very hard to do. And so, if you think about GPC, how are we answering those two questions? The first question for what purpose? I think that’s really where the ICC and the IDEO come in play. So, the integrated capabilities command and the Integrated Development Office, they’re going to work together to come up with an answer to that question for what purpose. And they’re going to do that by basically building mission threads and then decomposing those mission threads to a. Process we’re going to call mission engineering, and so, and I, you know, it’s fun to take, to take one and just sort of try to do this yourself, you know, how would I get from, you know, you know, point A, you know, in condition A, over to, you know, point N, condition N, what are the nodes and what are the segments that I have to do, and what are the, what are the functions that I have to do to actually do that? We’re actually going to do that. We’re going to do that for a mission thread, and then we’re going to do it for the second mission thread, and then we’re going to do it for all the mission threads that we can think of. And what that’s going to do is spawn a lot of ideas on how to build potential programs, and then we’re going to go off and prototype those programs, and we’re going to experiment, and then we’re going to turn those programs into programs of record, not all of them, and that’s really, I’m very excited about the work that the ICC and the IDEO are going to do to answer that very first question for what purpose. And so that really, for me, the future of air superiority is going to come out of that answer. And the second one is the how. And so, if we really want things to be integrated interoperable, this is where the three system centers come in. So, the three system centers are going to be commanded by center commanders that are going to have another hat called integrating PEO. And when you when you see the word integrating there, what it really means is they’re going to be able to set technical standards and architectures that the systems that the IDE on the ICC devise have to, have to comport to. And so that gets to the how we’re going to do it, to make sure that we actually, when we’re all done, that we actually get to a system of systems. We are actually, if you can’t tell very, very excited about this. We think it’s pretty elegant. It closes pretty nicely. It’s not without risk. It does require us to think a little bit differently. And so I guess what I would do is, I mean, my closing thoughts here is, you know, if you, especially if you’re industry, or even if you’re government, this idea of unity of command, which is a, which is a concept we all love to grab onto, you know, hey, I don’t work for you. I’ve got a boss. My boss has a boss, and that’s where I take my direction. We have got to get over ourselves and shelve that. Okay, we need to focus on unity of purpose, and we need to embrace the fact that we all work for each other, and it’s uncomfortable, but that is the only way that we’re going to actually deliver a system of systems that’s integrated and interoperable. Thank you.

Lt. Gen. David Harris, Deputy Chief of Staff, Air Force Futures:

If I could just add on to one comment, General Wilsbach, I appreciate the four components that you talked about, because it had me thinking that, you know, as I look at the rapidly changing characteristics of war and what the threat is doing. And I now see the different four pieces, I kind of view that, like general Richardson said, into a system, but I can look at air superiority almost by time epics. And I think there’s a different way that we look at those systems from one time epic, and then as you look at the rapidly changing, evolving threat, and how we would look at it in a different time epic I think we still want to achieve the same goals, but maybe some of those ingredients need to scale or be paired differently. And I think the more that we work in a system where we can board game these things and look at the threat and see where it’s driving us, it’s how do we become agile enough to maintain that air superiority across multiple time epics in there, and make sure that we’re not going into one way doors, or buying into one platform, or buying into one system, or buying into a munition that may not be relevant later down the road.

Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, Commander, Air Combat Command:

I think that the aspect that you bring up the changing nature of war is it has become much more complex than it used to be. And you know, when I was growing up, you could find your target from your own jet. You could shoot a weapon at it, and you could hit the target by yourself. We’ll still have some of that capability as we go into the future, but the preponderance of what we’ll have to do will absolutely have to be a system of systems to achieve the same objectives.

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Very good. Thanks for those perspectives. I’d also add that, you know, the Secretary earlier this year talked about, hey, we’re out of time. So, some of the deliberations you talk about seem like they’ll take a lot of time, of which we don’t have a lot of when we have an Air Force, or we have to recapitalize because it’s gotten so old. So, I think that needs to shed some light on the conversation as well. So, in that context, let’s dig a little bit deeper into some related details. Could each of you tell us a bit about the modernization of test and training ranges and how that’s going to impact next generation air combat? For example, what’s the status of the joint simulation environment, the joint Integrated Test and training centers at Nellis and Elmendorf, as well as the investment associated with all of that. So why don’t we go with the same lineup? General Harris?

Lt. Gen. David Harris:

Absolutely. Thank you so the so we’ve made investments into the virtual test and training environment JSE as well, and we’ll continue to make investments into it, but I think we need to know what investments and what types of investments are we making, and why? So, there’s the near-term piece, and all those things do feed readiness and it and it kind of hones and trains our war fighters today for the threat that we see maybe for the next few years. I think when we look back to a force design and. Does that force look to do? And I think it’s very much tied to a strategy. I would say that if you have a strategy for denial, your force design looks one way. If you have a strategy about protraction, then your force design looks very different. So, whatever, however that framing of the force design looks and what ICC is then going to pick up and try to develop as far as capabilities we have to make sure that we’re connecting our test and training environments to make sure that we’re maturing the right capabilities at the right time with the right speed. There are also things you can do in a virtual environment to ESC to more robust, have more robust training, and then as well as be able to throw different scenarios and push us to the edge in a way that we’re not tipping our hand.

Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:

I think it might be worth explaining what the joint simulation environment is and what, why is it different? Because we’ve had simulators for decades, and you know what’s new about the JSE, and it’s probably worthwhile understanding that so previously, you know, we had simulator environments were really designed to train aircrew in interacting with their aircraft. And the joint simulation environment is an environment whereby the threat and the environment acts like it does in the real world. And that’s why this joint simulation environment is good for training, obviously, but it’s also perhaps going to be good for test and it could very well save us millions of dollars, maybe more, because you can bring a new component into the simulated environment, make many runs, and then you can get test points accomplished, and perhaps do alterations inside of the simulated environment, and be able to go through your test plan much quicker, and then thereby delivering that capability to the warfighter that much better in the in the training environment, certainly allows us to expand our training opportunities. Like General Harris said, there’s many things that either we can’t do in the live fly because of maybe the airspace is too small, or we just can’t get the airspace. Perhaps we don’t want to reveal a capability in live fly that we definitely want to be proficient at using, and we can do that in the simulated environment. And so, the simulated the joint simulated environment, is outstanding. If you didn’t know, we’re actually teamed up with the Navy on this. They actually have a center at Pax River. We have been standing up for the last few years the center at Nellis, and we hope to have some more in the future. But it’s providing us with a much higher fidelity training and test opportunity with respect to the live fly. This is something that is being much more emphasized as a part of GPC as we look at exercising and I look at this as a spectrum.

And so, day to day, you know, might be the 100-level training. Remember, in college, you’re a freshman, you took the 100 level courses. That’s going to be your day-to-day training. And then you might do some TDYs, and they might be two and 300 courses, and then or exercises. And then the 400 level will be the graduate level, the senior, senior level type exercises, and so we heard about bamboo Eagle earlier in the week. Red flags will continue to be an exercise that we do, but the bamboo eagle is probably a 300-level exercise. Hopefully next year, we’ll plan on doing a very large, much larger than bamboo eagle in the Pacific to get that 400-level exercise, but these give our crews a building block approach as they do their day-to-day training, and then they get opportunities for bigger exercises. And as an example, bamboo Eagle, just a few weeks ago, came on the heels of a red flag, and we deployed out from a red flag across multiple air bases on the West Coast. The scenario was out over the water, so it was very representative what we might be called to do with extremely long ranges and at all the bases on the west coast, the teams were doing Agile combat employment, so I had a chance to go and visit a number of the wings that were stood up in their ace locations with tents and MREs, and they’re figuring out how to do command and control from disparate locations, making sure that they’re launching their aircraft and getting them to the Push points on time and in the right net and ready to do their mission. I had a chance to be out on the blue side and watch the command and control from that side and the red side as well. And so, what I can share with you is a highly effective exercise for allowing the teams to practice ace for the wind coming. Commanders to do, see to their forces, to get them in the air, and then to execute emissions that would be representative those that we would have to do as we build on that, we’ll continue to do red flags and bamboo eagles. And then next summer, the exercise we plan to do Pacific will be even larger and give you many more opportunities to exercise that on a much grander scale. And so, between the virtual and the life, we have a great opportunity here in the near future to really up our game from the readiness standpoint.

Gen. Duke Richardson:

All right, so not surprisingly, I’m going to take a slightly different tack here. So, the JSE is pretty exciting. I don’t know if folks realize what happened. So, the F-35 was trying to get a full rate production decision got stalled out, no fault of its own. The reason it got stalled out is we, frankly, we couldn’t finish the IoT and E because the runs that remained were so stressing, were so so threat dense that we couldn’t replicate that in open air. And so how do you do that? Well, I guess you could just do the full rate production decision anyway, or you could wait, which is what we did. So, we waited until we got this thing called the JSE accredited, and it’s fantastic. And so, it’s so fantastic that cruiser likes to do training there, you know, and it’s also so fantastic that we like to do operational tests there. But think about what I said on the first question. If it’s that fantastic, doesn’t it have other uses? And it actually does so. Two other uses that it does have is, one is for development tests. In other words, we can use it simply to do spec verification review much quicker. That’s huge, but that’s not that exciting that we do that now. You know, largely not in a simulator, though. What I’m really excited about is using it to do capability development. In other words, we could, we could basically virtually prototype something in the JSE and test it against real, real-world threats and our own systems and try it out. So, imagine virtual prototyping. And so, the ability to develop options, to working closely with the with the ICC, to decide what we actually want to then go off and design and build, that’s really, really exciting. And so, if you, if you’re thinking, I’m making this up, I’m not. So, you know, in addition to what Cruiser has, we inside the Air Force Test Center, inside Air Force material command, we have the digital test and training range, and we have a location at Nellis, and we also have a location at Edwards, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re going to use those JSE instantiations to do both development test work for ongoing programs, but also capability development so that we can build an affordable pipeline of options for the ICC to consider.

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Very good. I think that’s news to a lot of people out there, and it speaks to how advances in simulation have really contributed in ways that people 10 years ago didn’t think about General Harris. One for you, as we reoptimize for great power competition, how is a five seven thinking about the integration between force design at the Air Staff and integration with the new integrated capabilities, command and integrated Capabilities Office. And then a second part to that question is, how do you see systems across our core mission areas working together to generate desired effects for future combat?

Lt. Gen. David Harris:

Yeah, great question. So first, I would say that before a five, seven or Air Force futures. It was the artist formerly known as afwic. And we have done years of war gaming and studies and trying to figure out what this thing really was that we were talking about with the future environment, what we needed to look like, what did the Air Force need to structurally look like? And I had mentioned before in a previous panel that we had we had tried this several different ways. We had the Air Force you need in the Air Force you don’t need. Then we try to table the forces that were out there so all these things weren’t quite landing the way that we needed to. I would tell you that for every one of the war games, and then, working with safsa and shotsi and the team up there, we’ve gotten a lot of studies done, and we’ve learned a lot of things over time and the first thing I would tell you is that, and I touched on it earlier, the NDS really outlines for us the key operational problems that we need to get after. I would then say that, as we look at this, what are what is the air force contribution to solving those key operational problems? And then how do we partner with the rest of the joint force to be able to come together in a meaningful way to overcome those obstacles? And every one of those has a different time, epic. And over time, we’ve learned that there’s some trends that have migrated out, and we have tried to capture that through not only strategy, but the design. So, we’re at a point now where we actually believe we’ve landed on a design that actually provides that North Star for us, and that North Star really isn’t just for programming. It’s really meant to go back out to all the other commands to kind of give our latest thinking about. How we how we plan to be a joint contributor into solving some of these key operational problems. So that’s where I think a five seven works really lands. Well, now there has to be a piece, I think, with this new integrated capability command that a five seven feeds down by way of what capabilities do we need. So, you had mentioned before that. You know, we do have a lot of capabilities that are out there today, or platforms that are out there today, but with just some slight modification, we could really up our game in a lot of different areas and connect the force in a very meaningful way. Not everything has to be a clean sheet design, but there are plenty of them out there, and I think this is where ICC is really going to be the Lead Sled Dog and all of it. And that would be when they want to actually take a new clean sheet design, or we want to start looking at different modifications. Different modifications that we put across the force. When you have the ICC detachments that are paired up with every matchcom or command that’s out there, this is going to be that war fighter back that war fighter input back into ICC, and then connect that with the IDEO when you now have the whole spectrum of capability development. So, I think that’s where the bridge between a five, seven and ICC really lands. Coming out of ICC, I could see two things happening. One is when you take the broad guidance of what capabilities we need and tying this back into the JSE, or even the virtual test and training, you can take attributes, fly those and really figure out what types of requirements are we trying to get at. And you could really hone those down to make sure that we’re actually driving on the right capability and the right capacities at the right time. So, there’s a VTC, BTTC piece of this that plays into it, but going back into it, I could really take a requirement and put that back through the joint staff with the FCB, the JCB and the J rocks and all that. So, there is headquarters work to be done there. But I really think the bulk of this work, when it comes to modernizing the force, is the strength of all the different attachments going out to all the commands back into one, one command called ICC connected into the IDEO to make sure that we’re fit there. The other part of this with an asterisk next to it is, it can’t just be about the Air Force alone. We talked about the Space Force before this. So, there’s a space component here. So, when you look at the space futures piece and how you’re going to connect that back to ICC and making sure that we’re getting after the right capabilities, this is where I can see a play for the Integrated Capabilities Office at the Secretariat level to make sure that we have the right pairings of Air Force and Space Force capabilities coming together.

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Great. Thanks very much for that insight. General Wilsbach, earlier, you mentioned uninhabited aircraft as an element of the Air Force’s modernization efforts. Could you give us an update in the context of potential and where, we are sure.

Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:

Thanks. I’m glad you asked that question. I appreciate that. So, we’ve heard a lot of news, and in fact, you might have seen the scale models around the floor here, which is really exciting to see those. And as we’re thinking about bringing on this capability, we definitely need to think about how we use these differently than the way we’ve traditionally used aircraft. So first of all, we talk about affordable mass and what does that really mean when we’re trying to get a lot of airplanes for as low a cost as we can to present dilemmas for our adversaries. And when you think about that, that’s okay buy a lot of airplanes, put them out in the airspace, and that’s certainly one aspect of affordable mass but there’s probably much more to this than just flying the aircraft. And one of the things that we’re thinking about is, how do you actually use them on a day-to-day basis, not in a conflict, but rather during training? And so, we fly our traditional aircraft every day, so the crews have a chance to launch them, the pilots and the crew members have a chance to be proficient, and we have to do reps and sets so that they are proficient at doing that. Well, if you have an uncrewed aircraft that’s very automated, you don’t have to let the machine practice it knows how to do its job, and so therefore, do you actually have to fly the airplane every day? This is another version of affordable mass. The cost of having the airplane available to you is quite a bit lower. And we’re thinking about this differently than some of the other remotely piloted aircraft, in that we have, say, MQ-9s, and they are in storage containers, and we’re ready to fly them. We put them together, and then, then we can fly them. We’re thinking more about the CCAs as being fly ready. So, they’ll be put together, they’ll be in a hangar, and when we need to fly them, we’ll fly them. But perhaps maybe one airframe might only fly once a month. That’s a different engineering problem. And a jet that flies every day, as we know, jets like to fly, and if you only fly once a month, there’s some other engineering considerations as you manufacture this that you have to take into account, so that when you are ready to fly it, and you do go to combat, and you’re you are going to fly them every day, they’re ready to do that. So, there’s a there’s a lot of work that we still have to do on the CCA, but I’m extremely excited because we’re already standing up the experimental operational unit at Nellis. They’re plugging into the JSE unit out there, the JITTC-Nellis. We’re starting to learn more in the in the virtual environment on how we might use these, and then ultimately, we’ll have iron on the ramp at Creech Air Force Base, and we’ve already had, we have a team of people already at Nellis starting to work this. And so, there’s a lot of work ahead of us on this. It’s exciting. We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to get these aircraft in quickly, more to the point that you made earlier about going quickly and staying out in front of our adversaries.

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks for those insights. General Richardson, the Air Force has numerous ongoing modernization efforts, while at the same time, we’ve got to sustain the legacy systems and its inventory. Both modernization and sustainment must also navigate an increasingly tight fiscal environment. So, could you outline how AFMC is balancing these two challenges during a time of declining defense budgets?

Gen. Duke Richardson:

I sure can. So I think you know, AFMC does both of those things that you just mentioned, and we have to do it simultaneously. And so we have our PEOs inside AFMC are lifecycle managers. So they don’t get to make a choice between, do I sustain or do I do the modification? They actually have to do both. We have that front and center in our strategic plan, our, you know, objective one and two, literally, you know, objective one is sustain the fleet, because that’s the fleet we have. And objective two, surprise, unsurprisingly, is, you know, deliver the Future Force. I mean literally, those are the those are one and two, and that’s why we exist. And so we work pretty hard to do that. It’s definitely a balance. What makes it more complicated is the funding streams are different, right? So for modernization or building something new, that’s investment, what we call investment money, which is RDT and procurement, but to actually sustain things, we actually require, weapon system sustainment, and fly hours two separate pots of O&M and so. So that kind of complicates it. And for our exit, for our for our legacy fleets, we’re doing these things. We truly are doing them at the same time. So there might be a modification, let’s say, a large modification, that we’re doing to to a tanker while at the at the same time having to put that same tank or fleet through a, you know. PD, a heavy maintenance cycle every five years. Also the engines have to go through an overhaul. So all that stuff kind of goes on simultaneously. It’s definitely a challenge, especially in a steer budget environments, you know, I think the the Secretary and the chief are very mindful of that, so they’re always doing that, that delicate balance between the investment money, the weapon system statement and the flying hours to make sure that we we do that, because you kind of have to move all three levers together. You can’t do one at the expense of the other two, otherwise you might buy more of one thing than you can actually use. And so, to answer your question, we’re doing things. We’re doing long term and short-term things. And you know, just in the interest of time, I’m not going to be able to, unfortunately, go through all of it. But long term, in other words, what are we doing for the new, new the systems that we don’t have yet? One of the things that we’re doing is we’re setting up a product support architecture under General Shipton to talk about, when we say we’re gonna have a fleet, we’re gonna go through all the all the product support elements, and discuss, what does it mean to spare a fleet? What does it mean fleet? What does it mean to have the sustaining engineering that we need? What does it mean to have the log it system? Is it an enterprise solution? So we’re going to try to not try. We’re going to establish our systems so that they comply with General Shipton’s Product Support architecture. And so that’s something new that we’re going to that we’re going to take on. That’ll hopefully be stuff that you don’t necessarily see, but hopefully you’ll feel it in the end. And so in terms of what are we doing now, there’s a lot of stuff that we have to do now, because what I just described is really, frankly, too late for a lot of our fleets. And so there’s a whole list of actions that we’re doing to get after the legacy fleet. And many of you may know one of our large degraders right now is supply rate. And so you might ask, Well, how did you get yourself into this predicament on supply lots of reasons. Won’t go through them all, but we’ve got a pretty good strategy in place right now. Literally, it has 11 initiatives to get after fixing what we call the s rate, or the supply rate, on our systems, by the way, that won’t fix the fact that we don’t have enough maintainers. So because for every fleet that you can think of, the M rate or the maintenance rate is about as much, in some cases, more than the supply rate. So, it’s a two-prong problem, but we’re going to definitely get after the supply rate issue pretty hard, and industries been. Helping us, you know, get after that. And there’s a lot of work, a lot of work to go, but I really feel good about the 11 initiatives that we’re going after General Allvin put on his chiefs up all you might have seen it, 1.5 billion, simply for supply rate, Vice another, F-35 for example. That’s pretty big. And so, we’ve got an investment plan in case that money comes to fruition. So, thank you.

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Very good. We have just enough time for one last question, but it’s going to be a short answer. You get a minute and a half each. So here you go, given the likelihood that our next fight is going to be contested, and we need to achieve a strategic edge to win. What efforts are underway to strengthen the defense industrial base to ensure that we’ve got enough material to sustain a fight as necessary.

Lt. Gen. David Harris:

So, I’ll start off. I’ll just say that I think that one of the things we’re doing to help out industry in a defense industrial base is the fact that understanding what capabilities that we need to put in field when is going to be key to this. And I think when I look at the exhibition hall and what’s out there at AFA right now, they’ve done a fantastic job of having both large primes and some of the small business and small business out there, because the innovation space is needed by both.

Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach:

So first of all, I want to, you know, tip my hat to the US companies now, our airmen and, you know, frankly, soldiers, sailors and marines and guardians are out there operating with the finest equipment on the planet. And that’s American companies that are making, making those, those that equipment that we use. That being said, the speed is so important, volume, especially on spare parts so important. And the things that we do at ACC is we have a constant dialog with almost all the companies that we deal with, so they know where we’re at, and we share with them our perspectives, so they can they can understand and, and, and so that that relationship building that we do, we think pays some dividends. And that’s not, that’s not an all, that’s an all ending fix, but that’s the way that we’re tackling that.

Gen. Duke Richardson:

I think we absolutely need industry. I mean, nobody would dispute that. We need our organic industrial base that the Air Force sustainment, Senator General Hawkins provides. We need a defense industrial base. They both have to work together. I think what we can really do for industry is going to be a byproduct of these changes that you’re saying. So, this idea, I really haven’t talked about it much, but this idea of getting to a unified, prioritized demand signal for both future systems and also for product support. That’s what we’re going to hand them to, to them. And so, my two days here so far, when I go off and do these booth visits, they all they’re trying to figure out where we’re headed, and they talk to all of us, and they get slightly different answers. And so, think about if you’re in a company, and I actually asked this question. You’re in a company, and you’re trying to figure out where to spend your internal research and development money. You’re trying to place a bet somewhere, and Duke comes in there, and he’s talking loudly and vociferously, and you’re like, oh, Duke must know what he’s talking about. And then cruiser comes in, and he’s very stately, and he’s like, wow, this guy’s like, Wise. He’s like an owl. Maybe he knows what he’s talking about. And so, you are just they don’t they get confused. And I said, I think the best thing that we can do with GPC is give them a single, unified demand signal, signal. The challenge with that, Dave, is the following. It has to be durable. It can’t change from year to year. In some cases, it will, just because the threat changes. But there has to be a valid reason before we just change it. And frankly, personality changeover or leadership changeover isn’t enough, and so we’ve got to get to a durable, unified, prioritized demand signal so that industry can know where to place their bets. And I think if we can do that, I think everyone’s alive is going to be better. So, thank you.

Panel Moderator: Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):

Wow. Well, thank you all very much for those insights, and congratulations on making the time constraint really appreciate your time and what you do on a day-to-day basis. So, from all of us at the Mitchell Institute and Air Force Air and Space Forces Association, thanks, and we wish you a great air and space power kind of day. Please join us in thanking these gentlemen for their presentation.

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This transcript was auto-generated and may not be 100 percent accurate. The source audio and video can be accessed above.