2024 Air, Space & Cyber: Space Dominance

The “Space Dominance” panel at AFA’s 2024 Air, Space & Cyber Conference featured Joe Rickers, vice president of Connectivity, Transport, and Access at Lockheed Martin; Dan Ourada, vice president of Captures & Business Development at Amentum; and Sandy Brown, vice president of Mission Solutions & Payloads at RTX. The panel, held on September 17, was moderated by Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, assistant chief of space operations for Future Concepts and Partnerships. Watch the video below:

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, Assistant Chief of Space Operations for Future Concepts and Partnerships:

Good afternoon. I’m Air Marshall Paul Godfrey, the Assistant Chief of Space Operations for future concepts and partnerships, and it is my pleasure to be able to chair this panel this afternoon. Thank you to all of you. I know there’s a ton of good stuff going around, so thank you to all of you for taking the time to come to us this afternoon. I did want to do a quick show of hands to start with, how many space professionals do we have in the room? That’s like 98% how many other domain professionals do we have in the room? Hey, good on you guys for coming along and understanding what space dominance is all about, and that is one of the things right learning about the other domains, which, with the guys that we have on stage today, I think we are going to learn a huge amount. Now I’m being hazed at the moment. This is my third panel in the last couple of days. One thing I noticed, there isn’t a lot of introductions, so I’m just going to take a couple of minutes to introduce all of the guys that you see in front of you on the panel. Firstly, we have Dan orator. He serves as vice president ranges and aerial operations and logistics and supply chain capture teams for amentum, and also serves as the Air Force client account manager. He’s also been the director for joint unmanned systems and training service and training solutions, expanding momentums unmanned systems and training services portfolio across both the Department of Defense and commercial service sectors. And prior to joining industry in 2010 Dan had a distinguished 26-year Air Force career and as a combat veteran with over 3,200 hours in the F1-11, F1-17, German tornadoes and multiple staff tours. Welcome to the club spanning Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. Welcome Dan.

Give him a round of applause. Come on.

Next, we have Joe Rickers. Joe is the vice president of Lockheed Martin Space, national security space, leading the connectivity, transport and access mission area between 2019 and 2022. He led the United States Space Force, missile warning, next generation overhead, persistent infrared, geosynchronous system. He’s a previous vice president of Lockheed Martin, commercial space systems, and began his career with Lockheed Martin in 1985 so coming up to a watch next year, I guess Joe on that one as a systems test software engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope program, and has participated in multiple Lockheed Martin management development programs, and he’s been involved in space program management for the last 25 years. Welcome Joe.

Last but not least, Matt Brown. Matt is the executive technical director for Air and Space Defense Systems at Raytheon, providing technical leadership over investments in research and development. He served as chief engineer on multiple programs, most recently serving as chief engineer on a critical space protection capability for the US Space Force. Sounds interesting. Maybe more of that. Later. Matt began his career at Raytheon Missile and defense, where he worked as an operations analyst, circuit car designer, and is a graduate of Raytheon’s Engineering Leadership Development Program. Welcome Matt.

Now we’re not going to go for opening comments, as per most of the panels here, but given that we’re in a smaller, more intimate environment, I’d be really pleased if any of you have questions, if we’ve got time for it at the end, I’m sure we’re small enough in here that you can stand up and shout them out before I leap in to a couple of questions. Just some thoughts on space dominance. I do think it’s a fascinating area, especially having come 30 years in the air domain into space in the last four years. Firstly, an interesting term itself that we talk about air dominance quite a lot, but air dominance isn’t overly simple. We’ve defined a superiority and so on, but the term dominance has come into military parlance only in the last few years, and probably because of the way that the aerial warfare has been since 2001 basically and has often been used interchangeably with air superiority. I think there’s much more to air dominance than just a doctrinal term that describes an aspirational or achieved level of air control over a particular geographic area as a hint to when we might talk about space dominance, but it’s also about the logistics, industrial base, partnerships and so on. And so, when we come to space dominance, and talking about this on this particular panel, I do want to look at the doctrinal aspect. What does it actually mean when we get to space dominance, but how an allied you. Coalition might achieve space dominance across a range of areas, dime for example, diplomatic, information, military and economic. That’s why, certainly our partners from industry here, I think, are well placed to answer it.

So, Dan, open to you. Over to you for the opener, with the aviation background and everything that I was talking about there. You might be able to give me a different perspective on space dominance. I won’t give you the space doctrine 3-O, space superior. Space superiority definition. But do you think that the term space superiority is worth comparing to air superiority? Or does the unique nature of the space domain, the fact that debris remains up there, orbits are relatively predictable, mean that we should consider it another way of talking about the control of space?

Dan Ourada, Vice President, Captures & Business Development, Amentum:

So, thank you for that question, sir. And thank you to the Air Force Institute, the Mitchell Institute and the others who set this up. And thank you to all the Air and Space professionals that are here. So, I do believe that the terms superiority and dominance, as they relate between the two domains, and I’ll go as far as to add the maritime domain into that, do mean roughly the same thing. However, okay, there is those special elements that have to come into the way space operates, right? And that is the consequences of the actions we take in the space domain. We’re very comfortable in the maritime domain and in the air domain, with deny, disrupt and destroy, and we know what those mean. We know what those means in terms of policy, in terms of capability and budgets, right? When you begin to talk about those three items in the space domain, the unintended consequences, the second and third order effects, have much greater implications that policy just hasn’t kept up with yet, right? And in some ways, I think when we begin to do the hard thinking about that we need to not fall into the trap that we fell in when we started treating cyber as a domain, right? And when an attack came from the cyber domain, whether it was a state or a non-state actor, we didn’t necessarily treat it like an attack. We didn’t necessarily call that espionage, right? It kind of got ignored, and in the space domain, the consequences of ignoring disruption, denial and destruction are much greater because they don’t just impact military forces. They impact economies, okay, they impact all inhabitants of planet Earth. So that’s where you kind of got to return back and go, yes, they are. You know, the concept of superior, the concept of dominance, is the same. We need to do the hard thinking about the consequences of deny, disrupt and destroy, because those second and third order effects we haven’t done the thinking on you. So, we’re at an intersection between capability, policy and doctrine, and how we’re going to apply what we know to the two that the uniqueness of the space domain right and what we are going to do about it. And I would, I would make the advocacy for our space professionals to be doing the thinking in your PME, in your staff colleges, in your papers, right about consequences of space operations? Okay, they’re huge. We really haven’t done the hard thinking that we did in the 50s and 60s about nuclear weapons. So long answer to a short question. But I encourage all of the space and air professionals to really contribute to that and do please reach out to the Mitchell Institute. You saw some of them at their ads there, it’s a perfect venue for you to look towards publishing and engaging in that kind of thought and informing the intersections of our capabilities and our policies as we move forward.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Great answer that. I mean, I’ve written a ton of stuff down here that I think we’ll probably come back to. But just to pull a thread on that, when you talk about consequences, I kind of got into it a little bit with General Chilton about debris yesterday on the panel. Do you think we should be modeling debris? You know, civil space and military space, so that we do understand the consequences in civil space of a collision or a military space, a deliberate act by just like the 2021 director sent anti-satellite missile from Russia. Should we be do, doing more in terms of modeling and understanding the consequences?

Dan Ourada:

I think the nation that achieves space awareness first wins. Okay, so the sensors, the suites, the on orbit, terrestrial systems, entities, structures of our space force that can achieve that kind of space situational awareness are absolutely vital, and that’s one of the intercepts. Actions again, of that capability to policy, to budgets, along with the doctrine and the thinking that we need to have. You know, there are those who will advocate, from a deterrent point of view, the capability to physically destroy an asset in space. But I think every space operator here knows what’s somebody throw it out. How many objects in space were we up to a couple of million now? I mean, I think they’re still tracking one of Alan Shepard’s gloves as it goes around the globe, right? But we all know the consequences of that debris hitting commercial, military or other assets has a deep impact beyond the military domain, so that’s why it’s very, very important. And I fall back on that doctrinal question, superiority, dominance. We know those definitions, disrupt, deny, destroy, we know those, and we pursue those capabilities. We haven’t yet applied the hard thinking to the consequences of that. We know the capabilities to achieve it, and we know what it would mean if we destroyed an enemy capability in space, well, what would be a second order, third order, fourth order, effects, right? And what does that come down to? That really hasn’t happened yet. And I’ll return back to my initial answer of, let’s not treat space the way that we did cyber, right? An attack is an attack, and it needs to be responded that way.

Matt Brown, Executive Technical Director for ASDS, RTX:

I love that you included maritime, because when I think about space, when I when I think about what’s happening space, I think about the first carrier that we had back in 1920 that when we built it, we thought this is a great capability, and then we realized we have to defend it. And so, we had to come up with carrier strike groups. We had to build battleships, we had to build destroyers to support that mission. And I think that is about where we are in space today. When we think about the mission that we have in terms of space control, space protection, there is a lot of high value assets that have been working very well for a very long time, and people aren’t aware that this is a domain that we have to defend. You know, we have conversations about how, how useful is GPS to your neighbors? They may not even know that that thing in their dashboard is using GPS to get them to Starbucks. So, there’s opportunity for us to help see first that this is a, this is a warfighting domain. This is somewhere where we have to be ready to defend, much like we were thinking about the problem 100 years ago. From a naval perspective, I think that maritime is very accurate, and I think we are catching up to that in terms of public understanding today.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Yeah, there’s definitely something from most space forces around the world, coming from the United Kingdom, where it sat the Space Command, although a joint organization sat under the Royal Air Force, that you’re more likely to take air doctrine. But there is something in maritime doctrine in terms of littoral, low Earth orbit and sort of blue water, and how you might operate differently as well. So, you know, I think it’s a, it’s a really interesting question to discuss. But Joe the I think two areas where space does differ from the air domain when it comes to international and commercial partnerships. Firstly, international budgets are not huge. You know, I came from a budget that was last year was $100 million to a Space Force budget that’s $30 billion, right? That’s a hell of a difference. And it doesn’t allow for classic FMS sales, you know, because if you’ve got those smaller budgets, where any nation, if you’ve got the air budget, can go out and buy, you know, 5020, 30 f, 30 fives, you can’t necessarily go out and buy 50 satellites of this particular color or flavor or whatever it happens to be. And also, that there is an issue where other nations are trying to build, there’s so many other nations out there trying to build their space industrial bases, and therefore might be more inwardly focused when it comes to space technology, and not necessarily reaching out to the, you know, the big organizations. So how does Lockheed Martin, you know, work with allies and partners and overcome those sorts of, you know, almost barriers that are put in the way.

Joe Rickers, Vice President of the Connectivity, Transport, and Access Mission Area, Lockheed Martin:

Yeah, let me, and I will agree with you on the funding. It’s not just the size, it’s actually the timing as well, too, right? So, when we try to put together systems, you know, it does get down to, you know, how much can you afford, and when can you afford it, and how are we going to going to go do that? I think when we look at it, we look at it quite from a mission, and you hear it over the last couple of days missions, and Dan use the word capabilities, right? So how do we get the things that our war fighters need to have in their hands faster, and do it in a fashion with the allies, and certainly in space, it’s not FMS. You know we have foreign military sales. We know we buy airplanes, we buy submarines, we buy a lot of that, of those type platforms, but we need the capabilities, and we need to figure out how to go do that within the white space. And it’s a really, really, maybe it’s a gray space between FMS and what we typically call. DCS or direct commercial sales. But the caution I’ve got on things like direct commercial sales is you don’t buy one of these things shrink wrapped or at a store or those type things. So how do we work on getting those capabilities that we really need to have faster and more integrated? And there are buzzwords like, interoperable. How do we how do we use our systems? How do we use those capabilities? But that’s really where the key is. You know, we talk about space, and you say it’s a domain, it’s a really large domain, it’s a very large domain, and it’s a very big area of responsibility, and there’s no one country that has that. So, it’s going to require all of our international partners together to protect, defend and to be able to do the things that we all need to go do through space, whether it’s commercial or whether it’s security wise. In the future, that’s after the first part of your question, I think in the second piece, you know, there’s the industrial base as well too, and we have to use each other’s industrial bases. There’s no one company, there’s no one ability, where you can go just buy these things and you can compete them. So, when you look at any of our foreign partners, right? How do we take the capabilities that they have and make sure that we can go integrate those and use those integrated I do think it’s a little bit of a loaded term about inward focus, because I think if we inward focus, we’re not going to get to where we need to get to. We need to get to where the sum of all the parts is the is the domain, you know, power and the ability that we have, and not we have it, and they have it. And, you know, sometimes I say now, you know, we used to say insecurity. It was always needed to know. Well, need to know means a lot more people need to know now, and we need to be able to go work that together, and that needs to push down into our industrial bases as well, too.

Matt Brown:

Yeah, I think the idea of this focusing on the mission is a great way to think about exactly what you’re saying. You know, if it’s long-range Kill Chain, if it’s missile warning, missile tracking, what are the capabilities that we need together in a system of system architecture to solve that problem? And then we have to go back and because of classification levels and different things with that, we have to look at it again and say, well, how do we bring all that data together, right? So, how do we work together as international partners, with commercial with what we have in our own side of our budget, within DOD, within the intelligence community, how does that solve the system of system problem that we need to bring together, and then we have to integrate that data, and that’s really the challenge, I think, to bring the data, these different classification levels, together to solve the mission problem for the warfighter. And that that’s things that we’re doing today, but it’s not being done as broadly, specifically looking at it as a system of systems level with international partners. How does the international partner fit in? What are they bringing to close that gap that we can then leverage and vice versa within the overall domain.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Yeah. Okay, yeah, sorry.

Dan Ourada:

So absolutely correct, right? And when we begin to think about that, and this is for the space and air professionals in the audience, right? How many are familiar with the AUKUS construct? Okay, we have an example. We have an example right in front of us from the maritime domain that, you know, very adroitly pointed out by my colleague here, that we can apply to the space domain, right? And it is about setting the conditions. When I fall back on that doctrinal term, the intersection between doctrine, capability and policy. You know, AUKUS is about deterrence, it’s about capability, it’s about policy, but it’s also about that deterrent posture, that warning of don’t engage in this because we’re prepared. We’re ready, right? Let’s trade and do economy right, rather than fight and struggle. So we have to be very, very careful about the things that we set up in a multipolar world, in the complexities that we’re facing, especially as we, as we stand this up. So, you know, I applaud that. You know, we’ve all compared it to the maritime and the air domain, but it really is accurate, as you outlined, in general. You know, all of the other aspects that go into it, need to define that and work for it. And we have the examples in front of us, right? We have the proof points. It’s up to you guys.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

I’m going to pull a thread on that one. I know what I think, but it’s not about me right now. But from what are the barriers that you perceive in terms of large corporations, you know, like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin, when they are dealing with emerging space nations.

Joe Rickers:

yeah, and certainly we’ve already hit on a few of them, right? Certainly, the trade control, and you mentioned aukus, and it’s happening right now. I believe there’s a determination that’s out there right now. I’m looking at ITAR and the ability for our systems, where we can get exemptions, waivers to those types. Things. It needs to go deeper. And it needs to probably go into the commerce area as well too and keep working. It probably needs to go beyond August as well, too, right? So certainly, that’s one of the barriers, right? Because every day that we’re spending time, you know, working on regulatory things, when we really shouldn’t be doing that type of stuff, is a day that we’re probably not, you know, getting after what we need to get after security, absolutely another one, right? You know, it, as I said before, need to know, is probably different, and what we need to know today, and how we share that, and what we go do. Everybody’s going to have systems. Our security systems are set up by program by program by program, and we have to break that down to get to the missions, to get to the capabilities. There are any number of them. I’d mentioned funding you had talked about, you know, the amount of budgets, right? But we have to be able to figure out how we get the money and the timeliness, and we get those things to get the capabilities together. Many different barriers here, and we have to attack them all.

Matt Brown:

Yeah, I’ll just hit on one of those. Security Classification always a challenge, specifically when we’re starting to talk about bringing in international partners, bringing in commercial capabilities, and I think we have to start thinking about that and partnering differently as we go through some of the things that we’re doing. So you know, one of the programs that that you mentioned, sir, that I, that I was working on recently, that I won’t talk much about, but that that was a program where we were able to do 95% of the development unclassified, and we were able to bring build an architecture so that just the 5% that was classified we could bring in at the end of the program. So that allowed us to actually deliver that program through Covid, right? So, thinking about the problem and working with the government, it has to be a partnership, right? That was a very close partnership with the government to come to that ability to do that allows us to be successful in breaking down some of those barriers so that we can work together across those boundaries.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Yeah, again, go.

Dan Ourada:

So, I was going to add, I agree, one of the things that I and I’m looking out here at the space and air professionals, but mostly the acquisition professionals that are out here in the audience is anybody here in acquisitions? I’m hoping there’s a hand. There we go. Everyone’s coming after you now. You are now. You raised your hand. Raise your hand. Everybody’s going to come for you now, right? But you know this, this is one of the things, is that the need is so pressing. And as you’ve been at the last Air and Space Symposium, and at this one, we hear about the pacing threat, right? You know, I see a lot of heads nodding up and down, okay, we need to ask ourselves, is our acquisition regime right for the threat we face? Okay? And you’ve got three industry partners up here who basically said, in this short time, we’re ready, we’re ready. We’re waiting for you. We’re waiting for you to set that pace. So, as we enter this next era, as we enter this next step, I would encourage, and I’m looking over here at the acquisition professionals, right, to think about better ways we can all collaborate to achieve the acquisitions and the capabilities that you seek that match the doctrines and the policies that you’re going to set in the future, right? And I put this out there. I’ll say this before the other two guys, do LPTA, isn’t it, right? And I know that’s like the industry joke, right? We do have to do the hard thing thinking about whether or not our acquisition pathways are going to allow us to achieve this.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Just getting into that. You know, yesterday morning, I think it was yesterday morning, Derek Tournear, from the Space Development Agency, got an award, a really well-deserved award, if you guys work with SDA, and is that a model for acquisition that you think should be taken forward?

Joe Rickers:

Yeah, I’ve got quite a bit of SDA business in my portfolio now through each of the different tranches, and it is an eye-opening cultural experience going through that type of contracting. Even some of the contracting that SDA had to figure out in the early days, they had to change their contract types, and had to settle on how they were going to go do things. And we’ve had to, we’ve had to graduate from demos to operational capabilities the very large integrated constellations. And so, there’s and a lot to what SDA is doing culturally and with the business and how to produce things faster and more iterative and differently than we have done in the past. And its kudos to Dr. Tournear and to the organization for leaning into that change and continually really pushing that within, within for us and as industry, clearly, we probably wouldn’t have gone there, right, if that wasn’t where the where the Space Development Agency was very deliberately going to go. And I think the jury’s out. It’s going to take, you know, time as we put these systems together, but it’s certainly as you go to proliferated and you go to different ways of doing things, and what that means to defense a whole different type of a capability system.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

Yeah, it’s an interesting one about a sort of portfolio approach, where SDA get a portfolio of money and they can. Essentially spend it in the way that they want to spend it, very simply, as opposed to the Congressional Budget POM way of doing things, which is rightly process driven, but maybe doesn’t get to Dan’s point about being as quick as it could be.

Joe Rickers:

There’s certainly some interesting things you’ve probably seen in the press about, well, tell me what’s going to be in tranche three, or tell me what’s going to be in tranche rule, I can’t, because as we get there, we’re going to define what it’s going to be, which is a whole different paradigm, right, than we’ve had in the past.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

The one thing I did want to say on a classification as part of the reason that I’m here, you know, so they can roll me into a room, and when they have to take me out of the room, they then go and have a conversation. And I don’t know whether he’s still in there, but I do have to shout out major Greg Gagnon, es two in US Space Force. He’s done a huge amount in terms of being forward leaning, in releasing and remember, I’m not doing this as a Brit, I’m doing it for all of the allies. So, we’re definitely getting places with that, with those Matt, I talked about space dominance coming from a bunch of different areas, not least the industrial base. RTX, the parent corporation, according to the chief of research major Wikipedia, is one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world by revenue and market capitalization, clearly a dominant company when it comes to it in a in my previous life, one of the hardest things was keeping up with the space small medium enterprises with, you know, to a Startup in a garage who may well have the silver bullet that we’re looking for in terms of being able to, you know, understand and ultimately defeat a potential adversary. How does Raytheon maintain dominance in the space market whilst also being sensitive to those new technologies and companies that way map that may well have the next big thing.

Matt Brown:

Yeah, ironically, I think I wrote that line in Wikipedia, so I’m glad that you found that and quoted that. When you talk about industry, part of what I think we bring as RTX, and what I’m excited that I’m a part of is thinking about things, not necessarily just in terms of mergers and acquisitions, and that we have to develop everything on our own. And so we have a group within our business called RTX ventures that actually goes out and looks at what’s available in space and looks for opportunity to invest in those companies, to keep them agile, to keep them continuing to build the technology that they’re working on. So so there’s a couple of opportunities that we actually led the series a investment for impulse space, which is actually looking at ways to get things into the GTO orbit at a lower cost right tomorrow. IO for weather data and proliferated satellites to provide that data as a input to a larger ground system. Ursa Major for looking at propulsion. Those are all things that we’re actually investing in those companies to help them continue to grow the technology. And so what we what we’re really doing is saying we have to leverage what’s in the market. So then what happens is, I’ll go to some conferences, and I’ll be actually the one that’s like the acquisition guys, that you guys are here. I’m the one. They’ll come with me. Go, hey, I’ve got this really cool idea. And it all goes back to the mission. I’m a technology guy. I’m an engineer. I love technology. But the fact the matter is, I have to solve the mission problems. And so what I’m looking at is, how do I build my technology roadmaps such that the gaps that I have, I know I need something to close this. I don’t have it. I can invest or I could go out and look for that opportunity with other companies, right? Look for those small companies that are already thinking about that in a different way. And so that’s really where the partnering comes into place. And we’re doing that in several places. Another company, Spider Oak, that we’re working with to develop a space mesh network that’s that can heal itself and work at multiple classification levels. We’re co investing in research and development to solve those problems with these small companies. And I think that is a key going forward, because there is such a huge growth in this market today. This is an opera. We’re just at a point where there is so many opportunities and so many new technologies that we can partner with them and begin to solve those problems on those mission roadmaps the way that we need to.

Joe Rickers:

Given another commercial company view here, and one of the things we’ve really looked into hard, and we are actually on a whole demonstration path right now is, how do you try to go show those capabilities in orbit, whether it’s rendezvous proximity, whether it’s ISR, whether it’s tactical waveforms, whether it’s 5g in a regenerative and we’ve got a whole demo program which is somewhat getting complex, because you’ve got to have launchers, and you’ve got to have a lot of other things that go along with it. But you know that to the comment a little bit about what’s different with space, you know we have to go do those types of things to be quick and to bring those capabilities forward in space. And we’re leaning into going and doing those with a whole. Demo campaign that we have, yea.

Dan Ourada:

So, unlike my colleagues, I’m not an originally equipment manufacturer, right? Amentum is a pure play services company. And you know us from the 400 plus launches we support at Kennedy and at Patrick, and from the fuels that we run out at Vandenberg, and from the other tests and training enterprises, including the National Space Test and training center that we run for the Space Force out in Colorado Springs. And I want to put out there to you that the capabilities we seek are very important, the lift the vehicles, the mesh network that reinforces itself. But I want to tell you a story. One of your telemetry devices at one of your locations is on a World War one gun turret. Some of these radars have not been improved or updated, right for space safety since the 60s the 70s, right? So, as we go through, and the capabilities are stunning. What these two companies are delivering, what SpaceX is delivering, what the Space Force is doing, is absolutely incredible. But while we do that, and I look towards the acquisition professionals, and we talk about aukus and other capabilities there, our infrastructure to launch, to lift, to monitor, to control, to repair and to restage for multiple launches in a competitive environment, we have to address that as well, all right, because otherwise we’re not going to be able to get those exquisite capabilities our guardians and our airmen need.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

A couple of really interesting points in in that one the mission areas, if we could unpack that a bit, Certainly, that requires the customer I the DOD to be, to communicate well, so that you guys understand exactly where the mission area, where the gaps are in capability, so that you can potentially provide the solutions. Do you think we’re doing that well enough? At the moment, I’ve seen reverse Industry Days, from SSC, all sorts of things. How’s that going?

Joe Rickers:

I it’s going but it can be going better, absolutely right, because it is a different focus right now, the more we’re informed on where those gaps are, we try to assess them ourselves, and I’m sure when we try to go do that, we may or may not have them right, because we’re not the end users of the systems and the missions. So, the more that we can kind of work in that domain space, and we can share, and we can really be looking at the downstream capabilities and things we need. Because I bet you there are a lot of blind spots from when we look at them ourselves.

Matt Brown:

Yeah, I think space warfighting Analysis Center is a good example of where we are doing that. Well, SWAC is doing a good job of force design, understanding and modeling that, and then they are bringing in industry. You know, we’ve had lots of conversations with them where we are providing our analysis, we’re looking at their analysis, and we’re having a conversation about what that means in terms of the future mission. So I think that is a good model, I guess, is what I would say of how we can kind of work together and use ops Analysis and Modeling and sim to help shape what the Future Force design needs to look like, like, specifically when you talk about space, because, as you mentioned earlier, there are so many new variables that we have not had to consider in the past to be successful in space. And it’s really, we’re, you know, maybe 100 years behind the rest of the thinking about that problem in that way, because we’ve just always assumed it was a safe environment. So, lots of opportunity, I think there, and I think we’re on that path moving forward.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

We’ve got five minutes to go. I’ve got more stuff I can talk about, but I am going to break protocol, and probably the sniper is going to take me down. But are there any questions from the audience? I saw the first one over here. Go for it.

Over to you guys, the commercial sector is essentially drawing.

Joe Rickers:

I do think we use the SDA example, right? It’s happening there those, those are firm, fixed price contracts, right? And so we are not only SDA leaning in, but each of the industry partners that are actually working in that, in that domain, we’re doing it because there’s an extra launch and an extra launch, and there’s going to be the ability right over time, but it, you know, when we get to our internals within our corporations, there’s a pucker factor thereof, can I go bid this and you know, what are the returns we’re going to go get? So, it is a, certainly a different model for us in that example, yeah.

Matt Brown:

And I think a lot of those companies I was talking about earlier; they’re not leaning towards just defense. Those companies that we’re investing into support. They’re actually have a very viable commercial path forward that they’re looking to solve financially. And so, we’re actually kind of doing the reverse of what we would normally do. We’re partnering with them as they move towards their side of the business mission, and we’re looking how we can take that technology and apply it to our missions that we need to use the same capability for.

Dan Ourada:

Yeah, I also think I agree the SDA as a model for that. But there’s also some more thinking that needs to come into that policy and doctrine capabilities intersection, right? The more dual use capability that you put into this domain, the more targets you create. And what are the implications? And I’ll fall back on one of my opening comments about not making the mistake with the space domain that we did with the cyber domain. An attack is an attack, and we need to have the policy, the strategy behind it, to make sure we reinforce the dirt deterrent effect that we want. So, I agree wholeheartedly on all that you’ve heard from, from the panelists.

Joe Rickers:

Maybe one more aspect of that too, and it’s where is the commonality, right? Where are the economies of scale you talk about, you know, how large the economy may be there, right? But as we said, space is different. Spaces is big, and trying to find where those, those magic points are is something that we all have to kind of do.

Panel Moderator: Air Marshal Paul Godfrey:

As we wrap this up then and thank you for the question. I won’t be invited back next year. Now, have you guys got any final comments, given that you’ve got the floor from an industrial perspective, before we wrap up?

Matt Brown:

I guess I’ll just go back to the focus has to be on the mission as like the technology guy, I love to focus on the great technology that we have and all the opportunities. But I want to bring that into how can we support the warfighter? How can we get to where we need to be on the mission side, and how can we accelerate that as fast as possible?

Joe Rickers:

I’ll probably go a little bit different place, but, yeah, I don’t know. All my years of being in the industry, you know, it gets back to when you’re working it’s the trust, right? And whether it’s partnerships with our supply base, whether it’s partnerships with our international partners, it takes time. It takes conferences like these, where we get together, but there’s an absolute need, and when there’s a need like that, and then there’s trust, a lot of things will happen. So, I just think it’s, you know, its time, and we really have to move fast together.

Dan Ourada:

You know, I’m going to, I’m going to second both of those motions. But as one of the retired in the room, a retired airman, I freely admit that, okay, I’m looking at you, airmen and guardians, okay, you’re going to define all of the solutions to the challenges that we are sitting here in industry, ready to solve. So, I’m going to encourage you to do your PME, to work with the Mitchell Institute right to go to those colleges and make those studies, make those papers, pursue those degrees, and put that thought out there as a leader. Okay, I’m looking for the Billy Mitchell of the Space Force. You’re out there. You’re hearing me. Okay, step forward. Do it. The Space Force needs you. Our nation needs you. Our partners need you.

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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.