Modernizing Training for 21st Century Air Superiority
September 22, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
All right, good afternoon. So the entirety of my instructions were when the music stops, start talking. But I didn’t know when the last music was. I assume we are now good, because I’ve started talking. Thanks for joining. We are competing with General retired Goldfein and Dr. Wilson next door. So I do appreciate you being with us on this panel today. And I actually wish I’d be able to hear them as well. So thanks for joining. We’re going to be talking, obviously, about modernizing training for 21st century air superiority. I’m a Major General Clark Quinn. I’m the Deputy Commander of Air Education and Training Command. So everything from recruiting through initial tech skills, pilot training, F-35, KC-46, and then air war colleges, and some other development on education, the gamut. I think we can all agree that air superiority and Secretary Meink talked about it this morning is kind of a foundation of the way that we operate. We have not always had it, but we’ve kind of assumed it throughout the entirety of my career. Secretary Meink talked about Desert Storm, the amazing success we had there, and about our adversaries having watched and learned over the past 30-some-odd years. So while we have it, we can’t rest on our laurels. And we need to continue to upgrade and maintain our competitive edge. Some part of that is technology, but ultimately, the technology is reliant on humans. So many, many panels this week are going to talk about things that we need to gain and maintain air superiority. I’d like to focus our time a little bit on how we address preparing our people to operate those things. In the 30-ish years since I’ve been in the air superiority business, the entirety of the use of simulators when I first started was practicing emergency procedures. What do you do if your engine’s on fire? Figure it out. Everything else was in the air. Perhaps I’m exaggerating a little bit, but that was really the sole use of simulators when I started. Things have certainly changed for many, many reasons. Everything from operational security to the ranges and airspaces and what we want to keep secret, many things we can only do in a simulated environment now. Some of our threat replication, just flying a T-38 as red air is not quite going to simulate the threat that we could get in a simulated environment. As we talk about modernizing training, we’re going to talk a little bit about augmented reality, virtual reality, some other types of reality. I will say that I believe there’s always going to be a balance. It’s not all going to be simulated. It’s not all going to be virtual. There’s going to be some part of it that is real world. There is a certain intangible learning that comes from knowing that you can actually run into the ground or another airplane or get shot by a missile. No matter how good the simulation is, I know that’s not going to happen in a simulator. But I do have that fear when I’m in an aircraft. I’ll also say, and we talked in a little bit at the panel in a pre-brief about this, that there is a balance between speed of training, throughput, if we’re asked to surge. Let’s say that I can train much more efficiently. Do I train to a higher standard? Or do I keep the standard and train people quicker and get them into the Ops Air Force? I won’t say it’s a philosophical discussion, but it is a discussion that we in the training command need to have with all of our customers that our students go out to. Keep them for six months, get them up to here, train them at the same level in three months, and get them out to the Ops Air Force. It’s a balance, because then some of the training will go to the operational world. Fortunately, I only have to ask the difficult questions today. And I have a panel of amazing experts up here that will assist me in answering those, all from industry, obviously. What I’d like to do is go down the line, just a real quick one to two minute, who you are, who you represent, why you decided to join us today. And then we’ll go into the question and answer part of it. So we’ll go right down the line with Dan.
Dan Ourada:
Sure, my name’s Dan Ourada. I’m with Amentum, retired 26 years Air Force fighter pilot.
Jenn Serra:
Hi, my name is Jenn Serra. And I’m with Collins Aerospace, focusing in on simulation and training products and approaches.
Cedric George:
Hey, I’m Cedric George. I am a 32 year Airman. Had the privilege of being a logistician in our Air Force, and had the privilege of providing our Airmen with the right tools, training, and equipment they need to keep our aircraft flying, and to also make sure that we focus on readiness. I think you asked us, why am I interested in this panel? I’m very interested in this panel, because I believe, as you talked about, that this triangle you’re talking about between speed, quality, and throughput is something that really, the big challenge is how do you literally work through the speed of competency. And I want to talk about that and do that with my colleagues. Over to you, sir.
Maj. Gen. Barry Cornish, USAF (Ret.):
Well, hi. Clark, thanks for you and your staff for putting this together. I’m here because I wanted to be sitting on a panel with Curious that I think is a little bit of a reunion here. And it’s great to see all you folks. So thanks for teeing this up. Two of my passionate subjects, air superiority and training. I think this is a time where I was heartened this morning to hear that when we talk innovation, we’re not always talking about technology. We’re talking about how do we train better, and how do we get our Airmen of the future ready for air superiority in the 21st century? So thank you.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
Excellent. Thank you, everybody. Dan, I’m going to start with you. We were able to sync about a month ago as a panel and talk through some items. And one of the things that struck me when we were talking is the complexity of the expected threat environment– the scale, the scope, compared to perhaps what some of us would have started with 30-some-odd years ago, where a red flag type scenario was the pinnacle. There’s access to more information now. And you can almost become overwhelmed by it. So when you look at the environment and the readiness that’s required to operate today to employ air power, what are your thoughts? Are we training the right way? How can we do better? What do we need to add or improve in our training?
Dan Ourada:
So of course, being the local SAS grad, I’m going to pull the history out on you. And I go back to the fall of 1940 with Air Chief Marshal Dowding when he stated that our young men are going to have to shoot down their young men at a ratio of 5 to 1 if we’re to survive. Let’s frame that in today’s modern complexity, is that our young men and women are going to have to shoot down their young men and women at a ratio of 12 to 1 if we’re to hold the line. And we’re going to have to do that with 2/3 less iron over 6 and 7 times the distance. That’s not just something that the pilot alone can do. It requires a synchronicity between air, ground support operations, logistics, maintainers, bee shoppers, everybody that you can think of. We’re starting to practice some of that. Some of you have gotten to participate in Bamboo Eagle, where we use Star Shield to connect the networks. Some of you are beginning to fly out at the Nellis Test and Training Ranges that Momentum provides for you. We use RITA, the Range Interoperability Transport Network. We’re able to connect more and more forces over greater and greater distances. And these are the start. But even then, I’m not seeing, from my historical perspective, that we’re training to that 12 to 1 ratio. We need to be thinking more and more about adding that layer of complexity, that layer of information management, to not just our aircraft, but our networks that we train in, our simulators, and as part of that master letter of X’s. How many Airmen are qualified to handle a multi-platform adversary coming at us? We have to start that, and we have to start it now. It’s not about accelerating change or losing. This is about accelerating change or perishing.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
Awesome. Thank you, Dan. To a couple of the points that you made there, I want to say throughout my career, I always knew where I was going to land when I took off. In a pure environment, that field may not be landable. So add to the complexity of you may not even know where you’re landing. And now add CCAs. Are they taking off with us? Am I meeting them? Are they meeting me? And knowing where they’re going to come from, just a lot of added complexity. So transitioning a little bit, Jen, to you. And we, collectively, when we think of AI, your brain thinks of certain things. When we think of live virtual constructive, LVC, I think everybody kind of goes to where they think they’ve seen an LVC example. They know what it is. They go with it. And that’s what they frame. I’d like to ask you a little bit about your thoughts on live virtual constructive environments and how we can modernize training with those.
Jenn Serra:
Thank you, General, for the question. And this is something that Collins and the team that I work with every day, as well as the industry partners and the government partners that we work with, are extremely passionate about. Adversaries are more sophisticated than ever. They’re more perceptive and working really hard to figure out what we can do on our next generation platforms. And this is where we really need to lean in on what training and simulation can do for us. So the most effective way to do this for the warfighter is to lean in on integrating live virtual and constructive capabilities into our training scenarios, training environments, and the simulators themselves. We often think about all of those things as the same. They’re really not. We can be really, really innovative if we think about them separately. So for a second, I know everybody knows and can tell you that LVC stands for live virtual constructive, but sir, if it’s all right, I actually wanna put a definition around them real quick as we talk about it, ’cause it’s important that we all use the same words. So live, getting in the aircraft, flying your mission, flying your training, getting your sets and reps in, getting all that done, the L. The virtual, the virtual and the virtual simulators, the simulated environment, the synthetic environments, those things that make that scenario you’re flying real. They bring you nearly impossible opportunities and scenarios replicated in an environment that we couldn’t do any other way. And then the constructive piece, right? Using the AI, the ML, the different types of realities, and actually challenging that trainee to go to their full limits, recognizing that they can do something and inserting a new threat they have to adjust to, letting all of that technology work for them. So important as we go. So sir, I really just, one of the things we have to think about as we look at each one of those areas is that means we have to be innovative in a different way in each one of those areas. They are very separate. So in the live world, there’s so many capabilities we aren’t using today. On the P6, for me, it’s the P6 live training pod, working to bring forward those capabilities, high fidelity, multiple levels of security, cybersecurity requirements, those things that we know everybody has to do so that you can train with your peers, you can train on joint missions, you can train on coalition, and you can train like you’re gonna fight. You can’t get up there and not be able to do things and get your muscle memory in a place where you can’t react to things that you’re going to experience. And then when you pull that into the virtual world, letting that virtual world and synthetic environment and simulator work for you. Let’s partner those two things together. And when you can’t do that thing in the live environment, let’s make sure we’re taking it into the virtual environment and giving the trainees the opportunity and the warfighter the opportunity to practice those capabilities and practice that with their peers and their coalition partners. And then from the constructive, let’s not be afraid to challenge ourselves, right? We got a lot of technology, we need to lean forward, and we really need to go do that. So really at the end of the day, I’m very, very passionate about the fact that our live capabilities, our virtual capabilities, our virtual environment, simulated environments, and our constructive environments work integrated together and leaning in on that, which means changing our mindset and changing our practices.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
Awesome, thank you, Jenn. So a couple of things that struck me as you went through that is, I’m gonna go all the way back to my example 30 years ago when the vast majority of the simulator use was to practice emergency procedures. That basically required one human being to turn the machine on and maybe click engine fire, click hydraulic failure, and then observe how you did. To do everything that you just said, it has to be resourced appropriately, correctly, it has to be part of the training plan because someone is building those constructive entities and putting them in the right place in the right time. And when there is a change, somebody has to Rolex them to a different time. And ultimately it has to be built in as opposed to bolted on. And now I’m gonna reflect back to something that Secretary Meink and General Allvin also mentioned, which is most of our systems are older than the people that are flying them. So AETC, T38 is a perfect example. By definition, any type of live, other than live, any type of virtual, it has to be bolted on ’cause it wasn’t invented 60 some odd years ago when the T38 was first built. So as we are looking into the future, making sure that we buy and acquire the correct package, a ground-based training system to go with it. Okay, excellent. So we focused on airplanes here a little bit. My previous at AETC was 19th Air Force, which does flying training. As I moved into the deputy commander job, I started learning about all of the other 260 some odd AFSCs that we train. So we’re talking about flying here, but there’s human beings that are not in the airplane that make those airplanes go and get them ready to go. So curious, I’d like to ask you just a little bit about your thoughts and how we can use technology to train the competencies for all of the Airmen that support getting those aircraft into the air.
Cedric George:
Sure, and I appreciate, I’m gonna build on what Dan and Jen talked about. I’ll talk about the elephant in the room, and it’s the data. Everybody in the room knows this, right? We can’t do any of the things that we’ve talked about on this panel without the data. I’m gonna say it again. I believe that if we’re gonna get after General Quinn, the issue of modernizing training in the 21st century, we have to speed up the path to competency without compromising, as you said in the lead, this whole place around quality and throughput. Can’t compromise it. But what I mean by speed of competency in the area of support is, I’m asking how can we speed up the time it takes, again, without compromising the other two parts of that power triangle, without compromising those, what it takes to bring a logistician, an Airman, or a Guardian from novice to actual mission ready, right? The fight demands that. And I’m old enough to remember when training was butts in seat, and we got credit for how many hours we sat in the seat, and we got a check mark, completion is not competency. And so one of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about and doing in MetroSTAR is thinking about how can we take advantage of that data, vast stores of data that our weapons systems and flight space and logistics operations is generating to accelerate readiness and to accelerate what we absolutely have to have in this great United States of America, which is decision advantage. We lose that, and it’s a game changer for this country. We have got to protect decision advantage. So every sortie that’s generated, every repair that happens, every inspection that happens, it creates data and it creates insights. So the question I ask, General Quinn, is how do we take those insights and treat them like the new fuel for training, feed them back into adaptive systems to cut the time that is required to take our Airmen and our Guardians, to take them to a place of mission readiness? And by the way, we already know what this looks like. I want you to just pause for a second in this great gathering of warriors to just think about a system that we already know, a learning system that does this. How did Tesla, I know I’m taking a risk by bringing up Tesla in some parts of the country, but how did Tesla actually accelerate autonomy? They didn’t, they did not, and you know this, if you know the story, they did not keep those cars in the labs. They put those cars in the hands of real drivers on real roads and they said, giddy up. And from 2015 to where we are today, and by the way, I’m not doing anything, I don’t have any stock in Tesla, I’m simply telling you, we understand this learning system. We understand what it’s like. Imagine this, let me pause for a second and have us think about this. Imagine a learning system that allows us to generate readiness overnight, overnight. I don’t think that’s out of the possible future, I think that’s out of the possible now. And when we talk about modernizing 21st century training, we have to think that way. Now, let me be fair, never once has my G-Quambler actually had a software upgrade and got better. I’m just sorry, I’m just saying, it hasn’t. So I had a little bit of envy, maybe I just have a little bit of envy there, but I’ll tell you, we’re starting to see glimpses of this with MetroStar, we have a system, and I’ll do this just as an example, where we’re trying to bring best of breed technology, like you heard from the panel, into operational challenges and drive mission value where it matters, right? We have a system called Integrated Respirator Information System, IRIS, that allows us to put technology best of breed in the hands of main fuel maintainers that allows them to accelerate the speed of competency. It’s intrinsically safe, it allows them to actually get inside that fuel tank, and you have a three level, we just got back from Mildenhall last Friday night, where maintainers, three levels are inside that tank doing dirty, really tough, hazardous, confined work inside of our fuel tanks. But they have someone outside the tank now for the first time that can see what’s happening, they can actually know in the heart of hearts as they walk through the TO and do the maintenance by the books, that they have somebody that can help coach them, can provide oversight. I would offer to you General Quinn, my fellow Airmen and Guardians, that’s what we have to do. We have to create a learning system that takes best of breed hardware, software, and actually allows us to iterate and learn overnight. That’s what our Air Force has to do, and we have to do it very quickly.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
Excellent, thank you. So as we head down to Dog, I’m gonna tee a little bit off of what Curious just brought up, which is competencies, speed of achieving those competencies. And I’ll talk for just a second, then kind of tee up a big, broad question. I could have somebody land a T-6 perfectly on the first try. Okay, was that luck, or do I need to try it again? Like how many, do I need it to happen 10 times? What if the wind was perfectly down the runway and it was sunny and they did it perfect every time, does that guarantee it’s gonna work well when it’s raining and 25 knots of crosswind? Well, I can’t necessarily generate that unless it’s in a simulated environment, so maybe I can. Then what is my level of confidence in achieving a competency solely in a virtual environment versus the real world? So with that as kind of an overarching theme of how we achieve and map competencies, what are your overarching thoughts of how we modernize, how have we modernized the last couple of years and looking into the future, where do we need to go with our modernization?
Maj. Gen. Barry Cornish, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah, and I appreciate the question. And what you’re talking about really is more of a pivot toward a proficiency-based training than just logging squares. And in my view, I can probably say with confidence that if we do get in a shoot and fight with a pure adversary, somebody like China, there is no path to victory without air superiority. And I would also contend that history has proven that even a moderately equipped force that is well-trained can defeat a force that is superbly equipped with inferior training. Goes back to Alexander the Great. So in this kind of equation of speed and throughput and quality, I focus on quality. You have to, and then find efficiencies where you can because if you buy my argument that the most important difference in achieving air superiority, the difference between winning and losing is how well-trained that force is, then you have to invest in training, quality training. And we get there a number of ways. I think we’re a little bit out of balance on the LVC. I think we got too small of an L. We’ve invested a lot in virtual and constructive capabilities, which are awesome. And I think most fifth-generation pilots would tell you the best training they get is in the JSC. But I think we have to invest more in building those competencies for our Airmen, air crew, and Airmen of all types, all AFSCs, to emulate the environment that they’re actually gonna be fighting in. Realistic training there’s no substitute for. On the other side of that, I will tell you, those times where we’ve put a premium on speed and trying to get forces into theater quickly, as we did in Vietnam, with just a scant amount of familiarization training, those are where we suffered our highest losses. And we cannot afford to do that in a peer fight, especially when you’re surging to meet that demand. So I believe my advice would be internally to the Air Force. We’d all love to see the Air Force top line go up, but when we’re talking about strategic trades, we’ve got to increase O&M and procurement to give our Airmen the very best training systems that we can with live virtual and constructive, increased flying hours, so that we give them the necessary tools to go to war. My generation, our generation was extremely well-trained. I was supremely confident going into combat because I flew enough. By the way, the aircraft I flew when I first started flying F-15s were nine years old. Right? A long time ago. So well-equipped, but I was also very well-trained. I flew over 200 hours a year. I went to flags, I went to weapons school. I got to do all of those things that prepared me for that. And I want to pass that on to the next generation. So my impression is, and I could be wrong about this, but we’re a little bit too light on the L. We need more of that. But I would pivot to another part of our Air Force where we could use a lot of data analytics, to Cedric’s comment, to actually provide more adaptive learning paths for every Airman, because we all think differently. Airmen approach problem solving differently, and you can’t have a one size fits all training profile. So if you can use data to map training events, to learning outcomes, to operational competencies, where they need to be most proficient, and gather all of the disparate products in the training environment, core competencies, syllabi, training, grade sheets, everything, and you could map that progress, you can find efficiencies, you can shorten pipelines with no expense to quality. And I think that’s the competency mapping that you were talking about.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
Excellent, thank you. I’m gonna tee up kind of an open question that you can, whoever wants to jump in and answer it. So when we think about air superiority, again, everybody thinks of their own, I envisioned the horde of J-20s into the most dense IADs that a pure threat could put together. But over the last two years, in both the Middle East and in Ukraine, we’ve seen a lot of drones, UASs, small UASs, and we have shot down dozens of them, sometimes with million dollar missiles, sometimes with more cost-effective munitions. Give me your thoughts on what has surprised you, if anything, of what we’ve seen in the recent conflicts last year or two in both the Middle East and Ukraine, and how do we maintain a training plan that has us ready to take the hordes of J-20s and IADs and finding a couple of small UASs and taking them down as well?
Dan Ourada:
So I’ll go a little bit more to the ground environment. Where my company, we’re on the Army’s preposition stock, and we’ve been taking that equipment out of storage in Germany and Kuwait and giving it to the Ukrainians. I have over 100 tracked wheeled armored diesel, EW, cannon technicians using FaceTime at a forward location in Eastern Europe, teaching them how to get battle damaged equipment back into the fight. ‘Cause you know what? A $200 drone can take out a $60 million tank. That’s not an exchange ratio any nation can sustain. So it is an equation about the exquisiteness of your capability. But what we found out is that turning over this capability and this equipment and this expertise to the young men and women in Ukraine rapidly turned the tide of battle. So I’ll apply that to what we’ve got out here today in this live blended synthetic RITA extension of the range and transportation network, right? The extension of the joint synthetic environment. The use of our closed combative aircraft and our live virtual constructives. Turn it loose, give it to them. They will tell you what you need to know. They’ll tell us how we can get to that strategic exchange ratio. We can’t just keep it in the weapons school. We can’t just keep it in the test environment. Our young men and women out there are born into this technology. To them, it’s not foreign. Crap, I hand my iPhone to my 27 year old son to fix it, right? So let’s take a look at some of the things that we have in our wonderful strengths and that is the Airmen and women in this room today who could take that technology and find the series of golden nuggets that make a difference.
Jenn Serra:
Yeah, I 100% agree with you on the leaning in. I argue that we’re ready to lean in and that I’ll speak at least for my team and the stuff that we deal with regularly. The capabilities are available today and what we need to do is partner on how we use that speed to the good enough, right? We recognize that the answer doesn’t fall 100%, integrated, perfectly trained, all of those things, but what’s the good enough that gets us fast and gets us to the young warfighter who knows how to use it? So that’s taking and making range lists, right? Don’t bound ourselves by the boundaries of the ground equipment we can install and talk to our live training capabilities. Let’s extend those. What does it take to do that? I’m confident we already have it. We just haven’t used it or we haven’t figured out how to push it forward. Those virtual simulators, I’m gonna go back to my topic here, I’m gonna stick in my lane. Those virtual simulators, get ’em in the hands. Try new things, you can’t break ’em. You gotta try ’em. And if you do, great, tell us. We will push the boundaries on what it’s capable of doing for you and then be open-minded. I think the biggest thing we have to do is maybe we have to break that training plan that we’ve always known forever. I love the fact that we have to kind of stay with the steady true, what we know works, and how do we challenge it to keep getting the goodness of that and incorporating the things like the drones and using those decisions and starting to give ourselves the ability to feel comfortable and confident and competent that we can handle those unknown situations and make the right decision in a split second.
Cedric George:
Yeah, two things real quick, ’cause we’re running out of time and we’ve got a lot to talk about. One was, and I’ll build off, spawn what you said, and that is the degree to which we have trained American Airmen and Guardians. I gotta tell you, when we saw a near-peer competitor enter the scene and it was, I don’t wanna get melodramatic, but it was embarrassing. You think about the degree to which we train our Airmen with everything we’re talking about. Our Airmen, you’re right, our superior training is our force multiplier. And no, this is not hubris, and this is not extending our, we have to focus on this, this is why we’re here in the panel, and that is that it is what sets American Airmen and Guardians apart. So Spawn, you’re exactly right. Second thing that surprised me, and I’m watching this as a loggy, imagine this, is the proliferation of drone warfare. And I’m watching what we talked about just as I was leaving the Air Force Mission Command, and what are you gonna do when you work in this environment where everything’s shut down? Will the mission continue to the edge? And so as a loggy, I’m trying to figure out how I’m watching how they’re actually using drones with blockchain and actually continuing the mission when you chop off all the comm, and that drone can still get to the target. We had better pay attention to this. The playbooks, I mean, it’s very interesting. So I’m watching this very carefully and looking at how do we actually get this into our DNA where our Airmen and Guardian understand how to get the mission done, not in theory, not in a SAS class, but how you’re gonna actually get this done when everything falls apart. And by the way, it’s playing out right in front of us. It’s playing out. So I know we’re going to school on it at multiple classification levels, but I’m certainly surprised by that. Spawn, what you got?
Maj. Gen. Barry Cornish, USAF (Ret.):
So I’ll pick up on one of the things Clark said was when you took off, you usually knew where you were gonna land again. Bases aren’t sanctuaries anymore for us. And boy, Russia learned that the hard way, didn’t they? So layer-based defense has to be part of our DNA as well. And being agile and being able to move and make the picture complex for our adversaries as well. So what kind of digital tools can we provide our Airmen for that agile combat employment kind of environment? One thing that I learned with Booz Allen was we did a lot of the work for Digital Twin for Tyndall for the base of the future after another threat, a hurricane wiped that base out. And by taking that technology and building that Digital Twin, we applied that to the Pacific and looked at a bunch of different places, not bases, locations where you could actually fight out of. And so now that Digital Twin becomes a rehearsal environment for a lot of our Airmen, a lot of Cedric’s guys, right? So that if you have an Airman sit down in a digital environment and go through the cargo yard, where they’re gonna set everything up in that base X, and the first time that they’ve actually walked off that C-17 is not the first time they’ve actually seen it. That’s realistic training. And they could actually rehearse that environment and look at a tablet as they get off the airplane and go, “Everything is right here. “This is where I put it.” Those are the kind of digital tools that you can provide Airmen in absence of having them as a lot of us did, just move from one side of the base to the other to practice our readiness.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
Excellent. So a couple of things that I pulled out as we went down the line there, training for air superiority. And we talked about the high-end part. We’re gonna talk a little bit about the lower-end part. We have to train our cyber operators to be able to take some of those threats down. The video that General Allvin showed of the great defender that we were nice enough to leave one UAS for him to kinetically take out, good on him for doing it. It’s in AETC’s lane to train that defender to be able to be ready for that, to know that system. And through some great efforts within the air staff, we’re focusing pretty significantly on point defense. So the spectrum of air superiority is wide. Okay, we’ve got five minutes left. You’ve got the Deputy Commander of Training Command here. You’ve got the Commander of Air Combat Command here. I happen to know the PEO for training systems might be in the audience listening as well. What does the government need to do? How can we do better? This esteemed panel of non, not wearing uniforms ever or anymore. How are we screwing this up? What can we do better? Dan.
Dan Ourada:
First off, we need to accept the fact that every sortie we fly needs to fly training for this level of complexity. So we’ve gotta get through the two-ship, four-ship faster. And we’ve gotta get through the basic maintainer style sooner. They have to be ready for agile combat employment, not in three days, not in three months, tomorrow. That investment in training has to be made now, tomorrow. Otherwise, we’re not gonna get to that level. This is something that’s gonna take 12 to 24 months to get to, and I’m not sure we have 24 months.
Jenn Serra:
My advice would be, we’re ready now. I understand that there’s a lot that goes with getting the capabilities and getting the simulators. And I would tell you, we are ready now, and we’re interested in the partnership that it takes to lean in. My experience has been a lot of the capabilities and products we offer are barely getting integrated and the surface is barely being skimmed on what they’re capable of doing. And we wanna be your partner, showing you the maximum you can do with that capability you already have, with easy upgrades and not a complete changeover. So, industry has the expertise. We are ready, we are here to support and partner, and we’re ready to lean in. Our task and our fight and our heart is in making sure that our war fighters have the best training options possible that enable them to do the real world scenarios. So, I would have to say, we are mission ready, and we wanna be your partner.
Cedric George:
You know, let me build on that. I would just say, yes, we’re ready now. The challenge I have, you can imagine what I’m gonna say is that the one thing I think we can do is to finally release and unlock the vast stores of data that we already have. What I mean by that is what I talked about earlier, is we have terabytes of data coming off of our systems, and most of it is siloed, it’s proprietary, it’s locked in legacy systems, and we can’t get at what I described, what you experienced in that learning system that’s outside our fence lines. We can’t get to it. That’s why frameworks like CRETAs, OTAs, CIVRS, I’m pleased to see this administration has put the foot on the gas with those vehicles. That allows industry, to the point of ready, that allows industry to get access to secure government-owned data sharing so that the Air Force and industry can innovate together. And we really wanna innovate with you around big, wicked problems. And we wanna do it, and we wanna iterate, we wanna do it like I described. We don’t wanna do it in some flash, bang. We also don’t wanna do it in a five to 10 year acquisition that doesn’t deliver value. You need value now. And I’m telling you, on the private sector, I wish I’d known this, you get incremental value, you get it really quickly. And I want our Air Force to take advantage of that, and you’re not trading quality, you’re getting it into the hands of war fighters, they try it, they go, “Not this, but this.” And then you iterate, and you use that to add mission value. So that’s the one thing, if the PEO’s in the audience, I’d love to talk to you about, how do we get access to the data you already own so that we can iterate with you and add mission value?
Maj. Gen. Barry Cornish, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah, a friend of mine back in San Antonio, recently retired, Smokey Robinson, you may know him. He used to say, “Data’s my love language.” Sounds like it’s your love language too.
Cedric George:
Just saying.
Maj. Gen. Barry Cornish, USAF (Ret.):
It is about the data and how we can do better with it. And I think we could use data a lot better to understand our state of readiness. Today, training, the reason we train, right, is to build readiness for that contingency out there. We don’t know a whole lot about readiness ’cause we don’t measure it the right way. We typically today aggregate individual training by logging squares. You log your squares, I log mine, we report to the DO and the squadron commander, and it all aggregates up to the MAJCOM and comes up with a T rating. It tells you nothing about readiness, about competency in warfighting. We need to measure it where it matters, and that’s where forces come together, like a re-four pack, or a flag event, or something like that. I’ve always been frustrated that we have all of this data available to us. And a lot of it we pull off the jets or out of the SEMs, and we get what we need individually, and we flush the rest of it, you know, lays on the cutting room floor. We can do a lot more to understand our state of readiness, as well as inform each individual Airman where their competencies need to improve, where things like AI can help the human machine team, where we may need to spend that next training dollar to build competencies that actually matter, where the joint force comes together to fight wars. I mean, that’s where it really matters. So I would say if we could find ways to collect data at the large force employment level, and then report that as readiness, and track it more closely, it will give us a whole bunch of information that we need, and our future war fighters need.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
Excellent, okay, Dan asked for a re-attack, but I don’t get paid for this, unless I have 30 seconds to close it out, so.
Dan Ourada:
They’ll give you 30 seconds, okay? And this is knowing full well the two leaders that you pointed out are in the room. This is a tremendous capability of an industry, and that us old dinosaur Airmen are bringing to you. But there’s one thing holding us back, and it’s not just the Air Force, okay? It is the Department of Defense’s, the Department of War’s risk management framework, okay? Sometimes bringing this technology through that is too hard, it’s too high. And at some point, we have to ask ourselves, where are we making the risk trade-off? Because the risk of not bringing it in is higher than the risk of letting it be exposed. We’re at that point. To bring all of this capability that we’ve talked about is gonna require rethinking our risk management framework for data, for networks, and for all the things that we’re doing, the joint synthetic environment, Star Shield, everything that we’re doing. The largest hurdle I face in giving you large force exercises out in the Nellis Test and Training Ranges, Edward and Point Mugu, it’s not the threats, it’s not the capabilities that Rockwell brings. It’s that risk management framework. It’s just a bar too high right now. And so I had to make a paid political announcement.
Maj. Gen. Clark J. Quinn:
Awesome. All right, Dan, thank you. Panelists, thank you very much for your time. So a couple keys that I took out of that, unleashing our Airmen, right? So I’m gonna go back to General Allvin. He showed the APKWS shooting down drones. That was Airmen. That thing wasn’t designed to shoot down anything flying. It’s a little laser guided rocket. And yet we figured out a way to turn it into an air superiority weapon. That defender that took out a UAS coming towards him, I promise you we did not teach him how to do that in the current initial skills training in the Defender Schoolhouse. They figured that out. And then lastly, to your point about making things happen faster and earlier and doing it better, I look forward to bringing on new training systems like the T7, where I have a hope and a dream and a vision where I can move a lot of training out of F-16s and out of F-35s and out of F-15EXs and actually bring it into the T7 so I’m not training at $50,000 an hour in those systems. So again, thank you all very much. Everybody, thank you for your attendance. Appreciate it.