Air and Missile Defense

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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.

Michael Winkler:

Well, they’re clapping in the other room and we didn’t get anything yet. It was a great walk on stage. No, seriously, thanks to everybody for joining us. I’m Mike Winkler, I’m here from the PACAF A3. And the panel today, as you guys are obviously all aware of this already, but we wanna talk a little bit about something that’s always in the forefront of our minds out at PACAF, and that’s integrated air and missile defense, or air and missile defense, depending on how you wanna talk about it. I think everybody’s kind of aware of this. This anti-access area denial threat that we see around the globe right now is a modern reality for anywhere in the battle space. Out at PACAF, we spent a lot of time thinking about it, but it’s also, as we’ve seen in recent conflicts, something that we’re gonna deal with in CENTCOM and EUCOM, and in other parts of the Indo-Pacific, we’ve got a similar threat with Korea, at a little bit less veracity and a little bit less intensity. We’re currently dealing with that, as I think all the other theaters are as well, through both active and passive defenses. And the passive defenses are anything from agile combat employment to dispersal to hardening. I don’t think any of that is gonna be sufficient to be able to survive the adversary’s threat vectors there. So we’re thinking about active defense, and as you guys are all aware, traditionally the Air Force has relied on Patriots, Thads, SM-3s and 6s from the Army and Navy to do that mission, with the big contributions from the United States Air Force being on command and control, and on some theater-wide DCA, which helps with that problem set as well. As the adversary’s quiver continues to grow, it’s good to see the United States Air Force actually taking a solid look at trying to procure some of our own capabilities to help defend our forces. And now that we’re looking at that, and I think it’s 100% gonna be required in any kind of modern battle space, and we’re gonna owe it to our Airmen who are living and fighting under the adversary’s anti-access area umbrella, to be able to do the best we can to protect them and get them home after the conflict. So it’s great to see the Air Force looking towards that. But that leads to a whole bunch of questions on what the United States Air Force’s approach should be. I think most people are familiar, we’ve always had a theater-wide approach to how we do air defense, as the threat vectors are trending towards hypersonics, ballistic missiles, and now we’ve encountered small UAS capabilities. That’s putting us a little bit closer to the point defense role, and we’re gonna have to figure out how we’re gonna rectify those two mission sets. How much do we look at from an active standpoint? How much is a passive standpoint, if those capabilities ever become available? So kinetics, non-kinetics, high-end, low-end, and all of this is going on as a background of Golden Dome for America looms on the outside that may solve some of these problems for us, but may not solve other problems as we look at protecting Airmen in the field in forward-based theaters like UCOM, CENTCOM, and INDOPACOM, working closely with our adversaries and partners. I think it’s a little bit unknown right now for how much the Golden Dome’s gonna extend out to that. So those are all things we hope to be able to talk to during this panel. I’m pleased to be joined by four experts from industry up here on the stage, and thank you all very much for being here. And I’ll run through some introductions real quick, but John Breitenbach, the Director, A&D Markets for Real-Time Innovation, John, thanks. Randy Fields here is the Chief Technology Officer from Ultra INC. Scott Goldstein, the Senior Vice President for Strategy for Parsons. And the Honorable, well, Sean Monasco couldn’t join us, so Greg Little is here from Palantir to represent, and we appreciate all his contributions as well. So I cheated a little bit and started off with some initial comments of my own, but these guys from industry are the ones that we really wanna be talking about for this. So if you guys will indulge me, if I could offer you guys a stage for just a couple minutes each to either introduce yourselves or to talk about the things that are top of your mind from the industry’s perspective on the air and missile defense side. And we’ll, yeah, start with that end, Greg.

Greg Little:

All right, great. First, really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Mike, thank you for the invite to participate. I’m very jealous of your Hawaiian shirt right now. I’m devastated I have to be in a suit.

Michael Winkler:

Just two socks.

Greg Little:

Yeah, you look incredible. You should come work at Palantir. You’d fit right in. I think you laid out the threat profile really, really well, and I think we have to think of the different adversaries we have now in peer adversary in China, near peer adversary in Russia, the rogue nations in Iran and North Korea. Also, the different threat types you laid out, Mike, things like ballistics, hypersonics, crews, and drones. The thing that keeps me up the most, and I think we’ll hit C2 in a minute, but the thing that actually keeps me up the most is our industrial capacity. And I think when we think about this problem set, we could have the best defense systems on earth, we could have the best C2 systems on earth, but if we run out of munitions, it really doesn’t matter. Not only does it not matter from a defensive posture, but we have really no deterrence to speak of. And so in my mind, we really need more of everything. We need more of the exquisite, we need more of the non-exquisite, we need it cheaper and faster. If I look at the Patriot interceptors right now, I think we’re producing something like 600 a year or so. You know, if we look at a high salvo, these different threat environments over a protracted time period, we’re gonna run out of those within weeks. If we look at Russia-Ukraine as an example, where Russia is firing off thousands of missiles and drones per year, we sort of understand the consumption that we would need to be able to plan for. And right now, in a lot of our missile defense systems, you know, the industrial capacity is really assuming a limited engagement. We don’t have enough magazine depth, we can’t replenish those quickly. And I think if we assume that we will have the ability to be able to produce these quickly and to be able to fire up our factories, that assumption is completely wrong, we’ve already learned that. Also, I think what we have learned is that it does not make sense to fire exquisite, expensive weapon systems at each thing. We learned that in the Red Sea. So in my mind, and I’ll be one more minute, is like software and AI, which we are still great at in America, is actually an avenue to be great at manufacturing again in America. I’ll give you two areas where we’re seeing that come to fruition. One is in the workforce problem, and the other is in the fragmentation problem of manufacturing. So in the workforce problem, you know, oftentimes when you talk to different manufacturers, they’ll often say, “Hey, we don’t have the workforce “in America to be able to actually build things here.” And probably my best vignette on this is the work we do with Panasonic, with their Gigafactory that supplies batteries to Tesla in Reno, Nevada. If you think of Reno, Nevada, you don’t think of a manufacturing hub, right? You think of services, you think of casino, entertainment type of workforce. And so what we did there is we brought in all that digital, that knowledge from Japan and coded that. We brought in all of those standard operating procedures, manuals, extended that with mixed reality. And so these workers are now able to come up, sort of understand how the machines work, how to optimize them and how to fix them. And you went from a four-year process to make them proficient into eight months. And so we see that as a really big deal. The second part is the fragmentation issue. If you’ve ever been to a manufacturing plant, especially the older ones, you know, you have the engineers working on designs. Those designs in each engineering department don’t talk to each other, so you don’t know the effects. As they make those design changes, you don’t get to see the particular parts and suppliers that they would be dependent on. And then as things show up, do you have the workforce actually planned appropriately to be able to use that equipment to build the capability? And do you do, do you prevent silly things from happening? Like you make the wall before you put the electricity in. And so how do you optimize that? But I think we don’t talk enough about the importance of capacity in our industrial base to this problem. And, you know, we’re really excited to be able to see manufacturing come back to America, which is not only a national security risk, but also an economic prosperity thing. And so we’re super excited about what we’re seeing there.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, awesome. Scott.

Dr. J. Scott Goldstein:

Great, thanks. Fantastic points. I think you’ll probably see some redundancy as we all go through talking points here. You know, as a nation, we’ve been doing missile defense since World War II, when you kind of saw the first ballistic missile and the first cruise missile, and the fact that we needed to defend against those. And it’s kind of interesting when you think about modern events, you know, you’re almost back to the point of, you know, Spitfires and P-41s trying to wingtip, tilt over things that are coming in. The fact though is that the character of war and the character of missile defense has changed and it’s advanced and it’s gone from what really are, you know, a spectrum from fractional, you know, orbital bombardment systems all the way through these UAS swarms that we’ve been seeing in recent events. So I sat down, I was actually out in Indo-Pacom last week, I’ll be heading out to UCOM next week. And, you know, a lot of this is theater to theater around the world, as well as the last panel kind of addressed within the continental United States. There are great similarities, there are great issues that we have to address, and I kind of, across these saw similarity that hit across six different areas. And they’re interrelated, right? The first thing is we need to rely on what we’ve relied on largely through World War II and since 9/11, which is on intelligence, right? When you think about what might be considered black swan events, Operation Spider’s Web in the Ukraine, Rising Lion that Israel participate, or Israel implemented in Iran, the intelligence is the real thing that we’ve got to have ahead of time in order to be able to really be able to get in front of and address any of these threats and to be able to take the unanticipated and make them at least anticipated. There’s what really has to evolve, multi-service and multi-agency in terms of integration and synchronization for missile defense, and that’s the sensors and the effectors. There’s command and control, and here, you know, this includes everything in warning, tracking, and targeting, you really, for the first time, have to start talking, you know, we talk about things like JADC2, we talk about things like AI and meeting these OODA loops, and you’re talking now about classes of problems that’s the pressing case and becomes the necessity for that, again, around the world. And kinetic and non-kinetic weapons at scale, right? This ties directly into magazine depth and breadth. When you think about literally spending millions of dollars on what are AMRAAMs, AMRAAM shots, you know, against UAVs, things didn’t make sense, and we heard in this conference, you know, they tried dropping JADAMs on them, right? It really is something where we need to understand that there’s a scale of sophistication and a scale of cost in terms of what those threats are that we need to be able to match in terms of how we’re gonna handle those threats, and that ties into, again, the OODA loop, the decision time, and the intelligence ahead of time. And then the last point that I wanted to make was the testing, and here, this hits both the testing of the systems and the capabilities, but also the warning. I always reckon back to, you know, 2018 in Hawaii, when, you know, basically they had a false alarm that set the entire, you know, the entire island into, like, havoc. So, you know, those are kind of the tops of things, the top of the things that have been crossing my mind, and I think they’re ubiquitous in trying to solve this problem in the United States and overseas.

Michael Winkler:

And we’ll get into the C2 in a little bit. I’m glad you brought that up, though. Randy?

Randy Fields:

Thank you, I’ll be quick. I have two things from our kind of conversations, and I really appreciate kind of the tee-up. One of the big things, as you think about, what is our ability to respond to a live fire? And so, going back to what happened in the Red Sea, I was still in uniform at the time, and it was such an interesting thing, because no matter how many times we go through workups, we get prepared for that event. That first time that that Houthi missile was inbound for that battle group, right, I can tell you, having talked to the cryptologic warfare officers that I was assigned with, I mean, those EW guys, those CTTs, they’re just smashing, like chaffs happening, we’re trying to get everything that’s out there. That was a very expensive protective measure. Now, they didn’t do anything wrong. They did the right thing. Nobody died that day, no damage to our ships, but that was an extremely expensive way to learn. And I think it goes back to what is our test environment, what is our training environment? Not to knock our training, but we’ve never put our sailors and our Airmen and our Marines and our soldiers in harm’s way, but are they prepared for that first time that that comes in? And it gets back to our magazine depth isn’t deep enough that we can do more of those live events so that way they can see it, they can understand it, right? And you never want to put someone in a bad spot, and I remember seeing the letter come from the Admiral saying everyone did everything right. We did it right, everyone won the day, but damn, that was an expensive shot, you know? And so we then turned that into a fly, fix, fly kind of scenario to where we were doing a daily debrief with those folks so that way guys like me who were back at the fort, we were learning from them so in case we got called to go relieve someone up forward, we could fit right in and increase our op tempo. And we learned so much from those guys ’cause they were being shot at every day, right? And it was such a difference and a change of pace because this wasn’t Afghanistan, this wasn’t Iraq, this was an actual person attacking our ships, right? And then when we got ourselves into a great OODA loop, we were getting really good at it, then we responded and we responded with effect. So I think it gets into one, is the magazine depth there? Can we train, can we get our folks to be ready and get to that level of op tempo that that battle group got to, right? Because when, and God forbid it does happen, our folks in the PAC-F area that are gonna be under this, we don’t want them to shoot all their shots due to that magazine depth and then that second wave they’re not ready for.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, exactly. And I’m not belittling the CENTCOM AOR at all, but what you guys saw there and how we reacted to it I think is human nature. The concern that I’ve got is I don’t know what that salvo looks like for the first salvo of the day against the second island chain, but to your points, we gotta be ready for that third and fourth wave ’cause we think they’re coming. Awesome, John?

John Breitenbach:

Yeah, so great points by all my panelists. And I have to say that the title of this session is Integrated Air and Missile Defense, and I think that integration of all these systems, whether it’s regarding magazine depth or sensing or even training systems, the integration is the key part that’s going to help us get after this, right? Because the pace that we’ve seen from the Houthis, for instance, yes, it was every day for 40 plus days straight, but they’re shooting onesies, twosies at us. If we get into a conflict with a near peer adversary in some place like the first island chain, we’re going to see two to three orders of magnitude more threats at once that we need to quickly decipher, triage, share that information, figure out which of our kinetic and non-kinetic means we’re going to use to mitigate that. And because the magazine depth is so critical, because of our limited production capability right now, we’re gonna have to be really smart about the effects we use. And like you said, we don’t know how these are gonna come in. Or is it first gonna be a wave of hypersonics followed by some drones, followed by some rockets, or maybe in the other order? We’re doing a huge integration event in Guam right now, where they’re integrating a number of legacy systems with some newer systems. They’re putting Aegis Ashore in, they’re putting Patriot in, they’re throwing everything at it, right? Thad, trying to get this all integrated and sharing information. Problem when you do that is different systems see the same threat different ways. One might flag it as an air threat, the other might flag it as a space object. So how do we de-conflict that? So we need to get that information to a system that can make sense of that. I think as the amount of mass in the air goes up exponentially, again, by orders of magnitude, we’re gonna have to start to layer technologies like AI to do the decision making. Today, we have young sailors in the kill chain. At some point, we’re gonna have to move them out from perhaps in the kill chain to being on the kill chain, where they’re simply responding to a suggested course of action by an AI. And I think eventually, if there’s enough mass to deal with, we may have to get them completely out of the loop. Those loops may be automated. But the key to that whole progression is really integration of systems. And I think somebody in the earlier panel talked about it before. A lot of times in the defense industry, a lot of the vendors have thought about things as a sort of zero sum game. Your system wins, my loses or vice versa. And we have to set aside that philosophy. This really is, as someone said earlier, a team sport. It’s gonna require everybody in this room, everybody at the show to make their systems work together as one to handle these threats, both abroad as well as domestically.

Michael Winkler:

Awesome, I appreciate the comments. And again, C2 and the integration of all these things is obviously gonna be the key. We’ll go with some questions right now. And John, I’m gonna start with you because your last comments really did hit at this. But I’ll give you another opportunity to further dive into the details. I think it’s gonna be imperative for us to quickly field some sort of a system. I don’t know what everybody feels about the 2027 timeline with China. Something might happen, something might not. But sooner rather than later, we’re gonna have to get something in the field. And as a representative of somebody that should be helping to write that requirements document, I’m just looking for your guys’ thoughts across the panel. And again, we’ll start with John. On what are the requirements that we should bake into that? What’s gonna become a systems of systems that some of those systems exist today, others are probably gonna be fielded in the short term. And how do you knit all of that stuff together inside of an architecture that truly allows us to be integrated?

John Breitenbach:

So I can tell you from my company’s perspective, we are all about interoperability and making systems work together as one. In fact, that was our company tagline for a number of years was your systems working as one. And so we’re based on open, interoperable communication standards. We would love to see the Pentagon take a more aggressive role in specifying the technologies used for the integration. Essentially be a benevolent dictatorship. Say, if you’re going to build these systems or you wanna play as part of the Golden Dome, these should be the core connectivity protocols that are used so that we can guarantee integration. And from our perspective, we specialize in something called data-centric communications, which means that the data itself is the interface between these systems. That is the interoperability surface upon which you work. So from our perspective, we like to see the government specify things like, hey, this is the data model for a radar track. Track is a track is a track is a track. If everybody publishes their tracks this way, we get interoperable systems. And we have seen great benefit in that in a number of standards across different branches in the military over the years. And we think that’s the kind of standardization that it will take to get these large-scale systems working.

Michael Winkler:

Awesome, couldn’t agree more. Randy, you wanna take that? Or anybody else have comments on that?

Randy Fields:

I’ll do my one just because in our prep session, I really, really enjoyed when John mentioned the track is a track is a track. To make that happen, we really need that benevolent dictator. This is, to me, where I think FFRDCs can really shine. You own the ontology and let industry deliver it because that way, you’re working directly with the government and we can all provide you feedback. But we’ve started to see this in some of our early work in missile defense with an FFRDC that provided us an ontology. Industry was able to get together, complain a little bit to make small adjustments, and then implement. And we’re seeing extremely fast responses to that because now we’re just the implementers. We’re not having to try to create it and then say, “Who’s gonna own it?” No, we just said, “Hey, if you’re gonna do that, “we need six decimals instead of two or whatever.” And it’s going much faster. That ontology enables us to start to get that to where a track can be a track can be a track.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, awesome. I don’t wanna belittle the problem here ’cause it sounds great, but I just look at the Department of War now and the way that we’re built. And in this battle space right now, we’ve got everything from Link 16 to some of the newer data links. We got legacy, not legacy, I mean, they’re still great, but older Patriot systems, older THAAD systems, older SM3s and 6s that speak a little bit of a different language. With the MDA feeling like they’ve got some oversight of that in the individual services. So it’s gonna be a big effort to try to synchronize around some common data standards in there. I don’t know, Scott, if you’ve got anything you wanna contribute to that.

Dr. J. Scott Goldstein:

Yeah, so I think the synchronization is key. And I think that everything that’s been said is absolutely valid. But if I was doing the requirements, the piece that I would be the most concerned about that would keep me up at night, right, is we need to get that done and we need to get it right. But that’s just the first stage. It’s kind of the benign environment. How do we fight? The thing that keeps me up is that we, much like artificial intelligence, we’re training ourselves with human intelligence by the things that we’re seeing, the things that we’re watching. And I’m really concerned that everything that we’re seeing and watching is where we have not only air dominance, okay, but we have information dominance. And we’ve got the ability to go against someone who isn’t employing countermeasures, who isn’t really sitting there and putting you at risk for if your system was perfectly working. So I think we have to get the system perfectly working. If we don’t, then that’s like the white noise case. We have to have that down and make those investments. But then we have to figure out how do we get distributed and how do we get it to the point where we’ve got resiliency? Because that’s gonna be, I think, what we’re gonna be facing in the future.

Greg Little:

Yeah, the thing I would add, and I think you kind of hit on this, Mike, is when I think about, you know, always people like to compare Golden Dome to Iron Dome, and we know there’s significant differences. But I will say there’s an interesting cultural part that we need to think about of why Iron Dome is able to do what it does with David Sling and Arrow and be an integrated platform is because Israel is in constant threat. And so they have a sense of urgency. And so, you know, when we talk about interoperability, we talk about integration, these are wicked hard problems. I mean, we are a very fragmented ecosystem by design. And so stitching these things together is very clunky. It is ever more important, though, when we don’t have minutes to make decisions and we have seconds. And so I loved what Randy’s comment is like twofold. One, we just need to have a sense of urgency in doing this. And I think if I look at what the president is doing, he’s trying to create that sense of urgency when a lot of people don’t feel like we might actually be under threat. And in order to have that sense of urgency, we need to be constantly testing to be able to figure out what these things are looking at. We need to be able to look at, the only way you solve the fragmentation and the ontology problem is not doing these siloed, weird, every six month tests or testing one system under one perfect scenario. It’s worth throwing everything at that thing. We’re finding out what is working, what’s not working, what is the data we need, where’s the bandwidth issues, where do we need to see resiliency? And then also testing out the command and control. If we did command and control right now on a similar threat, which is not a high-end threat that Israel and Iran went through, 12-day war, we would be completely, completely lost. And so we need to be testing that out as well. The other thing we need to be talking about in the classic DoD fashion is they silo defense from offense. And Mike, we were hitting on this. It’s like, not only do you wanna swat the arrows, you wanna kill the archer, but not only do you wanna kill the archer, you want that archer never to get out of bed. And so we wanna be thinking much more in left of launch of how do we look at indications and warnings? How do we have the right cyber effects to be able to hit that? The other thing we often don’t test, which is very brittle, is the adversarial attack. So as we’re thinking of left of launch, we don’t actually prepare ourselves for a left of launch or what they might disrupt. So things like making sure our systems are hardened. As we use more AI, how are we making sure that we’re protecting ourselves against spoofing our Trojan horses or data poisoning? And so we will only figure these things out by doing it. And what I love about Admiral Acollino, Admiral Papparo, is their thing is you will do, try, fail, be better the next time, but do it in a very iterative cycle. And what I worry about for this problem set is there are so many players that you only can have a sense of urgency to be able to bring these together to be able to solve that fragmentation challenge.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, and hopefully some things that are going on in the Pacific, like the Guam defense system, and I think we’ll see those proliferate around the rest of the world too, will help bring that joint force together. Couldn’t agree more that if we do not train together the act that you were talking about over in CENTCOM, we will look 10 times worse than that out here.

Greg Little:

I think the other thing I’ll add, love all your take on this, is how do you make sure allies and partners are not a liability but actually a strength? And so this, Ollanda’s only within the magazine depth. I would love for Europe to have a much more defense industrial base to be able to actually producing these things themselves versus depleting. But we also need to be working with allies and partners, which is an interesting thing of data security, sovereignty. But we need our adversaries, our adversaries only find our allies and partners as a credible threat if they have the capabilities that they need to be self-sufficient as well.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, I appreciate those comments. And I think those spread across not just air and missile defense weapons, but pretty much all the way in the entire weapons inventory that we’ve got. And there’s certainly work to do there. But since you mentioned the allies and partners part of this, there’s a fascinating aspect of this where most of the Airmen that we are gonna be trying to defend are gonna be forward deployed somewhere in some other AOR, which means that the integrated portion of this is not just the joint force, that somehow or another we’ve gotta be able to plug and play our allies and partners into this so that it’s not some fragmented defensive system out there. And that’s gonna come with its own series of complexities from a standard standpoint. I’m wondering if any of you have any advice for how the Air Force should try to navigate that before we figure out what we’re gonna build.

Dr. J. Scott Goldstein:

I’ll throw out that when you think about what we’re doing in the AOC, right, we’ve got efforts that are going on both at least in UCOM and in INDO-PACOM working with our allies to standardize how we do that command and control. Parsons creates C2 core, which is used in all the different AOCs. We’re working now trying to get through to Japan and Australia so that you’ve got the ability to bring that together. I think getting ahead of things in terms of trying to solve those problems and that integration coming together with standards and being able to figure out what those pathways are are the only real solution to, we’re not gonna hit the threat and solve the problem at the same time. So we have to get ahead of it.

Greg Little:

The only thing I’ll add, just ’cause usually when I hear standards I throw up in my mouth a little bit. I just wanna, because you’re always chasing a utopia. And I think what you’re all saying, which is completely accurate, we all get triggered by the standards word, is like there actually is very few data elements you would need in the input and output schema to be able to make sure things are interoperable. And so I think, again, this is sort of where we have to sort of pick what we think the overall ontology would be and manage it. But it’s actually a relatively low lift for a lot of these systems to be able to get there. The reason it’s also hard just to go on my rant on acquisition is we just do these things in like a cost plus fix fee way, which then makes it incentivized to do standards in the longest possible, most expensive way, versus actually just driving to the outcome and incentivizing a large profit margin, which would then actually encourage people to interoperate.

Dr. J. Scott Goldstein:

Real quick, those are great comments. And it made me reflect on it’s really not about the standards, right? What it’s really about is .MLPF. It’s really about getting it together so that you understand what you’ve got, how to train for it, and you’re doing that on a regular basis. And the standards, you know, is the, like acid just comes up, right? But the standards, seriously, they set the baseline for being able to do that, and not just a joint interagency way, but again, with allies and partners.

Randy Fields:

I get really one quick one. So I love incentives. And so I think about this, how do we work with our partners for them to be able to be incentivized to do these things? We’re working with CREA, and then they’re trying to have some VMF stuff go to link 16, and then we’re trying to get this to that. I think that money talks, we’re able to have an incentive and say, if you guys are able to do this, we’re gonna give you money. I like that. But I really think we should be thinking about as we get our magazine depth, and making sure that we can train and fight together, we should be making it for an incentive. If you guys go through this exercise, we can show that it works, we’ll give you some arms, right? We’ll help you build up that, and that way you can then test some more, and we can keep it on a regular basis. And so we’ve been investing dollars. I think we need to really say, first place for the best partner gets a whole bunch of this, right? Second place gets this, third place gets that, right? And you better believe that that third place is gonna wanna be first next time, and first is gonna wanna keep it, right? And we’re all human, we’re gonna drive into competition, and you gotta think that second place partner is gonna say, damn it, I wanna be better, right? And we’re gonna rise to the competition. That makes us a more lethal allied group.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, great points there. We’ll go kinda lightning round here as we’re running a little bit short on time with some more material to cover. But you guys are all from industry, you’re close to it. There’s probably technologies out there that you’re tracking that people in this room aren’t. If you had to advise the Air Force on, we’re gonna invest in something. Should it be more passive defense, which I don’t think’s ever gonna be the panacea? Is it passive plus some degree of active, and then to the degree that it is active, is that high end, is that low end, is it far away, long range, kinetic, non-kinetic? Just your thoughts on, as we procure some sort of a defensive system, where you’d be pointing us or advising us to go to.

Greg Little:

Yeah, I’ll start. I think the C2 narrative is probably the most important. To some extent, the most realistic standpoint, if we’re preparing for the Davidson Winnow in 2027, when President Xi said they’ll be ready to be able to invade Taiwan, if I’m thinking about the Pacific, it’s like you’re gonna fight in a lot of ways with what you have, and so getting that C2 architecture is right. In context of that C2 architecture, I also think it’s like, how do you make sure that that C2 architecture is hardened in a way in which the adversary most likely will try to hit it with non-kinetic effects and to be able to disable it before you can even have the archer established to be able to fire? I also think the most interesting thing, if I think of Air Force and Space Force, is the most fascinating thing, where I think it’ll be really hard to do, probably not feasible, but I still love the idea of the Reagan era, SDI, Space Base Interceptors, which is called out, and so would love to see if that could actually work. The fear of that is, well, are you creating spaces as a, even more so as a theater of war? That’s already happened. Like, that ship has sailed. And then you’re like, well, will that actually create more of an arms race? Probably, but if you can actually hit that thing in the boost phase, it would be phenomenal. Probably my last thing, and a lot of this is more on the top secret side, is the left of launch capabilities I think are also something I would explore.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, I know, that’s great advice. Anybody else want to take a crack at that?

Dr. J. Scott Goldstein:

So the answer to your laundry list is yes, right? I actually agree that it’s the command and control, right? I mean, if you look at what’s going on now, General Guetlein is gonna put out his architecture, and you’ll have this dome of domes kind of thing that hits all of these different aspects, again, from that changing character of war, changing character of missile defense, and each one is going to be slightly different. How you go against swarms of UAVs or things that could be domestic, going against Andrew’s Air Force Base, right, is gonna be dramatically different than how you’re gonna go against an attack on Guam, and that’s gonna be dramatically different than what’s potentially gonna happen with a fractional orbital warfare system. So as you kind of think through these different pieces, having the decomposition in the dome of domes, it’s really that command and control, because you could be seeing many of these at the same time. It’s not gonna be picked one from one of those different aspects, and the other component of it is the integration is what’s going to allow, hopefully, that opportunity to work the interagency, the interservice and allied components of it, and without that, I think, you know, we’re gonna make the investments in everything else on your list. We have to. When the balloon goes up, we’re gonna use what we have, right, it’s not gonna be what’s coming, so we better be able to make it work as effectively as we can.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, all right, it seems like everybody’s focusing on C2, and that’s one of my favorite things to talk about. So if we do, so we’ll concentrate on C2. I think that’s a given. I think General Guetlein’s approach to Golden Dome is concentrating on C2 first, and that’s probably a good model for us to follow, but as the service struggles with how do we C2 these things, you guys brought up the dot mil PF thing earlier, and there’s a lot of those same struggles that we’re gonna deal with. You know, this is an air defense commander mission. I think most people are trying to distribute that capability to subordinate nodes in the theater, recognizing that most modern adversaries are gonna have a capability to deny us communications, to deny us some sort of cyber and some other things, so distributing those capabilities, that comes with a manpower bill because we’ve never distributed those capabilities before in a delegation of authorities. If we end up buying some counter small UAS capability, we’ll be bridging the base defense job, which is usually an installation commander’s mission, with something that probably has some theater area air defense capabilities to be able to bring to bear. So how do we work the C2 seams for base defense versus JFAC, RADC mission, and how much of those capabilities do we actually service retain versus make available to the joint force, which traditionally we make 100% of our forces available to the joint force, so how are we gonna end up struggling with that? We’ll end up having to deal with all those, but C2 from the kind of dot mil PF down and in perspective rather than the overall orchestration of the C2 software systems, AI enabled, and everything else that we’ve talked about, I wonder if you guys have any thoughts on pointing the Air Force in the right direction for how we grapple with some of those C2 issues that I just brought up.

John Breitenbach:

I’ll give you the quick one. It’s exactly what Greg was saying, the MVP, what’s that key set of messages, make it as, let’s do it perfect every single time, and then let’s start to get exquisite. I think oftentimes we try to eat the whole elephant instead of one bite at a time, and that’s what’s gonna enable us to kind of get there. Let’s make sure that we can point, aim, fire, reload. Think about that island chain that’s out there. Let’s say their batteries are low and they’re trying to hold onto it. Can you tip off to a cruiser or a destroyer in the area so that way they can hit it and know that they’ve got an opportunity to move, that island doesn’t move? So if we could just make sure that we can point and shoot every single time and then be able to tip off to someone else to handle it and get positive control, hey, I’ve got it, and if you didn’t hear back, that guy’s gonna shoot just because he doesn’t want you to have a bad day. Let’s get the MVP working before we kind of do some of the exquisite stuff.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, I agree with all that. Just on the example that you’d use there, you know, it’s an Aegis asset that can help take a shot. That’s if the Navy does not service retain those Aegis for carrier production or protection or anything else. So again, back to the Air Force side of that, every other service, the Army’s retaining Patriots, Navy’s retaining Aegis. I think that would trend us towards somewhere along the line having some defensive capabilities that we could use as a service that wasn’t necessarily relegated to the Area Air Defense Commander mission. And I get the irony of that statement that the Area Air Defense Commander is probably the JFAC and he’s just wearing a different hat doing it, but I think the service retention would end up helping us as a force overall, so thanks.

John Breitenbach:

I would say that one of the trends we’ve seen this spring in particular coming out of the Pentagon is this notion of putting software on a fast acquisition path separate from the hardware. Traditionally, we’ve gotten the software as part of a platform. And I think the key to making all of these issues work going forward is to really take that software-defined approach. ‘Cause one thing we’re not gonna get within the Davidson window is a whole lot of new hardware. But we do have the potential to upgrade software. And we’ve seen this happen in places like the Ukraine, where they took the Patriot missile banks, existing hardware, were never designed to shoot down Russian hypersonics, they upgraded the software, they increased the speed of the EWTA loop, and they were able to give it that capability without having to redeploy new hardware. And I think that that approach, particularly in an increasingly uncertain world where we don’t know the number or nature of threats, where we have maybe existing sensors, radar’s a great example. For years, we’ve spent radar detuning it to take out clutter, right? To take out anything the size of a bird. Well, now we have this new world of small UAVs, as we’ve seen since Operation Spiderweb. Holy cow, maybe we wanna undo those software changes and repurpose that radar to only look for things the size of a bird, right? And that can be done through software. So I would say the future really needs to be software defined. I think that’s where we’re gonna get these new capabilities, and if the platforms really are software defined and we can upgrade them out in the field, preferably over the air, we don’t need to worry about being perfect the first deployment, right? Because we can fix it tomorrow and we can iterate quickly.

Michael Winkler:

Rather be on the fast fail train and be able to fix it quickly, absolutely.

Dr. J. Scott Goldstein:

And I would throw out, we need a training ground, right? And one area where that may be, actually is over in UCOM, right? Where for at least that dome, they’ve built out ABAD, is an air base, air defense thing. And that might be the place where you could build that training ground, Fort Irwin, if you will, for the Army, right? In terms of where you can go and you can try new concepts, new tests, get the C2 down, and the hardware software integration.

Michael Winkler:

Yeah, we just gotta build the training capability in there to bring all the disparate players in this together to train. Folks, we’re kinda running out of time up here. We’re getting the flashing red light, so I just, on behalf of the Mitchell Institute, I appreciate everybody showing up to not just this event, but also to the conference overall. And again, to the expert panel that we’ve got up here, to John, to Randy, to Scott, and to Greg, can’t thank you guys enough for participating, and I hope everybody enjoys the rest of the conference and has a wonderful Air Force Day.