Forward Air Base Defense

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Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Good afternoon everyone, and thanks for showing up near the end of the day here. It’s been a great AFA thus far, and this next 40 minutes, we’ve got a great opportunity with some great panel members here to talk about Forward Air Base Defense. Let me quickly introduce myself. General Jeffrey Harrigian, retired a couple years ago out of USAFE. Prior to that, I was at AFCENT.

Now having an opportunity to talk with three gentlemen that I’ve had an opportunity to work with before. So quickly introducing Mr. Tom Goffus, who just came out of the NATO headquarters where he was the ASG focused on operations. Spent several years ago or several years over there. But I think importantly, I need to remind him he was once an F-15 pilot and I might have gunned him one time, but I don’t know if that actually is in his memory bank, but been around for several years with great expertise, not only at military level, but also at echelons above.

So thanks, chum, for being here. And to my left is Lieutenant General Thorsten Poschwatta, who I’ve also had a chance to work with when I was over at USAFE, who comes to us from the German operational command, where he’s been working there for several years and had an opportunity to work with him at CAOC Uedem and across the German Air Force. So Thorsten, thank you very much for being here. And Brigadier General Chris McFarland, who’s now the USAFE A5.

Again, a lot of experience in the F-15 and a little F-35 time as well, but been at USAFE now for a bit and working plans and programs there. And to all three of you, thank you very much for being here this afternoon. The topic’s a good one in that, as you all know, the threats have continued to evolve out there and changing every day, almost before our eyes. Additionally, as we have worked through those specific threat changes, we’ve had an opportunity to see what has happened down in Ukraine, offering us some other lesson learned. I would also say as we’ve looked at other world events across the Middle East, also reminding ourselves the importance of protecting our bases. Importantly, while we’ve done that, I think the collective team have moved forward, and I would say that even back in my time back at USAFE and AFCENT, we were starting to develop the idea of agile combat employment.

And then as we looked at who was doing what across the services, how we would do that together continues to be an area that we continue to talk about, one that is directly related to this topic. So I thought I’d start out with the NATO perspective from Mr. Goffus and allow him a couple minutes to talk through his perspectives on that. Over to you.

Thomas Goffus:

Thanks, Cobra, and thanks for the opportunity. I think this is an absolutely critical topic. And I think part of this is it jumps us into the world of innovation that is the reason why Ukraine is still in this war. And innovation is a fundamentally different way of doing business from the way we’ve done it before. I worked with one of the founders of the company, Sky Fortress, that put together the acoustic sensors that on a nightly basis track over 500 drones. They now have 17,000 plus sensors across Ukraine, and we are talking about software defined capabilities like that bothersome thing on your phone where you have to update it, your system needs updated.

They do that on a nightly basis. They tweak the algorithms on a nightly basis. And I know Cobra’s old enough to remember when we were all excited when we would get the new tape. That’s how old we are. And the new tape was once a year, and if it was really critical, we might get one every six months, and they’re doing this nightly on the battlefield. The two things that I take away from that experience, one, that the guy I met that set this up looked like he hadn’t slept in three months because he hadn’t slept in three months. Every night, he was over the shoulder with the actual operators. Innovators and operators have to talk directly to each other to get this right, to keep up at the speed of relevance.

And the second thing is that I asked him, I said, “Did your government define requirements for these acoustic sensors?” And he goes, “No. Our friends, our family, our neighbors were dying, and so we went out and put something together and made it work.” So defining the operational challenge rather than a detailed list of requirements where if the airplane has to fly 500 knots and it flies 499, it’s a fail. That’s not how innovation works. We cannot let perfect get in the way of good. So the innovation challenge is there.

The first piece that that highlighted for me, as the assistant secretary general for operations, 70% of my time, 60 to 70% was supporting Ukraine. My number one project was counter drone. It was an obvious need. This is at the beginning of 2022, and we were constrained at NATO because if you provided assistance to Ukraine that was lethal or kinetic, everybody was afraid we would become a party to the conflict. We would be involved in the war.

Now that has proven totally unfound, but I was constrained to electronic warfare systems. We found top end European solution. It took us three months from go to, we’re about ready to deliver. Before I delivered, I went to the Ukrainians and talked to the Ukrainian operators, fresh from the battlefield, lieutenant colonel. And I said, “I need to know if this is what you really need and want.” And when I got done, one colonel raised his hand. I thought he was going to scrape the ceiling and he goes, “You asked for it.” He goes, “None of this stuff is going to work.” And I said, “What?” He goes, “That’s three months ago. This battle changes every six weeks.” The drone battle changes every six weeks. It was counterdrone equipment and it was EW equipment. That’s how fast we have to be able to move. So that was kind of lesson one.

Lesson two, the good news is that at least in Europe, our European allies have gotten religion on IAMD and on counter drone. After four years of war, that’s all it took. So a little frustrated, took four years, but the glass is half full right. They want to get something done. Here’s the problem. They haven’t defined what they want to get done. Drones, that’s the problem. 20 drones came across the border-ish on the 9th and 10th of September into Poland. That was step one.

Step two, London, Berlin, Copenhagen all got shut down by drone incursions, thousands of flights canceled. And so everybody went out and started spending money. They asked Einstein, “If you had an hour to save the world, how would you spend your hour?” And he said, “Well, I spent 55 minutes defining the problem and five minutes solving it.” We skipped the 55 minutes and went right to the five minutes. That’s one of the problems.

The other thing we’ve discovered is that most of the expertise on counterdrone is not in the military. It’s in law enforcement. About 15 years ago, prison officials discovered that they couldn’t figure out where 50% of the contraband was coming from. And then they went, “Oh, that’s where it’s coming from.” Organized crime has a lot of money. They innovate hundreds of drone incursions every night. They’re the best operators for doing this. In the US, it’s the Bureau of Prisons under DOJ. The second-biggest owner and operator of counter drone equipment is DEA. The third is the Secret Service. Notice I haven’t said the military yet. So we need to steal that. One of their biggest lessons learned is most of this stuff doesn’t work. They do demos. They don’t do testing, meaning a very pristine environment, and then they put it in the real world and it doesn’t work.

Some of you are old enough to remember we went through this with Counter-IED back in the day. It’s a similar kind of function there. So the very last piece that I wanted to give you was the biggest challenge I think in NATO, the biggest operational challenge that ties all this together in integrated air missile defense and counter drone is sharing data. Data sharing is the number one fight for NATO in the next five years, but that doesn’t mean we have five years to solve it. We need to start solving it tonight.

And by the way, the solutions are out there. The technology is there. This is culture and process that we got to get right. Because I went to AIRCOM two weeks after the drone incursion and they had everything laid out. They know exactly what happened. And I said, “Did the F-35 bubbas that were trying to take down the drones, did they have this data?” And they said, “No, but it was there.” And they said, “Yeah, we just had to go everywhere and find it.” So real time data sharing is that biggest fight. Thanks, Cobra.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. And General Poschwatta, opening comments and initial thoughts please.

Lt. Gen. Thorsten Poschwatta:

Yeah. Thank you, Cobra. Thank you for being here. Perhaps I shortly touched what I’m doing. You mentioned it already. I have three tasks. I’m the CAOC commander in Uedem that is basically the responsibility for the air space and also the Alps until the North Cape from the Baltic States until Iceland. So quite big responsibility at the moment. And I will talk on drone incursions later on. And the other thing is the German air component commander and also with that at the JFEC commander on the German side. And the third task, and you know it very well, is the GPC executive director. That’s a NATO COE, a think tank. So that three tasks give me a lot of synergy to put lessons identified from operations into the think tank and think about solutions. So that keeps me busy right at the moment. When we’re talking about the subject today, forward airbase defense, it’s not a singular isolated task.

It’s forward airbase defense is integrated task into the NATO air and missile defense system. So we can’t look at it isolated. You might think, well, we can have base defense around the fence, but that doesn’t solve the problem. You need the whole system with radar sensors, with QRA fighter aircraft surface-to-air missiles to solve it. And when I was thinking about the subject, I thought, why are we talking about forward airbase defense? Because in the scenarios we are encountering at the moment, it’s about airbase defense because we have a 360 degree threat we are facing. We have hypersonic missiles, we have long range ballistic missiles. So the forward base bases are same certain as the basis in the middle of the country. So we should look on all of them. And the example was the spiderweb thing where Ukraine was able to go deep into Russian’s territory and launch their drones from the trucks.

And you mentioned already at the moment, we have drones at the civilian airports and so on. So the threat is already in our countries in Europe and that’s what we are facing and that’s why we have to see how we defend our basis. So for me, always we compare or always take Israel as the best example. They have a perfect defense, they have the iron dome. That is for Europe is an illusion. We never get the perfect defense there. So we have to think about other solutions or additional solutions over the integrated missile defense system and therefore it was a good concept. And basically, you, Cobra, brought it into AIRCOM when you were the AIRCOM commander, the Agile combat employment. And that is something we are doing at the moment, very much training it at the frontline on the eastern flank. And we are having building up a concept in the German Air Force also to have for every MOB, like two DOBs we can use.

And the thing is not only using the DOBs to get the aircraft fueled up and then go back to the MOB. No, we have to empower the DOBs with all the essential logistics stuff and so we can fly wartime mission from the DOB. And that helps to be unpredictable and not having only the MOBs as fixed target. We gave up and I grew up in the old Cold War. I’m like 45 years in the Air Force now. I grew up that we had still highway strips as landing strips. We gave that all up. And actually we don’t need it. We have enough civilian airfields and military airfields that are not in service anymore that we have to empower now for these capabilities. By the way, Finland and Sweden is still doing that with the highway strips. They have a lot of highway steps they are using, but also they have the aircraft that are suitable for that.

So the Agile Combat Employment is for me very important for having a concept to have a vertical dispersal that helps a lot. When talking about for the airbase defense, I have a good example, and that goes in conjunction with what you mentioned, Tom. I’m also responsible for the NSATU mission. And NSATU is a NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine. And we have a hub in Poland that is very close to the Ukraine border. And of course for us, it’s very important to protect it.

And there we have a system established with NASAMS, with Patriots, with a rotating QRA aircraft in Poland, like the F-35s from the Netherlands. They were there on the 10th of September. And I was the authorized commander at that time. And not at that time, I’m the authorized commander anyway for Northern Europe. So as soon as we have an air space violation, I will be called by my Tiger phone and I have to make the decision how to act.

And that night, it was for me, it was important, hey, to get a shootdown on the drones. To make a statement, a clear signal, we are able to do that. But of course we did it with an F-35 with an expensive missile. So that is the big capability gap we have at the moment to see how we can find scalable solution to attack the drones, not every time was F-35 was a high expensive missile. So that’s on that issue. But I think I’ve said enough for the beginning, I have still a couple of more issues.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

All right. Thank you very much for that. And your point’s well taken on the base defense versus the forward piece, particularly across Europe. So great points there. Thank you. And over to you, Brigadier General McFarland.

Brig. Gen. Chris McFarland:

Yes, sir. Thanks again for the opportunity. Thanks to the esteemed panelists here. On behalf of General Hines, who I know he wishes he could be here, I’m just happy to be a part of this discussion. And I’ll do my best to basically give his perspective and his unique perspective that a few gentlemen have as well. And General Harrigian is COM, NATO AIRCOM, and then also his COM USAFE-AFAFRICA. Sir, you talked well, General Harrigian, about the changing character of war and what we’ve seen over specifically the past four years in the European theater and all you have alluded to most of the main points that I was going to describe, the first one being that there really are no sanctuaries or the sanctuaries are so far back as to make them irrelevant to the fight. And we talk about INDOPACOM about the tyranny of distance.

We have a little bit of a tyranny of proximity in the theater that we’re operating out of. And so whether it’s our main operating bases, our forward operating locations, we’ve got to be able to make sure that we can generate and execute combat power, combat air power in order to meet SACEUR’s intent. And so that’s what we’re looking to do. I will say from a US Air Force perspective, USAFE has been at the forefront of getting after what the chief of staff said yesterday, which is readiness today and putting systems today. So we’ve done quite a bit of experimentation. We’re continuing with that, but not alone. We’re doing that with our joint and our allied partners. And to a lot of the points that have been described here, I think we’ve learned a lot in the past few years as we look at how the threat has matured, a tiered approach is what we’re looking to do in integrated air and missile defense.

And that tiered approach, as General Poschwatta said, goes all the way from hypersonics down to first person drones. So there’s a lot of work to be done and there’s a lot of work to move forward on getting after the different capability gaps and just everything across the. MLPF spectrum. So I look forward to discussing those things and hoping to bring that you safety perspective here. Thanks, sir.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, thanks. Appreciate that. So as a follow-up, we talked info sharing some of the challenges associated even with the weapons we have. As you look at it from organizing your forces and even at the NATO level, and then I’ll call them training, rehearsals, those types of activities that build the muscle memory, the practice required to go execute this mission set, which frankly it’s challenging. I’ll use that term. I’m wondering, and Nasty, maybe if we start with you a little bit from that and talk about how you guys are approaching that from a USAFE perspective.

Brig. Gen. Chris McFarland:

Absolutely. Yes, sir. So again, we’re kind of building the airplane a little bit as we’re flying it right now. And as most people probably understand as they hear things from the building, JIATF-401 and HAF A3 is taking the lead from the Air Force perspective on how we’re going to organize training and equip to get after this. But in USAFE specifically, we’ve been putting together different systems to try to get after what we need to do. And then again, having the wings, empowering the wings to take that equipment right now while we don’t have a full Air Force organizational construct and figure out how they’re going to make the mission happen. And I’m going to tell you right now, they’re doing it absolutely in fantastic fashion. When I look across some wings, I’ll do a few specifics here. First of all with RAF Lakenheath, and then also with Spangdahlem, we’ve given them equipment.

They’ve taken a lot of the equipment that we’ve had and some of the experimentation that we’ve done, and they’ve modified their wing operations center concept in order to be able to do effective airbase defense, at least through part of the overall kill chain of what we’re able to do. So that’s where we are right now. A lot of work being done. To General Poschwatta’s point as well, we are well integrated with Host Nation. From Germany standpoint as well, we’ve got several TTXs and several FTXs over the next year or so that we’re getting after this, integrated with the Bundeswehr and also with the Bundes with the federal police, which as we described, a lot of this can be a law enforcement problem depending on what the threat actually is. So we’re well integrated across there. I will say as well though, the C2 challenge that Mr. Goffus described is real, right?

And making sure that we can pass that in not only across classification levels, but also to the right people, to all of our allies, whether it be across sense making sense and acting. And so there’s a lot of work left to be done there. That is a hurdle, but I think overall we’ve got the initiative to get after it and we’ve got a good plan. So that’s where we are right now.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

General Poschwatta, any perspectives? I’ll say first from the German Air Force perspective, and then maybe even from the CAOC perspective at Uedum with respect to how you’re training for some of this.

Lt. Gen. Thorsten Poschwatta:

Well, the German Air Force perspective is the same as the NATO perspective because the German Air Force or Germany was never a nation that was doing a mission on its own. So we are always integral part of NATO. So we try to do our training always according to NATO procedures and together with NATO. And since I’ve collocated my air component command with the CAOC, so we mostly do all our missions via the CAOC tasking. So we do a lot of air task orders on a daily, weekly basis, much more than we have done in the past. And the war in the Ukraine learned us at the beginning, we were doing a lot of air policy to show the Russians here. We are there as NATO, we are there as Germany and we deployed from the German side. We deployed in the first two or three hours beginning of the war, the Eurofighters already to the front states.

So that is very important. And we realized, and that was still, I think, your time when you were commander, when we said, “Hey, air policing is not a good training for the crews. We have to do the so called high calorie training.” And that’s what we now integrated to train according to HR combat employment, starting a mission, for example, in Laage in Germany, landing in somewhere in Poland, getting refueled, getting weapons and flying to Estonia. So that is important, but much more important than the flying training because we were used to train always as air crews together and we had the red flags exercises, a lot of experience. Important is also on the technical and logistical side to train and to get interoperable. And the main thing I think is interoperability and that’s the key challenge we have, having 32 NATO nations and in the past with a lot of national interests in building systems and it’s very important to get much more interoperable.

And that’s what we are training and we are standing up an air defender exercise next year again. We had one three years ago because Germany is basically in the center of Europe and this is the logistical hub when we have operations and when we have to fight the threat against Russia and then we have to train all that getting US forces to our bases, other NATO nations and to train how we can handle that also on the logistical and technical side.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Great. And how about from the NATO headquarters as you’ve been watching this and seeing how collectively through the exercises and even the real world activities, any perspectives or even at the, I’ll call it the minister level that you’d be willing to highlight for us?

Thomas Goffus:

Yeah. Super, Cobra. I first wanted to just talk quickly about one of the things that the generals both of them keep bringing up. When we think about integrated air missile defense, almost everybody immediately goes to patriot missile batteries and that kind of thing. So that is one aspect of integrated air missile defense. That’s the act of defense, shooting the arrows. We skip what we used to be really, really good at a long time ago, which is passive defense. And that’s what we’re talking about here with the interoperability and the dispersal. So dispersal is one piece of that. Deception’s another piece of that, especially in the EW spectrum. That’s absolutely critical that we get on that, especially with the ESA radars that can be reprogrammed to either look like a Patriot radar or it can look like an NS400. And then hardening, obviously. Well, that’s one of the things that Operation Spiderweb highlighted.

And so that’s a piece of it. And I have a friend, his name’s Mike Hotmeier. I think he coined this term. It’s called backyard dome. And that means somebody puts a bunch of drones in a truck and they drive up to a mile or two away, and that’s what Operation Spiderweb eventually did. So we’re going to have to get good at that. And just like he said, I had the same thought. Forward, whenever you have weapons to go as far as they do these days, it’s just airbase defense and we’re going to have to get it out. And then the other challenge for NATO is actually active offense. That’s where you shoot the archer. In 30, in all the years of the Cold War, there was never appetite at the minister level to do active offense. And some nations are more sensitive to it than others, but getting 32 to agree to do a strike deep into Russian territory, it won’t be easy.

So after 9/10 September, on the 12th of September is when SACEUR, when Grynkewich stood up and said, “We’re setting up Eastern Century, which AIRCOM is running and doing a great job at.” Simultaneous with that, General Donahue, the LANDCOM commander, was setting up something called the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line, the first piece of which is acoustic sensors for counterdrone. All of this has a lot of counterdrone kind of focus to it. And at the minister level, to your point, it’s the first time that I didn’t have to force-feed allies. This is really important integrated air missile defense. They were telling me, “Hey, this is really important. What are we doing about it? ” Again, the operational challenge definition has to be there and it goes everywhere from very small drones and individual numbers coming after basis to a swarm of class two and class three kind of drones.

At NATO, it was frustrating for me because we have 13 different parts of the elephant trying to do counter drone. And all of a sudden it’s sexy and in any bureaucracy, that’s where the money is. So everybody went there. So we have ACT here in Norfolk, Virginia that is doing testing and there’s three different words. There’s demonstrating, and that’s where you make the counter drone stuff. So you go out into the desert where there’s no RF interference or anything, you put up a drone and then you show your scope to the general and go, “See, there’s the drone.” That’s demonstrating. That’s not testing because it’s not a real world environment. Testing is where you have the real stuff, but you also have the drones and the effectors instrumentalized so that you can actually pull data and figure out what’s really going on. And then the third piece is experimentation, which is different in and of itself.

Right now, I think ACT is doing a lot of experimentation. What they’re trying to do is sort through. It is a crowded field out there. Like encounter IED, there are industry sees that there’s opportunity, but we need to sort through that in a meaningful way. I was told by Interpol that’s been testing for over 10 years that in the last five years, they’ve seen about a 10%, five years, a 10% improvement in counter drone systems. That’s it. That’s crazy. So we need to learn from Ukraine where to do that. So ACT is doing something, obviously AICOM’s in the middle of it, LANDCOM’s in the middle of it. We have the EU that stood up the drone wall, and I went and talked to the EU about what the drone wall is, and they’re still trying to spell UAS and get all that right before they move out.

They have money, they have access to industry, but this isn’t something that scales well because innovation isn’t like building tanks and airplanes. So they’re trying to figure that out. And then we have DIANA, a Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, and they wanted to do experimentation. So where we put this is a division, a sister division to mine in ops is called Defence Industry, Innovation and Armaments Division. It’s led by Tarja Jaakkola, who’s a former Finnish National Armaments Director to try and organize the horses. And I think anybody that’s tried to approach this with their government, it’s frustrating, not just within the military, but within the government on getting a holistic answer to it. I think that’s one of the first steps. Define the problem, the operational challenge. And then number two is assign roles and responsibilities. Otherwise, you have too much overlap, too much duplication for efforts.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yes. Let me just follow up on the innovation point. I think collectively everyone in here would agree innovation, particularly when baked at the lowest echelon is very helpful. The problem we inevitably have, and I’m going to look at you a little bit, Nasty, here, is how you turn that into a program that actually sticks that people can train to and then mature the technology in a way that iterates to the level that’s required. I would argue we’ve got prototyping going on all over the place. Great. But how do you make that ultimately reach the capability that we’re looking for without it being a one-off? Any thoughts on that?

Brig. Gen. Chris McFarland:

I think you hit the nail on the head on one of the big problems on really making this thing something that’s repeatable and executable. We’re an O&M command, and so I’m not trying to pass the buck on that.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Oh, go ahead. I did it all the time. I’m like, “Anybody from ACC in here?” Come on, you’re the HAF.

Brig. Gen. Chris McFarland:

I mean, I will give props to ACC in HAF and JIATF-401 for the work they’re doing to set up the system that you just described. At some point, I think the best way I can answer it, at least from where we are right now, is you got to start somewhere. And so what we did was we put together a team of innovative folks, we empowered them, we gave them resources and said, “Get after this problem set and do the best you can.” We’ve done two iterations of what we call the operational utility assessment USA if you were going to start a third here in the summertime. And I saw the beginning as I showed up at USAFE last summer, I saw both of those. And the amount of improvement that we had, so I have a long way to go, but the amount of improvement that we had was really, really impressive.

When you’re doing this mission, let’s just stick with just the base defense at this time, you’ve got to be able to sense, you got to be able to make sense and you have to be able to act. We started off as we were going through putting hodgepodge systems together, finding different people with different talents, and it would take us Somewhere on the order of several minutes to, first of all, find, to track, and then identify a potential target. We don’t have those minutes based on all the discussion that we’ve been leading up to. By the second OUA, using some very specific tools, and I have to highlight here, human machine teaming. This problem said, especially with the volume that we’re seeing in Ukraine, we cannot do this in manual fashion. And so applying some of those tools, we got it down to seconds. There’s a lot more work to be done there.

And then of course, there’s the connection with our joint allied partners to be able to do that since it makes sense. The place where I’ll say for a gap that we have right now, and we were talking about this obviously with the panel right before, is in effecting. And that’s something we’re looking to get after very, very quickly. We’ve had some very good success with Ground-launched APKWS. We’re testing those out in a few different theaters. We’re getting after directed energy, high power microwave, things of that nature. But there’s a lot more work to be done in that area. And I think we all know based on the things that Mr. Goffus brought up about all the different UASs flying over bases in Europe, and I think we’ve had near 0% success rate in intercepting any one of those things. So a lot of work to do there.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Great. General Poschwatta, any thoughts on that as you looked at the innovation versus how you train to it and get it to mature over time?

Lt. Gen. Thorsten Poschwatta:

If you would have asked me one or two years ago, I would say the glass is half empty or more than half empty. Now I think it’s half full seeing it from the German national side because our system was stood up in old times when we had a lot of time to procure things, to develop things, a lot of administrative bureaucratic hurdles to overcome, and that has changed. So we really got with the war in the Ukraine, we got the message, we have to get faster. And we have to… There are a lot of smart guys out there. They find great solutions. And you have to take the risk to say, “Hey, we try that out. We don’t make a lot of experimentation and testing, and then we have to write a lot of papers and go through some instances.” So to get the things in the field.

And it was shown like in Ukraine, how fast you can do things, put missiles under their aircraft, under the Russian-built aircraft. Normally in German Air Force, it was integration of a missile also took normally one and a half years or something like that. So we are speeding up these processes, but we still can become much better on that one. Good. Tom, anything else?

Thomas Goffus:

Yeah. Cobra, I think you hit it right on the head. Lots of prototyping going on. It’s great stuff. I call it the garage bands. Lots of them out there. Really smart people doing really cool stuff. Once they know the operational challenges, they come up with solutions and the problem then becomes adoption and scaling. And I’ve seen this in two different ways. One, the Ukrainians came to us. We have a lessons learned center in NATO that is in Bydgoszcz, Poland. And we were there and I asked the Deputy Minister of Defense who’s responsible for European integration and a one star fresh from the battlefield who commanded troops on the battlefield. And I said, “What are your biggest operational challenges?” And at that point, it was a little over a year ago, it was glide bombs, the new fiber optic drones that are on the battlefield.

And then the third one is cheap effectors, and that’s kind of where the problem set was. So Admiral Vandier, SACT, puts out a RFP. He gets 70 companies that give him a PowerPoint solution to glide bombs. He picks three and he says, “You each have three months to put together a prototype. We’re going to the battlefield in Ukraine. We’re going to test them.” At least two of the three were viable right off the bat. And again, don’t let perfect get in the way of good and Ukrainians wanted it. And now the question was, how do we adopt it and scale it? Where’s the money come from? And it’s harder than you think.

So a lot of focus on the prototype, but we need to focus on this to get it better. The other model that I saw was these acoustic sensors, 17,000 of them. I said, “Well, I want some of those. They’re relatively cheap.” And what we were looking at was a set of these sensors. They’re not target quality track, but they’re good I&W to queue your high-end stuff to be able to get target quality track. And from Norway all the way to Romania, anything that touches Russia, Belarus or Ukraine, 5,000 kilometers, 100 kilometers deep, the cost would be 30 to 40 million euros total.

So that’s five to 10 million a country, depending on how long your border is. And two things that happened there. One is, some of the countries went, “No, no, no, we’re going to do our own.” And I said, “You guys are crazy. These are combat proven, combat refined three and a half years on the battlefield. And every year on the battlefield is at least five on the test range given how we do business.” And so you’re giving up 15 years of experience, cheap experience. And my big push was adopt the thing, because this is about innovation, adopt the things, buy them, use it as a test case, learn from it, and then you can build your own. This was my argument with Germany back when they were trying to decide what the tornado replacement was. And it was General Badia, who’s a really good guy.

And after he had memorized my F-35 speech of the F-35 as a sensor and as a data fusion platform, the third time I repeated back my points to him, I said, “So you’re going to build a sixth generation fighter and you’ve never operated a fifth generation fighter. You need the experience, the hands-on experience of doing that.” So that was one problem not built here, and we need to get over that. The other problem was when one of the nations says, “Yeah, I’d like that.” The price came in differently than they thought, and the company, small company, didn’t know how to price things because it was non-proprietary kit.

And I sat on a panel with General Breedlove a little over a year ago, and he said, “I’ve learned one thing from five decades of doing national security, and that is proprietary kit equals mission failure. That is closed architecture kit. If you want to integrate quickly, it needs to be open architecture. That’s where we need to go.” But the profit model is built on proprietary equipment and paying for the upgrades. So we need a new model. I don’t know what that is. I’ve been institutionalized for four decades in various parts of the government and NATO, but I think we need to move to that if we’re going to innovate quickly enough.

Grynkewich has one quick story in his F-16. He’s working with two different companies on a display. And he said, “If this color were brighter and that one were darker or this one was red and make that one green, and then give me another page with this on it, that would really help.” One company took him a month to do that. The next company took him one day. The next morning he had it fixed. We need to get to that one day kind of iteration cycle.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah, that’s great. So we’re going to close out here. I’ll give you guys some closing comments. I would be remiss though, if I didn’t remind everybody, part of this airbase defense piece is contested logistics. My point was, “Hey, it’s great to survive, but we actually got to generate combat power from these places. And if you don’t have weapons and the ability to sustain your whatever platform you’re operating, you’re not going to get the job done.”

The second piece of it, to your point, and I think you all hit on it, but even if you have the data, you better have the data going to the right people at the right place to make the decision and your ability to battle manage it. If you can’t do that, then you’re going to waste munitions and you’re going to find yourself in a really bad place. So all that is important. Can’t cover it all in 40 minutes. Chum, you just talked for 10 minutes, so I’m not going to give you closing comments here, but I’ll go over. Nasty, you got any closing comments for the team?

Brig. Gen. Chris McFarland:

I just want to say thanks again for the opportunity to be here. I think we covered most of the problems. There is a lot of work to be done, but I’m very optimistic watching how quickly things have been iterating in the theater and outside the theater. And as Mr. Goffus said, I think the theater and really the Western world has kind of woken up to this area that we didn’t think was a priority and really underinvested in or didn’t invest at all. So thanks again and looking forward to continuing working on this.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Appreciate it. Thorsten.

Lt. Gen. Thorsten Poschwatta:

Short comment only. For me, most important is cohesion of NATO. So stick together, interoperability and otherwise I’m looking very, very positive also into the future. We have to solve some problems, but we will solve them.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

I agree with you. Anything else you…

Thomas Goffus:

Innovate, innovate, innovate. Operators talk directly to the innovators, deal with operational challenges and data sharing. If we don’t get past that really quickly, we’re in a big world of hurt.

Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, USAF (Ret.):

Exactly right. Well, General McFarland and Mr. Goffus, thanks for jumping in late minute here and getting the job done. Hey, this topic isn’t going away and ultimately it’s going to be on the airman industry, the collective team that sorts through this problem and iteratively learns as we go forward and doesn’t miss an opportunity to listen to the operators as we develop capabilities and then train to it, train to it, train to it, and we’ll be ready. Thank you all for your time. Have a great afternoon. We’ll see y’all later.