Long-Range Strike—With Speed

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Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Well, welcome everybody. Dave Nahom, retired Lieutenant General. I go by Abu, and I want to thank you all for coming here for what is a very important topic. And I guess just a two-minute intro. I certainly don’t want to minimize other theaters like Europe, Middle East, and others, but when I think of long range strike, my mind goes straight to the Pacific. And a lot of my questions are going to kind of key on the Pacific. I added with speed on there, we talk a lot about the speed for an effect, the speed of the bomber, the delivery platform to get there, the speed of the weapon, not just for to get to the effect at a earlier time, but also to evade defenses for the long range strike.

But I also want to look at speed in another way. As we look at speed to ramp, speed to scale, speed to get the war fighter what they need. So something we’ll be looking at. We’ll probably touch on a few things, maybe denied PNT, position navigation timing. I want to talk about moving targets, not just moving across the desert, but certainly things that move across the water. Certainly want to talk about other things that the long range strike from the Air Force has worked in the past, namely Midnight Hammer. And certainly we will lean on some of the delivery platforms, the bombers, the fighters, but we also want to spend some time on the weapons.

We got a pretty good panel for you today. And I know we are in some order up there and we’re not in that order. We just all sat down at random. But first of all, some good friends all around too. From the Deputy Commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, Lieutenant General Jason Armagost. Armo is as experienced as they come in our Air Force, in the bomber platforms and long range strike. He’s somebody, when I was in uniform, I leaned on quite a bit when I did have questions.

Also in uniform, we have Brigadier General Brian Laidlaw, the Director of Operations Air Combat Command. So not only is he working on the force provider level right now, but Swinger comes from a huge background, not only in the Pacific, but in Europe, and obviously working a lot of these issues over the years.

Mr. Tom Jones, president of Aeronautic Systems of Northrop Grumman. Northrop Grumman’s one of our, obviously, the Air Force’s key partners as they build not only the current delivery platform, the B-2, but our future delivery platform, the B-21. And so we certainly are glad Tom could join us today.

And then Mr. Mike Rothstein, Vice President of Strategy Requirements, Air Weapon Sensors, Lockheed Martin, MFC. Skeeter not only brings an industry background, but Skeeter also spent a lot of time in the Pacific in uniform, and certainly brings a nice perspective there.

So I want to welcome all our panelists and thank you so much for being out here today. Let’s start with the next generation of weapons. And Armo, you’re sitting next to me, so I’ll start with you. Think about the delivery platform and the weapon. What are the advances you’re looking for? What is important to the war fighter? What’s important to the combatant commander as well?

Lt. Gen. Jason Armagost:

All right. Yeah, so I think one of the underlying tenants… Oh, by the way, I’m very happy to be on this panel as well because Skeeter was my first weapons officer at Misawa, and had great experiences with him. Tom and I have been on, I don’t know how many panels now. But Swinger also did some work together when I was at 8th Air Force and he was at PACAF. So great panel. And Abu, we go pretty far back now.

Okay. So speed I think is going to be a theme here as well. And you called it outright, but I want to actually open up the aperture on speed a little bit and remind folks that in strategy, so if we’re going to talk about strategy and force design, all the things that go into being able to execute a credible hold-at-risk strategy against our adversaries, speed is a key component of every military principle, and it is arguably the most unforgiving element of strategy. So the runway behind us doesn’t allow us to build airplanes faster or make decisions differently about the types of weapons or the types of platforms we mix them with.

Now that being said, target pairing to weapon platform matters greatly. That in fact, I think is the essential element of how you build a robust and resilient force capable of going with the range, payload, and capacity. But also, from a speed perspective, the more you can open up the aperture of axis of attack or axis of threat presentation, that has an element of speed in and of itself because it complicates the picture for the adversary, whether it’s an air-to-air fight or holding targets at risk on the ground across a wide front. And so it’s really, really important, as we look at the physics of carriage, meaning if we can ideally tailor weapon to platform and maximize the strike efficiency you gain from carriage capacity, I think that’s really, really important.

One of the fascinating things I think that the Chinese did, if you look back at kind of the open source missiles that they are carrying on various platforms, they kind of did a break point in about 2013 where they started building much bigger missiles and carrying them on non-stealthy platforms in most cases. But it’s interesting because I think they came to the same conclusion. If you get the weapon platform pairing correct, you can do a broad array of things across depth and range. And so it’s just a good example of the choices we make today playing into the future force design and being meaningful across a strategy.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

And I guess we’ll just go… And Tom, same question really. Just give me an industry perspective on the advancements that you see, what the war fighters asking for, what the combatant commanders are asking for, what the services are asking for, and where industry’s going.

Tom Jones:

Right. So I think I’ll take a little bit more of a technologist look at where I see things going, where we’re looking at investing as a company. I think number one, I believe we’re going to see a continued growth in the application of and the utility of autonomy as we look at how we deliver capabilities to the war fighter and how they’re able to utilize those, bringing fires to the enemy. That’s an area. We now have our Lotus IQ, which I think there’s just some press releases went out on yesterday where we’re partnering with over half a dozen small AI companies trying to figure out how do we figure out what the utility of these algorithms are through experimentation and doing that rapidly and cost effectively. So I think autonomy, we’re going to see that continuing to grow.

I’m a firm believer, and I might be a little bit biased here, but I think that stealth is going to continue to be table stakes in a lot of what we take going forward. It’s interesting. It seems like almost every year you’ll hear someone come up with a, “Well, stealth is dead because…” I think the latest thing is quantum sensing, things like that. If you look at it from a technologist perspective, no matter what the phenomenology is, in RF it’s stealth, but it’s basically you have a phenomenology and you have a way of sensing it, you have a way of processing it, and that can lead to being able to detect. In that chain, there’s different ways you can break it. In the RF spectrum, we use stealth technologies. I won’t get into them, but I think everyone knows what those are. Same thing with any of these new and evolving fields. And that’s something that all of us out in industry are looking at continually combating so that we can offer the US war fighter continued survivability going out there.

I think mobility is an area of a lot of interest. In particular, I see one of the next big things as we recap the bomber force with B-21, as we recap the fighter capability with F-47, really the next big question for me is what do we do about tanking, refueling? And there’s a number of areas we are looking at there. We just announced last week our partnership with Embraer, we’re working with JetZero, so a number of different areas that I see there.

And then I guess kind of finally in the survivability area, I think this idea potentially of bullets hitting bullets for enhanced survivability, as we look at bringing cognitive EW, cognitive comms into the RF spectrum, it’s going to be essential that we continue doing that, but it’s going to get increasingly complex and having other self-protection mechanisms in addition to stealth to fall back on, I think is an interesting area. So those are kind of some of the things we’re looking at and thinking about.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. Okay. Swinger, we hear a lot about long-range fires, long-range strike. Why is Air Force long-range strike so critical? What differentiates the Air Force from the other services? Not to put down the Army and the Navy and their contributions, but what sets Air Force long-range strike apart?

Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:

Yeah, perfect, sir. Thanks, I appreciate that question. Like General Armagost, I want to start off by saying thank you for the privilege of sitting with these gentlemen here on this panel. What I would say first, before I jump into the answer is as you alluded to in your opening comments, I’ve had the privilege of serving both the air component and EUCOM and then most recently the air component INDOPACOM. And I think it’s important to start the conversation with plan A remains deterrence. We spend a lot of time building up our capability, our credible deterrence to ensure that we never have to get into the wars that we train for. But to be clear that the deterrence remains plan A.

When you ask why is the long range fires and the capability to do it with speed so important? I think that’s pretty simple. What it does is it gives the President of the United States options that nobody else has. The secretary talked about this yesterday in his speech when he said, “We simply do things that others cannot.” It’s a tool that we have that others don’t. It enables us to do great things.

What I really appreciate from your question there is a discussion of how we fit into the joint force scheme of maneuvers. The truth is on the modern day battlefield, there’s plenty of fires to go around. I think long gone are the days where one platform or one service largely wins the day. Across the planet, across the COCOMs, every one of our solutions is a joint solution. I think today success largely rests on the ability to carefully choreograph an integrated joint scheme of maneuver. And that is not an easy thing to happen.

But the question that you ask is, what is air power’s role? What do we expect out of the air component? And I think throughout history, we’ve proven that often, if not always, the joint force turns to the air component because we have the ability to generate massive fires against the enemy center of gravity at the time and place of the joint force commanders’ choosing. We’re able to do it in a flexible way and we’re agile. We can pivot much more quickly with the fires that we can bring to bear. Everything from a troops in combat situation to a time sensitive target. We have flexibility and we can move around the battle space and we can bring those masses of fire against enemy center of gravity.

Largely, that becomes the air components contribution. That’s our value proposition to the joint force. I think said differently, the joint force turns on the air component to ensure that we force the enemy to keep their heads down in a way that they never get to come up for air, and that’s what we do.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. Okay, Skeeter, over the past couple years, the conversation of the speed of a weapon seems to be less of a conversation than speed to scale, speed to ramp. What is industry doing about that? Are they adjusting to that new paradigm?

Mike Rothstein:

Yeah, thanks, Abu. And again, thanks to my colleagues and friends up here. It’s good to be with you. And for all of you who made the longest trek, I think available here, that you came this far, so thanks for coming here too.

So speed to ramp and speed to scale, clearly that demand signal to industry is changing over the last several years. And industry ends up being a reflection of the demand signal that comes from generally what we consider to be one customer, which is the US government. You could break it down to services. And so I do see industry reacting both within our company at Lockheed, but really across. So even as I was talking with Glen Culler walking in, a tremendous amount of capital coming into this sector from unique ways that has not happened historically. And so now you have a lot of these, whether you want to call them startups, non-traditionals, are coming in with new thoughts and new ways of doing business, which frankly I think is good for the industry overall and good for the nation. And they’ll be able to do some things that some of the major primes can’t do. And likewise, the major primes can certainly do a lot of things that they can’t.

And then getting the capability, we’re also seeing a demand signal, whether you want to call it fly before you buy, which is don’t pitch us a concept on PowerPoint or with some engineering and no way behind it. Bring something that can work or at least a prototype or demo. And you’re seeing industry respond to that in ways that if you went back 5 or 10 years is very different. Once you have that capability, now you’re springboarding much faster into something that you could potentially field. And I’m seeing that react there too.

I think what is fundamentally important this whole conversation, though. Is it starts with a demand signal, and it starts with whether you want to call them attributes or requirements. And as the US Air Force, the US government is willing to trade, I don’t need it maybe as perfect as it’s always been. I don’t need it to be 20 years of warranty, shake, drop, rattle, blown up by a torpedo. Because if you want all that, you put yourself in a bespoke design with bespoke suppliers, and that takes time and effort. And to be able to prove all that reliability also takes time and effort.

So as the demand signal changes, you’re going to see industry change. And we’re doing it in certain ways. A quick example in long range strike, many of you heard about, we’re looking to invest in JASSM, which of course is a tried and true proven weapon, and how do we stretch it and add gas for the JASSM XR in the basic sense. We’re doing a lot more than that, but that’s also something we can do quickly. It’s not a new weapon start program. It’s a derivative of something there where 80, 90% of the engineering is already relying, so we can get to a solution faster.

And then on ramping to scale, I think we all need to think about… We’ve thought about design for performance always. When we’re on our A game, we think about design for manufacturing. But there’s another step there that says design for scalability, which is actually a higher order step than designing for manufacturing. They’re not the same thing. What can the supply chain withstand if I constrain myself to those things and back myself into the garage, that’s how we get after some of that.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Switching gears a little bit. Tom, certainly one of your products, the B-2 was featured in Operation Midnight Hammer. The B-2 crews, maintainers, and really all of Team Whiteman were our nation’s heroes that night. Talk about the role for industry in a short notice and rapidly development campaign like Midnight Hammer and where Northrop was in those events.

Tom Jones:

Yeah. Thank you very much, first of all, for acknowledgement of my team’s role in that. It was a great honor to help Global Strike pull off that phenomenal mission. And actually had the opportunity to go out and meet with the wing commander late last year just to kind of thank them for… They gave a lot of recognition to our team, which I thought was phenomenal. And the level of relationship that I saw between the Northrop Grumman sustainment team and the wing out there was just phenomenal. It’s quite frankly, unlike anything I think I’ve seen in 35 years at industry, which is great. Now the problem is I’m looking at it and go, “How can we make that more standard in terms of how we support our customer?”

In terms of the support they gave, it was very broad ranging. I think everything from helping with LO maintenance, helping getting the availability up, helping with mission planning, really it was all in. And I think it came from if a box needed to be packed and if there was only Northrop Grumman person there, that person packed the box because they were in there, they’re committed to the mission.

So I think those are some of the ways that we help contribute. Now, as great as all that is, I like to look forward to how we’ll be sustaining operations 10 years from now. I like to think we’d still be an integral part of the mission. Some of the advances we’re seeing with the B-21 in terms of reduced LO maintenance requirements, in terms of what we’re seeing in terms of decreased meantime to repair, the ability to be a daily flyer, hopefully we’ll take some of the things that we did here with the B-2, make that less critical so we can find other ways to add value.

And I think one of the really encouraging things are we’re continuing flight tests on B-21. Last year, 2025, we were able to accomplish as many flight hours in 30 days as we were able to accomplish in six months the previous year, which I think is a tremendous testament, number one, to the fidelity of the digital models, which help us anticipate how the system is going to perform. The performance of the system against the spec, because we’re not having to go back and fix a lot of things, which is great and certainly gives a lot of feeling of confidence that as we go forward, B-21 is going to be that daily flyer that we’ve been promising the general here for quite a few panels, right? I think that phrase has come up every one. So anyways, thank you.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

All right, thanks. Armo, let’s continue talking with the delivery platform. We know the future in the bomber, the B-21, and we’re hoping to have the numbers we need as a nation, but in the meantime, there are some challenges with bomber availability with the legacy platforms. Where do you see that? Obviously we’re not in an unclassed environment, but where do you see that as a leader in global strike and what can we do as a nation while we wait for the numbers of B-21s that we need?

Lt. Gen. Jason Armagost:

So I think probably quite simply, if you want something different than what you have, you have to do something different with what you have actually. So I’ll actually extend the answer that Tom gave on the B-2 relationship with Northrop and go back to when I was a captain in 2000. When I would go to a maintenance debrief after flying a sortie, there was the maintenance team and a Northrop rep sitting right there. And so that relationship has been very deep for very long actually. And I think it allows us to think differently as a uniform wearing portion of that community to approach problems and evolvement of a platform in a very unique and purposeful and meaningful way because we can move quickly together. And so that didn’t just happen for Midnight Hammer. There was a deep, deep, deep history of how that community and industry partner work together.

So that’s kind of the same approach we’re taking with literally everything. We have to look at what are we carrying? How are we carrying it? How are we going to do it differently on whether it’s the B-1, B-52, or B-2? What can we do with software differently? And the B-2 is another really good example where we’ve evolved the software from an OFP driven kind of six month drop rotation where you had to wait for capabilities to where you’ve separated the airworthiness component of the software and the mission component of software. And you can drop in a weapon, change the software load on the mission side and have almost an immediate capability.

So that comes from that relationship working over time, but the same things are happening in the B-1s and the B-52. And so we have to look at… I think it’s a pretty good assumption to make that if a weapon is made, it should be capable of being carried by a bomber, frankly. And going forward into the future, we need to open up the aperture about what that really truly means from a functional perspective. And so we’re thinking hard about that in the community. I think there’s a lot of good ideas that are shared across the Air Force actually on how we do that. And there’s some real opportunities, back to Skeeter’s point about… I’m pretty excited about the weapons enterprise writ large because we’re seeing things start to happen much quicker and in different ways than we have over the last five years, I would say for sure.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. So Swinger, kind of similar question with the ACC platforms in mind, because as we go into a large scale conflict in a place like the Pacific, there’ll be demands on the fighter fleet, Homeland Defense and other going on there. As you look at the future of the fighter, and certainly CCAs and unmanned platforms, are there ways that ACC is thinking about delivering effects differently, long range effects differently across Pacific?

Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:

The short answer is absolutely yes. We’re always looking for new and innovative ways to mass fires. I guess two thoughts come to mind. I think step one is filling your quiver with the arrows that you’re going to need to actually fire. And then step two, arguably the more important of the two, is how do you see to all of those fires once you have them in the quiver in order to actually generate the effect?

When it comes to the first part there about refilling your quiver, I think we saw yesterday, both from the secretary and the chief, the examples of where the combat Air Force’s mind is on this, the B-21s, the F-47s, CCAs and whatnot. I completely agree with General Armagost. I think the effort that we are going to refill our coffers with the actual weapons themselves, both the weapons that we have in the inventory today, as well as those that are on the near horizon that we’re trying to pull forward. We could talk EW, we could talk cyber. All of those things are arrows that go into the quiver.

But I would contend that the critical capability, and this is where we’re spending a lot of our time in ACC, is how do you choreograph all of those fires in order to generate the effects that we, as the air component, are going to be expected to be able to deliver? I think it’s fair to say in some cases, it’s going to be just as important for us to break kill chains as much as it is for us to be able to complete our own kill chains.

As you canvas some of the environments where we may find ourselves having to fight, I think the reality is that as we flow into theater, we’re going to have to disaggregate our forces. That could be a mix of geography in places like the Pacific. It’s certainly going to be driven by the threat, but as JFACs and JFCs set their theaters, we just have to settle for a disaggregated force. But in order to generate the effects that we’re talking about, whether it’s from long range or from forces in the field, we have to have the ability to command and control to reaggregate those forces, to generate that effect, safely recover those aircraft, and then disaggregate again in order to reconstitute and do it again.

Those cycles of aggregation and disaggregation over the course of the campaign are incredibly challenging and very hard to do. And they have to knit into the overall joint force scheme of maneuver as we look into it. So those are the things we’re looking at in ACC in order to mask those effects.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

And Tom, similar question. Again, I’m kind of giving you the industry follow-ons here, but from Northrup in industry, thinking outside the bomber, are you thinking about different ways to deliver long-range effects?

Tom Jones:

Yeah. A little less so from the aircraft side where we’re definitely looking to the general’s point at what are some of the weapons the bombers should carry because the bombers should be able to carry any weapon that’s out there. We definitely have other sectors within the company that are looking at all types of weapons. AARGM-ER or SAW, weapons like that. We’re heavily involved in solid rocket motor production, both for our own systems and for other folks systems and hypersonics. So I’m a little less versed in that because I’ve got my hands full just trying to build airplanes, but it’s definitely something that Northrop Grumman is heavily involved in, as well as we do sensing on aircraft, we do sensing in space. Same thing, we do weapons delivery from aircraft and we have sectors that work on long range delivery. Again, everything from AARGM-ERs to sentinel missiles. So absolutely looking at that.

Lt. Gen. Jason Armagost:

I want to pile on here real quick and help Tom out with what my perspective on that would be. And I’ll actually go back to Skeeter and I’s time at Misawa when brand new F-16CJs were on the ramp with HTS and we had to figure out how to use them. We had some CONOPS, but we didn’t know yet what we were doing with those things. And it was a really important and fortunate time to be a part of that effort because I brought that with me to the B-2 community.

But the point is, I think one of the things we lost in the peace dividend and then through the global war on terror was kind of a seed approach to the problem. We had air dominance, we called it air dominance, but what we had was unrestricted access in most cases. And that kind of baked in seed approach, which goes back to the point about what weapons should someone be able to carry, that’s why that matters. And when you talk about SAW or AARGM-ER or various weapons platforms, the weapons themselves are getting more diverse in their capability to handle different types of targets. And so bringing that seed approach back in to be native to all the various platforms and how they approach the problem is really important.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. I guess Skeeter, I’m going to give you, probably, I think the most important question of the day, at least the one I like the most. Everyone likes to talk about long range fires, long range strike, hypersonics, but mostly they’re talking about hitting a spot, a stationary spot. I think one of the most interesting and most critical things we’re going to be asked to do as a component is to hit things on the move. And not just moving across the desert, more importantly, moving across an ocean. Thinking about long range fires into moving targets, where is industry on this and where do you see the future?

Mike Rothstein:

Yeah, no, thanks, Abu. First of all, I think, and I would think that I’m in agreement with probably all the primes we’re thinking about this or anybody else in the industry. Future weapons for the Air Force. I’m not talking the ones that say they’ve been built and designed already. But if it cannot hit a moving target, it is not worth being in the inventory. I’m sure there’s some exceptions to that, but as a broad brush statement.

So now particularly, so that means particularly when you pair that with long range strike, you’re probably talking some sort of offboard targeting and/or in flight target update. So that means now you need a weapon with some sort of data link, and we can talk in other venues about what that might be, but that becomes part and parcel of what’s going on.

And then you’ve got to think about this trade between how good does my sensor need to be versus how much I trust the goodness of the in flight target update and the refresh rate thereof? And those are going to trade. If I have a super data link that’s refreshing all the time, I could probably go with a fairly cheap seeker. Now think, especially when you’re talking about moving target, some sort of ship, if you will. But if my refresh rate isn’t that much or the queue isn’t that good, I need a better seeker. And of course, when you pair that with the weapon effect you’re trying to achieve and where you need to hit.

So those are going to sit in tension. And I think there’s a lot of parallel processing going on right now because as we’re thinking about a more robust off-board targeting architecture at large, in some respects, it is still yet to be proven and yet to be proven how resilient that might be in combat. And so where are we going to place those bets? Between both industry and the government. So that’s an ongoing conversation.

The other one that I think is really important is, as you said up front, speed is obviously good. Of course, we would want our weapons to get there faster. As you get into hypersonic, supersonic, or subsonic, there’s certainly trades, but there is a big physics problem on moving larger warheads at higher speeds causes exponentially more thrust. You get bigger, you get more expensive. So where we might find advances in propulsion, I think is really important for everyone to pay attention to. Where we might find advances in how do you get what’s a, I’ll make it up, 500 pound warhead today in a form factor size that’s half that because we got better boom coming out of our explosives, that lets you go smaller, add more gas or smaller form factor depending on those trades. Those are really important to long range strike.

And then in the maritime environment, in particular, we have to remember that not all targets there are created equal. Going after Lo Yang or Renhai, heavily defended, may be a very different problem than going after roll-in roll-offs as you’ve rolled those defenses back and now you just need something that can do some damage, but it may not have to get through quite as many as robust of an IADS, if you will.

So those are all out there. I think they’re all on the table. I’m sure Northrop Grumman’s thinking about them very much the same way we are and everyone else. But I think the big needle movers that we need to think about is the sensor if two trade-offs and where we’re willing to collectively place confidence on what it will be in the future as we skate towards the puck and trying to get the next stage of propulsion to be affordable. And that’ll let everyone to get to the target faster and at longer ranges.

Lt. Gen. Jason Armagost:

I want to pile in on this one too. Because I think it’s really important to actually just add to that, which is you need to need to also consider the access you’ve bought with the platform that carries the weapon.

Mike Rothstein:

Of course.

Lt. Gen. Jason Armagost:

And so you may not need quite the range, which then you can make some of those trades back on the weapons, whether it’s explosive weight or survivability or whatever it is you want to trade for. So that weapon pairing to the penetrating assets matters really, really a lot. And so you can overgun yourself with your penetrating assets and lose carriage capacity in making the wrong choice.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Tom, go ahead.

Tom Jones:

Yeah. Well, that was part of the point I was going to make as well. But I think as you hit, it’s an incredibly complex problem from a how do you close the kill chain because you’re talking probably multiple sensing modalities, potentially multiple domains, tying all those together and in a very dynamic environment. And then you also have the ability of penetrating assets that can get closer, that maybe might be better from a command and control perspective to take certain strikes and use long range strikes on others. I think just the complexity of the problem, the trades you mentioned, highlights all the more why we really need to develop a great partnership between the operational user and industry so that we can evaluate, “Hey, here’s the consequences of these trade-offs.” Because if it’s just a toss and turns over the fence to industry, we toss a response back and forth like that, that’s not going to get to that speed that we’ve been talking about through this panel in terms of developing capabilities and getting out there.

So we need to figure out how we can really tighten the loop of requirements, hypotheses, technical analysis, operational analysis, and back and forth to really converge on some of these solutions because they are hard problems. And I think we’ve got the defense industrial base that can handle that. We just need to make sure we’re enabled and empowered and working in partnership to solve those problems as quickly as we can.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Thanks. Swinger, I’ll change gears again. With the fighter force in mind, if you’re shooting from range, it could be a huge tanker bill. If you’re shooting from in close, it’s other problems. Base defense, ABO, access spacing, and overflight. How are you thinking about this problem? Where are your concerns and what can industry do to help?

Brig. Gen. Brian Laidlaw:

No, Abu, that’s a great question. I hear that one a lot. I hear this discussion quite a bit. I think in some ways it becomes a little bit of a false dichotomy. I think the reality is we absolutely need both. I think the variable that sometimes gets a little bit underplayed is the fact that proximity enables density, and I think everybody would agree with that. The closer you can be, the more sorties you can generate. The more sorties you generate, the more air power effects you can deliver. At the end of the day, this will be a commander decision. Our joint force, our JFACs, and our JFCs will decide how they want to set the theater. They’ll strike that balance that’s appropriate for their theater based on risk versus reward. So I think in the end, we need both as we look at the problem.

The question about industry and can they help in this space? I think that is an important one to talk about. And as I think about it, especially from the fighter perspective, there’s kind of four things that aren’t going to be new to anyone in this room, but these are the things that I think are going to potentially move the needle and make a difference. And the first is strive from the beginning not to build systems in stove pipes. We need to be able to seamlessly pass data across disparate sensors that are coming from potentially foreign sensors or foreign radars and be able to knit those together into a common operating picture and ultimately a common tactical picture in a usable way that’s machine to machine. We got to get ourselves out of the swivel chair, chatroom coordination that served us well in the ’90s and early 2000s.

Second is I would say thinking rugged, simple, and light. That needs to be a design characteristic right from the get go. Anything that we’re going to push forward into the field or any kit that we’re going to send down range for our airmen, we have to think from the get go that agility and the ability to move around is going to be a requirement in order for them to be successful. The third thing I would ask for is think about from design, how we can maximize automation. Where we want to get to is a place where empowered commanders are making the decisions that really only humans can make. And the tech, the automation needs to enable those decisions so that those commanders can decide, they can act, and they can generate speed by moving out quickly.

And the last I would ask for, and this comes from serving in multiple theaters here, is build for release. It’s unimaginable that we would ever fight a major theater war without fighting alongside our allies and partners. Everything from weapons to sensors, the more that we can make them plug and play from the get go, and the more that we can make them share data seamlessly, machine to machine, all of those things are going to enable our airmen to be more effective.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Hey, we’re down just a couple quick minutes. So last couple questions, if you guys could just keep it tight, about a minute each. Tom, capacity challenges, need to scale for future fight. How do you look at other industry partners differently? How are you looking at collaboration? How is Northrop looking at this problem to scale quickly for the war fighter?

Tom Jones:

Yeah. As I mentioned before, partnership is key, and we’ve always partnered pretty openly. I think it’s more essential now than ever. In the classified session yesterday, I actually brought it up in my keynote as one of the three areas that we need to focus on in terms of getting speed of capability to the war fighter. It’s not enough for us to all just say, “Well, I’m capable of doing these things, so therefore I’ll go do all of them.” It’s, “Are you the best athlete in that? If not, let’s figure out how we can team together with the best athletes so that we can, again, bring quality product very quickly.” So I think it’s key. We’ve been engaging in that significantly over the last year. Talent IQ is a great example of teaming with a bunch of AI companies. But I believe it’s critical and we’re definitely out there doing that.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

So Skeeter, as industry looks to ramp up, what are you not hearing from the government? What do you need to hear differently as your company obviously expends capital to enable a scale up?

Mike Rothstein:

Yeah, thanks. Certainly if you’re not tracking this, what this administration is doing is asking, particularly the munition section right now, for a lot more upfront investment than there traditionally has been as we ramp up. We need consistency of demand signal, and we need those arms locked not only within the executive branch, but across the river with the hill. And that’s really important because there’s got to be a business case. So if we’re going to invest upfront, we got to be able to recoup that at some point to keep the business afloat and give the value to the shareholders that everyone expects. So that’s number one.

Number two, I would say make sure you keep the international partners involved. A little bit like what Swinger was saying, as we ramp up these munitions, we got to bring our partners in with this because if they think they’ve got to wait five, six, eight years until the US government has their fill, they will turn to other countries, and they are turning to other countries, which is not in our national interest in the end.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

And I guess there are just about a minute left, Armo, not to pitch you against industry, but what do you need from industry? What capabilities have the quickest, highest impact in the battle space? What are you getting? What are you not getting?

Lt. Gen. Jason Armagost:

So I would kind of answer offhandedly. If you read the national defense strategy, in the number one line of effort in the national defense strategy is defend the homeland. This is fascinating to me, but inside of the defend the homeland line of effort is actually nuclear modernization. So I’m not spinning to nuclear modernization, but what I want to do is make sure we connect all of what we’ve talked about on this panel up through that system of systems that we build as a force design and force structure so that we don’t create a gap where our peer adversaries think that they can go to a space that we can’t occupy in the nuclear war fighting structure that they have built now over decades, but we can bring back conventional capabilities to match them and make the cost of doing it too high and the probability of success too low. So I’m going to connect it to that number one line of effort.

Lt. Gen. David S. Nahom, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. Well, thanks. We’re down to 20 seconds, so I think that our timing is well. I do want to thank all the panelists. As you look at long range strike, and whether that’s a smaller operation like a Midnight Hammer or maybe some larger scale event that we would have in the South China Sea, our nation’s leaders are going to turn to long range strike or continually turn to the United States Air Force and to deliver those effects to not only, maybe end a conflict early, maybe control escalation, or in many cases, to finish a conflict quickly. I do want to thank you all. I’d like a round of applause for our panelists, really the leaders.