Defending the Homeland from Small Drones

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Col. Jason Eckberg:

Well, I will say those lights are really, really bright and I’m happy to be here. Hello, everybody. Salubria salutations. My name is Jason Eckberg. I go by Eck. I’m currently a division chief within the A3 at Headquarters Air Force, running the division that has, I think, the longest name in the entirety of the air staff. So what we’re going to do today and what we’re going to talk about today is the counter small UAS problem for Homeland Defense. Sitting to my left, we have about a 100 years of technical, programmatic and managerial and operational experience that will bring to us some of the key aspects of a counter UAS problem set that has really emerged over the last couple of years. I think four years ago, if we had asked the question, the idea that a small UAS, that a small drone could threaten the world’s greatest Air Force was probably something that we would think would be some sort of, if you’re of my age, a Tom Clancy novel.

I’m not sure who the next tech writer is at this point in time, but I feel like that is a science fiction that we probably wouldn’t have thought was going to be a big deal. Well, then we had operations, then we had things occurring around New Jersey. We had small UASs around Langley Air Force Base.

There were other small UASs that interrupted both development operational operations for the Air Force that started to prove out that this was a problem, that this was going to be a challenge for us. Fast-forward to last year, and you had the rather brilliant operation called Spiderweb, that the Ukrainians perpetrated against the Russian Federation and destroyed billions of dollars of strategic assets, all utilizing small UASs. So with that setup and with the imperative that we have in order to build a point defense capability that defends our bases in the homeland against this pernicious threat, I’m happy that we are going to be able to have this discussion on this topic. And I will frame it as saying is think about the framework of sensing, identification, tracking and solutions that will need to be brought to bear for our combat wing commanders and our base commanders in order to counter this kind of threat.

Okay. Onto the panel. Gentlemen, thank you very much for being a part of this today. Off to the far left is Mr. Aaron Dann, vice president for… Let me make sure I get this exactly right. Connectivity and network solutions for Northrop Grumman Corp. Sitting to his right is Mr. Travis Gomez, the director for business development and Air Force programs with Amentum. And finally, to my immediate left, Mr. Tyler Griffin, the counter UAS program director for Lockheed Martin. With that, I’m going to turn it over for quick opening remarks from each of our panelists. So Mr. Dann, go ahead.

Aaron Dann:

Yeah. First off, Colonel Eckberg, thank you, and thank you for that opening. Also want to thank the Air and Space Forces Association for this event. I’ll say this panel is timely. I view counter UAS, or I’ll say counter unmanned systems in general as the latest asymmetric threat. Northrop Grumman, we have a rich history in supporting these type of threats, whether it be countering rockets, artillery, mortars, counter IED systems, and now focused on this latest threat we’re focused on. From my viewpoint, it’s going to take an end-to-end solutions. I’m sure we’re going to talk a lot more about that. Leveraging the full domain, the full spectrum of capability when it comes to integrating sensors and effectors, non-kinetic effects as well. So it’s going to be really critical that we look on having solutions that are both adaptable, agile, open. I mean, these things are going to mature at the speed of technology.

We need to make sure our systems can keep up. And the last point that I’ll really hit on in my opening is around readiness. How we train for these situations is going to be critically important. We need to stress our systems. We need to understand what the capabilities and limitations are. I do not believe there’s going to be one system that is going to be able to defend across the vast set of environments. Both you think of urban areas, critical infrastructure, remote installations. It’s a massive challenge and it’s going to take all of the industry. So I really look forward to this panel. Look forward to having the conversation. And Travis and Tyler, it’s going to be a good discussion. Thank you.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Thank you, Mr. Dann. Mr. Gomez. Open it up.

Tyler Griffin:

Yeah, sounds good. Sounds good. I appreciate it. Again, I’ll echo comments. Colonel, appreciate the time. To AFA, appreciate the venue and the opportunity to discuss this topic. Like you said, it’s critical, critical topic these days. From an Amentum perspective, I’ll be honest, when I retired about a year and a half ago, I hadn’t heard of Amentum. What I didn’t know is that I had, I just didn’t realize it. We got lineage to companies going back over a 100 years, supporting a number of federal agencies to include the Department of War. So we’re proud to represent the company here today and look forward to having a discussion. We’ve been doing counter UAS aspects for a number of years now. And so we look forward to kind of shedding a little bit different light. By and large, we don’t build products. Our greatest capability is our people, and we’re very proud of that.

And so we tend to focus on the integrator portion of things, working with some extremely talented companies, bringing incredible capabilities to the fight. And so look forward to sharing our perspective from that standpoint. But again, appreciate the time.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Excellent. Thank you. Now, Tyler, we look forward to Lockheed Martin’s presentation. All right.

Tyler Griffin:

Colonel, we won’t let you down. And Aaron, Travis, look forward to our discussion here today. I’d like to thank AFA for putting this on and all the effort, Colonel, you went to, and Allison and others, to make sure we could have this robust discussion. To get into that discussion, I want to go back, sir, to your comment about Spiderweb. It is a nefarious problem and it is a challenge we all face. And as a community, we have to come together to address it. There’s no silver bullet. There are many capable effectors for 1V1, but when you look at a swarm scenario, it requires layered defenses and it requires simplicity. How do we make this easy for the operator? And from a Lockheed Martin standpoint, our mission solution to drive layered capabilities and simplicity is referred to as Sanctum.

Video:

The battlefield doesn’t warn you. It whispers in new shapes, new flight paths. The enemy doesn’t arrive with tanks. We arrive with payloads, autonomy, and malicious intent. Fast, cheap, quiet. By the time you see them, the damage is done. This isn’t the war we trained for. It’s asymmetric, adaptive, relentless. A $3,000 drone can deal a billion dollar blow, and it’s not a future threat. It’s now. The battlefield is no longer just the front lines. It’s the stadium, the runway, the power grid. Sanctum was built for this. Built as one architecture from edge to cloud, because defense is no longer just strength. It’s about speed, not just in action, but in learning. Every sensor, every effector, every operator, connected, synchronized, always evolving.

Every engagement leaves a fingerprint, captured on the edge, passed to the cloud, integrated into the next wave of protection, automatically. No analysts, no patch cycles, just real time evolution, models and hardware that update as fast as the threat. What happens here trains the system there. What one unit sees, the whole network remembers. Operators need clarity. One interface, one second, one decision. So the next drone doesn’t get through, so the next incursion doesn’t happen. So the next team makes it home. No headlines, no ceremony. Just one less breach.

And one more mission accomplished, because yesterday’s thinking won’t stop tomorrow’s threats and every bite of data can save a life.

Tyler Griffin:

So sir, if I can close with two comments before we get into the Q&A. Firstly, it’s a very exciting video. It’s not a standard thing for a Lockheed Martin to do, but we actually use that not just for marketing purposes, but to drive our system engineering process. Not SRR, PDR, CDR in the months that go in between. That’s a healthy process for certain missions, but to get after this nefarious counter UAS mission. We use that to drive the requirements, and that’s allowed us to move quickly, not just by ourselves, but with partners. And I want to highlight three partners that were in that video. Firstly, Fordham Technologies has the sensing capability and that drone hunter effector, which JIATF 401 made the first replicator two procurement earlier this calendar year. Great to have that partnership with Fordham as well as IPG Photonics, the largest laser manufacturing capability in the United States.

Scale of production, and Lockheed can bring the optimization of that low cost capability. And then lastly, Microsoft. What happens here trains the system there. We’re using the Azure Cloud, something that should be accessible at state, local, tribal, and territorial areas. How do we do that cost effectively? It’s through those partnerships. Thank you.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Well, thanks, Tyler. And by the way, yeah, it may not be a normal thing, but I did feel like that the video itself pretty aptly demonstrated, again, the sort of challenge that this particular problem set presents to us. With that, as we start to jump into sort of the range of solutions, the range of capabilities that are going to be required to be able to support this, I’ll start with you and I’ll ask, where do you feel is the most important part of that tech to go? I have keyed up questions about balancing kinetic and non-kinetic solutions. How do you integrate for decision support tools? When you look at that full system of systems that’s being proposed and being facilitated by JIATF 401 and by innovative acquisition and requirements methodologies, where do you set as the most important piece of that entire system that needs to be able to protect our most valuable Air Force assets?

Tyler Griffin:

Yes. Sir, I would say the balance around optimization for the operator, whether it’s a security guard at a fixed site, whether it’s somebody for deployed in an airbase, it’s optimizing their response to what’s coming in, and doing so in a way that minimizes collateral damage, a keen importance here in the homeland. We have great sensors. We have amazing effectors, but it’s untenable for those to create risk to either infrastructure or the population. So optimizing that decision process, optimizing the reaction time. So between successive shots within a swarm, we need to be quick and efficient, and it really comes down to four pieces. Firstly, understanding the situational awareness of what you’re defending and also what’s in the environment. Secondly, having confidence in your track. Third, understanding the capabilities and limitations of those effectors you have available at a given time and defeating a swarm, those effector availabilities are going to change real time.

So how all three of those dynamically evolving pieces change, comes down to the operator, and fourthly, most importantly, optimizing for the operator so that it’s one button click, as we try to depict in that video, to have a successful mission outcome. But that’s the biggest balance we have to strike for this mission.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Thanks, Tyler. Actually, this is a great place for us to start the conversation. And so, I’m going to open it up to Travis and to Aaron, what do you think? Where is that most important piece? Amentum spends a lot of time on the training and the education and supporting the operator. Is that a place where you find that having these solutions is going to be absolutely essential and some of the priorities for that?

Tyler Griffin:

Yeah. So great question. And Aaron, you’d brought up training. I know that’s something that we do have a lot of going on in that space from a training standpoint. I like to point out timing. We’ve heard for a while now about… And shout out to all my acquisition officers. I like to say being from Minnesota, an artist. I’m an artist formerly known as an Air Force acquisition officer. And I can tell you right now, it would be extremely hard for me, from a program or record standpoint to keep up from a timing standpoint. We have a lot of folks, bigs and smalls, working on technical capabilities. What we are seeing from an Amentum standpoint, some of the work we’re doing across our portfolio, specifically, I’ll just use the example of the southern border for Homeland Security. The timing of the threat evolvement has gone from months, the six-month range, nine-month range, to we’re talking weeks and in some cases, days.

And so, when I start thinking about, okay, the technologies and stuff that we need to work on beyond that, we’ve heard about acquisition being that war fighter domain and an extension of the war fighter. How are we, from a service standpoint, I say we collectively, how are we going to stay ahead of that threat when… You mentioned JAITF 401, General Ross is doing fantastic stuff with that group. We’re extremely excited about everything that’s going on. So when a unit can go and purchase stuff from that marketplace, however that works out, my fear is six months down the road, now that piece of equipment can no longer be updated with just software stuff. And now it’s sitting on a shelf, because either A, it just didn’t keep up with the threat, or B, folks PCS’d and now we don’t have the training continuing on. That’s where I start to get a little, I’ll say, worried from that standpoint.

And maybe a different little touch on how you ask the question, but that’s kind of the things that worry me, is that timing. How do we keep up? We don’t buy Microsoft XP or Microsoft or Windows 10 or Windows 11 anymore, right? We’ve moved on to Microsoft 365, because the purchasing of that software package and then trying to keep that relevant is just, we just can’t do it anymore. And I think it’s kind of a similar scenario, if I could use that example, from this standpoint, just based on what we’ve been seeing from a threat involvement standpoint.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Well, I’m going to come back to you on now one. Aaron, do you want to weigh in on this particular conversation? Because I know that you want to make sure that we don’t… What’s the phrase of art? I’m trying to remember the phrase of art that I heard recently, but we are collaborators, but we are competitors. So what would you think? Competimates, that’s what it is.

Aaron Dann:

Yeah. I mean, for me, it’s really going to come down to… And you know the partnership. I think every company, manys in here will have capabilities that can get after this threat in different ways. But if these systems are just let out into the wild, and I think it’s one of the reasons we have JAITF 401 is to really look around what is going to make sense in certain environments. We’re taking a mission first perspective. What is the mission call? And that mission is going to be different. So the solutions we’re building, we’re focusing on adaptability, software upgrade ability, where we can have third party effects come in from a non-kinetic perspective, embracing open architectures. Our DRAKE system, I referenced earlier, as our non-kinetic system, that’s something where we have essentially a mode development kit where we can get third party labs and providers or companies to come in.

And if they have a way to do this quickly, that’s great. We can get into the library, we can deploy it for these certain AORs and we can get after the threats there. So really that’s what we’re focusing on, is around that flexibility. We’ve also, at our own company expense, created a system called ION, right, that is really built around… In and of itself is not a sensor, not an effector, but it’s really around how do we bring these things in and have the adaptability with underlining AI that can bring in the sensor models and decide, hey, I’m in a 1V1 scenario. Let me take time, understand intent. Is this someone making a mistake or is this something more nefarious? And then, for a more stressing scenario, that’s when the human needs to be out of the loop and on the loop, and we got to let this trust the machine.

And I think that gets back to that training around, for us to trust the machines. Our operators understand, hey, when I hit this button, I understand the effect that I’m going to cause and making sure that we can control that effect or limit potential second order effects depending on the environment.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

So excellent answer. And I will say that that is a theme, which we’ve heard a couple different times. If you listen to the collaborative combat aircraft panel earlier today, then you saw that trust in autonomy for our operators is going to be essential to be able to bring these disproportionately advantageous effects against those pernicious adversaries that are going to go ahead and with Mendacity come after us. Yes, there was going to be a few big words, because you let me have a mic. All of that to say, Travis, I’m going to go back to you and I’m going to pick at this thread a little bit more, which is with respect to that advanced technology and that time cycle that is compressed, you said weeks to days. I’m going to be honest with you, the electrometic spectrum changes in seconds. So how do we deliver a combat capable force with the ability to adjust dynamically to situations that are changing on that kind of temporal compression that is absolutely essential to what’s happening in modern combat right now?

Tyler Griffin:

So I’ll help finish that question with limited resources, right? So how do we do all that with the resources that we have? One thing that we’ve talked to a number of folks about, I know there’s folks in the audience that I’ve talked about this too. So going along the example of Microsoft, how do we do our IT these days? It’s as a service, right? And so if we can kind of expand that thought a little bit, is it possible, and this is something that we obviously are a huge proponent of, is it possible to do counter UAS as a service? So when a unit buys a particular product, we’ll just say they buy the service instead and they take that product, best of breed, whatever it may be for that scenario, because we all know your protection of Creech is going to be different than your protection around the Pentagon, is going to be different than your protection around the southern border.

Whatever that solution is, provide that service to them with whatever product would be in that scenario. And then when the time comes, hey, this isn’t keeping up with the threat, or hey, we need to evolve this more than just a software update. Okay, let me take this back, work with our OEMs and say, hey, here’s this product back for reuse of however we’re going to do it while we insert the next greatest thing from a capability standpoint. So two things happen there. One, from a threat standpoint, you’re going to keep up with it as best you possibly can. And two, I don’t have a unit that just spent how many, I’ll just say thousands of dollars to the tune of possibly millions or more, right? That now has a piece of equipment that they no longer use. Now they’re no longer buying that equipment. They’re giving it back to us to then reuse and recapitalize as best we can, but they’re still getting that service, top level service that’s required to accomplish the mission, because the mission is counter UAS, not find the best product right now, today, if that makes sense.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

I’m intrigued by the counter UAS as a service. I think that, again, just reflecting upon the different models that we have, we’re in a panel talking about defending the homeland. So we’re talking about the ability to access bases here in the States, here in the contiguous United States, here at our bases that have that persistent access to our ability. So I think I see some efficacy in that particular approach, especially to ensure that we do not have minimized equipment that is just collecting dust on it. I’ll open it up to the other two panel members on this one. What do you think about that? Counter UAS as a service. Is it something which you’d want to offer or is there limitations that you think you’d see to it? Go ahead, Tyler.

Tyler Griffin:

Colonel, I’ll take that one first and I would say absolutely that model enables speed and part of disrupting ourselves is looking at how we monetize how capitalization flows through the books and speed of, and as a service model and the flexibility that this mission requires dictates a discussion around as a service capability. It requires different financing upfront, but absolutely looking forward to leaning into that further.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

All right. Aaron, anything?

Aaron Dann:

I’ll just say broadly, we’re definitely embracing the new war fighter acquisition system coming out, really excited about the PAE standing up and the ability and the flexibility those leaders will have and how they make decisions around requirements, trades, obviously working close with the core co-comms and operators and in war fighters are going to be operating these systems. I would just say broadly, we’re open to all types of different business models and look forward to having those discussions with the right customers, but it’s really going to get back to, hey, what problem are we trying to solve? Does this make sense for that particular situation?

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Right. Awesome. And that actually segues into, again, the personalized question that I was going to ask you, specifically on the idea of your VP of connectivity and networks. I mean, nothing says more like a network fighting a network than having a network of swarm drones coming after you and to doing that. So where do you see the combat of networks and systems and systems tech going ahead and attacking each other and the use of artificial intelligence within those systems of systems in order to combat that rapacious threat of systems to systems coming after us?

Aaron Dann:

Yeah. So as I think about this from really a mission perspective, I think the first thing we need to do is sense, right? We sense and then we need to make sense of what’s going on. I think with that, we’ve talked about the sensors we have lots across industry. North of Grumman in itself, we have our G/ATOR radar system. That’s really a fantastic capability that we’re showing how it can sense across a broad range of different threats. We also have EOIR, other capabilities as well, where we can sense across the electromagnetic spectrum. And with that, then you get into, okay, what do I do with that data that I have? And that’s really, really comes down to the connectivity and networking and also making sure that we have assured networking, right? Because once our adversaries understand, okay, hey, these systems I got to get through, they’re going to look for ways to get after them and make them maybe a little less capable than how we design them and look for what are those Achilles heels.

So I think we need to take a full view of that, both how our sensors are working, how we’re sharing data across the network. Because at the end of the day, having a common battlespace picture, and that battle space will be different, right? If I’m just defending, I’m from Southern California, so I’m looking forward to the LA Olympics in 2028. If I’m defending that, that’s different than if I’m defending an overseas base or a large military installation or nuclear sites, right? Those are going to be different levels and that’s going to drive to a different solution system. But all of them are going to need a baseline of connectivity networks. Us being experts in connectivity and networks, we also have learned a bit on how you can encounter connectivity and networks. And so bringing that to the fight. A lot of the things we’re thinking about are really taking hot production lines, areas where we can scale, bring speed, delivery, things that we’ve done maybe for radar warning in the past that, hey, we can adapt this to here, this is a demo we can do.

We’re doing lots of those, working with our customers and look forward to bringing more capabilities, because we see the drive and the speed of this threat and we need to make sure that we can adapt and respond effectively at the need of both our civil agencies that are looking to defend the homeland, our military agencies, DHS, we’ve crossed the board. And so we’re really looking forward to bringing that together. But at the end of the day, if I can see something, but I can’t communicate it out, I can’t give that common picture, I’m not going to be as effective as I would be with network solution, with assured connectivity, where I can share that picture across my systems to other systems, because at the end of the day, it’s about how do we protect the homeland?

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Sense, identify, track, and solve, it kind of comes back to-

Aaron Dann:

Sense and make sense.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

… Sense, makes sense, and the other pieces. Gentlemen, would you like to add to the color of the conversation here?

Tyler Griffin:

I don’t know. I guess if anything, I’ll foot stomp. You’re exactly right, from a scenario standpoint, each one is going to have their unique requirements, but having a baseline of commonality, not just from a, hey, well, this system, talk to this system, but from Airman Jones, he goes from base X to base Y. If there’s some commonality there, where the top off training can be limited, just a foot stomp of, 100% agree.

Tyler Griffin:

And I just add quickly, there’s a layer of command and control of the entire theater battle space, and then there’s a convoy or a small special forces insurgency that needs its own standalone capability. And there’s a layer between command and control and mission management that plays into connectivity as well.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Awesome. Thank you for the perspectives. And I really do think that this is adding some meat to some of the context that we have, some of the challenges we have. All right, this is going to be an open question for any of you that wants to jump through there. Are we talking about what is the most vexing barrier that you see, to being able to implement the right kind of counter UAS solutions for Homeland Defense, technical, operational, policy, or something that I’m missing? I’ll let you start, Tyler.

Tyler Griffin:

All right, I’ll go first and I’ll pick on policy, not in a negative light, but to say the progress that’s been happening under leadership from NORAD NorthCom, JAITF 401 and others, how do we synchronize and how do we evolve the policy, the recent advancement to look beyond the fence line is a significant step. I think state, local, tribal territorial empowerment and the deputization under 130I and others, great steps. In the next year to 18 months, how do we empower that to the security forces that look after how our critical supply lines? They may not be government officials, but how do we defend a facility much like the one that was hit in Russia over the weekend that provided ballistic missile infrastructure? How do we supply the capability and authorities from a policy perspective to those providing the arsenal of democracy here in the United States? That’s a big question I think we need to look into.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Thank you. That puts the policy barrier as being outlined. So we’ll go over to you, Travis.

Tyler Griffin:

Perfect. Yeah, if I could briefly. So I think of this kind of in two different lights. Left of launch and right of detection. I think right to the right of detection, 100% policy. The stuff that’s going on now, the progress that they’re making. I mean, you think of a system coming across, we’ll just say coming across the border. You go entities involved from DHS, CBP folks, to state and local enforcement tribal territories, to FAA, to at some point DOW. When you start talking base intrusion, I mean, the number of entities involved from an authority standpoint, that is a tough nut to crack and they’re doing a great job of getting after that. On the left of launch side, and I’ll caveat it this way, between launch and detection, we have a lot of work going on. There’s, like I said, a lot of fantastic companies, both big and small that are getting after sensors and mitigation and that kind of stuff.

One of the things that we’re trying to tackle, teaming with one of those fantastic partners, Primer AI, is that left of launch. How can we get ahead of this game? So once a system goes up, whether it’s in the air or underwater, whatever, once a system goes up, I’ll use that example. There’s lots of things to tackle that way from a technical standpoint. What can we do left of launch from a, we’ll say social media, any kind of signals that we can pull in to say, hey, something’s happening, giving us that maybe one step advantage and that one step advantage can be three football fields of advantage when it comes to in between the left of launch and detection.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

I’m going to ask, I’m going to challenge you on this one. Which social media do you pick?

Tyler Griffin:

So the beauty of capabilities now is… I’m going to use that. This is probably a bad example. All of them, right? As many as you can ingest. In all seriousness, the capabilities that we have now from an AI ML perspective is you can ingest a lot of data and not have to have Travis Gomez thankfully make sense of it all. That’s why we rely on those. I use primary AI example. Just quick shameless plug. For those coming to Softweek, we’re going to try and do a demo down there with them to show some of that left and launch capability that we’ve been working on. So for those coming to Softweek, come find me, please. We’re extremely excited to do that, but hopefully that answered your question.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

It does. And it was a little bit of a pejorative, because I can tell you that the social media landscape has gotten much bigger and the necessity for us to be able to utilize tools like Dataminr, the necessity for us to be able to provide that decision support capability that makes sense of not only the visceral environment, which is really just the physical manifestation of the airplanes and things that are flying around, but the virtual environment and the connections of that augmentation between reality and what’s virtual, is really starting to compress to where one place on the social sphere happens and then another place, something physical is going to occur. So Aaron, biggest challenge. Operational, technical, policy, or other.

Aaron Dann:

So as you talk through the technical and policy challenge, I don’t see them as independent. I think there’s times where we can bring technical solutions that can ease the policy. I mean, to the example you were providing, there’s data we don’t typically share with our civil agencies that maybe we need to in this situation. I think from a technical aspect, we have solutions and ways that we could bring forward as industry to show, hey, how could policy and technology work together to solve some of those apparent gaps? And I would say it’s just an area where I would say we can always do better. The other piece is, when I think of technology, I’ve touched on the openness need to partner, is that interfaces. And that’s something else as we look at this, as we look forward to some of the changes afoot with acquisition, is really focusing on, hey, there’s going to be proprietary solutions and that’s going to be important to many companies, but at the interface level, like how we can have our systems speak to each other, exchange tracks.

Prior to my current role, I was in missile warning, and we’ve figured this out before. We share a lot of data across the country with our allies, partners, from systems that weren’t necessarily designed to speak to each other. And that network is assured that’s a very important mission. I see a lot of parallels with counter UAS. I mean, it’s really around defending the homelands, defending our allies, and giving them the necessary warn, so that they can do what they need to protect themselves as well.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Thank you. Very astute observation, and I appreciate the candor with the response. All right. We are coming up on about lunchtime, and I know that I can already hear the stomach’s growling out in the audience. So I’m going to turn it over to you all for some closing comments, and then I’ll wrap it up. Tyler, we’ll start with you.

Tyler Griffin:

All right. Well, Colonel, I’d like to thank you for leading us through this. Also, thank you for some new buzzword bingo cards. Mundancity and recursive. I’m like, okay, I needed a vocabulary test coming in here. Thank you, sir. All due respect.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Yes, sir.

Tyler Griffin:

I would also say just in closing, a book that’s really meant a lot to me as I’ve emerged myself into Counter UAS is the origins of victory and the fact that we need to embrace technological advancements and disruption and be okay disrupting ourselves to maintain that operational superiority. And when we think of integrated air and missile defense, they’re great technologies that we have in this country that provide that capability, but it’s longer ranges and it might be a PK that’s much higher than what we would expect from a counter UAS effector. But when we layer them together, being comfortable with something that might have a probability of success of 60%, because there are two other advanced technologies behind it that’s got its back. And then leaning into that, at rate and volume is a big step and I think it aligns well with that great book I mentioned previously. Over.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Thank you for that. It’ll go on to my shelf as the next book that I’ll buy. Go ahead, Travis.

Tyler Griffin:

Perfect. Echoing thoughts. We appreciate the time. This has been fantastic. From a closing remarks standpoint, I think the thing that I’ll bring up is I think we just passed the four-year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine just this past week. There’s a lot of folks that have been doing this. So I’ll stress to my fellow airmen and guardians, we’re not going after this alone. There’s a lot of lessons learned that can be taken from them. I know all of us, I’m sure many of us have friends over there and not just there, whether it’s there or the southern border. There’s folks that have been doing this a while and folks that have been living in this scenario for a while. So let’s not try and reinvent that wheel and learn those lessons as best we can and take advantage, because as we all know, we’re people limited, we’re funding limited, and so we got to take advantage of everything we can. So don’t forget about the folks that are living this every day and capture those lessons learned.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Excellent. Thank you. And Aaron?

Aaron Dann:

Yeah, I really appreciate that point. I was recently in the Baltics, spending some time in Eastern Europe. And I would say speaking with the military leadership, the war fighters of the areas really gives you a sense for what they’re up against, what their concerns are, right? Intrusions into airports, civil infrastructure, and the concern at times where they don’t know for some time maybe before they realize what’s going on. And so I would say it was a really sobering visit. I’m going to be going back out, because I believe we can bring some solutions, working with our customers for our current counter UAS systems to really figure out how do we get after this, support our allies, support NATO at large, as they look to secure their critical borders and infrastructures. And then, what makes sense for the homeland? It’s a little bit of a different problem for us here, but it’s one we cannot ignore.

I don’t want this to be a situation where we have to learn a lesson. I think this is a time for us to train, train hard, take what we’re seeing around the world and make sure that we’re prepared for those scenarios and more. Thank you.

Col. Jason Eckberg:

Well, thank you very much. And gentlemen, thank you very much for everything, for the teaming over the last week, your perspicacity with respect to the answers to questions and responding to this dynamic thing. I will say also a loud thank you to the Air Force Association for allowing us the opportunity to have this engaged discussion. Special shout out to Alison Scotty who helped us get the video queued up. It was amazing how much of a teamwork this made. So thank you again. Thank you gentlemen. I look forward to engaging with you in the future and God bless us all and lets us keep the greatest air and space force going and protect it as much as we can. Thank you.