DAF Battle Network: Connecting Every Domain from Cloud to Constellation

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Heather Penney:

So good afternoon. I’m Heather “Lucky” Penney, director of Studies and Research at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, and I’d like to welcome everyone to this panel discussion on the DAF Battle Network.

Decision superiority has long been a foundational element of combat advantage, and it will even become even more critical in the future. Key to securing information advantage and decision superiority, however, is the modernization implementation of a new battle networks that have the ability to support commander decision making, enable long-range kill chains, enhance awareness for our battle managers, and empower war fighters on the tactical edge. But information will be contested and our battle networks must remain resilient, self-healing, low latency, high bandwidth, cross domain, able to ingest and share heterogeneous data, and both specifically target and be broadly available to users. It’s a tall order.

Without this kind of battle network, however, Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control or CJADC2 would not be possible because we would be too disconnected and desynchronized to be effective. So to enable our battle managers to make sense of the vast amounts of data collected by an assortment of sensors operating across air, land, sea and space that is easily understood across all of our armed surfaces, we will need to have the DAF Battle Network. So to discuss this issue, I’m honored to introduce our guests. Brigadier General Jason Voorheis, Department of the Air Force Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Command, Control, Communication, and Battle Management. We also have Dr. Bryan Tipton, Chief of Architecture and Engineering for the DAF PAE C3BM. And representing the Space Force, Ms. Shannon Pallone, Program Executive Officer of Battle Management, Command, Control Communications, and Space Intelligence for the United States Space Force. And finally, we are pleased to have Taylor “Bingo” Herron, executive at Palantir Technologies. So, thank you all for joining us here today.

General Voorheis, we’d like to ask you first to set the stage for us regarding how the DAF Battle Network has evolved, because a few years ago, all we heard about was JADC2, then CJADC2, but we haven’t heard much of those acronyms lately. Could you please clarify how CJADC2 has evolved and differentiated and where the DAF Battle Network is located within that construct?

Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis:

Yeah, absolutely. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for the opportunity to be on the panel. It’s great to be joined here by my close partners, Dr. Tipton and Ms. Pallone and a good friend of mine, Bingo, which a number of years ago we were stationed together as captains in the Air Force. So definitely a small world, finding ourselves back here up on the stage together 20 years or so later.

So Heather, as you know, I’ve been in the C3BM seat for about two and a half weeks now. Having said that, I’ve definitely been watching the C3BM movie play out over the last few years from different purchases that I’ve sat in and jobs that I’ve had. I’ve had a front row seat to how the DAF has evolved in this mission area from the early days of the advanced battle management system to the transition of that program to the Rapid Capabilities office where I was the B21 program director at the time to now the establishment of the DAF then I guess PEO C3BM back in the 2022 timeframe when General Cropsey was initially selected for that position by the secretary and Dr. Tipton was assigned as the chief architect for the program where obviously he still remains to manage what is now what we call the DAF Battle Network.

The DAF Battle Network and the C3BM organization really has two primary roles. The first role is as the integrating PEO, exercising technical architecture authority over the DAF Battle Network, which is the DAF’s contribution to CJADC2. The second role there that has evolved over time as more programs have been folded into the portfolio is the, right now based on the recent transformation, the portfolio acquisition executive exercising acquisition authority over what we call the core programs of the DAF Battle Network, things like CBC2 and 50 or so other programs that represent and are essential to C2 mission planning, the ground intelligence enterprise, as well as the enabling comms that tie all that together.

So I would say just as an observer, watching over the past few years under General Cropsey’s leadership and Dr. Tipton’s leadership, a significant amount of progress has been made over that time period to advance the DAF Battle Network, whether that be mission engineering, which I think Dr. Tipton can talk a little bit more about as we get further into the panel, and then as well fielding kit iteratively to the field. So we’ve developed a pretty strong relationship with both Air Force stakeholders and Space Force stakeholders, as well as a robust industrial base that’s supporting our programs. And as we think now about what Mr. Meink talked about, Secretary Meink, an Act transformation coming in as the new PAE, I’m very excited about the opportunity to accelerate fielding of capability in this portfolio. And hopefully, we can, as part of the panel, talk a little bit more about some of that transformation and how it applies to C3BM.

Heather Penney:

Absolutely. But we also need to locate space in here. And so before we talk about how we integrate with the other services, Ms. Pallone, would you please describe how you’re working to create the space layer and then integrate that into the air domain?

Shannon Pallone:

Thanks so much and thanks, Heather, for including me and more specifically space in this discussion. But if you go back to C3BM’s roots, space has been part of that from the start. So I don’t even look at it as, how am I integrating space in? It was building this DAF Battle Network together. I don’t own all of the space pieces. I own some of the space pieces, but it has been a partnership from day 1 of how am I executing programs that support the DAF Battle Network? How are we integrating those into the DAF Battle Network? How are we working with the mission engineering teams to make sure we’ve got the requirements right on the space side so that everything’s going to actually interoperate and work together?

And I think if you look at these command and control problems we’ve been trying to get after as a joint community for years, this has been a really great opportunity to exercise that within the DAF family in a really powerful way that then can scale to other opportunities.

Heather Penney:

So as you mentioned, satellite communications, data links, that space layer has long been something that has preceded DAF Battle Networks or even the USS Space Force. However, looking at it within that combat environment and taking that perspective has fundamentally changed, I think, how we’re looking at that.

So Dr. Tipton, I’d like to move to you to describe those mission threads that Shannon was addressing because to really exploit the advantages of both the DAF Battle Network and also the space layer, all of that integrated together, those information architectures have to match and overlay our operational architectures. So could you provide insights regarding how you’re breaking down these mission threads and aligning those networks?

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Sure. And let me start by giving you my thanks for being here and talking to the AFA. It’s great to share the stage with colleagues and friends. We’re welcoming General Voorheis to the PAE, and Shannon and I have worked together for a long time, and I really appreciate Bingo representing industry here.

So mission threads is how we organize really the design and our understanding of the progress of DAF Battle Network. I lead the engineering. My team is responsible for the design of the integration across a lot of sensors and shooters and mission threads, which are essentially sometimes people don’t quite get what the word is, a sequence of steps, a comic unit of things that have to happen to lead to a mission outcome.

Let me explain it a little bit by backing up in that if I say CJADC2 is the goal of the DAF Battle Network, I have a real challenge figuring out what good is. How do I evaluate that? But what we do instead is we say, let’s envision some future scenarios with our operators, with our war fighters that are really going to stress us and are challenging and we need to be prepared for.

High-end fights, typically these scenarios involve many of the things that stress C2, like they’re very fast moving, they have a lot of sensors and shooters on both sides, and they have all the demands coordinating together. And typically, there’s some theory of victory that involves C2, that if I can coordinate everything on our side and make the right decisions better, we’re going to prevail. That gives me a chance to say, “All right, how do I break that down into unique steps?” Like let me take specific cases in that scenario of this satellite needs to talk to this shooter and I come up with a kill chain, but it’s more than that.

I’ve got situations where I’ve got planners that need to issue a plan that’s good out to units, or I need to have intel analysts that need to come up with the right understanding of a target, and that’s a product they’re making. So we can then take all those individual mission threads and it allows us to organize here’s how we evaluate progress going forward and I can align them in time.

So, for example, if I have a new fighter coming in a certain year, I can try and make sure that we’re ready to plan with that fighter, ready to give it good intelligence and ready to make sure we’re giving it good targeting data. And I can make sure that we’ve got the tests line up for all those atomic mission threads in that year. And that’s the organization that we use to design the DAF Battle Network.

Heather Penney:

Thank you. So Bingo, I’d like to bring you into this conversation because the DAF Battle Network is just one element of that broader CJADC2, and the Army and the Navy are also working on their own networks. So how are you collaborating and coordinating across the services to ensure that seamless cross-domain data exchange?

Taylor “Bingo” Herron:

Gotcha. Yeah, thank you very much. And again, thank you for being on the panel and getting opportunity. I think my thesis goes that we’re going to win or lose the next war in the SEAMs. And I think that those SEAMs exist in many ways, SEAMs between enclaves, SEAMs between different systems within a given mission thread, SEAMs between classifications and certainly SEAMs between services. So knocking those down is obviously critically important.

When I think of the services specifically, I would say it’s almost a two-fosted problem. So on the first side of that is technology. So it’s all the stuff that you know within an individual service, the yeoman’s work of getting data exposed, getting it integrated, doing that in a resilient way, all the very hard work that I know a lot of people have worked tirelessly over the last several years to work through. But the more interesting piece to me is the organizational side of that, which is how do you work across different services that have different appetites for speed, different priorities, rightfully deeply held opinionated views of their own individual workflows, and particularly in the C2 space.

And so I think it can be tempting for industry or for government too to fall into your own silo and try to work within your individual Air Force program or whatnot. We budget that way, we work acquisitions that way, so there’s a reason that that happens. But I think it’s very difficult to build in silos and then try to stitch it together later. Where possible, I think it’s usually much more beneficial to try to build joint first and then move back towards the services.

You can’t do that holistically. I think that’s where the mission threads become critically important. So you take targeting mission thread as an example. If you’re working down that mission thread, understanding that it’s not an Air Force only game or it’s not an AOC only game. There’s a lot of other pieces that have to connect and it helps you be a little more discriminatory about where you get after. So I think the working mission thread joint first backwards is important where you can.

I think the second piece of that is probably, while you should be very opinionated about the data, because if you have different data schema and different approaches across different services, that’s going to make things monumentally harder. You probably need to be less opinionated about workflows. There’s something to be said for meeting the services where they’re at. So a submariner might want a different workflow than someone in an AOC, as an example, and that’s certainly fine. And so being flexible on the front end and a little bit more opinionated on the back end is probably important.

And then finally, just like looking for opportunities to pull the different communities together. So be that through joint exercises or things of that nature.

Heather Penney:

So as you talk about those SEAMs and the need to be able to integrate different workflows, it occurs to me that when we actually get into combat, that those mission threads may change. That as we see a contested EMS environment, that some of those networks might fall down. So we would need to be adaptive, we would need to be flexible, we would need to be resilient.

I’m curious, how are we building in that requirement to be flexible, to be adaptable into those mission threads, especially with the other services and with our allies and partners?

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Well, I’ll start on that one. So there’s a few things there. Actually, I wanted to back up a little bit to cross-service integration, if I may.

Heather Penney:

Please do.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

So I’ve been doing this business a few years. When CJADC2 first came out, the joint staff and OSD at the time said, “Hey, we’re going to figure out what the strategy is.” Being in a service, I was like, “Man, that sounds really hard. That sounds great. They’re going to figure it out. Look forward to what they’re coming up with.” Obviously, that doesn’t work.

So I think when we started C3BM, we pretty much said, “Hey, we’re sure we’re owning the DAF Battle Network, but really we have to have ownership of the joint problem.” We have to understand what the Navy and the Army are doing very clearly. We got a lot of forums to find out and make sure we’re right, but we have to represent that.

A second thing is I tell people, sure, it’s the DAF Battle Network, but really, it’s joint Air Force-Space Force network because if you look at the DAF, the Air Force and Space Force, they have different missions, they have different resourcing, they have different requirements. So if we can figure out how to get those two together, then we can try and scale to all the other services, which is what we’ve been doing.

And the third thing is it really helps in jointness, a really simple thing. If us and the other services just agree on, “Hey, we’re all going to use the same solution for some key function.” That happens a lot. It happens with a number of companies. It happens with the Joint Fires Network, which recently we took on. That was an example of we recognized early that serves a function that we all need, but the way we’ve been managing that is we’ve been trying to make sure we’re in lockstep with all the services and everything that we do, because it’s more important that it’s joint than it’s staff.

To your question about flexibility, we’re constantly thinking about variations as we go forward and we’re thinking about an agile mindset. We’re in a game where the technology is changing and the con ops are changing really fast and we have to posture to be able to change that fast as well. So we are doing that.

Shannon Pallone:

I would just add, I mean, you brought up a great point about exercises. I think participating in exercises has been such a force multiplier for how we get after a lot of that joint problem. We learn a lot, we iterate, we go back to the next exercise, we’ve done it a little bit differently. We start to understand where are those touchpoints, where do I have to pass data from one to the other? Where do the workflows look different? How do I feed into each other’s? That’s been such a powerful tool. And then I’d say, even on the DAF Battle Network side, as Bryan pointed out, I’m going to build some things, you’re going to build some things. We’re doing that intentionally and together and not in a vacuum of, I’m going to do some things and I’ll call you when I’m done and maybe you might want to use them.

It is, here’s what I can contribute, here’s what you can contribute, here’s how those integrate together. And that’s how we give each other more options as well. And then again, it’s scaling it a little bit broader into the joint fight beyond the jointness of Air and Space.

Taylor “Bingo” Herron:

I’d say from an industry side for agility, for me, having the courage to do outcome-based contracts, so not thinking you’re going to know exactly what you’re going to need month 18 from now and having this long checklist that never deviates. But rather like, this is where we need to go and we’re going to learn along the way and you’re going to deliver X. I think that’s extremely helpful because it gives you the agility to adapt in that learning.

Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis:

Hey, Heather, I’m going to pivot on you a little bit because I think the remarks that the other three panel members made here are a good point to make the connection to Secretary Meink and the SecWar’s acquisition transformation efforts. And maybe to rewind a little bit, I think what we saw with the establishment of C3BM, the integrating PEO role a couple years ago was the recognition of what we just talked about, which is we’re going to lose in the SEAMs. We’re not going to win a war in the future based on a single platform. It’s going to be a system of systems, and that’s really what the integrating part of C3BM is getting after.

And really, I think what you see now with the SecWar’s acquisition transformation strategy from an Air Force perspective is really building on that foundation that C3BM and others that are doing things like C3BM and the industrial ecosystem in there as well is really taking that to the next step and putting gasoline on that fire.

And so from a SecWar perspective, what we’re seeing is this idea that acquisition really is a war fighting function, this sense of urgency to our business that we really are on a need to be on a wartime footing and put a priority on the ability to actually field capability incrementally over time so our operators have the kit in the field to use. And then when you look at what Secretary Meink is doing on top of that, really looking across all of our enabling functional authorities to flatten and delegate those authorities down to the PAE level so that we have this alignment between responsibility, accountability and authority, and the PAE and the program offices have the ability to make the trades to drive the flexibility that we’re talking about here so that we can pivot when we have a programmatic challenge or we have an opportunity in the operational space to drive the right capability at the right time.

And so we talk about acquirers as war fighters as opposed to obviously F-15 drivers are war fighters, but acquisition officers and civilians are every bit war fighters as our operators. And so I think we’re trying to equip them to drive the capability. And as they do that, also at the enterprise level, driving that alignment between resourcing requirements and acquisition so that we have the stable funding and the stable requirements that allow us together to field that capability that’s most prioritized by the service and driven by the mission threads that come from the force design.

Heather Penney:

So I’m really curious to hear how the rest of you are experiencing the acquisition transformation because this, as you mentioned, General Voorheis, should be crucial to modernizing the entire service and delivering capability to our war fighters. So how are you all experiencing it within your duties?

Shannon Pallone:

So I would say the trades piece you talked about is really powerful and it’s especially powerful when you talk about a mission space like where we’re all playing. I loved what you said about outcomes-based contracting. I really don’t know where I’m going to go in 18 months. Ground systems, I worked six years ago, four years ago, two years ago today. I find myself taking totally different approaches too because technology is moving so fast that if I’m not adapting that approach, I’m not taking full advantage of it.

I love what the department is doing in terms of how do I take more advantage of commercial? How do I iterate? How do I go agile? How do I look at it as a capability instead of as a this is an end item weapon system is such a powerful framework to work through that problem in a time when things are moving this fast.

And doing that’s going to allow us to maintain decision advantage, which I really think is the most decisive thing that we can do. So it’s been, I would say, principles that I think this community has been running with for quite some time, so some of it is just validating. But then also, I would’ve said pour rocket fuel on instead of gasoline, but pour rocket fuel onto that of how do we go even faster. How do we accelerate that even more? Because if I’m not delivering to the joint fight, then nothing that I do is really relevant.

Heather Penney:

Go ahead.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Well, I’ll just add, I think it’s rolling out and we’re really looking forward to the changes that are going to be made. We’re constantly asking ourselves, how do we go faster? I think speed is something that we’ve been aligned with for a while. Trying to leverage commercial technology as much as possible is something that we’ve aligned with for a while. And I think there’s ways that we can still get faster and I’ll look forward to that.

Heather Penney:

So Bingo, I’m curious, how are you experiencing the acquisition transformation from the contractor side?

Taylor “Bingo” Herron:

Yeah, you bet. I was afraid you’d ask me that. So no, I mean, I guess what I would say is I run to this most acutely in cross program things. So we’ll go back to targeting mission threat. It’s just an easy one to use as an example. ISR, targeting, command and control, you get the airborne layer, there’s a whole lot of pieces to that. And so my consistent fear is that I’ll be working with one stakeholder, but then it touches another one, and then how do I work with this one? And I got the multi-agent problem.

I think what I’ve found very discreetly is like your TAP SoS team where they were taking a mission threat approach, did a really good job of doing cross coordination between those individual sub programs or whatnot. So I’ve experienced it. I’ve had a lot of fear and trepidation, but it’s come out rather well so far.

Heather Penney:

That’s great. I mean, so it’s not just you that’s dealing with the multi-agent problem. I mean, across DAF Battle Network and across the space layer, we have a number of different players, a number of different customers and providers if you want to think about the war fighters and the sensors and the battle managers that way.

So everyone’s going to have to sort through vast amounts of data across every domain. So how are you leveraging the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to enhance the lethality and efficiency and effectiveness of our battle managers across air and space?

Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis:

Yeah, I’d say that’s really the central question we’re focused on solving for our battle managers. The sheer volume of data is obviously overwhelming and really, our legacy approach to putting the entire cognitive burden on our battle managers is an unsustainable approach. So we’re optimizing for tomorrow’s fight, and that means we must turn to this deluge of data into decision advantage, as Shannon was kind of talking about earlier. And obviously, the key to that is human-machine teaming. And this really is the core of the C3BM effort, is to build that DAF Battle Network where human-machine teaming is so deeply integrated that our commanders can consistently outthink and outpace our adversary.

Shannon Pallone:

Yeah. And I’d say on the human-machine teaming front, a big part of that is experimenting with it, building trust. That is such a big part of the human-machine team is do I trust the machine and I need to be able to trust the machine when I’ve got to make a quick decision and I’ve got to assemble all that information quickly.

And so it’s getting the reps and sets in. And then again, I think we talked about this eight times already, but continuing to be able to evolve that, AI is also moving at a really frenetic pace and it’s going to be, can we even keep up with where it is? How do we leverage the best of it? How do we build the trust in it? How do we build the teaming out? That’s going to be a continued journey over the next couple of years, probably longer.

Heather Penney:

So I’d like to bring up REFORPAC 25 because we’ve talked about exercises and how we need to be able to exercise the elements of the DAF Battle Network to be able to test our hypothesis, to be able to stress the mission threads. And Dr. Tipton, last year the Air Force successfully deployed the TOC Light, the Tactical Operations Center Light kit.

What did you learn from this exercise and how are you applying that as you move forward for defining these mission threads in the DAF Battle Network?

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Sure. So first, I’ll say we’re actually always in exercise with that kit. We do a lot of exercises. That’s part of our strategy actually with C2, because it’s changing so fast to try and get into exercise as much as possible. For those of you who don’t know TOC-L. It’s a small lightweight command and control battle management kit for expeditionary units, forward edge. I view it as the edge of the DAF Battle Network, one of the edges. Physically, think of it as computers for a small team and a lot of comms on a palette that we could take anywhere.

But of course, what the real power of it is the software that you don’t see, and we’ve been working on that a lot. Things like what are the right visualizations? How do we have resilient networking? How do we move data to the right place? And to that point, it’s designed so that really two modes. One could be connected to the rest of the aircraft satellites data centers that we have and get advantage of all that data, or it could not. It could be in a denied, degraded, intermittent communication situation, and the war fighter needs to work with the palette kit that we give them in order to do their job.

We’ve learned a lot over the past few years with the first kits that we put out there, and actually, I’m happy that we’re now working … We’ve learned enough that we’ve said, “Okay, we can now redesign it and make it smaller, make it better, put it in a better format.” So we’re now working on a major release, too, that should be going into exercise soon.

Overall, all of our C2 programs, we try and line them up for how do they get in front of the war fighter, how do they get in front of exercise as much as possible to get that kind of learning.

Heather Penney:

So enabling each service to communicate and understand what each other’s sensors are, detecting is one thing, right? We’re going to need to sense across the different domains, be able to share that, be able to target that to specific users, but it’s not just the multi-agent within our own department. It’s also our allies and partners. And spoiler alert, classification is always going to be a challenge here, but also, how we are integrating our partners and allies.

So as we look forward, what are we doing to be able to ensure that they have the same information that we have so that we have the same decision advantage and cognitive understanding at the battlespace?

Shannon Pallone:

So I’ll offer, we’ve got an effort under the Unified Data Library that’s the Allied Exchange Program, and that’s really trying to get after exactly that is, how am I doing data sharing with our allies and partners? How am I taking what we’ve got for data, making sure that that’s being spread, not just to your point against the joint force, but also all of our allies as well, so that we can fight as one team. And I think that the two keys are, can I share the data and then do I have the right comm networks to actually move that data along? Those tend to be the two pacing problems.

I think sometimes we talk about, can I have a common software or a common operating picture or things like that and solve the data and the transport problem first. The rest of it will fall out from that. And that is the most critical piece to being able to fight as one team.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

I guess I’ll offer from C3BM perspective, I’m actually happy that we’ve been working on our allies and partners integration a lot, especially recently. A lot of engagements with our partners, with various allies, talking about how do we tell them our plans, how do we share data across the network, how do we share software? One that’s really exciting to me is, hey, there’s a lot of complicated policy in how we work with our forum partners.

We’ve developed a really close relationship with the SAF International Affairs folks because they’re the policy experts. And it turns out what we find is you can’t work policy and technical engineering independently. If you make progress in policy, it makes you’re building a network and sharing data a lot easier. And if you do some things technically, you can make the policy a lot simpler to manage. So that partnership is actually a big coupling that we have right now.

Something else I’ll point to is we’ve been working many years on our cloud-based command and control program, which is a REL program. It’s the NORAD or defense modernization. And in that environment, we’re working on in the cloud, can we bring our allies in to look at the same data and even build software with us? And that’s something that’s really important going forward.

Heather Penney:

I’m glad you mentioned the SAF/IA partnership because we’re talking about the DAF Battle Network as if it’s some ethereal, esoteric thing and is very abstracted, but it comes down to actual waveforms and actual containers, radios, languages, data message sets. And that means that people have to buy them and then integrate them into their weapons platforms.

And so, how are we also then ensuring that as we embark on this new DAF Battle Network, that not only do we modernize our own equipment across the entire service, but then create backwards compatible data links, message sets, and that also can be shared across the allies and partners because then, Bingo, this gets right to the notion of SEAMs.

Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis:

Yeah. I’ll just add, and this is something I worked on in my last job very closely with Dr. Tipton, but a part of that is the adoption and proliferation of open architectures more broadly, particularly to our international partners and making sure that those are publicly available. And so one key one, OMS/UCI was ITAR controlled as a standard and worked very hard with OSW and amongst the services to get that publicly released, which this January or February was finally made that way. So we needed to be doing those kinds of things as well, which I think it speaks to Dr. Tipton’s policy question.

Taylor “Bingo” Herron:

Yeah. I guess I would add that I think this goes beyond just coalition. So your concept of how do you go and be backwards compatible, I also think about that through just the broader DAF Battle Network. Billions have been spent on really capable things that exist. And so yeah, if you could completely clean slate it, great, you can’t. So the reality is we should be leaning into what exists already and finding artful ways to be able to pull those things together to integrate it into the DAP Battle Network more artfully.

Heather Penney:

Did you just say Link 16 lives forever?

Taylor “Bingo” Herron:

No.

Heather Penney:

All right. So we’ve got five minutes left now. So what I’d like to do first is ask you all, if we look at the DAF Battle Network in five years and 10 years, what are winning signals? What do you want to see? What should we see? So sir, we’ll go ahead and start with you. General Voorheis.

Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis:

Yeah. I mean, I go back to my initial comments of I think that the DAF Battle Network in terms of implementation and fielding actual capability is gaining significant speed. So I think the key metric that we should be looking at is the ability and the extent to which we have scaled and proliferated the capability to more and more users and our ability to have a flexible, dynamic, agile software baseline and platform to iterate over time to continue to drive that capability.

Shannon Pallone:

I’ll be a little bit aspirational and say, I want to see in five years that we’re actually able to evolve at the same pace as technology. I think we spend a lot of time … Bingo, you made a great point. Trying to just decide when am I going to dig out of tech depth and when am I going to take a tech leap is a really hard problem.

I really want us to get to that point where we’re on a common enough baseline that we’re able to just evolve it as we go instead of trying to dig out of where we’ve been for decades.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

I guess I’ll give my point of view that I think, hey, first of all, we’ve made a lot of progress in the last few years, but five years ago, we did not have the centralization of some of the data and the connections that we have today. Still, however, there are problems that are really stymieing us. The security is one that you mentioned earlier, security and policy.

It causes us to have data trapped in certain pockets at different security levels. I think we’ve got some ideas how to break through that and make that a lot more easy in the future. I want to get to the point where we can send data to anyone, the right data, security conscious, but we’ve got the connections in place and it’s easy and we know what to do, whether they’re allies, whether they’re at different security levels.

That’s a fully connected DAF Battle Network. I want to get there and then I’m going to echo everything Shannon said because she’s right. We got to move at the speed of commercial technology.

Taylor “Bingo” Herron:

I guess I’d like to see a DAF Battle Network where software became almost disposable. If you think of your iPhone or whatnot, if I log onto the iPhone and see the same app I saw four years ago, there’s a problem. And so the rate at which it takes to develop capability, get it fielded, get it tested, get it … all that good stuff, it’s just very long. And so I would love to live in a world where that is not the case. And I think there’s a lot of folks here from industry. You can walk the vendor halls that have amazing technology. If their pathway to get that in front of the war fighters is years, then you’re going to lose out on it. So bringing down those barriers to entry to make it almost disposable.

Heather Penney:

And that’s going to be a major issue. And fortunately, we’ve got acquisition transformation because part of the reason why that’s the case is simply because of the slowness that we have experienced across stove piped program sets. And so then we have different programs that are digging themselves out of that technical debt. How do we create the interoperability to allow us to speed up that kind of software?

So what I’d like to do now is provide each of you a lightning round of what you want the audience to walk out of here learning today. So if we haven’t covered it already, what do you want to be left in people’s minds when they walk out these doors?

So Bingo, we’ll start with you. General Voorheis, we’ll give you the last word.

Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis:

Yeah, I’m just excited to be a part of the C3BM team. Success for me and what I’m looking to get out of here is to really translate what the Secretary of War and the Secretary of Meink are providing to us in terms of acquisition authorities and transformation and translate that into the five-year things that these folks just talked about up here on the stage and make that a reality.

Shannon Pallone:

I would say industry partnership is absolutely critical to everything that we’re going to do. So as much as we can make sure you’re understanding our problem sets, we’re understanding what technology you bring to bear, and as much as we can simplify the integration patterns, that’s really key to success going forward.

Dr. Bryan Tipton:

Well, I think one thing to walk away with is, I think my opinion, we’ve come a long way in the last three years. Starting C3BM, running a new era, General Voorheis taking over. We’ve worked together a long time, appreciate his leadership, stepping into a big job, integrating the DAF Battle Network.

Going forward, there are a lot of things that you may not see right away that we have plans, but I think it’s going to be pretty exciting how we’re connecting everything together, and there’s a lot of capability coming. So I’m pretty happy where we’re going. I’m excited about the future.

I’ll put in a plug of we need a lot of people to come help us either in the PAE or in the industry partners. So definitely send us a note if you think you can be part of this. There’s a lot going on.

Taylor “Bingo” Herron:

I was supposed to go first, so now I’ve got to think of what to say. Yeah. So I think the extreme teaming to me is definitely it. I did a study on innovation pathways in the Air Force, I don’t know, five years ago or something, and I thought I would discover these, there’s a perfect pathway and it’s mechanics, or if you change the acquisition system, it’d be better. I thought that’s the end state I’d end up at. It wasn’t.

Everyone that succeeded, succeeded through a little bit of serendipity because they knew the right people. They stumbled into the right partners along the way. And so I think that’s true across your operator, your acquisitions community, industry, because I’m in industry, so they’re cool. And then the labs I think also have a critical role in here as well. But connecting those parts of the ecosystem together, I think is massively important to be able to drive transformation quickly.

Heather Penney:

Well, they say that professionals think about logistics, but they also have to think about networks because if it’s not for the information sharing, no one’s going to have the data that they need, whether or not that’s target data, whether or not that’s situational awareness or whether or not that’s the battle management picture that we need to be able to be successful. And in the peer environment that we’re in today, the increasingly dangerous global security world that we’re seeing, this is going to become even more crucial as we disaggregate our forces and increasingly operate as a system of systems. So it’s something that we need to spend a lot more time thinking about.

Thank you all so much for joining us today on the panel and then thank you all for attending. Please come visit the Mitchell Institute booth in the exhibit hall and have a great Air and Space power kind of day. Enjoy your evening.