Keynote Address—Advancing Combat Power in Air and Space

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Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Welcome everyone to AFA’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference with the theme, Advancing Air and Space Dominance: An Urgent Call to Build and Sustain the Forces. For generations, America’s strength, ingenuity, and commitment to freedom have helped secure peace, expand opportunity, and inspire people around the world. Our Air Force and our Space Force stand at the heart of that legacy. Air power and space power give our nation extraordinary options when it matters most. We have seen that recently in Operations Midnight Hammer, Resolute Resolve, and Epic Fury. Time and again, our Guardians and our Airmen have performed magnificently, demonstrating unmatched skill, professionalism, and dedication to the mission. Their success is a testament to the character of our total force, and it’s also a reminder of our responsibility to provide these men and women with the resources, capabilities, and readiness they deserve. Around the globe, threats are accumulating. The side that adapts fastest is best positioned to win.

And with that context, it’s my pleasure to introduce the 27th Secretary of the Air Force, Dr. Troy Meink.

Video:

For 250 years, Americans have faced down the impossible, adversaries who tried to outpace us, and enemies that tried to define who we are. And for 250 years, Americans have overcome every obstacle, outproducing and out innovating against every challenge. Today’s Airmen and Guardians carry that legacy into the future, innovating, executing at speed and at scale.

This is who we are.

This is how we win.

Aim high and Sempra Supra.

Dr. Troy Meink:

So good morning, everybody. How are we doing this fine Air Force morning? How are we doing this fine Space Force morning? How’d that happen? How are we doing this fine joint force morning? So Sergeant Holloway, that was awesome. Wherever you are sitting, you’re out there someplace, that was phenomenal, phenomenal. And Chaplain, thank you as well. So today I want to talk about cost-effective combat power, what it means to the department and how we will deliver it. But first I want to say thanks to Burt, AFA, everybody who took to put this together. I really appreciate it. It’s great to be back here again. It’s important for them and I know it takes a lot of work, a lot of work to get there. So oftentimes I like to open by telling a little story. I’m actually going to wait the story until the end.

And in this case, it’s going to be almost all true, but going to hold it till the end. So we have quite a few distinguished guests here in the audience today, and while I’m not going to be able to welcome everyone individually, I am delighted to welcome General Doug Schiess to his first AFA as our Space Force’s third Chief of Space Operations.

So Doug, Debbie, it is great to have both of you in the chair and I’m going to really appreciate working with you for the next couple of years. So most of all, I want to thank our Airmen, Guardians, civilians, and their families with a special thanks to those who are deployed around the world. Our people have been doing a lot of impressive work, which our service chiefs are actually going to walk through in some detail in their keynotes. General Wilsbach is going to tell you about two junior Airmen who intercepted 10 drones in a single shift, saving the lives of our personnel and our allies. You’ll also hear from General Schiess about Guardians leading the largest buildup of space capability in any theater’s history. They are engaging in combat operations under fire to support and defend the joint force. I remain inspired by our people every single day, including the one currently on orbit.

Video:

Good morning, AFA and greetings from the International Space Station. I’d like to echo the message of thank you. From up here, I get the whole view of human activities and it’s a great reminder to me that I’m part of something big and meaningful. So keep aiming high, Airmen, and to my fellow Guardians, Sempra Supra.

Dr. Troy Meink:

So they got to prove their own orbit, so they toss a little patch floating across the screen. You notice that? Yeah, that wasn’t staged at all. Every time I heard… I got a chance to talk to Colonel Minnin and the other astronauts a week or so ago. Every time I hear him and talk to him on space, I have to admit I get just a little bit envious. I’m sure as many of you do here today, I was really hoping to figure out how to turn this job into incentive flight up to space station. I was talking to Director of NASA and it’s like $60 million for that ticket. So still a little bit expensive, still a little bit expensive, but thanks for Colonel Minnin, thanks for what you’re doing up there and thanks for NASA and your support. So I wish we could spend the whole keynote thanking people and watching videos, but as I said at the start, I really want to talk about cost-effective combat power.

I’ve started pretty much every talk since I took this job by restating the DAF’s fundamental mission, defend the homeland, deter all adversaries, and then if necessary, winning combat. This led us to our enduring priorities of people, readiness, modernization. And while those have not changed, the threat is changing. And I’ve said this a lot and it just continues to surprise me at actually how fast it is changing, faster than I even thought was possible even 12 months ago. Today, we face a mix of rapidly changing technologies and adversaries moving aggressively to employ them. And I’m not just talking about the high end or the low end, it’s across the board. And we have a budget process that was really built for a different pace of war. Just think about some of the changes in the last few years. In the European theater, one way attack drones have replaced artillery as the primary killer on the battlefield while armor often sits idle on the side.

When I first came into this office, Agentic AI really wasn’t a commercial thing. Today, it competes with some of the world’s top programmers, cyber operators, and hackers, and these technologies are revolutionizing the battlefield. They allow countries that would not have had the resources in the past to quickly adapt and scale their combat capabilities. Hap Arnold used to say that an Air Force is always verging on obsolescence. That was true in his time and that is even more true today. If we expect to deter our adversaries, we must increase our combat power, innovate faster than anyone else, affordably. We need cost-effective combat power, and this department has already proven that it can deliver on that. Before we walk through some of that and the way forward, it’s worth highlighting some of those incredible progresses over the last year. First people, we are building a force prepared to generate combat power from day one.

We restructured the Air Force Academy wing by creating an academic wing focused on the profession of arms, where we are now integrating science tech and AI into modern warfare. And on the enlisted side, we relaunched our basic military training course with new curriculum and infrastructure. The goal is to expose Airmen and Guardians to flight lines, ranges, and operational environments from the start. This will be especially important to our growing Space Force, where we are rapidly expanding our training and a sessions pipeline to keep up with the projected growth, and the growth is expected to be significant. Beyond training, we also want a healthy and rewarding work environment for our personnel to support quality of service. When our people can come to work each day equipped, empowered, and focused on the mission they do best, I believe it’s better for us and it’s better for them.

And it’s something we’re thinking about a lot for our Airmen and Guardians. We rolled out a number of initiatives, including consecutive assignments in place, flexible rated career paths, and a training pilot career path, which will also help with quality of life, offering families stability and predictability. And improving quality of service and efficiency is also why we are putting more than 300 AI tools into the hands of our people. I use them every day. This includes mission scheduling tools that streamline work for nearly 150,000 Airmen and for our Guardians, data fusion tools that turn millions of data points into actionable information. The Space Force has also implemented a part-time Guardian construct, allowing us to benefit from the talented people who want to serve, who offer unique talent, but who have unconventional schedules, and we are upgrading how we support our people. One example is dorms as a service, a concept designed to leverage the best practices from universities to improve dormitory support for our personnel.

Next, readiness. We’ve made great progress despite our high ops tempo. Launch capacity is one of the areas where we’ve seen tremendous progress. Space Force launch sites have already hosted 116 orbital launches this year. I think it was actually 117 after yesterday and will be 118 tomorrow. Nearly 60% of all launches on the planet. This is allowing us to maintain and build our commercial and military space advantage. And I actually think this is an area where the US advantage will increase over the coming five to 10 years, not decrease. Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.

The Air Force has bolstered readiness through targeted fleet health initiatives like our North Star readiness campaign. Our sustainment centers surged parts procurement by nearly 120% to support Epic Fury. At the same time, industry partners have invested billions of their own capital to do the same. The result? Our fleet health is showing meaningful progress and with Congress’s support, we’ll follow that up with record high spare parts investment in the next year and years to come. Across both services, we are also improving facility readiness. From now on, the majority of military construction and restoration projects will use newly granted acquisition authorities to help accelerate delivery. We’d still like some more authority, but we’re using what we got. The result will be faster improvements to the infrastructure that generates our combat power.

And finally, we’ve made tremendous progress in modernization. We’ve established all 26 of our new portfolio acquisition executives or PAEs. Each is empowered and accountable for accelerating delivery of capabilities. We are already seeing tremendous progress with programs like Sentinel where we will be having our first PAD launch next year. We’re also considering additional PAEs, including areas such as point defense to further increase security for our Airmen and Guardians. We are delegating almost every authority we legally can to our PAEs. For most programs, that now includes Milestone Decision Authority, a big first in our acquisition community. I would’ve loved to have had that when I was a program manager, loved to have had that when I was a program manager. It’s a testament to the trust we are placing in our leaders.

I could not be more proud of all that our services are achieving, but the threat environment won’t allow us to remain static. We must accelerate the progress and delivery of a force that is adaptable, scalable, and affordable. That means evolving our force design. The F-47 and the B-21 are phenomenal aircraft. They have been designed with production, sustainment, maintenance and lethality in mind. They will be able to do things no other aircraft have ever done before. However, they’re not going to fully meet the mass or scale of combat power we need. But when we pair manned aircraft with lower cost autonomous systems, we will be able to unlock combat power at scale. So we’ll be dramatically increasing our combat power by adding large numbers of highly autonomous systems. We are using novel concepts such as open systems architecture to accelerate procurement, which has also increased competition from industry resulting in better choices, better prices, and in the end, more combat power.

Because of the steps we are taking today, we will have a significantly different force by 2032. By then, our special operators will have the ability to employ thousands of autonomous one-way attack systems, and we will have autonomous fighters like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft or CCAs. We intend to have at least 500 of these in service by 2032, and they’ll be performing many of the same missions that we do with manned fighters today. Today, the first FQ-42 and FQ-44 increments are already rolling off the assembly line, and I’m excited to name them here for the first time. I’m allowed to do that, right, Dale? I can do that? I’m still good. All right. Fury and vengeance.

So these aircraft went from contract award to first flight in 18 months or under, 18 months or under. That’s almost unheard of in aircraft development. And this is not the only class of autonomous aircraft we are aggressively pursuing. As we saw in Epic Fury, ISR strike platforms have been essential. We have used MQ9 and even now the ultra aircraft to great effect. Building on these lessons, we are developing a family of low cost multi-roll strike platforms called the mass modular aircraft or MMAs. MMAs will provide affordable, attributable, long-range strike, and we will be able to field them at scale. Our intent is to field a hundred MMAs in 2029 at even a lower cost than the CCAs and a fraction of cost of manned aircraft we built today. Then by 2032, 500 of these platforms will join our force operational field fleet. And a scalable force doesn’t just apply to aircraft.

We are also expanding munitions with our family of affordable mass munition programs. These are designed from the onset for producibility and affordable mass. It’s hard to tell which one it’s on there, but there is one of them on the wing. Actually, I think there are two of them on the wing, two of them on the way. We expect to have tens of thousands in the inventory by 2030. Matter of fact, they’re already being used today. In space, we are applying the same approach to proliferative constellations. One example is our space-based interceptor program, which moved from initial contract to flight-ready hardware in less than one year. We are making similar progress in our space data network and we are launching our AMTI or our air moving target indication constellation this month, this month. Taking together these investments will help us adapt and scale the force for today and tomorrow’s threat. Now, we cannot have a discussion on scaling combat power without a discussion on resources.

And we really need to think about this in two ways. First, as I’ve just been discussing, we need to increase efficiency. We need better value from industry. Many of the weapons components and systems we buy today have way outrun the cost curve. They perform extremely well, I mean extremely well, but the costs are growing faster than the rate of inflation. We need that to change if we want to maintain a military advantage and our economic security. And as I said earlier, we need to evolve our force structure to include these lower cost systems. But second, we simply need more resources, and the president and the department have requested a significant increase from Congress. Since 1947, when the department was founded, our country has really put a steadily declining share of its budget towards the military. The result is that today we receive a smaller percentage of the federal budget and an even smaller percentage of the GDP than at almost any time in our nation’s history.

In today’s rapidly changing threat environment, we cannot expect a world-class military if we choose not to invest in it, but we will be very vigilant with those resources. And I can guarantee you that the DAF will be good stewards of every dollar we receive, and we will be audit ready by 2027.

For people who have been working, this is really hard. Getting the services ready, audit ready by 2027 is a big deal, but we are now confident we’re going to get there. Now, my staff wanted me to close my remarks today by saying we cannot wait for a crisis or a wake-up call. My perspective is if we haven’t all heard the wake-up call already, we must be living in a cave and not watching any news. It’s there. So instead, I want to end with the mostly true story that I promised in the beginning. So I’ve been driving semi-autonomous cars, and some of you have heard these stories probably too many times. I’ve been driving semi-autonomous cars really since they first came out, really more than 10 years ago. For the first six or so of those years, they were interesting. They were helpful under certain conditions, but man, they were scary in others, right?

They’d get you if you weren’t careful. Over the years, I watched the onboard sensors compute get more and more sensitive and more powerful, and there was slow improvement, but not dramatic. But then about three years ago, a switch really flipped.

Companies really began dedicating really large GPU clusters and deep learning on very large data sets, and the improvements were definitely dramatic. Self-driving went from sketchy on the side roads to better than most humans 99% of the time. It’ll be better 99.9% of the time by the end of the year. It’s going to be better 99.99% of the time by the end of next year. This technology is moving staggeringly fast. This problem has been solved. So it’s probably pretty obvious, but why does this matter to us other than in our commute home? Well, because I can’t think of a single combat operation problem that’s harder than the one solved for autonomous cars. I could be wrong though. I sometimes am. So I’m going to give you all the challenge. So if you disagree with me, or if you can think of an operational environment more challenging than trying to drive downtown DC, send me a message.

It’s actually pretty easy, lots of people do, and I’m trying to come up with a prize. It’s going to be approve the secretary wrong price, right? But before you tell me about combat operations being different because lethal forces involved and there’s safety issues, consider that there are millions of lives already in the hands of these autonomous systems and that will be going to tens of millions and hundreds of millions. So again, but why does this matter? Because autonomy is one of… Now I’m not just talking about autonomy for operations, but autonomy and how we do acquisition, how we do operations, how we do manufacturing, how we do design. It’s really autonomy is one of, if not the key technology enabling cost-effective combat power, and we need to lean into it. A little bit scary, but we need to lean into it. Now, the really good news is that the United States is arguably the leader in autonomous systems in the world, but guess who number two is?

Guess who’s second and guess who is not afraid to implement it really, really fast? So the US has the most innovative people, research institutions, cultures, and industry in the world, and the team we have in the DAF is really unmatched anywhere. And matter of fact, if I was one of our adversaries, that would actually make me pretty nervous, but it is up to us to leverage those advantages. When people look back at this moment, they will not judge us on whether or not we implemented these autonomous systems because eventually we’re going to. But what we’re going to be judged on is how quickly we operationalize them, right? That is whether we operationalize them fast enough to maintain our advantage. That’s the challenge. So thank you very much for your time today. Fly, fight, win, Sempra Supra. Don’t stand up yet. We’re not done. Hey Burt, why don’t you come on up?

Sorry, I forgot to mention I wasn’t quite done. We’re going to sit down and talk just a little bit. I can only stand and talk for so long, give Burt a chance to ask some questions.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

So how this works normally is we talk about what the Secretary’s messages are and how he wants to work, and we talk about this conversation beforehand, but he didn’t share with me all the things, all the bombs he was going to drop in that opening salvo today. So we have to talk about some of that, that we didn’t really rehearse. And I’m trying to struggle in where to start, but I’m going to start on one of the things that interests me the most is in the middle of that, there was a very subtle, “Oh, by the way, we have space weapons on orbit.” Can you expand a little bit on that or not?

Dr. Troy Meink:

No.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

I had to ask.

Dr. Troy Meink:

That phrase was very well-thought-out, so whatever I said before is what I say again. What I would say is when we look at everything we’re doing in… I mean, really what we’ve done over the decades and what’s becoming even more and more important as we go forward, it’s the sensing in C2, everything we’re talking about doing from a long range and in control of our forces, long range fires, control of our forces, the space capability, our maintaining and being able to count on those space capabilities is important. And as everybody knows, there have been many who are developing capabilities to take those away from us, to threaten those things. So it is critically important that we maintain our dominance, not only in the air, but in space, and so that we’ve had to take steps to make sure that when we’re threatened, we can take care of that.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Well, let’s talk about some of the things that you also mentioned, and I’ll just use the CCA MMA as an example. Part of the issue that we have when we bring on something new, and that’s while CCA and MMAs are technically that new, they are different than the way we operate now, and so there’s a period of transition. So you go from, “Hey, here’s a good idea, here we’re prototyping it,” and now you guys are really turning up the clock on production and getting things out there. How are you working that across the rest of the portfolios to transition that new technology to the field in both it’s physically out there and then the Airmen and the Guardians are accepting of that new capability and able to employ it?

Dr. Troy Meink:

Yeah. I mean, we can probably talk about that question for the entire time I have here. Maybe I’ll break it into talk about it just a couple different ways. I mean, transition is always hard and we’re doing it across the largest level of modernizations going on right now across the Air Force in and on the space side of the house. It’s not just modernization, as we just talked about their emissions that didn’t exist five years ago. So it’s not just a modernization, it’s fielding entirely new systems. So you have this transition as we go through this modernization, that is always challenging whether or not it’s aircraft or whether or not we’re transitioning from Minuteman to Sentinel and across the board and balancing that transition as you’re alluding to is always really hard. There’s a couple of things that… There’s no one size fits all on how we handle those, but there’s a couple of big things that are going on.

We talk about the reconciliation and the additional resources that we’re asking for, particularly kind of the reconciliation of big trance of money. A lot of that is to help that because we’re in a situation to where you can’t just stop building the current missiles and wait until you get to the new ones. You have to maintain, you have to continue production as you’re ramping up production on the stuff that’s easier to scale, easier to ramp, easier to build, lower cost. You can’t just stop one and then switch to the other. Doesn’t work. So you have this transition overlap where it just simply requires more resources to manage that. And so that’s a big driver for what we’re asking for and why we’re asking for the reconciliation. And then just getting these systems into the hands of the operators so that they can experiment with them.

On the CCA side of the house, we’re doing a different approach at Creech where we’re giving these into an operational development unit. Their entire focus is developing and figuring out how we’re going to use these things. So you have to look at both the resource side of the house as well as, as you mentioned, how you get them in the hands of the operator so they can figure out how to best employ them. And we have to address all those. And I think we have a pretty good plan, but I’m sure we’re going to learn a lot and have to evolve as we go forward. I think again, the challenge is how do we do it quickly? Again, it’s not just… You always want to walk into these things very cautiously, but unfortunately at this point in time, given what we’re seeing and how quickly it’s being adapted by some of our potential adversaries, we don’t have a choice. We have to do it fast.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Right. I think the argument is very clear and you brought up a whole interesting concept there. I know that you have the PAE force almost maybe filled out, and you have this transition plan and you have just very impressive getting to 500 CCAs in 2032 and 100 MMAs in 2029. But that requires, like you just said, the resources that need to come from Congress, some of those. And then you need to transition our industry that they have to not only produce prototypes and they’re all sitting out here, but actually scale the production to produce. And that’s just the start, what you talked about today. In those two areas, whether it’s Congress and the issues on late bills and late budgets coming out or getting industry to scale, what are you thinking are areas that you can focus on and what are you thinking on areas that are risky?

Dr. Troy Meink:

Yeah. Budget stability is huge for these things. We obviously work a lot with Congress as well, administration, but budget stability, CRs are a challenge. As we’re trying to ramp up, this all impacts our ability to scale and ramp production. Now we’ve made great progress at the Hill has been a good dialogue, been very supportive, but that long-term budget stability is what’s required for contractors to do both the new entrants in the traditional defense primes to do the investment, to facilitize, to get to the point where they can produce them at the cost and scale that we need. And we’re seeing really good… I mean, the CCA side of the house, we could actually talk about 500 by 2030. We could actually build more of them than that. From the get go, the program was designed to be able to simple aircraft that you could build fast and at a lower cost.

And so now we’re in a situation to where we could actually build more than we can actually afford to buy if we wanted to. Now in other areas, we are just limited by the production capacity of industry and we are working to how do you squeeze more out of that? Secretary Feinberg has done a phenomenal job of really focused on how to do that and working with industry. So we’re making a lot of progress too, but across the board, it’s how do you scale production? And every single one of these systems has a little bit of a different problem you have to address.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. And I think we know that the budget’s going to be delayed, but good news out of this next budget is the fact that at least the comms that we’re hearing is there’s really good acceptance of multi-year procurement authorities in there, which I think is going to help in these areas, right?

Dr. Troy Meink:

Yeah. A multi-year procurement is one of them. We talk about stability, that’s one of the mechanisms we use. We use others, but that’s one of the mechanisms. I think I am usually almost always a glass half full kind of person. In the discussion we’ve had with the Hill, I think they all see the problem. I think we’re getting a lot of support both at, like I said, multi-year and some of the other things. Just getting through the process to get it all done and start scaling up is what we’re working with right now.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. And industry is helping out with that.

Dr. Troy Meink:

Yeah, very much so.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. I have a question and I think maybe others do also. So AI, I really was interested in what we were talking about up there. And as a Luddite and an old Luddite, sitting in here listening to you talk and thinking, okay, it’s one thing to talk about how do I get AI to help my calculus homework? And another thing is when we’re talking CCAs, we’re talking autonomous aircraft and we’re talking autonomous weapon systems, how do you get the force to accept those kind of new ideas? Because how does the human in the loop, the human outside of the loop watching, that’s an entire new thing for Airmen and Guardians to experience, it seems, in the employment of weapons.

Dr. Troy Meink:

We’ve been deploying weapons for a long, long time that have a bit of AI in them.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

They do.

Dr. Troy Meink:

They weren’t true AI. I can go down a rabbit hole of what true AI is there, but we’ve had autonomous weapons. I mean, whether it’s a tomahawk or any of our air missiles that operate independently at some point in time, terminal guidance, things like that. But the big difference here is really taking advantage of the autonomous capability that the deep learning and all these other things offer. The example I used was autonomous cars, which is one of the most challenging until you actually see some of these things start to operate, the complexity of what humans do all the time in that environment is really amazing. And the fact that they’ve solved that problem just tells you that we’re going to be able to solve it for and utilize it for all problems. Now, how do you get people to adapt it? I mean, the first thing is try to get tools.

I mean, it’s just been a nightmare just to get the various genning models, whether it’s Anthropic or Grok or Gemini or any of them to just get access to them on our networks. So I think the first thing is just get access to all those tools and all those things so people can start using them. Like I said, on the CCAs, getting them into these developmental kind of operational units so they can start experimenting with that. Familiarity breeds confidence. You’ve got to get these… And as we start seeing it more and more in everybody’s personal life as well as in their professional life, I think you’re going to see a rapid adoption system. How do you push that? I mean, I like to start with. I’m actually going to do it here. So how many people actually use any of these tools day to day? It’s maybe 30% of the crowd raise their hands.

We all need to be thinking about how we employ them because the more you learn them just messing with them in your personal life, you get more and more comfortable. A big part of it is, and there’s a bunch of different aspects you could talk about, but getting those tools, not only access to the operators, but we’ve struggled with getting those tools for the software developers. How do we get these tools in the software development environments? And I think we’re making progress there as well, but the first big step is just get the tools available to the workforce so they can start experimenting and using them. And there’s been a big push. I mean, even at the Department of War level, there’s been a huge push at that.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Okay. And switching to another similar area, in long-range kill chains, you mentioned that AMTI is launching and you think that satellite constellation is going to be up and running pretty soon. How do you see the long-range kill chain being fully ready to employ in the future?

Dr. Troy Meink:

We’ve been using versions of long-range kill chain for quite a while. We have some pretty long-range weapons already. I think this is just a dramatic scale up of the complexity of the environment and the numbers of these things we’re going to have to employ. As I mentioned before, sensing a C2 is critical. You can’t do this long-range kill chain operations without the C2 and the sensing that you’re getting from space and from other places, but sensing from spaces is going to be a huge driver for that. I actually have pretty good confidence that we’re going to be able to field those on time.

That actually is going pretty well. Then it’s how do you build the weapon systems that have a long enough range, the weapon systems that can take updates, all the things that it requires to get that weapon close enough so that whatever its mechanism for terminal guidance can take over. That whole kill chain all the way from aircraft development, getting out of the aircraft, getting the aircraft to the right point and getting it released, that entire kill chain is being worked aggressively and it’s going well. Again, I think the biggest problem or the problem, the biggest challenge we have there is just how do we make sure we can scale and build enough of the different weapons to take advantage of the C2 and sensing that we’re fielding.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

I’m assuming that you also are looking at an end state or an end game where perhaps the long range kill chain is interrupted somehow and the aircraft manned, unmanned, crude, uncrewed CCA B-21 has to complete it with some kind of organic system.

Dr. Troy Meink:

Yeah. You can’t be single point failure on any of these. So how you do your comm systems, you have to have redundancy both even in space as well as the systems on the aircraft. And then in the end, this is where having more autonomy both in the platform as well as in the weapon system itself, where even if the weapon loses its outside information stream, how does it have enough autonomy to do what we’ve told it to do in absence of that? And that’s where people start getting nervous, right? But that is something we have to figure out how to get comfortable, how to test do it, how to verify, certify that these weapons are going to do what they want when they go into an autonomous mode. But I mean, again, to be honest, the technology is there. We’re just figuring out how to apply it. We got to do that quickly.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

And then one of the last questions is, do you want to expand a little bit on a PAE for air-based defense?

Dr. Troy Meink:

Yeah, the team, if you look at… I mean, it’s quite obvious that the challenges that are out there given the proliferation of the one-way attack and other threats that we have, one-way attack drones and the other threats that we have are facing. So I think there’s two components. It’s the workforce, and I think we’re looking at how do you establish basically a new career field specifically for point defense. And then there’s a kit side of it. How do you make sure that they have the kit they need to do the job? And that is a rapidly changing environment as well, both the threat as well as the development of the kit that the defenders are going to use. So there’s got to be focus on both of those.

There is overhead with standing up a new PAE, probably not going to do it right away, but obviously I think we’re on a path that we have something like that in the future, but there definitely has to be continually increasing focus on making sure we can defend our Airmen and Guardians wherever they are in the world. This is not just an overseas problem, this is a US problem as well.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Right. And you’re already walking down that road, PAE or not already?

Dr. Troy Meink:

Yeah, we’re already walking down the road and eventually we’ll evolve into, I think, a PAE for it, but it’s really how you get the right focus and attention on that mission set and both on the kit side and the workforce side. So that’s where we’re probably going to end, I think. It’s not going to be tomorrow, but that’s probably where we end.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Again, I thought it was really interesting, all the things you’re introducing, the changes you’re making, the progress you’re pushing forward. I also know that the Airmen and Guardians have been a little busy last year. You’ve been out and about talking to them. How are they doing?

Dr. Troy Meink:

Extremely busy. Extremely busy. It’s been super impressive. As you’ve heard me say, and I’ve said here multiple times before, the people are still our greatest asset by far. When I go out and even whether it’s at Ellsworth where the Airmen are really building an entire new base there as they bring the B-21 on, or whether you talk to the units that are deployed overseas, I think what I get, and I ask a lot of questions, so oftentimes they’re always going to say nice things to me, but I try to ask a lot of questions and talk to enough people to tell whether or not, but they continue to be excited about what they’re doing and 100% mission focused, and it’s truly amazing. I’d love to get out of DC to go to different bases and stuff just for that. It actually reinvigorates me, re-energizes me how great a job they’re doing out in the field. So that’s the best part of the job.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

That’s good to hear and just not surprising, but really good to hear. Okay, real quick on the last question, we talked about this a little earlier, and you mentioned, and we’re going to just talk about STEM education, and we actually had a little conversation about helping our kids with homework earlier, but you said that the Department of Air Force must be able to attract and retain people with critical skills, and especially those in STEM, and that if we don’t get those kids interested in middle school, they might not be interested at all. So is the Department of Air Force working on how to help fill that gap in STEM education as we move into the next phase of our existence?

Dr. Troy Meink:

Yeah, I think the Air Force and Space Force, the Department of the Air Force in general, I’m pretty lucky in that respect. We seem to be able to do a pretty good job of recruiting. Matter of fact, we have almost more candidates than we can actually ingest into the system, and so that’s the really good news. Now the question is how do we make sure we get the right mix? And then how do you retain them? Retaining a crowd, doesn’t matter what the career field, even if it’s not STEM, retaining those individuals is critical.

One of the problems on particularly some of the STEM career fields is there’s quite a bit of money to be made outside of the service, and so there’s that pull to pull them out, maybe more there than in some of the other career fields, but all the career fields are critically important. But basically trying to do the recruiting and doing the retention, some of the quality of service stuff we talked about, not only for the pilots, but how do you allow the people who’ve done all this, the massive amount of training to get good at AI software development? How do you allow them to do that for their careers? Those sorts of things will help, I think, a lot with retention.

And again, we’re doing some of it for the aviators, but looking at it across the board to allow that improved quality of service where they actually get to do what they’re best at, what they’re passionate to be trained at from young age and getting to utilize that talent so we can retain them so they don’t… Although when they go out the industry and support us on the industry side, that’s a good thing too.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

You bet.

Dr. Troy Meink:

But yeah, we’re actually doing pretty good. Our retention’s actually good. Our recruiting is actually good, but it’s something we have to continue to focus on. As you know, I’m a big believer in… The only way you can make sure that when they come out of college or they come out of high school that they’re capable of supporting this really technical, complicated environment we’re going into. You got to make sure that the middle school, high school are turning them out. And I’ve been a big believer in some of the STEM programs, with some of the robotics programs. I’ve been a huge fan. I’ve done a lot of coaching and stuff. I think these programs are critically important to feed the pipeline and the nation needs to continue to focus on that.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Well, on that note, we’re lucky because we agree in the AFA, education is the bedrock of our Air Force and our Space Force, and it ensures that we get the best and brightest Airmen with the right education. We have somebody here today that is part of that process, and we have our AFA 2026 Teacher of the Year, Lisa Warner here today. And we’ll get you a a chance to see it.

Video:

Rolls-Royce is proud to sponsor the Air & Space Forces Association’s National Teacher of the Year Award. Congratulations to this year’s winner, Lisa Warner. Lisa takes learning far beyond the classroom. She has flown student design experiments in zero gravity, used music to explore how sound behaves in microgravity, and sailed on a NOAA research ship. Then she brings all of it back to a music room in Dowsman, Wisconsin, where her students turn real scientific data into music. At Rolls-Royce, we build the engines that power America’s most critical missions now. Lisa is building the next generation of engineers, scientists, and innovators who will build America’s aerospace future. Lisa, congratulations on this well-deserved recognition.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Thank you, Lisa.

Dr. Troy Meink:

So how did you get the airplane? Do we still call it the vomit comet? Is that allowed? I don’t know if we’re allowed to call it that. How do you work that? That’s pretty impressive.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. And for those that haven’t met her, she’s a fascinating person. You’ll really enjoy your conversation with her, so I encourage you to talk to Lisa. Congrats again. Rolls-Royce, thanks for sponsoring that every year because it makes such a difference. So thank you very much. Thanks, sir.

Dr. Troy Meink:

Thank you, Burt. I appreciate it.

Lt. Gen. Burt Field, USAF (Ret.):

You bet.

Dr. Troy Meink:

Thanks, everybody.