Rethinking the Stockpile: Building the Right Mix for Future Conflict

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Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

All right, we’re right at 10:50. Do I get a good comp check in here? All right. Good morning. I’m Brigadier General Bob Lyons, Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Weapons and Director of the Armament Directorate at the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center. It is my privilege to serve as your moderator for today’s panel, which is titled Rethinking the Stockpile: Building the Right Mix for Future Conflict. In my current role as the portfolio acquisition executive for weapons across the Air Force munitions portfolio, which is everything from a nine millimeter bullet to a hypersonic weapon. In that organization, we have three priorities. First one is to support global operations. The second is to get those production lines surging at max capacity. And third is to execute development programs with excellence. That’s the mix of exquisite weapons and affordable mass weapons. And along those lines, we’ve had a big year for munitions across the joint team.

And today we have an outstanding group of leaders with us today to talk about rethinking the stockpile. Those leaders bring a range of operational, industry, technology, and production perspectives to this important discussion. Let me briefly introduce them. First one is Colonel retired Scott Gilloon, US Air Force retired as Sector Vice President for Air Force Strategic Development and Capability Assessments at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. A former Air Force fighter pilot and commander, he accumulated more than 3,000 flight hours in aircraft, including the F-15C and the F-16. We have with us Ryan Hartman, Chief Executive Officer of Ondas Sentinel and a 27-year aerospace veteran. His career includes senior leadership roles at World View, Insitu, and Raytheon, as well as service in both the US Air Force and US Navy. We have with us Bryon Kroger is the founder and CEO of Rise8, which focuses on accelerating the delivery of mission-critical software to the war fighter, a former Air Force targeteer. He also co-founded Kessel Run where he served as the Chief Operating Officer and helped pioneer continuous authorization to operate.

We have Chris Spagnoletti, he’s Chief Executive Officer of Ursa Major and brings more than three decades of aerospace and defense leadership experience. He’s leading efforts to expand production capacity across hypersonics, solid rocket motors and space mobility systems. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us today and thank the audience for joining us today. Rebuilding the stockpile requires more than simply replenishing what has been expended. We must ensure we are building the right mix of weapons, balancing capability, capacity cost, adaptability, and the ability to produce at the speed and scale for future conflict.

Today’s questions will focus on how government and industry can work together to strengthen the industrial base, accelerate production, adapt to a changing threat, and ultimately ensure the war fighter has the right capabilities when and where they are needed. A stockpile for this country provides the president and combatant commanders with options. So with that, let us get into our discussion. Thank you for being here. So this idea of the right mix, so the question to start is, how should we define the “right mix”? How do we balance exquisite capability with affordable mass, sufficient depth, offensive, defensive, enabling capabilities? So that’s the question. So Scott, you’re the first on the deck.

Col. Scott “Fug” Gilloon, USAF (Ret.):

All right. Thanks, sir. Appreciate it. Thanks to everybody for showing up and listening to us and kind of taking our feedback or at least our take on the questions. So my perspective, I think the right mix is really probably understood as the portfolio capabilities that best addresses a range of demanding but plausible scenarios. It’s not necessarily a high/low mix, if you will, but it is the least cost, most resilient set of capabilities that we can produce across a duration, a set of conflict durations. We can look at it from threat conditions and operational demands. From a CCA perspective, CCA in particular, or uncrewed systems rather, allow us the opportunity to absorb losses at a rate that we’d find unacceptable in a lot of ways from our crewed platforms. But what we don’t have is necessarily a mix of weapons that’s kind of tied to this risk tolerant set of platforms.

So the combination of launch platforms, open architectures combined with the autonomy in these systems, I think is really what’s, when we start to evaluate the mix, we’re going to look across those missions and assess it as to what’s going to give us the greatest resilience throughout the portfolio or throughout our operational requirements compared to the set of challenges that we’re going to be able to present to the enemy.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Turn it over to Ursa Major CEO.

Chris Spagnoletti:

Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate everybody coming to listen. So when it comes to the right mix, I think you mentioned this, it’s a right balance. So from our perspective, we see three things. The first is that we need affordable mass. It can’t be cheap mass. I mean, these are munition systems, these are weapons. There’s a threshold for cost and designing and safety margins that you just can’t cross, but it has to be affordable. So it’s really about cost per effect, trying to maximize the cost per effect. The systems have to be scalable. I mean, we need to innovate to provide the war fighter the most optimal advantage to give an asymmetrical advantage, but it has to be scalable. You can’t just build one and watch it do this exquisite boutique thing. It has to be able to be scaled. You can’t build in materials and processes that are just really, really hard to build up at rate.

And then the last piece from our perspective, your munition systems have to be modular, they have to be adaptable. So modular has to be more than just checking the WOSA compliance box. It has to be when new changes are loaded in, the munition systems actually respond and adapt because the field of munitions needs to be able to adapt at the speed at which the theater demands. So those are the three things that we see that we’re focused on. It’s the affordability, cost per effect, it’s the ability to make it scale, and then it’s the ability to be able to adapt and be modular.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

And we’ve seen over the past year some really impressive success with affordable weapons inside the Air Force. And it’s based on those architectures, it’s based on cost being the target, the modularity, all the things that you mentioned. I wanted to see if some of the other panelists had some thoughts on this. Any of you?

Ryan M. Hartman:

Well, I agree with everything that’s been said. I think affordable mass is incredibly important, but I think the other part that we have to also discuss is the sensing systems and the targeting systems. We talk a lot about affordable mass and we talk a lot about having a capability that we can scale, but we also have to have the ability to target these systems.

Bryon Kroger:

I would just add, if we think about the traditional cost schedule performance as one side of a value equation, cost per effect is really good. We also have to think about time. So I always say cost schedule performance is one side of the value equation where performance is divided by cost and schedule. So the amount of performance or the effect you get per dollar per unit of time, because one of the biggest costs that we face is the cost of delay.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

That’s right. And we have support to global operations and there’s lessons we should always take from any conflict. I wanted to see what your views were with respect to lessons we should take based on recent conflicts that inform about what we stockpile, what we stockpile and also how do collaborative autonomy, collaborative combat aircraft, uncrewed systems change that mix. So with that, I go back to you, Mr. Gilloon, Scott, and then to Mr. Hartman.

Col. Scott “Fug” Gilloon, USAF (Ret.):

So recent conflicts, I think everybody would agree, show us that our platforms are increasingly vulnerable to adversary long range precision fires, UAS swarms, their surveillance methods, a host of threats. So I think to me that says that we need to open up our apertures, if you will, and extend the set of weapons that any particular platform can carry to the broadest allocation of platforms. Open modular systems give us a cost-effective way to do that, to set it across a diverse array of those aircraft. When it comes to uncrewed platforms, as I mentioned previously, when you look at it, those platforms can, again, absorb the losses that we really can’t afford in the crewed platforms. So with that in mind, if you will, you take an approach where we’ve got the weapons, the combination of the weapons, the platforms and the high end, what I want to call the enablers, in this case enabler being autonomy.

And we’re going to have to get comfortable with autonomy being the integrator, the balance and resilience for that team, a team of diverse platforms. And by platforms, I mean the weapon, the launch platform and the autonomy itself, being that integrator such that that team can function across a variety of threats. And this boils down all the way to the apertures. We talk about it and we say it and we talk about open apertures and what, or excuse me, open systems and what things like the GRA provide. But when we think about it in this case, we’re talking about a software driven adaptability to those evolving threats. And that is a real thing and it’s something that we need to consider as we look to build this stockpile, especially relative to something that’s more of your risk tolerant or you can call them down to expendable and/or attritable platforms.

Ryan M. Hartman:

Yeah. I’d say that it feels like the adversary has been having this discussion a lot longer than we have. And what we’ve seen in recent conflict is that the adversary is scaling much faster than we’re able to scale. And what that causes is us to have to use very exquisite weapon systems to be able to counter low cost threats. And so what’s necessary is quite obvious that we have to have cost parity so that this isn’t just an economics war. It’s a force on force war with low cost weapon systems. But if you start to scale the number of low cost interceptors, you create another problem around manpower. And so there has to be an intersection of low cost interceptors with autonomy. And by integrating autonomy into the equation, then we’re able to match the quantity and the scale that the adversary is bringing to the conflict.

And I’ll just double down on what I just said as well. So if we start producing something that’s at parity with what the adversary is doing, I mean, I’ve read reports that the adversary is manufacturing something on the order of 70,000 Shahid class one-way attack drones per month. And if we’re going to match that, again, you have to be able to target these systems. You have to have the ability to sense and it can’t just be a bunch of exquisite targeting systems because then you find yourself in the same issue with having a significant number of exquisite targeting systems that are being used to target low cost interceptors, but you have to have a balance. You have to have low cost sensing systems coupled with the low cost interceptors.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Now the terms autonomy, uncrewed systems, even some of the design principles that go in munitions have a software aspect to it. Any of you have any thoughts about how you treat the software part of this problem?

Bryon Kroger:

I’ll just say that autonomy has always conjured up risk in everybody’s minds, but as generative AI and LLMs have taken the mind share of what we think about when we think about AI and now autonomy, people are conflating autonomy with generative AI and the things that we see with generative AI. I mean, there’s great benefits, but there are a lot of pitfalls of using non-deterministic models to solve deterministic problems. So I would just remind everybody that there’s a whole class of AI and algorithms in general that is deterministic and it’s far less risky than I think what’s getting conjured up in everybody’s minds right now about autonomy. So there’s still risk with autonomy, even with deterministic models, but we need to separate those two categories and then make sure we’re doing a very good job of using deterministic models for deterministic problems and not using non-deterministic ones.

Chris Spagnoletti:

Yeah. When it comes to the munitions that accommodate or work with these autonomous systems, to your point, we have to develop the munitions, get the stockpiles to move at the time scales that are necessary. We just don’t have the time to wait year after year when we want to change the diameter. We want to change the thrust characteristic of an autonomous system. So these systems need to have munitions that, again, that move at the pace, at scale and the timeframes that actually make sense. Otherwise, like you said, the adversary is just moving at a much faster pace, at a much cheaper cost target. So we have to maintain and keep track.

Col. Scott “Fug” Gilloon, USAF (Ret.):

Yeah. The other thing I’d like to add is when we look at it, we tend to focus a lot on the problems and the challenges and it seems like this insurmountable mountain. What I will add is there are a tremendous amount of efforts going on that most people are probably not aware of. The open enclaves that have been created in aircraft to go and test and evaluate this, everything from an F-16 to an F-35, we’re doing this every day. And so I think I’d be remiss if I wasn’t up here telling folks or at least advocating on behalf of the folks who are doing all the tests, what we’re seeing every day in the test just for CCA alone, every single day there’s an aircraft flying that’s autonomous.

We don’t often think about that. There’s also a fighter aircraft. Like I said, the Air Force has been working for years to put open enclaves in its system, and I think it should be at least somewhat reassuring that we can do that from our legacy aircraft up through our most advanced fighters. I think that’s important because the software adaptability that we’re talking about is going to provide a level of operational resilience for both the air crew as well as the entire system.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Just a follow-up here, this idea of uncrewed systems, does it require its own distinct class of weapons or does it matter? Thoughts? Go ahead, sir.

Ryan M. Hartman:

So the answer is I think it’s a mix. I think uncrewed platforms, they can benefit from having bespoke weapon systems that again, match the affordable mass equation that we’re all talking about. In addition to that, uncrewed systems can get closer, they can get themselves into harm’s way, unlike crewed systems. I mean, obviously we’ve put crewed systems into harm’s way, but the fact that we can put more of them closer to the threat means that we should think about the weapons that we integrate on uncrewed systems.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Very good points. Do you have another one?

Col. Scott “Fug” Gilloon, USAF (Ret.):

No.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Okay. So at this point we’ve talked about mix, class of weapon. I want to talk about the effectiveness of those weapons on the battlefield. It has to do with the idea of adaptability as combat power. You had mentioned about the pace of test and there’s a lot of test happening, but that test is also based on what you learn. And we have quite a bit of evidence that when you’re on the battlefield, there’s quite a bit of learning that happens. So the question here is how do we measure the effects available on the day of a fight, not just inventory, and how do we ensure that our weapons can adapt after they’re fielded at the pace that they must adapt based on rapid changes with the threat? So let that sink in. Mr. Kroger, you got the first round on that one followed by Mr. Hartman.

Bryon Kroger:

Yeah. So I think first we have to acknowledge that the thing the commander actually needs to know isn’t just inventory, it’s those effects. And both knowing the effects and producing them increasingly relies on software. And as we rethink the stockpile, I think we need to think a lot more about software. We end up talking a lot about hardware and stockpile, everything from munitions to rockets to attritable drones. But the question I’d add to the mix is whether the systems can change after we field them. So static software in a dynamic fight is really dangerous at this point. We see that in Ukraine. I mean, they’re in a continuous cycle of adaptation, new tactics launch, countermeasures produced, new tactics launched in response. All of this is driven by software and they’re driving updates to the field, not just monthly or weekly or even daily, but multiple times a day.

They can get updates into the field in hours. Starlink did this too when they had to block certain actions that were happening over their networks. I mean, this is real. It’s already here. And if we think now about all this hardware that’s in the stockpile, it worked in testing, it worked in a demo environment, but the adversary didn’t attend any of those. And so we have to make sure… I think our most important capability is our ability to sense and respond to the enemy on the battlefield as the battle’s unfolding. And I don’t think that that’s a foreign concept to anybody in this room, but when it comes to software, we’ve just historically been really bad at this. In some cases, we’re fielding software slower than hardware.

It’s wild. And so we really have to decouple the software cycles from the hardware cycles and we need to set the bar high. I hear people talking about like, “Oh, it’d be really nice to get monthly software updates.” No, no, no. We need to hit DORA’s elite category where we are deploying multiple times a day, where we can get an update to the field on demand as soon as we need it. And I think until we set that as the bar, we’re going to have systems that… It’s funny, you wouldn’t think about not establishing a refueling apparatus for aircraft that need to get across long distances, but we haven’t really thought about from an enterprise IT perspective, how to create a similar refueling apparatus, the ability to continuously deliver software to the field in the way that we should. It’s not getting nearly enough tension and we need to start.

Ryan M. Hartman:

Yeah. I agree with everything that Bryon just said, and I just want to reinforce a couple things. The first is, inventory on the first day of a conflict is one important equation, but it is the ability for that inventory to evolve with the conflict. If you look at Ukraine, just as Bryon pointed out, the weapon systems that are being used today are very different than the weapon systems that were being used in the early days of the conflict. And software is part of it for sure, but as an industry, we also have to make sure that the hardware is evolving as a conflict evolves as well. I think Ukraine is a great example of having to consider affordable mass and being able to field affordable mass very rapidly. And test is an important part of this, but just as Bryon pointed out, in my 27 years in the industry, I haven’t seen the adversary comply with our acquisition system yet. And therefore we have to make sure that our acquisition system enables us to keep up with the pace of conflict and the adaptability necessary to stay relevant in conflict.

Chris Spagnoletti:

Yeah. When you mentioned software updates, I used to be avionics guy years ago and the hairs on the back of my neck went up just because it’s so painful. But it’s true though. When we talk about more advanced systems that can become modular, then when you make a software change, you have to do this battery of massive testing to make sure that you didn’t screw something else up. So what’s key is for us, for all of us to push the boundaries on how to do that faster, not give up safety, not give up any of the rigor, but we have to do it faster. We have to figure out a way. We’ve got to leverage the tools. And on the hardware side, we used to always say, “Just fix it in software.” Well, that’s not the case anymore. We have to do the same on hardware, which means the whole supply chain has to be adaptable all the way down the line.

Bryon Kroger:

I also want to give the DOD credit really quick. There was a new DOD instruction that was published, so I offered a critique that historically we haven’t been very good at this and it’s words right now. The gap is execution of course, but the new DOD instruction, I wrote it down here, it’s 8430.01, accelerated mission software. Not a lot of people have seen it yet, but I highly recommend checking it out. I’m often fairly critical and I couldn’t even find much to critique with it, so I actually think it’s really good instruction.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Great points. I’d add when you deal with battlefield learning is you have to, in some cases, be there. You have to be there to get the feedback in real time, and then there’s a loop back to your hardware design or software design, and then there’s the pace of test, all iterating together. Now you’d mentioned this idea of, I’m going to shift the conversation now to production capacity and bottlenecks. And each of you are inside of industry, you’ve got supply chains. So the question is, where are the most consequential production bottlenecks and what must change to create capacity to surge and sustain production?

Chris Spagnoletti:

Yeah. So when you think about where the bottlenecks are in defense products, one of the first kind of tenants that you have to overcome is the fact that we’ve spent years developing these products because they’re no fail. Every time you hit the button, they have to do what they’re supposed to do. So what that means is we lock in the process, we lock in the design, and we make it as hard as possible to change. So it always comes out similar. To move to really replenish the stockpiles and do something different, we have to think about a couple things. We got to think about how we’re going to have manufacturing lines that are modular. You can qualify a manufacturing line, but it has flexibility.

We have to treat our supply chain and procurement folks like they’re special ops teams. A lot of times when you run a business, it’s easy to fall in the trap and say, “Well, we’re going to really keep our costs down in certain areas.” And not leaning into the supply chain and procurement across all industries is a huge mistake because even the best designs are kind of meaningless if you don’t have all the parts and raw materials to put them together. But lastly, it’s capacity. Capacity is so key. For years and years, it was just in time, just in time manufacturing. Don’t get any other machines or people to just get enough things to get out the door. Well, again, that’s just too late.

Right now as an industry, we need to build capacity and it takes capital. It takes capital to get additional machines, training, because as an industry, we’re not used to having folks getting ready to do something. We want people busy all the time, but what that means is you have no spare capacity. So we really need to focus on building out that capacity, getting ready so that when the surge demand hits, we could really lean in and produce the parts and ship them where they need to be.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Any other thoughts?

Bryon Kroger:

Yeah, we certainly need to address capacity on the industry side. I’d also point out something we forget about, which is capacity on the government side when it comes to government dependencies like tests, cybersecurity, and fielding decisions. And one example is the authorization to operate process, at least for software, I can speak to it. We often go into organizations and map the value stream looking for bottlenecks because the ATO process for software is the bottleneck. But within that, what we found is that your calendars are actually the biggest bottleneck there in that upwards of 80 to 85%, depending on the customer we look at, of the time spent getting an authorization to operate, is time spent waiting in queue.

And when you go and look, it’s time getting on the authorizing official’s calendar or their designated representatives like the security controls assessors. That’s just one example of if it takes six months to get on the AO’s calendar, right there, you’re at a minimum of six months to field the system, but they’re going to find something because we always find things during test and evaluation, and now we go back, redevelop, and wait another six months to get on the calendar, and this is how you get 12 to 18 month ATO cycles.

Ryan M. Hartman:

There are four bottlenecks that I track when I think about capacity. The first is supply chain, the second is supply chain, the third is supply chain, the fourth is test. When I think about supply chain, it really is about scaling the supply chain at the same rate, and that requires capital. It requires leaning into where we think demand is and taking risks, and then also ensuring that they’re scaling at a rate that is consistent with how we’re scaling for quality and reliability. Then from a test point of view, when you’re designing and developing a new weapon system, being able to get time on a range is a very difficult thing to do. The Army has recently done something that I think is really interesting, and that’s giving industry the opportunity to schedule range time without having a government sponsor, without having to go through a significant process. Of course, there are safety things that we have to go through and we have to ensure that we know what we’re doing, but that new process to get on an Army range I think is going to help significantly.

Col. Scott “Fug” Gilloon, USAF (Ret.):

I think at least from my perspective, whether it’s uncrewed systems and weapons, they both face similar constraints in terms of when we’re designing a system, our integration of whether we choose a more exquisite capability over a lower cost capability has implications downstream just as have been referenced here. But at a high level, capacity is all about what you invest in ahead of time. So this is everything I think that’s been said. The supply chain, obviously, it’s critical. The software support, you’re not going to have that system without the software support. All of these things, but they have to be invested in ahead of time. We can optimize our production via additive manufacturing modularity. Sure, all of these things contribute and they help us to sort of minimize where those bottlenecks occur, but at the end of the day, I think capacity is much like your local fire department. You invest in the local fire department, you build it before you have a fire. Similarly, with capacity, you install the capacity to do these things before you have the crisis. So anyway, just my sense.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

The four of you said some pretty powerful things. One of those had to do with the calendars that folks in the government have, whether it’s an ATO or a range. And that’s also a bottleneck that traces right to production because you have to get tests to prove that something works. Once it works, then you’ve got to produce it. So this is an all hands on deck moment for anyone that has any calendar to get product out to the battlefield. There’s another thing that you talked about there about investment. And over the past year, there’ve been some pretty aggressive moves by the Department of War and the services, whether it be a multi-billion dollar deal to improve the defense industrial base or framework agreements that go across many years that allow industry to unlock capital. And in some cases, start things 18 months to two years faster if we had done it more the traditional way. So this now is geared toward the industry perspective. What confidence, how do you get confidence to make those investments and what should the government do to incentivize unleashing that capital? Mr. Kroger?

Bryon Kroger:

If you want big investments, especially in software, I think industry needs to know two things. One is that competition and contracts are going to be outcome based. And I’ll talk about that. And then that those government dependencies that I just mentioned won’t impede success. And credit to, actually, we’re competing for time here with Golden Dome and I actually have paid attention to how they’re running some of their competitions and I’m super impressed. They’re actually performance or outcome based, like for real, not just paper competitions, but real competition. And when the capital investment markets see that, it’s not this insider’s game anymore. It’s like, “Oh, we can invest in these non-traditional companies and actually win and turn our investments into what they’re looking for, which is return on investment.” So I think that that piece is really key. To do that though, you need outcome based contracts.

And I think acquisitions, we sometimes either talk about it too much or not enough. I would say right in the middle is the thing I want to see, which is firm fixed price outcomes on contract for areas where we know what the outcome we need is. So sometimes you’re exploring new spaces, R&D, firm fixed price outcomes aren’t going to work for that. Got it. But for the stockpile, I think that’s very relevant. And what I would say then is, in order for us on the industry side to guarantee those outcomes, we have to address those government dependencies that I talked about. And so we actually, we do this. We have a outcome guarantee. We guarantee your first mission outcome in production in 180 days or less or we work for free until it is, but it comes with conditions.

The government has to sign up for those dependencies like how long it takes to get on the AO’s calendar, getting silly things like CACs, credentials, GFE, access to environments, cloud resources provisioned, all of those things. It’s like, my timer is going to pause when the government doesn’t meet their SLAs. That’s a different way to look at contracts. We love to put conditions on the contractors and I think that’s great, we need those, but it needs to go both ways because the path to production, as you noted, it’s both sides of the equation.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Yeah. Mr. Spagnoletti?

Chris Spagnoletti:

Yeah. Just to echo what my partner said here, the firm fixed price contracts are better for the government and they’re better for business. It just drives accountability on both sides. But probably one of the most important factors in obtaining capital from the markets and getting that confidence is for the government to lean in. They have to have skin in the game, because the business is going out there trying to convince investors that, “Okay, we have something that the services need and we’ve proven it.” But what’s helpful is when the government leans in for performance-based contracts, because at the end of the day we have to perform. That’s our jobs. But I just have to double click on that, that when that happens, when the government says, “Okay, when you do X, Y, and Z, we will go ahead and consider production.” It changes the game. It really changes the game, changes the outlook. It raises the expectations of the markets, but also allows capital to come in. When that capital comes in, we can scale. It’s a trigger that turns very, very fast.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Any other thoughts? And you had talked a bit about contracting and how important that is and the way that’s structured. And one of our teammates is in here, General Lance French. So thank you for all that your folks have done over the last year to set conditions for the scale and speed, putting in place a lot of the measures that the gentlemen here are talking about. I’m now going to be a little bit more provocative with the question. This is more of that call to action in terms of what must we do now? With that stated, what is the single most important action that government, whether it’s executive branch, legislative branch, and/or industry should take today to be better positioned five years from today? Mr. Hartman.

Ryan M. Hartman:

So I think one of the most important things that we can do is make sure that we have capacity prior to a conflict. And that requires industry and government to partner together to understand the threat, co-invest to ensure that we have capacity prior to a conflict and ensure that we can field systems in an adaptable way. Meaning after a conflict starts, be able to adapt those weapon systems, those technologies to continuously evolve with the threat.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Mr. Kroger?

Bryon Kroger:

Everything that I’ve said today hinges on the ability to define outcomes and measure them in the first place. And we start getting into all the tactics and all the things that we need to do and test and ATOs and everything that I talked about, but we forget that part. And I think we need to reinvest actually in something really boring, especially if we’re talking about manufacturing. There’s a good analogy here. It applies to software as well, which is value stream engineering. And when you do value stream engineering, you identify the bottleneck and you set a target condition of some kind. That’s the outcome you’re looking for. And it shows up in two places. It shows up in our delivery value stream to you, but what we’re really trying to impact is the mission value stream that you own. We have to know both bottlenecks to find outcomes for both of those things, and then we can put an outcome on contract along with the supporting outcomes for delivery speed and quality and those types of things. So I would really invest in being able to define and measure outcomes, as boring as that sounds.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Mr. Gilloon.

Col. Scott “Fug” Gilloon, USAF (Ret.):

So I think the single greatest action, if I could, would be to create some sort of standing mechanism that’s going to convert all of the realistic operational experimentation into funded multi-year production contracts. I think in this way, when we look at the gap that we’re actually covering here, the gap is the end-to-end cycle of this. So it’s the fact that we’re doing the realistic experimentation all the way to the operator feedback to industry, which we don’t often get on the industry side. So if this sounds like create another DRPM or another org, I’m not advocating for that by any means, for more bureaucracy or more offices. But what I do think is you can take and integrate the existing organizations under some sort of mechanism that has the authority or delegates the authority rather for that set of organizations to do the realistic experimentation and move direct from there into some sort of funded multi-year process.

And I think that’s how you get a capacity. I think that’s how you address your sustainment. You’re going to figure those things out. If your experimentation is truly realistic, at least in my experience, you figure that out real quick, you figure out where your bottlenecks are. So I think from an industry perspective, definitely a way to, some sort of mechanism that we can do today.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Thank you.

Chris Spagnoletti:

Yeah, I’m going to go back to what I said before. It’s really, it’s getting the signal from the government. The United States is unleashing a massive amount of talent. We’ll continue to do so. A lot of these great businesses appear and in the audience at this event, but the bottom line is when the businesses have demonstrated that there are real capabilities that can help, what we need is the government to lean in. And we can tell that there’s changes being made and they’re starting to break loose. That has to continue because we’re pushing our people, we’re pushing the industry to scale very hard and we need the government to keep pace and help us as well.

Brig. Gen. Robert Lyons III:

Count us in. Gentlemen, I want to thank you for your insights and for joining us today. I want to thank the audience for choosing us today. I think today’s discussion reinforces that rethinking the stockpile isn’t simply about buying more of the same. It’s about doing things differently. It’s about ensuring that we have the right mix of capability and capacity. It’s an industrial base capable of producing at scale and all of us are part of it. So I want to thank our panelists with a round of applause and thanks to all of you for joining.